'Passionate intensity' In Our Time (Wayne Brown / Jamaica Observer)

[struggle4progress]

Wayne Brown
Sunday, April 03, 2005

'The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.'
(WB Yeats: 'The Second Coming')

<snip> Finally, in the glare of television cameras, the two things, money and the evangelical agenda - and it's a telling irony that current US President G W Bush rules on behalf of one, in the name of the other - came together, and ignited a fortnight-long outrage over the body of a brain-destroyed woman.

They also dramatised the penchant for thuggery of the current White House and Republican leadership - a thuggery which poses a real threat, first, to America's survival as a constitutional democracy, and beyond that to the international order. <snip>

This was government by rabble. <snip>

This column has said it before; I will say it again. It's time for thinking men and women, the world over - but especially in the US - to read and reread, very seriously, one or more of the many detailed accounts of the campaign of lies, the brutalisation of the national sensibility, the elections' rigging, the incitement to hysteria, the intimidation, vengefulness, incarceration, death threats, and eventually, the targeted murders via which, between 1925 and 1935, the National Socialists in Germany first gained and then consolidated their power; destroyed German democracy; and part-terrorised and part-corrupted the citizenry of a civilised nation into quiescence or, worse, into becoming the animals (cf Guantanamo, Abu Graib, Bagram, etc) which the Third Reich would soon unleash upon the world.

http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/columns/html/20050402T230000-0500_77921_OBS__PASSIONATE_INTENSITY_.asp