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The Devil in a Forest

James Wynn · 19 May 2009, 14:52 · from 2009-May.txt.gz

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From: crushtv at gmail.com (James Wynn)
Date: Tue, 19 May 2009 09:52:27 -0500
Subject: (urth) The Devil in a Forest
In-Reply-To: <4A12C26E.1070002 at verizon.net>
References: <mailman.68358.1242741493.12296.urth-urth.net at lists.urth.net>
	<4A12C26E.1070002 at verizon.net>
Message-ID: <6989DB2D2FE34E278A9BB3E6E28D6641@eMachinePC>

> I think there is more to it than just how sneaky his propaganda is. Sure, 
> Wolfe is propagandizing, as always---but he doesn't just
>propagandize for a narrow segment of the political spectrum,
>and he rarely makes things as black and white and baldly
>allegorical as you seem to suggest.

Well, I'm really only referring to this one work as libertarian/liberal 
propaganda. When I said "Wat/Robin Hood is an interesting exemplar of the 
corrupting nature of socialism", I wasn't trying to stake a flag in the name 
of John Stuart Mill. I thought it was mildly obvious. If you don't see it 
even when pointed out, then that's kudos to Wolfe. Silk's explanation of why 
he doesn't collect everyone's weapons is also propaganda, but not so 
artfully done. Way too obvious.

On the other hand, James Jordan is correct when he says that Wolfe is a 
master propagandizer of Christian principles. Still, one could reasonably 
say the same of him regarding Gnosticism. Is the Sun Cycle to Gnosticism 
what The Chronicles of Narnia are orthodox Christianity?

J. 


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