legionnaire

Note to potential new friends: I am currently, and have always been receptive to friend requests on SG. However, I do request that we at least talk once or twice before you send me a friend request.

I've finally got a long enough break to actually sit down and write something. It's been a busy two weeks, I've yet to take a day off since I got back from skiing a while ago. I gave a presentation yesterday to the lab on the status of my thesis project, and have another one to give today to a class on congitive impairments in rodent behavioral memory models as affected by the introduction of amyloid-beta oligomers vs. monomers. Which requires a whole lot of background reading. So between all of that, mentoring a rotating graduate student in the lab, trying to keep up with my experiments, tutoring, hanging out with toothpick, and playing WoW occasionally in my little spare time, it hasn't left a whole lot of time for SG. Bummer. But we'll see how things progress, maybe my work load will decrease a bit and I can spend more time here.

I've also been reading The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt, which is a pretty interesting read. Since my background is almost entirely scientific (a tabulation of the classes I've taken in college and graduate school reveals 38 math or science classes, and 6 others) I'm trying to educate myself in some of the more liberal arts, especially politilcally related ones. Unfortunately I haven't finished the book yet, and am still learning a lot in the first few chapters about the introduction of antisemitism as a political ideology, and how it influenced later political movements in Europe.

It's hard to read a book like that and not consciously compare our current political situation in the US with what happened in Europe at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. Of course there are significant differences - the main one, not to be understated, being that the 19th century european nation-state had ethnic homogeneity as one of its defining characteristics. The US has never really been like that, and is increasingly less so with the shift of focus of immigration moving from Europe to Asia and India, the ethnic makeup of the country becomes even harder to pin down. But there are other parallels that more worrisome.

Totalitarianism began as a movement whose ideology "transcended nations," meaning it resulted from what were originally strictly national political parties putting forth goals that were no longer constrained by political borders. Neoconservative ideology is similar in that it has as one of its fundamental tenets that democratic governments have a duty to encourage the conversion of other governments to democracies, even if it is against the majority will of the populace in those country, and even if it requires military force to do so. This is strikingly similar to some of the philosophical underpinnings of both "national socialism" (as dictated by Hitler, Franco, etc.) and communism, both of which assumed that people everywhere struggled under the constraints of their respective governments and needed to be encouraged, sometimes forcefully, to see the light. And both of which, along with neoconservative enforced democracy, naively believed that once this magical transition occurred, all political and social problems would be miraculously solved.

In addition, totalitarian regimes began as political parties who reversed the traditional role of the party to the state - meaning the state controls the party, and the ruling party influences the state's decisions. The reversal comes when the party sees itself somehow above the state, and that all elements of state governance should somehow come under party control - a necessary consequecnce being that any opposition to the party is considered to be treasonous, since the party has become the state itself. The Republican party has subsumed aspects of this philosophy in its open attempts to influence what were previously considered bipartisan, independent aspects of the judiciary. Having cemented (for now) control of the executive and legislative branches of the US government, control of the third branch would transform the country into an organ of the Republican party, rather than the opposite. The ominous messages following 9/11 from former attorney general John Ashcroft, as well as some his political allies in Congress that Democrats and administration critics were "aiding and abetting terrorists" simply by stating their views bears a striking and uncomfortable similary to totalitarian thought.

However, one of the most fundamental similarities that I find between our current situation and those found in pre-WWI European governments was the notion that governments and their citizens were no longer forming a mutually beneficial relationship. Previously it was European government's outmoded devotion to remnants of the feudal era; aristocracies and hereditary nobilities, that caused fundamental rifts between the populace (all of whom were now supposedly "equal," according to accepted enlightenment thought) and the actions of the governments (that were deliberately pandering to a small number of priveliged minorities at the expense of everyone else.) In some ways I feel this schism currently exists within the US, only the separation is between people and corporations.

The business of America may be business now, but that was not always the case, and was certainly not foremost in the minds of the countries founders when they set up our institutions. The undue influence that corporations have on the administration of our country, including its foreign policy, military affairs, social policies and taxation is often time fundamentally at odds with what is best for the people as individuals. What confounds the issue is that corporations are human creations, made up of groups of people, so to some it seems that no preferential treatment is given. However, the corporations are what make campaign contributions and keep the politicians in office, so it is to their interests that politicans remain beholden, even if the makeup of people running those corporations changes, the loyalties remain the same.

The European schism lead to wars of unimaginable cruelty and destruction before they were more or less "worked out." Let's hope that we can learn from our own historical mistakes and resolve whatever differences lie between the people and their governments in a less destructive fashion this time around.