The Last Gasp of American Democracy

By Chris Hedges
TruthDig.org, Posted on Jan 5, 2014

EXCERPT...

The most radical evil, as Hannah Arendt pointed out, is the political system that effectively crushes its marginalized and harassed opponents and, through fear and the obliteration of privacy, incapacitates everyone else. Our system of mass surveillance is the machine by which this radical evil will be activated. If we do not immediately dismantle the security and surveillance apparatus, there will be no investigative journalism or judicial oversight to address abuse of power. There will be no organized dissent. There will be no independent thought. Criticisms, however tepid, will be treated as acts of subversion. And the security apparatus will blanket the body politic like black mold until even the banal and ridiculous become concerns of national security.

I saw evil of this kind as a reporter in the Stasi state of East Germany. I was followed by men, invariably with crew cuts and wearing leather jackets, whom I presumed to be agents of the Stasi—the Ministry for State Security, which the ruling Communist Party described as the “shield and sword” of the nation. People I interviewed were visited by Stasi agents soon after I left their homes. My phone was bugged. Some of those I worked with were pressured to become informants. Fear hung like icicles over every conversation.

The Stasi did not set up massive death camps and gulags. It did not have to. The Stasi, with a network of as many as 2 million informants in a country of 17 million, was everywhere. There were 102,000 secret police officers employed full time to monitor the population—one for every 166 East Germans. The Nazis broke bones; the Stasi broke souls. The East German government pioneered the psychological deconstruction that torturers and interrogators in America’s black sites, and within our prison system, have honed to a gruesome perfection.

The goal of wholesale surveillance, as Arendt wrote in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” is not, in the end, to discover crimes, “but to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a certain category of the population.” And because Americans’ emails, phone conversations, Web searches and geographical movements are recorded and stored in perpetuity in government databases, there will be more than enough “evidence” to seize us should the state deem it necessary. This information waits like a deadly virus inside government vaults to be turned against us. It does not matter how trivial or innocent that information is. In totalitarian states, justice, like truth, is irrelevant.

The object of efficient totalitarian states, as George Orwell understood, is to create a climate in which people do not think of rebelling, a climate in which government killing and torture are used against only a handful of unmanageable renegades. The totalitarian state achieves this control, Arendt wrote, by systematically crushing human spontaneity, and by extension human freedom. It ceaselessly peddles fear to keep a population traumatized and immobilized. It turns the courts, along with legislative bodies, into mechanisms to legalize the crimes of state.

CONTINUED...

Internet Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20140110094659/http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_last_gasp_of_american_democracy_20140105

Original now busted link: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_last_gasp_of_american_democracy_20140105

for a certain incognito cadre to get active

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/14/nsa-utah-data-facility

he started the whole Silicon Valley cabal. Ebay and PayPal were forerunners and friends with the Google gang. This was all during the Comcast and dial-up techno geek bros. era circa 98 or so....Look at them now, running the big white house while Orange Marmalade knows nothing about anything....
saga to be continued, I guess.

Especially Not-Sees from South Africa??
The Congress oath of office includes the phrase "defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic".
Congress wake up!

Fox is the 800 pound gorilla in the room nobody wants to address.

They are all in and part of the Trump Crime Syndicate.

and the magats will continue to submissively OBEY

They believe they are getting something out of this. Wonder when MAGA will become "woke". When it is too late!

A genuine threat. Musk has done the groundwork.Thiel will be coming in with the kill shot for democracy.

And yes, we need to stay informed and stay loud.

If we survive this, the Tech Bro Billionaires Club needs dismantling. These men with their obscene amounts of money are nothing more than traitors to the very country that spawned them.

without the crazy. That means he can destroy more effectively. It's like replacing Hitler with Stalin. Bring back Musk!

They need to noth go back to where the are from and I don't mean Africa.

it'll never happen.

Last edited Mon Jun 2, 2025, 03:49 PM - Edit history (1)

There are oceans of bad blood between them.

How the roots of the ‘PayPal mafia’ extend to apartheid South Africa

Elon Musk grew up with the privileges of a stratified racial order and Peter Thiel lived in a city that venerated Hitler

by Chris McGreal
The Guardian, January 26, 2025

Excerpt...

They include Peter Thiel, the German-born billionaire venture capitalist and PayPal cofounder, who was educated in a southern African city in the 1970s where Hitler was still openly venerated. Thiel, a major donor to Trump’s campaign, has been critical of welfare programs and women being permitted to vote as undermining capitalism. A 2021 biography of Thiel, called The Contrarian, alleged that as a student at Stanford he defended apartheid as “economically sound”.

David Sacks, formerly PayPal’s chief operating officer and now a leading fundraiser for Trump, was born in Cape Town and grew up within the South African diaspora after his family moved to the US when he was young. A fourth member of the mafia, Roelof Botha, the grandson of the apartheid regime’s last foreign minister, Pik Botha, and former PayPal CFO, has kept a lower political profile but remains close to Musk.

Among them, Musk stands out for his ownership of X, which is increasingly a platform for far-right views, and his proximity to Trump, who has nominated Musk to head a “department of government efficiency” to slash and burn its way through the federal bureaucracy.

Snip...

The week before the inauguration, Steve Bannon, Trump’s former adviser, described white South Africans as the “most racist people on earth”, questioned their involvement in US politics and said Musk was a malign influence who should go back to the country of his birth.

Snip...

The South Africa into which Musk was born in 1971, and to which Thiel moved as a child from Germany, was led by a prime minister, John Vorster, who had been a general in a fascist militia three decades earlier that allied itself with Hitler.

Continues...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/26/elon-musk-peter-thiel-apartheid-south-africa

...to get his doctor to increase his dosage!

A kitten could lick those whiskers off him.

For all of us.

gutting programs for everyone not rich...

Peter Thiel is a lot more disciplined than Musk and is smart enough to stay behind the scenes and keep a lower profile. I doubt I’ll be reading a story in the NYT of his baby mama troubles, a litter of over 10 kids, and ketamine fueled orgies.

Vance is one of Thiel’s guys. I think Thiel was instrumental in making that pick (through Don Jr).

Palantir’s retail base is fanatical and the CEO is almost like a cult leader. The stock is like 500 x earnings. It’s been compared to Skynet. And they were nailing government contracts even before Trump. It has only accelerated.

All of this makes Thiel more dangerous.

Rec

Just shit.

Hiring Thiel is obviously in celebration of Pride Month. Tell all your maga moron friends and family. They will be highly disappointed.

The rapist could have put his own sycophantic number 2 Cover Girl Vance in charge. He was, after all a Thiel protege for years. But instead the rapist went with the gay DEI hire. What next, a pride flag atop the WH?

An ACLU document

We fight. Win some, lose most. Still we fight.

Even if it means ending the problem people. I don’t know what else stops psychopaths with money to burn.

Hasn't changed a bit since.