Quotes About Totalitarianism

Totalitaire overheersing is gericht op de vernietiging van de vrijheid, meer nog, op de eliminatie van de spontaniteit in het algemeen, en geenszins op de beperking, hoe tiranniek ook van de vrijheid. Technisch gesproken blijkt de afwezigheid van enig gezag of hiërarchie in het totalitaire systeem uit het feit dat er tussen de hoogste macht (de Führer) en de onderdanen geen tussenliggende niveaus zijn die elk hun aangepaste deel hebben in het gezag en de gehoorzaamheid.

Wanneer het totalitarisme aan de macht is, gebruikt het de staat als uiterlijke façade om het land in de niet-totalitaire wereld te representeren.[...]Ze moet de schijn van normaliteit en gezond verstand ophouden tegenover de normale buitenwereld.

Overtuigde communisten - de enige die vandaag enig belang heeft - zijn even belachelijk en evenzeer bedreigend voor het regime in Rusland als bijvoorbeeld de overtuigde nazi's van de Röhmfactie waren voor de nazi's.

The truth is that the price of totalitarian rule was so high that in neither Germany nor Russia has it yet been paid in full.

Less immediately significant but of greater importance for totalitarian governments was the other experience in Africa's race society, that profit motives are not holy and can be overruled, that societies can function according to principles other than economic, and that such circumstances may favour those who under conditions of rationalised production and the capitalist system would belong to the underprivileged

NOTHING is more characteristic of the totalitarian movements in general and of the quality of fame of their leaders in particular than the startling swiftness with which they are forgotten and the startling ease with which they can be replaced.

Only where great masses are superfluous or can be spared without disastrous results of depopulation is totalitarian rule, as distinguished from a totalitarian movement, at all possible.

order to establish a totalitarian regime, terror must be presented as an instrument for carrying out a specific ideology; and that ideology must have won the adherence of many, and even a majority, before terror can be stabilized.

Decisive in our context is that totalitarian government is different from dictatorships and tyrannies; the ability to distinguish between them is by no means an academic issue which could be safely left to the "theoreticians," for total domination is the only form of government with which coexistence is not possible.

Before they seize power and establish a world according to their doctrines, totalitarian movements conjure up a lying world of consistency which is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself; in which, through sheer imagination, uprooted masses can feel at home and are spared the never-ending shocks which real life and real experiences deal to human beings and their expectations.

The totalitarian dictators have proved that they knew only too well the danger inherent in their pose of normality; that is, the danger of a true nationalist policy or of actually building socialism in one country. This they try to overcome through a permanent and consistent discrepancy between reassuring words and the reality of rule, by consciously developing a method of always doing the opposite of what they say.

The task of the totalitarian police is not to discover crimes, but to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a certain category of the population.

The task of the totalitarian police is not to discover crimes, but to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a certain category of the population. The operation of the secret police, on the contrary, miraculously sees to it that the victim never existed at all.

while we know the operation and the specific function of the totalitarian secret police, we do not know how well or to what an extent the 'secret' of this secret society corresponds to the secret desires and the secret complicities of the masses in our time.

Totalitarianism strives not toward despotic rule over men, but toward a system in which men are superfluous.

The crimes against human rights, which have become a specialty of totalitarian regimes, can always be justified by the pretext that right is equivalent to being good or useful for the whole in distinction to its parts.

The totalitarian attempt at global conquest and total domination has been the destructive way out of all impasses. Its victory may coincide with the destruction of humanity; wherever it has ruled, it has begun to destroy the essence of man. Yet to turn our backs on the destructive forces of the century is of little avail.

the curious contradiction between the totalitarian movements' avowed cynical "realism" and their conspicuous disdain of the whole texture of reality. Or, the irritating incompatibility between the actual power-of modern man (greater than ever before, great to the point where he might challenge the very existence of his own universe) and the impotence of modern men to live in, and understand the sense of, a world which their own strength has established.

the Stalin regime was ruthlessly consistent: all facts that did not agree, or were likely to disagree, with the official fiction—data on crop-yields, criminality, true incidences of "counter-revolutionary" activities as distinguished from the later conspiracy fictions—were treated as non-facts.

the totalitarian hell proves only that the power of man is greater than they ever dared to think, and that man can realize hellish fantasies without making the sky fall or the earth open.

Under the conditions of total terror not even fear can any longer serve as an advisor of how to behave, because terror chooses its victims without reference to individual actions or thoughts, exclusively in accordance with the objective necessity of the natural or historical process. Under the totalitarian conditions, fear probably is more widespread than ever before; but fear has lost its practical usefulness when actions guided by it can no longer help to avoid the dangers that man fears.

But before Nazism, in the course of its totalitarian policy, attempted to change man into a beast, there were numerous efforts to develop him on a strictly hereditary basis into a god.

De belangrijkste handicap van de totalitaire propaganda is dat ze deze hunker van de massa's naar een volledig consistente, begrijpelijke en voorspelbare wereld niet kan bevredigen zonder ernstig in conflict te raken met het gezond verstand.

The open, unashamed adoption of what had become to the whole world the most prominent sign of Nazism was the last compliment Stalin paid to his late colleague and rival in total domination with whom, much to his chagrin, he had not been able to come to a lasting agreement.