“These anti-democratic forces will use fear, chaos and hatred…” Chris Hedges

“At no period in American history has our democracy been in such peril or the possibility of totalitarianism as real. Our way of life is over. Our profligate consumption is finished. Our children will never have the standard of living we had. This is the bleak future. This is reality.” 

…

“There are powerful corporate entities, fearful of losing their influence and wealth, arrayed against us.  They are waiting for a moment to strike, a national crisis that will allow them, in the name of national security and moral renewal, to take complete control. The tools are in place. These antidemocratic forces, which will seek to make an alliance with the Christian Right and other extremists, will use fear, chaos, the hatred for the ruling elites, and the specter of left-wing dissent and terrorism to impose draconian controls to extinguish our democracy. And while they do it, they will be waving the American flag, chanting patriotic slogans, promising law and order, and clutching the Christian cross. By then, exhausted and broken, we may have lost the power to resist.” Pp 189

Hedges, Christopher: Empire Of Illusion (New York: Nation Books 2009) pp 145, pp 189

“HOW SHOULD WE JUDGE THE POTPOURRI OF XENOPHOBIC, RACIST, AND HYPERNATIONALIST MOVEMENTS NOW IN THE NEWS?” William Brustein

“Could another racist, xenophobic party come to power today? The logic of the argument presented here leads me to answer yes: evil may be the horrifying outcome of rational politics. If average Germans had known in 1932 what they new in 1945 about the consequences, of Nazism, the Nazi Party would never have attracted a mass following. The Nazi Party skillfully cloaked its aims until it had achieved power. Many present and future demagogues may similarly masque their message of hate. It is unlikely that we can always detect evil before it reveals itself. How should we judge the potpourri of xenophobic, racist, and hypernationalist movements and parties that are now in the news?”

William Brustein, The Social Origins Of The Nazi Party, 1925-1933 (Yale University: New Haven 1996) pp 182

“These Clothes Were Both Splendid And Invisible:” Eric Hobsbawm

“As always, it was not the sophisticated intelligences which were prepared to recognize that the emperor wore no clothes; they spent their time inventing theories to explain why these clothes were both splendid and invisible.”

Eric Hobsbawm: The Age Of Empire. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London: 1987. Pp 250

Long Submission to Despots: Johann Gottfried Herder

“Everywhere human beings are what they have made of themselves, what they had the power and the desire to become. …Long submission to despotism… was not established by the might of the despots. The easy, trusting weakness of the subjects and, later, their patient indolence were its strong and only supports. For it is, of course, easier to bear with patience than to act with vigor.”

Johann Gotfried Herder: Against Pure Reason. Translated and Edited by Marcia Bunge. Wipf and Sone, Eugene Oregon: 1993. pp. 57.

If You Want A Picture Of The Future: George Orwell

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face- forever.

Do you begin to see then, what kind of a world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress toward more pain. The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love and justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph and self-abasement. Everything else we will destroy- everything.”

George Orwell- 1984 (Provide Complete Citation)

The Feet that Trample Down your Cities, They Are Your Own: Ettiene de La Boetie

“Poor, wretched and stupid peoples, nations determined on your own misfortune and blind to your own good! You let yourselves be deprived before your own eyes of the best part of our own revenues; your fields are plundered, your homes robbed, your family heirlooms taken away. You live in such a way that you cannot claim a single thing as your own; and it would seem that you consider yourselves lucky to be loaned your property, your families, and your very lives. All this havoc, this misfortune, this ruin, descends upon you not from alien foes, but from the one enemy whom you yourselves render as powerful as he is, for whom you bravely go to war, for whose ‘greatness’ you do not refuse to offer your own bodies unto death. He who thus domineers over you has only two eyes, only two hands, only one body, no more than is possessed by the least man among the infinite number dwelling in your cities; he has indeed nothing more than the power that you confer upon him to destroy you. Where has he acquired enough eyes to spy upon you, if you do not provide them yourselves? How can he have so many arms to beat you with, if he does not borrow them from you? The feet that trample down your cities, where does he get them if they are not your own? How does he have any power over you except through you? How would he dare assail you if he had no cooperation from you? What could he do to you if you yourselves did not connive with the thief who plunders you, if you were not accomplices of the murderer who kills you, if you were not traitors to yourselves? You sow your crops in order that he may ravage them, you install and furnish your homes in order to give him goods to pillage; you rear your daughters that you may gratify his lust; you bring up your children in order that he may confer upon them the greatest ‘privilege’ he knows- to be led into his battles, to be delivered into butchery, to be made the servants of his greed and the instruments of his vengeance; you yield your bodies into hard labor in order that he may indulge in his delights and wallow in his filthy pleasures; you weaken yourselves in order to make him the stronger and the mightier to hold you in check. From all these indignities, such as the very beasts of the field would not endure, you can deliver yourselves if you try, not by taking action, but merely by willing to be free. Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces.”

Ettiene de La Boetie, cited in Jensen, Derrick and George Daffran: Welcome To The Machine. Chelsea Green, White River VT, 2004 pp. 195-7