Community Development Journal, Volume 44, Issue 1, January 2009, Pages 123-127, https://doi.org/10.1093/cdj/bsn035, Published: 09 December 2008
In her articles in the voice of Fay Stender, lawyer for George Jackson and Huey Newton, and Beverly Axelrod, lawyer for Eldridge Cleaver, Ms. Bryant makes clear the truths that George Orwell and Dr. Jo Freeman and many writers around the world have made clear:
Conforming to deification of a violent and unworthy hero - a Donald Trump, for example - leads to mass murder, as in Jonestown; to the assassination of (among others) Dr. Marcus Foster; to the kidnaping, torture and rapes of Patricia Hearst, in which women as well as men participated; to the allowance of the slow deaths of "subject" populations deemed inferior via the withholding of adequate health-emergency preparation and care that we are seeing now among the American poor and "non-white" especially.
Arrogance combined with racism, sexism and many other deadly prejudices leads inevitably to identification with the Leader, who expertly chooses enemies whose murders en masse will be tolerated and sometimes even celebrated by a terrified citizenry. This form of genocide need not involve concentration camps, but can easily accept withholding of life necessities. Citizenries conforming to what their leaders believe leads to support of such genocides.
And silence is complicity.
And why do such authoritarian personalities exist? Many experienced their earliest life choices as death or domination. Many were devoid of human attachment by parents. Like the puppies taken from their mothers in Animal Farm, detachment led and leads to hatred as a political totality, both personally and publicly.
The furnace is fired by fears of one's own weakness and "inferiority", particularly as men and especially male providers. Of course these fears of the weakness within oneself are then projected onto others' alleged "weaknesses": women, homosexuals, the disabled, the overweight, African American, Hispanic American and Native North American citizens. And Jews, always.
Conforming to a split vision of one's vulnerability and isolation within the general society (is there one anymore?) with a sense of racial, sexual or other fantasy of deprived but genuine superiority leads to the scapegoat/ostracism/killing so expertly described by Dorothy Bryant in A Day in San Francisco.
A gang of teen-aged rapists looks Clara Lontana (Ms. Bryant's spokeswoman in the novel) over as Clara walks past them at the 24th Street BART Station. They decide not to rape her because she is crying and talking incoherently about her son, who is defying the facts about AIDS and inviting his death (which in reality took place a few years later).
They feel it is bad luck to "touch a loca".
And understanding these brutish kids' duality is bedrock to understanding our country now.
This complex duality is recounted brilliantly by Arlie Hochschild in Strangers in their Own Land - Anger and Mourning on the American Right. click here
How could this deadly conformity happen in what we have all been taught is a democratic country?
Pathological pressures in and on the body can lead to a failure of the immune system. So can similar failures within the body politic. The "tangle of pathologies" (phrase originated by Daniel Patrick Moynihan) accompanying unrelieved poverty include forms of human misery now illustrated by the failure to treat poor people throughout our nation for Covid. They include other conditions as well:
- the merging of private money and public power into a society of domination, where all individuals are expendable. Both climate change and the threat of accidental or deliberate nuclear war have combined to terrorize our species.
This has happened now as a bought Congress (with a few clear exceptions), intimidated by possible loss of office if they revolt against Donald Trump and his political enforcers, refuse to dare their constituents to turn on their reason and revolt against psychopathic politics.
- Deprivation of an economic dream of ascension through hard work and education. When Dorothy Bryant points out in A Day in San Francisco the "part timing" of a once full time-with -benefits academic teaching force, she describes a movement of society-wide economic calcification in many fields.
- Breaking of unions, and refusal to provide full-time jobs with benefits and universal health care for all persons in all working and family situations has produced helplessness and an openness to fascism, defined herein as corporatism: the buying of democracy by private interests with anti-constitutional political goals, superbly defined by Sarah Diamond among the first of those to see, and by Margaret Atwood in The Handmaid's Tale and Oryx and Crake.
- Hopelessness. Since 1945, the human race has been uneasily and powerlessly (or so it seems) living with the threat of universal annihilation by Empire-mad politicians. This sense of entrapment leads to every bizarre search for a savior, for deadly relief from fear via killer narcotics to suicide, in all forms well advertised and promoted with a propagandistic capability Joseph Goebbels would have envied.
Please read all about Herr Goebbels' propaganda philosophy and techniques while bearing in mind their consequences.
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