Helen & Harry Highwater's cranky weblog of news and opinion.
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"News that's not known, or not known enough." Helen & Harry Highwater's cranky weblog of news and opinion. |
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The iron fist is hidden by Herb Ruhs, MD As Noam Chomsky has repeatedly pointed out, a criminal's most essential asset is his credibility, and is therefore the ultimate focus of his activity. This is as true for criminal political regimes as it is for garden variety gangsters. If you intend to rule by force your willingness to use
The US government's transparent lies are meant for the uneducated and the gullible. The rest of the world must live with the reality that any resistance will be met with massive state terror. When US diplomats explained to the Taliban that they had a choice between accepting the plans of the oil companies and have streets of gold or being bombed into submission, they meant it. The Taliban resisted and the bombing ensued. Other countries contemplating resisting the plans of the Imperium were meant to take note. Insane violence perpetrated against one's own people can be as effective as that directed against others. The best artistic exposition of this kind of intimidation by means of wanton self-destructiveness is presented in the wonderful movie The Usual Suspects. At one point the Kevin Spacey's character recounts how a gangster named Keyser Söze gained credibility by responding to attacks on his family by first proceeding to kill his entire family himself. The idea was that someone ruthless enough to murder his own family to make a point can not be resisted. This is one of the many facets of the events of I remain agnostic on The title of Ron Suskind's new book, The Way of the World (which I have nearly completely read for free at Barnes and Noble), comes from a discussion he had with Benazir Bhutto, just before her assassination, where she laments that crime and cruelty seems to be the way of the world, but the actual truth is that honesty and mutual care is the true way of the world. It is an unusually frank and perceptive book that those who suspect that they may be too credulous about mass media explanations of events should consider reading. A people who are unwilling to imagine depravity on the part of its leaders is a people condemned to elevate such leaders to power and reap the consequences of this foolishness. Thus the threat of mass murder remains the way of the world. We drown in fear, cynicism and timidity rather than confront organized criminal violence and achieve real freedom. This is the genius of terror. The Assyrians understood this, and so do our current would-be rulers of the world. A people sickened with fear is already defeated and effectively subjugated. Herb Ruhs, MD PERMANENT LINK The way I often hear it is, "Stuff like that can't happen in America". Can't. Not that it isn't happening, but that it's literally impossible.I encounter the same problem trying to tell people what the Vietnam war was like. Denial is just the first stage of grief, the last one being acceptance. We can expect people to cling to the dead body of the Republic for quite a while, but eventually they'll get hungry and put it down. We, at least not enough of us, aren't at the hungry stage yet. Be patient, or just be a procrastinator. In times like these procrastination furthers. I suspect the time for reality storytelling is nigh. From a doomer nutball, and proud of it, Herb Ruhs, MD PERMANENT LINK  | Recent entries | Earlier entries | Latest entry | |
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