Category: Coup d’état

A specter is haunting the world: the increasing prospect of a new totalitarianism under the extended covid response. Unlike the specter of communism, or the specter of “dissent” to communist dictatorship that Václav Havel ironically identified in his groundbreaking essay “The Power of the Powerless,”1 this specter originates from those in power and not from the revolutionary or the powerless.2 And rather than haunting only Europe or Eastern Europe, this specter casts its long shadow across the future of all humanity, such that one wonders how one might plan, if at all, for this future.