(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.)
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