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The West Must Never Again Go Totalitarian

January 29, 2023

The West Must Never Again Go Totalitarian

The West can never again go totalitarian.

We saw it happen generations ago. We fought two of humanity’s most destructive wars and faced the horror of industrial-scale extermination. Never again, said the world’s peoples in the late 1940s, and they began the difficult task of uncovering all that had been done, all that had gone wrong.

The mass graves, the German and Soviet labor camps, the Japanese massacres in the Far East, America’s internment camps, the secret police and the mutilations, the ever-present threat of violence hanging over every member of society. We saw the personality cults around Hitler or Stalin for what they were, the blatant ideologies for what they had resulted in.

When the Berlin Wall fell in November of 1989, and with it the remains of the Evil Empire that had put it there, we discovered more horror. The archives of East Germany and the Kremlin showed that informants were everywhere happily giving up information – real or invented – on their fellow humans. We found more bodies. We learned that under enough fear and pressure, human life wasn’t worth anything. When push came to violent shove, bonds of family and community meant nothing.

The error of this terrifying history is to think that this was a problem of “the other,” someone far away who is nothing like us. Asks Thorsteinn Siglaugsson in a recent article: ”How do you find your inner Nazi? And how do you get him under control? Most people would have participated in the atrocities of their time, had they been put in that position – or at least sat by and allowed them to happen.”

In The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn’s oft used and highly relevant phrase says that the line between good and evil passes “right through every human heart.”…

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Twitter Files Prove America Headed For “Totalitarian State Territory”, Expert Warns

January 22, 2023

Twitter Files Prove America Headed For “Totalitarian State Territory”, Expert Warns

Thanks to the revelations in the Twitter Files, there’s evidence that the FBI and other agencies worked to suppress “lawful speech,” and if this type of action is allowed to continue, the United States is headed for “totalitarian state territory,” Matthew Peterson, the cofounder of New Founding, said in an interview with Epoch Times–NTD collaborative program “Newsmakers.”

New Founding helps people and organizations position themselves to avoid threats from Big Tech and “woke capital,” and Peterson has two decades of experience in digital media and political consulting.

When asked what will happen if the country’s current trajectory continues for three to five years, Peterson said, “We’ll be in totalitarian state territory, there’s no question about it.”

FBI Director Christopher Wray (C) on Capitol Hill in Washington, on Nov. 15, 2022. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

“I mean, remember, this went so far as the government saying, ‘You need to find evidence that there are Russians influencing the election on Twitter.’ And Twitter saying, ‘No, that’s not happening.’

“And then [Twitter had] to be quiet about it and not even defend themselves when they knew that there wasn’t Russian interference that they could find,” he added.

Peterson further explained that the U.S. government drove a narrative that it knew wasn’t true and was the “antithesis” of America’s founding principles.

“[The government’s actions are] the antithesis of America. The American founding is basically contradicted by what’s happening here, over and over again. And if we don’t do something about that, we will not have free speech in this country,” Peterson warned.

FBI and Fake News

Peterson pointed out that one of the biggest revelations in the Twitter Files—a collection of internal emails and communications made public by the company’s CEO, Elon Musk—was that the intelligence community’s influence on Twitter was more significant than anyone imagined.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

2022’s Danger Signs: From Totalitarian Paranoia to Authoritarian Madness

December 31, 2022

2022’s Danger Signs: From Totalitarian Paranoia to Authoritarian Madness

The danger signs were everywhere in 2022.

With every new law enacted by federal and state legislatures, every new ruling handed down by government courts, and every new military weapon, invasive tactic and egregious protocol employed by government agents, we were reminded that in the eyes of the government and its corporate accomplices, “we the people” possess no rights except for that which the Deep State grants on an as-needed basis.

Totalitarian paranoia spiked. What we have been saddled with is a government so power-hungry, paranoid and afraid of losing its stranglehold on power that it has conspired to wage war on anyone who dares to challenge its authority. In a Machiavellian attempt to expand its powers, the government unleashed all manner of dangers on an unsuspecting populace in order to justify its demands for additional powers to protect “we the people” from emerging threats, whether legitimate, manufactured or overblown.

The state of our nation suffered. The nation remained politically polarized, controlled by forces beyond the purview of the average American, and rapidly moving the nation away from its freedom foundation. The combined blowback from a contentious presidential election and the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in Americans being subjected to egregious civil liberties violations, invasive surveillance, martial law, lockdowns, political correctness, erosions of free speech, strip searches, police shootings of unarmed citizens, government spying, and the criminalization of lawful activities.

Thought crimes became a target for punishment. For years now, the government has used all of the weapons in its vast arsenal—surveillance, threat assessments, fusion centers, pre-crime programs, hate crime laws, militarized police, lockdowns, martial law, etc.—to target potential enemies of the state based on their ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that might be deemed suspicious or dangerous…

…click on the above link to read the rest…

The Mother of all Economic Crises

December 14, 2022

The Mother of all Economic Crises

Nouriel Roubini, a former advisor to the International Monetary Fund and member of President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisors, was one of the few “mainstream” economists to predict the collapse of the housing bubble. Now Roubini is warning that the staggering amounts of debt held by individuals, businesses, and the government will soon lead to the “mother of all economic crises.”

Roubini properly blames the creation of a debt-based economy on the near-or-at-zero interest rate and quantitative easing policies pursued by the Federal Reserve and other central banks. The inevitable result of the zero-interest and quantitative easing policies is price inflation wreaking havoc on the American people.

The Fed has been trying to eliminate price inflation with a series of interest rate increases. So far, these rate increases have not significantly reduced price inflation. This is because rates remain at historic lows. Yet the rate increases have had negative economic effects, including a decline in the demand for new homes. Increasing interest rates make it impossible for many middle- and working-class Americans to afford a monthly mortgage payment for even a relatively inexpensive home.

The main reason the Fed cannot raise rates to anywhere near what they would be in a free market is the effect it would have on the federal government’s ability to manage its debt. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), interest on the national debt is already on track to consume 40 percent of the federal budget by 2052 and will surpass defense spending by 2029! A small interest rate increase can raise yearly federal debt interest rate payments by many billions of dollars, increasing the amount of the federal budget devoted solely to servicing the debt.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

The ‘Twitter Papers’ Reveal the Totalitarians Among Us

December 5, 2022

The ‘Twitter Papers’ Reveal the Totalitarians Among Us

I admit to being skeptical of Elon Musk as a free speech hero. He has moved from one US government-subsidized business to another on his path to becoming the world’s richest person. But there is no denying that his release of the “Twitter Papers” this past weekend, which blew the lid off government manipulation of social media, has been a huge victory for those of us who value the First Amendment.

The release, in coordination with truly independent journalist Matt Taibbi, demonstrated indisputably how politicians and representatives of “official Washington” pressed the teams that were then in charge of censorship at Twitter to remove Tweets and even ban accounts that were guilty of nothing beyond posting something the power-brokers did not want the general public to read. Let’s not forget that many of those demanding Twitter censorship were US government officials who had taken an oath to the US Constitution and its First Amendment.

It is important to understand that both US political parties were involved in pushing Twitter to censor information they didn’t like. There is plenty of corruption to go around. However, as the Twitter Papers demonstrated, vastly more Tweets were censored at the demand of Democratic Party politicians simply because Twitter employees on the censorship team were overwhelmingly Democratic Party supporters.

Perhaps the most damning piece of evidence released in this first installment of the Twitter Papers was a series of Tweets from the Biden 2020 campaign to its contact inside Twitter asking that the social media censor them. An internal Twitter document shows that the censor team “handled these,” meaning censored them.
…click on the above link to read the rest…

The Road to Totalitarianism (Revisited)

November 17, 2022

The Road to Totalitarianism (Revisited)

It feels like it’s finally over, doesn’t it, the whole “apocalyptic pandemic” thing? I mean, really, really over this time. Not like all those other times when you thought it was over, but it wasn’t over, and was like the end of those Alien movies, where it seems like Ripley has finally escaped, but the alien is hiding out in the shuttle, or the escape pod, or Ripley’s intestinal tract.

But this time doesn’t feel like that. This time it feels like it’s really, really over. Go out and take a look around. Hardly anyone is wearing masks anymore (except where masks are mandatory) or being coerced into submitting to “vaccinations” (except where “vaccination” is mandatory), and the hordes of hate-drunk New Normal fanatics who demanded that “the Unvaccinated” be segregated, censored, fired from their jobs, and otherwise demonized and persecuted, have all fallen silent (except for those who haven’t).

Everything is back to normal, right?

Wrong. Everything is not back to normal. Everything is absolutely New Normal. What is over is the “shock-and-awe” phase, which was never meant to go on forever. It was always only meant to get us here.

Where, you’re probably asking, is “here”? “Here” is a place where the new official ideology has been firmly established as our new “reality,” woven into the fabric of normal everyday life. No, not everywhere, just everywhere that matters. (Do you really think the global-capitalist ruling classes care what people in Lakeland, Florida, Elk River, Idaho, or some village in Sicily believe about “reality”?) Yes, most government restrictions have been lifted, mainly because they are no longer necessary, but in centers of power throughout the West, in political, corporate, and cultural spheres, in academia, the mainstream media, and so on, the New Normal has become “reality,” or, in other words, “just the way it is,” which is the ultimate goal of every ideology.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Authoritarian Madness: The Slippery Slope from Lockdowns to Concentration Camps

January 29, 2022

Authoritarian Madness: The Slippery Slope from Lockdowns to Concentration Camps

“All the Dachaus must remain standing. The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwald, the Auschwitzes—all of them. They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the Earth into a graveyard. Into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all, their conscience. And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its remembrance, then we become the gravediggers.”— Rod Serling, Deaths-Head Revisited

In the politically charged, polarizing tug-of-war that is the debate over COVID-19, we find ourselves buffeted by fear over a viral pandemic that continues to wreak havoc with lives and the economy, threats of vaccine mandates and financial penalties for noncompliance, and discord over how to legislate the public good without sacrificing individual liberty.

The discord is getting more discordant by the day.

Just recently, for instance, the Salt Lake Tribune Editorial Board suggested that government officials should mandate mass vaccinations and deploy the National Guard “to ensure that people without proof of vaccination would not be allowed, well, anywhere.”

In other words, lock up the unvaccinated and use the military to determine who gets to be “free.”

These tactics have been used before.

This is why significant numbers of people are worried: because this is the slippery slope that starts with well-meaning intentions for the greater good and ends with tyrannical abuses no one should tolerate.

For a glimpse at what the future might look like if such a policy were to be enforced, look beyond America’s borders.

In Italy, the unvaccinated are banned from restaurants, bars and public transportation, and could face suspensions from work and monthly fines. Similarly, France will ban the unvaccinated from most public venues.

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

Othering Unvaccinated Persons

January 11, 2022

Othering Unvaccinated Persons

In my teaching, I prepare undergraduate students to become high school history teachers. In one course, teacher candidates prepare and deliver mock lessons. Their peers play the role of high school students, and I observe and give feedback following these practice lessons. Whether coincidence or a reflection of the times, this fall a good number of mock lessons covered the rise of totalitarianism. In one excellent lesson, a teacher candidate had his students examine the contexts that gave rise to totalitarianism. He accompanied this lesson with an excerpt from a world history textbook listing characteristics of totalitarianism.

This lesson hit on the true purpose for including totalitarianism in high school curricula. That purpose is not to honor the likes of Hitler, Stalin, or Mussolini. Nor is that purpose to provide the methods of totalitarianism as an instructional manual to follow. Rather, the purpose of teaching on totalitarianism is to deliver a warning: heed well the conditions that yielded totalitarianism, so you can recognize and avoid them. As I observed this teacher candidate’s lesson, I could not help but think about that purpose in the context of our present time.

One passage from the lesson’s textbook concerned me the most: “Totalitarian leaders often create ‘enemies of the state’ to blame for things that go wrong. Frequently these enemies are members of religious or ethnic groups. Often these groups are easily identified and are subjected to campaigns of terror and violence. They may be forced to live in certain areas or are subjected to rules that apply only to them” (pg. 876).

Creating an enemy of the state requires othering: a process of dehumanizing through marginalizing a group of humans as something different, less than, and other. Such othered groups become an easy target to scapegoat, unfairly bearing the blame for a society’s ills.

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

The Manufacturing of a Mass Psychosis – Can Sanity Return to an Insane World?

January 2, 2022

The Manufacturing of a Mass Psychosis – Can Sanity Return to an Insane World?

The following is a transcript of this video.

“The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.”

Gustav Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind

Diseases of the body can spread through a population and reach epidemic proportions, but so too can diseases of the mind. And of these epidemics of the latter variety, the mass psychosis is the most dangerous. During a mass psychosis madness becomes the norm in a society and delusionary beliefs spread like a contagion. But as delusions can take many forms, and as madness can manifest in countless ways, the specific manner in which a mass psychosis unfolds will differ based on the historical and cultural context of the infected society. In the past, mass psychoses have led to witch hunts, genocides and even dancing manias, but in the modern era it is the mass psychosis of totalitarianism that is the greatest threat:

“Totalitarianism is the modern phenomenon of total centralized state power coupled with the obliteration of individual human rights: in the totalized state, there are those in power, and there are the objectified masses, the victims.”

Arthur Versluis, The New Inquisitions

In a totalitarian society the population is divided into two groups, the rulers and the ruled, and both groups undergo a pathological transformation. The rulers are elevated to an almost god-like status which is diametrically opposed to our nature as imperfect beings who are easily corrupted by power…

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

Of grain and gulags: a note on work, labour and self-ownership

December 5, 2021

Of grain and gulags: a note on work, labour and self-ownership

I’ll begin with a brief account of how our modern global grain trading system was invented in Chicago in the 19^th century, which is maybe a bit of a jolt from the present focus of this blog cycle on the forms of property but hopefully my purposes will become clear.

Prior to the railroad/grain elevator/futures market nexus that began to emerge in the 1850s, prairie grain farmers sold their product in sacks that retained their identity with the source farm through to the point of sale. The innovation of the railroad/elevator system was to create standardized grades of grain that enabled the harvest from individual farms to be amassed together in vast quantities as a fungible commodity like money. The innovation of the futures market was to remove uncertainty about future price fluctuations, essentially by enabling speculators to assume the burden of the risk by betting on movements in grain prices. Before long, the value of the futures being traded greatly exceeded the value of the physical grain in existence.

These innovations called forth vastly more economic activity than previously possible, created a torrent of cheap grain that flooded global markets and pushed farmers in other places out of grain production (and often out of farming altogether), and stimulated the growth of prairie grain farming, while removing from farmers themselves substantial economic autonomy, fostering perhaps a self-interest on their part in the grading of their grain at the margin, but not a more holistic interest in the story of their grain from field to fork. They also pretty much forged the global economy as we know it today (I’ll ignore the meat/livestock side of the story for brevity, but the globalization of meat production was another prong to the same history)¹.

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

Pathologized Totalitarianism 101

November 24, 2021

Pathologized Totalitarianism 101

So, GloboCap has crossed the Rubicon. The final phase of its transformation of society into a pathologized-totalitarian dystopia, where mandatory genetic-therapy injections and digital compliance papers are commonplace, is now officially underway.

On November 19, 2021, the government of New Normal Austria decreed that, as of February, experimental mRNA injections will be mandatory for the entire population. This decree comes in the midst of Austria’s official persecution of “the Unvaccinated,” i.e., political dissidents and other persons of conscience who refuse to convert to the new official ideology and submit to a series of mRNA injections, purportedly to combat a virus that causes mild-to-moderate flu-like symptoms (or no symptoms of any kind at all) in about 95% of the infected and the overall infection fatality rate of which is approximately 0.1% to 0.5%.

Austria is just the tip of the New Normal spear. Prominent New-Normal fascists in Germany, like Der Führer of Bavaria, Markus Söder, and Minister of Propaganda Karl Lauterbach, are already calling for an allgemeine Impfpflicht (i.e., “compulsory vaccination requirement”), which should not come as a surprise to anyone. The Germans are not going sit idly by and let the Austrians publicly out-fascist them, are they? They have a reputation to uphold, after all! Italy will probably be next to join in, unless Lithuania or Australia beats them to the punch.

But, seriously, this is just the beginning of the Winter Siege I wrote about recently. The plan seems to be to New-Normalize Europe first — generally speaking, Europeans are more docile, respectful of all authority, and not very well armed — and then use it as leverage to force the new pathologized totalitarianism on the USA, and the UK, and the rest of the world.

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

Brink of Totalitarianism

November 6, 2021

Brink of Totalitarianism

Living in a Potemkin World

October 18, 2021

LIVING IN A POTEMKIN WORLD

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” ― George Orwell, 1984

“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.” ― George Orwell, 1984

I never thought I would experience the dystopian “fictional” nightmare Orwell laid out in his 1949 novel. Seventy-two years later and his warning about a totalitarian society, where mass surveillance, repressive measures against dissenters, mind control through government indoctrination and propaganda designed to convince the masses lies are truth, fake is real and the narrative can be manipulated to achieve the desired outcome of those in power, have come to fruition.

Everything is fake. I don’t believe anything I’m told by the government, the media, medical “experts”, politicians, military leadership, bankers, corporate executives, religious leaders, financial professionals, and anyone selling themselves as an authority on any subject matter. We are truly living in times of mass deception, mass delusion, and mass willful ignorance.

The term Potemkin Village comes from stories of a phony movable village built by Grigory Potemkin in the late 1700’s to impress his former lover, Catherine II, during her journey to Crimea in 1787. He supposedly erected fake villages along the banks of the Dnieper River, as her vessel sailed by, to impress her with the progress he was making on her behalf. After she passed, he would have the village disassembled and then reassembled further along downstream.

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

People Don’t Understand How Unfree We Already Are

September 29, 2021

People Don’t Understand How Unfree We Already Are

Listen to a reading of this article:

❖

The biggest and most widespread blind spot among those who oppose totalitarian control by the powerful is the assumption that it has not already been achieved.

We’ve been so busy watching out for the next overtly totalitarian dictatorship that wants to put the jackboot on our necks we never noticed the covert totalitarians sliding the shackles around our minds.

Everyone thinks about the abusers who beat their spouses, but not the abusers who dominate their spouses’ minds with psychological manipulation.

Everyone thinks about psychopathic killers prowling the streets, but not the psychopathic killers who rule our world via mass-scale manipulation.

Conspiracy analysts warn that the government is trying to give everyone a social credit score to force us all to comply with the agendas of the powerful, in nations where mass-scale narrative management through the media and online algorithms already manipulates everyone into complying with the agendas of the powerful.

People assume that they aren’t already behaving exactly how the powerful want them to behave within a civilization whose political, monetary and economic systems are already completely under the control of the powerful.

People think they are free just because they can go and buy whatever they want in an economy rigged for the powerful using money rigged for the powerful, because they can say whatever they want on internet platforms whose algorithms are manipulated by the powerful, because they can vote for a politician who only got on the ballot by being owned by the powerful.

People think they are free because the system let them elect a “populist” like Donald Trump, even after that “populist” spent four years doing nothing but advancing the interests of the powerful.

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

Four Scenarios for a Catastrophic Future: Part III (final)

June 21, 2021

Four Scenarios for a Catastrophic Future: Part III (final)

This is the third and final part of Rutilius Namatianus’ (RN) reassessment of some scenarios for the future originally proposed by David Holmgren. RN takes a position that goes against the standard interpretation that sees our problems originating mainly by climate change. Instead, RN believes that climate change didn’t do much damage to humankind, so far, and so it will remain a minor component of humankind’s trajectory, at least for the coming years, perhaps a couple of decades. What we are seeing, instead, is the crunch created by the gradually reduced availability of natural resources, coupled with increasing population and consumption levels. As a result, the services and the goods previously granted to nearly all social layers are becoming impossible to maintain and that is eroding the basic pact that keeps society together. Consistently, the Elites are developing a totalitarian grip on all sectors of society in such a way to funnel all the remaining resources for themselves and leave nothing to the commoners. And that’s where we stand now. Of course, there is much that is debatable in RN’s theses, but there is no doubt that he is identifying some real elements of what’s happening nowadays. (UB)

2021 – Future Scenarios Revisited

In Part 1 and Part 2, I re-examined Holmgren’s Future Scenarios ten years after they had been proposed, and where we had moved since then in the scenario state space. I also considered a new state-space that could be more pertinent to a question that must be high on many peoples’ priorities these days: we observe two trends, racing against each other: the trend of centralized power structures (however we call it, we never did get a single really good name for the great steamroller!) to conquer every last thing, consolidate power over every last place, the trend toward ever-increasing power, the logical continuation of the ‘stupid’ strategies we might say- to refer to a recent post- against the counter-trend of depletion, environmental degradation, exhaustion of resources, diminishing returns on complexity, and generally the whole picture we sum up with the word ‘collapse’…

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

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