Which Is the Most Totalitarian Country?

Eric Zuesse, originally posted at Strategic Culture

Is it the country that has a higher percentage of its citizens in prison than any other? That’s the U.S.

Is it the country that prosecutes an entity for having murdered 196 of its citizens but prohibits that entity from providing evidence of its innocence? That’s Holland.

Is it the country that robs Venezuela’s Government of a billion dollars in gold bars? That’s UK.

Is it the country that prosecutes an entity for having tried to murder one of its citizens but refuses to allow that entity to provide evidence of its innocence, and that has imprisoned the intended victim, and blocked that person from communicating to and receiving information from the public, and might even have secretly murdered and disposed of his corpse, all in order to prevent such communication? That’s UK. (And see a video discussing that article here.)

Is it the country that has imprisoned an Australian citizen ever since December 2010, and held him in solitary confinement and with inadequate medical care ever since 8 April 2020 (“originally jailed for 50 weeks in May 2019 for breaching his bail conditions” but not released him and instead transferred him to solitary confinement), while that Australian has never been convicted of anything other than bail-breach, which hadn’t even occurred until he had already been imprisoned for over 9 years in this foreign country — never having been tried in a court of law? That’s UK.

Is it the country that retaliated against the great Scottish investigative journalist who had reported honestly about the judicial victimization mentioned here regarding that trial of an Australian, as well as against another judicial horror (which was against a leader of Scotland’s separatist movement), by charging this Scottish reporter with “contempt of court” for his allegedly having caused the prosecution to fail to persuade the jurors on any of the charges in the criminal indictment against that Scottish separatist? This journalist said “The state believes it has finally discovered a way to put me in prison without the inconvenient hurdle of a jury of my peers. Contempt of Court is decided only by a judge. It is extraordinary that you can go to jail for a substantial two years with no jury protection and no test of ‘beyond reasonable doubt’; and on the whim of a judge defending what he may view as the dignity of his own office. This really is the epitome of bad law. To use it against freedom of speech is disgusting.” The nation’s laws exist only in order to allow aristocrats to rip off the public. That’s UK.

Is it the country which had demanded the UK to keep that Australian citizen in prison until he either dies there or gets sent to a U.S. prison to die? That’s the U.S.

Is it the country that has consistently had the world’s worst record as prosecuting international whistleblowers — whistleblowers (such as that Australian) against major violations of international law? That’s the U.S.

Is it the country that orders the attorneys, for a child-sex victim of the world’s most famous pimp and rapist, and imprisoner, of under-age girls, for sex with prominent men, to “destroy” some of the evidence she has against this alleged serial rapist of her? That’s the U.S.

Is it the country that international polls show is believed to pose a greater threat to world peace than any other? That’s the U.S.

Is it the country that, after World War II ended, slaughtered or assisted in slaughtering, between 1945 and 2007 (and not even counting more recently, such as in Syria and Yemen), “between 20 and 30 million people in wars and conflicts scattered over the world”? That’s the U.S.

Is it the country that spends about as much on its military as do all other nations on this planet combined? That’s the U.S.

Is it the country whose top court ruled on June 15th that no prosecutor in the country will be allowed to win a case against a policeman unless the lawyer who is representing the allegedly violating police officer is willing to have that officer convicted — not even if that police officer incontestably had shot an innocent bystander, and maybe not even if that officer were to have killed an entirely innocent person? That’s the U.S., and that’s its Supreme Court.

Is it the only country that has been scientifically examined in order to determine whether it is a democracy or instead a dictatorship — and it has been found to be a country in which “The preferences of the average [citizen] appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy” (which phrase scientifically defines quite well what the word “dictatorship” means), and only the preferences of the wealthiest and best-connected persons have any significant, measurable, effect upon shaping and determining that Government’s laws and policies (which finding defines quite well what group constitute that country’s dictators)? That’s the U.S.

Is it the only country that, when a news-release headlined “CIA Fabricated Russiagate ‘Evidence’, Says Former NSA Tech Chief” was submitted as an exclusive to each one of the 40 biggest and most influential ‘news’-media in that country, was turned down by each and every one of them? That’s the U.S.

How many more indicators should be required, then, in order to present a credible case that today’s United States of America can reasonably be considered to be the world’s most totalitarian country?

Whereas only one country has been scientifically analyzed in order to determine whether it is a democracy or instead a dictatorship, incarceration-rates have been reported by 223 countries; and each year, the U.S.A. comes out having the world’s highest percentages of its people in prisons. Is any single measure a more reliable measure of the extent to which a given country is a dictatorship, than that?

Death penalties are so infrequent in all countries nowadays, so that legal sanctions are overwhelmingly of the imprisonment type, instead of executions. Furthermore, countries that have civil wars, such as Sudan, can have remarkably low imprisonment-rates because almost all violence there is in armed battles. Those countries are at war, but they are not necessarily more dictatorial than the United States is. They might be more violent, perhaps, but not necessarily totalitarian, at all.

By contrast, the U.S. has high rates of violent crimes, and it also has the world’s very highest rates of imprisonments; and, so, even if the scientific studies had not shown it to be a dictatorship, a reasonable case does exist that the United States is totalitarian, even if it might not necessarily be the world’s most totalitarian (which could be any one of a number of others, such as UK, or Holland). And, yet, the United States, despite this reality, has the arrogance and audacity to pontificate to all the rest of the world about ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’, and refuses to allow the International Criminal Court to investigate its own possible war-crimes, and its blatant violations of basic human rights, as well as its many foreign invasions that were based only upon demonstrable lies, and which invasions were therefore themselves international-war crimes. But isn’t this lying and hypocrisy exactly what one would expect, if the United States is the world’s most totalitarian country? Is that not clearly so? The conclusion, therefore, seems virtually inescapable: the world’s most totalitarian country is the United States of America.

In addition, there is considerable other statistical evidence which seems inconsistent with calling the U.S.A. a “democracy”; and, also, in the latest international poll of residents in 53 countries regarding the percentage there saying yes to “My country is democratic,” the U.S. scored as being #38, which was in the bottom 29% on “democracy”; and numbers 1 through five on that list were (in order): Taiwan, Denmark, Switzerland, S. Korea, and China. Somehow, those countries scored at the top, though none of them pontificates to the rest of the world about “democracy” and “human rights.” Is humility alien to the U.S. regime?

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.