Introduction to the Age of Totalitarianism

The Great War of 1914-18 was dubbed by contemporaries as the "war to end all wars." However, a mere twenty-one years later, the world would be plunged into an even more deadly, destructive and transformative war. The Second World War (1939-1945) involved millions of people from almost every continent. Major world powers armed their massive technological armies and navies for global warfare while they mobilized the home front for military production and ideological conflict. While the causes of the Second World War are complex, its origins are in the political ideology of totalitarianism, especially the virulent hyper-nationalist form called fascism. While history remembers straight-armed saluting Nazis parading for Hitler, totalitarianism was more than this national expression in Germany from 1933-1945. Totalitarianism and resistance to it defined the interwar years and set the spirit of the age. 1919-1939 were tumultuous years in world history. The images, films, maps, political speeches and other artifacts that make up the age's history seem to point to a pre-destined catastrophe of war. But in the end, it was not destiny but human agency and action that determined the course of this period of history.

The Origins and Ideology of Totalitarianism:

Totalitarianism was a worldwide phenomenon that emerged from the multiple economic, social and cultural crises of the interwar years (1918-39). While the movement and ideology is usually associated with Hitler and Nazi Germany, varieties of totalitarianism emerged into power in Italy, Romania, Hungary, the Soviet Union and Japan. Regardless of national expression, totalitarianism was a response to the perceived "crises" of modern life and society emerging since the 1880s and continuing into the first decades of the 20th century. For many, rapid industrialization and economic recessions, intense urbanization, labor organization and strikes, the rise of communism and socialism, emerging consumer culture and the "New Woman" and women's right to vote signaled a coming "culture war." To their followers, totalitarian movements represented order versus disorder, traditional values versus ethical relativism, centralized power versus democracy and national progress and vitality versus national decline and decay.

Read Mussolini's What is Fascism (1932)