“You demagogues are like the fishers for eels; in still waters they catch nothing, but if they thoroughly stir up the slime, their fishing is good; in the same way it's only in troubled times that you line your pockets.”
Aristophanes, The Knights
"They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective, toward which all their deceit is directed, is to capture political power, so that using the power of the State and the power of the market simultaneously they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.
American fascism will not be really dangerous until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists [Big Money], the deliberate poisoners of public information, and those who stand for the K.K.K. type of demagoguery."
Henry A. Wallace, former Vice President of the US
"It [Citizens United] violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president."
Jimmy Carter, former President of the US
There is no good thing that cannot be turned to evil purposes by an unbalanced passion that crushes all distinctions and reason and commitments to virtue. Nothing.
Evil makes virtue its servant by elevating one portion of a thing as above all others, including its own inner logic and broader principles. It is when love of one thing turns into an instrument of hatred.
It takes patriotism and turns it into a paranoid fear of the deplorable other. It takes one part of an otherwise benevolent ideology and turns it into a blinding affliction.
It provides a means for the individual to excuse themselves and provide a rationale for increasingly terrible actions. It can infest the former victims of oppressors, and take what they have learned and turn it towards the very things that they themselves have hated and resisted.
It is above all a hypocrisy that lures the naive by filling their emptiness with something that they think serves them, benefits them, gives them meaning and purpose without having to think. It crushes all distinctions and reason.
It finds its moment when harshness is enshrined as exceptional, as unfortunate but necessary, rising above even the self-evident truths of equality and the public good, above the normal restraints of both good and evil.
Its name is expediency and exceptionalism. Its tools are fear and deception. Its methods are violence and harshness. Its fruits are blood and destruction.
And above all, it is the very opposite of love. It has no substance of its own; it is a pure opposition to that which has life and existence. Without hate and anger it has nothing to say.
You will find no love in it.
