At 5:44 PM -0500 1/12/2001, Frederick Pollack wrote:
>Like fundamentalist terror, totalitarian terror leaves no aspect of life
>exempt from the battle being waged. The state is felt to
>be the apotheosis of political and natural law, and it strives to extend
>that law over all of humanity. Reality, Arendt suggested,
>never modifies totalitarian ideas; events do not prove those ideas wrong
>or diminish belief. Instead, totalitarianism modifies
>perceptions of reality to suit the ideas; the world is changed to fit
>with the vision of totalitarianism. Nothing is allowed to
>stand in the way of totalitarian ideas. Opposition is guilt, punishment
>is death.
This quote seems to me a fairly good description of what is happening
in the US at the moment. Didn't a chill go down your spine when
reading of the new laws which allow people to be arrested and
_executed_ under military law? Is a State which enacts such
legislation a democracy, or is it shading into something else?
Shouldn't people who value ideas such as freedom and justice be
frightened about such laws? And doesn't the US have the greatest
spin doctor of them all, Hollywood and the media, which seems to have
no compunction about rewriting history in a completely Orwellian
fashion? A media which for the most part obediently toes the
Pentagon line? A media which is not reflecting the dissent in
America itself?
And isn't the US-led War in Terror precisely a mechanism to
"eliminate opposition"? At least, that is among its stated aims.
The US seems to have forgotten its objections to Britain and France
after WW2, when they wished to wage war on Egypt and others because
they harboured terrorists: the US said at the time that to do so was
unambiguously wrong. Why is it different now?
Best
Alison
--
Alison Croggon
Home page
http://users.bigpond.com/acroggon/
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