A Totalitarian State Abhors Freedom and Uses its Security Apparatus to Silence Critics Through Fear

"They hate us for our freedoms." GW Bush once said. And he was right, except 'they' are the fascists. Fascists hate people who are free. "The object of efficient totalitarian states, as George Orwell understood, is to create a climate in which people do not think of rebelling, a climate in which government killing and torture are used against only a handful of unmanageable renegades. The totalitarian state achieves this control," Chris Hedges wrote recently, "by systematically crushing human spontaneity, and by extension human freedom. It ceaselessly peddles fear to keep a population traumatized and immobilized. It turns the courts, along with legislative bodies, into mechanisms to legalize the crimes of state."

This isn't news. The new book, entitled 'The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover's Secret FBI' written by Betty Medsger, traces the history of the FBI, led by Hoover, and the anti-war and social justice movements of the late 60's and 70's whose members became targets of the law enforcement agency's clandestine COINTELPRO program and how the anti-Vietnam-War academics and activists who, 43 years ago, stole FBI documents that for the first time revealed J. Edgar Hoover's widespread, obsessive, illegal spying on dissident groups.

Hoover too sucked up seemingly irrelevant information on obviously innocent people then used it later to blackmail them, or those around them, for his own ends.  Hoover would have loved living in the Internet age. In it other tentacles of the 'security' state, who learned from Hoover, have developed even more ruthless tactics to control their friends and enemies alike. They've also learned that total secrecy about their nefarious activities is far less effective as an instrument of fear propagation than allowing some of them to be leaked.

Nowadays it's impossible to know if groups like the Former NSA Senior Executives &; Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity are the honest brokers of information they seem to be or tools of the 'Great Satan' spinning out planted mis-information that they themselves believe to be true. As The Mud Report has said before  if, even for a moment, folks could step back and put those fears into a larger context they'd understand that the real objective of  totalitarian fear mongering is to hide the failure of capitalism to deliver real freedom.

Real freedom is an internal condition, it can be nutured by each of us or it can be buried by our fears. One section from an excellent article i read yesterday titled 'In Chiapas, A Revolution That Won't Go Away' explains this better than any words this writer can. It's about a little boy named Diego and sub-titled 'The Boy Who Is Free':

"Diego is part of the first generation of Zapatista children whose births are registered by one of the organization’s own civil judges. In the eyes of his father, he is one of the first fully independent human beings. He was born in Zapatista territory, attends a Zapatista school, lives on unregistered land, and his body is free of pesticides and genetically modified organisms. Adding to his autonomy is the fact that nothing about him -- not his name, weight, eye color, or birth date -- is officially registered with the Mexican government. His family does not receive a peso of government aid, nor does it pay a peso worth of taxes. Not even the name of Diego’s town appears on any official map." - Laura Gottesdiener

The totalitarian state cannot condone real freedom. They are now nearly invulnerable to insurrection, but they are vulnerable to those who, as Sub-Commandante Marcos says, simply ignore them, who dropout, who refuse to live in fear and choose to live in freedom.