Would you call a bearded man ‘madam’?
by Alexander Boot:
Or, put another way, would any sane person do so? Wrong question.Here’s the right one: What kind of society can allow the punishment of a man who refuses to kowtow to collective madness by denying the evidence before his own eyes?
The answer is, a totalitarian society. You know, the kind ours is becoming.
It was George Orwell who first pointed out a key feature of totalitarianism: forcing people to accept madness as sanity and vice versa. Writing specifically about Italian fascists, he showed how they used that stratagem as a mechanism of power.
It was as if they were saying to the people: “What we make you do and say is ridiculous. We know it, you know it, and we know you know it. But we can make you do and say those things anyway, to impress on you who’s boss.”
If authoritarian regimes seek to run political life only, totalitarian ones strive for total control over people’s minds. That is the very essence of totalitarianism.
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