March 22, 2003

Questions to Class. . .

Need to read No Substitute for Madness. It couldn't happen here, you say?... (via Metafilter). In a move surprisingly bold, the ACJ prof asked the class for their views on the war on Thursday. One of the most consistent responses was that GW and Co. has information that we (and apparently the rest of the world) are not privy to and that we should trust him to do the right thing. How assuring, by Milton Mayer:

What no one seemed to notice, said a colleague of mine, a philologist, was the ever widening gap, after 1933, between the government and the people.....What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if he people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.

Posted by AJR at March 22, 2003 11:03 AM