Authoritarian Regime Quotes

People tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory—and this is largely determined by the extent of coverage in the media. Frequently mentioned topics populate the mind even as others slip away from awareness. In turn, what the media choose to report corresponds to their view of what is currently on the public’s mind. It is no accident that authoritarian regimes exert substantial pressure on independent media. Because public interest is most easily aroused by dramatic events and by celebrities, media feeding frenzies are common

But blaming Islam is a simple answer, easier and less controversial than re-examining the core political issues and grievances that resonate in much of the Muslim world: the failures of many Muslim governments and societies, some aspects of U.S. foreign policy representing intervention and dominance, Western support for authoritarian regimes, the invasion and occupation of Iraq, or support for Israel's military battles with Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. (p. 136-137)

There is no doctrine called extremism. When tyrants speak of extremists, they just mean people who are not in the mainstream—as the tyrants themselves are defining that mainstream at that particular moment. Dissidents of the twentieth century, whether they were resisting fascism or communism, were called extremists. Modern authoritarian regimes, such as Russia, use laws on extremism to punish those who criticize their policies. In this way the notion of extremism comes to mean virtually everything except what is, in fact, extreme: tyranny.

The people have realized that Martial Law is not law. A regime not established by law is devoid of the attribute to dispense law. A regime which puts in a bunker the highest law in the land does not have the moral authority to say that nobody is above the law.

If you are for gun control, then you are not against guns, because the guns will be needed to disarm people. So it’s not that you are anti-gun. You’ll need the police’s guns to take away other people’s guns. So you’re very pro-gun; you just believe that only the Government (which is, of course, so reliable, honest, moral and virtuous…) should be allowed to have guns. There is no such thing as gun control. There is only centralizing gun ownership in the hands of a small political elite and their minions.

[Christian rebellion] arises from the doctrine of mankind made in the image of God, and therefore protests against all forms of dehumanization. It sets itself against the social injustices which insult God the Creator, seeks to protect human beings from oppression and longs to liberate them… it protests against every authoritarian regime, whether of the left or of the right, which discriminates against minorities, denies people their civil rights, forbids the free expression of opinions or imprisons people for their views alone.

if you didn’t get involved in anything controversial—politics, human rights, or anything to do with Chechnya—then you could get on with life and enjoy the fruits of the authoritarian regime. The

Democracy, we now know, is more than periodic elections in some countries, such elections have been used to legitimize essentially authoritarian regimes and deprive large parts of the citizenry of basic rights.

Authoritarian Communism is, and should be, forever tainted by those real-world laboratories. But what of the contemporary crusade to liberate world markets? The coups, wars and slaughters to instill and maintain pro-corporate regimes have never been treated as capitalist crimes but have instead been written off as the excess of overzealous dictators, as hot fronts in the Cold War, and now of the War on Terror. If the most committed opponents of the corporatist economic model are systematically eliminated, whether in Argentina in the seventies or in Iraq today, that suppression is explained as part of the dirty fight against Communism or terrorism - almost never as the fight for the advancement of pure capitalism.

The main handicap of authoritarian regimes in the twentieth century - the attempt to concentrate all information in one place - might become their decisive advantage in the twenty-first cenutry.

Freedom is the right to difference; being plurality, it postulates the dispersion of the absolute, its resolution into a dust of truths, equally justified and provisional. There is an underlying polytheism in liberal democracy (call it an unconscious polytheism); conversely, every authoritarian regime partakes of a disguised monotheism.

All of this highlights several important ideas. First, growth under authoritarian, extractive political institutions in China, though likely to continue for a while yet, will not translate into sustained growth, supported by truly inclusive economic institutions and creative destruction. Second, contrary to the claims of modernization theory, we should not count on authoritarian growth leading to democracy or inclusive political institutions. China, Russia, and several other authoritarian regimes currently experiencing some growth are likely to reach the limits of extractive growth before they transform their political institutions in a more inclusive direction—and in fact, probably before there is any desire among the elite for such changes or any strong opposition forcing them to do so. Third, authoritarian growth is neither desirable nor viable in the long run, and thus should not receive the endorsement of the international community as a template for nations in Latin America, Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa, even if it is a path that many nations will choose precisely because it is sometimes consistent with the interests of the economic and political elites dominating them. Y

Democracy can exist only in the countries where people are brave! Coward nations always live under the authoritarian regimes!

It is no accident that authoritarian regimes exert substantial pressure on independent media.

Once available, the inquisitorial toolbox could be put to use by any authoritarian regime with the will and the means to unpack and use it.

For good people to do evil doesn't require only religion, or even any religion, but simply one of it's key elements: belief without evidence-in other words, faith. And that kind of faith is seen not just in religion, but any authoritarian ideology that puts dogma above truth and frowns on dissent. This was precisely the case in the totalitarian regimes of Maoist China and Stalinist Russia, whose excesses are often (and wrongly) blamed on atheism. Faith vs. Fact. p. 220

It is no accident that authoritarian regimes exert substantial pressure on independent media. Because public interest is most easily aroused by dramatic events and by celebrities, media feeding frenzies are common.

Over time political pragmatism could trump ideology helped by a growing civil society that will begin to produce a new cadre of pragmatic, entrepreneurial and social leaders—something that authoritarian regimes consistently stifled.

AUTHORITARIAN REGIMES USUALLY include a special riot police force whose task is to disperse citizens who seek to protest, and a secret state police force whose assignments include the murder of dissenters or others designated as enemies.

A majority that yields to the promises of security instead of seeking liberty and self-reliance is giving up something real and valuable in return for false promises. The fact that strong leaders are willing to demagogue, spin, deceive, and lie proves their goal is neither to care for the people nor to advance liberty. Instead, it’s their perverted desire to rule over others that drives them. But, even authoritarian regimes don’t last if there isn’t general acceptance of their governance by the people.

Conspiracy theories have long been used to maintain power: the Soviet leadership saw capitalist and counter-revolutionary conspiracies everywhere; the Nazis, Jewish ones. But those conspiracies were ultimately there to buttress an ideology, whether class warfare for Communists or race for Nazis. With today’s regimes, which struggle to formulate a single ideology – indeed, which can’t if they want to maintain power by sending different messages to different people – the idea that one lives in a world full of conspiracies becomes the world view itself. Conspiracy does not support the ideology; it replaces it. In Russia this is captured in the catchphrase of the country’s most important current affairs presenter: ‘A coincidence? I don’t think so!’ says Dmitry Kiselev as he twirls between tall tales that dip into history, literature, oil prices and colour revolutions, which all return to the theme of how the world has it in for Russia. And as a world view it grants those who subscribe to it certain pleasures: if all the world is a conspiracy, then your own failures are no longer all your fault. The fact that you achieved less than you hoped for, that your life is a mess – it’s all the fault of the conspiracy. More importantly, conspiracy is a way to maintain control. In a world where even the most authoritarian regimes struggle to impose censorship, one has to surround audiences with so much cynicism about anybody’s motives, persuade them that behind every seemingly benign motivation is a nefarious, if impossible-to-prove, plot, that they lose faith in the possibility of an alternative, a tactic a renowned Russian media analyst called Vasily Gatov calls ‘white jamming’. And the end effect of this endless pile-up of conspiracies is that you, the little guy, can never change anything. For if you are living in a world where shadowy forces control everything, then what possible chance do you have of turning it around? In this murk it becomes best to rely on a strong hand to guide you. ‘Trump is our last chance to save America,’ is the message of his media hounds. Only Putin can ‘raise Russia from its knees’. ‘The problem we are facing today is less oppression, more lack of identity, apathy, division, no trust,’ sighs Srdja. ‘There are more tools to change things than before, but there’s less will to do so.

Frequently mentioned topics populate the mind even as others slip away from awareness. In turn, what the media choose to report corresponds to their view of what is currently on the public’s mind. It is no accident that authoritarian regimes exert substantial pressure on independent media.

The first tool of authoritarian regimes is always informational control—both in the gathering of information on the public through surveillance and the filtration of information to the public through owned media. In its early days, the Internet seemed to pose a challenge to authoritarian regimes, but with the advent of social media, we are watching the construction of architectures that fulfill the needs of every authoritarian regime: surveillance and information control. Authoritarian movements are possible only when the general public becomes habituated to—and numbed by—a new normal.

What we have,” Robert tells us, “is not democracy. It is imitative democracy. We have all the external signs. We have elections. We have a parliament. We have legislation. All the accessories of democracy. But anyone with common sense here knows we live in an authoritarian state. Putin has learned that if he offers the accessories of democracy, his regime can be very hard to accuse. The regime does one thing very well: It doesn’t listen. So there can be free speech, channels of communication. But normally in a democracy, those voices affect decision making. In this country that doesn’t happen.

As algorithms come to know us so well, authoritarian governments could gain absolute control over their citizens, even more so than in Nazi Germany, and resistance to such regimes might be utterly impossible. Not only will the regime know exactly how you feel, but it could make you feel whatever it wants. The dictator might not be able to provide citizens with healthcare or equality, but he could make them love him and hate his opponents. Democracy in its present form cannot survive the merger of biotech and infotech. Either democracy will successfully reinvent itself in a radically new form or humans will come to live in “digital dictatorships.

Sooner or later, all talk among foreigners in Pyongyang turns to one imponderable subject. Do the locals really believe what they are told, and do they truly revere Fat Man and Little Boy? I have been a visiting writer in several authoritarian and totalitarian states, and usually the question answers itself. Someone in a café makes an offhand remark. A piece of ironic graffiti is scrawled in the men's room. Some group at the university issues some improvised leaflet. The glacier begins to melt; a joke makes the rounds and the apparently immovable regime suddenly looks vulnerable and absurd. But it's almost impossible to convey the extent to which North Korea just isn't like that. South Koreans who met with long-lost family members after the June rapprochement were thunderstruck at the way their shabby and thin northern relatives extolled Fat Man and Little Boy. Of course, they had been handpicked, but they stuck to their line. There's a possible reason for the existence of this level of denial, which is backed up by an indescribable degree of surveillance and indoctrination. A North Korean citizen who decided that it was all a lie and a waste would have to face the fact that his life had been a lie and a waste also. The scenes of hysterical grief when Fat Man died were not all feigned; there might be a collective nervous breakdown if it was suddenly announced that the Great Leader had been a verbose and arrogant fraud. Picture, if you will, the abrupt deprogramming of more than 20 million Moonies or Jonestowners, who are suddenly informed that it was all a cruel joke and there's no longer anybody to tell them what to do. There wouldn't be enough Kool-Aid to go round. I often wondered how my guides kept straight faces. The streetlights are turned out all over Pyongyang—which is the most favored city in the country—every night. And the most prominent building on the skyline, in a town committed to hysterical architectural excess, is the Ryugyong Hotel. It's 105 floors high, and from a distance looks like a grotesquely enlarged version of the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco (or like a vast and cumbersome missile on a launchpad). The crane at its summit hasn't moved in years; it's a grandiose and incomplete ruin in the making. 'Under construction,' say the guides without a trace of irony. I suppose they just keep two sets of mental books and live with the contradiction for now.

Authoritarian repressive regimes provided us with more " Baltagya " Totalitarian regimes are facturing violence Welcome to" Baltagya "'s maker Show -my words

It is not bad that the main beneficiaries of freedom criticize open societies, where there is much that can be criticized. It is bad if they do so by taking the side of those who seek to destroy these open societies, replacing them with authoritarian regimes, as in Venezuela or Cuba. When many artists and intellectuals betray democratic ideals, they are not betraying abstract principles, but rather the thousands and millions of flesh-and-blood people who, under dictatorships, resist and fight to gain freedom. But the saddest thing is that this betrayal of the victims does not come from principles and convictions but rather from professional opportunism and posturing, gestures and actions adapted to circumstance. Many artists and intellectuals in our times have become very cheap.

In 1985 South Korean was a relatively poor country, bound by strict traditions and ruled by an authoritarian regime. Today South Korea is a leading economic power, its citizens are among the best educated in the world, and it enjoys a stable and comparatively liberal democratic regime. Yet whereas in 1985 about nine South Koreans per 100,000 killed themselves, today the annual rate of suicide is 36 per 100,000.31

There is, therefore, a temptation to return to an explanation which automatically discharges the victim of responsibility: it seems quite adequate to a reality in which nothing strikes us more forcefully than the utter innocence of the individual caught in the horror machine and his utter inability to change his fate. Terror, however, is only in the last instance of its development a mere form of government. In order to establish a totalitarian regime, terror must be presented as an instrument for carrying out a specific ideology; and that ideology must have won the adherence of many, and even a majority, before terror can be stabilized. The point for the historian is that the Jews, before becoming the main victims of modern terror, were the center of Nazi ideology. And an ideology which has to persuade and mobilize people cannot choose its victim arbitrarily.

People tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory—and this is largely determined by the extent of coverage in the media. Frequently mentioned topics populate the mind even as others slip away from awareness. In turn, what the media choose to report corresponds to their view of what is currently on the public’s mind. It is no accident that authoritarian regimes exert substantial pressure on independent media.

Let us fool ourselves no longer. At the very moment Western nations, threw off the ancient regime of absolute government, operating under a once-divine king, they were restoring this same system in a far more effective form in their technology, reintroducing coercions of a military character no less strict in the organization of a factory than in that of the new drilled, uniformed, and regimented army. During the transitional stages of the last two centuries, the ultimate tendency of this system might b e in doubt, for in many areas there were strong democratic reactions; but with the knitting together of a scientific ideology, itself liberated from theological restrictions or humanistic purposes, authoritarian technics found an instrument at hand that h as now given it absolute command of physical energies of cosmic dimensions. The inventors of nuclear bombs, space rockets, and computers are the pyramid builders of our own age: psychologically inflated by a similar myth of unqualified power, boasting through their science of their increasing omnipotence, if not omniscience, moved by obsessions and compulsions no less irrational than those of earlier absolute systems: particularly the notion that the system itself must be expanded, at whatever eventual co st to life. Through mechanization, automation, cybernetic direction, this authoritarian technics has at last successfully overcome its most serious weakness: its original dependence upon resistant, sometimes actively disobedient servomechanisms, still human enough to harbor purposes that do not always coincide with those of the system. Like the earliest form of authoritarian technics, this new technology is marvellously dynamic and productive: its power in every form tends to increase without limits, in quantities that defy assimilation and defeat control, whether we are thinking of the output of scientific knowledge or of industrial assembly lines. To maximize energy, speed, or automation, without reference to the complex conditions that sustain organic life, have become ends in themselves. As with the earliest forms of authoritarian technics, the weight of effort, if one is to judge by national budgets, is toward absolute instruments of destruction, designed for absolutely irrational purposes whose chief by-product would be the mutilation or extermination of the human race. Even Ashurbanipal and Genghis Khan performed their gory operations under normal human limits. The center of authority in this new system is no longer a visible personality, an all-powerful king: even in totalitarian dictatorships the center now lies in the system itself, invisible but omnipresent: all its human components, even the technical and managerial elite, even the sacred priesthood of science, who alone have access to the secret knowledge by means of which total control is now swiftly being effected, are themselves trapped by the very perfection of the organization they have invented. Like the Pharoahs of the Pyramid Age, these servants of the system identify its goods with their own kind of well-being: as with the divine king, their praise of the system is an act of self-worship; and again like the king, they are in the grip of an irrational compulsion to extend their means of control and expand the scope of their authority. In this new systems-centered collective, this Pentagon of power, there is no visible presence who issues commands: unlike job's God, the new deities cannot be confronted, still less defied. Under the pretext of saving labor, the ultimate end of this technics is to displace life, or rather, to transfer the attributes of life to the machine and the mechanical collective, allowing only so much of the organism to remain as may be controlled and manipulated.

freedom the masses crave is not freedom of self-expression and self-realization, but freedom from the intolerable burden of an autonomous existence. They want freedom from “the fearful burden of free choice,”19 freedom from the arduous responsibility of realizing their ineffectual selves and shouldering the blame for the blemished product. They do not want freedom of conscience, but faith—blind, authoritarian faith. They sweep away the old order not to create a society of free and independent men, but to establish uniformity, individual anonymity and a new structure of perfect unity. It is not the wickedness of the old regime they rise against but its weakness; not its oppression, but its failure to hammer them together into one solid, mighty whole.

Authoritarian regimes usually include a special riot police force whose task is to disperse citizens who seek to protest, and a secret state police force whose assignments include the murder of dissenters or others designated as enemies. And indeed we find forces of the latter kind deeply involved in the great atrocities of the twentieth century, such as the Great Terror in the Soviet Union of 1937–38 and the Holocaust of European Jews perpetrated by Nazi Germany in 1941–45. Yet we make a great mistake if we imagine

On September 11, 1973, General Augusto Pinochet led a successful coup that overthrew the elected socialist government of President Salvador Allende in Chile. Ruling in the name of economic liberty, the Pinochet junta became one of the most notorious authoritarian regimes in recent history. With mass killings, widespread torture, and systematic intimidation, Pinochet’s forces crushed the trade union movement, vanquished the rural farmers seeking land reform, stifled student activism, and imposed radical and unpopular changes in schooling, health care, social security, and more. As Orlando Letelier, the soon-to-be-assassinated Chilean ambassador to the United States, explained in The Nation, the economic program and the repression were inseparable: social and political “regression for the majorities and ‘economic freedom’ for small privileged groups” went together.1 The military coup obliterated the citizen-led organizing that had made Chile a beacon to the rest of Latin America of what might be achieved by democratic, electoral means.2

Foucault can mock sexual reformers as much as he likes for their belief that the absence of sexual restrictions will automatically mark the beginning of an era of freedom. However, unfortunately, the opposite statement is also true. Sexual freedom is dangerous and rebellious. It is not by chance that authoritarian regimes then and now lash out at homosexuality and abortion, trying to enclose each gender in a strictly defined framework and force them to perform reproductive duties, and it is not by chance that such prohibitions precede more inhumane acts — purges and genocide.

People tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory—and this is largely determined by the extent of coverage in the media. Frequently mentioned topics populate the mind even as others slip away from awareness. In turn, what the media choose to report corresponds to their view of what is currently on the public’s mind. It is no accident that authoritarian regimes exert substantial pressure on independent media. Because public interest is most easily aroused by dramatic events and by celebrities, media feeding frenzies are common.

The federal government paid reparations not to the people who had been held captive, but rather to the people who had enslaved them. The former Confederates reinscribed a mutation of slavery in the form of sharecropping and an authoritarian regime that put people who had only recently emerged from slavery into a world of lynchings, night riders, and Klansmen, terrors meant to keep them subservient. As they foreclosed the hopes of African-Americans, they erected statues and monuments everywhere to the slave-owning Confederates, a naked forewarning to the lowest caste of its subjugation and powerlessness.

Radical regimes from Nazi Germany and Maoist China to contemporary Venezuela and Turkey show that people have a tremendous amount to lose when charismatic authoritarians responding to a “crisis” trample over democratic norms and institutions and command their countries by the force of their personalities.

The fascist dictator declares that the masses of people are biologically inferior and crave authority, that basically, they are slaves by nature. Hence, a totalitarian authoritarian regime is the only possible form of government for such people. It is significant that all dictators who today plunge the world into misery stem from the suppressed masses of people. They are intimately familiar with this sickness on the part of masses of people. What they lack is an insight into natural processes and development, the will to truth and research, so that they are never moved by a desire to want to change these facts. On the other hand, the formal democratic leaders made the mistake of assuming that the masses of people were automatically capable of freedom and thereby precluded every possibility of establishing freedom and self-responsibility in masses of people as long as they were in power. They were engulfed in the catastrophe and will never reappear. Our answer is scientific and rational. It is based on the fact that masses of people are indeed incapable of freedom, but it does not—as racial mysticism does—look upon this incapacity as absolute, innate, and eternal. It regards this incapacity as the result of former social conditions of life and, therefore, as changeable.

...the church lives in a regime of ecclesial authoritarian security and the military elites live in a regime of national authoritarian security. These structures produce the same kind of authoritarian people, with a super defensive stance in their strategies and argumentation. This is why they understand each other! (Leonardo Boff, p. 178)

In the coming decades, it is likely that we will see more Internet-like revolutions, in which technology steals a march on politics. Artificial intelligence and biotechnology might soon overhaul our societies and economies – and our bodies and minds too – but they are hardly a blip on our political radar. Our current democratic structures just cannot collect and process the relevant data fast enough, and most voters don’t understand biology and cybernetics well enough to form any pertinent opinions. Hence traditional democratic politics loses control of events, and fails to provide us with meaningful visions for the future. That doesn’t mean we will go back to twentieth-century-style dictatorships. Authoritarian regimes seem to be equally overwhelmed by the pace of technological development and the speed and volume of the data flow. In the twentieth century, dictators had grand visions for the future. Communists and fascists alike sought to completely destroy the old world and build a new world in its place. Whatever you think about Lenin, Hitler or Mao, you cannot accuse them of lacking vision. Today it seems that leaders have a chance to pursue even grander visions. While communists and Nazis tried to create a new society and a new human with the help of steam engines and typewriters, today’s prophets could rely on biotechnology and super-computers.

Extremism certainly sounds bad, and governments often try to make it sound worse by using the word terrorism in the same sentence. But the word has little meaning. There is no doctrine called extremism. When tyrants speak of extremists, they just mean people who are not in the mainstream—as the tyrants themselves are defining that mainstream at that particular moment. Dissidents of the twentieth century, whether they were resisting fascism or communism, were called extremists. Modern authoritarian regimes, such as Russia, use laws on extremism to punish those who criticize their policies. In this way the notion of extremism comes to mean virtually everything except what is, in fact, extreme: tyranny.

students of policy have noted that the availability heuristic helps explain why some issues are highly salient in the public’s mind while others are neglected. People tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory—and this is largely determined by the extent of coverage in the media. Frequently mentioned topics populate the mind even as others slip away from awareness. In turn, what the media choose to report corresponds to their view of what is currently on the public’s mind. It is no accident that authoritarian regimes exert substantial pressure on independent media. Because public interest is most easily aroused by dramatic events and by celebrities, media feeding frenzies are common.

In the area of Middle East Studies, you can always count on getting funding if your research is about minorities being treated horribly by ‘authoritarian regimes’ that the West want to topple, women oppressed and forced to wear the hijab, masculinity and femininity, gays are oppressed, refugees (provided that they are seeking safety in the West and running from a ‘dictator’ the West wants to topple), and so on. The pattern and the intentions are clear to a vigilant observer. What all such topics have in common is not that they are not important or need attention (they are so on both counts), but that their function is to maintain the West’s colonial and racist gaze on the rest of the world, which, in turn, serves the West’s hegemony and control over others.

And then everything changed. Liberal democracy crawled out of history’s dustbin, cleaned itself up and conquered the world. The supermarket proved to be far stronger than the gulag. The blitzkrieg began in southern Europe, where the authoritarian regimes in Greece, Spain and Portugal collapsed, giving way to democratic governments. In 1977 Indira Gandhi ended the Emergency, re-establishing democracy in India. During the 1980s military dictatorships in East Asia and Latin America were replaced by democratic governments in countries such as Brazil, Argentina, Taiwan and South Korea. In the late 1980s and early 1990s the liberal wave turned into a veritable tsunami, sweeping away the mighty Soviet Empire, and raising expectations of the coming end of history. After decades of defeats and setbacks, liberalism won a decisive victory in the Cold War, emerging triumphant from the humanist wars of religion, albeit a bit worse for wear. As the Soviet Empire imploded, liberal democracies replaced communist regimes not only in eastern Europe, but also in many of the former Soviet republics, such as the Baltic States, Ukraine, Georgia and Armenia. Even Russia nowadays pretends to be a democracy. Victory in the Cold War gave renewed impetus for the spread of the liberal model elsewhere around the world, most notably in Latin America, South Asia and Africa. Some liberal experiments ended in abject failures, but the number of success stories is impressive. For instance, Indonesia, Nigeria and Chile have been ruled by military strongmen for decades, but all are now functioning democracies

The authoritarians of today are also terror managers, and if anything they are rather more creative. Consider the current Russian regime, so admired by the president. Vladimir Putin not only came to power in an incident that strikingly resembled the Reichstag fire, he then used a series of terror attacks—real, questionable, and fake—to remove obstacles to total power in Russia and to assault democratic neighbors.

In the late twentieth century democracies usually outperformed dictatorships because democracies were better at data-processing. Democracy diffuses the power to process information and make decisions among many people and institutions, whereas dictatorship concentrates information and power in one place. Given twentieth-century technology, it was inefficient to concentrate too much information and power in one place. Nobody had the ability to process all the information fast enough and make the right decisions. This is part of the reason why the Soviet Union made far worse decisions than the United States, and why the Soviet economy lagged far behind the American economy. However, soon AI might swing the pendulum in the opposite direction. AI makes it possible to process enormous amounts of information centrally. Indeed, AI might make centralised systems far more efficient than diffused systems, because machine learning works better the more information it can analyse. If you concentrate all the information relating to a billion people in one database, disregarding all privacy concerns, you can train much better algorithms than if you respect individual privacy and have in your database only partial information on a million people. For example, if an authoritarian government orders all its citizens to have their DNA scanned and to share all their medical data with some central authority, it would gain an immense advantage in genetics and medical research over societies in which medical data is strictly private. The main handicap of authoritarian regimes in the twentieth century – the attempt to concentrate all information in one place – might become their decisive advantage in the twenty-first century.

In the late twentieth century democracies usually outperformed dictatorships because democracies were better at data-processing. Democracy diffuses the power to process information and make decisions among many people and institutions, whereas dictatorship concentrates information and power in one place. Given twentieth-century technology, it was inefficient to concentrate too much information and power in one place. Nobody had the ability to process all the information fast enough and make the right decisions. This is part of the reason why the Soviet Union made far worse decisions than the United States, and why the Soviet economy lagged far behind the American economy. “However, soon AI might swing the pendulum in the opposite direction. AI makes it possible to process enormous amounts of information centrally. Indeed, AI might make centralised systems far more efficient than diffused systems, because machine learning works better the more information it can analyse. If you concentrate all the information relating to a billion people in one database, disregarding all privacy concerns, you can train much better algorithms than if you respect individual privacy and have in your database only partial information on a million people. For example, if an authoritarian government orders all its citizens to have their DNA scanned and to share all their medical data with some central authority, it would gain an immense advantage in genetics and medical research over societies in which medical data is strictly private. The main handicap of authoritarian regimes in the twentieth century – the attempt to concentrate all information in one place – might become their decisive advantage in the twenty-first century.

For good people to do evil doesn't require only religion, or even any religion, but simply one of it's key elements: belief without evidence-in other words, faith. And that kind of faith is seen not just in religion, but any authoritarian ideology that puts dogma above truth and frowns on dissent. This was precisely the case in the totalitarian regimes of Maoist China and Stalinist Russia, whose excesses are often (and wrongly) blamed on atheism.

In the twenty-first century it sounds childish to compare the human psyche to a steam engine. Today we know of a far more sophisticated technology – the computer – so we explain the human psyche as if it were a computer processing data rather than a steam engine regulating pressure. But this new analogy may turn out to be just as naïve. After all, computers have no minds. They don’t crave anything even when they have a bug, and the Internet doesn’t feel pain even when authoritarian regimes sever entire countries from the Web. So why use computers as a model for understanding the mind? Well, are we really sure that computers have no sensations or desires? And even if they haven’t got any at present, perhaps once they become complex enough they might develop consciousness? If that were to happen, how could we ascertain it? When computers replace our bus driver, our teacher and our shrink, how could we determine whether they have feelings or whether they are just a collection of mindless algorithms? When

It remains, as ever, an axiom of conventional wisdom that the use of propaganda as a means of social and ideological control is distinctive of totalitarian regimes. Yet the most minimal exercise of common sense would suggest a different view: that propaganda is likely to play at least as important a part in democratic societies (where the existing distribution of power and privilege is vulnerable to quite limited changes in popular opinion) as in authoritarian societies (where it is not). It is arguable that the success of business propaganda in persuading us, for so long, that we are free from propaganda is one of the most significant propaganda achievements of the twentieth century.

[Hannah] Arendt pointed out that both the Nazi and the Soviet regimes conducted periodic purges or crackdowns, which she called 'an instrument of permanent instability.' Constant flux was necessary for the system's survival: 'The totalitarian ruler must, at any price, prevent normalization from reaching the point where a new way of life could develop - one which might, after a time, lose its bastard qualities and take its place among the widely differing and profoundly contrasting ways of life of the nations of the earth.' Indeed, she wrote, 'The point is that both Hitler and Stalin held out promises of stability in order to hide their intention of creating a state of permanent instability.

While these tactics were aggressive and crude, they confirmed that our legislation had touched a nerve. I wasn’t the only one who recognized this. Many other victims of human rights abuses in Russia saw the same thing. After the bill was introduced they came to Washington or wrote letters to the Magnitsky Act’s cosponsors with the same basic message: “You have found the Achilles’ heel of the Putin regime.” Then, one by one, they would ask, “Can you add the people who killed my brother to the Magnitsky Act?” “Can you add the people who tortured my mother?” “How about the people who kidnapped my husband?” And on and on. The senators quickly realized that they’d stumbled onto something much bigger than one horrific case. They had inadvertently discovered a new method for fighting human rights abuses in authoritarian regimes in the twenty-first century: targeted visa sanctions and asset freezes. After a dozen or so of these visits and letters, Senator Cardin and his cosponsors conferred and decided to expand the law, adding sixty-five words to the Magnitsky Act. Those new words said that in addition to sanctioning Sergei’s tormentors, the Magnitsky Act would sanction all other gross human rights abusers in Russia. With those extra sixty-five words, my personal fight for justice had become everyone’s fight. The revised bill was officially introduced on May 19, 2011, less than a month after we posted the Olga Stepanova YouTube video. Following its introduction, a small army of Russian activists descended on Capitol Hill, pushing for the bill’s passage. They pressed every senator who would talk to them to sign on. There was Garry Kasparov, the famous chess grand master and human rights activist; there was Alexei Navalny, the most popular Russian opposition leader; and there was Evgenia Chirikova, a well-known Russian environmental activist. I didn’t have to recruit any of these people. They just showed up by themselves. This uncoordinated initiative worked beautifully. The number of Senate cosponsors grew quickly, with three or four new senators signing on every month. It was an easy sell. There wasn’t a pro-Russian-torture-and-murder lobby in Washington to oppose it. No senator, whether the most liberal Democrat or the most conservative Republican, would lose a single vote for banning Russian torturers and murderers from coming to America. The Magnitsky Act was gathering so much momentum that it appeared it might be unstoppable. From the day that Kyle Scott at the State Department stonewalled me, I knew that the administration was dead set against this, but now they were in a tough spot. If they openly opposed the law, it would look as if they were siding with the Russians. However, if they publicly supported it, it would threaten Obama’s “reset” with Russia. They needed to come up with some other solution. On July 20, 2011, the State Department showed its cards. They sent a memo to the Senate entitled “Administration Comments on S.1039 Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law.” Though not meant to be made public, within a day it was leaked.

But despite the Secret Service–like behavior, and the regal nomenclature, there’s nothing hierarchical about the way an ant colony does its thinking. “Although queen is a term that reminds us of human political systems,” Gordon explains, “the queen is not an authority figure. She lays eggs and is fed and cared for by the workers. She does not decide which worker does what. In a harvester ant colony, many feet of intricate tunnels and chambers and thousands of ants separate the queen, surrounded by interior workers, from the ants working outside the nest and using only the chambers near the surface. It would be physically impossible for the queen to direct every worker’s decision about which task to perform and when.” The harvester ants that carry the queen off to her escape hatch do so not because they’ve been ordered to by their leader; they do it because the queen ant is responsible for giving birth to all the members of the colony, and so it’s in the colony’s best interest—and the colony’s gene pool—to keep the queen safe. Their genes instruct them to protect their mother, the same way their genes instruct them to forage for food. In other words, the matriarch doesn’t train her servants to protect her, evolution does. Popular culture trades in Stalinist ant stereotypes—witness the authoritarian colony regime in the animated film Antz—but in fact, colonies are the exact opposite of command economies. While they are capable of remarkably coordinated feats of task allocation, there are no Five-Year Plans in the ant kingdom. The colonies that Gordon studies display some of nature’s most mesmerizing decentralized behavior: intelligence and personality and learning that emerges from the bottom up.

All of us sit here at this conference and feel secure in our belief that we live in an era beyond this kind of…authoritarian regime change; but what sort of political climate do you think could potentially break apart our current stasis and deliver us back in time, so to speak? Thank you, I am gratified there has been so much interest in our little project. Gilead Studies languished for many years, I suppose those who had lived through those times did not want them resurrected for various reasons including what might have been done to them and what they themselves might have done. But at this distance, we can allow ourselves some perspective. It’s fortunate that is the last question as my voice is giving out. As to your question, in times of peace and plenty, it is hard to remember the conditions that have led to authoritarian regime changes in the past. And it is even harder to suppose that we ourselves would ever make such choices or allow them to be made. But when there is a perfect storm and collapse of the established order is in the works precipitated by environmental stresses that lead to food shortages, economic factors such as unrest due to unemployment, a social structure that is top heavy with too much wealth being concentrated among too few, then scapegoats are sought and blamed, fear is rampant, and there is pressure to trade what we think of as liberty for what we think of as safety. And, when the birth rate of any society is low enough to create an aging shrinking population, then commercial and military authorities will become alarmed. Their customer base and their recruitment base will be in jeopardy and there will be extreme pressure on women of childbearing age to make up the population deficit, thus our handmaid and her tale.

The channel does not pay lip service to fairness. It does not employ any neutral commentators. On the contrary, it celebrates its own ability to manipulate reality. At one point in 2018, the station showed a clip from a press conference; the then leader of the opposition party, Grzegorz Schetyna, was asked what his party achieved during its eight years in government, from 2007 to 2015. The clip shows Schetyna pausing and frowning; the video slows down and then ends. It’s as if he had nothing to say. In reality, Schetyna spoke for several minutes about the mass construction of roads, investments in the countryside, and advances in foreign policy. But this manipulated clip—one example of many—was deemed such a success that for several days, it remained pinned to the top of Telewizja Polska’s Twitter feed. Under Law and Justice, state television doesn’t just produce regime propaganda; it draws attention to the fact that it is doing so. It doesn’t just twist and contort information, it glories in deceit.

The French philosopher and political activist Simone Weil wrote that "to be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul." The modern condition of rootlessness is a foundational experience of totalitarianism; totalitarian movements succeed when they offer rootless people what they most crave: an ideologically consistent world aiming at grand narratives that give meaning to their lives. By consistently repeating a few key ideas, a manipulative leader provides a sense of rootedness grounded upon a coherent fiction that is "consistent, comprehensible, and predictable." George Lakoff, former distinguished professor of cognitive science and linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley, writes, “That's why authoritarian leaders always attack the press. They seek to deny and distract from the truth, and this requires undermining those who tell it. . . . Corrupt regimes always seek to replace truth with lies that increase and preserve their power. The Digital Age makes this easier than ever.

You would expect the loss of a stable existence on earth to drive a search for fixity on a higher sphere. If this is the case, a rise in the appeal of fundamentalism will testify to the experience of impermanence. That takes me deep into the realm of subjectivity, but there are empirical hints and signs. In Egypt, we saw, the old regime was initially replaced by the Muslim Brotherhood, which won the country’s only fair elections to date. The hard reality in the Middle East is that Islamist groups have prospered wherever secular Arab authoritarians have wobbled. In the US, the more demanding faiths — evangelists, Mormons, Hasidics — have grown at the expense of older institutions which too much resemble the earth-bound hierarchies of the Center. The spread of Christianity in China is among today’s best-kept secrets. For the governing classes and articulate elites of the world, this turn to religion is both appalling and incomprehensible — but this is a denial of human nature. If the City of Man becomes a passing shadow, people will turn to the City of God.

it is not only our values that matter, but the military might that backs them up. Truly, in international affairs, behind all questions of morality lie questions of power. Humanitarian intervention in the Balkans in the 1990s was possible only because the Serbian regime was not a great power armed with nuclear weapons, unlike the Russian regime, which at the same time was committing atrocities of a similar scale in Chechnya where the West did nothing; nor did the West do much against the ethnic cleansing in the Caucasus because there, too, was a Russian sphere of influence. In the Western Pacific in the coming decades, morality may mean giving up some of our most cherished ideals for the sake of stability. How else are we to make at least some room for a quasi-authoritarian China as its military expands? (And barring a social-economic collapse internally, China’s military will keep on expanding.) For it is the balance of power itself, even more than the democratic values of the West, that is often the best preserver of freedom. That also will be a lesson of the South China Sea in the twenty-first century—one more that humanists do not want to hear.

The appropriation of terms from psychology to discredit political opponents is part of the modern therapeutic culture that the sociologist Christopher Lasch criticized. Along with the concept of the authoritarian personality, the term “-phobe” for political opponents has been added to the arsenal of obloquy deployed by technocratic neoliberals against those who disagree with them. The coinage of the term “homophobia” by the psychologist George Weinberg in the 1970s has been followed by a proliferation of pseudoclinical terms in which those who hold viewpoints at variance with the left-libertarian social consensus of the transatlantic ruling class are understood to suffer from “phobias” of various kinds similar to the psychological disorders of agoraphobia (fear of open spaces), ornithophobia (fear of birds), and pentheraphobia (fear of one’s mother-in-law). The most famous use of this rhetorical strategy can be found in then-candidate Hillary Clinton’s leaked confidential remarks to an audience of donors at a fund-raiser in New York in 2016: “You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? They’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it.” A disturbed young man who is driven by internal compulsions to harass and assault gay men is obviously different from a learned Orthodox Jewish rabbi who is kind to lesbians and gay men as individuals but opposes homosexuality, along with adultery, premarital sex, and masturbation, on theological grounds—but both are "homophobes.” A racist who opposes large-scale immigration because of its threat to the supposed ethnic purity of the national majority is obviously different from a non-racist trade unionist who thinks that immigrant numbers should be reduced to create tighter labor markets to the benefit of workers—but both are “xenophobes.” A Christian fundamentalist who believes that Muslims are infidels who will go to hell is obviously different from an atheist who believes that all religion is false—but both are “Islamophobes.” This blurring of important distinctions is not an accident. The purpose of describing political adversaries as “-phobes” is to medicalize politics and treat differing viewpoints as evidence of mental and emotional disorders. In the latter years of the Soviet Union, political dissidents were often diagnosed with “sluggish schizophrenia” and then confined to psychiatric hospitals and drugged. According to the regime, anyone who criticized communism literally had to be insane. If those in today’s West who oppose the dominant consensus of technocratic neoliberalism are in fact emotionally and mentally disturbed, to the point that their maladjustment makes it unsafe to allow them to vote, then to be consistent, neoliberals should support the involuntary confinement, hospitalization, and medication of Trump voters and Brexit voters and other populist voters for their own good, as well as the good of society.

What are the implications of ethnic identity for multi-racial and multi-ethnic societies? Tatu Vanhanen of the University of Tampere, Finland, has probably researched the effects of ethnic diversity more systematically than anyone else. In a massive, book-length study, he measured ethnic diversity and levels of conflict in 148 countries, and found correlations in the 0.5 to 0.9 range for the two variables, depending on how the variables were defined and measured. Homogeneous countries like Japan and Iceland show very low levels of conflict, while highly diverse countries like Lebanon and Sudan are wracked with strife. Prof. Vanhanen found tension in all multi-ethnic societies: “Interest conflicts between ethnic groups are inevitable because ethnic groups are genetic kinship groups and because the struggle for existence concerns the survival of our own genes through our own and our relatives’ descendants.” Prof. Vanhanen also found that economic and political institutions make no difference; wealthy, democratic countries suffer from sectarian strife as much as poor, authoritarian ones: “Ethnic nepotism belongs to human nature and . . . it is independent from the level of socioeconomic development (modernization) and also from the degree of democratization.” Others have argued that democracy is particularly vulnerable to ethnic tensions while authoritarian regimes like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or Tito’s Yugoslavia can give the impression of holding it in check. One expert writing in Foreign Affairs explained that for democracy to work “the party or group that loses has to trust the new majority and believe that its basic interests will still be protected and that there is nothing to fear from a change in power.” He wrote that this was much less likely when opposing parties represent different races or ethnicities. The United Nations found that from 1989 to 1992 there were 82 conflicts that had resulted in at least 1,000 deaths each. Of these, no fewer than 79, or 96 percent, were ethnic or religious conflicts that took place within the borders of recognized states. Only three were cross-border conflicts. Wars between nations are usually ethnic conflicts as well. Internal ethnic conflict has very serious consequences. As J. Philippe Rushton has argued, “The politics of ethnic identity are increasingly replacing the politics of class as the major threat to the stability of nations.” One must question the wisdom of then-president Bill Clinton’s explanation for the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia: “[T]he principle we and our allies have been fighting for in the Balkans is the principle of multi-ethnic, tolerant, inclusive democracy. We have been fighting against the idea that statehood must be based entirely on ethnicity.” That same year, the American supreme commander of NATO, Wesley Clark, was even more direct: “There is no place in modern Europe for ethnically pure states. That’s a 19th century idea and we are trying to transition into the 21st century, and we are going to do it with multi-ethnic states.

Rule by decree has conspicuous advantages for the domination of far-flung territories with heterogeneous populations and for a policy of oppression. Its efficiency is superior simply because it ignores all intermediary stages between issuance and application, and because it prevents political reasoning by the people through the withholding of information. It can easily overcome the variety of local customs and need not rely on the necessarily slow process of development of general law. It is most helpful for the establishment of a centralized administration because it overrides automatically all matters of local autonomy. If rule by good laws has sometimes been called the rule of wisdom, rule by appropriate decrees may rightly be called the rule of cleverness. For it is clever to reckon with ulterior motives and aims, and it is wise to understand and create by deduction from generally accepted principles. Government by bureaucracy has to be distinguished from the mere outgrowth and deformation of civil services which frequently accompanied the decline of the nation-state—as, notably, in France. There the administration has survived all changes in regime since the Revolution, entrenched itself like a parasite in the body politic, developed its own class interests, and become a useless organism whose only purpose appears to be chicanery and prevention of normal economic and political development. There are of course many superficial similarities between the two types of bureaucracy, especially if one pays too much attention to the striking psychological similarity of petty officials. But if the French people have made the very serious mistake of accepting their administration as a necessary evil, they have never committed the fatal error of allowing it to rule the country—even though the consequence has been that nobody rules it. The French atmosphere of government has become one of inefficiency and vexation; but it has not created and aura of pseudomysticism. And it is this pseudomysticism that is the stamp of bureaucracy when it becomes a form of government. Since the people it dominates never really know why something is happening, and a rational interpretation of laws does not exist, there remains only one thing that counts, the brutal naked event itself. What happens to one then becomes subject to an interpretation whose possibilities are endless, unlimited by reason and unhampered by knowledge. Within the framework of such endless interpretive speculation, so characteristic of all branches of Russian pre-revolutionary literature, the whole texture of life and world assume a mysterious secrecy and depth. There is a dangerous charm in this aura because of its seemingly inexhaustible richness; interpretation of suffering has a much larger range than that of action for the former goes on in the inwardness of the soul and releases all the possibilities of human imagination, whereas the latter is consistently checked, and possibly led into absurdity, by outward consequence and controllable experience.

It is quite unfathomable why the EU leadership fails to anticipate these potentially catastrophic possibilities, and fails to respond to popular concerns with more moderate immigration policies. One possible explanation for these perverse policies that has been put forward by highly regarded scholars, such as Samuel Huntington, is that the current leadership of the EU is composed of left-wing authoritarians who are enemies of the Western liberal tradition. According to Huntington, “Multiculturalism is in its essence anti-European... "and opposes its civilization. The official repression of dissent and pursuance of unpopular policies by undemocratic means suggests that such ideologues wish to turn the EU into a centrally controlled empire similar to the Soviet Union. If that is the case, then their current policies make a good deal of sense, in that they flood the continent with people who have lived under autocratic regimes and never lived in democratic republics. Such people may well be willing to tolerate repressive regimes provided they can maintain a moderate standard of living and their own traditional religious practices. As Hunnngton points out, imperial regimes often promote ethnic conflict among their minority citizens to strengthen the power of the central authority, with the not unrealistic claim that a powerful central authority is essential to maintain civil order. But if that is the case, then Europe will be transformed into an authoritarian and illiberal multiethnic empire, undemocratic, economically crippled and culturally retrograde. Is it any wonder that so many see Europe as committing suicide and its end coming "not with a bang, but a whimper?

German voters never gave the Nazis a majority of the popular vote, as is still sometimes alleged. As we saw in the last chapter, the Nazis did indeed become the largest party in the German Reichstag in the parliamentary election of July 31, 1932, with 37.2 percent of the vote. They then slipped back to 33.1 percent in the parliamentary election of November 6, 1932. In the parliamentary election of March 6, 1933, with Hitler as chancellor and the Nazi Party in command of all the resources of the German state, its score was a more significant but still insufficient 43.9 percent. More than one German in two voted against Nazi candidates in that election, in the teeth of intimidation by Storm Troopers. The Italian Fascist Party won 35 out of 535 seats, in the one free parliamentary election in which it participated, on May 15, 1921. At the other extreme, neither Hitler nor Mussolini arrived in office by a coup d’état. Neither took the helm by force, even if both had used force before power in order to destabilize the existing regime, and both were to use force again, after power, in order to transform their governments into dictatorships (as we will see shortly). Even the most scrupulous authors refer to their “seizure of power,” but that phrase better describes what the two fascist leaders did after reaching office than how they got into office. Both Mussolini and Hitler were invited to take office as head of government by a head of state in the legitimate exercise of his official functions, on the advice of civilian and military counselors. Both thus became heads of government in what appeared, at least on the surface, to be legitimate exercises of constitutional authority by King Victor Emmanuel III and President Hindenburg. Both these appointments were made, it must be added at once, under conditions of extreme crisis, which the fascists had abetted. Indeed no insurrectionary coup against an established state has ever so far brought fascists to power. Authoritarian dictatorships have several times crushed such attempts.

Lenin, therefore, begins from the firm and definite principle that the State dies as soon as the socialization of the means of production is achieved and the exploiting class has consequently been suppressed. Yet, in the same pamphlet, he ends by justifying the preservation, even after the socialization of the means of production and, without any predictable end, of the dictatorship of a revolutionary faction over the rest of the people. The pamphlet, which makes continual reference to the experiences of the Commune, flatly contradicts the contemporary federalist and anti-authoritarian ideas that produced the Commune; and it is equally opposed to the optimistic forecasts of Marx and Engels. The reason for this is clear; Lenin had not forgotten that the Commune failed. As for the means of such a surprising demonstration, they were even more simple: with each new difficulty encountered by the revolution, the State as described by Marx is endowed with a supplementary prerogative. Ten pages farther on, without any kind of transition, Lenin in effect affirms that power is necessary to crush the resistance of the exploiters "and also to direct the great mass of the population, peasantry, lower middle classes, and semi-proletariat, in the management of the socialist economy." The shift here is undeniable; the provisional State of Marx and Engels is charged with a new mission, which risks prolonging its life indefinitely. Already we can perceive the contradiction of the Stalinist regime in conflict with its official philosophy. Either this regime has realized the classless socialist society, and the maintenance of a formidable apparatus of repression is not justified in Marxist terms, or it has not realized the classless society and has therefore proved that Marxist doctrine is erroneous and, in particular, that the socialization of the means of production does not mean the disappearance of classes. Confronted with its official doctrine, the regime is forced to choose: the doctrine is false, or the regime has betrayed it. In fact, together with Nechaiev and Tkachev, it is Lassalle, the inventor of State socialism, whom Lenin has caused to triumph in Russia, to the detriment of Marx. From this moment on, the history of the interior struggles of the party, from Lenin to Stalin, is summed up in the struggle between the workers' democracy and military and bureaucratic dictatorship; in other words, between justice and expediency.

authoritarian regimes currently experiencing some growth are likely to reach the limits of extractive growth before they transform their political institutions in a more inclusive direction—and in fact, probably before there is any desire among the elite for such changes or any strong opposition forcing them to do so.

Nonviolent campaigns against authoritarian regimes are twice as likely to succeed as violent ones.

Vladimir Putin shot out of obscurity in 1999 by exploiting growing nostalgia for the USSR, fueled by the disappointment, uncertainty and crisis that brought Yeltsin’s reform era to a shuddering halt. Once in power the following year, Putin set about building an authoritarian regime whose control would expand for more than a decade, until soaring corruption on top of another economic downturn—a much smaller one, triggered by the global financial crisis of 2008—prompted another backlash.

The Lixingshe movement set up by dedicated supporters from Whampoa in 1932 to ensure authoritarian allegiance to the leader grew to number half a million members, with offshoots such as the political shock troops known as the Blue Shirts. But the notion of a continuous mass movement remained deeply suspect to the militarised bureaucracy in Nanking - a major difference between Chiang's regime and Mussolini's Italy or Hitler's Germany. It presented an authoritarian view of Chinese tradition as a historic justification for dictatorship with a conservative cultural policy to buttress the supremacy' of the state and its chief. Intellectuals were told to sacrifice their individual liberty for the sake of the nation. If the regime had fascist tendencies, it was `Confucian Fascism', as the historian Frederic Wakeman has dubbed it.

I wasn’t optimistic. Interpol has a reputation for cooperating with authoritarian regimes to chase down political enemies. In many cases Interpol had done the wrong thing. The most egregious example of this was in the lead-up to World War II, when Interpol helped the Nazis pursue prominent Jews who’d fled the Reich. There have been many shocking examples since.

Marx’s penetrating insight into the nature of freedom remains a challenge to any liberal political philosophy. It is the core of Marx’s attack on alienation in the 1844 Manuscripts, as it is the core of his critique of the free market in Capital. If Marx has any claim to a place alongside Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Hegel as a major figure in Western political thought, it must rest on his attack on the liberal conception of freedom. All the same, the alternative conception of freedom Marx espoused contains within it a difficulty Marx never sufficiently appreciated, a difficulty which can be linked with the tragic mutation of Marx’s views into a prop for murderously authoritarian regimes.

The smartphone turns the person next to you into a potential publisher of your most private or embarrassing moments. Many app vendors, who know a great deal about you, sell data without proper disclosure; mobile-privacy policies routinely rival “Hamlet” for length. And if leaked documents are correct, GCHQ, Britain’s signals-intelligence agency, has managed to hack a big vendor of SIM cards in order to be able to listen in to people’s calls. If spooks in democracies are doing this sort of thing, you can be sure that those in authoritarian regimes will, too. Smartphones will give dictators unprecedented scope to spy on and corral their unwilling subjects.

Reformist–political, also called “Islamist” movements, may function as political parties in countries where there are democratic elections, or as opposition movements in countries ruled by authoritarian regimes. They may be national or international. Many of these movements call for the implementation of “shariʿa.” This is a political ideological slogan intended to rally support for the creation of a utopian, divinely governed Islamic state and society, often with the implication that a truly Islamic state would legislate regressive punishments and family regulations. What it means in practice is obscure because historically, Islamic law (fiqh) was and is variable and changeable.

Will they achieve a uniformity in censorship methods among the various regimes?” “Not uniformity. They will create a system in which the methods support and balance one another in turn....” The Director General invites you to examine the planisphere hanging on the wall. The varied color scheme indicates: the countries where all books are systematically confiscated; the countries where only books published or approved by the State may circulate; the countries where existing censorship is crude, approximate, and unpredictable; the countries where the censorship is subtle, informed, sensitive to implications and allusions, managed by meticulous and sly intellectuals; the countries where there are two networks of dissemination: one legal and one clandestine; the countries where there is no censorship because there are no books, but there are many potential readers; the countries where there are no books and nobody complains about their absence; the countries, finally, in which every day books are produced for all tastes and all ideas, amid general indifference. “Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do,” Arkadian Porphyrich says. “What statistic allows one to identify the nations where literature enjoys true consideration better than the sums appropriated for controlling it and suppressing it? Where it is the object of such attentions, literature gains an extraordinary authority, inconceivable in countries where it is allowed to vegetate as an innocuous pastime, without risks. To be sure, repression must also allow an occasional breathing space, must close an eye every now and then, alternate indulgence with abuse, with a certain unpredictability in its caprices; otherwise, if nothing more remains to be repressed, the whole system rusts and wears down. Let’s be frank: every regime, even the most authoritarian, survives in a situation of unstable equilibrium, whereby it needs to justify constantly the existence of its repressive apparatus, therefore of something to repress. The wish to write things that irk the established authorities is one of the elements necessary to maintain this equilibrium. Therefore, by a secret treaty with the countries whose social regime is opposed to ours, we have created a common organization, with which you have intelligently agreed to collaborate, to export the books banned here and import the books banned there.” “This would seem to imply that the books banned here are allowed there, and vice versa....” “Not on your life. The books banned here are superbanned there, and the books banned there are ultrabanned here. But from exporting to the adversary regime one’s own banned books and from importing theirs, each regime derives at least two important advantages: it encourages the opponents of the hostile regime and it establishes a useful exchange of experience between the police services.” “The

the institutional features of the Chilean judiciary promoted a conservative bias among judges, which in turn explains why the judges offered such little resistance to the undemocratic and illiberal regime of General Pinochet. Both the role conception into which judges were socialized and the incentive structure in which they functioned discouraged them from taking principled liberal-democratic stands, before, during, and after the authoritarian period.

Guillermo O'Donnell argues that one of the first actions undertaken by repressive and authoritarian regimes is the suppression of "horizontal voices"-that is, the possibility of "addressing others or others ... addressing me, claiming that we share some relevant characteristics."9 In the process of addressing others, we recognize ourselves as a "we," and the shaping of a collective identity takes place.

The Fundamentalist Principle: Those who know the truth should decide who is right.”22 The fundamentalist principle is the bedrock of theocracies and secular totalitarian regimes; but we also see this fundamentalist impulse in the increasingly authoritarian nature of Social Justice scholarship and activism and in its attempts to shut down criticism. This way lies totalitarianism, if fundamentalists can get themselves in power.

Indeed, fascist regimes tried to redraw so radically the boundaries between private and public that the private sphere almost disappeared. Robert Ley, head of the Nazi Labor Office, said that in the Nazi state the only private individual was someone asleep. For some observers, this effort to have the public sphere swallow up the private sphere entirely is indeed the very essence of fascism. It is certainly a fundamental point on which fascist regimes differed most profoundly from authoritarian conservatism, and even more profoundly from classical liberalism.

The former Confederates reinscribed a mutation of slavery in the form of sharecropping and an authoritarian regime that put people who had only recently emerged from slavery into a world of lynchings, night riders, and Klansmen, terrors meant to keep them subservient. As they foreclosed the hopes of African-Americans, they erected statues and monuments everywhere to the slave-owning Confederates, a naked forewarning to the lowest caste of its subjugation and powerlessness.

A hybrid regime is the authoritarian regime in the new historical moment. We know the difference between authoritarian and totalitarian regimes: the former rewards passivity and the latter rewards mobilization. A totalitarian regime demands participation: if you do not march the march and sing the songs, then you are not a loyal citizen. An authoritarian regime, on on the other hand, tries to convince its subjects to stay home. Whoever marches too energetically or sings too loudly is suspect, regardless of the ideological content of the songs and the direction of the march.

The other argument [about the Iraq War] was about argument itself. It characterized any argument about policy (whether, in fact, Iraq did have weapons of mass destruction and whether regime change could be effected through an invasion) as unnecessary, dithering, disloyal, and possibly even deliberately evil, since the correct course of action was so obvious. Major media outlets demonized dissent. In a democracy.

Here, we can see why the authoritarian 'socialist' regimes of the twentieth century did not deserve to be called socialist at all. In the Soviet Union, workers had very limited control over their workplaces. They were told what to do by party functionaries. Socialism does not mean control by the government, it means control by the people, and if the government is not responsive to the will of the people, it's 'socialistic' in the same way that Kim Jong-Un's Democratic People's Republic of Korea is 'democratic.' This is also why, while I and many others use the term democratic socialism to draw a distinction between our ideas and the hideous so-called socialism implemented under Joseph Stalin, ultimately the term should be redundant. Socialism is a term for economic democracy, so an undemocratic system doesn't deserve to claim the name.

The ‘Sturm und Drang’ was even more complicated in its sociological structure than the West European forms of preromanticism, and not merely because the German middle class and the German intelligentsia had never identified themselves closely enough with the enlightenment to keep their eyes sharply fixed on the aims of the movement and not to deviate from it, but also because their struggle against the rationalism of the absolutist regime was at the same time a struggle against the progressive tendencies of the age. They never became aware of the fact that the rationalism of the princes represented a less serious danger for the future than the anti-rationalism of their own compeers. From being the enemies of despotism they, therefore, became the instruments of reaction and merely promoted the interests of the privileged classes with their attacks on bureaucratic centralization. To be sure, their struggle was not directed against the social levelling tendencies of the system, with which aristocratic and upper middle-class interests were in conflict, but against its generalizing influence and violation of all intellectual distinction and variety. They championed the rights of life, of individual being, natural growth and organic development, against the rigid formalism of the rationalized administration, and meant not only the denial of the bureaucratic state with its mechanical generalization and regimentation, but also the repudiation of the planning and regulating reformism of the enlightenment. And although the idea of the spontaneous, irrational life was still of an indefinite and fluctuating nature and certainly hostile to the enlightenment, but not yet markedly conservative in its purpose, nevertheless, it already contained the essence of the whole philosophy of conservatism. It did not need much now to ascribe a mystical superrationality to this principle of ‘life’, in contrast to which the rationalism of enlightened thought seemed unnatural, inflexible and doctrinaire, and to represent the rise of political and social institutions from historical ‘life’ as a ‘natural’, that is to say, superhuman and superrational growth, in order to protect these institutions against all arbitrary attacks and to secure the continuance of the prevailing system.

With investment levels so high and already being misallocated on a massive scale, the central government might have preferred higher consumption. But China’s myriad institutional constraints, which we will discuss in more detail later in the chapter, meant that consumption could not have grown quickly enough except through a surge in household borrowing. Unsurprisingly, given what the Chinese leadership had just seen occur in the United States, there was no interest in a similar experience. That is why the government chose to focus on boosting investment. The most straightforward response to the global financial crisis was a massive boost in infrastructure and housing investment to offset the decline in foreign spending. This simultaneously magnified China’s long-standing imbalances while shifting them inward. China was able to sustain growth even as its current account surplus fell at the cost of a nearly unprecedented surge in Chinese indebtedness. Unproductive investments have failed to pay for themselves.2 The danger is that the Chinese government, having reached the limits of its ability to generate rapid growth through debt-funded investment, will once again attempt to shift the costs of its economic model to the rest of the world through trade surpluses and financial outflows. The only way to prevent this is to rebalance the Chinese economy so that household consumption is prioritized over investment. That means reversing all of the existing mechanisms transferring purchasing power from Chinese workers and retirees to companies and the government—reforms at least as dramatic and politically difficult as the reforms implemented by Deng Xiaoping beginning in 1978. Unfortunately for China, the choices of the past few decades have become politically entrenched. It is easy for an antidemocratic authoritarian regime to suppress workers’ rights and shift spending power from consumers to large companies. Stalin did it, after all. The problem is that years of state-sponsored income concentration creates a potent group of “vested interests”—Premier Li Keqiang’s preferred term—that will fiercely resist any reforms that would shift spending power back to consumers. Any successful adjustment

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Photographs from Distant Places (1) In distant villages, You always see the same scenes: Farms Cattle Worship spaces Small local shops. Just basic the things humans need To endure life. (2) ‘Can you stay with me forever?’ She asked him in the airport, While hugging him tightly in her arms. ‘Sorry, I can’t. My flight leaves in two hours and a half.’ He responded with an artificially caring voice, As he kissed her on her right cheek. (3) I was walking in one of Bucharest’s old streets, In a neighborhood that looked harshly beaten by Time, And severely damaged by development and globalization. I saw a poor homeless man Combing his dirty hair In a side mirror of a modern and expensive car! (4) The shape and the color of the eyes don’t matter. What matters is that, As soon as you gaze into them, You know that they have seen a lot. All eyes that dare to bear witness To what they have seen are beautiful. (5) A stranger asked me how I chose my path in life. I told him: ‘I never chose anything, my friend.’ My path has always been like someone forced to sit In an airplane on a long flight. Forced to sit with the condition Of keeping the seatbelt on at all times, Until the end of the flight. Here I am still sitting with the seatbelt on. I can neither move Nor walk. I can’t even throw myself out of the plane’s emergency exit To end this forced flight! (6) After years of searching and observing, I discovered that despair’s favorite hiding place Is under business suits and tuxedos. Under jewelry and expensive night gowns. Despair dances at the tables where Expensive wines of corruption And delicious dinners of betrayal are served. (7) Oh, my poet friend, Did you know that The bouquet of fresh flowers in that vase On your table is not a source of inspiration or creativity? The vase is just a reminder Of a flower massacre that took place recently In a field Where these poor flowers happened to be. It was their fate to have their already short lives cut shorter, To wither and wilt in your vase, While breathing the not-so-fresh air In your room, As you sit down at your table And write your vain words. (8) Under authoritarian regimes, 99.9% of the population vote for the dictator. Under capitalist ‘democratic’ regimes, 99.9% of people love buying and consuming products Made and sold by the same few corporations. Awe to those societies where both regimes meet to create a united vicious alliance against the people! To create a ‘nation’ Of customers, not citizens! (9) The post-revolution leaders are scavengers not hunters. They master the art of eating up The dead bodies and achievements Of the fools who sacrificed themselves For the ‘revolution’ and its ideals. Is this the paradox and the irony of all revolutions? (10) Every person is ugly if you take a close look at them, And beautiful, if you take a closer look. (11) Just as wheat fields can’t thrive Under the shadow of other trees, Intellectuals, too, can’t thrive under the shadow Of any power or authority. (12) We waste so much time trying to change others. Others waste so much time thinking they are changing. What a waste! October 20, 2015

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Under authoritarian governments, vital communities will tend to coalesce in political opposition as they bump into regime surveillance and control. The regime still controls the apparatus of repression. It can deny service, physically attack, imprison, or even kill H. informaticus—but it can’t silence his message, because this message is constantly amplified and propagated by the opposition community. Since the opposition commands the means of communication and is embedded in the global information sphere, its voice carries beyond the reach of any national government. This was the situation in Egypt before the uprising of January 25, 2011. This is the situation in China today. The wealth and brute strength of the modern state are counterbalanced by the vast communicative powers of the public. Filters are placed on web access, police agents monitor suspect websites, foreign newscasters are blocked, domestic bloggers are harassed and thrown in jail—but every incident which tears away at the legitimacy of the regime is seized on by a rebellious public, and is then broadcast and magnified until criticism goes viral. The tug of war pits hierarchy against network, power against persuasion, government against the governed: under such conditions of alienation, every inch of political space is contested, and turbulence becomes a permanent feature of political life.

This is a good way to understand liberalism—as opposition to illiberalism. While liberalism might be hard to define, illiberalism is easily recognizable in totalitarian, hierarchical, censorious, feudal, patriarchal, colonial, or theocratic states and in people who want to bring about such states, limit freedoms, or justify inequalities. Liberals oppose this, not because they want to establish their own authoritarian regime, but because they are opposed to all such regimes. Therefore, liberalism is expansive, but it is not weak.

Junior partnerships within authoritarian regimes proved disastrous for fascist movements. Playing second fiddle fit badly with fascists’ extravagant claims to transform their peoples and redirect history. For their part, the authoritarian senior partners took a dim view of the fascists’ impatient violence and disdain for established interests, for these cases often involved fascist movements that retained much of the social radicalism of the early movement stage.

Even nonradicalized authoritarian regimes glorified the military. For all his desire to stay out of the war, Franco seized the opportunity offered by the defeat of France in 1940 to occupy Tangiers, as we saw earlier. Military parades were a major form of public ritual for Franquist Spain. Defeated France, under the Vichy regime of World War I hero Marshal Pétain, put much energy into military pomp and patriotic display. It never stopped asking the Nazi occupation authorities to allow the tiny Vichy Armistice Army to play a greater role in the defense of French soil from an Allied invasion. Even the quietist Portuguese dictator Salazar could not neglect the African empire that provided major emotional and economic support for his authoritarian state. But there is a difference between authoritarian dictatorships’ glorification of the military and the emotional commitment of fascist regimes to war. Authoritarians used military pomp, but little actual fighting, to help prop up regimes dedicated to preserving the status quo. Fascist regimes could not survive without the active acquisition of new territory for their “race”—Lebensraum, spazio vitale—and they deliberately chose aggressive war to achieve it, clearly intending to wind the spring of their people to still higher tension. Fascist radicalization was not simply war government, moreover. Making war radicalizes all regimes, fascist or not, of course. All states demand more of their citizens in wartime, and citizens become more willing, if they believe the war is a legitimate one, to make exceptional sacrifices for the community, and even to set aside some of their liberties. Increased state authority seems legitimate when the enemy is at the gate. During World War II, citizens of the democracies accepted not only material sacrifices, like rationing and the draft, but also major limitations on freedom, such as censorship. In the United States during the cold war an insistent current of opinion wanted to limit liberties again, in the interest of defeating the communist enemy. War government under fascism is not the same as the democracies’ willing and temporary suspension of liberties, however. In fascist regimes at war, a fanatical minority within the party or movement may find itself freed to express a furor far beyond any rational calculation of interest. In this way, we return to Hannah Arendt’s idea that fascist regimes build on the fragmentation of their societies and the atomization of their populations. Arendt has been sharply criticized for making atomization one of the prerequisites for Nazi success. But her Origins of Totalitarianism, though cast in historical terms, is more a philosophical meditation on fascism’s ultimate radicalization than a history of origins. Even if the fragmentation and atomization of society work poorly as explanations for fascism’s taking root and arriving in power, the fragmentation and atomization of government were characteristic of the last phase of fascism, the radicalization process. In the newly conquered territories, ordinary civil servants, agents of the normative state, were replaced by party radicals, agents of the prerogative state. The orderly procedures of bureaucracy gave way to the wild unstructured improvisations of inexperienced party militants thrust into ill-defined positions of authority over conquered peoples.

Considering fascism simply as a capitalist tool sends us astray in two respects. The narrow and rigid formula that became orthodox in Stalin’s Third International denied fascism’s autonomous roots and authentic popular appeal. Even worse, it ignored human choice by making fascism the inevitable outcome of the ineluctable crisis of capitalist overproduction. Closer empirical work showed, to the contrary, that real capitalists, even when they rejected democracy, mostly preferred authoritarians to fascists. Whenever fascists reached power, to be sure, capitalists mostly accommodated with them as the best available nonsocialist solution. We had occasion to see that even the giant German chemical combine I. G. Farben, whose ascent to the rank of the biggest company in Europe had been based on global trade, found ways to adapt to rearmament-driven autarky, and prospered mightily again. The relations of accommodation, foot dragging, and mutual advantage that bound the business community to fascist regimes turn out to be another complicated matter that varied over time. That there was some mutual advantage is beyond doubt. Capitalism and fascism made practicable bedfellows (though not inevitable ones, nor always comfortable ones). As for the opposite interpretation that portrays the business community as fascism’s victim, it takes far too seriously the middle-level frictions endemic to this relationship, along with businessmen’s postwar efforts at self-exculpation. Here, too, we need a subtler model of explanation that allows for interplays of conflict and accommodation.

Nazi officials felt free to take more violent action than they had done in the western campaigns of 1940, first against the enemies of the regime, then against fascism’s conservative allies, and eventually against the German people themselves, in an ecstasy of terminal destruction. Whereas in traditional authoritarian war regimes, the army tends to extend its control, as it did in the German Reich during 1917–18 and in Franco’s Spain, the German army lost control of occupation policy in the east after 1941, as we have seen, to the Nazi Party’s parallel organizations. Party radicals felt free to express their hatreds and obsessions in ways that were foreign to the traditions of the state services. The issue here is not simply one of moral sensitivity; some officers and civil servants were appalled by SS actions in the conquered territories, while others went along because of group solidarity or because they had become hardened. It was to some degree an issue of turf. It would be unthinkable for a traditional military dictatorship to tolerate the incursions of amateurish party militias into military spheres that Hitler—and even, in Ethiopia, Mussolini—permitted. Here we enter a realm where the calculations of interest that arguably governed the behavior of both the Nazis and their allies under more ordinary circumstances in the exercise of power no longer determined policy. At this ultimate stage an obsessed minority is able to carry out its most passionate hatreds implacably and to the ultimate limit of human experience. Liberation from constraints permitted a hard core of the movement’s fanatics to regain the upper hand over their bourgeois allies and carry out some of the initial radical projects. At the outposts of empire, fascism recovered the face-to-face violence of the early days of squadrismo and SA street brawling. One must resist the temptation at this final stage to revert to a highly personalized way of looking at the exercise of power in fascist regimes, with its discredited notions of hoodlums kidnapping the state. The Nazi regime was able to pursue the war with ever mounting intensity only with the continued complicity of the state services and large sectors of the socially powerful. Fascist radicalization, finally, cannot be understood as a rational way to persuade a people to give their all to a war effort. It led Nazi Germany into a runaway spiral that ultimately prevented rational war making, as vital resources were diverted from military operations to the murder of the Jews. Finally radicalization denies even the nation that is supposed to be at fascism’s heart. At the end, fanatical fascists prefer to destroy everything in a final paroxysm, even their own country, rather than admit defeat. Prolonged fascist radicalization over a very long period has never been witnessed. It is even hard to imagine. Can one suppose that even Hitler could keep up the tension into old age? Arranging the succession to a senescent fascist leader is another intriguing but, so far, hypothetical problem. The more normal form of succession to a fascist regime is likely to be decay into a traditional authoritarianism. At that point, there can be progressive liberalization as in post-Franco Spain or perhaps revolution (as in post-Salazar Portugal). But orderly succession is clearly far more of a problem with fascism than with other forms of rule, even communism. Fascism is, in the last analysis, destabilizing. In the long run, therefore, it was not really a solution to the problems of frightened conservatives or liberals. The final outcome was that the Italian and German fascist regimes drove themselves off a cliff in their quest for ever headier successes. The fascisms we know seem doomed to destroy themselves in their headlong, obsessive rush to fulfill the “privileged relation with history” they promised their people.

The boundary separating fascism from authoritarianism is more subtle, but it is one of the most essential for understanding. I have already used the term, or the similar one of traditional dictatorship, in discussing Spain, Portugal, Austria, and Vichy France. The fascist-authoritarian boundary was particularly hard to trace in the 1930s, when regimes that were, in reality, authoritarian donned some of the decor of that period’s successful fascisms. Although authoritarian regimes often trample civil liberties and are capable of murderous brutality, they do not share fascism’s urge to reduce the private sphere to nothing. They accept ill-defined though real domains of private space for traditional “intermediary bodies” like local notables, economic cartels and associations, officer corps, families, and churches. These, rather than an official single party, are the main agencies of social control in authoritarian regimes. Authoritarians would rather leave the population demobilized and passive, while fascists want to engage and excite the public. Authoritarians want a strong but limited state. They hesitate to intervene in the economy, as fascism does readily, or to embark on programs of social welfare. They cling to the status quo rather than proclaim a new way.

Astonishing, of course, that those very terms - 'reeducation' and 'rehabilitation' - do not scare the hell out of academics who use them and hear them. That they do not call to mind the not-so-distant history of authoritarian regimes in Europe or lead on to the thought that 'diversity,' for many of us in the academy, has now come to mean a plurality of sameness. More important: the words, apparently, do not suggest how vulnerable we are - all of us - to error, slippage, and hurt, and how the protocols, tribunals, and shamings currently favored by many in the academy have distracted us from our primary obligation, which is to foster an atmosphere of candor, good will, kindness, and basic decency without which we can be of no use to one another or to our students.

In the genesis of the myth, neither the role of fabrication nor that of propaganda should be exaggerated. Besides, the effectiveness of the latter generally depends on the consent of those to whom it is addressed; it does not have the power to govern minds, and even in the most authoritarian regimes it is to the police, rather than to propaganda, that the absence of any dissident voice must be attributed.

Fascist regimes could not settle down into a comfortable enjoyment of power. The charismatic leader had made dramatic promises: to unify, purify, and energize his community; to save it from the flabbiness of bourgeois materialism, the confusion and corruption of democratic politics, and the contamination of alien people and cultures; to head off the threatened revolution of property with a revolution of values; to rescue the community from decadence and decline. He had offered sweeping solutions to these menaces: violence against enemies, both inside and out; the individual’s total immersion in the community; the purification of blood and culture; the galvanizing enterprises of rearmament and expansionist war. He had assured his people a “privileged relation with history.” Fascist regimes had to produce an impression of driving momentum—“permanent revolution”—in order to fulfill these promises. They could not survive without that headlong, inebriating rush forward. Without an ever-mounting spiral of ever more daring challenges, fascist regimes risked decaying into something resembling a tepid authoritarianism. With it, they drove toward a final paroxysm of self-destruction. Fascist or partly fascist regimes do not inevitably succeed in maintaining momentum. Several regimes sometimes considered fascist deliberately took the opposite tack of damping down excitement. They “normalized” themselves—and thereby became more authoritarian than fascist.

I would like for us to dwell on the notion of “dictators killing their own people,” which is quite problematic and misleading. First, the notion presumes that killing one’s own people is only done by directly using weapons and prisons, as commonly cited when referring to Arab dictators, but it overlooks the many other indirect ways through which a state can kill its own people, like denying them decent, livable wages; healthy, chemical-free, non-cancerous foods; access to decent basic healthcare and good education; and many other basic human rights that are a privilege not a right in the US. Never mind that the US doesn’t even come close in providing these basic needs whose lack can easily make any state responsible for “killing its own people”, I am not disclosing a secret when I say that the US equally fails in the test of not directly killing its own people through imprisoning and shooting blacks, immigrants, and Muslims. The second serious problem with the statement of dictators “killing their own people” is the failure of many so-called academics and intellectuals who contribute to knowledge production in interrogating it in an honest manner, which, to me means that the starting point is always to look at how the US kills its own people. Once that is determined and confirmed, it would be hard to make the case that the US is in a position to go around the world hunting other authoritarian regimes who do kill their own people. This fact makes many academics and intellectuals—unless willing to pay a high price for speaking the truth—complicit with the agendas of the warmongers who have been exterminating the people of the Middle East for many decades now. As a result, one can’t help wondering whether the real job of many feeble and co-opted intellectuals and academics in America is to simply aid the establishment in promoting itself as a “free democracy”, and consequently aiding it with its false mission of “democratizing” other nations.

Indeed, fascist regimes tried to redraw so radically the boundaries between private and public that the private sphere almost disappeared. Robert Ley, head of the Nazi Labor Office, said that in the Nazi state the only private individual was someone asleep. For some observers, this effort to have the public sphere swallow up the private sphere entirely is indeed the very essence of fascism. It is certainly a fundamental point on which fascist regimes differed most profoundly from authoritarian conservatism, and even more profoundly from classical liberalism. There was no room in this vision of obligatory national unity for either free-thinking persons or for independent, autonomous subcommunities. Churches, Freemasonry, class-based unions or syndicates, political parties— all were suspect as subtracting something from the national will.121 Here were grounds for infinite conflict with conservatives as well as the Left. In pursuit of their mission to unify the community within an all-consuming public sphere, fascist regimes dissolved unions and socialist parties. This radical amputation of what had been normal worker representation, encased as it was in a project of national fulfillment and managed economy, alienated public opinion less than pure military or police repression, as in traditional dictatorships. And indeed the fascists had some success in reconciling some workers to a world without unions or socialist parties, those for whom proletarian solidarity against capitalist bosses was willingly replaced by national identity against other peoples. Brooding about cultural degeneracy was so important a fascist issue that some authors have put it at the center. Every fascist regime sought to control the national culture from the top, to purify it of foreign influences, and make it help carry the message of national unity and revival. Decoding the cultural messages of fascist ceremonies, films, performances, and visual arts has today become the most active field of research on fascism. The “reading” of fascist stagecraft, however ingenious, should not mislead us into thinking that fascist regimes succeeded in establishing monolithic cultural homogeneity. Cultural life in fascist regimes remained a complex patchwork of official activities, spontaneous activities that the regimes tolerated, and even some illicit ones. Ninety percent of the films produced under the Nazi regime were light entertainment without overt propaganda content (not that it was innocent, of course). A few protected Jewish artists hung on remarkably late in Nazi Germany, and the openly homosexual actor and director Gustav Gründgens remained active to the end.