Battleangel

Stalin has risen … via Boing Boing … resembling something that we’ve all seen in old Soviet and German propaganda posters. Even the art style is dead on. Eerie.

Seen on the MARC commuter train (between Baltimore and DC) today, this picture pretty much sums up the new “National Security:”

Source: Articulatory Loop

Spy on your fellow citizens, we want you to be constantly fearful, suspicious and socially wary. Nothing good ever came out socializing with your fellow commuters, except for revolution and dissent. There is only loyalty to you government. Total terror breeds total loneliness; total loneliness enables total power.

As Hannah Arendt once said: “Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence; thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within.”

Totalitarianism according to Arendt “strives not toward despotic rule over men, but toward a system to which men are superfluous.”

In essence, in order to rule successfully over people in a totalitarian state, one has to break all forms of social bonds that exist within the population. Mistrust and paranoia are ideal tools for this task. Ideally you’d want husbands and wives to rat out each other and never be able to sleep at night for fear of being turned in. It’s only in the absence of human relations that loneliness and fear become the predominant states and fanatic loyalty and absolute power can be wielded without question.