Learned Helplessness and the Imperial Mind

[marmar]

Published on Monday, August 22, 2011 by CommonDreams.org
Learned Helplessness and the Imperial Mind

by Thomas S. Harrington


As some of you have perhaps noticed, I am fascinated by the Baroque, and, more specifically, with how so much of the cultural production in today's America resembles the fruits of that movement which dominated the Spanish empire in the period after the Council of Trent (1543 to 1563), which is to say, the series of strategic conclaves that gave birth to the Counterreformation.

The Counterreformation was an attempt to shore up the Catholic Church--and from there, the Spanish Empire (and vice versa)--in the face of the Protestant Reformation that was then spreading like wildfire across northern and central Europe, territories where the now Spanish-controlled Hapsburg Empire had long been dominant.

Looking back from today, you wonder. Did the Spaniards and their collaborators really believe overwhelming military power and the re-packaging of old and widely discredited thoughts and practices would to bring the Dutch and the rebel German principalities back to the Church and the Empire?

......(snip)......

In every counterinsurgency the chief aim of the propaganda part of the operation is to remove certain notions from the realm of what Chomsky has called, "thinkable thought". The leadership class seeks, in effect, to make the social cost of uttering and/or acting upon certain ideas so high that people will learn to self-censor and bury within themselves the impulse to think in ways that openly challenge social orthodoxy. ................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/08/22-6

[midnight]

1. I'm not sure about the history of all the Counterreformation..

But this notion of your either with us or you are with then enemy notion is what springs to mind about Chomsky's "thinkable thought". The name calling and the bullying that comes with it are the M.O. The bulling ranges from maybe we should drug test to you sound like a camouflage Republican...


I love this line: " forget about all that bad Northern talk about individual examinations of conscience. "

[MisterP]

2. my hair stood on end when I found out the author of this botch job was a Spanish historian

but he does 20th-century stuff
I'd be interested to know what his sources are for this