People Should Not Be Afraid of Their Governments. Governments Should Be Afraid of Their People.

 

“People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.” The line sounds like fiction, because it is. V for Vendetta. But great fiction cuts closer to truth than most policy papers. In just a dozen words, it rips through the veil of modern tyranny with more force than a thousand think tank reports. Let’s be clear: we in the West live under increasingly soft-totalitarian regimes. Not the gulags of Stalin or the killing fields of Pol Pot, but regimes built on surveillance, censorship, bureaucratic suffocation, and cowardly compliance. No firing squads, just the quiet hiss of reputational assassination, digital banishment, and legal harassment. And what’s the result? Fear. Not from the rulers, but the ruled. The citizen cowers. The bureaucrat swaggers. The politician lies, the journalist spins, and the dissenter is crushed, gently, politely, in accordance with “the law.” This is backwards. This is not the polis of Athens or the republic of Rome. This is not Magna Carta, nor 1776, nor 1688. This is cowardice cloaked in civility. The people are afraid, of speaking, of working, of thinking aloud. Afraid of the mob. Afraid of the state. Afraid of losing everything for saying something. This is how tyranny lives in a postmodern age: not in tanks and truncheons, but in tweets and tribunals. Governments should fear us. That is the only healthy order. A state that does not fear its people will abuse them. It is a universal law of power, like gravity. Power unchallenged is power unchained. When the people are feared, governments behave. They tread carefully. They consult, not command. They remember their place: servants, not masters. But for that to happen, the people must remember who they are. They must become dangerous again. Dangerous not in the criminal sense, but in the civic sense. Armed with conviction, courage, and competence. With minds sharpened by debate, spines stiffened by history, and tongues unshackled by the mob. A citizenry of men, not soy-fed drones. Women, not submissive serfs. Citizens, not subjects. You do not beg for freedom. You demand it. You do not tiptoe around tyrants. You tear down their thrones. This is the hard truth that every comfortable Western suburbanite must relearn: liberty is not safe. It is not easy. It is not passive. Liberty is a fight. Every generation. Every time. When governments no longer fear the people, corruption blooms. Bureaucracies metastasize. Speech is muzzled. Dissent is pathologized. And the people, once free, become livestock, fed, drugged, pacified. Look around. That’s where we are. And the only way out is through fear. Not our fear. Theirs. Make the politicians sweat. Make the bureaucrats panic. Make the censors hesitate. Make them remember that power belongs to us—and can be taken back. Governments are not gods. They are gangs with flags. And like any gang, they understand one language: force. Not just physical, but cultural, intellectual, moral. The force of millions of free men standing tall and saying, no more. Not your laws. Not your lies. Not your lockdowns. Not your speech codes. Not your pronouns. Not your passports. Not your ideology. We are not afraid of you. You should be afraid of us.