The term ‘totalitarian’, as distinct from merely authoritarian, was coined in the 1930s.
But the underlying concept goes back to a much earlier source: “And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.”
There it is, the difference in a nutshell. An authoritarian doesn’t care about his subjects’ souls as long as their bodies dance to his music. Totalitarians are different: they aren’t happy with merely physical tyranny. They want the metaphysical kind as well.
Typically, they seek to kill sanity by smudging the borderline between virtual and actual realities, with the fake one always taking precedence. Eventually, most people will accept falsehood as truth, and those who don’t will pretend to do so.
Totalitarians love the second type as much as the first. Orwell pointed this out in one of his essays, when talking about the sadistic joy totalitarians feel when watching those who know better and still spout insane gibberish, not even daring to crack a smile.
This brings us to an unmistakably totalitarian establishment: St Andrews University, the alma mater of both the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. This year for the first time, it ranked above Oxbridge in the Good University Guide.
As befits our best university, St Andrews blazes the path for all others to follow. And the path leads straight to hell.
St Andrews students are forced, on pain of expulsion, to take compulsory diversity modules. There they are expected to give the ‘right’ answers to questions about racism, homophobia, climate and some such.
A typical agree-or-disagree question: “Acknowledging your personal guilt is a useful start point in overcoming unconscious bias.”
Or another example: “It is important to think about and understand our own prejudices and stereotypes so we don’t treat someone else unfairly or inappropriately.”
Someone forgot to teach those Scottish teachers the difference between education and brainwashing. Perhaps they didn’t have to learn: totalitarians sense in their bone marrow what they have to do.
A note to any sane freshers at St Andrews: I feel your pain. I too had to go through university in a totalitarian country, the Soviet Union. I too was forced to fake insanity while remaining sane. I wasn’t good at it though, and I’m sure you aren’t either.
Luckily, I was only threatened with expulsion and was allowed to matriculate. However, my secret personal file had enough black marks in it to consign me to a life of misery. Since the file was indeed secret, I never saw it. But I knew what it said: watch him, he’s anti-Soviet scum.
You must feel as Cincinnatus C. felt in Nabokov’s novel Invitation to a Beheading. Living in a land where everyone was transparent, Cincinnatus alone was opaque. That’s why he was to be beheaded: totalitarians can forgive any crime except being different.
You might object that we still have no concentration camps, public trials and mass executions. I can only reply by sending you back to the quotation from St Matthew above. Jesus establishes a clear pecking order there: those who merely wish to kill the body aren’t to be feared. It’s those who are after your soul who are really scary.
Totalitarians don’t use violence for its own sake. It merely serves to attain their goal, total control. If such a goal can be attained non-violently, so much the better. If mass murder is after all required, that’s fine too. Whatever works.
That’s why the force-feeding of woke dung isn’t just ridiculous – it’s sinister. It’s an attempt to take dominion of the soul, and fair enough: most people’s souls are indeed up for grabs.
They have been primed by decades of incessant propaganda that starts at the cradle and ends at the grave. Resistance takes an epic fortitude of mind and spirit, but where can such strength come from? It certainly can’t be produced by craving for material goods, which seems to be the only impelling force of modernity.
Ticking the expected answer in a questionnaire seems like a tiny concession to make. It never is though. “One claw gets stuck,” goes the old saying, “the whole bird will perish.”
Totalitarians can smell a soul cast adrift, and when they do they pounce. Another tick, please kind sir. And another, if you don’t mind. Just one more, and we’re done. Before you know it, there goes your soul, ticking away bit by cowardly bit.
I wish I could advise St Andrews students to throw those module papers back into the totalitarians’ mugs, but I can’t. No mere mortal has the right to demand heroism from others; this has to be a personal free choice.
The only advice I can offer comes straight from Thomas Cranmer: “Blessed Lord, who hast caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning; grant us that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them.”
Yes, I know this is archaic, unfashionable and generally uncool. But I can’t think of any other viable source of strength to resist totalitarianism. Be it the Soviet kind, the Nazi kind – or the St Andrews kind.
P.S. Is the University named after several different St Andrews? Or was the First-Called named St Andrews? If the answer to both questions is no, how about an apostrophe there, chaps? You being the best university and all.
I’ve been thinking of Vladimir Bukovsky a lot of late. I’d very much like to know where he found the courage to withstand twelve years of punitive psychiatric hospitals, prisons and labour camps….
He was a hero, one of very few. Heroism is like genius – it can be admired but never fully understood.
The town is called St Andrews. It was called St Andrews before a University was inflicted upon it in 1413, many, many years before possessive apostrophes were invented. The fact that the cultural Marxists who run the risible remnants of the University haven’t yet got around to inserting an apostrophe ought to be grounds for rejoicing: the continued spelling of St Andrews without an apostrophe is a minor triumph for traditionalism.
Since you quote Cranmer, note also that the revisers of the Book of Common Prayer in 1662 similarly refrained from adding possessive apostrophes to Cranmer’s text, because they regarded the pre-Civil-War Prayer Book as being sanctified by tradition and by the blood of St Charles, King and Martyr. (But the “1662” BCP published nowadays for the use of about ten tiny congregations has been gradually modernised in spelling.)
Thank you. I knew there had to be a good reason. I just didn’t know it, and I do.
I know I’m a pedant, but it’s better to be corrected by a supporter than by an opponent, isn’t it? It sometimes seems to me as if God hath appointed me to be a proof-reader and sub-editor of my betters’ excellent writings.
When I’m wrong, I’m grateful for any correction, even from an opponent. Actually, you’ll find this hard to believe, but I’m a bit of a pedant too. That’s why I hate myself each time my pig ignorance breaks through my defences.
This totalitarianism is becoming quite scary. Chaps are being ostracized, fired, or worse for voicing the wrong opinion on any number of matters. All it takes in these modern times is one insane voice to start the onrush, then the mindless rabble, in a vain attempt to signal their own virtue, join. Even worse, governments see this vile, crushing onslaught and realize they can use it to their advantage with evil edicts and mandates, and pernicious propositions put to public vote.
It’s amazing how Marxist ideology has infested and penetrated the Western thinking and community. Despite the collapse of the Soviet state, its ideology calls the shots in the so-called West nowadays to the degree that we can state the ideological triumph of Soviets over the collective West. Formally the Soviet State suffered a defeat in the cold war, but Soviet ideology is currently reigning supreme to the west of the Berlin Wall. Just a few examples: propaganda of free love and same-sex relations between comrades (Lenin was one of the pioneers and reportedly had a boyfriend in Zinoviev); guilt to be felt by white imperialists to colonised peoples of Africa (Bolsheviks always blamed imperialist colonialism and enslavement of Afro-Americans, they befriended African cannibals and oppressed black brothers, would fit well into the now trendy BLM); the state is more important than individuals, no freedom of speaking out your mind; multi-culturalism and anti-nationalism is another Soviet invention as well as separation of church and state. The list is actually very long. So while the West celebrated a victory in the cold war, it has been utterly defeated by Soviet (Marxist) ideology.