{"id":398,"date":"2003-09-19T13:50:31","date_gmt":"2003-09-19T17:50:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/2003\/09\/19\/totalism\/"},"modified":"2007-02-13T17:21:59","modified_gmt":"2007-02-13T21:21:59","slug":"totalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/2003\/09\/19\/totalism\/","title":{"rendered":"Totalism"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a name=\"a486\"><\/a>  <a target=\"new\" href=\"http:\/\/www.alexandrastein.com\/\">Alexandra Stein<\/a> on <a target=\"new\" href=\"http:\/\/www.opendemocracy.net\/debates\/article-3-33-1496.jsp\">Totalism in the 21st century<\/a>, a response to Todd Gitlin and George Monbiot&#8217;s earlier <a target=\"new\" href=\"http:\/\/www.opendemocracy.net\/debates\/article.jsp?id=6&amp;debateId=91&amp;articleId=1462\">conversation<\/a> in <em>Open Democracy<\/em>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><em>[Totalism] is a critical issue facing the global progressive movement, and it\u2019s one we drag into the 21st century from the 20th, the bones of millions clanking along as proof of its dangers. Totalism, and its social-psychological relatives: sectarianism, fundamentalism, totalitarianism and cultism, are alive and well. And totalism \u2013 unlike global capitalism \u2013 is not driven by profit, but by the raw desire for power and control of each totalist leader. (&#8230;)<\/p>\n<p>It thrives on an absolutist or fundamentalist ideology: left-wing, right-wing, on the wings of the angels of the Christian identity movement or the wings of spiritual beings in the New Age. But in the end, the ideological wings don\u2019t matter, the social relationships of people to each other do.  [<a target=\"new\" href=\"http:\/\/www.opendemocracy.net\/debates\/article-3-33-1496.jsp\">more&#8230;<\/a>]<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Naomi Klein presented a <a target=\"new\" href=\"http:\/\/www.alternet.org\/story.html?StoryID=15737\">sharper point of view<\/a> back in April in response to Gitlin&#8217;s book, putting names and faces to Stein&#8217;s similar call for an end to Totalism:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><em>The true faces of modern activism belong to people like the late Rachel Corrie, the 23-year-old American &#8220;human shield&#8221; whose young body was crushed by a bulldozer in Gaza last month. Corrie wasn&#8217;t in the occupied territories to give comfort to suicide bombers; she was standing with the nonviolent International Solidarity Movement trying to keep a Palestinian family home from being demolished.  [<a target=\"new\" href=\"http:\/\/www.alternet.org\/story.html?StoryID=15737\">more&#8230;<\/a>]<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Alexandra Stein on Totalism in the 21st century, a response to Todd Gitlin and George Monbiot&#8217;s earlier conversation in Open Democracy: [Totalism] is a critical issue facing the global progressive movement, and it\u2019s one we drag into the 21st century from the 20th, the bones of millions clanking along as proof of its dangers. Totalism, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":311,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[600],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-398","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-yulelogstories"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/311"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=398"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=398"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=398"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}