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We don't know a perfected totalitarian power structure, because it would require the control of the whole planet. But we know enough about the the still preliminary experiments of total organization to realize that the very well possible perfection of this apparatus would get rid of human agency in the sense as we know it. To act would turn out to be superfluous for people living together, when all people have become an example of their species, when all doing has become an acceleration of the movement mechanism of history or nature following a set pattern, and all deeds have become the execution of death sentences which history and nature have given anyway.

Hannah Arendt

"Elemente und Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft" p. 683

Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power's disappearance.

Hannah Arendt

Few people talk about it but it’s actually extremely weird to have celebrities at all. It’s a cultural and economic phenomenon that works to hijack our tendency to form relationships and identify with people we find attractive. It takes a mechanism that’s supposed to help us bond with our family members and leverages it for profit. The fact that some people can’t handle this gets overlooked. All blame is placed on the individual, allowing the rest of us to absolve ourselves of guilt and responsibility.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21203079

Journalists should ask a specific question: since these programs began operation shortly after September 11th, how many terrorist attacks were prevented SOLELY by information derived from this suspicionless surveillance that could not be gained via any other source? Then ask how many individual communications were ingested to acheive that, and ask yourself if it was worth it. Bathtub falls and police officers kill more Americans than terrorism, yet we've been asked to sacrifice our most sacred rights for fear of falling victim to it.

Further, it's important to bear in mind I'm being called a traitor by men like former Vice President Dick Cheney. This is a man who gave us the warrantless wiretapping scheme as a kind of atrocity warm-up on the way to deceitfully engineering a conflict that has killed over 4,400 and maimed nearly 32,000 Americans, as well as leaving over 100,000 Iraqis dead. Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honor you can give an American, and the more panicked talk we hear from people like him, Feinstein, and King, the better off we all are. If they had taught a class on how to be the kind of citizen Dick Cheney worries about, I would have finished high school.

Edward Snowden

http://www.guardian.co.uk ... n-nsa-files-whistleblower

Hast du schon einmal eine abgeschnittene Hand oder einen abgehauenen Fuß oder Kopf, vom übrigen Körper getrennt, daliegen sehen? Gerade so nimmt sich derjenige aus, der über sein Schicksal unwillig wird, sich von anderen absondert oder sich gemeinschädliche Handlungen erlaubt. Du hast dich so gewissermaßen ausgestoßen, von der naturgemäßen Einheit getrennt. Denn als ein Teil warst du ihr einverleibt und hast dich nun selbst davon abgesondert. Aber hier ist es noch bewundernswert, daß du dich mit ihr von neuem vereinigen kannst. Diese Möglichkeit, nach Trennung und Verstümmelung mit dem Ganzen wieder zusammenzukommen, hat Gott keinem andern Teil der Natur verliehen. Erwäge doch die Güte, womit er den Menschen bevorzugt hat. Denn er hat beides in seine Hand gelegt, seine Lostrennung vom Ganzen gleich anfangs zu vermeiden, aber auch nach seiner Trennung sich wieder mit demselben zu vereinigen, sich von neuem ihm einzuverleiben und seine Stellung als Teil wieder einzunehmen.

Marcus Aurelius

"Selbstbetrachtungen"

Believing in progress does not mean believing that any progress has yet been made.

Franz Kafka

The Third Notebook, December 4, 1917

If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?

George Orwell

The similarities between this kind of terror and plain gangsterism are too obvious to be pointed out. This does not mean that Nazism was gangsterism, as has sometimes been concluded, but only that the Nazis, without admitting it, learned as much from American gangster organizations as their propaganda, admittedly, learned from American business publicity.

More specific in totalitarian propaganda, however, than direct threats and crimes against individuals is the use of indirect, veiled, and menacing hints against all who will not heed its teachings and, later, mass murder perpetrated on "guilty" and "innocent" alike. People are threatened by Communist propaganda with missing the train of history, with remaining hopelessly behind their time, with spending their lives uselessly, just as they were threatened by the Nazis with living against the eternal laws of nature and life, with an irreparable and mysterious deterioration of their blood. The strong emphasis of totalitarian propaganda on the "scientific" nature of its assertions has been compared to certain advertising techniques which also address themselves to masses. And it is true that the advertising columns of every newspaper show this "scientificality," by which a manufacturer proves with facts and figures and the help of a "research" department that his is the "best soap in the world." [1] It is also true that there is a certain element of violence in the imaginative exaggerations of publicity men, that behind the assertion that girls who do not use this particular brand of soap may go through life with pimples and without a husband, lies the wild dream of monopoly, the dream that one day the manufacturer of the "only soap that prevents pimples" may have the power to deprive of husbands all girls who don't use his soap. Science in the instances of both business publicity and totalitarian propaganda is obviously only a surrogate for power. The obsession of totalitarian movements with "scientific" proofs ceases once they are in power. The Nazis dismissed even those scholars who were willing to serve them, and the Bolsheviks use the reputation of their scientists for entirely unscientific purposes and force them into the role of charlatans.

But there is nothing more to the frequently overrated similarities between mass advertisement and mass propaganda. Businessmen usually do not pose as prophets and they do not constantly demonstrate the correctness of their predictions. The scientificality of totalitarian propaganda is characterized by its almost exclusive insistence on scientific prophecy as distinguished from the more old-fashioned appeal to the past. Nowhere does the ideological origin, of socialism in one instance and racism in the other, show more clearly than when their spokesmen pretend that they have discovered the hidden forces that will bring them good fortune in the chain of fatality.

There is of course a great appeal to the masses in "absolutist systems which represent all the events of history as depending upon the great first causes linked by the chain of fatality, and which, as it were, suppress men from the history of the human race" (in the words of Tocqueville). But it cannot be doubted either that the Nazi leadership actually believed in, and did not merely use as propaganda, such doctrines as the following: "The more accurately we recognize and observe the laws of nature and life, . . . so much the more do we conform to the will of the Almighty. The more insight we have into the will of the Almighty, the greater will be our successes." [2] It is quite apparent that very few changes are needed to express Stalin's creed in two sentences which might run as follows: "The more accurately we recognize and observe the laws of history and class struggle, so much the more do we conform to dialectic materialism. The more insight we have into dialectic materialism, the greater will be our success." Stalin's notion of "correct leadership," [3] at any rate, could hardly be better illustrated.

Totalitarian propaganda raised ideological scientificality and its technique of making statements in the form of predictions to a height of efficiency of method and absurdity of content because, demagogically speaking, there is hardly a better way to avoid discussion than by releasing an argument from the control of the present and by saying that only the future can reveal its merits. However, totalitarian ideologies did not invent this procedure, and were not the only ones to use it. Scientificality of mass propaganda has indeed been so universally employed in modern politics that it has been interpreted as a more general sign of that obsession with science which has characterized the Western world since the rise of mathematics and physics in the sixteenth century; thus totalitarianism appears to be only the last stage in a process during which "science has become an idol that will magically cure the evils of existence and transform the nature of man." [4] And there was, indeed, an early connection between scientificality and the rise of the masses. The "collectivism" of masses was welcomed by those who hoped for the appearance of "natural laws of historical development" which would eliminate the unpredictability of the individual's actions and behavior. [5] There has been cited the example of Enfantin who could already "see the time approaching when the 'art of moving the masses' will be so perfectly developed that the painter, the musician, and the poet-will possess the power to please and to move with the same certainty as the mathematician solves a geometrical problem or the chemist analyses any substance," and it has been concluded that modern propaganda was born then and there. [6]

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[1] Hitler's analysis of "War Propaganda" (Mein Kampf, Book I, chapter vi) stresses the business angle of propaganda and uses the example of publicity for soap. Its importance has been generally overestimated, while his later positive ideas on "Propaganda and Organization" were neglected.

[2] See Martin Bormann's important memorandum on the "Relationship of National Socialism and Christianity" in Nazi Conspiracy, VI, 1036 ff.

[3] Stalin, Leninism (1933), Vol. II, chapter III.

[4] Eric Voegelin, "The Origins of Scientism," in Social Research, December, 1948.

[5] See F. A. v. Hayek, "The Counter-Revolution of Science," in Economica, Vol. VIII (February, May, August, 1941), p. 13.

[6] 1bid., p. 137. The quotation is from the Saint-Simonist magazine Producteur, I, 399.

Hannah Arendt

"The Origins of Totalitarianism"

O ihr Tage meiner Kindheit,
Nun dahin auf immerdar,
Da die Seele noch in Blindheit,
Noch voll Licht das Auge war:
Meine Blicke ließ ich schweifen
Jedem frei ins Angesicht;
Glauben galt mir für Begreifen
Und Gedanken kannt ich nicht.

Ich begann jedoch zu sinnen
Und zu grübeln hin und her,
Und in meiner Seele drinnen
Schwoll ein wildempörtes Meer.
Meine Blicke senkt ich nieder,
Schaute tief in mich hinein
Und erhob sie nimmer wieder
Zu dem goldnen Sonnenschein.

Mußt ich doch die Welt verachten,
Die mir Gottes Garten schien,
Denn die Guten läßt er schmachten,
Und die Bösen preisen ihn.
Freude, Lust und Ruh vergehen –
Oh, wie wohl war einst dem Kind!
Meine Seele hat gesehen,
Meine Augen wurden blind!

Frank Wedekind

Der Mut befreit von der Sorge um das Leben, für die Freiheit der Welt. Des Mutes bedarf es, weil es in der Politik primär niemals um das Leben, sondern immer um die Welt geht, die so oder anders aussehen, so oder anders uns überdauern soll.

Hannah Arendt

"Freiheit und Politik"

If you quietly accept and go along no matter what your feelings are, ultimately you internalize what you're saying, because it's too hard to believe one thing and say another. I can see it very strikingly in my own background. Go to any elite university and you are usually speaking to very disciplined people, people who have been selected for obedience. And that makes sense. If you've resisted the temptation to tell the teacher, "You're an asshole," which maybe he or she is, and if you don't say, "That's idiotic," when you get a stupid assignment, you will gradually pass through the required filters. You will end up at a good college and eventually with a good job.

Noam Chomsky

Interview by Charles M. Young in Rolling Stone, May 28, 1992

Most wars in the 20th century have started as a result of lies. Amplified and spread by the mainstream press. And you go, well that is a horrible circumstance, that is terrible that all these wars start with lies. And I say no, this is a tremendous opportunity, because it means that populations basically don't like wars and they have to be lied into it.

Julian Assange

All fine architectural values are human values, else not valuable.

Frank Lloyd Wright

"The Living City" (1958)

God bless the grass that grows thru the crack
They roll the concrete over it to try and keep it back
The concrete gets tired of what it has to do
It breaks and it buckles and the grass grows thru
And God bless the grass

God bless the truth that fights toward the sun
They roll the lies over it and think that it is done
It moves through the ground and reaches for the air
And after a while it is growing everywhere
And God bless the grass

God bless the grass that grows through cement
It's green and it's tender and it's easily bent
But after a while it lifts up its head
For the grass is living and the stone is dead
And God bless the grass

God bless the grass that's gentle and low
Its roots they are deep and its will is to grow
And God bless the truth, the friend of the poor
And the wild grass growing at the poor man's door
And God bless the grass

Malvina Reynolds

See, capitalism is not fundamentally racist -- it can exploit racism for its purposes, but racism isn't built into it. Capitalism basically wants people to be interchangeable cogs, and differences among them, such as on the basis of race, usually are not functional. I mean, they may be functional for a period, like if you want a super exploited workforce or something, but those situations are kind of anomalous. Over the long term, you can expect capitalism to be anti-racist -- just because its anti-human. And race is in fact a human characteristic -- there's no reason why it should be a negative characteristic, but it is a human characteristic. So therefore identifications based on race interfere with the basic ideal that people should be available just as consumers and producers, interchangeable cogs who will purchase all the junk that's produced -- that's their ultimate function, and any other properties they might have are kind of irrelevant, and usually a nuisance.

Noam Chomsky

We are as forlorn as children lost in the wood. When you stand in front of me and look at me, what do you know of the griefs that are in me and what do I know of yours? And if I were to cast myself down before you and tell you, what more would you know about me that you know about Hell when someone tells you it is hot and dreadful? For that reason alone we human beings ought to stand before one another as reverently, as reflectively, as lovingly, as we would before the entrance to Hell.

Franz Kafka

And the cover of Vodafone's Digital Parenting is a picture of three lovely-looking little kids, about eight years old, all sat in a line on a sofa, where they're all absorbed by handheld devices and computers and screens, and they're not interacting in any meaningful human way. And all through Digital Parenting are all these disguised advertorials about "edu-taining" software that you absolutely need to buy. Vodafone's Digital Parenting. It's like the fox's guide to chicken security.

Stewart Lee

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

Voltaire