Totalitarianism.

Editor,

Rounding up, imprisoning, and disappearing every dissenter who opposes the corporate state is child's play once social networks based on who calls whom are mapped.

A security state operating in secret is enabled -- and supported by many when it is revealed -- by incessant fear mongering, promises of recapturing a mythic past, and a defensive, militaristic exceptionalism that envisages itself as the greatest nation on Earth, under attack and victimized for no comprehensible reason.

Adoring throngs saluted Hitler rapturously when he was building his totalitarian state. People making good money supported the Argentinian junta that disappeared thousands who opposed authoritarianism.

You don't have to look far to see corrupt, lawless regimes who do indeed attract support from individuals they scare with shadowy, omnipresent enemies and woo with pretty good incomes while more and more undesirables are identified and rounded up.

Nothing scares me more than totalitarianism, and it takes a lot less than you think for a totalitarian process to be put in motion, develop into a totalitarian system, and wreak havoc with millions upon millions of lives.

Not everybody suffered under Naziism. Not everybody suffered under Stalin, Pinochet, or a rogues' gallery of major and minor despots. But in every case, enemies of those states, enemies of those processes, were sought and purged when they were found.

I left the USA a year ago precisely because this is the path we are on, and it is very bad.

Re: "Secrecy and Freedom" (6/9/2013)