Hello to all the readers;
On the heels of my commentary on the state of the nation yesterday, I highly recommend the following article written by my erudite friend Nelson Hultberg. Nelson brings a rich historical background to his writings and as such, he provides a perspective that is often lacking in much of what we read today. Understanding the historical origins of political theory is a key ingredient in grasping the underlying aims of modern political movements.
Our nation is in serious danger of losing its fundamental moorings if it has not already done so. When you read Nelson's commentary, you will better understand the extent of this danger.
I am also hopeful that many of you will understand why I believe the ideological divide in our nation cannot be bridged. There was a motto of the Communists when asked about their strategy of advancing their poisonous ideology - "Three steps forward; two steps backward".
This is a simple but diabolically ingenius plan. It means that once an aim is achieved, the society may rebel against it and kick back throttling some of the gains the communists have achieved but it will never be successful at completely rooting those gains out. Then the drive "forward" (the Obama campaign slogan) begins afresh with the starting point now being a bit further down the line towards their ultimate goal.
This is the strategy that the left employs in our nation.... push, push and push their big government agenda knowing full well that there will always be a push back or a counter attack against it. However, their accomplishments are never completely gotten rid of and thus the nation as a whole slides further and further and further to the left and further and further and further away from its system of Constitutionally limited government.
Case in point - does anyone believe that having now managed to get their beloved Obamacare passed through employing the most despicable, nefarious and contemptible means imaginable, the left is not rejoicing realizing full well that it will never be gotten completely rid of? Socialized medicine, with all its horrific impact, will now become hopelessly entangled in the warp and woof of our society. America had a chance to drive a stake through this vampire once and for all, but stupidly chose to return the very candidate to office who shoved it down their unwilling throats in the first place. I predict here and now that it will not be that much longer down the road when the left will begin making noises about how those who are in the business of treating the sick should not be making such "obscene profits" in so doing. Wait and see, it is coming as sure as the sun rises in the East.
Trader Dan
A New Kind of Freedom
Nelson Hultberg
Karl Marx was asked once how he could justify advocating a political system of slavery for the individual, which is what socialism is. He replied that, socialism is not slavery; it is a "new kind of freedom." As all perceptive students of history know, the intellectuals of Europe bought into such Alice in Wonderland sophistry and plunged into the twentieth century nightmare of collectivist tyranny. But unfortunately so did American intellectuals about 30 years later when the Progressives of Woodrow Wilson's era established the Creature from Jekyl Island to usher in centralized government banking and the progressive income tax to "spread the wealth around."
Socialism is not really so bad, reasoned the American intellectual community. If we think about it, it actually is a "new kind of freedom." We just have to do what the Red Queen and the Mad Hatter advocated. We have to change the meaning of the words that define the fundamental values of our lives. After all, there is no objective reality; words can mean whatever we want them to mean. All we have to do is teach Marx's new definition of freedom to the young at an early enough age, and when they grow into adulthood they will not think of a government-dominated society as slavery at all. It will be a "new kind of freedom" to them.
Americans never bought into Lenin's
violent revolutionary socialism, but they did buy into the Fabians'
democratic evolutionary socialism. Fabian ideas in Britain were readily picked up by the American progressives and liberals of the twentieth century. This redefinition of values has been consuming us now for 100 years ever since the Creature from Jekyl Island and the tax revenuers took over Washington. The progressives and liberals have even redefined their redefinitions. Fascism, being basically the same as socialism, is now acceptable in the mix.
What is horrifying is that Barack Obama's election victory is tied directly to this corruption of values. We have now elected, for a second time, a man who was raised by communists in Hawaii. Obama's mind was forged from the likes of
Frank Marshall Davis, a powerful and radical communist apparatchick of the fifties, sixties, and seventies. Davis was Obama's constant companion from the age of 9 to 18 before he went off to Occidental College in Los Angeles. His worldview is thus the Marxian sophistry that socialism is a "new kind of freedom." In the mind of Obama, individuals like Hank Rearden and Dagny Taggart are not entrepreneurial benefactors to their fellow man; they are evil rich people who exploit their fellow man. These evil rich need to be leveled down. And the way to do it is insidiously, governmentally with ever-expanding redistribution of wealth programs and ever-expanding monetary inflation.
One of Ayn Rand's powerful insights in
Atlas Shrugged is that dictatorships take over because the people actually approve of them. She called it the "sanction of the victim." This attitude now permeates the American electorate. Nietzsche's "slave mentalities" dominate the throngs of voters that determine what our government is to do. The great majority of Americans are demonstrating that they actually want to be enslaved.
Rand also made the following observation: When asked once why she voted Republican if she thought both parties had sold out to collectivism, she replied that both parties are headed toward the abyss, but Democrats wish to charge toward it and Republicans wish to creep toward it. She, no doubt, felt that we have more time to educate the people as to what is happening with Republicans in power.
Well, America just ran out of time this past election night. A majority of American voters indicated that they believe government owes them a living along with health care, security, and self-esteem. They indicated that they are very comfortable with the Fabian march into socialist-fascism that has been taking place ever since the Creature was instituted in 1913. They indicated that they believe rich people don't earn their wealth; they steal it from the kindly masses by siphoning off the surplus productivity of their labor and reducing them to grinding poverty. (This is the fallacious "labor theory of value" that Marx perpetuated.)
Unfortunately this fallacious reasoning is why so many Americans have become so slothful and are choosing to vote for a living rather than work for a living. It is the reason why so many productive men and women in America are poisoned with guilt and now tolerate the egregious, confiscatory taxes that are destroying the dynamism of our economy and the sanity of our lives. Justice and prosperity cannot be built by catering to slothful masses with theoretical fallacies.
The slothful masses now control America through an Orwellian czar in Washington whose mentor was a rabid communist apparatchik in the 1970s, and whose close advisors (Bill Ayres, Jeremiah Wright, Valerie Jarrett, etc.) have always been radical leftist haters of America. This Orwellian czar is now a lame duck President and doesn't have to run again. All that blocks him from ravaging our rights and freedoms is a supine Senate and a timid array of House Republicans. Will these political sycophants be able to stand up to him and the new hordes of entitlement seekers that bolster him with their eager votes? Not likely. Congress will, instead, begin to reach out to the new entitlement seekers along with the pressing hordes of illegals and their comrades waiting in the wings for entrance to America.
Jean Raspail's
Camp of the Saints looms over the horizon. Congressional sycophants will begin to emulate Fox News analyst, Kirsten Powers, who gleefully reported on election night: "We are now a brown nation." They will begin to reevaluate their position on the illegals. They will reason that another 15 million illiterate anti-Americans amidst us is no problem. To paraphrase Nixon, "We're all Multiculturalists now."
Thus Obama will push full-blown for amnesty for the illegals and Marx's redefinition of slavery into a "new kind of freedom." We will charge toward the abyss at a speed never before employed. Obama and the Creature will gobble up the last of our freedoms. America will become a giant replica of Greece.
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Nelson Hultberg is a freelance writer in Dallas, Texas and the Director of Americans for a Free Republic (
AFR.org). His articles have appeared in such publications as the
Dallas Morning News, The American Conservative, Insight, The Freeman, and
Liberty, as well as on numerous Internet sites such as The Daily Bell, Financial Sense, and Safe Haven. He is also the author of a soon to be released book on political philosophy,
The Golden Mean: Libertarian Politics, Conservative Values. Email him at: nelshultberg@aol.com
