“The scientific concept of dictatorship means nothing else than no laws, absolutely unrestricted by rules.” – Vladimir Lenin
By Lenin’s definition, we no longer live in a constitutional republic called the United States of America, but rather in a Soviet-style soyuz – a union, or “community,” in which the ruling elite can do anything it wants to any of us at any time because they are entirely unrestrained by law. All of the necessary elements are in place for full-scale, undisguised totalitarian rule; all that remains is for the ruling elite to “perfect” the “community” it has established. This can be done through what a classified 1962 State Department study called a series of “sudden, violent shocks” – such as a war, an act of mass terrorism (most likely of the false-flag variety), or a “grid-down” event precipitated through sabotage or a natural disaster. What we are witnessing could be described as “scalable totalitarianism” or perhaps Stalinism on a case-by-case basis. “Scalable” is a term commonly used to describe an information system (such as a web platform) that can be enlarged and expanded to fit existing needs. “Stalinism,” which refers to the mega-murderer Josef Stalin who succeeded Lenin as ruler of the Soviet Union, is a system in which an entire population is regarded as unindicted criminals subject to prosecution, imprisonment, or liquidation at any time.
Sovietized “Justice”
The operational principle of Stalin’s “justice” system was: “You find me the man, I’ll find the crime.” In contemporary America, warns civil liberties attorney and constitutional scholar Harvey Silverglate, each of us commits at least three criminal acts every day that could be construed as federal felonies by a sufficiently inventive and malicious prosecutor. Once fed into the machinery of oppression called the “justice system,” an American – though innocent of any actual criminal offense – will almost invariably be found guilty of something. This is because our system of due process, which was the product of centuries of Anglo-Saxon common law tradition, has been Sovietized. In a previous newsletter (February 2013), we examined the fashion in which the U.S. court system has been remodeled into a culturally adapted approximation of the Soviet system. Under Russia’s reformist Czar Alexander, Russia embraced the western model of a jury-based court system in 1864. When Lenin and the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, the jury-based system was destroyed and replaced with “People’s Courts” composed of a judge and a panel of two to six Party-appointed “assessors” who heard all of the evidence and decided all questions of both fact and law. Those assessors “became known as ‘nodders’ for simply nodding in agreement with the judge,” wrote federal Judge John C. Coughenour in an article published by the Seattle University Law Review: “People’s assessors virtually always agreed with judges; acquittals were virtually nonexistent…. [U]nlike our adversarial system, the Soviet inquisitorial criminal justice system neither prioritized nor emphasized the rights of individual defendants, but instead paid homage to the interests of the state.” What Judge Coughenour describes as a contrast between the Soviet and American legal systems has, tragically, become one of the strongest points of similarity between the systems today. In the pseudo-legal proceedings called “trials” in contemporary America, the defendant wins only once out of every 212 times, which is a decent approximation of “never wins.” During the late Stalin era, Soviet procurators were ordered to achieve a 100 percent conviction rate; their counterparts in contemporary U.S. federal courts have essentially accomplished that feat. This is because the federal system, like its Soviet predecessor, is designed to serve the interests of the State — and federal juries are typically purged of anyone unwilling to play the role of “nodder” in a show trial. All of this helps explain why the United (Soviet) States of America now has the largest prison population in history. In June 2010, an official in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, David Barron, signed a secret memorandum justifying the summary execution of U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki through a drone strike in Yemen. In late September, Barack Obama nominated Barron to serve on the U.S. First Circuit Court. The advertised purpose of the Office of Legal Counsel, or OLC, is to explain to the president what the law requires him to do. Since the administration of George W. Bush, however, the mission of that office has been to devise official justifications for presidential lawlessness. Rather than explaining the law to the president, the OLC’s task is to explain why the president’s will is to be considered the law. Barron, and an associate named Martin Lederman, were instructed to compose a brief validating the pre-determined decision to execute al-Awlaki – without conviction, trial, or even formal criminal charges. This meant reviewing a carefully selected collection of intelligence reports depicting the cleric as an operational leader of al-Qaeda, and searching diligently for exceptions to statutes forbidding the murder of a U.S. citizen overseas. Barron’s assignment was to exalt presidential power by nullifying judicial oversight. Now he will continue that work as a federal judge. Once again, this arrangement is very similar to what existed in Stalin’s Soviet Union.
Sovietized “Law Enforcement”
The traditional American justice system included locally accountable peace officers – usually the Sheriff and his deputies, often supplemented with constables who served limited roles. The primary duty of such officials was to protect persons and property, thereby keeping the peace. That system began to change dramatically in the late 1960s with the introduction of paramilitary auxiliaries called “SWAT” teams. By the mid-1990s, local SWAT teams had become an adjunct to the Pentagon as part of the “War on Drugs.” Today, local police departments – and county sheriff’s offices — are now entirely federalized and largely militarized. At least 80,000 SWAT raids take place each year, nearly all of which are carried out for routine drug enforcement or warrant service. SWAT teams are rarely, if ever, used to respond to actual emergencies, such as the recent Washington Navy Yards shooting – in which the SWAT team was told to stand down once the killing had commenced. What are SWAT raids used for, if not to take down an active shooter who is killing people? In June 2011, police in Laguna Beach, California, dispatched a SWAT team to raid the Rowland Heights home of Marilyn Injeyan, a 71-year-old retired schoolteacher. Her son, Vahan, was described as a “person of interest” in a vandalism attack involving a stink bomb. Fearing that the 5-foot-3, 125-pound female septuagenarian posed a genuine threat to his safety, SWAT commander Sgt. Robert Rahaeuser ordered that the terrified and compliant woman be seized and handcuffed. The officer who carried out that order yanked Injeyan’s arms behind her back with sufficient force to tear both of her rotator cuffs. The shock and trauma caused the elderly woman to urinate on herself. Neither Injeyan nor her son was ever charged with a crime. Mrs. Injeyan filed a lawsuit against the city. On September 11 of this year, U.S. District Judge Beverly O’Connell dismissed the lawsuit, ruling that the “cloak of immunity” enjoyed by police remains intact even when they act “maliciously and without probable cause.” The judge also ordered the now 73-year old victim pay the city’s legal costs. In Communist countries, family members of those executed as state enemies had to pay for the bullets used to kill them. We’re not far from that now.
Sovietized Culture
America’s system of ordered liberty was the outgrowth of what could be called a Christian Individualist culture. From this perspective, the individual is a created being enjoying sovereignty over his life and property, and morally required to respect and protect the rights of other individuals as zealously as he guards his own. All of this presupposed a culture built on the institution of the traditional family, which, as John Locke and subsequent thinkers like G.K. Chesterton understood, was the only institution that can reconcile the individual with the larger society. This is why collectivists have always sought to destroy the conventional family, and to replace it with the concept of parens patriae – the “fatherhood” of the State. Writing in the Winter 1996 issue of the Marxist journal Dissent, Michael Walzer enumerated some of the cultural victories won by the left since the 1960s: • “The visible impact of feminism.” • “The effects of affirmative action.” • “The emergence of gay rights politics, and … the attention paid to it in the media.” • “The acceptance of cultural pluralism.” • “The transformation of family life,” including “rising divorce rates, changing sexual mores, new household arrangements — and, again, the portrayal of all this in the media.” • “The progress of secularization; the fading of religion in general and Christianity in particular from the public sphere — classrooms, textbooks, legal codes, holidays, and so on.” • “The virtual abolition of capital punishment.” • “The legalization of abortion.” • “The first successes in the effort to regulate and limit the private ownership of guns.” Significantly, Walzer admitted that these policies were imposed upon our society by “liberal elites,” rather than being driven “by the pressure of a mass movement or a majoritarian party.” These changes “reflect the leftism or liberalism of lawyers, judges, federal bureaucrats, professors, school teachers, social workers, journalists, television and screen writers — not the population at large,” noted Walzer. Rather than building “stable or lasting movements or creat[ing] coherent constituencies,” the left focused on “winning the Gramscian war of position” as part of an effort to collectivize society. Although many of these movements are depicted as efforts to expand individual liberty, they are promoted to expand the State’s role in mediating private life, thereby disrupting natural associations and institutions. Let’s take the most obvious example of this process at work this year – the effort to legitimize the novel arrangement called “same-sex marriage.” Nearly everybody caught in this controversy has embraced the idea that marriage is a government-created institution, rather than being a natural institution that existed before the creation of the political state. Traditionalists demand that the state “protect” marriage by officially defining it; “equality” activists demand that the state expand the definition to include “same-sex” couples. Few people have had the presence of mind to point out that the State has NO legitimate role in marriage whatsoever. The dialectical outcome of this issue is a dramatic, and potentially fatal, expansion of the State’s control over the institution it has long sought to destroy. The objective is to destroy all natural institutional barriers – the family, religious fellowships, voluntary private associations — between the State and the individual, and to deprive the individual of the means of defending himself against the State’s
Sovietized Education
To be a Progressive is to believe that officially sanctioned coercion is the magic ingredient that makes government policies and institutions morally superior to private, voluntary association. Progressives treat the State as a divine entity, and generally ignore the corruption and violence that are inescapable elements of all State action. Few, if any, Progressive writers have exhibited this tendency more prominently than Daily Beast columnist Michelle Goldberg. In a recent essay entitled “The Sinister Side of Home Schooling,” Goldberg used a single horrific case of child abuse involving home-schooling parents as if it were representative of the millions of conscientious parents who love and educate their children. This act of misrepresentation-by-anecdote was intended to demonstrate that homeschooling is supposedly dangerous to children because it is unregulated. A little more than a week earlier, the same Michelle Goldberg published an essay denouncing efforts to impose health and safety regulations on abortion clinics – facilities that have the sole function of carrying out State-licensed child killing. Such efforts, shrieked Goldberg, are a form of “right-wing terrorism.” For Progressives of Goldberg’s ilk, killing a child with the State’s blessing is a sacred right, but educating a child without the State’s sanction is a crime. This is because the purpose of government-administered education is to transform children – individuals created in God’s image and invested with immense creative potential – into compliant cogs in the collectivist wheel. This is the malignant vision behind the “Common Core” initiative, and it explains why parents critical of Common Core are treated in much the same way dissidents were treated in the Soviet Union. Towson, Maryland, resident Robert Small was arrested at a public forum on September 19 for asking questions about the School District’s implementation of the national “Common Core” standards. While school officials smirked at him, Towson, a 46-year-old father, was shoved and dragged away by an off-duty police officer who lied in his official report in order to charge Robert Small with “assaulting an officer” – a charge that has a potential 10-year prison sentence. “Don’t stand for this!” Robert Small pleaded as he was dragged away. “You are sitting here like cattle! Is this America?” Well, yes, this is America – Soviet America. “Common Core” is Soviet-style collectivist indoctrination, coupled with intelligence gathering. It incorporates Vospitane – so-called “character education” designed to destroy a sense of self-ownership and replace it with the toxic concept of self-less-ness and duty to the community. It also includes an aggressive system of testing and information collection intended to make both the child and his household entirely transparent to the State. Common Core has been imposed by the central government and ratified by “local” officials through “consensus” – without local input or accountability. Thus the treatment inflicted on Robert Small was entirely predictable – and a foretaste of what is to come as the collectivist ruling elite continues to build its “perfect community.”
Sovietized Economy
In October 2008, the U.S. became a fully realized socialist economy. No less an authority on the subject than then-Venezuelan ruler Hugo Chavez, a protégé of Fidel Castro, noted that because of TARP and the Wall Street bailout, the U.S. has a government-controlled economy not much different from that of Communist Cuba. Over the past several years, the Federal Reserve has printed (or digitally created) hundreds of billions of dollars out of nothing in order to fund the bailouts. There is no logical stopping place between where we are today, the financial events that took place in the Weimar Republic, and the hyper-inflation that destoyed the Soviet Union. 2013 has witnessed the first wave of what will become a cascade of municipal bankruptcies – Detroit’s being the most dramatic so far. Outside of the coercive sector, the economy is entirely moribund. Small businesses are being driven into extinction, and the monstrosity called Obamacare will destroy what few remain.
The Totalitarian “Community” is nearly “Perfected”
For a few decades, the U.S. has lived under a system often called “soft totalitarianism.” In 2008, that ideology was replaced with a fast-hardening variety. The mold has been prepared, and the ideology that was poured into it has started to set. source
