Political fanaticism, the natural result of a failed ideology, is a tool that keeps real power and property in the hands of tyrants. Andrew Willard Jones and Marc Barnes explain how. Help us make more: visit www.newpolity....
I was going to ask the question, “Can a Catholic be a fanatic too?” (because Catholic RU-vid is a very mixed bag!) and you answered it for me in the last two minutes. Unfortunately, yes we can. Thanks for your honesty. This was a brilliant episode, very helpful to me.
59:02 Marc and Andrew give an excellent breakdown of how the trend toward "I support the current thing" is a hallmark of the societal shift into fanaticism, and how the purity spirals of modern discourse are a feature (not a bug) of ideological tyranny
That was pretty deep about loving our enemies. If you love and don't hate them, then hate for the enemy can't be a driving force to control you. Where are you getting this stuff man? Pretty awesome! God bless!
44:00 This is a great analysis of the Ameri/Anglo centric view of WWII, I had never thought of it that way before, but you are right, In terms of damage done and people killed, the real war began when Hitler and Stalin split up Poland and then Hitler reneged. I would not underestimate the circa 1940's American susceptibility to mass propaganda. I think of the major cultural shift from the view of the Soviets as murderous, society destroying brigands, to viewing them as noble and courageous resisters of Nazism, supported by Hollywood and the War Department in order to drum up support for war materiel shipments to Russia. I think this illustrates a beginning of the descent of the governments at least of the western powers into cynicism. That is, they were aware that the Soviets were wrong, they didn't really want to be allied with them, and they probably felt on some level that it was wrong to lie about them and make people believe they were good, but at any rate it was what was needed to fight the worse evil of Nazism, so as Churchill said: "If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.” Even though it came from the top, it was enabled by the the susceptibility of the population to propaganda. Of course, part of that was also naivete', the Soviets had long since mastered propaganda and were presenting a very careful image of themselves to the west, in part to gain support for their war against Hitler. FDR, for one, seems to have been completely taken in by Stalin.
Thanks for the interesting conversation guys! One thought - are you guys mixing down/applying compression to the audio? There are some pretty drastic peaks and values in volume.
Adam, With all the shifting around our audio has been inconsistent. I suspect some of the basic compression we were using wasn't sufficient on a few episodes. Sorry about that! Stick with us, and hopefully you'll notice improvements.
