>CB: "Lunatic" is a psychological term, not political.
Can they be separated so neatly? What do you make of "war fever" or Hofstadter's "paranoid style" that comes up here now and again?
^^^^ CB: Yes, I know such comes up here now and again, but I usually think of it as a form of cussing, expression of exasperation, not a serious claim that someone is insane. Hitler seems to have been insane, but we don't usually explain the rise of the Nazis due to Hitler's mental illness.
It's like explaining institutional racism by individual, personal racism; or rightwing working class masses as dumb.
I guess Hofstadter's terminology is a weakness in his thesis.
I thought there was something of a consensu on this point around here. I took the initial reference to Israel as a lunatic state as "cursing in frustration", and perhaps some of the usual reticence or euphemizing out of concern for not being thought of as anti-semitic.
To the extent that McCarthy was "crazy", I still wouldn't attribute McCarthyism to that craziness. The ruling class used a crazy man to wipe out the Communist Party and thwart mass support for US Marxism, something like Hitler on a much smaller scale.
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How is the following quote from Joe McCarthy not both political and paranoid?
http://karws.gso.uri.edu/jfk/conspiracy_theory/the_paranoid_mentality/the_paranoid_style.html
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>How can we account for our present situation
>unless we believe that men high in this
>government are concerting to deliver us to
>disaster? This must be the product of a great
>conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any
>previous such venture in the history of man. A
>conspiracy of infamy so black that, which it is
>finally exposed, its principals shall be forever
>deserving of the maledictions of all honest
>men.
What can be made of this unbroken series of
>decisions and acts contributing to the strategy
>of defeat? They cannot be attributed to
>incompetence.
The laws of probability would
>dictate that part of
[the] decisions would serve the country’s interest.
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