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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   25760 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 1, 2024

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Totalitarianism is a more extreme form of authoritarianism. E.g. Imperial Germany during WW1 was authoritarian, while Nazi Germany in WW2 was totalitarian.

China was totalitarian under Mao, authoritarian with the Deng Xiaoping reforms, and is tilting towards totalitarianism again with Xi, although that might have paused (unclear at the moment). I wouldn't really call Turkey totalitarian yet. Ukraine was authoritarian, but have had freeish elections since the Maidan, although they have a ton of other problems and are by no means a consolidated democracy yet.

This looks a lot like degree of hostility of the US is the best predictor of your measure of totalitarianism. If we use the Wikipedia definition of totalitarianism as a baseline,

Varying by political culture, the functional characteristics of the totalitarian régime of government are: political repression of all opposition (individual and collective); a cult of personality about The Leader; official economic interventionism (controlled wages and prices); official censorship of all mass communication media (the press, textbooks, cinema, television, radio, internet); official mass surveillance-policing of public places; and state terrorism.[1]

Political repression of opposition is present in all (Russia, China, Ukraine, Turkey), though I'd broadly say the degree is Turkey < Ukraine <= Russia << China. In Ukraine this got much worse since the war; while before it they only banned the communist parties and engaged in soft repression of others, after the war started they went after more or less the whole opposition. Meanwhile, while Russia did visibly crack down on some of the most promising opposition parties (ex. Navalny's, Nadezhdin's), some manifestly oppositional parties like Yabloko are still operational and occupy positions of power, and the biggest one (the Communist Party) could be called cozy with Putin's but not exactly aligned either.

None of them have a real cult of personality around the leader, though China is the only one to come up with a construct like "Xi Jinping thought" so it gets close; I don't think any of them have controlled wages and prices; in terms of official censorship once again China is way in front of everyone (being the only one with a Great Firewall and actual proactive censorship regime), but my sense is that there Ukraine currently is actually ahead of Russia since they are thinking out loud about even banning Telegram; China is the only one with mass-surveillance policing of public places; for state terrorism none of them score particularly highly but Russia might win with the occasional false flags associated with Putin's rule.

This looks a lot like degree of hostility of the US is the best predictor of your measure of totalitarianism.

This is backwards. The US has democracy as a big part of its ideology, and thus is naturally allies with most democracies and is inherently hostile towards most autocracies. However, it's not black and white; Saudi Arabia has long been authoritarian, and is creeping towards totalitarianism under MBS, yet they're still an important regional ally of the US.

Turkey < Ukraine <= Russia << China

Russia has also gotten worse since the war started. There's no real opposition. The closest thing to it died in a Siberian labor camp not too long ago. You're not even allowed to openly criticize Putin any more, which people like Girkin have found out. Ukraine has done a bunch of bad things too like postponing its election, but I'm pretty sure people are still allowed to criticize Zelensky without getting Girkin'ed.

methinks the Wikipedia definition is self-serving to some sections of the West, too. I think it is plausible there to be a totalitarian state presenting itself run by a committee without the Leader.

A better definition would concentrate on the degree of total control of the society, both private and public, or aspirations thereof. Instead of merely being satisfied by frustrating their political opponents in the public political life and being the boss, a totalitarian wants to use power of state apparatus to get rid of opposing thought.

The classical definition of the totalitarian/authoritarian distinction is that authoritarian regimes have non-state actors with real power which can act as a check on the state(eg the Catholic Church in Latin America), whereas totalitarian regimes don't tolerate any. Now obviously this is a definition that, for the USA, is rather self serving, but also cold war era Latin America genuinely didn't have a great leap forwards equivalent.

Yeah, that's not a bad definition. Do you have a link or source you can give me that defines it that way?

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