Days and Works

The Reality of Totalitarian Despotism

Things are curiously reversed these days. The U.S. Government behaves as if totalitarian Communism had gotten religion and become one of us. President Kennedy, after all, granted sanctuary only to the hired Cuban gunman, but President Nixon has promised atomic immunity to the big Moscow boss himself. While from the citadel of freedom the signals sound “Stack arms!,” horrified Soviet citizens gasp an urgent warning, “Don’t!”; previously foot-dragging European friends now discover their utter inability to feel the safety from Communism that the European security pact purports to extend; and tolerant, democratic, patient Chile explodes in violent indignation against the ideocratic despotism of its late minority president. Is Communism an enemy, totalitarianism a reality? Sakharov, Jobert, and Chileans say yes, Nixon and Brandt no. Somebody else also says no: Herbert Spiro, author of the article “Totalitarianism” in the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, asserting that the term was born of a cold war mentality and will now begin to “wither away,” so that the next edition of the IESS will not even list it. This has moved Bertram D. Wolfe, author of Three Who Made a Revolution, to publish a paper on totalitarianism in the Lugano Review (March 1973), in which he powerfully sketches once again the full range of the very real political evils planned and inflicted by Nazism, Fascism, Communism, pointing out that it was the very perpetrators of these evils who coined for themselves the predicate “totalitarian.” The word, appearing in Italy in the mid Twenties, used at the same time in Germany by Ernst Jünger and Carl Schmitt, was put into general circulation by the British press soon thereafter. So much for the myth of the cold war origin of “totalitarianism,” says Wolfe. Actually, the first mention of the term occurs in Adam Müller’s lectures “On the Whole of Statecraft” (1808/9), where the state is called “the totality of all human affairs,” the epitome of all physical and mental life, an organism entitled to our undivided love, which can demand of us everything and to which we must dedicate ourselves with all our “heart, affection, and emotion.”

GN

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Gerhart Niemeyer

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The Reality of Totalitarian Despotism

Things are curiously reversed these days. The U.S. Government behaves as if totalitarian Communism had gotten religion and become one of us. President Kennedy, after all, granted sanctuary only to the hired Cuban gunman, but President Nixon has promised atomic immunity to the big Moscow boss himself. While from the citadel of freedom the signals sound “Stack arms!,” horrified Soviet citizens gasp an urgent warning, “Don’t!”; previously foot-dragging European friends now discover their utter inability to feel the safety from Communism that the European security pact purports to extend; and tolerant, democratic, patient Chile explodes in violent indignation against the ideocratic despotism of its late minority president. Is Communism an enemy, totalitarianism a reality? Sakharov, Jobert, and Chileans say yes, Nixon and Brandt no. Somebody else also says no: Herbert Spiro, author of the article “Totalitarianism” in the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, asserting that the term was born of a cold war mentality and will now begin to “wither away,” so that the next edition of the IESS will not even list it. This has moved Bertram D. Wolfe, author of Three Who Made a Revolution, to publish a paper on totalitarianism in the Lugano Review (March 1973), in which he powerfully sketches once again the full range of the very real political evils planned and inflicted by Nazism, Fascism, Communism, pointing out that it was the very perpetrators of these evils who coined for themselves the predicate “totalitarian.” The word, appearing in Italy in the mid Twenties, used at the same time in Germany by Ernst Jünger and Carl Schmitt, was put into general circulation by the British press soon thereafter. So much for the myth of the cold war origin of “totalitarianism,” says Wolfe. Actually, the first mention of the term occurs in Adam Müller’s lectures “On the Whole of Statecraft” (1808/9), where the state is called “the totality of all human affairs,” the epitome of all physical and mental life, an organism entitled to our undivided love, which can demand of us everything and to which we must dedicate ourselves with all our “heart, affection, and emotion.”