effect, offshoots of totalitarian models do not provide good approximations of post-Stalinist reality." According to Michael Scott Christofferson in 2019, "Arendt's reading of the post-Stalin USSR can be seen as an attempt to distance her work from 'the Cold War misuse of the concept.'" Historian John Connelly wrote that totalitarianism is a useful word but that the old 1950s theory about it is defunct among scholars. Connelly wrote: "The word is as functional now as it was 50 years ago. It means the kind of regime that existed in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, the Soviet satellites, Communist China, and maybe Fascist Italy, where the word originated. ... Who are we to tell Václav Havel or Adam Michnik that they were fooling themselves when they perceived their rulers as totalitarian? Or for that matter any of the millions of former subjects of Soviet-type rule who use the local equivalents of the Czech totalita to describe the systems they lived under before 1989? It is a useful word and everyone knows what it means as a general referent. Problems arise when people confuse the useful descriptive term with the old 'theory' from the 1950s." Politics Early usage The notion that totalitarianism is total political power which is exercised by the state was formulated in 1923 by Giovanni Amendola, who described Italian Fascism as a system which was fundamentally different from conventional dictatorships. The term was later assigned a positive meaning in the writings of Giovanni Gentile, Italy's most prominent philosopher and leading theorist of fascism. He used the term totalitario to refer to the structure and goals of the new state which was to provide the "total representation of the nation and total guidance of national goals." He described totalitarianism as a society in which the ideology of the state had influence, if not power, over most of its citizens. According to Benito Mussolini, this system politicizes everything spiritual and human: "Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state." One of the first people to use the term totalitarianism in the English language was the Austrian writer Franz Borkenau in his 1938 book The Communist International, in which he commented that it united the Soviet and German dictatorships more than it divided them. The label totalitarian was twice affixed to Nazi Germany during Winston Churchill's speech of 5 October 1938, before the House of Commons in opposition