A Meditation on Crowds
The just-completed American presidential campaigns, the election, and the inauguration together have taught us a lesson about crowds. Our electronically mediated presidential campaigns thrive on crowds and on the social phenomena that attend them: one might list unified cheering, rhythmic repetition of slogans, emotive activations of the body, swooning, flag-waving, and an eagerness to respond, in “Simon-says” style, to broad cues from a designated leader. Our political spectacles differ hardly at all in their outward appearance from our sportive entertainments. Another word for a crowd is a mob, a mass of people mobilized in unanimity and thus demoting itself freely and spontaneously from the status of the responsible individual to that of a collective instrument of agitation or coercion – and for a purpose more than likely not its own. Crowds are mobile, but they are also motile, that is to say, fickle. The crowd that shouts “Ave Rabbi!” will swiftly transform itself into the crowd that shouts, “Crucifigatur!”
Bad News from Europe: Nazi Methods in Court
The Dutch judicial authorities are going to prosecute Geert Wilders, one of the 150 members of the Dutch Parliament, for making the movie Fitna. In this short documentary, which explains what happens if a number of verses of the Koran are taken seriously, Mr Wilders compares the Muslims’ holy book to Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. He claims the Koran calls for violence against Jews and other non-Muslims. Fitna can be seen here.
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