02-15-2021, 12:35 PM
(02-15-2021, 05:51 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(02-15-2021, 01:41 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: I certainly distrusted the "Trump-Trump Macoutes" (was there a real name for them? The secret police had similar vehicles and typically a large US flag and a Trump banner...)
I used Google on Macoutes and came up with the TonTon Macoute, French for 'Uncle Gunnysack', a paramilitary organization under Papa Doc and Baby Doc in Haiti. Apparently Uncle Gunnysack was originally like the boogyman, used to scare misbehaving children. He would kidnap kids, put them in a gunnysack, and eat them for breakfast. The TonTon Macoute may not have been racist, but they were otherwise a typical dictator's tool of oppression. They in time earned the nickname.
I had never heard of the Trump-Trump Macoutes before, but I could see someone adapting the original name for Trump's secret police.
I made it up. I couldn't think of anything out of Stasi, KGB, Cheka, Gestapo, Mukhabarat, Kempeitai, Santebal (Khmer Rouge), OVRA, SAVAK, or the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission. Trump's inchoate secret police didn't yet have a name. Let's all hope that that secret police dies without any chance of resurrection. I wasn't mocking Haiti; I feel nothing but sympathy for the victims that horrible organization. It's the organization that I deride. I hate lawlessness, and lawlessness includes brutal enforcement of the rule of a lawless dictator or despot.
Except for the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission (and, yes, it had all the classic features of a secret police except for a limited territorial scope) they differ from bogeymen in only one respect: they are all too real.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.