A technocracy’s effect is to nullify the will of the people.
The first of such modern regimes was arguably the National Socialist German Workers Party (aka the Nazi Party). Minister of Armaments Albert Speer was among Hitler’s finest and most prized technocrats. In recent years, Speer’s role has been overshadowed by diabolical agents with more obvious blood on their hands, such as Adolf Eichman, Rudolph Hess, Hermann Goering, and others.
However, Speer was central to Hitler’s vision for Germany. He laid out grandiose architectural plans for the Third Reich’s capital and kept the bulk of the German armaments machine running, even as the lights dimmed around Hitler’s failed vision of a thousand-year reign of unopposed power. He was no less diabolical than his peers.
Since WWII, people have pondered and debated how it was possible for Germans, considered among the world’s most cultured and educated people, to fall in line with the Nazi agenda. After the war, Speer offered insights that are also warnings to Democrats’ technocratic aspirations.
When Germany surrendered, Speer was brought to the ancient German city of Nuremberg, where he was put on trial for crimes against humanity along with twenty-four others. After much deliberation between the tribunal, he was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment at Spandau prison in Berlin. It was a slap on the wrist sentence compared to other regime members who stood trial and received death sentences.
When Speer’s trial neared its conclusion, his final testimony included information explaining how the Nazi regime effectively won the hearts and minds of the bulk of the German population after the nation’s economic and cultural decline following WWI. He also issued a stern warning to the victorious democratic nations that were already building large bureaucratic departments that were overseen by the proto-technocrats of their day.
(Keep in mind that America had a head start on this project: During the 1930s, Roosevelt’s New Deal transformed the American federal government by adding nearly seventy megalithic bureaucracies to the Federal government, permanently transforming America’s governing system. This transformation began the process of convincing many well-meaning Americans that “the bigger the government, the better,” and conditioned Americans to embrace large bureaucratic agencies run by technocrats.)
Speer spoke the following: Hitler’s dictatorship was the first dictatorship of an industrial state in this age of modern technology, a dictatorship which employed to perfection the instruments of technology to dominate its own people… By means of such instruments of technology as the radio and public-address systems, eighty million persons could be made subject to the will of one individual. Telephone, teletype, and radio made it possible to transmit the commands of the highest levels directly to the lowest organs where because of their high authority they were executed uncritically. Thus, many offices and squads received their evil commands in this direct manner. The instruments of technology made it possible to maintain a close watch over all citizens and to keep criminal operations shrouded in a high degree of secrecy. To the outsider this state apparatus may look like the seemingly wild tangle of cables in a telephone exchange; but like such an exchange it could be directed by a single will. Dictatorships of the past needed assistants of high quality in the lower ranks of the leadership also-men who could think and act independently. The authoritarian system in the age of technology can do without such men. The means of communication alone enable it to mechanize the work of the lower leadership. Thus, the type of uncritical receiver of orders is created.
Speer explained that, while Hitler was the first to employ the tools of authoritarian control to carry out his regime’s crimes, as technology developed after the war, other technocratic dictatorships would pose an even greater threat to humanity: The more technological the world becomes, the greater is the danger…As the former minister in charge of a highly developed armaments economy it is my last duty to state: Every country in the world may be dominated by technology; but in a modern dictatorship this seems to me to be unavoidable. Therefore, the more technological the world becomes, the more essential will be the demand for individual freedom and the self-awareness of the individual human being as a counterpoise to technology.
In 2023, America is witnessing an ever-encroaching government composed of unelected and unrestricted technocrats who are increasingly running, or perhaps, ruining, ordinary Americans’ lives. Therefore, it pays to take a lesson from one of history’s most evil technocratic regimes and its chief architect.
Speers’ words from his final testimony should chill any reader who favors a free society. We already see how the dozens of huge bureaucracies routinely roll over Americans’ constitutional rights, imposing their collective wills upon the people without regard to our ostensibly representational government.
Moreover, this rogue bureaucracy is allied with Big Tech’s spiderweb. Both big tech and the Deep State are composed of radical leftist ideological factions who believe in their absolute right to censor any view or opinion that runs contrary to a far-left narrative. No wonder, then, that we are witnessing a government, press corps, and common culture run amok with the Marxist-Woke mind virus.
The big question is whether there are enough freedom-loving Americans left to defeat this anti-freedom system of governing. After all, the bureaucratic state about which the evil Speer warned has already successfully entrenched itself into the fabric of the American way of life.
It’s urgent that Americans understand that their liberties are being held hostage by technocratic elites. They must immediately begin the process of reclaiming their ancient rights before it’s too late. That means using all legal means possible to oppose the government and technological alliance that works to subvert the will of We, the People, America’s true rulers.
Source: American Thinker.
