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There is much discourse on “how to balance freedom with secu­rity.” History offers numerous examples of leaders who in the name of national security have been ready to extinguish what precious few liberties people might have won after generations of struggle. Challenges to the privileged social order are treated as attacks upon all social order, a plunge into chaos and anarchy. Repressive measures are declared necessary to safeguard people from the dangers of ter­rorists, subversives, Reds, and other supposed enemies, both foreign and domestic. Again and again we are asked to choose between freedom and security when in truth there is no security without freedom. In both dictatorships and democracies, the agencies of “national security,” acting secretively and unaccountably, have regularly violated both our freedom and our security, practicing every known form of repression, corruption, and deceit. Once in control of the state, plutocratic interests can use a regres­sive taxation system to make the public pay for the agencies of repression that are essential to elite domination. Still, democratic governance can prove troublesome, inciting all sorts of popular demands and imposing restraints on Big Business’s enjoyment of a freewheeling market. For this reason the captains of capitalism and their conservative publicists support both a strong state armed with every intrusive power and a weak government unable to stop corpo­rate abuse or serve the needs of the ordinary populace. Aside from the systemic imperatives that cause capitalism to accu­mulate without end, we must also reckon with the driving force of class greed. Wealth is an addiction. There is no end to the amount of money one might desire to accumulate. The best security to being rich is to get still richer, piling possession upon possession, giving oneself over to the auri sacra fames, the cursed greed for gold, the desire for more money than can be consumed in a thousand lifetimes of limitless indulgence, wanting in nothing but still more and more money.

https://eastsidemarxism.files.wordpress.com/2017/04/michael-parenti-blackshirts-and-reds-rational-fascism-and-the-overthrow-of-communism.pdf