English
The seeds of totalitarian ideologies were primarily planted by Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-78) during the French Revolution, in his criticism of private property. He promoted egalitarian and communal ownership of property. Francois Noel Babeuf (1760-97) another Frenchman believed ignorant masses have “to be organized to be made aware of their own interests and rights” (Kreis. The History Guide) by military means; those in power were justified in using “terror against the people, for the people’s own good” (Kreis). Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia were “both clearly totalitarian in practice” (Adams).
National Socialism under Adolf Hitler is a prime example of totalitarianism. As Peter Baehr states in New Dictionary of the History of Ideas, “Under totalitarianism, it is what people are, more than what they do that marks them for punishment”. Not only the Jews but also the gypsies and Slavs were victimized by the National Socialists of Germany. The concentration camps were the laboratories of their totalitarian domination. “The pervasive use of terror to isolate, intimidate, and regiment all whom the regime deem [ed] menacing” (Baehr) was perpetuated by the Gestapo, the secret police rather than the army.
Propaganda was extensively used to brainwash the common people into believing in the supremacy of the Aryan race and the need to cleanse the nation of all pollutants; hence the establishment of the horrendous gas chambers in the concentration camps. Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda was responsible for this national redemption, the deification of the leader and the idolatrous worship of the state. (Baehr).
In the early twentieth century both Germany and Russia, saw the dominance of totalitarian ideologies in their “all powerful leader, the police state, the control of the press, the propaganda” (Adams).
Works Cited
Adams, John. Ideology. Retrieved May 22, 2016
http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/westn/Ideology.html
Baehr, Peter. New Dictionary of the History of Ideas. 2005. The Gale Group Inc.
Retrieved May 22, 2016
http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/totalitarianism.aspx
Kreis, Steven. The French Revolution and the Socialist Tradition: Early French Communists (1). May 13, 2004. Retrieved May 22, 2016
http://www.historyguide.org/intellect/lecture19a.html
