totalitarian

“The Handmaid’s Tale,” her prescient novel of totalitarian dictatorship, began with the group hanging scene, which was shifted to the back of the book.

Stalin, who ruled the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953, presided over a totalitarian state that executed and imprisoned millions of people that he deemed political enemies.

America is caught in a vise—on one side, “America first”; on the other, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her crowd, whose New York breakthrough would strengthen totalitarian temptations.

“A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy,” Orwell wrote in his diary while he was working on the book.

This exploitation was of course opportunistic in the extreme, but it also revealed something fundamental about totalitarian psychology.