"Earlier autocracies had come nowhere near to such intensity of control over their societies. Important things changed in the twentieth century. One was the development of technology allowing rapid communication, especially telephones, the telegraph, railways and aircraft. With the expansion of literacy and numeracy, the opportunity for administrative and ideological penetration had never been greater. A second factor was of equal importance. Even the most ambitious dictatorships of the past had shied away from trampling down many traditions and eradicating groups and organisations. Political movements were formed after the nineteenth century to turn their societies upside down and reconstruct them in their own image; and these movements - the communists on the left and the fascists on the right - destroyed, wherever possible, every vestige of autonomous association. They had a totalising perspective. Nothing was to be regarded as unpolitical. The totalitarian rulers had no respect for private life. They pulled the media, sport, and recreation into their grasp. They eliminated all opposition. They filled the jails and conducted a campaign of permanent terror. They poured the bottles of their ideology into the minds of those whom they ruled."