out-Bushes

Ten thousand young commissars - their title borrowed from the Communist Party leaders of the Soviet era - came here to learn to be Russia's next generation of tycoons and political leaders. Equally important, they came to prepare to stamp out any challenge from opposition groups to President Vladimir Putin's government. All were summoned by Nashi, a pro-Kremlin organization that pays homage to Putin and seeks to promote Russia's resurrection as a superpower capable of frustrating what leaders call Western "imperialism." --Russian youth rally at pro-Putin camp, USA Today

oil fascism

...so God help me, I can perceive nothing but a certain conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and title of the commonwealth. They invent and devise all means and crafts, first how to keep safely, without fear of losing, that they have unjustly gathered together, and next how to hire and abuse the work and labour of the poor for as little money as may be. -Of the Religions in Utopia, St. Thomas More

A state is not, like the ground which it occupies, a piece of property (patrimonium). It is a society of men whom no one else has any right to command or to dispose except the state itself. It is a trunk with its own roots. But to incorporate it into another state, like a graft, is to destroy its existence as a moral person, reducing it to a thing; such incorporation thus contradicts the idea of the original contract without which no right over a people can be conceived. --Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace

...it is in part a new kind of industry for gaining ascendancy by means of family alliances and without expenditure of forces, and in part a way of extending one's domain. --Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace

It's interesting to speculate how revulsion to Robespierre's "Reign of Terror" may have moderated Kant's views.

Are the enemies within not the allies of the enemies without? The assassins who tear our country apart, the intriguers who buy the consciences that hold the people's mandate; the traitors who sell them; the mercenary pamphleteers hired to dishonor the people's cause, to kill public virtue, to stir up the fire of civil discord, and to prepare political counterrevolution by moral counterrevolution-are all those men less guilty or less dangerous than the tyrants whom they serve? --Robespierre, On the Moral and Political Principles of Domestic Policy

"If there had been no Rousseau, there would have been no Revolution, and without the Revolution, I should have been impossible." --Napoleon

et al

It the meantime, the US, another "dream" of Enlightenment thinkers, is itself becoming what it was never intended to be. William Ewert Gladstone called the US Constitution"...the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man" It is tragic that it will die slowly of a thousand cuts.

In 1935, Sinclair Lewis penned the cautionary tale, It Can't Happen Here, chronicling the fictional rise of Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip, who becomes President against the protests of Franklin D. Roosevelt and America's saner citizens. A charismatic Senator who claims to champion the common man, Windrip is in the pocket of big business (i.e. Corpos), is favored by religious extremists, and though he talks of freedom and prosperity for all, he eventually becomes the ultimate crony capitalist. Boosted by Hearst newspapers (the FOX News of its day), he neuters both Congress and the Supreme Court, before stripping people of their liberties and installing a fascist dictatorship. -- Maureen Farrell, Can It Happen Here?