Word: totalitarianisms
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Those authorities lowered it to new levels. As Hannah Arendt observed, in the end, "what totalitarian ideologies aim at is not the transformation of the outside world or the revolutionizing transmutation of society, but the transformation of human nature itself . . . The totalitarian belief that everything is possible seems to have proved only that every thing can be destroyed...
...should be punished." Yet that punishment must rise from rational response to irrational acts. Unfortunately, perhaps tragically, if it is to remain open, human society must assume certain risks. They need not include insanity, terrorism, murder. But they had better include the liberty of action. Total-in other words, totalitarian-security means, ultimately, the Astrodome made global. No weather, no shadows, no frustration, no delight, no true freedom. It is an Anthony Burgess vision made real, a film in which there is no fadeout. That vision is worth pondering the next time violence beckons in some chance and random spot...
...easiest way to understand them is to dismiss them as monsters. If writing off a whole nation makes you uncomfortable, you can posit a totalitarian state that shredded a people to an atomized mass and transformed each man into a monster. But the facts are less convenient. Most Germans lived close to normal lives. The world turned upside down, but most Germans remained standing...
...woman against attack by the brutes, whom he kills in a number of instructive and painful ways. This is his victory: to have passed the portals of murder into the world of manhood, and by so doing to have conquered the menace of women. It is a totalitarian pastoral, the rural equivalent of a sidewalk beating...
...especially intriguing on the Dollfuss assassination, partly because he lived through it all as a young adult. Maass finds it hard to capture the personality of his diminutive (4 ft. 11 in.) "Milli-Metternich." But he shows effectively how Dollfuss forced his "Christian corporate state" too suddenly into a totalitarian mold, basing his power on a single official party while socialists plotted on the left and Austrian Nazis on the right. Maass also demonstrates the appalling lack of official reaction when the government learned of the plot to overthrow it in July 1934. Austria had become such a "nation...