ABSTRACT
THE effectiveness of totalitarian mass propaganda, as distinct from appeals directed against the individual, depends upon the extent to which these masses are brought physically under control and are so organised that they can be moved and directed collectively in the required direction. Government-controlled mass organisations are indispensable for the conduct of totalitarian policy, and European dictatorships, in so far as they were successful and able to stabilise themselves, were invariably based on a recognition of this necessity. Dictatorships which fail to establish not only mental but bodily control over the masses or allow this control, once it is established, to slip again from their hands, as in the case of Mussolini, cannot survive the severer shocks to which they are exposed. Systems, on the other hand, which have established such physical control and are able to retain it beyond the point where they are no longer masters of their destinies, as in the case of Hitler, can maintain cohesion, for a time, when the foundations of their power have already disappeared.
