Waking up to totalitarianism
by Rob Slane, TCW:
WE in Western societies naively imagine we would never descend into totalitarianism, because such systems are unmistakably evil and we are undeniably good. Not only would we immediately recognise it, but our moral goodness and inestimable courage would see to it that we stopped it before it took root.
However, such systems never arise vowing to deliver evil, but always promising to do good. The Bolsheviks were apparently redressing the plight of the workers against their bourgeois oppressors. The National Socialists were restoring the pride of Germany after the ignominies of Versailles and hyperinflation. The theme connecting all such systems is that those propagating them are the self-proclaimed saviours of society, dealing with the problem and the enemy which they themselves have defined, and presenting the cause to the masses not as outright evil, but rather unmitigated good.
Our ability to oppose such a system does not depend on our ability to see the evil from our armchairs decades later. Rather, it depends on our ability to spot totalitarianism in its fledgling form in our day, and on summoning the courage and resolve to stand against it here and now.
In an address to the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations in New York in 1975, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn warned his audience against Western complacency by asking:
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