Word: totalitarian
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...TOTALITARIAN TEMPTATION by JEAN-FRANCOIS REVEL 311 pages. Doubleday...
...pattern has become classic: a nation emerges from the colonial yoke, lustily declares its independence-and then succumbs to the totalitarian mode. French Philosopher Jean-Francis Revel, author of Without Marx or Jesus, tries to analyze this alarming trend in a book filled with mordant wit and intensity. As a kind of historical prosecuting attorney, Revel puts Joseph Stalin in the dock, then offers witnesses to the crime of totalitarianism. It was the murderous Russian dictator who showed the 20th century how to construct a hermetically sealed tyranny, says Revel. It is the Stalinist model that is being sedulously imitated...
According to The Totalitarian Temptation, Communist regimes are judged by what they promise to do; oth er states are rated on their deeds. The de nial of freedom in Communist-dominated Peru, for example, is excused by many leftists as a historical necessity on the road to the socialist paradise. The same behavior in Chile is denounced as fascist repression. Revel makes the pro vocative point that while many fascist regimes have come and gone, and a few have even been liberalized, not a single orthodox Communist regime has disappeared in this century...
...says, turning him into a magnet for social activists interested in gaining exposure through the use of public figures. Wald says he avoids most organizations, preferring to act individually, but he is deeply involved with the American Friends Service Committee and Amnesty International in defending Soviet dissidents and opposing totalitarian regimes in South Korea and Chile. Wald also backed the presidential campaigns of Eugene McCarthy in 1968 and George McGovern...
...full-fledged entertainment business it has become, a business controlled by the rulers of hamburger, whiskey, chewing gum, lumber, and brewery empires. Fans should not condemn the players for demanding and receiving a larger measure of the revenue they themselves generate. As Judge Frank said in 1949, "Only the totalitarian-minded will believe that high pay excuses virtual slavery...