Fascism in power is the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic, and most imperialistic elements of finance capital. —Georgi Dimitrov.

April 15, 2003—In his February 23 New York Times Magazine article "Fortress America," Matthew Brzezinski writes with a sense of inevitability of such garrison state tactics as routine military presence at shopping malls and restaurants; the proliferation of Joint Operations Command Centers (JOCCs), such as the one already in operation in Washington, D.C., which can track suspected citizens through every phase of their daily movements using facial recognition technology; a national identification card advocated by Larry Ellison of Oracle and others in the computer industry which would contain the user's biographical, financial, and medical history and without which it would be difficult to move around American cities; the Face-Finder Recognition system developed by MIT which can be used at A.T.M's, car-rental agencies, and D.M.V. offices; the conversion of American cities into patchworks of places no one can go near without proper identification; the transformation of air travel from dozens of flights a day between major cities to one or two a day, costing much more and without any guarantee that one might even get on a flight; and Americans getting used to the idea of suspicious citizens simply disappearing without anyone being notified.

1. Brian Chapman, in Police State, describes some police state characteristics: "The transformation of the criminal police into a political police; the expansion of the political police into a body used for the control of opinion; the development of all the apparatus for permanent surveillance of the population through widespread networks of informers and the control of the communications; the substitution for the judiciary of extraordinary courts, though these are still under military control; extensive powers of arrest and preventive detention based on emergency powers and the application of numerous laws of exception." Chapman is describing the 1967 Greek coup d'etat, but the same comments apply to the new American totalitarian regime, each of the components of the police state now firmly in place. With the appointment of Himmler as minister of the interior in August 1943, the Nazi police state became fully realized: the police were no longer a normal part of state administration, with legal backing required for individual measures, but part of the political mobilization system.

"The man behind duct tape and plastic sheeting is not Tom Ridge, the homeland security secretary, nor some anonymous policy maven at a Washington research group . . . but Ralph E. Gomory, the president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation . . . who even before September 11 . . . was worried about terrorism and determined to find possible responses." The February 23 New York Times reports that the foundation, in the spring of 2001, made a grant to the Center for Law and the Public's Health, "a joint effort of Georgetown University and Johns Hopkins, to come up with a legal response to bioterrorism." What might a legal response to bioterrorism mean? Dr. Gomory speculates, "Who has the power to quarantine Manhattan, for instance. There are lots of issues relating to authority and power that bioterrorism touches."

2. Horkheimer: "He who will not speak of capitalism should keep silent of fascism too." The new totalitarian state has done away with the previous mediation of free contracts. As in early capitalism, masses of people are available again to be organized against democratic systems. Horkheimer says that liberalism cannot be reinstated; the managerial revolution makes that impossible. Once again, the world is moving in the same fascist direction. Ortega y Gasset's contempt for the masses is again justified. Marcuse notes: "Within a repressive society, even progressive movements threaten to turn into their opposite to the degree to which they accept the rules of the game . . . the exercise of political rights (such as voting, letterwriting to the press, to Senators, etc. . . . ) in a society of total administration serves to strengthen this administration by testifying to the existence of democratic liberties which, in reality, have changed their content and lost their effectiveness." The eclipse of reason signifies for Horkheimer and Adorno the zeitgeist of 1946; today again fear and disillusionment mean that the individual will not be able to resist the new universal means of manipulation.

Laurie Goodstein reports in the February 23 New York Times that an addiction recovery program singled out by Bush in his state of the union address is actually a ministry. Healing Place Church's founders, Tonja Myles and her husband Darren, acknowledge that it is neither a recovery program nor a drug treatment center; before starting the ministry, the two ran a plumbing business, and they have no experience in substance abuse treatment. The Times adds: "The White House says the plan does not violate constitutional prohibitions on government support for religion because the money goes toward the addicts' vouchers, not to the programs directly. Critics call it a strategy designed to dodge laws on separation of church and state."

3. Modern totalitarianism is inextricably linked with modern forms of democracy. Already, Tocqueville was disquieted: "I think . . . that the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything that ever before existed in the world; our contemporaries will find no prototype of it in their memories. I seek in vain for an expression that will accurately convey the whole of the idea I have formed of it; the old words despotism and tyranny are inappropriate; the thing itself is new and since I cannot name it, I must attempt to define it." Michael Halberstam, in Totalitarianism and the Modern Conception of Politics, points out that J. L. Talmon, in his classic work on the roots of totalitarianism in popular democratic culture, noted the same links. Halberstam points out that the Weimar Republic deteriorated into the Third Reich, following the first truly pluralistic political system in German history, and that the Russian Provisional Government was followed by the Bolshevik takeover after the liberation of the Russian people from feudalism. The almost frenziedly liberal, tolerant, pluralist culture for (privileged) parts of urban America in the nineties has been followed by eradication of legal democratic freedom, total violation of freedom of conscience, and destruction of the boundaries between the private and public.

A classified FBI intelligence bulletin, disseminated to state and local law enforcement agencies throughout the country, warns authorities to be on the lookout for "lone terrorists" not directed by Al-Qaeda. "Lone extremists [notice the switch from terrorists to extremists] represent an ongoing terrorist threat in the United States. Lone extremists may operate independently or on the fringes of established extremist groups, either alone or with one or two accomplices." According to the February 23 New York Times, the bulletin's emphasis is on loners who might act on the spur of the moment to attack American targets, without any apparent previous indication or motivation. Such "lone wolves" might suffer from "psychological abnormalities, as much as devotion to an ideology." Lone extremists might commit violent acts without even the group's leadership knowing about it. What then can law enforcement look out for? " . . . [O]ften there are early warning signs concerning these individuals that could be useful to law enforcement. Many lone extremists, for example, have a history of functioning poorly within traditional communities, such as educational institutions, churches and places of employment." To preempt such sudden, spur of the moment outbursts of violence against the United States, investigators are making full use of covert monitoring using national security warrants (now obtainable without judicial scrutiny).

4. The conditions of mass democracy are inseparable from the formation of the police state: terror is the most efficient means to control newly mobilized political masses. Bonapartist states and authoritarian regimes, dictatorships and despotisms are akin to the totalitarian state, but these regimes leave some room for individual freedom. Totalitarianism insists on conformity by all classes, attacks "enemies" of the system and their ideologies. Totalitarian states rest on mass movements rather than the elite social groups of previous authoritarian regimes. Michael Curtis, in Totalitarianism: "Such regimes . . . [appear] at a historical moment when traditional and religious values have a declining efficacy on individuals and when the state of man in modern democratic systems does not lead to an easy integration into organizations based on the common interest. With the technological controls at its disposal, the regime attempts the implementation of that meaning by the creation of a new society and a new type of citizen." Totalitarianism is the negation of politics, because it is the negation of choice. Orwell points out the distinctive nature of totalitarianism: the attempt to control not only actions, but thoughts and emotions (hence the pervasive emphasis on preemptive, preventive, predictive measures).

The February 22 New York Times reports that the Los Angeles City Council has adopted a resolution against the Iraq war. Rather than confront the menace of the police state right at home, cities are passing toothless resolutions against foreign adventurism. On the contrary, they are justifying such opposition to get more funds to build the police state at home! Councilman Eric Garcetti, the sponsor of the Los Angeles resolution, says that "We need to take care of our security needs here in Los Angeles, which are woefully inadequate, before we set out abroad." The February 23 Times reports, in "New York Sees a Silver Lining in the Orange Alert," that New York expects to benefit from the raising of the terror alert to the orange level: "The list of what the city says it needs is long: $100 million to train the Police Department, Fire Department and other local 'first responders'; $200 million to enhance counterterrorism programs and protect landmarks like the United Nations, the New York Stock Exchange and the Federal Reserve Bank; $187 million to improve security at places like police precinct stations and hospitals; $189 million for emergency response equipment; and $223 million to improve emergency communications in high-rise buildings, tunnels and the subway." These are all escalating steps to realizing Fortress America, making an Israel out of a once free republic.

5. Terror is necessary to fulfill the historical destiny of the totalitarian state. Michael Curtis, in Totalitarianism, remarks on the variables of the totalitarian regime: Terror is enforced through an official ideology meant to create a new type of man; monopoly control is exercised over private thought to produce total conformity; terror, concentration camps, and a political police force are used to keep the individual in permanent threat; private interests are eradicated in favor of public ones; legal restrictions are removed on the wielders of power, and along with that, dissent is criminalized; free elections are ended, and the media monopolized to mobilize the masses. Meanwhile, the very masses on whose cupidity the totalitarian state has long constructed its foundations, whose very narcissism makes them not appreciate the value of political choice, show up in the streets in the millions with cute slogans like "No blood for oil," and "Somewhere in Texas a village has lost its idiot." Everywhere in Western democracies, the citizen has lost his senses.

Law enforcement officials claim, after arresting Professor Sami al-Arian of the University of South Florida, that although they knew about his activities supporting terrorism since the mid-1990s, "legal, political, and operational roadblocks" prevented them from bringing charges against him. The February 22 New York Times reports that a former Justice Department official claims that "we were obviously aware of Sami. He was considered a big fish, a very serious guy" in terrorism. The FBI began bugging Mr. Al-Arian in 1994 using secret warrants obtained under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and claims that all the while it was listening to him plotting terrorist attacks—but did nothing to stop him. His lawyer calls him "a political prisoner." Attorney General John Ashcroft hails this arrest as a triumph of the powers granted to him under the 2001 Patriot Act to merge intelligence and criminal operations. Part of the government's indictment says that on November 11, 1994, in response to a Palestinian Islamic Jihad attack, Professor Al-Arian wrote a note asking God to bless the efforts of the group.

6. All of the current regime's innovations can be seen as a radical extension of the effort to regulate the individual's inner life, a system of total control abetted by new technologies. But it is the exercise of total power for its own sake, without pretense to humanistic purposes: it is the ultimate expression of nihilism. (The new technologies of control are for the first time being exercised: because they exist, they must be used.) The extermination of the Jews, Dwight Macdonald wrote, was not an end to anything. The war against Iraq and whoever else is to follow is not for oil, or for anything. No military, imperialistic purposes are served. Totalitarianism need not even serve the purpose of intimidating internal enemies: opposition flourishes, as in 1984. Dostoevsky says, and Arendt repeats, that "everything is possible." Therefore, it must be. Another sign of the totalitarian tendency, Christopher Lasch points out in The Minimal Self, is that the artist refuses to interpret experience expansively.

"Doctors, Soldiers and Others Weigh In on Campus Diversity," reports the February 23 New York Times. More than 300 organizations have submitted 64 briefs to the Supreme Court supporting affirmative action at the University of Michigan's undergraduate and law schools. What can be said about the unseemly sight of so-called liberal individualists passionately herding together to defend the pernicious race discrimination policy of affirmative action as a matter of inviolable creed? The Times goes on to report the conflicting views of the American Jewish Committee and the Asian American Legal Foundation on this matter. The American Jewish Committee opposed the University of California in the Bakke case in 1978, but now backs Michigan, engaging in obfuscating talk about quotas and goals: "While quotas used to limit the number of Jews in higher education were motivated by the discriminatory intent to restrict a particular group, goals have the intent of increasing the number of qualified minority members at the institution." This logic presumes that increasing the number of minorities is by itself a laudable goal. But supporting the plaintiffs, the Asian American Legal Foundation calls race-conscious admissions "odious," explaining: "There is ample reason to look askance at any program that classifies people by ethnicity to achieve some 'ideal' racial composition. There is no difference between a policy of admitting some people because there are 'not enough' of their race and a policy of excluding others because there are 'too many' of theirs. This country's most respected universities have a shameful history of such policies, namely the admission ceilings first adopted for Jewish students in the 1920s, out of concerns over Jewish 'over-representation' at those schools."

7. Is a particular personality type more susceptible to totalitarian suasion? Adorno and his fellow researchers, in The Authoritarian Personality, look at childhood training as the psychological explanation. Where do fear and dependency come from in parent-child relations? Rigidity of defense, narrowness of ego, preoccupation of parents with problems of status, granting of social approval on the basis of external moral values like cleanliness and politeness, and punishment and condemnation of others for nonconformity to these external values—these observations about the authoritarian type of personality are as valid for Germans in their time of fascist paranoia as Americans since the eighties. Here, the distinctions between modern American liberalism and conservatism completely erode, since both agree on the sources of fear.

Adorno points out in "Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda" that Freud, in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, identified in 1922, well before the rise of fascist movements, the bond which the fascist leader must create between individuals in order to convert them into a mass susceptible to fascist manipulation and capable of acting against its own rational interests. Freud explains the coherence of masses in terms of the libidinal or pleasure principle. Adorno elaborates further: Love relationships are concealed or kept on the unconscious level to aid in the transformation of sexual energy into mass feeling suitable for political purposes. The mechanism which transforms libido into the necessary bond is identification, with the leader as the all-powerful primal figure. Narcissism, through idealization, plays a crucial role in regard to identification. The leader can be loved only if he himself cannot love—hence the absence of any give and programmatic content to the leader's speeches, as well as the "paradoxical prevalence of threat and denial." Among followers, belonging to the in-group generates feelings of purity, while any self-criticism is viewed as narcissistic loss.

In Everyday Life in the Modern World, Henri Lefebvre says: "A terrorist society is the logical and structural outcome of an over-repressive society; compulsion and the illusion of freedom converge; unacknowledged compulsions besiege the lives of communities (and of their individual members) and organize them according to a general strategy; the distinction between the other-directed and inner-directed conscience is abolished since what now plays the part of inner is the other disguised, integrated and justified; opposition is silenced either through being condemned as a perversion and thus invalidated, or by integration."

On February 25, House majority leader Tom Delay criticizes Vermont Governor Howard Dean and other Democrats who oppose a war with Iraq, saying that the Democrats are fast becoming "the appeasement party of the future." Delay tells reporters that Dr. Dean has disqualified himself for national leadership: "If he wants to be president of the United States, but subject the United States to decisions by the U.N., he lacks the sound judgment needed for responsible national leadership."

On February 26, four Arab men are indicted on federal charges that they illegally sent $4 million to Iraq through a Syracuse-area charity called Help the Needy. One of the men, oncologist Dr. Dhafir, says that he "was fully, deeply and openly involved in providing what he believed was food aid to Iraq." At the same time, a University of Idaho graduate student is indicted for failing to state on his visa application his relationship to an organization that allegedly operates websites praising martyrdom. This organization is actually the Islamic Assembly of North America.

The Senate Judiciary Committee says on February 25 that the FBI has not been aggressive enough in applying unprecedented levels of domestic surveillance authority, particularly under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Senator Arlen Specter says, "The real question is if the FBI is capable of carrying out a counterintelligence effort."

8. Arendt's insights in The Origins of Totalitarianism: Totalitarian movements count on masses supposed to be too indifferent or dumb for liberal parties' attention. The masses grow out of the fragments of a society where before individual loneliness and hyper-competitiveness had been held in check by class membership. Loyalty to totalitarian programs is possible only when the program is emptied of all content, so that a change of mind is not conceivable. The nihilistic, terroristic activism of totalitarianism attracts intellectual elites as much as it does the masses. Propaganda is part of the psychological warfare used by totalitarian regimes, but terror, in the form of indirect, veiled hints against all those who dissent, continues to be used even when the psychological aims have been accomplished and the population has been completely subdued.

Once a totalitarian movement takes power, the infallibility effect of propaganda becomes fully realized (the regime makes true what it predicts). A lying world of consistency, to accord with the needs of the masses' mind, is constructed to replace reality itself. The purpose of propaganda is not persuasion but organization—for instance, the creation of front organizations and elite formations separating those within the movement from those outside. The division between a real and an ostensible government, once the totalitarian movement is in power, is another pervasive feature. Totalitarian regimes are bent on world conquest even if it works against their own people's interests; they seem to take their own conspiratorial fiction seriously. Nazi law was binding beyond the German border, as all parts of the world were seen as potential territory for conquest. Disregard for immediate consequences, not so much as ruthlessness; neglect of national interests rather than nationalism; conviction in ideological fictions rather than lust for power—these are what define totalitarianism. The totalitarian movement is structureless, emancipated from the profit motive, freed of utilitarian concerns.

The function of the secret police is to realize the totalitarian fiction within the country. To ferret out secret enemies, the entire population is drafted into front organizations: neighbor becomes more dangerous to one harboring "dangerous thoughts" than the official secret police. The secret police is superfluous to the security needs of the totalitarian regime; it is only its instrument for total domination. The identity of the objective opponent keeps shifting—as soon as one is vanquished, war may be declared on another.

Concentration camps are laboratory experiments to reduce human personality to the status of a thing, to eliminate all expression of spontaneity. Terror enforces oblivion, the person in the concentration camp being totally cut off from the world, and Hell and Purgatory being realized on earth by killing the juridical person in man: that is, certain categories of people are set outside the protection of the law. The moral person in the man is then killed, after which individuality is exterminated. Concentration camps are essential to the totalitarian regime: without them the regime cannot inspire total fanaticism and loyalty on the part of its troops, and total apathy on the part of the whole people.

Anis Shivani is the author of the novels "The Age of Critics" and "Memoirs of a Terrorist."  He is currently at work on a book called "Fear and Repression in the New Plutocracy."  He welcomes comments at Anis_Shivani_ab92@post.harvard.edu

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