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• Wednesday, May 7, 2008 08:46 PM

  @ Baldie McEagle

  I'm sorry if I got too arcane with calvinist hermeneutics and so forth, but my concern is that opposition in the USA comes largely from the so-called 'libertarians,' whose alternative is a sort of utopian hyper-individualism, and my argument would suggest that this is just pushing the problem even further, and digging the hole even deeper. Another way of expressing this would be to say that 'sociology' in the European sense seems to be largely condemned in the USA a sort of 'socialist' ideology, because it treats 'society' as a really existing phenomenon with laws of its own. US hyper-individualism is so extreme, even in its mainstream forms, that the mere idea of 'sociology' tends to be regarded as a sort of wedge whereby totalitarianism can enter in. As a result, 'society' keeps making a 'return of the repressed' to the USA, in the pathological form of collective apocalyptic hysteria.

  I have lost a lot of my respect for the antiwar.com crowd over this. Ask yourselves, what the HELL is Gary North - an unabashed theocratic totalitarian - doing posing as a 'libertarian'? Answer : theocracy is defined as an 'alternative' to government, because 'government' is defined in terms of the First Amendment, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." The resulting utopianism regarding an imaginary theocratic alternative is yet another reason for the US infatuation with religious zionism, and simultaneously for its terror of 'Islamism.' This is a collective, schizophrenic, dissociative split, in my opinion.

  There is probably something in Tocqueville I could have used to introduce my argument much more comprehensibly, but I have never bothered to read him. I have an awful lot of books I never manage to read, mostly dealing with political philosophy and its relationship to religion, but to be self-educated in this field (i.e. not supervised by an academic tutor) is to condemn oneself to almost certainly becoming a 'crank.'

  —Rowan Berkeley Read Rowan Berkeley's other letters
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