Intrusion by Totalitarian Thinking
The author considers totalitarianism to be not a practice, but a way of thinking. It is often suggested that an individual gains total power by force and intimidation, but this alone is not sufficient to subdue a large population and maintain power for a long period of time. Governments are overthrown easily enough when a sufficient number of the people refuse, resist, and rebel. Even a totalitarian rules by the consent of his people - which is to say that people accept tyrants.
The totalitarian ruler may either seek out a culture of people who are ready and willing to be dominated, though it is generally the case that a leader with a totalitarian agenda may wait for a culture to be ripe for plundering. Or he may seek to furtively change a culture to prepare the people for domination, helping the process along. His techniques depend entirely on the personalities of his subjects, and it can be seen that even in free and democratic societies, there exist some number of "humorless robots" and ample opportunity to increase the willingness of the people to accept totalitarian rule.
The Strategy of Terror
The weapon of terror has been used since the earliest ages of society. Simple stated, "terror" is the use of threat to cause people to comply for fear of an extrinsic punishment that the terrorist will inflict upon them if they refuse.
The term "terrorist" is often used to describe those who do not have formal authority - but terrorism is very often the mechanism of those who have formal authority. Rather than convincing their followers that doing something is a good idea on its own merit, terrorists simply say "do my bidding or I will punish you." It is in fact far more common for a "legitimate" authority to terrorize its own people than for them to be terrorized by any opposing group. Terrorism is very often the primary mechanism of control for the politician, the clergyman, the employer, and the parent.
Terrorism is useful to the autocrat because of its immediacy and flexibility. The need not take the time to explain how something is beneficial or harmful, but merely needs to present a clear and obvious threat that is not directly connected to the order. And the same threat can be applied to gain compliance regardless of what is needed. To explain to people that doing one thing or not doing another requires a lengthy explanation of the causal relationships of both - and it's much easier to say "or I will brutalize you" to gain compliance.
The simplest form of terrorism is a direct threat from one person to another. Those who have organizations at their disposal can threaten people indirectly, through the police force and similar groups. And those who have nothing at their disposal; can often threaten people by describing imaginary threats. The last is also valuable to the state because it saves a considerable amount of resources if it can convince people of a threat without having to undertake the expense to create one.
For the state, torture and murder are its main threats, delivered through institutions that include prisons, concentration camps, asylums, sanitariums, work camps, and the like. Aside of being centers in which victims can be conditioned, their existence provokes fear in the general population, who know very well that being sent to the "mental health facility" means imprisonment, torture, and death for most of the "patients" who are sent there.
It's asserted that "terror can almost never stop itself." Once an individual uses this tool and finds its wondrous effectiveness and flexibility, it is virtually never discontinued - but instead is used more broadly and frequently. The prisons of a totalitarian society never seem to get smaller, and are never closed down, but tend to grow constantly. The concentration camps are never shut down until the state is overthrown.
Purging Rituals
In primitive societies, authority is gained by deposing the previous ruler - the new king is the man who killed the old king. And it is often necessary to also kill off his allies and families, who may seek revenge or the recapture of authority by one of their group. Hence the new king must kill not only the old king, but also all of his family and all of his supporters, to seize and maintain power.
In modern democratic societies, in which the position of the ruler is secured by many people, there are many who must be eliminated or pacified to successfully depose the ruler. It is for this reason that most revolutions are very bloody, and that before a new government can be installed (or shortly after) there are mass-killings to pacify the supporters of the previous regime.
The author asserts that a purge usually includes an "elaborate confession ceremonial" in which the group that the new leader wants to exterminate confess their "crimes" - this is important to making the purge seem legitimate and to set a precedent for further purgation to maintain civic order and rid society of "criminals" who oppose the authority of the state.
Purges not only exterminate the previous regime, but send a strong message to those members of society who still feel support for the old regime and may question the value and legitimacy - to accept the new ruler, or to suffer the same fate. As the previous section described it, this is clearly an act of terrorism practiced by the state against the people.
(EN: The author also overlooks functional benefits of a purge, which is often conducted to seize property. A purge generally targets wealthy members of society and, in addition to their execution, often results of the seizure of their assets - which provides funds to a new state without taxing the general population. People who have nothing worth taking are seldom "purged.")
Scapegoating
A totalitarian state creates many problems, and as such is in constant need for someone else to blame them on so that the state may claim to be taking action.
Most religions, primitive and modern, create supernatural scapegoats to exonerate a deity from being blamed for the suffering of subjects. Polytheistic societies have good and evil deities, and even monotheistic societies that claim a single and all-powerful deity invent demons, devils, and evil spirits who can be blamed. The exorcism is a meaningless ceremony that places the blame on an object or person, and goes through the motions of destroying or casting out the evil spirits who are subverting the will of a benevolent deity.
Modern politics, for all its sophistication, uses the same technique, though rather than blaming an evil spirit it targets a group or class of people and blames upon them all the ills of society, and then seeks to punish them for creating all the ills of society and subverting the work of an otherwise perfect government.
It is also wise for the state to merely punish, rather than eradicate the symbolic cause of problems. If the "evil tree" is cut down and burned and the crops still do not grow, it is obvious that the shaman is a fake. Likewise if the enemies of state are completely eliminated and the problems are not solved, then it is obvious the state has made a grave error - so the enemy must be preserved to serve as a constant scapegoat.
Totalitarian regimes often encourage gossip and rumor - this creates a wide range of scapegoats. As an added bonus, if the people can be turned against one another, they are not turning against the sate and lack the necessary cohesion to unit and overthrow the tyrant. False accusations are also a means for individuals to feel supported by the state - by calling attention to others, they distract from themselves, and all are drawn closer to the state.
Espionage and Paranoia
"Spies" make prefect scapegoats, and are the equivalent of "evil spirits" to the modern state. The state can accuse covert spies and saboteurs for the misery of the people, and because these groups are clandestine there is an excuse to never fully eradicate them. Espionage is useful; both internally and externally - to cause people to be suspicious of one another and fearful of outsiders.
Fear of spies also engages the citizens in assisting the state in policing one another. The spy-hunter fancies himself a friend of the state and expects to be protected and rewarded, and meanwhile has the power to harm his personal enemies by accusing them of espionage. This is particularly attractive to those who lack power and feel disenfranchised. Consider that it is children who accuse adults in witch trials, and when they see their accusations taken seriously, they recognize they have the power to harm whomever they want.
Meanwhile, the fear of being accused of being a spy can be used to intimidate any citizen. A person who seeks to catch spies is often engaging in behaviors that make him seem like he is a spy. To keenly observe the behavior of others, to gather evidence of their activities, is a common behavior to the spy and spy-hunter alike, such that attempting to discover spies makes it likely that one will be accused of spying. Fear of spies, of being spied upon, or of being falsely accused of being a spy, does much to keep the citizens under control of the state. One does not dare say anything disparaging of the state, nor agree with any negative comment someone else has made, for fear of being accused.
Strategic Criminalization
In a functional sense, "crime" is any activity an individual undertakes that is unjustly harmful to others - but totalitarian politics has usurped the term to mean any activity of which the state does not approve. In that way, criminalization is about requiring obedience, not benevolence. Once an individual has accepted that "crime" is wrong, he has consented to accept as wrong whatever the state calls a crime.
Criminalization is also a practice that is used to create crime, in order to justify the state taking action against individuals and groups of people. When a perfectly harmless or necessary action is declared to be a crime, anyone who undertakes it is criminal. "Ignorance of the law is no excuse" and people can be arbitrarily punished for activities they (rightly) believed to be harmless.
Criminalization is also valuable in gaining the cooperation and compliance of the government's own employees. To support the state effectively, the policeman, prisoner, and executioner must have no hesitation in taking stern action against the enemies of the state. If they likewise adopt the attitude that anything the state declares to be a "crime" is wrong, then they will not question their orders. If the people and the press agree that "crime" is wrong, they will raise no objection when the state exterminates its detractors.
Criminalization tends to prevent free thinking: if an action is declared to be a crime and is unquestionably wrong, then there is no necessity to think about the reason why it is wrong, or consider at all that it might not be wrong at all. The rebel questions whether what the state considers to be criminal is really detrimental to society, the subdued citizen does not think about such things and is incapable of thinking about them.
And if whatever the state declares to be criminal is a crime, then the definition of crime can be changed bty the state on a daily basis. What was illegal yesterday is compulsory today and may be illegal again tomorrow. This enables dictators to rule at a whim, with arbitrariness and inconsistency, and never be questioned or doubted.
Verbal Domination
It is a common linguistic theory that words govern thought: if a person does not have a word to describe something, he cannot think about it or communicate about it with others.
(EN: This is fundamentally inaccurate, as people "coin" terms for concepts that language does not accommodate. However, it is true that people believe that controlling language controls thought, so while I disagree with the premise, I will keep notes as a means of better understanding the thinking of those who accept the premise.)
Language has long been a tool of communication, and one mode of communication is persuasion. Leaders would gather followers by using speech to persuade them, and rhetoric was of interest to those who hungered for power even back to ancient Greece. Though speech was replaced with writing, the principle is the same - words are used to communicate ideas, which influence the minds and behaviors of the audience.
Propaganda is a kind of motivational speech - it is either meant to cause someone to support an idea, or to give those who already support an idea a means of communicating among themselves and affirming their beliefs. The totalitarian propagandist is attempting to use words to constrain thoughts, so that citizens will use the language of state, verbatim, rather than finding their own means of expression, and in that way thoughts are standardized and restricted.
There's a brief mention of the psychological impact of words - that the positive emotions associated to a term such as "liberty" or "peace" means that these words can be used in conjunction with ideas the state wishes the people to accept. One clear example is doubletalk, where contrary words are used in conjunction: tyranny is freedom, freedom is slavery, and the truth is a lie. To say that "it is good that we should be punished for disobeying our leader" puts a positive spin on an experience that ought to be interpreted negatively.
Simply to call someone a "traitor" is to stigmatize him and simply to call someone a "patriot" is to praise him - it is assumed that they are a bad/good person and that their actions were good/bad even before we know what those actions were and consider whether they really earned the label placed upon that person. The words are like emotional triggers that set us on a path to a conclusion before the facts are known.
This plays on "man's mental laziness" as it is more convenient to simply accept what one is told than it is to sort things out for oneself. Language can even be used to subdue the mind - a lengthy and complex statement presented as evidence is very often effective in getting people to accept the conclusion, simply because they cannot be bothered to consider what they have heard. Once a person is verbally subdued, he will readily accept what he is told without question.
Crimethink and Crimespeak
While the functional need of the totalitarian is to control the behavior of his subjects, his ultimate aim is to prevent them from thinking for themselves at all. So we find that in the totalitarian state, there are crimes of thought and speech, rather than merely crimes of deed.
Thought and speech must be criminalized because they are precedents to action. The individual who can choose what to believe can choose to hold beliefs that do not serve the agenda of the state. The individual who can communicate these thoughts to others can conspire with them to form a resistance to the state.
Declaring thought or speech to be criminal also facilitates purgation and scapegoating. While a deed can be proven or disproven by evidence, thought and speech can be "proven" by allegation. The party can make a citizen a hero or a villain depending on their interests at the moment.
The kind of citizen that the totalitarian wishes to create is one who is abjectly service and self-denouncing, who is willing to bear false testimony against himself or others, and who does whatever he is told. To reduce a person to this state requires smothering their mind. The only "safe conduct pass" for citizens of a totalitarian regime is not merely obedience, but complete abdication of the self and one's own mental integrity.