What Societal Collapse Feels Like
- Kevin Lankes
- 13 minutes ago
- 12 min read
Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/K0CYwlPwftA
There have been many moments in human history where authoritarianism and tyranny have popped up across nations and societies. Right now you may be wondering if that’s what we’re seeing in America today, if it’s as bad as those previous times, if it’s what your grandparents were thinking and feeling in 30s and 40s, or what they thought during the nineteen teens and 1920s in Russia or Spain, or the 1970s in Chile. There’s an easy way to find out. Because we have thousands of years of recorded history to pull from, with these exact moments where open society descended into dictatorships scattered across the pages of that history like scars.
What follows here are all times when nations and societies were actively collapsing, and what that looked like and felt like, according to the people who were there and lived through them.
“Anarchy & the War”
The politicians are still preaching a plausible patriotism, whilst our ministers of religion still assure us that Christ is on our side, and all’s well with the big war business. Yours is not to reason, but to obey, we are told.
Whether the people want war or not, they hold that it is not their business to interfere, but rather to strengthen the rule of authority by quiet submission.
Freedom: a journal of anarchist communism. vol. 32, no. 352, 1918
The Commissar, M. Zimmerman, indeed arrived in Vladivostok, and with him an order from the All-Russian Directorate that the militia of the Province be handed over to him.
“The militia is your police,” I said to M. Medvieyeff, “how can you do without it?”
“We no longer have the power to arrest a pickpocket,” he replied in a modest way.
“But why should the Directorate want to do such a thing?”
“We have a theory. We have come to the conclusion that someone else is speaking for the Directorate.”
“And the Directorate itself--”
“Is put out of the way.”
“How can you imagine such a thing?”
“We can imagine nothing else.”
The Siberian Duma….had been dissolved by order of the Administrative Council. “By order of the Administrative Council!” That phrase had been a slogan of the Tsar’s regime, and its magic power had sent a hundred thousand freedom-loving Russians to the dungeons, to the gallows, and to hard labour in the mines. “By order of the Administrative Council” stood for the words, without a trial.
The Stupidities and Outrages of the New Regime
I was sometimes amused, sometimes shocked by the utter stupidity of the new autocratic regime in Siberia. Instead of pacifying the population by a series of tolerant and benevolent actions, the new administration took every possible opportunity to announce its true character by irritating and frequently outrageous behavior.
The Rise of a New Russian Autocracy: Kolchak, Autocrat and Tyrant, by Joshua Rossett, 1919
Odessa was once a pretty, and very clean town, with all the modern conveniences of European life. Today it is a picture of misery. At any moment one can be subjected to a terrible discipline, to hunger, and to physical and moral tortures by the Government. You are arrested by the order of the Government, but there is no need of the trifling formality of being brought before the very primitive Revolutionary Court. Domiciliary visits, requisitions of a most arbitrary kind, generally at night time, raids in the streets from various pretexts, keep the population in continual anxiety and under constant tension.
There is no longer a free Press. In the days of the Czar there was not a free Press, but papers could be published which were not all monarchical, and whose whole tendency and spirit was in opposition to the Government. Today, no opposition is tolerated, so there are only published Communist papers, and few Socialist papers, very much cut down and censored.
The United Manufacturers Journal. No. 22 : Russia a Ruined Country — Merchant's Indictment of Soviet Rule — Why External Trade is Impossible — The Risk for British Contractors, 1921, anonymous author who was a customer of a Birmingham firm
On Oct. 24, at Naples, Mussolini had harangued a great gathering of followers from all over Italy and uttered these words: "It is now a matter of days, perhaps hours. Either they shall give us the government or we shall capture it with a swoop on Rome. I tell you, I assure you, I swear to you that the orders, if necessary, will come.” His followers applauded with shouts of, "Rome or death!"
WHEN MUSSOLINI LED THE MARCH ON ROME; The Dramatic Scene of Fifteen Years Ago Is Described by an Eye-Witness of the Event Former Rome Correspondent of The Manchester Guardian WHEN MUSSOLINI MARCHED ON ROME WHEN MUSSOLINI MARCHED ON ROME, New York Times, C.J.S. Sprigge, 1937
There was no German who was not aware that concentration camps existed. No German who believed they were sanatoria. No-one who did not fear them. Few Germans who had not had a relative or friend in a concentration camp or had at least known that this or that person was in a camp […]. There were many Germans who learnt something about the camps through foreign radio broadcasts. Quite a few who came into contact with inmates via work details. A considerable number who came across processions of wretched prisoners […]. Many business people who had contact with the SS running the camps because they provided supplies, and industrialists who applied to the SS Business Administration Main Office for concentration camp slaves for their factories […]. How did the Germans as a nation respond to this injustice? As a nation, not at all. That is the unpalatable truth, but it is the truth.Source: E. Kogon, Der SS-Staat (Munich, 1946), pp. 331–3
Everybody is arresting everybody, bypassing the prescribed official procedure, everybody threatens everybody with protective custody, everybody threatens everybody with Dachau […]. Down to the smallest gendarmerie station a veritable uncertainty about who is responsible for what has gripped the best and most reliable officials; this, quite simply, is bound to have devastating and state-eroding effects. - SA-Gruppenführer Schmid to the Bavarian Minister-President Siebert, 1 July 1933, in P. Diehl-Thiele, Partei und Staat im Dritten Reich (Munich, 1971), p. 95
"Today's exchange rate: One U.S. dollar equals 4.2 trillion marks. Workers are being paid twice daily, rushing to stores immediately to spend their wages before prices rise again. Savings of a lifetime have become worthless. The middle class, the backbone of our society, is being destroyed."
Frankfurter Zeitung (Frankfurt Newspaper) November 15, 1923
“Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood: the railway-cuttings smothered by wild flowers, the deep meadows where the great shining horses browse and meditate, the slow-moving streams bordered by willows, the green bosoms of the elms, the larkspurs in the cottage gardens; and then the huge peaceful wilderness of outer London [. . .] all the sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.” George Orwell (Homage to Catalonia): (231-232).
I had not slept yet. . . . I missed and felt sorrow for my mother, so I could not sleep. Khmer Rouge cadres called me. They said, "Come with us and we will bring you to have some sugar." I had not seen sugar for years, so I hurried to grab an old bowl to clean my face. But it was a trick. I opened the door and they tied my hands behind my back with a scarf. I told them, "There is no need to tie me; I will not run. But if you take me away, please look at my baby who is sleeping naked and has no one to care for him. Please let me take him with me. I will follow you wherever you want. I have no husband or other family left, just this baby. My other children are not mine; they are now the children of Angkar. Let me take this baby with me." They untied my hands and used the scarf to tie my baby around my neck. They tied the baby around my neck. They wanted us to die together. . .
Theresa de Langis, Ph.D., lead researcher, and You Sotheary, Project Assistant, and Taing Samrach, student volunteer for English note taking during the interview. This interview is part of the Cambodian Women’s Oral History Project, ©2013, and is protected under Creative Commons copyright.
The streetlights are turned out all over Pyongyang—which is the most favored city in the country—every night. And the most prominent building on the skyline, in a town committed to hysterical architectural excess, is the Ryugyong Hotel. It's 105 floors high, and from a distance looks like a grotesquely enlarged version of the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco (or like a vast and cumbersome missile on a launchpad). The crane at its summit hasn't moved in years; it's a grandiose and incomplete ruin in the making. 'Under construction,' say the guides without a trace of irony. I suppose they just keep two sets of mental books and live with the contradiction for now.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays
“They made me leave the house in handcuffs and they put me in a car. They put tape on my eyes and made me wear dark glasses. The tape was so I couldn’t see where they were taking me and the dark glasses, so people on the street wouldn’t know I had been taken.”
Lelia Perez, Chilean citizen under Pinochet, 1975
The “saddest day in soccer history” occurred on November 21st, 1973. Two months before, Pinochet had overthrown the Chilean government and taken power. The national stadium was converted into a giant concentration camp. Though in the run-up to the World Cup qualifying match with the Soviet Union, it was white-washed and cleaned and then handed over to FIFA. On the day of the match, the Soviet team didn’t arrive, and Chile scored a very anticlimactic goal into an empty net. Looking back, Carlos Caszely of the Chilean national soccer team said it was “the stupidest goal that I’ve ever seen in my life.”
Former stadium prisoner Jorge Montealegre: “There were cases in which the administrators of the camp rejected the ‘load’ [prisoners], alleging that there were already too many people in the stadium and the prisoners needed to be executed by the [intelligence or security] unit
responsible for their capture.
Ernesto Araneda Briones from the Communist Party:
At the entrance of the National Stadium they [the military] conducted operations,
fired in every direction and we had to throw ourselves on the floor. They simulated
attacks. Everything that they did was to degrade us and to make us feel as if we were
nothing… They hoped we would lose our condition of human beings, to think, to be
in control of ourselves. All of this was part of a terrorism that they were imparting.
“We began our daily pilgrimage to solicit information and try to be as close as we
could to them,” explained Rebecca Bizi Alvear, who had a husband and son in the
stadium, “This period was so anguished and painful that I remember it as a nightmare, like a
type of haze in which moved me a mechanical way.”
FIFA statement to the public after its inspection of the Chilean National stadium:
The stadium is actually in use as a center of verification (“Clearing Station”) and the
people there are not prisoners but detained whose identity must be established (a large
number are foreigners who do not have valid documents). In the interior of
the stadium, beyond the exterior walls, everything appears normal and the gardeners
are working the grounds… Mr. D’Almeida and I [Kaeser] have arrived at the
conclusion that, based on what we saw and heard in Santiago, that life has returned to
normal and the guarantees given by the military are such that the World Cup
qualifying game between Chile and the USSR can be played on November 21,
1973.131
The Chilean memorial does not include the names of those who lost their jobs and
their homes and their health insurance and their pensions after the 1973 coup, a
number estimated to be over a million. It does not include the men from the
shantytowns who, night after night, were rounded up by patrols and beaten and made
to stand at attention, naked, in a soccer field while beyond the glaring spotlights their
wives and mothers and children were forced to watch. Nor do the names on the wall
include almost a million exiles or migrants—close to one tenth of Chile’s population
at the time of the military takeover.
Exorcising Terror: The Incredible Unending Trial of Augusto Pinochet, by Ariel Dorfman, Chilean Novelist
"All is lost. What remains that is not so stricken, that we must needs confess it to be doomed and blasted? Look round on all the limbs of the State which you know so well; where will you find one that is not crushed and crippled.” - Cicero writing to his friend Atticus about the fall of the Roman Republic
If you’re still with me at this point, here’s a fun game we can play. Try to see just how close these next accounts sound to your modern-day experience of America today.
Howard Zinn (you can’t be neutral on a moving train): “I was astonished, bewildered. This was America, a country where, whatever its faults, people could speak, write, assemble, demonstrate without fear. It was in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights. We were a democracy...
But I knew it wasn't a dream; there was a painful lump on the side of my head...
The state and its police were not neutral referees in a society of contending interests. They were on the side of the rich and powerful. Free speech? Try it and the police will be there with their horses, their clubs, their guns, to stop you.
From that moment on, I was no longer a liberal, a believer in the self-correcting character of American democracy. I was a radical, believing that something fundamental was wrong in this country--not just the existence of poverty amidst great wealth, not just the horrible treatment of black people, but something rotten at the root. The situation required not just a new president or new laws, but an uprooting of the old order, the introduction of a new kind of society--cooperative, peaceful, egalitarian.”
How about this one? How close is this to your experience? Fun twisty game thing about college affordability - black out country name and caption this with something like guess which modern nation - U.S. or NK
With North Korea's university application season set to begin in earnest from mid-January, students and parents are increasingly unhappy that family financial status decides which universities students can apply to.
“University applications will soon begin, but in schools, students feel that which universities they can and cannot attend has already been decided,” a Daily NK source in Ryanggang province said recently. “It’s a fact that financial power, not grades, decides university admissions.”
DailyNK, by Eun Seol 1/14/26
What about this? Is this familiar? Is this the modern United States or a South American dictatorship? You decide.
Under Pinochet, Chile became a social laboratory for the right-wing monetarist and free-market policies that were to be unleashed globally by the end of the 1970s with the advent of the Reagan and Thatcher governments.
Pinochet’s mass murders, the destruction of living standards and democratic rights and the atomisation of the working class, created unparalleled opportunities for foreign capital and the Chilean bourgeoisie to enrich themselves. A functionary in the military regime, Sergio de Castro, boasted that Pinochet’s repressive apparatus provided the “authorities a degree of efficiency that was not possible to obtain in a democratic regime; and it made possible the application of a model developed by experts and did not depend upon the social reactions produced by its implementation.”
This “shock therapy,” backed by Washington and spearheaded by Milton Friedman’s “Chicago Boys” economists, consisted of the most radical program of privatisation and deregulation seen anywhere in the world. The economic experiment plunged almost half the population into poverty and deliberately kept unemployment in the double digits.
wsws.org, by Mauricio Saavedra and Margaret Rees, 9/17/03
Or this one?
Turkmenistan’s president went on a low-key bicycle ride this morning. And by low-key I mean he was greeted by many hundreds of people forced to stand clapping for him and to join him on his ride as dancers and singers performed along his route.
Societal collapse and a nation’s descent into tyranny also looks like famous people coming out of the woodwork to publicly glaze you in over-the-top ways. When Mussolini took power in Italy, Winston Churchill congratulated him, saying that quote, “What a man! I have lost my heart! If I had been an Italian, I am sure I should have been wholeheartedly with you from the start to the finish in your triumphant struggle.”
The rise of tyranny also looks like jokes, jokes that normalize the dehumanization of others in order to for people on the wrong side of history to cope with the horrendous acts they’re committing or remaining complicit in:
Two men meet [on the street].
“Nice to see you’re free again. How was it in the concentration camp?”
“Great! Breakfast in bed, a choice of coffee or chocolate. Then some sport. For lunch we got soup, meat and dessert. And we played games in the afternoon before getting coffee and cakes. Then a little snooze and we watched movies after dinner.”
The man was astonished: “That’s great! I recently spoke to Meyer, who was also locked up there. He told me a different story.”
The other man nods gravely and says: “Yes, well, that’s why they’ve picked him up again.” - P. Moore, “German Popular Opinion on the Nazi Concentration Camps, 1933–1939”, Ph.D. dissertation, Birkbeck, University of London, 2010, pp. 110–11
Some of these quotes I edited for clarity and trimmed for time. Because they had added context that would have needed much more explanation to deliver, or because certain words were not easy to translate directly. Not included here are the testimonies I cried and shivered while reading through, barely able to look at the words on the screen. The ones with warning labels that told me to practice self-care while reading. Humanity has done horrific, horrific things to itself. Just absolutely evil things. And we’re not quite there yet, and I didn’t want to be sensational or exaggerate what we’re seeing today. But the point of all this is that we could be there, and sooner rather than later. And it could be you writing testimonies just like this, or being interviewed someday far in the future for the terrible things you faced in the days to come. These days don’t need to come. And if we want to, we can come together, we can remember the past, and we choose not to repeat it. Before I say goodbye and we see each other in the next video, I’d like to leave you with this very last quote. Not from history, but from now. From here.
“He’s now president for life. President for life. And he’s great. And look, he was able to do that. I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll have to give that a shot someday.” - Donald Trump, speaking about President Xi of China
Sources:
https://escholarship.org/content/qt7hb9q786/qt7hb9q786_noSplash_a6f725cd6d43cf40a81e33c987d5b0f5.pdf
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