"No matter how paranoid or conspiracy-minded you are, what the government is actually doing is worse than you imagine." - - - William Blum

June 18, 2003

Pathological Fanaticism


Arianna Huffington discusses Bush's pathological fanaticism. Excerpt:
Gustav le Bon, a social scientist known for his crowd psychology theories, has stressed the importance of repetition as a weapon in the fanatic's arsenal. Repetition breeds blind acceptance and contagion.

"Ideas, sentiments, emotions and beliefs," writes le Bon, "possess in crowds a contagious power as intense as that of microbes." As James Moore, co-author of "Bush’s Brain," says, "If the president says it over and over enough, people will believe it, just as Karl Rove got him to say over and over that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11."

The technique was so successful that a poll taken by the Pew Center in 2002 showed that 66 percent of Americans believed that Hussein and bin Laden were both behind the attacks. In the words of that giant banner that Rove had placed behind the president following his Top Gun landing on the USS Abraham Lincoln: "Mission Accomplished."

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