quotations about totalitarianism
The economic dictatorship of the monopolies and the political dictatorship of the totalitarian state are the outgrowth of the same political objectives, and the directors of both have the presumption to try to reduce all the countless expressions of social life to the mechanical tempo of the machine and to tune everything organic to the lifeless machine of the political apparatus.
RUDOLF ROCKER
Anarcho-Syndicalism
What I'm saying is simply that every totalitarian society, no matter how strict, has had its underground. In fact, two undergrounds. There's the underground involved in political resistance and the underground involved in preserving beauty and fun--which is to say, preserving the human spirit.
TOM ROBBINS
Still Life with Woodpecker
Totalitarianism is not only hell, but all the dream of paradise-- the age-old dream of a world where everybody would live in harmony, united by a single common will and faith, without secrets from one another.... Once the dream of paradise starts to turn into reality, however, here and there people begin to crop up who stand in its way. and so the rulers of paradise must build a little gulag on the side of Eden. In the course of time this gulag grows ever bigger and more perfect, while the adjoining paradise gets even smaller and poorer.
MILAN KUNDERA
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Societies such as ours that once had democratic traditions or periods when relative openness was possible are often the most easily seduced into totalitarian systems because those who rule and build totalitarian structures continue to pay outward fealty to the ideals, practices and forms of the old system.
CHRIS HEDGES
"Our Only Hope Will Come Through Rebellion", March 29, 2014
Totalitarianism is always capable of changing into anarchy and vice versa. The road to anarchy and the road to totalitarianism often run parallel.
NISHITANI KEIJI
"The I-Thou Relation in Zen Buddhism", The Buddha Eye: An Anthology of the Kyoto School and Its Contemporaries
Does human nature undergo a true change in the cauldron of totalitarian violence? Does man lose his innate yearning for freedom? The fate of both man and the totalitarian State depends on the answer to this question. If human nature does change, then the eternal and world-wide triumph of the dictatorial State is assured; if his yearning for freedom remains constant, then the totalitarian State is doomed.
VASILY GROSSMAN
Life and Fate
Totalitarianism is always Manichaean, dividing the world into two mutually exclusive parties, the good and the bad, aiming to annihilate the latter. Putting these principles into everyday practice necessarily involves the use of generalized terror.
TZVETAN TODOROV
Hope and Memory: Lessons from the Twentieth Century
The fallacy is to believe that under a dictatorial government you can be free inside. Quite a number of people console themselves with this thought, now that totalitarianism in one form or another is visibly on the up-grade in every part of the world. Out in the street the loudspeakers bellow, the flags flutter from the rooftops, the police with their tommy-guns prowl to and fro, the face of the Leader, four feet wide, glares from every hoarding; but up in the attics the secret enemies of the regime can record their thoughts in perfect freedom -- that is the idea, more or less.
GEORGE ORWELL
"As I Please", Tribune, April 28, 1944
The tragedy of the national totalitarian states consists principally in this: while they require the total devotion of the person, they lack and even repudiate explicitly all understanding and respect for the person and its interior riches. In consequence, they are impelled to seek a principle of human exaltation in myths of outward grandeur and unending efforts toward external power and prestige. Such an impulse tends of itself to generate war and the self-destruction of the civilized community.
JACQUES MARITAIN
The Person and the Common Good
The totalitarian attempt to make men superfluous reflects the experience of modern masses of their superfluity on an overcrowded earth. The world of the dying, in which men are taught they are superfluous through a way of life in which punishment is meted out without connection with crime, in which exploitation is practiced without profit, and where work is performed without product, is a place where senselessness is daily produced anew. Yet, within the framework of the totalitarian ideology, nothing could be more sensible and logical; if the inmates are vermin, it is logical they should be killed by poison gas; if they are degenerate, they should not be allowed to contaminate the population; if they have "slave-like souls" (Himmler), no one should waste his time trying to re-educate them.
HANNAH ARENDT
The Origins of Totalitarianism
The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers, is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist.
WINSTON CHURCHILL
attributed, In The Highest Degree Odious: Detention Without Trial in Wartime Britain
EVERYTHING NOT FORBIDDEN IS COMPULSORY.
T. H. WHITE
The Once and Future King
Such crimes against humanity always are fortified by rationalizations and justifications: it is for the good of the people; it is for the enforcement of the doctrines of the state; it is so that we can establish the coming secular or religious millennium. Furthermore, such crimes are often even regularized in "handbooks," inquisitorial guidebooks that accompany "tribunals" and "hearings" that provide occasions for more or less elaborate self-justifications. But when we penetrate through to the core of these crimes, something else is at work. Just as the order of totalitarianism is always disorder, so, too, the logic of the state in these state crimes is always ultimately illogic.
ARTHUR VERSLUIS
The New Inquisitions : Heretic-Hunting and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Totalitarianism
Totalitarianism ... does not so much promise an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia. A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud. Such a society, no matter how long it persists, can never afford to become either tolerant or intellectually stable. It can never permit either the truthful recording of facts or the emotional sincerity that literary creation demands. But to be corrupted by totalitarianism one does not have to live in a totalitarian country. The mere prevalence of certain ideas can spread a kind of poison that makes one subject after another impossible for literary purposes. Wherever there is an enforced orthodoxy -- or even two orthodoxies, as often happens -- good writing stops. This was well illustrated by the Spanish civil war. To many English intellectuals the war was a deeply moving experience, but not an experience about which they could write sincerely. There were only two things that you were allowed to say, and both of them were palpable lies: as a result, the war produced acres of print but almost nothing worth reading.
GEORGE ORWELL
The Prevention of Literature
Totalitarianism is a soft and supple thing. Sated with hedonism and distraction, citizens aren't even aware how far they've fallen into the clutches of their autocratic masters. The moment someone has an original or rebellious thought, there's a drug, catchy tune, or sex to distract them.
GRACY OLMSTEAD
"To Avoid A Dystopian Future, We Must Become Savage", The Federalist, February 3, 2017
The road to totalitarian domination leads through many intermediate stages for which we can find numerous analogies and precedents.
HANNAH ARENDT
The Origins of Totalitarianism
Totalitarian regimes energize their base and forge national unity by emphasizing an "us vs. them" mentality: "If only there weren't"--fill in the blank: Jews, immigrants, Muslims, blacks, homosexuals--"our country would achieve its intended prosperity."
CHRISTOPHER LEBRON
"What Totalitarianism Looks Like", Boston Review, January 28, 2017
As moral and spiritual values cease to exact an unswerving commitment, an unquestioning allegiance; as we discuss them, have reservations about them, modify them and quantify them; so do our lives become infused with that metaphysical vagueness which is the blight of the natural condition. It is then that we look to the secular world for a certainty which, in truth, it cannot offer. Totalitarianism is always there, waiting, ready to fill the breach.
ANONYMOUS
The Salisbury Review, 1984
We take for granted the need to escape the self. Yet the self can also be a refuge. In totalitarian countries the great hunger is for private life. Absorption in the minutiae of an individual existence is the only refuge from the apocalyptic madhouse staged by maniacal saviors of humanity.
ERIC HOFFER
Reflections on the Human Condition
Genocide, after all, is an exercise in community building. A vigorous totalitarian order requires that the people be invested in the leaders' scheme, and while genocide may be the most perverse and ambitious means to this end, it is also the most comprehensive.
PHILIP GOUREVITCH
We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will be Killed with Our Families