When an international movement with all-encompassing ideology and global political aims seizes power in one country, it faces a paradoxical situation.

The socialist movement avoided this crisis because Marx and Engels neglected the national question, and after WWI, socialist parties had become national parties prioritizing national sentiments over international solidarity.

This transformation into national parties did not occur in totalitarian movements like Bolshevik and Nazi movements.

These movements faced the danger of becoming ossified by taking over state machinery and frozen into absolute government, or limited by the national borders restricting their freedom of movement.

Both ossification and nationalism are deadly for totalitarian movements because they threaten the movement’s internal drive and exterior expansion, both vital for survival.

The form of government developed by these movements reflects Trotsky’s slogan of “permanent revolution,” a concept implying continuous revolution beyond national boundaries.

Trotsky’s original theory was a socialist forecast of sequential revolutions, but the term “permanency” suggests a semi-anarchistic ongoing instability.

In the Soviet Union, revolutions became a permanent institution through general purges after 1934 under Stalin.

Stalin attacked Trotsky’s slogan because he adopted permanent revolution tactics himself.

Nazi Germany also showed a tendency toward permanent revolution, though it was not fully realized due to limited time.

Nazis began with liquidating party factions that spoke of the “next stage of revolution,” acknowledging the real struggle had just begun.

Instead of Bolshevik permanent revolution, Nazis promoted a racial idea of a selection process that requires constant radicalization and extermination of the “unfit.”

Both Hitler and Stalin promised stability while intending to create a state of permanent instability.

This solution addressed the contradiction between a totalitarian claim and limited power in a single country, and membership in the international community respecting sovereignty.

The totalitarian ruler faces a dual task: to establish the movement’s fictitious world as a real everyday life, but to prevent this world from stabilizing.

A stabilized totalitarian state would lose its “total” quality and become subject to national laws and traditions, undermining claims of absolute validity.

The moment revolutionary institutions become a national way of life, totalitarianism loses its essence, making claims like Nazism as non-exportable or socialism in one country mere deceptions.

The paradox is that possessing all government power in one country is not entirely advantageous for a totalitarian movement.

The regime’s disregard for facts and adherence to a fictitious world becomes harder to maintain but remains essential.

Power involves direct confrontation with reality, which totalitarianism constantly struggles to overcome.

Propaganda and organization alone can no longer sustain the belief that impossible things are possible and that an insane consistency governs the world.

The psychological basis of totalitarian fiction—the active resentment of the status quo—is diminished once in power.

Any factual information leaking through the iron curtain poses a greater threat to totalitarian rule than counterpropaganda.

Totalitarian regimes inherently pursue global total domination and elimination of competing nontotalitarian realities to maintain power.

Reliable domination of even a single individual requires global totalitarian conditions.

Ascendancy to power means establishing official headquarters or branches for the movement and a laboratory to experiment with organizing people for ultimate purposes that disregard individuality and nationality.

Totalitarianism uses state administration for world conquest and directing movement branches.

It establishes secret police to enforce its domestic experiment of transforming reality into fiction.

It erects concentration camps as laboratories for its experiment in total domination.