Totalitarianism: From Gulags to Algorithms and Beyond

The word totalitarianism was born in Fascist Italy. Giovanni Gentile, Mussolini’s philosopher, coined the phrase stato totalitario to celebrate a state that would absorb every aspect of national life. Mussolini himself gave the most memorable formula in 1925: “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” The term was quickly turned against its inventors. By the 1930s, foreign commentators used it to describe the suffocating grip of both Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, and later the apparatus of Stalin’s Soviet Union.

Cold War political science refined the definition. Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski described six key features: an official ideology, a single ruling party, monopoly of communications, monopoly of weapons, a centrally planned economy, and a terroristic police. Hannah Arendt, in her classic The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), gave the concept philosophical depth. For her, totalitarianism was not merely dictatorship, but an attempt to erase individuality and remake human beings themselves. Unlike ordinary authoritarianism, which demands obedience, totalitarianism demands transformation of the self.

Evolution of Totalitarian Control

Twentieth-century totalitarian regimes deployed the instruments of their age. Stalin’s Soviet Union built the gulag archipelago: vast labour camps where millions suffered and died, their torment serving both as punishment and as a tool of terror. Nazi Germany perfected propaganda through radio, cinema and mass rallies, while the Gestapo cultivated networks of informers. Mao’s China mobilised millions of students as Red Guards to enforce ideological purity on every street. Pol Pot’s Cambodia took matters further still, seeking to abolish cities entirely and reconstruct society from nothing.

Such regimes were brittle. They required constant mobilisation, vast bureaucracies, and expensive systems of repression. When their economies faltered, collapse often followed. Yet in the twenty-first century, digital technology has transformed the calculus. Control is now cheap, constant, and subtle. Artificial intelligence, biometric recognition, GPS tracking and online censorship allow rulers to monitor behaviour continuously. Where Stalin relied on spectacle and terror, today’s rulers may rely on invisibility: citizens censor themselves because they know they are watched.

Totalitarian Regimes Today

North Korea remains the purest expression of the classic model. The Kim dynasty presides over a quasi-religious cult. The ideology of Juche—self-reliance—is drilled into every child. Media, education and art are controlled; families are punished collectively for the dissent of one member. Labour camps persist, echoing the Soviet gulag.

China under Xi Jinping illustrates a digital-age variant. Xi has enshrined his “Thought” in the constitution, abolished presidential term limits, and fused party loyalty with every profession. The Chinese state operates the most advanced surveillance system in the world: facial recognition cameras, digital dossiers, and a social credit system. In Xinjiang, the mass internment of Uyghurs demonstrates continuity with twentieth-century repression, but updated with biometric checkpoints and algorithmic policing.

Turkmenistan takes another path, clinging to the grotesque personality cult pioneered by Saparmurat Niyazov. His successors maintain the state’s isolation from the world, the saturation of propaganda, and the absence of independent thought.

Eritrea resembles North Korea in miniature. National service is indefinite, religion is suppressed unless approved by the state, and media is non-existent. The whole of society is placed on a permanent war footing.

Case Comparisons

• Stalin’s Purges versus Xi’s Surveillance: Stalin relied on show trials and executions to terrify. Xi relies on artificial intelligence to anticipate dissent. One was spectacular; the other is silent.

  
  

• Nazi Propaganda versus Chinese Internet Control: Goebbels used radio and cinema to saturate society with Nazi ideology. Today China’s censorship and firewalls achieve the same effect in the digital sphere.

  
  

• North Korean Gulags versus Eritrean Conscription: Both absorb private life into state machinery. North Koreans suffer in camps; Eritreans are trapped in endless military service.

  
  

• Mao’s Red Guards versus Xinjiang’s Internment Camps: Mao mobilised youth mobs; Xi confines Uyghurs to re-education camps. The methods differ, the ambition—to remake thought—is the same.

Borderline Cases

Other states exhibit totalitarian tendencies without fully qualifying. Russia under Vladimir Putin suppresses opposition and censors media, yet retains limited spaces of private initiative and lacks a coherent ideology beyond nationalism. Iran enforces religious orthodoxy, but factional competition and informal life remain. Afghanistan under the Taliban is brutally repressive, especially towards women, but lacks the administrative capacity for total social control.

From Gulags to Algorithms—and Beyond

Despite these variations, the ambition of totalitarianism remains constant: to dominate life entirely, eliminating autonomy. In the twentieth century, terror was physical and spectacular. In the twenty-first, it is digital and ambient. Stalin’s gulags and Goebbels’ radio have given way to Xi Jinping’s facial recognition systems and internet censorship. Classic regimes collapsed when their resources ran dry; digital totalitarianism may endure, being cheaper and more efficient.

Yet even more alarming prospects loom.

• Artificial Intelligence may one day not only detect dissent but predict it, enabling citizens to be arrested for what they might do.

  
  

• Biotechnology could allow regimes to map entire populations genetically, or manipulate physiology to suppress resistance.

  
  

• Brain–Computer Interfaces, already under research, could give states access to thought itself, realising the totalitarian dream of erasing the private realm.

  
  

• Data Integration across all spheres of life could produce “digital twins” of citizens—complete profiles continuously updated, leaving no space for autonomy.

Conclusion

Totalitarianism is not a historical relic. It survives today in North Korea, China, Turkmenistan and Eritrea, and shades into authoritarianism elsewhere. Its methods have changed, but its essence—control of thought and eradication of autonomy—remains. The danger is that new technologies may give it forms more resilient than those of the past.

The term coined in Fascist Italy a century ago retains urgent relevance. It reminds us that there is a difference between tyranny and totalitarianism: tyranny demands obedience, but totalitarianism seeks to possess the human soul. If twentieth-century totalitarianism horrified the world with its gulags and its genocides, the twenty-first may yet present something subtler but no less terrifying: the quiet perfection of control.