Focusing on portrayals of Mussolini's Italy, Hitler's Germany, and Stalin's Russia in U.S. films, magazine and newspaper articles, books, plays, speeches, and other texts, Benjamin Alpers traces changing American understandings of dictatorship from the la

“The Enemy Within is a book for all patriots who understand that our country is in a fight for its life.”—MARK LEVIN America on the Brink A questionable election. The president of the United States illegally impeached—twice—and silenced. The First Amendment hanging by a thread. The national heritage under attack. Mob violence. America is on the brink of becoming a one-party dictatorship. How did this happen? The Enemy Within: How a Totalitarian Movement Is Destroying America provides the answer. David Horowitz has been the bête noire of the Left for decades on account of his courageous revelations of their aims and tactics, and now he sounds the alarm: the barbarians are already inside the gates. Horowitz lays out how we have ended up in the worst national crisis since the Civil War. He details: • The Left’s embrace of Critical Race Theory and Cultural Marxism—the underpinnings of their totalitarian ideology • The decades-long infiltration of our education system by ideologies hostile to America, our institutions, and our freedom • Why the Obama administration marked a point of no return in the division of America into two irreconcilable political factions • The Democrats’ unprincipled campaign to destroy a duly elected U.S. president • Their political exploitation of the coronavirus pandemic • Their complicity in the riots of the summer of 2020, which left twenty-five dead, injured two thousand police officers, caused billions of dollars in property damage, and revealed the fragility of our civic order As Abraham Lincoln so presciently warned on the eve of America’s last existential crisis, “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live for all time, or die by suicide.” In The Enemy Within, David Horowitz provides a spot-on assessment of the threat to the American Republic and points to an escape route—while there’s still time.

"Never before in human history have governments had the power to totally control your life. Today, they do. That sort of power does strange things to human ambition. Even with the best of intentions, Lord Acton famously noted, absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely. Hard-won freedoms are being chiselled away every day, as a global bureaucracy springs up in partnership with global businesses, globally-focused politicians and global lobby groups, to impose a new global system of rules and expectations. New technology has not only made the globe a village, it's made governing that village a piece of cake in comparison with earlier civilisations. From population control to gun control, food regulations to clampdowns on natural health, Agenda 21 to climate change, mercury-filled lightbulbs to the Green Police, global treaties signed behind closed doors at the behest of unelected bureaucrats are rapidly locking in changes and a framework for the bureaucracy to take global control. In Totalitaria, bestselling author and investigative journalist Ian Wishart exposes a high stakes strategy of divide and rule, of 'manufactured' crises and instant solutions. He lays bare, in their own words, a cynical agenda to create a world where those with power and influence do well. It doesn't matter whether you call it capitalism with a social conscience, or socialism with a market face - to all intents and purposes its an iron fist in an ever so velvet glove"--From publisher.

The political history of the twentieth century can be viewed as the history of democracy’s struggle against its external enemies: fascism and communism. This struggle ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet regime. Some people think that democracy now faces new enemies: Islamic fundamentalism, religious extremism and international terrorism and that this is the struggle that will define our times. Todorov disagrees: the biggest threat to democracy today is democracy itself. Its enemies are within: what the ancient Greeks called 'hubris'. Todorov argues that certain democratic values have been distorted and pushed to an extreme that serves the interests of dominant states and powerful individuals. In the name of ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’, the United States and some European countries have embarked on a crusade to enlighten some foreign populations through the use of force. Yet this mission to ‘help’ others has led to Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, to large-scale destruction and loss of life and to a moral crisis of growing proportions. The defence of freedom, if unlimited, can lead to the tyranny of individuals. Drawing on recent history as well as his own experience of growing up in a totalitarian regime, Todorov returns to examples borrowed from the Western canon: from a dispute between Augustine and Pelagius to the fierce debates among Enlightenment thinkers to explore the origin of these perversions of democracy. He argues compellingly that the real democratic ideal is to be found in the delicate, ever-changing balance between competing principles, popular sovereignty, freedom and progress. When one of these elements breaks free and turns into an over-riding principle, it becomes dangerous: populism, ultra-liberalism and messianism, the inner enemies of democracy.

Hostis humani generis, meaning "enemy of humankind," is the legal basis by which Western societies have defined such criminals as pirates, torturers, or terrorists as beyond the pale of civilization. Sonja Schillings argues that the legal fiction designating certain persons or classes of persons as enemies of all humankind does more than characterize them as inherently hostile: it supplies a narrative basis for legitimating violence in the name of the state. The book draws attention to a century-old narrative pattern that not only underlies the legal category of enemies of the people, but more generally informs interpretations of imperial expansion, protest against structural oppression, and the transformation of institutions as "legitimate" interventions on behalf of civilized society. Schillings traces the Anglo-American interpretive history of the concept, which she sees as crucial to understanding US history, in particular with regard to the frontier, race relations, and the war on terror.

Liberty is not, as the German precursors of Nazism asserted, a negative ideal. Whether a concept is presented in an affirmative or in a negative form is merely a question of idiom. Freedom from want is tantamount to the expression striving after a state of affairs under which people are better supplied with necessities. Freedom of speech is tantamount to a state of affairs under which everybody can say what he wants to say. At the bottom of all totalitarian doctrines lies the belief that the rulers are wiser and loftier than their subjects and that they therefore know better what benefits those ruled than they themselves. Werner Sombart, for many years a fanatical champion of Marxism and later a no less fanatical advocate of Nazism, was bold enough to assert frankly that the Führer gets his orders from God, the supreme Führer of the universe, and that Führertum is a permanent revelation.* Whoever admits this, must, of course, stop questioning the expediency of government omnipotence. Those disagreeing with this theocratical justification of dictatorship claim for themselves the right to discuss freely the problems involved. They do not write state with a capital S. They do not shrink from analyzing the metaphysical notions of Hegelianism and Marxism. They reduce all this high-sounding oratory to the simple question: are the means suggested suitable to attain the ends sought? In answering this question, they hope to render a service to the great majority of their fellow men.