Quotes About Authoritarianism

psychologist Wilhelm Reich theorized that the suppression of sexuality was essential to an authoritarian government. Without the imposition of antisexual morality, he believed, people would be free from shame and would trust their own sense of right and wrong. They would be unlikely to march to war against their wishes, or to operate death camps. Perhaps if we were raised without shame and guilt about our desires, we might be freer people in more ways than simply the sexual.

In his lectures to young communists in Germany during the rise of Hitler and the Nazis, psychologist Wilhelm Reich theorized that the suppression of sexuality was essential to an authoritarian government. Without the imposition of antisexual morality, he believed, people would be free from shame and would trust their own sense of right and wrong. They would be unlikely to march to war against their wishes or to operate death camps.

Their priority has been not to clamp down on the thing to which the public are objecting but, rather, to the objecting public. If anybody wanted a textbook case on how politics goes wrong, here is one.

I spent my life studying communism and Soviet systems.

Whenever "A" attempts by law to impose his moral standards upon "B," "A" is most likely a scoundrel.

One Monday, all school classes were suspended indefinitely. All students were directed instead to participate in the movement by writing big posters, da-zi-bao, criticizing the educational system. Rolls of white paper, dozens of brushes, and many bottles of red and black ink were brought into the classrooms. The teachers were nowhere to be seen.

The Red Guards at her school held struggle meetings to criticize her almost every day. During those struggle meetings they beat her and whipped her with their belts.

During the Second World War, he founded a war communications research project at the Library of Congress and recommended that the United States preserve democracy from authoritarianism by way of systematic, government-run mass manipulation.

I'm afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security.

But private individuals do not exist in the Soviet Union or in China where the claims of the state are total and even art and literature must be subservient to the interests of the state….

Today, of course, the dictatorship would be of the extreme left, but nevertheless would include the power of both the government and the corporations that have their hands in public affairs.

John Whitehead, author of A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, notes the U.S. government has been breaking its promises to the American

wary of government-driven hysteria over potential pandemics as well as government agencies that have proven more beholden to corporate

He remained against Getúlio even after the 1937 coup.

This was perfect dictator-logic: we investigate you, therefore you are an enemy.

In Hitler's Third Reich it is estimated that there was one Gestapo agent for every 2000 citizens, and in Stalin's USSR there was one KGB agent for every 5830 people. In the GDR, there was one Stasi officer or informant for every sixty-three people. If part-time informers are included, some estimates have the ratio as high as one informer for every 6.5 citizens.

Apparently, even in the GDR, sleep deprivation amounted to torture, and torture, at least of minors, was not official policy.

Mielke and Honecker grew up fighting the real evil of Nazism. And they kept on fighting the west, which they saw as Nazism's successor, for forty-five years after the war ended.

Since the same ruthless fist that had suppressed justice had also suppressed a few useless old customs,

the worst kind of one-party state "invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.

Wolf's answers rarely praised communism outright, and he didn't use Marxist language. But almost all of them praised the Red Army or the Soviet system, both of which were favorably compared to their German counterparts. And all of them explicitly contained the promise that life, which had become unbearable under the Nazis and during the final days of the war, would now quickly improve.

The incident illustrates the distinct absence of a communist sense of humor.

Unity is an anomaly. Polarization is normal. Skepticism about liberal democracy is also normal. And the appeal of authoritarianism is eternal.

Karen Stenner, a behavioral economist who began researching personality traits two decades ago, has argued that about a third of the population in any country has what she calls an authoritarian predisposition, a word that is more useful than personality, because it is less rigid.