Freedom’s all well and good, but are there any significant works of fiction that argue against it and instead advocate a totalitarian way of life? Something pro-1984, pro-Borg, etc.?
It seems that whenever a perfectly controlled utopia is depicted in fiction, it’s always temporary and soon destroyed by human greed / a person who tastes freedom and starts a movement / corrupt, power-hungry authority figures / sheer stupidity. I’d like to at least entertain the thought of something different…
Mein Kampf?
Starship Troopers is, at the very least, pro-authoritarian.
Judge Dredd, long-running comic-book series from the british 2000 AD magazine.
During the eighties, the pro-authoritarian spoof that the series was became even darker, with Dredd lobotomizing a journalist who tried to uncover a mistake by the judges that cost thousands of lives, the judges fighting a democratic movement with torture and difamation, and so on.
There’s a book that just came out here in Sweden called “I was an Arian” that is set in 1970s Sweden after a Nazi victory in WWII. Albert Speer is Hitler’s successor, and from what I can gather out of this review in Dagens Nyheter it’s not simply a good vs. evil kind of story:
The book centers around a sports journalist, Thomas Robladh, and his romantic involvement with a woman who is part of an underground resistance movement planning to assassinate Speer when he visits Stockholm to inaugurate a new member of the German parliament, a poet laureate. Thomas doesn’t get swept up in it:
So maybe it’s not completely pro-totalitarian in that it depicts a fantastic utopia with an all-powerful leader at the head of society, but it certainly doesn’t seem to provide ideas that you can and should resist.
The Dark Knight Returns seems to be favorable to the idea of Rule of Batman.
Quite the contrary he’s clearly a freak outside of mainstream society who ‘has to be chased’. He works only because he’s out of the system not running it. Even his own followers object to him gaining too much power.
I wouldn’t really say it’s pro-totalitarian, but the Draka in S. M. Stirling Domination series do come across as kinda awesome.
I mean, like in the same way Godzilla is. You wouldn’t want him to attack your city, but you have to admit, he does a pretty impressive job of it.
Authoritarian is certainly not the same as totalitarian. In *Starship Troopers *the level of individual freedom for all is given as is very high whether you were a veteran with a vote or otherwise.
The nearest I can think of is Asimov’s *Second Foundation *and the proposed Second Empire - peace and harmony at the expense of real freedom, everything planned and controlled by the pscho-historians.
A good point about the Domination, rather too much indirect approval for my taste. But then I really don’t like that series.
Norman Spinrad’s The Iron Dream was, on the surface, a pulp fantasy adventure. It had a fascist subtext because Spinrad wrote it as a what-if. As in, what if Adolf Hitler immigrated to America and wrote pulp fantasy adventures.
The TV series Rome favored Julius Caesar and Octavian and IMO made the Republicans look weak and stupid. At the least, as I remember it from watching, Julius was assassinated more because of snobbery and jealousy than his megalomania.
While I don’t think the novel Starship Troopers was fascistic unless you’re looking for it and ignoring the bits that don’t fit, the movie version IMO glorified fascism, albeit with hamfisted irony.
I started reading a novel about Napoleon a couple years ago where the author seemed to worship the man but I can’t remember author or title.
Mark Twain has Hal Morgan say something along the lines of “Absolute Dictatorship is the best form of rule, provided the ruler is beneficial and immortal.” Morgan is the titular Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court who becomes THE BOSS, and who finds that he can put in all sorts of improvements and relieve suffering almost by fiat, and who (of course) sees himself as that benevolent force.
It’s hard to argue with the sentiment. Morgan sees his enlightened engineer/hero as bringing enlightenment and hygiene to a hopelessly custom-bound and stagnant world, and his nearly absolute power allows him to fix things up, release prisoners, and really make things better for people, brushing away the impediments of people who do things that way 'because we always have" and who exercise petty grudges.
Of course, Twain satirizes Morgan as much as Arthurian England – he’s NOT perfect, or omnipotent, often has to trick people into doing what he wants, and is petty on his own. But he did use his power to improve a lot of lives
I hate to reopen the whole *Starship Trooper *controversy and I must admit I haven’t read the book, but from the evidence in the movie I don’t see how that society could be called fascist. It would not be inconsistent with what we see in the movie for there to be a vigorous multiparty system in place with closely fought elections, a meaningful “Bill Of Rights”, a free press, an active ACLU-like organization, etc.
Well, of course there aren’t many works arguing that we should give power to corrupt dictators bent on oppression for personal gain. That’s not how totalitarianism starts, you know. It starts by arguing that things are so bad that only strong trustworthy individuals can protect the common people.
And that’s pretty easy to find in fiction. Take pretty much any “Dirty Harry” /Chuck Norris/“24”/“Die Hard” -type of movie/TV series where the main character does what has to be done, ignoring the petty rules and restrictions that only favor criminals and hamstring the legitimate authorities. They’re basically arguing against civil rights, meaningful restrictions on police powers, and democratic accountability for authorities.
In fact, it’s hard to think of any work of fiction involving crime in any way (except the small “Les Miserables” genre of criminals-driven-to-it) that doesn’t implicitly argue for totalitarianism. Maybe the original “Law and Order” sometimes shows a lot of nuance in addressing issues of what the tradeoffs are with civil liberties, but even there, generally in L&O, civil liberties are what lets a perp go free, not what protects people from lazy or pissed-off cops.
And pretty much any movie/novel that glorifies war or the military is implicitly totalitarian.
Like many Libertarian writers, including Heinlein and Goodkind, Miller’s work suffer from a schizophrenic love for “authoritarian rebels”. Yes, his heroes won’t follow any rule but their own, but then will force their personal rules upon everyone else by force if necessary, never tolerating dissent. “300” is a better example of this contradiction.
Well, the elections and such are clearly delineated in the book. A great deal is made of the possession of the franchise only by those who have served in the services. So government is clearly of the elected sort. It’s also made clear that anyone at all may serve for any reason, regardless of ability or political affiliation. Heinlein’s controversy, in my opinion, is postulating that an electorate made up of those who served would maintain a stable, static government. Certainly the characters in the book assume that near-perfection has been achieved.
But fascist? Not with free elections and a relatively open electorate.
More than a subtext – it was a history of the rise of Nazism couched in fantasy fiction terms. And Norman made it absolutely clear by way of the Afterward that he was doing it deliberately.
In I, Claudius and Claudius the God, Claudius, though favoring a republic, comes to realize that it’s only a pipe dream and that it’s better to rule as a dictator.
I think I’d have to question that. I don’t know what exactly you mean by “glorifies”, but you can have a film or book that is positive toward a war or the military that isn’t totalitarian. There’s not a necessary connection.
There was almost no similarity.