Early usages Self-description of autocracies The term "totalitarian" was used by leaders and top officials of right-wing and far-right dictatorships and autocracies established during the
interwar period and
World War II to describe their regimes—most notably by
Benito Mussolini of
Fascist Italy. Among the Soviet Union (USSR), Nazi Germany, and Fascist Italy, it became an official self-description only in the case of Fascist Italy; it was also used in Nazi Germany but to a lesser extent, and it was not used at all by the USSR—this pattern was later reversed by theorists of totalitarianism who viewed the USSR as a prime example. Therefore, the meaning of the term as used in the self-descriptions by fascists differed from its post-World War II interpretations. The term "totalitarian" became used by Italian fascists themselves: later, theoretician of Italian fascism
Giovanni Gentile ascribed politically positive meanings to the terms
totalitarianism and
totalitarian in defence of Mussolini's legal, illegal, and legalistic social engineering of Italy. As ideologues, the intellectual Gentile and the politician Mussolini used the term to identify and describe the ideological nature of Italian societal structures and the practical economic, geopolitical, and social goals of the new
Fascist Italy, which was the "total representation of the nation and total guidance of national goals." In proposing the totalitarian society of Italian fascism, Gentile described a civil society wherein totalitarian ideology (i.e., subservience to the state) determined the
public sphere and the
private sphere of the Italian nation.
Hannah Arendt, in her book
The Origins of Totalitarianism, contended that Mussolini's dictatorship was not a totalitarian regime until 1938. Arguing that one of the key characteristics of a totalitarian movement was its ability to garner
mass mobilization, Arendt wrote: For example,
Victor Emmanuel III still reigned as a
figurehead and helped play a role in the
dismissal of Mussolini in 1943. Additionally, the
Catholic Church was allowed to independently exercise its religious authority in the
Vatican City, per the 1929
Lateran Treaty, under the leadership of
Pope Pius XI (1922–1939) and
Pope Pius XII (1939–1958). and his motto
Una patria! Un estado! Un caudillo! resembling the Nazi motto
Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer. During the
Spanish Civil War, Franco proclaimed that his
Spanish State would be modelled after "other countries of totalitarian regimes", these being Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. As the Nazi Party rose to power in 1933, it began using the concept of a totalitarian state propagated by Mussolini and
Carl Schmitt to characterize its ideal regime.
Joseph Goebbels stated in a 1933 speech: "Our party has always aspired to the totalitarian state. […] the goal of the revolution [National Socialist] has to be a totalitarian state that penetrates into all spheres of public life." declared his intention to "give Spain a true unity, a new spirit, a totalitarian polity". He went on to say: "Democracy is not an end but a means to the conquest of the new state. When the time comes, either
parliament submits or we will eliminate it." General
Francisco Franco was determined to prevent the growth of competing right-wing parties in Spain, and CEDA was dissolved in April 1937. Later, Gil-Robles went into
exile. Franco began applying "totalitarian" to his regime during the
Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). On 1 October 1936, he announced his intent to organize Spain "within a broad totalitarian concept of unity and continuity"; practical realization of this began with the forced unification of all parties of the
Nationalist zone into
FET y de las JONS, the sole governing party of the new state. Afterward, he and his ideologues stressed the similarly "missionary and totalitarian" nature of the state under construction vis-à-vis Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, and totalitarianism was described as an essentially Spanish way of government. In December 1942, as
World War II progressed, Franco stopped using the term, and it received a negative connotation as Franco called for a struggle with "Bolshevist totalitarianism."
Ioannis Metaxas, the leader of the
4th of August Regime in Greece, which took some inspiration from fascism, wrote in his diary that he had established "an anti-communist, anti-parliamentary state, a totalitarian state, a state based on agriculture and labour, and therefore anti-plutocratic". After the
Italian and
German invasions of Greece, he wrote that "by beating Greece, they were beating what their flag stood for." Although Metaxas did not create a one-party state, he believed that the whole of the Greek people—the nation—constituted said party, excluding any real or hypothetical communists, reactionaries, or democrats.
Ion Antonescu, the
Axis-aligned dictator of the
Kingdom of Romania during World War II, described his regime as "
ethnocratic" and "ethnic Christian" and as "the national-totalitarian regime, the regime of national and social restoration"—devoted to the ideology of an extreme
Romanian nationalism and Romanian heritage. It enacted
antisemitic and racist legislation and was active in perpetrating
the Holocaust; however, in 1941, Antonescu dissolved the ruling party, the
Iron Guard, denounced its terrorist methods, and continued his rule without a single-party system. The regime also spared half of resident
Romanian Jews during its existence. In 1940, then-foreign minister of the
Empire of Japan Matsuoka Yosuke expressed in an interview the ideological assumptions prevailing within the
Shōwa statist government: "In the battle between democracy and totalitarianism the latter adversary will without question win and will control the world. The era of democracy is finished and the democratic system bankrupt... Fascism will develop in Japan through the people's will. It will come out of love for
the Emperor." A document produced by the government's cabinet-planning board pointed out that, "since the founding of our country, Japan has had an unparalleled totalitarianism... an ideal totalitarianism is manifest in our national polity... Germany's totalitarianism has existed for only eight years, but Japanese [totalitarianism] has shone through 3,000 years of ageless tradition".
Criticism and analysis formulated a concept of totalitarianism in his analysis of the USSR in the 1930s. In the interwar period,
totalitarianism emerged as a term used to criticize and analyze the dictatorships of the time. It was used to describe fascism and later became a ground for comparing fascist states to the Soviet Union; it was not understood as an element of a liberal–totalitarian dichotomy or as the inverse of liberal democracy. producing perhaps the most famous example of such usage by a left-wing anti-Stalinist dissident. The first to direct the term toward the USSR was writer and left-wing activist
Victor Serge, who did so shortly before his arrest in a letter published in France. Also that year, Trotsky compared fascist and Soviet bureaucracies, describing both as parasitic, and later stated that "in the last period, the
Soviet bureaucracy has familiarized itself with many traits of victorious fascism, first of all by getting rid of the control of the party and establishing the cult of the leader." In
The Revolution Betrayed (1936), Trotsky used "totalitarian" to analyse the USSR, attributing to totalitarianism—rooted in "the dilatoriness of the world proletariat in solving the problems set for it by history"—such features as concentration of power in the hands of a single individual, the abolition of popular control over the leadership, the use of extreme repression, and the elimination of contending loci of power. Later, he included "the suppression of all freedom to criticize; the subjection of the accused to the military; examining magistrates, a prosecutor and judge in one; a monolithic press whose howlings terrorize the accused and hypnotize public opinion". Trotsky wrote that the USSR "had become totalitarian" in character several years before the word arrived from Germany. However, his concept was much less defined than those of the Cold War theorists, and he would have disagreed with their core points—e.g., that "central control and direction of the entire economy" applied to fascism—and would have rejected their tendency to depict totalitarian societies as politically monolithic and inherently static, as well as their anti-communist perspective and description of
Lenin as a totalitarian dictator. Scholars have argued that for him it was a pejorative, not a sociological concept based on equating fascism and socialism like it was for Cold War theorists. ; the caption mentions "Totalitarian Eclipse" threatening democracy. One of the uses of
totalitarianism in English was by Austrian writer
Franz Borkenau in his 1938 book
The Communist International, in which he commented that it united the Soviet and German dictatorships more than it divided them. The label
totalitarian was twice affixed to Nazi Germany during
Winston Churchill's speech of 5 October 1938 before the
House of Commons of the United Kingdom, in opposition to the
Munich Agreement, by which France and Great Britain consented to Nazi Germany's annexation of the
Sudetenland. Churchill was then a
backbencher member of parliament representing the
Epping constituency. In a radio address two weeks later, Churchill again employed the term, this time applying the concept to "a communist or a Nazi tyranny." The concept gained legitimacy in 1939 with the
Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, after which it became accepted, at least until 1941, to present Stalin and Hitler as "twin dictators" and call Nazism "brown Bolshevism" and Stalinism "red fascism". The same year, scholars of various disciplines held the first international symposium on totalitarianism in Philadelphia. Among the major productions of pro-Stalinist Western propaganda was the film
Mission to Moscow (1943), based on the 1941 book of the same name. Politically matured by having fought and been wounded in and survived the Spanish Civil War, in the essay "
Why I Write" (1946), the democratic socialist
George Orwell writes: "the Spanish war and other events in 1936–37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for
democratic socialism, as I understand it." He argued that future totalitarian régimes would spy upon their societies and use mass communications media to perpetuate their dictatorships, and that "if you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever."
Cold War was of the totalitarian model. In
The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), political theorist
Hannah Arendt writes that, in their infancy in the early 20th century,
corporatist Nazism and
Soviet communism were novel forms of government, not updated versions of the old
tyrannies of military or a corporate dictatorships. She argues that the human emotional comfort of political certainty is the source of the mass appeal of revolutionary totalitarian régimes, given that the totalitarian worldview offers psychologically comforting, definitive answers to the complex socio-political mysteries of the past, present, and future. Thus, Nazism proposed that all history is the history of
ethnic conflict, of the survival of the fittest race. In contrast, Marxism–Leninism proposed that all history is the history of
class conflict, of the survival of the fittest social class. Thus, upon the believers' acceptance of the universal applicability of totalitarian ideology, the Nazi revolutionary and the communist revolutionary then possessed the simplistic moral certainty with which to justify all other actions by the state, either by an appeal to
historicism or by an
appeal to nature, as expedient actions necessary to establish an authoritarian state apparatus.
True belief In
The True Believer (1951),
Eric Hoffer writes that political mass movements, such as
Italian Fascism (1922–1943), German
Nazism (1933–1945), and Russian
Stalinism (1929–1953), featured the common political praxis of negatively comparing their totalitarian society as
culturally superior to the
morally decadent societies of democratic countries of Western Europe. Such
mass psychology indicates that participating in and joining a political mass movement offers individuals the prospect of a glorious future, and that such membership in a community is an emotional refuge for those with few real-world accomplishments. The 'true believer', then, is assimilated into a collective body of other true believers who are psychologically protected with "fact-proof screens from reality" drawn from the official texts of the totalitarian ideology.
Collaborationism In a 2018 article titled "European Protestants Between Anti-Communism and Anti-Totalitarianism: The Other Interwar Kulturkampf?", historian Paul Hanebrink writes that Hitler's assumption of power in Germany in 1933 frightened
Christians into
anti-communism because, for European Christians—Catholic and Protestant alike—the
culture war crystallized as a struggle against communism. Throughout the European interwar period (1918–1939), right-wing totalitarian régimes indoctrinated Christians into demonizing the communist régime in Russia as the apotheosis of
secular materialism and as a militarized threat to worldwide Christian social and moral order. Throughout Europe, Christians who became anti-communist totalitarians perceived communism and communist governments as existential threats to the moral order of their respective societies, and they
collaborated with Nazi leadership and other fascists in the hope that anti-communism would restore the societies of Europe to a form of
Christendom.
Totalitarian model In late-1950s American geopolitics,
totalitarianism,
totalitarian, and the "totalitarian model", from
Carl Joachim Friedrich and
Zbigniew Brzezinski's
Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (1956), became common in U.S. foreign policy. The
totalitarian model became a key paradigm for
Kremlinology—the study of the USSR's police state. Kremlinologists analyzed internal politics (policy and personality) of the
Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to craft national and foreign policy, providing
strategic intelligence about the USSR. The U.S. also used the model to approach fascist regimes, such as
banana republics. As anti-communist political scientists, Friedrich and Brzezinski described totalitarianism with a model of six interlocking, mutually supporting characteristics, including: • An elaborate guiding ideology • A
one-party state • Use of
state terrorism • A monopoly on the control of weapons • A monopoly on the control of
mass media • A centrally directed and controlled
planned economy Criticism and evolution of the totalitarian model popularized combating left-wing totalitarianism in U.S. foreign policy, Revisionist historians criticized the totalitarian model for its inability to fully describe Soviet and Russian history. They argued that Friedrich and Brzezinski overlooked how the Soviet social system functioned both as a political entity (the USSR) and as a social entity (Soviet civil society). This social system could be understood through socialist class struggles among professional elites—political, academic, artistic, scientific, and military—seeking upward mobility into the
nomenklatura, the ruling class. Revisionists pointed out that the Politburo's political economy allowed for some executive power to be delegated to regional authorities for policy implementation. They viewed this as evidence that a totalitarian regime adapts its economy to new demands from civil society. Traditionalist historians, however, saw the USSR's political and economic collapse as proof that the totalitarian economic system failed because the Politburo did not incorporate genuine popular participation in the economy. The historian of Nazi Germany
Karl Dietrich Bracher noted that the "totalitarian typology" developed by Friedrich and Brzezinski was an inflexible one because it did not include the revolutionary dynamics of bellicose people committed to realizing the violent revolution required to establish totalitarianism in a sovereign state. Bracher argued that the essence of totalitarianism is total control to remake every aspect of civil society using a universal ideology—which is interpreted by an authoritarian leader—to create a collective national identity by merging civil society into the state. under
Saddam Hussein was a totalitarian state. In
Democracy and Totalitarianism (1968), the political scientist
Raymond Aron writes that for a régime to be considered totalitarian, it can be characterized by the presence of five mutually supportive characteristics: • A one-party state, wherein the ruling party has a monopoly on all political activity. • A state ideology upheld by the ruling party that is given official status as the only authority. • A state monopoly on information—control of the mass communications media to broadcast the official truth. • A state-controlled economy featuring major economic entities under state control. • An ideological police-state terror organization and criminalization of political, economic, and professional activities. In a 1980 review of
How the Soviet Union is Governed (1979) by
Jerry F. Hough and
Merle Fainsod, scholar of authoritarianism William Zimmerman writes: "the Soviet Union has changed substantially. Our knowledge of the Soviet Union has changed, as well. We all know that the traditional paradigm [of the totalitarian model] no longer satisfies [our ignorance], despite several efforts, primarily in the early 1960s (the directed society, totalitarianism without police terrorism, the system of conscription) to articulate an acceptable variant [of Communist totalitarianism]. We have come to realize that models which were, in effect, offshoots of totalitarian models do not provide good approximations of post–Stalinist reality [of the USSR]."
Kremlinology During the
Cold War (1945–1989), the academic field of
Kremlinology (analysing
Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union policies and politics) produced historical and policy analyses dominated by the totalitarian model of the USSR as a
police state controlled by the absolute power of the supreme leader
Stalin, who headed a monolithic, centralized hierarchy of government. The study of the internal politics of the Politburo's crafting of policy in the Kremlin produced two schools of historiography of the Cold War: traditionalist Kremlinology and revisionist Kremlinology. Traditionalist Kremlinologists worked with and for the totalitarian model and produced interpretations of Kremlin politics and policies that supported the police-state portrait of communist Russia. The revisionist Kremlinologists presented alternative interpretations of Kremlin politics and reported the effects of Politburo policies on Soviet society, both civilian and military. Despite the limitations of police-state historiography, revisionist Kremlinologists argued that the old image of Stalinist Russia of the 1950s—a totalitarian state intent on world domination—was oversimplified and inaccurate, given that Stalin's death changed Soviet society.
Totalitarian model as an official policy In the 1950s, the political scientist
Carl Joachim Friedrich argued that
communist states, such as
Soviet Russia and
Red China, were countries that were systematically controlled by a supreme leader who used the five features of the totalitarian model: • an official
dominant ideology that includes a
cult of personality about the leader; • control of all civil and military weapons; • control of the public and the private
mass communications media; • the use of
state terrorism to police the populace; • a political party of mass membership that perpetually re-elects the leader. In the 1960s, revisionist Kremlinologists researched communist organizations, as well as the relatively autonomous
bureaucracies that influenced high-level policy of Soviet governance. Revisionist Kremlinologists, such as
J. Arch Getty and
Lynne Viola, transcended the interpretational limitations of the totalitarian model by recognising and reporting that the Soviet government, its party leadership, and the civil society of the USSR had greatly changed upon the death of Stalin. Revisionist
social history indicated that the social forces of Soviet society had compelled the government of the USSR to adjust
public policy to an actual
political economy composed of pre-War and post-War generations with differing perceptions of the utility of
communist economics.
Post-Cold War has ruled
Eritrea as a totalitarian dictator since the country's independence in 1993. , which is a self-proclaimed
caliphate that demands the religious, political, and military obedience of
Muslims worldwide In
Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?: Five Interventions in the (Mis)Use of a Notion,
Slavoj Žižek ironically described the concept of totalitarianism as an "ideological antioxidant" similar to the "
Celestial Seasonings" green tea that, according to its advertisement, "neutralizes harmful molecules in the body known as
free radicals". He further wrote that "[t]he notion of 'totalitarianism', far from being an effective theoretical concept, is a kind of stopgap: instead of enabling us to think, forcing us to acquire a new insight into the historical reality it describes, it relieves us of the duty to think, or even actively prevents us from thinking". Saladdin Ahmed criticizes the concept of totalitarianism as formulated by Brzezinski and Friedrich and, to a lesser extent, Arendt, in
Totalitarian Space and the Destruction of Aura (2019), noting that their definitions of totalitarianism are invalid if transported to other regimes. "This was the case in General August Pinochet's Chile", he writes, "yet it would be absurd to exempt it from the class of totalitarian regimes for that reason alone", since while Pinochet did not adopt an "official" ideology, but "ideological hegemony, whereby the dominant ideology becomes internalized and normalized, is far more effective than imposing an official ideology." Saladdin posited that while
Chile under Pinochet had no "official" ideology, there was one man who ruled Chile from "behind the scenes", "none other than
Milton Friedman, the godfather of
neoliberalism and the most influential teacher of the
Chicago Boys, was Pinochet's adviser". To Saladdin, such hegemonic yet not "official" ideology is much a more effective means of "totalitarian" control of society than an "official" ideology openly imposed by the state, what is exemplified by comparing Chile to
Nicolae Ceaușescu's Romania, which collapsed within a short period: "No one defended them; no masses poured onto the streets to mourn their deaths. Ceausescu's Romania, as an exemplary Stalinist state, met all of Friedrich and Brzezinski's criteria of a totalitarian state, but it was nowhere close to achieving total domination." In this sense, Saladdin criticized the concept of totalitarianism because it was only being applied to "opposing ideologies" and it was not being applied to liberalism. He also criticized the other criterion of totalitarianism formulated by Brzezinski, Friedrich and Arendt: In the early 2010s, Richard Shorten,
Vladimir Tismăneanu, and Aviezer Tucker posited that totalitarian ideologies can take different forms across political systems, yet all focus on
utopianism,
scientism, or
political violence. They posit that Nazism and Stalinism both emphasized the role of specialization in modern societies, saw
polymathy as a thing of the past, and stated that their claims were supported by statistics and science, which led them to impose strict ethical regulations on culture, use psychological violence, and persecute entire groups. Other scholars have criticized their arguments due to their partiality and anachronism.
Juan Francisco Fuentes treats totalitarianism as an "
invented tradition" and he believes that the notion of "modern
despotism" is a "reverse anachronism"; for Fuentes, "the anachronistic use of totalitarian/totalitarianism involves the will to reshape the past in the image and likeness of the present". Other studies try to link modern technological changes to totalitarianism. According to
Shoshana Zuboff, the economic pressures of modern
surveillance capitalism are driving the intensification of online connection and monitoring, with spaces of social life becoming saturated by corporate actors, directed toward the making of profit and/or the regulation of action.
Toby Ord believed that George Orwell's fears of totalitarianism constituted a notable early precursor to modern notions of anthropogenic existential risk, the concept that a future catastrophe could permanently destroy the potential of Earth-originating intelligent life due in part to technological changes, creating a permanent
technological dystopia. Ord said that Orwell's writings show that his concern was genuine rather than just a throwaway part of the fictional plot of
Nineteen Eighty-Four. In 1949, Orwell wrote that "[a] ruling class which could guard against (four previously enumerated sources of risk) would remain in power permanently". That same year,
Bertrand Russell wrote that "modern techniques have made possible a new intensity of governmental control, and this possibility has been exploited very fully in totalitarian states". In 2016,
The Economist described China's
Social Credit System, developed under
General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party Xi Jinping's
administration to screen and rank Chinese citizens based on their personal behavior, as
totalitarian. Opponents of China's ranking system say that it is intrusive and it is just another tool which a one-party state can use to control the population. Supporters say that it will transform China into a more civilized and law-abiding society. Shoshana Zuboff considers it instrumentarian rather than totalitarian. In
Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism (2022), the political scientists
Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way argued that nascent revolutionary régimes usually became totalitarian régimes unless they were destroyed by a military invasion. Such a revolutionary régime begins as a
social revolution independent of the state's existing social structures (not political succession, election to office, or a military ''
coup d'état''). For example, the
Soviet Union and
Maoist China were founded after the years-long
Russian Civil War (1917–1922) and
Chinese Civil War (1927–1936 and 1945–1949), respectively, not merely state succession. They produce totalitarian dictatorships with three functional characteristics: (i) a cohesive
ruling class comprising the military and the political élites, (ii) a strong and loyal coercive apparatus of police and military forces to suppress dissent, and (iii) the destruction of rival political parties, organizations, and independent centers of socio-political power. Moreover, the unitary functioning of the characteristics of totalitarianism allow a totalitarian government to perdure against economic crises (internal and external), large-scale failures of policy, mass social-discontent, and political pressure from other countries. Some totalitarian
one-party states were established through coups orchestrated by military officers loyal to a vanguard party that advanced
socialist revolution, such as the
Socialist Republic of the Union of Burma (1962), the
Syrian Arab Republic (1963), and the
Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (1978).
Possible future emergence Other emerging technologies that could empower future totalitarian regimes include
brain-reading and various applications of
artificial intelligence. Philosopher
Nick Bostrom said that there is a possible trade-off, namely that some existential risks might be mitigated by the establishment of a powerful and permanent
world government, and in turn the establishment of such a government could enhance the existential risks which are associated with the rule of a permanent dictatorship.
Religious totalitarianism Islamic The
Taliban is a totalitarian
Sunni Islamist militant group and political movement in
Afghanistan that emerged in the aftermath of the
Soviet–Afghan War and the end of the Cold War. It governed most of Afghanistan from
1996 to 2001 and
returned to power in 2021, controlling the entire country. Features of its totalitarian governance include the imposition of the
Pashtunwali culture of the majority-
Pashtun ethnic group as
religious law, the exclusion of minorities and non-Taliban members from the government, and extensive
violations of women's rights. The
Islamic State is a
Salafi-Jihadist militant group that was established in 2006 by
Abu Omar al-Baghdadi during the
Iraqi insurgency, under the name "
Islamic State of Iraq". Under the leadership of
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the organization later changed its name to the "Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant" in 2013. The group espouses a totalitarian ideology that is a
fundamentalist hybrid of
Global Jihadism,
Wahhabism, and
Qutbism. Following its
territorial expansion in 2014, the group renamed itself as the "Islamic State" and declared itself a
caliphate that sought domination over the
Muslim world, establishing what has been described as a "political-religious totalitarian regime". The
quasi-state held
significant territory in Iraq and Syria during the course of the
Third Iraq War and the
Syrian civil war from 2013 to 2019 under the dictatorship of its first caliph,
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who imposed a strict interpretation of
Sharia law.
Criticism of the classification of Islamism as totalitarianism Enzo Traverso, a critic of totalitarianism as a theoretical concept of historical and political sciences, is also critical of the usage of it in relation to
Islamist movements like the
Islamic State and the
Taliban and their state formations. According to Traverso, such a notion contradicts the very theoretical concept of totalitarianism. Systems which are commonly described as totalitarian, fascism and communism, sought to create a
utopian "New Man" and as a result, they set their projects toward the future, not to revive old forms of
absolutism, as noted by
Tzvetan Todorov: "The
reactionary modernism of
Islamic terrorism, on the contrary, employs modern technologies in order to return to the original purity of a mythical Islam. If it has utopian tendencies, they look to the past rather than the future." More to it, totalitarianism has been applied to secular movements which have been described as irrational "
political religions" which seek to abolish traditional religions, liturgies and symbols and replace them with their own liturgies and symbols, while
Islamic fundamentalism, on the contrary, is a politicized religion and a reaction to secularization and modernization. Besides that, as a form of violence,
terrorism is usually described as antipodal to state violence; while fascism was a reaction to democracy, Islamism arose in authoritarian, but weak states. "Speaking of a 'theocratic' totalitarianism makes this concept even more flexible and ambiguous than ever, once again confirming its essential function: not critically interpreting history and the world, but rather fighting an enemy," argues Traverso. Traverso writes that the term was adopted by Western propaganda after
9/11, which had previously used it against other enemies while maintaining the West's geopolitical interests. He notes that the Islamic state which most resembles the concept of totalitarianism,
Saudi Arabia, is an ally of the West and as a result, it cannot be considered a part of the "
Axis of Evil", and for that reason, as he believes, Saudi Arabia is rarely described as "totalitarian", unlike
Iran. The historians who continue to criticize Linz and describe the regime as totalitarian usually limit such characterization to ten to twenty years of the "
First Francoism." minister
Esteban Bilbao (left) and Catholic archbishop
Enrique Pla y Deniel (center) doing the Roman salute in
Toledo Cathedral, Spain, March 1942 Linz wrote that "the heteronomous control of the ideological content of Catholic thought by a universal church and specifically by the
Pope is one of the most serious obstacles to the creation of a truly totalitarian system..." Linz's argument has been debated: "The frequent and saturated references to Francoist Catholic humanism... coming from Christian theology, could hardly conceal the fact that the individual was only understood as a citizen to the extent of his adherence to the Catholic, hierarchical and economically privatist community that the military uprising had saved," argues Guillermo Portilla Contreras. Furthermore, Luis Aurelio Gonzalez Prieto argues that "Catholic values that permeated the conservative ideological substratum... were precisely what was wielded by the Francoist Spanish political doctrine of the late thirties and early forties to justify the need for the constitution of a totalitarian State at the service and expansion of the Catholic religion." Franco was portrayed as a fervent Catholic and a staunch defender of
Catholicism, the declared
state religion.
Civil marriages that had taken place in the Republic were declared null and void unless they had been validated by the Catholic Church, along with divorces. Divorce,
contraception and abortions were forbidden. According to historian
Stanley G. Payne, an opponent of describing Francoism as a totalitarian system, Franco had more day-to-day power than
Adolf Hitler or
Joseph Stalin possessed at the respective heights of their power. Payne noted that Hitler and Stalin at least maintained rubber-stamp parliaments, while Franco dispensed with even that formality in the early years of his rule. According to Payne, the lack of even a rubber-stamp parliament made Franco's government "the most purely arbitrary in the world." However, from 1959 to 1974, the "
Spanish Miracle" took place under the leadership of
technocrats, many of whom were members of
Opus Dei and a new generation of politicians that replaced the old
Falangist guard. Reforms were implemented in the 1950s and Spain abandoned
autarky, reassigning economic authority from the isolationist Falangist movement. This led to massive economic growth that lasted until the mid-1970s, known as the "
Spanish miracle". This is comparable to
de-Stalinization in the Soviet Union in the 1950s, whereby
Francoist Spain changed from being openly totalitarian to being an authoritarian dictatorship with a certain degree of
economic freedom. ==See also==