~ American socialist Norman Mattoon Thomas
This oft cited (but dubiously sourced) quotation is frequently heard during U.S. political debates.. whether or not it's legitimate is irrelevant, because the spirit of the quote is in fact legitimate... and this quote, this notion, has gained renewed relevance with the presidency of Barack Obama. Obama's initial run-up to the White House engendered the label "socialist.” Of course his subsequent efforts to enact his socialist health-care reform program, and his recent scandal history, has solidified the view that President Obama is actually the closet socialist that many feared he was. In fact he is appearing to be the liberal-fascist many liberty minded Americans knew he was.
On that note, a couple of days before all the Obama scandals broke, during a college commencement speech, the president denied that tyranny was on the agenda and mocked his fellow citizens who raised that alarm... He alluded that that sort of thinking was simply crazy. The president then warned us about listening to the voices of dissent, voices that were "warning that tyranny is always lurking just around the corner.” He added, “You should reject those voices...”
It's funny how close Socialism and Fascism are... They might not be exactly the same thing, but they are without a doubt kissing cousins.
Obviously, we would never reject the voices of dissent ...because more often than not, they are the voices of reason. The president is in fact the one suspected of ushering in that very same tyranny that he tells us to ignore. Sadly we now know actually what was lurking around the corner; because it's right fucking here.
Why did the president feel the need to advise us about what up until now was obvious? What was he really trying to tell us?
"The lady doth protest too much, methinks.."
Interestingly, this presidency and the current political circumstances are not new, I mean, this is not a new concept or worry... in 1961, Ronald Reagan cited these same concerns during a talk he gave on the perils of socialized medicine.
Reagan based his assertion that the United States was sliding into socialism by degrees based not just on what was hysterical mob rule, but what was clear at the time… He spoke of an agenda and what was in fact what the socialists and communists were actually actively doing and continue to do. Joe McCarthy and the anti-communists where not the tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy theorists that the left and the media propaganda machine have spun. What McCarthy said the left was doing, they were in fact actually doing... The often dismissed and ridiculed “Red Scare” was indeed real.
The Big Lie
Upton Sinclair, the noted American author and socialist, best known for his novel The Jungle, twice ran unsuccessfully for Congress on the Socialist ticket and in 1934 he ran unsuccessfully for the governorship of California… this time as a Democrat. Interestingly, in a 1951 letter following his gubernatorial defeat, he said this:
“The American People will take Socialism, but they won't take the label.” He went on to say “running on the Socialist ticket I got 60,000 votes, and running [as a democrat] on the slogan to 'End Poverty in California' I got 879,000. I think we simply have to recognize the fact that our enemies have succeeded in spreading the Big Lie. There is no use attacking it by a frontal attack, it is much better to out-flank them.”
So who's lie is it? For me, this point was driven home when I spoke with my mother in-law on the topic some years ago. In the early 1950’s, as a teenager on Martha’s Vineyard, she worked for and took dictation for a guy named Max Eastman. At the time Max was writing an essay called: Reflections on the Failure of Socialism (I have a signed copy). Max was a fascinating guy, he was an early socialist and even traveled to post revolutionary Russia, befriending Leon Trotsky and others. He was an ardent leftist and socialist until this trip to the USSR in 1922 where he witnessed the hypocrisy and lies that came with the revolution and he slowly began to realize the scam that socialism really was.
What Max told my Mother in-law was that the early socialists/communists in the US were under increasing pressure by the US government and the anti-communist movement, so the leadership developed a strategy of “blending in.” They advised their contemporaries to merge into the Democratic Party and assume the role of the left wing. Here their methods or beliefs wouldn’t necessarily change or even be noticed; only their name would.
Max abandoned the idea of a proletarian revolution and his high expectations for the liberal intelligentsia after he recognized that the "revolution of our times" was an abject failure.
The Left
Since the 1930’s, the left, now known incongruously as “Liberals” or “Progressives,” have sunk to the depths of mawkish ‘self-deception and wholesale treason to the truth.’ So much so as to be absolutely insulting to a cognizant freedom thinking adult..
I believe that what has impacted the liberal philosophy today, more than any other political upset emotional or intellectual, is that the American desire for liberty and freedom persists. That fire cannot be quelled with simple feel good rhetoric or angry self righteous finger pointing..
The seemingly recent and resurgent leftist push following the Obama elections was basically the liberal-left rearing it’s ugly head. As it does when the people are cowed and the "narrative" is right. However, this thrust has also again raised the hackles of freedom seeking Americans. This push is neither recent nor is it resurgent, it is continuous; we are simply just paying attention once again.
'What socialism, progressivism, communism and other ideologies of the left have in common is an assumption that some very wise people — like themselves — need to take decisions out of the hands of lesser people, like the rest of us, and impose those decisions by government fiat or by force.'
Max Eastman recognized this in the 1930’s and like the rest of us, recognized that fascism, (another ideology of the left), is what follows when socialism, progressivism and communism has proved the illusion that it is. It has proven to be so in Stalinist Russia, in pre-Hitler Germany and I would argue, as it is proving right now.
No comments:
Post a Comment