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

in concentration camps, they aim “to destroy the essence of man”
and to fabricate the “inanimate men,” as a new kind of human
species. 12
In her historical analysis, Arendt used the term totalitarianism “sparingly
and prudently.” She argued that, although there were many
genuinely totalitarian movements in interwar Europe, most of them
“failed” in traditional one-party dictatorships. Only two political
regimes in history could be classified as totalitarian: Nazi Germany
(1938-1945) and Soviet Russia (1928-1941, and 1945-1953).
By discussing Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany under a common
theoretical framework, Arendt provides a powerful articulation of
the theory of unitotalitarianism. Her comparative analysis is, however,
largely uneven: Her definition of totalitarianism is tailored on
Nazi Germany, of which she had direct experience and extensive
scholarly knowledge. Her views on the nature of communist
regimes are less informed, due to the lack of access to archival
sources, and to the fact that, at the time of her writing, the Soviettype
regimes in Eastern Europe and South-East Asia were “in the
making” and thus difficult to classify.
Arendt’s book explored the origins and evolution of totalitarianism
as a political trend, but devoted less attention to the actual functioning
of totalitarian regimes. This gap was soon filled by Carl J.
Friedrich and Zbigniew K. Brzezinski who, in Totalitarian Dictatorship
and Autocracy, advanced a complementary analytical model for the
study of totalitarian regimes. Friedrich and Brzezinski integrated totalitarian
regimes of the twentieth century within the larger family of
autocracies. In an explicit comparison, they emphasized the common
elements but also the differences between traditional forms of autocracy
and modern totalitarian regimes, the latter being defined as autocracies
“based on modern technology and mass legitimization.”
The novelty of totalitarian regimes was their innovative, technologically-conditioned
forms of organization and methods of rule. In
order to explain the main features of totalitarian regimes, Friedrich
and Brzezinski identified six underlying features of what they called
the “totalitarian syndrome” or “model:”
“1. An official ideology, consisting of an official body of doctrine
covering all vital aspects of man’s existence, to which everyone
living in that society is supposed to adhere at least passively.
12 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 438.
133 Constantin Iordachi