Premiere Live Stream. The Final Reckoning. 7 pm Swedish Time this evening.
Concluding Volume in the Dialogues at Father Browns Vicarage will stream live at 7 pm Swedish Time this evening. 6 pm UK Time "Tea Time" Not Afternoon tea but a substitute for the 6pm news.
You Might Wish to fill a glass with Father Browns favourite tipple a small glass of sherry. I will remain online for an Hour post the stream.
An open Invite is extended to my fellow pamphleteers to Discuss The Circle of Blame, The Fictional Mind and Conscious eternal Love.
If you want to join the discussion just message the chat and I will send you a link during the live stream.
ON THE NATURE OF TOTALITARIANISM / 355
“The lies of totalitarian movements, invented for the moment, as well as the forgeries committed by totalitarian regimes, are secondary to this fundamental attitude that excludes the very distinction between truth and falsehood. It is for this end, that is, for the consistency of a lying world order, rather than for the sake of power or any other humanly understandable sinfulness, that totalitarianism requires total domination and global rule and is prepared to commit crimes which are unprecedented in the long and sinful history of mankind.*
*This and the preceding ten paragraphs are from the manuscript entitled “Ideology and Propaganda.” - See Link
“This Machine . . . “
Written by
in
“What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Obama, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.”
The quote isn’t originally about Obama, although every single part of the statement can be found, explicitly or indirectly, in the government’s defense in the Snowden/NSA scandal.
Replace “Obama” with “Hitler”, and you have the original. It’s from Milton Mayer’s classic They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45, and the words are those of a university colleague of the author, explaining “the ever widening gap, after 1933, between the government and the people.”
Oh well, maybe the USA isn’t a fascist state after all. We’ll see what happens with the Congress vote about Syria.
Some indices to keep an eye on:
The manipulation of democatic institutions by a relatively small group of people in power.
The level of secrecy, including the passing of secret laws to be used by secret courts.
The close ties between governmental and corporative interests with huge economic resources. As Mussolini put it: “Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.”
The use of police force and judiciary persecution to stifle opposition and critical investigation, e.g. the prosecution of Barrett Brown, Chelsea Manning, and — not yet consummated — Glenn Greenwald and Edward Snowden.
The percentage of GNP spent on military and police.
The skilled use of Orwellian Doublespeak.
“Your friend the baker was right,” said my colleague. “The dictatorship, and the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting. It provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway. I do not speak of your ‘little men,’ your baker and so on; I speak of my colleagues and myself, learned men, mind you. Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need to.´´
They Thought They Were Free
The Germans, 1933-45 Milton Mayer