A discussion on the dangerous of tyranny, evident in the creation of the 900-page document, Project 2025.

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Before the 13 Colonies in the "New World" became the United States of America, its settlers from Europe, wanting to be free from religious intolerance, fired bullets at the indigenous population-- men, women, and children. Racial difference was already an issue. For sure. Millions of the Indigenous people witnessed their homes and crops go up in flames, their wives and children, and elderly parents, trying to outrun bullets. When bullets didn't manage to kill, disease did!

The violence of the Atlantic Slavery Trade, the kidnapping and exploitation of African American labor was nothing short of tyrannical. As tyrannical as the conquering of the Indigenous for land and resources. Growth!

American "innocence" can't save the American experiment in democracy.

" We stop together as if on signal," states the Handmaid narrator of the Handmaid's Tale . We "stand and look at the bodies, she explains. "It doesn't matter if we look. We're supposed to look: this is what they are there for, hanging on the Wall. Sometimes they'll be there for days, until there's a new batch, so as many people as possible will have the chance to see them."

In the 1978 Hollywood version of the Invasion of the Body Snatchers , it's not long before the food safety inspector, played by the late Donald Sutherland, Mr. Bennel, notices the change. Already underway, the invasion is reflected in the stiffness of the passersby. There's less smiling, kissing, hand shaking, hugging. He hears how people are reporting that others are "different" and not who they're supposed to be. In Mr. Bennel's circle of friends and acquaintances, there is the go-to-psychologist who is already no longer human. As Mr. Bennel states, "'that's because they are all part of it. They're all pods, all of them.'"

They may resemble humans but, as aliens, they've lost their humanity. No emotions. No display of love or compassion, and, as Dr. David Kibner, the "psychologist," declares, there's no need to hate, either.

The following year, 1979, Alien hit the movie theaters. The aliens are on a mission to eliminate humanity, with the assists of engineered "engineers," that is, other aliens, produced by megacorporations. Aliens have been "dead a long time."

The same could be said of Winston and all the characters in Orwell's 1984 . In our minds eye, we see Winston, and he sounds like a man alive in resisting Big Brother, he seems like a man alive with love for a woman, but he has long been dead. Under the tyrannical thumb of Big Brother, everyone is being watched. Every one must believe in the power of Big Brother to deny the right of freedom to all. Here, in this world, the Wall isn't necessary. There is Room 101.

Classical dystopia books and films, if good, serve as warnings: While humanity is the enemy of tyranny, for a thriving humanity, democracy is as necessary to our existence as is water and food.

How do, we humans, advocates for democracy, "avoid the evil" of tyranny? This is a question the Founding Fathers asked, writes historian Timothy Snyder in Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. The Founders, looking to "ancient democracies and republics," did so in an effort to avoid the pitfalls of "good intentions." The "good intentions" that often lead to disasters.

Is it even possible to maintain a democracy and not end up with an "oligarchy-- or "empire"?

I read those lines, thinking about how my ancestors would have answered this question. They would have had to contend with the hypocrisy, the "innocence" displayed by their "business-oriented" owners. They would have over heard discussions in the great rooms and parlors between men, speaking profoundly on the subject of democracy. Freedom, even.

I was thinking of the Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes noting in I, Too, Sing America refer to the beauty of the African people, enslaved and mistreated in America. But one day, he's confident that the country will come to see that beauty in Black humanity, and recognize how to "avoid the evils" of tyranny.

But until then"

The political debate in the US has always been centered around "the problem of tyranny with American society." And the problem has yet to be resolved.

Snyder writes that the "history of modern democracy is also one of the decline and fall." It's up and down, in other words. After WWI, 1918, after WWII, 1945, and, again, after the end of communism, 1989, democratic societies, responding to globalization, became dazed and confused, looked for a tyrant with an army of brown shirts, a dictator with an army of loyalists. "European democracies collapsed into right-wing authoritarianism and fascism in the 1920s and 1930s."

After two decades of fascist rule, the intellectual legacy of fascism continues to grow more relevant than ever since; and after four decades of communist rule, those totalitarian states left behind the idea of "rule by a disciplined party elite."

Democracy, writes Snyder, "demands that we examine history to understand the deep sources of tyranny." We could then properly response to threats to democracy here in the US. However, he adds, so far, "we are no more wiser than Europeans in the 20s and 30s." Even though we have "one advantage." We can learn from the past.

Yet, we haven't learned from a perspective that will give us the vision necessary to see clearly how our history played out. We haven't learned to follow the "North Star," so to speak. Some Americans have been too "innocent," naive, while other Americans have woefully insisted on clinging to the creation of enemies from without, enemies to maim and kill, to fill the prisons. To point to as justification for the use of sacred violence!

When Snyder asks, "Does the history of tyranny apply to the United States?" I would hope this is a rhetorical question. Otherwise, wait to hear a collective KBJ-sigh.

Because the answer is yes! A resounding yes! And it's not human nature as described by Snyder, seemingly, taking a step back taking that deep dive. Human nature, he states, "is such that American democracy must be defended from Americans who would exploit its freedoms to bring about its end." The willingness to slaughter people, to steal their land and resources, to deprive them of life and liberty, to enslave them isn't the doing of human nature. I would think humanity would be doomed. Thinking matters. Approaching the problem from a different perspective, matters.

Tyranny of the few is always feasible because it has been feasible in the US before. But there has always, too, been resistance. A relatively few slaveholders thought slavery a good thing. And it was profitable for them and the whole of the US and it's economic growth. It situated the US as the leader of the Western world because of the wealth generated by the labor of enslaved Blacks.

And yet, slavery came to an end. It ended not solely because Lincoln signed, reluctantly, the Emancipation Proclamation. Blacks thought themselves as having always been human . Contrary to a system that declared them dead!

And that's the thing! Under a fascist or a totalitarian state, "the whole climate of thought will be different. In fact, there will be no thought, as we understand it now," states Winston in Orwell's 1984 . There will be no need to think! Tyranny operates best when its subjects no longer think.

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In an adjacent room, Winston witnesses an officer enters the room and points to one prisoner. The man "gasp" and flings himself on his knees before the office. He cries out for the office to take him anywhere. Do anything to him, he says. He'll confess to anything and everything. He already has, he adds. "'You've been starving me for weeks. Finish it off and let me die. Shoot me. Hang me" Is there somebody else you want me to give away? Just say who it is and I'll tell you anything you want.'"

The prisoner tells the officer that he has a family. Wife and 3 children. The youngest is 6-years-old. "'You can take the whole lot of them and cut their throats in front of my eyes, and I'll stand by and watch it. But not Room 101!'"

The prisoner is already alien. No longer human, he thinks the unthinkable and expresses to his tormentors his allegiance to tyranny: Take the whole lot of them. The children, the 6-year-old! He's no longer a human being in this room, before he even reaches the interrogation room, Room 101.

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The 900-page document, created by the Heritage Foundation by former President Trump's enablers, will permit Americans to believe themselves free-- free to exercise retribution and further cruelty upon fellow Americans. In other words, America is that country before the Civil War. It's divided, with enemies. Within! Project 2025 offers an unapologetic America a means to right wrongs it perceives as having been committed against white America. Mainly white men!

It is an agenda for the business of producing death to any life form struggling to live. Educational institutions will train loyalists to tyranny. The DOJ will condemn the guilty-- the non-loyalists. In turn, Project 2025's iron boots will stomp out the need for social justice and compassion. A society concerned for the wellbeing of its citizens won't be a society for a tyrant! According to Media Matters, Project 2025 will "severely inhibit the federal government's protection around reproductive rights, LGBTQ and civil rights, and immigration, as well as its climate change efforts."

" People's natural loves and loyalties" will be replaced with "unnatural ones." In other words, the dead are needed instead of the living!

It's no accident that Project 2025 targets Blacks, Indigenous, Latino/as, immigrants, LGBTQ, and women-- the same groups marginalized and imprisoned, oppressed and exploited-- in an attempt to return individuals to a state of the long dead.

I'm sure some trees remember they once served as ritual sites for death!

We have to see in Project 2025 a return to the way it was when the first settlers fired with impunity on Indigenous women and children and when Blacks labored on the plantations. It's a return to the "Old" New World and a re-structuring of labor as we have come to know it. Advance it, for there might be such a thing again as Black and Hispanic jobs!

It has been happening in Gaza for months. Years. Decades. Immigrants from Guatemala or El Salvador or Haiti will recognize themselves in the people of Gaza or the Congo or the Sudan. There won't be a narrative allowed to call them beautiful!

How to avoid the evil invasion of ideologies of hate?

If only we can overcome the nightmares we bring to life! Maybe we might become wiser than previous generations.

It's possible.

Authors Bio:

Activist, writer, American Modern Literature, Cultural Theory, PhD.