This link has been bookmarked by 4 people . It was first bookmarked on 21 Mar 2008, by anks nowak.
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19 Apr 16
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16 Feb 11
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31 Jan 09
Danielle Stamp"WWF Totalitarianism Project." World Future Fund. 14 April 2008. World Future Fund. 6 Feb 2009 <http://www.worldfuturefund.org/Projects/Total/wfftotalitarianismpproject.htm>. (Provides a fairly detailed background on my topic along with extensive links and resources to further my research.)
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term totalitarianism was invented by Mussolini
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Pericles and his imperialist foreign policies led Athens into such a national catastrophe that democracy was largely discredited in the ancient Greek world.
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Athens was never a major world power like Persia.
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Alexander the Great who made Greece a world power
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he despised Athenian democracy. (Aristotle was Alexander's tutor.
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The Roman Republic was one of the most brutal imperialist regimes ever seen
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the Roman Republic did become a major world power.
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After Augustus established the Empire in 40 B.C., parliamentary democracy had so little credibility that it largely disappeared for almost 1,700 years as a serious political force in the wes
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China where the state of Chin (considered the Sparta of ancient China) created the first Chinese Empire. This state was based on some of the most ruthless political theories of totalitarian political control that the world has ever seen, the theory of legalism.
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the first major empire in India was being created by Emperor Chandrgupta I.
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The political master plan for this society is outlined in a very detailed book by Kautilya, the Emperor's Prime Minister called the Arthashastra
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the racial caste system described in the ancient Book of Manu
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Parliamentary democracy was reborn in the late eighteenth century and nineteenth century in Europe, being based on idealized versions of ancient Greece and Rome.
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Power can be a double-edged sword. The current "triumph" of parliamentary democracy could well become its funeral wreath if it cannot reform itself.
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Ideas from the past will be used to control the future
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Hitler gained power because he promised to end the gridlock of the Weimar Republic. The huge popularity of people such as Hitler and Napoleon (as well as Augustus Caesar) shows that the people will welcome leaders who promise to sweep away democracy in order to deal with crises.
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Or could we replay such events as the Holocaust, Stalin's Gulag Archipelago or Mao's "Great Leap Forward", which we now know killed over 40 million Chinese citizens under appalling circumstances? We have already had recent holocausts such as the mass murder of one million people in Rwanda and the mayhem in that took place in the former Yugoslavia as democracy unleashed the forces of racism and violence that had been kept in check by the dictatorship of Tito.
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Technology will increase the hypnotic power of charismatic leaders and will also enable levels of political control virtually unprecedented in history. There is a lot of truth to Albert Speer's observation that a key difference of Hitler's regime to those of the past was the role of technology.
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Not since Augustus Caesar had there been such a total orchestration of technology, media, art and music for political purposes.
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21 Mar 08
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