emerging Italian Fascist state as 'totalitarian'. During the late 1950s and the early 1960s -

particularly in a Cold War fixated America - a theory centred on totalitarianism became the

dominant academic narrative on both fascism and communism.

This was in good part due to its use in legitimising certain anti-communist conservative political

aims of the Cold War (by associating communism with the universally hated Nazism) and an

associated solid support in the western popular media which fastened on to this easy to

understand model and repeated it ad nausium. The correct interpretation of its nazi past

became a potent ideological weapon in the propaganda war, with historians on both sides

embroiled in a heavily charged political debate as to whether Nazism was either an expression

of big business (and therefore chiefly a capitalist and liberal phenomenon), or a variety of

'totalitarian' regime still expressed in East German 'communism'.

This historical revisionism was to return in another guise in 1986 with the so called

historikerstreit ('historians battle') Sparked off by the text of a lecture to be given by Ernst Nolte

emigre to the US (in 1934), Herbert Marcuse. During the 1930s he had suggested that for all the

It is the fatal combination of rule by permanent terror and blinkered ideological rigidity and

already existed, for some time, a body of serious research into the totalitarian movements

and culminating in One-Dimensional Man (1964) he argued that while fascist society imprisons

subject to the same life-negating, authoritarian and genocidal potential. In such literature Soviet

disintegration of European society brought about by World War 1. This proved to be an uneven

dictatorship resulting from the difficulties experienced by multiparty democracy.

Some common words found in the essay are:
World War, Friedrich Brzezinski, Eros Civilization, Soviet Gulags, Cold War, Dictatorship Autocracy, Marxist Neumann, Deitrich Bracher, Soviet Union, Interpretations Fascism, carl friedrich, totalitarian theory, nineteenth century, atomisation individualisation, friedrich zbigniew, carl friedrich zbigniew, cambridge mass, totalitarian dictatorship autocracy, beneath surface, movements regimes, liberal democracy, cats grey, friedrich zbigniew brzezinski, mainstream totalitarian theory, level abstraction cats,
Approximate Word count = 2597
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page double spaced)