When the fanatics rule, people with common sense or a little humanity are trampled.

Facing Totalitarianism
By William Tucker

Last week, I saw Sophie Scholl: The Final Days, the story of a 21-year-old German girl and her brother who were executed for distributing anti-Hitler leaflets during the last days of the Third Reich.

It’s a well-wrought film, brooding in its implications of totalitarianism. The offenses were no more than the average college student indulges in these days. Yet the Nazis’ desperate struggle to retain control over people’s thoughts made it necessary to execute dissenters.

In the climactic scene, the brother pleads to a room full of generals witnessing his trial. “The war is lost,” he tells them. “We are wasting lives. Everyone in this room knows this.” The nervous generals shuffle their feet in discomfort, but the hyperactive ayatollah-like judge screams and shouts and imposes the death penalty.

It’s a particularly apt lesson as we face another implacable foe whose main strength is the overwhelming subservience of its people.

In Escape from Freedom, published right at the outset of World War II, psychiatrist Erich Fromm gave an unforgettable portrait of the attractions of totalitarianism. The appeal of Nazism, he wrote, was that it freed people from the burdens of modern life. Since the Enlightenment, the great development in Europe had been the rise of individual freedom. In politics, people now had control over their governance. In economics, they had wide latitude in seeking their fortunes. In religion, family, and society, the traditional bonds that kept people in subservience to others had been broken.

Yet this freedom created a terrifying new phenomenon—personal isolation. “Freedom from the traditional bonds of medieval society, though giving the individual a new feeling of independence,” Fromm wrote, “at the same time made him feel alone and isolated, filled him with doubt and anxiety, and drove him into new submission and into a compulsive and irrational activity.”

The appeal of Nazism was that it allowed individuals to submerge themselves in the myth of the state. Nazism controlled every aspect of life and demanded complete obedience, and many people were more than willing to comply. In Berlin Diary, William L. Shirer tells a story from the early days of the war. After Dunkirk, Shirer relates, as Hitler attempted to bomb England into submission, the Germans were instructed not to listen to British radio broadcasts. One night the British shot down a plane piloted by the son of a woman in his neighborhood. The BBC broadcast the boy’s name, announcing he had been taken captive. Several of the woman’s neighbors rushed to assure her that her son was alive. The woman turned them in to the SS for listening to British broadcasts.

Such loyalty to the state creates a populace that may not be terribly good at day-to-day activities such as creating an economy or making a living, but is primed for tasks of warfare. As in Sophie Scholl, the fanatics rule, while people with common sense or a little humanity are trampled.

The Muslim world lives with the same fanaticism. With Islam, however, we are not faced with a population like the Germans, who were rebelling against the Enlightenment, but with a society that has never experienced it. There is nothing in Islam that creates individual freedom. Imams hold enormous sway over popular opinion and dissent is practically unknown. Allah rules all. The masses gathered in city squares chanting “Allah, use us to your will” are professing their loss of personal identity. The ranks of martyrs will be filled for a long, long time.

Thus, there is a certain naivete to President George Bush’s fervent hope that democracy can rule the Middle East. We are projecting out of European-American experience. In Moslem countries, religion fits the Western definition of totalitarianism—a system that yokes the political, religious, and cultural institutions of society into one.

Personally, I like the strategy for a “Long War” issued earlier this month by the Defense Department. The Pentagon envisions a ten-year period in which we will not engage in any more full-scale invasions but will attempt to keep foreign governments out of the hands of fanatics and defeat terrorism through smaller, clandestine operations.

This may seem like a long forced march for a country that thought we might have reached the “end of history” with the defeat of the Soviets. In fact, history is much longer. Western Civilization has always been threatened by the “Scythiains” on its borders. The openness that American society has achieved is rare in history. It gives us an unmatched superiority in technical and cultural achievement, but not all our neighbors are going to adopt it.

William Tucker is a weekly columnist for The American Enterprise Online.