Totalitarianism Revisited

Abstract

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the debate over the American war in Iraq, revived talk of totalitarianism among liberals and leftists thinking about radical Islamists and Middle East dictatorships. With varying degrees of enthusiasm, respected former dissidents such as Vaclav Havel and Adam Michnik and distinguished intellectuals in Europe and America such as Paul Berman, André Glucksmann, Richard Herzinger, Christopher Hitchens, Michael Ignatieff, as well as Nobel Peace Prize recipient José Ramos-Horta justified, if not military intervention, then an aggressive and principled policy toward Saddam Hussein's regime—largely on liberal-humanitarian grounds, invoking the imperative of resisting totalitarianism. Though he explicitly opposed the unilateral use of military force, Joschka Fischer, then Germany's foreign minister, spoke of a "third totalitarianism"—after Nazism and communism—"as the major challenge facing the international community in the twenty-first century." In December 2004, in "An Argument for a New Liberalism, a Fighting Faith," Peter Beinart, editor of the New Republic, complained that "three years after September 11 brought the United States face-to-face with a new totalitarian threat, liberalism has still not been fundamentally reshaped by the experience." British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw called terrorism the "new totalitarianism," the world's greatest threat to democracy. The return of this term is instructive, because its history is not at all as luminescent as its advocates would have us believe.