Note - from June 24th 2009, this blog has migrated from Blogger to a self-hosted version. Click here to go straight there.
A wise man (and Brother) once said that "they who would give up essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither"... another wise man (and also a Brother - note the pattern) said
"... I detest what you write, but I would give my life to make it possible for you to continue to write."
(Note that this is often quoted as "I disagree with what you say, but would ... "etc.. that is a later construction by Voltaire's fans from 1906.)_
TomDispatch.com is currently carrying a terrific piece about the mechanism by which the military and intelligence communities are inserting themselves ever more forcefully into the interstices of American civil society. It's quite long, but I urge you to read it - because with John Howard now the political world's most ardent analinguist, the same mechanisms will be happening here.
The piece reads like something that you might have read about the Ceaucescu regime, or perhaps Czechoslovakia in the 1950s. It certainly has a Soviet-era ring to it. And the quotations from Bros Franklin and Arouet are in genuine danger of being fatally undermined in the US (which, as I forecast in 2001 during one of our morning meetings, is doomed as a country).
People should not be hugely surprised: after all, there is always a cadre of "True Believers" who are willing to hunt down and kill dissenters - whether those dissenters be against
- religious hegemons (e.g., the Aryan and Cathar "heresies" who were ruthlessly slaughtered, or the "witches" who were ruthlessly slaughtered by the Inquisition and the Salem witch-trials); or
- political hegemons ("Anarchists" in the early 20th Century, "Fascists" in the second quarter, "Communists" in the third, and "Terrorists" in the fourth).
Even fruit fly inspectors are cut from that sort of cloth - the sort of person who thinks that a sensible use of public money is to harrass every motorist wo passes through an artificial border in case any of those motorists have a banana in his car. Zealots; one step from the banality of evil is the anodyne stupidity of the bureaucrat too stupid to grasp that a fruit fly is unlikely to respect a line on a map - most of them are illiterate (the fruit flies, I mean... but come to think about it...).
In other words, if you get on the wrong side of the maniacs of the type who always get intoxicated by social power, you're dead meat. And our system has always permitted the most maniacal to rise to the top. From Caligula through to the Borgia and Medici families, to Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, Mao, Ceaucescu, Pol Pot, Amin, Bush... and the trail of death follows as surely as night follows day. I've already admitted that I would have death sqquads, and I'm a nice bloke.
What is required is nothing less thanthe complete abandonment of current political systems; a return to the kleroterion. That is the only way that a society can progress without intermittent interference from some shitbag with designs on declaring himself a God.
