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Totalitarianism is a concept widely used by the Western bourgeois media to conflate progressive communist governments with reactionary fascist governments.
This term has been developed by Western scholars who defend liberal democracy as the highest form of human society, completely ignoring the negative dimensions of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.
History
In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt argued that Nazi and Communist governments were new forms of government and not merely updated versions of the old tyrannies. According to Arendt, the source of the mass appeal of totalitarian regimes is their ideology which provides a comforting and single answer to the mysteries of the past, present and future. For Nazism, all history is the history of race struggle and for Marxism–Leninism all history is the history of class struggle. Once that premise is accepted, all actions of the state can be justified by appeal to nature or the law of history, justifying their establishment of authoritarian state apparatus.[1]
National Security Advisor for Jimmy Carter and Rockefeller-connected, Zbigniew Brzezinski helped to introduce the concept of totalitarianism to university social science and professional research as a way to characterize and criticize the Soviet Union during the Cold War.[2]
Michael Parenti and James Petras have suggested that the totalitarianism concept has been politically employed and used for anti-communist purposes. Parenti has also analysed how "left anti-communism" attacked the Soviet Union during the Cold War.[3] For Petras, the CIA funded the Congress for Cultural Freedom in order to attack "Stalinist totalitarianism".[4] More recently, Enzo Traverso has attacked the creators of the concept of totalitarianism as having invented it to designate the enemies of the West.[5] Historian Domenico Losurdo outlines that the horrors which supposedly equate Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union are not without historical parallel. He further outlines that they had significantly differing policies on the treatment of Eastern European nations and that Nazi rhetoric struck a chord with Western colonial ideas. In fact, Indian leader Gandhi remarked that Stalin was a "great man" and that "in India we have Hitlerian rule, however disguised it may be in softer terms." The fact that the Soviet Union was the last to compromise and the political-historical conditions behind the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact must be remembered rather than using the historical event to invent such a false dichotomy.[6]
See also
References
- ↑ Villa, Dana Richard (2000). The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt. Cambridge University Press. pp. 2–3.
- ↑ Brzezinski, Zbigniew; Friedrich, Carl (1956). Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy. Harvard University Press.
- ↑ Parenti, Michael (1997). Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism. San Francisco: City Lights Books. pp. 41–58.
- ↑ James Petras, 'The CIA and the Cultural Cold War Revisited', Monthly Review, Volume 51, Issue 06, 1999
- ↑ Traverso, Enzo (2001). Le Totalitarisme: Le XXe siècle en débat. Poche.
- ↑ Losurdo,Domenico , (2016) 'Stalin and Hitler: Twin Brothers or Mortal Enemies'