Better Dead Than the Living Dead

...This idea, then, was not invented by the new American administration...

...Nothing I have seen since makes me doubt that I was well taught...

...If totalitarianism is ever to be destroyed, though, it is necessary both to grasp the totalitarian idea fully and to resist it in its every manifestation...

...These arguments evade the central point...

...III An spite of what critics of the authoritarian-totalitarian distinction may argue, it cannot be stressed enough that, unlike authoritarianism, totalitarianism is preeminently an idea...

...Indeed, the critics typically argue that the United States is "propping up" some regimes which abuse human rights, and should use this "dependency" to insist upon reforms...

...No matter what the specifically national tradition or the particular spiritual source of its ideology, totalitarian government always transformed classes into masses, supplanted the party system, not by one-party dictatorships, but by a mass movement, shifted the center of power from the army to the police, and established a foreign policy openly directed toward world domination...

...For those of us who believe in the principles of liberty and who believe, further, that these principles are "natural" to humans-indeed, that "the natural system of liberty" is humankind's proper inheritance-must necessarily believe that at some future time, in some unforeseen way, the totalitarian idea will collapse of its own dead weight...

...Words, declarations, and principles mean both in principle and in practice what rulers decide they mean...

...Nonetheless, if it is proper to speak generally of free and democratic nations and of respect for human rights, it is also proper to speak generally of authoritarian regimes and totalitarian regimes...

...No one can possibly think this way, we wish to say...

...For when we treat the latter as delinquents, "we foster both unnecessary hostility and the kinds of internal reaction that strengthens extremism, paranoia, and repression.'' The reader may wonder why treating Argentina and Chile as delinquents will not have similar deplorable effects...

...Political leaders are not usually required to compensate for the intellectual backwardness of their academic and journalistic critics...

...But would not such a policy be one-sided if similar pressures were not applied to other authoritarian or totalitarian states not allied with the United States...

...It is not the total physical barbarity or total range of State control which are decisive, but the total ideological claim, against which there is no appeal...

...Since totalitarianism is a disease of the human spirit-an intoxication of the will, a blinding of the intellect-it can be defeated through weapons of the spirit...

...The totalitarian wanly said: "But he was executed...

...A foreign policy aimed at unmasking the totalitarian idea and joining in the universal revulsion against it, while steadfastly and coldly calling the evils of authoritarianism by their self-condemning names, is well designed to attack both the lesser and the greater evils which today threaten and disgust us...

...What matters is that at any time, not only in principle but by ideology, the only law which applies is the will of the State...

...The utility of the totalitarian idea to revolutionaries is the simplicity of its morality, the resentments it channels, the range of methods it licenses, and the naked power it enhances...

...Farer attacks the idea that authoritarian regimes may evolve in democratic directions by countering that the Somoza regime lasted 45 years and that military rule has persisted (under, he does not say, how many constitutions) in El Salvador since 1932...

...pressure can lead authoritarian regimes, particularly in Latin America, to live up to their professed Western ideals...

...The degree of physical barbarity, torture, and visible police terror varies from regime to regime and from time to time...

...Once we take seriously communism's own definition of itself-in both ideological and historical terms-we cannot escape the conclusion that this is not a system that can be reformed...

...II Despite the weight of common experience over nearly half this planet, and despite the weight of sober scholarship, resistance to the distinction between authoritarian and totalitarian has suddenly grown-predictably, on the political Left...

...This claim is staggering...

...My colleague asked where he was...

...This polemical use of the "useful distinction" has been designed, Farer thinks, for "attacking Carter's human rights policy and for countering criticisms of regimes that brutally crush proponents of reform, liberals, socialists, and Marxists alike...

...The principle on which Hoffmann seems to stand is as follows: "The key issue-for the rest of the century-is the issue of revolution . . . and it is against the excesses and local incrustations [sic] of capitalism that many revolutions are likely to occur, " Hoffmann would oppose U.S...

...It is naive, of course, to expect the last existing form of totalitarian thought, Marxism-Leninism, to collapse of its own weight...

...The interesting question is why they should be so required in this one basic and fundamental case...

...Even when the institutions of the church have been restrained, narrowed, and repressed, this moral vision has proved its vigor...

...Third, in those contexts in which one must choose between the lesser of two evils, this distinction helps us to abhor both evils with exactitude of judgment and with prudential discretion...

...It is the claim of that will to embody in itself all the authority of nature, natural law, history, and moral right that constitutes the essence of totalitarianism...

...Once, in Geneva, my colleague asked a representative of a totalitarian state about a certain personality...

...This hideous claim makes individual human beings, even ironically totalitarianism's rulers, superfluous...

...The totalitarian regime claims, as the authoritarian regime does not, to embody right and wrong in its own will...

...The very fact that it is, at first, "academic," "abstract," "metaphysical," even "theological" is precisely what makes it monstrous...

...Today, this tendency is exaggerated by urbanization, mass communications, and the spread of "revolutionary ideas," so that authoritarian rulers of a new type "impose comprehensive surveillance and more tightly controlled social institutions by increasing the power and reach of public authority...

...Actually, the cheapening of the word "totalitarian" by giving it merely a metaphorical use does not increase but diminishes one's moral outrage...

...Actually, there is a third possibility...

...For no totalitarian state can, in principle, even admit to the violation of any individual human rights...

...Ideas of liberty and universal morality may work within the timbers of totalitarian structures like termites...

...For most of human history man has endured despotism, autocracy, and thorough authoritarian rule with remarkable passivity, a kind of sleep noted even by the author of our own Declaration of Independence...

...He also argues that "authoritarian governments of every ideological hue extend their jurisdiction as far as necessary to achieve their ends...

...Under totalitarian regimes, there exist no individual human rights, nor is there any moral and intellectual ground on which to claim them...

...On the surface, therefore, totalitarian regimes at some times and in some places may appear to be at once more placid and less physically barbaric than some authoritarian regimes...

...Even they can come to be appalled by what they have wrought...

...This is the underlying monstrosity...

...Thus, when Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig and UN Ambassador Jeane Kirk-patrick brought the long tradition of political science on this point into public usage, I quietly cheered...

...Thus, some who hold to the distinction between authoritarian regimes and totalitarian regimes have believed that a crucial difference between the two is that some among the former, but none among the latter, have evolved historically in a democratic and liberal direction...

...Farer judges that the distinction between authoritarian and totalitarian, which "could be useful," is, alas, "being subverted by dogmatists who assign practically all rulers professing capitalism and trying to liquidate leftists to the category of 'merely authoritarian' while coincidentally expelling every revolutionary government and movement into the outer darkness of totalitarianism...

...Only once in 37 annual seasons of the UN Human Rights Commission has an Eastern European nation been cited for human rights violations...

...Professor Arendt went on to explain how Lenin and Stalin had added something new-something worse-to the boastful claims of Mussolini...

...This is still the case...

...The universe of political regimes is, after all, fairly small, unlike the virtually numberless cases over which physicists may generalize...

...Doublespeak is not, as some think, primarily an instrument of propaganda but a logical corollary of the totalitarian idea: Meanings follow from naked will, in an Alice-in-Wonderland cosmology...

...The diagnosis of totalitarianism has been a staple of acute political science for more than forty years,* although the reality itself-at first so hard to grasp-is older by a generation...

...Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State...

...First, he points to the idea of national unity, of Poland simply as Poland, with a history and culture much practiced in the arts of survival under hostile ideological occupation...

...There are signs that spiritual decay is already far advanced among the present generation of totalitarians...

...By this word they said what they meant and meant what they said: a unity of theory, action, organization, and consent unprecedented in history...

...Of course, the force of the established totalitarian system, so total in physical power, makes the prospect of "erosion" within Poland itself problematic, even if the Soviets do not intervene to defend the integrity of the totalitarian idea...

...This monstrous power, moreover, at a stroke does away with any and all violations of human rights...

...Even when its own elites cease believing in it-even if, as Solzhenitsyn writes, no one in the USSR can speak of Marxism-Leninism without a sardonic smile-the military power and administrative inertia of the empire which embodies those ideas may stand far longer than their animating principle...

...What is this distinction's utility...

...One of the great myths of our era has been the attempt to describe world politics in terms of right, left, and center, in such a way as to suggest that opposed to the totalitarian Left there is also a totalitarian Right...

...Hidden in Hoffmann's scheme is contempt for capitalist society, since only on the basis of such contempt does his use of the word "radical" have any meaning at all...

...Particularly when wedded to Marxist ideology, totalitarianism claimed a new dialectic...

...Mere anti-Communism seemed flaccid...

...Finally, the distinction offers hope...

...Authoritarian governments which abuse human rights do not need to be called totalitarian in order for us to hold them in moral and political abhorrence...

...The assaults upon the distinction between authoritarian and totalitarian begin with claims that it is too "abstract," "academic," even "theological...

...Most of the critics seem especially concerned about specific regimes in Latin America (Argentina, Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala, and others), although they occasionally mention South Korea and the Philippines as well...

...But the essence of the idea is unitary, arbitrary will...

...The critics, however, do not so much deny the force of the distinction on its merits as dispute the ways in which it may be applied in practice...

...From the beginning, they intended to go beyond any natural law, any positive law, and any rule of reason to establish their fortress in the arbitrary will of the leader...

...To obey the will of toilers is thought to be obedience not solely to human will but to Nature or History itself...

...He recognizes that, in terms of human rights, Castro is worse than Batista...

...That is why Professor Kolakowski writes of it as a system not to be reformed but destroyed...

...Not only that, their frequently evidenced narrowness of mind evokes its own retribution...

...These are very large ifs, but their potential cannot a priori be denied...

...It is systemically opposed not only to democracy and liberty but to any moral legitimation, even in a previously authoritarian society, outside itself...

...Yet for decades American public life and high political leadership seemed to suffer from the failure to grasp this distinction with lucidity and to employ it critically...

...Nonetheless, wishful thinking cannot carry us away...

...It must be stressed that authoritarian regimes have at times acted with all the ferocity and barbarity of totalitarian regimes...

...Because it claims to embody all morality in its own ferocious will, it is in a category all by itself...

...Hoffmann argues that the former should be treated as delinquents, the latter not...

...At first, this leader was imagined to be a single person, like II Duce himself or, later, his imitator (in this and other respects) Adolf Hitler...

...no other rights count...

...When authoritarian rulers tolerate, or in any case cannot control, the wanton murder and torture of citizens who are democratic-or, indeed, any citizens-they lose any legitimation they may claim in the name of common morality, natural law, religion, or other authority beyond the state...

...In some cases, citizens may be free to change residence, to travel, or to relocate within the country, to change occupations, and to conduct their private affairs with little or no official interference...

...They pointed to a statewide unity centered in the depths of the mind-total consent...

...The fact is that any changes, real or possible, that tend to make the communist power machine less totalitarian and less oppressive do not reinforce this system but weaken it...

...That is what makes totalitarianism novel...

...The collapse of Mussolini and Hitler has left the world with only one vigorous totalitarian system: that legitimated by Marx and Lenin...

...Since totalitarianism is fundamentally an idea, it can be defeated in and by the human spirit...

...Yet he continues to attribute idealism to the "radical regimes" and "revolutions" of our era, a simple-minded act of soul-shattering splendor...

...That is what makes totalitarianism monstrous...

...Authoritarian regimes must be assisted and encouraged, often in the light of moral claims beyond themselves which they themselves recognize, to respect the individual human rights and liberties implicit in those moral claims...

...They simply take for granted thatU.S...

...The world, we believe, cannot forever endure half slave and half free...

...The first recorded claim that a state is and ought to be totalitarian was not made by scholars but by its first enthusiastic practitioner-by Benito Mussolini in a speech of October 28, 1925: "Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nullo contro lo Stato" ("All things in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State...

...Years ago, in college, I was taught that the distinction between the authoritarian and the totalitarian regime is the single most important political distinction of our time...

...It is, perhaps, too much to hope that human flesh will ever be wholly free of authoritarian regimes and their abhorrent violations...

...Even totalitarians can cease believing in the totalitarian idea...

...We should, says Hoffmann, "give no encouragement to regimes that trample the human rights for whose defense we stand (such as the current regimes in Argentina and Chile...

...For there are, strictly and consistently, no human rights whatever outside of totalitarian justice...

...In her brilliant book, The Origins of totalitarianism (1951), Hannah Arendt began her justly famous thirteenth chapter on ' 'Ideology and Terror: A Novel Form of Government" with these words: In the preceding chapters we emphasized repeatedly that the means of total domination are not only more drastic but that totalitarianism differs essentially from other forms of political oppression known to us such as despotism, tyranny and dictatorship...

...It is not enough, however, to argue that the new powers conferred upon state authorities through modern technologies -whether of the mass media, computers, transport, communications, exquisite instruments of torture, or the capacities for mass murder-now make authoritarian regimes totalitarian...

...whenever these became truly totalitarian, they started to operate according to a system of values so radically different from all others, that none of our traditional legal, moral, or common sense utilitarian categories could any longer help us to come to terms with, or judge, or predict their course of action...

...Those who cherish democracy, individual human rights, liberty, and the power of the moral universe transcending any and all states are in opposition both to authoritarian states and to totalitarian states...

...Wherever it rose to power, it developed entirely new political institutions and destroyed all social, legal and political traditions of the country...

...In such matters, authoritarian regimes may rival totalitarian ones...

...The forms totalitarianism assumed in its three classic cases-in Mussolini's Italy, Hitler's Germany, and in the USSR under Lenin, Stalin, and today- are not identical...

...The totalitarian smiled, "Oh, he was rehabilitated...

...All typologies and generalizations, indispensable as they may be, must constantly be checked against concrete cases and singular circumstances...

...What some authoritarian governments do-and what, in the nature of the case, all are tempted to do (which is what makes democracy and the Bill of Rights necessary)-is beyond excuse...

...It goes to the source of all authority...

...This myth was briefly shattered during the period of the Ribbentrop-Molotov accord, but it revived in full vigor once Nazi Germany and the Stalinist USSR engaged in a bloody war of survival...

...There are revolutions which intend to cut human beings down until they fit that horrifying and incredible idea, and they are vigorous and on the march...

...Neither in principle nor in practice does it allow for any other justification...

...Characteristic of these critics is Stanley Hoffmann, who continues to justify the Carter policy in Latin America, even though he now finds the way in which Carter executed it incompetent...

...Only a firm grasp of the totalitarian idea arms us against the greatest menace of our era...

...On the other hand, they tacitly recognize that moral remonstrance has no effect whatever upon totalitarian states, unless backed up by applications of power which evoke reasons of expedience...

...The question that then arises is whether the system must be felled at one stroke, or whether gradual erosion can accomplish the same end...

...He asks: "Don't some repressive regimes, in our spheres of influence, survive not because they correspond to local political cultures but because of the support we lend them...

...While in practice it remained rooted in the arbitrary will of rulers, totalitarianism of the Marxist sort claimed in theory to represent "strictly and unequivocally those laws of Nature and History from which all positive laws always have been supposed to spring...

...Thus, the more successful it is, the more its physical barbarities may diminish...

...It allows for no gap between the claims of the state and the claims of morality...

...In his case, "complexity" licenses such inconsistencies, but in a pattern that is quite familiar...

...He has one standard for the former-detente, friendship, cosseting, wooing-and another for the latter: no encouragement for delinquency...

...It claims total power over every sphere of human thought and action...

...policy, "should U.S...

...Attacks upon this distinction-absent these many years-have recently been unremitting...

...But the withholding of total consent by 33 million Poles weakens the grip of the totalitarians within Poland by just that much...

...In particular, they express fears that any policy recognizing such a distinction will, in the words of Anthony Lewis, bear down hard on Communist regimes and "wink" at human rights abuses by authoritarian regimes "of the right...

...Second, we are forewarned that the suppression of information within totalitarian regimes allows them to escape public attention and public outrage commensurate with their systemic abuses...

...If the fulcrum of the argument is leverage, the recommended tactic has little immediate bearing on the type of regime in question and much bearing on its dependence upon the United States...

...Totalitarian states regard all their activities as moral by definition...

...The notion of totalitarianism, of course, is not simple...

...Mussolini and his cohorts knew quite well that they were establishing something new...

...This is not a matter of ideological preference...

...He doubts that Somoza was worse than Kadar...

...Since they are not totalitarian, they depend upon such legitimation, and its absence weakens them severely, alienates their natural supporters, and gives strength to their enemies...

...I naively expected serious journalists and academics to applaud this bridging of the gap between rhe academy and government as a step forward for reasoned intelligence...

...His point is that the "new type" of authoritarians conduct themselves like totalitarians...

...totalitarian regimes cannot be...

...So much is true...

...For authoritarian regimes may be, and often are, delegitimated because of violations of moral principles...

...Next he points to the hold of the Polish church upon the minds and hearts of millions of Poles, and its claim to a moral and historical vision independent of totalitarian ideology...

...it can only be destroyed...

...He wavers between holding that the United States can no longer unilaterally work its will in a world of complexity-he observes that where the USSR or Libya ship arms to "terrorists" there must be local actors willing to receive them-and holding that the United States can and does work its will unilaterally "to prevent the coming to power of radical regimes...

...In an important way, every political regime is unique...

...In a novel way, totalitarianism claims far more than complete dominance within the political sphere...

...The critics typically reply that in such cases we have little "leverage' ' anyway...

...Many of the pronouncements of its founders-Lenin and Trotsky above all-leave us in no doubt as to communism's essential nature...

...In two long articles on foreign policy in the New York Review of Books last spring, Hoffmann uses many subordinate clauses and sentences to import the new growth of Soviet military power and the fresh dangers of Soviet military ambition-points no longer contestable-into his earlier positions and still comes out about where Carter was in his Notre Dame speech of 1977...

...Westerners who grow up in a pragmatic, secular, limited state can scarcely comprehend the radical nature of such claims...

...It is true of "democratic," "liberal," "socialist," and even "revolutionary...

...It is this gap between the claims of the state and the moral principles from which it derives its legitimacy that makes the progress of liberty and individual rights possible...

...Yet this is true of all important words in political theory...

...No autocrat or dictator of the past ever made such total claims for the state...

...All states and most rulers in history have done things which are immoral...

...In fact, totalitarianism is neither of the Right nor of the Left...

...Totalitarian lawfulness "pretends to have found a way to establish the rule of justice on earth...

...Yet, from the perspective of the future systemic course of individual human rights, the distinction matters a great deal...

...Both stand condemned-authoritarianism by its own sources of legitimation, which it betrays, and totalitarianism by its arrogation of all morality to its own naked internal will...

...This moral difference, indeed, is recognized even by the critics of the distinction between authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, though they do not put it in so many words...

...The totalitarians could not be quite total in Poland...

...Yet here, too, the distinction between authoritarian regimes and totalitarian regimes has special force...

...It is not in their physical or psychological brutality that authoritarian regimes differ from totalitarian ones...

...Nor does the ruthless suppression of poets, intellectuals, or dissidents who threaten political stability...

...Finally, Kolakowski cites the role of privately held farms and a virtually independent agricultural sector...

...Such termites combine the powers of erosion with possibilities of destruction in a single stroke...

...Until now, there have been no cases of totalitarian systems ever being overthrown from within...

...Again, a particularly thorough and savage authoritarian regime may wage relentless war on every individual within society who threatens its grip on political power...

...It is intended to triumph through violence and coercion, obeying no other law than political expediency, and its ultimate achievement must be unlimited concentration of economic, political, police, and cultural power in the hands of a single party...

...No other source of moral or intellectual authority is recognized but the will of the ruling body...

...Totalitarianism is threatened by even the smallest wedges driven into its total claims, so that the existence of a moral vision which presumes to judge totalitarianism, rather than to be judged by it, and the existence of institutions, however restricted in their scope and practices, which in principle withhold from it total consent, may threaten to "erode" it from within...

...Instead, exactly the opposite proved to be the case...

...Communism has defined itself not only in historical practice but in theoretical terms as well...

...Writing recently in Harper's of the impact of totalitarianism upon contemporary Poland, Leszek Kolakowski focuses upon this essential point...

...Yet we are so opposed for distinctly different reasons and with distinctly different hopes...

...It is not too much to hope at all that the last remaining form of totalitarianism will decay, die, and perish from the earth...

...Michael Novak BETTER DEAD THAN THE LIVING DEAD: THE TOTALITARIAN DIFFERENCE Totalitarian regimes do not measure their successes by the number of corpses they heap up but by the degree to which they render all citizens living corpses...

...The moral order reasserts itself...

...The heart of the matter remains ideology...

...It claims, as well, total power over the moral universe of conscience and over intellect itself...

...Others, choosing the other track, huff and puff to blow up authoritarian regimes by degrees until, they claim, the distinction between the two is merely "academic...

...And we should-as Carter did in Nicaragua and Zimbabwe-accept ungrudgingly radical new regimes...

...intervention on behalf of the status quo turn us into heavy-handed protectors of shaky regimes, and should we behave as self-appointed geo-political policemen...

...The question he never confronts is whether most of the nations of the world which have experienced "revolution" in this century continue to be non-democratic, authoritarian regimes at best and totalitarian regimes at worst...

...Neither bigotry nor racism makes totalitarian regimes distinctive...

...Present totalitarian governments are developed from one-party systems...

...This discussion of Mussolini is important for understanding the fundamental notes of totalitarianism...

...Clearly, a detached scholar might argue for such a position, however odd it seems, without resisting the distinction between authoritarian and totalitarian states...

...Setting aside the role of Soviet totalitarianism in eventually deciding the fate of Poland, Kolakowski then cites those elements of life in Poland which prevented Poles (and perhaps Poles alone in Eastern Europe) from ever quite yielding total consent to totalitarian premises...

...Our first instinct is to refuse to hear them or to believe that they are equivocally intended...

...Individuals are allowed only those dimensions of spontaneity the state chooses to permit them...

...No totalitarian could say, "My country, right or wrong," for he recognizes no right, no wrong, except in the will of the rulers of the state...

...It is not without significance that the madness of Idi Amin bears resemblance to the radical revolutionary will of Pol Pot and his comrades except that the latter were following doctrine, plan, and principle...

...Furthermore, once a totalitarian regime has achieved total control over a terrorized population, it may count upon a docile citizenry...

...Desiring to save the "essence" of Marx and Lenin from having been "distorted by many very regrettable but historically explainable mistakes" (Kolakowski knows the syndrome well), some on the Left are reluctant to accept the full force of the totalitarian idea in Marxist-Leninist thought...

...Even the rulers of totalitarian states are painfully aware, as Hannah Arendt shrewdly pointed out, that even they are superfluous in the very logic of the system they serve...

...The word they consciously chose for this novelty was totalitario...

...He recalls the illusions of those who think Communism is reformable: Yet if we take communism's conception of itself at face value, a "democratic communism" is a self-contradictory notion...

...What it says, what it does, that is moral...

...Totalitarian regimes, however, cannot be reformed...

...In the words of Kolakowski again: "The question that . . . arises is whether the system must be felled at one stroke, or whether gradual erosion can accomplish the same end...

...In the end, though, ideas are decisive...

...Such a state does what it wills...

...Earlier, I cited Kolakowski's question whether totalitarianism must be destroyed in a single stroke or destroyed gradually through erosion...

...Mere support for right-wing or left-wing regimes -without ideological awareness-seemed undiscerning and ineffective...

...and maximizes those of authoritarian societies...

...they are agents for corrosion, not purification...

...They knew they were going beyond the statism of Napoleon, beyond the autocrats of fabled Byzantium, beyond tribal chieftains and Western emperors...

...Totalitarian regimes do not measure their success by the number of corpses they heap up but by the degree to which they render all citizens living corpses...

...it is his favorite word...

...In Hoffmann's world, most revolutionaries are really agrarian reformers deeply rooted in local cultures and prevented from enjoying the liberal institutions they desire solely by quasi-foreign elites propped up, alas, by the unilateral power of the United States...

...Authoritarian regimes have put to death bishops, priests, rabbis, and entire classes of people, and they have done so on religious, racial, and political grounds of virtually every sort...

...Kings have often made claims "by divine right," and all authoritarian regimes-like democratic regimes-derive legitimacy by reference to values outside the will of the rulers and the state...

...The evils of authoritarianism are no less evil because those of totalitarianism are worse...

...Farer thinks that Jeane Kirkpatrick's vision, for example, is "Manichean," and depends on "heroic indifference to detail...

...Even those Poles who are atheist and agnostic find in this vision and in the courage to sustain it a spiritual bulwark against totalitarian consent...

...From the viewpoint of a victim who has been tortured or mutilated or destroyed in the center of his personality, it makes little difference whether the torturer is authoritarian or totalitarian...

...The single human body, and the single human psyche, has all too often been submitted to the horrors of the stake, the rack, the jaw-breaking pomme, the skull-crushing machine, the electric shock, the water-torture, the guillotine, and other barbarities, under every sort of ideology...

...The regime of Idi Amin, for example, may have exceeded in its blood and gore any contemporaneous totalitarian regime except that of Pol Pot in Cambodia...

...In effect, these critics would have us punish our friends and forge closer alliances with our foes...

...It is too barbaric...

...Yet the Italian Fascists left no doubt that the citadel they occupied was not intellect but will: feroce volonta totalitaria (violent totalitarian will...

...And hundreds of millions of their subjects can cease believing in it, too...

...This contempt is carried to an extreme by Tom J. Farer in an article on Latin America which Hoffmann cites in order to spare himself detailed analysis of that region...

...The general lines of argument appear to be that those authoritarian states which, in one way or another, are allies of the United States should be placed under pressure to reform themselves...

...The essence, as Stalin divined, is as well exemplified in rule by one party, committee, troika, or Party Congress, as by a single ruler...

...It is one about which Solzhenitsyn has written often...

...The real world, these critics say, is more "complex...

...Almost systematically, Hoffmann minimizes the abuses and dangers of totalitarian societies and their friends (the USSR, Cuba, Angola, etc...

...It is one of the properties of authoritarian regimes that they owe their legitimacy, such as it is, to religious or other values greater than themselves...

...But this seems to be what Hoffmann means by' 'complexity...

...This fact has placed those on the political Left in the West in a difficult rhetorical position...

...One considers Cambodia totalitarian and Uganda authoritarian, not by counting the corpses but by examining the idea by which their rulers justified themselves...

...From the perspective of victims, as we have seen, it matters little whether one's torturers are authoritarians or totalitarians...

...Yet on this point the theory may have to be revised if, by some sustained and almost superhuman effort, the Poles (and then, perhaps, other Eastern Europeans) manage to destroy totalitarianism from within-and the Soviets, for some reason, permit the totalitarian principle to be denied in Poland...

...The case of Poland brings to light two other features of totalitarianism...

...The public effort to stifle private liberties varies widely...

...They try to water down the seriousness of the idea and to find "reforms" and "mitigations" in its embodiment...