With populist, nationalist and repressive governments on the rise around the world, questioning the impact of politics on the nature and role of law and the state is a pressing concern. If we are to understand the effects of extreme ideologies on the state's legal dimensions and powers - especially the power to punish and to determine the boundaries of permissible conduct through criminal law - it is essential to consider the lessons of history. This timely collection explores how political ideas and beliefs influenced the nature, content and application of criminal law and justice under Fascism, National Socialism, and other authoritarian regimes in the twentieth century. Bringing together expert legal historians from four continents, the collection's 16 chapters examine aspects of criminal law and related jurisprudential and criminological questions in the context of Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, Nazi-occupied Norway, apartheid South Africa, Francoist Spain, and the authoritarian regimes of Brazil, Romania and Japan. Based on original archival, doctrinal and theoretical research, the collection offers new critical perspectives on issues of systemic identity, self-perception and the foundational role of criminal law; processes of state repression and the activities of criminal courts and lawyers; and ideological aspects of, and tensions in, substantive criminal law.

Ante Pavelic was the leader of the fascist party of Croatia (the Ustase), who, on Adolf Hitler's instruction, became the leader of Croatia after the Nazi invasion of 1941. Pavelic was an extreme Croatian nationalist who believed that the Serbian people were an inferior race - he would preside over a genocide that ultimately killed an estimated 390,000 Serbs during World War II. Croatia under Ante Pavelic provides the full history of this period, with a special focus on the United States' role in the post-war settlement. Drawing on previously unpublished documents, Robert McCormick argues that President Harry S. Truman's Cold War priorities meant that Pavelic was never made to answer for his crimes. Today, the Ustase remains difficult legacy within Croatian society, partly as a result of Pavelic' political life in exile in South America. This is a new account of US foreign policy towards one of the Second World War's most brutal dictators and is an essential contribution to Croatian war-time history.

Musicians have often wanted to change the world. From underground innovators to pop icons many have believed in the political power of music. Rulers recognise it too. Music has been used to challenge the political and social order - and to prop up the status quo. Sound System is the story of one musician's journey to discover what makes music so powerful. Dave Randall uses his insider's knowledge of the industry to shed light on the secrets of celebrity, commodification and culture. This is a book of raves, riots and revolution. From the Glastonbury Festival to the Arab Spring, Pop Idol to Trinidadian Carnival, Randall finds political inspiration across the musical spectrum and poses the question: how can we make music serve the interests of the many, rather than the few? Published in partnership with the Left Book Club.

Why do some autocratic leaders pursue aggressive or expansionist foreign policies, while others are much more cautious in their use of military force? The first book to focus systematically on the foreign policy of different types of authoritarian regimes, Dictators at War and Peace breaks new ground in our understanding of the international behavior of dictators.

Jessica L. P. Weeks explains why certain kinds of regimes are less likely to resort to war than others, why some are more likely to win the wars they start, and why some authoritarian leaders face domestic punishment for foreign policy failures whereas others can weather all but the most serious military defeat. Using novel cross-national data, Weeks looks at various nondemocratic regimes, including those of Saddam Hussein and Joseph Stalin; the Argentine junta at the time of the Falklands War, the military government in Japan before and during World War II, and the North Vietnamese communist regime. She finds that the differences in the conflict behavior of distinct kinds of autocracies are as great as those between democracies and dictatorships. Indeed, some types of autocracies are no more belligerent or reckless than democracies, casting doubt on the common view that democracies are more selective about war than autocracies.

In December 1931, El Salvador's civilian president, Arturo Araujo, was overthrown in a military coup. Such an event was hardly unique in Salvadoran history, but the 1931 coup proved to be a watershed. Araujo had been the nation's first democratically elected president, and although no one could have foreseen the result, the coup led to five decades of uninterrupted military rule, the longest run in modern Latin American history. Furthermore, six weeks after coming to power, the new military regime oversaw the crackdown on a peasant rebellion in western El Salvador that is one of the worst episodes of state-sponsored repression in modern Latin American history. Democracy would not return to El Salvador until the 1990s, and only then after a brutal twelve-year civil war. In Authoritarian El Salvador: Politics and the Origins of the Military Regimes, 1880-1940, Erik Ching seeks to explain the origins of the military regime that came to power in 1931. Based on his comprehensive survey of the extant documentary record in El Salvador's national archive, Ching argues that El Salvador was typified by a longstanding tradition of authoritarianism dating back to the early- to mid-nineteenth century. The basic structures of that system were based on patron-client relationships that wove local, regional, and national political actors into complex webs of rival patronage networks. Decidedly nondemocratic in practice, the system nevertheless exhibited highly paradoxical traits: it remained steadfastly loyal to elections as the mechanism by which political aspirants acquired office, and it employed a political discourse laden with appeals to liberty and free suffrage. That blending of nondemocratic authoritarianism with populist reformism and rhetoric set the precedent for military rule for the next fifty years.

Dictatorships throughout the twentieth century--including Mussolini's Italy, the Third Reich, the Soviet Union, Poland, and East Germany--held elections. But were they more than rituals of participation without the slightest effect on the distribution of power? Why did political regimes radically opposed to liberal democracy feel the need to imitate their enemies? Offering significant insights into absolutist state governance, "Voting for Hitler and Stalin" thoroughly investigates the remarkable, paradoxical phenomenon of dictatorial elections, revealing the many ways they transcended mere propaganda.

In some circles, a nod towards totalitarianism is enough to dismiss any critique of the status quo. Such is the insidiousness of the neo-liberal ideology, argues Slavoj Žižek. "Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?" turns a specious rhetorical strategy on its head to identify a network of family resemblances between totalitarianism and modern liberal democracy. Žižek argues that totalitarianism is invariably defined in terms of four things: the Holocaust as the ultimate, diabolical evil; the Stalinist gulag as the alleged truth of the socialist revolutionary project; ethnic and religious fundamentalisms, which are to be fought through multiculturalist tolerance; and the deconstructionist idea that the ultimate root of totalitarianism is the ontological closure of thought. Žižek concludes that the devil lies not so much in the detail but in what enables the very designation totalitarian: the liberal-democratic consensus itself.

They usually start out as ordinary people, doing their best to deal with mixed messages in a complex world. What they donOt realize is that they may be the target of a violent system that is building an obedient workforce. One day theyOre enjoying a few laughs with buddies, and seemingly the next day, they wake up as human killing machines. And they allowed it to happen. Addressing one of the most serious threats to the world today, Human Killing Machines applies the model of systematic indoctrination to case studies of brutality in Iran, Nazi Germany, Al Qaeda, and Abu Ghraib. The book reveals how these transformations take place_how systems redefine morality to turn ordinary people into torturers, terrorists, and genocidal killers. Analyzing the key differences between these cases also helps to identify the safeguards which limit violence. Lankford demonstrates the weaknesses of indoctrination, the ways heroic individuals have resisted its influence, and the potential for countermeasures. Based on these examples, he offers recommendations for how we can begin to reform the U.S. military and increase its accountability, reduce Al Qaeda terroristsO commitment to their missions, and spark an awakening in Iran so that the oppressive regime goes out with a whimper_not with a bang.

This book argues that, more than any other factor, it was the encounter with totalitarianism that dissolved the ideals of American progressivism and crystallized the ideals of postwar liberalism. The New Deal began as a revolution in favor of progressive governance--executive-centered and expert-guided. But as David Ciepley shows, by the late 1930s, intellectuals and elites, reacting against the menace of totalitarianism, began to shrink from using state power to guide the economy or foster citizen virtues. All of the more statist governance projects of the New Deal were curtailed or abandoned, regardless of success, and the country placed on a more libertarian-corporatist trajectory, both economically and culturally. In economics, attempts to reorient industry from private profit to public use were halted, and free enterprise was reaffirmed. In politics, the ideal of governance by a strong, independent executive was rejected--along with notions of "central planning," "social control," and state imposition of "values"--and a politics of contending interest groups was embraced. In law, the encounter with totalitarianism brought an end to judicial deference, the embrace of civil rights and civil liberties, and the neutralist reinterpretation, and radicalization, of both. Finally, in culture, the encounter sowed the seeds of our own era--the era of the culture wars--in which traditional America has been mobilized against these liberal legal advances, and against the entire neutralist, "relativist," "secular humanist" reinterpretation of America that accompanies them.

Motivated by the reentry of tyranny into political discourse and political action, this new collection of essays compares ancient and contemporary accounts of tyranny in an effort to find responses to current political dilemmas and enduring truths. Identified by Plato and Aristotle as the worst kind of regime, the concept of tyranny was called into question during the Enlightenment and finally rejected in the 20th century as questions of good and evil were separated from facts-the proper domain for political science. However, in our globally interconnected world, tyrants are no longer dangerous solely to their subjects and neighbors, but to all. Confronting Tyranny brings together distinguished scholars to explore the lessons of classical political philosophy for the present political crisis of understanding and action.

In Baghdad, an enormous monument nearly twice the size of the Arc de Triomphe towers over the city. Two huge forearms emerge from the ground, clutching two swords that clash overhead. Those arms are enlarged casts of those of Saddam Hussein, showing every bump and follicle. The "Victory Arch" celebrates a victory over Iran (in their eight-year-long war) that never happened. This text is a study of the interplay between art and politics - of how culture, normally an unquestioned good, can play into the hands of a power with devastating effects. Kanan Makiya uses the culture invented by Saddam Hussein as a window into the nature of totalitarianism and shows how art can become the weapon of dictatorship. Under Saddam Hussein, culture connived in his evil - this text explains how. It should be useful reading for anyone concerned with the power of culture and the culture of power.

Concentration camp survivor, former Marxist-Leninist and Lithuanian patriot, Aleksandras Shtromas devoted his life to understanding totalitarianism and political change. He was a remarkably prescient thinker and is probably best known for his prediction of the fall of the Soviet Union, forecast at a time when the mighty empire seemed almost invincible. This posthumous collection of writings, edited by Robert Faulkner and Daniel J. Mahoney, addresses some of the topics that preoccupied Shtromas throughout his life, including totalitarian regimes, postcommunist transitions, the fates of the Baltic states, and the nature of political revolutions. Readers of Totalitarianism and the Prospects for World Order: Closing the Door on the Twentieth Century will encounter not just a learned and impressive scholar, but also a great man who confronted monstrous evils in his lifetime.

This work tells the epic story of the arrest of General Augusto Pinochet in London in October 1998, and the events surrounding it. It begins with Pinochet's violent military coup against the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973. It probes the sociopathic, paranoid and authoritarian tendencies that led him to murder thousands of people in Chile while authorizing acts of international terrorism in Argentina, Italy and Washington D.C. In response to his brutal reign, a human rights movement was forged that played a critical role in finally ousting the dictator in 1990. But even out of office, his power was such that he suppressed all efforts to prosecute him, until his detention in London. The book describes the clash between the politicians who sought to cover up and wash their hands of Pinochet, and the judges, lawyers and human rights organizations. And it discusses the implications of the affair for an international regime of justice.

What is the influence of international human rights activism on authoritarian governments in the modern era? How much can pressure from human rights organizations and nations affect political change within a county? This book addresses these key issues by examining the impact of transnational human rights organizations and international norms on Chile during Gen. Augusto Pinochet's regime (1973-90) and afterward.
Darren G. Hawkins argues that steadily mounting pressure from abroad concerning human rights did, in fact, make Pinochet more vulnerable over time and helped stimulate Chile's movement to a liberal democracy. Such international expectations could not be ignored by Pinochet, and they gradually and cumulatively made themselves felt. By 1975 some Chilean officials were adopting the discourse of human rights and claiming their adherence to international norms; two years later the government's security apparatus responsible for the reign of terror was reorganized, and disappearances in Chile nearly ceased. In 1980 the regime abandoned its insistence on unlimited authoritarian rule and approved a constitution that set term limits and promised future democratic institutions; Pinochet lost a constitutionally mandated plebiscite in 1988 and ultimately left office in 1990. Hawkins contends that these changes not only were internally driven but reflected an ongoing response to an international discourse on human rights.

Well-researched and cogently argued, this case study further illuminates and complicates our understanding of modern Chilean history and provides ample testimony of the far-reaching effects of international human rights work.

In the final volume, Arendt focuses on the two genuine forms of the totalitarian state in history-the dictatorships of Bolshevism after 1930 and of National Socialism after 1938. Index.

Can foreign capital empower dictatorship? This groundbreaking book develops a unified theory that links three prominent forms of international capital to the endurance of dictatorships. International capital empowers governments to finance two key instruments of non-democratic politics: repression and patronage. The Perils of International Capital uses theory, case studies, and cross-national statistical evidence to demonstrate causal effects between foreign capital and authoritarian politics. These finding are crucial to scholars and policymakers alike, as they call for a recalibration of the welfare effects associated with greater financial globalization. Ahmed reveals that, while foreign capital may improve economic development, it can tragically hinder democratic governance in the process.

Across central and eastern Europe after World War II, the newly established communist regimes promised a drastic social revolution that would transform the world at great pace and pave the way to a socialist future. Although many aspects of this utopian project are well known - such as fast-paced industrialisation, collectivisation and urbanisation - the regimes even sought to transform the ways in which their citizens interacted with each other and the world around them. Using a unique analytical model based on an amalgam of anthropology, sociology, history and extensive archival research, award-winning scholar Roman Krakovsky here considers the Czechoslovakian attempt to 'reinvent the world' - 'time' and 'space' included - in this all-encompassing way. Ranging from WWII to the fall of the Berlin Wall, his innovative analysis variously considers the impact of Stakhanovism, the impossible-to-achieve production targets intended to assert socialism's future potential; the attempt to replace Sunday's Christian attributes with socialist ones; and the profound changes brought about to the public and private spheres, including the culture of informing and the ways this was circumvented. Across a wide range of case studies Krakovsky demonstrates both the far-reaching extent of the communist vision and the inherent flaws and contradictions that gradually destabilised it. This in-depth perspective is vital reading for all scholars of twentieth century history and politics.

Belarus is an isolated country dominated by one man. Few tourists go there despite its fascinating, cultured past and beautiful countryside. Belarussians are friendly and hospitable yet they rarely have the chance to speak their minds and are deprived of access to unbiased information. They have been removed from the flow of European history by a tyrannical regime described by Condoleezza Rice, the former US Secretary of State, as 'the last dictatorship in Europe'. The people of Belarus were not ready for independence in 1991 and were misled into believing that the young, unsophisticated Alexander Lukashenko would lead them into a bright future. Instead he foisted upon them a dictatorship little different from what they had known before. Bennett's book tracks the history of Belarus from the collapse of the Soviet Union to the eventual establishment of dictatorship in 2006. It takes the reader through the excitement and mistakes of the first presidential election in 1994, undemocratic referenda and elections, suspicious disappearances of critics of the regime and the suppression of opposition. It ends with a close look at the enigmatic Alexander Lukashenko and hazards a guess as to how his regime will end. Belarus deserves to be better known; this book pulls back the curtain

"Dictators and Dictatorships" is a qualitative enquiry into the politics of authoritarian regimes. It argues that political outcomes in dictatorships are largely a product of leader-elite relations. Differences in the internal structure of dictatorships affect the dynamics of this relationship. This book shows how dictatorships differ from one another and the implications of these differences for political outcomes. In particular, it examines political processes in personalist, military, single-party, monarchic, and hybrid regimes.The aim of the book is to provide a clear definition of what dictatorship means, how authoritarian politics works, and what the political consequences of dictatorship are. It discusses how authoritarianism influences a range of political outcomes, such as economic performance, international conflict, and leader and regime durability.Numerous case studies from around the world support the theory and research presented to foster a better understanding of the inner workings of authoritarian regimes. By combining theory with concrete political situations, the book will appeal to undergraduate students in comparative politics, international relations, authoritarian politics, and democratization.

"Fascists," "Brownshirts," "jackbooted stormtroopers"--such are the insults typically hurled at conservatives by their liberal opponents. Calling someone a fascist is the fastest way to shut them up, defining their views as beyond the political pale. But who are the real fascists in our midst?
"Liberal Fascism" offers a startling new perspective on the theories and practices that define fascist politics. Replacing conveniently manufactured myths with surprising and enlightening research, Jonah Goldberg reminds us that the original fascists were really on the left, and that liberals from Woodrow Wilson to FDR to Hillary Clinton have advocated policies and principles remarkably similar to those of Hitler's National Socialism and Mussolini's Fascism.
Contrary to what most people think, the Nazis were ardent socialists (hence the term "National socialism"). They believed in free health care and guaranteed jobs. They confiscated inherited wealth and spent vast sums on public education. They purged the church from public policy, promoted a new form of pagan spirituality, and inserted the authority of the state into every nook and cranny of daily life. The Nazis declared war on smoking, supported abortion, euthanasia, and gun control. They loathed the free market, provided generous pensions for the elderly, and maintained a strict racial quota system in their universities--where campus speech codes were all the rage. The Nazis led the world in organic farming and alternative medicine. Hitler was a strict vegetarian, and Himmler was an animal rights activist.
Do these striking parallels mean that today's liberals are genocidal maniacs, intent on conquering the world and imposing a new racial order? Not at all. Yet it is hard to deny that modern progressivism and classical fascism shared the same intellectual roots. We often forget, for example, that Mussolini and Hitler had many admirers in the United States. W.E.B. Du Bois was inspired by Hitler's Germany, and Irving Berlin praised Mussolini in song. Many fascist tenets were espoused by American progressives like John Dewey and Woodrow Wilson, and FDR incorporated fascist policies in the New Deal.
Fascism was an international movement that appeared in different forms in different countries, depending on the vagaries of national culture and temperament. In Germany, fascism appeared as genocidal racist nationalism. In America, it took a "friendlier," more liberal form. The modern heirs of this "friendly fascist" tradition include the" New York Times," the Democratic Party, the Ivy League professoriate, and the liberals of Hollywood. The quintessential Liberal Fascist isn't an SS storm trooper; it is a female grade school teacher with an education degree from Brown or Swarthmore.
These assertions may sound strange to modern ears, but that is because we have forgotten what fascism is. In this angry, funny, smart, contentious book, Jonah Goldberg turns our preconceptions inside out and shows us the true meaning of Liberal Fascism.

Available for the first time in English language translation, the third volume of Totalitarianism and Political Religions completes the set. It provides a comprehensive overview of key theories and theorists of totalitarianism and of political religions, from Hannah Arendt and Raymond Aron to Leo Strauss and Simone Weill. Edited by the eminent Professor Hans Maier, it represents a major study, examining how new models for understanding political history arose from the experience of modern despotic regimes.

Where volumes one and two were concerned with questioning the common elements between twentieth century despotic regimes - Communism, Fascism, National Socialism, Maoism - this volume draws a general balance. It brings together the findings of research undertaken during the decade 1992-2002 with the cooperation of leading philosophers, historians and social scientists for the Institute of Philosophy at the University of Munich.

Following the demise of Italian Fascism (1943-45), German National Socialism (1945) and Soviet Communism (1989-91), a comparative approach to the three regimes is possible. A broad field of interpretation of the entire phenomenon of totalitarian and political religions opens up. This comprehensive study examines a vast topic which affects the political and historical landscape over the whole of the last century. Moreover, dictatorships and their motivations are still present in current affairs, today in the twenty-first century. The three volumes of Totalitarianism and Political Religions are a vital resource for scholars of fascism, Nazism, communism, totalitarianism, comparative politics and political theory.