10.23.12
On the wish for authoritarians
It’s difficult for grasp how the Republican Party retains any support. That is, until you recognize that human beings, and the way they think, haven’t changed much.
Here’s William L. Shirer, in a yellowed 1959 copy of “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” with something to say on people who live in media cages:
I myself was to experience how easily one is taken in by a lying and censored press and radio in a totalitarian state … It was surprising and sometimes consternating to find that notwithstanding the opportunities I had to learn the facts and despite one’s inherent distrust of what one learned from Nazi sources, a steady diet over the years of falsification and distortions made a certain impression on one’s mind and often misled it. No one who has not lived for years in a totalitarian land can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape the dread consequences of a regime’s calculated and incessant propaganda. Often in a German home or office or sometimes in a casual conversation with a stranger in a restaurant, a beer hall, a cafe, I would meet with the most outlandish assertions from seemingly educated and intelligent persons. It was obvious that they were parroting some piece of nonsense they had heard on the radio or read in the newspapers. Sometimes one was tempted to say as much, but on such occasions one was met with such a stare of incredulity, such a shock of silence, as if one had blasphemed the Almighty, that one realized how useless it was to try to even make contact with a mind which had become warped and for whom the facts of life had become what Hitler and Goebbels, with their cynical disregard for truth, said they were.
So when Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi wrote last night that Mitt Romney had “fucked the dog” in the debate, he immediately followed it with: “This should be the death-blow to Romney, but I’ve said that before and been wrong.”
The Psychopath Vote, the Romney vote, has its media, much like the one Shirer described experiencing in his book. The internet did not give anyone a free, uncensored world. In practice, it made it easier to encapsulate the space of one’s own tribe.
As far as foreign policy went, viewers will have noticed how the GOP, using its media, has made global warming a third rail issue in American politics.
“The rapid melting of the polar ice cap is turning the once ice-clogged waters off northern Alaska into a navigable ocean …” reads the piece.
However, in 2012 America, one insane and dangerous political party, often faced by only supine opposition, has successfully convinced half the country that this isn’t happening or is of no consequence.
And so we’ve had debates in which the the incumbent and the gazillionaire menace squabble over who will be most aggressive digger and miner of fossil fuels.