RUSH: Now, the new totalitarians are here. Federalist. Tom Nichols. Who is Tom Nichols? “Tom Nichols is a professor of national security affairs at the US Naval War College and an adjunct professor in the Harvard Extension School.” He wrote this piece at the website called
The Federalist and it’s titled “The New Totalitarians Are Here.” He said, “There’s a basic difference in the traditions of political science between ‘authoritarians’ and ‘totalitaritarians.’
“People throw both of these words around, but as is so often the case, they’re using words they may not always understand. They have real meaning, however, and the difference between them is important. Simply put, authoritarians merely want obedience,” they just want you to agree with them, “while totalitarians … want obedience and conversion. Authoritarians are a dime a dozen.” Your average boss is an authoritarian. “Totalitarians are rare.
“The authoritarians are the guys in charge who want to stay in charge, and don’t much care about you, or what you’re doing, so long as you stay out of their way. They are the jefe and his thugs in a brutal regime that want you to shut up, go to work, and look the other way when your loudmouthed neighbor gets his lights punched out by goons in black jackets. Live or die. It’s all the same to the regime.”
Just stay out of their way.
“Totalitarians are a different breed. These are the people who have a plan, who think they see the future more clearly than you or who are convinced they grasp reality in a way that you do not. They don’t serve themselves — or, they don’t serve themselves exclusively — they serve History, or The People, or The Idea, or some other ideological totem that justifies their actions.”
There’s always some grand cause justifying their totalitarianism.
“They want obedience, of course. But even more, they want their rule, and their belief system, to be accepted and self-sustaining. And the only way to achieve that is to create a new society of people who share those beliefs, even if it means bludgeoning every last citizen into enlightenment. That’s what makes totalitarians different and more dangerous: they are ‘totalistic’ in the sense that they demand a complete reorientation of the individual to the State and its ideological ends.
“Every person who harbors a secret objection, or even so much as a doubt, is a danger to the future of the whole project, and so the regime compels its subjects not only to obey but to believe. This is what George Orwell understood so well in his landmark novel ‘1984.’ His dystopian state doesn’t really care about quotidian obedience; it already knows how to get that. What it demands, and will get by any means, is a belief in the Party’s rectitude and in its leader, Big Brother. If torturing the daylights out of people until they denounce even their loved ones is what it takes, so be it.
“That’s why the ending of the novel is so terrifying: after the two rebellious lovers of the story are broken and made to turn on each other, the wrecks left by the State are left to sit before the Leader’s face on a screen with only one emotion still alive in the husks of their bodies: they finally, truly love Big Brother. Americans Are Getting Too Comfortable With Thought Control.”
And on that we’ll take a brief timeout here and let you think about all of that because I’ve just described a whole lot of people you know. I have just, with the assistance here of Mr. Nichols, explained a whole lot of what’s going on right around you, each and every day from the local bakery, to the photo shop, to the Supreme Court justices who dissent. It’s not enough that the losers lose. In their defeat, they must be humiliated and they must be converted and they must be taught never, ever, to dissent again. It’s all happening right in front of our eyes here, and everything that I have described so far, read from in this piece, you can cite me examples. Just having had listened to this program in the past two weeks is all it would take.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Okay. Back quickly to The New Totalitarians by Tom Nichols, professor of national security, US Naval War College.
“Americans Are Getting Too Comfortable With Thought Control. I’ve gone down this road of literary and academic exposition –” meaning he’s written this piece and all those other things. “– because I fear an increasing number of my fellow Americans are, at heart, becoming totalitarians. Now, by this I do not mean America is creating Nazis or Stalinists. It’s true, of course, that both Nazism and Stalinism were species of the genus ‘totalitarian,’ but both have since died the deaths they deserved. I mean that ordinary people, and not a few opinion and thought leaders, are adopting the same insane belief that human minds can be molded and shaped and made to think in new ways by sheer force.
“I grant that overall, American political debate on all sides has become nastier and less tolerant. What makes these kinds of attacks, however, smack of totalitarianism — and I could reel off dozens more examples, but your computer would run out of pixels — is that people like Takei and Bennett-Smith are lighting their torches and demanding rough justice even on issues where they’ve already won. In other words, it isn’t enough that Thomas was in the Court’s minority, or that no college in America is bothering to listen to Young. They want Thomas and Young silenced, stripped of their status in their peer group, and to recant — even after being defeated in public on the issue at hand.”
Now, you remember George Takei (imitating Thomas), “Clarence Thomas is just a clown in black face. He has no business being on the Supreme Court.” How many times have I pointed out no matter how much the left wins, they’re not happy. No matter what they get, they’re never happy. No matter what they get, they’re never satisfied. The reason is that there’s always dissent. They’re going to be miserable as long as there are people who disagree. Just the fact that there is disagreement depresses them, angers them, outrages them. That is intolerable. That’s what totalitarianism is.
It’s not enough that Clarence Thomas’s side was defeated in that gay marriage case or in the Obamacare case. No. What mattered was that he dared write his disagreement. And what mattered was his disagreement it was an affront to what we think. How dare he? And so Clarence Thomas is going to be punished and everybody like him is going to be punished until they see the light and stop disagreeing with us. You will support gay marriage some day and you will love it. And furthermore you’re going to end up thinking that it is superior to traditional marriage. And if you don’t, we are going to continue coming after you.
It doesn’t matter what you think. If it disagrees with us, you’re finished. They make it plain in all of these very public efforts they make of destroying people. The new totalitarian is terrifying because it means that for a fair number of people in what’s supposed to be a democracy, winning simply isn’t enough. They are not really trying to capture something as pedestrian as political equality nor are they satisfied that if they get it. They’re not really seeking a win in the courts or a legal solution. Those are all just merit badges to be collected along the way to a more important goal and that is you will agree and you will love them and you will believe them and you will support them and you will recant your dissent. And we’re going to keep pounding you until you do, and that is what is happening.