Ralph Schoellhammer
One of the biggest problems in today’s politics (at least in the West) is the tendency by politicians to compartmentalise everything. Now the optimist could say this is clear evidence that they are not totalitarian. That is at least partially true: Hitler and Stalin did not accept the idea that there is a private sphere separated from the state, that whatever the individual does must be evaluated in light of what this would mean for the Volkskoerper. They took an organic view on all societal matters, meaning that there was no true individual choice, only options that the state would offer – or revoke.
There is a telling anecdote from the last months of the war, when Hitler proposed to switch the Wehrmacht onto a vegetarian diet plus supplements. He only relented from this idea after one of his general staff officers conducted these new dietary guidelines in a self-experiment, leading to such an obvious health deterioration that even the Fuehrer abandoned his original plan. A few years earlier he also proposed a smoking ban in the army, another proposal that took a lot of convincing from his generals to be discarded. For the totalitarian mind, everything is connected and therefore – at some point – everything will become an issue for the state. Or, as Benito Mussolini once said: “”Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.”
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