Dictatorship or totalitarianism?

Between Frozen Authority and Absolute Domination

The distinction between dictatorship and totalitarianism is fundamental to understanding modern forms of authoritarian power. Hannah Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), showed that totalitarianism is not a mere intensification of dictatorship, but a new political structure based on a logic of movement and total domination, far beyond the simple confiscation of power.

Dictatorship: an authoritarian but limited power

Dictatorship, whether military, monarchical, or revolutionary, rests on the concentration of power in the hands of a leader or a small group. It suppresses political freedoms but generally preserves certain social, economic, and cultural structures that remain relatively autonomous.

Classic examples:

• Franco’s dictatorship in Spain: brutal political repression, but preservation of a civil society (family, Church, businesses) not totally absorbed by the State.

• The military juntas in Latin America (Pinochet’s Chile, Argentina in the 1970s): state violence, torture, but without an ideology seeking to control the entirety of social and psychological life.

The dictator seeks to hold onto power, not to radically reshape society.

Totalitarianism: a system in perpetual motion

Arendt insisted: “Totalitarianism is not just a reinforced dictatorship: it is a form of domination that seeks to transform human nature itself.” (The Origins of Totalitarianism).It is no longer only about controlling the public sphere, but about penetrating every sphere of private life, fabricating a parallel reality through ideology and omnipresent “conspiracies.”

Key features according to Arendt:

1. Totalizing ideology: a global narrative that explains everything (race under Hitler, class struggle under Stalin).

2. Permanent terror: not as an occasional means, but as a permanent mode of government.

3. Fabrication of internal and external enemies: the “conspiracy” is constitutive of the system.

Contemporary examples and their designated enemies

Vladimir Putin’s Russia

• External enemies: NATO and the United States, accused of orchestrating a “proxy war” in Ukraine; the European Union, described as a decadent bloc hostile to Russia. The war in Ukraine is justified as the necessity of “liberating” a people trapped by a Western conspiracy.

• Internal enemies: political opponents (Navalny, Memorial, human rights NGOs) are labeled “foreign agents.” Sexual minorities and environmental activists are portrayed as threats to the “Russian soul.”Putin leans on an imperial and Orthodox ideology that frames Russia as a besieged fortress.

Donald Trump’s United States

• External enemies: China, accused of having “created” or “manipulated” the Covid-19 pandemic to weaken America; European allies, described as freeloaders under the U.S. military umbrella.

• Internal enemies: the “deep state,” journalists (called “enemies of the people”), Democrats portrayed as organizers of massive electoral fraud. Immigrant minorities, particularly Latino communities, are framed as threats to national identity.Trump did not create a fully fledged totalitarian regime, but he sowed what Arendt called “the erosion of fact”: the conviction that anything contradicting the leader’s narrative is manipulation.

Algeria

• External enemies: France, accused of neocolonialism and hidden manipulations; Morocco, presented as the major geopolitical adversary, allied with Israel and accused of seeking to “destabilize” Algeria through shadow networks.

• Internal enemies: French-speaking intellectuals and critical academics, branded as “agents of foreign powers”; secular activists, accused of trying to erase Arab-Muslim identity; independent journalists and human rights associations, depicted as relays of foreign influence.Since the Hirak movement, every social or political protest has been reframed as a conspiracy of the “foreign hand.” The totalitarian rhetoric erases the legitimacy of popular protest by reducing it to outside manipulation.

Nicolás Maduro’s Venezuela

• External enemies: the United States, accused of “economic warfare” and sabotage; Colombia, described as a rearguard base for conspirators; the international opposition, reduced to an imperialist front.

• Internal enemies: opposition parties (Guaidó and others), accused of being “CIA agents”; independent entrepreneurs and traders, accused of “hoarding” and economic sabotage; the free press, criminalized as an instrument of Washington.The food and health crisis is explained not by mismanagement, but by a permanent conspiracy.

Comparison with classic dictatorships

Unlike modern totalitarian regimes, dictatorships such as Franco’s Spain or Pinochet’s Chile did not rely on a logic of omnipresent imaginary enemies. They repressed directly and brutally, but without reconstructing a mental universe where every problem was the manifestation of a global conspiracy.

As Arendt summarized:

“Totalitarianism truly begins when the fact itself is destroyed, when the boundary between truth and falsehood is erased, and when reality becomes interchangeable with fiction.”

Conclusion

The essential difference between dictatorship and totalitarianism lies in the nature of power:

• Dictatorship controls political power through force.

• Totalitarianism seeks to reshape the entire society by establishing a parallel reality in which permanent “conspiracies” justify terror and ideology.

From Putin to Maduro, via Trumpism or the Algerian regime, the obsessive designation of external and internal enemies shows that the totalitarian logic analyzed by Arendt remains a formidable political tool in the 21st century.