Orwell's 1984 and Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 combined?

[festive1]

John Hopkins University is a great school! They won't mind if you post the whole thing just use the hide tag

This was a paper given at the 2011 African Studies Association conference in Washington, DC. I haven't been able to find a link to it anywhere. This is actually me copying and pasting from the electronic copy my husband sent me from his office files :-) Lynne Reiner publishers has agreed to publish an expanded version of this as a book. Hopefully to be published in 2013.

this defintion suggests that the ideology is only a farce, and the government uses this ideology to trick people, while behaving differently behind the scenes even setting up secret police, while this might be an appropriate defintion for totalitarianism when discussing Marxism, it doesn't account for the US constitution or Mein Kampf, it suggests there was ultimately nothing wrong with Mein Kampf, it was only the "people" who were at fault, it was essentially Hitler's fault, Germany lost because, he himself did not adhere to his own ideology and instead setup secret forces that contridicted his original principles.

Totalitarianism is an ideal type, there is no such thing as a purely totalitarian system, just as there is no such thing as a purely democratic system. There were, both in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, islands of dissent and autonomous social structures. However, that doesn't mean that these were not essentially totalitarian systems. There are many authoritarian regimes in the world that commit human rights abuses, that deny democratic rights, that are extremely repressive. A system is only totalitarian if it has these 3 key features, as accepted by most political scientists:
1: The overarching ideology
2: The convergence of party and state
3: Mass mobilization
and this is a simplification. There are other features that are commonly present in totalitarian regimes that may also be found in authoritarian regimes. Such as: the use of terror, extensive police apparatus, charismatic dictator, and repression of opposition political parties, independent press, and civil society.
By these guidelines and definition of totalitarianism, Eritrea is a totalitarian state, as is Rwanda and Ethiopia, North Korea and Cuba are also generally considered surviving totalitarian systems.

This leaves me too believe that fascism is fine as long as you do it right, OR that there is no such thing as fascism, in the first place.

It is absurd that you should suggest this.

He then begins to describe the eritrean secret police as if they are the african KGB of the 21st century,

Which they are.

completley leaving out the fact that outside infulences even exist in africa by simpy dimissing the whole country as isolationists,

A state can be totalitarian without being isolationist. It is convenient to control information in a totalitarian system, and therefore many totalitarian systems are relatively isolated.

there might not be "international headlines" but there are news reports, that your government chooses not too accept based on "legitamacy concerns"

Very few outsiders are allowed to travel to Eritrea. There is no independent press. Simply because North Korean press says something does not mean it is true, it is the same in the case of Eritrea, any press coming out of the country has been screened by the government.

but of course if any child writes an article about "alqueada in eritrea" it will be front page news,

red herring

but illegal fishing trawlers scraping the eritrean coast or illegally dumping nuclear waste, are completely left out of the discussion because the reports aren't "confirmed"

These are private companies doing these things, not the government, and non sequiteurs.

I hope there's a better argument for totalitarianism in Rwanda because this appears to be saying all mean people are totalitarian, or every leader who doesn't aspire to be like america is a totalitarian despot

Just the ones that meet the generally accepted criteria listed above. Not all mean people are totalitarian.

Here's the case for Rwanda:

a
Paul Kagame, Rwanda’s president, is proud of his country’s political achievements, the way it has healed “the deep-seated wounds of a shattered society in need of both justice and reconciliation.” Challenging outside critics advocating greater democracy, Kagame ripostes, “it was precisely a system of pluralistic politics that played a major role in the genocide, as newly formed parties with shared extremist ideology outperformed the former one-party state in mobilizing the population to commit mass murder.” Nevertheless, “Rwandans do have a voice in their own affairs,” and he claims the country has adopted a system of decentralization, imihigo, and that the high turnout in the 2010 elections proves the government’s popularity.20
Despite these democratic pretentions, Rwanda’s economic success and apparent “good governance,” the political system bears all the hallmarks of totalitarianism. President Kagame acknowledges the need for authoritarian measures, and the usual repressive apparatus is in place. Again, to cite Freedom House, this includes dominance by the ruling party, the RPF; control of the media and civil society; a lack of academic freedom and freedom of assembly; and a non-independent judiciary. Rwanda gets credit for its gacaca courts, its efforts against corruption, and the high percentage of women represented in the parliament. Rwanda scores a down-trending, but relatively respectable “5” in Freedom House’s ranking of civil liberties, and a “6” in the political freedom category, situating it in the same class as Angola, Congo-Brazzaville, Djibouti, and Mauritania (as well as Russia).21
Perhaps this can be ascribed to the regime’s talent for packaging itself for international approval. Indeed, propaganda and indoctrination have been highly effective in legitimating the regime. As Rentjies concludes, “the use of the instruments of knowledge construction has an extraordinary impact on the relations of those in power with both their own citizens and the outside world.” He suggests this may be due to Kagame’s experience as head of military intelligence in Museveni’s NRA. This has been successful with the international community, but also “domestically, the RPF has decreed one single truth and devised instruments (legislation, intimidation, ‘re-education’, silencing alternative voices) to avoid its being challenged, at least publicly.”22
The Rwanda case may also be cited for the government’s mass mobilization techniques. The gacaca courts failed to achieve significant popular participation until this was made mandatory. The famous umuganda brigades require every Rwandan citizen to devote one day of the month to cleaning public spaces. The re-education centers for former genocidaires have also attained some notoriety. The government’s attempts at social engineering include rural transformation through villagization, crop regionalization, and the forced elimination of thatched huts.23 Although all these efforts have socially beneficial justifications, in practice they are often coercive and assert the control of the state over the individual.
If the perspective of a single dissident can shed light on a totalitarian regime, as sampled in the case of Ethiopia, then the experiences of a large group of poor farmers may provide another form of illumination. In October 2010, the author met with a group of about 300 local residents of a district some 100 kilometers outside of Kigali who were holding a workshop on reconciliation sponsored by an international donor. The group was almost evenly divided between survivors of the genocide and ex-prisoners or family of prisoners. In the course of the workshop, some participants seemed to express a willingness to make efforts to reconcile. Typically, one participant emphasized that, after being released from 15 years in prison, he was struggling to survive and support his family. But as far as his neighbors were concerned, they had said they forgave him for what he had done, and there was no longer a problem between them. It was apparent that one of the incentives for participants to attend the workshop was the 1500 RWF ($3) “transportation allowance” each of them collected at the end of the program. Yet at the conclusion, several relatively well-dressed police and local government officials intervened to make it clear that all participants were expected to donate $1 of their allowance to help build a new classroom for the local school. Virtually every participant dutifully did so, and they were each given proper receipts, but it was poignantly clear that most did so with some regret, even if uncomplaining, since even $1 is a lot of money in such a poor community. What was not clear, watching the officials handling the money after collecting it, was how much would actually go to build the classroom.
Such passive objections to the totalitarian regime have been more scientifically documented by Susan Thomson in her study, “Whispering truth to power: The everyday resistance of Rwandan peasants to post-genocide reconciliation.” As Thomson observes, the Rwandan government’s policy of national unity and reconciliation “structures the interaction of individual Rwandans with the state and with each other. On paper, it is a set of mechanisms that ‘aim to promote unity between Tutsi and Hutu in creating one Rwanda for all Rwandans’; in practice, it disguises the government’s efforts to control its population while working to consolidate the political power of the ruling Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF).