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...should be wary of it. Cultism isn't new. It's old and it's very human. There is no Devil here or Anti-Christ or Alien menace or Predator--just us humans, with our magnificent, highly creative, unfathomable brains often falling prey to delusions, images and false realities--and sometimes falling prey quite catastrophically.
We've seen the creation of leaders and cultish worship time and again. In less dangerous ways, we do it every day with rock stars, movie stars, politicians, billionaires and famous people of every kind. And back through this century alone, we have many quite awful eruptions of cultism: the Stalinist cult, the Hitler cult, the Mao cult, the Mussolini cult.
The cult combined with miitary and state power is of course the most lethal manifestation of this need to worship and be led.
American democracy has been fairly free of this crap for most of its history--partly because of a raucous, irreverent press. We are desperately lacking that today, except on the internet. THAT is not normal, but I do think that ordinary Americans are a lot more disdainful of the Bush cult than anyone realizes.
For one thing, I am totally convinced that a majority of the voters repudiated this idiot and his murderous cabal, by a lot more than the Exit Polls say (3% margin to Kerry)--since there was massive vote SUPPRESSION (people who never got to the polls--Greg Palast estimates 3 million black voters were denied the vote one way or another).
I think the Bush cult only plays to a minority, and can only "succeed" (that is, stay in power) by keeping the majority off balance, by stealing its votes, by making the majority FEEL LIKE it is minority, by dividing & conquering, and isolating--and by using its lapdog media to the max to keep up the relentless propaganda.
It's very brittle power, in my opinion--extremely dangerous, but still brittle.
And I don't think our military and our intelligence community are nearly as much in lockstep with Bushism as the German military establishment was with Hitlerism.
We are a very different country than Germany 1933-34--much bigger, much more diverse, much harder to control.
It was Hannah Arrendt, I think, who spoke of the "banality of evil." "Evil"--of the kind we are seeing with the Bush cult--is boring.
Americans hate boring.
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