One for the bucket (I am aware you are aware of this post)
On Lindy Bill and his thread: "Politics for Pros"
I don’t know about you all but I have to admit to being fascinated with Lindy Bill and his thread on SI – “Politics for pros-moderated.” (“Moderated” means anybody who offers a contrary, non-neocon opinion is banned).
I of course have been banned, which if fine. If Lindy wants to run a closed shop, who am I to argue?
But as I say, I am fascinated. He offers something actually rather rare --- a chance to look into the soul of a movement.
In my humble opinion, if you want to understand collective evil, that is to say, if you want to understand how human beings can get themselves into a place where they kill other human beings on a mass scale, you should follow Lindy’s thread, and look at what he and his mates are doing and HOW they do it – HOW they react to events and arguments, and HOW they explain themselves to themselves.
Was it Turgenev (the Russian writer) who said that if you want to describe the Don River, you should tell how it looks as reflected in a shard of glass on one of its banks?
“Politics for Pros” is that shard of glass, and the Don River that you are able to see reflected in it is the Gulag, the mass killing of millions of human beings in the Soviet Union, or the justifications that excuse the endless brutality of Israel against her neighbors.
Now, understand, I am not saying that Lindy Bill is Stalin. Obviously he is not, and I very much doubt that he personally would carry out acts of brutality, murder or torture. But he is with great energy and persistence, in his own small way, creating a mind-set where less intelligent, more unhinged, and cruder people can do just that.
In “Politics for Pros” you are able to the Soviet Py-Ops apparatus writ small, i.e., you can see a place where there is censorship (such as Lindy is able to exercise within the circumscribed range of his little authority), demonization, heavy handed and relentless dehumanization of “them,” equally heavy-handed and equally relentless sanctification of “us,” the using of such power as he has to close off the world, in order to have to deal with a reality only of his own choosing, and much, much more, all right before our very eyes.
Now of course Lindy and his mates would say that they are anti-communists. Yes, true, they are. But their anti-communism is superficial. They are anti-communists but not anti-Soviet, meaning: they do not fight for the traditional causes of communism. Rather, they fight for other causes, but they use the techniques of the Soviet Union.
There is no doubt in my mind that if the neo-cons were able to gain un-checked power in the USA, by methods legal or otherwise, that soon we would start seeing political murder on a mass scale. I suppose then we would find out the stuff that Lindy Bill is made of. Would he swing into opposition? I would hope so, but there is some small part of me that fears that he would end up being an apparatchiki in some bureau somewhere, justifying every step of the way the erection of a neo-con gulag.
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