It’s Not Totalitarian — But What Is It?
15th March 2018
Baron Bodissey asks a good question.
I’ve taken a lot of flak over the past couple of days for referring to the current government of the UK as “totalitarian”. And with good reason — it’s not the right word to describe the repressive regime which is now in place in Britain. The task of suppressing free speech and independent opinion is not the government’s alone, but is also subcontracted to supposedly independent institutions of civil society, the media (especially social media) and the academy. It’s a full-court press across the whole of British culture, but without any obvious co-ordination by a centralized hierarchy headed by a strongman in the style of Stalin, Hitler, or Mao.
No, it’s a different system, and the word “totalitarian” does not do it justice. The word is too old-fashioned: It conjures up images of jackboots and concentration camps and firing squads, which are not necessary (so far) to accomplish the state’s purposes.
Sweden and Germany are much the same, and other Western European countries — France, Belgium, and the Netherlands — are almost as bad. All are using the same types of non-totalitarian methods to enforce an efficient, technologically advanced regimen of thought control. The current government of the UK is far more successful in its brainwashing of the populace than the Soviets or the Nazis could ever have dreamed of.
I think ‘totalitarian’ is accurate. It speaks more to the result than the cause.