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Entry: Ron Paul: It's Payback Time Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/ron_paul_its_payback_time#11135 Post contents: Re: "The older members of this group have fought and lost wars against the neocons that were professionally costly; what they now want more than anything else is...revenge." Professor Gottfried, with all due respect to you - and my respect for your scholarship and evidently honourable character is considerable - I'm not entirely at ease with the proposition of using the political process of a liberal democracy as a means of achieving personal revenge for personal losses or personal offenses. I don't think that's QUITE what you intended to mean, but please be aware that from employing the rhetoric of "revenge" in the context of the political process of the state, it's just another short step to employing the powers of the state for purposes of personal vendettas, as happened during the French Revolution. And we should never cease to remind ourselves, and others, that (as Sir Kenneth Clark said) the worst mistake of the French revolutionaries was to believe that they were "virtuous." Just a reminder - and we can never remind ourselves of this too much - that the condition of Original Sin means there is a slippery slope from justifiable grievances, to justifiable condemnations of people (like the neocons) who abuse political power, then to less justifiable use of the rhetoric of political "virtue", then to the deadly dangerous rhetoric of political revenge, and then to political terror. On that note, Mr Moore's comment included the rhetoric of "smash" and "poison" and "must be crushed" - which might be fair (but not wise) rhetoric to use in response to the neocons, but such rhetorical employment of the language of violence was, after all, the seed of the political terror of revolutionary France and Russia, and Mao's Red Guards. If one believes in Original Sin, then one ought to avoid employing the rhetoric of political revenge and violence, even in metaphorical ways, because the nature of Man is to rationalise escalations from rhetoric into flesh and blood action. A great mind can find ways to rationalise and justify all kinds of atrocities, and you, Professor Gottfried, as a wise and incomparably learned critic of the superstition of "progress" and "revolution", you of all people understand that historical condition of Man, better than most of us. Sent at: 2008 05 15