ABSTRACT
The dog was not really a fascist, of course. Even the average fascist is more intelligent than the typical dog for, unlike fascists, dogs are incapable of forming even the most rudimentary political opinions. Traditional taxonomies, such as Plato’s, are of no help, and nor does totalitarian philosophy with its story about the ‘total state’ serve to define a genuinely distinct political form as opposed to a highly repressive tyranny. As for the idea of totalitarianism as total control, it seems that total control or, at any rate, total control without cruelty and pain would only be possible in a state populated by beings unlike ourselves by cyborgs or automata. Totalitarianism would, thus, stand at one extreme of a spectrum, with less extreme examples of control ranged elsewhere along the line. On the one hand it could be taken to mean that totalitarianism is a distinct type of regime.
