A Tale Of Two Totalitarians

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1. Dogma
2. Ideology

“	Like a foreign conqueror, the totalitarian dictator regards the natural and industrial riches of each country, including his own, as a source of loot and a means of preparing the next step of aggressive expansion. Since this economy of systematic spoliation is carried out for the sake of the movement and not of the nation, no people and no territory, as the potential beneficiary, can possibly set a saturation point to the process. The totalitarian dictator is like a foreign conqueror who comes from nowhere, and his looting is likely to benefit nobody. Distribution of the spoils is calculated not to strengthen the economy of the home country but only as a temporary tactical maneuver. For economic purposes, the totalitarian regimes are as much at home in their countries as the proverbial swarms of locusts. The fact that the totalitarian dictator rules his own country like a foreign conqueror makes matters worse because it adds to ruthlessness an efficiency which is conspicuously lacking in tyrannies in alien surroundings. ... This is the reason why totalitarianism prefers quisling governments to direct rule despite the obvious dangers of such regimes.	”
	— Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

“	Ideologies are harmless, uncritical, and arbitrary opinions only as long as they are not believed in seriously. Once their claim to total validity is taken literally they become the nuclei of logical systems in which, as in the systems of paranoiacs, everything follows comprehensibly and even compulsorily once the first premise is accepted. The insanity of such systems lies not only in their first premise but in the very logicality with which they are constructed. The curious logicality of all isms, their simple-minded trust in the salvation value of stubborn devotion without regard for specific, varying factors, already harbors the first germs of totalitarian contempt for reality and factuality.	”
	— Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

“	The wétiko psychosis is a sickness of the spirit that takes people down an ugly path with no heart. ... Above all, the wétiko disease turns such people into werewolves and vampires, creatures of the European's nightmare world, and creatures of the wétiko's reality. They have taken their Satan to the four corners of the world, and they have made him their God.	”
	— Jack D. Forbes, Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wétiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism

Note: This article intends to focus on developing material for an essay that will attempt to demonstrate the totalitarian tendencies of dogmatic and ideological constructs.