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Tuesday, July 27, 2010
The leftist Prime Directive.
Nothing has been more integral to leftists’ intellectual work than their extraordinary effort to cover up the true nature of totalitarianism. These efforts occur because of a willful desire to conceal, a willful blindness to the truth, an insufficient intellectual ability, or mental illness.
Consider a New York Times reporter at the inception of one of the most monstrous regimes in human history and also what every anti-war activist scumbag in the United States refused even to contemplate as the inevitable outcome of the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam—and the Congressional betrayal of the anticommunist cause:
Sydny Schanberg of the New York Times completely failed to apprehend the nature of the Khmer Rouge and his leftist compatriots baying for American withdrawal from Vietnam
In the New York Times, Sydney Schanberg reported from Cambodia that “it is difficult to imagine how [Cambodian] lives could be anything but better with the Americans gone.” Mr. Schanberg added that “it would be tendentious to forecast [genocide] as a national policy under a Communist government once the war is over.”
A year later, Mr. Schanberg was awarded a Pulitzer Prize, though not for tendentiousness.
All in all, America’s withdrawal from Southeast Asia resulted in the killing of an estimated 165,000 South Vietnamese in so-called re-education camps; the mass exodus of one million boat people, a quarter of whom died at sea; the mass murder, estimated at 100,000, of Laos’s Hmong people; and the killing of somewhere between one million and two million Cambodians.
I contemplate the history of the 20th century merely up to 1945 and conclude that no sane, decent person can do otherwise than entertain complete skepticism when claims are made for the benign nature of government power. The burden of proof is massively on any advocate of greater government power to show that the benefit to be achieved is worth the danger to life and liberty involved.
But the left is indifferent to the warnings derived from the last century. What matters to the leftist is whether or not some marginal Good Thing will result from the proposed increase in government control. In short, what matters to the left is expediency.
No doubt the left was amazed by what happened in Cambodia. “How could this be?!”
But here is the definition of a liberal—A liberal is someone who is always surprised when he finds chewing gum under the seat.
”Surely man is different from this stark evidence before me of indifference and contempt! No. I will only believe what my eyes tell me here if my investigations unearth 10,000 instances of this behavior.”
See the AP photograph in Mr. Stephens’s article. Even what you see there isn’t enough to open leftists eyes.
It never is.
No.
What the left proposes never has a downside. Leftist pipe dreams are safe at any speed.
”From WikiLeaks to the Killing Fields. Liberals contemplate withdrawal from Afghanistan, heedless of the consequences.” By Bret Stephens, Wall Street Journal, 7/27/10 (edits by Mr. Stephens).
Comments
I can’t quite tell Colonel if you’re being facetious. I’m pretty sure that most who still call themselves liberals are wearing blinders. So I don’t think they are knowingly following the prime directive to which you allude.
But if you’re referring to the leaders of the Leftist/Statist collaboration—the ruling class—then my vote is for “willful desire to conceal.”
Nothing has been more integral to leftists’ intellectual work than their extraordinary effort to cover up the true nature of totalitarianism. [emphasis added]
Did Bernie Madoff tell his marks from whence their payouts were coming?
Did Barack Obama tell our fools that their healthcare would of course be rationed under his scheme?
Did the Morlocks disclose ahead of time where they were herding the Eloi?
It’s the ruling party Colonel—the lead “Progressive” Sustainability worshipers—and not their useful idiots, who have adopted that prime directive of which they dare not admit too soon.
You may be asking “how exactly would they admit that the 20th Century socialist regimes’ methodical murder of over 100 million people was their Pilot Program”?
I, for one, think they have admitted it in a number of ways, among them the items you listed.
What continues to perplex me—I am beyond stunned by now—is how large are the numbers who steadfastly refuse to believe where this dictatorial rule is heading.
Col. Bunny: as you may have said in a different form—I’m all ears to hear your suggested method to achieve the great awakening.
Posted by Pascal (the derivative) on 07/27/2010 at 03:01 AM"Soviet Story” is a Latvian film documenting the Soviet genocide of Russia and Eastern Europe, and the complicit western media.
http://westernrifleshooters.blogspot.com/2010/07/soviet-story.html
Summary: Progressives are very very bad. Eastern Europe went through hell. And now our own miseducated fools bring this down upon us.
Posted by on 07/27/2010 at 06:49 AMPascal, I’m not being facetious. Willful action is only one of four alternative explanations and the other three do nicely in my view, either in isolation or with a lot of overlap.
On your point of how they admit to murder as their pilot program, I just read an interesting Mises.org article about Trotsky (Trotsky: The Ignorance and the Evil) in which Daniel and Gabriel Cohn-Bendit are quoted on Trotsky, thus:
“He told the unions [at the Third Congress of Trade Unions] that “coercion, regimentation, and militarization of labor were no mere emergency measures and that the workers’ State normally had the right to coerce any citizen to perform any work at any place of its choosing.”
The author of the Mises piece, Ralph Raico, comments:
“Neither Marx nor Engels ever disavowed their claim that those in charge of “the workers’ state” had the right to enslave the workers and peasants whenever the need might arise. Now, having annihilated the hated market, the Bolsheviks found that the need for enslavement had, indeed, arisen. And of all the Bolshevik leaders, the most ardent and aggressive advocate of forced labor was Leon Trotsky.”
Much worse can be found in the utterances of Che and, again, who can read just a little of what Trotsky or Che said, to name but two, and not be instantly put on notice of pig ignorance, economic fantasy, and inevitable murderous result.
The left knows all this but deliberately ignores it. In the reverse situation, the left seizes on scurrilous allegations of racism or ethnocentrism and inflates them to sins of galactic vileness by means of that workhorse of leftist catalysts—the smear. Conservatives are required to know if those they support ever kicked their dog or went back for illegal seconds at the salad bar and then to cast such miscreants into the outer darkness. But if a leftist guttersnipe is ever found to declaim on the merits of summary execution or corvee labor, he will remain in the leftist pantheon, forever revered by the zealots. Nixon had an enemies list—eternal shame and revulsion. Stalin and Mao executed enemies by the million—silence.
Hell yes, the silence is deliberate.
Such people will never be awakened for they are committed enemies. As for the useful idiots, I have no wisdom beyond the pale imitation of it I try to employ when it comes to waking the somnolent. I’ve said before that a great many very erudite, insightful, and imaginative people are at work in the blogosphere every hour of every day and still the tea party movement is a relatively small, or at least, unfocused movement and the sleepwalkers in my immediate life act and think like they live in the U.S. of the 50s and have no appreciation WHATsoever of the erosion of our constitutional protections and the inroads of the traitors. Nor does any of this concern them if I raise it.
No. I hope I am wrong about the extent of a new consciousness but I fear that it will ultimately boil down to Solzhenitsyn’s “pityiless crowbar of events” to strike before there is any kind of an epiphany. Complacency rules and all the extraordinary commentary and analysis you can find on the web today is for naught for all intents and purposes. The American people as a whole do not care about liberty and view it as a pleasant convenience that will last forever without maintenance by or protection from them.
An extremely smart college professor friend thinks that the U.S. is a theocracy and a delightful environmentalist I know will show real emotional energy on the issue of plastic shopping bags but none on the creation of over 100 new federal agencies in 2000+ pages of the Health Care Destruction Act of 2010.
If you know of a place to start to rejink the thinking of such folks, you’re a better man than I am.
Posted by Col. B. Bunny on 07/27/2010 at 01:23 PMThanks, sofa. I have the DVD but have yet to watch it. I’m endlessly fascinated by every aspect of the Gulag and any society that is ruled by fools and knaves who have untrammeled power. I despise the hateful people who toy with state power so recklessly or ardently pursue it in their stupid, prideful belief that decent society only lacks their intelligence and moral insight to bring it about.
Posted by Col. B. Bunny on 07/27/2010 at 01:38 PMI’m coming to the conclusion that our quislings and traitors are more of a problem than our enemies.
Posted by on 07/28/2010 at 12:04 AMYes, a house divided an all that. The willful blindness is what puzzles me. I’m aware of a tack that I might step on. It doesn’t have to be a landmine. I’m instantly onto my tack problem. Observation, analysis, tack-removal action plan, implementation. With the somnolent, there are tacks all over the place but never any reaction, let alone acknowledgment of a problem. NPR must send out a coded message every rush hour with the words “fairness,” “inclusion,” and “diversity.” That’s good for 30 days of cortical paralysis. Tra la la, chaps.
Posted by Col. B. Bunny on 07/28/2010 at 02:50 PM"Bill Clinton’s IQ has been reported as being about 180.”
Which, QED, is utterly irrelevant in certain circumstances.
Posted by on 07/28/2010 at 07:03 PMSorry, that comment re Clinton should have been in response to “Bastions and Batteries: Part 2” , where I have now placed it.
Posted by on 07/28/2010 at 09:33 PM"Leftists pipe dreams safe at any speed.”
SE MAGNIFIQUE
When the Colonel is on a roll, the sky’s
the limit. racPosted by on 07/29/2010 at 04:39 AMThanks, Rach. The phrase “unsafe at any speed” probably has some serious whiskers on it. I could still touch my toes when it first had any currency. No it doesn’t and it’s depressing to try.
Posted by Col. B. Bunny on 07/29/2010 at 11:53 AM
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