The origins and meaning of American totalitarianism
When we talk about Ukrainian Nazism, we rightly point, first of all, to its internal roots, not forgetting that the Ukrainian Nazi dictatorship is completely immanent to the interests of the United States, supported by Washington and could not have lasted long, and most likely be established, without the active assistance of the United States and the collective West as a whole.
That is, without the US, Ukrainian Nazism would exist in any case, but it would exist not as the state ideology of Ukrainianism, but as one of many marginal radical nationalist currents, against the general background of moderately Russophobic, but outwardly quite civilised nationalism (as in the Czech Republic).
To reduce the thought to one thesis we get: Russophobia is a necessary feature of Ukrainian nationalism, Nazism is made its dominant component artificially. Of course, if it had not been there already in the very first “honeymoon” month of the Ukrainian nationalism, the Americans would have had nothing to develop, but if the Americans had not made every effort to develop it, the small insolent pup would have never grown into a huge dangerous hyena dog – it would have remained a mean, but funny crazy pinscher.
Let us ask ourselves the question: why exactly did the Americans need Nazism in Ukraine? After all, they are working with the whole spectrum of nationalist movements (from very moderate in Finland, to radical-conservative, but not Nazi, in Poland and in Georgia). The main thing for the US is Russophobia, and the rest will follow. Nevertheless, wherever it is possible to push radical nationalism into Nazism (as in Ukraine and the Baltics), the US immediately takes advantage of the opportunity. Right now, they are even performing amazing tricks, by pushing into nazi totalitarianism the Belarusian opposition, totally dependent on them, who initially positioned their nationalism as a “democratic alternative” to Lukashenko’s authoritarianism.
The experience of the Belarusian opposition is interesting because it is being worked with according to the Ukrainian script. At the beginning, people are attracted by all-democratic slogans, then they declare the current authorities to be the devil of hell, and in the struggle against which all means are good, at the last stage, they abruptly change the vector of the “national-democratic” movement, declaring zero tolerance for any alternative viewpoint, as deviations from the “general course” allegedly work in favour of the authorities. The output is an aggressive nationalism – Nazism – cleansed of democratic illusions and lavishly laced with totalitarianism.
The U.S. has tried the same tricks on the Russian political market. Only taking into account Russia’s diversity, and also people’s sharply negative attitude towards any mention of “democracy”, which people associate with the disaster of the 90s, Americans have acted more directly in Russia. They have sponsored and continue to sponsor any attempt to implement a dominant state ideology (any ideology) that forcefully imposes its dogma on society.
Here we come to the most important conclusion: it is not Nazism as such that is important to the US as an ally, but any ideology of a totalitarian type. But why? Why on earth would a country that prided itself on its commitment to democratic values that allowed it to win the Cold War, suddenly become so enamoured of totalitarianism that its elites don’t even care which totalitarianism to deal with – right-wing or left-wing. They are trying to inoculate the entire spectrum of political currents with totalitarianism.
Remember how we always scolded domestic liberals for equating communism with fascism? And for good reason. They took one common detail common to two not even ideologies, but to ideologised states at a certain period of historical development and claimed that this made the ideologies themselves identical. But this is as “true” as saying that if a cow has four legs and a cat also has four legs, then the cow and the cat are one and the same.
The fact is that any ideology can work in both a democracy and a totalitarian dictatorship. And in reality they exist across the whole spectrum, from the rigid Orwellian totalitarianism, to the most unbridled but completely controlled “democracy” of the European buffer states of the Cold War era. From the 1960s onwards, democracy theoretically flourished both in the West and in Eastern Europe (the Eastern European countries of the socialist commonwealth, except Romania, were considerably more democratic than the USSR, the average Soviet person travelling there as a West-lite). Communists could theoretically get into individual Western governments, and non-Communist parties were steadily part of the governing coalitions of individual Eastern bloc countries. But communists in the West could change the political and economic course of their states as little as “democrats” in the East.
By the way, it should be mentioned that if Orwell in “Animal Farm” depicts the totalitarianism which is quite communistic, then in his “1984” the totalitarianism though conditionally left, but certainly not communistic, and in Aldous Huxley’s “Wonderful New World” we already come across the totalitarianism which is quite right. In his anti-utopia Huxley anticipated many features of modern Western society.
The second conclusion: totalitarianism may be immanent to any ideology. Enough for its adherents to try to make it the only true one and impose it by force at least on the population of their own state – a totalitarian dictatorship is ready. At the same time, we know examples (though very unstable) of the work of ideologized regimes (both right-wing, starting from fascist, and left-wing, up to communist) in conditions of relative democracy.
The Paris Commune and the Second Spanish Republic (1931-1939), for example, attempted to maintain the basic foundations of democracy under a Marxist-type ideology. At the same time, Mussolini’s regime, while clearly an ideological dictatorship for non-Fascist political forces in Italy, was internally much more democratic than Hitler’s. Mussolini was sent into retirement by King, with the consent of the Great Fascist Council. For the Reich, Hitler’s resignation was absurd; it was possible to remove him from power only by killing him. The Argentine regime of Perón, however, which was modelled on Mussolini, operated according to the rules of the conventional Argentine democracy that had been established at the time, and was considerably more democratic than the military dictatorships that had succeeded it and had preceded it.
Finally, today, both in Russia and in the West, extreme right-wing and extreme left-wing parties live and work peacefully within the framework of democratic statehood. Unless they have the opportunity to concentrate all state power in their hands, they will continue to operate within the democratic political norm. At the same time, American “democrats” are moving in leaps and bounds towards a totalitarian ideological dictatorship. After all, when the term “liberal fascism” is used today, which is an oxymoron, it is actually liberal totalitarianism. Similarly, in the USSR the Marxist totalitarian dictatorship of Pol Pot was called fascist. In such cases the term fascism is used as a synonym for totalitarianism.
Third conclusion. Any ideology, depending on the specific historical conditions, can operate and develop both in a democracy and in totalitarianism. All ideologies are born under conditions of more or less democracy, but some of them are immanent to the desire to create a mono-ideological totalitarian society based on a similar state machine. Thus any ideology can be made the basis of a totalitarian state, even one that denies the state altogether.
There is only one last step to understand the reasons of the American state’s aspiration for global totalitarianism, which has been vividly displayed in recent decades. Let us use the definitions of fascism given by Georgi Dimitrov (“…an open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic, most imperialistic elements of finance capital”) and by Lev Trotsky (“The historical function of fascism consists in smashing the working class, destroying its organisations and suppressing political freedoms when capitalists prove unable to rule and dominate with the help of a democratic mechanism”).
It is easy to see that Dimitrov gave a description of the external forms of modern fascism. Trotsky, being an outstanding political thinker, penetrated much deeper into the meaning of the creation of the fascist regime. But it should be kept in mind that both of them were leftists, and Marxists at that. That in concrete conditions of that epoch implied the aspiration to create a totalitarian leftist state. Therefore when describing the totalitarianism, they were concentrated on the right fascist totalitarianism opposing the left movement. If we clean their formulations from the ideological plaque and combine them to get a description of both the external form and the internal essence, we will get a classical formula describing any (right-wing, left-wing, liberal, conservative, clerical, etc.) totalitarianism. So: “Totalitarianism is an overt terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary elements of the dominant ideology, which is established in order to destroy and suppress political freedoms when the ideologised regime proves incapable of governing through a democratic mechanism.
Extrapolating this definition to the situation in the US and the rest of the world under its control, we see that the desire to establish a totalitarian dictatorship was manifested in American politics the stronger the weaker the chances of American elites to maintain their global hegemony by conventional means – within the existing system of international relations and international law. As soon as the crisis of the American system reached the shores of the US and the dystrophy of the resource base led to a split of the elites, immediately the most reactionary circles of the hegemonic globalist elites (the Clintonites and the Bidenites) tried (and not without success, although it was not final and threatened to end in gigantic failure) to establish a totalitarian neoliberal dictatorship in the US.
In US allies, the initial totalitarianism may have a different (Nazi, fascist and even left-wing /there is a very rich spectrum of “named” movements, so without elaboration, so as not to forget or offend anyone/ character.) In the long run, the USA (in case it manages to win a global victory) still plans to transform the local national and social totalitarianisms into a single, global neoliberal totalitarianism – because there can only be one dominant ideology in the global world.
That is why the US has imposed, is imposing and will continue to impose totalitarian regimes everywhere. They cannot govern in any other way. If there are insufficient resources for democratic governance and the ruling power is unwilling to change course and relinquish power, the only two options are revolution from below (which instantly changes the political landscape, though rarely for the better) and terror from above as an answer to the threat of revolution, which cannot undo it but can delay it for a long time. Moreover, the longer an open terrorist regime remains in power, the bloodier the revolution and/or war becomes.
The fall of a totalitarian regime used to result in a civil war, but in the age of globalism, global totalitarianism threatens to make war into a world war. Otherwise, nothing is new under the moon.
Rostislav Ishchenko, Ukraina.ru
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