ABSTRACT
An ideology may be totalitarian, but without a population supporting it, the ideas remain politically irrelevant. When one looks through history, there are quite a few ideologies that look pretty totalitarian that don’t end up going anywhere, with a few small bands of adherents debating among themselves but not doing much else. Historically, these movements are not purely spontaneous. In other words, it is not as if a sizeable part of the population in Germany woke up one morning in 1933, collectively thought “say, that small-mustached guy seems like an up-and-up fellow,” went out into the street and demanded that the fellow, his ideology, and his party get complete and total political power. When looking at totalitarianism as a movement/organization, it is necessary to be somewhat cautious.
