totalitarianism

plural totalitarianisms

1. countableuncountableA system of government in which the people have virtually no authority and the state wields absolute control, for example, a dictatorship.

   Now, with her new book Beyond the Wall, Hoyer is seeking to retrieve the GDR from being written off as a chilling “footnote in German history”, a miserably grey country synonymous with unflinching totalitarianism.

   2023 April 28, Frederick Studemann, “Katja Hoyer: we need to hear ‘the whole story’ about East Germany”, in Financial Times, London: The Financial Times Ltd., →ISSN, →OCLC

   3 more examples

   And if it is true that in the final stages of totalitarianism an absolute evil appears (absolute because it can no longer be deduced from humanly comprehensible motives), it is also true that without it we might never have known the truly radical nature of Evil.

   1951, Hannah Arendt, “Preface to the First Edition”, in The Origins of Totalitarianism (A Harvest/HBJ Book), new edition, San Diego, Calif.; New York, N.Y.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, published 1973, →ISBN, pages viii–ix

   The film Repentance caused a sensation across the Soviet Union not only because it publicly condemned the evil of totalitarianism but also because it encouraged tens of thousands of Soviet people to reflect upon the source and root cause of the evil.[…]

   2020 October 31, Yiqing, “Why Is the Chinese Communist Party So Afraid of Intellectuals?”, in Minghui

   Mr. Yudin argues that Russia is moving out of authoritarianism – where political passivity and civic disengagement are key features – into totalitarianism, which relies on mass mobilization, terror and homogeneity of beliefs.

   2022 April 9, Sabrina Tavernise, “[Vladimir] Putin’s war in Ukraine shatters an illusion in Russia”, in The New York Times, New York, N.Y.: The New York Times Company, →ISSN, →OCLC