Creeping totalitarianism is silently supplanting normal human thoughts and beliefs with an omnipresent and soul-destroying moral pathology.  Although many wish to find another name for totalitarianism -- something that suggests that it has a purpose beyond power -- that is a mistake.

"Socialism" for example, is a dull, empty word.  Orwell's horrific 1984 described a state based upon "Ingsoc" -- English Socialism -- but the Inner Party did not believe in redistributing wealth or helping the poor.  The Inner Party believed in power -- limitless power -- and sought that power to make misery.

If our enemy is not some incarnation of socialism -- a system which no one really believes in any longer -- then our enemy is not the state, per se, either.  This was another theme in 1984.  The state was the hand puppet of those who controlled information, thought, and recreation.  To us today, the "state" is the toy of those who feed an invented reality with their version of entertainment, information, and knowledge. 

History repeats itself.  The state in Soviet Russia, Fascist Italy, or Nazi Germany was pitiful: the party, not the state, wielded power.  Mussolini, the first totalitarian, is often believed to have promoted the worship of the state.  Yet the Fascist leader in the April 1, 1919 edition of Popolo d'Italia, the first Fascist periodical in Italy, wrote: "Down with the State in all its forms and incarnations."  This attitude did not end when Fascists gained power.  Mussolini stated in 1935 of Fascism:  "We are not a ministry; we are not even a government; we are a regime."

Nazis had the same view.  Hitler said: "The National Socialist Party is the state" and "The state does not command us.  We command the state."  The state was simply a tool used by the real villains in Hitler's Germany: the Nazis.  The Reichstag under the Nazis almost never met, and although there was in theory a cabinet, it also almost never functioned.   

The same was true of Communism.  Howard Fast, a Hollywood screenwriter who was a communist and won the Stalin Prize, after he left Communism, noted: "Russia provided the world with a new situation[.] ... A modern industrial complex was created within a nation that literally had no functioning government, as we know government, but merely a framework for the administration which the Communist Party controls" (emphasis added).  Further, "[t]here was no Soviet government; there is none today."  Lenin agreed:  "Without instructions from the Central Committee of our party not one state institution in our republic can decide a single question of importance as regards matters of policy and organization." 

That is our situation today.  We have a federal budget law which is simply ignored, and immigration laws are not enforced.  The Tenth and Ninth Amendments, intended to preserve the autonomy of states and of individuals, have been scrubbed out of the Constitution.  We have no "government" in America at all any longer; we have a regime of intimidation whose real masters do not hold public offices. 

Those who control information, entertainment, education, and social popularity -- the shadowy inventors of "politically correct" language, emotions, and reality which pull us with ten thousand different strings into perverse puppetry made to mimic true life -- are our equivalent of the Inner Party in Orwell's dystopia.

We cannot defeat them by elections; we can defeat them only by removing their power to dictate the films, music, art, manners, schools, charities, colleges, and causes which create an artificial union of Americans.  Adopting this cure to the disease which threatens our souls requires rejecting the banal slogan which even good Americans have lazily absorbed: "United We Stand."  No -- no! -- no!  That is not America or its promise of liberty.  We must repudiate all homogenizing rhetoric.  Divided we stand.  United we fall. 

This is a hard lesson for some Americans to grasp.  The mutilation of language has caused noble words like "diversity" to reek of totalitarianism.  America and its liberty, however, were very much tied to religious, cultural, and social diversity.  The peoples who came here -- Puritans, Jews, Catholics, Quakers, and Baptists, among others -- did so to remain divided in their social and cultural life but united in their passion for liberty. 

Even harder for us is how to wage war against those who have seized the bastions of cultural and educational power.  There is really only one way: we must eschew with calculation every vestige of the shadow-masters of position in public life.  Cast our marketplace votes in consumer decisions to remove all support for network television, new movies, colleges, public schools, and other incarnations of political correctness. 

That is half the battle.  The other half is to do what ultra-Conservative Jews, Mormons, and other smaller groups have done: create a cultural, educational, entertainment, information, and social system which encompass our values.  When those two campaigns begin, and not before then, will we begin to fight the real enemy and to win the war which must be won.