Thanks again to American Thinker for running this item. You can visit the website at: https://www.americanthinker.com/
On occasion, one looks back through history – unless one has gone to school over the past decade and, therefore, has no idea what history is – and asks oneself “how could they have done that?”
How could a nation as clearheaded, if persnickety, as Germany rallied around the abomination of Hitler? How could the monsters of distant and recent past – Pol Pot, Mao, Stalin, Torquemada, various “…the Hun(s)” and on and on – convince their fellows humans to do what they did to their other fellow humans?
Dictators may dictate, but there must be others to carry out the orders, even if they do so unwillingly (though, no matter what they say afterwards, few were actually unwilling at the time.)
It is that willingness – would we do that? – that is at the heart of the personal aspect of the question. And - if we can gauge but what we see around our culture today – the answer for that is not only yes but an excited yes, an enthralled yes, an intentional yes, a blinding yes.
It is the yes of the woke state, it is the yes of cancel culture, it is the yes of censorship, it is the yes of keeping power, it is the yes of getting power, and it is the yes of desperately trying to win the approval of those in power so you get to be in the club.
And the loudest yes is coming from the people who will one day – or currently do – make up the vast middle management of the malevolence machine.
Take, for example, the bureaucracy of torture. Short of choosing random people to drag into the woods to beat to death, the practice of torture has levels of complexity that must be attended to by office drones.
During the Inquisition, stretching racks and iron maidens and dungeons and thumb screws and all of the accoutrements of torture did not simply magically appear – they had to be conceived, ordered, built, scheduled, and paid for. Processes had to be implemented, decisions made, chains of command had to be followed, forms had to be filled out, results had to be tracked. And each and every one of those tasks was performed by what could only be described as a middle manager, a clerical cubicle counter.
There is, to paraphrase Hannah Arendt, a certain banality to evil, an easy willingness to dissociate from a true understanding of the end results of one’s seemingly mundane actions.
Now, the “woke state” bureaucracy is following the same path, though today’s fetid functionaries seem more willing, more intent, more glassy-eyed committed to the end results than a mere railway clerk scheduling timetables for death camp trains.
The woke state cohort currently in power absolutely believes it is doing what is best, that, because they are on the right side of history, history – if it is ever done again – will judge them positively.
The long-time embedded member of that woke state may better understand that manipulative lies are just that but justify their actions by telling themselves they must be doing the right thing because they have a summer house and have been promoted countless times; the newer, fresh from school but truly unschooled, see their societal control as a force for good for everyone and if they happen to get a good job with decent benefits for doing it then all the better.
And it is the middle where the most damage can be done – exploding numbers of education administrators, never ending assistant deputies and vice-presidents, mushrooming human resources departments, the creation of an entire industry – Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion – to re-create the cudgel of racism and corrupted law enforcement and the security state and foundations and non-governmental organizations and the social economy and media flacks and the billions and billions of dollars funneled into the system to feed the beast all intertwine to service a power structure intent on enshrining its future in amber.
The people doing these jobs today are the same people who were attorneys at Stalin’s show trials, requisitioning flails for the Inquisition, copying basement confessions in triplicate, and going home with a glow from the knowledge they did their job well that day.
The woke state claims everything it is doing is to protect, purify, preserve, perpetuate, and promote that which society truly needs and desires and that the rest of us must have faith that is true.
We have all seen where that fetid and foolish faith led to in the past – the outcome will be no different this time.