"Nothing appears more surprising to those, who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and the implicit submission, with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers.
I hope that you're right but I'm sceptical. Most of us haven't lived in a time or place when a government had tight control of its people by means of extensive surveillance and a large number of willing enforcers. But we might be closer to that than we like to think.
Helmuth James von Moltke, a member of the German Resistance in the 1940s, spoke of 'guillotines working round the clock' in cities across Germany, executing people who, often only in a passing critical comment, were identified as enemies of the state. We're a society much more closely observed than Germany in the 1940s, and watching what ICE are doing makes me suspect there will be no shortage of willing enforcers.
I'm with you on there being powers on a different level to those of state enforcers, and on people having the power, if nothing else, of integrity, but ..
I think we may be moving into the territory that Terrence Malick maps out in A Hidden Life, his film about the witness of Franz Jaegerstaetter. It is, I guess, a film about how one sort of power confronts a different sort of power, and about the cost of integrity.
There were so many in those days who paid a high price for their integrity and while, yes, their witness was powerful, and still is .. they didn't avert catastrophe.
Wrote a short song bout this situation in Tennessee: https://youtube.com/shorts/ko6xZ1BR2X4?si=DptFwBEzlope1inw
This is amazing, Alex. Thank you.
Thank you
1 9 8 4
I hope that you're right but I'm sceptical. Most of us haven't lived in a time or place when a government had tight control of its people by means of extensive surveillance and a large number of willing enforcers. But we might be closer to that than we like to think.
Helmuth James von Moltke, a member of the German Resistance in the 1940s, spoke of 'guillotines working round the clock' in cities across Germany, executing people who, often only in a passing critical comment, were identified as enemies of the state. We're a society much more closely observed than Germany in the 1940s, and watching what ICE are doing makes me suspect there will be no shortage of willing enforcers.
I'm with you on there being powers on a different level to those of state enforcers, and on people having the power, if nothing else, of integrity, but ..
I think we may be moving into the territory that Terrence Malick maps out in A Hidden Life, his film about the witness of Franz Jaegerstaetter. It is, I guess, a film about how one sort of power confronts a different sort of power, and about the cost of integrity.
There were so many in those days who paid a high price for their integrity and while, yes, their witness was powerful, and still is .. they didn't avert catastrophe.