Reality- or fantasy-based community?
[2005-05-14]

In October 2004, a White-House spokesman “accused” New York Times Magazine journalist Ron Suskind of living in a “reality-based” community. Suskind was told, "[w]e're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality... we'll act again, creating other new realities”.

OK, the spokesman can‘t be blamed for not knowing about Marinetti (action-crazed Italian futurist) but, surely, he must be aware of similar statements made by Mussolini, Hitler or Goebbels! Not even the history’s maddest dictators went as far as to claim they could actually create realities...

To find out more about this extraordinarily stupid, naïve and arrogant view of the world, go to any of the following sites.

• Warblogging.com
• Delusions of Empire — The epistemology of imperialism
• Without a Doubt (by Ron Suskind)
• The Widening Reality-Based Community
• Universities as a reality-based community
• Elections 2004: Religion, Racism and Reaction

... and hundreds more like them.

It’s disturbing to learn that powerful people behind Bush — Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, for example — live in a fantasy world and that they try to force-feed the public with their fantasies of terror. You can read what high-ranking, reality-based CIA officials, whether you agree with their politics or not (I don’t!) but who really knew what was going on, have to say about the neocons’ fantasy-based community. Read, for example, Hyping Terror For Fun, Profit - And Power by Tom Hartmann (start 7 paragraphs down if you’re in a hurry).