Totalitarianism and Technology in Old and New Era

Totalitarianism and Technology in Old and New Era
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Totalitarianism and Technology in Old and New Era
Introduction
To maintain power and legitimacy, old totalitarian governments invested a lot of resources to sell ideologies to the public. Propaganda created and passed through the media helped these regimes to justify their actions and gain trust from the public. The Nazi regime and the Soviet regime are some good examples of totalitarian regimes. Both of these regimes were driven by the need to industrialize and become economically powerful. To achieve this, the two regimes invested heavily in research and development (Traverso, 2017). Equally, the two invested in the media to sell their ideologies to the people and to gain their trust. Through the media, totalitarian regimes were able to show the public that they could be effective in taking care of public affairs. In addition, these systems created fear among the public through police terror. For instance, the Nazi regime had a police unit named Gestapo while the Soviets had Cheka. These police units were used to suppress the rebellion and collect information necessary for governance. To a large extent, these regimes succeeded in building their economies but in the end, lost public trust leading to their collapse. Today, totalitarian dictatorships are taking advantage of technology to control the public. This is done by spying on the people and controlling the information that is available to the public. Whilst there have been increased calls for democracy, even the most celebrated democratic systems have at one point or the other been accused of infringing on peoples’ rights by spying on them (Wintrobe, 2019). Media censorship as well as paying media houses and individual journalists to skew information is common in modern totalitarian systems. For example, China is said to be spending millions of dollars to create and sell propaganda through the media. States have successfully used modern technological platforms to advance propaganda and create fear in the public, which has, in turn, helped pave way for totalitarian dictatorship.
The Old Totalitarianism
Totalitarianism can be traced back to around the 1920s when many countries were facing an economic depression following the First World War. This type of government is characterized by a system where the state takes total centralized control of resources as well as public and private life. In the earlier twentieth century, the world economy was in disarray following the remnants of the First World War. In a bid to build their economies and become stronger globally, many governments sought to take full control of the available resources. Leaders such as Stalin (Soviet Union), Mussolini (Italy), and Hitler (Germany) tried to justify and build support for their actions through various means including but not limited to propaganda and police terror. Such tools were applied to show the public that the government was looking at its security and that it had control over the future of the nation (Calhoun, 2018). In a sense, existing mass communication channels at that time proved helpful in instigating the motives of these governments.
The above types of governments had various common c...