This is NOT a rehash of my GULAG v. HOLOCAUST blog, nor is it an attempt to apologize for or glorify National Socialism, but more of an overall discussion on a wider topic, authoritarianism vs. totalitarianism vs. capitalism.
Authoritarian regimes are typically the right-wing dictatorships and juntas, such as Brazil’s military from 1964-85, Marcos, Pinochet, Salazar, Batista, the various South Vietnamese governments from 1955-75, etc. Really you just have a thug or general who wants power for its own sake, little excuse beyond that, and all he cares about it making sure he gets his “piece of the action” and enough pussy (or whatever his particular vice happens to be). He has no grand vision, no big plans, no grandiose scheme or desire to micromanage the entire country down to the last molecule – and no pretensions thereof.
Totalitarian regimes are what we think of like 1984, where the state encompasses the entire society and attempts to control literally everything. With the exception of Nazi Germany, they are invariably communist regimes: Soviet Russia, Red China, Vietnam, Eastern Europe, Cuba, North Korea. From cradle to grave, the regime seeks to modify not merely our behavior but our very thoughts. Unlike authoritarian regimes, which rarely bother to justify their existences, power, or authority, totalitarian regimes cloak their actions in the veneer of ideology and moral superiority. “We represent the PEOPLE – if you oppose us, you oppose the people, and must be struck down.”
Class. According to Marxist doctrine, there are three classes: the aristocracy (kings, queens, nobles), the bourgeois (merchants and capitalists), and the proletariat (workers and peasants). Under feudalism, the aristocracy rules, with a small but growing bourgeois class. Eventually the bourgeois overthrows the aristocracy and institutes capitalism, then sets about exploiting the proletariat until it too is eventually overthrown in a proletarian revolution - and we get socialism. Eventually the state withers away to a point of anarchy called communism, and we all live happily ever after. “Communist” regimes are actually socialist, as true communism has never been achieved in any country – nor is it ever likely.
Under a socialist dictatorship, the state is supposedly the legal representative of the proletariat. The bourgeois are dispossessed and thrown into re-education camps to be rehabilitated into socialist society. Without any class besides proletariat, such a society is, theoretically, classless. By comparison, under the fascist/National Socialist dictatorship, all three classes are subjugated to the state, which represents the people. Worker, farmer, businessman, industrialist, all are enslaved to the state. For this reason, fascists and communists ostensibly hate each other and oppose each other vigorously, yet the reality is that they have far more in common than the theoretical ideological deviations would suggest.
In many countries in Western Europe, the socialist party has taken power, yet without installing the dreaded dictatorship of the proletariat. Instead, they maintain the market system, individual rights, and otherwise a capitalist democracy, though with 90% taxes, free health care, free education, 40 hour work week, pensions, etc. These are essentially capitalist countries with substantial doses of socialism added.
Stalin v. Trotsky. Neither had much of any ideological differences with the other: Trotsky was merely the loser of the power struggle.
Cult of personality. Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Tito, Ho Chi Minh, Ceaucescu. Despite being about “the people”, communist regimes oddly focused on strong single personalities, individual leaders. The reality was, none of these leaders cared about the people: they simply cared about power for its own sake, and were predictably brutal and ruthless about suppressing revolt even from within the proletariat. Lenin dismissed reports of cannibalism among Ukrainian peasants by laughing that this meant they were too weak to oppose him. The rare examples of sincere patriots inevitably became the first victims of the purges, in which the revolution weeds out the idealists in favor of the pragmatists - who are the only ones devious and ruthless enough to survive or prosper under such regimes.
1984 & Animal Farm. George Orwell’s pair of books, each explaining these concepts in a different way. 1984 examines the nature of the state itself, which ultimately exists for its own sake, against its own people. Ayn Rand once defined “dictatorship” as a war between the government and its own, legally disarmed, people. And this is explained in even more detail in the book Winston reads, provided to him by O’Brien, who is pretending to be part of the resistance but is in fact an officer of the secret police. Odd, though: O'Brien turns out to be more of a source of information to Winston than the other way around, and the torture Winston endures is not to extract information - he knows far less than O'Brien does, and little of value - but to corrupt him, force him to betray his lover, and destroy him as a person and an individual. Indeed, the movie "The Lives of Others", concerning a Stasi agent in East Berlin in the mid 80s, shows that the quality of life of the secret police really wasn't that much better than that of the poets, playwrights, actors, etc. who were the victims of the police state. It was all one big dark, depressing prison for everyone concerned.
Animal Farm works on several different levels. The animals sincerely want liberation from their human master, and were reasonable in following the pigs’ revolution. But you can also see how the worker – Boxer, the horse – is ultimately exploited by the same revolution, and how the pigs eventually took over the same role as the human farmer. Even the vicious, snarling, dogs act as the enforcers for the pigs.
Nazi Germany. The notable exception, the only totalitarian regime which was not communist. The Nazis had an ideology, a Final Solution, the SS, the Gestapo, and the will to carry it out. Hitler had a master plan, as described (vaguely) in Mein Kampf, for anyone patient enough to read it. Cloaked in German nationalism and anti-semitism, the Nazis terrorized not only the Jews and subject occupied nations, but their own people, as willing victims, co-conspirators in mass insanity as they may have been. But while the world is fairly unanimous in challenging and condemning this form of totalitarianism, equally oppressive and evil forms – especially Soviet Russia – found no shortage of “useful idiots” apologizing for, or even supporting, their ideologies. Tom Morello, I’m talking to you...
Statism vs. capitalism. For all its faults, capitalism remains the ideal form of economic system. Authoritarian and totalitarian regimes (Nazi and socialist) can be collectively referred to as statist or collectivist. They boil down to the priority: individual vs. collective, the needs of the many vs. the needs of the few. The cruel irony of collectivist regimes is that in their rampant and fanatic devotion to “the people”, “society”, “the collective”, etc. they completely negate the individual, yet society is, ultimately, nothing more than an aggregate of individuals. The ultimate minority is, of course, the individual, who is the ultimate victim, the sacrificial offering to the sacred collective. By destroying the individual as a person with any rights or importance per se, the collectivists ultimately destroy themselves. Without freedom for the individual, there is no freedom for anyone.
The response to this, from most socialists, is that left to its own devices, capitalism produces various market failures: poverty, hunger, economic injustice, inequality of wealth and income. Politics and economics, the distribution of scarce, limited and finite resources, is too important to be left up to the whims, caprices, and apparently random vicissitudes of at best an impersonal market and at worst an aggregate of sometimes monopolistic and oligopolistic markets. Why leave this to chance, when there are highly intelligent planners who can redistribute wealth and income, and micromanage the entire country, far better? If we need to do this by a brutal dictatorship, well, so be it – better than being run by Big Business, right? Raise the spectre of a country run by GM, IBM, Ford, or Bill Gates to scare us into the arms of Big Brother. (Comrade Moore & Comrade Nader will be happy to oblige).
Who are these geniuses? They’re the socialists themselves. Have we ever met an avowed socialist who was not highly intelligent AND fully confident in his or her intelligence and wisdom (e.g. Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, or Christopher Hitchens). The one problem with their “brain the size of a planet” issue is that no two socialists can ever agree on anything (see “Life of Brian” for this symptom of continually splitting socialist factions). Fortunately for us, that is. But there were no shortage of highly intelligent opponents to collectivism, including, but not limited to, Ayn Rand, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and Ludwig von Mises. Bottom line is that for all its faults, capitalism keeps us free – which is far more than can be said for its alternatives.
