Marcuse on Trumplandia

Herbert Marcuse, describing Nazism in 1941: “This machine, which embraces the life of men everywhere, is the more terrifying since, with all its efficiency and precision, it is totally incalculable and unpredictable. Nobody, except perhaps the few “insiders”, knows when and where it will strike. It seems to move by virtue of its own necessity and is still flexible and obedient to the slightest change in the set-up of the ruling groups. All human relations are absorbed by the objective wheelwork of control and expansion.” “Under the terror that now threatens the world the ideal constricts itself to one single and at the same time common issue. Faced with fascist barbarism, everyone knows what freedom means.” Herbert Marcuse, 'State and Individual Under National Socialism' (1941), reprinted in Technology, War and Fascism, Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, ed. Douglas Kellner, Routledge, 1998, p. 78. 'Some Social Implications of Modern Technology,” Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, Vol. 9, Nr. 3 (1941): 435f.