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.<\/p>\n
For a dictator to get elected, they need large mobs of uninformed but inchoately angry people to put them into office.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
So the dictator keeps the mob occupied.\u00a0 Hitler pointed them at the Jews; Kristallnacht<\/a> <\/em>sent mobs of young Nazis into the streets to harass Jews, destroy their businesses, and make their lives miserable.\u00a0 91 died.\u00a0 Stalin kept the mob busy denouncing each other.\u00a0 Hugo Chavez and\u00a0 Ayatollah Khomeini and Fidel Castro and Saddam Hussein all found boogeymen, internal and external, to keep the mob from turning their wrath on them.<\/p>\n Now, Barack Obama is not a dictator.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n That “groundswell” has to be kept occupied during the dismal business of actually trying to run a government.<\/p>\n 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<\/em>.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Did you know that?)<\/p>\n But even Kristallnacht <\/em>didn’t spring fully-formed from nowhere.\u00a0 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?)<\/p>\n Waves of eliminationist violence – the Holocaust, Rwanda, Darfur, the Holodomor – all start small.\u00a0 And they all start somewhere.<\/p>\n At any rate,\u00a0 today “the rich” – bankers, insurance executives – are the scapegoat.\u00a0 And it’s starting<\/a>:<\/p>\n …in Scotland, an “anti-capitalist” group attacked the home of<\/a> 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n 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.\u00a0 Mobs love scapegoats.\u00a0 Scapegoats are bright, shiny things to keep mobs occupied so they don’t get cranky and turn on their leaders out of boredom.<\/p>\n In the meantime, look for the media and their less-bright cousins <\/a>to focus obsessively on “right-wing violence”, no matter how hard <\/a>they have <\/a>to imagine <\/a>it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4440","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberal-tyranny"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4440","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4440"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4440\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4440"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4440"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4440"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}