{"id":11320,"date":"2015-08-21T08:02:57","date_gmt":"2015-08-21T13:02:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=11320"},"modified":"2015-08-21T08:02:57","modified_gmt":"2015-08-21T13:02:57","slug":"the-plague-of-american-authoritarianism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=11320","title":{"rendered":"The Plague of American Authoritarianism"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3 class=\"headline\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/2015\/08\/21\/the-plague-of-american-authoritarianism\/\" rel=\"bookmark\">The Plague of American Authoritarianism<\/a><\/h3>\n<p>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\u2019s poisonous Nazi rule and Mussolini\u2019s 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.<a href=\"http:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/2015\/08\/21\/the-plague-of-american-authoritarianism\/#_edn1\" name=\"_ednref1\">[i]<\/a>\u00a0Education 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\u00a0the 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<\/p>\n<p>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.<a href=\"http:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/2015\/08\/21\/the-plague-of-american-authoritarianism\/#_edn2\" name=\"_ednref2\">[ii]<\/a>\u00a0Far from being a thing of the past, she believed that totalitarianism \u201cheralds as a possible model for the future.\u201d<a href=\"http:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/2015\/08\/21\/the-plague-of-american-authoritarianism\/#_edn3\" name=\"_ednref3\">[iii]<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[43,5493,8347,556,8348,4345,655,1213,827,834],"class_list":["post-11320","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-authoritarianism","tag-counterpunch","tag-henry-giroux","tag-nazi","tag-naziism","tag-political-system","tag-propaganda","tag-totalitarianism","tag-united-states","tag-us"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11320","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11320"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11320\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11321,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11320\/revisions\/11321"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11320"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11320"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11320"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}