11-25-2016, 01:29 PM
(11-25-2016, 11:18 AM)Mikebert Wrote: Scary article by Steven Walt in Foreign Policy
http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/11/23/ten-...-dictator/
Ten Ways to Tell if Your President Is a Dictator
-- listed in the event that the article is no longer available or you dither on reading the article:
1. Muzzling the media. The earliest warning is his stated desire to make lawsuits for libel of media easier to initiate and win libel suits against hostile reporters and editors.
2. Building a sympathetic media network. So FoX News is too unreliable for his purposes? Who'd a thunk it?
3. Politicizing the civil service, military, National Guard, and law enforcement. Just think of how much easier it will be if the IRS targets dissidents, the Postal Service refuses to deliver mail by or to identified dissidents or rivals, Keitel*-like flunkies advance rapidly in the Armed Forces, and if police commanders had the guts to mow down peaceful protesters.
4. Government surveillance of domestic opponents. Just think of the CIA given authority to spy on Americans or some new agency given such authority. Welcome to a mirror image of the Soviet Union, only ultra-capitalist and for right-wing Christianity.
5. Using state power to reward supporters and punish opponents. Corruption through connections -- supporters get richer at expense of those who fail to comply.
6. Stacking the Supreme Court -- filling openings with legal cronies and fanatics. Look at his cabinet choices and ask yourself whether you expect anything different.
7. Enforcing the law for only one side. Remember -- justice is fair and impartial or it is a tool of oppression and political control.
8. Really rigging the system. Intensification of voter suppression and gerrymandering.
9. Fear-mongering. Racial, religious, and ethnic bigotry; attacks on cultural expressions that he considers hostile to his politics as treasonable.
10. Demonizing the opposition. Showing the world, including critical parts of American life, as parts of a hostile conspiracy against the rightful American way for mass attacks in media and for official persecution.
*Field-Marshal Wilhelm Keitel (1882-1946), Chief of the Staff of the German Army just before and during World War II, who destroyed the political independence of the German Army, planned Nazi aggression, and ordered the German Army to participate in crimes against humanity including the Holocaust. Utterly incompetent for service beyond the level of a junior officer, he never questioned the wisdom of the Fuehrer. A week after Hitler offed himself in his bunker, he signed the official surrender of Germany to the Soviet Union, probably the only decent thing he ever did as a senior officer. He was soon arrested by the Allies and tried in the main Nuremberg trial on counts of Crimes Against Peace, Conventional War Crimes, and Crimes Against Humanity; his sole defense was the "superior orders" claim rejected by the Allies. He was convicted of monstrous crimes and executed by hanging.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.