My father’s family fled a totalitarian regime that stands to this day. My mother’s predominantly Russian Jewish family, some of whom lived in what is today Ukraine, thankfully left the region before the great totalitarian powers starved and slaughtered people by the tens of millions. For these and other common reasons, I tended, when growing up, to think of totalitarianism as the greatest proximate danger if democracy were lost.
How did this horrifying political form come to be in the first place? “War made the state, and the state made war,” as Charles Tilly put it. Total war made the totalitarian state. Europe 1914-1945 saw the emergence of total war among industrial powers, in which even the liberal nations turned to command and control models to achieve the total mobilization of their societies to hit production targets, ration private consumption, and inflict destruction and death on an unprecedented scale.
It was in this environment that the first totalitarian society, the Soviet Union, was created. Where societies waging total war mobilized for victory, the Bolsheviks attempted to build a society that was permanently mobilized. Rather than a wartime expedient to ensure the lion’s share of society’s resources are dedicated to victory at the price of making more wasteful use of those resources, centralized “material balance control” was to be the new normal, the way of the future. Of course, total mobilization did not end with hitting production targets. Even relatively tolerant societies cracked down on dissent in times of total war. In a totalitarian society, there could be no dissent. All mobilized on behalf of an all-encompassing goal, all affirmed the value of that goal, and those who did not, did not last long.
The Soviet Union is gone, and the totality of its totalitarianism waned long before the end. The appearance of a totalitarian tide sweeping across the world seems now to have been the mirage of a peculiar moment. In part, this is because nuclear weapons have rendered total war much less likely among most major industrial powers. But it is also simply because of the nature of totalitarianism as a political order.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The End of Safety to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.