A Plague of Nonsense
23rd February 2019
ZMan is delightfully dyspeptic today.
Ideological government, either the hard type like the Soviets or the soft sort like we have in America, needs enemies. More specifically, it needs examples. In order to reinforce the rightness of the civic religion, they need to demonstrate the wrongness of heresy. That means the demand for heretics is constant. Finding heretics one at a time is expensive, so it soon becomes a bulk operation. They cast the net, pull in some trouble makers, throw away the small ones and keep the useful ones.