Word: totalitarianism
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...Iran's internal-external politics into the proper perspective. The Islamic Republic, now approaching its seventh year of volatile tenure, has taken every possible measure to entrench itself as a theocratic despotism. Its leaders, armed with the radical Iranian brand of Shia ideology, which utilizes the modern totalitarian techniques of mass mobilization and suppression of all opposition, believe they are in firm conrtol of the country...
...best of totalitarian traditions, the officers of the club recently decided to change some rules. The officers decided to eliminate the lottery and to change the selection process. Now, complain current members, the four officers alone choose all the new members...
None were more aware of this peril than the great totalitarians themselves. Hence Mao's desperate attempt to rekindle the flame with the Cultural Revolution. Only permanent revolution can meet the totalitarian ideal, and permanent revolution is impossible. Even tyranny needs its sleep...
What remains, then, is what Political Philosopher Michael Walzer calls "failed totalitarianism": dead, bureaucratic rule marked by exhaustion and resignation, a hollow ideology, conformity without belief. A shell of the totalitarian idea. Does this mean, then, that the famous distinction between this system and traditional authoritarianism (e.g., nonideological dictatorship like that of Somoza or Marcos) disappears? No, because one crucial difference remains: only one system continues to aspire to totality, to colonizing every nook and cranny of social life...
Totality and irreversibility are related. It used to be thought that totalitarianism had repealed the law of history by which power sows the seeds of its own destruction. If sheer ruthless vigilance could destroy any center of opposition, even any island of independent thought, then -- aside from external conquest, which alone destroyed Nazism -- totalitarian rule could never be reversed...