Totalitarianism, War, and Resistance in the Post-Covid Era

Part one, global technocracy.

My headline message is that an attempt is underway to collapse liberal democracy and the nation state and to replace them with a novel global form of totalitarianism known as technocracy.

In my book, Wall Street, the Nazis and the Crimes of the Deep State, I discuss 13 areas of continuity between 1930s Nazi Germany and life in the West since 2020.

They include emergency powers, attacks on the working and middle classes, ideological conformity, propaganda, health surveillance, euthanasia, eugenics, the prevalence of pseudoscience, inversions of morality, and eco-politics.

I argue that those continuities are not accidental because the drive to build a totalitarian state is common to both eras.

That said, there are also some key differences between Nazi Germany and the present, which I also discuss in the book.

In particular, the form of totalitarianism that is being engineered today is global and is facilitated by digital technologies that allow all of human life to be monitored and controlled in real time on a single global network.

I call this the technocratic control grid.

The idea behind technocracy goes back to the 1930s, when an alternative to the booms and busts of capitalism was being sought in the context of the Wall Street crash and the Great Depression.

Technocracy was originally defined as, quote, the science of social engineering, the scientific operation of the entire social mechanism to produce and distribute goods and services to the entire population, end quote.

The idea, very broadly, was that if enough information can be acquired on everything which affects society, then society can be planned and run in the most efficient way possible, creating economic stability and increased leisure time for all.

However, always embedded in the idea of technocracy was totalitarianism.

Technocracy is about scientifically managing the entire social mechanism, the entire population.

Similar fantasies about scientific dictatorship can be found in mid-20th century writings by Bertrand Russell, Aldous Huxley, and Zbigniew Brzezinski.

The technologies for realizing technocracy were not available in the 1930s, but they are now, and they typically go under the label smart.

Increasingly, everything and everyone is becoming a node on a single global network, transmitting and receiving information in real time.

Think, for instance, of so-called smart cities, which, as the former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson told the United Nations in 2019, quote, pollinate with sensors all joined together by the internet of things with bollards communing invisibly with lampposts, end quote.

At first, it all sounds harmless enough.

Yet, Johnson went on to say that, quote, this technology could also be used to keep every citizen under round-the-clock surveillance.

Digital authoritarianism is not, alas, the stuff of dystopian fantasy, but of an emerging reality.

End quote.

They always tell us.

In fact, the danger from digital technologies extends far beyond cities.

As Catherine Austin Fitz has argued, the whole of society is being transformed into a digital concentration camp, a conclusion reached separately by former Silicon Valley entrepreneur Aman Jabi and myself.

The infrastructure for the digital control grid is being scaffolded all around us in the form of digital surveillance, facial recognition software, digital currencies, social credit scoring, digital ID, smart devices, and even autonomous weapon systems, such as those recently tested in Palestine and Ukraine.