Tuesday, October 30, 2007

From George Orwell's "1984"

"A Party member… is supposed to live in a continuous frenzy of hatred of foreign enemies and internal traitors, triumph over victories, and self-abasement before the power and wisdom of the Party. The discontents produced by his bare, unsatisfying life are deliberately turned outwards and dissipated by such devices as the Two Minutes Hate, and the speculations which might possibly induce a skeptical or rebellious attitude are killed in advance by his early acquired inner discipline…called, in Newspeak, crimestop. Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity."

[emphasis added]

My thought: It reminds me of a whole host of people:

Rush Limbaugh
Ann Coulter
Bill O'Reilly
Shawn Hannity
and a whole host of Evangelical Christians, Right Wing pundits and Neoconservatives
to name just a few.

Not to mention all the "Good Germans" who looked the other way as tyranny came to power.

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