“You had to stop discussing politics or you would run right into it, causing no damage to anything but yourself.”
– Terry Pratchett, Snuff (p. 14)
Category / Politics
Sowell: Innovative
“‘Innovative’ is another of the generalities used in place of arguments, and ‘making a difference’ is likewise promoted as something desirable, without any specific arguments. However, the Holocaust was ‘innovative’ and Hitler ‘made a difference’. The anointed, of course, mean that their particular innovations will be beneficial and that the differences their policies make will be improvements. But that is precisely what needs to be argued, instead of evading the responsibility of producing evidence or logic by resorting to preemptive words.”
– Thomas Sowell, Vision of the Anointed (p. 96)
Faulkner: The Race Problem in the South
“From the beginning of this present phase of the race problem in the South, I have been on record as opposing the forces in my native country which would keep the condition out of which this present evil and trouble has grown. Now I must go on record as opposing the forces outside the South which would use legal or police comÂpulsion to eradicate that evil overnight. I was against compulsory segregation. I am just as strongly against compulsory integration. Firstly of course from principle. Secondly because I dont believe it will work…
And I would say this too. The rest of the United States knows next to nothing about the South. The present idea and picture which they hold of a people decadent and even obsolete through inbreeding and illiteracy – the inbreeding a result of the illiteracy and the isolation so that there is nothing else to do at night – as to be a kind of species of juvenile delinquents with a folklore of blood and violence, yet who, like juvenile delinquents, can be controlled by firmness once they are brought to believe that the police mean business, is as baseless and illusory as that one a generation ago of (oh yes, we subÂscribed to it too) columned porticoes and magnolias. The rest of the United States assumes that this condition in the South is so simple and so uncomplex that it can be changed tomorrow by the simple will of the national majority backed by legal edict.”
– William Faulkner, “Letter to a Northern Editor”
Arendt: The Ideal Subject
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e. the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e. the standards of thoughts) no longer exist.”
– Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (p. 474)
Arendt: The Method of Infallible Prediction
“[The method of infallible prediction] is foolproof only after the movements have seized power. Then all debate about the truth or falsity of a totalitarian dictator’s prediction is as weird as arguing with a potential murderer about whether his future victim is dead or alive – since by killing the person in question the murderer can promptly provide proof of the correctness of his statement. The only valid argument under such conditions is promptly to rescue the person whose death is predicted. Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it. The assertion that the Moscow subway is the only one in the world is a lie only so long as the Bolsheviks have not the power to destroy all the others. In other words, the method of infallible prediction, more than any other totalitarian propaganda device, betrays its ultimate goal of world conquest, since only in a world completely under his control could the totalitarian ruler possibly realize all his lies and make true all his prophecies.”
– Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (p. 350)
In Pursuit of Copiousness 