The scandals coming into view with Harvard Professors like Alan Dershowitz and Lawrence H. Summers in the Epstien Files have me going back to Responsibility of Intellectuals (1967!!) by Noam Chomsky... It's no surprise the money, power, and status has people lying with few consequences in support of USA corrupt policy for Israel and Wall Street Economics now.. For back then, I wonder if The Kennedy "Intellectuals" may just be lucky there wasn't unencrypted e-mail back then, so we won't know what sort of perverse rapey pricks they were in private life, if their private lives match up with their policy participation like they do for Dershowitz and Summers...

When Arthur Schlesinger was asked by The New York Times in November, 1965, to explain the contradiction between his published account of the Bay of Pigs incident and the story he had given the press at the time of the attack, he simply remarked that he had lied; and a few days later, he went on to compliment the Times for also having suppressed information on the planned invasion, in “the national interest,” as this term was defined by the group of arrogant and deluded men of whom Schlesinger gives such a flattering portrait in his recent account of the Kennedy Administration.It is of no particular interest that one man is quite happy to lie in behalf of a cause which he knows to be unjust; but it is significant that such events provoke so little response in the intellectual community—for example, no one has said that there is something strange in the offer of a major chair in the humanities to a historian who feels it to be his duty to persuade the world that an American-sponsored invasion of a nearby country is nothing of the sort. And what of the incredible sequence of lies on the part of our government and its spokesmen concerning such matters as negotiations in Vietnam? The facts are known to all who care to know.... there is indeed something of a consensus among intellectuals who have already achieved power and affluence, or who sense that they can achieve them by “accepting society” as it is and promoting the values that are “being honored” in this society. It is also true that this consensus is most noticeable among the scholar-experts who are replacing the free-floating intellectuals of the past.Let me finally return to Dwight Macdonald and the responsibility of intellectuals. Macdonald quotes an interview with a death-camp paymaster who burst into tears when told that the Russians would hang him. “Why should they? What have I done?” he asked. Macdonald concludes: “Only those who are willing to resist authority themselves when it conflicts too intolerably with their personal moral code, only they have the right to condemn the death-camp paymaster.” The question, “What have I done?” is one that we may well ask ourselves, as we read each day of fresh atrocities

chomsky.info/19670223/

#NoamChomsky #ResponsibilityOfIntellectuals with #DwightMacdonald and #ArthurSchlesinger #KennedyIntellectuals #EpsteinFilesMusings #AlanDershowitz #LarrySummers #LawrenceHSummers

The Responsibility of Intellectuals

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@jayrosen_nyu Dwight MacDonald pointed this out ... 70 years ago, in his "Theory of Mass Culture":

The upper classes, who begin by using it to make money from the crude tastes of the masses and to dominate them politically, end by finding their own culture attacked and even threatened with destruction by the instrument they have thoughtlessly employed. (The same irony may be observed in modern politics, where most swords seem to have two edges; thus Nazism began as a tool of the big bourgeoisie and the army Junkers but ended by using them as its tools.)

https://is.muni.cz/el/1421/jaro2008/ESB032/um/5136660/MacDonald_-_A_Theory_of_Mass_Culture.pdf

It's the old problem of grabbing the tiger by the tail.

#DwightMacdonald #MassCulture #media #FoxNews #RupertMurdoch #LachlanMurdoch

@Stoori Recognising the fascistic tendency or potential of communications modes and media formats is actually precisely what I'm encouraging here.

It's not that "all memes are fascist".

But you'll find that very nearly all fascists uses memes.

I'm reminded of the parallel with a famous observation of John Stuart Mill on stupidity and conservatives:

I did not mean that Conservatives are generally stupid; I meant, that stupid persons are generally Conservative. I believe that to be so obvious and undeniable a fact that I hardly think any hon. Gentleman will question it.

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/23qdkr/john_stuart_mill_i_did_not_mean_that/

http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1866/may/31/committee-adjourned-debate#column_1592

My view (supported by the work of Arendt, Paxton, Eco, MacDonald, and others) is that fascism is a behavioural mode, not an ideologial one, one that tends to be highly emotive, low-information, and reactionary. It probably emerges in times of high social and political stress.

Knowing that, and being aware of the risks and signs is valuable.

Yes, fascism wears ideological trappings, but those serve its behaviours and not the other way 'round. The specific ideologies claimed are fluid and flexible and inconsistent both internally and over time.

See the commentary on this post:
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6wuenu/is_politics_truly_ideological_or_is_this_a_20th/

@steko @zatnosk

#fascism #ideology #HannaArendt #FrankfurtSchool #Memes #MemeticWarfare #RobertPaxton #UmbertoEco #DwightMacDonald #MarshallMcLuhan #AdamCurtis #CenturyOfTheSelf #NoamChomsky

John Stuart Mill: "I did not mean that Conservatives are generally stupid; I meant, that stupid persons are generally Conservative."

John Stuart Mill's infamous indictment of the adherents to conservative political ideology occurs [in Parliamentary debate record for the British...