Publius Tacitus — America On It's Way to Being Stalin's Soviet Union

Nothing more sickening and offensive than the hypocrisy of a nation claiming to be the pinnacle of democracy and freedom while moving inexorably towards a state that embraces authoritarianism. And no, I do not mean that Donald Trump is the culprit. He is not. He is a weak man masquerading as a strong man while the BORG aka the Deep State pushes onward with its agenda to quash the spirit of liberty that once infused this great country. He is more a victim than an instigator....

Sic Semper Tyrannis
America On It's Way to Being Stalin's Soviet Union

Publius Tacitus

John W. Whitehead — America Breaks Down: The Anatomy of a National Psychosis

Whitehead founded The Rutherford Institute to preserve and defend human rights and civil liberties in a non-partisan way. He issues a stark warning to Americans.

Unless we can learn to live together as brothers and sisters and fellow citizens, we will perish as tools and prisoners of the American police state.

Counterpunch
America Breaks Down: The Anatomy of a National Psychosis

John W. Whitehead | President, The Rutherford Institute

Alleen Brown — Leaked Documents Reveal Counterterrorism Tactics Used at Standing Rock to “Defeat Pipeline Insurgencies”

A shadowy international mercenary and security firm known as TigerSwan targeted the movement opposed to the Dakota Access Pipeline with military-style counterterrorism measures, collaborating closely with police in at least five states, according to internal documents obtained by The Intercept.

The documents provide the first detailed picture of how TigerSwan, which originated as a U.S. military and State Department contractor helping to execute the global war on terror, worked at the behest of its client Energy Transfer Partners, the company building the Dakota Access Pipeline, to respond to the indigenous-led movement that sought to stop the project.

Internal TigerSwan communications describe the movement as “an ideologically driven insurgency with a strong religious component” and compare the anti-pipeline water protectors to jihadist fighters.

"It can't happen here," morphs into "It can't be happening here, can it?"

Warning: SCARY.

The Intercept
Leaked Documents Reveal Counterterrorism Tactics Used at Standing Rock to “Defeat Pipeline Insurgencies”
Alleen Brown

New Directions

Like many good books, Martin Gurri’s The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium is about One Big Idea, though the implications take a while to work through. It’s basically a story of how technology and media are changing politics.…Gurri really won my heart when he brought this insight together with the work of the great anthropologist Mary Douglas, who had an uncanny knack for creating powerful and useful analytical frameworks:

Andrew Batson's Blog
So far, my favorite book about the 2016 election is one that came out in 2014

Andrew Batson

The crawl toward despotism within a failed democracy is always incremental. No regime planning to utterly extinguish civil liberties advertises its intentions in advance. It pays lip service to liberty and justice while obliterating the institutions and laws that make them possible. Its opponents, including those within the establishment, make sporadic attempts to resist, but week by week, month by month, the despot and his reactionary allies methodically consolidate power. Those inside the machinery of government and the courts who assert the rule of law are purged. Critics, including the press, are attacked, ridiculed and silenced. The state is reconfigured until the edifice of tyranny is unassailable.

Truthdig
A Last Chance for Resistance

Chris Hedges

Oleg Komlik — Karl Polanyi on the Rise of Fascism and Market Economy

Karl Polanyi was deeply concerned by the essence of Fascism and focused on the institutional structure from which Fascism starts its march. He devoted the final parts of his magnum opus The Great Transformation specifically to this crucial topic and elaborated a bright analysis of the dark rise of Fascism between the two world wars. 

The following passage is composed from excerpts I selected from this insightful classic book and assembled them as a short article. I urge you to delve into this piece (and then to read the full original chapters) and to mull over the substance of fascist situations and moves, as well as their linkage to free market and economy of self-interest, which generate anti-individualistic and repressing endeavors directed to change not only the political sphere and societal fabrics, but human consciousness itself.

Economic Sociology and Political Economy
Karl Polanyi on the Rise of Fascism and Market Economy
Oleg Komlik | founder and editor-in-chief of the ES/PE, Chairman of the Junior Sociologists Network at the International Sociological Association, a PhD Candidate in Economic Sociology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Ben-Gurion University, and a Lecturer in the School of Behavioral Sciences at the College of Management Academic Studies

Peter Lavalle — Collapse of the Radical Liberal Order

The paradoxes of liberalism.

Western Liberalism is in crisis. Originally conceived as a moderate and tolerant ideology is now caving in on itself. Instead of promoting a set of ideas that are inclusive and open-minded, Liberalism today is unwilling and unable to accept any other worldviews. Essentially it has become a form of political extremism mirroring Islam’s jihadist fanatics found in the Middle East and beyond. In fact, both provide the ideological oxygen each needs to survive.

Liberalism is suffering the same fate of other modern Western ideologies, namely Socialism and various forms of Nationalism. Each presented themselves as competing alternatives to the status quo, i.e. the establishment of the time. Each initially aspired to be inclusive. Once each achieved a degree of political traction and legitimacy, elements within each sought to monopolize politics and power. This result was the totalitarian temptation.…

History is dialectical, testing various solutions to social, political and economic challenges. Liberalism arose in 18th century Europe with the Enlightenment and its cause was greatly boosted by the founding of the United States of America on liberal principles.

It was wrongly believed that this was "exceptional," "indispensable," and "the end of history." Time rolls on, conditions changed, and new challenges arise calling for fresh solutions. The world is again that a juncture but not yet at the junction between the old and the new.

There is no way to "reform" an 18th century solution to make it suitable for the 21st century. The past shapes the future by contributing its lessons, both successes and failures. But it is for the present to take on the emerging challenges of the near future.

Since global society is a complex adaptive system, there is no way to predict from the past what the future will bring. History doesn't repeat itself in a circular fashion but rather develops as a spiral, making leaps that are only dimly seen at the horizon.

The sooner the West ceases to impose an 18th century narrative on globalization, liberalism can contribute to the transformation that is taking place as communications and transportation technology shrink the world without attempting to dominate the process, which leads to conflict.

The Duran
Collapse of the Radical Liberal Order
Peter Lavalle

See also

The gathering in Conference Room 3.101 of the Bundestag’s ultra-modern Paul-Loebe Haus on Friday, 16 December was described by its organizers from the Détente Now! / Neue Entspannungspolitik Jetzt! Initiative as a press briefing to officially launch the initiative in Germany. Détente Now! had already had its debut in the USA the week before with an op-ed article in the iconic Progressive weekly magazine of commentary, The Nation. The launch on two continents was meant to draw attention to the overarching objective of establishing a new peaceful Atlanticism to replace the Neocon-dominated Atlantic Alliance that has developed over the past two decades in a malignant way, bringing us into a New Cold War and, in the estimation of some of us, to the brink of a hot war.

Une parole franche
Berlin Diary: 16 December 2016

Gilbert Doctorow

Alexander Dugan — What is wrong with Europe?

Alexander Dugin is one of the foremost philosophers and political thinkers of Russia today. He is a "conservative" in the sense of conserving tradition, in this case the traditional Russkiy mir (Russian World). He views contemporary Western culture as decadent. Dugin has been sanctioned but the West.

Liberalism is a nihilistic ideology. It insists on liberty from any kind of collective identity, but never suggests anything positive. When in competition with the totalitarian ideologies of the past, communism and fascism, liberalism appeared to be concrete and attractive because it negated such totalitarianism while positing itself as a real alternative. But when the totalitarian competition was overcome, the nihilistic nature of liberalism came to be fully revealed. It can only negate things, and cannot affirm anything constructive. It is not the ideology of positive freedom, but of negative liberty. Although yesterday this might not have been so explicit, today it is clear.…

Liberalism has turned totalitarian. There is no liberty to not be a liberal. One must be a liberal. You can choose to be a left liberal, a right liberal, or a center liberal and, in the extreme case, you can be a far left or far right liberal, but you must always be a liberal. 

If you are judged to be illiberal by liberals, then you are finished, labelled as an extremist, terrorist, and so on. The liberals can only tolerate liberally tolerant people. If you are not tolerant in the liberal sense, you are intolerable.…

This is central to the paradoxes of liberalism. Anything that arises from the strict application of liberalism as negative freedom (freedom from external constraint) is regarded as being "natural."

Can this be corrected with the addition of positive freedom (freedom for actualizing potential)? This depends on agreement over human nature, which is disputed.

See Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Positive and Negative Liberty, introduction:

Negative liberty is the absence of obstacles, barriers or constraints. One has negative liberty to the extent that actions are available to one in this negative sense. Positive liberty is the possibility of acting — or the fact of acting — in such a way as to take control of one's life and realize one's fundamental purposes. While negative liberty is usually attributed to individual agents, positive liberty is sometimes attributed to collectivities, or to individuals considered primarily as members of given collectivities. 

The idea of distinguishing between a negative and a positive sense of the term ‘liberty’ goes back at least to Kant, and was examined and defended in depth by Isaiah Berlin in the 1950s and ’60s. Discussions about positive and negative liberty normally take place within the context of political and social philosophy. They are distinct from, though sometimes related to, philosophical discussions about free will. Work on the nature of positive liberty often overlaps, however, with work on the nature of autonomy.

As Berlin showed, negative and positive liberty are not merely two distinct kinds of liberty; they can be seen as rival, incompatible interpretations of a single political ideal. Since few people claim to be against liberty, the way this term is interpreted and defined can have important political implications. Political liberalism tends to presuppose a negative definition of liberty: liberals generally claim that if one favors individual liberty one should place strong limitations on the activities of the state. Critics of liberalism often contest this implication by contesting the negative definition of liberty: they argue that the pursuit of liberty understood as self-realization or as self-determination (whether of the individual or of the collectivity) can require state intervention of a kind not normally allowed by liberals.

Many authors prefer to talk of positive and negative freedom. This is only a difference of style, and the terms ‘liberty’ and ‘freedom’ are normally used interchangeably by political and social philosophers. Although some attempts have been made to distinguish between liberty and freedom (Pitkin 1988; Williams 2001; Dworkin 2011), generally speaking these have not caught on. Neither can they be translated into other European languages, which contain only the one term, of either Latin or Germanic origin (e.g. liberté, Freiheit), where English contains both.

Liberalism is at the front of cultural change in the world today. I regard myself as a libertarian of the left who views negative liberty as a necessary condition for mature liberalism and positive liberty also as necessary. A concept of liberalism that is both necessary and sufficient must include the individual, social and spiritual aspects of freedom and its purpose.

Alexander Dugin puts forward a point of view different from my own, but one to which he is entitled.  The contribution he makes is several fold. First, he brings in a view of liberalism from outside liberalism. Secondly, he presents a powerful strain of thought in the Russian world today. These are the most important. There are others. Regardless of one's opinion of his views, his views are important as cultural force to be reckoned with. sanctioning Alexander Dugin is not going to make his ideas go away. If fact, doing so is illiberal.

Fort Russ
Dugin: What is wrong with Europe?

Alexander Dugin, Katehon
Edited by J. Arnoldski

Norman Pollack — Oh, Those Nasty Russians — Notes on Totalitarianism

A look at the growth in the direction of totalitarianism and imperialism in the US. And no, Friedrich Hayek, it's not the result of increasing socialism of the left but increasing fascism of the right that establishment Democrats have bought into.

Inverted totalitarianism?

Counterpunch
Oh, Those Nasty Russians — Notes on Totalitarianism
Norman Pollack

John Gray — A Point of View: The writer who foresaw the rise of the totalitarian state

The 19th Century Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote about characters who justified murder in the name of their ideological beliefs. For this reason, John Gray argues, he's remained relevant ever since, through the rise of the totalitarian states of the 20th Century, to the "war against terror".

When liberalism becomes illiberalism.

BBC News Magazine
A Point of View: The writer who foresaw the rise of the totalitarian state

John Gray

Elias Isquith — “It’s total moral surrender”: Matt Taibbi unloads on Wall Street, inequality and our broken justice system

Matt Taibbi, author of "The Divide," tells Salon about Geithner's excuses, Piketty's success and Nixon's cronies

His relentless coverage of Wall Street malfeasance turned him into one of the most influential journalists of his generation, but in his new book, “The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap,” Matt Taibbi takes a close and dispiriting look at how inequality and government dysfunction have created a two-tiered justice system in which most Americans are guilty until proven innocent, while a select few operate with no accountability whatsoever....

MT: The book is really just about why some people go to jail and why some people don’t go to jail, and “the divide” is the term I came up with to describe this phenomenon we have where there are essentially two different criminal justice systems, one that works one way for people who are either very rich or working within the confines of a giant systemically important institution, and then one that works in another way for people who are without means. And that’s what the book is about....

Bureaucracies organically flow toward the easier result, and the easier result is always a smaller company, an undefended person, a low-level drug dealer. They hesitate before it decides to proceed against a well-heeled, well-defended company [against which] they’re going to have to fight for years and years and years just to get the case in court … It’s not just about the poor, it’s more about how there’s a class that enjoys impunity and then there’s everybody else....

Morally, it doesn’t work anymore. You just cannot have a society where people instinctively know that certain people are above the law, because it will create total disrespect for authority among everybody else. And that’s completely corrosive. You need to have people believing in the system to some degree — even if it’s just an illusion, you need to have them believing.

EI: You know, with your comment about how people need to believe in the system to some degree, it occurs to me that in a fundamental way, you’re actually making a small-c conservative argument. You’re not saying we need to burn everything to the ground and start over, you’re saying we need to stick with the principles we supposedly all believe in.

MT: People forget that all my sources come from Wall Street. They’re all capitalists, they’re all ardent capitalists. They grew up, their passion in life was reading Adam Smith and believing in that whole world. And I came into this story six years ago, whatever it was, not really knowing a whole lot about it, but certainly I never would have described myself as an ardent capitalist … When people ask me what the solutions are to these problems, for me, the fastest shortcut to everything being cleaned up is disentangling the government from its unnatural support of these too-big-to-fail institutions, forcing them to sink or swim on their own in the real free market. I never would have imagined myself making that argument five or six years ago, but that’s the argument … These people, not only are they not being prosecuted, but they’re not subject to the normal forces of the market anymore, and in a way that enables them even more … If you were to force these companies to sink or swim on their own they’d be vaporized instantly. We see this every time there’s any hint the government is going to stop bailing these companies out or may consider not doing it in the future — they lose billions of dollars in market capitalization overnight …

Salon
“It’s total moral surrender”: Matt Taibbi unloads on Wall Street, inequality and our broken justice system
Elias Isquith | Assistant Editor, Salon

Chris Hedges — We're Losing the Last Shreds of Legal Rights to Protect Ourselves from Oligarchy

A ruling elite that accrues for itself total power, history has shown, eventually uses it

The U.S. Supreme Court decision to refuse to hear our case concerning Section 1021(b)(2) of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which permits the military to seize U.S. citizens and hold them indefinitely in military detention centers without due process, means that this provision will continue to be law. It means the nation has entered a post-constitutional era. It means that extraordinary rendition of U.S. citizens on U.S. soil by our government is legal. It means that the courts, like the legislative and executive branches of government, exclusively serve corporate power — one of the core definitions of fascism. It means that the internal mechanisms of state are so corrupted and subservient to corporate power that there is no hope of reform or protection for citizens under our most basic constitutional rights. It means that the consent of the governed — a poll by OpenCongress.com showed that this provision had a 98 percent disapproval rating — is a cruel joke. And it means that if we do not rapidly build militant mass movements to overthrow corporate tyranny, including breaking the back of the two-party duopoly that is the mask of corporate power, we will lose our liberty....

The goals of corporate capitalism are increasingly indistinguishable from the goals of the state. The political and economic systems are subservient to corporate profit. Debate between conventional liberals and conservatives has been replaced by empty political theater and spectacle. Corporations, no matter which politicians are in office, loot the Treasury, escape taxation, push down wages, break unions, dismantle civil society, gut regulation and legal oversight, control information, prosecute endless war and dismantle public institutions and programs that include schools, welfare and Social Security. And elected officials, enriched through our form of legalized corporate bribery, have no intention of halting the process.

The government, by ignoring the rights and needs of ordinary citizens, is jeopardizing its legitimacy. This is dangerous. When a citizenry no longer feels that it can find justice within the organs of power, when it feels that the organs of power are the enemies of freedom and economic advancement, it makes war on those organs. Those of us who are condemned as radicals, idealists and dreamers call for basic reforms that, if enacted, will make peaceful reform possible. But corporate capitalists, now unchecked by state power and dismissive of the popular will, do not see the fires they are igniting. The Supreme Court ruling on our challenge is one more signpost on the road to dystopia.

It is capitalism, not government, that is the problem. The fusion of corporate and state power means that government is broken. It is little more than a protection racket for Wall Street. And it is our job to wrest government back. This will come only through the building of mass movements.

“It is futile to be ‘anti-Fascist’ while attempting to preserve capitalism,” George Orwell wrote. “Fascism after all is only a development of capitalism, and the mildest democracy, so-called, is liable to turn into Fascism.”...

These masters have set in place laws that, when we rise up — and they expect us to rise up — will permit the state to herd us like sheep into military detention camps. Section 1021(b)(2) is but one piece of the legal tyranny now in place to ensure total corporate control. The corporate state also oversees the most pervasive security and surveillance apparatus in human history. It can order the assassination of U.S. citizens. It has abolished habeas corpus. It uses secret evidence to imprison dissidents, such as the Palestinian academic Mazen Al-Najjar. It employs the Espionage Act to criminalize those who expose abuses of power. A ruling elite that accrues for itself this kind of total power, history has shown, eventually uses it.

AlterNet
Chris Hedges: We're Losing the Last Shreds of Legal Rights to Protect Ourselves from Oligarchy

Washington's Blog — NSA Recorded the CONTENT of ‘EVERY SINGLE’ CALL in a Foreign Country … and Also In AMERICA?

Welcome to the digital Panopticon.

Washington's Blog
NSA Recorded the CONTENT of ‘EVERY SINGLE’ CALL in a Foreign Country … and Also In AMERICA?

See also Snowden:  “Is It Really Terrorism That We’re Stopping? I Say No. The Bottom Line Is That Terrorism … Has Always Been a Cover For Actions”

What Americans Don’t Know About the Ukraine Crisis

David Ferguson — Ed Snowden claims he raised concerns with NSA officials more than 10 times (via Raw Story )

Ed Snowden claims he raised concerns with NSA officials more than 10 times (via Raw Story )

Former security contractor and National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden said that he tired to bring his concerns to the attention of superiors on at least 10 occasions before deciding to leave the organization with a massive cache of secret…

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Henry A. Giroux — Totalitarian Paranoia in the Post-Orwellian Surveillance State

This is a long post but Giroux meticulously combed through the state of affairs and their implications for contemporary life and (formerly) liberal democracy. You've probably read Orwell and probably know all this already, but Giroux sums it up eloquently.

Truthout | Op-Ed
Totalitarian Paranoia in the Post-Orwellian Surveillance
Henry A Giroux

Chris Hedges — The Last Gasp of American Democracy

This is our last gasp as a democracy. The state’s wholesale intrusion into our lives and obliteration of privacy are now facts. And the challenge to us—one of the final ones, I suspect—is to rise up in outrage and halt this seizure of our rights to liberty and free expression. If we do not do so we will see ourselves become a nation of captives.

The public debates about the government’s measures to prevent terrorism, the character assassination of Edward Snowden and his supporters, the assurances by the powerful that no one is abusing the massive collection and storage of our electronic communications miss the point. Any state that has the capacity to monitor all its citizenry, any state that has the ability to snuff out factual public debate through control of information, any state that has the tools to instantly shut down all dissent is totalitarian. Our corporate state may not use this power today. But it will use it if it feels threatened by a population made restive by its corruption, ineptitude and mounting repression. The moment a popular movement arises—and one will arise—that truly confronts our corporate masters, our venal system of total surveillance will be thrust into overdrive.

The most radical evil, as Hannah Arendt pointed out, is the political system that effectively crushes its marginalized and harassed opponents and, through fear and the obliteration of privacy, incapacitates everyone else. Our system of mass surveillance is the machine by which this radical evil will be activated. If we do not immediately dismantle the security and surveillance apparatus, there will be no investigative journalism or judicial oversight to address abuse of power. There will be no organized dissent. There will be no independent thought. Criticisms, however tepid, will be treated as acts of subversion. And the security apparatus will blanket the body politic like black mold until even the banal and ridiculous become concerns of national security.

Truthout
Chris Hedges | The Last Gasp of American Democracy
Chris Hedges, Truthdig | Op-Ed

John Hudson — FBI Drops Law Enforcement as 'Primary' Mission

The FBI's creeping advance into the world of counterterrorism is nothing new. But quietly and without notice, the agency has finally decided to make it official in one of its organizational fact sheets. Instead of declaring "law enforcement" as its "primary function," as it has for years, the FBI fact sheet now lists "national security" as its chief mission. The changes largely reflect the FBI reforms put in place after September 11, 2001, which some have criticized for de-prioritizing law enforcement activities. Regardless, with the 9/11 attacks more than a decade in the past, the timing of the edits is baffling some FBI-watchers….

According to a 2007 Seattle Post-Intelligencer investigation, the Justice Department did not replace 2,400 agents assigned to focus on counterterrorism in the years following 9/11. The reductions in white-collar crime investigations became obvious. Back in 2000, the FBI sent prosecutors 10,000 cases. That fell to a paltry 3,500 cases by 2005. "Had the FBI continued investigating financial crimes at the same rate as it had before the terror attacks, about 2,000 more white-collar criminals would be behind bars," the report concluded. As a result, the agency fielded criticism for failing to crack down on financial crimes ahead of the Great Recession and losing sight of real-estate fraud ahead of the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis.

Foreign Policy | The Cable
FBI Drops Law Enforcement as 'Primary' Mission

John Hudson

Making the national security-surveillance state official.

Washington's Blog — Former Top NSA Official: “We Are Now In A Police State”

32-year NSA Veteran Who Created Mass Surveillance System Says Government Use of Data Gathered Through Spying “Is a Totalitarian Process”

Former Top NSA Official: “We Are Now In A Police State”
Washington's Blog

Radley Balko — 7 Ways The Obama Administration Has Accelerated Police Militarization

There were signs that President Barack Obama might rein in the mass militarization of America's police forces after he won the White House. Policing is primarily a local issue, overseen by local authorities. But beginning in the late 1960s with President Richard Nixon, the federal government began instituting policies that gave federal authorities more power to fight the drug trade, and to lure state and local policymakers into the anti-crime agenda of the administration in charge. These policies got a boost during Ronald Reagan's presidency, and then another during President Bill Clinton's years. Under President George W. Bush, all of those anti-drug policies continued, but were supplemented by new war on terrorism endeavors -- yet more efforts to make America's cops look, act and fight like soldiers....

Indeed, in his first interview after taking office, Obama's drug czar, Gil Kerlikowske, said that the administration would be toning down the martial rhetoric that had dominated federal drug policy since the Nixon years. "Regardless of how you try to explain to people it's a 'war on drugs' or a 'war on a product,' people see a war as a war on them," Kerlikowske told The Wall Street Journal. "We're not at war with people in this country."

Unfortunately, while not insignificant, the change in rhetoric has largely been only that. The Obama administration may no longer call it a "war," but there's no question that the White House is continuing to fight one. Here's a quick rundown of where and how Obama's policies have perpetuated the garrison state:

The Huffington Post
7 Ways The Obama Administration Has Accelerated Police Militarization
Radley Balko

Washington's Blog — The Fact that Mass Surveillance Doesn’t Keep Us Safe Goes Mainstream

Top Terrorism Experts Say that Mass Spying Doesn’t Work to Prevent Terrorism

Washington's Blog
The Fact that Mass Surveillance Doesn’t Keep Us Safe Goes Mainstream
WashingtonsBlog

Washington's Blog Everything You Wanted to Know about Spying … But Were Afraid to Ask

Spying, the big picture

Link roundup

Washington's Blog
Everything You Wanted to Know about Spying … But Were Afraid to Ask