“Kicked into Reality”*

Truly, one feels kicked a little further into reality after a confluence of observations this past week.

● A pregnant mother is arrested in Australia for “inciting” a peaceful protest against increasing tyranny.
● A YouTuber has his door kicked in and is arrested for stating he was going to attend a peaceful protest against tyranny.
● England re-constricts public or home gatherings from 30 to 6.
● Journalists are arrested for practicing journalism.

I read Robert Greene's chapter 16, “The Law of Aggression” in The Laws of Human Nature and saw how vividly it confirmed that we are ALL on the aggressive spectrum.¹ How it also confirmed the Stanford Prison Experiment² findings (1971) about human nature and the predisposition of almost all men and women to abuse power.

I read from It Can't happen Here and knew it had begun — that Lewis saw our day as if in vision — another déjà vu; that all the promises to “not do” certain things were hollow as the doing of them unrolls day by day.

Here is a taste of Lewis' prescience:

“Now, it seems as if whatever’s right is wrong.³

— it’s like reading about typhus [tyranny] in China and suddenly finding it in your own house!”⁴

Probably many of them cared nothing about insults to the Corpo state, but had only the unprejudiced, impersonal pleasure in violence natural to most people.⁵

“Come on! Shut up and keep moving!” said the M.M. behind Doremus, and prodded him with the bayonet. It did not, actually, hurt much, but Doremus spat with fury. So long now he had unconsciously assumed that his dignity, his body, were sacred. Ribald Death might touch him, but no more vulgar stranger.⁶

You don’t quite understand, my Doremus. Habeas corpus— due processes of law— too, too bad!— all those ancient sanctities, dating, no doubt, from Magna Charta, been suspended— oh, but just temporarily, y’ know— state of crisis— unfortunate necessity martial law——”⁷

He saw that, for all the apparent prosaic calm of day after day on the paper, he was equally in danger of slipping into acceptance of his serfdom and of whips and bars if he didn’t slip. And he continued to be just as sick each time he wrote: “The crowd of fifty thousand people who greeted President Windrip in the university stadium at Iowa City was an impressive sign of the constantly growing interest of all Americans in political affairs,” and Staubmeyer changed it to: “The vast and enthusiastic crowd of seventy thousand loyal admirers who wildly applauded and listened to the stirring address of the Chief in the handsome university stadium in beautiful Iowa City, Iowa, is an impressive yet quite typical sign of the growing devotion of all true Americans to political study under the inspiration of the Corpo government.”⁸

Under a tyranny, most friends are a liability. One quarter of them turn “reasonable” and become your enemies, one quarter are afraid to stop and speak, and one quarter are killed and you die with them. But the blessed final quarter keep you alive.⁹

“Listen, Comrade Karl, Windrip and Hitler will join Stalin long before the descendants of Dan’l Webster. You see, we don’t like murder as a way of argument— that’s what really marks the Liberal!”¹⁰

On a day in late October, suddenly striking in every city and village and back-hill hide-out, the Corpos ended all crime in America forever, so titanic a feat that it was mentioned in the London Times. Seventy thousand selected Minute Men, working in combination with town and state police officers, all under the chiefs of the government secret service, arrested every known or faintly suspected criminal in the country. They were tried under court-martial procedure; one in ten was shot immediately, four in ten were given prison sentences, three in ten released as innocent. . .and two in ten taken in the M.M.’ s as inspectors. There were protests that at least six in ten had been innocent, but this was adequately answered by Windrip’s courageous statement: “The way to stop crime is to stop it!” The next day, Medary Cole crowed at Doremus, “Sometimes I’ve felt like criticizing certain features of Corpo policy, but did you see what the Chief did to the gangsters and racketeers? Wonderful! I’ve told you right along what this country’s needed is a firm hand like Windrip’s. No shilly-shallying about that fellow! He saw that the way to stop crime was to just go out and stop it!”¹¹

... the Americans were the first to start new and completely orthodox institutions, free from the very first of any taint of “intellectualism.”¹²

They can’t go and let us see that every doggone one of our old institutions is a rotten fake, the way Church and State and everything has laid down to the Corpos, and still expect us to think they’re so hot! But for unformed minds like your grandfather and Doremus, I suppose we’ll have to pretend to believe that the preachers who stand for Big Chief Windrip are still so sanctified that they can sell God’s license to love!”¹³

All over the country, books that might threaten the Pax Romana of the Corporate State were gleefully being burned by the more scholarly Minute Men. This form of safeguarding the State— so modern that it had scarce been known prior to A.D. 1300— was instituted by Secretary of Culture Macgoblin, but in each province the crusaders were allowed to have the fun of picking out their own paper-and-ink traitors.¹⁴

Daily— common now as weather reports— were the rumors of people who had suddenly been carried off “under protective arrest,” and daily more of them were celebrities. At first the M.M.’ s had, outside of the one stroke against Congress, dared to arrest only the unknown and defenseless. Now, incredulously— for these leaders had seemed invulnerable, above the ordinary law— you heard of judges, army officers, ex-state governors, bankers who had not played in with the Corpos, Jewish lawyers who had been ambassadors, being carted off to the common stink and mud of the cells.¹⁵

Windrip & Co. had, like Hitler and Mussolini, discovered that a modern state can, by the triple process of controlling every item in the press, breaking up at the start any association which might become dangerous, and keeping all the machine guns, artillery, armored automobiles, and aëroplanes in the hands of the government, dominate the complex contemporary population better than had ever been done in medieval days, ... ¹⁶

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*”kicked into reality”— from Lewis, Sinclair. It Can't Happen Here (Signet Classics) (Kindle Locations 3073-3074). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
1. Greene, Robert. The Laws of Human Nature (p. 547). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
2. Just search this blog and its companion blog (Déjà Vu Times II) for the many references to the Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) and the abuse of power.
3. Lewis, Sinclair. It Can't Happen Here (Signet Classics) (Kindle Location 2889). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
4. Ibid., (Kindle Locations 2944-2945).
5. Ibid., (Kindle Locations 3009-3010).
6. Ibid., (Kindle Locations 3039-3041).
7. Ibid., (Kindle Locations 3159-3162).
8. Ibid., (Kindle Locations 3328-3334).
9. Ibid., (Kindle Locations 3337-3338).
10. Ibid., (Kindle Locations 3372-3373).
11. Ibid., (Kindle Locations 3389-3398).
12. Ibid., (Kindle Locations 3417-3418).
13. Ibid., (Kindle Locations 3512-3515).
14. Ibid., (Kindle Locations 3590-3594).
15. Ibid., (Kindle Locations 3579-3584).
16. Ibid., (Kindle Locations 4223-4227).