Authoritarian Government

Techniques of Dictaroship

Controlled participation

  • youth movements

  • rallies

  • controlled elections

Force and terror

  • imprisoning dissidents

  • exile

  • disappearances

Propaganda and censorship

  • glorify leader

  • indoctrination

  • media control

Directing popular discontent

  • scapegoating

  • enemies of the people

  • foreign threats

  • internal threats

  • show trials

Nazi purges

  • Night of the Long Knives

    • Brownshirts in a Nazi paramilitary massacred Jewish businesses and killed enemies of the state.

  • Power consolidation controlled with Himmler as the lead of the S.S.

  • Ernst Rohm was head of the Brownshirts; considered a threat to Hitler’s authority.

    • fear of an alternate army was unpopular with Germans.

  • From June 30th to July 2nd, Rohm supposedly held a coup, giving the Nazis an excuse to kill him.

    • 85 officials killed; power increasingly consolidates.

  • The end of the Brownshirts as a potent political force.

Propaganda and terror

  • Soviet propaganda:

    • plentiful grains

    • omits info or is half-lies

    • simplifications, emotional, adverts, attacks and targets a desired audience

  • Censorship:

    • Yezhov, the head of the NKVD in 1936 was photographed with Stalin.

      • He was then blamed for excesses and executed in 1940. He was removed from the photo with Stalin.

  • Nazi propaganda:

    • conspiracy theories → anti-semetic images including “wirepeller”

    • Eugenics propaganda: money and taxpayer money, associate people with disliked things e.g. typhus

  • Force and terror

    • Concentration camps were primarily first used for dissidents, then people who harmed the Nazi vision.

      • Slave labour, POW and work camps.

    • In 1942, the Final Solution was planned: complete extermination of the Jewish population.

Soviet sham elections

  • Stalin: mid 1920s - 1953:

    • consolidated his mandate

    • approved/communist candidates were the only ones allowed to run