Totalitarianism in the 20th century
What is totalitarianism?
Several authors and books have sought to define totalitarianism:
—Giovani Amendola in an article published in Il Mondo on May 12, 1923, entitled “sistema totalitario” equates fascism and communism. Benito Mussolini himself used the expression: “the totalitarian will, inflexible in carrying out its mission” in June 1925.
—Hannah Arendt; The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951.
—The American Friedrich and Brzezinski, Totalitarian dictatorship and autocracy:
it requires an ideology that cuts across all aspects of human sight, a single-party system led by a dictator, a system of police control over the population, concentration of all means of propaganda, concentration of all military means, central control and direction of the entire economy. It appears more in Anglo-Saxon literature than in France.
—Raymond Aron, Democracy and Totalitarianism, 1965:
Regime that grants a party a monopoly on political activity, a party ideology that displays absolute and official primacy, monopoly of the means of force and persuasion by the totalitarian state, economic and professional activities subject to the state and becoming the state, political and ideological terror.
Historically, there have been only three totalitarianism: Nazism, communism and fascism.
Totalitarianism means the annihilation of civil society for the benefit of and seeks to shape a new Man according to the ideology of race, class.
Dictatorship does not claim to transform the individual: it only seeks to maintain its power.
Can we compare Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin?
—For a long time it was unthinkable to compare them, the USSR was crowned with glory because of its victory against Nazism.
—The number of works that seek to compare them has multiplied.
– The Gulag Archipelago, by Solzhenitsyn.
