On Totalitarian Regime

This is a political system, that has infinitely expanded its intervention in the lives of citizens so that to include all their activities into the scope of his administration and coercive regulation. The word "Totus" is Latin for "all, the whole." A totalitarian state is a state comprehensive of all. It starts from the fact that the citizens initiative is unnecessary and harmful, and the freedom of citizens is dangerous and intolerable. There is a single power center: it is designed to know all, foresee all, plan all and prescribe all. The usual sense of justice is based on the premise: all that is not forbidden – is allowed; a totalitarian regime inculcates a sense quite different: everything not prescribed - is prohibited. The normal government says: you have a sphere of the private interest, you are free in it; totalitarian state says, there is only the public interest, and you're bound by it. The normal state allows: think for yourself, have faith freely, build your inner life, as you want; the totalitarian state requires: think what is prescribed, do not have faith at all, build your inner life by decree. In other words: here controls are comprehensive, man is enslaved in his every aspect, freedom has become a crime and is punishable.

Thus it appears that the essence of totalitarianism is not so much a particular form of government (democratic, republican or authoritarian), but in the amount of control: its volume is all-encompassing. However, such comprehensive control is feasible only during the dictatorship of the most consistent kind, based on the unity of government, on a single exclusive party, on a monopoly of employment, on pervasive domestic spying, on mutual informant network, and ruthless terror. This organization of control allows the nominal form of government to be any kind: Soviet, federal, electoral, Republican or otherwise. Important is not the form of government, but organization of control that provides absolute reach: to the last nook in an urban basement, to the country side shed, to the privacy of the soul, to the science lab, the composer’s imagination, the hospitals, the libraries, the newspapers, to the fishing boat and to the church confessional.

This means that the totalitarian regime does not rest on the basic laws but on the decrees of the party's executive orders and regulations. To the extent that laws still exist, they are completely subordinated to the party's instructions. As the institutions of the state still appear to function, they show only a veneer shell masking the party dictatorship. As "citizens" still exist, they are the only subjects of duties (but not rights! Not privileges!); they are objects of orders, or otherwise: individual men are working machines, conductors of fear and simulators of sympathetic loyalty. This is a system in which there is no legal subjects, there are no laws, there is no rule of law. Here the sense of justice is replaced by psychological mechanisms - hunger, fear, humiliation and torment; and creative work is replaced by the psycho-physical mechanisms of hysterical strain of a slave.

Therefore totalitarian regime is not either a legal body nor a governmental institution. Created by materialists, he is held together entirely on animal and slave-like mechanisms of "body-soul", on threatening orders of work supervisors, on their arbitrary orders passed to them down from above. It is not a state in which there are citizens, laws and government, it is the socio-hypnotic machine, it is a terrible and unprecedented in history biological phenomenon - a society welded together by fear instinct and villainy - but not by right, nor by freedom, nor by the spirit, nor by the citizenship and not by the nation.

If notwithstanding, one were to speak about the form of this organization, even not a legal but rather counter-legal, then that is a slave-owning dictatorship of unprecedented size and pervasive reach.

The rule of law rests entirely on the vocation of the human person – person spiritual, free, plenipotentiary, self-controlling in the soul and in the business, that is, it rests upon the loyal sense of justice. A totalitarian regime, on the contrary, rests on a terrorist suggestion. People are facing unemployment, deprivation of rights, separation from family, loss of family and children, arrest, jail, inquisitorial interrogation, humiliation, beatings, torture, exile, the death in a labor concentration camp of hunger, cold and fatigue; under the pressure of this all-encompassing fear they are inculcated into full obedience, shamelessly materialistic world view, the systematic mutual denunciation, readiness for whatever falsehood and immorality and into consent to live from hand to mouth and with bare threads covering their bodies, under back-breaking work. And moreover, they are taught "the pathos of the communist revolution" and the absurd sense of superiority over all other nations, in other words, they are taught the pride of their own insanity and the illusion of their own prosperity. Under the influence of this terrorist hypnosis they are infected with a blind faith in the unnaturality of communism, tragicomic conceit and contemptuous distrust of anything that is not coming from (Soviet! Communist!) pseudo-Russia.

This hypnosis infiltrates and cripples their souls - for a long time, for decades, in generations; they no longer notice its origin, they do not understand from where they have this obsessive pride, and some of them (thank God - not all!), once abroad, wandering in a sick, totalitarian state of the soul on the face of the earth, trusting no one, with malice and contempt meeting earlier immigrants and fall from time to time in the fits of painful self-importance. This is the remains of the thirty-year [1917-1947] hypnosis that can only gradually be overcome and eradicated. These are the unique features of this sick and monstrous regime.

In the Bible we often read a prophet speaking of one thing but we see a meaning that he, it seems, himself was not entirely aware of; we understand the prophetic meaning because we read it through the New Testament prism, which reveals it.

Something similar happens here, I think. Let us read this again:

The rule of law rests entirely on the vocation of the human person – person spiritual, free, plenipotentiary, self-controlling in the soul and in the business, that is, it rests upon the loyal sense of justice. A totalitarian regime, on the contrary, rests on a terrorist suggestion. People are facing unemployment, deprivation of rights, separation from family, loss of family and children, arrest, jail, inquisitorial interrogation, humiliation, beatings, torture, exile, the death in a labor concentration camp of hunger, cold and fatigue; under the pressure of this all-encompassing fear they are inculcated into full obedience, shamelessly materialistic world view, the systematic mutual denunciation, readiness for whatever falsehood and immorality and into consent to live from hand to mouth and with bare threads covering their bodies, under back-breaking work. And moreover, they are taught "the pathos of the communist revolution" and the absurd sense of superiority over all other nations, in other words, they are taught the pride of their own insanity and the illusion of their own prosperity. Under the influence of this terrorist hypnosis they are infected with a blind faith in the unnaturality of communism, tragicomic conceit and contemptuous distrust of anything that is not coming from (Soviet! Communist!) pseudo-Russia.
This hypnosis infiltrates and cripples their souls - for a long time, for decades, in generations; they no longer notice its origin, they do not understand from where they have this obsessive pride, and some of them (thank God - not all!), once abroad, wandering in a sick, totalitarian state of the soul on the face of the earth, trusting no one, with malice and contempt meeting earlier immigrants and fall from time to time in the fits of painful self-importance. This is the remains of the thirty-year [1917-1947] hypnosis that can only gradually be overcome and eradicated. These are the unique features of this sick and monstrous regime.

The direct meaning is: the Russian people were intimidated into animal-like existence by the Soviet terror, which was more pervasive than anything the human history prepared us for: "People are facing unemployment, deprivation of rights, separation from family, loss of family and children, arrest, jail, inquisitorial interrogation, humiliation, beatings, torture, exile, the death in a labor concentration camp of hunger, cold and fatigue; under the pressure of this all-encompassing fear they are inculcated into full obedience".

From terror follows fear and from fear -- obedience. From obedience follows the way of life: "shamelessly materialistic world view, the systematic mutual denunciation, readiness for whatever falsehood and immorality and into consent to live from hand to mouth and with bare threads covering their bodies, under back-breaking work". Finally, from the way of life follows aggressive superiority: "they are taught the pride of their own insanity and the illusion of their own prosperity. Under the influence of this terrorist hypnosis they are infected with a blind faith in the unnaturality of communism, tragicomic conceit and contemptuous distrust of anything [foreign]". That completes the formation of a new nation from the original one: "This hypnosis infiltrates and cripples their souls - for a long time, for decades, in generations; they no longer notice its origin, they do not understand from where they have this obsessive pride".

But this is the order the ingredients were mixed in 1917-1947. We, Americans, recognize the ingredients but not the order of mixing them. Terror we did not have yet; fear is just beginning to be felt, as people gradually realize that the old-fashioned prosperity is slipping away and the new prosperity is all in serving the new Leviathan: in Obamacare, the lawyering regulatory class, the education bureaucracy, the political hacks, the Wall-street-Bernanke money pump. Pervasive control? We got the technology and we a ready to use it. And we got the ideology to drive up the fervor: we are the nation that conquered discrimination, religion, racism, homophobia, national borders, and lead the world into the 21 century.

So could it be that the Obama hypnosis -- which is evident to anyone who looks -- is not the result of terror, but rather of the left wing ideology itself? It is, after all, not Cheka but the multimillion Russian peasantry that got itself drunk and went, beady-eyed, to trash everything of value, selling off its allies in the war, bayonetting the officers and socializing girls. That was not before the terror but the origin of the terror: the hypnotic state of a nation that had guns but lost religion.

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I.A. Ilyin. On Totalitarian Regime