“The maintenance of power, namely, the pursuit of unlimited authority domestically has gone far to shape the actual machinery of [Political] power as we know it today. Organs of administration which served this purpose became vastly swollen [Dept. of Homeland Security]. The security of power came to rest on the iron discipline of the Party, on the severity and ubiquity of the secret police [Homeland Security, FBI, DOD, IRS, etc.], and on the uncompromising economic monopolism of the state [two years of COVID quarantine – and counting]. The “organs of suppression,” in which the leaders had sought security from rival forces, became in large measure the masters of those whom they were designed to serve.
Today the major part of the structure of power is committed to the perfection of the dictatorship and to the maintenance of the concept of [Party] as in a state of siege. Those human beings who form that part of the structure of power must defend it at all costs for without it they are themselves superfluous.
The rulers can no longer dream of parting with those organs of suppression. The quest for absolute power has increased exponentially in modern times. The excesses of the police apparatus have fanned the potential opposition to the regime into something far greater and more dangerous than it could have been before the excesses began.
But least of all can the rulers dispense with the fiction by which the maintenance of the dictatorial power has been defended. [i.e. You can’t be elected without Party support].
The second concept important to [Party] ideology: the infallibility of the [Party]. The concept of power permits no focal points of organization outside the “Party” itself. It requires the Party leadership the sole repository of Truth. If Truth were to be found elsewhere, there would be no justification for its expression in organized activity. But it is precisely that which the [Political Party leadership] cannot and will not permit. The leadership of the [Political] party is therefore always right. Party leadership is at liberty to put forward any particular thesis which it finds useful to the cause at any particular moment and to require of the faithful an unquestioning acceptance of that thesis by the members of the Party as a whole. This means that Truth is not a constant but is actually created by the Party leadership themselves. It may vary from week to week, month to month. It is only the most recent manifestation of the wisdom of those in whom the ultimate wisdom is supposed to reside. The accumulative effect of these factors is to give the Party an unshakeable stubbornness in its orientation. This orientation can be changed at will by the Party but by no other person. Once a given Party line has been laid down the whole Party machine moves inexorably along a prescribed path, like a persistent toy automobile wound up and headed in a given direction [invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq]. The individuals who are the components of this toy are unamenable to argument or reason from outside sources. Their whole training has taught them to mistrust and discount the glib persuasiveness of the outside world. Like the white dog before the phonograph, they hear only the “master’s voice.” Since there can be no appeal to common purposes, there can be no appeal to common mental approaches.” – George F. Kennan, Sources of Soviet Conduct, July 1945; Annals of America, Vol. 16, p. 441
