Friday, October 01, 2010



Marc Estrin : Holocaust Thinking in America I: The Authoritarian Personality

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So now, in place of Newt Gingrich's 1994 Contract With America (aka Contract On America) we have the new GOP Pledge to America. Not unlike the current design, the rich are to get richer, and the poor to get sick, become homeless, starve, or shatter in endless wars.

The comparison of our American trajectory with the tactics and strategy of Germany in the late 1930s is more striking now than ever. We would do well to study this era carefully for a possible glimpse of our own future. Those targeted are no longer just our dispossessed, reviled and outcast -- our "jews" -- but much of the American (and of course world) population.
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Individualism becomes suspect, a negative value to be stamped out. “Difference” means unpredictability, and fear of an unpredictable, uncontrollable, “Other” spawns all the “isms” which rampage today: racism, sexism, classism, anti-semitism, anti-immigrant, anti-muslim rage, xenophobia. Nature itself becomes an uncertain enemy to be conquered and subdued.
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The psycho-sexual chaos at the core of an authoritarian personality simultaneously fascinates and repels. Rigid moralism embracing stereotypical values seems the most secure protection against anarchy and chaos. There is exaggerated concern with and denunciation of libidinal art and sexual “goings-on."
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A culture of punishment follows hard upon. Offenders against order must be strictly punished. Dominance and submission becomes crucial. The very same heartmind is both pro-life and pro-death penalty. But the sanctity of life is secondary: the important thing is punishment.
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Most of the German perpetrators were “normal” people, people who would not be picked up by any questionnaire or psychiatric screen. They were by and large not sadists or moral degenerates or even political fanatics -- yet they became conscious collaborators in the process of mass murder.

How was it possible to create torturers out of next door neighbors? (How could our clean-cut young boys napalm women and children?) What about that animal pity?
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lots were drawn to pick who would be the"teacher"and who would be the"learner."
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# posted by intcoex : 4:59 PM




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