MASHA GESSEN
The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

It was the oldest trick in the book - a constant state of low-level dread made people easy to control, because it robbed them of the sense that they could control anything themselves. This was not the sort of anxiety that moved people to action and accomplishment. This was the sort of anxiety that exceeded human capacity. ... You can no longer sit still or reason. You regress, and after a while the only thing you can do is scream, like a helpless terrified baby. you need an adult, a figure of authority. Almost anyone willing to take charge will do. And then, if that someone wants to remain in charge, he will have to make sure that you continue to feel helpless.

He's literally showing world leaders his already-made merch for a third term in blatant violation of The Constitution.

For an endless dictatorship.

Buy a Trump 2028 hat. Own the libs. End the United States of America for just $35.00 with bonus, almost free cult membership. Operators are standing by.

He's already said it out loud, on the world stage, in front of cameras.

MASHA GESSEN
The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

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."

HANNAH ARENDT
The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)

What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world, is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the ever-growing masses of our century.

HANNAH ARENDT
The Origins of Totalitarianism

Darwinism met with such overwhelming success because it provided, on the basis of inheritance, the ideological weapons for race and well as class rule and could be used for, as well as against, race discrimination.

Politically speaking, Darwinism as such was neutral, and it has led, indeed, to all kinds of pacifism and cosmopolitanism as well as to the sharpest forms of imperialistic ideologies. In the seventies and eighties of the last century, Darwinism was still almost exclusively in the hands of the utilitarian anti-colonial party in England.

The first philosopher of evolution, Herbert Spencer, who treated sociology as part of biology, believed natural selection to benefit the evolution of mankind and to result in everlasting peace. For political discussion, Darwinism offered two important concepts: the struggle for existence with optimistic assertion of the necessary and automatic "survival of the fittest," and the indefinite possibilities which seemed to lie in the evolution of man out of animal life and which started the new "science" of eugenics.

HANNAH ARENDT
The Origins of Totalitarianism

It is in the moment of defeat that the inherent weakness of totalitarian propaganda becomes visible. Without the force of the movement, its members cease at once to believe in the dogma for which yesterday they still were ready to sacrifice their lives. The moment the movement, that is, the fictitious world which sheltered them, is destroyed, the masses revert to their old status of isolated individuals who either happily accept a new function in a changed world or sink back into their old desperate superfluousness.

The members of totalitarian movements, utterly fanatical as long as the movement exists, will not follow the example of religious fanatics and die the death of martyrs (even though they were only too willing to die the death of robots). Rather they will quietly give up the movement as a bad bet and look around for another promising fiction or wait until the former fiction regains enough strength to establish another mass movement.

BENJAMIN CARTER HETT
The Death of Democracy

Alongside the viciousness of much of German politics in the Weimar years was an incongruous innocence: few people could imagine the worst possibilities. A civilized nation could not possibly vote for Hitler, some had thought. When he became chancellor nonetheless, millions expected his time in office to be short and ineffectual. Germany was a notoriously law-abiding as well as cultured land. How could a German government systematically brutalize its own people?

German Jews were highly assimilated and patriotic. Many refused to leave their homeland, even as things got worse and worse. "I am German and am waiting for the Germans to come back; they-have gone to ground somewhere," Victor Klemperer wrote in his diary-he was the son of a rabbi and a veteran of the First World War who chose to stay, and miraculously survived.

Few Germans in 1933 could imagine Treblinka or Auschwitz, the mass shootings of Babi Yar or the death marches of the last months of the Second World War. It is hard to blame them for not foreseeing the unthinkable. Yet their innocence failed them, and they were catastrophically wrong about their future. We who come later have one advantage over them: we have their example before us.

BERTRAND RUSSELL

First they fascinate the fools, then they muzzle the intelligent.

ABHIJIT NASKAR
Neurosonnets: The Naskar Art of Neuroscience

When someone plays fast and loose with rights and freedom, their place is either in the jungle or in a mental institution, not in office. Fascism, fundamentalism and nationalism, these are the ultimate mental illness.

HANNAH ARENDT
The Origins of Totalitarianism

In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world, the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and nothing was true.

Constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie, but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore.

A people that can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong.

With such a people, you can do whatever you want.

HANNAH ARENDT
The Origins of Totalitarianism

One of the greatest advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive.

 

Tick-tock, MAGAts.

Tick-tock.

Shout out the fucking third-party voters and the 90 million eligible Americans who REFUSED to vote.

“We always have to obey the laws, but we also have homegrown criminals that push people into subways, that hit elderly ladies on the back of the head with a baseball bat when they’re not looking, that are absolute monsters. I'd like to include them in people to get out of the country. They're as bad as anybody that comes in. We have bad ones too. I'm all for it."

JOHN E. KRAMER
Blythe

The people’s silence is a tyrant’s greatest advocate. The less captives talked, the less they knew; the less they knew, the more they feared; and the more they feared, the more easily others could manipulate them to their own ends, the more easily the captives could be controlled.

Reading

David Enrich
MURDER THE TRUTH
Fear, the First Amendment, and a Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful

HANNAH ARENDT
The Origins of Totalitarianism

One of the greatest advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive.

HANNAH ARENDT
The Origins of Totalitarianism

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.

RAY BRADBURY
The Martian Chronicles

They began by controlling books of cartoons and then detective books and, of course, films, one way or another, one group or another, political bias, religious prejudice, union pressure; there was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

Religion is a totalitarian belief. It is the wish to be a slave. It is the desire that there be an unalterable, unchallengeable, tyrannical authority who can convict you of thought crime while you are asleep, who can subject you to total surveillance around the clock every waking and sleeping minute of your life, before you're born and, even worse and where the real fun begins, after you're dead. A celestial North Korea. 

Who wants this to be true? Who but a slave desires such a ghastly fate? I've been to North Korea. It has a dead man as its president, Kim Jong-Il is only head of the party and head of the army. He's not head of the state. That office belongs to his deceased father, Kim Il-Sung. It's a necrocracy, a thanatocracy. It's one short of a trinity I might add. The son is the reincarnation of the father. It is the most revolting and utter and absolute and heartless tyranny the human species has ever evolved. 

But at least you can fucking die and leave North Korea!