ALL FOR ONE?

Which society is more appreciative of the genius among them: free society or totalitarian society?

The quick unthinking answer would be: free society is obviously better in all aspects of individual freedom, and in this one too. But in reality this isn’t so. In order to appreciate genius, society must have a disposition for elitism, rather than egalitarianism; and, even more importantly, it must be individually unselfish, that is, its mentality must be collectivist, taking pride in the excellence of others more than in one’s personal success. Free society however is all about “me.” American society is a good indicator of this selfish disposition: it is more inclined to support the rights and privileges of the underachievers, those who are inferior to “me,” and therefore are not “my” competitors in the cutthroat struggle for personal success. It is no secret that several American geniuses (Bobby Fischer is probably the most recognizable example) have fared extremely badly in life, as soon as it was understood that the enterprising others would not be able to profit, or, having profited, would no longer be able to keep profiting, from their achievements.

Indeed, the best thing that can sustain a genius in free capitalistic society is not national pride or elitist appreciation of greatness, but the ability of a capable middleman to take advantage of this genius, to profit from his glory. Free society, I repeat, is a selfish society, and its sense of national pride and self-identification as one of all, is in very short supply. (Mr. Mitt Romney’s most recent foreign trip is a good illustration in support of my argument.)

It is only the “unfree” totalitarian society that can unselfishly appreciate genius, as its formula “one for all” disparages the free society’s formula “every man for himself and every woman for himself.” And it is only the “unfree” totalitarian society, where success or failure are measured exclusively by the individual’s value to society as a whole and where even the most sociophobic genius can feel secure behind the second part of this totalitarian formula: all for one... provided, of course, that he has been able to prove that value.

UTILITARIANISM: "ON WHOSE SIDE?"

Before we begin this entry, it must be noted that utilitarianism has many aspects, which are by no means all alike. It is terribly difficult to articulate what exactly utilitarianism is, as it exists in a variety of both general and particular applications. It is therefore virtually meaningless to discuss this subject in its entirety, but the picture becomes different and somewhat more manageable when we drop the pretense of a comprehensive grasp, and instead, concentrate on something very singular and very specific.

In examining the Utilitarian phenomenon in the history of Western philosophy---Jeremy Bentham and all---one intriguing question comes to mind. Considering that the political history of the world has boiled down, eventually, to the ongoing philosophical opposition of capitalism and free enterprise, on the one hand, versus socialism and communism, on the other hand, on whose side does this leave classic Benthamism, better known as Utilitarianism? Now, this is the kind of approach that can bear some meaningful fruit, instead of leading us into a barren hot desert, where, soon finding ourselves thirsty and delirious, we will be imagining a swarm of opposing armies fighting each other under the same banner of---you guessed it!---utilitarianism.

The great irony of our selective approach is that by thus restricting our area of application we will no longer be imagining things, but we shall see real armies fighting each other under the illusion that they are fighting against the very same enemy, namely, utilitarianism!

In Western tradition, utilitarianism is seen as a form of socialism. Capitalistic societies presumably hold the Jeffersonian pursuit of happiness as an individualistic pursuit, and once we start talking about happiness in numerical figures, hello, socialism! This is perhaps one way of looking at things, and I cannot say that it is a wrong way, but there are obviously other ways of looking at it too. In my conversations with some philosophically savvy American counterparts, I used to be somewhat surprised by their categorical dismissal of the Utilitarians as basically collectivists, who measure happiness by bigger numbers and therefore belong to the Communistic camp. This was all the more surprising having known the Soviet attitude to Utilitarianism, which saw it as a typical petit-bourgeois movement, closely tied to the capitalistic frame of mind, and inimical to socialism and scientific communism.

Who is right? Obviously, even theoretically Utilitarianism, which favors the greatest number at the expense of smaller numbers, contradicts the basic principle of totalitarianism, which sees society as a monolith, and refuses any opposition or conflict between larger and smaller numbers. The totalitarian principle is, of course, “All for One and One for All,” the One being the State, while the All are all citizens, down to the smallest number. As we can infer from this, the Utilitarian formula has no place in the totalitarian dogma, because it contradicts the principle of totality.

So, what is utilitarianism to a totalitarian? The incompatibility of utilitarianism with scientific communism and with other totalitarian principles can be seen emerging already in the attitude of Karl Marx to Bentham at the dawn of the era when all these conflicts and controversies were about to start coming to the fore.

“…The arch-philistine Jeremy Bentham was the insipid, pedantic, leather-tongued oracle of the bourgeois intelligence of the Nineteenth Century.” Marx’s uncompromising invective, quoted from his magnum opus Das Kapital, where he puts everything in the communism-capitalism-utilitarianism triangle into their proper places, unsurprisingly matches to the tee the scientific opinion on this subject of the old Soviet scholars, and undoubtedly equally corresponds to the enduring opinion of all bona fide post-Soviet Russian political thinkers, who know a thing or two about the better, theoretical side of totalitarismo, even if they prefer not to use this politically incorrect word.

ABSOLUTE FREEDOM AND THE REAL WORLD

There is a fairly respectable school of thought, which maintains that there is no such thing as capitalism, or socialism for that matter, in the modern world. It would be even more respectable, if it adds the word ‘pure’ into the formula, for, it is a well-established triviality that just as pure chemical elements cannot be found in nature, so cannot pure capitalism or pure socialism be found in the real world, no matter how hard and how long we keep looking for them. We do of course have some ideas of what these two ought to be (the former being free market with zero government regulation, while the latter can perhaps be found in Charles Fourier, but hardly anywhere else), but we know well that having an idea of something is not a sufficient condition for that something to necessarily exist in reality.

By the same token, there is no such thing as “absolute freedom” anywhere in the world, and the only thing that we can do here is determine, or rather define, the parameters of practical freedoms, and track the instances of their incidence in this or that society to the best of our discernment and comprehension.

Hobbes delightfully defines freedom as “the absence of external impediments.” From this definition, as well as from his description of the Commonwealth, it is already clear that organized society has as its rationale a sincere desire, on the part of the covenanters, to create exactly such an external impediment, in the person of the sovereign, on the individual freedoms of the citizens, in case the latter go awry, or rather, pursue the urges of their dismal natural state, which invites nothing but a war of all against all. Thus, it goes without saying that absolute freedom as such doesn’t exist under normal social conditions. In the past, whenever the king or any other type of absolute sovereign would try to exercise his ‘absolute freedom,’ he would quickly end up without a head, or something even more ghastly.

And yet, everybody (hopefully) understands that when today we distinguish between the so-called free and unfree societies, we have something else in mind, rather than the crudity of absolute freedom. Commonsense basics are telling us that the difference between those two does exist, and in fact amounts to something both tangible and definable. The challenge, as I said before, is to define the parameters of the practical freedoms that we are talking about, and only then, having parsed them into small individual concrete parts, to examine how they are applicable to the above-posited free and unfree societies, to see whether they are meaningfully describing our pre-established dichotomy.

Having determined that the difference between freedom and unfreedom is not in the presence or absence of an absolute, but in the specific levels of freedom and unfreedom in each society, it is probably unproductive for one society to accuse another society of being “unfree,” when the other can quickly point its finger back to some specific instance of unfreedom in the accuser, and thus, fallaciously, deduce that, once unfreedom exists everywhere, to a certain degree, the overall differences in the levels of freedom in ‘free’ and ‘unfree’ societies are not that significant, unless unfreedom in the most repressive societies reaches an exceptional level, after which only a violent revolution can serve as a solution to the inevitable crisis.

Ironically, it was not the high level of repression in Nazi Germany that brought down the regime, but it was the debacle of World War II, caused by the militaristic adventurism of the leaders of the Third Reich. Thus, even the definitions of freedom and unfreedom are always conditional, depending on the success or failure of the government that practices them.

Now, although it can be said with a fairly good conscience that American society is a free society, whereas, say, Soviet society of yore was an unfree society, once we get to the specifics of each case, the situation gets somewhat more complicated.

I remember how during the cold war the “freedom to travel” was considered one of such definitive criteria, and how many Russians used to privately grumble that whereas the people in the West (those lucky devils!) could travel freely wherever they wished to go (Rio de Janeiro! Paris! Rome!…), the Russians had been precluded from traveling abroad, except under special arrangements made for them by the Soviet Government.

This Russian “unfreedom” to travel was seen as a definitive distinguishing feature separating them from the free world. Yet, in their dreamy misery, those Russians did not realize that this Western “freedom to travel” was always contingent upon having enough money to exercise this freedom, and that, in fact, not too many Americans or even Europeans were rich enough to afford foreign travel. As a matter of fact, any Russian of small means had a much better chance to go abroad than his counterpart in the free world, because when he or she would be going abroad, that trip was either free, or heavily subsidized by the Soviet State. (Unless it was a professional trip, foreign travel was usually a reward given by the State for good service.)

The much celebrated freedom of speech was indeed a key factor in distinguishing free and unfree society. It is utterly deplorable that speech was restricted and controlled by the State. The Russians were certainly well enough educated to want to exercise free speech intelligently and purposefully, and sorely offended by their inability to do so under the constraints of the Soviet system. I am personally appalled by the stupidity of the Soviet system of my own time (I can understand the severe constraints of the wartime era, and of the years from 1926 (sic!!!) to 1941, when the nation was actively preparing herself for the imminent devastating war with Germany, but not since the time the USSR had established itself as a nuclear superpower!) when most of the restrictions on free speech were totally unjustified and counterproductive. However, there was an upside to this kind of unfreedom. The Russians were well educated, courtesy of free education from kindergarten through college and beyond, which free Americans didn’t have and still do not have, at least to that extent. (They also enjoyed free healthcare, a luxury which free Americans didn’t have and still do not have.) Their education helped them keep an open mind on most things, making any attempt to brainwash them futile and amply compensating them for the constraints on free speech by an unbounded freedom of thought, which they could exercise to the fullest extent of their mind’s capacity.

Alas, in free societies, particularly in America, there often exists a certain complacency of the mind, aggravated by a lack of rigorous (non-multiple choice!) education, which tends to take it for granted that as long as the declarative freedoms are theirs, there is no longer a need to pursue them, concentrating instead on the pursuit of philistine happiness, or, frankly, on plain economic survival. The very low numbers of election voters indicate either a disinterest in the political process or a disgusted disappointment in it, which actually amounts to the same thing. (Had it been otherwise, the choice of major candidates in presidential elections in the more recent cycles, effectively since 1996, would have been more responsible and more representative of the actual alternatives facing American society.) As a substitute for political action, it is disappointing to observe this indisputably great nation sinking into a swamp of that typical capitalistic morale which used to be ridiculed so gleefully and venomously by Marx, and so mournfully by Einstein after him.

The real parameters of freedom have been lost in modern American psyche, substituted by a certain confusion between a sincere urge for intellectual independence and an actual dependence on not very trustworthy sources of information and a political complacency that today characterizes the average Joe. Even political activism follows pre-scripted lines and results in very predictable and rather meaningless collective action. Independently thinking Americans (and these still do exist in ample numbers!), have almost entirely been pushed out of the political arena by agenda-seeking ideologues, for whom words, like public interest, dignity, and honor mean nothing more than a simpleton’s mush. (And don’t we know that the word “simpleton,” being totally incompatible with the “business virtues” of capitalism, has become the most hopeless of all cardinal sins and debilitating disabilities!)

…Freedom and unfreedom in the real world. Once again, I am fully aware of the legitimacy of distinguishing between free and unfree societies, but even recognizing it as an established fact, we ought to keep this issue in proper perspective.

STATE POLICY AND PUBLIC OPINION

I've never trusted opinion polls and never ascribed much significance to them as a policy-influencing factor. Mind you, in the 1970’s, I was professionally involved in the task force on American public opinion and its polling, at my Institute for USA and Canada Studies in Moscow, where I was in a good position to learn how such polls work, and what their advantages and shortcomings are. The main thing I learned then, was that public opinion polls mostly serve not to reflect public opinion, but to shape it and to infuse it with artificial issues, over which the public is either divided or of demonstrably the same mind. This is done by carefully selecting the issues for polling, and by the specific ways in which the questions are asked, which in Perry Mason’s lingo is called “leading the witness.”

It is hard, of course, for the whole national society to be of the same mind about pretty much anything, and therefore, had national public opinion polls been allowed to be taken indiscriminately, they would have been quite disruptive to the conduct of state policy, and for this reason alone they cannot be allowed. What, then, is allowed is an illusion of a comprehensive national debate, where ‘safe’ issues have been carefully chosen and worded, so that the debate as such would not spill into such areas where established state policies allow no contradiction, for national security reasons, and must be protected from the perils of democracy.

The ‘state department’ responsible for forming and controlling public opinion in controlled societies can be called Agitprop, after the actual word used in the USSR during the Soviet era. The principal role of agitation and propaganda in all closed societies is not just to indoctrinate the public, but to make it crystal clear which stated positions on all matters of government policy are desirable as a reflection of the "collective will" of the people, and which ones (the opposites of, or deviations from, the acceptable ones) may put such individuals who espouse them on a collision course with the armored train of the “national will.”

Under such circumstances, it is quite understandable that all “public opinion polls,” or referenda, if you like, conducted in totalitarian or otherwise controlled societies, are designed not to inquire the public about what it really-really thinks, but merely to demonstrate a high level of national unity, by allowing the public to give an overwhelming endorsement of all such issues that are counted as matters of importance to the conduct of national policy.

Needless to say, in modern post-Soviet and post-Yeltsin Russia (we can call it “Putin’s Russia” for the time being) there is a well-established practice of returning to the principles of controlled society, while trying to appear “free society-like” to the West. Therefore the practice of national polling is designed to resemble the national polls conducted in the free nations of the West. Predictably, such “quasi-Western” polls are no less hypocritical than their Western counterparts, and many of their topics have a distinctive feel of being man-made, as if primarily intended for Western consumption. On the other hand, the real public feelings on such matters that reveal totalitarian and anti-American tendencies in Russian society are probably intentionally underpolled and underreported.

It’s time for us now to take a look at some specifics of American free-society public opinion polling, so that we could better understand how it functions, and why.

It would be ridiculous to deny the validity of our general argument of the first two paragraphs of the present entry regarding any government’s (both in closed and free societies) concerns about public opinion running amok and interfering with matters of state policy and national security. Besides, it is easy to see that as long as such a thing as official secrets exists (which means until the end of time), the public will remain basically uninformed, or most often underinformed, which is even worse, about effectively the whole list of domestic and foreign policy issues, and it is both unwise and clearly dangerous to ask the uninformed about what they think about any issue on which they are uninformed or underinformed.

Thus, ironically, the public opinion policy of controlled societies (whose citizens are well aware of the fact that they are being controlled) is in some sense more honest than the public opinion policy of free societies, where the majority of citizens are unaware of the similar fact. It is therefore mostly in free societies, where public opinion polling resorts to particularly intricate methods of manipulation and outright deception. The public debate is being infused with artificial, politically inconsequential issues, passed off as the issues of utmost public importance (such as, say, same-sex marriage, legalization of marijuana, and such, in America of the new millennium), while the issues of the truly greatest importance (such as all issues of war and peace!) are often downplayed, misrepresented, and otherwise disallowed from entering the area of legitimate and informed public debate.

What would be the rule of thumb, if such exists, in approaching these issues? Look at how the Democrats and the Republicans vote, how they argue, and once you see a disagreement between them, you can safely bet that such disagreements would be among the most active issues of public debate and public polling. But wherever the two major parties stand united in the proverbially bipartisan fashion, with each party trying to outdo the other in its own enthusiasm for the issue in point, the eagerness of the pollsters to conduct a poll of this nature may not be as forthcoming as in the other, safer cases. Some outrageous examples of this are in abundance. During the August 2008 war in the Caucasus, initiated by the reckless and despotic President of Georgia Mikheil Saakashvili against the South Ossetian autonomy, which he was planning to subdue in the same manner that he had subdued the Adjarian autonomy in 2004, but met a stubborn resistance, and had to retreat after the Russians came to the rescue of the massacred Ossetians, there was a blanket condemnation issued by America and the West, in support of the rabidly anti-Russian and self-servingly pro-American ex-Communist Georgian dictator, and no polls of dissenting public opinion were taken in America. Granted, had such poll been taken, most probably it would overwhelmingly have reflected the dire state of public misinformation on this issue, rather than a “fair and balanced judgment” which at that time was non-existent. (Afterword: four years have passed since then, and history has been somewhat sorted out as to who was the aggressor in that war, with the finger pointing at Mikheil Saakashvili. Yet, the American public seems to be unaware that there had been a rush to judgment back then in August 2008, no polls to that account taken, and no lessons learned.)

Another example comes now from the American domestic political scene. It is the ostensibly turbulent issue of healthcare, the cornerstone of President Obama’s domestic policy. There was and still is a sharp division on this issue between the defenders of “Obamacare” and its detractors, with countless public polls taken. But philosophically there is practically no difference between the Obamacare and its pseudo-alternative. Both endorse medicine-for-profit; both exclude the basic moral principle of free healthcare from consideration. Thus the Obamacare debate is in fact a shallow, grotesquely politicized debate that never even touches the core issue here, and no public opinion polling numbers can change the fact that no genuine debate on the future of healthcare in America is really taking place in this country.

Returning to the general issues of public opinion polling, it is important to understand that I am not advocating a drastic change in the existing practices. On the contrary, I do not see how the existing practices can be reasonably changed. After all, general public is like a large animal, which needs to be tethered, to avoid havoc in the household. But there is one comment that I am trying to make in this entry: it is about the hypocrisy of the whole thing, and I stand by it.

Finally, lest the reader assumes that I am an advocate of controlled society and a detractor of free society, it is not so. In fact, I still much prefer many aspects of free society over the parallel aspects of closed society. After all, didn’t Winston Churchill say (arguably and possibly spuriously, but se non è vero, è ben trovato!) something about “democracy being the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried”?

But, on the other hand, I know hypocrisy when I see it…

TOTALITARIANISM WITHOUT PREJUDICE: RECAP

(See my mega-entry Totalitarianism Without Prejudice, published on this blog on January 17^th, 2011.)

Before moving on, I’d like to pay a self-congratulatory tribute to the title of my comprehensive blog posting on totalitarianism, which was Totalitarianism Without Prejudice. Not only was it an excellent title for the whole Totalitarian subsection of the Collective Guilt And Glory section, but it is also a basic methodological tool, to apply to all controversial subject matter which, for any reason whatsoever, happens to be subjected to a serious scientific inquiry. It is, indeed, a continuing shame that whenever scholars address this fascinating subject, they mandatorily and invariably treat it with extreme prejudice, as if there were nothing more to the term than those “loser” regimes of Hitler and Mussolini, and the Western stamp of opprobrium on Stalin’s Soviet Russia. As if Giovanni Gentile, who ascribed a thoroughly positive meaning to this term, was some kind of deluded dirty-minded psycho! As if the old man Plato, who is universally recognized as one of the greatest minds, if not the greatest, in the history of mankind, had not a long time ago described a totalitarian society as the ideal society, in his Politeia! (See my entry Plato’s Totalitarian Politeia posted on this blog on December 2, 2011.)

In other words, there is a definite difference between, say, Hitlerism and totalitarianism. The latter term, as I said before, was not even invented by its post-WWII critics, but was treated as a positive term by its chief promoter (Gentile), a humanistic philosopher at that! Why aren’t we ever curious to look at the term as it evolved in historical usage, why aren’t we intellectually honest and politically brave enough to disassociate it from the stigma of its tainted use?

It is every scholar’s duty to approach all subjects of his or her study without prejudice, and yet they have all consistently failed this task whenever a subject has been tinged with political controversy where it seems to be their solemn duty to take sides on the “correct” side of the issue, and to heck with “objectivity”!

I am therefore gratified that at least I myself find it possible, no matter what, to present the reader with this honest and totally unbiased discussion of one of the most mishandled and politicized terms in the lexicon of political science. Totalitarianism without prejudice? Why don’t we study all controversial subjects without prejudice? Don’t we have enough confidence in our moral fiber that all such subjects which deserve severe condemnation can be properly condemned and sentenced without an a priori verdict?

GENIUS AND DEMOCRACY: PUSHKIN'S VERDICT

(This entry’s suggestive title Genius And Democracy begs to be associated in my reader’s mind with Pushkin’s “Genius and Villainy are two things incompatible,” in his "Little Tragedy" Mozart and Saglieri. Because I cannot be properly reassured that my reader will be ready to make such an association, I therefore have to resort to such a crude device as spelling out what was initially supposed to be just a little hidden playful hint.)

For every Russian soul, mine no exception, the name of Alexander Pushkin symbolizes everything which is the best in Russia, her free maverick spirit, her deepest philosophical wisdom, her radiant creative genius, her youthful tragic heroism.

Pushkin is the epitome of an original thinker, that rare delicate plant, whose gentle nurturing is, according to Nietzsche, the greatest and most sublime responsibility of any civilized society. He stood apart from the rest of society, while his noble conception of social and individual freedom may be rivaled by a few other geniuses, but never surpassed.

He lived during one of the most turbulent times in Russia’s history during the nineteenth century: the 1825 Decembrist Rebellion, which was a conspiracy of several liberal officers-noblemen to abolish autocracy in Russia, and to emancipate the serfs. The rebellion was ineptly conducted, especially since its leader Prince Trubetskoy changed his mind and at the critical moment dropped out of sight, while the designated regicide Peter Kakhovsky, despite killing two senior military officers of the Tsarist Establishment, on two separate occasions could not bring himself to shoot Tsar Nicholas I (although previously he had suggested himself for the mission with a considerable bravado), plus a wave of defections from the ranks of the conspirators further doomed the half-baked plot. Pushkin was not one of the conspirators, but he sympathized with their liberal ideas, and in the grim aftermath (five participants were hanged, many others were sentenced to hard labor or exiled to Siberia for life) of this bizarre and tragic affair, he pleaded for a relaxation of the punishment, and for the Imperial pardon, which never came.

In his classic Russian version of Horace’s Ode Exegi Monumentum, Pushkin sees his own immortal contribution to humanity in “arousing good emotions with my lyre, glorifying liberty in our worthless age, and pleading for generosity toward the fallen.” This man truly knew something about freedom and liberty, and not from all the books in the world, as much as from the inner pulsations of his great soul, which is of course the only genuine manner of acquiring such knowledge.

But freedom and democracy never meant the same thing to him. “With astonishment we saw democracy in its repugnant cynicism, in its cruel superstitions, in its unbearable tyranny,” he writes in an astonishingly clairvoyant article. The democracy he has in mind is not the refined, intellectually privileged Jeffersonian masterpiece, but that common, vulgar variety that grows everywhere outside the world’s gardens of Eden, like a raging wild weed ready to overwhelm any attempted transplant of the refined, assiduously cultivated species, which it regards as a foreign and unwelcome intruder in the vast primeval fields of the real world.

(“Friends of Syria,” beware!)

FREEDOM AND REPRESSION IN MUTUAL ENVY

Repressed societies are well aware of their shortcomings, which of course are plenty, and in their everyday existence they exhibit a certain envy toward free societies, which expresses itself, most commonly, in their susceptibility to corruption. The latter is normally kept in check by surpluses of topical repression, but, on occasion, when the authorities are lax, it gets out of hand. A good example of this are the last three decades of the USSR. In my 1981 letter to Soviet Foreign Minister and family friend, Andrei Andreevich Gromyko, I emphasized the fact that although I was ready to accept some measure of repression as a logical feature of Soviet society, the tolerance of corruption in repressive societies deprives repression of its social legitimacy and thus leads to a degeneration of any such repressive state which condones it.

Here is a fine point about totalitarian society, that its internal (“ideally” repressed, but occasionally allowed to raise its head for practical “prophylactic” reasons) opposition behaves much more honorably under plain repression than when the safety valve is activated to let out the steam. The yearning for abstract “freedom,” if there is none, can be admirably heroic, but as soon as some of such freedom is allowed, it immediately and horribly degenerates, primarily into a will to make money, as much of it as the “freedom” allows. The ugly lesson of the 1990’s, in Yeltsin’s post-Soviet Russia, is still fresh, and, so far, deliberately perpetuated, and the currently still operational West-related Russian “freedom industry,” mostly located in Moscow, serves as a bogeyman for the general population, to remind the ordinary people what “freedom” really means for the country that suffers from it, and for the smart alecks who practice it and prosper.

But, as I mentioned earlier, this ugly type of “freedom” did not start with Yeltsin. Corruption started under Khrushchev already, and was on an ascending line through Brezhnev’s years, reaching obscene proportions in the late 1970’s -- early 1980’s, thus making the collapse of the USSR predictable a full decade before the fact...

So much for the “freedom envy,” let us now say a few words about its opposite, the “totalitarian envy.”

Ironically, “envy” is a two-way street, and free societies, too, are aware of their shortcomings; and in their existence they too exhibit a certain envy toward repressive societies, which expresses itself most commonly in their move toward repression. A highly instructive example of this was the United States under the Bush-Cheney Administration. In fact, the Cheney logic expressed by him on numerous occasions, reveals exactly the kind of repression-envy which has a solid logic in it, and can easily push a free society into the excesses of repression, disguised as a national security emergency state. Needless to say, the tragedy of 9/11/2001 did not help the cause of freedom. A decade down the road, with the ridiculous pat-downs of children and grandmothers in American airports, racial profiling out of control, security cameras and wiretaps invading free people’s privacy, freedom of speech curtailed in many ways, both subtle and not so subtle, the beast of repression is well satisfied with the sacrifice brought to its altar by the freedom-challenged West, defeating and humiliating the semi-clad maiden made invincible only through her defenselessness…

(Rest assured, each free state has its legitimate national security concerns, and has a perfect right to pursue them without becoming a “national security state” in the process. In my 1983 letter to President Reagan, I pointed out America’s main national security interest at the time, which was to be properly prepared for the imminent generational change in the Kremlin, and thus to be able to influence these events in a positive, as opposed to exploitative, way. [This letter, in my recollection, will be posted on my blog at a later date.] At the same time, however, both privately and publicly, in my lectures and published articles, I was repeatedly warning against allowing reasonable national security concerns to be pushed beyond their necessary limits, to result in the phenomenon of the “national security state.”)

Heroic totalitarianism and magnificent freedom... are they, just like iron, incapable of surviving in pure form? Apparently, such is the case, although by the same token as we can still talk of “iron,” we can still talk about “free society,” and also dream of a perfect social “totality” without having to use the “tainted word”!

It is useful to understand that each of these two types of social organization has its considerable advantages and no less significant shortcomings. It is just as easy in a free society to criticize yourself for exactly the same deficiencies, the absence of which constitutes the core advantage of the repressive societies, and vice versa. It is necessary, however, to remember the famous Churchillian dictum to the effect that democracy is the worst type of social organization, except that its alternative is unacceptable.

Just as a national security state within a free society defeats the messy yet precious purpose of freedom, the main and perhaps only rationale of a repressive society is defeated by its relaxation, to the extent that it will allow corruption and other vices of a free society to creep into it through the loophole of freedom-envy. To each their own (“suum quique”), and if we choose freedom, we must also take its downside together with the upside; and, by the same token, if we choose repression, we must forego the excesses of freedom.

Otherwise, we degenerate.

SECRET POLICE AND STATE POWER

Propaganda has a knack for turning even very serious things into caricatures. Whenever one tries to return such things to a serious discussion, there is always a danger of appearing to defend the indefensible. No one wishes to be thus misconstrued, hence, goodbye to objectivity, hello propaganda. My advantage, though, is not fearing to be misconstrued. My sole objective is to get serious about serious things, that is all. With this in mind, let us return to a previous conversation.
As I promised earlier, this entry will be taking a look at the powers of secret police in totalitarian societies, and their chances to come out on top in the struggle for state control. The rationale for it has been sparked by the following sentence, quoted in my earlier posting Totalitarianism In Western Tidbits Part II: “One of the dangers inherent in the totalitarian dictatorship is the possibility that the secret police might seize control of the party itself.”
Assuming that “control of the party” in this case means, or indirectly implies state power, let us dismiss the middleman now and talk directly about the actual power of secret police to take over a totalitarian state. But before we get there, it will be worth mentioning that in the history of all classic totalitarian dictatorships, no such effort has ever been successful, nor, to my knowledge, has even been tried. Previewing the rest of this entry, we can be assured of the same situation with the overall power takeover.--- No such luck!
Let us now get back to the assertion above.
As if totalitarian societies were just as prone to opportunistic power struggles as normal dictatorships, this assertion overlooks the fact that totalitarianism is all about solid stability, and that it employs the practices of severe repression, embodied in secret police, exactly for the reason of assuring the state of no alternative or even potential, stores of power to challenge the power of the state. In fact, any power struggle is against the nature of the totalitarian state, and the sole justification of a coup d’état would be the incompetence of the existing government, that is, its abject inadequacy in promoting the welfare of the state and in fulfilling its tasks. Thus, during the colossal political and social crisis in post-Soviet Russia, under Boris Yeltsin, the KGB alone was to remain the bulwark of stability and continuity, allowing the damaged nation to survive the crisis, and eventually supplying its leadership from its own ranks (Vladimir Putin, Sergei Ivanov, and a great many others), not by means of a coup, but through an orderly transition of power.
But how about the strong possibility of power abuse by some opportunistic individuals in high positions of power? This theoretically-posed question can be sufficiently answered from the practical experience of the three classic totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, namely, Italy, Germany, and the Soviet Union. (I am reluctant to include Mao’s China in the same consideration even though this applies to China as well, as there is a peculiar Asiatic dimension to Chinese totalitarianism, which, on principle, I do not wish to gloss over, should I engage in such wholesale generalizations, no matter how true they may turn out to be.)
Starting with Italy, we find the name of Arturo Bocchini (1880-1940) directly associated with the creation and functioning of fascist secret police. Bocchini was named chief of the regular Italian police, Polizia di Stado, in 1926. He was also a Senator in the Italian Parliament. In 1927 he organized OVRA, secret police proper. Efficiently run as a state bureaucracy by a dedicated bureaucrat without any ambitions of power, it was greatly assisted by state laws, but was a surprisingly mild instrument of oppression, demonstrating the characteristic absence of an institutional will to power. Only ten people were sentenced to death by Italian secret police up to the time of Bocchini’s death in 1940.
A much more sinister, cruel, and oppressive was the secret police of the Third Reich in Hitler’s Germany. I am sure that the name Gestapo is familiar to many people, but, ironically, Gestapo was only a small part of the secret police apparatus. At first, the secret police functions were performed by the SS (under Himmler’s headship since 1929), plus the SA, plus the SD. Here is an example of the structural diffusion of power, by means of which the German totalitarian State was solving the problem of too much power concentrated in one organization. In 1933 Gestapo proper was set up by Hermann Göring, merging with the SD, and then coming under Heinrich Himmler’s control. Himmler was of course a consummate bureaucrat and a fanatic of the regime without any ambitions of personal power. Even his last act of “personal independence” trying to negotiate with the British and the Americans behind Hitler’s back, was not an effort to save himself, but to save the regime, and in no way made any claim to a personal, “authoritarian” distinction.
And finally, in Soviet Russia, the problem of secret police power was first solved by the state’s reliance on foreigners (that is, ambitious men with no Russian roots, ergo no public following) such as the famous Pole Felix Dzerzhinsky and his Cheka successor Vyacheslav Menzhinsky also Polish, or the Latvians Ian Berzin and Martyn Latsis, to mention just a few. Another method of keeping the secret police under control was to expedite the cycle of rotation for its upper echelon, in order to prevent them from ‘entrenchment’ and from eventually being able to take advantage of their position. The quick demise of Genrikh Yagoda and Nikolai Yezhov, and, after Stalin’s death, the elimination of the all-powerful Beria, are enough to illustrate how the state dispensed its preventive medicine. Ironically, many thousands of secret policemen, especially those of them who seemed to enjoy their ghastly business, in other words a disproportionately huge number of them were tried, and either shot, or, for lesser offenses, dispatched to the Gulags, thus further swelling the numerical ranks of the victims of Stalin’s Terror. (For more on Russia’s KGB [I am using this specific name generically] see my Russia and History sections.)

NATIONAL SUPERIORITY AND OBEDIENCE TO AUTHORITY

The most natural disposition of a free person is the laid off attitude of live and let live. It is hard to imagine a free person meddling in other people’s affairs. In fact, for better or for worse, a preoccupation with others forfeits one’s freedom. A person in love is chained by Cupid to the object of his affection, which is perhaps the best form of slavery when the love is returned but hardly the worst if it is not. The worst kind of slavery is an obsessive attachment without the redeeming grace of love.

All such preoccupations in vain persons are somehow related to their feeling of personal importance vis-à-vis the rest of humanity. The immediate downside here is that the corollary of a superiority complex is an acute inferiority complex, a need for an authority, and a compulsion to obey it. Such an authority does not have to be the President of my country, especially when he belongs to another political party. My supreme authority can be my doctor, or the principal of my children’s school, or my favorite news network, and my favorite television personality. What they say is the law which I am always eager to obey either consciously or unconsciously… Needless to say, I can think of myself as the freest of the free, but there is no freedom here…

On the scale of nations, none of the great nations are free, as they tend to measure their national excellence by the criteria of the outside world: their sense of national greatness boils down to other nations’ inferiority. Hence, it becomes their global mission to prove to all others their national superiority, which can’t be done of course without imposing on them. In the end they become hopelessly dependent on them, and even start rationalizing their own national interest exclusively through their prism.

National superiority, that is, superpower authority, does not come free of charge to the superpower citizens. Obedience, like charity, begins at home. How can the world obey our superpower if her own citizens don’t? The implications are clear: protest over the little things, but obey over the bigger things. Those who choose to protest over the latter anyway, are trivialized, and very few seem to mind…

I hope that the reader understands that I am talking in generalities. To make this point clear, let us remove ourselves from the current time frame into, say, the second half of the 19^th  century, and pick Nietzsche’s Germany as a more specific subject of this conversation.

The following is a brilliant summary of the effect of Hegel’s philosophy on German society, which can of course be legitimately generalized by applying Hegel’s concept of the “world-process” to any nation at any time, as long as that nation possesses, at that particular time, a self-awareness as a happening nation, to use the new-age jargon as by far the most appropriate and explicit, a virtually perfect word for self-awareness. The author of this brilliant summary is obviously Nietzsche.

 “Were we to think of antiquarian late arrivals as suddenly exchanging that modesty for shamelessness; let us think of them as with shrill voices they proclaim: the race is at its height, for only now does it know itself and has become revealed to itself---we would then discover the significance of a certain famous philosophy for German education. I believe that there has been no dangerous change or turn in the German education of this century which has not become more dangerous through the enormous influence of Hegel. The belief that one is a late arrival of the ages is paralyzing and upsetting; terrible and destructive it must seem if one day such a belief, by bold inversion, deifies this late arrival as the true meaning and purpose of all that has happened earlier, if his knowing misery is equated with the consummation of world history. Such a way of looking at things has accustomed the Germans to talk of the world-process, and to justify their own time as the necessary result of this world-process; such a way of looking at things has established history in place of the other spiritual powers, art and religion, as solely sovereign, insofar as it is the self-realizing concept, insofar as it is the dialectic of the spirit of people and the Last Judgment.

This history, understood in a Hegelian way, has contemptuously been called the sojourn of God on earth, which God, however, is himself first produced by history. But this God became intelligible to himself inside the Hegelian craniums, and has already ascended all dialectical steps of his becoming up to self-revelation so that for Hegel the apex and terminus of world history was his own Berlin existence. He should have said that all things after him are to be only a musical coda of the world-historical rondo. He didn’t say that and so he implanted in the generation leavened by him that admiration for the power of history which turns into naked admiration for success and leads to the idolatry of the factual. But who once has learned to bow his head before the “power of history” finally nods his “yes” to every power, be this a government or a public opinion or a numerical majority. If every success contains within itself a rational necessity, if every event is a victory of the logical or of the idea, then down on your knees, and up and down on every rung of the step ladder of success. And what a school of decorum it is to contemplate history in this way!” (Unzeitgemäßen, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, Section 8.)

The totalitarian ideal, which I have been writing expansively about, characterizes the new self-awareness of a nation coming into her own. One cannot possibly describe either Germany or Italy of Nietzsche’s time as new nations, on the formal grounds that their new status of statehood had just been achieved. But there can be no doubt that the rebirth of the national spirit associated with this new status, the Einig, Einig, Einig! cry of a “race at its height” qualifies them as “new,” and justifies their unbounded “shamelessness.” The same goes, of course, for the phenomenon of Soviet Russia, an old nation that had just plunged itself into the fire, imagining herself a phoenix and exhilarated by the excruciating pain, which it then interprets as the pangs of rebirth.

A nation bowing its head to the power of history is indeed a sadomasochistic ruffian, ready to teach them a lesson, yet yearning to be disciplined by the strong hand of a sadistic ruler. Here is the actual paradox of the totalitarian reality: the progress of a genius revolutionary-pervert, happily trading his newly gained liberty for voluntary bondage.

…National superiority… two world wars, both lost. The good news is that it takes more than two lost world wars to put down a strong nation. The bad news is that World War III of today is none of the above…

It must be clear from my last paragraph that I am prepared to leave this discussion well before it imposes its eerily suggestive similarities on our present time. Before we tackle our present, we must properly digest our past. In this sense, this entry’s mission is now accomplished.

MASS SOCIETY AND THE TOTALITARIAN ALTERNATIVE

Among the many issues of great interest in connection with the totalitarian phenomenon is the question of the relationship between the so-called mass society phenomenon, and totalitarianism, as a definitive social answer to it.

Mass society is described by Encyclopaedia Britannica as “a term intended by its proponents to connote the main features that distinguish modern industrial societies from feudal, peasant, or tribal societies. A mass society, they argue, is one, in which the most important institutions are large, centralized, bureaucratic, and impersonal; where most human relationships are shallow, partial, and transitory; where individuals tend to be lonely, anxious, rootless, and in search for a sense of community.”

Compare this to Marx’s idea of alienation of the individual under the capitalist system. Clearly, for Marx, mass society, as described above, is capitalist society. His solution to the problems of capitalism is the advent of “communism,” or, in more modest and practical terms, the socialist alternative.

Enough has been said already about Marxism, capitalism, and anti-capitalism, in their proper places. What is of interest for the purpose of this series on totalitarianism is how the latter can be seen as an alternative (or should I say the alternative?) to mass society, that is, to capitalist society. As I see it, the main symptom of the malaise affecting capitalist mass society is alienation, whereas the totalitarian remedy manifests itself in social coming-together, a regeneration of sorts. It is this positive feature of totalitarianism, which the great Hannah Arendt inadvertently singles out, when she writes about social convictions shared by all classes of totalitarian society alike. (See her exact quotation to this account later in this entry.)

The broad emergence of the idea of the masses was the result of the ascendancy of the bourgeoisie onto the world stage at the dawn of the French Revolution. Marquis de Condorcet, who should have stayed with his beloved mathematics, instead of volunteering his services to political science, and that infamous utilitarian monster Sir Jeremy Bentham, became the chief apologists of the masses, although Voltaire was, as always, quick to note that the masses (“la public”) were “a ferocious beast,” either to be chained, or fled from…

John Stuart Mill, to his credit, gave multiple warnings of his fear of the masses. Alexis de Tocqueville was another voice of concern about the dangers of egalitarianism and a mass society. In his notes on American democracy, he observed that people in an egalitarian society lost faith in one another, and lost respect for authority of a superior person or a superior class. Instead, they placed their faith in the “public as a whole,” and in the nation-state as its embodiment.

Tocqueville’s observations in particular reveal an astonishingly thin line between a democratic society and its totalitarian (I am continuing to use this term with conviction and relish!) counterpart.

The concept of mass society, which incorporates the ideas of social democratization and the splintering of community, would lead many serious scholars to believe that the emergence of a mass society has been the causa prima of the twentieth-century totalitarianism. In her analysis of the Nazi phenomenon in Germany, Hannah Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, suggested that, unlike the nineteenth-century mob, that was built along the class lines, modern totalitarianism was built on masses, being shaped “by all-pervasive influences and convictions which were tacitly and inarticulately shared by all classes of society alike.”

Another German émigré, Franz Leopold Neumann, has made an intriguing and far-reaching conclusion that the main reason for the rise of Hitler and of Nazism was not the psychological susceptibility of the German mass society to political extremism, but social discontent with the bureaucratization and depersonalization of the government of the Weimar Republic, and with its inability to provide proper leadership.

In other words, public dissatisfaction with inadequate leadership in a mass society culture may lead to the rise of totalitarianism… A remarkable observation, indeed! To which I may add that mass society alienation in the Weimar Republic may indeed have led Germany to an attempt at social regeneration, resulting in the monster of the Third Reich. 

Is mass society totalitarianism-prone? This question was to create a furious debate, with some outraged scholars rushing to the defense of democracy, trying to prove that even though the United States and Great Britain do fit the profile of a mass society the best, neither has developed any significant extremist social movements that could indicate a tendency toward totalitarianism in them.

In my opinion, there is a very thin line separating totalitarianism from ‘non-totalitarianism’ within modern mass societies, whether it be Russia or the United States. Russia is a nation with a well-shaped totalitarian psychology. Calling it a mass society may be just a little stretch, if the detailed definition is employed with insistence on every technicality. But, by the same token, the United States is a full-blown mass society, yet exhibiting certain totalitarian tendencies, particularly in this nation’s foreign policy. Let us recall from the entry on the descriptions and formal definitions of totalitarianism the following illuminating passage, here presented in an abbreviated form:

“Controlled economy allows the totalitarian dictatorship to exploit its population for foreign conquest and world revolution. For example, all resources can be concentrated on a single military project.”

I actually do contend that American economy shows some evidence of being controlled, in the ability of the government to print large quantities of paper money, to allow, and to cover up, trillions of dollars of deficit spending. The rest of the passage above shows an eerie relevance to the still current neoconservative policy to exploit the American population for foreign conquest and world revolution (gently dubbed as “spreading democracy around the world”), and to lavish exorbitant amounts of resources “on a single military project” (like in that senseless war in Iraq, as perhaps the most outrageous example).

There is also evidence of an intense public dissatisfaction with the quality of government leadership in the executive branch and the representation in the Congress. There is a fatigue with bureaucratic incompetence, a nostalgia for a competent dictatorship, even if that erstwhile competence is largely illusory, in the return of, say, the Clinton dynasty to the White House.

Do understand me correctly, none of this is to suggest that America is somehow on the verge of becoming a totalitarian state without even knowing or understanding it. However, I have indeed observed some further creepy tendencies of an erosion of the multi-party (or rather the two-party) system, which I have described as “neo-bipartisanship” in modern American politics, in my Twilight’s Last Gleaming section. This means that, in a sense, the two-party system has lost its effectiveness and legitimacy, as the provider of alternative policies to the public choice. These days the clueless Democrats in the United States Congress have nothing to offer to the public to counteract, or rather to countermand, the policies of the Bush Administration on the issues of great importance, limiting their differences with the Republicans to non-essential, and even trivial, trifles.

No, America is by no means a “totalitarian wannaby,” and to describe her as such would be to completely misunderstand the nature of the totalitarian ideal, which presupposes a sense of national cohesion, of which America today has none. (Otherwise, there would have been a far greater sense of social appreciation of the fact that this nation is at war, and that her children are dying every day out there… for a presumably worthy national cause?!)

…But what this entry does strive to suggest is that there exists a deplorable paucity of public understanding of certain key points of political philosophy, regarding social political alternatives in all societies, and the hidden property of totalitarianism, as a natural alternative to a mass society in crisis, is prominently among these. There may even exist, if I am following the signals correctly a core group of highly disaffected white Americans who may be eager for a political takeover, if not of the United States as a whole, then of certain geographical parts of the United States, gaining autonomy, or even independence, in a splintered collection of entities currently known as the world’s sole superpower.

POST-TOTALITARIANISM AS A FAKE CONCEPT

In the American movie Enemy of the State, one character tells the other: “You are either incredibly smart or incredibly stupid!” The same can be said of the authors of the term post-totalitarianism, and, just like in the movie, we are about to find out which it is, with a different outcome here, however.

The term post-totalitarianism was developed fairly recently by the distinguished Spanish political scientist Juan Linz and the American politologist Alfred Stepan to describe post-Stalinist USSR as a distinctive type of social organization formed right after a previous experience of totalitarianism. It has been subsequently applied to other nations of post-communist Eastern and Central Europe, particularly to East Germany after her attainment of independence from the USSR and reunification with West Germany, apparently not very organic and satisfying, according to the authors of this particular application.

Considering how many post-WWII and pre-Soviet collapse states used to be considered totalitarian, but not anymore, the term “post-totalitarian” seems like a very handy political science concept, to cover the field of former Soviet dependencies, satellites, clients, and other captive nations. The only problem with this is that while the prefix “post-” may signify something, the use of the principal: “totalitarian” exposes the problem of bad definitions, which we have talked about at some length already, and intend to be talking about still, for a while.

Equating post-Stalinism in the USSR with post-totalitarianism misses the point of what totalitarianism is. It goes without saying that the author of de-Stalinization Nikita Khrushchev had no intention of liberating the USSR from the totalitarian grip, and of course it was not up to him to do so. Khrushchev’s attack on Stalin was his weapon in a fierce power struggle within the Soviet leadership, and the reader is strongly advised at this point to read through my Khrushchev subsection of the History section, where this subject is treated at length.

By thus attacking one of the three whales of totalitarianism: the leader principle, Khrushchev dealt a severe blow to the totalitarian cohesiveness of Soviet society, but never quite destroyed it. Ever since Khrushchev delivered that blow, Soviet society was ailing, but it was never “de-totalitarianized.” In fact, totalitarianism has survived in Russia, first weakened by a gradual decay of Soviet statist social mentality, but then receiving the electric shock of Yeltsin’s 1990's, and thus revived into Putin’s Russia. Totalitarianism is still recovering in Russia today, but the totalitarian spirit, the national pursuit of the totalitarian ideal, is robust, and on the rapidly ascending line.

Thus, my chief objection to the term “post-totalitarianism,” as it was originally applied to Soviet Russia, is its emptiness of substance. Totalitarianism in real terms is an application of the ‘totalitarian ideal’ to social life and practice. To talk about post-totalitarianism is essentially the same as talking about post-democracy, or post-liberalism, or post-conservatism, etc. Granted, several totalitarian states have fallen, conspicuously, those were Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany, but they were defeated militarily, and a new social code was imposed on them by the victors. As for East Germany during her forced membership in the Soviet bloc of nations, being effectively an occupied territory, it cannot be called totalitarian, because the totalitarian spirit is always home-grown, and never imported from the outside.

To summarize what I have been trying to say above, totalitarianism is always a native germ dwelling in all societies. When it triumphs, the social organization of such society becomes a reflection of this triumph. It is necessary for political science to approach this subject in a manner appropriate for the task. Nobody in America would ever call the George W. Bush years as “post-Clintonism,” or “post-Democratism.” Nor will it be wise to refer to the Obama years as “post-Bushism,” or “post-Republicanism.” It is not that such terms are wrong, but they are clearly fake concepts, and my advice to the political scientists is to avoid them at all costs, while finding more meaningful tags for the different national-historical periods which they have thus mislabeled.

IRAN, IRAQ, AND JEANE KIRKPATRICK

(This short but instructive entry is undoubtedly an important contribution to the further development of the Totalitarian subsection, although here it serves as an intermission of sorts.)

This entry would have been a natural founding member of the Americana club, had it not been a perfect fit for my continued discussion of the totalitarian principle, as a clear illustration of certain theoretical points, to be made specifically in this Collective Guilt And Glory section.

In this case, we are dealing with totalitarianism versus authoritarianism, and the preference for the alleged lesser of two evils, as a strategic principle of the United States foreign policy, formulated by one of Ronald Reagan’s chief foreign policy architects, Dr. Jeane Kirkpatrick.

Reminding us again of the Kirkpatrick Doctrine, in her 1979 article Dictatorships and Double Standards, she argued very explicitly, bravely denouncing any pretense to diplomatic language that certain key foreign policy implications could be drawn by distinguishing “totalitarian” regimes from “autocracies” in general. According to Kirkpatrick, “typical autocracies are primarily interested in their own survival, and, as such, allow varying degrees of autonomy regarding elements of civil society, religious institutions, court, and the press. On the other hand, under totalitarianism, no individual, or institution, is autonomous from the state’s all-encompassing ideology. Therefore US foreign policy should distinguish between the two and even grant temporary support to non-totalitarian autocratic governments, in order to combat totalitarian movements, and promote US interests.”

The predictable academic problem with Dr. Kirkpatrick’s thinking was that she could never properly define totalitarianism and how it was different from autocratic government. I say “predictable,” because nobody, after Giovanni Gentile, has been able to describe it properly; and considering the deep Western bias against the term and the extreme unwillingness of all potential and actual post-WWII totalitarians to touch it with a ten-foot pole, how could anyone hope to arrive--- anywhere, anytime, anyhow--- at a reasonable definition? Apparently, it was enough for Dr. Kirkpatrick to be able to describe totalitarianism by the by now immortal cliché: “I know it when I see it.” Having toyed with socialism for the most part of her younger life, she had become an uncompromising ideological enemy of the USSR, and, for her, you could not be more patently “totalitarian” than America’s main adversary in the cold war world! Incidentally, I completely understand all those American socialists who thus transferred that political adversarial relationship into the ideological sphere, and renounced socialism merely on that basis, which, however, is not supposed to have anything to do with the academic definition of totalitarianism.

As if to challenge the Kirkpatrick Doctrine in practice, a gory war broke out in 1980, soon after her famous article quoted above was published, between the Islamic Republic of Iran (which I had always identified as quasi-totalitarian, that is well before Secretary Rice’s shocking 2005 quarterbacking during America’s war in Iraq, when she must have realized that America’s target ought to have been Iran, and not Iran’s worst enemy, therefore, America’s strategic “friend”!) and that classic example of blatant authoritarianism, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, in which the United States, first cautiously but from 1982 on, openly, supported the side of the bloody dictator (and a bitter enemy of Israel) against America’s recent offender.

Ironically, when the tables were turned on Saddam in the 1990’s under the first President Bush, and then of course in the new millennium under the second President Bush, that consummate authoritarian dictator was suddenly transformed into a “totalitarian” thug, as if to eternalize the Kirkpatrick Doctrine in this travesty of  linguistic logic: If you are not a friend of the United States, if America doesn’t like you, or if she goes to war against you--- then you must be totalitarian by definition!

TOTALITARIANISM IN WESTERN TIDBITS PART II

(See Part I of this entry, posted yesterday.)

Let us continue with our Western tidbits on totalitarianism:

“Secret Police: The secret-police apparatus employs all modern theories and techniques of scientific crime detection and psychology. It terrorizes the populace in ways radically different from, and far crueler than those of the police systems of earlier autocracies. The totalitarian secret police employs institutions and devices such as the concentration camp, predetermined trials, and public confessions. One of the dangers inherent in the totalitarian dictatorship is the possibility that the secret police might seize control of the party itself.” (Wikipedia.)

There is no question that the punishment of perpetrators against the welfare of the State is much crueler in the totalitarian society, where only State-controlled opposition is to be allowed, and no loose nut or bolt in the social machinery is to be tolerated, than in any free society, whose means of self-protection against the loose cannons are much more subtle, although not quite as innocent or altogether ineffective as we may be often led to believe. Such defensive social mechanisms, not just against common criminals, but also against political and religious offenders, have always existed, habitually marked with remarkable cruelty, unless an enlightened, habeas corpus-conscious society would take effective steps against prisoner torture, and cruel execution methods, or would abolish the death penalty altogether, to assert its humane nature.

As for the gibberish about “the dangers inherent in the totalitarian dictatorship that the secret police might seize control of the party itself,” see my separate entry Secret Police And State Power, later in this section. It is for the reason that I will be giving this important subject a full-size treatment there, that my comment here is so brief and non-comprehensive.

“Control of Arms: The monopoly of all effective weapons of destruction is an attribute of all contemporary governments. In totalitarian dictatorships, however, which provide no legal means of effecting a change of government, popular revolutions, such as the uprisings which occurred in East Germany in 1953, and in Hungary in 1956, have little prospect of success. Tanks, flamethrowers, jet airplanes, and other weapons provide totalitarian dictators with strong defense against revolution.” (Wikipedia.)

Here is some estimable academic forgetting his estimable business and getting too personal for anybody’s good. The uprisings mentioned above were not started by the populace against the totalitarian rule, but by occupied nations against the occupying forces and their collaborators. This could happen to anyone who is conducting an occupation of a foreign land, and talking about totalitarian regimes in this context is, again, incompetent and totally irrelevant to the topic of this discussion.

As for the theoretical possibility of a totalitarian society starting an armed grassroots rebellion against the government which rules it, such an idea is inconsistent with the underlying principle of a totalitarian state, which, by its nature, presupposes an overwhelming public support. A mass uprising against the government would be possible only when the state’s leaders had themselves undermined the totalitarian principle, and had attempted to usurp authoritarian power (under the principle l’État c’est moi!), creating a conflict with the totalitarian interest (l’État c’est nous!) of the nation.

“Control of the Economy: The centrally controlled economy enables the totalitarian dictatorship to exploit its population for foreign conquest and world revolution. For example, all resources can be concentrated on a single military project. Totalitarian economy allows the dictator to control the workers, making them dependent on the government. Without a work permit none can work; work permits may be withdrawn for offenses such as objecting to foul working conditions.” (Wikipedia.)

The subject of state control of the national economy leads us into the murky waters of intellectual bias and philosophical dysfunction, as the above passage convincingly illustrates. This whole text is sheer nonsense starting with its incoherent references to foreign conquests, world revolutions and single military projects. None of these are essentially characteristic of a totalitarian dictatorship, and the desire to engage in foreign adventurism and promotion of revolutions against unfriendly or not-friendly-enough foreign regimes can be found in militarily strong democratic nations in sometimes even greater measure than in strong totalitarian powers.

Even worse, the silliness about withdrawing work permits from misbehaving workers is totally inconsistent with the socialist underpinnings of the totalitarian society, where the right to work is every citizen’s express obligation, and not a privilege, to be withdrawn by the State!.

No wonder, the term totalitarianism has been so much disliked all this time. Those who are particularly in no mood to turn into mass agitators and propaganda hacks, have shunned it because of its inconsistencies, and glaring discrepancies, such as the following ones, observed and admitted as evidence of incompetence on the part of Western scholars of totalitarianism, by their more skeptical colleagues:

“By the 1960’s there was a sharp decline in the concept’s popularity among scholars. The decline in Soviet centralization after Stalin, research into Nazism revealing significant inefficiency and improvisation, and the Soviet collapse have reduced the utility of the concept to that of an ideal or abstract type. In addition, constitutional democracy and totalitarianism as forms of the modern state, share many characteristics. In both, those in authority have a monopoly on the use of the nation's military power and on certain forms of mass communication; and then the suppression of dissent especially during times of crisis, often occurs in democracies as well. Also, one-party systems may be found in non-totalitarian states, as are government-controlled economies and dictators.”

In other words, Western political science has now been saying: forget everything you have been told by us about totalitarianism: this can all be garbage. (While such repentant admissions were being uttered, and/or written, the likes of Jeane Kirkpatrick had continued to use this term, now appealing not to the Academia, for some esoteric scholarly discussion, but directly to the conservative politicians and to their chronically underinformed constituents…)

To summarize the thrust of this oversized repudiation of the popular notions about totalitarianism, that are almost as incoherent and deceptive, and just as meaningless as all agitation and propaganda ineptly or with deliberate incompetence conducted by the cold-war West, and now by a post-cold-war America, there is no value, but plenty of social harm in such dishonorable practice, as misinformed public, exercising its freedom of speech in ignorance, is unknowingly in violation of the principles of representative democracy, by virtue of the worthlessness of its vote.

(...It may be perhaps of some value to trace the evolution of totalitarianism as an academic term in one of the subsequent entries, which I am planning to do later in this series.)

TOTALITARIANISM IN WESTERN TIDBITS PART I

(This entry is a direct continuation of the overall subject of totalitarianism in popular definitions, raised in my previous two postings.)

To continue this summary of Western academic conceptions of totalitarianism, with an understanding that no fair and balanced alternative to them is extant, here is another characteristic sample (quoted from Yahoo Answers):

“Totalitarian Governments: Those countries, whose governments are usually characterized as totalitarian, were Germany, under the National Socialism of Hitler; the USSR, particularly under Joseph Stalin; and the People's Republic of China, under the Communist rule of Mao Ze-dong. Other governments have also been called “totalitarian,” such as those of Italy under Benito Mussolini, North Korea under Kim Il Sung, Syria under Hafez al-Assad, and Iraq under Saddam Hussein.” (From answers.yahoo.com.)

Ironically (or should I say scandalously?), this enumeration of totalitarian governments fails to mention the fact that it was Mussolini’s Italy that had given birth to the term totalitarianism, in the first place, and here, look: it is reduced to a dubious “also-ran.” I wonder what poor Giovanni Gentile would have said to such a terrible affront?! “…Also been called totalitarian,” my foot! Then, of course, North Korean totalitarianism has definitely survived the first Kim, passed on to his late son, and still showing no apparent cracks under the latest obscenely youthful grandson. As for Syria under the first Assad, and Iraq under Saddam Hussein, these were authoritarian dictatorships, and by no means totalitarian societies. With regard to Assad the son, currently under attack, he must be a far better ophthalmologist than he is a dictator. It is actually not he, but his father’s old regime, which is rather feebly fighting for its life and for the lives of the terrified minorities of Syria against an enemy far more dangerous to the future of Israel and the whole region than either Hafez or Bashar ever were.

As for the omissions on the list above, the most significant omission is that of Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam. It was North Vietnam’s totalitarian nationalism that not only prevailed in the Vietnam War, but achieved an even greater triumph in the reunification of the whole nation under the impoverished Hanoi’s supremacy over the rich Saigon. Such is the nature of totalitarianism that its political strength and national cohesion prove stronger in the end than superior economic might. For this reason, I am convinced that in the future Korean reunification (which is only a matter of time), despite all the glaring shortcomings of the North, the unified national government will sit in the nuclear weapons-rich totalitarian Pyongyang, rather than in the economically prosperous but otherwise wanting Seoul.

 “The Party and Its Tools: Under a dictator, the members of the ruling party become the nation’s elite. The entire society is subjected to a hierarchical organization, where each individual is responsible to another in a position of higher authority, with the single exception of the supreme leader, who is answerable to no one. All nongovernmental social groups are either destroyed totally or coordinated to serve the purposes of the party and the state. Total subjection of the individual is possible only through the advanced science and technology. Among the decisive, technologically conditioned features of totalitarian dictatorships are their monopoly of mass communications, terroristic secret-police apparatus, monopoly of all effective weapons of destruction, and a centrally controlled economy.” (Here and subsequently, the passages are quoted from the Wikipedia.)

It is incredible how arbitrary and circumstantial, rather than logical and definitive, these descriptions are. It may be true of most regimes, called totalitarian, that they indeed used to be tied to a one-party system, and Lenin’s famous exhortations of the latter are well-known. But, as I said before, the condition of a one-party system is theoretically unnecessary to define a totalitarian state. Instead of becoming the head of his party, the leader may choose to rise above the partisan fray, allowing a very small number of political “parties” to vie for victory in parliamentary ‘elections’ and for nominal ‘representation,’ always under the state control. We may also consider Plato’s totalitarian Politeia, where those diverse social castes can be said to represent different political parties without any infringement upon the overriding totalitarian principle.

Indeed the word “party” may have acquired some normally accepted meaning on account of habitual usage, but its actual parameters even if becoming a temporary captive of usage, do not have an organic connection to it. To use a rather clever analogy, if the first ten students in a random sampling of a classroom turn out to be male, this does not give the sampler the right to conclude that the school is for boys only.

The logical error of the one-party-stipulating conclusion becomes apparent, when we view it as a mistaken transfer of the one-state truistic stipulation to overlap and coincide with the accepted one-party occurrence with no regard to the rules of necessity and sufficiency, which, in this case, do not even apply.

Finally for the passage above, the talk about the necessity of advancement in science and technology, for a totalitarian state to become possible, is also rather superficial, as one can easily conceive of the totalitarian principle pre-existing its realization in the age of mass communications, the latter making the stipulation of totality easier to implement, but only in technical, not philosophical terms.

“Control of Mass Communications: By virtue of its monopoly of mass communications the ruling party and the government are in possession of all channels, through which people get information and guidance. All newspapers, magazines, book publishing, as well as radio and television broadcasting, theater production and motion pictures, are centrally controlled. All writers, actors, composers, poets, speakers are enrolled in party-controlled organizations licensed by the government. Usually they are required to be members of the party. The party line, that is, its interpretation of policy, is imposed on all mass media via censorship.” (Wikipedia.)

Once again, this rigid preoccupation with the one-party system blurs the real picture. It’s the state, stupid! And, incidentally, the requirement of party membership mentioned above was never imposed from above, at least in my firsthand post-Stalinist and second-hand Stalinist experience within the Soviet State. On the contrary, the State looked upon those who would eagerly seek Communist Party membership as suspected careerists. In the Great Purge of 1937, Communist Party members were particularly targeted, similarly to the case of the Spanish Inquisition under Torquemada, when Jewish Christian converts were ordered to be examined, and many were burned at the stake on the suspicion of insincerity. The highest criterion of good citizenship was therefore not the Party membership, but the citizen’s unwavering loyalty to the State, and in all walks of life, loyal non-members of the Communist Party had a much better chance of eventual survival and success in life than the “lucky” card-holders.

(Part II of this entry will follow tomorrow…)