Totalitarianism

Totalitarianism is a political system where the state has complete control over everyone and everything. The government has limitless power through total control of both the public and the private sector. Adolph Hitler's Nazi Germany and Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union are both examples of totalitarian governments, so this gives us a clue as to what they often involve; genocide. A totalitarian government cannot begin overnight however, the public are cleverly manipulated into allowing it to gradually begin. This can be seen in George Orwell's 1984, where Winston Smith, completely drawn into the government propaganda accepts that 2+2=5.

How to start a totalitarian government (For Dummies)

1. Remove Individuality: Start chipping away at peoples individuality, maybe introduce a swanky new compulsory dress code to make sure that everybody looks the same, we are all one!

2. Break up groups: Social groups, religious groups, academic groups, BAN THEM ALL. Ensure that people are mingling with strangers, people that they don't care about, after all, we are all one!

3. Create Isolation: Remove contact from each other and from the rest of the world, we don't care about them. People can't rise against us on their own.

4. Control the media: Take over the media, people will read the news that we want them to. The history books are full of lies as well, erase them, we can start fresh. We can't have those pesky teachers lying as well, better get rid of them and employ some government trained staff.

5. Create fear: This can be achieved by creating a common enemy, but not being too specific about it. Let's choose the short people, what have they ever done for us? Everybody hates them anyway, don't you? Anybody that looks short, or is reported for being short, or thinks they might be short, or has short parents can be executed. Get those trouble makers out of the way. Our increased police presence, many of whom are secret, should make sure that nobody speaks bad of us, or thinks bad of us, or looks like they might be thinking badly of us.

Sorted, now we have a country ready for our totalitarian government. People are scared of being executed, so they do as they are told. This includes executing our enemies, as they don't want to become enemies themselves. Be sure to stay inconsistent, with random executions from time to time, just to keep people on their toes!

Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) was a German Jewish political theorist, who focused many of her writings on the idea of power, her most famous book, The origins of Totalitarianism explores Naziism and Stalinism and how they were allowed to exist. She comes to the conclusion that the Holocaust had nothing to do with eradicating Jews, but was simply about absolute power and consitency in that power. She reported for The New Yorker on the Trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the key organisers of the holocaust. Whilst describing this trial she coined the phrase, 'the banality of evil.' This describes the way in which evil is often simply a result of thoughtlessness. She concluded that Eichmann's only crime, was not thinking about his actions and the consequences that they would have, and simply following orders. In the trial, Eichmann declared that he had always tried to follow Kant's categorical imperative, he saw Hitler as the moral legislator of his actions, when inn actual fact, A. Arendt refutes this, stating that he had taken the wrong lesson from Kant's work and that he should have been following his moral self as a legislator, and he had also failed to follow 'the golden rule'. She claims that he consoled himself by believing that he was no longer the 'master of his own deeds'.