this lecture is titled dictatorships for history eleven o one the united states entered world war i with the stated aim of making the world safe for democracy after the war germany replaced its monarchy with the democratic weimar republic and new nations in eastern europe such as poland and czechoslovakia also became democracies however as the interwar period progressed numerous countries including germany abandoned democracy in favor of authoritarian regimes that promised extreme solutions for extreme problems, including the social and economic problems associated with the Great Depression. This lecture examines dictatorships from the fascist Nazi right and the communist left, and introduces a political phenomenon that is still with us today, totalitarianism. Totalitarian regimes past and present share some common characteristics.
Let's review seven of the main characteristics of totalitarianism. First of all, a totalitarian regime demands the active, not simply passive, but active loyalty and commitment of all of its citizens. Secondly, a totalitarian regime relies on mass communications, propaganda, for the purpose of indoctrinating its citizens of all ages thirdly a totalitarian regime as we can see in the very name totalitarian demands total control not just of actions but of thoughts we think here for example of george orwell's term from nineteen eighty four from his novel nineteen eighty four thought crimes or the phenomenon of re-education that we see in communist China and other regimes that have historically shown totalitarian traits. Fourthly, a totalitarian regime typically has a single leader and around that single leader there is a cult of personality.
He is, as you can see in the picture of Stalin in the center of this slide, a larger-than-life figure, not coincidentally a god-like figure. looming high above mere mortals, someone in whom the masses pose total faith, total commitment, total obedience. And that single leader, with usually his cult of personality, presides over a single party, whether it's the Communist Party, the Nazi Party, the Ba'ath Party, etc. Fifth, totalitarian regimes reject liberal democracy.
parliamentary government. Liberal democracy and parliamentary government are not seen as sources of freedoms and rights, but rather divisiveness, corruption, special interests. Sixth, in a totalitarian regime, individual freedom is subordinated to the general will. The individual does not have personal dignity, rights, and freedom of thought.
Rather, The collective, whether it is the workers, the master race, or whatever body is designated as the collective, that will of the collective is all. And seventh, a totalitarian regime relies on a secret police, whether it's the KGB or the Gestapo. It relies on a secret police, surveillance. including electronic surveillance, the use of technology, and very importantly, a police state in which people are suspicious and paranoid of each other, relying on denunciations and betrayals.
The two most prominent dictatorships, Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union, reached their peak of power in the 1930s. But there was a precursor of these extremist regimes already in the 1920s, and that was the fascist Italian regime led by Benito Mussolini. Benito Mussolini led fascist Italy from 1922 to 1943. He was killed at the end of World War II in 1945. A little bit about Mussolini's background.
Benito Mussolini was a former socialist, and he was also a World War I veteran who became an extreme nationalist. in the course of World War I and thereafter. In 1919, in the northern city of Milan, he established the Fascist Party.
The Fascist Party was an anti-communist and anti-democratic nationalist party, a party that had mass rallies and who had stormtroopers, or street fighters, called the Blackshirts. who went into street battles against socialists communists and labor unions italy was a country that was having economic social and political problems after world war one musolini's extremist fascist party drew a lot of support from not just middle-class italians but also industrialists and landowners Mussolini's black shirts often acted where the legal authorities could not or would not act, including the violent disruption of strikes. In 1922, Mussolini and his black shirts marched on Rome.
Rather than dispersing the fascist marchers, the King of Italy appointed Mussolini Prime Minister. Political insiders, political elites, believed that Mussolini without experience in parliamentary politics, could be manipulated. However, Mussolini's intention as Prime Minister was not to save the parliamentary regime, but to destroy it.
And indeed, by 1926, Mussolini had succeeded, through violence and propaganda and subterfuge, in creating a one-party fascist state in Italy. Mussolini liked to see himself as a successful totalitarian dictator. Indeed, as you can see in the picture in front of you, he also liked to project the image of a new Roman emperor. And as we'll see later, Mussolini indeed did try to build a new Roman empire in an alliance with Nazi Germany. Mussolini once said, in terms of his fascist regime, everything within the state.
Nothing outside the state. Nothing against the state. And that seems to be a perfect definition of totalitarianism in a nutshell.
However, Mussolini never did succeed in building a total state in Italy. There were other sources of authority that remained. For example, there was still a monarch. There was still a king of Italy.
Even though Mussolini ran the government, there was still a titular monarch. Also, the army and its generals remained an important source of power. In fact, like the king, a source of power that during World War II would turn against Mussolini and depose him.
And finally, the Catholic Church, with which Mussolini had a treaty or concordat, was still an autonomous body in Italy in control of education and Catholic youth groups. So unlike certain... other totalitarian dictators, Mussolini never quite achieved the complete leveling of all of society's institutions that he aspired to, and something at which other totalitarian rulers, past and present, have been more comprehensive, thoroughgoing, and successful at. Nonetheless, Mussolini set a precedent for the successful creation of a dictatorship on the ruins of a parliamentary democracy, and he directly influenced Adolf Hitler. Let's turn to Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany.
Again, a little bit of background about Hitler himself. Adolf Hitler, perhaps the most famous or infamous German who ever lived, was actually born in Austria. what we know in the course as Austria-Hungary before the end of World War I. Adolf Hitler left Austria-Hungary, in fact he was dodging the draft, and went to Munich, Germany.
When World War I broke out, Hitler enthusiastically joined the German army, because he was an extreme German nationalist. During World War I, he was a decorated corporal. He actually received the Iron Cross twice. And when Germany lost the war, as mentioned in an earlier lecture, Hitler was disillusioned and refused to believe that Germany had truly been defeated.
He became a foe of the new Weimar Republic, rejected the Treaty of Versailles, and let vent extreme anti-Semitic opinions. His Nazi party that he founded, with SA brownshirts who marched in the streets and protected him at mass rallies, the Nazis were an anti-Weimar, anti-Versailles, and anti-Semitic political party. In 1923, after an attempted seizure of power called the Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler briefly spent time in prison. While in prison, he wrote a book called Mein Kampf, or My Struggle. In Mein Kampf, Hitler promised readers that Germany would rearm, that it would get rid of the Jews one way or another, and that it would achieve Lebensraum, or living space, through expansion.
Hitler was released from prison and was in obscurity during the late 1920s, but the Great Depression gave him an opportunity to come to power. Extreme problems called for extreme solutions. Under the strain of the Great Depression, the Weimar Republic disintegrated.
One of the last actions of the President of the Weimar Republic was to appoint Adolf Hitler Chancellor in January 1933. By March of 1933, Hitler gained emergency powers from the German parliament. And he used these emergency powers to create a one-party state by 1934, with himself as the leader or Fuhrer of Nazi Germany. Assisted by the Reich Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, Hitler broadcast the Nazi message, literally, to millions of Germans. And he used his power to bring about anti-Jewish laws which emphasized so-called Aryan superiority and the so-called inferiority and danger of Jews. The anti-Jewish laws, which rendered Jews second-class citizens, culminated in the November 1938 Night of Broken Glass, a horrific orgy of violence and desecration.
In Nazi Germany, worse things were yet to come. during the war with the Holocaust. The Holocaust was perpetrated by Hitler's regime, including the SS leader Heinrich Himmler. More about that later.
In the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin succeeded Lenin and by 1928 had consolidated his power. His vision for the Soviet Union was expressed in the first five-year plan in 1928. which called for rapid industrialization of that country the collectivization of agriculture meant that twenty six million family farms would be turned into two hundred and fifty thousand collectives to initiate collectivization stalin began with propaganda against more successful indeed wealthier peasants called kulaks but once the kulaks were collectivized millions of others followed resistance was punished with violence and in some cases the withdrawal of food from entire areas. The Ukraine in particular suffered, and approximately 10 million peasants died in the terror famine that happened between 1933 and 1934. Many other people, millions in fact ultimately, were sent to the gulag, the concentration camps, the labor camps in Siberia.
Stalin also purged the Communist Party. and the Soviet military. Eventually, 8 million people were arrested in this mass purge, and over a million people were killed.
As we can see in the photographs on the right, people simply disappeared, literally and figuratively, from the picture, including Stalin's leading comrades. In our next lecture, we're going to look at World War II and the Holocaust. We'll look at what Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan did to bring about World War II.
And we'll look at why World War II was even more destructive than World War I.