6/12/2023 0 Comments The rise of totalitarianism book![]() All these regimes created a single party that stood outside of, but also largely dominated, the traditional state. In Nazi Germany they included all those not belonging to the national community, including socialists and communists, Jews, and any other ethnic minorities. ![]() In Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China the key enemies were class enemies: capitalists, landlords, richer peasants and foreign agents of all kinds. They attempted to control every aspect of the lives of their people, enlisting everyone in a common struggle against designated enemies, foreign and domestic, and forcing them all to adopt official ideology. ![]() The classic totalitarian regimes all shared a few characteristics. Together with the terror wrought at the same time by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the Cultural Revolution was the last outburst of 20th-century totalitarianism, a phenomenon that also included Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany, and was captured for all time in one of the classics of 20th century literature, George Orwell’s 1984. Seen in retrospect, these events have an even greater world-historical significance. ![]()
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