Covid and the Psychology of Totalitarianism

Never Again? Israel’s mask mob echo the Holocaust | The Conservative Woman - Donna Edmunds:

June 30, 2022 - "In January this year, a young woman went to the opera.... The woman, known only as M, has a medical mask exemption and arrived with her face uncovered. Soon after, she was violently turned upon by her fellow opera-goers. ‘There were about 400 attendees, about 100 of them were shouting at me (people physically blocking my way to my seats and not letting me through) people telling me not to stand near them and shooing me away,’ she wrote in her Telegram post. ‘A woman hit me on the head. I didn’t speak a single word to all these people, I was literally cowering in place and at no point did I speak or reply or gesture to any of them, after the initial blow up I just went straight to security.’

"Thankfully, the security staff were supportive of M, moving away the more aggressive among the crowd and threatening to evict them. Some of the staff seemed shaken by what they had witnessed. They escorted M to her seat and stood guard at the end of her row throughout the performance. This scene would be shocking enough had it taken place somewhere like Berlin, which has seen this sort of irrational out-group persecution by supposedly enlightened citizens before. It’s all the more disturbing that it actually took place in Tel Aviv, Israel.

"Israel is a country awash with Holocaust memorials.... Yet when Covid struck in March 2020, Israel was among the countries that most enthusiastically embraced the harshest of public health measures. Its citizens suffered months of lockdowns, business closures, school closures, mask mandates and the most insulting policy of all: the ‘green pass’ – a vaccine passport which segregated society into the ‘clean’ and the ‘unclean’. Deckchairs appeared on Tel Aviv beach labelled ‘reserved for vaccinated people only’. The parallels with our history, only eight decades behind us, were striking and alarming, yet astonishingly the majority were content to sit inside warm restaurants during the winter of 2021, watching those who were unwilling or unable to be vaccinated turned away or shivering outside under inadequate patio heaters without a murmur of dissent....

"We know that nearly 400,000 Jews died in the Warsaw Ghetto, but how many of us know why the ghetto was created? That it was a public health policy? When the Germans invaded Poland in 1939 and bombed Warsaw, the city’s sewerage system was damaged and typhus quickly spread. German propaganda already blamed Jews for spreading disease, so, although typhus was found throughout the city, it was the Jewish neighbourhoods that became ‘restricted epidemic areas’. Although by the summer of 1940 typhus cases were falling, German doctors persuaded the authorities to create a ghetto to prevent further spread. The creation of the ghetto, where overcrowding and lack of food were rife, caused a spike in cases.

"Fast-forward to 2022, and not everyone was content to go along with the narrative. Some of us wondered how so many could be so blind to the history repeating in front of their eyes. What did those Tel Aviv opera-goers think they were doing when they mobbed M?

"A Belgian psychologist and academic gives us the answer. Mattias Desmet has spent the last few years studying the rise of totalitarian regimes and was already uncomfortable with the direction Western societies were headed in when Covid hit.... In his book The Psychology of Totalitarianism, Desmet explains that societies in which a large number of people have anxious, lonely lives lacking in meaning are ripe for totalitarianism to set in. In those conditions, people are looking for a narrative that creates purpose and a sense of shared endeavour. Many people found exactly that in the Covid era. If left unchecked, the false narrative of mass formation descends into violence and persecution. It descends into the Holocaust.

"Desmet explained what is required to avert this dismal fate. ‘It’s really crucial that the people who are not in the process of mass formation continue to speak out, because if they don’t, the mass hypnosis becomes deeper and deeper, and typically reaches the point where the masses become so fanatically convinced of the narrative they believe in, that they believe it is necessary to eliminate the people who don’t go along with it,’ he said. ‘This is because once someone is in mass formation he feels an overwhelming solidarity, and he’s convinced that people who don’t share the solidarity, who don’t go along with the masses, lack solidarity, lack citizenship. Consequently they are not human any more and have to be destroyed.’

"He added: ‘If dissident voices stop speaking out, then the process that happened in the Soviet Union around 1930 and in Germany around 1935 will typically start to happen [again]. Once the dissident voices, the opposition, stop speaking out within the public space, within a period of six months to one year, the cruelty starts.’

"When I heard about M’s experience, I knew I had to speak out. And I wasn’t the only one. Along with my partner and a few others, most notably historian Andrew Barr, we set about writing a declaration – a warning – from the Jews to the world. We have been here before. We know where division, demonisation and mass psychosis lead. We cannot let it happen again.

"Some have said that we are insulting those who died in the Holocaust by highlighting the clear parallels between Covid policies and the events leading to the Holocaust. We say the opposite: that only by learning from history and ensuring that nothing of the sort ever happens again can the memories of those who died truly be honoured.... Others have said that our declaration has been made redundant by the apparent rollback of Covid policies. Flights are taking off again, people are unmasked, the world is returning to a semblance of normality. To those people I say two things: first, in May, Joe Biden stated frankly: ‘Covid isn’t over.’ Second, our governments have had a taste of absolute power. They now know they can lock us up at the drop of a hat. If they’ve done it once, they will do it again, unless we make it abundantly clear that we won’t be so meek the next time....

" I invite you to sign the Isaiah 62 Declaration here. https://isaiah62declaration.com/"
                For Zion’s sake I will not keep silent
                For Jerusalem’s sake I will not be still
                Isaiah 62:1

Read more: https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/never-again-israels-mask-mob-echo-the-holocaust/

Authoritarianism in a time of Covid

 The New Authoritarians | Tablet - Alex Gutentag:

March 29, 2022 - "After Trump’s election, many commentators expressed anxiety that his followers would plunge the country into far-right authoritarianism. Instead, it is the class of college-educated Democrats that now openly argues for the value of blind submission to authority and the elimination of personal freedoms.... It no longer poses a mere threat to democracy — it has become a full-fledged attack on basic democratic principles. Far from upholding civil liberties, the self-proclaimed 'resistance' to Trumpism has itself exhibited many hallmarks of authoritarianism: suppression of dissent, demand for unquestioning obedience, and tight control over the flow of information.... 

"The TV production of Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale premiered on April 26, 2017, and was widely touted in liberal media outlets as a 'prescient' 'mirror' of the country under Trump.... Yet based on the domineering COVID-era behavior of the show’s own target audience, The Handmaid’s Tale appears to have been less of a warning to viewers and more of a handbook. Forced and coercive medical procedures, adoption of mandatory new garbs, censorship, and frozen bank accounts were central to the totalitarian state depicted in the novel and the show. In the end, this program found its real-world parallel not in autocratic moves from the right, but in liberal-approved measures like vaccine mandates, mask requirements of dubious medical value, restrictions on speech, and seizure of protesters’ financial assets—all of which were vocally supported by the affluent laptop class.

"This is not simply a matter of hypocrisy. It is only by painting themselves as victims fighting against their oppressors that college-educated professionals can rationalize their own authoritarianism. The cult of victimhood conjures the specter of fascism, misogyny, or white nationalism in order to justify blatantly repressive measures. This is why, for example, the professional class consistently portrayed unvaccinated people as Trump supporters even though in many major cities vaccine passports mostly excluded Democrat-voting Black residents from indoor establishments. Under the guise of combatting anti-vax extremism, woke liberal politicians embraced segregation and the exact kind of 'systemic racism' they claimed to oppose. While considering themselves to be on the side of righteousness and rationality, commentators called for hospitals to reject unvaccinated patients, and some even celebrated their deaths. This is precisely the type of punitive, regressive tendency that progressives warned would be a consequence of Trump’s election....

Photo: Miles Probyn, Associated Press

"President Biden likewise encouraged Big Tech to deplatform anyone with alternative views about COVID vaccines by presenting the people sharing these views as literal murderers who were 'killing people.' Sweeping censorship that amounted to digital book burning helped create an illusion of consensus even though many of the claims prohibited on social media (such as the fact that the vaccines did not prevent transmission) proved to be true. Far from private companies exercising discretion over how their platforms are used, these tech companies operated in coordination with the executive branch, meaning their clampdown on speech was in violation of the First Amendment. This is exactly the type of orchestrated silencing effort we were once told only happens under dictatorships.

"Moreover, it is not social media but mainstream news outlets that have been the largest purveyors of 'misinformation.' One accusation often made against Trump supporters is that they blindly and unthinkingly believe false claims. But during the pandemic this was consistently true of college-educated Democrats, who still hold the most skewed and erroneous views about COVID. In 2022, 48% of 'very liberal' people still believed that COVID posed a 'great risk' to children’s health despite widely available evidence that the risk COVID poses to children is miniscule. Between January 2021 and September 2021, the CDC reported that 280 children died with COVID (later the CDC would admit that it had inflated its total death numbers by almost 25%). According to the latest available data (from 2015-19), flu and pneumonia killed more children annually. Heart disease, firearms, drowning, and motor vehicles all pose a much greater risk to children than COVID. Believing that COVID is a 'great risk' for kids, justifying child mask mandates and school closures, is exactly the kind of persistent scientific illiteracy of which journalists accuse Trump supporters.

"College-educated Democrats have also expressed growing support for the national security surveillance state.... In 2017, 69% of Democrats said the FBI was doing a 'good' or 'excellent' job, compared to 49% of Republicans (and 44% of Democrats in 2003). Also in 2017, the CIA had a net favorability of 32% for Democrats, compared to a net favorability of just 4% for Republicans. Democratic support for federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies has coincided with increasing cooperation with tech companies and media outlets. This was demonstrated by the suppression of the now 'verified' 2020 Hunter Biden laptop story, which was restricted on Twitter and Facebook while the media and dozens of intelligence experts attempted to discredit it as 'Russian disinformation.' 

"The beneficiaries of a mounting culture of censorship, silence, and exclusion are not just Democrats who see some political gains. More significantly, it is their financial backers. Throughout the COVID era, the party and its affiliated voter base of white-collar workers have solidified their role as ideological enforcers for billionaires and corporations. During lockdowns and vaccine mandates, tech and pharmaceutical companies made astronomical profits and were aided and abetted at every turn by their pajama-class foot soldiers. While lockdowns plunged millions of Americans into conditions of unemployment, despair, and hunger, it gave professionals a luxury: a time to rest at home and be free from stressors like commuting. As billionaires saw their wealth surge, the upper-middle class stayed silent or complicit.... 

"This silencing had serious repercussions. It is now commonly acknowledged, for example, that school closures were a mistake, but those who spoke up early lost friends, jobs, and opportunities. What is dismissed as cancel culture is actually central to the authoritarian project. A new idea ('flatten the curve,' 'save Grandma,' 'two weeks to stop the spread') can be introduced at any moment, and if it’s framed as morally necessary and unquestionable, it will receive resounding support from the most well-educated class.... When new moral panics, rigid rules, and speech codes are constantly being introduced, the main function they serve is to test people’s loyalty to the dominant ideology."

Read more: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/new-authoritarians

Covid-19 pandemic is a crisis of democracy

A Crisis of Democracy

by George J. Dance

Image courtesy U.S. Global Leadership Coalition.

It is no exaggeration to call the coronavirus pandemic a crisis. While the virus itself has turned out to be less dangerous than Covid Cultists believe – not one country has experienced the millions of deaths they have been prophesying since March – governments' responses to it throughout the democratic world have spawned numerous other crises, from mass unemployment to civil unrest, that have been progressively tearing away at the social fabric. The very idea of a democratic state, as a viable form of government, is being called into serious question. 

"Democracy" (rule by all the people) has always been not one concept, but a bundle of coexisting ones. Two of those concepts of democracy have always been in conflict. The coronavirus crisis has exposed those hidden conflicts as never before.   

One vision of democracy, which we can call liberal or libertarian democracy, was summed up by economist (and armchair sociologist) Ludwig von Mises this way:

For the sake of domestic peace liberalism aims at democratic government. Democracy is therefore not a revolutionary institution. On the contrary; it is the very means of preventing revolutions and civil wars. It provides a method for the peaceful adjustment of government to the will of the majority. When the men in office and their policies no longer please the majority of the nation, they will – in the next election – be eliminated and replaced by other men espousing different policies. 

Democracy, in other words, served a libertarian end: as a means of eliminating force from politics, it was a major step toward the libertarian ideal of eliminating force from social relations. So it was good in itself. As well, as many libertarian ideas do, it brought other significant benefits. 

One benefit was to instantiate what sociologist Vilfredo Pareto called the "circulation of elites". Every human society of record has been divided into an elite, which lives the good life and calls the shots, and the riffraff underneath; perhaps, given how humans live in groups, that division is a necessary part of society. In precapitalist societies, that division was fixed: if you were born a lord you could expect to be a lord all your life; if you were born a peasant, you could expect to always be a peasant. The rise of capitalism, though, abolished that fixed order, making it possible for individuals to move into and out of the elite; the lowest floor sweeper in a factory could theoretically become a factory owner, and vice versa. Democracy extended the 'circulation' principle into government: in America any native-born child could grow up to be President. 

As a further benefit of adopting the 'circulation' principle, members of the governing elite now had to consider the point of view of the non-elite as well. A Prime Minister might be able to pile high taxes on the private citizens; but now he had to face the real possibility of becoming a private citizen and having to pay those taxes himself. That brought about a common interest, on the part of governors and citizens alike, in limiting what government could do to its citizens. Thus democracy led to the idea of limiting government power constitutionally, through formal checks and balances that restricted how governments could make law – the Rule of Law not men – and through bills of human rights, which limited what governments were allowed to make laws about. 

To libertarians, then, democracy was seen as a good because it was a means to achieving good ends. However, there were other democratic thinkers, to whom "pleas[ing] the majority of the nation" was not a means to an end, but the very end itself. In their view, a democratic government was the expression and will of the people – achieving the will of the people was the supreme political good –and therefore whatever a democratic government did (unless, of course, it were taken over by bad people) was always good. It followed that restrictions on government like bills of rights were bad things, encumbrances that prevented governments from doing as much good as possible.  

This second view can be called the totalitarian view of democracy. The word 'totalitarian' is no stretch; at the limit, it implies that government may do whatever it wants to any individual it wants, so long as a majority wants it to; in short, it contradicts the very idea of human rights. Novelist (and armchair philosopher) Ayn Rand called it:

a social system in which one’s work, one’s property, one’s mind, and one’s life are at the mercy of any gang that may muster the vote of a majority at any moment for any purpose.... 

If we discard morality and substitute for it the Collectivist doctrine of unlimited majority rule [Rand also wrote], if we accept the idea that a majority may do anything it pleases, and that anything done by a majority is right because it’s done by a majority (this being the only standard of right and wrong) – how are men to apply this in practice to their actual lives? Who is the majority? In relation to each particular man, all other men are potential members of that majority which may destroy him at its pleasure at any moment. Then each man and all men become enemies; each has to fear and suspect all; each must try to rob and murder first, before he is robbed and murdered.

Those two visions of democracy have always co-existed in precarious balance in democratic states; but the Covid pandemic has utterly destroyed that balance. 

Democratic governments' interventions in the pandemic have been paradigm examples of totalitarian democracy. Contrary to what some may believe, lockdowns (and their component  measures) are enormously popular. The Covid Cult that swept the world convinced millions that they were going to die of this new plague, and that only governments could save them. Since then, massive majorities throughout the world have been demanding that their governments save them, rewarding those who acted quickly to close down society, and punishing those who held back. It is wrong for libertarians to call the result 'tyranny,' for it is the very opposite: it is the government carrying out the popular will.

Meanwhile, the rights of the people are being trampled. People have seen their livelihoods taken away. They are routinely arrested, and even roughed up, by the police, just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. They are being arrested for their social media posts. They are being shot for breaking curfew. Life under lockdown is becoming a human rights nightmare. 

Even the Rule of Law has vanished; for this Covid totalitarianism has been happening, for the most part without any opposition, as if the constitution and the normal laws do not exist. Those have not been amended but are simply ignored, with the executive branch of government dictating whatever it wants done by executive order. Opposition parties, with their eyes on the same polls the government is reading, simply play along. A few courts have stood up for the Rule of Law by striking down some government actions; but those too have been demonized by the Covid Cult as "endanger[ing] thousands of lives," and in some cases their decisions have been ignored and the laws they struck down have still been enforced.  

In short, totalitarian democracy has become the official program of most democratic nations, while libertarian democracy has been discarded. This is an example of 'spontaneous order': No one planned for their country to become totalitarian; democratic governments have simply stumbled into totalitarianism, or been pushed into it by their citizens.

The silver lining to that cloud is that, while democratic majorities still support Covid totalitarianism, they have never approved of totalitarian democracy. As they gain experience of life in a totalitarian state, they cannot be counted on to support its continuance. Its tenets are being challenged by a growing number of scientists, philosophers, thinkers and even politicians. Official protests against Covid totalitarianism, though small and sporadic, are each week growing in number; while noncompliance (euphemistically referred to by governments as 'pandemic fatigue') is soaring, as the soaring case rates of Covid in America and Europe make clear. The liberal or libertarian ideal of people running their own lives, including assessing their own risks, may be down but it is certainly not out.  

I believe that in a straightforward conflict between totalitarian democracy versus liberal or libertarian democracy, the latter would win. However, that can and will happen only if enough people understand the nature of the underlying conflict.   

The COVID Cult

The Covidian Cult | Off-Guardian - CJ Hopkins:

October 13, 2020 - "One of the hallmarks of totalitarianism is mass conformity to a psychotic official narrative ... that has little or no connection to reality and that is contradicted by a preponderance of facts. Nazism and Stalinism are the classic examples, but the phenomenon is better observed in cults.... What many people fail to understand is that to those who fall prey to them (whether individual cult members or entire totalitarian societies) such narratives do not register as psychotic. On the contrary, they feel entirely normal. Everything in their social 'reality' reifies and reaffirms the narrative, and anything that challenges or contradicts it is perceived as an existential threat.

"These narratives are invariably paranoid, portraying the cult as threatened or persecuted by an evil enemy or antagonistic force which only unquestioning conformity to the cult’s ideology can save its members from.... The point is not the identity of the enem. The point is the atmosphere of paranoia and hysteria the official narrative generates, which keeps the cult members (or the society) compliant.... In addition to being paranoid, these narratives are often internally inconsistent [and] illogical.... This ... forces their adherents to attempt to reconcile their inconsistency and irrationality ... in order to remain in good standing with the cult. Such reconciliation is of course impossible, and causes the cult members’ minds to short circuit and abandon any semblance of critical thinking, which is precisely what the cult leader wants. Moreover, cult leaders will often radically change these narratives for no apparent reason, forcing their cult members to abruptly forswear (and often even denounce as 'heresy') the beliefs they had previously been forced to profess, and behave as if they had never believed them, which causes their minds to further short circuit, until they eventually give up even trying to think rationally, and just mindlessly parrot whatever nonsensical gibberish the cult leader fills their heads with....

"If all this sounds familiar, good. Because the same techniques that most cult leaders use to control the minds of the members of their cults are used by totalitarian systems to control the minds of entire societies: Milieu Control, Loaded Language, Sacred Science, Demand for Purity, and other standard mind-control techniques. It can happen to pretty much any society, just as anyone can fall prey to a cult, given the right set of circumstances. It is happening to most of our societies right now. An official narrative is being implemented. A totalitarian official narrative. A totally psychotic official narrative, no less delusional than that of the Nazis, or the Manson family, or any other cult. Most people cannot see that it is happening, for the simple reason that it is happening to them....

"And this is why so many people — people who are able to easily recognize totalitarianism in cults and foreign countries — cannot perceive the totalitarianism that is taking shape now, right in front of their faces (or, rather, right inside their minds). Nor can they perceive the delusional nature of the official “Covid-19” narrative, no more than those in Nazi Germany were able to perceive how completely delusional their official 'master race' narrative was. Such people are neither ignorant nor stupid. They have been successfully initiated into a cult, which is essentially what totalitarianism is, albeit on a societal scale.

"Their initiation into the Covidian Cult began in January, when the medical authorities and corporate media turned on The Fear with projections of hundreds of millions of deaths and fake photos of people dropping dead in the streets. The psychological conditioning has continued for months. The global masses have been subjected to a constant stream of propaganda, manufactured hysteria, wild speculation, conflicting directives, exaggerations, lies, and tawdry theatrical effects. Lockdowns. Emergency field hospitals and morgues. The singing-dancing NHS staff. Death trucks. Overflowing ICUs. Dead Covid babies. Manipulated statistics. Goon squads. Masks. And all the rest of it.

"Eight months later, here we are. The Head of the Health Emergencies Program at the WHO [World Health Organization] has basically confirmed an IFR [infection fatality rate] of 0.14%, approximately the same as the seasonal flu.... The 'science' argument is officially over. An increasing number of doctors and medical experts are breaking ranks and explaining how the current mass hysteria over 'cases' (which now includes perfectly healthy people) is essentially meaningless propaganda, for example, in this segment on ARD, one of the big mainstream German TV channels. And then there is the existence of Sweden, and other countries which are not playing ball with the official Covid-19 narrative, which makes a mockery of the ongoing hysteria. 

"The point is, the facts are all available.... From mainstream outlets and medical experts. From the Center for F*cking Disease Control. Which does not matter in the least, not to the members of the Covidian Cult. Facts do not matter to totalitarians and cult members. What matters is loyalty to the cult or the party. Which means we have a serious problem, those of us to whom facts still matter, and who have been trying to use them to convince the Covidian cultists that they are wrong about the virus … for going on eight months at this point.

"While it is crucial to continue reporting the facts and sharing them with as many people as possible — which is becoming increasingly difficult due to the censorship of alternative and social media — it is important to accept what we are up against. What we are up against is not a misunderstanding or a rational argument over scientific facts. It is a fanatical ideological movement.... Instead of the cult existing as an island within the dominant culture, the cult has become the dominant culture, and those of us who have not joined the cult have become the isolated islands within it."

Read more: https://off-guardian.org/2020/10/13/the-covidian-cult/

Remembering 100 years of Communism

Remembering Communism | Winnipeg Sun - Hendrik van der Breggen, Providence University College,:

November 11, 2017 - "Fall 2017 marks the 100th anniversary of the 1917 Russian Revolution, the beginning of a grand experiment in communism. This social experiment had bitter fruit that shouldn’t be forgotten.

"Influenced by Karl Marx, the leaders of Soviet communism — Lenin, Stalin, and Co. (Comrades) — strived to create a utopian society. After taking power, the communists abolished private property and took control of the means of production (factories, farms). Their promise was that state control (a 'dictatorship of the proletariat') would be temporary. Eventually, new men and women would come into being.... A socialist heaven would finally come to earth....

"It turns out that the temporary dictatorship by the communist elite wasn’t temporary. And the Soviet experiment was a disaster.... Soviet communism’s killing of its own people makes Nazi death camps pale in comparison. Whereas 6 or 7 million died in the Nazi holocaust, ... historians estimate the Soviet death toll was 20 million, whereas Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (who lived in the Soviet Union) estimates 60 million.

"Of this total, approximately 5 or more million died at a result of the Soviets’ 1932-33 deliberate starvation of Ukraine.... Millions of Soviets also died in slave labour camps (a.k.a. Gulags, made famous by Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago). Underfed and living in sub-zero temperatures, citizens were worked to death or were murdered in the woods.... [M]any Soviet citizens were simply arrested, tortured, and shot.... for criticizing government or for suspicion of being a saboteur, other times to fill government quotas....

"According to The Black Book of Communism (Harvard University Press 1999), other communist regimes had similar disastrous results.

• China: 65 million deaths
• Vietnam: 1 million deaths
• North Korea: 2 million deaths
• Cambodia: 2 million deaths

"In total, over the past 100 years communist regimes have been responsible for about 100 million deaths (of their own people)....

"[C]apitalist societies have done wrong, of course. (And crony capitalism is especially problematic.) Nevertheless, ... governments in capitalist societies tend to be limited in their power. They protect private property, voluntary exchange, and individual freedoms; they do not tend to murder their own people en masse.

"It remains, then, that the killing of one’s own people has been extraordinarily huge in — and a salient feature of — communist societies.... The 2008 film The Soviet Story (available on YouTube) provides additional historical perspective on the bitter fruit of the 1917 Russian Revolution — bitter fruit that should never be forgotten."

Read more: http://winnipegsun.com/opinion/columnists/remembering-communism
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How "anti-fascist" violence enables fascism

Using Violence Against Fascists Plays Right into Their Hands | Foundation for Economic Education | Laurie Maurhofer:

August 28, 2017 - "After the murder of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, many people are asking themselves what they should do if Nazis rally in their city. Should they put their bodies on the line in counter demonstrations? Some say yes. History says no. Take it from me: I study the original Nazis....

"Charlottesville was right out of the Nazi playbook. In the 1920s, the Nazi Party was just one political party among many.... It was in 1927, while still on the political fringes, that the Nazi Party scheduled a rally in a decidedly hostile location – the Berlin district of Wedding. Wedding was so left-of-center that the neighborhood had the nickname “Red Wedding,” red being the color of the Communist Party....

"The people of Wedding were determined to fight back against fascism in their neighborhood. On the day of the rally, hundreds of Nazis descended on Wedding. Hundreds of their opponents showed up too, organized by the local Communist Party. The anti-fascists tried to disrupt the rally, heckling the speakers. Nazi thugs retaliated. There was a massive brawl. Almost 100 people were injured.

"I imagine the people of Wedding felt they ... had courageously sent a message: Fascism was not welcome. But historians believe events like the rally in Wedding helped the Nazis build a dictatorship. Yes, the brawl got them media attention. But what was far, far more important was how it fed an escalating spiral of street violence. That violence helped the fascists enormously....

"We know now that many Germans supported the fascists because they were terrified of leftist violence in the streets. Germans opened their morning newspapers and saw reports of clashes like the one in Wedding. It looked like a bloody tide of civil war was rising in their cities. Voters and opposition politicians alike came to believe the government needed special police powers to stop violent leftists. Dictatorship grew attractive. The fact that the Nazis themselves were fomenting the violence didn’t seem to matter.

"One of Hitler’s biggest steps to dictatorial power was to gain emergency police powers, which he claimed he needed to suppress leftist violence....

"Today, right extremists are going around the country staging rallies just like the one in 1927 in Wedding. According to the civil rights advocacy organization the Southern Poverty Law Center, they pick places where they know antifascists are present, like university campuses. They come spoiling for a physical confrontation. Then they and their allies spin it to their advantage....

"There’s an additional wrinkle: the Antifa. When Nazis and white supremacists rally, the Antifa are likely to show up, too. 'Antifa' is short for anti-fascists, though the name by no means includes everyone who opposes fascism. The Antifa is a relatively small movement of the far left, with ties to anarchism. It arose in Europe’s punk scene in the 1980s to fight neo-Nazism. The Antifa says that because Nazism and white supremacy are violent, we must use any means necessary to stop them. This includes physical means.... The Antifa's tactics often backfire, just like those of Germany’s communist opposition to Nazism did in the 1920s....

"The cause Heather Heyer died for is best defended by avoiding the physical confrontation that the people who are responsible for her death want."

Read more: https://fee.org/articles/using-violence-against-fascists-plays-right-into-their-hands/
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North Korea: The invisible gulag

The Invisible Gulag | World Security Network - by Jonathan Kay, National Post:

December 10, 2010 - "The world remains pock-marked by countries that still insist on calling themselves 'communist.' But in reality, Joseph Stalin's totalitarian dream of exterminating the individual human spirit survives in only one tiny corner of the world: North Korea....

"North Korea is a giant prison. Worse than a prison, in fact, because prisoners in normal countries don't have to forage for wild grass, or catch rats, to stay alive. For most Westerners, who aren't permitted to see this real-life Mordor with their own eyes, the country's horrors are so vast that they lie in a surreal place beyond our political imaginations. North Korea seems less an actual country than a sort of sovereign theme park dedicated to the glorification of evil....

"Norbert Vollertsen, a blond middle-aged German doctor, first travelled to North Korea in 1999, as part of his charity work with an international NGO. Taking shifts in a Pyongyang emergency room, he was horrified by the scenes he witnessed. Even patients with treatable diseases such as diabetes and tuberculosis lay dying on gurneys. Meanwhile, the medication that had been sent from Germany to save their lives was on sale for American dollars at a special Pyongyang store reserved for foreign diplomats.

"One day, Vollertsen saw a line-up in front of his hospital. He learned that a tractor-factory worker had been severely burned by molten metal, and that the people queuing up were donating pieces of their own skin so that the man could be saved.... Vollertsen made the fateful decision to join the line-up....

 "A week later, Vollertsen was asked to make another skin donation. But this time, when he showed up at the hospital, North Korean TV cameras filmed the whole thing. The event was broadcast on the country's (only) newscast, and Vollertsen was celebrated as a national hero.... The regime even awarded him the "North Korean Friendship medal" and -- more importantly -- a driver's licence that permitted him to roam the North Korean countryside unimpeded. No Western journalist has ever had such access....

"Nothing Vollertsen had seen in Pyongyang prepared him for the even more piteous scenes he witnessed in the rural provinces.

"All around were desolate landscapes -- the forests having been chopped down for firewood. Starvation was rampant: Most peasants survived on bags of donated rice from the West (which the North Korean government claimed to be a form of 'tribute' delivered from fearful Western powers)....

"The patients Vollertsen treated in children's clinics were scarcely more animated than corpses. He recalled to me one particularly haunting specimen -- an emaciated 12-year-old whose striped pajamas, reminiscent of a Nazi concentration camp prisoner, struck a grim historical chord with Vollertsen. 'He looked straight into my eyes,' the German doctor remembers, 'so full of sorrow and despair. No future. No hope. Nothing. It reminded me of the photos of the people you see at the Washington Holocaust museum.'"

Read more:  https://web.archive.org/web/20130417005739/http://www.worldsecuritynetwork.com/Koreas/National-Post/The-Invisible-Gulag