It was the journalist Malcolm Muggeridge who wrote of Nazi Germany describing government by terror:

“By such means it is possible for an unscrupulous and ruthless minority to impose its dictatorship on the majority; to make them obedient, apparently amenable to any policy, however violent and inconsistent, and to inculcate them with any doctrine, however unreasonable and absurd. Unity of purpose is achieved, but by imposition from without, not by conviction from within. It is the unity of the chain-gang. In the process of achieving this chain-gang unity, whatever differentiates a civilised community from its jungle origins is lost. There can be no trust between man and man when all are in duty bound to act as informers; there can be no intellectual or moral integrity when opinions are dictated and any deviation from them punished; there can be no learning or art, no pursuit of truth at all, when the free exercise of curiosity and speculation is made a crime. Human life, so confined, is something very paltry, lacking in dignity, insignificant. Whatever is fine and permanent in human achievement has been realised through individuals courageously facing the circumstances of their being; and a society is civilised to the extent to which it makes this possible. Terrorism, which aims at putting out the spiritual light, is the antithesis of civilisation.” http://www.p-ced.com/1/node/85