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Does one always know one's own best interests? Or are all of us
smarter than some of us?<br>
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From pain to Payne, there was none like Paine.<br>
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On 10/11/10 7:15 PM, John W. wrote:
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<div>I guess my one question would be this: If a majority of
eligible voters, without overt coercion, are complicit in
electing tyrants to rule them (whether or not said voters
are somehow misled by the mass media), has democracy died?</div>
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<div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 5:08 PM,
Brussel Morton K. <span dir="ltr"><<a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="mailto:MKBRUSSEL@comcast.net">MKBRUSSEL@comcast.net</a>></span> wrote:</div>
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<div style="word-wrap: break-word;">Disgust and rage…
Is he wrong? Is this how Thomas Payne wrote?
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<h3>How Democracy Dies: Lessons From a
Master</h3>
<p>Monday 11 October 2010</p>
<p><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/how_democracy_dies_lessons_from_a_master_20101011/"
target="_blank">by: Chris Hedges | <b>Truthdig
| Op-Ed</b></a></p>
<p><img moz-do-not-send="true" alt="photo"><br>
<span>(Image: <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/truthout" target="_blank">Jared
Rodriguez / <span
style="white-space: nowrap;">t r u
t h o u t</span></a>; Adapted: <a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/alun/38029348/"
target="_blank">Alun Salt</a>, <a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/zphaze/4701919237/"
target="_blank">zphaze</a>)</span></p>
<div>
<p>The ancient Greek playwright<a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.imagi-nation.com/moonstruck/clsc13.htm"
target="_blank"> Aristophanes </a>spent
his life battling the assault on
democracy by tyrants. It is
disheartening to be reminded that he
lost. But he understood that the
hardest struggle for humankind is
often stating and understanding the
obvious. Aristophanes, who had the
temerity to portray the ruling Greek
tyrant, Cleon, as a dog, is the
perfect playwright to turn to in
trying to grasp the danger posed to us
by movements from the tea party to
militias to the Christian right, as
well as the bankrupt and corrupt power
elite that no longer concerns itself
with the needs of its citizens. He saw
the same corruption 2,400 years ago.
He feared correctly that it would
extinguish Athenian democracy. And he
struggled in vain to rouse Athenians
from their slumber.</p>
<p>There is a yearning by tens of
millions of Americans, lumped into a
diffuse and fractious movement, to
destroy the intellectual and
scientific rigor of the Enlightenment.
They seek out of ignorance and
desperation to create a utopian
society based on “biblical law.” They
want to transform America’s secular
state into a tyrannical theocracy.
These radicals, rather than the
terrorists who oppose us, are the
gravest threat to our open society.
They have, with the backing of
hundreds of millions of dollars in
corporate money, gained tremendous
power. They peddle pseudoscience such
as “Intelligent Design” in our
schools. They keep us locked into
endless and futile wars of
imperialism. They mount bigoted
crusades against gays, immigrants,
liberals and Muslims. They turn our
judiciary, in the name of conservative
values, over to corporations. They
have transformed our liberal class
into hand puppets for corporate power.
And we remain meek and supine.</p>
<p>They want to transform America’s
secular state into a tyrannical
theocracy. These radicals, rather than
the terrorists who oppose us, are the
gravest threat to our open society.</p>
<p>The huge amount of taxpayer money
doled out to Wall Street, investment
banks, the oil and natural gas
industry and the defense industry,
along with the dismantling of our
manufacturing sector, is why we are
impoverished. It is why our houses are
being foreclosed on. It is why some 45
million Americans are denied medical
care. It is why our infrastructure,
from public schools to bridges, is
rotting. It is why many of us cannot
find jobs. We are being fleeced. The
flagrant theft of public funds and
rise of an obscenely rich oligarchic
class is masked by the tough talk of
demagogues, themselves millionaires,
who use fear and bombast to keep us
afraid, confused and enslaved.</p>
<p>Aristophanes saw the same
psychological and political
manipulation undermine the democratic
state in ancient Athens. He repeatedly
warned Athenians in plays such as “The
Clouds,” “The Wasps,” “The Birds,”
“The Frogs” and “Lysistrata” that
permitting political leaders who shout
“I shall never betray the Athenian!”
or “I shall keep up the fight in
defense of the people forever!” to get
their hands on state funds and power
would end with the citizens enslaved.</p>
<p><em><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.truth-out.org/newsletter"
target="_blank">Get Truthout in
your inbox every day! Click here
to sign up for free updates.</a></em></p>
<p>“The truth is, they want you, you
see, to be poor,” Aristophanes wrote
in his play “The Wasps.” “If you don’t
know the reason, I’ll tell you. It’s
to train you to know who your tamer
is. Then, whenever he gives you a
whistle and sets you against an
opponent of his, you jump out and tear
them to pieces.”<br>
Our democracy, through years of war,
theft and corruption, is also being
diminished. But the example
Aristophanes offers is not a hopeful
one. He held up the same corruption to
his fellow Greeks. He repeatedly
chided them for not rising up and
fighting back. He warned, ominously,
that by the time most citizens awoke
it would be too late. And he was
right. The appearance of normality
lulls us into a false hope and
submission. Those who shout most
loudly in defense of the ideals of the
founding fathers, the sacredness of
Constitution and the values of the
Christian religion are those who most
actively seek to subvert the
principles they claim to champion.
They hold up the icons and language of
traditional patriotism, the rule of
law and Christian charity to demolish
the belief systems that give them
cultural and political legitimacy. And
those who should defend these beliefs
are cowed and silent.</p>
<p>“For a considerable length of time
the normality of the normal world is
the most efficient protection against
disclosure of totalitarian mass
crimes,” <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/arendt/"
target="_blank">Hannah Arendt</a> wrote
in “The Origins of Totalitarianism.”
“Normal men don’t know that everything
is possible, refuse to believe their
eyes and ears in the face of the
monstrous. ... The reason why the
totalitarian regimes can get so far
toward realizing a fictitious,
topsy-turvy world is that the outside
non-totalitarian world, which always
comprises a great part of the
population of the totalitarian country
itself, indulges in wishful thinking
and shirks reality in the face of real
insanity. ...”</p>
<p>All ideological, theological and
political debates with the
representatives of the corporate
state, including the feckless and weak
Barack Obama, are useless. They cannot
be reached. They do not want a
dialogue. They care nothing for real
reform or participatory democracy.
They use the tricks and mirages of
public relations to mask a steadily
growing assault on our civil
liberties, our inability to make a
living and the loss of basic services
from education to health care. Our
gutless liberal class placates the
enemies of democracy, hoping
desperately to remain part of the
ruling elite, rather than resist. And,
in many ways, liberals, because they
serve as a cover for these corporate
extremists, are our greatest
traitors. </p>
<p>Aristophanes too lived in a time of
endless war. He knew that war always
empowered anti-democratic forces. He
saw how war ate away at the insides of
a democratic state until it was
hollowed out. His play “Lysistrata,”
written after Athens had spent 21
years consumed by the Peloponnesian
War, is a satire in which the young
women refuse to have sex with their
men until the war ends and the older
women seize the Acropolis, where the
funds for war are stored. The play
called on Athenians to consider
radical acts of civil disobedience to
halt a war that was ravaging the
state. The play’s heroine, Lysistrata,
whose name means “Disbander of
Armies,” was the playwright’s
mouthpiece for the folly and
self-destructiveness of war. But
Athens, which would lose the war, did
not listen.</p>
<p>The tragedy is that liberals and
secularists, like Obama, are not
viewed as competitors by the corporate
forces that hold power, but as
contaminates that must be eliminated.
They have sought to work with forces
that will never be placated. They have
abandoned the most basic values of the
liberal class to play a game that in
the end will mean their political and
cultural extinction. There will be no
swastikas this time but seas of red,
white and blue flags and Christian
crosses. There will be no stiff-armed
salutes, but recitations of the Pledge
of Allegiance. There will be no brown
shirts but nocturnal visits from
Homeland Security. The fear, rage and
hatred of our dispossessed and
confused working class are being
channeled into currents that are
undermining the last vestiges of the
democratic state. These dangerous
emotions, directed against a liberal
class that as in ancient Athens
betrayed the population, have a strong
appeal. And unless we adopt the
radicalism held by Aristophanes,
unless we begin to hinder the
functioning of the corporate state
through acts of civil disobedience, we
are finished.</p>
<p>Let us not stand at the open gates of
the city meekly waiting for the
barbarians. They are coming. They are
slouching towards Bethlehem. Let us,
if nothing else, like Aristophanes,
begin to call our tyranny by its name.</p>
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