Re: Big Brother One Step Closer?

On Thursday 15 May 2003 9:56 pm, James Richard Tyrer wrote:
> Daniel Cassidy wrote:
> > In fact, I find it hard to believe that a non-absurd distinction can be
> > made. If a regime has total control over a country, it is totalitarian,
> > that's what the word means.
>
> Then you would be wrong.
>
> It is not the total control over a country that makes a regime
> totalitarian; it is the total control over people's lives.  Even under
> the horrible authoritarian regime of Pinochet’s Chile, ordinary
> citizens has some freedoms that were very much absent in the USSR.
>
> For example a fascist government may still have a free market economy.
>
> This would clearly be authoritarian but not totalitarian.

Fine. But where's your evidence to suggest that Dre didn't mean 
'totalitarianism' by your definition in the first place?

Personally, I'd simply see 'authoritarianism' as you describe it as a lesser 
form of totalitarianism. If Dre is right, and the word only came into usage 
for political means, then the point is largely academic.

-- 
dan

"Were i susceptible to having my mind changed, it would have changed my mind" 
- Matthew Parris

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