Arthur Silber on Stockholm Syndrome.

This is important, and I would urge what few people ever lay eyes on these pages (you too, monitors), to go read it all.  A short sampling:

If you live in the United States (and more broadly, if you live in any modern State), you are a victim of Stockholm Syndrome. This is necessarily true, even if you passionately protest against the overwhelming majority of the policies and actions pursued by the State in which you live. If you continue to live there, you suffer from Stockholm Syndrome due to that fact alone.

...

Most "dissenting" writers exhibit the characteristics of Stockholm Syndrome, even if to a somewhat lesser degree than reflexive supporters of the status quo. Consider the deeply awful Sam Smith article that I analyzed the other day. Smith identifies a number of reasons for his strong criticisms of Obama -- and then proceeds to offer transparently unconvincing rationalizations for voting for Obama next year (because, as Smith says, Obama will "do us the least harm," ignoring that Obama, too, is committed to your complete destruction).

Smith, like many, many others, thus adopts the captor's perspective, and "fights" on the captor's terms -- and in this sense, he is "defending" his captor, just as a sufferer of Stockholm Syndrome does. If you fight in the manner permitted by those who hold you hostage, how likely do you think it is that your captors will set you free? That's right: they won't. Your captors permit you to "fight" them in certain ways because they know you'll lose.

...

On this point, we must begin (as I always endeavor to do) with the terrible fact that Obama claims the "right" and power to murder anyone in the world, whenever he wants, for whatever reason he wishes, that is, he claims to hold absolute power. In other words: if you continue to live, it is only because the State permits you to. Gone altogether is even a nod toward the notion of unalienable rights, or that "life" is first among them. Thus, the State gives life by simply not taking it.

It's all like that.  (For those who have not read Silber before:  he's crude, verbose, almost comically self-referential, and he will challenge you.  Don't make the mistake of letting any of that get in the way of what he says.)

Silber has become one of my must-reads*, right up there with Grigg and Wolfe and Shaffer.  I first referenced/reviewed him back in January of 2010, and he has proven reliably on the money since then.  What I continue to find most fascinating about the man is that he appears to have come from just about as far away a perspective as I could imagine personally, and yet arrived at substantially the same place I have. (If ever you want to see what white-hot criticism of "progressives" looks like, just spend a little time at Silber's place.)

And the Stockholm Syndrome metaphor, just like the battered-spouse metaphor, works.

Have it at your command.


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* I distinguish "must-reads" from other important sources, and for me the distinguishing feature is the art of their writing.  McElroy and Balko, for example, are daily links, and nobody gives you the news you need in the way that you need it like those two, but where they report, inform and analyze, some writers really come alive, not just with what they say but with how they say it.