Totalitarianism

Totalitarianism: absolute control by the state or a governing branch of a highly centralized institution. Basically totalitarianism is ‘a system of rule, driven by an ideology, that seeks direction of all aspects of public activity, political, economic and social, and uses to that end, at least to a degree, propaganda and terror’. Although this seems like a lot its very general. To have a full understanding, you would have to know its history. This will tell you that when this state of control was just a thought it wasn’t intended to be the final ways of any form of governing. The word is thought to have first been used by the philosopher, Giovanni Gentile in 1925, during the earlier years of Italian Fascist rule. To describe a comprehensive socio-political system. Mussolini happily used the word, and while in general it usefully describes Nazism and Stalinism, Hitler avoided its use and Stalin saw it as applicable to Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany but not to Russia. The concept gained wider currency and became prominent in schoolbooks during the post-1945 Cold War period. It was at that time that it was defined more fully, mostly by US historians Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski in Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (1956). Friedrich and Brzezinski‘s theoretical model, derived from the history of the twentieth century, had six key features. · An official ideology to which general adherence was demanded, the ideology intended to achieve a ‘perfect final stage of mankind‘. · A single mass party, hierarchically organized, closely interwoven with the state bureaucracy and typically led by one man. · Monopolistic control of the armed forces. · A similar monopoly of the means of effective mass communication. · A system of terroristic police control. · Central control and direction of the entire economy.