Not All Fruit is Raspberry
There is not a relationship between culture and the propensity of the members of that culture to be swept into a Totalitarian government. Conservative cultures may fall into Totalitarianism through their focus on tradition. This need to return to the traditions of their culture may yield an exclusionary view towards those who do not exemplify the characteristics of whatever era and peoples are identified as ‘traditional.’ Progressive cultures, which tend to focus only on that which is necessary to ascend into some ideal, future form, are also susceptible to Totalitarian reign. The yearning for this future form would cloud the lens of the people with the need to keep pushing forward, despite who or what ideas get trampled in the process. Dictatorships and Totalitarian governments arise in moments of a generally perceived – either current or anticipated – need. Such was the way of Rome, in which a dictator was elected to hold in their hands the total power of the state in a time of war, to provide immediate and unanimous decision, and thus form a kind of harmony within the government. One may define a dictatorship in this way, as a government in which the power resides with one person, who may guide the state over which they rule in any direction they wish, for an indeterminate amount of time. A Totalitarian regime, however, is a dictatorship in which the power is used to further the desires of the dictator, and through the means of isolating the people, making them physically and emotionally dependent upon the dictator and its ideology.
That Totalitarianism may flourish despite the culture is easier to observe through exploring the paths a dictatorship may take to warp into a Totalitarian state. First, one must understand how a dictatorship might thrive. The political conditions of Spain up to the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) offer a pristine case from which to derive the steps and situations necessary to promote a dictatorship. The Spanish had, by the end of the 1800s, a vacuum of ideology. They had lost both religious and political intervention and interaction. The Church had isolated itself from the masses, and the political power was wrested from the people.1The Church, which had for centuries been the glue holding together the kingdoms of Spain and stood for equalization of the classes, lost its power when the Bourbon kings centralized the political sphere.2The people were even led by the Church in their revolt against the new regime, seeking to return to the less stringent reign of previous years. When the king of Spain and its government abandoned the people, the Church led the revolt against Napoleon.3When the Church abandoned the people of Spain for the upper classes in an effort to reclaim power taken from it by the Liberals, the people lost their pride in Catholicism. They refused religion.4In the 1800s, politics were removed from the people. The upper class, who ruled the political realm, elected to make itself richer rather than focus on the plight of the people, and so they could not be trusted.5What good is a government if it does not enable its people? The Spanish military held no qualms about separating itself from the people, either; the people viewed war as a horrible thing, especially after the Cuban War.6The people perceived the Army as but another “over-staffed, under-paid” government institution.7The three governing bodies of politics – the Church, the elite, and the Army – were all despised by the people. Who did they have but themselves to guide them? Who could they trust but themselves? Then arose a party which deemed itself anti-government.
The Anarchist movement, which declared government a foul, clumsy, unnecessary thing, inhibiting the progress of men more than aiding it.8In a country where “[e]very revolutionary movement… is a moral success,” as it implied that someone was fighting the corrupt government under which the people lived, where the people felt oppressed by those to whom they looked for guidance and aid, what hope existed among the people?9The need for a functional, clean governing body was intensely strong in the people, which is why when a dictator arrived promising to fill this need, there were plenty of hands ready to support and lift him. When the dictatorship arose, the people thought it would fulfil their desire to bring about the end of the antiquated, corrupt system and enable them in all areas of their lives: politically, economically, and socially.10Aside from the failure of even this dictatorship – it did not actually fulfil the needs of the people, and led to the Spanish Civil War more than prevented it – there are a few reasons why the dictatorship did not evolve into Totalitarianism. The people were not actively divided from themselves; they were not atomized. Horizontally and vertically, Spain was extremely divided, but this partitioning only cut people into groups, rather than into pure, faceless individuals.11There was no desire to do so by the government, either. The dictatorship sought control of the state, not complete dominations of the individual who fit the parameters of its in-group. If the dictatorship sought something beyond mere power, it might have evolved into a Totalitarian regime, but this yearning was not as intense as it could have been. Thus, when it came time for the people to consider rebelling against the dictator, they could do so without the paranoia denizens of a Totalitarian regime experience.
This calls into question the ascendancy of a Totalitarian regime. How is it that this extreme paranoia develops? The Spanish dictator definitely used brute force to get what he wanted, to fix votes and the like, but the level of terror instigated in the Spanish versus those of Hitler’s Germany is incredibly different. The Spanish were used to the violence offered by the dictator; it had been used many times over, by various parties to overtake the reign of another. The terror inspired by the Nazis, however, was of a deeper, more psychologically damaging kind. Whilst the violence in Spain was directed to the elite in power, the violence of the Nazis was arbitrary, aimed at anyone. Not the leaders, but the people.12The Nazis fought as if under the conditions of a total war, where civilians may be openly shot, where there is no hesitation to fire upon a destitute village. If everyone can be targeted, then there is always something to fear. Justice is irrelevant. It is an aesthetic a Totalitarian regime strives for, and if one is perceived as standing in the way of this Aesthetic, the grand vision of the regime leader, they must be eradicated. If punishment is doled out arbitrarily, however, how does one know whether what their actions or words will be perceived as a threat to the Aesthetic? One is in a persistent, perpetual state of self-doubt. And if one cannot trust oneself, how can one trust others? Will associating with this woman or that man put my allegiance to the Aesthetic into question? Totalitarian regimes seeks to organize the masses, to atomize the individuals under their reign.13However, and perhaps ironically, Totalitarianism can only flourish in places where there is an enormous population. Various dictatorships arose all over Europe after the First World War, and none of them could mutate into Totalitarian regimes. They were too small for the one to get lost in; there was no sea of people in these countries, but lakes or ponds.14If there are less people for a regime over whom to preside, then the changes the regime make are more significant. Totalitarian regimes thrive when the majority of those they seek to overtake are part of an apathetic mass.15
Before the First World War, Europeans largely took an active role in politics. People cared about what happened to them, for they felt that they were relevant. After World War I, this was not the case. The world could be easily ravaged, people slain by the multitudes. Things lost their meaning.16The only way people could comprehend the world during and after the war was to isolate themselves from reality. They did not deny reality, nor the material world; they isolated themselves within their own understanding of it. They became embittered. No one could fully understand the experience of another, because the only attachment people had to the world was their viewpoint of it. They had seen the destruction of the world and yearned for its renewal.17The people felt lost and exposed in the manner of the soldiers who clambered from the trenches, the threat of gunfire looming over them. The trenches were seen as beautiful, as they were safer than the open, exposed land. Their psyche revolved around this concept, of the internal depths being safer than the external openness.18During the time between the World Wars, the political left gained power across Europe, implying a desire amongst the people for radical change and to be more together than they felt; they wanted to feel a part of something again, rather than isolated or lonely.19As Totalitarian regimes thrive in atmospheres of loneliness, their ascendancy is not surprising to those gifted with hindsight.
Whereas democracy makes the individual matter, Totalitarianism seeks to destroy the individual entirely. Totalitarianism focuses on the nonspecific ideas. It promotes the faceless, classless, placeless entity as perfection. It strives to kill the individual, to end morality and greatness, to render people no more than expendable chattel.20They need not make friends; they have the ultimate friend in the regime. The regime can save their life, spare them from torture, from hunger and pain. The regime is the new God; there is no need for religion, nor creativity, nor any other aspiration but to be a part of the regime.21The infiltration of the Totalitarian mindset begins with propaganda, which is used to garner the hearts and heads of the largely apathetic masses.22Hitler, too, was known for his charisma. He was able to captivate and fascinate the masses with his speeches.23The regime presents the masses with ideas of direction and possibility. In the Nazi case, the direction was towards the Aesthetic, towards the master race that would overtake and purify the world and remake it as the party deemed fit. Unlike the Spanish dictator, who would return things to how they used to be, Hitler pushed society towards the future. Progress was vital for the Nazis; they must progress towards the master race, and discard those who would taint it; they must create a world free of repression. It is to suit this last idea that Hitler instilled in the youth the concept of freedom as unbound by morality. They could be as violent and cruel as they sought, for to live as one did in nature was to live as a man of the future.24This represents the cornerstone of Totalitarian methodology in regards to ruling the people. One must keep the people moving to maintain one’s reign in a Totalitarian regime. Totalitarianism implies a kind of perpetual chaos amongst which the regime seems to be the order.25By providing an atmosphere in which it is deemed acceptable by the moderator of society – the regime – to be callous and arbitrarily violent, it is expected that one can never be certain of their place in the eyes of the regime. As such, one must always be calculating and self-assessing, so much so that one cannot stop and contemplate the morality of one’s or one’s leaders’ decisions. Totalitarian rule galvanizes a kind of psychological Brownian motion. It is irrelevant whether the regime focuses upon the past nor the future; so long as it can provide an argument strong enough to sweep one in its riptides, Totalitarianism may thrive.
Totalitarianism requires a specific set of conditions to be met. The masses must become isolated and dependent upon an outside source (the regime) to feel a part of something. The regime, this external, unifying force, must fulfil the vacuum the masses feel. The difference between dictatorship and Totalitarian rule is the extent to which the government, under this dictator’s rule, permeates the lives of the people it controls. A dictatorship can resemble a healthy relationship between consenting adults. A Totalitarian state resembles the abusive, codependent relationship in which one is perpetually manipulated into isolation from others and obedience to the other. This manipulation may be through physical or mental coercion, but the environment provided by a Totalitarian government is excessively restrictive and controlling. Cuba, for example, lives under a dictatorship, whilst the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) is a Totalitarian regime. Cuba still interacts with the surrounding world, whilst North Korea attempts to cut itself off from its neighbors except to threaten them with domination. Even the way one refers to the countrymen is different. One feels it to be more natural to refer to the people of Cuba ‘Cubans’ than the denizens of North Korea ‘North Koreans.’ One is more likely to refer to the people as the country in the North Korea case.26The relationship between dictatorships and Totalitarian regimes is similar to that of fruit as a whole and specific fruits, like raspberries. Not all dictatorships mutate into Totalitarianism, but all Totalitarian regimes must at some point exhibit the traits of a dictatorship. Not all fruit is raspberry, but all raspberries are fruit.
1 Gerald Brenan. The Spanish Labyrinth: An Account of the Social and Political Background of the Civil War (Cambridge,: University Press, 1950), 13-14.
2 Brenan, Labyrinth, 39-41.
3unmoored Brenan, Labyrinth, 42.
4 Brenan, Labyrinth, 46-50.
5 Brenan, Labyrinth, 14.
6 Brenan, Labyrinth, 59.
7 Brenan, Labyrinth, 61.
8 Brenan, Labyrinth, 196.
9 Brenan, Labyrinth, 221.
10 Brenan, Labyrinth, 78.
11 Brenan, Labyrinth, 229.
12 Hannah Arendt. The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966), 344.
13 Arendt, Origins, 308.
14 Arendt, Origins, 310.
15 Arendt, Origins, 311.
16 Modris Eksteins. Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989), 210-212.
17 Eksteins, Rites, 214.
18 Eksteins, Rites, 215.
19 Eksteins, Rites, 255.
20 Arendt, Origins, 316. Also, 455.
21 Arendt, Origins, 339.
22 Arendt, Origins, 342.
23 Arendt, Origins, 305-306.
24 Eksteins, Rites, 267, 307.
25 Arendt, Origins, 462-463.
26 For example, one hears more often, “Cubans make splendid bread.” However, in the Korean case, one might refer to the people of North Korea as, “North Korea does not like James Franco.”