168-551: In the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984), by George Orwell , Newspeak is the fictional language of Oceania , a totalitarian superstate . To meet the ideological requirements of Ingsoc (English Socialism) in Oceania, the Party created Newspeak, which is a controlled language of simplified grammar and limited vocabulary designed to limit a person's ability for critical thinking . The Newspeak language thus limits
336-652: A cacotopia or anti-utopia , is a community or society that is extremely bad or frightening. It is often treated as an antonym of utopia , a term that was coined by Thomas More and figures as the title of his best known work , published in 1516, which created a blueprint for an ideal society with minimal crime, violence, and poverty. The relationship between utopia and dystopia is in actuality, not one of simple opposition, as many dystopias claim to be utopias and vice versa . Dystopias are often characterized by fear or distress, tyrannical governments, environmental disaster , or other characteristics associated with
504-601: A cult of personality about The Leader; official economic interventionism (controlled wages and prices); official censorship of all mass communication media (the press, textbooks, cinema, television, radio, internet); official mass surveillance -policing of public places; and state terrorism . In the essay "Democide in Totalitarian States: Mortacracies and Megamurderers" (1994) the American political scientist Rudolph Rummel said that: There
672-427: A dictator , who also controls the national politics and the peoples of the nation with continual propaganda campaigns that are broadcast by state-controlled and by friendly private mass communications media . The totalitarian government uses ideology to control most aspects of human life, such as the political economy of the country, the system of education, the arts, the sciences, and the private-life morality of
840-413: A military junta and by the socio-economic elites who are the ruling class of the country. Modern political science catalogues three régimes of government: (i) the democratic, (ii) the authoritarian, and (iii) the totalitarian. Varying by political culture, the functional characteristics of the totalitarian régime of government are: political repression of all opposition (individual and collective);
1008-403: A one-child policy place in this futuristic dystopian society. In a 1967 study, Frank Kermode suggests that the failure of religious prophecies led to a shift in how society apprehends this ancient mode. Christopher Schmidt notes that, while the world goes to waste for future generations, people distract themselves from disaster by passively watching it as entertainment. In the 2010s, there
1176-461: A régime of government wherein the supreme leader personally exercises total power (political, military, economic, social) as Il Duce of The State. That Italian fascism is a political system with an ideological, utopian worldview unlike the realistic politics of the personal dictatorship of a man who holds power for the sake of holding power. Later, the theoretician of Italian Fascism Giovanni Gentile ascribed politically positive meanings to
1344-566: A boot stamping on a human face – forever , would aptly describe the situation of the denizens in Dante's Hell. Conversely, Dante's famous inscription Abandon all hope, ye who enter here would have been equally appropriate if placed at the entrance to Orwell's " Ministry of Love " and its notorious " Room 101 ". Dystopias typically reflect contemporary sociopolitical realities and extrapolate worst-case scenarios as warnings for necessary social change or caution. Dystopian fictions invariably reflect
1512-572: A cacotopia (or the imagined seat of the worst government) discovered and described". Though dystopia became the more popular term, cacotopia finds occasional use; Anthony Burgess , author of A Clockwork Orange (1962), said it was a better fit for Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four because "it sounds worse than dystopia". Some scholars, such as Gregory Claeys and Lyman Tower Sargent , make certain distinctions between typical synonyms of dystopias. For example, Claeys and Sargent define literary dystopias as societies imagined as substantially worse than
1680-467: A cataclysmic decline in society. Themes typical of a dystopian society include: complete control over the people in a society through the usage of propaganda and police state tactics, heavy censoring of information or denial of free thought, worshiping an unattainable goal, the complete loss of individuality, and heavy enforcement of conformity. Despite certain overlaps, dystopian fiction is distinct from post-apocalyptic fiction, and an undesirable society
1848-484: A continually diminishing vocabulary; complete thoughts are reduced to simple terms of simplistic meaning. The political contractions of Newspeak — Ingsoc (English Socialism), Minitrue (Ministry of Truth), Miniplenty (Ministry of Plenty) — are similar to Nazi and Soviet contractions in the 20th century, such as Gestapo ( Geheime Staatspolizei ), politburo ( Political Bureau of the Central Committee of
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#17327726412202016-546: A high-sounding but specious excuse for Western self-interest, just as surely as the counterclaim that allegedly debunking the totalitarian concept may be a high-sounding but specious excuse for Russian self-interest. For Domenico Losurdo , totalitarianism is a polysemic concept with origins in Christian theology and applying it to the political sphere requires an operation of abstract schematism which makes use of isolated elements of historical reality to place fascist regimes and
2184-494: A joint venture of academia and government to promote an anti-traditionalist social agenda, are contemptuous of religion and require initiates to desecrate Christian symbols. Margaret Atwood 's novel The Handmaid's Tale takes place in a future United States under a Christian-based theocratic regime. In the Russian novel We by Yevgeny Zamyatin , first published in 1921, people are permitted to live out of public view twice
2352-416: A long time period, the roles were eventually reversed – the rich degenerated and became a decadent "livestock" regularly caught and eaten by the underground cannibal Morlocks. Some fictional dystopias, such as Brave New World and Fahrenheit 451 , have eradicated the family and kept it from re-establishing itself as a social institution. In Brave New World , where children are reproduced artificially,
2520-435: A military or a corporate dictatorship. That the human emotional comfort of political certainty is the source of the mass appeal of revolutionary totalitarian régimes, because the totalitarian worldview gives psychologically comforting and definitive answers about the complex socio-political mysteries of the past, of the present, and of the future; thus did Nazism propose that all history is the history of ethnic conflict , of
2688-432: A political mass movement offers people the prospect of a glorious future, that such membership in a community of political belief is an emotional refuge for people with few accomplishments in their real lives, in both the public sphere and in the private sphere . In the event, the true believer is assimilated into a collective body of true believers who are mentally protected with "fact-proof screens from reality" drawn from
2856-616: A right-wing interpretation of the documentary facts, thus, the revisionist school dismiss traditionalist historians as the being the politically reactionary faculty of the HUAC school of scholarship about the Communist Party USA . In 1980, in a book review of How the Soviet Union is Governed (1979), by J.F. Hough and Merle Fainsod, William Zimmerman said that "the Soviet Union has changed substantially. Our knowledge of
3024-490: A root-word, e.g. goodthinkful means "Orthodox in thought"; whilst adverbs are formed by adding the suffix –wise , e.g. goodthinkwise means "In an orthodox manner". The intellectual purpose of Newspeak is to make all anti- Ingsoc thoughts "literally unthinkable" as speech. As constructed, Newspeak vocabulary communicates the exact expression of sense and meaning that a member of the Party could wish to express, while excluding secondary denotations and connotations, eliminating
3192-403: A simple form. They are compound words and noun-verbs with political significance that are meant to impose and instill in Oceania's citizens the correct mental attitudes required by the Party. In the appendix, Orwell explains that the very structure of the B vocabulary (the fact that they are compound words) carries ideological weight. The large number of contractions in the B vocabulary—for example,
3360-488: A strict interpretation of Sharia law. Francoist Spain (1936–1975), under the dictator Francisco Franco , has been characterized as a totalitarian state until at least the 1950s by scholars. Franco was portrayed as a fervent Catholic and a staunch defender of Catholicism , the declared state religion . Civil marriages that had taken place in the Republic were declared null and void unless they had been validated by
3528-693: A struggle against Communism. Throughout the European interwar period (1918–1939), right-wing totalitarian régimes indoctrinated Christians to demonize the Communist régime in Russia as the apotheosis of secular materialism and [as] a militarized threat to worldwide Christian social and moral order". That throughout Europe, the Christians who became anti-communist totalitarians perceived Communism and communist régimes of government as an existential threat to
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#17327726412203696-419: A thing of the past, and they also stated that their claims were supported by statistics and science, which led them to impose strict ethical regulations on culture, use psychological violence, and persecute entire groups. Their arguments have been criticised by other scholars due to their partiality and anachronism. Juan Francisco Fuentes treats totalitarianism as an " invented tradition " and he believes that
3864-519: A vanguard party that advanced socialist revolution , such as the Socialist Republic of the Union of Burma (1962), Syrian Arab Republic (1963), and Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (1978). In 1923, in the early reign of Mussolini's government (1922–1943), the anti-fascist academic Giovanni Amendola was the first Italian public intellectual to define and describe Totalitarianism as
4032-549: A vast industrial and mining complex, which is totally devoted to the production of ever more powerful and destructive weapons, and which is ruled by the dictatorial and totally ruthless Prof. Schultze – a militarist and racist who dreams of world conquest and as the first step plots the complete destruction of the nearby Ville-France, a utopian model city constructed and maintained with public health as its government's primary concern. The economic structures of dystopian societies in literature and other media have many variations, as
4200-427: A week for one hour and are only referred to by numbers instead of names. The latter feature also appears in the film THX 1138 . In some dystopian works, such as Kurt Vonnegut 's Harrison Bergeron , society forces individuals to conform to radical egalitarian social norms that discourage or suppress accomplishment or even competence as forms of inequality. Complete conformity and suppression of individuality (to
4368-579: A world in which Nazi Germany won the Second World War can be considered as dystopias. So can other works of Alternative History, in which a historical turning point led to a manifestly repressive world. For example, the 2004 mockumentary C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America , and Ben Winters ' Underground Airlines , in which slavery in the United States continues to the present, with "electronic slave auctions" carried out via
4536-520: A world we should like to live in, but one we must be sure to avoid. 1968 New Scientist 11 July 96/3 It is a pleasant change to read some hope for our future is trevor ingram ... I fear that our real future is more likely to be dystopian. See also Gregory Claeys. "When Does Utopianism Produce Dystopia?" in: Zsolt Czigányik, ed. Utopian Horizons. Utopia and Ideology – The Interaction of Political and Utopian Thought (Budapest: CEU Press, 2016), pp. 41–61. Totalitarianism Totalitarianism
4704-403: Is a political system and a form of government that prohibits opposition political parties , disregards and outlaws the political claims of individual and group opposition to the state, and controls the public sphere and the private sphere of society. In the field of political science , totalitarianism is the extreme form of authoritarianism , wherein all socio-political power is held by
4872-711: Is also explained in Suzanne Berne 's essay "Ground Zero", where she explains her experience of the aftermath of 11 September 2001. Fictional dystopias are commonly urban and frequently isolate their characters from all contact with the natural world. Sometimes they require their characters to avoid nature, as when walks are regarded as dangerously anti-social in Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 , as well as within Bradbury's short story " The Pedestrian ". In That Hideous Strength , science coordinated by government
5040-546: Is as bad as possible; opp. UTOPIA (cf. CACOTOPIA). So dystopian n., one who advocates or describes a dystopia; dystopian a., of or pertaining to a dystopia; dystopianism, dystopian quality or characteristics." The example of first usage given in the OED (1989 ed.) refers to the 1868 speech by John Stuart Mill quoted above. Other examples given in the OED include: 1952 Negley & Patrick Quest for Utopia xvii. 298 The Mundus Alter et Idem [of Joseph Hall] is...the opposite of eutopia,
5208-400: Is commonly called Utopian is something too good to be practicable; but what they appear to favour is too bad to be practicable". Decades before the first documented use of the word "dystopia" was "cacotopia"/"kakotopia" (using Ancient Greek : κακόs , "bad, wicked") originally proposed in 1818 by Jeremy Bentham , "As a match for utopia (or the imagined seat of the best government) suppose
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5376-490: Is different. These are things that are very visceral and very obvious, and they make you question the future, and how we will survive. It's so much a part of everyday life that young people inevitably – consciously or not – are questioning their futures and how the Earth will be. I certainly do. I wonder what kind of world my children's kids will live in." The entire substantial sub-genre of alternative history works depicting
5544-403: Is directed toward the control of nature and the elimination of natural human instincts. In Brave New World , the lower class is conditioned to be afraid of nature but also to visit the countryside and consume transport and games to promote economic activity. Lois Lowry's " The Giver " shows a society where technology and the desire to create a utopia has led humanity to enforce climate control on
5712-596: Is everywhere unmistakable" in the decolonising countries of Eurasia . That revolutionary Marxism–Leninism was the most successful type of totalitarianism, as proved by the USSR's rapid industrialisation (1929–1941) and the Great Patriotic War (1941–1945) that defeated Nazi Germany. That, despite those achievements in social engineering and warfare, in dealing with the countries of the Communist bloc only
5880-512: Is free from lice" or "This field is free of weeds". The word could not denote free will , because intellectual freedom was no longer supposed to exist in Oceania. The limitations of Newspeak's vocabulary enabled the Party to effectively control the population's minds, by allowing the user only a very narrow range of spoken and written thought; hence, words such as: crimethink (thought crime), doublethink (accepting contradictory beliefs), and Ingsoc communicated only their surface meanings. In
6048-529: Is intrusive and it is just another tool which a one-party state can use to control the population. Supporters say that it will transform China into a more civilised and law-abiding society. Shoshana Zuboff considers it instrumentarian rather than totalitarian. North Korea is the only country in East Asia to survive totalitarianism after the death of Kim Il-sung in 1994 and handed over to his son Kim Jong-il and grandson Kim Jong-un in 2011, as of today in
6216-674: Is later used by Hugh Howey in his series of dystopias of the Silo Series . Excessive pollution that destroys nature is common in many dystopian films, such as The Matrix , RoboCop , WALL-E , April and the Extraordinary World and Soylent Green , as well as in videogames like Half-Life 2 . A few "green" fictional dystopias do exist, such as in Michael Carson 's short story " The Punishment of Luxury ", and Russell Hoban 's Riddley Walker . The latter
6384-524: Is much confusion about what is meant by totalitarian in the literature, including the denial that such [political] systems even exist. I define a totalitarian state as one with a system of government that is unlimited, [either] constitutionally or by countervailing powers in society (such as by a Church, rural gentry, labor unions, or regional powers); is not held responsible to the public by periodic secret and competitive elections; and employs its unlimited power to control all aspects of society, including
6552-408: Is not necessarily dystopian. Dystopian societies appear in many fictional works and artistic representations, particularly in historical fiction , such as A Tale of Two Cities (1859) by Charles Dickens , Quo Vadis? by Henryk Sienkiewicz , and A Man for All Seasons (1960) by Robert Bolt , stories set in the alternate history timelines, like Robert Harris ' Fatherland (1992), or in
6720-500: Is reflected in Norman Jewison 's 1975 film Rollerball (1975). Some dystopias, such as that of Nineteen Eighty-Four , feature black markets with goods that are dangerous and difficult to obtain or the characters may be at the mercy of the state-controlled economy. Kurt Vonnegut 's Player Piano depicts a dystopia in which the centrally controlled economic system has indeed made material abundance plentiful but deprived
6888-720: Is set in the aftermath of nuclear war, "a post-nuclear holocaust Kent, where technology has reduced to the level of the Iron Age ". Contrary to the technologically utopian claims, which view technology as a beneficial addition to all aspects of humanity, technological dystopia concerns itself with and focuses largely (but not always) on the negative effects caused by new technology. Dystopian themes are in many television shows and video games such as Cyberpunk 2077 , Half Life 2 , The Hunger Games , Cyberpunk: Edgerunners , ' Blade Runner 2049 , Elysium and Titanfall . "An imaginary place or condition in which everything
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7056-400: Is stressed, and the addition of other themes—the dangers of science and technology, of social inequality, of corporate dictatorship, of nuclear war—are also traced. A psychological approach is also favored here, with the principle of fear being identified with despotic forms of rule, carried forward from the history of political thought, and group psychology introduced as a means of understanding
7224-437: Is the result. In exercising the power of government upon a society, the application of an official dominant ideology differentiates the worldview of the totalitarian régime from the worldview of the authoritarian régime, which is "only concerned with political power, and, as long as [government power] is not contested, [the authoritarian government] gives society a certain degree of liberty." Having no ideology to propagate,
7392-822: The Duce leading the Italian people to the future, Benito Mussolini said that his dictatorial régime of government made Fascist Italy (1922–1943) the representative Totalitarian State : "Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State." Likewise, in The Concept of the Political (1927), the Nazi jurist Schmitt used the term der Totalstaat (the Total State) to identify, describe, and establish
7560-425: The nomenklatura , the ruling class of the USSR. That the political economics of the politburo allowed measured executive power to regional authorities for them to implement policy was interpreted by revisionist historians as evidence that a totalitarian régime adapts the political economy to include new economic demands from civil society; whereas traditionalist historians interpreted the politico-economic collapse of
7728-494: The Antichrist have taken over the world and the only remaining source of dissent is a tiny and persecuted Catholic minority. In Brave New World the establishment of the state included lopping off the tops of all crosses (as symbols of Christianity) to make them "T"s (as symbols of Henry Ford's Model T ). In C. S. Lewis 's That Hideous Strength the leaders of the fictional National Institute of Coordinated Experiments,
7896-457: The Iraqi insurgency , under the name " Islamic State of Iraq ". Under the leadership of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi , the organization later changed its name to the "Islamic State of Iraq and Levant" in 2013. The group espouses a totalitarian ideology that is a fundamentalist hybrid of Global Jihadism , Wahhabism , and Qutbism . Following its territorial expansion in 2014 , the group renamed itself as
8064-406: The anthropocentrist proposition that: "Man has become the master of the world, a master unbound by any links to Nature, society, and history", which excludes the intervention of supernatural beings to earthly politics of government. American historian William Rubinstein wrote that: The 'Age of Totalitarianism' included nearly all the infamous examples of genocide in modern history, headed by
8232-487: The legitimacy of a German totalitarian state led by a supreme leader . After the Second World War (1937–1945), U.S. political discourse (domestic and foreign) included the concepts (ideologic and political) and the terms totalitarian , totalitarianism , and totalitarian model . In the post-war U.S. of the 1950s, to politically discredit the anti-fascism of the Second World War as misguided foreign policy , McCarthyite politicians claimed that Left-wing totalitarianism
8400-519: The overthrow of the Shah in 1978–79 has been totalitarian—here totalitarianism was married to Muslim fundamentalism . In short, totalitarianism is the ideology of absolute power. State socialism, Communism , Nazism, fascism , and Muslim fundamentalism have been some of its recent raiments. Totalitarian governments have been its agency. The state, with its international legal sovereignty and independence, has been its base. As will be pointed out, mortacracy
8568-423: The totalitarian model and produced interpretations of Kremlin politics and policies that supported the police-state version of Communist Russia . The revisionist Kremlinologists presented alternative interpretations of Kremlin politics and reported the effects of politburo policies upon Soviet society, civil and military. Despite the limitations of police-state historiography, revisionist Kremlinologists said that
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#17327726412208736-517: The totalitarian model of the USSR as a police state controlled by the absolute power of the supreme leader Stalin , who heads a monolithic, centralised hierarchy of government. The study of the internal politics of the politburo crafting policy at the Kremlin produced two schools of historiographic interpretation of Cold War history: (i) traditionalist Kremlinology and (ii) revisionist Kremlinology. Traditionalist Kremlinologists worked with and for
8904-644: The "Islamic State" and declared itself as a caliphate that sought domination over the Muslim world and established what has been described as a " political-religious totalitarian regime ". The quasi-state held significant territory in Iraq and Syria during the course of the Third Iraq War and the Syrian civil war from 2013 to 2019 under the dictatorship of its first Caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi , who imposed
9072-408: The "blind and incurable" ideologue could ignore the Communist régimes' trend towards police-state totalitarianism in their societies. In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), the political scientist Hannah Arendt said that, in their times in the early 20th century, corporate Nazism and soviet Communism were new forms of totalitarian government, not updated versions of the old tyrannies of
9240-473: The "slow cancellation of the future". Theo James , an actor in Divergent (originally a novel by Veronica Roth ), explains that "young people in particular have such a fascination with this kind of story [...] It's becoming part of the consciousness. You grow up in a world where it's part of the conversation all the time – the statistics of our planet warming up . The environment is changing. The weather
9408-512: The 1929 Lateran Treaty , under the leadership of Pope Pius XI (1922–1939) and Pope Pius XII (1939–1958). One of the first people to use the term totalitarianism in the English language was Austrian writer Franz Borkenau in his 1938 book The Communist International , in which he commented that it united the Soviet and German dictatorships more than it divided them. The label totalitarian
9576-414: The 1950s, the political scientist Carl Joachim Friedrich said that Communist states , such as Soviet Russia and Red China , were countries systematically controlled with the five features of the totalitarian model of government by a supreme leader: (i) an official dominant ideology that includes a cult of personality about the leader, (ii) control of all civil and military weapons, (iii) control of
9744-401: The 21st century. Other emerging technologies that could empower future totalitarian regimes include brain-reading , contact tracing , and various applications of artificial intelligence . Philosopher Nick Bostrom said that there is a possible trade-off, namely that some existential risks might be mitigated by the establishment of a powerful and permanent world government , and in turn
9912-433: The A, B, and C vocabularies. The words of the A vocabulary describe the functional concepts of daily life (e.g. eating and drinking, working and cooking). It consists mostly of English words, but they are very small in number compared to English, and each word's meanings are "far more rigidly defined" than in English. The words of the B vocabulary are deliberately constructed for political purposes to convey complex ideas in
10080-489: The Church, along with divorces. Divorce, contraception and abortions were forbidden. According to historian Stanley G. Payne , Franco had more day-to-day power than Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin possessed at the respective heights of their power. Payne noted that Hitler and Stalin at least maintained rubber-stamp parliaments, while Franco dispensed with even that formality in the early years of his rule. According to Payne,
10248-483: The Communist Party of the Soviet Union ), Comintern ( Communist International ), kolkhoz (collective farm), and Komsomol (communist youth union). Newspeak contractions usually are syllabic abbreviations meant to conceal the speaker's ideology from the speaker and the listener. As a constructed language , Newspeak is a language of planned phonology , limited grammar, and finite vocabulary, much like
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#173277264122010416-406: The Earth in luxury with access to technologies that cure all diseases, reverse aging, and regenerate body parts. Written a century earlier, the future society depicted in H. G. Wells ' The Time Machine had started in a similar way to Elysium – the workers consigned to living and working in underground tunnels while the wealthy live on a surface made into an enormous beautiful garden. But over
10584-539: The Government of the USSR to adjust public policy to the actual political economy of a Soviet society composed of pre–War and post–War generations of people with different perceptions of the utility of Communist economics for all the Russias. Hence, Russian modern history had outdated the totalitarian model that was the post– Stalinist perception of the police-state USSR of the 1950s. The historiography of
10752-699: The Internet and slaves controlled by electronic devices implanted in their spines, or Keith Roberts Pavane in which 20th Century Britain is ruled by a Catholic theocracy and the Inquisition is actively torturing and burning "heretics". In When the Sleeper Wakes , H. G. Wells depicted the governing class as hedonistic and shallow. George Orwell contrasted Wells's world to that depicted in Jack London's The Iron Heel , where
10920-616: The Jewish Holocaust , but also comprising the mass murders and purges of the Communist world , other mass killings carried out by Nazi Germany and its allies, and also the Armenian genocide of 1915. All these slaughters, it is argued here, had a common origin, the collapse of the elite structure and normal modes of government of much of central, eastern and southern Europe as a result of World War I , without which surely neither Communism nor Fascism would have existed except in
11088-675: The Ministry of Truth being called Minitrue, the Records Department being called Recdep, the Fiction Department being called Ficdep, the Teleprogrammes Department being called Teledep—is not done simply to save time. As with examples of compound words in the political language of the 20th century— Nazi , Gestapo , Politburo , Comintern , Inprecor , Agitprop , and many others—Orwell remarks that
11256-440: The Ministry of Truth uses a jargon "not actually Newspeak, but consisting largely of Newspeak words" for its internal memos. As many of the words in this list (e.g. "bb", "upsub") come from such memos, it is not certain whether those words are actually Newspeak. Fiction: Dystopia A dystopia (from Ancient Greek δυσ ( dus ) 'bad' and τόπος ( tópos ) 'place'), also called
11424-519: The Nature of Mass Movements (1951), Eric Hoffer said that political mass movements, such as Italian Fascism (1922–1943), German Nazism (1933–1945), and Russian Stalinism (1929–1953), featured the common political praxis of negatively comparing their totalitarian society as culturally superior to the morally decadent societies of the democratic countries of Western Europe. That such mass psychology indicates that participating in and then joining
11592-482: The Nazi total states did possess government administrators, Bracher said that a totalitarian government did not necessarily require an actual supreme leader, and could function by way of collective leadership . The American historian Walter Laqueur agreed that Bracher's totalitarian typology more accurately described the functional reality of the politburo than did the totalitarian typology proposed by Friedrich and Brzezinski. In Democracy and Totalitarianism (1968)
11760-576: The Oldspeak word science has no equivalent term in Newspeak; instead, these words are simply treated as specific technical words for speaking of technical fields. Newspeak's grammar is greatly simplifed compared to English. It also has two "outstanding" characteristics: almost completely interchangeable linguistic functions between the parts of speech (any word can function as a verb, noun, adjective, or adverb), and heavy inflectional regularity in
11928-515: The Party believed that abbreviating a name could "narrowly and subtly" alter a word's meaning. Newspeak is supposed to make this effort a conscious purpose: [...] Comintern is a word that can be uttered almost without taking thought, whereas Communist International is a phrase over which one is obliged to linger at least momentarily. In the same way, the associations called up by a word like Minitrue are fewer and more controllable than those called up by Ministry of Truth. This accounted not only for
12096-636: The Soviet Union during the Cold War. For Petras, the CIA funded the Congress for Cultural Freedom to attack "Stalinist anti-totalitarianism." Into the 21st century, Enzo Traverso has attacked the creators of the concept of totalitarianism as having invented it to designate the enemies of the West. According to some scholars, calling Joseph Stalin totalitarian instead of authoritarian has been asserted to be
12264-517: The Soviet Union has changed, as well. We all know that the traditional paradigm [of the totalitarian model] no longer satisfies [our ignorance], despite several efforts, primarily in the early 1960s (the directed society, totalitarianism without police terrorism, the system of conscription) to articulate an acceptable variant [of Communist totalitarianism]. We have come to realize that models which were, in effect, offshoots of totalitarian models do not provide good approximations of post–Stalinist reality [of
12432-518: The Soviet citizenry as much as Stalin relied upon state terrorism for their support. That by politically purging Soviet society of anti–Soviet people Stalin created employment and upward social mobility for the post–War generation of working class citizens for whom such socio-economic progress was unavailable before the Russian Revolution (1917–1924). That the people who benefited from Stalin's social engineering became Stalinists loyal to
12600-536: The Sower , Darkness at Noon , Nineteen Eighty-Four , Brave New World , The Handmaid's Tale , The Hunger Games , Divergent and Fahrenheit 451 and such films as Metropolis , Brazil (1985), Battle Royale , FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions , Soylent Green , The Purge: Election Year , Logan's Run , and The Running Man (1987). . An earlier example is Jules Verne 's The Begum's Millions with its depiction of Stahlstadt (Steel City),
12768-410: The USSR and of the Soviet period of Russian history is in two schools of research and interpretation: (i) the traditionalist school of historiography and (ii) the revisionist school of historiography. Traditionalist-school historians characterise themselves as objective reporters of the claimed totalitarianism inherent to Marxism , to Communism , and to the political nature of Communist states , such as
12936-436: The USSR to prove that the totalitarian régime of economics failed because the politburo did not adapt the political economy to include actual popular participation in the Soviet economy. The historian of Nazi Germany, Karl Dietrich Bracher said that the totalitarian typology developed by Friedrich and Brzezinski was an inflexible model, for not including the revolutionary dynamics of bellicose people committed to realising
13104-415: The USSR. Revisionist Kremlinologists, such as J. Arch Getty and Lynne Viola , transcended the interpretational limitations of the totalitarian model by recognising and reporting that the Soviet government, the communist party, and the civil society of the USSR had greatly changed upon the death of Stalin. The revisionist social history indicated that the social forces of Soviet society had compelled
13272-422: The USSR. Moreover, the U.S. also used the totalitarian model when dealing with fascist totalitarian régimes, such as that of a banana republic country. As anti–Communist political scientists, Friedrich and Brzezinski described and defined totalitarianism with the monolithic totalitarian model of six interlocking, mutually supporting characteristics: As traditionalist historians, Friedrich and Brzezinski said that
13440-483: The USSR. Moreover, traditionalist historians criticise the politically liberal bias they perceive in the predominance of revisionist historians in academic publishing, and claim that revisionist-school historians also over-populate the faculties of colleges, universities, and think tanks . Revisionist-school historians criticise the traditionalist school's concentration upon the police-state aspects of Cold War history, and so produce anti-communist history biased towards
13608-502: The USSR; thus, the Revolution had fulfilled her promise to those Stalinist citizens and they supported Stalin because of the state terrorism. In the case of East Germany , (0000) Eli Rubin posited that East Germany was not a totalitarian state but rather a society shaped by the confluence of unique economic and political circumstances interacting with the concerns of ordinary citizens. Writing in 1987, Walter Laqueur posited that
13776-550: The USSR]." In a book review of Totalitarian Space and the Destruction of Aura (2019), by Ahmed Saladdin, Michael Scott Christofferson said that Hannah Arendt's interpretation of the USSR after Stalin was her attempt to intellectually distance her work from "the Cold War misuse of the concept [of the origins of totalitarianism]" as anti-Communist propaganda. In the essay, "Totalitarianism: Defunct Theory, Useful Word" (2010),
13944-402: The citizens. In the exercise of socio-political power, the difference between a totalitarian regime of government and an authoritarian régime of government is one of degree; whereas totalitarianism features a charismatic dictator and a fixed worldview , authoritarianism only features a dictator who holds power for the sake of holding power, and is supported, either jointly or individually, by
14112-477: The class of totalitarian regimes for that reason alone". Saladdin posited that while Chile under Pinochet had no "official ideology", there was one man who ruled Chile from "behind the scenes", "none other than Milton Friedman , the godfather of neoliberalism and the most influential teacher of the Chicago Boys , was Pinochet's adviser". In this sense, Saladdin criticised the totalitarian concept because it
14280-476: The communication function of English and contemporary ideological changes in usage during the 1940s. In the novel, the linguistic decadence of English is the central theme about language-as-communication. In the essay, Standard English was characterised by dying metaphors, pretentious diction, and high-flown rhetoric, which he satirised with the term doublespeak , the opaque language that arises from cognitive dissonance , and Orwell concludes: "I said earlier that
14448-558: The communication of facts, not the communication of abstract thought. While employed as a propagandist by BBC during the Second World War (1939–1945), Orwell grew to believe that the constructions of Basic English, as a controlled language, imposed functional limitations upon the speech, the writing, and the thinking of the users. In the essay " Politics and the English Language " (1946) and in "The Principles of Newspeak" appendix to Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), Orwell discusses
14616-630: The concept to "a Communist or a Nazi tyranny." José María Gil-Robles y Quiñones , the leader of the historic Spanish reactionary party called the Spanish Confederation of the Autonomous Right (CEDA), declared his intention to "give Spain a true unity, a new spirit, a totalitarian polity" and went on to say: "Democracy is not an end but a means to the conquest of the new state. When the time comes, either parliament submits or we will eliminate it." General Francisco Franco
14784-456: The concepts of "mother" and "father" are considered obscene . In some novels, such as We , the state is hostile to motherhood, as a pregnant woman from One State is in revolt. In dystopias, religious groups may play the role of oppressed or oppressor. One of the earliest examples is Robert Hugh Benson 's Lord of the World , about a futuristic world where Marxists and Freemasons led by
14952-415: The concerns and fears of their creators' contemporaneous culture. Due to this, they can be considered a subject of social studies . In dystopias, citizens may live in a dehumanized state, be under constant surveillance, or have a fear of the outside world. In the film What Happened to Monday the protagonists (identical septuplet sisters) risk their lives by taking turns onto the outside world because of
15120-571: The connection between authoritarian régimes and doublespeak language, earlier discussed in "Politics and the English Language": When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find — this is a guess, which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify — that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship. But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. In contemporary political usage,
15288-406: The construction of usages and of words. Inflectional regularity means that most irregular words are replaced with regular words combined with prefixes and suffixes. For example, the preterite and the past participle constructions of verbs are alike, with both ending in –ed. Hence, the Newspeak preterite of the English word steal is stealed, and that of the word think is thinked. Likewise,
15456-470: The conventional way but which the World Government describes as "savages". In George Orwell 's Nineteen Eighty-Four , the dystopian society described within has a tiered class structure with the ruling elite "Inner Party" at the top, the "Outer Party" below them functioning as a type of middle-class with minor privileges, and the working-class "Proles" (short for proletariat ) at the bottom of
15624-519: The decadence of our language is probably curable. Those who deny this [decadence] may argue that language merely reflects existing social conditions, and that we cannot influence its development, by any direct tinkering with words or constructions." Orwell argued that the decline of English went hand-in-hand with the decline of intellectualism among society, and thus facilitated the manipulation of listeners and speakers and writers into consequent political chaos. The story of Nineteen Eighty-Four portrays
15792-494: The destruction of rival political parties, organisations, and independent centres of socio-political power. Moreover, the unitary functioning of the characteristics of totalitarianism allow a totalitarian government to perdure against economic crises (internal and external), large-scale failures of policy, mass social-discontent, and political pressure from other countries. Some totalitarian one-party states were established through coups orchestrated by military officers loyal to
15960-530: The dystopian rulers are brutal and dedicated to the point of fanaticism, which Orwell considered more plausible. The political principles at the root of fictional utopias (or "perfect worlds") are idealistic in principle and result in positive consequences for the inhabitants; the political principles on which fictional dystopias are based, while often based on utopian ideals, result in negative consequences for inhabitants because of at least one fatal flaw . Dystopias are often filled with pessimistic views of
16128-502: The economic system is not the source of the society's flaws, as in Brave New World , the state often controls the economy; a character, reacting with horror to the suggestion of not being part of the social body, cites as a reason that works for everyone else. Other works feature extensive privatization and corporatism ; both consequences of capitalism , where privately owned and unaccountable large corporations have replaced
16296-405: The economy often relates directly to the elements that the writer is depicting as the source of the oppression. There are several archetypes that such societies tend to follow. A theme is the dichotomy of planned economies versus free market economies, a conflict which is found in such works as Ayn Rand 's Anthem and Henry Kuttner 's short story "The Iron Standard". Another example of this
16464-438: The elimination of irregular conjugations: Therefore, the Oldspeak sentence "He ran extremely quickly" would become "He runned doubleplusspeedwise". This is a list of Newspeak words known from the novel. It does not include words carried over directly from English with no change in meaning, nor does it include regular uses of the listed affixes (e.g. unbellyfeel ) unless they are particularly significant. The novel says that
16632-536: The end of the Cold War". In the 1990s, François Furet made a comparative analysis and used the term totalitarian twins to link Nazism and Stalinism. Eric Hobsbawm criticised Furet for his temptation to stress the existence of a common ground between two systems with different ideological roots. In Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?: Five Interventions in the (Mis)Use of a Notion , Žižek wrote that "[t]he liberating effect" of General Augusto Pinochet 's arrest "was exceptional", as "the fear of Pinochet dissipated,
16800-415: The entirety of Afghanistan. Features of its totalitarian governance include the imposition of Pashtunwali culture of the majority Pashtun ethnic group as religious law, the exclusion of minorities and non-Taliban members from the government, and extensive violations of women's rights . The Islamic State is a Salafi-Jihadist militant group that was established in 2006 by Abu Omar al-Baghdadi during
16968-406: The environment, as well as to eliminate many undomesticated species and to provide psychological and pharmaceutical repellent against human instincts. E. M. Forster 's " The Machine Stops " depicts a highly changed global environment which forces people to live underground due to an atmospheric contamination. As Angel Galdon-Rodriguez points out, this sort of isolation caused by external toxic hazard
17136-546: The establishment of such a government could enhance the existential risks which are associated with the rule of a permanent dictatorship. The Taliban is a totalitarian Sunni Islamist militant group and political movement in Afghanistan that emerged in the aftermath of the Soviet–Afghan War and the end of the Cold War. It governed most of Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001 and returned to power in 2021 , controlling
17304-666: The family, religion, education, business, private property, and social relationships. Under Stalin , the Soviet Union was thus totalitarian, as was Mao 's China , Pol Pot 's Cambodia , Hitler 's Germany , and U Ne Win 's Burma . Totalitarianism is, then, a political ideology for which a totalitarian government is the agency for realizing its ends. Thus, totalitarianism characterizes such ideologies as state socialism (as in Burma ), Marxism–Leninism as in former East Germany , and Nazism . Even revolutionary Muslim Iran , since
17472-571: The film Blade Runner , influenced by and based upon Dick's novel). Dystopian fiction frequently draws stark contrasts between the privileges of the ruling class and the dreary existence of the working class. In the 1931 novel Brave New World by Aldous Huxley , a class system is prenatally determined with Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons, with the lower classes having reduced brain function and special conditioning to make them satisfied with their position in life. Outside of this society there also exist several human settlements that exist in
17640-402: The foreign-policy discourse of the U.S. Subsequently established, the totalitarian model became the analytic and interpretational paradigm for Kremlinology , the academic study of the monolithic police-state USSR. The Kremlinologists analyses of the internal politics (policy and personality) of the politburo crafting policy (national and foreign) yielded strategic intelligence for dealing with
17808-501: The future. Famous examples set in the future included Robert Hugh Benson 's Lord of the World (1907), Yevgeny Zamyatin 's We (1920), Aldous Huxley 's Brave New World (1932), George Orwell 's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), and Ray Bradbury 's Fahrenheit 451 (1953). Dystopian societies appear in many sub-genres of fiction and are often used to draw attention to society, environment , politics, economics, religion, psychology, ethics, science, or technology. Some authors use
17976-587: The government in setting policy and making decisions. They manipulate, infiltrate, control, bribe, are contracted by and function as government. This is seen in the novels Jennifer Government and Oryx and Crake and the movies Alien , Avatar , RoboCop , Visioneers , Idiocracy , Soylent Green , WALL-E and Rollerball . Corporate republics are common in the cyberpunk genre, as in Neal Stephenson 's Snow Crash and Philip K. Dick 's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (as well as
18144-462: The habit of abbreviating whenever possible, but also for the almost exaggerated care that was taken to make every word easily pronounceable. The B words in Newspeak are supposed to sound pleasant, while also being easily pronounceable, in an attempt to make speech on anything political "staccato and monotonous" and, ultimately, mask from the speaker all ideological content. The words of the C vocabulary are scientific and technical terms that supplement
18312-411: The hierarchy with few rights, yet making up the vast majority of the population. In Ypsilon Minus by Herbert W. Franke , people are divided into numerous alphabetically ranked groups. In the film Elysium , the majority of Earth's population on the surface lives in poverty with little access to health care and are subject to worker exploitation and police brutality , while the wealthy live above
18480-621: The historian John Connelly said that totalitarianism is a useful word, but that the old 1950s theory about totalitarianism is defunct among scholars, because "The word is as functional now as it was fifty years ago. It means the kind of régime that existed in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, the Soviet satellites, Communist China, and maybe Fascist Italy, where the word originated. . . . Who are we to tell Václav Havel or Adam Michnik that they were fooling themselves when they perceived their rulers as totalitarian? Or, for that matter, any of
18648-524: The historiographic accuracy of Popper's 20th-century interpretation and delineation of the historical origins of totalitarianism, because the ancient Greek philosopher Plato did not invent the modern State . In the early 20th century, Giovanni Gentile proposed Italian Fascism as a political ideology with a philosophy that is "totalitarian, and [that] the Fascist State—a synthesis and a unity inclusive of all values—interprets, develops, and potentiates
18816-527: The historiographic limitations of the totalitarian-model interpretation of Soviet and Russian history, because Friedrich and Brzezinski did not take account of the actual functioning of the Soviet social system, neither as a political entity (the USSR) nor as a social entity (Soviet civil society), which could be understood in terms of socialist class struggle among the professional élites (political, academic, artistic, scientific, military) seeking upward mobility into
18984-457: The ideal society: it is a dystopia, if it is permissible to coin a word. 1962 C. WALSH From Utopia to Nightmare 11 The 'dystopia' or 'inverted utopia'. Ibid. 12 Stories...that seemed in their dystopian way to be saying something important. Ibid. ii. 27 A strand of utopianism or dystopianism. 1967 Listener 5 Jan. 22 The modern classics Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four are dystopias. They describe not
19152-425: The ideological terms totalitarianism and totalitarian in defence of Duce Mussolini's legal, illegal, and legalistic social engineering of Italy. As ideologues, the intellectual Gentile and the politician Mussolini used the term totalitario to identify and describe the ideological nature of the societal structures (government, social, economic, political) and the practical goals (economic, geopolitical, social) of
19320-409: The imperial future, Italian totalitarianism must politicise human existence into subservience to the state, which Mussolini summarised with the epigram: "Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state." Hannah Arendt, in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism , contended that Mussolini's dictatorship was not a totalitarian regime until 1938. Arguing that one of
19488-510: The isolationist Falangist movement . This led to massive economic growth that lasted until the mid-1970s, known as the " Spanish miracle ". This is comparable to De-Stalinization in the Soviet Union in the 1950s, where Francoist Spain changed from being openly totalitarian to an authoritarian dictatorship with a certain degree of economic freedom . The city of Geneva under John Calvin 's leadership has also been characterised as totalitarian by scholars. The death of Stalin in 1953 voided
19656-417: The key characteristics of a totalitarian movement was its ability to garner mass mobilization , Arendt wrote: "While all political groups depend upon proportionate strength, totalitarian movements depend on the sheer force of numbers to such an extent that totalitarian regimes seem impossible, even under otherwise favorable circumstances, in countries with relatively small populations.... [E]ven Mussolini, who
19824-434: The lack of even a rubber-stamp parliament made Franco's government "the most purely arbitrary in the world." However, from 1959 to 1974 the " Spanish Miracle " took place under the leadership of technocrats , many of whom were members of Opus Dei and a new generation of politicians that replaced the old Falangist guard. Reforms were implemented in the 1950s and Spain abandoned autarky , reassigning economic authority from
19992-485: The linguistic and political concepts of goodthink and crimethink that reinforce the totalitarianism of The Party over the people of Oceania . The long-term goal of The Party is that, by 2050, Newspeak would be the universal language of every member of The Party and of Oceanian society, except for the Proles, the working class of Oceania. In Newspeak, English root-words function both as nouns and as verbs, which reduces
20160-436: The linguistic functions of the A and B vocabularies. These words are the same scientific terms in English, but many of them have had their meanings rigidified to attempt, as with the A vocabulary, to prevent speakers from being able to express anti-government thoughts. Distribution of the C vocabulary is limited, because the Party does not want citizens to know more than a select few ways of life or techniques of production. Hence,
20328-421: The literature of The Party will change. Even the slogans will change. How could you have a slogan like Freedom is Slavery when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact, there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness. Newspeak words are classified by three distinct classes:
20496-466: The making of profit and/or the regulation of action. Toby Ord believed that George Orwell's fears of totalitarianism constituted a notable early precursor to modern notions of anthropogenic existential risk, the concept that a future catastrophe could permanently destroy the potential of Earth-originating intelligent life due in part to technological changes, creating a permanent technological dystopia . Ord said that Orwell's writings show that his concern
20664-535: The mass communications media to perpetuate their dictatorships, that "If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever." In the aftermath of the Second World War (1937–1945), in the lecture series (1945) and book (1946) titled The Soviet Impact on the Western World , the British historian E. H. Carr said that "the trend away from individualism and towards totalitarianism
20832-455: The mass of humanity of meaningful labor; virtually all work is menial, unsatisfying and only a small number of the small group that achieves education is admitted to the elite and its work. In Tanith Lee 's Don't Bite the Sun , there is no want of any kind – only unabashed consumption and hedonism, leading the protagonist to begin looking for a deeper meaning to existence. Even in dystopias where
21000-505: The millions of former subjects of Soviet-type rule who use the local equivalents of the Czech [word] totalita to describe the systems they lived under before 1989? [Totalitarianism] is a useful word, and everyone knows what it means as a general referent. Problems arise when people confuse the useful descriptive term with the old 'theory' from the 1950s." In Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism (2022),
21168-609: The minds of unknown agitators and crackpots. In the essay "The 'Dark Forces', the Totalitarian Model, and Soviet History" (1987), by J.F. Hough, and in the book The Totalitarian Legacy of the Bolshevik Revolution (2019), by Alexander Riley, the historians said that the Russian Marxist revolutionary Lenin was the first politician to establish a sovereign state of the totalitarian model. As
21336-562: The moral order of their respective societies; and collaborated with Fascists and Nazis in the idealistic hope that anti-communism would restore the societies of Europe to their root Christian culture. In the U.S. geopolitics of the late 1950s, the Cold War concepts and the terms totalitarianism , totalitarian , and totalitarian model , presented in Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (1956), by Carl Joachim Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, became common usages in
21504-476: The new Fascist Italy (1922–1943) , which was the "total representation of the nation and total guidance of national goals." In proposing the totalitarian society of Italian Fascism, Gentile defined and described a civil society wherein totalitarian ideology (subservience to the state) determined the public sphere and the private sphere of the lives of the Italian people. That to achieve the Fascist utopia in
21672-536: The notion of "modern despotism " is a "reverse anachronism"; for Fuentes, "the anachronistic use of totalitarian/totalitarianism involves the will to reshape the past in the image and likeness of the present". Other studies try to link modern technological changes to totalitarianism. According to Shoshana Zuboff , the economic pressures of modern surveillance capitalism are driving the intensification of connection and monitoring online with spaces of social life becoming open to saturation by corporate actors, directed at
21840-462: The official texts of the totalitarian ideology. In "European Protestants Between Anti-Communism and Anti-Totalitarianism: The Other Interwar Kulturkampf?" (2018) the historian Paul Hanebrink said that Hitler's assumption of power in Germany in 1933 frightened Christians into anti-communism, because for European Christians, Catholic and Protestant alike, the new postwar ' culture war ' crystallized as
22008-680: The old image of the Stalinist USSR of the 1950s—a totalitarian state intent upon world domination—was oversimplified and inaccurate, because the death of Stalin changed Soviet society. After the Cold War and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact , most revisionist Kremlinologists worked the national archives of ex–Communist states, especially the State Archive of the Russian Federation about Soviet-period Russia. In
22176-400: The only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it"—and used the above quote as the title to the opening chapter of his book, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? . In the book, he also refers to dystopian film such as Children of Men (originally a novel by P. D. James ) to illustrate what he describes as
22344-570: The past participles of swim, give, bring, speak, and take were, respectively swimmed, gived, bringed, speaked, and taked, with all irregular forms (such as swam, gave, and brought ) being eliminated. The auxiliaries (including to be ), pronouns , demonstratives , and relatives still inflect irregularly. They mostly follow their use in English, but the word whom and the shall and should tenses are dropped, whom being replaced by who and shall and should by will and would . In spoken and written Newspeak, suffixes are also used in
22512-425: The person's ability to articulate and communicate abstract concepts, such as personal identity , self-expression, and free will , which are thoughtcrimes , acts of personal independence that contradict the ideological orthodoxy of Ingsoc collectivism . In the appendix to the novel, "The Principles of Newspeak", Orwell explains that Newspeak follows most rules of English grammar, yet is a language characterised by
22680-410: The phonology, grammar, and vocabulary of Basic English (British American Scientific International Commercial English), which was proposed by the British linguist Charles Kay Ogden in 1930. As a controlled language without complex constructions or ambiguous usages, Basic English was designed to be easy to learn, to sound, and to speak, with a vocabulary of 850 words composed specifically to facilitate
22848-511: The point of acting in unison) is also depicted in Madeleine L'Engle 's A Wrinkle in Time . Violence is prevalent in many dystopias, often in the form of war, but also in urban crimes led by (predominately teenage) gangs (e.g. A Clockwork Orange ), or rampant crime met by blood sports (e.g. Battle Royale , The Running Man , The Hunger Games , Divergent , and The Purge ). It
23016-428: The political scientist Raymond Aron said that for a régime of government to be considered totalitarian it can be described and defined with the totalitarian model of five interlocking, mutually supporting characteristics: Laure Neumayer posited that "despite the disputes over its heuristic value and its normative assumptions, the concept of totalitarianism made a vigorous return to the political and academic fields at
23184-443: The political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way said that nascent revolutionary régimes usually became totalitarian régimes if not destroyed with a military invasion. Such a revolutionary régime begins as a social revolution independent of the existing social structures of the state (not political succession, election to office, or a military coup d'état ). For example, the Soviet Union and Maoist China were founded after
23352-404: The politically secular authoritarian government "does not attempt to change the world and human nature", whereas the "totalitarian government seeks to completely control the thoughts and actions of its citizens", by way of an official "totalist ideology, a [political] party reinforced by a secret police , and monopolistic control of industrial mass society ." From the right-wing perspective,
23520-425: The public and the private mass communications media , (iv) the use of state terrorism to police the populace, and (v) a political party of mass membership who perpetually re-elect The Leader. In the 1960s, the revisionist Kremlinologists researched the organisations and studied the policies of the relatively autonomous bureaucracies that influenced the crafting of high-level policy for governing Soviet society in
23688-459: The relationship between utopia and dystopia. Andrew Norton-Schwartzbard noted that "written many centuries before the concept "dystopia" existed, Dante 's Inferno in fact includes most of the typical characteristics associated with this genre – even if placed in a religious framework rather than in the future of the mundane world, as modern dystopias tend to be". In the same vein, Vicente Angeloti remarked that " George Orwell 's emblematic phrase,
23856-513: The revisionists in the field of Soviet history were guilty of confusing popularity with morality and of making highly embarrassing and not very convincing arguments against the concept of the Soviet Union as a totalitarian state. Laqueur stated that the revisionists' arguments with regard to Soviet history were highly similar to the arguments made by Ernst Nolte regarding German history. For Laqueur, concepts such as modernisation were inadequate tools for explaining Soviet history while totalitarianism
24024-513: The ruling class or a government that is brutal or uncaring, ruling with an "iron fist". Dystopian governments are sometimes ruled by a fascist or communist regime or dictator. These dystopian government establishments often have protagonists or groups that lead a " resistance " to enact change within their society, as is seen in Alan Moore 's V for Vendetta . Dystopian political situations are depicted in novels such as We , Parable of
24192-533: The simplistic totalitarian model of the police-state USSR as the epitome of the totalitarian state . A fact common to the revisionist-school interpretations of the reign of Stalin (1927–1953) was that the USSR was a country with weak social institutions, and that state terrorism against Soviet citizens indicated the political illegitimacy of Stalin's government. That the citizens of the USSR were not devoid of personal agency or of material resources for living, nor were Soviet citizens psychologically atomised by
24360-546: The social phenomenon of political totalitarianism is a product of Modernism , which the philosopher Karl Popper said originated from humanist philosophy ; from the Republic ( res publica ) proposed by Plato in Ancient Greece , from Hegel 's conception of the State as a polity of peoples, and from the political economy of Karl Marx in the 19th century —yet historians and philosophers of those periods dispute
24528-507: The society in which the author writes. Some of these are anti-utopias , which criticise attempts to implement various concepts of utopia. In the most comprehensive treatment of the literary and real expressions of the concept, Dystopia: A Natural History , Claeys offers a historical approach to these definitions. Here the tradition is traced from early reactions to the French Revolution . Its commonly anti-collectivist character
24696-659: The spell was broken, the taboo subjects of torture and disappearances became the daily grist of the news media; the people no longer just whispered, but openly spoke about prosecuting him in Chile itself". Saladdin Ahmed cited Hannah Arendt as stating that "the Soviet Union can no longer be called totalitarian in the strict sense of the term after Stalin's death ", writing that "this was the case in General August Pinochet's Chile, yet it would be absurd to exempt it from
24864-551: The story of Nineteen Eighty-Four , the lexicologist character Syme discusses his editorial work on the latest edition of the Newspeak Dictionary : By 2050—earlier, probably—all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer , Shakespeare , Milton , Byron —they'll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually contradictory of what they used to be. Even
25032-612: The survival of the fittest race; and Marxism–Leninism proposes that all history is the history of class conflict , of the survival of the fittest social class. That upon the believers' acceptance of the universal applicability of totalitarian ideology, the Nazi revolutionary and the Communist revolutionary then possess the simplistic moral certainty with which to justify all other actions by the State, either by an appeal to historicism (Law of History) or by an appeal to nature , as expedient actions necessary to establishing an authoritarian state apparatus. In The True Believer: Thoughts on
25200-433: The term Newspeak is used to impugn an opponent who introduces new definitions of words to suit their political agenda. To eliminate the expression of ambiguity and nuance from Oldspeak (Standard English) in order to reduce the English language's communication functions, Newspeak uses simplistic constructions of language, such as the dichotomies of pleasure vs. pain and happiness vs. sadness . Such dichotomies produced
25368-507: The term to refer to existing societies, many of which are, or have been, totalitarian states or societies in an advanced state of collapse. Dystopias, through an exaggerated worst-case scenario, often make a criticism about a current trend, societal norm, or political system. "Dustopia", the original spelling of "dystopia", first appeared in Lewis Henry Younge's Utopia: or Apollo's Golden Days in 1747. Additionally, dystopia
25536-406: The totalist ideology of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union —because "the Soviet political system was chaotic, that institutions often escaped the control of the centre, and that Stalin's leadership consisted, to a considerable extent, in responding, on an ad hoc basis, to political crises as they arose." That the legitimacy of Stalin's régime of government relied upon the popular support of
25704-487: The totalitarian régimes of government in the USSR (1917), Fascist Italy (1922–1943), and Nazi Germany (1933–1945) originated from the political discontent caused by the socio-economic aftermath of the First World War (1914–1918), which rendered impotent the government of Weimar Germany (1918–1933) to resist, counter, and quell left-wing and right-wing revolutions of totalitarian temper. Revisionist historians noted
25872-417: The user of Newspeak avoids critical thinking . English words of comparative and superlative meanings and irregular spellings were simplified; thus, better becomes gooder and best becomes goodest . The Newspeak prefixes plus– and doubleplus– are used for emphasis, e.g. pluscold means "very cold" and doublepluscold means "very very cold". Newspeak forms adjectives by appending the suffix –ful to
26040-400: The violent revolution required to establish totalitarianism in a sovereign state. That the essence of totalitarianism is total control to remake every aspect of civil society using a universal ideology—which is interpreted by an authoritarian leader—to create a collective national identity by merging civil society into the State. Given that the supreme leaders of the Communist, the Fascist, and
26208-444: The vocabulary available for the speaker to communicate meaning; e.g. as a noun and as a verb, the word think eliminates the word thought to functionally communicate thoughts , which are the products of intellectualism . As a form of personal communication, Newspeak is spoken in staccato rhythm, using short words that are easy to pronounce, so that speech is physically automatic and intellectually unconscious, by which mental habits
26376-415: The ways of lateral thinking (indirect thinking), which allow a word to have additional meanings. The linguistic simplification of Oldspeak into Newspeak was realised with neologisms, the elimination of ideologically undesirable words, and the elimination of the politically unorthodox meanings of words. The word free still existed in Newspeak, but only to communicate the absence of something, e.g. "The dog
26544-601: The whole life of a people". In 1920s Germany, during the Weimar Republic (1918–1933), the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt integrated Gentile's Fascist philosophy of united national purpose to the supreme-leader ideology of the Führerprinzip . In the mid 20th-century, the German academics Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer traced the origin of totalitarianism to the Age of Reason (17th–18th centuries), especially to
26712-403: The years long Russian Civil War (1917-1922) and Chinese Civil War (1927-1936 and 1945-1949), respectively, not merely state succession. They produce totalitarian dictatorships with three functional characteristics: (i) a cohesive ruling class comprising the military and the political élites, (ii) a strong and loyal coercive apparatus of police and military forces to suppress dissent, and (iii)
26880-404: Was a surge of popular dystopian young adult literature and blockbuster films. Some have commented on this trend, saying that "it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism ". Cultural theorist and critic Mark Fisher identified the phrase as encompassing the theory of capitalist realism —the perceived "widespread sense that not only is capitalism
27048-540: Was an existential threat to Western civilisation , and so facilitated the creation of the American national security state to execute the anti-communist Cold War (1945–1989) that was fought by client-state proxies of the US and the USSR. During the Russo–American Cold War (1945–1989), the academic field of Kremlinology (analysing politburo policy politics) produced historical and policy analyses dominated by
27216-889: Was determined not to have competing right-wing parties in Spain and CEDA was dissolved in April 1937. Later, Gil-Robles went into exile. Politically matured by having fought and been wounded and survived the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), in the essay " Why I Write " (1946), the socialist George Orwell said, "the Spanish war and other events in 1936–37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism , as I understand it." That future totalitarian régimes would spy upon their societies and use
27384-750: Was genuine rather than just a throwaway part of the fictional plot of Nineteen Eighty-Four . In 1949, Orwell wrote that "[a] ruling class which could guard against (four previously enumerated sources of risk) would remain in power permanently". That same year, Bertrand Russell wrote that "modern techniques have made possible a new intensity of governmental control, and this possibility has been exploited very fully in totalitarian states". In 2016, The Economist described China's developed Social Credit System under Chinese Communist Party general secretary Xi Jinping 's administration , to screen and rank its citizens based on their personal behavior, as totalitarian . Opponents of China's ranking system say that it
27552-505: Was not. Laqueur's argument has been criticised by modern "revisionist school" historians such as Paul Buhle , who said that Laqueur wrongly equates Cold War revisionism with the German revisionism; the latter reflected a "revanchist, military-minded conservative nationalism." Moreover, Michael Parenti and James Petras have suggested that the totalitarianism concept has been politically employed and used for anti-communist purposes. Parenti has also analysed how "left anti-communists" attacked
27720-476: Was only being applied to "opposing ideologies" and it was not being applied to liberalism. In the early 2010s, Richard Shorten, Vladimir Tismăneanu , and Aviezer Tucker posited that totalitarian ideologies can take different forms in different political systems but all of them focus on utopianism , scientism , or political violence . They posit that Nazism and Stalinism both emphasised the role of specialisation in modern societies and they also saw polymathy as
27888-541: Was so fond of the term "totalitarian state," did not attempt to establish a full-fledged totalitarian regime and contented himself with dictatorship and one-party rule ." For example, Victor Emmanuel III still reigned as a figurehead and helped play a role in the dismissal of Mussolini in 1943. Also, the Catholic Church was allowed to independently exercise its religious authority in Vatican City per
28056-651: Was twice affixed to Nazi Germany during Winston Churchill 's speech of 5 October 1938 before the House of Commons , in opposition to the Munich Agreement , by which France and Great Britain consented to Nazi Germany's annexation of the Sudetenland . Churchill was then a backbencher MP representing the Epping constituency . In a radio address two weeks later, Churchill again employed the term, this time applying
28224-509: Was used as an antonym for utopia by John Stuart Mill in one of his 1868 Parliamentary Speeches ( Hansard Commons ) by adding the prefix "dys" ( Ancient Greek : δυσ- "bad") to "topia", reinterpreting the initial "u" as the prefix "eu" ( Ancient Greek : ευ- "good") instead of "ou" ( Ancient Greek : οὐ "not"). It was used to denounce the government's Irish land policy: "It is, perhaps, too complimentary to call them Utopians, they ought rather to be called dys-topians, or caco-topians. What
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