I Don't Think the Situation is Getting Better For Dissidents in the West
There is a feeling in dissident circles that “the worse things are, the better,” when it comes to the crumbling might of the American Empire. I don’t really buy this, sorry. The country may be crumbling and people may be getting poorer and more desperate, but that doesn’t mean that the budget of the secret police will be slashed anytime soon. Quite the opposite, in fact. So long as the secret police gets funded, the criminals will stay in power and the shakier their hold gets, the more they’ll need to rely on the secret police. Things will get worse for dissidents when the situation gets more critical, not better.
Envision, if you will, a scenario in which the secret police is not a threat. Well, then, the path to power is quite simple. You 1) create a political organization 2) rally the people behind a populist platform and a populist candidate 3) win the elections or, if the elections are cooked, 4) march on either the local capital or the federal capital and refuse to leave. Assume authority one way or another, basically, and 5) then start passing laws to jail the enemy and purge the government. Also, once in power, 6) refuse to leave.
Easy peasy.
But the secret police stops this process at step one. It is difficult to organize politically outside of the approved parties, who have an understanding with the Deep State to play by the rules.
If you were dead-set on organizing a nativist, populist party, it could indeed be done. So long as the rhetoric, optics and the platform itself was based on the principle of being popular, chances of success would be high. All one has to do is figure out what is popular and support it - this is made easier by the plethora of polling data we now have to work with.
In America, for example, the organization would have to promote an “America First” domestic and foreign policy. It would be vaguely Christian, but not fanatical and non-aligned to any particular denomination. While unabashedly nativist, it would also use the proper words and not run headlong into the rhetorical traps set by the enemy media. The key here isn’t to appease liberals, but to assuage skittish centrists who might be convinced that you’re dangerous by the liberal media. “Heritage Americans” or simply “True Americans” are good terms to use. I would even incorporate American Indian imagery to highlight the nativist stance of the party in the same way that the Tea Party used a colonial aesthetic. Americans, after all, have used Indian aesthetics when rebelling against an occupation government before. It’s also an arresting visual - see the case of Qanon Shaman. But, this is all just me brainstorming and having fun. Right-wingers tend to prefer the sullied and dour visuals of Prussia and the Third Reich, unfortunately and, leftists are even worse, constantly falling back on brutalist symbology and splashing copious amounts of red everywhere. Telling these people to expand their color palette is tantamount to heresy. People are often more attached to an aesthetic than the idea that the aesthetic is designed to promote.
Moving on, the next step would be to engage in actual politicking. That means reaching out to different voter blocs and forming a coalition with them to gain votes. Having your own consolidated bloc of voters and supporters means getting approached as well. From there, deals have to be made and promises pledged to people with power who might be willing to gamble on a new nascent political organization. Then, upon taking power, the purges have to be swift and thorough.
All rather simple. I’m not exactly bringing anything new to the table here. This is how it’s always been done.
But this all remains largely a pipe dream because the secret police exists to stop the process at step one - the actual construction of a political organization staffed by competent people capable of bringing a populist platform to the masses. Even if the police doesn’t shut down these organizations immediately, many competent people are too scared to get involved in the first place. Then, the media, also largely run by the secret police or people who share the same elitist mentality exists to hamper the outreach of such nascent groups and their message. Furthermore, the system punishes those within the system who might want to engage with a new political player. Making deals requires secrecy and conspiring - all hampered by the snooping of the secret police.
We’re at the point now where Donald Trump, a former president is getting raided by the secret police. We’re also at the point where the elections have been blatantly rigged and no one with power seemed capable or interested in doing anything about it. With Nancy Pelosi’s latest stunt in Taiwan, we seem to be getting confirmation that we have entered a phase of one-party rule in the US, where the DNC has more power over domestic and foreign policy than the professionals running these organizations and the GOP is largely just controlled opposition. As a result, there is a distinct feeling that the whole Empire is tearing at the seams and even basic competency has been done away with to make room for the principle of party loyalty or loyalty to the DNC’s party agenda above all else. The secret police, while having its own agenda, appears to have become the attack dogs of the party pushing Woke Liberalism on a hapless domestic population and America’s vassal states abroad.
So, the point here is simple: we gotta do something about the secret police because they are the main obstacle that has to be surmounted. The secret police ought to be all that we talk about in the dissident blogosphere. Not ideology.
One of the most important things we can do now is to simply start talking about them and what they do, specifically. As things stand now, people who get approached, harassed or intimidated choose to keep silent, as if they’re hiding a dirty secret that would reflect poorly on them. Worse, many people cooperate with the secret police because they either a) think that it is moral to do so b) think that it will help them out of a sticky situation or c) are scared stiff and don’t know what they’re doing at all. I personally know people who have been approached by the secret police, have talked to them, and who deny that this has occurred to them or play it down. I can’t exactly accuse them of being feds without proof, but the seed of doubt has already been sown in my mind.
Instead of maintaining silence, we should assume that all prominent and even semi-prominent people have been approached and we should demand that they tell us what happened and what they told the secret police. The general operating procedure ought to be to a) admit that this occurs and b) to refuse to cooperate or even communicate with the secret police. We need to acknowledge this stark reality and normalize talking about it - it will help dispel the fear and terror that the police exert on people at the very least if they realize that they are not alone.
We need to develop both awareness of the secret police problem and strategies for dealing with it going forward. I’ve already suggested the idea of first going somewhere where the secret police can’t reach and compromise a nascent political organization i.e., abroad. The next suggestion I have is to start talking about the problem openly because we can’t make any headway with people denying that it even exists. Finally, we need to study the famous Prisoner’s Dilemma and come up with cooperation strategies that incentivize people to close ranks and not rat out their comrades. I have brought up all of these topics on the blog before at one point or another, but now I’m trying to bring it all together.
The only way in which worse can become better for dissidents is if it leads to the masses opening up to the idea that a change of the political guard is necessary for the survival of the nation and their own survival. That is indeed occurring now. This opens up opportunities for rhetoric of a more radical character, but also increases the danger for people engaging in it. As the system begins to teeter and wobble, the hand that governs become harder and more desperate to make examples of people who would challenge its waning authority.
It should be clear that we will face more repression, not less, as the situation in the West worsens.
Couple thoughts.
In terms of talking about contacts with the secret police, the National Security Letter is designed precisely to prevent this. Even to admit to having seen one is to court jail. They don't always use this, obviously, but it's impossible to know how often they are used by the very nature of it.
One effective resistance tactic, historically, is obscurantism. We're already doing this, e.g. esoteric meme culture. The Poles did something very similar in the 80s. Their underground punk scene, which served as a propaganda arm for the Solidarity movement, adopted a lyrical style that was deliberately opaque to those not in the know. When the archives were opened up after communism fell, it turned out that this had been very effective: agents sent out to infiltrate had been left utterly baffled by what they were hearing.
The secret police is definitely being expanded in the US. The IRS is being made much larger in order to squeeze the taxpayer, and I think we can all guess which taxpayers they'll be sicced on. The IRS is also going to be armed, now. So we'll be able to add economic repression to the list of tactics the regime uses to suppress domestic dissent.
I am confused about the intelligence services, at least in the French context. I have met a few students whose goal was to join them. When I occasionally meet one, I ask them about what they do now and some have answered that they work for the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which means that they have probably joined domestic intelligence. They are all patriotic or nationalistic and heavily conservative. I have also met people who have retired from the intelligence services and they are patriotic and conservative too; one is even reactionary and royalist. These people also have an uncanny ability about never uttering any useful info about their former jobs. So I could not figure out whether most people there were patriotic or conservative or whether they are outliers. I have never met anyone in active positions in the intelligence services, however their personnel is supposed to remain dissimulated under innocuous job descriptions. Thus there are patriots in the secret police but I cannot fathom their actual numbers and power.
That said there are signs that the intelligence services work first and foremost for themselves and co-operate with their peers for their own good standing. They have official secret budget allocations from parliament but they also seem to run dark budgets. The CIA has been shown to be involved in drug trafficking in the past. In France during the celebrations of the first world war, the delegation from Kosovo was treated with great consideration whereas the Serbian delegation was treated with despise; the mere presence of a delegation from Kosovo made no sense. Furthermore a novelist portrayed as having contacts in the intelligence services has described several Western intelligence services running cigarettes, drugs, and arms traffics through Kosovo. Kosovo has also been described by many papers as a state run the local mafia. This has lead me to conclude that the French intelligence services, the CIA and others run all sorts of lucrative trafics and have dark budgets. They also have access to arsonists and assassins from the mafias they work with.
So the intelligence services work first for themselves and in association with their peers. Loyalty to the government or to the top civil servants comes second in my opinion. Some old episodes in France show this. In 1980 or so the French services received the betrayal of a top official in the KGB. They chose not to tell the president because there was an election in 1981 and waited for the new president to be elected. They did tell the CIA about him though ! Then they told about him to the new president and asked him whether they should tell the Americans. The French intelligence and the CIA used this to test the loyalty of the president to NATO and the USA ! Authentic treason. I could recount other episodes that display a similar state. They are all gleaned from papers or books published by inquisitive journalists and they have caused small scandals when they were revealed.
I do not know how to assess on the role of the intelligence services in the repression of conservatives, reactionaries, right-wing dissidents. In the USA and Europe it is more the universities, the media, the civil service and the corporations that have been on the attack. The intelligence may give a hand but I believe that this comes at the request of the politicians, the top civil servants, or the Mossad; and they might not be zealous about it. As for the infiltration of reactionary groups, it might be done by employees of NGOs, like the Open Society, rather than the secret police. The secret police might train them though. Plenty of sabotage and personal harm might be inflicted by purely private means.