The distinction between totalitarianism and a more garden-variety authoritarianism seems rather unclear to me. For instance, does North Korea not count as totalitarian? There's not really any particular grand goal, but the level of pervasive oppression, terror, top-down control, and so on exceeds anything I know about under Stalin or Hitler.

Or what about Libya under Gaddafi (Khadafi, if you prefer)? There, you had the terror (but less), the vision of a perfect society (Gaddafi's own), and yet it didn't really yield a society with the oppressive quasi-mind-control like Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia.

If there isn't a reasonably clear phenomenon that we're trying to explain--just two big examples that may well have turned out like that due to the quirks of history--then the parallels to modern times are a lot harder to make. Or, rather, they're easier to make, but they are less specific, because they apply to a wider range of phenomena.