Any dictator can get some soldiers and shoot their predecessor and get into power, and then spend his term waiting for the next goon with soldiers to repeat the process.
For a dictator to get elected, they need large mobs of uninformed but inchoately angry people to put them into office.
But the mobs are like the soldiers in the first example; the dictator has to keep looking over his shoulder in case the mob turns on him.
So the dictator keeps the mob occupied. Hitler pointed them at the Jews; Kristallnacht sent mobs of young Nazis into the streets to harass Jews, destroy their businesses, and make their lives miserable. 91 died. Stalin kept the mob busy denouncing each other. Hugo Chavez and Ayatollah Khomeini and Fidel Castro and Saddam Hussein all found boogeymen, internal and external, to keep the mob from turning their wrath on them.
Now, Barack Obama is not a dictator. He’s a democratically elected president. In 2012, when he loses in an electoral landslide (provided the GOP can get its act together) he’ll hand power over.
But Obama – the least-vetted, most inexperienced president in American history – was elected by a huge popular groundswell, animated by fatigue with the sitting administration and actively disinformed by a media whose legs tingled at the thought of The One taking office.
That “groundswell” has to be kept occupied during the dismal business of actually trying to run a government.
Last weekend on Marty Owings’ Radio Free Nation I noted that the “protests” we see carrying people to the homes of AIG executives to “protest” the giving of perfectly-legal but shamefully tone-deaf bonuses had echoes of the sort of populist mob action that led us to Kristallnacht. The show’s liberal commentator threw a fit, of course; since 91 executives haven’t died, there are no parallels whatsoever (only liberalsl get nuance. Did you know that?)
But even Kristallnacht didn’t spring fully-formed from nowhere. It was part of an endless wave of legalized violence against those the regime needs to demonize to keep the mob occupied (and we all know where that wave ended, don’t we?)
Waves of eliminationist violence – the Holocaust, Rwanda, Darfur, the Holodomor – all start small. And they all start somewhere.
At any rate, today “the rich” – bankers, insurance executives – are the scapegoat. And it’s starting:
…in Scotland, an “anti-capitalist” group attacked the home of Sir Fred Goodwin, former CEO of the Royal Bank of Scotland, smashing several windows and vandalizing a car parked in the driveway. Goodwin had been demonized in the press and attacked by British politicians, much like AIG’s management.
The reactions of bystanders are rather appalling. A neighbor “said she was surprised that [Goodwin’s home] had not been attacked before.” Others seemed understanding of, if not sympathetic with, the vandals.
No, Obama’s not chartering this sort of violent lunacy. But he, and his compliant media, are setting up “the rich” – today it’s AIG execs – as scapegoats for an economic downturn that has plenty of parents. Mobs love scapegoats. Scapegoats are bright, shiny things to keep mobs occupied so they don’t get cranky and turn on their leaders out of boredom.
In the meantime, look for the media and their less-bright cousins to focus obsessively on “right-wing violence”, no matter how hard they have to imagine it.
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