by J.B. Shurk, Lew Rockwell:
Totalitarianism is the warm bath in which civilization slits its wrists. It envelops the people with petty rules, strange dogmas, immoral duties, and forced sacrifices. It warms its victims with intoxicating promises of the government’s false love. It leaves the citizen naked — stripped first of his free will, then the thoughts in his head, and finally anything he once called his own. It slowly dispossesses each person of his personhood, until the population withers into frail, colorless facsimiles of the bleak, omnipresent State. Without the courage to act, the desire to think, the wisdom to pray, or the conscience to object, human purpose disappears. Society is exsanguinated of its vitality, creativity, spirituality, and mirth — until it slips beneath the water and stops breathing.
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
This was the story of Lenin’s Soviet Union and the imprisoned nations trapped behind Stalin’s Iron Curtain. It was the story of Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, Mao’s China, and Pol Pot’s Cambodia. It has been the story of Kim’s North Korea, Castro’s Cuba, Chávez’s Venezuela, and the ayatollahs’ Iran. For over a century, humanity has endured one form of barbarous totalitarianism after the next. It slithers into unsuspecting countries — often hiding behind the mask of democratic elections. It misrepresents itself as just one political party of many before announcing itself as the only party for all. It seeks to eliminate opponents in stages: first it proselytizes, then it intimidates, and finally it murders. With a couple hundred million victims over the last century alone, it is a governing philosophy that specializes in mass executions, dank prison cells, killing fields, and concentration camps. Totalitarianism infiltrates society with lies and builds nothing but the machinery of death.
With the Earth still wet from so much blood, Western governments now seek to turn the twenty-first century into the twentieth century’s even bloodier reflection. It is humbling to realize that we humans repeat so many mistakes through the course of history. It is infuriating, however, to watch today’s political leaders push humanity down the exact same paths that led to such monstrous tragedies in the recent past. When will the lesson be learned that censorship of opposing points of view leads to irreparable social division? When will governments grasp that coercion only intensifies the human desire to be free? When will courts realize that two-tiered justice and political persecution ensure the rule of law’s demise? How many more lives must be lost before those who exercise power understand that tyranny always leads to terror?
Totalitarian control over each citizen’s life was the driving force behind the outbreak of WWII and the prolonged isolation of closed societies surviving under the blanket of communism during the Cold War. Germans uniquely possess the social memories of both totalitarian perpetrator and victim — first driving the Nazi ideology across the European continent and then suffering through a half-century of bifurcation and Soviet oppression in the East. They experienced the temporary euphoria of trading their individual lives for the greater glory of the German State and the torturous agony of submitting to an occupying force that required absolute obedience. If any nation of people should have learned the harsh repercussions of totalitarianism, it is Germany.
