Word: totalitarianism
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...Their eyes light up responding to the seeming utopia and their hands push the empty shopping carts with clumsy eagerness. The suspicious glances of the shoppers and salespeople, the sudden arrest of a shoplifter the clicking video cameras at every aisle--all combine into a grosteque echo of a totalitarian state...
Moderates, centered in the State and Commerce departments, have argued that it is difficult to use economic pressure to force a totalitarian soci ety to change its foreign policy. Such countries can drive down standards of living a long way before they cut military spending. Moreover, the Soviet Union could be less predictable and more dangerous when it is economically weak than when it is doing well...
Neither approach seems to have worked. The theory of convergence-that, over time, the Soviet economy and its political superstructure would become more decentralized, borrowing more and more from capitalism-has not been borne out. The imperative on which the system operates is still totalitarian control. No matter what they stock in their refrigerators, KGB officers are no where near joining the Pepsi generation in any ideological sense...
...decision ignores South Africa's unique position in the world community. In 1974, the United Nations General Assembly voted Pretoria out of that body to protest apartheid and the illegal occupation of neighboring Namibia. While other totalitarian states can count on sympathy from at least a few other nations, South Africa is almost totally ostracized...
Well, up to a point. To suppose the work is only a satire on an obsolete propagandist style is to miss its deadlier thrust. What K & M are getting at is not just totalitarian art, but official art as such. Stalin and the Muses-showing Clio, muse of history, presenting a volume for revision to the mustachioed god in his transcendent white military greatcoat-is "objectively" a hilarious spoof, done in clumsily tight parody of the 17th century grand manner. But then, if these sleek pictorial tropes are I so absurd when lavished on Stalin, why should they...