Politics of the past: the use and abuse of history - Socialists ...

and politician Giovanni Amendola to denounce the Fascist “total”
monopoly of power as opposed to the previous pluralistic, multiparty
political regime. 2 It was soon appropriated by the Italian fascists
themselves, due to its extremist as well as modern political
connotations, and extensively employed with the sense of “wild radicalism,”
“possessed will,” or “ferocity.” 3
After the post-1925 consolidation of the fascist regime in Italy, the
term totalitarianism was invested with a new meaning, denoting the
intent of the state to control every sphere of the human life. In
Germany, the term was borrowed in the early 1930s by Nazi
ideologues from the Italian political debates. It was used to both
describe and legitimize the dismantlement of the institutional structure
of the Weimar Republic and its replacement with a dictatorial
regime, a process euphemistically referred to in the Nazi political
vocabulary as “syncronization” (Gleichschaltung). With the
consolidation of the Nazi rule, the term totalitarianism was soon
abandoned in favour of the specific vocabulary of racial utopia that
dominated the official political vocabulary. The main objection
against the term totalitarianism was its “static” connotations which
could not accurately describe the political dynamism of the new
regime. The term totalitarianism was therefore rarely employed in
the Nazi propaganda, being used mostly as an adjective in the form
of “totalitarian” or “total” revolution.
The concept of totalitarianism thus had a passing history in the official
fascist political discourse. Soon, however, the concept migrated
from political to academic discourses, where it made a
spectacular “career.” The “totalitarian thesis” was first elaborated in
early to mid-1930s in the United Kingdom and the United States
and stressed the similarities between Nazism and Stalinism as dictatorial
regimes and as the greatest threats to liberal democracies. 4
Originally applied to Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, the concept of
totalitarianism was later extended to the study of the Stalinist Russia
as well, commonly labelled “Red Fascism.” 5 This gave birth to the
2 Abbott Gleason, Totalitarianism: The inner history of the Cold War (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 14.
3 Gleason, Totalitarianism, 15.
4 Michael Halberstam, “Totalitarianism as a Problem for the Modern Conception
of Politics,” Political Theory, 26 (1998) 4, 459-488.
5 Les K. Adler and Thomas G. Paterson, “Red Fascism: The Merger of Nazi
Germany and Soviet Russia in the American Image of totalitarianism, 1930’s-
1950s,” The American Historical Review, 75 (1970), 1046-1064.
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