Totalitarianism

The secret police apparatus employs the theories and techniques of scientific crime detection and modern psychology. It terrorizes the population in ways radically different from and much crueller than those of the police systems of earlier autocracies. The totalitarian secret police employs institutions and devices such as the concentration camp, predetermined trials, and public confessions in the propagation of state terror. One of the dangers inherent in the totalitarian system is the possibility that the secret police might seize control of the party itself.

The monopoly of all effective weapons of destruction is an attribute of all contemporary governments. In the totalitarian states, however, which provide no legal means of effecting a change of government, popular revolutions, such as the uprisings that occurred in East Germany (now part of the United Federal Republic of Germany) in 1953 and in Hungary in 1956, have scant prospects of success because of the state's unhesitating use of them to crush dissent, as in the Tiananmen Square Protest in China. Tanks, aeroplanes, and other weapons provide the totalitarian state with strong defence against revolution.

The centrally controlled economy enables the totalitarian state to exploit its population for foreign conquest and world revolution. For example, all resources can be concentrated on a single important military project. The totalitarian type of economy enables the ruling apparatus to control the workers and make them dependent on the government. Without a work permit none can work. Work permits may be withdrawn for offences such as objecting to foul working conditions. Thus the workers in a totalitarian state are sometimes called state slaves.