Suchergebnisse

Introduces totalitarianism, discusses the social, political, economic, religious, and cultural effects, and examines various totalitarian leaders' ideas.

Considers the utility of the term totalitarianism & the return of antitotalitarian rhetoric in the current struggle against terrorism, providing a historical perspective to shed light on its protean meaning & the related intellectual debate on its definition. Historical moments of totalitarianism are discussed: 1920s "antifascism"; the response to the Hitler-Stalin pact; the term's post-1947 renewal as anti-Sovietism/anticommunism; the post-Vietnam-era (1975-1980) response to violent aspects of the new Left; & the period from 1993 to the run up to the 2003 Iraq War, called the "antitotalitarianism of the 68ers." The political facets of the debate over totalitarianism are highlighted, & it is argued that antitotalitarian rhetoric often obscures political & moral ambiguities. D. Edelman

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the debate over the American war in Iraq, revived talk of totalitarianism among liberals and leftists thinking about radical Islamists and Middle East dictatorships. With varying degrees of enthusiasm, respected former dissidents such as Vaclav Havel and Adam Michnik and distinguished intellectuals in Europe and America such as Paul Berman, André Glucksmann, Richard Herzinger, Christopher Hitchens, Michael Ignatieff, as well as Nobel Peace Prize recipient José Ramos-Horta justified, if not military intervention, then an aggressive and principled policy toward Saddam Hussein's regime—largely on liberal-humanitarian grounds, invoking the imperative of resisting totalitarianism. Though he explicitly opposed the unilateral use of military force, Joschka Fischer, then Germany's foreign minister, spoke of a "third totalitarianism"—after Nazism and communism—"as the major challenge facing the international community in the twenty-first century." In December 2004, in "An Argument for a New Liberalism, a Fighting Faith," Peter Beinart, editor of the New Republic, complained that "three years after September 11 brought the United States face-to-face with a new totalitarian threat, liberalism has still not been fundamentally reshaped by the experience." British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw called terrorism the "new totalitarianism," the world's greatest threat to democracy. The return of this term is instructive, because its history is not at all as luminescent as its advocates would have us believe.

"Totalitarianism" is a powerful word rich in historical associations and rebounding in current political usage. The four books under review reflect both the term's range of usage and the enduring fascination with the phenomena it described. Totalitarianism's initial terminological siblings, "nazism" and "communism," are applied chiefly to the original historical subjects that generated them. A close political cousin, "fascism," long ago escaped its close ideological family and is applied to everything from brutal police to road hogs. In contrast, "totalitarianism," formerly confined to a narrow political as opposed to a cultural context, is suddenly in play. In recent issues of the New York Times, David Brooks excoriates Iraqi proponents of "totalitarian theocracy" (5/16/2004); President Bush deplores the terrorists' "totalitarian ideology" (5/29/05), and Condoleezza Rice abhors Iran as a "totalitarian state" (5/29/2005). A Central Asian despot is characterized as a "fragile totalitarian" in a feature by David E. Sangler (5/29/2005), and the group of army officers (the Military Council for Justice and Democracy) that overthrew President Maouya Sidi Ahmed Taya in Mauritania in August 2005 defend their decision "to put an end to the totalitarian practices of the deposed regime." Totalitarianism is back, but what does it mean?