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Monday, July 29, 2002
The Psalm of Adolf
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Pledge! | | NOISE
Ramsey Clark, who was attorney general under President Jimmy Carter, said at a Greenwich Village news conference that such measures as the months-long detainment of people without charges is tantamount to the worst abuse of civil rights in the nation’s history. “McCarthy only talked,” said Clark, referring to Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin and his infamous hunting of Communists in the 1950s. “Bush is acting.” What the intelligentsia-or those who today unfortunately often go by that name-what they need is not propaganda but scientific instruction. The content of propaganda is not science any more than the object represented in a poster is art. The art of the poster lies in the designer's ability to attract the attention of the crowd by form and color. A poster advertising an art exhibit must direct the attention of the public to the art being exhibited; the better it succeeds in this, the greater is the art of the poster itself. The poster should give the masses an idea of the significance of the exhibition, it should not be a substitute for the art on display. Anyone who wants to concern himself with the art itself must do more than study the poster; and it will not be enough for him just to saunter through the exhibition. We may expect him to examine and immerse himself in the individual works, and thus little by little form a fair opinion.
...[T]he war propaganda of the English and Americans was psychologically sound. By representing the Germans to their own people as barbarians and Huns, they prepared the individual soldier for the terrors of war, and thus helped to preserve him from disappointments. After this, the most terrible weapon that was used against him seemed only to confirm what his propagandists had told him; it likewise reinforced his faith in the truth of his government's assertions, while on the other hand it increased his rage and hatred against the vile enemy.
To that I can only say: The conscience of a moral personality is a far greater protection against the misuse of an office than is the supervision of parliament or the separation of powers. I know no one who has a stronger conscience, or is more true to his people...He knows that both his honor and his work are at risk. He cannot pass the responsibility for his decisions to irresponsible parliamentary majorities, as do the statesmen of all other nations. That also means that his freedom of action is not restricted or watered down by parliamentary bodies or other forces. This above all is why in desperate times people and nations need an absolute leader — assuming he possesses the necessary abilities — and why such a leader can be necessary to the continued existence of the government and people...With you, we long for the preservation of peace and are prepared to follow your command to defend our people's peace...We are proud and happy to have one of history's greats, a son of our people, among us during our life times. The yes that we give affirms his leadership to the world, and thanks him at the same time...To you, our Führer, we pledge our loyalty — Adolf Hitler, we believe in you!
We need honest, reasoned debate; not fearmongering. To those who pit Americans against immigrants, and citizens against non-citizens; to those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty; my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists - for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America's enemies, and pause to America's friends. They encourage people of good will to remain silent in the face of evil...We have worked with Congress in the belief and recognition that no single branch of government alone can stop terrorism. We have consulted with members out of respect for the separation of powers that is the basis of our system of government. However, Congress' power of oversight is not without limits. The Constitution specifically delegates to the President the authority to "take care that the laws are faithfully executed." And perhaps most importantly, the Constitution vests the President with the extraordinary and sole authority as Commander-in-Chief to lead our nation in times of war.
I hate the fact that 90% of Americans – who up until August derided government in general as inefficient and self-serving – can believe that over 3,000 causalities can suddenly make that same government efficient, capable, noble and dead-set on working in America's best interest...This is Gulag logic, it's Soviet logic, and it has America in its grips right now...It is not too late to prove that a government must earn loyalty, not dictate it, as Ashcroft has begun to do.
It is quite extraordinary the extent to which I have been lied about. It is remarkable, and it makes me ashamed of journalists. No one ever gives any quotes. The same is true for the charge that I am a nationalist. I am a patriot. I love my motherland. I want my country, which is sick, which for 70 years has been destroyed, and is on the very edge of death, I want it to come back to life. But this doesn't make me a nationalist. I don't want to limit anyone else. Every country has its own patriots who are concerned with its fate...When Western society was established, it was based on the idea that each individual limited his own behavior. Everyone understood what he could do and could not do. The law itself did not restrain people. Since then, the only thing we have been developing is rights, rights, rights, at the expense of duty.
Trotskyist theory and practice is rather neatly summed up in the opening sentence of the manifesto the Fourth International adopted at its foundation in 1938. Called The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International, and drafted by Trotsky himself, it began with the absurd declaration: "The world political situation is chiefly characterised by historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat". This tendency to reduce everything to a question of the right leadership (Trotsky once wrote a pamphlet on the Paris Commune in which he explained its failure by the absence of a Bolshevik Party there) reminds us that Trotskyists are 102 per cent Leninists and believers in the vanguard party. They believe, in other words, that workers by their own efforts are incapable of emancipating themselves and so must be led by an enlightened minority of professional revolutionaries (generally bourgeois intellectuals like Lenin and Trotsky). Thus they fall under the general criticism of Leninism and indeed of all theories which proclaim that workers need leaders.
We don't believe in mass branding of people. There are saints, martyrs and devils of every stripe, color, and ethnicity. For every martyr-like American prisoner of war, there is an American that will happily kill and rape a fleeing Albanian refugee. For every slaughterer in Serbia there is a gentle kind protector that will shield and hide victims (only to be turned into a Steven Spielberg movie one day). And for every well meaning political leader, there is an opportunistic pig who will stop at nothing to assert supremacy in an uncertain world. |
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