but rather a society shaped by the confluence of unique economic and political circumstances interacting with the concerns of ordinary citizens. Writing in 1987, Walter Laqueur posited that the revisionists in the field of Soviet history were guilty of confusing popularity with morality and of making highly embarrassing and not very convincing arguments against the concept of the Soviet Union as a totalitarian state. Laqueur stated that the revisionists' arguments with regard to Soviet history were highly similar to the arguments made by Ernst Nolte regarding German history. For Laqueur, concepts such as modernization were inadequate tools for explaining Soviet history while totalitarianism was not. Laqueur's argument has been criticized by modern "revisionist school" historians such as Paul Buhle, who said that Laqueur wrongly equates Cold War revisionism with the German revisionism; the latter reflected a "revanchist, military-minded conservative nationalism." Moreover, Michael Parenti and James Petras have suggested that the totalitarianism concept has been politically employed and used for anti-communist purposes. Parenti has also analysed how "left anti-communism" attacked the Soviet Union during the Cold War. For Petras, the CIA funded the Congress for Cultural Freedom in order to attack "Stalinist anti-totalitarianism." Into the 21st century, Enzo Traverso has attacked the creators of the concept of totalitarianism as having invented it to designate the enemies of the West. According to some scholars, calling Joseph Stalin totalitarian instead of authoritarian has been asserted to be a high-sounding but specious excuse for Western self-interest, just as surely as the counterclaim that allegedly debunking the totalitarian concept may be a high-sounding but specious excuse for Russian self-interest. For Domenico Losurdo, totalitarianism is a polysemic concept with origins in Christian theology and applying it to the political sphere requires an operation of abstract schematism which makes use of isolated elements of historical reality to place fascist regimes and the Soviet Union in the dock together, serving the anti-communism of Cold War-era intellectuals rather than reflecting intellectual research. Other scholars, among them F. William Engdahl, Sheldon Wolin, and Slavoj Žižek, have linked totalitarianism to capitalism and liberalism, and used concepts such as inverted totalitarianism, totalitarian capitalism, and totalitarian democracy. See also Comparison of Nazism and Stalinism Criticism of communist party rule Criticism of Marxism Democratic backsliding List of authoritarian states List of cults of personality List of totalitarian regimes Totalitarian architecture References Further reading Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Schocken Books, 1958,