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A funny thing happened on September 11 last year in the cradle of democracy and beacon of the Free World. Within literally hours of Mohammed Atta's suicide-cruise-missile attack on the World Trade Towers, American airwaves were filled with pundits - and moderators-arguing first and foremost for the need to curtail America's civil liberties. As if that was what got us in the mess in the first place.

We're not talking about Rush Limbaugh here. We're talking about National Public Radio, that supposed hotbed of left-wing elitism. The Diane Rhem show to be specific. You know, that center-left DAR wonk with the Parkinson's Disease voice. All day, through the evening, and in the weeks to come, Americans were not only being prepared from above for a crackdown on their rights-they were DEMANDING their own repression, and demanding it hard. Even Comedy Central's John Stewart attacked a guest from the ACLU because she was taking a stand against indefinitely detaining people in America based on their ethnicity. All this in spite of the fact that as yet so little was known about the terrorists who attacked them that no rational person could possibly make a link between the civil rights then enjoyed, and the attacks that took place.

Fine, so it wasn't rational. But it certainly FELT good. Choosing the path that FEELS right over the rational path is highly underrated in our post-Voltarian world.

The mass detentions, military patrols, the USA Patriot Act, the sweeping powers handed to our law enforcement and spy agencies, the paranoid micro monitoring of our lives, the sudden rush of snitching and suspicion, the laws that were all rushed through our democratic institutions, egged on by the supposedly liberal media, and craved by the population at large-their purpose was not so much to prevent further terrorist attacks, but rather, to calm a panicked citizenry. And it worked. Calming the population that is.

While anthrax attacks made a mockery of unprecedented police state measures, sleeper cells went on sleeping undisturbed even by John Ashcroft's own admission. Yet the American population felt increasingly comforted by the knowledge that theirs and everyone else's moves were being monitored more closely and thoroughly than ever before in American history, overseen by a deluded, messianic bigot from Missouri. Dire warnings about "credible threats" of "imminent attack" were issued, each one increasing both the public's comfort with the new civil rights rollbacks (otherwise how could they have learned that The Golden Gate Bridge was being targeted?), and its demand for even further rollbacks of civil liberties, whatever that may entail.

Despite what you may want to believe about yourself and your country, the fact is that the overwhelming majority of Americans have been a step ahead of Ashcroft and Bush in demanding they be monitored more vigorously, and, if necessary, prosecuted more secretly, ruthlessly and unfairly than every before.

This brings us to our uncomfortable point, one that no post-Enlightenment humanist would dare to admit: human beings WANT to be repressed. They feel safer. They function better under properly administered doses of repression. It gives them limits, direction, order, comfort, security. This is why American management theory, alone among disciplines in the West, never bothered with the counter-intuitive humanist myths pushed by Voltaire and Rousseau about freedom of choice and man's essentially decent nature.

American corporations, the soul of the country, are top-down, rigidly structured mini-autocracies which are by definition anti-democratic and repressive. They function in a world of overt and covert employee monitoring, suspicion and pressure, fear and paranoia, rewards and punishments, conformity and caution. Their goal is maximum efficiency. Maximum efficiency is achieved both by motivating the workers to produce at their peak potential, and by creating conditions for maximum predictability. Cutting-edge companies like Intel and GE compared the work habits of employees motivated by teamwork and job security to those who were motivated by the constant fear of layoffs, deadlines, pressure... and they discovered a dark secret about man that our Enlightenment forefathers tried to make us forget: that workers--human beings, that is--respond most positively to fear. Using this discovery as the basis of their corporate management philosophies, these corporations wound up transforming American corporate culture, and eventually much of the world's. Most Americans spend far more time today in these vertically-structured autocratic mini-states, pressured, monitored, spied on, rewarded today and fired tomorrow, than at any time in American history.

Indeed most Americans spend more time in the autocratic work world than in the free, democratic world outside the office.

For some twenty years now, America's citizens have grown increasingly accustomed to living in fear, taking orders and looking over their shoulders during the ten or twelve hours per day they spend in their offices. They've adapted, and they've adapted drat well, as America's increasingly authoritarian corporations zoomed past the rest of the world's--where people still agitate for job security, reduced work hours, health and retirement benefits, and all the other things that American workers ditched long ago.

In other words, Americans, given not just a choice but even years of official brainwashing about the inherent goodness of individuality, equality and liberty, still found a way to create a parallel superstate within America, an autocratic archipelago from industrial park to glass skyscraper in every city, town and suburb, a world far more powerful and far more meaningful to people's increasingly atomized lives than the liberal state which it pledges allegiance to.

Given the choices out there in the freest country on earth, Americans JUMPED for autocracy, and not just any autocracy, but the harshest ones out there, where management theory, advanced by iron-fisted despots like Andy Grove and Jack Welch, consciously pushes fear as a formula for success. Fear is the whip of autocracies; fear is the whip of modern American corporations.

Americans like it there in the office--today it defines a person's life and worth--working more hours and more productively than at any time in human history, while the family and community, institutions that once competed for the American's time, have withered into irrelevance. Is that a surprise? After the hippie revolution, the family ceased to be autocratic--and, not coincidentally, ceased to matter. Community--the very word implies an absence of fear and hierarchy. Who wants to waste their time at a neighborhood cookie bake when you can put in ten hours at the office on a holiday? Americans ditched it like a bad date.

All that remains for the 21st century American, after the "freeing" of the family, the community and religion--the only thing still solid, constant, and comforting, is the office world, the corporation, the only place, coincidentally, that became increasingly authoritarian while the other institutions wilted. In the office, you know your limits. In the top-down world of the corporation, your world is framed by the people above you. And that's why it's so... addictive?

Before entering that autocratic office world, there is the modern autocratic school, with its snitching hotlines, metal detectors, random drug tests, imposing hierarchy (principal/dean/teacher), zero-tolerance discipline, and, yes, pressure to succeed in an increasingly competitive world offering proportionately fewer opportunities as more and more struggle to fill the same number of limited slots in the same twenty or thirty universities that best ensure a place in a better office a few years hence.

Put a kid in a hippie school where he's free to think and behave as he pleases, and the next thing you know he's stealing hubcaps and smoking banana leaves in the bathroom. Send him to a pricey bootcamp in Utah, and he'll come back saluting you for "turning my life around."

How did we get there? Who did this to us?

Is it the fault of a few evil cabalists in Manhattan that a majority of Americans, whenever given the choice enshrined in their constitution, elect to spend their lives in grim mini-autocracies?

That sounds too easy, blaming the People's problems on the anti-People.

This is the last refuge for the liberal humanist horrified by how completely, and how eagerly, Americans abandoned liberal rights for the chance to be ruled with an iron fist. It must be some bad person's fault. It can't be in our nature, can it?

We start our eXile Guide To Repression with a dossier on contemporary America in large part because for years now, American Russia-watchers have been accusing the Russians of harboring a peculiar genetic preference for a "strong hand", an "iron fist", "authoritarianism", "the sting of the knout", "the heel of the boot," and so on. This supposedly unique penchant for strong authority was slung by self-congratulatory Westerners ostensibly to explain democracy's failure and the KGB's return to power under Putin. Of course it has a far more direct and obvious purpose: to make Americans oblivious to their own moth-to-lamp-like attraction to authoritarianism of one form or another.

And oh what a wonderfully successful, if deceptive, iron fist America has turned to time and time again. In the 1960s, in response to a budding youth movement that espoused too much personal freedom and race riots seeking too much equality, voters turned to Richard Nixon, the most corrupt, reckless iron-jowled lamprey they could enthrone, on a platform promising more police and less tolerance. Four years--and untold numbers of dead, jailed or exiled American students and dissidents later--Nixon's promised oppression paid off in spades. The hippie, left-wing and black power movements had been crushed. Interestingly enough, the only institution to survive the 60s was the corporation, which came out not only intact, but stronger, meaner and more central to people's lives than before the 60s. Not coincidentally, corporations were also the last American institutions where authoritarianism survived.

In 1972, with the liberty-crazed longhairs and niggers contained, Nixon swept to one of the biggest landslide victories in American presidential history, crushing the candidate who promised more personal freedom, and less autocracy. McGovern may as well have promised gum disease while he was at it--he was speaking to the wrong electorate when he promised them that. After a brief interval came Ronald Reagan, who promised to stomp the liberals much more effectively than Nixon, return the country to the Church-Family-Police order of the pre-1960s, and scare the living poo poo out of any country who dared to gently caress with us or our professed way of life.

And it worked. People responded, both domestically and abroad. The internal liberal threat was crushed once and for all--these days, a liberal is someone who watches Dan Rather. The hippies ditched their egalitarian communes for the conformity of vertically-structured corporations, where they've happily remained ever since. Blacks ditched their 'fros and stopped burning down cities. Unions, with their egalitarian structure and socialist ideas, were ground into irrelevance. God--the worst Dictator of them all--made a comeback. Just as dramatically, the outside world took Reagan's six-gun act seriously and surrendered. The Soviets raised the white flag without firing a shot. Europeans stopped protesting and started working, Third Worlders stopped bashing us around and started begging for money and wearing cheap baseball caps with American flags. Nearly everyone--Americans and foreigners, friends and enemies alike--took Reagan's iron fist seriously, as if they WANTED to believe in it, as if saying, "What took you so long, America? We've been dying to be repressed!"

And speaking of "iron", England's "Iron Lady" came to power, like Reagan two years later, in response to perceived excessive freedom (described as "chaos" or "disorder"). The whole idea of egalitarianism espoused by the Labor Party never sat comfortably with the English. Only two wars and imperial collapse made egalitarianism briefly imaginable. No one wanted to work, only strike. No one felt good about themselves, the future or their country, only whinge about decline. So they elevated an Iron Lady to give them a right good kick in the arse. And Britain responded. Today, English people work, and they like it--they're the only people in Western Europe who know how. Unions are gone. Protest is muted. Conformity is second nature.

Yet in spite of all of this, British journalists routinely deride Putin's popularity as proof positive of the Russian people's unique desire to be ruled by a leader with an iron fist.

One rule about repression is, the only way you can enjoy it as much as your master is if neither you nor master admit the repression--takes all the fun out of it. That's what decimated the incest industry in Appalachia: all the college-educated social workers who swept through in their VW buses to convince the daughters that what their daddies were doing to them was the wrongest thing on earth.

America suffered from hippies, and it turned to Nixon. A little stagflation and a few hostages in Iran, and it elevated Reagan. England got punk rock and striking workers, and the peasants rode Maggie Thatcher into Downing Street on their own backs, imploring her to plant her heel into the isle's grateful neck.

In this context, Putin's popularity, as well as Russia's nostalgia for the Brezhnev days, doesn't seem so unusual... or bad. Russia suffered economic, social and geopolitical disasters far more profound than anything England or America suffered before turning to its own authoritarian figures.

And we're not alone.

Chile responded well to Pinochet, turning it into a docile land of happy office workers, the strongest economy in Latin America. The Afghans, after 20 years of civil war, only rolled out the red carpet to the Taliban because they brought new meaning to the word "discipline and punish". China, after centuries of decline and factionalism, only united under Chairman Mao, whose uniquely savage form of totalitarianism was handsomely rewarded not only with power, but genuine love, an entire generation of youths hanging their teachers on meat hooks and eating their parents brains just to please Master Mao, leaving tens of millions of corpses in their wake. How many thousands died in the crush at funerals for Stalin and Khomeini? How many tears were shed? A lot more than for Mother Theresa, that's for sure. Somehow one doubts that do-gooder Jimmy Carter's funeral will be the scene of little more than solemn business-card-exchanging.

Despite what we'd like to believe, despite rational arguments to the contrary, humans gravitate naturally towards repression because it's warm there. What the humanists hopefully refer to as society's pendulum swing is actually a constant lurching for order and direction, a fear of drifting and night.

Authoritarianism works. Despotism is man's nigh-tee-night blanket. His Teddy Bear. The proof--America, England, Chile, China, Afghanistan--is painfully clear.

Thus far, the results of Russia's turn to authoritarianism have been roughly similar. Economic growth. Creeping conformity. Improving work ethic. Booming stock market. More smiles. A feeling of stability. gently caress TV6. That's because Russians, like Americans, are finding they can function better under The Man's crushing heel.

Man has returned to his natural habitat, after a brief, harrowing journey into the unknown. Now, this article's gotta end cuz we've got a lotta work to do at the office, and we can't be late for the 7 a.m. staff meeting or the boss'll kill us!