According to an old joke, while in a liberal democracy everything that is not forbidden is allowed, in a totalitarian system everything that has not been banned is compulsory. In George Orwell’s notorious anti-totalitarian novel 1984, an even more terrifying summary of life in a totalitarian system is offered, when the character Winston Smith is told by his mysterious interrogator O’Brien: ‘If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever’.
For many, fascism and totalitarianism are synonymous, but the concept has a more complex history. Totalitarian states can be broadly summarised as non-democratic political systems that use modern tools such as the mass media, alongside a political police, to try to coordinate all aspects of life among an entire population. Examples that have been regularly cited in this connection range from Nazi Germany, to the USSR, to Communist China, while lesser-cited cases include Pol Pot’s Cambodia and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. It has been argued that current totalitarian states include North Korea and Iran. In other words, totalitarian states have been thought to emerge from a wide variety of revolutions in the twentieth century, created to secure the ideals of these revolutions in the political systems that were developed afterwards.
However, not all forms of modern authoritarianism should be seen as clear-cut cases of totalitarianism. Putin’s Russia does not really fit the totalitarian model. Its authoritarianism is based on manipulation through disinformation, rather than trying to instil belief in a single ideology, and many other authoritarian regimes do not neatly fit the totalitarian model either. Whether China is now totalitarian, or has become something else, remains open to debate. Nor are modern far right populists who engage in elections totalitarian in this regard, as they aim to manipulate democratic systems rather than overthrow them.
