[lbo-talk] weimar

Dwayne Monroe dwayne.monroe at gmail.com
Sun Apr 27 19:54:25 PDT 2008


Chuck Grimes:

This was a total re-structuring of society and it was done on bureaucratic and institutional means. For example, membership lists in former Weimar political parties were sorted out and obviously the Communist party members were tracted down by these lists and hauled off. What any individual Communist current believed or thought or had done lately was irrelevant. They were names on the list, and people on that list went to such and such a place, period. There were no hearings or days in court to argue or plead. It wasn't even guilt by association. It was just the functional governmental apparatus that followed proscribed courses of action of what was to be done with the names of this or that list. That is why the Third Reich recorded everything. The record keeping fanaticism was the routinization of all social functions. Political party memberships, places of work, schools attended, income, places of residence, religion, family trees---the records of these facts defined who and what you were and what your function should be in the new rationally ordered state---a state whose primary function was to wage war.

......

We should keep this insight into ancient paranoiac methods in mind as we investigate current examples of list building and categorization: the Dept. of Homeland Security, the Transportation Safety Authority, Total Information Awareness, the 'No Fly' and 'terror watch' lists, etc.

Lacking the will or the cleverness (or perhaps, both) to conduct genuine counter-terrorist investigation -- slow work requiring patience and focus, not media friendly, not helpful to propaganda efforts -- Western governments, led by the examples of Washington and London, are creating massive lists of suspected persons.

Of course, we all know this and are appropriately outraged for the usual civil libertarian reasons.

Beyond that however, I think we should recognize this renewed list mania as a 21st century echo of the earlier project you're describing.

The new lists -- which are actually databases assembled using search algorithms -- are meant to divide populations into two categories: (relatively...provisionally) safe and suspect.

And as with those earlier lists, distinctions are destroyed -- both a teenage boy who likes to wear black clothes and a man who visited Yemen to see family can broadly be considered 'suspect' and therefore subject to local and/or federal attention.

Threat assessment becomes a routinized, assembly line affair. Using a severely impoverished understanding of human behavior, bureaucracies attempt to craft failsafe techniques which are praised, because computers are central to the process, as "rational" and even "scientific".

.d.



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