Re: Powerlessness Corrupts

[Jim Devine <jdevine03@xxxxxxxxx>]

me:
> > >  ... the CP are encouraged to think in
> > > totally black and white terms. Those organizations themselves tended to
> > > think in black/white terms.

Charles:
> > > What's your argument for this claim ?

me:
> > my experience.

Charles:
> > Are you saying you think in more subtle terms than the CP ?

> I'd like to [think that I think in more subtle terms].

Charles:
> > By "black
> > and white" you mean overly simplistic ?

me:
> what else could I mean?

> CB;What's an example of where you think the CP thinks in overly simplistic
> terms and you think in correctly complex terms ?

how can a party "think"? the idea that a party -- as opposed to its
members -- think is absurd.  It's true that the _central committee_
comes together to think about and decide the party line, etc. But the
party can't think.

Maybe they all think alike, but that's scary. It's only in cults (the
Moonies, for example) that people all have exactly the same opinion
(or close to it).

There is a lot of heterogeneity in any non-cult organization (as I
understand the CP is and has been). And a lot of the members can be
very smart. (Of course, most of the neocons seem very smart, but
extremely dogmatic and wrong.)

An example of simplistic CP membership thinking: some friends in what
they called the capital-P "Party" lambasted Joan Baez as being racist
for singing a "racist" song by the Band ("the Night They Drove Old
Dixie Down"). This was crap. Even if the song _were_ racist, that
didn't make her racist. In reality, they were trashing her because she
had the nerve to criticize the Soviet Union (then seen by the CP as
the socialist cat's meow).

My experience with them and their comrades after that was that they
were nice people, some of them very smart and interesting to talk to,
but they were dogmatic. This was also my experience with members of
other organizations that described themselves as following the
"Leninist" model, including the Socialist Workers' Party.
--
Jim Devine / "To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only
an international crime; it is the supreme international crime
differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself
the accumulated evil of the whole." -- Nuremberg Tribunal