Benito Mussolini Dbq Essay

After World War I, all of Europe was left with the somber sense of optimism. Postwar writers would write about the horrors of modern warfare, stating it led to the moral breakdown of Western civilization. As a result of this despair, various totalitarian regimes emerged to control many different states in Europe throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Notable leaders include Benito Mussolini, Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler. Benito Mussolini led the first totalitarian state in Italy which was a form of government where a one-party dictatorship attempts to control every part of the lives of its citizens. Mussolini controlled Russia through his five-year plans for the economy and russification. Hitler controlled Germany through the beliefs of extreme

“A single mass party led typically by one man the dictator and consisting of a relatively small percentage of the total population up to 10 percent of men and women, a hard core of them passionately and unquestioningly dedicated to the ideology and prepared to assist in every way in promoting its general acceptance” (Document 1). A system of terroristic police control, supporting but also supervising the party for its leaders , and characteristically directed not only against demonstrable enemies of the regime, but against arbitrarily selected classes of the population” (Document 1). These quotes basic explain that any basic totalitarian state has a dictator with small percentage of the population that promotes the ideology and a group terroristic police forces that root out anyone against the regime. In Hitler’s regime, his goal was to get rid of the all Jews and establish an Aryan race of Europeans. He established the Nuremberg Laws which prevented the Jews from marrying non-Jews, attending or teaching at German schools and universities, hold government jobs, practice law or medicine or publishing books.The Gestapo placed Jews in ghettos where they faced horrible living

Joseph Stalin established the five-year plans which improved transportation, built heavy industry and increased farm output. Document 6 shows that Cubans had a list of 32 things they weren’t allowed to do. Some of them included sending children to a private or religious school, watching independent or private radio or TV stations, and even selling home-grown food products without government approval. Document 7 tells us about a man who was arrested for resisting the police. The announcement says, “for resisting the police on Monday, January 19, 1942, Dr. Ulrich Georg Israel Schultz was lawfully shot by the police” (Document 7). Document 10 describes an incident where people are burning books. The Propaganda minister said, the age of the extreme intellectualism has now ended, and the success of the German revolution has again given the right of way to the German spirit” (Document 10). Totalitarian states tried to restrict cultural life by showing propaganda in order to promote the ideology and root out