1984 or 2008 "Fidelity to party leadership must trump fidelity to law. "

The New Nomenklatura
BY Scott Horton - April 14, 2007 - http://harpers.org/archive/2007/04/horton-nomenklotura


Students of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four know the mechanisms of control for the totalitarian state. Parallel to the formal structures of the government are the structures of the party, and the dividing line between them is blurred. There is the outer party, membership in which insured a certain degree of privilege and authority but also subjects the member to discipline. The party is not a mass organization in the old bourgeois sense—for Orwell, the party makes up 19% of the population, whereas under the Soviet regime party membership fluctuated between 4 and 10%. It represents an elite of sorts, true-believers who provide the party’s eyes and ears out among the populace. On the other hand, with the perks of party membership comes the bridle of party discipline. A party member must mind his thoughts and must be careful not to stray from the path that the party leadership establishes. Infidelity may well be severely punished.

But a system must be developed to cull the party membership to select the true party elite, those who can be counted upon to demonstrate absolute fidelity to the party and to maintain its secrets. This is the “inner party.” It would never exceed roughly 1% of the population and its members will know that much of the party’s rhetoric is dishonest, generated to insure a supine populace and enhance its authority. But it will continue to articulate this rhetoric never the less. .......

The process of building party cadres and selecting the elite of the inner party was a fundamental challenge for the totalitarian or wannabe totalitarian state. It was developed to its greatest extent first in the fascist states of Europe in the late thirties, and then, in a far more sophisticated form, in the Stalinist era in Russia ..........

"I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever, in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or in anything else, where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all." --Thomas Jefferson to Francis Hopkinson, 1789.

"Were parties here divided merely by a greediness for office,...to take a part with either would be unworthy of a reasonable or moral man." --Thomas Jefferson to William Branch Giles, 1795.

Or, Rosa Luxemburg

“Freedom for supporters of the government only, for members of one party only, no matter how big its membership may be is, no freedom at all. Freedom is always freedom for the man who thinks differently. “
Rosa Luxemburg

Or, Mikhail Bakunin

"Freedom is the absolute right of all adult men and women to seek permission for their actions only from their own conscience and reason, and to be determined in their actions only by their own will, and consequently to be responsible only to themselves, and then to the society to which the belong, but only insofar as they have made a free decision to belong to it." Mikhail Bakunin