To loosely echo my favourite cowboy philosopher Rick Roderick:
If you have an ideology the people most dangerous are those close to you with similar ideas, because they might hold you to your own values. ( it's a great gift to those in the business of divide and conquer that minor differences are easily stirred into great schisms, e.g. The Judean People's Front... splitters!). Thus, nominally democratic governments never had anything to fear from Fascism, Communism, or Radical belief systems, rather it's those who espouse freedom and democracy that need to watched, because people might begin take them seriously. That's one of the few places where the "elegant suspicion" of a post-modernist celebration of difference works. And why, before getting into a fight ones suspicions should be, not of ones potential enemy, but whose interests (outside the situation) would it suit that we are at odds? Then you often find it possible to trace inflammatory comments to that source.
a.
On Tue, 21 Jun 2011 10:40:40 +0100 J bz jbeezez@gmail.com wrote:
During Hip Hop's more militant times people like Ice T would refuse to diss someone like MC Hammer, for example. They took the attitude that he was one of them, doing his best, and making headway in an industry that was the site of the real battleground.