I love authors with a wry sense of humor. Brian Crozier, in his “The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire,” uses the descriptor “‘totalist’ dictator.” In the footnote, he writes:
“The words totalist and totalism will be used throughout this book, except when quoting other authors. The original words totalitarian and totalitarianism are usually credited (in their Italian equivalents) to Mussolini’s adviser Giovanni Gentile, who used the first of them in a speech on March 8, 1925. There is nothing sacrosanct about them, and I have always found them inelegantly and unnecessarily polysyllabic.”
Indeed.
Sounds like a soft pedal of the most murderous leftist regime of all time!