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Democracies are more likely to win “Total Wars” than totalitarian regimes.’

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The term ‘total war’ has been attributed to a small number of conflicts. The term was originally coined by the German military officer Erich Ludendorff in his book ‘The Total War’. Previous to this the renowned military theorists Carl von Clausewitz and Antoine-Henri Jomini both touched on the raw principles of ‘total war’, but failing to ever recognise the term Ludendorff went on to fashion. It was not until the 1950s that the term re-emerged to describe the nature of the conflict during the First and Second World Wars, whilst a number of wars previous to this have characteristics of ‘total wars’, the primitive state of national economies and refusal to fully mobilise the economy purely for war can explain why these conflicts were more …show more content…

The use of violence to repress and monitor was a common theme used by dictators to ‘control’ their peoples. This was uncommon in democracies, for example the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill did not have his own personal guard, answerable only to himself; it was Churchill who was scrutinized by the people, the reverse of the situation pertaining in both Germany and the Soviet Union. Totalitarianism endangers the stability of a nation as there will be “growing internal unrest due to the excesses of terrorism, the denial of rights and the inability of large segments of the population to participate in public affairs ”. It was these basic democratic principles which were absent throughout the totalitarian regimes of the 20th Century; as a single man’s ideology was allowed to develop unrestricted, with little input from either a strong government or the general public.

In the autocratic governments of wartime Europe the chain of command was rigidly maintained from the top down, unlike democracies where the chain was more susceptible to variation. The effects of the totalitarian administrative structure manifest themselves in subordinates’ inability to question orders and policies which leads to further disregard for the negative consequences of such commands. A fine example of this would be German high command’s inability to make intuitive judgements without the Fuhrer’s expressed permission, on the day of

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