The Origins of Totalitarianism
During the Cold War, the theory of two totalitarianisms, fascism and communism, gained strong momentum in the Western world, for example through the work of Hannah Arendt (notably her influential book "The Origins of Totalitarianism") and other scholars, such as Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, who argued that Nazi and Soviet regimes were equally totalitarian. According to Volker Berghahn, "as Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski later put it in their classic analysis of the totalitarian paradigm that came to sweep the board in Western ideological discourse in the 1950s, Nazism and Stalinism were "basically alike" and represented very modern and brutally destructive versions of twentieth-century dictatorship."