Ellen, you are a troll. I just went over to Lucianne and MJ is right. 90-95% of the posts celebrate his death.
Did you think no one would look it up. God, rightwingers just lie and lie.

Ellen

I totally agree with you.

There are a number of juvenile posts to the "Slimes" but that is not so different than what gets posted here. There are a number of people who blame Halberstam for the U.S. defeat in Vietnam but they did not celebrate his death.

My favorite post was:" Any chance he was preparing to use his considerable writing talent and platform to promote/support Obama? Every death is a suspicious death during a Clinton campaign. In any event, my thoughts and prayers are with his loved ones."

Anti-Clinton and nudge to Obama while invoking religion all in one post.

If there was not a lot of mourning there was no glee either.
Daniel A. Greenbaum

Wow, I thought Ellen had a point, so I went and looked:

navyjag907, 4/23/2007 10:15:17 PM - He certainly helped with our defeat in Vietnam. Journalists like him presented the case that we were losing when in fact we were winning. He and his ilk have blood on their hands from what happened there. i hope he goes to hell for what he did.

This was #2 on the list. Perhaps he hadn't posted when Ellen went to look and she missed him. I suppose 'wishing he goes to hell' doesn't amount to celebrating his death? Or maybe it does.

Anyway, after that there's some nutty lunatic stuff about how Halberstam was a scumbag in life. And about how America was actually winning the Vietnam war and how guys like Halberstam made America lose.

#3, clipped wings, 4/23/2007 10:23:38 PM - Halberstam was a New York Slimes reporter in Vietnam. His slanted mindset and outright lies helped to kill and imprison thousands of people. His so-called reporting in Vietnam was, indeed, shameful. Just about right for the Slimes.

#5, Cisco, 4/23/2007 10:38:45 PM - Making room at the bottom.

#6 Bemused2, 4/23/2007 10:50:24 PM - slimes honor their own.

Dolley Madison, 4/24/2007 10:07:44 AM - He was not a "great journalist" sulzberger; he was a liar.
Gone and hopefully soon forgotten.

Notice the repeated reference to the term 'slimes'? I think that's the new right wing pejorative du jour. How charming.

Oh, here's my favourite:

PJSam, 4/24/2007 8:33:50 AM- The article does not state who hit his car....an illegal?

Whoa, talk about one track minds.

And then there's this little gem:

Dolley Madison, 4/24/2007 10:26:28 AM - If JFK were alive today, he would be a Republican; everyone knows it, too. I hear it all the time.

Yes, the voices beamed into Dolly Madison's brain by the Martians say it constantly, so it must be true.

To be honest, it really doesn't have much of an impact. This is just the usual pile of scumbaggery that passes for dialogue over at Lucianne.

And frankly, if a Kennedy or Clinton died, it wouldn't be human sentiment that animates Lucianne to shut down her site. She and her accolytes would be too busy celebrating to want to bother with internet riff raff.

Anyway, Halberstam is an obscure figure. It's amazing that the right wing can get even this much bitterness together.

That's a little bit harsh, don't you think madison? Ellen has as much right to be here as anyone else, and I think that she's entitled to a modicum of courtesy.

If you think she's wrong about something, explain why. If you think she's lying, show it.

I suppose I'm the last person who should be giving you this sort of advice, since I've been prone to nasty bunfights. But in my defense, I would like to say that while I often fail, I do make the effort to be a better person, and occasionally succeed.

My advice to you is to strike out for the high road.

Ned, I showed that she's lying as did Valdron. Just read the Lucianne comments. She starts out saying MJ can't read and then puts out a lie, assuming no one will go to the original source. She's a troll.

Madison, I disagree with Ellen and Daniel Greenbaum that there is essentially no difference in the amount of hating on this site as opposed to Lucienne's. As far as that goes, I agree with you that to characterize the two as the same is to ignore the general "sitegeist", if you'll forgive my pun. Ellen's scorn for MJ's reading abilities is undeserved.

But I think we need to acknowledge that there is some hating that goes on here from time to time, and there is at least one post on Lucienne that expressed sympathy to Halberstam's family. And neither Ellen nor Dan is a troll.

I disagree with Ellen   .   .   .   that there is essentially no difference in the amount of hating on this site as opposed to Lucienne's.

And where, pray tell, did you find me saying any such thing? 

I disagree with Ellen and Daniel Greenbaum that there is essentially no difference in the amount of hating on this site as opposed to Lucienne's.

Dan Greenbaum: "...that is not so different than what gets posted here."

Sorry, Ellen, you're right ... not guilty by association.

I said the use of the "Slimes" as a "clever" play on the Times was like here not that the general posts were the same. However, I still agree with Ellen that when I looked at Goldberg's site there many posts complaining about Halberstam's supposed role in the outcome in Vietnam, I saw only one post celebrating his death.

It would seem to me that calling Ellen a liar only makes my point.

Daniel A. Greenbaum

Thanks, because Mr. Greenbaum makes that charge, frequently -- although usually on a whole 'nother subject -- and I've never agreed with it.

I admire your dedication to ignorance. I wish I had the strength of character to not even be tempted to look at facts, and simply rely upon my values in the face of all.

;D

Lucianne Goldberg is a part of that right wing attack media; Limbaugh, Hannity, Savage, Coulter, etc., who marshall their forces from the same dregs of society that Ernest Roehm went to to find his brownshirts; the bullies, the haters, the homophobes, the undereducated, the criminal element, and the psychotics.

Many conservative talk show hosts, people like Rush Limbaugh, Ollie North, Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly of FOX, and columnists like Cal Thomas, and many at The Washington Times, etc. have a gift for exploiting lower-middle class resentment, envy, and bigotry for their own political purposes. Knowing how easily led some are, they offer their readers and listeners overly simplistic, mindless banalities in a complicated world.

All too many people seem to need an enemy in order to survive, and people like Lucianne, Limbaugh, etc. gladly supply them; liberals, Jews, Blacks, Hispanics, Environmentalists, etc. Its the "us against them" shit. 'Yer either with us or agin us', if'n you ain't a conservative you must be a liberal'.

Cretins like Lucianne ride their demogoguery to fame and fortune as their fans happily build the gallows the Luciannes of the world will eventually use to hang them.

Why am I not surprised that some on the right are reveling at the death of Halberstam? and it wouldn't surprise me if many of those posting crap on Halberstam knew nothing about him until his death; now they pontificate.

Conservative radio talk show audiences and blogs like Lucianne.com, Free Republic, etc aren't exactly breeding grounds for particle physicists.

And anyone that claims the left has and spews as much hate as the right is frikkin insane.

So, Mr. and Mrs. America, the next time you tune in to the conservative media,
and Limbaugh, Hannity, O'Reilly, Thomas or Lucianne, etc. offer you your daily dose of bad news as they're rounding up the usual suspects; liberals, senior citizens, women, minorities, environmentalists, the lame, the poor, and the Jews, as the 'enemy of the day', you can stand there like a ghost pointing an empty sleeve and smirking, or you can remember the words of Pogo:

"We has met the enemy and they is us."

Ah yes, I can hear them building the gallows.

When John F. Kennedy was killed, many on the right (particularly big business) celebrated - I was a young adult at the time and heard them on the radio.

When Robert Kennedy was killed, ditto.

When Martin King was killed, ditto.

It hasn't changed much, has it?

I can't believe I did something so silly, but I read every post and rated them as positive, neutral or negative. Among the neutral, I included some that were negative about Halbertam, but in a respectful tone and the several tangential posts. There were 5 positive posts, 9 neutral posts and 13 negative posts. In tone and intensity, as usual the negative was far more negative than the positive. It's possible that those who defend the lucianne posters lump the neutral with the positive to attain a false balance, but there is no balance, the posts are running three to one favoring the bilious and vile.

My nomination for most vile and offensive: Pinger's "This proves that ''good things do happen to bad people."

MJR, you are wasting the top slot here with your comment about the right wing. Why in the world would I care about the right wing's opinion of David Halberstram?

Am I supposed to be shocked that the right wing would celebrate Ted Kennedy's death?

The right wing is obviously made up of a bunch of fucking idiots who don't realize that when Ted Kennedy dies, the right will lose one of its most well-known left wing targets. Not many liberal buffoons like Ted Kennedy left to kick around.

Cheap shot to get a cheap headline and, imo, and Josh Marhsall should have known better than to give it to you.

You're only allowed to go up to #24 (the last reply available to MJ when he wrote his post), and Pinger's is #26.

Reply #27. "Whatever he was in life, he is now dead. May he rest in peace and may his family be comforted.

I have The Reckoning and Truman, both of which are astonishingly well written books."

Reply #28. "Some of the nasty comments about Halberstam's tragic death are right in the Terry McAuliffe/Bill Clinton school of soulless nastiness. Look in the mirror!

Whatever Halberstam's politics, he was one hell of a writer . . . ."

top slot?? what are you talking about?

A bit of an aside. I may have met David Halberstam a time or two, just to say hello, in the office of his brother Mike, who was my physician until he was murdered in 1980. For those who might not remember, Mike and his wife surprised a burglar in the act of burglarizing their home, who shot him and then fled. Mike jumped into his car, chased the burglar, and hit him (the running burglar IIRC, not the burglar's car), until police arreted the burglar.

Would Mike have lived if he had just stayed still until paramedics arrived and he was gotten to surgery? I don't know. But, if that was the spirit in his brother, it was an admirable one of "never quit, never be intimidated".
--
Howard

I miss Mike, who was a friend as well as a physician. One little vignette -- he always drew his own bloods, and was very good at it. Having done that a bit myself, and known the best people at phlebotomy tended to be European-trained, I asked where he developed the skill.

He reminded me that a few years before, there had been a middle-to-upper-class heroin fad in DC, and he had quite a few among his patients. After they had abused their veins for a while, many of them offered to get the blood themselves. He considered the ethics, and then said "OK. As long as you teach me how you do it."

ummm... blogs generally are ordered chronologically with the most recent entries at the top. tpmcafe is no exception.

Agreed; but what we're debating is whether the comments over at lucianne.com support Rosenberg's assertion that "the rightwingers [over there] are just having a party over the death of David Halberstam."

Are they wrong about Vietnam?  Of course.  About Clinton?  What else is new?

But that's not Rosenberg's charge. 

Valdron says:

".......at the bile that flows like sewage in a high pressure hose at Lucianne's and other sites."

Excellent metaphor.

Feel free to use it all you want, it only costs a nickel per, cash in advance.

;D

I'm just saying #27 supports your case much more strongly than #28.

Though even #27 carries the distasteful preface "Whatever he was in life."

Enough with the Monty Python! "Know what I mean; know what I mean?"

Warning: threadjack ahead.

Can we change the subject from who's the most vile and nasty to something unequivocally positive:

Iraq students show Virginia Tech support

Yeah ... I about fell out of my chair laughing when I read that JFK would be a Republican today and Nixon would be a Democrat! Just wait, in fifteen years they'll try to give us both George Bushes and in thirty years, they'll claim Bill Clinton!

Seems to me that you're working a little bit too hard, Ellen.

By my judgement, of the twenty-four: four were clearly celebrating or pleased with his death.

Seven more were disparaging or hostile to his life and works. I dunno, but it says something on the death of a man when the reaction is to start taking a big dump on his life. Saying 'he was an asshole' doesn't necessarily mean you're saying you're glad he's dead. But it's not far from it.

Six more fell into the category of 'generic hate' topics - Vietnam, Journalists, Illegal Immigrants, Johnson, McNamara, etc. Basically, standard issue wingnut stuff. Bring out the hate, they take out their own pet peeves.

I don't know that its proper to exclude the 'generic haters' since clearly, although they're obviously mentally defective, they're engaging the emotional tenor of the topic.

That's seventeen out of twenty four who are very ugly people.

Of the balance, there's just one single lonely positive.

And there's five cluelessly neutral comments ("Was he on TV?" "I always confuse him with Seymour Hersh").

How do you want to slice it?

4/7/6/5/1 Love Death/Hate Life/Generic Hate/Clueless/Positive?

17/5/1 Hate/Neutral/Positive?

11/11/1 Anti-H/Ignore H/Pro-H?

Take your pick.

Frankly, Ellen, I don't know why you're defending this obvious nonsense, except perhaps as some sort of exercise in Orwellianism.

It's a silly topic.

Let's see now, if I had to pick them out:

Bush would be Azathoth, the blind gibbering chaos which sits at the heart of the Universe, ceaselessly attended by capering horrors who dance endlessly around him as he sits drooling upon the throne.

Cheney would be Yog-Sothoth, who is both the gates and the guardian of the gates, who is the empty place, and who is represented as spheres, clearly a reference to his tubby build.

Gonzales is obviously Nyarlathotep, described as a well dressed and handsome youngish man of Meditteranean aspect, but whose visage conceals a crawling chaos of unreason and formlessness. I thought of attributing Karl Rove as an avatar of Nyarlathotep, given his role as the messenger and servant of Azathoth, but really, Gonzales is the better fit.

Which leaves us, of Lovecraft's major deities, Cthulhu, Shug-Niggurath, Dagon, Hastor, Yig, Tsatthuoga, Yib and Nug. Let's hear your picks. Who is an avatar of who in the Bush administration?

The relationship between Hastor and Hastert should be obvious.

Azathoth fits nicely, but I must consider further with Cheney. I don't necessarily want to rule out Elder God, but then what do we do with Rove and Norquist?

If Yog-Soggoth is coterminous with all space in time, isn't he needed at Fort Meade?

Cynothoglys, the Mortician God, is close enough to Delay, the Exterminator God.

If one buys into Stephen King's version of Cthulhu as "a gigantic, tentacle-equipped, killer vagina from beyond space and time.", is that Coulter?



Vaguely apropos, remember that the villain in Blazing Saddles was Hadley Lamarr, while the incumbent National Security Advisor is Stephen Hadley. Coincidence?
--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

I don't think these guys have it in them to be Lovecraftian; for all the bad things they've done they're kind of shabby people. On the other hand, I can't shake this feeling that Chaney is a Sith Lord.

Reminds me of the unkind joke told about Austrians, who have worked hard to convince the world that Beethoven was Austrian and Hitler German.

I did meet Dave once. A nice guy.

So, what you're saying is that you see her more than anything else as an avatar of Shub-Niggurath.

Fair enough.

I heard him speak at the NAIS conference - a brilliant courageous guy.

Tom

As for the truly amazing discussion evoked by Ellen

A she's right ,

B Tom Maguire seems to conduct himself like a reasonable human being altho that's certainly not true of all his users (nor of all TPM's) and ,

C As Dean Acheson said when told of Joe McCarthy's death : de moritibus nil nisi bonum.

The Best and the Brightest and his book about Jack Ramsay and the Portrland Trailblazers are my favorites.

Tom

Have we just had a relatively long thread all about what a right-wing blog said about David Halberstam's death?  People arguing about what they said?  Others calling people names for saying that the blog was more (or less) cheerful about his death.

What a waste of time and space!  So some right-wing bloggers are ass-holes / some aren't.  So what? 

If Halberstam had stooped this low in his writing we would have gotten several books on what the gossip was in Vietnam, or long discussions about in-fighting in the area of sports.

 I listened to an interview Terry Gross did with him in the eighties.  What a vibrant, fantastically interesting man.  I knew his brother, Mike, who was a doctor in DC.  He was a doctor; he was the most eccentric person I had ever met up to that point.  He was a writer too; he wrote a book, The Wanting of Levine, about the first Jewish President (obviously a novel).  Mike surprised a burglar in his home, and refused to lie down when ordered to.  The guy shot him and ran away.  Mike lived 2 blocks from a hospital, but he jumped in his car, and actually ran the guy down.  The burgler was caught, but Mike had lost too much blood and died in the ER soon after he finally went there.

Anybody have anything interesting to say about a Halberstam?  Even about how his books affected you?  I'd love to hear it.

addendum: 

I had this thread open while I was reading a Science chapter to my son for his homework, an hour later I wrote this post.  When I posted it I saw comments upstream similar to what I was asking for; even someone else who knew Mike.  That makes me feel great about this site!  People always come through! 

Jan

Valdron, you are correct, as usual.  I don't HAVE a position on Cthulhu, unless it would fall into the category of my comment: 

Some right-wingers are ass-holes / some aren't.

Jan

This whole thread reminds me an awful lot -- including the post counting and categorizing -- of our discussion about the response to the return of Elizabeth Edwards's cancer.  Le sigh.

Maybe yes; maybe no.  I said, some are / some aren't, remember?

 But wasn't Mike a great guy?  I still have his book.  The reason I said he was eccentric was because (among other things) he would drive on the sidewalks when traffic was blocked on Pennsylvania Avenue near Washington Circle.  And he was always happy.

Jan

I agree with the general sentiment of your comment.
Nobody "speaks" for the left or the right or gays or women, because they are not concrete particulars but general terms referring to a whole class of people and as we know there are no two people who think exactly alike. It is true that some views are more prevalent on the left or right and one might metaphorically proclaim that that view speaks for the whole class, but it is rare that the left or the right speaks with one voice on a particular issue.
Right wingers have many dirty little tactics but one of the most effective is to pick a particularly offensive comment from a so-called lefty and maintain that the entire left shares that offensive view. In logic it is called the fallacy of faulty generalization.

Having said that, I agree with MJ that right wingers are by temperament more hateful than lefties. After all, there are distinguishing characteristics (not only of Clinton's penis...had to get that in) that makes people gravitate towards one political ideology or the other. It is not a completely random process. And right wingers do tend to be 1) more belligerent, 2) more hateful, 3) more deceitful...etc. than the left.

So as not to let the left completely off the hook, they do hate too. They currently hate Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Anne Coulter, etc....but they do so without the particularly poisonous venom that right-wingers hate the left with. We lefties are the flower children of the past. Recall: make love not war. Our hatred is defensive while theirs is aggressive. We are the torch-bearers of the Enlightenment, they are the refusinks. They refuse science (global warming, creationism, ..etc.). For all we know, the postmoderns may turn out to be right, but I don't think so. The hope of humanity is in a vision of progress and not in anal retentive insistence on clinging to the baser instincts of mankind: prejudice, intolerance, blind acceptance of ideas, superstition and an overall rejection of reason (recall the "fact-based" soliloquy on reality of, was it Karl Rove?). To cling to base instincts is to cling to animality. We liberals have higher ambitions than that.

Good post, but:

The only way for America to win in Viet Nam was for us to kill everyone there. We weren't willing to do that, particularly since they were no real threat to us.

I'm not sure there's enough evidence to conclude that we weren't willing to kill more or less everyone in North Vietnam. We didn't use nuclear weapons or massive bombing of Hanoi because we were afraid of provoking direct Chinese or Soviet intervention in the war. But we did indiscriminately bomb and shell the countryside, send infantry out to produce "body counts" without ever checking whether those killed were actually combatants, and very deliberately turned our eyes away from the evidence that we were killing vast numbers of civilians. The US may well have killed more than a million civilians in Vietnam. We left because US casualties were up in the tens of thousands and we couldn't invade or annihilate North Vietnam for geostrategic reasons. On the bloodthirstiness issue...we didn't come out of that war so well on this count.

Accumulating Peripherals

The firs ten comments:

1."He certainly helped with our defeat in Vietnam. Journalists like him presented the case that we were losing when in fact we were winning. He and his ilk have blood on their hands from what happened there. i hope he goes to hell for what he did."

2."Wasn't he just on TV this past weekend? Some sort of a panel?"

3."Halberstam was a New York Slimes reporter in Vietnam. His slanted mindset and outright lies helped to kill and imprison thousands of people."

"His so-called reporting in Vietnam was, indeed, shameful. Just about right for the Slimes."

4."..ironic that he was killed by a journalism major from Berkeley. "

5."Making room at the bottom."

6."slimes honor their own."

7."Because of Halberstam and his running mates, I thought we were losing when I did my tour in Vietnam and for years later. I know how badly my morale was affected by his kind of writing."

8."While I can see how some take issue with Best and Brightest, I found his other works excellent. October 1964 is a great read about the integration of Major League Baseball, and The Reckoning was a very informative comparison of American and Japanese auto manufacturing, and how the Japanese made substantial progress in the US in the 60's and 70's."

9."He was happy to be trundled out by various anti-war types looking to mainstream their Viet Nam trope. Better at what he did than Carl Bernstein but a tool, nonetheless."

10.""Memory is often less about the truth than about what we want it to be." David Halberstam. Which is how I viewed his writing about Vietnam."

Ellen is citing the 11th comment and two others. It's really not representative of the thread. I don't know why Ellen is picking out three of the most reasonable comments and ignoring the swill that MJ is talking about. In any case, accusing MJ of not reading the comment thread is poor.

Just read the posts here. Interesting stuff.

The reason I wrote it is not simply to get a debate going (I didn't really expect there would be one in that the Lucianne comments are overwhelmingly and unambiguously disgusting).

I wrote it because media folks read TPM. And I think that if I can use this space to remind those who stop here that the mainstream left is not like the mainstream right, that the right is less political than it is some kind of hate-driven disorder, and that treating American politics as if Pelosi is just the flip side of Gingrich and Eric Alterman is the flip of Anne Coulter is utterly wrong.

It's a point I will make again. The mainstream right is all about hate. The mainstream left is, at its worst, naive and overly idealistic.

Some of us on the left may need to read more history. Some of them (most of them) on the right need therapy.

I didn't visit Lucianne Goldbeg's site but having read some of the comments posted there and re-posted here, I'd say that a fair number of Goldberg's posters never read David Halberstams' books.

You can visit Goldberg's site any day of the week to read comments from the headcases who post there. I think they are more likely to be not very smart than mentally disturbed.

I liken Goldberg's commenters to what I imagine Rush Limbaugh's Dittoheads must be like. Imagine paying Rush Limbaugh $55 per year for his site's "premium" content? Try listening to Limbaugh for three hours. You have to be dumb as a bag of hammers to be a Dittohead.

I did a quick search at the National Review Online for "David Halberstam" and from what I read, the comments were thoughtful. Even Jonah Goldberg posted an "Oh,No!" about Halberstam's car accident.

One reason that MJR's post annoys me so much is that there is no other post about David Halberstam's death here in the TPM Cafe as far as I know. For months, the Cunning Realist blog has excerpted from the "The Best and the Brightest" to compare the Iraq War with the Vietnam War and the comments are fascinating.

When Molly Ivins died, a thread meant to be a tribute to her was hijacked by a bunch of TPM Cafers who used the thread to continue a long-running diatribe against the thread's author. I unsuccessfull tried to bring the topic of the thread back to Molly Ivins by posting excerpts of her work.

It seems to me that if all we have to say about David Halberstam's life and work is that a bunch of the usual morons at a right wing website are glad he is dead, it doesn't say much about the members of the TPM Cafe.

That's my opinion and I'm sticking to it.

Yeah. David Brooks is sort of a dim bulb but threats, bullying , ridicule aren't his style and I don't think he sees civil discourse as part of the left agenda. . And to some extent that's true of Tom Maguire altho lord knows most of his users fit that pattern to a T.

yes, those points are somewhat valid. but they're still painting with a much broader brush than i usually care to use.

As bad as the collateral damage was in Viet Nam, and it was bad, that was a side effect of the technology we had developed and used to fight WW II and Korea, mixed into a guerrilla war in which we were trying to defend or install an oppressive mostly Vietnamese Catholic regime on a Buddhist nation.

I do not think that our goals included genocide. Nor do I think we were drifting uncontrollably towards genocide in Viet Nam.

The problem was the massive use of area weapons to try to win a guerrilla war in which the local Communist leader at night was also during the day the primary South Vietnamese employee of a supply company that a friend of mine commanded. My friend knew it, had seen him leading Communist rallies, and had reported it. He was told that he couldn't even fire the guy. The most powerful American methods of warfare simply do not work when the enemies are mixed in with the population and the friendlies.

Don't try to tell that to the aviators like Donald Rumsfeld. They don't want to believe it. They think the solution is simply to get better targetting information and tighter control of where the ordnance lands. That's because they are fighting the wrong war. The NeoCons are even worse. They are sending someone else to fight the wrong war. Then they are going to try to find someone to blame (Democrats) for losing it.

I too like Brooks, but he seems like an exception to the rule, rather than the rule.

I'm still waiting for all of my mother's library to come out of storage, but I'm fairly sure there is some history of therapy.

Perhaps the ideal is to use my favorite and little known concept from Freud Himself. Sigmund described a situation where the insights gained in psychoanalysis were so threatening that the patient (analysand) would banish all symptoms in order to stop the analysis. It is called, and I am not joking, the "flight into health."

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

Paul Berman explained that refusal to accept reality in his interesting book Terror and Liberalism.

He suggests that the irrational "'isms" exist because they set up an ideal society that must be achieved at any cost. In Communism it was the true Communist Society. Fascism and Nazism set up a society from the past. Islamic Fundamentalism has its ideal society as set up by Muhammed and as is described in the Koran for which some of them are willing to kill and oppress. Berman called these imaginary societies the "Ur-Myth" of each ideology. The desire to achieve that "Ur-Myth" is what unifies the organization.

The societies are all different, but the methods of getting there require authoritarian methods and strongly indoctrinated ideologies. To the people who come up through the Madrassas/Young Republicans/Communist youth/Hitler Youth, the ideology is reality and anything that conflicts with it is a lie, to be destroyed along with the liars who support it.

Those who accept this idea - the "Ur-Myth" are moved towards the core of the organization and groomed to take it over. Those who do not accept this idea are rejected from the organization. Those who remain in the organization quickly recogize the attitudes that lead to success and those which lead to failure.

What Paul Berman was explaining was the reasons why organizations based on irrational ideas not only exist, but become very powerful in society. Their internal mechanisms work to create a strongly cohesive organization because they reject reality, not in spite of it.

I'd say that it works the same way for cigarette executives, too. They may have doubts about the message they put out, but if they don't have psychological techniques for burying those doubts they will fail as executives in a tobacco company.

There are other psychological mechanisms that drive people to join organizations and adopt their ideology, such as the personal need for security and certainty, but this is a very powerful one which is central to the existence of the organization itself.

Another source might be Robert Jay Lifton's The Nazi Doctors, which deals with the psychological mechanisms, generally called "doubling", that let healers become killers. Not all of them were sadists, and there were a couple of isolated doctors and technicians that managed to keep their values in Auschwitz, staying healers and being respected by both sides.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

Hi I have posted (further down in the thread) some of the results and discussion of different personality types and political allegiances.

The short answer is that what liberals see as 'reality denial' is actually part and parcel of a politically conservative orientation.

http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/

and also other references in my other post.

Conservatives tend to see anything else as disloyalty and an absence of patriotism. Once you have sorted out the world into 'good guys' and 'bad guys' then anything that appears to question the primacy of the 'good guys' is more or less treason.

It's a view well-supported in any Tom Clancy novel (and he sells millions) let alone Left Behind. The true bad guys in Clancy novels are the well meaning liberals who undercut and subvert America's efforts to defend itself, allowing enemies to detonate nuclear bombs at Baltimore football games.

(the theory is controversial, to say the least, but also well developed).

You have an ally in John Dean, who was convinced by the same work, and discusses it in "Conservatives Without Conscience."