B. Traven

I'm reading Traven's Government, the first novel in his Jungle novels series. It's good to hear from someone who also understands the lies we tell ourselves to justify the idiotic regimes we impose on others. In pre-revolutionary Mexico, the craven governmental officials can easily justify sending the indigenous Mexicans into debt-peonage, essentially for the rest of their lives. It's for the good of the country, they tell themselves. So goes the moral nature of capitalism. But, then I also read Grossman's Life and Fate, which chronicles the same kind of lies in a socialist paradise. I wonder about Weber's sense of the routinization of charisma, the way a vision of humanity is changed and altered into yet another system of oppression and stupidity: the establishment of a bureaucracy to impose those reforms, no matter how many people are destroyed in the process. And then I say to those who would broadcast their ideas about humanizing humanity--think twice. Maybe we don't need another critique of deceit and self-delusion, of human exploitation--as well as another plan to establish a more just society. Didn't Bob once say to me that, if we had communism in the United States, George Bush the 1st would have been a commisar?