12 Feb 2005

THE SOUL OF EFFICIENCY

In an article about "Professor" Ward Churchill, AP casually informs us that in comparing 911 victims to "little Eichmanns", Churchill was referring to someone who "ensured the smooth running of the Nazi system".

Eichmann the efficient train conductor, last stop Auschwitz? Assurer of a Nazi system that ran smoothly on tallow from rendered Jews? The smooth operator who managed to implement the PR of the "Final Solution"?

Why are they unable to say Eichmann oversaw the "murder of millions of innocent civilians.", for example? That would make Ward Churchill look real bad, as opposed to the write-up which must have everyone wondering what the fuss is about.

The Ward Churchill affair is underestimated. It is a sign that leftist academia is under seige from the majority of centre-right thinking people in the US. Further that a major shift may be coming. This could force the controllers of univerity discourse into a massive rethink of their lack of intellectual diversity.

6 Feb 2005

SPOT THE DIFFERENCE

As a political inclination and an aesthetic style, fascism is marked by, among other things, the following characteristics:

The worship of violence as a purifying social force.

A hyper-nationalistic ideology, that casts history into a drama featuring an inevitably violent struggle between Good and Evil, and that obsesses on questions of racial and ethnic identity.

The dehumanization and scapegoating of opponents ... demands that the evil in our midst be eradicated "by any means necessary," up to and including the mass extermination of entire nations and peoples.

The treatment of moral responsibility as a fundamentally collective matter.

The tyranny of a nationalistic figure who “represents” the nation. (Added by O_G)

(Thanks to Paul Campos, Professor of Law, Univ of Colorado)

As a political inclination and an aesthetic style, radical socialism is marked by, among other things, the following characteristics:

The worship of violence as a purifying social force.

A hyper-trans nationalistic ideology, that casts history into a dialectic between the progressive and retrogressive, and that obsesses on questions of class identity.

The dehumanization and scapegoating of opponents , demands that the social paradoxes in our midst be eradicated "by any means necessary," up to and including the mass extermination of entire classes.

The treatment of moral responsibility as a fundamentally collective matter.

The tyranny of an elitist “vanguard” of revolutionaries to represent the working class.

(Thanks to Orwells_Ghost,nairobi,Kenya)