Howard Rotberg : The power of public fantasies: Three years of political libel
http://The power of public fantasies: Three years of political libel
Public fantasies are behind 3 years of political libel reflecting not hatred of 1 man, but of American democracy and the rule of law.
Merriam-Webster defines “fantasy” as:“the power or process of creating especially unrealistic or improbable mental images in response to psychological need”;“a creation of the imaginative faculty whether expressed or merely conceived”; or“a mental image or a series of mental images (such as a daydream) so created”
And so, a fantasy most often relates to a private creation of imagination or mental images. It is the stuff of dreams, daydreams, and individual psychology, a way to overcome reality.
Much of the hatred for the State of Israel is based on public fantasies. In Israel itself, recent disclosures may put the left’s cultivation of accusations against Prime Minister Netanyahu in the same category..
We should study more how the fantasies meet the psychological needs of the haters, whether they are Islamists or western leftists. Anti-Semites who are individual sociopaths are much less dangerous than when they turn their fantasies into public group-think among fellow Leftists or Islamists.
Contemporary politics, especially in America, seems to reflect an increasing set of public fantasies, increasingly from the Left, which traditionally embraced a classic liberalism based on reality, but which now embraces fantastical revolution. For example, Michael Brendan Dougherty, writing in National Review, “Dangers for Democrats”, August 31, 2010, states that “the fantasy of ending Donald Trump’s presidency through some kind of apocalyptic and extra-legal confrontation, rather than an election, keeps getting persistent airing on the left.”
Surely the debunked Russian Collusion and Ukrainian Collusion narratives, the bizarre impeachment hearing, the deceit of the Kavanaugh investigation, and the attempts to blame the Coronavirus and the big city riots on President Trump, were mere fantasies of hyper-politicized operatives, rather than the exercise of reasonable political limits within a constitutional democracy.
I am the son of a survivor of the Holocaust, my father having been slave labor in Auschwitz, where his parents and then 8 year old sister were murdered in the gas chambers, along with 6 million other Jews, killed in those crematoria, by mobile killing units, by mass shootings and mass burials, or by individual murders in the attempted and too close to successful,Final Solution.
I turned 16 years of age in 1967, at the same time as acounter-culture sprung up around me, based on pacifism due to resistance to the Vietnam draft, on the teachings of postmodernism and relativism in universities, on drugs from marijuana to LSD, on the beginnings of Black Power advocacy, on sexual freedoms facilitated by the Pill, on an explosion of talent in rock music, on plentiful job opportunities in the public sector and low rents and housing costs, freeing young people from the constraints of living with their parents, and, finally, on the power of a huge demographic, known as the Baby Boomers, which tilted public policy and regard to it by virtue of the power of demographics.
The debunked Russian Collusion and Ukrainian Collusion narratives, the bizarre impeachment hearing, the deceit of the Kavanaugh investigation, and the attempts to blame the Coronavirus and the big city riots on President Trump, were mere fantasies of hyper-politicized operatives.
But all that was of passing interest to me.As I came of age in the ‘60s, I was on the lookout for books explaining what had happened, and how and why, to my family and to my people at the hands of the Nazis and those complicit with them. So I eagerly enrolled in University of Toronto with a mission – that of studying history, politics, ideologies, culture and psychology, all with the idea of learning what had thus far been little explained – how a modern European Christian nation with great achievements in music, literature and technology turned itself into one of the most evil regimes in history, totally serving a madman named Hitler, and totally focused on killing every Jew on earth.
Finally in the late ‘60s, the perspective of twenty years from the events, allowed historians to attempt some explanations beyond the political, economic, diplomatic and military, in order to focus on why the Holocaust happened, and what in the culture and ideologies and psychology of the German people all came together in such an obscene way.
I found a historian, the late Robert Harney, who was teaching the history of modern European ideologies, values, and cultural history, and I had found my mentor. I remember a very long essay I wrote, entitled, “Promises and Problem of a Psycho-historical Analysis of Nazi Germany”.
And so, this many years later, on September 5, 2020, I was reading the book review section of theNew York Times, and came across the review by Peter Fritzsche of the latest biography of Adolf Hitler, entitled, Hitler: Downfall 1939 -1945, by Volker Ulrich. Any biography of an individual, I have learned, must struggle with the issue of personal influence of that individual versus the responsibility, actions and attitudes of a large group.
Fritzsche notes: “There is the force of Hitler’s personality and the consequence of the will of a single individual of course. But we also return (to a broader study) because the Third Reich reveals the power of public fantasies. The liberal mind-set is not the default position.”
And so, it is beyond annoying, to read discussions of current American public affairs that seem stuck on the silliness ofname-calling and such when in fact the abuses of power reside more in the media, the university and the alliance of corrupt bureaucrats and corrupt politicians, than anything Donald Trump could dream up in his tweets or his reactions to the war against him by what I term the “Leftist-Islamist-Globalist Agenda”.
What should be of interest is how the private fantasies of the Left and their Islamist and Globalist friends have been turned by those in power into very public fantasies which have formed the basis of 3 and a half years of non-stop slander. This political libel reflects not just a hatred of one man, but the hatred of the very basis of American liberal democracy and its Rule of Law. The knee-jerk welcome of the racist and anti-Semitic Black Lives Matter and corporate funding of a group so little understood by these donors, and the failure to admonish Antifa and its enablers in Democrat-ruled states and municipalities, shows the danger of the transition of private into public fantasies.
I have written a lot aboutsymbolism, and its role in furthering the Leftist-Islamist-Globalist Alliance, including a three-part series in Israel National News:
These symbols in the public realm are but one aspect of fantastical thinking -“the power or process of creating especially unrealistic or improbable mental images in response to psychological need”.
We have to be more concerned with the symbolic nature of the destruction of statues, the attacks on police stations and the budgets for policing, the idea that rioters are just protesters, the taking of the “knee” by athletes, and other symbols of the attack on liberal democracies.
Even the symbolic nature of George Floyd’s death as an example of so-called systemic racism must be challenged as it might also be construed as a symbol of the wasted life of a career criminal, high on very dangerous drugs like fentanyl, abandoning father of 5 children, and the lack of values of too many black males in America. Study the actual numbers of black men killed by whites, compared to black men killed by other black men or whites killed by blacks and the George Floyd matter loses some of its power. Symbols without truth, fantasies without understanding, all connote the triumph of power over goodness.
More good would come from Floyd’s death if it would be seen as a warning against the use of the horrible drug Fentanyl, currently killing thousands of young people, far more than the police could ever kill.
The fact that America, with its “swamp” and “Deep State” was well aware that its fantasies were to be exposed,by the “other”, was the reason that even before his inauguration Trump was under attack both legally and illegally by the Deep State and other actors in government, academia and the media. The gap between their perception of his supposed authoritarianism and the fact that their methods were more authoritarian than anything he might do, can only be explained by studying the psychological needs of a Democratic Party (and its shills in media and the academy) now controlled by hard Marxists and radical environmentalists and anti-Israel propagandists.
Public fantasies indeed.
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