English

The New Totalitarians

The New Totalitarians is a 1971 book by British author Roland Huntford. Huntford analyzes the political and social climate of early 1970s Sweden, and argues that it resembles a benevolent totalitarian state in the mould of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. The main thesis was that the Swedish government relied less upon the violence and intimidation of the old totalitarians than upon sly persuasion and soft manipulation in order to achieve its goals. The influence of the state and official ideology were the most visible in the most private of matters, where little or no consciously “political” control had stretched before. At the time, Sweden was a nation controlled by the Social Democratic Party of Sweden, which had ruled the country's government for over 40 years. Huntford argues that this had led to the complete dominance of socialist thought at all levels of the government, including the bureaucracy and the judiciary, which were all controlled by a powerful interconnecting network of Social Democratic labour unions, lobby groups, and partisan organizations. He also points to the fact that these networks made it very difficult for non-socialists to achieve any position of real po

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