Posted by
drpete on Friday, May 01, 2009 12:26:54 PM
The biggest difference between Barack Obama today and Napolean, Mussolini, Lenin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Hitler and most-recently, Arafat of yesteryear is that none of the others had a teleprompter. The named leaders of yesteryear all devastated the masses who worshipped them. Much of the jury in the "Masses v. Obama" case has yet to begin deliberations.
All, it is generally conceded, advanced on the wings of great oratory skills. All are/were pragmatic opportunists, advancing themselves and their agendae amid the manufactured chaos of crises. All do or did manipulate the most-mass newsmedia of their day, whether, massive rallies, fire-side radio chats, newsreels at the movies, broadcast of the 1936 Olympics, Palestinian news feeds carried by the gullible and compliant outlets wordwide, televised speaches and "news conferences" along with intimidation of opposition talk radio.
All are/were either radical socialists, radical liberal fascists, or both. All do/did eschew logic, facts, truth and rationality in favor of emotion and stirring passion in the masses. All replaced religions with faiths that were this-wordly and political, and led by this-world people rather than exta-wordly [G]od(s). The hisorical are well-known to most. The latest iteration is "Black Liberation Theology".
All came to realize that having the people they lead/led, not only impassioned, but scared, made the followers more compliant. All are/were transformational, creating new societies with new paradigms, while impugning everything past. All do or did subordinate the individual to the collective -- the state or nation, the worker class, the race, the party -- and subordinate the rule of law to the rule of an oligarchy of "leaders".
All came to believe that truth is unimportant. Whatever the people believe to be truth is what is important, because it is that which guides them. Leaders, then, need to create a truth which moves the masses. It is no wonder, then, that George Will recently opined, "For conservatives seeing is believing while for liberals believing is seeing." It is why on this blogsite I earlier characterized what the President was doing as "misdirobfuscation".
If what we're witnessing is not new, but rather deja vu, -- and that's how I see it -- the ending is clear, and not pretty. What remains of the story to be written is what and who will be devastated before the final chapter, and how badly. If we use post-revolution France, a dying and shrinking Italy, post-war Germany, the Soviet Union, Palestine, and the New Deal legacy as clues and predictors, the prognosis is bleak.