them. Indeed President George W. Bush in his 2002 declaration of ‘war on
terrorism’ would clearly prefer to be able simply to attack the nation states he
identified as supporters of terrorism, but he could not get his allies to see them
as ‘threats’, even though they agreed with the USA about the more general
terrorist threat.
Totalitarianism
Totalitarianism is a political concept often either combined with, or even
confused with, others such asauthoritarianismordictatorship. The con-
fusion arises because there tends to be an empirical connection so that
authoritarian or dictatorial societies are often also totalitarian. There is,
however, no necessary connection. To call a society totalitarian means that
the political rulers control every aspect of private and social life in the society, as
well as having so extensive a politicalpowerthat virtually no liberty or
autonomy in decision-making is left to individuals or groups outside the
political power system. Thus the Soviet Union was often described as being
totalitarian, particularly underStalin, but this was not because it operated a
single-party systemwhere only theCommunist Party of the Soviet
Union (CPSU)wielded power. The Soviet Union was totalitarian because of
the way itusedpower. The whole of the media, educational system, and social,
sporting and other leisure activities, were controlled by, and used to propagate
the ideology of, the CPSU. All industrial decisions, including activities of
trade unions, were under direct control of party-appointed officials. Even the
military organizations were controlled and ideologized directly by the party, via
the system of making the deputy commander of each unit, of whatever level, a
party ‘political commissar’. It is this character of complete permeation of a
society by the personnel and ideas of the ruling group that makes for
totalitarianism. Other forms of society could, and at times have been, equally
totalitarian. A thorough-goingtheocracy, for example, where the church had
the ability to penetrate and organize all aspects of life, would be totalitarian.
Some writers have even tried to claim that the exponents of radically
participatory democracy, like, for example,Rousseauin hisSocial Contract,
were ‘totalitarian democrats’. This latter example arises from the way that
Rousseau insists on as much communal activity, and as much homogeneity, as
possible among citizens in order to minimize conflict and to aid the production
of a publicly-spiritedgeneral willamong all citizens. It is similar to the fears of
writers like John StuartMillandde Tocquevilleabout thetyranny of the
majority. In practice few political systems can wholly penetrate a society, and
some form of undergroundlibertarianismusually flourishes, as with the
dissident movement in the Soviet Union, or the capacity to combat some
aspects of Nazism by the churches in the Third Reich.
Totalitarianism