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A final point occurs to me. These protests about the sky is falling, and a world of deceit fall very far of the mark.
What we have today is a new social group that exalts in manipulation and the horror movie joys of zombies and
paranoia as applied to society and state. This phenomenon is actually a very old one. It is older in Europe,
but it has fine antecedents in the US. That is, those who profit from pointing out that everyone is being deceived
and so forth. Such nuttiness was ascendant in the 1920s, at least, the first part of the decade,
in the 1930s, in the 1950s, and in the 1960s, and, if I think of it, in the 1970s, to boot.
The 1970s were a pretty lousy time in many ways. I was there for the 60s and 70s. Full bore.
It is not for nothing that Alfred Rosenberg named his book the
Myth of the 20th Century as a fascist-Nazi attempt to undo all progress in Europe since
1789 or 1848 or whenever. it is an old canard of right wing paranoia. Or left wing paranoia.
Actually, education has the goal to enable you to smell a stinker, but as per the comment above about
persons in crappy houses, with crappy cars, and dissatisfied female mates and so forth, (I do not
associate with these kind of people as a rule, since I lead a very closed life) maybe such education is a lost
thing. It is very well is a lost thing, what with the superstitions and paranoia that are the norm.
A certain sector of US society has lost faith in education, which I note and register, but
I am not going to allow people who hold up this site in the best sense to get slime ed by inference.
Damit basta.
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05-12-2018 04:39 AM
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Why I write the above, since smarter people than I came up with it....
ARCHIVE / 1964 / November
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Article — From the November 1964 issue
The Paranoid Style in American Politics
By Richard Hofstadter
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It had been around a long time before the Radical Right discovered it—and its targets have ranged from “the international bankers” to Masons, Jesuits, and munitions makers.
American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind. In using the expression “paranoid style” I am not speaking in a clinical sense, but borrowing a clinical term for other purposes. I have neither the competence nor the desire to classify any figures of the past or present as certifiable lunatics. In fact, the idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.
Of course this term is pejorative, and it is meant to be; the paranoid style has a greater affinity for bad causes than good. But nothing really prevents a sound program or demand from being advocated in the paranoid style. Style has more to do with the way in which ideas are believed than with the truth or falsity of their content. I am interested here in getting at our political psychology through our political rhetoric. The paranoid style is an old and recurrent phenomenon in our public life which has been frequently linked with movements of suspicious discontent.
Here is Senator McCarthy, speaking in June 1951 about the parlous situation of the United States:
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.
Now turn back fifty years to a manifesto signed in 1895 by a number of leaders of the Populist party:
As early as 1865–66 a conspiracy was entered into between the gold gamblers of Europe and America. . . . For nearly thirty years these conspirators have kept the people quarreling over less important matters while they have pursued with unrelenting zeal their one central purpose. . . . Every device of treachery, every resource of statecraft, and every artifice known to the secret cabals of the international gold ring are being used to deal a blow to the prosperity of the people and the financial and commercial independence of the country.
Next, a Texas newspaper article of 1855:
. . . It is a notorious fact that the Monarchs of Europe and the Pope of Rome are at this very moment plotting our destruction and threatening the extinction of our political, civil, and religious institutions. We have the best reasons for believing that corruption has found its way into our Executive Chamber, and that our Executive head is tainted with the infectious venom of Catholicism. . . . The Pope has recently sent his ambassador of state to this country on a secret commission, the effect of which is an extraordinary boldness of the Catholic church throughout the United States. . . . These minions of the Pope are boldly insulting our Senators; reprimanding our Statesmen; propagating the adulterous union of Church and State; abusing with foul calumny all governments but Catholic, and spewing out the bitterest execrations on all Protestantism. The Catholics in the United States receive from abroad more than $200,000 annually for the propagation of their creed. Add to this the vast revenues collected here. . . .
These quotations give the keynote of the style. In the history of the United States one find it, for example, in the anti-Masonic movement, the nativist and anti-Catholic movement, in certain spokesmen of abolitionism who regarded the United States as being in the grip of a slaveholders’ conspiracy, in many alarmists about the Mormons, in some Greenback and Populist writers who constructed a great conspiracy of international bankers, in the exposure of a munitions makers’ conspiracy of World War I, in the popular left-wing press, in the contemporary American right wing, and on both sides of the race controversy today, among White Citizens’ Councils and Black Muslims. I do not propose to try to trace the variations of the paranoid style that can be found in all these movements, but will confine myself to a few leading episodes in our past history in which the style emerged in full and archetypal splendor.
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Richard Hofstadter was DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University. His book "Anti-intellectualism in American Life" was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1964. This essay was adapted from the Herbert Spencer Lecture, delivered at Oxford University in November 1963.
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I was 11 years of age in 1964, and well recall the Johnson Goldwater event with some clarity. And I was a teen ager and very active politically as a Republican
four years later.....
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Friend carpediem, So right you are. I did not write the sentence about crappy cars. The wizard of Omaha has a crappy car, and he is richer than God.
Thanks for the picture from the Twilight Zone. More reason why you and I think on the same lines. I recall this episode
with great fondness. Rod Serling. What would he say about our now?
I was not going to publish what one of you sent me, but it was in response to the momentary travail.
In former times, people had dignity and honor. Now they revel in no dignity and the reality television of indignity and torture.
I do not get it.
Since I have studied the SS for decades, however, in attempt to understand how Germany could descend into the same thing
that seems again abroad in the world, the questions are germane.
Thank you, carpediem, your work here is always top flight as I wrote yesterday. And I will write it tomorrow, too, as required.
Last edited by Friedrich-Berthold; 05-12-2018 at 06:05 AM.
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Blimey, I had forgotten all about this thread.
How things have changed in the world since 2012. The one thing that remains unchanged seems to be the power of the printed word.
FB your championing of the "book" is to be commended and supported without reservation.
My apologies for having been absent in my posts in recent times.
Best wishes to you,
Tony
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by
spandau
Blimey, I had forgotten all about this thread.
How things have changed in the world since 2012. The one thing that remains unchanged seems to be the power of the printed word.
FB your championing of the "book" is to be commended and supported without reservation.
My apologies for having been absent in my posts in recent times.
Best wishes to you,
Tony
In part my words are meant for you, and for the other actual authors here who make this a fine place.
I won't let stand this insidious balderdash that all authors are using their books as a vehicle for fakes.
Such a thing is considerably older than the US Army garrison Berlin dagger king, but so what?
Also, one of you really owes me an example, and with my bloody state of mind, I am going to get my example so I understand what is being said here.
.
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