Word: totalitarianism
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...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...
...found massive support for the Sandanistas, and a sense of freedom and security that is not characteristic of totalitarian regimes," Snyder reported in Thursday's Globe...
...articles on which this movie is based. It must be nerve-racking for the producers to offer a tale so lacking in standard melodramatic satisfactions. But the result is worth it, for this is the clearest film statement yet on how the nature of heroism has changed in this totalitarian century. In The Killing Fields, as in reality, swashbuckling begins to look not merely improbable but impractical. It is the survivor, silently, indefatigably worming his way through monolithic adversity toward the light, who rightly commands...