Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Rutland County Council? "The aim is to create a state where everyone knows it is best to say nothing, and the bastards shut up" Nick Cohen

What would you do? Some say the Senior Director
at Rutland County Council was pushed by a bully.
The council won't hold and investigation into why he jumped?

The answer is fight back?


This morning I found a piece of text published on another blog.

After the lynching on Monday of Three Rutland County Councillor by the Tory Mob and a couple
of independents and thinking of my involvement in local governance,  I thought the following  passage by Cohen was very appropriate?

in that passage Cohen imagines a dictator talking to the chief of his secret police:

"You mean I should kill the leaders of the opposition?" 
"I will happily do so, Excellency, if you command it. But that's not the idea. You need to pick on slights and humiliations that are so small that they seem not to be humiliations at all, and punish them with unreasonable ferocity.

Random violence creates the necessary conditions for order. A leader of the opposition expects us to arrest him from time to time, but a writer making a veiled criticism of your rule, or a man who grumbles about you in a shop queue, does not. By randomly attacking a few people who speak sedition, we tell many people that the only safe option is to avoid all talk about politics.

The aim is to create a state where everyone knows it is best to say nothing, and the bastards shut up."

I believe this text is available to all our good leaders who control Oakham and Rutland's Governance.

of course around here they prefer not to say the "bastards shut up" the prefer to describe it as apathy.


 Calder's Second Law of Politics.  a passage in Nick Cohen's You Can't Read This Book.