THE WILL TO PURPOSE – ACTIVATING OUR INNER DRIVE & INTENTIONALITY

Posted on December 4, 2022 by Reid Mukai

By Kingsley L. Dennis

‘A sincere reflection on human behavior is enough to convince us that the power of choice plays much less part in the life of man than we think.’ ~J.G. Bennett

We are familiar with the concept that a person has no real choice, and we generally regard this in relation to our commercial choices. That is, what we choose to buy is generally a decision based on a selection of limited choice. This has also been referred to as ‘curated needs.’ What we think or believe we want, or need, is conditioned into us – or ‘curated’ – so that we are merely responding to managed external stimuli to acquire certain goods. Whilst this is valid, and is indeed an operative modality, it remains within the material realm. In the opening citation, the thinker and author J.G. Bennett was referring to a form of choice beyond that of a material one. He was relating to the lack of choice within the inner world of the human being – that is, the presence of human will. Bennett was speaking and writing from the 1940s to the 1970s, yet what he said then is as relevant for today as he was not speaking about things that are relative to historical time or place but to an almost timeless situation – the human condition. The lack of genuine inner will of the human being has been made starker in modern times due to the lens of psychology and similar sciences.

Professor Mattias Desmet has recently popularised the concept of mass formation and false solidarity, which refer to how crowd psychology is established and sustained.[i] In his recent book (The Psychology of Totalitarianism), Desmet points out that what we call totalitarianism has only been with us for the past 120 years, since the beginning of the twentieth century. Two previous examples that he gives are the Stalinist regime that came to power on the back of the Russian Revolution, and the National Socialist (Nazi) regime in Germany. Most recently, he says, the world is experiencing the rise of a global form of totalitarianism under the guise, or ideology, of technocracy. The one thing that totalitarianism has in common is that it is based on ideology rather than brute power. Further, that the populace is persuaded (or programmed) into obeyance through propaganda and social-cultural conditioning, rather than forced through fear (as is the case with dictatorships). The mass formation of willing obedience is a symbol for our times. With the availability of global communications, a largely digitally ‘plugged-in’ world population, the widespread influence of controlled media, and the pervasive presence of mind-influencing technologies, the human species has never been in a more pressing moment in its collective history.

Modern day humanity may not only be suffering from a lack of genuine choice; more importantly, it may be experiencing the dilemma of a lack of connection with internal will power. It is this dominant state of the human psyche – we may even go so far as to call it a widespread psychosis – that lies at the root of much of our present ills with its sense of apathy and pessimism. Some readers will be familiar with German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of the will to power; lesser known is the English philosopher Colin Wilson and his notion of the will to perceive. For Wilson, the question of freedom and choice is not a social problem – it is an internal one for it requires an ‘intensity of will.’[ii] In other words, it is a personal struggle to achieve a form of self-awakening, or triggering, to arouse oneself from the torpidity and apathy of life. The issue is that for most people they don’t consider the fragility of life’s situation. The general masses, at least in the western world, consider themselves to be already free. They exist within the belief structure that they are protected and looked after by their governments and social institutions and that, give or take a few things, they have most essential needs provided for. Such people, I would posit, live on the outside of themselves – they are skin-dwellers. They live through their personalities and are most likely to adhere to mass consensus narratives. They are to be swayed by the rollercoaster ride of external events and react as anticipated by the governing elites who manipulate finances, food supply, energy supply, and more. This mass of people will only recognize the loss of freedom when it is threatened in relation to external events. It is a manufactured sense of freedom for once the threat has vanished – or seemingly made to vanish – then the meaning of freedom dissipates for the danger is no longer perceived. That is, it is an exterior crisis or danger that triggers people into action and as the perceived threat fades, they slip back once again into apathy and mass obedience. There is a lack of internal stimulation.

The stimulation of the human will requires that a person has the will to acquire insight. This they must choose for themselves, for no other agency shall give it to them. On the contrary, many social systems are designed to deteriorate a person’s will by compelling them to give away their dependency and authority onto external systems. Consistency, commitment, and the intention to will, are human aspects severely undermined by the deliberate constraint of material structures and social systems. Such critical observations and the power of intention are also being increasingly undermined by the rise of what I would call ‘lazy spirituality.’ This is the type of Instagram positive thinking or commercial well-beingness that online ‘spiritual celebrities’ are all too eager to promote (and sell). Behind such on-demand spiritual well-being-positive-thinking packages is a passivity or laziness to critically engage in inner work and to gain perceptive cognition to recognize the fallacy inherent within the material domain.

It is one thing to be positively-orientated and having ‘oneness’ for all creation; it is another matter to have the perceptive capacity to recognize that there are forces in play in the world that are active in nullifying metaphysical values and realities in order to replace them with an ever-deepening materialism. It would seem that there is an increasing form of cultural laziness and indecision, especially in this current time when people chiefly wish for things to be made easy for them. Instead of a person having faith and hope that they can change by making real effort, they are usually entertained with illusions that then take away from them the impulse to make any real change within themselves. In today’s world, a person who seeks to develop inner awareness and to raise their perceptive capacity often find themselves at odds with their cultural milieu. Those with ‘spiritual seriousness,’ so to say, are what Colin Wilson referred to as the Outsider.[iii] Such individuals have an intangible need to be more than just a ‘happy, well-fed animal.’ Again, Wilson referred to this state as being that of the robot; he said that we all have a robot within us that is eager to come out and take over all our daily duties for us. The Greek-Armenian mystic G.I. Gurdjieff called this the state of the ‘man machine.’ I have referred to this as the robosapien.[iv]

Within such automated states the individual experiences the world through a narrowed lens of awareness. Wilson, for example, recognized that such limited awareness almost lulled a person into a ‘state of permanent drowsiness, like being half-anesthetized’ so that a broader vision of life is restricted. And this is how what we call ordinary, everyday life affects us. Whether it be through external impacts, stimulants, distractions, information, technological entanglement, energetic haze, and more, the environment of everyday life pacifies us by closing down our perceptual horizons. In response to this, Colin Wilson noted that ‘it is as impossible to exercise freedom in an unreal world as it is to jump while you are falling.’[v] Freedom is not only related to physical mobility and access to human rights; it is also a question of an inner ‘intensity of mind’ that can pull a person out of the collective of mass formation (as Desmet would call it). The modern life can be regarded as a cause of spiritual decay because it seeks to demolish any recognition of a metaphysical reality. And through this, many people are unknowingly suffering a form of ‘reality deficiency.’ There have been people who, over the years, have strived to point this out to us, from wisdom teachers, mystics, and philosophers (like Colin Wilson). This deficiency prevents people from receiving inner nourishment; over time, this acts to deprive human cognition by literally starving it of nutrients (perception). We are in a time right now of great ‘reality deficiency’ as the dominant consensus narratives peddle their lies, manipulations, and programming.

Each age has its own form of reality and/or metaphysical suppression, from the physically overt (Spanish Inquisition) to the covert (technocracy). Within each specific era, there are calculated forces that act to impinge upon the individuals’ own evolutionary drive toward not only self-attainment but, more importantly, a connection with a transcendental impulse (what some may call as Source). The historian Arnold Toynbee believed that civilizations (and its individuals) progress by overcoming struggles; by moving through ‘challenge points,’ so to speak. If the crisis is too great, the civilization succumbs and collapses. If the challenge is not great enough, the civilization overcomes and becomes complacent, slides into greater decadence and eventually collapses. The challenge must be just right – the ‘Goldilocks’ zone, as Gary Lachman calls it. Challenges bring out the best in individuals too, yet they must be able to grow and develop through the crisis – and this is often down to an inner will or drive. Toynbee believed that a civilization needs to produce a ‘creative minority’ to meet such a challenge of its time. It would seem that we are amidst such a ‘challenge point’ right now; and it is not only a physical crisis but also an existential one. I would go further and suggest that human civilization cannot survive indefinitely without some inborn sense of a transcendental purpose – otherwise it is like a hollow shell that becomes increasingly brittle over time. British philosopher and historian Nicholas Hagger, whose monumental work The Fire and the Stones examines the sacred impulse (the ‘Fire/Light’) within twenty-five civilizations, likewise has shown how civilizations are inspired by the transcendental impulse and decay when such an impulse is forgotten or dismissed.[vi]

What is required is for us, our communities and cultures, to become more conscious of our participation in reality. Further, that what we take to be reality is a merger between the physical and the metaphysical. As such, humanity is a being ‘of spirit’ that is manifesting through the intermediary of a physical body. To take this even further, we need to come to recognize that all existence is consciousness primarily, and that physical phenomena is an energetic state that manifests from a source of consciousness. What is required of humanity to survive beyond this existential crisis and challenge point is to become more conscious. Is this possible? Colin Wilson was not so sure. Wilson believed, and stated as such, that the majority of people cannot accept the burden of becoming more conscious. He felt that the ‘masses’ were both consciously and subconsciously choosing the more comfortable ‘mediocracy of life.’ I would even question what this term means any more – what is the ‘mediocracy of life’ when we can no longer be sure what reality is? Abstractions have now replaced realities to create an enveloping world of pseudo-reality and a ‘theatre of the absurd.’ As I talked about in my book Bardo Times,[vii] life has become a simulation – a simulacra as the French theorist Jean Baudrillard would say – and the notion of what is ‘real’ appears to have dissolved into what is the latest consensus narrative. What is important to acknowledge in these challenging times is that as the chaos whirls around us, humanity stands on the threshold of a higher form of life.

This is the other point that perceptive individuals have been attempting to point out to us (not least of them has been the Indian sage Sri Aurobindo). And this threshold becomes more apparent and urgent whenever a civilization begins either its decline or its necessary transition to a different epoch and modality. This is the challenge that civilization must face – either to raise/adjust its level of consciousness and perceptive capacity or stagnate and then collapse. Human civilization necessarily reflects the state of perception of its inhabitants. As that indwelling perception expands, so too does the physical environment develop in alignment. If perceptive capacity is restricted or even being deliberately reduced, as is the case right now, then entropic or atrophying forces begin to dominate. This is why we must resist, at great effort, to submit to a programming of conformity and perceptive limitation that is likely to come about through increased technocratic forms of social management and control. This is where Colin Wilson’s notion of the will to perceive comes in. Due to the external environment, human consciousness is generally conditioned into a dulled state so that higher insights or perceptions are not ‘allowed’ to get through. We need to seek to ‘widen’ (expand) our consciousness beyond such limiting influences so that greater perceptive insights can be achieved. Most people, however, are reflections of their surroundings and, as such, require external inputs to motivate or trigger them into action. Chaos and crises can function as such triggering impacts. The ‘will to perceive’ also activates a will to purpose. Behind the human developmental impulse there is a push, I would say, to increase our intentionality. Without the ‘will to purpose’ there is a lack of conscious participation. It is the will to purpose that distinguishes the human being from the machine – the ‘robosapien.’ Modern life, with its technocratic pull, is encouraging people not to think but to allow automation to take over duties and responsibilities. On the contrary, we need to be ‘pulling ourselves up by the bootstraps’ and intentionally driving ourselves across the threshold. What could this threshold be?

Humanity is moving towards a stage in its evolutionary path whereby it becomes cognizant of its role as a fusion (a bridge or merger) between spirit/consciousness and physicality/matter. We are, in these times, the forward ground crew sent ahead to prepare the groundwork. Sometime in the future – it could be ten, twenty, thirty years or more – human understanding and the sciences will come to recognize the primary role of consciousness behind all existence. And when this occurs, human life will alter drastically. We shall understand that human existence is a merging of non-physical intelligence with physical forces. The very notion of life and reality will be greatly expanded beyond current conceptions. We shall be propelled beyond the confines of the physical robot – the robosapien – and shall utilize presently unknown organs of perception. But we are not at that threshold yet. And this is partly why we are seeing a contestation of forces in play. There are forces that do not wish for humanity to reach, and pass, this threshold for we shall then no longer be their passive robots to manage and control. The present control hierarchies will be demolished. And there is a small contingency that wish to cut humanity off from this transcendental impulse, to isolate us from receiving such developmental forces, and to push us back into our perceptual prisons of the ‘everyday mundane.’ Such forces aim to increase the programming and technologies of cognitive influence to hypnotize the mass of humanity into accepting an ‘upside-down’ reality that the robosapien seems the most suited to. Our will to purpose now is about having the inner drive and intentionality to move us beyond this current predicament and modern state of alienation, and forward into a state of heightened cognition and expanded perceptual awareness.

It is my view that the ‘teething pains’ that we are presently experiencing represent the birthing, or arrival, of a new form of consciousness coming to manifestation through the human species. That is, a mergence with an expanded field of consciousness. And for this to emerge, the individual is called upon to ‘meet it’ halfway, so to speak. Social forces will attempt to continue to hold back the individual by mental, emotional, and physical/biological interventions. And yet, against these artificial constrictions, I am confident that if enough of us (we don’t need to be a majority) can strive for cognitive freedom, perceptive clarity, and inner awareness, we can become the early wave – the evolutionary outsider – to make the initial steps across the threshold. Just enough of us need to act as the ‘antennae of the race’[viii] to pass the baton onto our descendants. And that, I would say, gives us enough reason to activate our will to purpose.

About the Author

Kingsley L. Dennis is the author of The Phoenix Generation: A New Era of Connection, Compassion, and Consciousness, and The Sacred Revival: Magic, Mind & Meaning in a Technological Age, available at Amazon. Visit him on the web at http://www.kingsleydennis.com/.

[i] See my previous essay: ‘The Establishment of Mass Psychology & False Solidarity’ – https://kingsleydennis.com/the-establishment-of-mass-psychology-false-solidarity/

[ii] For an in-depth study of Wilson’s life and thought, I would recommend the excellent biography by Gary Lachman – Beyond the Robot: The Life and Work of Colin Wilson (2016)

[iii] See Colin Wilson’s book The Outsider (originally published in 1956)

[iv] See my book Hijacking Reality: The Reprogramming and Reorganization of Human Life (2021)

[v] Wilson, Colin (1982) The Outsider. Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher, p39

[vi] Hagger, Nicholas (1991) The Fire and the Stones. Dorset: Element Books.

[vii] Bardo Times: hyperreality, high-velocity, simulation, automation, mutation – a hoax? (2018)

[viii] A phrase coined by the poet Ezra Pound.

LA VOLUNTAD DE PROPÓSITO: Cruzar el umbral venidero de la humanidad

The Gaslighting of the Masses

Posted on October 19, 2022 by Reid Mukai

By CJ Hopkins

Source: Off-Guardian

For students of official propaganda, mind control, emotional coercion, and other insidious manipulation techniques, the rollout of the New Normal has been a bonanza. Never before have we been able to observe the application and effects of these powerful technologies in real-time on such a massive scale.

In a little over two and a half years, our collective “reality” has been radically revised. Our societies have been radically restructured. Millions (probably billions) of people have been systematically conditioned to believe a variety of patently ridiculous assertions, assertions based on absolutely nothing, repeatedly disproved by widely available evidence, but which have nevertheless attained the status of facts. An entire fictitious history has been written based on those baseless and ridiculous assertions. It will not be unwritten easily or quickly.

I am not going to waste your time debunking those assertions. They have been repeatedly, exhaustively debunked. You know what they are and you either believe them or you don’t. Either way, reviewing and debunking them again isn’t going to change a thing.

Instead, I want to focus on one particularly effective mind-control technology, one that has done a lot of heavy lifting throughout the implementation of the New Normal and is doing a lot of heavy-lifting currently. I want to do that because many people mistakenly believe that mind-control is either (a) a “conspiracy theory” or (b) something that can only be achieved with drugs, microwaves, surgery, torture, or some other invasive physical means. Of course, there is a vast and well-documented history of the use of such invasive physical technologies (see, e.g., the history of the CIA’s infamous MKULTRA program), but in many instances mind-control can be achieved through much less elaborate techniques.

One of the most basic and effective techniques that cults, totalitarian systems, and individuals with fascistic personalities use to disorient and control people’s minds is “gaslighting.” You’re probably familiar with the term. If not, here are a few definitions:

“the manipulation of another person into doubting their perceptions, experiences, or understanding of events.”American Psychological Association

“an insidious form of manipulation and psychological control. Victims of gaslighting are deliberately and systematically fed false information that leads them to question what they know to be true, often about themselves. They may end up doubting their memory, their perception, and even their sanity.”Psychology Today

“a form of psychological manipulation in which the abuser attempts to sow self-doubt and confusion in their victim’s mind. Typically, gaslighters are seeking to gain power and control over the other person, by distorting reality and forcing them to question their own judgment and intuition.”Newport Institute

The main goal of gaslighting is to confuse, coerce, and emotionally manipulate your victim into abandoning their own perception of reality and accepting whatever new “reality” you impose on them. Ultimately, you want to completely destroy their ability to trust their own perception, emotions, reasoning, and memory of historical events, and render them utterly dependent on you to tell them what is real and what “really” happened, and so on, and how they should be feeling about it.

Anyone who has ever experienced gaslighting in the context of an abusive relationship, or a cult, or a totalitarian system, or who has worked in a battered women’s shelter, can tell you how powerful and destructive it is. In the most extreme cases, the victims of gaslighting are entirely stripped of their sense of self and surrender their individual autonomy completely. Among the best-known and most dramatic examples are the Patty Hearst case, Jim Jones’ People’s Temple, the Manson family, and various other cults, but, the truth is, gaslighting happens every day, out of the spotlight of the media, in countless personal and professional relationships.

Since the Spring of 2020, we have been subjected to official gaslighting on an unprecedented scale. In a sense, the “Apocalyptic Pandemic” PSYOP has been one big extended gaslighting campaign (comprising countless individual instances of gaslighting) inflicted on the masses throughout the world. The events of this past week were just another example.

Basically, what happened was, a Pfizer executive confirmed to the European Parliament last Monday that Pfizer did not know whether its Covid “vaccine” prevented transmission of the virus before it was promoted as doing exactly that and forced on the masses in December of 2020. People saw the video of the executive admitting this, or heard about it, and got upset.

They tweeted and Facebooked and posted videos of Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, Bill Gates, the Director of the CDC, official propagandists like Rachel Maddow, and various other “experts” and “authorities” blatantly lying to the public, promising people that getting “vaccinated” would “prevent transmission,” “protect other people from infection,” “stop the virus in its tracks,” and so on, which totally baseless assertions (i.e., lies) were the justification for the systematic segregation and persecution of “the Unvaccinated,” and the fomenting of mass fanatical hatred of anyone challenging the official “vaccine” narrative, and the official New Normal ideology, which hatred persists to this very day.

The New Normal propaganda apparatus (i.e., the corporate media, health “experts,” et al.) responded to the story predictably. They ignored it, hoping it would just go away. When it didn’t, they rolled out the “fact-checkers” (i.e., gaslighters).

The Associated Press, Reuters, PolitiFact, and other official gaslighting outfits immediately published lengthy official “fact-checks” that would make a sophist blush. Read them and you will see what I mean. They are perfect examples of official gaslighting, crafted to distract you from the point and suck you into an argument over meaningless details and definitions. They sound exactly like Holocaust deniers pathetically asserting that there is no written proof that Hitler ordered the Final Solution … which, there isn’t, but it doesn’t fucking matter. Of course Hitler ordered the Final Solution, and of course they lied about the “vaccines.”

The Internet is swimming with evidence of their lies … tweets, videos, articles, and so on.

Which is what makes gaslighting so frustrating for people who believe they are engaged in an actual good-faith argument over facts and the truth. But that’s not how totalitarianism works. The New Normals, when they repeat whatever the authorities have instructed them to repeat today (e.g., “trust the Science,” “safe and effective,” “no one ever claimed they would prevent transmission”), could not care less whether it is actually true, or even if it makes the slightest sense.

These gaslighting “fact-checks” are not meant to convince them that anything is true or false. And they are certainly not meant to convince us. They are official scripts, talking points, and thought-terminating clichés for the New Normals to repeat, like cultists chanting mantras at you to shut off their minds and block out anything that contradicts or threatens the “reality” of the cult.

You can present them with the actual facts, and they will smile knowingly, and deny them to your face, and condescendingly mock you for not “seeing the truth.”

You can show the New Normals the video, and they will watch it, and then look you right in the eye and deny it. https://t.co/iLWsS7jl0f https://t.co/JJTuhGViya
— Consent Factory (@consent_factory) October 13, 2022

But here’s the tricky thing about gaslighting.

In order to effectively gaslight someone, you have be in a position of authority or wield some other form of power over them. They have to need something vital from you (i.e., sustenance, safety, financial security, community, career advancement, or just love). You can’t walk up to some random stranger on the street and start gaslighting them. They will laugh in your face.

The reason the New Normal authorities have been able to gaslight the masses so effectively is that most of the masses do need something from them … a job, food, shelter, money, security, status, their friends, a relationship, or whatever it is they’re not willing to risk by challenging those in power and their lies. Gaslighters, cultists, and power freaks, generally, know this. It is what they depend on, your unwillingness to live without whatever it is. They zero in on it and threaten you with the loss of it (sometimes consciously, sometimes just intuitively).

Gaslighting won’t work if you are willing to give up whatever the gaslighter is threatening to take from you (or stop giving you, as the case may be), but you have to be willing to actually lose it, because you will be punished for defending yourself, for not surrendering your autonomy and integrity, and conforming to the “reality” of the cult, or the abusive relationship, or the totalitarian system.

I have described the New Normal (i.e., our new “reality”) as pathologized-totalitarianism, and as a “a cult writ large, on a societal scale.” I used the “Covidian Cult” analogy because every totalitarian system essentially operates like a cult, the main difference being that, in totalitarian systems, the balance of power between the cult and the normal (i.e., dominant) society is completely inverted. The cult becomes the dominant (i.e., “normal”) society, and non-cult-members become its “deviants.”

We do not want to see ourselves as “deviants” (because we haven’t changed, the society has), and our instinct is to reject the label, but that is exactly what we are … deviants. People who deviate from the norm, a new norm, which we reject, and oppose, but which, despite that, is nonetheless the norm, and thus we are going to be regarded and dealt with like deviants.

I am such a deviant. I have a feeling you are too. Under the circumstances, it’s nothing to be ashamed of. On the contrary, we need to accept it, and embrace it. Above all, we need to get clear about it, about where we stand in this new “reality.”

We are heading toward New Normal Winter No. 3. They are already cranking up the official propaganda, jacking up the fabricated “cases,” talking about reintroducing mask-mandates, fomenting mass hatred of “the Unvaccinated,” and so on. People’s gas bills and doubling and tripling. The global-capitalist ruling classes are openly embracing neo-Nazis. There is talk of “limited” nuclear war. Fanaticism, fear, and hatred abound. The gaslighting of the masses is not abating. It is increasing. The suppression of dissent is intensifying. The demonization of non-conformity is intensifying. Lines are being drawn in the sand. You see it and feel it just like I do.

Get clear on what’s essential to you. Get clear about what you’re willing to lose. Stay deviant. Stay frosty. This isn’t over.

First Came 9/11. Then COVID-19. What’s the Next Crisis to Lockdown the Nation?

Posted on September 9, 2022 by Reid Mukai

By John & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”—H.L. Mencken

First came 9/11, which the government used to transform itself into a police state.

Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, which the police state used to test out its lockdown powers.

In light of the government’s tendency to exploit crises (legitimate or manufactured) and capitalize on the nation’s heightened emotions, confusion and fear as a means of extending the reach of the police state, one has to wonder what so-called crisis it will declare next.

It’s a simple enough formula: first, you create fear, then you capitalize on it by seizing power.

Frankly, it doesn’t even matter what the nature of the next national emergency might be (terrorism, civil unrest, economic collapse, a health scare, or the environment) as long as it allows the government to lockdown the nation and justify all manner of tyranny in the so-called name of national security.

Cue the Emergency State.

Terrorist attacks, mass shootings, “unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters”: the government has been anticipating and preparing for such crises for years now.

As David C. Unger writes for the New York Times: “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness have given way to permanent crisis management: to policing the planet and fighting preventative wars of ideological containment, usually on terrain chosen by, and favorable to, our enemies. Limited government and constitutional accountability have been shouldered aside by the kind of imperial presidency our constitutional system was explicitly designed to prevent.”

Here’s what we know: given the rate at which the government keeps devising new ways to establish itself as the “solution” to all of our worldly problems at taxpayer expense, each subsequent crisis ushers in ever larger expansions of government power and less individual liberty.

This is the slippery slope to outright tyranny.

You see, once the government acquires (and uses) authoritarian powers—to spy on its citizens, to carry out surveillance, to transform its police forces into extensions of the military, to seize taxpayer funds, to wage endless wars, to censor and silence dissidents, to identify potential troublemakers, to detain citizens without due process—it does not voluntarily relinquish them.

The lesson for the ages is this: once any government is allowed to overreach and expand its powers, it’s almost impossible to put the genie back in the bottle. As Harvard constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe recognizes, “The dictatorial hunger for power is insatiable.”

Indeed, the history of the United States is a testament to the old adage that liberty decreases as government (and government bureaucracy) grows. To put it another way, as government expands, liberty contracts.

In this way, every crisis since the nation’s early beginnings has become a make-work opportunity for the government.

Each crisis has also been a test to see how far “we the people” would allow the government to sidestep the Constitution in the so-called name of national security; a test to see how well we have assimilated the government’s lessons in compliance, fear and police state tactics; a test to see how quickly we’ll march in lockstep with the government’s dictates, no questions asked; and a test to see how little resistance we offer up to the government’s power grabs when made in the name of national security.

Most critically of all, it has been a test to see whether the Constitution—and our commitment to the principles enshrined in the Bill of Rights—could survive a national crisis and true state of emergency.

Unfortunately, we’ve been failing this particular test for a long time now.

Indeed, the powers-that-be have been pushing our buttons and herding us along like so much cattle since World War II, at least, starting with the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor, which not only propelled the U.S. into World War II but also unified the American people in their opposition to a common enemy.

That fear of attack by foreign threats, conveniently torqued by the growing military industrial complex, in turn gave rise to the Cold War era’s “Red Scare.” Promulgated through government propaganda, paranoia and manipulation, anti-Communist sentiments boiled over into a mass hysteria that viewed anyone and everyone as suspect: your friends, the next-door neighbor, even your family members could be a Communist subversive.

This hysteria, which culminated in hearings before the House Un-American Activities Committee, where hundreds of Americans were called before Congress to testify about their so-called Communist affiliations and intimidated into making false confessions, also paved the way for the rise of an all-knowing, all-seeing governmental surveillance state.

By the time 9/11 rolled around, all George W. Bush had to do was claim the country was being invaded by terrorists, and the government used the USA Patriot Act to claim greater powers to spy, search, detain and arrest American citizens in order to keep America safe.

By way of the National Defense Authorization Act, Barack Obama continued Bush’s trend of undermining the Constitution, going so far as to give the military the power to strip Americans of their constitutional rights, label them extremists, and detain them indefinitely without trial, all in the name of keeping America safe.

Despite the fact that the breadth of the military’s power to detain American citizens violates not only U.S. law and the Constitution but also international laws, the government has refused to relinquish its detention powers made possible by the NDAA.

Then Donald Trump took office, claiming the country was being invaded by dangerous immigrants and insisting that the only way to keep America safe was to expand the reach of the border police, empower the military to “assist” with border control, and essentially turn the country into a Constitution-free zone.

That so-called immigration crisis then morphed into multiple crises (domestic extremism, the COVID-19 pandemic, race wars, civil unrest, etc.) that the government has been eager to use in order to expand its powers.

Joe Biden, in turn, has made every effort to expand the reach of the militarized police state, pledging to hire 87,000 more IRS agents and 100,000 police officers. Read between the lines and you’ll find that Biden has all but declared war on the American people.

What the next crisis will be is anyone’s guess, but you can be sure that there will be a next crisis.

So, what should you expect if the government decides to declare another state of emergency and institutes a nationwide lockdown?

You should expect more of the same, only worse.

More compliance, less resistance.

More fear-mongering, mind-control tactics and less tolerance for those who question the government’s propaganda-driven narratives.

Most of all, as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, you should expect more tyranny and less freedom.

There’s every reason to worry about what comes next.

Certainly, the government’s past track record and its long-anticipated plans for instituting martial law (using armed forces to solve domestic political and social problems) in response to a future crisis are cause enough to worry about the government’s handling of the next “crisis.”

Mark my words: if and when another nationwide lockdown finally hits—if and when we are forced to shelter in place— if and when militarized police are patrolling the streets— if and when security checkpoints have been established— if and when the media’s ability to broadcast the news has been curtailed by government censors—if and when public systems of communication (phone lines, internet, text messaging, etc.) have been restricted—if and when those FEMA camps the government has been surreptitiously building finally get used as detention centers for American citizens—if and when military “snatch and grab” teams are deployed on local, state, and federal levels as part of the activated Continuity of Government plans to isolate anyone suspected of being a threat to national security—and if and when martial law is enacted with little real outcry or resistance from the public—then we will truly understand the extent to which the government has fully succeeded in acclimating us to a state of affairs in which the government has all the power and “we the people” have none.

Powerful New Evidence that U.S. Is A Dictatorship

Posted on September 6, 2022 by Reid Mukai

By Eric Zuesse

Source: The Duran

Because the U.S. Government flaunts itself as being a democracy instead of a dictatorship and it coups and invades and overthrows and replaces (“regime changes”) Governments that it declares to be dictatorships instead of democracies (the “New Cold War” isn’t about “capitalism versus communism,” but about “democracy versus dictatorship”), a crucial question now in all international political discussions is: Is the U.S. Government ACTUALLY a democracy, or does it instead only pretend to be one? In other words: Is the U.S. Government’s position in “the New Cold War” fraudulent?

The June 2022 issue of the peer-reviewed academic journal, Structural Change and Economic Dynamics, contained an article that answers this question with empirical data which has definitively crushed all of the U.S. Government’s references to itself as being a “democracy.” It is therefore significant not only because it proves that the U.S. Government is a dictatorship, but also because it proves that the U.S. position in “the New Cold War is fraudulent. The article is therefore of significance not just to Americans, but globally.

The article, which was specifically about and addressed to America, closed by saying: “We think it is time that social scientists stop pushing the equivalent of the Ptolemaic solar system. They need to recognize what almost everyone else does: that we live in a money-driven political system. No one is going to make progress by adding epicycles to voting models.” In other words: political ‘scientists’ and ‘historians’ who continue to perpetuate the U.S. regime’s claim to being a democracy (one-person-one-vote instead of one-dollar-one-vote) are now archaic: they are equivalent to the physical philosophers who had preceded the first physical scientist or “physicist” Galileo’s empirical demonstrations and the resulting first scientific theory (and subsequently Darwin doing the same thing in the biological sciences), that the Bible is not a book of history but instead a book of mythology mixing lies with truths in order to perpetuate and expand a particular clergy. But, now, the issue isn’t about control of the State by the clergy, but instead it’s about control of the State by the aristocracy — the nation’s super-rich. That’s what’s at issue in today’s America. Science is finally now extending outward, from its existing base, first in physics, and then in biology, to demonstrate such powerful empirical political realities as this in society — encroaching now upon the U.S. regime’s fraudulent dogma that the U.S. Government is a “democracy” instead of a “dictatorship” (a dictatorship such as it invades abroad and tries to overthrow and replace, by a ‘democracy’, some foreign nation’s Government — to add a new vassal-nation to the American empire’s ‘allies’ or actual colonies). This Emperor has no clothes, is what this academic article displays. But this particular “Emperor” represents not the clergy (such as in the time of Galileo and of Darwin), but instead the aristocracy — the super-rich (the imperialists, in the “New Cold War”).

The article’s title is: “How money drives US congressional elections: Linear models of money and outcomes”. Its “Abstract” or summary says that “the relations between money and votes cast for major parties in elections for the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives from 1980 to 2018 are well approximated by straight lines.” In other words: Billionaires and other super-rich individuals can and do purchase electoral outcomes with their enormous political donations in America. It’s a “straight-line” relationship between money and winning: the candidate who is backed by the most money has the biggest (a huge) likelihood of winning; the candidate who is backed by the least money has the least (a minuscule) likelihood, and most of that money to the winning candidates comes from the few super-rich. The way to be politically successful in today’s America is, now clearly, to be more corrupt than your competitor — to be offering the Government for sale to the highest bidders (and to deliver on the promises that the politician makes to these individuals, so as to be able to remain in public office and continue to serve those masters). (And, then, after public office, come the biggest private benefits, to those former office-holders.) America is an aristocracy, not a democracy; it is one-dollar-one-vote, not one-person-one-vote. That’s what the article demonstrates.

Even more crushing is the same three authors’ (Thomas Ferguson, Paul Jorgenson, and Jie Chen) further analysis from these same data, their article “Big Money — Not Political Tribalism — Drives US Elections”, which exposes the fraudulence of the two American political Parties’ supposed ‘ethnic’ or ‘racial’ appeals, as being instead actually the aristocracy’s distractive political theater pumping those divides, as being, in reality, instead — at the structurally deeper level — between Republican versus Democratic Party billionaires, with Republican billionaires financing White-power appeals, and Democratic billionaires financing Black and other minority (and feminist) power appeals, all so that the nation’s population-at-large won’t be fighting instead against the aristocracy itself, which is the sole real beneficiary of this system of exploitation of the masses (exploitation of workers and consumers). Thus, the aristocracy’s victims — the public, the consumers and workers, the people who are NOT in the aristocracy — look elsewhere than at the aristocracy, to see their enemy. This latter paper isn’t behind a paywall, and it shows the same straight-line graphs relating money to power that the first-mentioned one here (which IS paywalled) did. So, one can readily see visually, here, how profoundly corrupt America’s Government actually is. (Those graphs are stunning, because the data are.)

I have previously posted articles summarizing, and linking to, a vast range of other empirical evidences, of many different types, all likewise pointing very strongly toward America’s being an aristocracy instead of a democracy, and these are some of them:

“How America’s dictatorship works”

“America Is One-Dollar-One-Vote, Not Really One-Person-One Vote.”

“Jimmy Carter Is Correct That the U.S. Is No Longer a Democracy”

“Politicians Don’t Actually Care What Voters Want”

“Is the U.S. actually a ‘police state’?”

“How the U.S. Government is controlled by its armaments firms”

“How the Billionaires Control American Elections”

“The Evilness of America’s Ruling Class”

All of those data should be compared to the opposite view, the U.S.-regime-imposed view, which is expressed by America’s political ‘scientists’ and ‘historians’, who continue to perpetuate the U.S. regime’s claim to being a democracy (one-person-one-vote, instead of one-dollar-one-vote — which is America’s reality). Not only politicians, but also scholars, are beneficiaries of billionaires’ donations — the donations funding professorial chairs, college endowments, and ‘non’-profit foundations and ‘charities’. Such private interests thus control the public interests, to produce a deeply corrupt (privatized) body-politic.

On which side of this debate, about the aristocracy and the public, do you stand, and why? And what do you think should be done about it? Do you favor the aristocrats, or the public? This is not a political question, but a meta-political one. It transcends existing political Parties, and all existing political prejudices. It requires authentically scientific thinking about public policies. Above all, such questions concern the existing one-dollar-one-vote (aristocracy), versus the possibility of one-person-one-vote (democracy) emerging (or re-emerging). But can dictatorship ever transform into democracy? If so, how? Of course, history provides answers, and it shows that, at least for a while, the American Revolution did transform an aristocracy here into a democracy (albeit, a limited one): it conquered Britain’s aristocracy on its land. Unfortunately (or fortunately, if one prefers aristocracy to democracy), an American aristocracy has recently risen here. America now has its own aristocracy. In science, only history provides answers. There have also, in some other countries, been revolutions overthrowing the local nation’s own aristocracy. All evidences in science are historical facts — nothing else than that. And the articles which are linked-to here are scientific: they are analyses which are based only on the relevant historical facts, displaying what history (not myth) shows. One thing that all of human history shows is that every aristocracy is based on myths. America’s aristocracy is no different. Social science is now puncturing that myth — exposing that fraud. This is significant globally, not merely locally.

—————

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.

Digital Authoritarianism: AI Surveillance Signals the Death of Privacy

Posted on August 1, 2022 by Reid Mukai

By John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“There are no private lives. This a most important aspect of modern life. One of the biggest transformations we have seen in our society is the diminution of the sphere of the private. We must reasonably now all regard the fact that there are no secrets and nothing is private. Everything is public.” ― Philip K. Dick

Nothing is private.

We teeter on the cusp of a cultural, technological and societal revolution the likes of which have never been seen before.

While the political Left and Right continue to make abortion the face of the debate over the right to privacy in America, the government and its corporate partners, aided by rapidly advancing technology, are reshaping the world into one in which there is no privacy at all.

Nothing that was once private is protected.

We have not even begun to register the fallout from the tsunami bearing down upon us in the form of AI (artificial intelligence) surveillance, and yet it is already re-orienting our world into one in which freedom is almost unrecognizable.

AI surveillance harnesses the power of artificial intelligence and widespread surveillance technology to do what the police state lacks the manpower and resources to do efficiently or effectively: be everywhere, watch everyone and everything, monitor, identify, catalogue, cross-check, cross-reference, and collude.

Everything that was once private is now up for grabs to the right buyer.

Governments and corporations alike have heedlessly adopted AI surveillance technologies without any care or concern for their long-term impact on the rights of the citizenry.

As a special report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace warns, “A growing number of states are deploying advanced AI surveillance tools to monitor, track, and surveil citizens to accomplish a range of policy objectives—some lawful, others that violate human rights, and many of which fall into a murky middle ground.”

Indeed, with every new AI surveillance technology that is adopted and deployed without any regard for privacy, Fourth Amendment rights and due process, the rights of the citizenry are being marginalized, undermined and eviscerated.

Cue the rise of digital authoritarianism.

Digital authoritarianism, as the Center for Strategic and International Studies cautions, involves the use of information technology to surveil, repress, and manipulate the populace, endangering human rights and civil liberties, and co-opting and corrupting the foundational principles of democratic and open societies, “including freedom of movement, the right to speak freely and express political dissent, and the right to personal privacy, online and off.”

The seeds of digital authoritarianism were planted in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, with the passage of the USA Patriot Act. A massive 342-page wish list of expanded powers for the FBI and CIA, the Patriot Act justified broader domestic surveillance, the logic being that if government agents knew more about each American, they could distinguish the terrorists from law-abiding citizens.

It sounded the death knell for the freedoms enshrined in the Bill of Rights, especially the Fourth Amendment, and normalized the government’s mass surveillance powers.

Writing for the New York Times, Jeffrey Rosen observed that “before Sept. 11, the idea that Americans would voluntarily agree to live their lives under the gaze of a network of biometric surveillance cameras, peering at them in government buildings, shopping malls, subways and stadiums, would have seemed unthinkable, a dystopian fantasy of a society that had surrendered privacy and anonymity.”

Who could have predicted that 50 years after George Orwell typed the final words to his dystopian novel 1984, “He loved Big Brother,” we would come to love Big Brother.

Yet that is exactly what has come to pass.

After 9/11, Rosen found that “people were happy to give up privacy without experiencing a corresponding increase in security. More concerned about feeling safe than actually being safe, they demanded the construction of vast technological architectures of surveillance even though the most empirical studies suggested that the proliferation of surveillance cameras had ‘no effect on violent crime’ or terrorism.”

In the decades following 9/11, a massive security-industrial complex arose that was fixated on militarization, surveillance, and repression.

Surveillance is the key.

We’re being watched everywhere we go. Speed cameras. Red light cameras. Police body cameras. Cameras on public transportation. Cameras in stores. Cameras on public utility poles. Cameras in cars. Cameras in hospitals and schools. Cameras in airports.

We’re being recorded at least 50 times a day.

It’s estimated that there are upwards of 85 million surveillance cameras in the U.S. alone, second only to China.

On any given day, the average American going about his daily business is monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways by both government and corporate eyes and ears.

Beware of what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, and with whom you communicate, because it will all be recorded, stored and used against you eventually, at a time and place of the government’s choosing.

Yet it’s not just what we say, where we go and what we buy that is being tracked.

We’re being surveilled right down to our genes, thanks to a potent combination of hardware, software and data collection that scans our biometrics—our faces, irises, voices, genetics, microbiomes, scent, gait, heartbeat, breathing, behaviors—runs them through computer programs that can break the data down into unique “identifiers,” and then offers them up to the government and its corporate allies for their respective uses.

As one AI surveillance advocate proclaimed, “Surveillance is no longer only a watchful eye, but a predictive one as well.” For instance, Emotion AI, an emerging technology that is gaining in popularity, uses facial recognition technology “to analyze expressions based on a person’s faceprint to detect their internal emotions or feelings, motivations and attitudes.” China claims its AI surveillance can already read facial expressions and brain waves in order to determine the extent to which members of the public are grateful, obedient and willing to comply with the Communist Party.

This is the slippery slope that leads to the thought police.

The technology is already being used “by border guards to detect threats at border checkpoints, as an aid for detection and diagnosis of patients for mood disorders, to monitor classrooms for boredom or disruption, and to monitor human behavior during video calls.”

For all intents and purposes, we now have a fourth branch of government: the surveillance state.

This fourth branch came into being without any electoral mandate or constitutional referendum, and yet it possesses superpowers, above and beyond those of any other government agency save the military. It is all-knowing, all-seeing and all-powerful. It operates beyond the reach of the president, Congress and the courts, and it marches in lockstep with the corporate elite who really call the shots in Washington, DC.

The government’s “technotyranny” surveillance apparatus has become so entrenched and entangled with its police state apparatus that it’s hard to know anymore where law enforcement ends and surveillance begins.

The short answer: they have become one and the same entity. The police state has passed the baton to the surveillance state, which has shifted into high gear with the help of artificial intelligence technologies. The COVID-19 pandemic helped to further centralize digital power in the hands of the government at the expense of the citizenry’s privacy rights.

“From cameras that identify the faces of passersby to algorithms that keep tabs on public sentiment online, artificial intelligence (AI)-powered tools are opening new frontiers in state surveillance around the world.” So begins the Carnegie Endowment’s report on AI surveillance note. “Law enforcement, national security, criminal justice, and border management organizations in every region are relying on these technologies—which use statistical pattern recognition, machine learning, and big data analytics—to monitor citizens.”

In the hands of tyrants and benevolent dictators alike, AI surveillance is the ultimate means of repression and control, especially through the use of smart city/safe city platforms, facial recognition systems, and predictive policing. These technologies are also being used by violent extremist groups, as well as sex, child, drug, and arms traffickers for their own nefarious purposes.

China, the role model for our dystopian future, has been a major force in deploying AI surveillance on its own citizens, especially by way of its social credit systems, which it employs to identify, track and segregate its “good” citizens from the “bad.”

Social media credit scores assigned to Chinese individuals and businesses categorize them on whether or not they are worthy of being part of society. A real-name system—which requires people to use government-issued ID cards to buy mobile sims, obtain social media accounts, take a train, board a plane, or even buy groceries—coupled with social media credit scores ensures that those blacklisted as “unworthy” are banned from accessing financial markets, buying real estate or travelling by air or train. Among the activities that can get you labeled unworthy are taking reserved seats on trains or causing trouble in hospitals.

In much the same way that Chinese products have infiltrated almost every market worldwide and altered consumer dynamics, China is now exporting its “authoritarian tech” to governments worldwide ostensibly in an effort to spread its brand of totalitarianism worldwide. In fact, both China and the United States have led the way in supplying the rest of the world with AI surveillance, sometimes at a subsidized rate.

This is how totalitarianism conquers the world.

While countries with authoritarian regimes have been eager to adopt AI surveillance, as the Carnegie Endowment’s research makes clear, liberal democracies are also “aggressively using AI tools to police borders, apprehend potential criminals, monitor citizens for bad behavior, and pull out suspected terrorists from crowds.”

Moreover, it’s easy to see how the China model for internet control has been integrated into the American police state’s efforts to flush out so-called anti-government, domestic extremists.

According to journalist Adrian Shahbaz’s in-depth report, there are nine elements to the Chinese model of digital authoritarianism when it comes to censoring speech and targeting activists: 1) dissidents suffer from persistent cyber attacks and phishing; 2) social media, websites, and messaging apps are blocked; 3) posts that criticize government officials are removed; 4) mobile and internet access are revoked as punishment for activism; 5) paid commentators drown out government criticism; 6) new laws tighten regulations on online media; 7) citizens’ behavior monitored via AI and surveillance tools; 9) individuals regularly arrested for posts critical of the government; and 9) online activists are made to disappear.

You don’t even have to be a critic of the government to get snared in the web of digital censorship and AI surveillance.

The danger posed by the surveillance state applies equally to all of us: lawbreaker and law-abider alike.

When the government sees all and knows all and has an abundance of laws to render even the most seemingly upstanding citizen a criminal and lawbreaker, then the old adage that you’ve got nothing to worry about if you’ve got nothing to hide no longer applies.

As Orwell wrote in 1984, “You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.”

In an age of too many laws, too many prisons, too many government spies, and too many corporations eager to make a fast buck at the expense of the American taxpayer, we are all guilty of some transgression or other.

No one is spared.

As Elise Thomas writes for Wired: “New surveillance tech means you’ll never be anonymous again.”

It won’t be long before we find ourselves looking back on the past with longing, back to an age where we could speak to whomever we wanted, buy whatever we wanted, think whatever we wanted, go wherever we wanted, feel whatever we wanted without those thoughts, words and activities being tracked, processed and stored by corporate giants, sold to government agencies, and used against us by militarized police with their army of futuristic technologies.

Tread cautiously: as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, 1984 has become an operation manual for the omnipresent, modern-day AI surveillance state.

Without constitutional protections in place to guard against encroachments on our rights when power, AI technology and militaristic governance converge, it won’t be long before Philip K. Dick’s rules for survival become our governing reality: “If, as it seems, we are in the process of becoming a totalitarian society in which the state apparatus is all-powerful, the ethics most important for the survival of the true, free, human individual would be: cheat, lie, evade, fake it, be elsewhere, forge documents, build improved electronic gadgets in your garage that’ll outwit the gadgets used by the authorities.”

Totalitarianism & The Five Stages of Dehumanization

Posted on July 13, 2022 by Reid Mukai

By Christiann W.J.M. Alting Von Geusau

Source: The Pulse

Hannah Arendt’s seminal work The Origins of Totalitarianism(1948) makes for sobering reading in the world we see developing around us in the year 2021. Indeed, we find ourselves in an impasse of epic proportions where the essence of what it means to be human is at stake.

“The totalitarian attempt at global conquest and total domination has been the destructive way out of all impasses. Its victory may coincide with the destruction of humanity; wherever it has ruled, it has begun to destroy the essence of man.” – Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, first published 1948

Although it is hard to claim that – at least in the West – we find ourselves once again under the yoke of totalitarian regimes comparable to those we know so well from the 20^th century, there is no doubt that we are faced with a global paradigm that brings forth steadily expanding totalitarian tendencies, and these need not even be planned intentionally or maliciously.

As we will come to discuss later, the modern-day drivers of such totalitarian tendencies are for the most part convinced – with the support of the masses – that they are doing the right thing because they claim to know what is best for the people in a time of existential crisis. Totalitarianism is a political ideology that can easily spread in society without much of the population at first noticing it and before it is too late. In her book, Hannah Arendt meticulously describes the genesis of the totalitarian movements that ultimately grew into the totalitarian regimes of 20^th century Europe and Asia, and the unspeakable acts of genocide and crimes against humanity this ultimately resulted in.

As Arendt would certainly warn us against, we should not be misled by the fact that we do not see in the West today any of the atrocities that were the hallmark of the totalitarian regimes of Communism under Stalin or Mao and Nazism under Hitler. These events were all preceded by a gradually spreading mass ideology and subsequent state-imposed ideological campaigns and measures promoting apparently “justifiable” and “scientifically proven” control measures and actions aimed at permanent surveillance and ultimately a step-by-step exclusion of certain people from (parts of) society because they posed “a risk” to others or dared to think outside of what was considered acceptable thought.

In his book The Demon in Democracy – Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, the Polish lawyer and Member of the European Parliament Ryszard Legutko leaves no doubt that there are worrying similarities between many of the dynamics in Communist totalitarian regimes and modern-day liberal democracies, when he observes: “Communism and liberal democracy proved to be all-unifying entities compelling their followers how to think, what to do, how to evaluate events, what to dream, and what language to use.”

This is also the dynamics we see at work on many levels of globalized society today. Every reader, but especially politicians and journalists, interested in human freedom, democracy and the rule of law, should carefully read Chapter 11 on “The Totalitarian Movement” in Hannah Arendt’s much-acclaimed book. She explains how long before totalitarian regimes take actual power and establish complete control, their architects and enablers have already been patiently preparing society – not necessarily in a coordinated way or with that end-goal in mind – for the takeover. The totalitarian movement itself is driven by the aggressive and at times violent promotion of a certain dominant ideology, through relentless propaganda, censorship, and groupthink. It also always includes major economic and financial interests. Such a process then results in an ever more omnipotent state, assisted by a host of unaccountable groups, (international) institutions and corporations, that claims to have a patent on truth and language and on knowing what is good for its citizens and society as a whole.

Although there is of course a vast difference between Communist totalitarian regimes of the 21^st century that we see in China and North Korea, and Western liberal democracies with their growing totalitarian tendencies, what seems to be the unifying element between the two systems today is thought control and behavioral management of its populations. This development has been greatly enhanced through what was coined by Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff as “surveillance capitalism.” Surveillance capitalism, Zuboff writes, is “[a] movement that aims to impose a new collective order based on total certainty.” It is also – and here she does not mince her words – “[a]n expropriation of critical human rights that is best understood as a coup from above: an overthrow of the people’s sovereignty.” The modern state and its allies, whether communist, liberal or otherwise, have – for the above and other reasons – an insatiable desire to collect massive amounts of data on citizens and customers and to use this data extensively for control and influence.

On the commercial side, we have all the aspects of tracking people’s behavior and preferences online, brilliantly explained in the documentary The Social Dilemma, confronting us with the reality that “Never before have a handful of tech designers had such control over the way billions of us think, act, and live our lives.” At the same time we see in operation the “social credit” system rolled out by the Chinese Communist Party that uses big data and permanent CCTV live footage to manage people’s behavior in public areas through a system of awards and punishments.

The mandatory QR code first introduced in China in 2020 and subsequently in liberal democratic states around the world in 2021, to keep permanent track of people’s health status and as a prerequisite for participating in society, is the latest and deeply troubling phenomenon of this same surveillance capitalism. Here the dividing line between mere technocracy and totalitarianism becomes almost extinct under the guise of “protecting public health.” The currently attempted colonization of the human body by the state and its commercial partners, claiming to have our best interests in mind, is part of this troubling dynamic. Where did the progressive mantra “My body, my choice” suddenly go?

So, what then, is totalitarianism? It is a system of government (a totalitarian regime), or a system of increasing control otherwise implemented (a totalitarian movement) – presenting itself in different forms and at different levels of society – that tolerates no individual freedom or independent thought and that ultimately seeks to totally subordinate and direct all aspects of the individual human life. In the words of Dreher, totalitarianism “is a state in which nothing can be permitted to exist that contradicts a society’s ruling ideology.”

In modern society, where we see this dynamic very much at work, the use of science and technology play a decisive role in enabling totalitarian tendencies to take hold in ways that 20^th century ideologues could only have dreamed of. Furthermore, accompanying totalitarianism in whatever stage, institutionalized dehumanization occurs and is the process by which the whole or part of the population is subjected to policies and practices that consistently violate the dignity and fundamental rights of the human being and that may ultimately lead to exclusion and social or, in the worst case, physical extermination.

In the following, we will look more closely at some of the basic tenets of the totalitarian movement as described by Hannah Arendt and how this enables the dynamics of institutionalized dehumanization that we observe today. In the conclusion, we will briefly look at what history and human experience can tell us about freeing society from the yoke of totalitarianism and its dehumanizing policies.

The reader must understand that I am in no way comparing or equating the totalitarian regimes of the 20^th century and their atrocities to what I see as the increasing totalitarian tendencies and resulting policies today. Instead, as is the role of a robust academic discourse, we will take a critical look at what we see happening in society today and analyze relevant historical and political phenomena that might instruct us on how we can deal better with the present course of events that, if not corrected, does not bode well for a future of freedom and the rule of law.

I. The workings of totalitarianism

When we speak about “totalitarianism,” the word is being used in this context to describe the whole of a political ideology that can present itself in different forms and stages, but that always has the ultimate goal of total control over people and society. As described above, Hannah Arendt distinguishes within totalitarianism between the totalitarian movement and the totalitarian regime. I add to this categorizing what I believe to be an early stage of the totalitarian movement, called “totalitarian tendencies” by Legutko, and that I call ideological totalitarianism in relation to current developments. For totalitarianism to have a chance of succeeding, Hannah Arendt tells us, three main and closely intertwined phenomena are needed: the mass movement, the elite’s leading role in steering those masses and the employment of relentless propaganda.

The lonely masses

For its establishment and durability totalitarianism depends as a first step on mass support obtained through playing into a sense of permanent crisis and fear in society. This then feeds the urge of the masses to have those in charge constantly take “measures” and show leadership to ward off the threat that has been identified as endangering the whole of society. Those in charge can “remain in power only so long as they keep moving and set everything around them in motion.”The reason for this is that totalitarian movements build on the classical failure of societies throughout human history to create and uphold a sense of community and purpose, instead breeding isolated, self-centered human beings without a clear overarching purpose in life.

The masses following the totalitarian movement are lost themselves and as a result in search of a clear identity and a purpose in life that they do not find in their current circumstances: “Social atomization and extreme individualization preceded the mass movement (..). The chief characteristic of the mass man is not brutality and backwardness, but his isolation and lack of normal social relationships.^”

How familiar this sounds to any person observing modern society. In an age where social media and whatever else is presented on screens set the tone above all else and where teenage girls fall into depression and increased suicide attempts because of the lack of “likes” on their Instagram account, we indeed see a disconcerting example of this lack of normal relationships that were instead meant to involve in-person encounters leading to profound exchanges. In Communist societies it is the Party that sets out to destroy religious, social and family ties to make place for a citizen that can be completely subjected by the State and the dictates of the Party, like we see happening in China and North Korea. In hedonistic and materialistic Western societies this same destruction happens through different means and under the neo-Marxist guise of unstoppable “progress,” where technology and a false definition of the purpose of science erodes the understanding of what it means to be human: “In fact,” writes Dreher, “this technology and the culture that has emerged from it is reproducing the atomization and radical loneliness that totalitarian communist governments used to impose on their captive peoples to make them easier to control.” Not only have the smartphone and social media drastically reduced genuine human interaction, as any teacher or parent of schoolchildren can attest to, but the social framework has in recent times further dramatically deteriorated through other major shifts in society.

The ever-growing Big-Tech and government policing of language, opinions, and scientific information in the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, accompanied by a level of censorship not seen since World War II, has greatly reduced and impoverished the public discourse and seriously undermined trust in science, politics and the community.

In 2020 and 2021, mostly well-meant yet often ill-advised government-imposed Corona measures such as lockdowns, mask-mandates, entry-requirements to public facilities and Corona vaccine mandates have further massively limited the unimpeded human interaction that any society needs to retain and strengthen its social fabric. All these externally imposed developments contribute from different directions to human beings, especially the young, increasingly and ever more lastingly being deprived of those ‘normal social relationships’ Hannah Arendt speaks of. Seemingly lacking alternatives, this in turn leads large groups of the population – most of them not even realizing it – into the arms of totalitarian ideologies. These movements, however, in the words of Arendt, “demand for total, unrestricted, unconditional, and unalterable loyalty of the individual member (..) [since] their organization will encompass, in due course, the entire human race.”

The final goal of totalitarianism, she explains, is the permanent domination of human beings from within, thus involving each and every aspect of life, whereby the masses have to be kept constantly in motion since “a political goal that would constitute the end of the movement simply does not exist.” Without in any way wishing to downplay the gravity and urgency of these issues in and of themselves, or the need as a society to devise ways to deal with existential threats arising from them, Corona political and media narratives are examples of such an ideological totalitarianism that wants to completely control how human beings think, speak and act in that area of life, whist keeping them in perpetual anxiety through well-planned regular dramatic news updates (One tool being used for this successfully throughout the world is the constant well-rehearsed press conferences by grave-looking ministers in suits behind Plexiglas and flanked by experts and state flags), instrumentalized heartbreaking stories and calls to immediate action (“measures”), dealing with (perceived or real) new threats to their person, to their cause and to society as a whole. Fear is the main driving force behind keeping this perpetual anxiety and activism going.

The role of the elite

Hannah Arendt then goes on to explain what is a disturbing phenomenon of totalitarian movements, it being the enormous attraction it exerts on the elites, the “terrifying roster of distinguished men whom totalitarianism can count amongst its sympathizers, fellow-travelers, and inscribed party members. This elite believes that what is required for solving the acute problems society is currently faced with is the total destruction, or at least the total redesign, of all that was considered common sense, logic and established wisdom until this point.

When it comes to the Corona crisis, the well-known capacity of the human body to build natural immunity against most viruses it has already encountered is no longer deemed relevant in any way by those imposing vaccination mandates, rejecting foundational principles of human biology and established medical wisdom.

To achieve this total overhaul for the sake of complete control, the elites are willing to work with any people or organization, including those people, called “the mob” by Arendt, whose features are “failure in professional and social life, perversion and disaster in private life.” A good example of this is the West’s dealings with the Chinese Communist Party. Although the flagrant corruption and human rights abuses – including the genocidal campaign against the Uyghurs in Xinjiang – perpetrated by this institution of repression throughout history until today are well-documented, as is its role in covering up the 2019 outbreak of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in Wuhan perhaps resulting from a lab leak, most countries in the world have become so dependent on China that they are willing to look the other way and cooperate with a regime that is willing to trample on all that liberal democracy stands for.

Hannah Arendt describes another disturbing element that is part of what she calls the “temporary alliance between the mob and the elite” and that is the willingness of these elites to lie their way into obtaining and retaining power through “the possibility that gigantic lies and monstrous falsehoods can eventually be established as unquestioned facts.” At this point it is not a proven fact that governments and their allies are lying about statistics and scientific data surrounding Covid-19; however, it is clear that there exist many serious inconsistencies that are not or not sufficiently being dealt with.

Throughout the history of totalitarian movements and regimes the offenders have been able to get away with much because they understood very well what is the primary concern of the simple man or woman going about their daily business of making life work for their families and other dependents, as masterfully expressed by Arendt: “He [Göring] proved his supreme ability for organizing the masses into total domination by assuming that most people are neither bohemians, fanatics, adventurers, sex maniacs, crackpots, nor social failures, but first and foremost job holders and good family men.” And: “[n]othing proved easier to destroy than the privacy and private morality of people who thought of nothing but safeguarding their private lives.”

We all long for security and predictability and hence a crisis makes us look for ways to obtain or retain security and safety, and when necessary, most are willing to pay a high price for this, including relinquishing their freedoms and living with the notion that they might not be told the whole truth about the crisis at hand. It should be no surprise then that considering the potential lethal effect the Coronavirus can have on human beings, our very human fear of death has led most of us to part without much of a fight with the rights and freedoms that our fathers and grandfathers fought so hard for.

Also, as vaccine mandates are introduced around the globe for workers in many industries and settings, the majority is complying not because they themselves necessarily believe they need the Corona vaccine, but only because they want to reclaim their freedoms and keep their jobs so they can feed their families. The political elites imposing these mandates know this of course and make smart use of it, often even with the best of intentions believing that this is necessary to deal with the crisis at hand.

Totalitarian propaganda

The most important and ultimate tool used by totalitarian movements in the non-totalitarian society is to establish real control of the masses by winning them over through the use of propaganda: “Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself; the masses have to be won by propaganda.”As Hannah Arendt explains, both fear and science are extensively used to oil the propaganda machine. Fear is always propagated as directed towards somebody or something external that poses a real or perceived threat to society or the individual. But there is another even more sinister element that totalitarian propaganda historically uses to cajole the masses into following its lead through fear and that is “the use of indirect, veiled, and menacing hints against all who will not heed its teachings (..)”, all the while claiming the strictly scientific and public benefit nature of its argument that those measures are needed. Both the deliberate instrumentalization of fear and the constant referral to “follow the science” by political actors and the mass media in the Corona crisis has been extremely successful as a propaganda tool.

Hannah Arendt freely admits that the use of science as an effective tool of politics in general has been widespread and not necessarily always in a bad sense. This is of course also the case where it concerns the Corona crisis. Even so, she continues, the obsession with science has increasingly characterized the Western world since the 16^th century. She sees the totalitarian weaponization of science, quoting the German philosopher Eric Voegelin, as the final stage in a societal process where “science [has become] an idol that will magically cure the evils of existence and transform the nature of man.”

Science is employed to provide the arguments for the justification of societal fear and for the reasonableness of the far-reaching measures imposed to “confront” and “exterminate” the external danger. Arendt: “The scientificality of totalitarian propaganda is characterized by its almost exclusive insistence on scientific prophecy (..)”

How many such prophecies have we not heard since the beginning of 2020 and that have not come to pass? It is not at all relevant, Arendt continues, whether these “prophecies” would be based on good science or bad science, since the leaders of the masses make it their primary focus to fit reality to their own interpretations and, where deemed necessary, lies, whereby their propaganda is “marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such.”

They do not believe in anything that is related to personal experience or what is visible, but only in what they imagine, what their own statistical models say, and the ideologically consistent system they have built around it. Organization and single-mindedness of purpose is what the totalitarian movement aims at for obtaining full control, whereby the content of the propaganda (whether fact or fiction, or both) becomes an untouchable element of the movement and where objective reason or let alone public discourse no longer play any role.

Until now, respectful public debate and a robust scientific discourse have not been possible when it comes to the best way to respond to the Corona pandemic. The elites are keenly aware of this and use it to the advantage of forwarding their agenda, that instead it is radical consistency that the masses long for in times of existential crisis, as it (initially) gives them a sense of security and predictability. Yet this is also where the great weakness of totalitarian propaganda lies, since ultimately “(..) it cannot fulfill this longing of the masses for a completely consistent, comprehensible, and predictable world without seriously conflicting with common sense.”

Today we see this exacerbated, as I already mentioned above, through a fundamentally flawed understanding and use of science by the powers that be. Former Harvard Medical School professor Martin Kulldorff, a well-known epidemiologist and biostatistician specializing in infectious disease outbreaks and vaccine safety, notes what is the correct application of science and how this is lacking in the current narrative: “Science is about rational disagreement, the questioning and testing of orthodoxy and the constant search for truth.”

We are now very far removed from this concept in a public climate where science has been politicized into a truth factory that tolerates no dissent, even if the alternative viewpoint merely outlines the numerous inconsistencies and falsehoods that are part of the political and media narrative. The moment however, Arendt points out, this system error becomes clear to the participants in the totalitarian movement and its defeat is imminent, they will at once cease to believe in its future, from one day to the other giving up on that for which they were willing to give all the day before.

A striking example of such an overnight abandonment of a totalitarian system is the way in which most apparatchiks in Eastern and Central Europe between 1989 and 1991 turned from hardline career Communists into enthusiastic liberal democrats. They simply abandoned the system they were so faithfully part of for many years and found an alternative system that circumstances allowed them to now embrace. Therefore, as we know from the rubble heaps of history, every effort at totalitarianism has an expiry date. The current version will also fail.

II. Dehumanization at work

During my over 30 years of studying and teaching European history and the sources of law and justice, a pattern has emerged about which I already published in 2014 under the title “Human rights, history and anthropology: reorienting the debate.” In this article I described the process of “dehumanization in 5 steps” and how these human rights’ violations are not generally being perpetrated by ‘monsters,’ but for a large part by ordinary men and women – helped by the passive ideologized masses – who are convinced that what they are doing or participating in is good and necessary, or at least justifiable.

Since March 2020 we have been witnessing the global unfolding of a serious health crisis leading to unprecedented government, media and societal pressure being exerted on whole populations to acquiesce in far-reaching and mostly unconstitutional measures limiting people’s freedoms and in many cases through threats and undue pressure violating their bodily integrity. During this time, it has become increasingly clear that there are certain tendencies to be seen today that show some similarities to the sort of dehumanizing measures employed as a rule by totalitarian movements and regimes.

Endless lockdowns, police-enforced quarantines, travel restrictions, vaccine mandates, the suppression of scientific data and debate, large-scale censorship, and the relentless deplatforming and public shaming of critical voices are all examples of dehumanizing measures that should have no place in a system of democracy and the rule of law. We also see the process of increasingly relegating a certain part of the population to the peripheries whilst singling them out as irresponsible and undesired because of the “risk” they pose to others, leading to society gradually excluding them. The President of the United States expressed pointedly what this means in a major live-televised policy speech:

“We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin. And your refusal has cost all of us. So, please, do the right thing. But just don’t take it from me; listen to the voices of unvaccinated Americans who are lying in hospital beds, taking their final breaths, saying, “If only I had gotten vaccinated.” “If only.”” – President Joe Biden September 9, 2021

The five steps

Those peddling political rhetoric today that sets up the “vaccinated” against the “unvaccinated, or vice versa, are going down a very dangerous road of demagoguery that has never ended well in history. Slavenka Drakulic, in her analysis of what led to the 1991-1999 Yugoslav ethnic conflict, observes:” (..) in time those ‘Others’ are stripped of all their individual characteristics. They are no longer acquaintances or professionals with particular names, habits, appearances and characters; instead they are members of the enemy group. When a person is reduced to an abstraction in such a way, one is free to hate him because the moral obstacle has already been abolished.”

Looking at the history of totalitarian movements eventually leading to totalitarian regimes and their campaigns of state-controlled persecution and segregation, this is what happens.

The first step of dehumanization is the creation and political instrumentalization of fear and the resulting permanent anxiety amongst the population: fear for one’s own life and fear for a specific group in society that is considered to be a threat is constantly being fed.

Fear for one’s own life is of course an understandable and entirely justifiable response to a potentially dangerous new virus. Nobody would like to get sick or die unnecessarily. We don’t want to catch a nasty virus if it can be avoided. Yet once this fear is being instrumentalized by (state) institutions and media outlets to help them achieve certain objectives, such as for example the Austrian government has had to admit to doing in March 2020when it wanted to convince the population of the need for a lockdown, fear becomes a potent weapon.

Again, Hannah Arendt brings in her sharp analysis when she observes: “Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence; thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within.”

In his 9 September 2021 speech President Biden instrumentalizes for political purposes the normal human fear for the potentially fatal virus and goes on to expand it with fear for ‘unvaccinated people,’ by suggesting that they are per definition responsible not only for their own deaths but potentially for yours too because they are “unnecessarily using” ICU hospital beds. In this way there has been established a new suspicion and anxiety around a specific group of people in society for what they might do to you and your group.

The creation of fear towards that specific group then turns them into easily identifiable scapegoats for the specific problem that society is facing now, regardless of the facts. An ideology of publicly justified discrimination based on an emotion present in individual human beings in society has been born. This is exactly how the totalitarian movements which turned into totalitarian regimes in recent European history started. Even though it is not comparable to the levels of violence and exclusion of 20^th century totalitarian regimes, we are today seeing active fear-based government and media propaganda justifying the exclusion of people. First the “asymptomatic,” then the “unmasked” and now the “unvaccinated” are being presented and treated as a danger and a burden to the rest of society. How often have we not heard from political leaders during the past months that we are living through the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” and that the hospitals are full of them:

“That’s nearly 80 million Americans not vaccinated. And in a country as large as ours, that’s 25 percent minority. That 25 percent can cause a lot of damage — and they are. The unvaccinated overcrowd our hospitals, are overrunning the emergency rooms and intensive care units, leaving no room for someone with a heart attack, or pancreatitis, or cancer.” – President Joe Biden, September 9, 2021

The second step of dehumanization is soft exclusion: the group turned into scapegoats is excluded from certain – though not all – parts of society. They are still considered part of that society, but their status has been downgraded. They are merely being tolerated whilst at the same time being berated in public for them being or acting differently. Systems are also put in place that enable the authorities, and thus the public at large, to easily identify who these ‘others’ are. Enter the “Green Pass” or QR code. In many Western countries this finger-pointing is happening now, especially towards those not vaccinated against the SARS-CoV-2 virus, regardless of the constitutionally protected considerations or medical reasons why individuals may decide against receiving this specific jab.

For example, on November 5, 2021, Austria was the first country in Europe to introduce highly discriminatory restrictions for the “unvaccinated.” These citizens have been barred from participating in societal life and can only go to work, grocery shopping, church, have a walk or attend to clearly defined “emergencies”. New Zealand and Australia have similar limitations. Examples are manifold around the world where without proof of Corona vaccination people are losing their jobs and being barred entry into a host of establishments, shops and even churches. There are also an increasing number of countries barring people from boarding planes without a vaccination certificate, or even forbidding them explicitly to have friends over for dinner at home, like in Australia:

“The message is if you want to be able to have a meal with friends and welcome people in your home, you have to get vaccinated.” – State premier Gladys Berejiklian of New South Wales, Australia, 27 September 2021

The third step of dehumanization, mostly occurring in parallel with the second step, is executed though documented justification of the exclusion: academic research, expert opinions and scientific studies widely disseminated through vast media coverage are used to underpin the propaganda of fear and the subsequent exclusion of a specific group; to ‘explain’ or ‘provide evidence’ why the exclusion is necessary for the ‘good of society’ and for everybody to ‘stay safe.’ Hannah Arendt observes that “[t]he strong emphasis of totalitarian propaganda on the “scientific” nature of its assertions has been compared to certain advertising techniques which also address themselves to masses. (..) Science in the instances of both business publicity and totalitarian propaganda is obviously only a surrogate for power. The obsession of totalitarian movements with “scientific” proofs ceases once they are in power.”

The interesting caveat here is that the science is of course often being used in a biased way, only presenting those studies that fit the official narrative and not the at least equal number of studies, no matter how renowned its authors, that provide alternative insights and conclusions that might contribute to a constructive debate and better solutions. As mentioned before, here science becomes politicized as a tool for promoting what the leaders of the totalitarian movement have decided should be the truth and the measures and actions based on that version of the truth. Alternative viewpoints are simply censored, as we see the likes of YouTube, Twitter and Facebook engage in on an unprecedented scale.

Not since the end of the Second World War have so many renowned and acclaimed academics, scientists and medical doctors, including Nobel Prize recipients and nominees, been silenced, deplatformed and fired from their positions only because they do not support the official or ‘correct’ line. They simply desire for a robust public discourse on the question of how best to deal with the issue at hand and thus engage in a common search for truth. This is the point where we know from history that the ideology of the day has now been formally enshrined and has become mainstream.

The fourth step of dehumanization is hard exclusion: the group that is now ‘proven’ to be the cause of society’s problems and current impasse is subsequently excluded from civil society as a whole and becomes rightless. They no longer have a voice in society because they are deemed not to be part of it anymore. In the extreme version of this, they are no longer entitled to the protection of their fundamental rights. When it comes to Corona measures imposed by governments worldwide and to varying degrees, in some places we are already seeing developments leaning to this fourth stage.

Even though in scope and severity such measures cannot be compared to those imposed by totalitarian regimes of the past and the present, they do clearly show worrisome totalitarian tendencies that, when unchecked, could eventually grow into something far worse. In Melbourne, Australia, for example, a euphemistically called “Center for National Resilience” will soon be completed (as one of various such centers) that will act as a permanent facility where people are to be forcibly locked up in quarantine, for example when returning from foreign travel. The rules and regulations for life in such an already existing internment facility in Australia’s Northern Territory state make for chilling Orwellian reading:

“Chief Health Officer Direction 52 of 2021 sets out what a person must do when in quarantine at the Centre for National Resilience and at Alice Springs Quarantine Facility. This direction is law – every person in quarantine must do what the Direction says. If a person does not follow the Direction, the Northern Territory Police may issue an Infringement Notice with a financial penalty.”

The fifth and final step of dehumanization is extermination, social or physical. The excluded group is forcefully ejected from society, either by any participation in society being made impossible, or their banishment into camps, ghettos, prisons and medical facilities. In the most extreme forms of totalitarian regimes that we have seen under Communism and Nazism, but also the ethnic nationalism during the wars in the former Yugoslavia 1991-1999; this then leads to those people being physically exterminated or at least treated as those that are “no longer human.” This becomes easily possible because nobody speaks for them anymore, invisible as they have become. They have lost their place in political society and with it any chance to claim their rights as human beings. They have stopped being part of humanity as far as the totalitarians are concerned.

In the West we have thankfully not reached this final stage of totalitarianism and resulting dehumanization. However, Hannah Arendt gives a stark warning that we should not count on democracy alone being enough of a bulwark against reaching this fifth stage:

“A conception of law which identifies what is right with the notion of what is good for – for the individual, or the family, or the people, or the largest number – becomes inevitable once the absolute and transcendent measurements of religion or the law of nature have lost their authority. And this predicament is by no means solved if the unit to which the ‘good for’ applies is as large as mankind itself. For it is quite conceivable, and even within the realm of practical political possibilities, that one fine day a highly organized and mechanized humanity will conclude quite democratically – namely by majority decision – that for humanity as a whole it would be better to liquidate certain parts thereof.”

III Conclusion: how do we liberate ourselves?

History gives us powerful guidance on how we can throw off the yoke of totalitarianism in whatever stage or form it presents itself; also the current ideological form that most do not even realize is happening. We can actually stop the retreat of freedom and the onset of dehumanization. In the words of George Orwell “[f]reedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.” We live in times where exactly this freedom is under grave threat as a result of ideological totalitarianism, something I have tried to illustrate with how Western societies deal with the Corona crisis, where facts too often seem not to matter in favor of enshrining the latest systemic ideological orthodoxy. The best example of how freedom can be recovered is how the peoples of Eastern and Central Europe ended the totalitarian reign of Communism in their countries starting in 1989.

It was their long process of rediscovery of human dignity and their nonviolent yet insistent civil disobedience that brought down the regimes of the Communist elite and their allies of the mob, exposing the untruthfulness of their propaganda and the injustice of their policies. They knew that truth is a goal to attain, not an object to claim and thus requires humility and respectful dialogue. They understood that a society can only be free, healthy and prosperous when no human being is excluded and when there is always the genuine willingness and openness for a robust public discourse, to hear and understand the other, no matter how different his or her opinion or attitude to life.

They finally retook full responsibility for their own lives and for those around them by overcoming their fear, passivity and victimhood, by learning once again to think for themselves and by standing up to a state assisted by its enablers, that had forgotten its only purpose: to serve and protect each and every one of its citizens, and not just those it chooses.

All totalitarian efforts always end on the dustheap of history. This one will be no exception.

Declare Your Independence from Tyranny, America

Posted on July 4, 2022 by Reid Mukai

By John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

Imagine living in a country where armed soldiers crash through doors to arrest and imprison citizens merely for criticizing government officials.

Imagine that in this very same country, you’re watched all the time, and if you look even a little bit suspicious, the police stop and frisk you or pull you over to search you on the off chance you’re doing something illegal.

Keep in mind that if you have a firearm of any kind (or anything that resembled a firearm) while in this country, it may get you arrested and, in some circumstances, shot by police.

If you’re thinking this sounds like America today, you wouldn’t be far wrong.

However, the scenario described above took place more than 200 years ago, when American colonists suffered under Great Britain’s version of an early police state. It was only when the colonists finally got fed up with being silenced, censored, searched, frisked, threatened, and arrested that they finally revolted against the tyrant’s fetters.

No document better states their grievances than the Declaration of Independence, drafted by Thomas Jefferson.

A document seething with outrage over a government which had betrayed its citizens, the Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4, 1776, by 56 men who laid everything on the line, pledged it all—“our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor”—because they believed in a radical idea: that all people are created to be free.

Labeled traitors, these men were charged with treason, a crime punishable by death. For some, their acts of rebellion would cost them their homes and their fortunes. For others, it would be the ultimate price—their lives.

Yet even knowing the heavy price they might have to pay, these men dared to speak up when silence could not be tolerated. Even after they had won their independence from Great Britain, these new Americans worked to ensure that the rights they had risked their lives to secure would remain secure for future generations.

The result: our Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the Constitution.

Imagine the shock and outrage these 56 men would feel were they to discover that 246 years later, the government they had risked their lives to create has been transformed into a militaristic police state in which exercising one’s freedoms—at a minimum, merely questioning a government agent—is often viewed as a flagrant act of defiance.

In fact, had the Declaration of Independence been written today, it would have rendered its signers extremists or terrorists, resulting in them being placed on a government watch list, targeted for surveillance of their activities and correspondence, and potentially arrested, held indefinitely, stripped of their rights and labeled enemy combatants.

Read the Declaration of Independence again, and ask yourself if the list of complaints tallied by Jefferson don’t bear a startling resemblance to the abuses “we the people” are suffering at the hands of the American police state.

Here’s what the Declaration of Independence might look and sound like if it were written in the modern vernacular:

There comes a time when a populace must stand united and say “enough is enough” to the government’s abuses, even if it means getting rid of the political parties in power.
Believing that “we the people” have a natural and divine right to direct our own lives, here are truths about the power of the people and how we arrived at the decision to sever our ties to the government:
All people are created equal.
All people possess certain innate rights that no government or agency or individual can take away from them. Among these are the right to Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
The government’s job is to protect the people’s innate rights to Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. The government’s power comes from the will of the people.
Whenever any government abuses its power, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish that government and replace it with a new government that will respect and protect the rights of the people.
It is not wise to get rid of a government for minor transgressions. In fact, as history has shown, people resist change and are inclined to suffer all manner of abuses to which they have become accustomed.
However, when the people have been subjected to repeated abuses and power grabs, carried out with the purpose of establishing a tyrannical government, people have a right and duty to do away with that tyrannical government and to replace it with a new government that will protect and preserve their innate rights for their future wellbeing.
This is exactly the state of affairs we are under suffering under right now, which is why it is necessary that we change this imperial system of government.
The history of the present Imperial Government is a history of repeated abuses and power grabs, carried out with the intention of establishing absolute tyranny over the country.
To prove this, consider the following:
The government has, through its own negligence and arrogance, refused to adopt urgent and necessary laws for the good of the people.
The government has threatened to hold up critical laws unless the people agree to relinquish their right to be fully represented in the Legislature.
In order to expand its power and bring about compliance with its dictates, the government has made it nearly impossible for the people to make their views and needs heard by their representatives.
The government has repeatedly suppressed protests arising in response to its actions.
The government has obstructed justice by refusing to appoint judges who respect the Constitution and has instead made the courts march in lockstep with the government’s dictates.
The government has allowed its agents to harass the people, steal from them, jail them and even execute them.
The government has directed militarized government agents—a.k.a., a standing army—to police domestic affairs in peacetime.
The government has turned the country into a militarized police state.
The government has conspired to undermine the rule of law and the constitution in order to expand its own powers.
The government has allowed its militarized police to invade our homes and inflict violence on homeowners.
The government has failed to hold its agents accountable for wrongdoing and murder under the guise of “qualified immunity.”
The government has jeopardized our international trade agreements.
The government has overtaxed us without our permission.
The government has denied us due process and the right to a fair trial.
The government has engaged in extraordinary rendition.
The government has continued to expand its military empire in collusion with its corporate partners-in-crime and occupy foreign nations.
The government has eroded fundamental legal protections and destabilized the structure of government.
The government has not only declared its federal powers superior to those of the states but has also asserted its sovereign power over the rights of “we the people.”
The government has ceased to protect the people and instead waged domestic war against the people.
The government has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, and destroyed the lives of the people.
The government has employed private contractors and mercenaries to carry out acts of death, desolation and tyranny, totally unworthy of a civilized nation.
The government through its political propaganda has pitted its citizens against each other.
The government has stirred up civil unrest and laid the groundwork for martial law.
Repeatedly, we have asked the government to cease its abuses. Each time, the government has responded with more abuse.
An Imperial Ruler who acts like a tyrant is not fit to govern a free people.
We have repeatedly sounded the alarm to our fellow citizens about the government’s abuses. We have warned them about the government’s power grabs. We have appealed to their sense of justice. We have reminded them of our common bonds.
They have rejected our plea for justice and brotherhood. They are equally at fault for the injustices being carried out by the government.
Thus, for the reasons mentioned above, we the people of the united States of America declare ourselves free from the chains of an abusive government. Relying on God’s protection, we pledge to stand by this Declaration of Independence with our lives, our fortunes and our honor.

In the 246 years since early Americans first declared and eventually won their independence from Great Britain, “we the people” have managed to work ourselves right back under the tyrant’s thumb.

Only this time, the tyrant is one of our own making: the American Police State.

The abuses meted out by an imperial government and endured by the American people have not ended. They have merely evolved.

“We the people” are still being robbed blind by a government of thieves.

We are still being taken advantage of by a government of scoundrels, idiots and monsters.

We are still being locked up by a government of greedy jailers.

We are still being spied on by a government of Peeping Toms.

We are still being ravaged by a government of ruffians, rapists and killers.

We are still being forced to surrender our freedoms—and those of our children—to a government of extortionists, money launderers and corporate pirates.

And we are still being held at gunpoint by a government of soldiers: a standing army in the form of a militarized police.

Given the fact that we are a relatively young nation, it hasn’t taken very long for an authoritarian regime to creep into power.

Unfortunately, the bipartisan coup that laid siege to our nation did not happen overnight.

It snuck in under our radar, hiding behind the guise of national security, the war on drugs, the war on terror, the war on immigration, political correctness, hate crimes and a host of other official-sounding programs aimed at expanding the government’s power at the expense of individual freedoms.

The building blocks for the bleak future we’re just now getting a foretaste of—police shootings of unarmed citizens, profit-driven prisons, weapons of compliance, a wall-to-wall surveillance state, pre-crime programs, a suspect society, school-to-prison pipelines, militarized police, overcriminalization, SWAT team raids, endless wars, etc.—were put in place by government officials we trusted to look out for our best interests.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the problems we are facing will not be fixed overnight: that is the grim reality with which we must contend.

Yet that does not mean we should give up or give in or tune out. What we need to do is declare our independence from the tyranny of the American police state.

Everything Is a Weapon: The U.S. Government Is Waging Psychological Warfare on the Nation

Posted on June 27, 2022 by Reid Mukai

By John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“Have you ever wondered who’s pulling the strings? … Anything we touch is a weapon. We can deceive, persuade, change, influence, inspire. We come in many forms. We are everywhere.”— U.S. Army Psychological Operations recruitment video

The U.S. government is waging psychological warfare on the American people.

No, this is not a conspiracy theory.

Psychological warfare, according to the Rand Corporation, “involves the planned use of propaganda and other psychological operations to influence the opinions, emotions, attitudes, and behavior of opposition groups.”

For years now, the government has been bombarding the citizenry with propaganda campaigns and psychological operations aimed at keeping us compliant, easily controlled and supportive of the police state’s various efforts abroad and domestically.

The government is so confident in its Orwellian powers of manipulation that it’s taken to bragging about them. Just recently, for example, the U.S. Army’s 4th Psychological Operations Group, the branch of the military responsible for psychological warfare, released a recruiting video that touts its efforts to pull the strings, turn everything they touch into a weapon, be everywhere, deceive, persuade, change, influence, and inspire.

This is the danger that lurks in plain sight.

Of the many weapons in the government’s vast arsenal, psychological warfare may be the most devastating in terms of the long-term consequences.

As the military journal Task and Purpose explains, “Psychological warfare is all about influencing governments, people of power, and everyday citizens… PSYOP soldiers’ key missions are to influence ‘emotions, notices, reasoning, and behavior of foreign governments and citizens,’ ‘deliberately deceive’ enemy forces, advise governments, and provide communications for disaster relief and rescue efforts.”

Yet don’t be fooled into thinking these psyops (psychological operations) campaigns are only aimed at foreign enemies. The government has made clear in word and deed that “we the people” are domestic enemies to be targeted, tracked, manipulated, micromanaged, surveilled, viewed as suspects, and treated as if our fundamental rights are mere privileges that can be easily discarded.

Aided and abetted by technological advances and scientific experimentation, the government has been subjecting the American people to “apple-pie propaganda” for the better part of the last century.

Consider some of the ways in which the government continues to wage psychological warfare on a largely unsuspecting citizenry.

Weaponizing violence. With alarming regularity, the nation continues to be subjected to spates of violence that terrorizes the public, destabilizes the country’s ecosystem, and gives the government greater justifications to crack down, lock down, and institute even more authoritarian policies for the so-called sake of national security without many objections from the citizenry.

Weaponizing surveillance, pre-crime and pre-thought campaigns. Surveillance, digital stalking and the data mining of the American people add up to a society in which there’s little room for indiscretions, imperfections, or acts of independence. When the government sees all and knows all and has an abundance of laws to render even the most seemingly upstanding citizen a criminal and lawbreaker, then the old adage that you’ve got nothing to worry about if you’ve got nothing to hide no longer applies. Add pre-crime programs into the mix with government agencies and corporations working in tandem to determine who is a potential danger and spin a sticky spider-web of threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, flagged “words,” and “suspicious” activity reports using automated eyes and ears, social media, behavior sensing software, and citizen spies, and you having the makings for a perfect dystopian nightmare. The government’s war on crime has now veered into the realm of social media and technological entrapment, with government agents adopting fake social media identities and AI-created profile pictures in order to surveil, target and capture potential suspects.

Weaponizing digital currencies, social media scores and censorship. Tech giants, working with the government, have been meting out their own version of social justice by way of digital tyranny and corporate censorship, muzzling whomever they want, whenever they want, on whatever pretext they want in the absence of any real due process, review or appeal. Unfortunately, digital censorship is just the beginning. Digital currencies (which can be used as “a tool for government surveillance of citizens and control over their financial transactions”), combined with social media scores and surveillance capitalism create a litmus test to determine who is worthy enough to be part of society and punish individuals for moral lapses and social transgressions (and reward them for adhering to government-sanctioned behavior). In China, millions of individuals and businesses, blacklisted as “unworthy” based on social media credit scores that grade them based on whether they are “good” citizens, have been banned from accessing financial markets, buying real estate or travelling by air or train.

Weaponizing compliance. Even the most well-intentioned government law or program can be—and has been—perverted, corrupted and used to advance illegitimate purposes once profit and power are added to the equation. The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on COVID-19, the war on illegal immigration, asset forfeiture schemes, road safety schemes, school safety schemes, eminent domain: all of these programs started out as legitimate responses to pressing concerns and have since become weapons of compliance and control in the police state’s hands.

Weaponizing entertainment. For the past century, the Department of Defense’s Entertainment Media Office has provided Hollywood with equipment, personnel and technical expertise at taxpayer expense. In exchange, the military industrial complex has gotten a starring role in such blockbusters as Top Gun and its rebooted sequel Top Gun: Maverick, which translates to free advertising for the war hawks, recruitment of foot soldiers for the military empire, patriotic fervor by the taxpayers who have to foot the bill for the nation’s endless wars, and Hollywood visionaries working to churn out dystopian thrillers that make the war machine appear relevant, heroic and necessary. As Elmer Davis, a CBS broadcaster who was appointed the head of the Office of War Information, observed, “The easiest way to inject a propaganda idea into most people’s minds is to let it go through the medium of an entertainment picture when they do not realize that they are being propagandized.”

Weaponizing behavioral science and nudging. Apart from the overt dangers posed by a government that feels justified and empowered to spy on its people and use its ever-expanding arsenal of weapons and technology to monitor and control them, there’s also the covert dangers associated with a government empowered to use these same technologies to influence behaviors en masse and control the populace. In fact, it was President Obama who issued an executive order directing federal agencies to use “behavioral science” methods to minimize bureaucracy and influence the way people respond to government programs. It’s a short hop, skip and a jump from a behavioral program that tries to influence how people respond to paperwork to a government program that tries to shape the public’s views about other, more consequential matters. Thus, increasingly, governments around the world—including in the United States—are relying on “nudge units” to steer citizens in the direction the powers-that-be want them to go, while preserving the appearance of free will.

Weaponizing desensitization campaigns aimed at lulling us into a false sense of security. The events of recent years—the invasive surveillance, the extremism reports, the civil unrest, the protests, the shootings, the bombings, the military exercises and active shooter drills, the lockdowns, the color-coded alerts and threat assessments, the fusion centers, the transformation of local police into extensions of the military, the distribution of military equipment and weapons to local police forces, the government databases containing the names of dissidents and potential troublemakers—have conspired to acclimate the populace to accept a police state willingly, even gratefully.

Weaponizing fear and paranoia. The language of fear is spoken effectively by politicians on both sides of the aisle, shouted by media pundits from their cable TV pulpits, marketed by corporations, and codified into bureaucratic laws that do little to make our lives safer or more secure. Fear, as history shows, is the method most often used by politicians to increase the power of government and control a populace, dividing the people into factions, and persuading them to see each other as the enemy. This Machiavellian scheme has so ensnared the nation that few Americans even realize they are being manipulated into adopting an “us” against “them” mindset. Instead, fueled with fear and loathing for phantom opponents, they agree to pour millions of dollars and resources into political elections, militarized police, spy technology and endless wars, hoping for a guarantee of safety that never comes. All the while, those in power—bought and paid for by lobbyists and corporations—move their costly agendas forward, and “we the suckers” get saddled with the tax bills and subjected to pat downs, police raids and round-the-clock surveillance.

Weaponizing genetics. Not only does fear grease the wheels of the transition to fascism by cultivating fearful, controlled, pacified, cowed citizens, but it also embeds itself in our very DNA so that we pass on our fear and compliance to our offspring. It’s called epigenetic inheritance, the transmission through DNA of traumatic experiences. For example, neuroscientists observed that fear can travel through generations of mice DNA. As The Washington Post reports, “Studies on humans suggest that children and grandchildren may have felt the epigenetic impact of such traumatic events such as famine, the Holocaust and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.”

Weaponizing the future. With greater frequency, the government has been issuing warnings about the dire need to prepare for the dystopian future that awaits us. For instance, the Pentagon training video, “Megacities: Urban Future, the Emerging Complexity,” predicts that by 2030 (coincidentally, the same year that society begins to achieve singularity with the metaverse) the military would be called on to use armed forces to solve future domestic political and social problems. What they’re really talking about is martial law, packaged as a well-meaning and overriding concern for the nation’s security. The chilling five-minute training video paints an ominous picture of the future bedeviled by “criminal networks,” “substandard infrastructure,” “religious and ethnic tensions,” “impoverishment, slums,” “open landfills, over-burdened sewers,” a “growing mass of unemployed,” and an urban landscape in which the prosperous economic elite must be protected from the impoverishment of the have nots. “We the people” are the have-nots.

The end goal of these mind control campaigns—packaged in the guise of the greater good—is to see how far the American people will allow the government to go in re-shaping the country in the image of a totalitarian police state.

The facts speak for themselves.

Whatever else it may be—a danger, a menace, a threat—the U.S. government is certainly not looking out for our best interests, nor is it in any way a friend to freedom.

When the government views itself as superior to the citizenry, when it no longer operates for the benefit of the people, when the people are no longer able to peacefully reform their government, when government officials cease to act like public servants, when elected officials no longer represent the will of the people, when the government routinely violates the rights of the people and perpetrates more violence against the citizenry than the criminal class, when government spending is unaccountable and unaccounted for, when the judiciary act as courts of order rather than justice, and when the government is no longer bound by the laws of the Constitution, then you no longer have a government “of the people, by the people and for the people.”

What we have is a government of wolves.

Our backs are against the proverbial wall.

“We the people”—who think, who reason, who take a stand, who resist, who demand to be treated with dignity and care, who believe in freedom and justice for all—have become undervalued citizens of a totalitarian state that views people as expendable once they have outgrown their usefulness to the State.

Brace yourselves.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, “we the people” have become enemies of the Deep State.

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After the Crash

Dispatches From a Long Recovery (Est. 10/2024)

Tag Archives: Totalitarianism

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