Elections alone will not defeat the left.
One Election Away from Losing Our Freedom, by Daniel Greenfield
If the Democratic Party continues to function as a radical leftist party, abiding by no laws, imposing radical change unilaterally, and using its media to cover for its corruption and political sins, the United States will face a Venezuelan or Egyptian scenario.
Every area of life is being politicized and this politicization did not take place as a result of elections and cannot be stopped with mere elections.
The totalitarians employ every cultural, political and economic element that they can against their enemies.
The electoral wars matter, but the totalitarians have to be fought for control of every institutions and defied at every point of control.
hyperbolic times
Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh
Polite debate is no longer the accepted norm in our society. The liberal left is not tolerating divergent opinions, they want them eliminated. Outrageous labels, personal threats, and even violence have escalated during what used to be polite discourse and disagreements of opinion. [Read more…]
the turning point
“What good does it do me, after all, if an ever-watchful authority keeps an eye out to ensure that my pleasures will be tranquil and races ahead of me to ward off all danger, sparing me the need even to think about such things, if that authority, even as it removes the smallest thorns from my path, is also absolute master of my liberty and my life; if it monopolizes vitality and existence to such a degree that when it languishes, everything around it must also languish; when it sleeps, everything must also sleep; and when it dies, everything must also perish?
There are some nations in Europe whose inhabitants think of themselves in a sense as colonists, indifferent to the fate of the place they live in. The greatest changes occur in their country without their cooperation. They are not even aware of precisely what has taken place. They suspect it; they have heard of the event by chance. More than that, they are unconcerned with the fortunes of their village, the safety of their streets, the fate of their church and its vestry. They think that such things have nothing to do with them, that they belong to a powerful stranger called “the government.” They enjoy these goods as tenants, without a sense of ownership, and never give a thought to how they might be improved. They are so divorced from their own interests that even when their own security and that of their children is finally compromised, they do not seek to avert the danger themselves but cross their arms and wait for the nation as a whole to come to their aid. Yet as utterly as they sacrifice their own free will, they are no fonder of obedience than anyone else. They submit, it is true, to the whims of a clerk, but no sooner is force removed than they are glad to defy the law as a defeated enemy. Thus one finds them ever wavering between servitude and license.
When a nation has reached this point, it must either change its laws and mores or perish, for the well of public virtue has run dry: in such a place one no longer finds citizens but only subjects.”
Alexis de Tocqueville
“When people revolt in a totalitarian society, they rise not against the wickedness of the regime but its weakness.”
Eric Hoffer
I observe Elbert County governing elites build their fortress of zoning legalese to control the fabric and future of Elbert County. At once, they’re possessed with a superior foresight that transcends the creative efforts of tens of thousands of citizens, but at the same time, they enforce their permits and grafted approvals with all manner of penalty and punishment, just in case a pronouncement should lack persuasive content.
As night follows day, these planning monuments will foreclose a prosperous future for Elbert County. That one is easy to predict. The only possible consequence from impossible law is stagnation. People will move away from stagnation if only to get upwind from the smell of it.
But grandiose planning documents, fêted by their writers, adoring cults, and subversive leadership, will do more than chill Elbert County’s prospects. As a corpus of dead weight over the heads of Elbert County governors, these procedures will crush any administrator, elected or appointed, who presumes to control them.
They’ve built the weakest links that will be their undoing.
B_Imperial
tyranny of, by, and for, planners
To summarize, the BOCC appointed a Water Advisory Committee [WAC]. The WAC helped write the new Special District Regulations scheduled to be approved by the BOCC. The WAC wrote themselves into the regulatory process for approving new or modified Special Districts, and gave themselves the power to hold up the process indefinitely.
Here’s how they did it:
3. Incomplete Applications. If / when either a pre- or final application is found to be incomplete, Community & Development Services shall inform the Applicant, return the Application, and restart the timeline clock only after a completed application has been received.
6. Pre-Application Review. Referral agencies shall include any service district within three miles of the proposed Special District. The consultants and referral agencies will have 21 days to respond with comments to CDS in writing. A Referral Agency may request an additional ten [10] days if needed. Comments that require a written response from the Applicant will be forwarded when received. Such written responses shall be submitted to CDS and forwarded to the referral party for verification
b. The Pre-Application Service District Plan shall be reviewed by the Elbert County Review Committee as follows:
- Elbert County Water Advisory Committee & Water consultant as required
c. Review Committee professionals shall be expected to review the information relative to their professional expertise and respond in writing to CDS about:
- Professional experience / opinion related to project feasibility for the greater good of Elbert County citizens.
9. Requests for Additional Details. Elbert County may request additional detail about the project. When additional detail is requested, the project timeline will be suspended and will not restart until the additional detail is received in writing.
To conclude: an unelected board wrote the law, and will enforce the law, without any limitations beyond what they consider to be the greater good of Elbert County citizens.
This is the face of tyranny.
B_Imperial
step right up, make your cuts
The subject of cutting federal spending isn’t manageable in the abstract. While the “fiscal cliff” and “cutting spending” make for nice sound bites, they convey very little practicable information. Unfortunately the problem is vast, however, it is not impossible. The Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance is a great place to start to understand the elements of the spending problem. It takes 38 typed pages just to list the 2,192 Federal Domestic Assistance programs in all their various types:
A: Formula Grants
B: Project Grants
C: Direct Payments for Specified Use
D: Direct Payments with Unrestricted Use
E: Direct Loans
F: Guaranteed/Insured Loans
G: Insurance
H: Sale, Exchange, or Donation of Property and Goods
I: Use of Property, Facilities, and Equipment
J: Provision of Specialized Services
K: Advisory Services and Counseling
L: Dissemination of Technical Information
M: Training
N: Investigation of Complaints
O: Federal Employment
The above 38 page table is extracted from the 3000+ page CFDA 2012 Print Edition.
Let’s be clear, this is not an optional civics matter for an American citizen. The Founders contemplated that our citizenship would entail a functional understanding of what our Federal government does, and whether it acts within the constitutional limits that authorize it to do those things.
Read the list. Imagine if you can, the tortured logic necessary to make a constitutional justification for each line item on the list. Many will require extended powers of fantasy to do so.
In a rational country governed by the rule of law, those programs least connected to constitutional authority should be the first to go.
The U.S. Supreme Court became the arbiter of legislative constitutionality with the 1803 Marbury decision. But the Court only acts on constitutional questions that the judicial system delivers to it. The Court requires a “case in controversy” to hear a constitutional question, let alone make a decision.
We will not see cases in controversy on the question of the constitutionality for most, if not all, of the 2,192 established Federal Domestic Assistance programs. And we know that under Obamacare, thanks to Justice Roberts, the 2012 list is scheduled to grow substantially (see previous post). We have no grounds to expect the Court to save us from totalitarianism.
But the process of the Courts’ deciding constitutionality in no way impedes or prohibits citizens from making their own assessments of what is constitutional, and exercising their political authority at the ballot box to make it so.
To be sure, the media will not enable this detailed citizens’ decision to proceed. It will continue to toss out sound bites and leave the citizens largely in the dark about the real nature of the problem. And those politicians wed to their pork who do not practice statesmanship will, in like manner, act to thwart any efforts to diminish the power of their pork-enabling offices.
We can save our country from financial ruin. It starts with understanding the real problem. It proceeds to finding and electing men and women who will represent us in the dismantling of the Federal Domestic Assistance state.
B_Imperial
ascendancy of autocracy
Obama Is An Autocrat, Not A Democrat
By ERNEST S. CHRISTIAN
Posted 09/11/2012 07:09 PM ET
Barack Obama is very dangerous, the apotheosis of an insidious strain of authoritarianism that destroys freedom from within.
It had been gnawing away at America’s vitals since the 1930s. Then, impatient for power, Obama’s Chicago contingent hit upon the ultimate quick-acting fraud — capture the White House by electing an illusion.
They conjured up an imaginary Obama invested with virtues never before or since found in the original. The make-believe Obama then starred in an electoral fairy tale scripted by the media and proclaimed a hit by bewitched voters.
Thus did it come to pass in the year 2008 that Americans were duped into electing a president quite different from the illusion for which they voted.
The real Obama is a steely-eyed autocrat, dedicated to expanding power at the expense of our liberty, still a bit of a Marxist, alternately hostile to or agnostic about capitalism, and intent on transforming America into a government-controlled society composed of obedient automatons. [Read more…]
misconceptions
Message to New-Plains leftists, and all leftists for that matter: You are way over-thinking the problem in your Lincoln Day Dinner Opinion.
It’s your politics that depend on conspiracy, elaborate design, subterfuge, underground networking, militancy, belief structures without supporting cause and effect, collective force, and activist imposition. You, evidently, think your politics are worth breaking a few eggs to make your utopian omelet.
Of course all that misspent energy begs questions about what on earth led you to such methods because they’ve never led to anything but poverty, misery and death. But then you dissemble about the poverty, misery and death that come from your totalitarian methods by saying, “Oh that’s the natural condition of things before we arrived and we just haven’t done enough yet. Give us more time and we’ll get it right.”
The problem here is that after you first claim that the natural state of things is horribly wrong in some way, your solutions invariably attempt to return us to conditions that you leftists always use to justify more intervention! If things were so bad, why in the name of progress do you always try to return us to conditions when things were worse? Apparently progression is really regression in the leftist skew.
And though you don’t know where your regression/progression is really going, you believe that whenever and wherever you arrive, the end will justify the means. Your terrible tenacity that spawned so much poverty, misery and death will be forgiven by the few who survive to cross the threshold to walk hand in hand through the gates of utopia. The awe of the perfectly sustainable, fair and clean human society will wipe their memories clean of all the horror spawned from your mythology.
Now pay attention. You really should learn to stop projecting this sort of thing on to conservatives. We’re not like you. We don’t use these techniques, these conspiracies, these impositions, or these forces. Look around you at one of these Elbert County Republican gatherings. The conservatives are the ones in the room not doing any of that stuff. You look really stupid when you paint us with those brushes.
Truth is, the only time we even think about such devices is when we’re forced to describe you. Think about this if you dare. Liberty is like a ship without a captain. It’s a massive rudderless force that takes no direction whatsoever to find the correct path. And only when you attempt to steer the ship does it go off course and crash into something.
You leftists have crashed the ship so many times in history that you’ve lost sight of how the whole thing operates.
I can’t imagine how to fix your conceptual framework. You are so broken.
—————————————————————————————————————
History repeats
Hitler told the Reichstag
“The government will make use of these powers only insofar as they are essential for carrying out vitally necessary measures…The number of cases in which an internal necessity exists for having recourse to such a law is in itself a limited one.”
He also promised an end to unemployment and pledged to promote peace with France, Great Britain and the Soviet Union. But in order to do all this, Hitler said, he first needed the Enabling Act.
Enabling Act, Article 1
In addition to the procedure prescribed by the constitution, laws of the Reich may also be enacted by the government of the Reich.
Enabling Act, Article 2
Laws enacted by the government of the Reich may deviate from the constitution as long as they do not affect the institutions of the Reichstag and the Reichsrat. The rights of the President remain undisturbed.
Barak Obama, State of the Union, 1-24-2012
Some of what’s broken has to do with the way Congress does its business these days. A simple majority is no longer enough to get anything -– even routine business –- passed through the Senate. (Applause.) Neither party has been blameless in these tactics. Now both parties should put an end to it. (Applause.) For starters, I ask the Senate to pass a simple rule that all judicial and public service nominations receive a simple up or down vote within 90 days. (Applause.)
The executive branch also needs to change. Too often, it’s inefficient, outdated and remote. (Applause.) That’s why I’ve asked this Congress to grant me the authority to consolidate the federal bureaucracy, so that our government is leaner, quicker, and more responsive to the needs of the American people. (Applause.)
The American Community Survey
U.S. Supreme Court
ICC v. Brimson, 154 U.S. 447 (1897)
Interstate Commerce Commission v. Brimson
No. 883
Argued April 16, 1894
Decided May 26, 1894
154 U.S. 447
“Power given to Congress to regulate interstate commerce does not carry with it authority to destroy or impair those fundamental guarantees of personal rights that are recognized by the Constitution as inhering in the freedom of the citizen.”
“The inquiry whether a witness before the Commission is bound to answer a particular question propounded to him, or to produce books, papers, etc., in his possession and called for by that body, is one that cannot he committed to a subordinate administrative or executive tribunal for final determination. Such a body could not, under our system of government and consistently with due process of law, be invested with authority to compel obedience to its orders by a judgment of fine or imprisonment.”
“Neither branch of the legislative department, still less any merely administrative body, established by Congress, possesses or can be invested with a general power of making inquiry into the private affairs of the citizen. Kilbourn v. Thompson,
Page 154 U. S. 479
103 U. S. 168, 103 U. S. 190. We said in Boyd v. United States, 116 U. S. 616, 116 U. S. 630 — and it cannot be too often repeated — that the principles that embody the essence of constitutional liberty and security forbid all invasions on the part of the government and its employees of the sanctity of a man’s home and the privacies of his life. As said by MR. JUSTICE FIELD in In re Pacific Railway Commission, 32 F. 241, 250, “of all the rights of the citizen, few are of greater importance or more essential to his peace and happiness than the right of personal security, and that involves not merely protection of his person from assault, but exemption of his private affairs, books, and papers from the inspection and scrutiny of others. Without the enjoyment of this right, all others would lose half their value.”
Now, see:
The American Community Survey
~
after the “O”
We’re told one reason Obama’s popularity is falling in various polls is because the hard left have lost faith in him. The next leftist to take up the mantle of saving the republic from the scourge of individual liberty will learn from Obama’s defection from the left’s vision. That ideologue will capture the hearts of the hard left and also collect the drifting center independents in the deal. When they all fall in line behind the next strong man we will have our American dictator.
change back
the ends of politics
The path led through the camp entrance bearing the inscription “Arbeit macht frei” (work will make you free). The over-dimensional motto on the roof of the maintenance building announced: “There is a path to freedom. Its milestones are obedience, honesty, cleanliness, sobriety, hard work, discipline, sacrifice, truthfulness and love of thy fatherland.”
———————————————————————————————
Dachau is a mirror into the dark part of each of our souls we wish we did not have. Everyone should see it, know it’s there, and know what the most civilized of people are capable of doing given the right circumstances.
czarism
|
OBAMA’S CZARS |
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|
CZAR |
Czar Position |
Summary |
|
Richard Holbrooke |
Afghanistan Czar |
Ultra liberal anti gun former Gov. of New Mexico. Pro Abortion and legal drug use. Dissolve the 2nd Amendment |
|
Ed Montgomery |
Auto recovery Czar |
Black radical anti business activist. Affirmative Action and Job Preference for blacks. Univ of Maryland Business School Dean teaches US business has caused world poverty. ACORN board member. Communist DuBois Club member. |
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Jeffrey Crowley |
AIDS Czar |
Radical Homosexual.. A Gay Rights activist. Believes in Gay Marriage and especially, a Special Status for homosexuals only, including complete free health care for gays. |
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Alan Bersin |
Border Czar |
The former failed superintendent of San Diego . Ultra Liberal friend of Hilary Clinton. Served as Border Czar under Janet Reno – to keep borders open to illegal’s without interference from US |
|
David J. Hayes |
California Water Czar |
Sr. Fellow of radical environmentalist group, “Progress Policy”. No training or experience in water management whatsoever. |
|
Ron Bloom |
Car Czar |
Auto Union worker. Anti business & anti nuclear. Has worked hard to force US auto makers out of business. Sits on the Board of Chrysler which is now Auto Union owned. How did this happen? |
|
Dennis Ross |
Central Region Czar |
Believes US policy has caused Mid East wars. Obama apologist to the world. Anti gun and completely pro abortion. |
|
Lynn Rosenthal |
Domestic Violence Czar |
Director of the National Network to End Domestic Violence. Vicious anti male feminist. Supported male castration. Imagine? |
|
Gil Kerlikowske |
Drug Czar |
devoted lobbyist for every restrictive gun law proposal, Former Chief of Police in Liberal Seattle. Believes no American should own a firearm. Supports legalization of all drugs |
|
Paul Volcker |
E conomic Czar |
Head of Fed Reserve under Jimmy Carter when US economy nearly failed. Obama appointed head of the Economic Recovery Advisory Board which engineered the Obama economic disaster to US economy.. Member of anti business “Progressive Policy” organization |
|
Carol Brower |
Energy and Environment Czar |
Political Radical Former head of EPA – known for anti-business activism. Strong anti-gun ownership. |
|
Joshua DuBois |
Faith Based Czar |
Political Black activist-Degree in Black Nationalism. Anti gun ownership lobbyist. |
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Cameron Davis |
Great Lakes Czar |
Chicago radical anti business environmentalist. Blames George Bush for “Poisoning the water that minorities have to drink.” No experience or training in water management. Former ACORN Board member (what does that tell us?) |
|
Van Jones |
Green Jobs Czar |
(since resigned).. Black activist Member of American communist Party and San Francisco Communist Party who said Geo Bush caused the 911 attack and wanted Bush investigated by the World Court for war crimes. Black activist with strong anti-white views. |
|
Daniel Fried |
Guantanamo Closure Czar |
Human Rights activist for Foreign Terrorists. Believes America has caused the war on terrorism. Believes terrorists have rights above and beyond Americans. |
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Nancy-Ann DeParle. |
Health Czar |
Former head of Medicare / Medicaid.. Strong Health Care Rationing proponent. She is married to a reporter for The New York Times. |
|
Vivek Kundra |
Information Czar |
Born in New Delhi, India. Controls all public information, including labels and news releases. Monitors all private Internet emails. (hello?) |
|
Todd Stern |
International Climate Czar |
Anti business former White House chief of Staff- Strong supportrer of the Kyoto Accord. Pushing hard for Cap and Trade. Blames US business for Global warming. Anti- US business prosperity. |
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Dennis Blair |
Intelligence Czar |
Ret Navy. Stopped US guided missile program as “provocative”. Chair of ultra liberal “Council on Foreign Relations” which blames American organizations for regional wars. |
|
George Mitchell |
Mideast Peace Czar |
Fmr. Sen from Maine Left wing radical. Has said Israel should be split up into “2 or 3 “ smaller more manageable plots”. (God forbid) A true Anti-nuclear anti-gun & pro homosexual “special rights” advocate |
|
Kenneth Feinberg |
Pay Czar |
Chief of Staff to TED KENNEDY. Lawyer who got rich off the 911 victims payoffs. (horribly true) |
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Cass Sunstein |
Regulatory Czar |
Liberal activist judge believes free speech needs to be limited for the “common good”. Essentially against 1st amendment. Rules against personal freedoms many times –like private gun ownership and right to free speech. |
|
John Holdren |
Science Czar |
Fierce ideological environmentalist, Sierra Club, Anti business activist. Claims US business has caused world poverty. No Science training. |
|
Earl Devaney |
Stimulus Accountability Czar |
Spent career trying to take guns away from American citizens. Believes in Open Borders to Mexico . Author of statement blaming US gun stores for drug war in Mexico . |
|
J. Scott Gration |
Sudan Czar |
Native of Democratic Republic of Congo. Believes US does little to help Third World countries. Council of foreign relations, asking for higher US taxes to support United Nations |
|
Herb Allison |
TARP Czar |
Fannie May CEO responsible for the US recession by using real estate mortgages to back up the US stock market. Caused millions of people to lose their life savings. |
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John Brennan |
Terrorism Czar |
Anti CIA activist. No training in diplomatic or gov. affairs. Believes Open Borders to Mexico and a dialog with terrorists and has suggested Obama disband US military |
|
Aneesh Chopra |
Technology Czar |
No Technology training. Worked for the Advisory Board Company, a health care think tank for hospitals. Anti doctor activist. Supports Obama Health care Rationing and salaried doctors working exclusively for the Gov. health care plan |
|
Adolfo Carrion Jr.. |
Urban Affairs Czar |
Puerto Rican born Anti American activist and leftist group member in Latin America . Millionaire “slum lord” of the Bronx , NY. Owns many lavish homes and condos which he got from “sweetheart” deals with labor unions. Wants higher taxes on middle class to pay for minority housing and health care |
|
Ashton Carter |
Weapons Czar |
Leftist. Wants all private weapons in US destroyed. Supports UN ban on firearms ownership in America .. No Other “policy” |
|
Gary Samore |
WMD Policy Czar |
Former US Communist. Wants US to destroy all WMD unilaterally as a show of good faith. Has no other “policy”. |
democide not divisive
Limbaugh’s So ‘Divisive’ The Left Had To Make Up Lies About Him
By MARK STEYN
Posted 10/16/2009 07:54 PM ET
Here is a tale of two sound bites. First: “Slavery built the South. I’m not saying we should bring it back; I’m just saying it had its merits. For one thing, the streets were safer after dark.”
Second: “The third lesson and tip actually comes from two of my favorite political philosophers, Mao Tse Tung and Mother Teresa. Not often coupled with each other, but the two people that I turn to most to basically deliver a simple point, which is: You’re going to make choices. … But here’s the deal: These are your choices; they are no one else’s.
“In 1947, when Mao Tse Tung was being challenged within his own party on his own plan to basically take China over, Chiang Kai-Shek and the nationalist Chinese held the cities, they had the army. … They had everything on their side. And people said ‘How can you win? How can you do this against all of the odds against you?’
“And Mao Tse Tung says, ‘You fight your war and I’ll fight mine.’ You don’t have to accept the definition of how to do things. … You fight your war, you let them fight theirs. Everybody has their own path.”
The first quotation was attributed to Rush Limbaugh. He never said it. There is no tape of him saying it. There is no transcript of him saying it. After all, if he had done so at any point in the last 20 years, someone would surely have mentioned it at the time.
Yet CNN, MSNBC, ABC, other networks and newspapers cheerfully repeated the pro-slavery quotation and attributed it, falsely, to Rush Limbaugh. And planting a flat-out lie in his mouth wound up getting Rush bounced from a consortium hoping to buy the St. Louis Rams.
NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said the talk show host was a “divisive” figure, and nondivisive figures like the Rev. Al Sharpton and the Rev. Jesse Jackson expressed the hope that, with Mr. Divisive out of the picture, the NFL could now “unify.”
The second quotation — hailing Mao — was uttered back in June to an audience of high school students by Anita Dunn, the White House communications director. I know she uttered it because I watched the words issuing from her mouth on “The Glenn Beck Show” on Fox News. But don’t worry. Nobody else played it. [Read more…]
government at the people
Dems Go Nuclear
Posted 10/16/2009 07:54 PM ET
Health Care: Democrats seem set to use the “nuclear option” to ram their government health takeover into law. Bipartisanship already looked dead; now it looks extinct.
The health care revolution the Democratic Congress has planned — with its inevitable medical rationing, thousands of dollars in increased insurance premiums, and coverage of illegal aliens — may get placed on the familiar fast track used to spend hundreds and hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars this year.
Instead of the 60 votes needed in the Senate if proper parliamentary rules were followed, passing this reshaping of the medical system as a “budget reconciliation” measure would mean only a simple majority was needed.
House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., accused of cheating on his taxes, last week held a hearing to let the House version of the health reform bill be passed this way. As the Washington weekly Human Events reports, Democratic leaders “have apparently invoked the ‘nuclear option’ to shut out Republicans and ensure the bill is passed before the end of the year.”
So all those “town hells” during the summer, where senators and congressmen were given an earful about passing secretly written thousand-page bills without reading them, will be ignored. [Read more…]
county term limits
We will receive our ballots for the November election in the mail soon. The election is not in November, it is virtually upon us. NOTE, the absence of discussion in the local fishwraps about the removal of county term limits is no accident. To get it passed, our local liberal editors know they must pretend the issue doesn’t exist–a stealth promotion of their political position through omission–because totalitarian initiatives don’t stand up very well under much scrutiny.
You didn’t expect them to play fair now did you?
czar watch
(click to enlarge)
the leftist experience
[T]he moral destruction of communism was worse because the confusion between common morality and communist morality remains deep rooted. With the latter hiding behind the former, it is parasitical and polluting, using common morality to spread its contagion. Here is a recent example: in the discussions that followed the publication of The Black Book of Communism, an editorial writer at the French communist newspaper L’Humanite’ announced on television that 85 million deaths did not in any way tarnish the communist ideal. They represented only a very unfortunate deviation. After Auschwitz, he continued, one can no longer be a Nazi, but one can remain a communist after the Soviet camps. This man, who spoke in good conscience, did not realize at all that he had just articulated his own most fatal condemnation. He could not see that the communist idea had so perverted the principles of reality and morality that it could indeed outlive 85 million corpses, whereas the Nazi idea had succombed under its dead. He thought he had spoken as a great and decent man, idealistic and uncompromising, without realizing that he had uttered a monstrosity. Communism is more perverse than Nazism because it does not ask man consciously to take the moral step of the criminal, and because it uses the spirit of justice and goodness that abounds throughout the earth to spread evil over all the earth. Each communist experience begins anew in innocence.
Alain Besancon, A Century of Horrors, 2007.
American leftists will ridicule their comparison to communists, however, in moral relativity, in masking harmful policies under good intentions, and in denial over their policies’ historical failures, leftists and communists are a distinction without a difference. [Read more…]
contrived continuity
The psychological state of the militant is distinguished by his fanatical investment in the system. This central vision reorganizes his entire intellectual and perceptual field, all the way to the periphery. Language is transformed: it is no longer used to communicate or express, but to conceal a contrived continuity between the system and reality. Ideological language is charged with the magical role of forcing reality to conform to a particular vision of the world. It is a liturgical language for which every utterance points to its speaker’s adherence to the system, and it summons the interlocutor to adhere as well. Code words thus constitute threats and figures of power.It is not possible to remain intelligent under the spell of ideology.
The most obvious sign that ideological insanity is artificial is that it is reversible: when the pressure ceases and circumstances change, one gets out all at once, as if from a dream. But it is a waking dream–one that does not block motility and maintains a certain apparently rational coherence. Outside the affected area, which is the superior part of the mind in a healthy person–the part that articulates religion, philosophy, and the “governing ideas of reason,” as Kant would say–the comprehensive functions seem intact but focused on and enslaved by the surreal object. When one wakes, one’s mind is empty; one’s life and knowledge must be entirely relearned.
Alain Besancon, A Century of Horrors, 2007.
The Republican mistake of the 2008 election was to embrace a portion of the left’s ideological insanity to bring in moderates, which ended up ratcheting the debate to the left. Whoever concluded that Republicans could score by giving the ball to the opposition should be fired. [Read more…]