Getting closer all the time

As usual, the GH is always the last to know.
The world is a dangerous place, always has been. Any time you have two or more people assembled there is going to be conflict. It is simply a matter of how the conflict is expressed. I had heard of Anonymous before but this is the first video I have seen. The delivery is new, but the message has been around for quite some time. Jello Biafra warned about this very sort of thing going back at least to his spoken word "I blow minds for a living." In fact, if you didn't know that album was from 1991, you might think it just came out. So, history repeats itself.

The relevant question is "why?" Why do people in power hit on this "let's round people up and toss them down a hole in secret forever" schtick so frequently in human history? More relevant for the US is, which state is the natural or traditional condition? Repression of dissidence flares up often in the land of the free, the first nation to actually write down what each citizen's rights are. The Alien and Sedition Acts, suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War, Palmer Raids, internment of Japanese-Americans to name a few.

I have stated before that I wrote my thesis on Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and Reinhold Niebuhr. Both of these intellectuals thought and wrote a great deal on these questions. Schlesinger felt that the flareups of repression where aberations, like society getting drunk, doing something stupid, and regretting it in the morning. So the natural state of American society was to be free and respect individual rights and liberties. He used the analogy of drink to explain the ferocity of businessmen's resistance to reform as well. A case of political "delirium tremens" in response to every effort of the people to increase social and economic justice. Normally a crisis triggered the bouts of repression and demoguagery, later, when the crisis passed, corrective measures tended to increase the security of individual rights. I say tends, perhaps not, but to really address the empirical history of each episode would take much more space and research.

Niebuhr, on the other hand, had a more pessimistic interpretation. He argued that it was the natural tendency of any social group in power to repress interests other than their own. In a time of internal crisis, where the social group in power is threatened, it is dispiciable that the elite would respond this way but not really suprizing. What is suprizing is that the traditional defenders of freedom are demoralized, disillusioned, lethargic, and scattered. Enter Anonymous, a secretive organization that may or may not be the necessary countervailing force. Whatever they are, it is not a suprize that they are using the same technologies to fight back against the Children of Darkness. The CoD use television, telecommunications, and so on to surveil and suppress every other group in society.

I still have hope that a stable American society can be restored without vicious repression or coercion. What shape the delirium tremens would take this time is anyone's guess. But I cling to Niebuhr's belief that stability is much more durable when a tolerable justice gives the broad population an investment in maintaining that society. This must be achieved by a reduction in the privilege of the very top.

Or else, what is getting closer is the nightmare scenarios of Robocop, The Running Man, Soylent Green, and all the other movies that scared the bejeezes out of me as a kid. Because honestly, the Anonymous broadcasts are a great aspect of fiction, much less fun in reality.