In last week’s post, in a cursory glance at how the lunatics have taken over the asylum, I asked – ‘who are these people’ and responded to my own question – not only do we know - we knew.
Well – there is nothing like talking yourself in
times of madness.
But as a brief side-note to that – one might ask how did these monsters seize power; from Trump to Netanyahu and from Vladimir Putin
to Geert Wilders and, while he’s never won an election (you’d not think it from
the amount of prime time the UK press has lavished on him) Britain’s Farage, who
now poisons the UK body politic like a mega-virus.
Well – the response to ‘how?’ is almost as
depressing as the response to ‘who?’ It’s depressing because we know exactly
how these things occur, we’ve been here so many times before and have done
nothing to effectively prevent a re-occurrence.
To short-circuit this post I’ll simply quote from Al
Gore’s The Assault on Reason – which
discusses – among other things – the madness of the invasion of Iraq and the
poisoning of American politics by the lunatic, racist right.
“Throughout
history, our innate fear of others-who-are-different-from-us has combined all
too frequently…to unleash the most horrific violence and oppression…Moreover,
this deadly form of exclusivist group passion can be virtually invulnerable to
reason. So it is especially useful to demagogues who learn how to fan it and
exploit it to gain and consolidate power.”
Al Gore
The Assault on Reason
(chpt 2)