Totalitarianism
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Totalitarianism has written some of the darkest pages of our human history. It has affected billions of people, just in the past century. It continues to affect millions, with the potential to impact the entire world, even as I write this. Kim il-Jong, the current ultra-authoritarian leader of North Korea, has positioned himself as a nuclear threat to the world and has tried to hold the world, especially certain countries, hostage to his threats. One of the worst problems to grasp is the effect that living within such a regime has on the people who are its targets and victims. When totalitarian victimization comes up, the thoughts are almost always drawn to the outer targets of the totalitarian regime. For instance, the Jews and gypsies who suffered and were slaughtered by Hitler's Third Reich. These people were certainly victims. What they experienced was utterly horrible to such a degree as to be nearly incomprehensible. But we forget that the people who were sucked into Hitler's ultra-authority were also victims. They, too, suffered great losses, even though those losses could not be seen on the surface. Those who lived under and within the Hitler regime were subjected to the same extreme manipulation and ultra-authoritarian tactics as people in smaller ultra-authorities. In a very real way, those held in and under the Nazi party lost their very beings to Hitler and the ultra-authority at large. Generations later, the people of Germany have still not fully recovered. The same effect is true of the people who lived under the Stalin totalitarian ultra-authority. No totalitarian regime has existed that has not adversely affected the people who have lived under the governmental cloud of extreme manipulation. Some have been impacted more than others; in many places the older totalitarian systems have crumbled without the external warfare that ended Hitler's and Hussein's regimes. In such instances, the population has had a longer, perhaps less traumatic exit from the grip of the old manipulations. However, the damages will still be there, both on a societal level and an individual level. |