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This article deals with totalitarianism and its language, conceived as both the denial and to some extent the reversal of liberalism and its conceptual framework. Overcoming liberal language meant not only setting up new political terminology, but also replacing words with symbols, ideas with sensations. This is why the standard political lexicon of totalitarianism became hardly more than a slang vocabulary for domestic consumption and, by contrast, under those regimes—mainly Italian fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism—a amboyant universe of images, sounds, and metaphors arose. Many of these images revolved around the human body as a powerful means to represent a charismatic leadership and, at the same time, an organic conception of their national communities. Totalitarian language seems to be a propitious way to explore the "dark side" of conceptual history, constituted by symbols rather than words.

A common error is to look for the source of all evil in a new, secular Fall of man caused by some intellectual innovation; the decisive role of intellect in action is over-valued. A form of this theory is the 'totalitarian democracy' found in the writings of J. L. Talmon, & its danger lies in its possible reinforcement of the Western tendency to idolize its present & transient relations & institutions. This is equally in error with the Communist contempt for the present. Society is patient, not agent, to Talmon & this is the intellectualist error; more intellectual traditions are at work than Talmon allows, & we owe a greater debt to reformers & utopians than he admits. Though we must be aware of 'terrible simplifiers', we must also beware of simplifications by our interpreters. We should resume the habit of pol'al thought, balancing possible errors against the fate that befalls those who refuse to think. IPSA.

This volume takes a comparative approach, locating totalitarianism in the vastly complex web of fragmented pasts, diverse presents and differently envisaged futures to enhance our understanding of this fraught era in European history. It shows that no matter how often totalitarian societies spoke of and imagined their subjects as so many slates to be wiped clean and re-written on, older identities, familial loyalties and the enormous resilience of the individual (or groups of individuals) meant that the almost impossible demands of their regimes needed to be constantly transformed, limited and

J. J. Connington's 1923 British disaster novel Nordenholt's Million is an extreme, proto fascist work that responds to the interwar context of economic decline and social unrest in Britain. It utilises an apocalyptic scenario (soil denitrification) to draw an analogue of contemporary Britain and is uncompromising in its critique of conventional government systems and social decline. The novel depicts a situation where, to enable survival, the weak, dissenters and the unskilled are sacrificed in a drive towards creating a utopian future. Accordingly, in Nordenholt's Million the apocalypse is a transformative opportunity. It offers a wish fulfilment tale involving the emergence of strong, decisive leadership - based on many of the qualities of the Nietzchean Übermensch - to instigate a highly efficient, eugenically constructed 'ideal' post-apocalyptic society. At the conclusion, a new civilisation emerges in which what the novel has framed as the social, political and economic problems of Britain have been overcome.Drawing upon Nietzchean ideas and the appeal of extreme politics, Nordenholt's Million tackles the morality of its politics by emphasising the necessity – and even desirability - of dictatorship in difficult circumstances. It presents dictatorship as the political solution to weak government and contemporary crises. Such a positive representation of dictatorship, even one apparently justified by catastrophe, could only have been written in a pre-World War II context. However, less than a century later, the extremes that the text presents as so appealing are echoed in in new social and political arenas informed by fear and discontent. Nordenholt's Million is then, a revealing and disconcerting novel that explores the appeal of fascism during periods of social and economic unease. ; J. J. Connington's 1923 British disaster novel Nordenholt's Million is an extreme, proto fascist work that responds to the interwar context of economic decline and social unrest in Britain. It utilises an apocalyptic scenario ...

We observe today an astonishing spectacle. Just as during the worst period of the French Revolution, Christianity, and particularly the Catholic Church, is under systematic attack in wide parts of the world, in the Soviet Union, in its European satellites, and in Red China. These countries are under control of groups which profess an atheistic doctrine. The official doctrine of the Soviet world expresses the belief that religion will disappear; it permits the application of tactics which strangulate Church life slowly, but successfully. Leading members of the hierarchy have been arrested and sentenced; schools and monasteries have been closed down; religious orders disbanded; missionary work of centuries has been destroyed. All this is accomplished by systematic and carefully planned campaigns. Every means of deception is used. In profoundly Catholic countries like Poland, caution prevails; in others brutal terror is applied. And all measures against Church life are presented, despite the clear atheism of the official doctrine, as measures against reactionaries and political counter-revolutionaries; churchmen are accused of being American agents and allies of Imperialism and Capitalism