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Examples Of Totalitarianism In The Giver

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The concept of totalitarianism is first developed by the Italian fascists, primarily Giovanni Amendola in the 1920's. Totalitarianism is the total claim that totalitarian regimes make on their population (Arendt, 1973). In this context, totalitarianism is best described as an ideology that is against human rights where the way superior governs a state is only advantageous to only one party; who is the ruler. This is because the society has a limited access of freedom and there is no choice in making decisions because all control of public and private life is government-run without the conformity or will by the society.
Terror is the main control tactic to govern the state without diplomacy being used. The regime has zero tolerance with the …show more content…

For example the famous totalitarian leader is Adolf Hitler, a notorious for his reign in German, the leader of Nazi Party one of the political revolutionaries party (Maurice, 1975) who employed totalitarianism as a means to attempt to achieve an obedient nation that was his personal vision for the country; a perfectly planned nation according to his vision. Under Hitler’s regime, if a citizen spoke against the government or criticising the government system, they would be arrested and often sent to a concentration camp. This can be found in The Giver where whoever do something contradict to the society rules or against the superior will be “release”; the euphemism way of being kill. Concentration camps were part of a system used for the imprisonment and murder of people and held millions of Jews, political prisoners, gypsies, homosexuals, mentally handicapped, and any other person the Nazis deemed undesirable. Undesirable, at this point means those who are sick or genetically defective from his views and were sent to the concentration camps to be killed, to be slaves until they die or to be used as animals in the Nazi scientific experiments and expulsed them from the …show more content…

Several examples included that artists had to create paintings portraying Nazi values, jazz music was banned, and books written by people deemed undesirable under the Hitler regime were burned. Similarly, in The Giver, the society has lack of freedom where music is banned; books that are unrelated to the superior are banned, any new knowledge that are found against the system will be banned as well. According to Lepsius (2006) in his journal of Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, girls and boys have been indoctrinated with Nazi ideology from a young age, and the Nazi police organization, known as the SS, intimidated and terrorised people in an attempt to control them. Hitler was responsible for the genocide of a total of 5.5 million Jews and millions of other victims whom he deemed as sub-humans and socially undesirable. He is also responsible for the killing of an estimated 19.3 million civilians and prisoners of war (Garin,

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