Gordon Fitch wrote:
>
> As a POW/MIA activist asked
> me in a newsgroup several years ago when I ventured to doubt
> some of his contentions, "Who are you going to believe --
> Nixon and Kissinger or ordinary American citizens?"
Gordon, this won't work. Believing these particular "ordinary American citizens" _is_ believing Nixon and Kissinger, for everything those citizens "know" they first learned from Nixon and Kissinger. The stories about the POW/MIAs were fantastic on the surface, and to believe in them required both an utter faith in the veracity of men like Nixon _and_ a deep anti-communism, the conviction that communists were intrinsically evil and capable of any excess.
[Crucial Digression: There exists no group within the population but what at some point some of its members can be 'reached' by the left, can become leading activists on the left. But few errors are more damaging to the growth of the left than the endless anxiety to reach those who are least likely reachable.]
Some of those "ordinary American citizens" will end up on our side -- but not through our willingness to indulge their vicious fantasies. And most of them will either in fact be politically passive _or_ join the death squads which will be hunting us down if we ever become threatenting enough. Opinions can reasonably differ on which sectors of the population are in fact most reachable at any given time, but it is folly to try to reach everyone at once or, worse, become focused on those who will despise us regardless of how much we stroke their prejudices.
Carrol