Week 5 Assignment - Ideal Citizen in a Totalitarian Government PDF

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Week 5 Assignment - Ideal Citizen in a Totalitarian Government...

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Running Head: IDEAL CITIZENS IN A TOTALITARIAN GOVERNMENT

Ideal Citizens in a Totalitarian Government Chamberlain College of Nursing Political Science (POLI330N-61716) Dr. Leah Persky November 30, 2019

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A good citizen is that individual who acts in agreement with rules, customs, and expectation of his/her own state and society (Magstadt, 2017). Unfortunately, being a good person is defined differently as someone with exemplary attitudes and model characteristics such as nice, kind, honest, truthful, caring, and integrity. The differences between the two as defined is more glaring in totalitarian state where tyranny is the social order. Aristotle’s definition of tyranny is that it is an unlawful form of government by one individual who strongly controlled every part of life and government. The totalitarian ideologies emanated from the likes of Adolf Hitler who imagined a culturally pure “Aryan” society, the society without classes as pledged by Lenin and Josef Stalin, and the peasant state of revolution that Mao Zedong imagined. Depending on the society and individual is, the requirements of being a good citizen varies because the totalitarians define citizenship in their own contexts. For example, a good citizen in Soviet Russia of the 1930s was an individual whose first devotion was to the Communist Party. Individualism is prohibited and even forbidden. The rights of society are supreme, leaving no room at all for the rights of the individual. This speaks to how totalitarianism imposes loyalty to the state over personal convictions and family. Why should being loyal to a party be accorded relevance over personality? Why would people dogmatically follow a dictator’s whims regardless of where they are being led? In striking contrast, constitutional democracy affords people rights to their conscience and freedom of speech, religion, etc. Evaluating the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) current totalitarian government, a lot of comparisons could be made with Stalin on how citizens are impeded from exercising their rights. Kim Jong Un is the third leader of the dynastic Kim family and head of the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK) who exercises almost total political control. The

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DPRK, one of the most totalitarian states where the regime limits all civic and political freedoms for its citizens, comprising freedom of expression, assembly, association, and religion. It uses a coercive polities of purgatives, attempts at social control and worsening retributions. The people of North Korea are increasingly scrutinized and maltreated by the state by means of coerciveness and unilateral power. As described in A Wisteria Tree House, the sister-in-law’s memoir of Kim Jong Il’s by Hye-rang Song (2001, p. 340), DPRK’s social control was an operational tyrannical technique to unswervingly connect socialist subjects to the highest authority, allowing the government to control people’s everyday lives (Kang, 2014). Voter apathy is defined as an absence of interest in partaking in the electoral process by the worried individuals that may result to the poor instituting of the legitimacy of democracy since the voters do not express their mandate. This allows the political class to make ineffective policies, after all, the citizens refuse to turn up for elections. In North Korea, citizens aged 17 and older are mandatory to turnout on election day. According to BBC News, almost all (100%) voters show up and endorsement for the governing alliance is undisputed. Citizens are required to be devoted to the leader who is believed to be the best ruler they can have. While voters are allowed to perform their civic duties on election day, they have no choice of candidates. There is usually only one name on the ballot papers which is supposed to be put in the ballot box in the open. According to BBC News, anyone who decides to cross out the only name on the ballot paper is seen as insane and handed over to the authorities. This is one way the government controls the people. Unfortunately, the ideal citizen in DPRK is different because of the yardsticks used to measure ideal citizenship in the state compared to other constitutional democracies. Definition of

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a good citizen is purely contextual because of the introduction of the totalitarian states envisioned by the Stalins, Hitlers, Mao Zedongs, etc. References Kang, J. W. (2014). The Two Faces of North Korean State Power. Politics, 34(3), 213–222. https://doi-org.chamberlainuniversity.idm.oclc.org/10.1111/1467-9256.12052 Magstadt, T. Understanding Politics: Ideas, Institutions, and Issues. [VitalSource Bookshelf]. Retrieved from https://online.vitalsource.com/#/books/9781337026055/ North Koreans vote in 'no-choice' parliamentary elections. (2019, March 10). Retrieved from https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-47492747. Systematic Tyranny: How the Kim Dynasty Holds the North Korean People in Bondage. (2019, February 13). Retrieved from https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/systematictyranny-how-kim-dynasty-holds-north-korean-people-bondage....