The comments are raging in my little spoof on the Iraq war debate, being now well over a hundred. We’ve had one transnationalist troll from Norway, named Canute, who, unlike his wiser namesake, doesn’t realize that he will be unable to hold back the tide of freedom. My old friend Marcus Lindroos, a Finnish space enthusiast, has been weighing in as well, trotting out all the hoary stale shibboleths about the Evil Amerikan Empire.

In one post, he called Thieu’s South Vietnam a “totalitarian” state. When I corrected him, he asked if that was not synonymous with being a dictatorship. While I don’t even think that Thieu was a dictator, I told him that the short answer to that question was “no.”

It obviously deserves to be expanded upon. In brief, and while there are sometimes gradations, rather than a bright line between them, authoritarian dictators miminally concern themselves with control of people’s lives, usually only to the degree necessary to maintain power, and get what they want. Totalitarians have a much broader, and more frightening agenda–they seek to control every aspect of peoples’ daily lives, down to their very thoughts.

Totalitarian regimes are characterized by total control over the educational system, a state-imposed ideology, and an almost-messianic worship of the leader himself, with dire penalties for anyone who brooks opposition, in word or deed. Thieu (and Pinochet, and other authoritarians) often ruled with an iron fist, and occasionally might have people disposed of, who they viewed as a threat, but that kind of leader is run-of-the-mill, and as old as civilization.

Totalitarianism was a wholly new monstrous invention of the twentieth century, made possible by technology, particularly communications and information technology. Stalin was the prototype. Hitler perfected it.

In contrast, Thieu (and most of the garden-variety thugs who, for instance, ran Central America through the seventies and eighties), was indifferent to what people wore, or who they worshiped, or even what they thought of him, as long as he got his graft, and was in no fear of losing his power.

And what Marcus and others don’t seem to understand is that totalitarianism isn’t dead, though perhaps it could be considered to be the undead–a shadowy zombie of Nazism has taken form in the Muslim world. The Taliban were totalitarians–they told people what to wear, how and who to worship, what music they could hear (generally none), and what to think. They destroyed, quite literally, any references to other religions, even when it was a stone statue, meters high, that had been in place for hundreds of years. To enforce their madness, they punished dissenters with cruel and appalling, and very public tortures and executions, to make an example of them. A regime that would pull the fingernails from a woman simply because they had polish on them is a totalitarian regime.

Saddam Hussein’s Iraq falls in the same category, though it’s a secular form. Mere dictatorships are susceptible to coups. To prevent them, the head of a totalitarian regime instills a high level of fear–anyone who shows the slightest hint of disloyalty is not just prevented from rising to a position from which he could make an attempt at a coup, but murdered, often brutally after torture, along with his wife, children, parents, siblings, anyone who knew him, and the horses or camels they rode in on. The people are simply tools and resources to be used for his own purposes–if he needs guinea pigs to try out the latest Sarin recipe, just toss it on some Kurds to see what happens.

Ultimately, the source of this new and virulent form of Nazism (including the rabid anti-semitism) is the Wahhabi sect of Islam, funded by the oil money of the House of Saud. Through much of the nineties, and until last fall, Afghanistan was effectively a Saudi colony.

And just as ultimately, our war against it will not be over until such funding stops, either voluntarily, or by taking away their oil.

The danger from the Middle East is both less, and greater than that we faced sixty years ago from the totalitarian regimes of Japan and Germany. It’s less, because the countries that are waging an undeclared war on us are industrially backwards, and their conventional military ability is pathetic. It’s greater, because they are occasionally clever about using our own technology and love of liberty against us (as we saw on September 11), and because they inexplicably have the sympathy of many in the west, particularly in Europe, which is going to hinder our ability to deal properly with them, (though it will certainly not prevent it).

For many years, we found it convenient to ignore the trampling of the rights and liberties of the people of the region by the thugs who ran the place, as long as we continued to get affordable oil. We discovered last fall that such neglect is no longer affordable. The next geopolitical challenge is the rise of virulent, totalitarian Islam and Arabism, and if we wish to prevent future recurrences of what happened last September, we will have to meet it, and firmly.