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Margaret Anna Alice's avatar

Thank you for yet another glorious unveiling of the GloboCap-techno-medical-fascist-tyranny presently engulfing our world.

You mentioned setting aside your “satirical schtick to try to understand it.” The three books I have found most astoundingly illuminating in that regard are Sebastian Haffner’s Defying Hitler; Milton Mayer’s They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1930–45; and Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland.

I cite the latter two extensively in my Letter to a Colluder: Stop Enabling Tyranny (https://margaretannaalice.substack.com/p/letter-to-a-colluder-stop-enabling), the second in the series I kicked off with Letter to a Covidian: A Time-Travel Experiment (https://margaretannaalice.substack.com/p/letter-to-a-covidian-a-time-travel).

Your quote, “The essence of totalitarianism — regardless of which costumes and ideology it wears — is a desire to completely control society, every aspect of society, every individual behavior and thought,” reminds me of this segment from They Thought They Were Free:

“Take Germany as a city cut off from the outside world by flood or fire advancing from every direction. The mayor proclaims martial law, suspending council debate. He mobilizes the populace, assigning each section its tasks. Half the citizens are at once engaged directly in the public business. Every private act—a telephone call, the use of an electric light, the service of a physician—becomes a public act. Every private right—to take a walk, to attend a meeting, to operate a printing press—becomes a public right. Every private institution—the hospital, the church, the club—becomes a public institution. Here, although we never think to call it by any name but pressure of necessity, we have the whole formula of totalitarianism.

“The individual surrenders his individuality without a murmur, without, indeed, a second thought—and not just his individual hobbies and tastes, but his individual occupation, his individual family concerns, his individual needs. The primordial community, the tribe, re-emerges, its preservation the first function of all its members. Every normal personality of the day before becomes an ‘authoritarian personality.’ A few recalcitrants have to be disciplined (vigorously, under the circumstances) for neglect or betrayal of their duty. A few groups have to be watched or, if necessary, taken in hand—the antisocial elements, the liberty-howlers, the agitators among the poor, and the known criminal gangs. For the rest of the citizens—95 per cent or so of the population—duty is now the central fact of life. They obey, at first awkwardly but, surprisingly soon, spontaneously.

“The community is suddenly an organism, a single body and a single soul, consuming its members for its own purposes. For the duration of the emergency the city does not exist for the citizen but the citizen for the city.”

If you’re interested in reading a truckload of salient excerpts from They Thought They Were Free, I featured it in my first Recommendations Roundup (https://margaretannaalice.substack.com/p/recommendations-roundup-1-predicting).

Apologies for the lengthy response, but that excerpt seemed so pertinent to this article, I couldn’t resist including it.

I look forward to our interview and will sing out when I’m ready :-)

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dg's avatar

I've been trying to understand what is going on with the people who go along with all of this. I've lost most of my friends over this , save for one. Most of my family too. I have not seen a better explanation than this interview with Mattias Desmet, Professor of Clinical Psychology at Ghent University in Belgium. It is long, and not the easiest interview, but I really think the information can be helpful - it was for me. https://youtu.be/uLDpZ8daIVM. It does not try and explain who is behind it, but why the masses are falling for it.

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