If we go back to the good old days of the Stalin Purges in the 1930s, what do we learn? What made them different from just good old jailing of regime opponents?
After all, with modern police and incarceration methods, a repressive government can easily jail and disappear its opponents. That's what the Argentine generals did to the lefty Montoneros back during their military junta days. Argentine lefties are still complaining about it.
For Stalin, merely arresting his co-Bolshevik revolutionaries and disappearing them wasn't enough. They had to confess. There had to be a conspiracy against the father of his people, Comrade Stalin. The heretics had to grovel before being tossed into the auto da fè.
So the Stalin Purges echoed the spirit of the Spanish Inquisition, another enforcer of orthodoxy. Actually, in modern terms, the Spanish Inquisition was pretty mild. It usually never got further than showing its victims the instruments of torture. That was enough to get them to confess to horrible crimes and heresies.
When Barack Obama was elected as the United States First Black President many Americans thought that the long national nightmare on race was over. We thought that the lion would lie down with the lamb and the race wars would be consigned to the dustbin of history. We instinctively thought that the president would tell the race baiters to cool their jets.
In fact the opposite has occurred. Whenever there is a race incident, from a black professor being stopped and frisked at his house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, or a black kid getting gunned down by a White Hispanic, or a rich sports-team owner spewing racial epithets at his mistress, the president steps in and amps up the outrage.
Now you would think that, fifty years after the end of government-sponsored racial segregation that we could draw a line under racism and say, look, there are a lot of white people that don't like black people. But the fact is that they don't have political power. There are laws to penalize racist acts. Let's not get too overheated about what is in peoples' hearts and minds.
Government, after all, is not supposed to be worrying about hearts and minds, but the law. That's what Janet Reno told us when the mood took her.
Forget government, it is religion that is supposed to worry about hearts and minds.
But our modern secular religions combine politics and religion into a single proto-totalitarian cult of the state. Therefore in a modern secular liberal society, it does too matter what people are thinking. And it does too matter that racist and sexist thoughts are swirling around out there. It follows that they should be expunged, and that proper confessions should be made after people have been shown the instruments of torture.
President Obama has set a clear example to his co-religionists. Heretics should be hunted down and publicly shamed.
With the example of their lightbringer before them, the followers of President Obama diligently search not just for criminal acts against the government of secular liberalism, but heretical thoughts against the gods of race, gender, and class.
Do they ever.
So we are justified in calling the present era the years of the Obama Purges.
President Obama and his supporters are eager to teach their ideological opponents a lesson. Resistance is futile, they communicate in word and deed.
Maybe so. But the problem with repression is that there are two responses. One is to knuckle under to the new world order. The other is to form a movement of resistance. Some people conform; others rebel.
Which response will win out?
After all, with modern police and incarceration methods, a repressive government can easily jail and disappear its opponents. That's what the Argentine generals did to the lefty Montoneros back during their military junta days. Argentine lefties are still complaining about it.
For Stalin, merely arresting his co-Bolshevik revolutionaries and disappearing them wasn't enough. They had to confess. There had to be a conspiracy against the father of his people, Comrade Stalin. The heretics had to grovel before being tossed into the auto da fè.
So the Stalin Purges echoed the spirit of the Spanish Inquisition, another enforcer of orthodoxy. Actually, in modern terms, the Spanish Inquisition was pretty mild. It usually never got further than showing its victims the instruments of torture. That was enough to get them to confess to horrible crimes and heresies.
When Barack Obama was elected as the United States First Black President many Americans thought that the long national nightmare on race was over. We thought that the lion would lie down with the lamb and the race wars would be consigned to the dustbin of history. We instinctively thought that the president would tell the race baiters to cool their jets.
In fact the opposite has occurred. Whenever there is a race incident, from a black professor being stopped and frisked at his house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, or a black kid getting gunned down by a White Hispanic, or a rich sports-team owner spewing racial epithets at his mistress, the president steps in and amps up the outrage.
Now you would think that, fifty years after the end of government-sponsored racial segregation that we could draw a line under racism and say, look, there are a lot of white people that don't like black people. But the fact is that they don't have political power. There are laws to penalize racist acts. Let's not get too overheated about what is in peoples' hearts and minds.
Government, after all, is not supposed to be worrying about hearts and minds, but the law. That's what Janet Reno told us when the mood took her.
Forget government, it is religion that is supposed to worry about hearts and minds.
But our modern secular religions combine politics and religion into a single proto-totalitarian cult of the state. Therefore in a modern secular liberal society, it does too matter what people are thinking. And it does too matter that racist and sexist thoughts are swirling around out there. It follows that they should be expunged, and that proper confessions should be made after people have been shown the instruments of torture.
President Obama has set a clear example to his co-religionists. Heretics should be hunted down and publicly shamed.
With the example of their lightbringer before them, the followers of President Obama diligently search not just for criminal acts against the government of secular liberalism, but heretical thoughts against the gods of race, gender, and class.
Do they ever.
So we are justified in calling the present era the years of the Obama Purges.
President Obama and his supporters are eager to teach their ideological opponents a lesson. Resistance is futile, they communicate in word and deed.
Maybe so. But the problem with repression is that there are two responses. One is to knuckle under to the new world order. The other is to form a movement of resistance. Some people conform; others rebel.
Which response will win out?
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