[lbo-talk] Paranoid Styles, Soviet and American (was Hamas "a project of Shin Bet")

B. docile_body at yahoo.com
Mon Oct 23 11:57:43 PDT 2006


Yoshie and others,

Anti-statism has a kind of complicated role in how the US public thinks about govt. Usually it's selective anti-statism (the right def. feels no anti-statism when it comes to the most brutal parts of the state: prisons, military, beefing up cop forces, harsher laws, etc.) and hat side also seems saturated with the sort of yahoo ideology that says "I hate my gubt., but love my country!" This kind of right wing anti-statism renders "anti-statism" on their end almost meaningless.

But! About "The American paranoid style of politics," I'm reminded of this passage I saw from Thomas Love Peacock's 1816 work _Nightmare_Abbey_:

"He built many castles in the air, and peopled them with secret tribunals, and bands of illuminati, who were always the imginary instruments of his projected regeneration of the human species."

-B.

Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:

"l. Paranoid styles are difficult to combat. The same noble sentiments motivate the tendency to believe all accusations against governments even without corroborating evidence that exists among both conspiracy theorists and those who are concerned about human rights, though conspiracy theorists tend to focus on their own government and human rights activists tend to focus on foreign governments. The government has more power than individuals (besides it is always in the wrong in the eye of instinctive anti-statists, which almost all Americans are), so all charges made by individuals against the government must be always right, or at least 'there may be something to it'!



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