DEFINING A TOTALITARIAN STATE
A totalitarian regime or state attempts to control nearly every aspect of personal,
economic,
and political life.
Senator Harry Reid's (D-NV) floor statement on Frist's Nuclear Option:
"It appears that the Majority Leader cannot accept any solution which does not guarantee all current and future judicial nominees an up-down vote. That result is unacceptable to me because it is inconsistent with constitutional checks and balances. It would essentially eliminate the role of the Senate minority in confirming judicial nominations and turn the Senate into a rubberstamp for the President's choices...
"Mr. President, the filibuster is not a 'procedural gimmick.' The filibuster is an important check on executive power and part of every Senator's right to free speech in the United States Senate."
Benito Mussolini was the first to use the word totalitarian to describe his dictatorship positively, although it could have been used just as easily to describe the Soviet Union under such leaders as Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, who had seized power in Russia in 1917 and shared similar tendencies toward a complete restructuring and regimentation of society. Totalitarian governments prohibit all activities contrary to the r?ime's goals of either a radical restructuring of society to create a new economic order,
(source)
institutional racism (National Socialism, the Croatian Ustቋ, South African Apartheid),
(US Torture at Guantanamo "increasingly repressive" by Andrew Buncombe (The Independent, U.K.) :
The report by the Red Cross - the only independent organisation permitted
to visit the prisoners - was written after a visit by its inspection team in June. It said it discovered a system designed to break the will of the 550 prisoners - four of them British citizens - through "humiliating acts, solitary confinement, temperature extremes [and] use of forced positions".It added: "The construction of such a system whose stated purpose is the production of intelligence cannot be considered other than an intentional system of cruel, unusual and degrading treatment and a form of torture."
reconstitution of human nature through fundamentalist religion (Taliban rule in Afghanistan),
The Posse in the Pulpit... from TIME Magazine
But for all the value of evangelical activists to the G.O.P., this may be a moment when their conviction is as much a headache as a help. They are refusing
to accept anything but total victory--namely, up or down majority votes in the Senate for all the nominees, which would almost certainly guarantee their confirmation. That position is making it very difficult for the two parties to achieve a face-saving compromise.
or some combination of these. They maintain power through secret police, propaganda, and suppression of open criticism of the regime, often through terroristic methods.
Newsweek retracted an article claiming that U.S. soldiers flushed a copy of the Koran during one of its intimidate/interrogation sessions. Washington Post has supported the article, saying that similar allegations have been made before. However, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan has done nothing but lecture the national press for trying to tell the truth. If what Nixon and Ziegler did to Bernstein and Woodward were bad... McClellan comes pretty damn close.
A letter from Congressman John Conyers to Scott McClellan (from its post on DailyKos):
Much as in George Orwell's fictional Nineteen Eighty-Four, the r?ime exploits real or imaginary threats to itself as threats to the people and as excuses for persecution of dissidents and other 'enemies of the people'.I write to express my profound disappointment and outrage about comments you made about a matter involving Newsweek magazine, which smacks of political exploitation of the deaths of innocent and a shameless attempt to intimidate reporters from critically investigating your Administration's actions. Your comments are contradicted by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and stand in stark contrast with your actions involving the "Downing Street Memo." I urge you and your counterpart at the Pentagon to immediately retract the comments made yesterday, and - at long last - provide a full accounting of the administration's actions in the lead up to the Iraq war.
As you are aware, a May 9th Newsweek report indicated that interrogators at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba flushed the Koran down a toilet as part of an interrogation. Newsweek has since retracted the story. However, as the magazine was reevaluating information received from its sources, it appears you opted to exploit the situation for partisan political gain by falsely laying blame on Newsweek for recent deaths in Afghanistan.
Due to the reputations of totalitarian states for mass murder,
My discretion only will allow me to link to a series of pictures from Abu Gharib. Be warned, they are very graphic and I haven't seen all of them.
extreme repression, and militarism,
the word totalitarian almost invariably implies opprobrium toward a particular government, and is often used selectively in asserting that one sort of dictatorship is less loathsome than another, as in contemporary disputes over the legitimacy and characteristics of the Chilean r?ime under Augusto Pinochet as opposed to Fidel Castro's Cuba.
Any halfwit should be able to catch the unnervingly "coincidential" characteristics of a Totalitarian State in the so-called "democracy" that the United States claims to be. That's the depressing part. For a significant portion of Americans... they just don't get it, or worse... they don't care.
posted by christie at 10:34 PM
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