ONENESS AND ALLNESS

(It is important to register the connection, in the reader’s mind, between this entry about oneness and allness and the previous “fascist” Aesopian fable. The essence of totalitarianism, indeed, covers a lot of bases, and the core meaning of “patriotism,” in the next entry, is just one of these many bases.)

With this entry we briefly return to the subject of totalitarianism without prejudice. A lot of entries on this subject have been posted already, particularly, the mega-entry Totalitarianism Without Prejudice, posted on January 17, 2011, to which I am now drawing the reader’s attention. My purpose as always is to remove the enormously prejudicial (through a relentless deliberate misuse) stigma from a legitimate and conceptually useful term deserving at least an objective non-judgmental consideration. It has been my contention that the term “totalitarianism” is indispensable for the understanding of the world’s most significant socio-political problems of today, and that its careless dismissal as an odious historism or an almost equally odious socio-political aberration does great harm to political science depriving it of an essential tool of scientific inquiry.

Previously I pointed out that originally as a socio-political term totalitarismo had an unequivocally positive meaning for one of the greatest humanistic philosophers of the first half of the twentieth century Giovanni Gentile, also known as the philosopher of fascism, thus called by none other than Benito Mussolini. Before we disqualify Gentile on those grounds, shouldn’t we be interested in how a renowned humanist and social reformer could ever conceive of something so universally condemned as indefensible?

I have made a number of comments already linking Dumas’ gallant buddy slogan “One for all--All for one” (which is originally a rallying cry for the four bosom friends in his novel The Three Musketeers) to the core ideal of totalitarianism, where the principle of the oneness of the State has an unbreakable bond to the ‘allness’ of its citizens.

The key point of this observation is so important, and in fact pivotal, to the concept of totalitarianism, that no extra effort to drive home its importance can be considered redundant, as long as it is not wasted on an inattentive reader.

The reader is therefore encouraged once again to always associate the word totalitarianism with the Dumas catchphrase one for all--all for one, in order to achieve the highest level of objectivation of its meaning, not encumbered by the heavy baggage of its highly negative political connotations, amassed in historical usage based on the long years and various national forms of its objectionable practice.