Totalitarian Rule

2 Pages 467 Words

Tacitus wrote in his biography of Agricola concerning the despotism of the Emperor Domitian was experienced as reality by the high school students of Hitler's Germany:
"the conscience of the human race were perishing, while at the same time they banished the teachers of philosophy, and exiled every noble pursuit, that nothing good might anywhere confront them. Certainly we showed a magnificent example of patience; as a former age had witnessed the extreme of liberty, so we witnessed the extreme of servitude, when the informer robbed us of the interchange of speech and hearing. We should have lost memory as well as voice, had it been as easy to forget as to keep silence."
The concept of totalitarian rule cannot be determined by purely logical means. It was explained and clarified only by those who went through the bitter experience of this form of government. As late as the end of the 1920's the word "totalitarian" was used to designate any state which was governed in an authoritarian rather than a parliamentarian manner.
In the 1930s and 1940s our century open terror has assumed particularly inhuman forms, such terror is nevertheless not confined to totalitarian rule and therefore is not sufficient to define it. From time immemorial despots have imprisoned their opponents under particularly cruel conditions; they have tortured them, dishonored them, debased and executed them. The suppression of freedom has always assumed the same forms, and nothing good ever came out of the totalitarian rules of the 1930’s.

Joseph Stalin, born Dzhugashvili, and Leon Trotsky, born Bronstein, were the same age, and both had been from early youth members of the Russian Social Democratic party. As dedicated Communists, they had common basic outlook: they were philosophical materialists, committed to the unity of theory and practice and bent upon spreading Communism throughout the whole world. While Lenin was alive (at any rate until 1922) both m...