HOME   AUDIOS

TOTALITARIANISM LECTURE

PART I

The title of this lecture is "The New Totalitarianism." The term totalitarianism was invented by Mussolini, but is as old as history, as our research going back into ancient history has shown. Totalitarianism goes back to the ideas of Plato; it goes back to the Arthashastra in ancient India; it goes back to the book of Lord Shang, and the basic structure of China's first Empire, and the Han Dynasty in ancient China. The total control of society by the state: it's as old as history.

Now what we're going to talk about here is the emerging new totalitarianism in the 21st century. Since the terrorist attacks in 2001, there has been a true legal revolution - particularly in America - setting the stage for a totalitarian state. Now, a lot of this is quite widely known, and we're not going to get into all the details of that. What we are going to do is to try to put this whole situation in the light of history. Part of the problem is that when people think of totalitarianism, they have a comic book view from World War II movies of what they think totalitarianism is. The average American, when you said the word "totalitarianism," they think of the ultimate evil figure in American mythology, if you will, Hitler, and their view of Hitler is that he was some crazy guy who ran around screaming and yelling, killing the Jews, behaving like a total nutcase 24 hours a day, with a racial ideology of anti-Semitic ideology, and so on and so forth. If anybody thinks that were talking about somebody like that coming to power, let's just stop that idea right now. That is not what we're talking about. More important, that was not who Hitler was. 

The evolution all of the Weimar Republic to a totalitarian state is actually highly relevant to today, for ideas that have nothing to do with Hitler's ideology. What it does represent is how a dysfunctional democracy was voluntarily transformed into a totalitarian state. In other words, the German people demanded a totalitarian state. This wasn't some sort of conspiracy that was imposed from the top. It was a mass movement that demanded an authoritarian leader, and that's extremely important to understand, that when democracies fail and or are faced with huge external or internal threats, there is a demand for totalitarianism. The Roman Republic elected a dictator in times of war. So, these are not unique events. Hitler was not a fringe figure in German politics. It's very important to understand that. Because if you don't understand that, you don't understand how totalitarianism is coming to power now, and how it will evolve as history unfolds in places like America and other so-called "free" countries. Hitler represented mainstream forces in German politics. He was backed by a "who's who" of the German establishment.


PART II

Hitler was backed by the Becksteins, the Brookmans - this, in American politics, this would be the equivalent of a young politician being backed by the Rockefellers and the Kennedys and George Soros, and people such as that. Before the so-called "putsch" in 1923, Hitler was driving around Germany on a speaking tour with general Von Ludendorff, who was the de-facto military dictator of Germany, and a great national hero in World War I. This is really mind-boggling when you think about it. Here's a guy who is a mere corporal - a nobody. He started his career in 1919, wasn't even a German citizen until the late 1920s, and he's traveling around Germany on a speaking tour costarring with general Von Ludendorff. So this this is important to understand. If you don't understand this, you don't understand anything.

Furthermore, like many radical politicians, Hitler constantly tried to present a moderate image to the public - in other words, with the exception of a veiled threat in one speech in 1939 against the Jews as to what would happen if war broke out, Hitler's public statements about the Jews always emphatically stated that there was to be no violence, and this was to be solved in a humane manner, so on, and so on, and so forth. So you see, if you don't - if you have a comic book view of totalitarianism, you're not going to understand what's going on now.

Now, the primary driver, the long-term trends for totalitarianism is the dysfunction of whatever the political system was that preceded it. In other words, if the system -  such as today - cannot deal with environmental problems, cannot deal with financial problems, so on and so forth, people will demand an authoritarian solution. When the Enabling Act was passed by the Weimar Reichstag, it was almost unanimous, except for the social Democrats, and many people have stated that the speech - the one party opposed to the social Democrats, Mr. Wells, was somehow very inspiring. We read Mr. Wells speech, and it's really appalling. He spends most of his time trying to explain why he agrees with Hitler on a whole lot of issues, and very conspicuously - very conspicuous, and certainly not accidentally - refuses to condemn the persecution of the Jews. So that was the so-called opposition in Germany, you see.

So this helps frame the state of mind where totalitarian regimes come to power. Augustus Caesar was welcomed as the "savior" of Rome, and he - if you don't know Roman history - was the guy who systematically destroyed and ended the Roman Republic. And Hitler was greeted as a Messiah in Germany, he was greeted as a savior. Hitler had so much popular support that until Kristallnacht in 1938, the concentration camps were largely empty. The Gestapo was a very small organization. It was about 5% the size of the East German Stasi as a percentage of the population. So if you don't understand the dynamism of modern totalitarianism, then you really don't understand much of anything about what's going on.

Now, getting to America, what kind of person would be a coming American dictator? What kind of person would be that? Well frankly, the ideology is very flexible here, but you have to look at some of America's basic traditions, and this is just purely theoretical. It doesn't mean to reflect on any party, but here's a likely scenario: somebody would be probably from the left, with a very distinguished career of speaking out on behalf of completing the vision of Martin Luther King, the economic vision of Martin Luther King. Totalitarian leaders build their base upon legitimate grievances. Honestly in a democratic society, they have to do that to get elected, aside from the fact these are grievances that do indeed need to be fixed. We can see an emerging totalitarian leader bringing up issues such as the fact that the minimum wage is back to where it was in the 1950s; they can bring up the fact - which Obama refuses to bring up - that the lower classes, the middle classes are basically in a complete state of economic crisis in America.

Now, a number of triggers will have to take place before a totalitarian state comes to America. Among them would be an economic collapse, that would certainly drive the forces of totalitarianism. An equally likely scenario is a biological terrorist attack, or an epidemic, because of the fact that the current American society is so dysfunctional that it does not have national health insurance, or mandated sick leave like every other modern state. that means, translate, that America is a sitting duck for a biological terrorist attack or an epidemic. So, you can easily be talking about a death toll in the hundreds of thousands. Now, just picture this in your mind: hundreds of thousands of people dying; a catastrophe that has virtually never occurred in American life; pictures of the dying, sick children gasping out their last breaths; the media going full on 24-7 to cover this whole situation. In light of the huge trends towards totalitarianism so far in American life, can anybody really believe that this would not lead to the creation of a total totalitarian state? You just have to fill in the blanks here, and even issues such as concentration camps might become very necessary, because if it's a highly contagious epidemic, the people who had the contagion would have to be put in concentration camps.


PART III

A key point would be the ability of a charismatic leader to sell the idea of totalitarianism to the American people. Now, let's just look at what's happened since 9/11/2001. We had a rampant campaign of military imperialism abroad, and we had - for the first time since the end of the Middle Ages - the legitimization of the use of torture as a means of political policy by the Bush administration, and the Obama administration has done everything possible to make 100% certain that the people who committed these crimes would not be prosecuted. These are nothing short of revolutionary, in terms of actions towards a totalitarian state. You have to understand that neither Hitler nor Stalin ever had the nerve to publicly endorse an abomination like torture in order to justify their keeping themselves in power.

So, we also have the end of the fairytales that " Oh, the Internet will make totalitarianism impossible." Quite the contrary. Technology has no morality. The entire structure of the internet is centralized in a series of near-monopoly power by a small group of corporations, which could easily be taken over by the state. And, very shocking in the year 2013 via the revelations of a very courageous young man by the name Snowden, we have a revealed that the National Security Agency in the United States has built an electronic system to monitor all American citizens. It's absolutely breathtaking, the power. and it is clear that somebody just needs to hit a computer switch on their keyboard to be able to listen in on any phone call in America. Now, this is truly breathtaking. Really, truly breathtaking. The dreams of Himmler and Beria and other secret police people could virtually never even imagine something like this. And technology such as voice recognition, and things like that enable an enormous increase in monitoring and productivity in the system of a secret police force.

So the fairytales that - technology has no morality, technology can be used one way or the other. And the other issue, which we discussed repeatedly in terms of technology, is you can't understand modern totalitarianism if you don't understand the dynamism of modern totalitarianism. People such as Hitler had very magnetic personalities, and the their ability to communicate with people was very high on an emotional level. Now, prior to this, you had to do things such as Hitler did, which was to have the loudspeaker systems in German cities wired into the radio, so that Hitler could could talk to the German people all over Germany at one point in time. Now, today, it's just on a quantum basis. On a quantum basis, because the with the Internet, they will be able to deliver their charismatic message 24-7 in digital stereo and HDTV. The emotional punch of this thing is going to be far greater.

So, the groundwork is set, and in terms of getting back to the issue of ideology, my theory is that it would come from the left, that you'd have somebody who could say they were fulfilling the - and with legitimate grievances - fulfilling the vision of Martin Luther King, so on and so forth. They'd be able to sell this to the certainly to the Democratic Party's endorsement of totalitarian-only police state tactics, such as Prism, and there'd be endorsement of violent imperialism overseas. It shows there's a huge base of support already for this sort of stuff, and goodness knows what would happen when we had a real terrorist attack. So, these are things that are part of the framework of what's coming.

Now, the very dysfunctional nature of American society at the moment lays the groundwork for this, because currently, America's doing nothing about the death of the bees; doing nothing about a whole series of other environmental problems; and so this lays the groundwork for death on an enormous scale. When you have death on an enormous scale, people become desensitized to death, they become desensitized to death, and willing to tolerate huge levels of violence. So you need to filter out your - whatever comic book nonsense you were taught in school about what totalitarianism is.

The new totalitarians are going to be the nice totalitarians. It will all be sugarcoated; it will all be presented as something to protect civil liberties, to protect democracy. We can just see this, I mean, we can just see this. Let's take a political sales pitch here. Here's an idea: let's say that you have a terrorist attack, a biological terrorist attack, which is very scary because biological terrorist attacks are very hard to track down. Remember that we still don't know organize the biological terrorist attacks on the Senate in 2001. No, we we don't know. We never caught the person.

So, that just shows how dangerous these things are. That was just a very small one, what, 10 people died - when you've got 300,000 people dead, there will be a demand that you catch those people. You bet there is. And if that sets off a nationwide epidemic that goes all over the country - which could easily happen - you can just figure out where that one goes. So there will be a mandate to do that, and this will be presented as a moral goal, and so on and so forth.


PART IV

A final point in looking at the new totalitarianism is to look at the structure of the global environmental situation. There are huge questions about the Green Revolution and the prospects that you could have a massive crop failure that would take out tens of millions of people and this will fuel further instability overseas. So there will be violence overseas that could be also used as a justification for terror. Getting back to the political dynamism of the creation of totalitarianism in America - let's take a theme - let's say that you portray or claim rather that there is actual evidence that there is a a link between say Al Qaeda Islamic terrorists who are very popular bogie people in the minds of the average American citizen and let's mix in this: anti-sematic white racists; now there's a bogeyman figure on the left that everybody could certainly get in favor of crushing.

So you put this together, think this through, you've got the conservative hatred of of Islam and all that, you have a left-wing hatred of old white racists and and so on and so forth. So there you go. You got a political consensus for some supposedly temporary measures that will protect the country from an epidemic that might kill a third of the American people with some really good solid villains that you can get bipartisan support for - support for destroying. You can really see this coming together and it will be presented as a "moral need" to be on the lookout for spies and so on. Maybe your neighbor might be somebody who needed to be monitored, this person had said some critical comments about the government and so on and you might just want to do your part to keep track of them a little more closely and things like that.

So the whole psychology of this thing can easily be mobilized and an effective leader would be able to cut across the ideological divide. This person would come from the left and would be able to - in light of the so-called terrorist threat - be able to mobilize the American people behind a bipartisan "United We Stand" kind of mentality. And also relating to overseas, America has murdered so many people overseas with say the drone attacks and where it's antagonized 90% of the population of a nuclear state while accomplishing nothing in terms of foreign policy by killing children for no purpose, this could also be fueling a threat of nuclear terrorism. You can fill in the blanks there.

We've also brought up the issue of the development of EMP weapons - nonnuclear EMP weapons - by America and the issue of bringing down internet commerce by the NSA, figuring out a way to crack encryption codes, what if that gets out? So you see all this this stuff - the fuel for the fire - it's like wildfire, the fuel the fire is right out there. It's right out there waiting to be mobilized. So you just put all this together and a dynamic leader who's can bring the country together to save the American people from all these deadly threats. You can see how all this works out and that's going to be the new totalitarianism. It will be somebody who wraps themselves in the flag, somebody who suggests that they represent social justice and American values, and it's a very plausible and very logical way in which history will evolve. End of lecture.