Maggie's Farm

In Herman Wouk's great WWII double-book novel The Winds of War and War and Remembrance the (one of several in the sprawling Henry family history that is used to tell a vast story of WWII)heroine Natalie Jastrow, a Jewish American/Czech dual citizen finds herself trapped in Europe and eventually sent to a Potemkin Village Nazi concentration camp in Czechoslovakia, named Theresienstadt. I'll leave it there as someone may want to read the book and besides i'm not up to plot recap at this hour.

But Theresienstadt was no Wouk fiction, it was real --Wouk just worked it into the novel --and the descriptive passages in the fictional novel are the actual descriptive passages in the historical record, suitably recast into the author's style of course, but with data points faithful to the record.

If you read the book, the starched whiteness of the nurses' uniforms and the immaculate paint on the little Swiss Chalet-style Alpine residence cottages, the smiling friendliness of the Nazi staff toward visitors from the international relief organizations and world press there to see what exactly was all this fuss and rumor about ''European concentration camps'' --will chill you to the bone.

Point is, the Potemkin Villages work, especially in the great meme wars of the communication revolution's comet tail of no-entry-barrier corruption.

They work because they are not what we usually assume they are, that is, a govt's way of fooling the press and such as the Red Cross. No, they are as much creations of the press and such as the Red Cross, in a sort of membrane of the officialdom of whatever govt tyranny is operant in the given case.

Because without the villages, the press and relief organizations would have to either have no report to report at all, or would have to report the truth --which is too ghastly to allow to be known that it is in fact what is in fact known.

http://www.bing.com/search?q=herman+wouk+theresienstadt&form=IE8SRC&src=IE-SearchBox

--point is, if we're all savvy to the Potemkin in those eight great left-wing philanthropic organizations, are we yet savvy to the implied future Theresienstadt as much as promised thereby?

Speak o de Debbil:



the imbed at Insty is to

http://pjmedia.com/blog/modern-democratic-fire-eaters/

(tried to hyperlink, but Bluenose the Spamguard Rein-In Dear says 'no')