(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!
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