III.

The Party and Its Tools

Under a totalitarian regime, members of the ruling party become the elite of the nation. The entire society is subjected to a hierarchical organization wherein each individual is responsible to another in a position of higher authority—with the single exception of the supreme leader, where one exists, who is answerable to no one. All non-governmental social groupings are either destroyed totally or coordinated to serve the purposes of the party and the state.

Total subjection of the individual became possible through advanced bureaucratic organization and industrial technology. Among the decisive features of totalitarian dictatorships are a monopoly of mass communications, a terroristic secret police apparatus, a monopoly of all effective weapons of destruction, and a centrally controlled economy. It is the ideology of the totalitarian state, however, which provides the justification (and usually the functional principles) for the universal propagation of the ruling structure. In its universalist aims totalitarianism has been compared to theocracy.

A.

Control of Mass Communications

By virtue of the monopoly of mass communications the ruling party and the government are in possession of all channels through which people receive information, guidance, and direction. All newspaper, magazine, and book publishing, as well as radio and television broadcasting, theatre productions, and cinema, is centrally controlled and directed. All writers, speakers, actors, composers, and poets are enrolled in party-controlled organizations, and they are licensed by the government. Usually they are required to be members of the party. The party line, that is, the party's interpretation of events, is imposed on all mass media through censorship.

B.

The Secret Police

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.

C.

Control of Armament

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.

D.

Control of the Economy

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.