Total War: The Essence of the Police State‏

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

The one thing that all police states have in common is an existential enemy that must be defeated at all costs. The entire society beneath the yoke of state becomes conscripted into the war against the "focus of evil." Any part of society that is insubordinate automatically sides with the enemy, whether that position is real or imaginary. This gives rise to the need for internal instruments of enforcement to root out insubordinate elements. Even the local library participates in police work to do their duty in ferreting out suspicious elements in opposition to state authority.

Democracies are especially prone to the totalitarian impulse because people can easily be manipulated into perceiving an ominous threat where little or none exists. The state and its owners appeal to the false sense of pride and the imagined rights of the populace in order to enlist popular political support in the totalitarian venture. The evils of the enemy become exaggerated by sensationalist reporting and a fear on the part of the media of appearing to be soft on the threat. Real rights cam be eliminated in the name of promoting rights that only few can actually exercise. The rights of high stakes investors must be protected at the expense of those with meager means because of the national importance of large holdings.

The greatest achievement of the totalitarian spirit is the establishment and promotion of totalitarianism in the name of freedom. Anyone who opposes the despotic state is opposed to freedom itself. Pacifists are seen as vicious antagonists who must be purged from the social fabric for their anti-freedom views. Children must be conditioned to see pacifism as a part of the existential threat to freedom. Anyone who opposes total war against the enemy of freedom is an enemy of freedom. Education is crafted to regiment the populace into the machinery of war for the sake of war with a thin facade of "freedom" to disguise naked aggression. Civic participation is limited to a yearly visit to the polls in order to select a candidate from a pre-approved list of vetted flunkies who differ only in their opinion on which end of the egg one must open.

The irony of the whole thing is how little it takes to jerk the knee of this monstrous apparatus. The existential threat becomes more ominous as the resources at its disposal becomes smaller. The real enemy in total war is not the one on the other side of the frontier, but the one who amplifies the threat from beyond. In America, anti-Communism was far more anti-American than it was anti-Russian. Woodrow Wilson was a bigger despot to America than was the Kaiser. Surveillance workers in America suffer from the stress of knowing that they are under surveillance.

Isn't freedom wonderful?

Comments

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

Total war cannot be waged on a partial basis. It is either "all in" or it is not.

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

What I am saying is that elements of totalitarian government exist in supposedly non-totalitarian governments. People are so well trained to kowtow to symbols of popular sovereignty that they fail to notice that these are only symbols.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Anyone that knew the origin of those words in US political discourse would already understand that much. The whole career of Stephen Douglas would be one of the most symbolic representatives of the nuances of democracy if people knew more about him. Pity the Little Giant gets neglected more than he does, he vies with James Buchanan for "most evil and incompetent American ever."

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

When I compare Stephen Douglas with George Jr., I cannot help but evaluate the latter as higher up on each scale.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

I agree.

[policraticus.livejournal.com]

Democracies are especially prone to the totalitarian impulse ...

As opposed to, say, dictatorships, autocracies, monarchies or anarcho-syndicalist communes...

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Ironically absolute monarchies and their political elites don't like totalitarians very much. This is because the totalitarian ethos on all-in-the-state leaves no room for overmighty nobles who would risk destabilizing the state, while to totalitarians dynastic monarchies are inferior and weak societies too focused on privilege.

[policraticus.livejournal.com]

That is fair comment. Few hated the nobility more than the fascists.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

And the feeling was mutual. Mussolini would have deposed Victor Emmanuel III if he'd ever managed to actually win a war against an enemy that could shoot back with something approaching parity. The generals that finally did come close to killing Hitler were invariably men of old Junker families, while generals like August von Mackensen of the old Prussian elite were by no means fond of the Nazis and the "Bohemian Corporal." Not to mention in a more modern and equally relevant example the attitudes of the Persian Gulf monarchies to the Ba'ath totalitarian dictatorships and to Ayatollah Khameini's regime: they hated both equally as risking revolutionary menaces to their own claims to power. Not to mention also the gulf (pun intended) between the absolutist regime of Reza Shah Pahlavi and the Islamic Republic in all its forms.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Ironically there's only be one totalitarian regime that's actually initiated a very big war, the Nazis. The rest of them tended to prefer smaller wars and be rather more cautious as the dictators were more interested in preserving their monopoly on power than menacing it, and a big war can't exactly be guaranteed to be controlled. Even winning it might endanger the system that starts it, thus most regimes which are properly totalitarian won't actually be so interested in *starting* big wars as democracies or republics are. For a classical example, if we contrast the Roman Republic with the Roman Empire, the former was far more interested in aggressive wars than the latter. For a modern example, the USA was much more prone to wage continual wars during a single year or a single generation than the Soviet Union was, despite the much greater obsession with massive armies and warfighting in general in the latter (including the giant Freudian exercise that was the May Day Parades).

Of course this by no means saying that democracy and totalitarianism are equal in terms of political systems. Democracies do not, in theory, randomly arrest, torture, or create mass graves of their own citizens. Totalitarianism works by taking this as a base-line to build off of, while the totalitarian ethos *does* tend to emphasize war and militant concepts in rhetoric, though seldom as often or as grandly in practice as it does in rhetoric.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Oh, and total war is almost entirely in the realm of theory. Human history offers all of one instance that truly approximates it, the Soviet war against Finland, Germany, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Croatia, Spain, and Italy. And that was not choice or desired by the Soviets but was the result of a crisis to some extent rather more self-inflicted than was necessary, while winning the total war set in motion the train of events culminating in the 1991 splintering of the USSR into the CIS states. Total war in practice invariably remains theoretical, not absolute, because war is contingent and is almost never universally liked anywhere, while its needs invariably tend to clash with the full utilization of society precisely because it's geared to destroy, not to create.

Total war is perpetually in the realm of theory also because nowadays any total war will likely see use of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons (the word total does not mean "excluding illegal weapons in categories X, Y, and Z" and the superbugs + mass nuclear saturation of the world = end of civilization, though not technically the end of the human species. The living will most assuredly envy the dead, but envying the dead no less makes them living. We have never seen a total war bar that arguable one case, and God willing we shall never see it again. Because if we do then civilization as we know it no longer exists.

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

You simply fail to see the totalitarian aspects of "democracy."

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

No, I insist on words meaning what they mean, not being used for cheap political points. There is a difference.

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

The cheap political points are the ones earned by those who misuse the word "democracy."

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Well, to be sure this is so, yes. But then what does one expect when one takes the concept of Classical-Age imperialist societies and attempts to transplant them over 2,000 years after the fact? The Athenian Empire was in a sense a direct precursor of such "democratic" empires as that of the United Kingdom in all means, including the resort to the most un-democratic thuggery and cruelty imaginable. That democracy relies on undemocratic suffering elsewhere to sustain itself in the real world does not any more make it the same thing as totalitarianism than going to a garage makes a person an automobile.

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

Comfortable concentration camps are still concentration camps.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Again, true, but nobody counts things like reservations in this regard, even when the actual totalitarians themselves used it for inspiration and justification.

[kardashev.livejournal.com]

"The one thing that all police states have in common is an existential enemy that must be defeated at all costs."

I've been wanting to start a police state myself. Since the USA has already used commies and radical muslims, I'm going to have to think up a new enemy with which to scare my populace. How does the space midget menace sound? Think that can generate some bomb shelter buildin' paranoia and jingoism?

[abomvubuso.livejournal.com]

You could start one on NationStates (http://www.nationstates.net/). You could name your state The Supersonic Zombie Midget Empire.

[kardashev.livejournal.com]

I played that game before several years ago.

I'd give it a different name though. Bigdickistan has a nice ring to it, don't you think?

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

"Grossenschwanzistan" would give it that ueber-untermensch look and feel.

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

Ross Perot embodied space midgetry already. People have been inoculated to the threat.

[kardashev.livejournal.com]

I thought he was one of Santa's elves that got banished from the North Pole, tbh.

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

He applied, but they would not accept him.