Totalitarian Nature Research Articles

«ПОМЫСЛИТЬ СОВЕТСКОЕ БЫТИЕ»: СОВЕТСКИЕ, РОССИЙСКИЕ И ЗАРУБЕЖНЫЕ ИССЛЕДОВАНИЯ ВТОРОЙ ПОЛОВИНЫ XX– НАЧАЛА XXI В

Thе article explores works about soviet life by soviet, russian, european and american researchers, written in the second half of the 20th century and at the beginning of the 21st century. The understanding of soviet life by european and american authors was determined by studying the nature of totalitarianism. The authors analyzed the features of classical european metaphysics that determined the formation of ideologies (the concept of the ideal state of Plato, the concept of rational laws of historical development of K. Marx), the psychology of the «man of the masses», the influence of propaganda and alternative ways of controlling the masses, the importance of the image of a Superpowerful Empire for modern Russia. The key authors are K. Popper, H. Arendt, Z. Brzezinski and K. Friedrich, J. Nye, W. Laqueur. Soviet authors analyzed the themes of protecting humanistic values and civil rights and freedoms, transforming culture under state control and formation of the aesthetics of totalitarian art, the existence of an individual in collectivist environment, the formation and destruction of the special communication environment of the soviet world: a system of signs and myths. The most interesting authors are G. S. Pomerants, I. N. Golomstock, B. E. Groys, P. Weil and A. Genis, G. L. Smirnova, A. A. Zinoviev, M. K. Mamardashvii, M. P. Kapustina, Yu. A. Levada. Some studies are concentrated on the legacy of the USSR as a kind of lost civilization – the analysis of everyday life, creating dictionaries and encyclopedias of soviet life, the studying of memories and diaries. The works by L. V. Belovinsky, I. B. Orlova, N. B. Lebina, N. N. Kozlova are notable.

THE END OF POSTCOMMUNISM AND THE TRENDS OF THE FURTHER DEVELOPMENT OF EX-POSTCOMMUNIST COUNTRIES

The article is devoted to clarifying the problem of the end of postcommunist transformations and the essence of the further development of the ex-postcommunist countries. The avalanche collapse of the communist regimes at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s led to the beginning of postcommunist transformations. Today it can be stated that this process is over. The author argues this conclusion with the following considerations: 1) any transformational process, the essence of which is to replace one quality of society or its political system with another, cannot go on indefinitely, it must end someday; 2) the end of the transformation process is due to the establishment of a new quality; 3) the totalitarian nature of the previous communist regimes presupposes the multivariate end of postcommunist transformations. Various postcommunist countries have achieved different results during transformations. In Central-Eastern Europe, the Baltic States, and a number of countries in South-Eastern Europe, postcommunist transformations have culminated in the establishment of democracy. The transformations of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan was over the establishment of authoritarian regimes. Neo-totalitarian regimes have emerged in Belarus, Russia, and Turkmenistan. In Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Armenia, Georgia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Moldova and Ukraine, political development fluctuates between democracy and authoritarianism for a long time. The author concludes that the period of postcommunism in all these countries finally over in the middle of 2010s. The end of postcommunism marked the beginning of a new stage in the socio-political development of the ex-communist countries. Its main tendencies are revealed in this paper. The author includes in such: 1) a fall the level of democracy in Central-Eastern and South-Eastern Europe; 2) a strengthening differentiation of political development of single regions and the countries; 3) a growth of nationalism; 4) a changes in relations with the EU; 4) a strengthening Russia's interference.

Totalitarny islamizm czy totalny islam? Irracjonalny lęk czy uzasadniony strach? Mirosława Sadowskiego integralna i kontekstowa analiza szariatu

TOTALITARIAN ISLAMISM OR TOTAL ISLAM? IRRATIONAL ANXIETY OR JUSTIFIED FEAR? MIROSŁAW SADOWSKI’S INTEGRAL AND CONTEXTUAL SHARIA ANALYSISIn the article, the author presents his reflections on the publications of Mirosław Sadowski, the book Islam. Religia i prawo Islam. Religion and law and the article “Czy islam ma charakter totalitarny?” Is Islam of a totalitarian nature?. The main references are the systemic nature of Islam totalitarianism and total theocracy and the problem of political correctness. The text elaborates on selected theses, characteristic of current research, which pays homage to selective analysis based on the paradigm of Islamophobia. The scientific narrative consisting of the reduction of complex phenomena to one code has been criticized.

Dobrovoljno ropstvo i totalitarnost u distopijskim romanima 20. stoljeća: Status književnosti u Vrlome novom svijetu, 1984. i Fahrenheitu 451

The article thematises the relationship of the will to rule and the will to be ruled in the aforementioned dystopian novels by Aldous Huxley, George Orwell and Ray Bradbury. The first part of the article points out Hannah Arendt’s observations on the nature of totalitarianism, the second part deals with the similarities concerning the status of literature in the fictitious totalitarian societies represented in the three novels, whereas the final part exemplifies Arendtʼs views through Étienne de La Boétieʼs writings on “voluntary servitude”. The conflict between those who want to be ruled and those who want to be free reflects the clash of those who want to annihilate literature and those who want to preserve it.

THE RITUAL OF TRANSITION AS A FACTOR OF SOCIOCULTURAL DYNAMICS IN THE CONTEXT OF POSTMODERN SOCIETY

Introduction. The article analyzes the transformation of the role of ritual in different types of society, responsible for social reproduction, maintaining community and order. The tasks are: 1) to reveal the characteristic features of the ritual of transition as a sociocultural phenomenon; 2) consider the stage of transition of the system from one state to another, associated with the loss of structure, hierarchy, status of elements; 3) characterize the transformation of the ritual of transition in the conditions of the multicultural and poly-subject sociality of the modern world. Research methods are selected due to the tasks of the research. The general methodological paradigm of the study is socio-philosophical, which allows to consider the ritual of transition as a specific social phenomenon, the forms of which depend on the types of societies, as well as to identify and demonstrate the significance and content of ritual practices in the processes of postmodern society. The comparative method is used to contrast a traditional ritual of transition with modern ritual practices of initiation. The method of historical sociology (N. Elias) in conjunction with the genealogical approach to the study of social phenomena (M. Foucault) are used to analyze transformations of ritual forms in relation to the processes of constructing and reproducing of social reality. Research results: A three-phase transition ritual involving separation, liminality and reaggregation stages is responsible for the elimination of the established social structure by adapting to the new. For a representative of a traditional society, ritual is a culturally standardized set of actions of symbolic content that are performed in situations, dictated by tradition, focused on the formation of an individual identity in the context of current sociocultural changes. The sacralized ritual of transition, within postmodern society is seen as a playful set of "schemes", "forms" of actions, no longer served as a way of social and individual harmonization in the face of many new sociocultural phenomena for the existing order. The problem of mastering a new order is actual because the liminality with the community arisen within it cannot prepare the ground for the adoption of innovations. Discussion. The most important in the study is an appeal to the anthropological and ethnographic theories of the ritual proposed by the works of E. Durkheim, E. Lich, B. Malynovskyi, M. Moss, A. Radcliffe-Brown, W. Robertson-Smith, V. Turner, J. Fraser. Modern Western studies of the problem of ritual are presented by R. Collins, M. Eliade, the concepts of the functional approach of P. Berger, P. Bourdieu, E. Giddens, K. Girce, I. Hoffmann, T. Lukman, N. Luman, G. Mead, O. Rosenstock-Hussy, R. Girard, affecting the problem of the role of rituals in everyday life in the process of constructing and reproducing social reality; the concepts of the secular ritual of D. Kertzer, S. Moore, B. Mayerhof. With all these varieties of theories and concepts of ritual, the problem associated with the analysis of ritual practices of transition in the aspect of their attitude to multicultural processes in modern society, in the above-mentioned works is not specifically addressed. Conclusion. Liminality in postmodern society becomes permanent. The prolongation of the liminal stage is due to the social uncertainty of multicultural and polysubject policy. The situation of communitas in the protracted liminal stage threatens with the emergence of a new subculture of a totalitarian nature.

Громадський контроль діяльності підприємств торгівлі, харчування та побутового обслуговування: деталі політичної реконструкції «відлиги».

The article examines political aspects of social transformations of the «Thaw» period. It is proved by means of discussion that the problematic development of social sphere in the republic was made conditional upon priority development of group «A» production before group «B», which, first of all, put them into unequal conditions and caused a programmed lagging of the latter. It is proved that great attention of the new government to the problems of the social sphere was dictated as by the aggravation of the political confrontation with the supporters of the Stalin regime as by the necessity of adaptation of the USSR’s political system to the conditions of the post-war world. The process of formation by the trade unions of civilian control of its character and political conditions is divided by the researcher into two phases. It is being stressed that the governing party had unmistakably selected the object of political influence which could bring highest possible political dividends in the form of its support by various layers of the population. Those were business, public catering and domestic service enterprises. Being poorly developed, they could not satisfy the needs of the society. Also several principal conclusion as to the importance of the civilian control have been made. The author assumes that it was brought into practice with the aim of covering conceptual mistakes embedded into the basis of the Soviet economy and camouflaging the totalitarian nature of the new power therefore generating an illusion of its concern about the society. The author thinks that organized by the trade unions control over the spheres of trade, catering and domestic care provided a possibility to a start of removing the problem, which is, for a period of time, postponed the inevitable dismissal of the «Thaw» government. At the same time the author underlines that organized by the trade unions control presented a part of the concept of Soviet management. While developing it, the trade unions positioned themselves as «the school of Communism» which teaches the workers to manage state affairs.

Антиутопія та гетеротопія: фікційне місто-тюрма в повісті «Місто, в якому не ходять гроші» Кузьми Скрябіна.

The article represents an attempt of geopoetical view on post-Chornobyl story by famous Ukrainian poet and pop-singer A. Kuzmenko (a.k.a. Kuzma Skriabin). Analyzed text is the part of Ukrainian postcolonial and at the same time postmodern discourse, coined by T. Hundorova as “postChornobyl Library”. In the article based on ideas of U. Eco, M. Foucault and M. de Certeau an analysis of spatial frames and special narrative is being conducted. It is supposed that the topical parameters of the story could be interpreted in terms of “heterotopia” (“other space” which mixes cultural semantics, effectively excluded from the order of human space) and “anti-utopia”. The City, linked for sure with its prototype, Prypiat, is composed of heterotopias of lower level: railway station, cemetery, hotel, hospital and so on. The most powerful and valuable for plot spatial frames in the story are those with semantics of graveyard: depot of contaminated machines and empty rural house, which preserved signs of pre-evacuation life. It was proven that the transformation of Alisa, the heroine of the story, is marked with those catastrophic loci. The embodiment of power in the City was also traced. Transhumanistic experiments conducted in the City are interpreted as totalitarian practice: both idea of “panopticon” (M. Foucault) and inscribing of power in skin (M. de Certeau). The post-Soviet nature of totalitarianism is at the same time an effective deconstruction of the idea of total control: unilateral transparency, effectiveness of repression machine are doubted in organization of the City. The key communist utopical idea (exclusion of money) symbolically marks the failure of total idea.

Religion and Democracy

Different discussions about separation of religion and politics and secularism motivated this thought that is there any consistency between religious society and democracy or not. The starting point in the discussions is the lack of democracy in religious community and totalitarian nature of society from scientific and technological aspects. The belief that the religious community cannot tolerate various views motivated me to think more in this regard and the result is the present study to use inductive method and evaluate the details and reach generalities that religion cannot negate democracy. The main question of study is whether religion and democracy are combined? The exiting hypotheses show that individualistic approaches in human communities are better than religious approach. Individualistic approaches are mostly based on democracy basics. Religion is the origin of real democracy in human communities. The important hypothesis in this study is accepting the main position of human being and his real origin is its consistency on Sharia. The variables of study are different human communities, the thought origin of communities, awareness of society to religious orders, the relationship of society with the God speech soul via perceiving Quran, historical and political history of society, thought evolution in joining process to global village and other variables as they can change the inference of human aspects and God speech.

“DOES DEMOCRACY END IN TERROR?” TRANSFORMATIONS OF ANTITOTALITARIANISM IN POSTWAR FRANCE

Does democracy end in terror? This essay examines how this question acquired urgency in postwar French political thought by evaluating the critique of totalitarianism after the 1970s, its antecedents, and the shifting conceptual idioms that connected them. It argues that beginning in the 1970s, the critique of totalitarianism was reorganized around notions of “the political” and “the social” to bring into view totalitarianism's democratic provenance. This conceptual mutation displaced earlier denunciations of the bureaucratic nature of totalitarianism by foregrounding anxieties over its voluntarist, democratic sources. Moreover, it projected totalitarianism's origins back to the Jacobin discourse of political will to implicate its postwar inheritors like French communism and May 1968. In so doing, antitotalitarian thinkers stoked a reassessment of liberalism and a reassertion of “the social” as a barrier against excessive democratic voluntarism, the latter embodied no longer by Bolshevism but by a totalitarian Jacobin political tradition haunting modern French history.

Modernization of Albanian Totalitarian Nature – Pattern’s Survey of Modernity in Ideology and Practice of the Stalinist State in Albania

This aim of this study is to identify the elements of Modernity of nature, ideology, and the practice of Albanian state during the period 1944-1991. The central hypothesis in the author’s view is the identification the Albanian Stalinist System as an alternative form of modernization. In this perspective, the cause of existence, the nature and the historical experience of the Albanian Stalinist System are products of formative processes of European Modernity. The methods used by the author is by putting the phenomena in a comparative context in both international and historical, therefore to emphasize the commonalities and particularities between the Albanian Stalinist State and European Modern States and also a comparison between Albanian Satlinist state and early state forms in Albania. This comparative view is extended in different aspects like state’s ideology, it’s form and practices. This study initiates with a fundamental concept of modernity and its basic features, proceeds with the identification of Stalinism as modernizing/progressive model and concludes with reveling the modernizing elements of the Albanian Stalinist regime. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n2s1p506

Between the Brown and the Red: Nationalism, Catholicism, and Communism in Twentieth-Century Poland: The Politics of Boleslaw Piasecki. By Mikolaj Stanislaw Kunicki. Ohio University Press Polish and Polish-American Studies Series. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2012. xxix + 266 pp. $39.96 cloth; $28.95 paper.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Between Brown and Red: Nationalism, Catholicism, and Communism in Twentieth-Century Poland: The Politics of Boleslaw Piasecki . By Mikolaj Stanislaw Kunicki . Ohio University Press Polish and Polish-American Studies Series. Athens : Ohio University Press , 2012. xxix + 266 pp. $39.96 cloth; $28.95 paper.Book Reviews and NotesPolitical biography has fallen out of fashion, so Mikolaj Stanislaw Kunicki's fascinating biography of Boleslaw Piasecki is a welcome reminder of how genre can provide insight into larger political issues. Between Brown and Red is also a reminder of pitfalls of biography, which inevitably struggles to balance role of individual with whirlwind of complex social, cultural, and political forces. While Kunicki is not always successful in striking this balance, merits of this book far outweigh its shortcomings.Kunicki recounts career of Polish right-wing nationalist, sometime fascist, sometime communist, and always Catholic Boleslaw Piasecki. He was a remarkable--and despicable--political opportunist whose public career began in far right student movements of 1930s and ended with his elevation to Poland's Council of State in 1970s. As Kunicki convincingly asserts, Piasecki's story reveals the persistence of right and of pluralistic rather than totalitarian nature of East European communism (181).Piasecki's success came from his ability to position himself as a broker between Catholic Church, communist government, and, perhaps, Soviet influence. Piasecki was a devout Catholic, but his relationship with his Church was a contentious one. As founder and leader of PAX, a lay-Catholic organization that championed an alliance between Catholic Church and Poland's communist government, Piasecki struggled to retain influence with both institutions. When he championed communism, most notably in his 1956 book Essential Issues , he alienated Catholic Church and barely avoided excommunication. Without his Catholic credentials, he equally risked losing influence with Party, which tolerated his Catholicism precisely because it valued his influence with Church. As he scrambled to retain influence in both worlds, his life became a metaphor for struggle to balance nationalist, Catholic, and socialist forces in Poland.Piasecki's survival, and his persistent political influence for over forty years, is a testament to both his political savvy and his execrable opportunism. …

Urbanism of Grandiosity: Planning a New Urban Centre for Tehran (1973–76)

Abstract In the 1970s a grand-scale ceremonial urban centre, with an extensive programme of governmental, commercial and residential buildings, was planned for north Tehran. Construction began in 1975, but was soon halted by the eruption of the street protests that led to the 1979 revolution. This essay analyses the project’s conception, socio-political underpinnings and ultimate failure, by contextualizing it within Tehran’s urban landscape and by tracing its design trajectory. As a grandiose project made possible by the oil boom, the final plan of Shahestan, drawn up by the planning firm Llewelyn-Davies International, not only reflects the megalomania of Mohammad Reza Shah (r. 1941–79) but also reveals the totalitarian nature of the Pahlavi regime in the 1970s. But prior to hiring the planning firm, Queen Farah supported a rival design by the internationally famous architects Louis Kahn and Kenzo Tange, who were indeed involved in the project for a few months before Kahn’s death in 1974. I argue that this duality of patronage, and all the oppositions that it embodies, is echoed in the gendered representation of monarchy in the final plan and signifies how the project subverts a liberal narrative of modernism. Moreover, the new urban centre was not at the city’s physical core but rather at the centre of its northern part – the locus of an expanding upper middle class. The discrepancy between the intended purpose of the project and the social realities of its urban context epitomizes the regime’s paradoxical approach to modernity and modernization.

Czy i na ile jest możliwa dzisiaj współpraca rodziców i nauczycieli na rzecz integralnego wychowania ucznia?

W obecnej rzeczywistości, gdy rozpowszechnia się coraz bardziej liberalny model wychowania, postulat formacji integralnej ucznia staje się koniecznością. Analiza podstawy programowej nauczania ogólnego uświadamia nam, że szkoła tkwi w głębokim kryzysie, który także sama wywołała. Podjęcie działań naprawczych wymaga zespolonych, solidarnych działań. Dopiero wówczas będą one skuteczne. Należy pilnie uświadamiać rodziców o ich prawie do wychowania, jak również wspomagać działania na rzecz domagania się ich udziału w wychowaniu szkolnym. Są to zadania, jakie stoją dzisiaj przed wszystkimi podmiotami odpowiedzialnymi za wychowanie: rodzicami, samą szkołą i Kościołem.

American Freedom and Islamic Fascism: Ideology in the Hall of Mirrors

American Freedom and Islamic Fascism: Ideology in the Hall of Mirrors Ellen McLarney (bio) While democratic liberalism continually reimagines fascism as its monstrous Other, fascism might be better understood as its doppelganger or double. Nikhil Singh, “Afterlife of Fascism” The terrorism being combated by Superpower, while real enough, is one whose image Superpower’s representatives have constructed. Superpower’s understanding of the requirements of its own powers has been guided by the character it has chosen to bestow upon terrorism. Sheldon Wolin, Democracy Incorporated The Bush administration’s post-9/11 diagnosis for the origins of the attacks was Islamic “hatred” for American freedoms: freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and democratically elected government. This freedom, Bush argued, is the crux of the difference between “us” and “them,” what differentiates Islamic fundamentalism from the liberal, democratic West. This characterization of the Middle East and the Islamic world draws on classic colonial imagery of oriental despotism as well as rhetoric associated with other wars of global expansion like World War II and the Cold War. In Bush’s September 20th speech to Congress and the American people, he identified the perpetrators of 9/11 as “heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century … They follow in the path of fascism, Nazism, and totalitarianism.”1 This speech apparently set the terms of the debate, establishing mirroring discourses of freedom and fascism, discourses taken up nearly verbatim by the British and American media. The media became a potent arm in a propaganda war, projecting the threat to “our freedoms” onto an alien Islam, even as the Bush administration embarked on imperialistic wars abroad, strengthened the powers of the executive branch, suspended laws of habeus corpus, violated international law, and loosened restrictions on spying on American citizens, all in an atmosphere of chauvinistic patriotism and militarism. As fears grew about an unbounded American state sowing its influence across the globe, totalitarianism was projected onto Islamic political ambitions. After 9/11, the British and American media functioned as an ideological apparatus of the state embedded in the military, the marketplace of ideas became a “war of ideas,” as the media offered their services as “laptop generals,” using rounds from “thought-murder guns.”2 “We cannot kill all these people,” Dinesh D’Souza wrote of the Muslim world, “We have to change their minds.”3 By the time British and American intellectuals began theorizing the US security state as “inverted totalitarianism” (Susan Buck-Morss, Sheldon Wolin), neoliberalism as authoritarian (David Harvey, Wendy Brown, Eva Cherniavsky), and the United States’ “empire of liberty” as fascist (Nihil Singh), the media had already bombarded public consciousness with arguments about the totalitarian nature of radical Islam.4 These intellectuals sought to invert, or somehow revert this discourse, by turning the charge of totalitarianism back on the state. “The Left,” writes Slavoj Zizek in Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? “has accepted the basic co-ordinates of liberal democracy (‘democracy’ versus ‘totalitarianism,’) and is now trying to redefine its (op)position within this space.”5 Zizek argues that this space is a “stopgap: instead of enabling us to think, forcing us to acquire a new insight into the historical reality it describes, it … actively prevents us from thinking.”6 This basic coordinate of freedom versus fascism (or democracy versus totalitarianism, liberalism versus authoritarianism, the West versus Islam) is not just a stopgap, a closed, claustrophobic space within which thought can get caught, but a kind of hall of mirrors in which liberal ideology—whether secular or Islamic—infinitely reflects back on itself. This essay explores mirroring discourses of freedom and fascism through the figure of Sayyid Qutb, whose own theology of Islamic freedom was described in the British and American press as a “total dictatorship,” a form of “extreme despotism,” and one of the “grand totalitarian revolutionary projects of the 20th century,” like those of “the Nazis, the Fascists, and the Communists.’”7 Only days after 9/11, the British and American media made Qutb the embodiment of the origins of Islamic fascism, identifying him as “the father of modern Islamist fundamentalism.” From this intellectual legacy, a “direct line of influence” could be traced to the 9/11 hijackers, echoing...

Alessio Ponzio . La Palestra del littorio: L'Accademia della Farnesina; un esperimento di pedagogia totalitaria nell'Italia fascista . (Temi di storia.) Milan : FrancoAngeli . 2009 . Pp. 273. €32.00.

This book traces the history of Accademia della Farnesina, which the Italian fascist regime charged with training and educating future teachers of physical education, and it argues that the Accademia was more than a center for schooling. It also aimed at training fascist youth leaders and more consequentially at transforming young Italians into perfect embodiments of the regime. The author's overall goal is to demonstrate fascism's totalitarian nature by looking at its educational work through the prism of the Accademia. Alessio Ponzio argues that the history of the Accademia reveals the regime's struggle to identify pedagogical models and ideals that would fulfill its totalitarian project. The Accademia represented a site in which fascism enacted its intent to both reinvent Italian politics and remake the Italians through an “anthropological revolution.” With a thorough and detailed analysis of archival documents and journals of the time, the author begins his account by contextualizing the Accademia within the broader history of physical education in post-unification Italy. We thus learn that already in 1861 the idea of physical education as a tool for the formation of Italian citizens emerged and led to the introduction of physical education in schools. The field of physical education, however, remained quite dysfunctional in liberal Italy, and once fascism came to power the government reorganized the teaching with the goal of creating new Italians. In 1927 the fascist youth organization Opera Nazionale Balilla (ONB) was charged with the task of providing physical education to all students in elementary and middle schools. Eventually, the growing need for trained teachers who could perform the tasks envisioned by the regime required new pedagogic means and structures. The Accademia della Farnesina was founded with this intent and soon became a political tool for the regime to train leaders for the fascist youth organization.

White Ethnic New York: Jews, Catholics, and the Shaping of Postwar Politics. By Joshua M. Zeitz. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. xvi, 278 pp. Cloth, $65.00, ISBN 978-0-8078-3095-6. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 978-0-8078-5798-4.)

Joshua M. Zeitz's monograph contrasts Jewish and Catholic responses to social and cultural change in the twenty-five years after World War II. The dominant Catholic groups he studies are Irish and Italian. Zeitz seeks to capture the essential differences between Jews and Catholics to understand urban political changes and political coalitions. One major purpose of the study is to delineate the long period of erosion and the eventual disintegration in the 1960s of the Franklin D. Roosevelt-New Deal ethnic coalition. A second purpose is to demonstrate that “pluralism” among white ethnics was of lasting importance after World War II, despite the fact that most scholars have downplayed its vitality. Zeitz is successful in summarizing the tensions and contrasts between Catholics and Jews. The two groups (or are they aggregations?) clearly disagreed “on fundamental questions about citizenship and community, authority and dissent, the nature of totalitarianism, and relationship between citizens and the state” (p. 6). The children, emerging from the two cultures, entered the maelstrom of the 1960s with different world views. In this respect, the author complicates our perspective on the contestations of the era. On the other hand, insofar as race issues, racial interrelations, and “backlash” were critical to the disintegration of Democratic coalitions, Zeitz's approach lacks clarity.

Mussolini's colonial race laws and state-settler relations in Africa Orientale Italiana (1935-41)

Why in Mussolini's empire were relations between colonizers and colonized regulated by the government in Rome? The reason is not to be sought in the supposed tendency of Italians to fraternize with Africans but rather in the totalitarian nature of the regime and the rapidity with which the empire was populated. In a few years tens of thousands of Italians emigrated to Africa Orientale Italiana (AOI); the informal elaboration of common standards of behaviour on the part of colonists towards the local population would have required time while Mussolini intended to forge the empire following a strict hierarchy of racial relations. By and large, Italians were in agreement with their government over the subordination of the colonized, but they disagreed with the forms that such subordination should assume. Many Italians violated the race laws; but mixing with Africans did not necessarily mean being on friendly terms with them. A significant minority of Italians went to AOI with the intention of making rapid and easy profits: they had no intention of settling permanently and were intolerant of any rules, including those aimed at racial segregation. Thus a clash developed between these Italians, who were not interested in long-term colonial projects, and the government which was determined to impose its own model of colonial order.

Scientology and the European Human Rights Debate: A Reply to Leisa Goodman, J. Gordon Melton, and the European Rehabilitation Project Force Study

At stake in the European human rights debate over Scientology is the legitimacy of various governmental responses to the organization that limit, and potentially prevent, its activities and those of its members. By any means, at all costs, Scientology must portray itself as an aggrieved party whose rights are being trampled by officials who are fostering bigotry, discrimination, rabid secularism, and denominational protectionism of historic faiths. Seen in this context, my lengthy and detailed publications about Scientology's near-certain human rights violations cannot go unchallenged by the organization and its defenders. Most serious are my conclusions that Scientology operates a forced labour and re-education program against reputedly delinquent members of its 'elite' Sea Org(anization)-a program that has included teenagers and children as young as twelve years old (Kent 1999c: 9). Called the Rehabilitation Project Force (RPF), this program, I concluded,fits social scientific definitions of brainwashing efforts (Kent 2000; 2001a; b). The program should be (and is) of particular concern for Europeans because its totalitarian nature harkens back to other anti-democratic ideologies that they have witnessed firsthand.

Arendt, Kafka, and the Nature of Totalitarianism

(2000). Arendt, Kafka, and the Nature of Totalitarianism. Perspectives on Political Science: Vol. 29, No. 4, pp. 211-218.

Fascist spectacle: the aesthetics of power in Mussolini's Italy

A cultural history of Italian fascism, this work traces the narrative path that accompanied the making of a regime and the construction of Mussolini's power. The author reads fascist myths, rituals, images, and speeches as texts that tell the story of fascism. Linking Mussolini's elaboration of a new ruling style to the shaping of the regime's identity, she finds that in searching for symbolic means and forms that would represent its political novelty, fascism in fact brought itself into being, creating its own power and history. Falasca-Zamponi aregues that an aesthetically founded notion of politics guided fascist power's historical unfounding and determined the fascist regime's violent understanding of social relations, its desensitized and dehumanized claims to creation, it privileging of form over ethical norms, and ultimately its truly totalitarian nature.