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We are now in the seventh year of this Fourth Turning. A famous quote from the seventh year of the last Fourth Turning portended the desperate, bloody and ultimately heroic trials and tribulations which awaited generations of our ancestors. What will be our rendezvous with destiny?

“There is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.” – Franklin Delano Roosevelt – June 27, 1936 – Philadelphia, PA

Our Rendezvous With Destiny

“The seasons of time offer no guarantees. For modern societies, no less than for all forms of life, transformative change is discontinuous. For what seems an eternity, history goes nowhere – and then it suddenly flings us forward across some vast chaos that defies any mortal effort to plan our way there. The Fourth Turning will try our souls – and the saecular rhythm tells us that much will depend on how we face up to that trial. The saeculum does not reveal whether the story will have a happy ending, but it does tell us how and when our choices will make a difference.” – Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning

The people have been permitting a small cadre of elitists, billionaire financiers, corporate chiefs, propagandist media moguls, and crooked politicians to make the choices dictating the path of our country since the 2008 dawn of this Fourth Turning. The choices they have made and continue to make have imperiled the world and guaranteed a far more calamitous outcome as we attempt to navigate through the trials and tribulations ahead. Their strategy to “save the country” by saving bankers, while selling the plan to the public as beneficial to all and essential to saving our economic system, has proven to be nothing more than the greatest wealth transfer scheme in human history. The ruling class is deliberately blind to their own venality and capacity for evil.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Sheldon Wolin and Inverted Totalitarianism

November 2, 2015

Sheldon Wolin and Inverted Totalitarianism

Sheldon Wolin discusses his ideas with Chris Hedges in this still from Hedges’ interview with Wolin for The Real News Network. (TRNN via YouTube)

Sheldon Wolin, our most important contemporary political theorist, died Oct. 21 at the age of 93. In his books “Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism” and “Politics and Vision,” a massive survey of Western political thought that his former student Cornel West calls “magisterial,” Wolin lays bare the realities of our bankrupt democracy, the causes behind the decline of American empire and the rise of a new and terrifying configuration of corporate power he calls “inverted totalitarianism.”

Wendy Brown, a political science professor at UC Berkeley and another former student of Wolin’s, said in an email to me: “Resisting the monopolies on left theory by Marxism and on democratic theory by liberalism, Wolin developed a distinctive—even distinctively American—analysis of the political present and of radical democratic possibilities. He was especially prescient in theorizing the heavy statism forging what we now call neoliberalism, and in revealing the novel fusions of economic with political power that he took to be poisoning democracy at its root.”

Wolin throughout his scholarship charted the devolution of American democracy and in his last book, “Democracy Incorporated,” details our peculiar form of corporate totalitarianism. “One cannot point to any national institution[s] that can accurately be described as democratic,” he writes in that book, “surely not in the highly managed, money-saturated elections, the lobby-infested Congress, the imperial presidency, the class-biased judicial and penal system, or, least of all, the media.”

Inverted totalitarianism is different from classical forms of totalitarianism. It does not find its expression in a demagogue or charismatic leader but in the faceless anonymity of the corporate state.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Culture of Cruelty: the Age of Neoliberal Authoritarianism

October 23, 2015

Culture of Cruelty: the Age of Neoliberal Authoritarianism

George Orwell’s nightmarish vision of a totalitarian society casts a dark shadow over the United States. As American society has moved from a welfare to a warfare state, the institutions that were once meant to limit human suffering and misfortune and protect the public from the excesses of the market have been either weakened or abolished.[1] With the withering, if not evisceration, of the social contract, the discourse of social responsibility has been removed from the principles of democratic reform. Relegated to an object of disdain by right-wing extremists, the legacy of democratic principles now withers under a social order marked by a hardening of the culture and the emergence of an unprecedented survival-of-the fittest ethos. This is a mean-spirited ethos that rails against any notion of solidarity and compassion that embraces a respect for others. The consequences of this emerging authoritarianism speak to a different experience of total terror in the 21^st century.

The basic elements of this new neoliberal authoritarianism can be seen clearly in the ongoing and ruthless assault on the social state, unions, higher education, workers, students, poor minority youth, and any vestige of the social contract. Free market policies, values, and practices with their emphasis on the privatization of public wealth, the elimination of social protections, and the deregulation of economic activity now shape practically every commanding political and economic institution in both countries. Markets now use their economic and ideological resources to weaponize and militarize all aspects of everyday life, increasingly held in place by a culture of fear, a pedagogy of repression, a banal celebrity culture, game show aesthetics, and a politics of precarity, control, and mass surveillance.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Curse of Totalitarianism and the Challenge of an Insurrectional Pedagogy

October 2, 2015

The Curse of Totalitarianism and the Challenge of an Insurrectional Pedagogy

Introduction

The forces of free-market fundamentalism are on the march ushering in a terrifying horizon of what Hannah Arendt once called “dark times.” Across the globe, the tension between democratic values and market fundamentalism has reached a breaking point. [1] The social contract is under assault, neo-Nazism is on the rise, right wing populism is propelling extremist political candidates and social movements into the forefront of political life, anti-immigrant sentiment is now wrapped in the poisonous logic of nationalism and exceptionalism, racism has become a mark of celebrated audacity, and a politics of disposability comes dangerously close to its endgame of extermination for those considered excess. Under such circumstances, it becomes frightfully clear that the conditions for totalitarianism and state violence are still with us smothering critical thought, social responsibility, the ethical imagination, and politics itself. As Bill Dixon observes:

[T]he totalitarian form is still with us because the all too protean origins of totalitarianism are still with us: loneliness as the normal register of social life, the frenzied lawfulness of ideological certitude, mass poverty and mass homelessness, the routine use of terror as a political instrument, and the ever growing speeds and scales of media, economics, and warfare. [2]

In the United States, the extreme right in both political parties no longer needs the comfort of a counterfeit ideology in which appeals are made to the common good, human decency, and democratic values. On the contrary, power is now concentrated in the hands of relatively few people and corporations while power is global and free from the limited politics of the democratic state. In fact, the state for all intent and purposes has become the corporate state. Dominant power is now all too visible and the policies, practices, and wrecking ball it has imposed on society appear to be largely unchecked.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Real Enemy Is Within

September 7, 2015

The Real Enemy Is Within

Steve Mann / Shutterstock

If you are not dedicated to the destruction of empire and the dismantling of American militarism, then you cannot count yourself as a member of the left. It is not a side issue. It is the issue. It is why I refuse to give a pass in this presidential election campaign to Bernie Sanders, who refuses to confront the war industry or the crimes of empire, including U.S. support for the slow genocide carried out by Israel against the Palestinians. There will be no genuine democratic, social, economic or political reform until we destroy our permanent war machine.

Militarists and war profiteers are our greatest enemy. They use fear, bolstered by racism, as a tool in their efforts to abolish civil liberties, crush dissent and ultimately extinguish democracy. To produce weapons and finance military expansion, they ruin the domestic economy by diverting resources, scientific and technical expertise and a disproportionate share of government funds. They use the military to carry out futile, decades-long wars to enrich corporations such as Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman. War is a business. And when the generals retire, guess where they go to work? Profits swell. War never stops. Whole sections of the earth live in terror. And our nation is disemboweled and left to live under what the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls “inverted totalitarianism.” Libertarians seem to get this. It is time the left woke up.

“Bourgeois society faces a dilemma,” socialist Rosa Luxemburg writes, “either a transition to Socialism, or a return to barbarism … we face the choice: either the victory of imperialism and the decline of all culture, as in ancient Rome—annihilation, devastation, degeneration, a yawning graveyard; or the victory of Socialism—the victory of the international working class consciously assaulting imperialism and its method: war. This is the dilemma of world history, either-or; the die will be cast by the class-conscious proletariat.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Harper’s Newspeak

August 31, 2015

Harper’s Newspeak

He loves naming laws with false slogans. (So do fascists.)

Newspeak: ‘An impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.’ Photo source: Stephen Harper Flickr.

In 1995 the Italian writer Umberto Eco, who grew up in Mussolini’s Italy, wrote an essay on the eternal threat of fascism for the New York Review of Books.

Eco explained that fascism, like any totalitarian system, depended on certain features to poison the political landscape.

It could sprout, warned Eco, like an invasive weed in any place where careless citizens let liberty erode.

To Eco the central ingredients of eternal fascism included a cult of heroism; an irrational worship of technology; a faith in action and action plans (politics as permanent warfare); a fear of difference (all fascist governments are racist); leadership that bullies the masses; an obsession over some kind of international plot (such as ISIS taking over the world) and a belief that parliamentary government is rotten to the core.

A fascist government also bent plain language into Newspeakto converse with the people. Whether engineered by socialists, capitalists or dictators, all Newspeak, noted Eco, must make “use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.” In essence, fascism suspends thinking with lies and false language.

George Orwell understood that political chaos danced with the decay of language and that political language “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murders respectable and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

Just about every modern institution and political party employs Newspeak to one degree or another. Many U.S. universities have become experts at closing minds with deceptive language.One notorious university library guideadvised students that the rich are really “people of material wealth” and the obese are “people of size.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Plague of American Authoritarianism

August 21, 2015

The Plague of American Authoritarianism

Authoritarianism in the American collective psyche and in what might be called traditional narratives of historical memory is always viewed as existing elsewhere. Viewed as an alien and demagogic political system, it is primarily understood as a mode of governance associated with the dictatorships in Latin America in the 1970s and, of course, in its most vile extremes, with Hitler’s poisonous Nazi rule and Mussolini’s fascist state in the 1930s and 1940s. These were and are societies that idealized war, soldiers, nationalism, militarism, political certainty, fallen warriors, racial cleansing, and a dogmatic allegiance to the homeland.[i] Education and the media were the propaganda tools of authoritarianism, merging fascist and religious symbols with the language of God, family, and country, and were integral to promoting servility and conformity among the populace. This script is well known to the American public and it has been played out in films, popular culture, museums, the mainstream media, and other cultural apparatuses. Historical memory that posits the threat of the return of an updated authoritarianism turns the potential threat of the return of authoritarianism into dead memory. Hence, any totalitarian mode of governance is now treated as a relic of a sealed past that bears no relationship to the present. The need to retell the story of totalitarianism becomes a frozen lesson in history rather than a narrative necessary to understanding the present

Hannah Arendt, the great theorist of totalitarianism, believed that the protean elements of totalitarianism are still with us and that they would crystalize in different forms.[ii] Far from being a thing of the past, she believed that totalitarianism “heralds as a possible model for the future.”[iii]

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Canadian ‘Totalitarianism’? Hope Can Win, Says Author Thomas King

July 8, 2015

Canadian ‘Totalitarianism’? Hope Can Win, Says Author Thomas King

Governor General award winner talks election politics and the power of words

Cherished author and former New Democrat candidate Thomas King insists he’ll stay out of politics this pivotal election season.

But on the heels of his Governor General award-winning novelThe Back of the Turtle — set in a coastal B.C. village devastated by a toxic spill — neither is the 72-year-old Order of Canada recipient shying away from controversy.

He’s incensed by the sweep of Conservative legislation under Prime Minister Stephen Harper, in particular last month’s wide-reaching anti-terrorism bill, and earlier the slashing of waterway and environmental protections, muzzling of scientists on climate change, and gutting of Canada’s research libraries.

“The pieces of legislation they brought in, to my way of thinking, have been very close to a kind of totalitarianism,” he told The Tyee in a phone interview from his home in Peterborough, Ontario. “That doesn’t make me feel good, and I don’t think it’s very — if I dare say it — Canadian, particularly.”

Last year, The Back of the Turtle secured him the Governor General’s top literary prize. The book follows Dr. Gabriel Quinn, an aboriginal scientist who works for a multinational company whose chemical spill has decimated a small coastal B.C. town. The protagonist disappears and resurfaces in his fictitious hometown, Smoke River Indian Reserve, where he confronts his complicity in the cataclysm.

Despite energy companies’ safety assurances, it’s a feared outcome increasingly familiar across the country as a raft of bitumen and gas pipeline proposals advance.

For King, who is of mixed Cherokee, German and Greek descent, the novel’s clash of worldviews reflects many of the ethical tensions with which many Canadians grapple. But in that clash, he believes, also lies the potential for changing citizens’ hearts and minds.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Tragedy of Harper’s Canada

July 3, 2015

The Tragedy of Harper’s Canada

Tilting Toward Totalitarianism

“This abuse of executive power is tilting toward totalitarian government and away from the foundations of democracy and the rule of law on which this country was founded.”

-Errol Mendes, Professor of constitutional and international law (University of Ottawa)

The current Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper looks like a tattered and ragged old stuffed animal these days. You know–the ones with one button-eye missing and the other hanging by a single thread. Although he has survived endless scandals and sleazy acts over the past decade, Harper’s musical tune is now screeching and discordant.

Two of his top ministers (the obedient Peter McKay and the attack-dog, know-nothing John Baird) have decided to abandon politics. A third (Jim Prentice) left to run Alberta, but was soundly defeated by a resurgent New Democratic Party. Harper’s possible successor, Jason Kenney, now Minister of Defence, looks bewildered as he repeats NATO’s lies about Russian aggression and fumbles along in a totally incoherent foreign policy.

On the international scene, this mean autocrat has had the gall—if you can believe this—to point his finger at Vladimir Putin and tell him to get out of the Ukraine. This moronic demand bespoke of his ignorance of the Ukraine’s common history and culture with Russia. Harper has murky ties with right-wing Canadian Ukrainians and has adopted the fantastical narrative pushed by the US and its pliant allies in the EU and NATO. He thinks this may get him some votes. He sent 200 troops (disguised as trainers) into the Ukraine to help quell the rebellion in Eastern Ukraine.

The opposition parties are demanding that Stephen the Sneaky come clean regarding his support for the neo-Nazi gangs of thugs in the Ukraine armed forces (like the Azov battalion). He appears to love vilifying Putin. Recently Russian MP Aleksey Puskov (United Russia) stated that Russia is the “most anti-Russian state in the western alliance as a whole and definitely also in the G7 group.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Emergence of Orwellian Newspeak and the Death of Free Speech

June 30, 2015

The Emergence of Orwellian Newspeak and the Death of Free Speech

“If you don’t want a man unhappy politically, don’t give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war. If the government is inefficient, top-heavy, and tax-mad, better it be all those than that people worry over it…. Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of ‘facts’ they feel stuffed, but absolutely ‘brilliant’ with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving. And they’ll be happy, because facts of that sort don’t change.” ― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

How do you change the way people think? You start by changing the words they use.

In totalitarian regimes—a.k.a. police states—where conformity and compliance are enforced at the end of a loaded gun, the government dictates what words can and cannot be used. In countries where the police state hides behind a benevolent mask and disguises itself as tolerance, the citizens censor themselves, policing their words and thoughts to conform to the dictates of the mass mind.

Even when the motives behind this rigidly calibrated reorientation of societal language appear well-intentioned—discouraging racism, condemning violence, denouncing discrimination and hatred—inevitably, the end result is the same: intolerance, indoctrination and infantilism.

It’s political correctness disguised as tolerance, civility and love, but what it really amounts to is the chilling of free speech and the demonizing of viewpoints that run counter to the cultural elite.

– See more at: https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/the_emergence_of_orwellian_newspeak_and_the_death_of_free_speech#sthash.cDulZM82.dpuf

The Day the Earth Died

June 25, 2015

The Day the Earth Died

And Why Sierra Club, Greenpeace, Etc., Were Virtually Silent About It

As the civilizations that we all know, and love, and lived, slide increasingly into totalitarian misery; and the environment, which had been our lives, becomes less and less livable, there will be, in retrospect, one key day, which historians will mark, as the turning-point toward Earth’s death; and it was 23 June 2015. That’s the day when the U.S. Senate, which had previously turned down the procedural move (called “Fast Track Trade Promotion Authority,” and discussed here) that opens the door to passing U.S. President Obama’s falsely-called ‘trade’ deals, finally (in effect) passed it — thereby reducing the Constitutionally required two-thirds of Senators that’s needed to approve any of these treaties in order for it to become law, down to merely an unConstitutional 50% of the Senators (+ the Vice President as the tie-breaker), as if a treaty were like any merely ordinary law (which requires only 50%+1); “Fast Track” thus enormously increases the likelihood of passing any of Obama’s world-murderous ‘trade’ treaties, from approximately 0%, to approximately 100%.

Here is how these treaties will murder the Earth:

Each of these ‘trade’ deals is about lots more than merely international commerce; it is far more fundamentally about sovereignty — who rules? There is a feature in each one of them that empowers international corporations to sue any member-nation to the treaty, which tries to pass any regulation, including any environmental regulation, that is stricter than what is set in stone forever in the given ‘trade’ deal.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Government Is Using Secrecy As a Weapon

June 8, 2015

Government Is Using Secrecy As a Weapon

“Everything Secret Degenerates”

Everyone knows Lord Acton’s famous quote:

Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

But few have heard this equally profound quote from Lord Acton:

Every thing secret degenerates, even the administration of justice; nothing is safe that does not show how it can bear discussion and publicity.

Likewise, US Supreme Court Justice Brandeis said:

Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.

But government secrecy is at an all-time high. Government is more hostile to the press than ever before.

The government prosecutes cases based upon “secret evidence” that they don’t show to the defendant … or sometimes even the judge hearing the case.

Government is “laundering” information gained through mass surveillance through other agencies, with an agreement that the agencies will “recreate” the evidence in a “parallel construction” … so the original source of the evidence is kept secret from the defendant, defense attorneys and the judge. A former top NSA official says that this is the opposite of following the Fourth Amendment, but is a“totalitarian process” which shows that we’re in a “police state”.

The government uses “secret evidence” to spy on Americans, prosecute leaking or terrorism charges (even against U.S. soldiers) and even assassinate people. And see this and this.

Secret witnesses are being used in some cases. And sometimes lawyers are being prevented from reading their own briefs.

Moreover:

A neocon “advocacy” group [was] immunized from the law, because the U.S. government waltzed into court, met privately with the judge, and whispered in secret that he had better dismiss all claims against that group lest he harm national security …

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Martin Armstrong Reports on a Secret Meeting in London to Ban Cash

May 27, 2015

Martin Armstrong Reports on a Secret Meeting in London to Ban Cash

Screen Shot 2015-05-26 at 10.54.52 AM

At this point, anyone paying even the slightest bit of attention to the central planning economic totalitarians running the fraudulent global financial system is aware of the blatant push in the media to acclimate the masses to accepting a “cashless society.”

In the mind of an economic tyrant, banning cash represents the holy grail. Forcing the plebs onto a system of digital fiat currency transactions offers total control via a seamless tracking of all transactions in the economy, and the ability to block payments if an uppity citizen dares get out of line.

While we’ve all seen the idiotic arguments for banning cash, i.e., it will allow central planners to more efficiently centrally plan economies into the ground, Martin Armstrong is reporting on a secret meeting in London with the aim of getting rid of any economic privacy that remains by ending cash.

From Armstrong Economics:

I find it extremely perplexing that I have been the only one to report that there is a secret meeting in London where Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard University and Willem Butler the chief economist at Citigroup will address the central banks and advocate the elimination of all cash to bring to fruition the day when you cannot buy or sell anything without government approval. When I Googled the issue to see who has picked it up yet, to my surprise Armstrong Economics comes up first. Others are quoting me, and I even find it spreading as the Central Bank of Nigeria, but I have yet to find reports on the meeting taking place in London when my sources are direct.

Other newspapers who have covered my European tour have stated that the “crash” of which I speak is the typical stock market rather than in government. What is concerning me is the silence on this meeting where there are more and more reports about a cashless society would be better.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Abolishing Cash – New Age of Economic Totalitarianism

May 18, 2015

Abolishing Cash – New Age of Economic Totalitarianism

Europe is moving full speed ahead to eliminate all cash. Instead of reforming and tackling the economic problems, government always seeks to maintain the same course of thinking that now leads us to the totalitarian approach coming from Brussels. To maintain the euro, they must maintain the banks. However, the bank reserves are debts of all member states. As government becomes insolvent as in Greece, the banking system is undermined. The only way to prevent the banking collapse is to prevent people from withdrawing cash. Hence, we see this trend is surfacing in all the mainstream press to get the people ready for what is coming after 2015.75 – the elimination of cash. We are even starting to see this advocated in parts of Germany. We will not be able to buy or sell anything without government approval. That is where we are going, and it may be the major event that erupts after 2015.75.

The bail-in that took place in Cyprus managed to get away without bloodshed. The people just took it. This has encouraged governments everywhere, since now they know they can safely do the same thing and the people are like sheep – dumb and stupid. Just how much will society take before they say no?

A TOTALITARIAN SOCIETY HAS TOTALITARIAN SCIENCE

May 2, 2015

A TOTALITARIAN SOCIETY HAS TOTALITARIAN SCIENCE

The government, the press, the mega-corporations, the prestigious foundations, the academic institutions, the “humanitarian” organizations say:

“This is the disease. This is its name. This is what causes it. This is the drug that treats it. This is the vaccine that prevents it.

“This is how accurate diagnosis is done. These are the tests. These are the possible results and what they mean.

“Here are the genes. This is what they do. This is how they can be changed and substituted and manipulated. These are the outcomes.

“These are the data and the statistics. They are correct. There can be no argument about them.

“This is life. These are the components of life. All change and improvement result from our management of the components.

“This is the path. It is governed by truth which science reveals. Walk the path. We will inform you when you stray. We will report new improvements.

“This is the end. You can go no farther. You must give up the ghost. We will remember you.”

We are now witnessing the acceleration of Official Science. Of course, that term is an internal contradiction. But the State shrugs and moves forward.

The notion that the State can put its seal on favored science, enforce it, and punish its competitors, is anathema to a free society.

For example: declaring that psychiatrists can appear in court as expert witnesses, when none of the so-called mental disorders listed in the psychiatric literature are diagnosed by laboratory tests.

For example: stating that vaccination is mandatory, in order to protect the vaccinated (who are supposed to be immune) from the unvaccinated. An absurdity on its face.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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