Word: totalitarian
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...columnist for the newsmagazine L 'Express and its editor in chief from 1978 to 1981. His 1970 book in praise of American freedom of dissent, Without Marx or Jesus, outraged nationalistic French intellectuals of both the left and right. In 1976 he created another furor with The Totalitarian Temptation, a blistering condemnation of French Socialist tolerance of "vintage Stalinism...
...where Temptation left off. Revel now charges Western democracy as a whole with failing to recognize the reality of Communist, particularly Soviet, expansion since 1917. According to Revel, Western "victories" in that struggle (the 1948 Berlin airlift, Korea) have never been more than temporary impediments to Communist aggression; totalitarian achievements (the Berlin Wall, hegemony in Eastern Europe) have been permanent. As Revel puts it, "The confrontation between the Soviet Union and the West [has] resembled a football game in which one of the teams, the West, disqualified itself from going beyond the 50-yard line...
Revel blames the one-sidedness of the contest on the nature of democratic pluralism. "To totalitarianism, an opponent is by definition subversive," he writes, while democracy "treats subversives as mere opponents for fear of betraying its principles." The fundamental difference between the systems renders democracies inherently less capable than totalitarian regimes of defending themselves against internal enemies. That fact, he says, is ruthlessly exploited by the Soviets in their covert encouragement of global terrorism...
Externally, Revel argues, pluralism engenders a far more fatal tendency: "Democracy tends to ignore, even deny, threats to its existence because it loathes doing what is needed to counter them." In other words, democracy instinctively resorts to appeasement, usually justified as the encouragement of totalitarian "moderates" over "hard-liners." A French diplomat shortly after Munich, Revel notes, described Hitler as caught between Goebbels and Himmler [hard] and Goring [moderate]; Stalin wheedled concessions out of the Roosevelt Administration by warning that his liberal tendencies were under attack in the Politburo...
...much the same way, democracies view history with selective amnesia. "As things are now . . . only the West's failures, crimes and weaknesses deserve to be recorded by history," says Revel, while totalitarian reality "is what Soviet leaders are preparing to do now" in the way of promised reforms or concessions. Memories of capitalism's Great Depression endure, while the deaths of millions during forced Soviet collectivization in the same period do not. Viet Nam remains fresh in the mind; the Marxist bloodbaths of Lieut. Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam in Ethiopia during the late 1970s...