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first off, powerclown, you have the allusion wrong. not only to the wrong book---it comes from milosz's "the captive mind"--he calls the phenomenon "ketman"---but also what it's about. it's as much about the relation of fear to political unanimity in general as it is about stalinism in particular. you might think about why exactly it is that you take such solace in the raving commissars of far right paranoia on faux news---you too seem to fear being annihilated any moment---you too seem to enjoy that fear.
and paraoia is fun: it makes you the center of the world.
structurally, it's an interesting little foretaste of how the jurrasic right will react if the national security state starts to be dismantled--which i think is absolutely necessary. one way to look at the whole of neoconservative thinking is as a last-ditch effort to maintain the rationale for the authoritarian structures that are the legal expressions of the national security state.
but maybe you don't remember what it is: the argument was that because stalin was a dictator and democracy slow to react (even in its shadowpuppet form in the united states) structures needed to be put into place to enable the united states to function like a dictatorship. the switch is in state of emergency law. you remember how much the bush administration liked states of emergency, don't you? or hasn't faux news mentioned that?
it is the largest remaining relic of the cold war. it is also a patronage network that is predicated on a particular set of approaches to the military--the approach that enabled "mutually assured destruction" to appear a viable nuclear strategy, the approach that centered on creating a network of underground bunkers that would enable the state structure to continue existing, presiding over a world of ash. it's of a piece with the approach to military strategy that's lost each major war it's been engaged in since the 1960s. it's geared around one type of conflict, with one way of thinking about procurement.
and the conservatives have been no friend of it in other areas--there would have been an alarm sounding as the basic manufacturing industries--particularly steel--was fragmented and outsourced away if conservatism had been consistent with it's own military "thinking"---but it wasn't. so the only thing to conclude is that the neo-cons were about defending the patronage network for it's own sake, because their nutty view of power rested on it.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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