Totalitarian Ideology Research Articles

Marxism and Nationalism

One of Hannah Arendt's more surprising observations in Origins of Totalitarianism is her statement that 'modern anti-semitism grew in proportion as traditional nationalism declined'.1 Rather than identify anti-semitism, and racism in general, as the most extreme and pernicious excrescence of nationalism, Arendt chose to see antisemitism as something extraneous to nationalism, a reaction to its failure. Elsewhere in her book she argues that each class in European society became infested with anti-semitism when it came into conflict with the state, 'because the only group which seemed to represent the state were the Jews'.2 This surely is an extraordinary view. This is not the place to discuss in detail the question how far Arendt's overall thesis about the role of Jews in European economic life and their power in the modern state is itself an internalization, by a Jewish thinker, of anti-semitic images and theories; nor can such an affinity of views be merely ascribed to her close relationship with Heidegger. On a much more fundamental level, Arendt would be the first to concede that sometimes victims of totalitarian ideologies adopt albeit unknown to themselves images, stereotypes and identities projected onto them by their persecutors. In Eichman in Jerusalem, Arendt argued forcefully along these lines, perhaps pushing the argument to its extreme; her analysis of modern Jewish life and the causes of anti-semitism may be another instance, sophisticated, scholarly and urbane as it is, of such a brutalization of the victim. Be this as it may, Arendt's apparently idiosyncratic view of the relationship between the rise of anti-semitism and the decline of nationalism is linked to her general understanding of the phenomenon of nationalism, and it is directly connected with our main topic, viz. the Marxian attitude to nationalism. For in the course of her

Psychiatry at the end of the 20th century

SummaryThe political role psychiatry plays in mental health strategies in the 20th century is discussed as well as the dangers of abuse when totalitarian ideologies rule supreme. The author comments on positive developments in the sectors of applied psychiatry and psychotherapy after World War II and the implementation of uniform requirements for the classification of psychopathological disorders as well as their limitations. Psychiatry as a scientific discipline relies on two fundaments: the conclusions drawn from the collective, present and past experience of psychiatric medicine and the impulses given by neighbouring disciplines such as neurobiology, psychology and sociology. These influences are necessary for the advancement of psychiatry, but can be restrictive in that they lead to tunnel vision by giving simple explanations for mental disorders of complex or unknown etiology. A multidimensional approach is required for the elaboration of adequate therapies and research must avoid dogmatism and short-sightedness.

A Poetics of the American Idea: The Jewish Writer and America

The history of the Jews in America is to a considerable extent the history of an idea. It is the story of how Jewish history was transformed by the idea of America and how, in turn, Jewish writers, intellectuals, artists, and public figures helped to sustain and modernize this idea. While it altered the modern Jewish experience, Jewish thinkers often led in the effort to make the idea of America relevant to the needs of an urban, industrial, and even postindustrial age. The work of such writers and thinkers served to keep the American idea meaningful in a time of competing authoritarian and totalitarian ideologies.

Totalitarian ideology in Portugal

Totalitarian ideology in Portugal

The EU: Towards a United States of Europe

The European Union (EU), a contested “European” political construct, is contemporarily positioned at a critical juncture that presents three options that may determine its status as a supranational actor: stagnation, dissolution, or deeper and wider integration. The myriad pressures antagonizing the European Union and its structural foundations parallel those that the project sought to address following World War II. The unprecedented level of devastation caused by advanced military technologies and totalitarian ideologies in the war provided the impetus for increased cooperation amongst independent nation-states. Institutional cooperation encourages the deconstruction of destructive socio-political forces including racism, nationalism, and primordial cultural identities. These essentialist forces emerge in the absence of effective governance and encourage internal and external hostilities. The EU is intended to provide a structural framework for liberal-democratic countries to make collective decisions to increase economic prosperity, freedom, security, and justice [...]

Dov Ber‐Borochov: a marxist‐zionist ideologist

The Socialist-Zionist movement played a key role in Zionist colonization of Palestine. Its ideology became the most influential and persistent in the Jewish community in Palestine (the Yishuv) before the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. Socialist-Zionism has been associated with most of the pioneer and colonizing efforts, institutions and procedures since the second Zionist immigration wave (hadAliya ha-Shnia) to Palestine in 1904-05, and became the chief force in the nation-building of Israel. It dominated Zionist immigration, consolidated the nationalist movement, and diffused the principles of an egalitarian social system into the Yishuv in Palestine. All this was accomplished by accumulating the social, economic and military functions in two all-encompassing political, economic and social structures, the Histadrut-the General Confederation of Labour, and the Hityashvut -the system of settlement.' The ideology of Socialist-Zionism supported the organizational and institutional structures of the Socialist-Zionist colonists and thus spread among the Jewish community in Palestine. Despite resistance from non-socialist groups and individuals, this ideology persisted and was incorporated into social and economic institutions, behaviour and procedures. Socialist-Zionist ideology was not a unitary, totalitarian, and single ideology. It was iconoclastic-as all ideologies are. It blended messianic with progranumist tendencies and integrated a variety of trends, doctrines and formulations of socialism and Zionism. It contained elements of the Russian Social Democratic variety of Marxism, Bundism, the Austrian and German Social Democracy, Russian Anarchism, Bolshevism and even of utopian pre-Marxian socialism. Its Zionist elements can be traced from the utopian Zionism of Moses Hess and Theodor Herzel to the practical Zionism of Sokolow and Weizmann. Thus, the Socialist-Zionist movement had many forerunners, as well as philosophers and ideologists. This essay examines some of the doctrines of one of the early SocialistZionist ideologists, Dov Ber-Borochov, and particularly focuses on Borochov's attempt to integrate Marxism and nationalism. This essay is no attempt to examine the philosophical and political writings and contributions of Borochov. It focuses only on Borochov's interesting attempt to find a Zionist-Marxist formula.2

Totalitarianism, Ideology, and Propaganda

THE COMPREHENSIVE AND DETAILED control of all ideas, beliefs, and statements is one of the most problematic features of totalitarian regimes. Several theories of totalitarian ideology have been presented to explain why political, philosophical, artistic, scientific, and historical ideas must conform to what the leadership considers correct. In this essay I shall defend the hypothesis that the totalitarian leadership approaches ideas with the purpose of creating the maximum insecurity among the people it controls. The only exceptions to this generalization occur when the leadership wishes to realize certain short-term goals, like increasing production or stimulating patriotism. The hypothesis must be shown to account for the relevant data more satisfactorily than any other hypothesis. The most convenient way to establish its probability is to examine in some detail its principal alternative, which maintains that the data are to be understood in terms of a dogma or doctrine which determines the totalitarian's activities and to which he obliges everyone to'conform. By means of this procedure each problem can be introduced, the alternative hypothesis can be shown incapable of explaining it, and its relation to the purpose of total insecurity can be indicated. Both hypothesis imply that the relationship between totalitarian regimes and the ideas they control differ in kind from corresponding relationships within contemporary democracies and old-fashioned dictatorships. This view is a corollary of the belief that totalitarianism in general is a phenomenon unique to the contemporary era. Since most social scientists now accept this belief, and since a refutation of the theories which deny it would take us too far afield, I shall simply assume this difference in kind. The arguments which follow apply exclusively to totalitarian regimes, to totalitarianism in power rather than to totalitarian movements operating under non-totalitarian governments, for the totalitarians engage in all their curious practices regarding ideas only when they have control of the state. I shall also assume that [ 68]

The Stalinist Revision of History: The Case of Brest-Litovsk

The events leading to the rise of Stalin to sole prominence in the Soviet Union and the general political picture of the totalitarian Stalinist regime are now familiar, but specific forms of the evolution of “Stalinism” are often not adequately understood. Evolving Soviet historiography is an unusually informative mirror of these developments, since it not only attempts to describe them, but implicitly embodies them as well. The present article is an analysis of one theme from early Soviet history, treatment of which in Soviet historiography exemplifies both the trend of Soviet historiography as a whole, and the trend of Stalinism as an emergent totalitarian ideology based on Bolshevism.