Tag: inverted totalitarianism

Guest Post by Brenda Baletti, Ph.D.

In an appearance this weekend on “The Kim Iversen Show,” Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and journalist Kim Iversen discussed resistance during the pandemic, strategies for rebuilding democracy and the power of fear — and of new technologies — to control dissent.

In an appearance this weekend on “The Kim Iversen Show,” Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and journalist Kim Iversen discussed resistance during the pandemic, strategies for rebuilding democracy and the power of fear — and of new technologies — to control dissent.

Iversen called Kennedy, chairman and chief litigation counsel of Children’s Health Defense, “one of the most prominent voices against the authoritarian pandemic response.”

On the subject of dissent, Iversen asked Kennedy what he thought made a heterogeneous group of people, about 30% of the American population, question or resist the official COVID-19 narrative when most people went along with it.

Kennedy pointed to a history of CIA research experiments, called MKUltra, which involved manipulating the human mind.

Continue reading “RFK, Jr. to Kim Iversen: ‘Nobody Ever Complied Their Way Out of Totalitarianism’”

“To reduce a complex argument to its bare bones, since the Depression, the twin forces of managed democracy and Superpower have opened the way for something new under the sun: ‘inverted totalitarianism,’ a form every bit as totalistic as the classical version but one based on internalized co-optation, the appearance of freedom, political disengagement rather than mass mobilization, and relying more on “private media” than on public agencies to disseminate propaganda that reinforces the official version of events.

It is inverted because it does not require the use of coercion, police power and a messianic ideology as in the Nazi, Fascist and Stalinist versions (although note that the United States has the highest percentage of its citizens in prison — 751 per 100,000 people — of any nation on Earth). According to Wolin, inverted totalitarianism has ’emerged imperceptibly, unpremeditatedly, and in seeming unbroken continuity with the nation’s political traditions.’

The main objectives of managed democracy are to increase the profits of large corporations, dismantle the institutions of social democracy (Social Security, unions, welfare, public health services, public housing and so forth), and roll back the social and political ideals of the New Deal. Its primary tool is privatization [and deregulation].

Chalmers Johnson, Inverted Totalitarianism: A New Way of Understanding How the U.S. Is Controlled