Raghu: " Not untrue, just grossly exaggerated to the point of being misleading that's all."
I would never have thought of saying it this way, but now that Raghu has I think he is wrong about the exaggeration. The exaggeration is created by raghu's reading of his own statement. He misinterprets "military" as omnipresent military control; he misinterprets "show trial" as a continuous or omnipresent event in everyone's personal experience. Actually, even Hitler's Germany or Stalin's Russia would not have been like that. And there was a minor error in the original statement: Raghu was thinking clearly but too preoccupied with making his point to notice that his (intended) parody failed when he wrote " military dictatorship" (appropriate to former "Third World" nations) rather than simply, " dictatorship." Once we get rid of his misreading of his own parody we see that in fact it is a quite restrained description of current actuality. Of course the "show trials" are rare; but the government has (a) established its power to conduct such whenever they prove useful. The trial of Manning and the trial awaiting Snowden if captured are clearly show trials, and what they are _showing_ is that the U.S. state now has and will use such trials whenever it proves useful. A similar analysis may be made of each of the labels that raguhu throws out in its simple factual statement masquerading as a parody. Carrol _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
