Shaping the Totalitarian Mindset: Techno-Fascism (NSA) and the Obama Administration
by NORMAN POLLACK
CounterPunch.org
June 03, 2014
History is a holistic political-structural process, Marx’s dialectical framework notwithstanding, because even allowing for contradiction there are successive stages of integration, from each of which conflicting tendencies are generated. There is nothing deterministic here, merely the assertion that reality has a unified character, whether or not experiencing social struggle. And in America, regrettably not, upper groups maintaining internal economic-ideological supremacy, beginning, I suspect, from the late-19th century, and progressively tightening its control over society through time up to and including the present. This is not an empty formula that radicals have learned through rote—the experience of gradually shrinking boundaries within which to achieve social change becomes apparent on an almost daily basis, the rapidity of the process now sufficient cause for alarm—yet met with false consciousness below, constant movements toward confrontation and war both to instill among the populace loyalty, consensus, silence, and among upper groups, the impetus for militarism and capitalist expansion (themselves structurally integrated), false consciousness above of another sort: a pathological quest for global dominance of the international system when that system itself no longer fears America.
America in decline, or even in not absolute terms, but rather, within a world system that in power terms is becoming de-centered (a multipolar framework), is losing its way, becoming desperate, striking out at real and imagined enemies (some from the past, as in an anticommunism never put to rest), tempted to manufacture crises as a way of preserving domestic cohesion, paramount for clinging to the unilateral military dominance to which it had been accustomed since World War 2, or at least its symbols if not its substance. Decline is never hospitable ground for democracy, particularly a democracy that requires, as a condition of its functioning, a permanent state of war—where we have been since perhaps the Korean War; and hence, a questionable democracy at best, and since the Bush-Obama years no longer subject to debate. I say, the shrinking boundaries on a daily basis for achieving social change: Therefore, let’s go back several days to three separate signs bearing out the foregoing discussion, all, I believe, interrelated, because rooted in the needs of an American capitalism struggling to protect its hegemonic status on top the global pyramid.
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