Essay on Modern Dictatorship

Modern dictatorship is the product of World War I. The War was claimed to be a fight of democracy against autocracy and it was fought to make the world safe for democracy.

The Treaty of Versailles was also formed on broad democratic principles.

It recognised the principle of self-determination of nations and built new States on the ruins of earlier monarchies. The defeated Germany presented to the world the best specimen of a parliamentary government through the Weimar Constitution. It was hoped that the new States as well as the old would gradually come round to parliamentary democracy.

But surprising as it may seem, in close wake of the War, nearly three-quarters of the people of Europe found democratic government either destroyed or in danger of destruction. Italy came under the heels of Mussolini and his Fascist Party in 1922, after his famous march on Rome. Primo di Rivero was declared the father of Spain in 1923.

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The Weimar Constitution of 1918 was replaced in government by a dictatorship under Hitler and his Nazi party. In Poland the lingering shadow of parliamentary government was lost in 1929, when Pilsudski sent a body of soldiers into the lobby of the Chamber to remind the representatives of their limitations. In Yugoslavia, King Alexander dismissed parliament and suspended the Constitution.

In Rumania, King Carol made a similar attempt at royal dictatorship in 1931. Besides these countries, Bulgaria, Portugal, Hungary, Austria and Turkey also came under the sway of dictators. In Greece, John Metaxes established himself in power on August 4, 1939, and began to regiment the life of the country on the pattern of Germany and Italy.

In every case dictatorship was born of disillusion and despair, military defeat, economic crisis, breakdown of old traditions and the existence of a man or a group of men with a definite programme of action.

In countries where democracies had appeared, it had been a plant with no deep roots as it was alien to the soil. Conditions were therefore not favourable to the successful functioning of democratic institutions.

In all these countries it was a dictatorship of the Right. But in Russia it was a dictatorship of the Left. The former means the dictatorship of the capitalist and the latter is the dictatorship of the proletariat, which is a transitional phase between the destruction of the capitalist society and the emergence of the communistic society when the State “withers away.”

Both these brands of “dictatorship is fundamentally opposed to one another in their ideology, but they operate on roughly the same principles. Their common feature was that both ruled by a single group and do not tolerate the existence of any other party.

They begin with the community, not with the individual, and consider that the claims of the State, as representing the community, must always have precedence. They deny that the power of the State should be limited by appeal either to individual rights or to fundamental laws; law is the will of the State and there is nothing higher than the State.

They deny that any part or aspect of human life can be outside the normal and continuous control of the State; the State is charged with authority over the whole, the totality of what goes within its territories—political, economic, religious, and cultural. Government is identified with the State and it is not responsible to anything or anybody.

The non-accountability of government is, in fact, one of the fundamental concepts of dictatorship. The dictatorship of all types has, therefore, in common the negation of the fundamental principles on which democracy rests.

Modern dictatorships, therefore, gave birth to a totalitarian State as opposed to a democratic State. The Greek City-State was also totalitarian in the sense that the Greeks did not differentiate between the State and society.

The State and society were practically synonymous for them and the Greek City-State was omnicompetent; it was the church, the school, and the State all combined. But the modem dictator’s totalitarian State is not one like the Greek City-State.

It is total government with autocracy extending its interest and control into every facet of the people’s lives. The State is everything and the individual amounts to nothing.

Two important principles of modem dictatorship are: (1) to make a sharp distinction between rulers and subjects; and (2) to blur the distinction between government and the State.

In order that his authority may not be challenged, the ruler not only monopolises the actual power, but denies to others the right to power. An effective means to this end is to obliterate the difference between government and the State.

The ruler becomes the State. The State and, for that matter, government becomes omnicompetent. There is no sphere of life which the modem dictator’s State will not cover. For Hitler and Mussolini there was nothing above the State, nothing beyond it, and nothing beside it.

The State embraced all activities of the individuals and subordinated them to national ends. It was an omnicompetent and infallible State. Mussolini’s motto to the people of Italy was: “All within the State, none outside the State, none against the State.” This was tantamount to the worship of the State and this worship of the State was cultivated in schools, on the playground, in clubs, associations and in fact everywhere.

The life of every individual did not belong to him, but to the State and the State alone. Thus, narrow nationalism, chauvinism, aggressive warfare and imperialistic expansion were some of the essential features of Facism and Naziism.

Russian Communism had also become nationalistic and militaristic, although it was not yet aggressively imperialistic, despite what Russia had done to Finland, the small Baltic States and in Afghanistan.

When the nation is glorified, the obvious result is war. Hitler and Mussolini openly preached war. Hitler extolled force and violence and he had all praise for the man of action. He believed in the power of the victorious sword.

According to Mussolini, peace “is an act of cowardice in the face of sacrifice.” Italy and Germany pursued a policy of colonial expansion for procuring raw materials, for the sale of their manufactured goods, and for the realisation of their will to power. Mussolini said, “Imperialism is the eternal and immutable law of life.” Italy, he declared, “must expand or perish.”

Dictatorship means one-man or one-party political rule and all totalitarian regimes, to right or left, have adopted essentially the same technique. The leader or dictator who stands at the head obviously cannot do everything by himself. He rules through an elite or selected ruling class and this class is the party which is the basis of the system. It is, therefore, the very antithesis of democracy.

Democracy, according to the dictators and their apologists, is a decaying corpse because it is “stupid, corrupt and slow-moving.” Parliaments, it was maintained, are mere talking shops, “incapable of accomplishing results; at times of emergency they are absolutely helpless.”

Since modem dictatorship is one-man or one-party rule, it permits no political opposition and is hostile to individual liberty. Individual liberty, according to Communism, is a bourgeois conception, and Fascism and Naziism both, regarded it as a fetish of the’ past.

The individual, it is said, has no life apart from the State, and so he must be completely subordinated to it. The totalitarian State, thus, does not give to its subjects the right to speech, the right to press, the right to assembly and all those rights which characterise the individual’s life in a democratic State.

In the USSR where they were conceded, they were subordinated to the cause of socialism and a socialist society. The ideal of Naziism and Fascism was “one Reich, one people, one leader.”

The Fascist oath read: “In the name of God and Italy, I swear to execute without discussion the orders of the Duce and to serve with all my strength and if necessary with my blood the cause of the Fascist revolution.” Mussolini’s motto to the youth organisation of Italy was “To believe, to obey, and to fight.” Hitler put it: duty, discipline and sacrifice.

This is regimentation of human life, pure and simple. The whole nation must think in one way, talk in one way, and act in one way. Free discussion and criticism of government were ruthlessly suppressed.

Communist totalitarianism is distinct from Fasicst or Nazi totalitarianism in one important fact. The State, its machinery and everything else that happens in a Communist regime is meant to be merely a transitional stage on history’s inexorable path toward a future depicted as one of complete human emancipation and freedom.

The Dictatorship of the Proletariat is armed with the revolutionary task of destroying capitalism and building socialism. Every coercive measure it adopts is justified to attain the end.

The Party, which is the vanguard of the socialist society, is entrusted with the duty of educating the “backward” public in their “social consciousness.” The Party must, therefore, exercise control and accumulate powers.

The holders of powers are the agents of the movement of socialism and they act “democratically” in a more profound way than do the people’s representatives in a capitalist democracy. The Communist leaders are accordingly, performing the historic task of social and general reconstruction.

It is a basic characteristic of Communism that it makes social change a major objective and that it mobilizes all the instruments of the modem industrial State—technology, education, communication media—to accelerate this process. In doing so, it has two objectives.

To move as rapidly as possible toward the transcendent goals which are formulated by the leaders, and to keep the society so mobile that non-party groups, which are permitted to exist, have little chance to stabilize and exercise effective influence on its character. In communist regimes, there is what is often called “permanent revolution.”

The purge is another characteristic of Communist regimes. It promotes specific policies and, at the same time, it removes those who oppose them. It may eliminate the power of those against whom it is aimed.

The purge, accordingly acts against those considered a danger to the elite either because they hold different social objectives (as was true of sizable groups in the early days of Communist regimes) or because they endorse different techniques for moving toward the common goal or because they threaten to establish predominant influence (as it has happened after Mao’s death in China).

To sum up, totalitarian polities, like democratic ones, may be both civilian controlled and popular, but in totalitarian Communist systems there is an official ideology. The ideology is totalitarian in that the totality of social life is considered a legitimate matter for political control.

In a totalitarian regime not only power is concentrated in the hands of an individual or groups, but also the regime eliminates all opposition parties, controls communication mass media, exercises control over the economy, makes deliberate use of terror through the secret police, and completely amoral use of force. The existence of a single official ideology and a single party accounts for concentration of political and economic power in the same group.

It is, however, argued whether it is logical to fit in the USSR, Germany and Italy in the same category. In the Soviet Union of 1970s collective leadership was replaced by rule of a single leader; the police state came to an end and there was little use of terror and physical force. Even more free opinion was tolerated though the official ideology remained unchanged.

The third session of the National People’s Congress, held in September 1980, represented a watershed in the history of Communist China. It takes the process of post-Mao change a big step further.

These are: to separate party and government posts, and to end the concentration of too much power in individual leaders, to consolidate the concept of collective leadership, to induct comparatively younger men into responsible positions, and to end the practice of life-long political vocation for ageing leaders. On the economic side, the emphasis is on decentralisation and liberalisation in the economy, which is reflected in the 1982 constitution.