Sidebar for Plaintiffs

Feeling a bit foolish. When I came to the section on totalitarianism in my world history tome, I had to smack myself on the head. I’d never actually considered that the primary word in totalitarianism was “total.”

Right now we’re afflicted with a constant series of radical, destructive and one-sided pseudo-governmental actions, and a deluge of political terminology to describe it. Autocracy is one word; fascism is the current fave term. Dictatorship, tyranny, chaos…I could pull others out of the political lexicon but the one I’d paid little attention to is the ultimate horror in governments, the system all tyrants aspire to: totalitarianism.

How did we get here? Here are excerpts from A History of the Modern World, 3rd edition (1965), laying out how “totalitarianism” came about:

Totalitarianism, as distinct from mere dictatorship…was no historic freak…The state was an institution that had continuously acquired new powers ever since the Middle Ages; step by step, since feudal times, it had assumed jurisdiction over law courts and men at arms, imposed taxes, regulated churches, guided economic policy, operated school systems, and devised schemes of public welfare.

The state, i.e., We The People. So, the authors are saying, the states’ purviews have, to the benefit of most of its citizens, widened and deepened as they challenged tyranny as a governing force. In doing so, they loosened the bonds tyranny had wrapped around the people.

Yay for us! But, as we who live in a democratic republic know very well, a democratic fence is metaphorical rather than metallic. Tyrants can creep in through the holes our form of constitutional government left behind as a tacit acknowledgment of and appreciation for the intelligence, acumen and rationality of citizens in a democracy.

Anyway, the holes have been invisible to most of us until someone slinks through one. When that happens, we urge Congress to seal it up with a law.

The twentieth-century totalitarian state, mammoth and monolithic, claiming an absolute domination over every department of life, now carried this old development of state sovereignty to a new extreme.

This new philosophy [totalitarianism] drew heavily upon a historic nationalism which it greatly exaggerated…

I want to point out that we Americans don’t genuinely have a historic nationalism to exaggerate, despite centuries of attempted historical revisions and the current wanna-be’s efforts to elevate white supremacy onto that throne.

Even science was a product of specific societies: there was a “Nazi science” which was bound to differ in its conclusions from democratic, bourgeois, Western, or “Jewish” science…All art, too–music, painting, poetry, fiction, architecture, sculpture–was good art in so far as it expressed the society of nationality in which it grew.

Whoops, there go the National Institutes of Health! And the CDC! And the Kennedy Center! And the Smithsonian! And libraries! And andandand…

The totalitarian regimes did not simply declare…that peoples’ ideas were shaped by environment. They set about shaping them actively. Propaganda became a principal branch of government…Now, like all else, it became “total.” Propaganda was monopolized by the state, and it demanded faith in a whole view of life and in every detail of this co-ordinated whole. Formerly the control of books and newspapers had been mainly negative…Now, in totalitarian countries, control of the press became frighteningly positive. The government manufactured thought. It manipulated opinion. It re-wrote history.

Well, maybe on Fox News and in the New York Post, but every day I read two newspapers which, despite loud criticism over their wording in headlines, are giving me the facts of the whole story, even when they don’t stud them with the sort of pejorative terminology critics are demanding. And I read journals, too, other newspapers, newspapers from all over this country and the world.

The very idea of truth evaporated. No norm of human utterance remained except political expediency–the wishes and self-interest of the men in power…People came to accept, and even to believe, the most extravagant statements when they were endlessly repeated, year and year. Barred from all independent sources of information, having no means by which any official allegation could be tested, the peoples of totalitarian countries became increasingly in fact, and not merely in sociological theory, incapable of the use of reason.

Hey, look at me, sitting at my keyboard using my reason to write this. If one person, i.e., me, still has reason, there must be millions more who have it.

So after I post this, I’m going to compose a list of the news sources which I see virtually every day, the ones that give me “the very idea of truth.” Because, if there are so many sources offering facts (the term I prefer to “truth,” which is so filmy and exudes the scent of religion) without fearing government shut-down, then I believe what we’re living under is not totalitarianism. It is a mock-up of fascistic totalitarianism.

On Bluesky yesterday, the profoundly intelligent Jamelle Bouie remarked upon a photo of a small group of National Guardsmen walking in D.C., toward a government building with that absurdly awful huge banner of Trump’s face (his mug shot, I believe) and an American flag.

Here’s what Bouie wrote: