How Covert Agents Infiltrate the Internet to Manipulate, Deceive, and Destroy Reputations

[JDPriestly]

169. True. Combine surveillance, record-keeping on every individual's whereabouts and activities

and propaganda and you have dictatorship of the worst kind, by the oligarchy in our case.

There is a book on the German experience during WWII, They Thought They Were Free.
Here is an excerpt:

“What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.

“This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.

“You will understand me when I say that my Middle High German was my life. It was all I cared about. I was a scholar, a specialist. Then, suddenly, I was plunged into all the new activity, as the university was drawn into the new situation; meetings, conferences, interviews, ceremonies, and, above all, papers to be filled out, reports, bibliographies, lists, questionnaires. And on top of that were the demands in the community, the things in which one had to, was ‘expected to’ participate that had not been there or had not been important before. It was all rigmarole, of course, but it consumed all one’s energies, coming on top of the work one really wanted to do. You can see how easy it was, then, not to think about fundamental things. One had no time.”

“Those,” I said, “are the words of my friend the baker. ‘One had no time to think. There was so much going on.’”

https://disinfo.com/2013/10/excerpt-thought-free-germans-1933-45-milton-mayer/

I know I will get flak for comparing our current surveillance and propaganda state to NAZI Germany. We don't have concentration camps. But there was far more to the NAZI state than concentration camps. Far more. I lived in Germany and Austria. When talking about the NAZI period, people would tell me that after all, Hitler did increase the employment rate. After the terrible inflation and then wide unemployment that followed WWI in Germany, the German people felt they were regaining national pride under Hitler. They were wrong. It is easy to be wrong, very wrong in a surveillance state with an effective propaganda arm.

And this information released so recently makes me feel more certain that I am correct in comparing our developing, still in the early stages, surveillance and propaganda state to NAZI Germany in the 1930s. In fact, a major Austrian, the Creditanstalt bank failed in 1931.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creditanstalt

The parallels are frightening.

We are not living in NAZI Germany -- yet, but we need to change our course if we want to avoid it.