[CheshireTheCat]

Hannah Arendt's list of the factors that influence the descent into totalitarian madness such as above is fascinating. It is included in the article.

[PIF]

or you can read Wilhelm Reich’s definitive work: The Psychology of Mass Fascism

[Southside_Chicago_Republican]

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[CGVet58]

bttt

[Chainmail]

A good read... Thanks!

[2harddrive]

Dangerously Intolerant Liberals Destroying Our Society = DILDOS

[colorado tanker]

We are vulnerable. Western liberals have been in denial since WWII that the Nazis were a party of the left, not the right. They despised the capitalist societies of Britain and the US.

[gattaca]

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[DeweyCA]

Hannah Arendt, in her 1951 study The Origins of Totalitarianism, said these factors in German and Russian society made them susceptible to Nazism and Bolshevism, respectively:

Loneliness
Social Atomization
Loss of Faith In Hierarchies And Institutions
The Desire To Transgress And Destroy
Indifference to Truth, and the Willingness To Believe Useful Lies
A Mania for Ideology
A Society That Values Loyalty More Than Expertise
The Politicization of Everything

[DeweyCA]

FTA (from a prof who had been born in the USSR):

Back in the USSR in the 1970s and the 1980s nobody believed the dogma. People repeated the ideological mantras for cynical reasons, to get advanced in their careers or get food packages. Many did it to protect their kids. But nobody sincerely believed. That is what ultimately saved us. As soon as the regime weakened a bit, it was doomed because there were no sincere believers any more. Everybody who did take the dogma seriously belonged to the generation of my great-grandparents.

In the US, though, the generation of the fanatical believers is only now growing up and coming into its prime. We’ll have to wait until their grandkids grow up to see a generation that will be so fed up with the dogma that it will embrace freedom of thought and expression. But that’s a long way away in the future.

I’m mentoring a group of young scholars in the Humanities to help them do research, and I’m starting to hate this task. Young scholars almost without exception think that scholarship is entirely about repeating woke slogans completely uncritically. Again, this is different from the USSR where scholars peppered their writing with the slogans but always took great pride in trying to sneak in some real thinking and real analysis behind the required ideological drivel. Every Soviet scholar starting from the 1970s was a dissident at heart because everybody knew that the ideology was rotten.

[John S Mosby]

Well, listening to these developing little totalitarians who are AGAINST free speech, and want to eliminate the 1st Amendment and the 2nd as well-— is to realize they will be the young thugs coming after...us. And it brings to mind the reality of how to stop them, and to do what Solzhenitsyn said:

“What would things been like [in Russia] if during periods of mass arrests people had not simply sat there, paling with terror at every bang on the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but understood they had nothing to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people?” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

[Pajamajan]

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