{"id":1137,"date":"2013-09-08T13:13:39","date_gmt":"2013-09-08T12:13:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/oestrem.com\/thingstwice\/?p=1137"},"modified":"2013-09-08T19:41:22","modified_gmt":"2013-09-08T18:41:22","slug":"this-machine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oestrem.com\/thingstwice\/2013\/09\/this-machine\/","title":{"rendered":"“This Machine . . . “"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"This<\/a>
This Machine Kills Fascists<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

“What happened here was the gradual habituation<\/strong> of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret<\/strong>; to believing that the situation was so complicated<\/strong> that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand<\/strong>, or so dangerous<\/strong> that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security<\/strong>. And their sense of identification with Obama, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured<\/strong> those who would otherwise have worried<\/strong> about it.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"...<\/a>
… and this machine doesn’t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The quote isn’t originally about Obama, although every single part of the statement can be found, explicitly or indirectly, in the government’s defense in the Snowden\/NSA scandal.<\/p>\n

Replace “Obama” with “Hitler”, and you have the original. It’s from Milton Mayer’s classic They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45<\/i>, and the words are those of a university colleague of the author, explaining “the ever widening gap, after 1933, between the government and the people.”<\/p>\n

Oh well, maybe the USA isn’t a fascist state<\/a> after all. We’ll see what happens with the Congress vote about Syria.<\/p>\n

Some indices to keep an eye on:<\/p>\n