"We sit by and watch the barbarian. We tolerate him in the long stretches of peace, we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence; his comic inversion of our old certitudes; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there are no smiles.”
Hilaire Belloc, The Barbarians, 1912
"The Hitler Party likes to emphasize its uniqueness, and it really should not be measured against conventional yardsticks. Even if it were to explode into smithereens today, the fact would remain that it recently won fifteen million voters. It must satisfy not only a particular political need, but also a specifically German emotional condition. Its brutality, loud-mouthedness and brainlessness have acted not as a deterrent but rather as an attraction, and have generated unconditional and subservient followers."
Carl von Ossietzky, Die Weltbühne, January, 1933
"Representative institutions no longer represent voters. Instead, they have been short-circuited, steadily corrupted by an institutionalized system of bribery that renders them responsive to powerful interest groups whose constituencies are the major corporations and wealthiest Americans. The courts, in turn, when they are not increasingly handmaidens of corporate power, are consistently deferential to the claims of national security.
Elections have become heavily subsidized non-events that typically attract at best merely half of an electorate whose information about foreign and domestic politics is filtered through corporate-dominated media. Citizens are manipulated into a nervous state by the media's reports of rampant crime and terrorist networks, by thinly veiled threats of the Attorney General and by their own fears about unemployment. What is crucially important here is not only the expansion of governmental power but the inevitable discrediting of constitutional limitations and institutional processes that discourages the citizenry and leaves them politically apathetic.
No doubt these remarks will be dismissed by some as alarmist, but I want to go further and name the emergent political system 'inverted totalitarianism.' By inverted I mean that while the current system and its operatives share with Nazism the aspiration toward unlimited power and aggressive expansionism, their methods and actions seem upside down. For example, in Weimar Germany, before the Nazis took power, the 'streets' were dominated by totalitarian-oriented gangs of toughs, and whatever there was of democracy was confined to the government.
In rebuttal it will be said that there is no domestic equivalent to the Nazi regime of torture, concentration camps or other instruments of terror. Instead, inverted totalitarianism has its own means of promoting generalized fear; not only by sudden 'alerts' and the publicized heavy-handed treatment of aliens and the Devil's Island that is Guantánamo Bay, but by a pervasive atmosphere of fear abetted by a corporate economy of ruthless downsizing, withdrawal or reduction of pension and health benefits; a corporate political system that relentlessly threatens to privatize Social Security and the modest health benefits available, especially to the poor.
With such instrumentalities for promoting uncertainty and dependence, it is almost overkill for inverted totalitarianism to employ a system of criminal justice that is punitive in the extreme, relishes the death penalty and is consistently biased against the powerless.
Thus the elements are in place: a weak legislative body, a legal system that is both compliant and repressive, a party system in which one party, whether in opposition or in the majority, is bent upon reconstituting the existing system so as to permanently favor a ruling class of the wealthy, the well-connected and the corporate, while leaving the poorer citizens with a sense of helplessness and political despair, and, at the same time, keeping the middle classes dangling between fear of unemployment and expectations of fantastic rewards once the new economy recovers.
That scheme is abetted by a sycophantic and increasingly concentrated media; by the integration of universities with their corporate benefactors; by a propaganda machine institutionalized in well-funded think tanks and conservative foundations; by the increasingly closer cooperation between local police and national law enforcement agencies aimed at identifying terrorists, suspicious aliens and domestic dissidents. What is at stake, then, is nothing less than the attempted transformation of a tolerably free society into a variant of the extreme regimes of the past century."
Sheldon Wolin, Inverted Totalitarianism, May 1, 2003
Stocks took a dive again today, but managed to rally back and post some measurable gains.
Gold and silver were smacked again, hard.
The bears were leaning pretty heavily on the miners, particularly some that were ex-dividend today.
Buying them on the dip was an edgy trade at times.
But they managed to come back again into the close, somewhat.
VIX declined.
The Dollar rallied.
And so we toddle on into the weekend.
As a reminder there will be a Non-Farm Payrolls report on Friday March 7th.
The weather has become rather warm here the last few days, rising into the low 60s while the sun is out.
And so today was a good day to wear shorts while taking Daisy for her afternoon walk.
It's the little things that make life worth living.
Need little, want less, love more.
For those who abide in love, abide in God, and God in them.
Have a pleasant weekend.
