Saturday, July 16, 2016

Totalitarian America - an Inagined Scenario.

I copied this from Srauss and Howe's The Fourth Turning Forums website, which I believe is now extinct. I proofread it and made corrections, and elaborated on it by adding the last paragraph. Basically it's a totalitarian dystopia based on a possible Ayn-Randian and Christian hard right gaining complete dominance and control in the United States -- which could be enabled by Donald Trump winning the White House.

I can see this 4T, in one of my worst nightmares, as the questionable procession from control by the Boom Right to Mafia-like enforcers of Generation X who so bungle things that the Millennial Generation uses its collectivist tendencies to turn against heirs of wealth that have become an aristocracy in all but name, religious hucksters who fool people, and gangland enforcers (which could be Bloods, Crips, and MS-13) in a violent proletarian revolution. 
The other is that America under a Hard Right regime becomes an anathema -- much like North Korea or Iran today, Iraq under Saddam Hussein, or South Africa under Apartheid, if for very different reasons, with its unique view of how to organize an economy and an anti-democratic political system. Paradoxically, the nastiest systems often have a missionary desire to spread the ideology where it is unwelcome through local chicanery or outright force, and as a result a tendency to take undue risks of international war. Just imagine what a theocratic-plutocratic America would be like to the rest of the world. 
Think of all the escaped dissidents who would end up in places like Paris, Tokyo, Moscow, Tel Aviv, New Delhi, Karachi, and Beijing.  
"I could no longer practice medicine in the United States after I refused to become a member of the (name favored church in the Christian and Corporate State)", says Mohamed S in Ankara.  
"I lost my teaching permit when the police found a copy of Das Kapital, and was fired from the University of California at Berkeley", says Dr. Linda T in Berlin. "I had been using it for material often critical of communism and the old Soviet Union, but all that the regime saw me useful for was to mine coal in Kentucky. At age 52, I know how long I would last in a coal mine, especially on short rations, but survival of people like me is no priority." 
"I lost my congressional seat in what used to be a safe seat in the Chicago area after the Constitution was amended to allow employers control of workers' votes. You know -- vote wrong, lose your job, but go to a labor camp. I got some knocks on the door at 2AM, my dog was poisoned, and I got warnings to leave while I could before I ended up like my beloved and late dog, and as a black man I felt that I would feel more comfortable in Recife" says former Congressman W. "Protect your civil liberties here in Brazil while you still can!" 
"I have returned to Mexico because work in America no longer pays enough to live on. I never expected to do so, but I didn't want my kids to have to drop out of school and become domestic servants despite doing well in school. The stuff about 'Land of the Free' has become a farce. I say this in English because I want the thugs who now rule America to hear this in the language that they know", says Maria Z., born and raised in Denver like her children, in Guadalajara. "A Mexican worker may be poor, but not as poor as an American worker who has chains instead of pay!" 
"As an exchange student from Boston (my family is still fairly comfortable, but maybe not for long -- we are Jews) attending the University of Krakow I was at first not so comfortable about being so close to a site of extreme infamy [Auschwitz] where some of my relatives perished... but I now feel safer in Poland than in Massachusetts, especially after I hear of the labor camp built in Worcester. I know that if I did complete my education at Harvard I would be heavily in debt and would have to make some abominable choices just to avoid going broke. I wish to renounce my US citizenship and begin the process of becoming a citizen of Poland", writes Sarah G. on her application for political asylum. 
"I escaped the United States when I was a teenager and am now a Russian citizen. As a gay man living in Saint Petersburg, I know full well that Russia still has on its books a law against 'homosexual propaganda' in the presence of minors. Still, I came here from Dallas because the law is not enforced very often or harshly these days as it used to be. Even if it were, people still don't hunt you down like an animal and kill you on the very spot they find you, like they do in America," says Peter T. on Russia Today. 

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