7 Signs of Tyranny
By Robert Reich
To watch this on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tg8y5H_Rrf0
As tyrants take control of democracies, they typically do 7 things:
1. They exaggerate their mandate to govern.
They claim, for
example, that they won an election by a “landslide” even after losing the
popular vote.
They criticize any finding that they or co-conspirators stole the
election.
And they repeatedly claim “massive voter fraud” in the absence of any
evidence, in order to have an excuse to restrict voting by opponents in
subsequent elections.
2. They turn the public against journalists or media outlets that criticize
them.
They call them
“deceitful” and “scum,” and telling the public that the press is a “public
enemy.”
They hold few, if any, press conferences, and prefer to communicate
with the public directly through mass rallies and unfiltered statements (or
what we might now call “tweets”).
3. They repeatedly lie to the public, even when confronted with the
facts.
Repeated enough, these
lies cause some of the public to doubt the truth, and to believe fictions that
support the tyrants’ goals.
They foment public bias or
even violence against them. They threaten mass deportations, “registries” of
religious minorities, and the banning of refugees.
5. They
attack the motives of anyone who opposes them, including judges.
They attribute acts of
domestic violence to “enemies within,” and use such events as excuses to beef
up internal security and limit civil liberties.
6. They appoint family members to high positions of authority.
They appoint their own
personal security force rather than a security detail accountable to the
public. And they put generals into top civilian posts.
7. They
keep their personal finances secret, and draw no distinction between personal
property and public property
They profiteer from
their public office.
Consider yourself
warned.
ROBERT
B. REICH is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of
California at Berkeley and Senior Fellow at the Blum Center for Developing
Economies. He served as Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration, for
which Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries
of the twentieth century. He has written fourteen books, including the best
sellers "Aftershock", "The Work of Nations," and "Beyond
Outrage," and, his most recent, "Saving Capitalism." He is also
a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine, chairman of Common Cause,
a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and co-creator of the
award-winning documentary, INEQUALITY FOR ALL.
