> Behalf Of Brad De Long
> >A couple of notes on an otherwise excellent post. Fascism is _not_
> >necessarily totalitarian. Take, for example, the five
> major "fascist"
> >states during WWII - Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Fascist Spain,
> >Militarist Japan, and the Communist USSR. Of those,
> Italy, Spain, and
> >Japan were clearly not totalitarian, and Germany is quite
> debatable.
>
> Never heard anyone debate it. Since Stalin's Russia and Hitler's
> Germany are the two regimes out of which the ideal type of
> "totalitarianism" was constructed, it would be kind of
> silly to claim
> that Hitler's Germany was not "totalitarian"...
>
> Brad DeLong
Since we spent an hour in my graduate seminar a few weeks ago debating
precisely that,
I don't think that it is silly at all, actually. Totalitarianism as
an ideal
type was not based upon Nazi Germany - it was almost entirely
constructed based on
Stalin's Russia, with lots of people making assumptions about Nazi
Germany that modern
research now reveals to have not been the case. Unlike the Soviet
Union, for example, Nazi Germany did not have a pervasive program of
secret police and informers. Stanley Hoffmann defined a totalitarian
government as one that rules through the application of terror across
an entire population, and we generally came to the conclusion that
Hitler's government was totalitarian only for a relatively short
period of time in 1944 after the assasination attempt against him.
The average German citizen had little to fear from the SS as long as
he or she was not Jewish and did not engage in active resistance to
the government - which made Nazi Germany markedly different from
Stalin's Russia, or even, say, East Germany, where it now appears that
something approaching a quarter of the population informed on the
other three quarters to the Stasi. Hitler's government, as was
pointed out in the post, enjoyed a great deal of popular support for
most of its existence. It had no need to be totalitarian, and
therefore usually was not, as a totalitarian governments are quite
inefficient as they must divert so much of their resources to
controlling their own population.
********************Gautam "Ulysses" Mukunda**********************
* Harvard College Class of '01 *He either fears his fate too much*
* www.fas.harvard.edu/~mukunda * Or his deserts are small, *
* [EMAIL PROTECTED] *Who dares not put it to the touch*
* "Freedom is not Free" * To win or lose it all. *
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