Yes, the trick is to make everyone complicit. In Romania you couldnt get anything (education, job, apartment) without being a party member, and you had to spy on your neighbors as well. Also, as socialism tends to cause scarcity, sooner or later everyone is corrupt as they make deals to have access to the most basic goods.
So you can't trust anyone, and everyone is guilty, a good recipe for a police state.

The principle of making everyone complicit is as old as the practice of stoning people to death. In Saddam Hussein's Iraq, medical students were forced to punish "criminals" by performing amputations. When everyone's hands are dirty, they become more pliant and easier to control.

Sarah:

You are both right and wrong. You are right that it is very difficult to overturn an evil regime. You are wrong when you imply that it is unrealistic for the collapse to seem like it is easy. When evil regimes finally collapse internally they usually collapse rapidly. So rapidly that it is easy.

The reason for both apparently contradictory facts being true is that evil regimes rot from within. When the final challenge is made, it is against a hollow shell that crumbles virtually overnight -- even if that final push took less effort than previous attempts.

Larry Niven touched on that theme in one of his novels that involve slower-than-light interstellar travel. Don't remember the name, but he did a lot of talking about water-monopoly empires in it.

I'll be glad to put in a good word at Baen about your book proposals. I was very impressed with your works and gave them a favorable review in a Texas newspaper for which I write. (I have learned not to start one of your books late at night if I have to get up early the next day.)

Hi Mark. Yes, I like your reviews. :) Actually my problem is more the idea that everyone's moral compass holds them pure against the tyranny. I've recently been reading Black Swan, which I think would explain the "sudden collapse" phenomenon.

Heard from publisher at Baen. We're waiting for (groan) numbers. So, keep everything crossed. :) Meanwhile I'm fair and away on another space opera about five hundred years after Darkship Thieves. (Double groan.) Did I ask for this? No, I didn't. It's just what demands to be written.

"Everyone's moral compass holds them pure against the tyranny."

Bwah-ha-ha-ha-hah. The sad part of that belief is that is what underlies modern "liberal" (actually progressive) politics -- the idea that humans are perfectable. The genius of the framers of the Constitution is that they designed a system that would work even when individual moral compasses aimed directly at "selfish self-interest" rather than "greater good." They had no faith in moral compasses being infallible -- if they were there would be no need for separation of powers or the Bill of Rights. It worked fine until the "Progressive" reforms at the beginning of the 20th century (16th, 17th, and 18th Amendments) removed some of the protections.

My favorite crush-the-evil-empire SF stories were always by Heinlein. He had a good grasp of practical politics. It's true that his heroes generally would opt to die before selling their souls to the tyrants, and most often would manage something clever, brave, and violent enough to prevail over them. But sometimes they went down with the ship instead. It's a nice reminder that the duty of free men really is to die rather than soil our souls -- that survival isn't everything. Think how impossible a totalitarian state would become if each individual simply and resolutely declined to go along. The earlier you start saying "no," the fewer who will have to die saying it.

As the culprit who inspired Sarah's post here, I've got to say that one of my big gripes is the idea that after the evil tyrant has been defeated it's all hears and flowers and happily ever afters and everyone thanks whoever it was that got rid of the tyrant.

Sarah's covered the reasons that isn't the case, and I can see why we need to believe something like it - we always want to believe that good is rewarded and evil punished.

The problem is we tend to absorb the lesson of the stories we're told, and then history goes and reinforces it by talking about winning this war or that war and precious little about the cleanup and consolidation and just plain nastiness that often happens afterwards.

Too much of that, and you start getting fairytale thinking where you need Heinlein.

Just the other day I read a mystery (and now I can't remember the name of the author or the book. Senile, I tell you. Before fifty) that took place in liberated France. The... Mess, there's no other word for it. The scars of betrayals of counter betrayals made these people walking psychiatric cases. Not just a happy time with people dancing in the streets.

Another book that catches that feeling is Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. Not as well plotted as her mysteries, and some of her insights... (shrug) but it perfectly captures the post civil war atmosphere in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Heinlein, well, when you're a master, you're a master. He makes it SO good that we believe the revolution could happen like that. Mind you, in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, to make it believable, they needed a super intelligent computer. In Revolt in 2100 his role is incidental to the revolution. My favorite -- purely fairytale -- is Sixth Column, and that too needs a new technology that immitates magic.

My favorite Heinlein going down with the ship story is The Long Watch. I always cry when I read it. There are very few stories that do that. (Though I cry buckets when Mycroft "dies" in TMIAHM.)

Actually, Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot all had strong popular support--and Stalin and Mao still do. The bureaucratic state that succeeded Stalin gradually lost that support. The fact is that ALL governments, being a tiny fraction of the governed, survive only by the support or at least acquiescence of the governed.

Bob Sykes,

You didn't believe what Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin et al said, did you? Surely you don't also believe what Mugabe, Castro Junior and their friends are saying now?

When tyrants control the communication channels, they will of course paint a rosy view of their little corner of Hell. When they reduce people to a desperate struggle just to survive, those people don't have the energy to object. They've been beaten, starved and terrorized into submission. See what Sarah said about famines - when people don't have enough to eat, their first priority is not rebellion, it's food. That's why many of these regimes were exporting food while their people starved.

Evil tyrants lie. When their tyranny collapses and what's left is anarchy, of course people will express regret for the lost security, when they at least knew where they stood.

Government can also survive by the fear, disbelief or even ignorance of the governed.

Thus ends your history and social studies lesson for the day.

Well, crud. That "anonymous" was meant to be me. Oops.

Kate