Allowing Totalitarian Regimes to Take Over

The causes of totalitarian regimes taking power:

In Germany, between 1930 to 1940, there was starvation, there was extreme poverty, there was total despair, and no one did anything to help the suffering except one man who came along in the name of the National Socialist Party. He promised salvation, food, strength, power, and pride. What would you do? Assume you have no knowledge of history, you are living in despair, and your children are starving. Would you follow someone who gives hope? You have nothing to lose.

That man was Hitler.

Do not let future generations of people fall into such despair and degradation that they will follow the next Hitler or the next Stalin. Extremes of socialism and fascism feed on despair and recruit those who feel the government has no connection to them.

The disadvantaged, the disconnected, those with no legitimate voice in government, the self-inflicted disenfranchised — these exist in every nation. The nation as a whole may be wealthy, educated, articulate, enfranchised, and reasonable. There are always people left out of the whole. There are always those with less and resenting it. It does not matter if the country is impoverished or the richest in the material world. There are always those left behind, those with less than the majority. These are the people who turn to extremists for help. They do so because they feel no one else will help. To the average person, many of those disadvantaged appear to suffer from self-inflicted problems — self-inflicted though fecklessness, by choosing to use drink, drugs, or by failure to take the education offered. This attitude by the majority only makes the discontented more certain the world is against them. They do not see themselves as causing the problem. Their attitude is that the world is against them. Even in nations, such as Britain, with a welfare state support that is intended to ensure everyone “enjoys” a basic level of material life, there are many who are dissatisfied. They may be annoyed by the control the bureaucracy has over their lives, the rules they must obey to get welfare; or they may be angry about the divide between the most wealthy and those on welfare.

The social services people they interact with are usually the bottom rung of the bureaucratic ladder. They are badly trained, badly paid, badly led, stressed, and have their own personal problems to deal with. They do not always form a beneficial connection to the workings of the state. Some may have their own grievances and align themselves with the disaffected. Others are only concerned with their personal progress, to a degree that they become indifferent to the people they are supposed to help. All the time, the television is bombarding everyone with distorted images of great wealth available to everyone who gets to be a pop singer, a footballer, or TV news reader. The expectation among the disaffected is that if given they opportunity they could also have it all. This fuels the anger and antisocial emotions of the disaffected. Logical reason stops being used; anger and grievance become a way of life. The dissatisfaction and the perceived unfairness take over and replace individual efforts to change each person's material well-being by effort, education, and work.

This is the feeding ground for totalitarianism political parties. They can be far left or far right. They all need the support of those who can be persuaded they have nothing to loose. The weapons of persuasion are exaggeration, bigotry, ignorance, envy, greed, deceit, lies, and flattery. Latch on to one small but genuine grievance, expand the suffering from an actual case, turn this into a widespread view that it is constantly happening to “their” social or religious group, and you have a following. If you add in the provision of alcohol and illegal drugs, it is relatively easy to rouse a mob. The existence of the mob is used to fuel propaganda. The media is manipulated and publicity is given to the huge threat to the majority, a threat that only the totalitarians have a way of containing.

It is interesting to read in The Voyage of the Beagle, Darwin saying about Paraguay in 1833, “This country, like every other South American states, will have to learn that a republic cannot succeed until it contains a certain body of men imbued with the principles of Justice and honour.” From this, it seems that unless a government is honourable to all its citizens, unless there is justice for all, totalitarian tyranny will take over.

Be warned. It can happen again, especially when fermented by religious zealots with a separate agenda to that which they allow to be known.