Learn more about our membership, access transcripts, and the art we use in the videos by visiting

Academy of Ideas.com.

Humanity is arming itself, in dread and fascinated horror, for a stupendous crime.

While we cannot create a heaven on earth, we can create a hell, and history is full of examples.

Many of these man-made hells are the result of war and conquest, but many others are the result of governments persecuting their own people,

be it the gulags of the Soviet Union, the killing fields of Cambodia, the Nazi concentration camps,

the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda, or the cultural revolution in China,

power-hungry political leaders are responsible for the deaths of millions of people in the 20th century.

How much have we learned from these recent horrors? Could a modern democratic government

commit a political persecution and kill a portion of its own population? In this video, we are going to

explore how this risk is high in any society that is naive and sheepish enough to permit the rise

of totalitarian rule.

The totalitarian hell, writes Hannah Arendt, proves only that the power of man is greater

than they ever dared to think, and that man can realize hellish fantasies without making

the sky fall or the earth open.

Totalitarian government is a modern phenomenon.

It first emerged in the 20th century and as Rod Dreher explains,

a totalitarian society is one in which an ideology seeks to displace all prior traditions and institutions, with the goal of bringing all aspects

of society under control of that ideology. A totalitarian state is one that aspires to nothing

less than defining and controlling reality. To achieve its ideological ends, a totalitarian

government mobilizes all the mechanisms of the state

to exert a strict top-down control of the populace.

...