O totalitarianism it was a political regime that emerged and disappeared in European countries in the 20th century. You totalitarian regimes have in common the total control of public life and private life. To maintain themselves, countries that adopted totalitarianism elected totalitarian leaders, who centralized the various figures of power and the actions of the State itself. themselves, in addition to investing heavily in propaganda and electing potential enemies, which became the greatest internal justification for totalitarianism work.
We can observe three examples major and main forms of totalitarianism in 20th century Europe: the Nazism, of Hitler, the fascism, of Mussolini, and the Stalinism, in the Soviet Union. However, the authoritarian dictatorships of franc (Spain) and Salazar (Portugal) can be considered totalitarian, in addition to being inspired by the Italian fascism of Benito Mussolini.
Read too: What is military dictatorship?
Origin of totalitarianism
Although some theorists try to impute the origin of totalitarianism to the
communism, whether by dissidence or reaction, it is not possible, from an analysis free of ideological visions, to present a precise reason that gave rise to all totalitarian regimes. It is clear, however, that there is a common element among them: the crisis.All totalitarian regimes emerged at a time when european crisis, left mainly by First World War and by ineffective economic policies. The crisis led to a chaotic situation of high inflation, poverty, hunger, unemployment and lack of basic assistance to the population.
The totalitarian political regimes appeared in that scenerychaotic as possible solutions to the population's problems and, therefore, they gained popular support. We can then associate the origin of totalitarianism with the hatred of some social category, justified by the fear and terror attributed to the population.
Read too: Was Nazism on the left or on the right?
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Examples of totalitarianism
Nazism: led by adolf hitler, took place in Germany between 1933 and 1945.
Fascism: led by Benito Mussolini, it operated in Italy between 1922 and 1943.
Stalinism: Soviet communism began in 1917, from the Russian Revolution, but Stalinism, emerged from a Josef Stalin's private and unorthodox interpretation of Marxism, only entered the scene in 1924, lasting until 1953.
frankism and Salazarism: Francisco Franco was a general who dominated Spain between 1939 and 1975; Antônio de Oliveira Salazar dominated Portugal between 1926 and 1970, ending economic liberalism and establishing the Portuguese Estado Novo. Both leaders are considered totalitarian, anti-communist, nationalist and were inspired by Mussolini's fascism.
To learn more about the events that marked this type of regime, we recommend reading the text Totalitarian regimes: examples, characteristics, consequences.
Characteristics of totalitarianism
We can list some common elements that delineate the concept of totalitarianism, both in the example of a regime far-left totalitarian regimes (Soviet Union) and far-right totalitarian regimes (Germany and Italy). These elements are:
Chaotic crisis scenario: Germany, at the time of the rise of the Nazi party, was going through a financial and institutional crisis left by the First World War, which resulted in hunger and unemployment. Hitler and the National Socialist German Workers' Party emerged as a hope of recovery. At first, Hitler received strong popular support. It was no different in Russia, which was also ravaged by World War I and years of tsarist monarchy. In 1917, when the Russian revolution, the movement's leaders (Lenin became the most important leader of the revolutionary process) promised to eliminate the ills faced by the country. With the departure of Lenin From power, Stalin, the successor, imposed a leftist totalitarian regime, whose main enemy was the anti-communists.
Identification of a common enemy: in all totalitarian regimes, we can find the identification of potential enemies in common, which, in general, are groups that do not share the interests of the regime or that are chosen to serve as targets of indignation popular. By having a common goal, it's easier to keep the people together for an ultimate goal. In the case of Stalinism, the enemy was the bourgeois; for the Nazis, the central enemy was the jewish people, in addition to gypsies, communists and homosexuals; for the fascists, the enemies were foreigners, anti-nationalists and critics of the strong state, like the anarchists.
Total control of the population's lives: it is a common characteristic of totalitarian regimes to control the life of the population, both in the public and in the private sphere. This feature makes totalitarianism different from dictatorships, as it gives the state full powers of arbitrarily decide on everything that the population can or cannot access, in all aspects of its life. This causes the State to be excessively inflated, establishing a link between totalitarianism and authoritarianism, which can cause confusion between totalitarianism and communism. Although there is a record of a totalitarian leftist regime (Stalinism), it cannot be said that the totalitarian regimes are essentially left-wing or that communism is a totalitarian proposition.
Centralization of power: to sustain themselves, totalitarian regimes centralized power in the hands of a leader or a political group, which led to the cult of personality and, as a strategy, the groups or leaders propagated nationalism and patriotism as essential elements for the growth of the nation. There is also the one-party system.
Advertising: all totalitarian regimes have invested heavily in publicity to propagate totalitarian ideals and maintain ideological dominance over the people. The idea was to maintain popular support, even in times of crisis. Nazi, Stalinist and fascist propaganda were extremely strong, always presenting the leader and the state as the saviors of the motherland against the enemies. Any hint of liberal or anti-nationalist thinking (such as the defense of globalist culture and economy) was opposed with the incisive propaganda, which dominated all the media, after all, all the media were nationalized. Radio, cinema, newspapers, everything that was a means of cultural dissemination should pass through the scrutiny of the State. To effectively control the media and guarantee advertising, totalitarian leaders created ministries and secretariats for media regulation.
Fear, terror and policing: there is constant policing of the population, justified by the fear of the ruler of his ruled and vice versa. Terror is spread as being a real element, which causes fear in people, who allow themselves to be ruled totalitarianly.
Elimination of singularities: the totalitarian state eliminates the existing differences between people, creating an equal total body, by implementing the same ideas on people through advertising, imposing the same products for consumption and controlling their lives private.
Also access: Right and left
Totalitarianism and Philosophy
Such as philosophy is dedicated, among other things, to the problematization from the milieu and political practices, we can identify philosophical thoughts that somehow criticized or supported totalitarianism. There is, for example, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, who was for a long time a supporter of German Nazism.
The Frankfurtians Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse, in addition to Walter Benjamin, criticized Nazism, not least because they were German Jews persecuted by the Hitler regime. Anarchists and communists like Gramsci criticized Italian fascism. Many artists and intellectuals supported Stalinism, such as the German poet Bertold Brecht.
However, the largest and most grounded study on totalitarian regimes that analyzes impartial all cases of 20th century totalitarianism come from the German Jewish philosopher HannahArendt.
→ Totalitarianism and Hannah Arendt
THE philosopherjewishgerman Hannah Arendt wrote a book calledOrigins of Totalitarianism, in addition to other texts in which she is dedicated to analyzing the totalitarian phenomenon and anti-Semitism through political philosophy.
In Origins of Totalitarianism, the thinker is dedicated to identifying the origins of this phenomenon contemporary to her (she suffered Nazi persecution for being Jewish, she being imprisoned in a Nazi camp on French territory until she could flee to the United States), as well as thoroughly studying the causespolitics that lead to totalitarianism. Arendt identifies the existence of the common elements between the totalitarian regimes that were described above.
![Stamp printed in Germany stamps the face of Hannah Arendt, who wrote the book Origins of Totalitarianism. [2]](/f/bdc6ad757a64842ca7137dbca2996cc2.jpg)
Stamp printed in Germany stamps the face of Hannah Arendt, who wrote the book Origins of Totalitarianism. [2]
According to Arendt, totalitarianism is the elevation of two phenomena: the fear it's the horror. The fusion of these two elements in their potentiality leads to an extremely bureaucratic system in which the total State transforms the collectivity into a single body. One of the marks of totalitarianism is the annulment of individuality for the promotion of a society that thinks the same way and wants the same things, thus supporting, in unison, the actions of the totalitarian leader. In Origins of totalitarianism, Arendt says:
In place of borders and channels of communication between individual men, it builds an iron belt that encircles them in such a way that it is as if their plurality dissolves into One-Only-Man of dimensions gigantic... Pressing men against each other, total terror destroys the space between them.i
In order to carry out what was aimed at with totalitarianism, it was not enough to act with alienating propaganda and with the ideological force of the leader, but it was also necessary eliminate anyone who stood against the regime, in addition to persecuting a certain category of people as being common enemies of the nation.
Hannah Arendt also classifies, in later works, as Eichmann in Jerusalem, the existence of different types of people who were behind Nazism. According to the philosopher, there were Nazisconvinced, taken by a radical evil (which in the Kantian vocabulary designates people taken by an evil rooted in them), that is, those who really believed in anti-Semitism as the salvation of the motherland.
There were also people like Adolf Eichmann, a low-ranking SS officer responsible for transporting imprisoned Jews to the concentration camps. In his late trial (Eichmann managed to escape and was captured in Argentina only in 1962, being tried in an international court of exception), Eichmann stated in his defense that he was not a anti-Semitic.
Indeed, the facts pointed to a peaceful personality of the defendant, who, as she said in her defense, just worked for the army during that regime, looking for a career and a job. professional. The Eichmann trial led Arendt to find a new type of totalitarian, especially the Nazis: those who didn't believe in what they were doing (which led directly to evil), but who simply did it to get some advantagepersonal.
Image credits:
[1] Everett Historical / Shutterstock
[2] Mitrofanov Alexander / Shutterstock
i ARENDT, HANNAH. Origins of totalitarianism. Translation by Roberto Raposo. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1989, p. 518.
by Francisco Porfirio
Philosophy teacher
