George F. Kennan

With virtually everyone, minus Bush of course, jumping all over the Attorney General including Tom Tomorrow, Gonzales' goose is cooked, another authoritarian personality in the Bush administration down, many more to go.

Bob Geiger's blog has some great comics on the topic and on Cheney's method of cooking the goose.

If you are talking about Bush and company you are talking about the authoritarian personality. Its really a beast of its own special color.

In my excursions through the web, I came across this:

CNN Cold War - Interview: George F. Kennan

Kennan was there at the start of the cold war. What is interesting about the interview is that he talks about Stalin, and its first hand. He dealt with Stalin and knew how Stalin dealt with others.

Stalin was a ruthless authoritarian. His tactics were unbelievable and brutal. He would have the spouses of his staff taken away and imprisoned. Then he would see how the staff person would react, loyalist or not.

Note: Loyalty is a key component of the authoritarian, just like the way Federal attorneys were replaced by Bush loyalists. Loyalty is more important that actual ability and especially impartiality. The loyalists is beyond being partisan, he or she is a true believer.

Stalin would have various staff people executed and then see how the rest would react. The capricious use of authority and power to the end of killing, torturing, and creating paranoia were his tools of control.

This is why when we talk about the use of torture by Americans, we must acknowledge that the perverted authoritarian is at work and in the house. The Bush administration is all about authoritarian personality.

Here are a few excerpts by Kennan on Stalin:

1. "You must remember one thing, that Stalin was distrustful, in a pathological way, of anyone who professed friendship or fidelity to him. Those abnormal reactions did not affect the foreign statesmen who came to see him. They had never said that they were partisans of his, and then he couldn't punish them anyway. So he treated them in quite a different way than he did his own people...."

2. "Stalin felt that in order to get public support for the things he was doing -- which were very harsh policies -- he had to convince a great many of the people, the common people and the party members, that Russia was confronted with a conspiracy on the part of the major capitalist powers: especially England, but Germany too. That they were confronted with efforts by these people to undermine the Soviet government by espionage, by trying to paralyze Russian industry through sabotage, things of that sort. There wasn't any truth in this, but he didn't care: he saw the safety of his own regime being endangered if he could not make people believe that Russia was a threatened country."

Can you think of a situation where a regime stands to gain by ramping up fear in the general population? Does WMD ring a bell or perhaps better Baghdad than Boise, mushroom clouds?