Quote:
Originally Posted by Nigel Mace
I have just come across this. An excellent interview/article and a particularly careful and nuanced 'use' of historical experience - an all too rare achievement. It is, I'm afraid, also all too prescient. Find it at...
http://international.sueddeutsche.de...efend-american |
Nigel,
Thanks for another excellent link. That was a well-articulated interview. I thought this extract was particularly interesting:
"The American Revolution actually preserved ideas from Britain: the rule of law being the most important. The whole justification of the American Revolution was that the British were not living up to their own principles, were not including Americans in their own system. In a broad way that that was also the argument of the civil rights movement: the system fails itself when it does not extend equal rghts to all citizens. So there can be resistance and even revoution which is about meeting standards rather than about simple destruction. What Bannon says correctly about the Bolsheviks was that they aimed to completely destroy an old regime. We can slip from one to the other very easily, from rebelliousness to a complete negation of the system. Most Americans had a rule of law state for most of their lives, African Americans are an exception, and so most Americans think this will be there forever. They don’t get that a “disruption” can actually destroy much of what they take for granted. They have no notion what it means to destroy the state and how their lives would look like if the rule of law would no longer exist. I find it frightening that people who talk about the destruction of the American state are now in charge of the American state."
This is the point I was trying to make in my post #187 about the necrophilous age we live in. In The
Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, the psychoanalyst and social philosopher Erich Fromm describes the necrophilous character as one who has “the passionate attraction to all that is dead, decayed, putrid, sickly; it is the passion to transform that which is alive into something unalive; to destroy for the sake of destruction…. It is the passion ‘to tear apart living structures’” (332). I fear many Trump voters voted for the destruction of something without realizing what destruction begets, that is, death. One of the things that will certainly die is any resemblence of classical conservatism or the Republican Party. I still believe they are selling their souls for something that will eventually condemn them. Unfortunately, it's going to take us all down, I fear.
I remember sitting in a history class as an undergraduate many moons ago where the professor told us about a paper he wrote, which postulated that the Revolutionary War could have been averted if we had just employed the courts on which our common laws were founded. He surmised that the English Empire would have been so powerful, the world could have averted the Civil War, WWI and WWII. He received so many death threats that his wife made him stop talking about his theory in public. I'm not suggesting that I agree with his theory, just that it never surprises me what people are ready to kill for.
I honestly would like to hear the counterargument to that of the Yale professor in Nigel's link. (Other than the counterargument that points out he's a Yale professor, ha!).
Greg