- Re: All States are Police States! We don't SUDDENLY live in a police state Archived Message
Posted by brooks
on April 1, 2020, 8:59 am, in reply to "All States are Police States! We don't SUDDENLY live in a police state"
| Certainly there are elements of authoritarianism in every state - a reason to get rid of them - but I don't think they all qualify as police states. There's a pretty wide spectrum from relatively free societies to Nazi Germany, Pinochet's Chile or Saudi Arabia, and while we've been moving towards the wrong end of that spectrum for some time, the fact that we can still have political discussions like this and publicly expose and denounce the crimes of our own states without being disappeared is not a trivial matter. Of course neither is the fact that Julian Assange is in the British Gulag gulag being tortured for doing just that. I would say we're hovering precariously somewhere between a free society and a police state with significant elements of both and probably on the verge of descending into the latter as things continue to break down and capitalism collapses under the weight of its own contradictions and crimes against the natural world. You are right to point out the significance of the fact that even elites - generally immune from the state repression - are getting worried by the ominous signs of where we are headed. As Chomsky has pointed out, elites generally don't like fascism. "They might turn to it in a time of crisis, but typically they want the state to be powerful enough to work for their interests, but not powerful enough to infringe on their privileges." Given the multiple crises we're facing now, the danger of them turning to it are very real, and the signs all around us. Which is why we have to use the space we still have to prevent falling any further into that abyss. |