TGIF: Are We Sure It Can’t Happen Here?

One runs a risk whenever one cites the 20th century’s great terror states while discussing current ominous developments in the western democracies. Apparent comparisons of the United States or western and central European countries to Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia will inevitably be hooted down with accusations of alarmist conspiracy-mongering and worse, shameful ahistoricity. Nevertheless, that must not keep us from noticing and pointing to contemporary events that bear an eerie resemblance, however slight, to things that went on in those totalitarian terror states. Such regimes don’t spring up overnight. They emerge, and looking at history, we can see that their more or less gradual emergence have telltale signs that we would do well to keep an eye out for. We can’t rest comfortably with the cliche that “it can’t happen here.” Yes, we risk overinterpreting events, but perhaps that is better than underinterpreting them.

Read TGIF at The Libertarian Institute.

TGIF (The Goal Is Freedom) appears on Fridays. Sheldon Richman, author of America's Counter-Revolution: The Constitution Revisited, keeps the blog Free Association and is executive editor of The Libertarian Institute. He is also a senior fellow and chair of the trustees of the Center for a Stateless Society and a contributing editor at Antiwar.com.

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Whom to Read Next?

When I am working on deciding on my next course of reading, it's as though the authors are standing before me to make their cases. Right now, Spinoza and Arendt are debating. Arendt is the more persuasive at the moment. I love Spinoza, but something in Arendt makes my core vibrate. It is something like excitement -- with a dash of fear. It's very odd.

I can accept a world of scarcity in all things except time.

Tyranny and Cooperation

Social phenomena -- both good and bad -- cannot happen without cooperation -- that is, without people doing things uncoerced. This is especially clear with bad phenomena. How much havoc could a Stalin, a Hitler, a Mao Zedong, or a Pol Pot wreak alone or with just a few trusted deputies? Obviously, a ruler needs many others to cooperate with him. Importantly, cooperation does not require understanding. Most people will not grasp the tyrant’s project, much less endorse it. But one way or another they will go along actively and passively (abstaining from resistance). Why? Because they have learned -- from parents, teachers, youth-group leaders, peers -- that that is just what one does: one respects the “law of the land,” which is seen as the will of the legitimate ruler(s) or of the people, depending on the reigning ideology, but is in fact merely a series of decrees (statutes, executive orders, etc.) widely believed to be authoritative. So coercion is unnecessary. But even when it is required, the tyrant still needs the cooperation of those called on to enforce the decrees. Should they defy their orders, the cooperation of others will be relied on to have those orders carried out. Etc. The ruled always outnumber the rulers. If no one cooperates, the tyrant must abandon his project or do his own dirty work. But that means the damage he could inflict would necessarily be small-scale. Moreover, acting alone, the tyrant would be exposed as a fraud, a mere freelance thug. In the end, evil systems can exist only because enough unthoughtful people cooperate with authority, unthoughtful in Hannah Arendt's sense, that is, in the sense that they never ask themselves if they have a better reason to respect the authority's decrees than “it’s the law.” I think this is what Arendt meant by “the banality of evil.”

(For more, see my "Come and See the Anarchy Inherent in the System!" and the chapter "The Constitution of Anarchy" in my book America's Counter-Revolution: The Constitution Revisited.)