Re: CHAT: totalitarianism [was Re: Sexual terminology]

Quoting John Cowan <cowan@...>:

> Thomas R. Wier scripsit:
>
> > I'm not sure how I see how that distinction work out in practice,
> > however.  It is IMHO hard to claim that Saddam Hussein is not a
> > totalitarian despot, in that he has complete control over all
> > aspects of human life in those parts of Iraq not patrolled by
> > British and American aircraft, and only slightly less in those
> > patrolled regions.  He has ruthelessly laid waste to whole regions
> > of the country and to entire populations, with chemical weapons
> > at times.
>
> Yes, but AFAIK (and it's hard to get unbiased information here), he
> is doing so solely in support of his own power.  He is a typical
> tyrant, though equipped with means of mass destruction that historic
> tyrants did not have.
>
> Totalitarian regimes such as Hitler's Germany,
> Stalin's Soviet Union, and Pol Pot's Cambodia destroyed their
> own people in pursuit of a (twisted) ideal of racial or ideological
> purity.
But see, that's the big debate among historians of those
regimes: were they in fact only interested in pursuing their
ideological agendas, or were they interested in power, and
used ideological agendas to pursue that end? There are goodly
number of competent historians, especially those studying
Hitler and Stalin, that are convinced of the latter position.

What I objected to originally was the notion that you can
impose a rigid distinction between totalitarianism and
authoritarianism.  The reality is that regimes that you
classify as one type typically actually use methods of
both, but in varying proportions.

=====================================================================
Thomas Wier <trwier@...> <http://home.uchicago.edu/~trwier>
                     "...koruphàs hetéras hetére:isi prosápto:n /
Dept. of Linguistics  mú:tho:n mè: teléein atrapòn mían..."
University of Chicago "To join together diverse peaks of thought /
1010 E. 59th Street   and not complete one road that has no turn"
Chicago, IL 60637     Empedocles, _On Nature_, on speculative thinkers

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