Totalitarianism Is Totalitarianism Is Totalitarianism

Recently I watched the film/doco Orwell: 2+2=5 which doesn’t stop at simply documenting Orwell’s life or his novels (the two most famous being 1984 and Animal Farm.) The film illustrates that the recent rise of totalitarianism in a number of countries are instances of exactly what Orwell was warning about in the writing of his novels. In discussing this film one person commented that there are a degrees of totalitarianism.

That comment reminded me of the 1913 poem by Gertrude Stein, Sacred Emily.

One of the lines in that poem is widely known and frequently cited. It reads,

‘A rose is a rose is a rose.

So too, I thought, is totalitarianism.

Totalitarianism is totalitarianism is totalitarianism.

There are no degrees. Just as murder is murder, totalitarianism is totalitarianism.

Okay, okay, I hear the retort. What about murder in the first degree, and murder in the second degree? What distinguishes one from the other? First-degree murder is pre-meditated, intentional and deliberate. Second-degree murder is unplanned, but still intentional. Second-degree murders are often those committed in the “heat of passion.” Both are murder.

Does such distinction apply to totalitarianism?

It would be hard to argue that totalitarianism is unplanned or that it occurs in a moment of heated passion.

But, what is totalitarianism? The term itself was coined in the early 1920s to describe Italian fascism under Mussolini. The word totalitarian derives from the Italian totalità meaning totally with the suffix arian being a reference to the word authoritarian. So, in essence, totalitarianism is total authoritarianism. It is a word of dominance, oppression, and tyranny. As a political ideology it has been studied many times by philosophers, political theorists, historians, and others. The most common features that these studies attribute to totalitarianism include:

• Centralised government and control of the State.
• A dictatorial approach.
• Requirement of subservience to the State.
• Use of State terrorism.
• State control of mass communication and monopoly of the media.
• Display of an overbearing arrogance to others, especially those deemed to be enemies of the State.
• A one-party State.
• A charismatic dictator who holds power for powers sake.

Not all these characteristics need be present to qualify a system as totalitarian. Absence of one or two of these does not make a system a second-degree or third-degree totalitarian one.

There are no degrees of totalitarianism.

One of those who undertook a lot of research into totalitarianism was Hannah Arendt. She noted that totalitarianism, and its charismatic leader, provided people with a simplistic and comforting worldview about complex social issues.

Another writer was Wilhelm Reich who wrote The Mass Psychology of Fascism in 1932 just as Hitler was coming to power and then updated it in 1944. Reich suggested that fascism arose out of patriarchal systems already existing in society. Patriarchy, Reich theorised, prepared children to obey and revere a harsh and dominant leader.

By fusing these two theories (Arendt’s comforting worldview, and Reich’s patriarchal roots) George Orwell composed his two classic novels: Animal Farm in 1945 and 1984 in 1949.

It would seem that Orwell’s warnings went unheeded, for totalitarianism seems to have been given a kick-start again in many parts of the world.

We cannot and must not allow totalitarianism to take root. If it does, it must be uprooted.

I began this blogpiece with a reference to a poem about roses. I will finish with another well-known quotation related to roses. This time from William Shakespeare and his play Romeo and Juliet:

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

Applying this to totalitarianism:

Totalitarianism by any other name would smell as repugnant.

Known For All The Wrong Reasons

One of 500 Dafur refugee children's drawings
from the Waging Peace collection

Pol Pot, Stalin, Hitler, Idi Amin, Franco, Kai-Shek, Mao, Hussein – all well-known names. Most likely though, they are known for the wrong reasons. Asked to associate single words with any of these names and many people would come up with a list looking something like this: dictator, despot, genocide, holocaust, brutal etc.

We know their names because of the atrocities committed under their rule.

Stalin is estimated to have had 40-60 million killed during his regime.

Mao Tse Tung had somewhere between 45 million and 75 million killed whilst in power.

During Hitler’s Reich the number of deaths is estimated at 17-20 million.

Chiang Kai-Shek murdered about 10 million.

Approximately 2 million were killed during Hussein’s rule. Pol Pot’s Cambodian rule killed a similar number.

The number killed during Idi Amin’s reign is indeterminate but estimated at between 100,000 to 500,000. Franco, in Spain, is responsible for about 400,000 deaths.

Those eight names, all from the 20^th century, were responsible for at least a conservative estimate of 116 million deaths. The death toll could have been as high as 170 million. And that number is only by those eight. Others that could be mentioned are: the dictator Milosevic, and the genocides of Rwanda, Dafur, Armenia, and the Rape of Nanking.

More than 116 – 170 million wrong reasons for knowing their names.

In 1948 the Genocide Convention was drafted and gained 153 state parties to it (as of February 2025.) The Convention defines genocide as the ‘… intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group…’  The Convention includes in the rubric of genocide not simply outright killing, but also the causing of bodily or mental harm, deliberately imposing conditions of life that will bring about destruction, preventing births within the group, and forcibly transferring children from the group to another group.

When genocide is considered in the light of this Convention, then the total numbers given above are likely to rise by a considerable number of orders of magnitude.

This definition also enables us to recognise a number of other historical events as genocide. The colonisation (including slaughter) of native Americans by European invaders from the 16^th century onwards, the Atlantic slave trade, the stolen generation in Australia.

Genocide did not end with the signing of the Genocide Convention, and genocide did not end with the shift from the 20^th to the 21^st century. Genocide is continuing.

We can name the names of those contributing to genocide today.

They also will be known for all the wrong reasons when the history of the 21^st century is written.