- Judy
While I have no doubt that
>many members are the dupes of people entraining their labor
>into smaller-scale institutions (militia groups), and some of
>the leaders are just driven power the need for more power (i.e.
>by fear and insecurity), and the followers by a different
>need for security (a leader to take responsibility for me),
>still I suspect there is a core of truth to their ideology.
>They oppose the alienated political forms of our largest-scale
>institutions (the US government), which they see as tyranical
>because it cannot operate on a human scale, cannot engage with
>us as real people, human to human, cannot be trusted therefore.
......
>I suspect that if one tried the approach in my last post for
>leveraging oneself in/through a group 'outside' the limitations
>of one's own point of view, and evolving through the diversity of
>the group, an emergent point of view that was sensitive to more
>of the whole of the larger system, then one could indeed judge
>miltias and governments and ruling ideologies. Not trans-historically,
>not absolutely and universally, but also not exactly according
>to the values one started out with. Militia members should participate
>in the 'evaluation team', and klan-watchers, and an FBI agent,
>et al., but allowing themselves to be pulled out of limited
>institutional roles, yet inevitably contributing the viewpoints
>from their lives to the shifts in values all of us would make,
>eventually, from full engagement in such a group.
Judy Diamondstone diamonju who-is-at rci.rutgers.edu
Graduate School of Education Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey
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Eternity is in love with the productions of time. - Wm Blake