Thursday, November 18, 2004
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Politicians are adept at making you think you are thinking when in fact you are parroting slogans of their own contrivance.
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The unspoken aim of an elite is the systematic moronization of the masses.
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We are all victims of politicians, if not the enemy’s than our own. People of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your charlatans.
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According to the Turkish version of the story, it was Bulgarians, Greeks and Armenians who provoked Ottoman massacres by killing Turkish civilians. If true, the question we should ask is: “Why did law-abiding subjects of the Empire suddenly behave like bloodthirsty savages?”
It can be said of massacres, what Merleau-Ponty says of torture:
“It is said, and it is true, that torture is the answer to terrorism. This does not justify torture. We ought to have acted in such a way that terrorism would not have arisen.”
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Democracy may also be defined as fascism modified by anti-fascist checks and balances, which sometimes fail to check and balance.
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Thomas Mann: “The intellectual man is almost as much interested in painful truths as the fool is in those which flatter him.”
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Friday, November 19, 2004
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We cannot change history, but we can try to understand it, beginning with the fact that political decisions are not acts of God (like earthquakes and volcanoes) but acts of men, with their own set of prejudices, loyalties, interests, blind spots, limitations, idiosyncrasies, fears, doubts, and anxieties. In short, politicians are people like us, totally disqualified to assert infallibility.
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History may be summed up as a slow-motion avalanche of blunders and miscalculations by men of power whose central concern is to either maintain or increase their powers.
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Talleyrand is right: sometimes errors of judgment can be far worse than crimes.
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It has been said, and it is true, that we see things not as they are, but as we are. Our understanding is therefore enhanced whenever we think against ourselves, or we view reality as a succession of traps and ambushes.
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A version of the past that supports a specific political agenda cannot be right. Also, between a version that flatters our vanity and one that does not, the chances are the unflattering version will be closer to the truth.
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A Sudanese general on the genocide in Darfur: “It is not genocide; it is war, and in war bad things happen.”
Sounds familiar?
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We have many kinds of literary awards except a Freedom of Speech Award. Can you guess why?
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Because I dare to question the judgment and wisdom of our political leadership, I am sometimes accused of “self-hatred.” Figure that one out, if you can.
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Saturday, November 20, 2004
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It is a mistake to identify the people with the regime, especially if the regime is non-representative, and all regimes are to some extent non-representative, including democracies. Consider the case of the Bush Administration today. Roughly speaking it represents only the interests and values of only 25% of the people, since 50% don’t vote and the remaining 25% voted against him. And of the 25% that voted for him, one is justifying in wondering how many of them did so on the basis of deceptive slogans that exploited their prejudices and fears. For more on this subject, see GAG RULE: ON THE SUPPRESSION OF DISSENT AND THE STIFLING OF DEMOCRACY by Lewis H. Lapham (New York, Penguin Press, 2004).
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Speaking of the unpopularity of democracies and the ease with which they slide into fascism, Lapham writes: “Nobody ever said that democratic government was easy, which is why, during the twenty years between the last century’s two world wars, it failed and was abandoned by the people of Italy, Turkey, Portugal, Spain, Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Albania, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Austria, and Germany.”
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And finally, here is Spengler on the undemocratic nature of democracies: “A small number of superior heads, whose names are very likely not the best known, settle everything, while below them are the great mass of second-rate politicians selected through a provincially-conceived franchise to keep alive the illusion of popular self-determination.”
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