0 comment Thursday, August 21, 2014 | admin
Thomas Jefferson famously said "I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man." We've all heard this quoted, or read it, but it's significant that he specifically said ''tyranny over the mind of man."
Often when we hear the word 'tyranny' we automatically envision the old Communist regimes in Eastern Europe where people were shipped off to gulags or mental institutions for dissenting from the regime and the Party. This hard totalitarianism, with its roundups of dissidents, or its midnight knocks on the door, is not the only kind. Though the systems could and did imprison (and sometimes kill) the bodies of dissenters, they could not always imprison the minds of their subjects.
It's commonly said, by those with direct experience of these regimes, that the people in general did not truly believe the ideology whichwas the basis for the Communist regimes. Newspapers, radio, and television, as well as movies, offered only the accepted party line on anything, and heavily censored anything that belied the official belief system. However, it seems that this information control was rather clumsy and transparent, and many people thus saw through it, inwardly rejecting it while outwardly conforming, and discreetly keeping silent.
Sometimes it's a temptation to wonder if the same is not true in the Western countries, where our politically correct, mandatory multiculturalism and ''equality'' are the dictates of the day. There is, certainly, a core of people who, for whatever reason, have managed to reject the lies at the heart of the prevailing order. But are these people sufficient in numbers to form any significant opposition?
Sad to say, I think the majority in our country, and perhaps in all Western countries, are fully indoctrinated, so much so that they have no idea they have even been programmed to think as they do. I think many are indoctrinated so thoroughly that they believe the ideology of the regime to be their own, independent beliefs, and what's more, they would probably be willing to give their lives or take the lives of others for the sake of those beliefs.
True believers, no matter how bereft of truth the system to which they've pledged themselves, will do this. How many cults have made the headlines, as their benighted followers commit suicide or go to the extreme of killing the ''traitors'' who desert the cult or question its tenets?
Thomas Jefferson was a man who chose his words with great precision and care, as he did all things. When he wrote the phrase, 'tyranny over the mind of man,' he did so for a reason.
Imprisoning men's bodies does not confine their minds. The Left knows this. It's often said, however, that an idea can't be killed. When the Communist regimes imprisoned people like Solzhenitsyn, they did not destroy his ability to think freely. When a dissident or resister is killed, his ideas often spread because of his death. You truly can't kill ideas, but the tyrants know that you might kill an idea a-borning, and stop it from becoming fully formed and growing. And you might, to a great extent, render many people incapable of conceiving a free idea. You might intellectually sterilize or stunt people by steady, unrelenting propaganda, especially if it's started as early as possible in life, and sustained. You might, if you wished to do this, use everything from advertising to movies, to plays, music, literature, the visual arts, sports and games. Soon, as the propaganda takes hold, people propagate it without even realizing they are passing it on, like a virus. It becomes part and parcel of the whole culture.
To truly condition people and diminish their ability to think freely, you might also make plenty of mind-numbing, dulling drugs available, from the illegal ''street drugs'' to the respectable kind, prescribed by your kindly doctor and dispensed by the pharmacist. Have you ever noticed how many people you meet are on some kind of mood-altering drugs these days? The children are on various drugs for 'ADD", or ADHD or whatever it's called now, and the adults are often on antidepressants or sleep medications. Why are our medical professionals so eager to press these things on us? Every time I visit the doctor, the routine question ''are you depressed?'' is asked. Whose idea is it to importune people to take antidepressants? Is it some kind of official policy?
I am not impugning the character of doctors or other medical workers. I don't doubt that they believe they are doing only what is for our benefit, but I wonder why as a people we are so medicated.
A population that is harried and stressed by unstable conditions, uncertainty about tomorrow, and grieving, in some cases, the loss of the familiar, may feel more need to medicate their feelings away, and our government is probably happy to encourage this trend, as they become increasingly involved in our medical and health business. But a population that is anxious, stressed, and medicated for it will be less likely to be able to think clearly and judge rightly.
The ideologues who shape our culture do not want a populace with the time, the acuity, or the inclination to think and evaluate for themselves. The ideologues, those soft totalitarians who sit in seats of power, want to influence if not control our thoughts. Not only are our thoughts fair game, but our feelings, our emotions, our attitudes, our opinions, our moods, our wishes, aspirations, dreams, hopes, and expectations. They want to dictate the language we use, the words we choose to express ourselves. Obviously, via our entertainment, they want to shape the most private and personal fantasies and urges, too, and then enslave us to those as well.
Even our most sacred impulses are being shaped by the insidious influence of the prevailing ideology, which of course is, like the true God, a jealous 'god' who wants us to have no other deity but itself. Our churches, being led by and populated by imperfect people, has also fallen prey to the world's belief system, and the propaganda, which wants to govern how we relate to God as well as to our fellow man.
The Bible tells us not to fear those who kill the body. The soft totalitarians, the mind tyrants, may not kill dissenters outright, but they want to abort our ability to think and to feel as free men and women.
Often when we hear the word 'tyranny' we automatically envision the old Communist regimes in Eastern Europe where people were shipped off to gulags or mental institutions for dissenting from the regime and the Party. This hard totalitarianism, with its roundups of dissidents, or its midnight knocks on the door, is not the only kind. Though the systems could and did imprison (and sometimes kill) the bodies of dissenters, they could not always imprison the minds of their subjects.
It's commonly said, by those with direct experience of these regimes, that the people in general did not truly believe the ideology whichwas the basis for the Communist regimes. Newspapers, radio, and television, as well as movies, offered only the accepted party line on anything, and heavily censored anything that belied the official belief system. However, it seems that this information control was rather clumsy and transparent, and many people thus saw through it, inwardly rejecting it while outwardly conforming, and discreetly keeping silent.
Sometimes it's a temptation to wonder if the same is not true in the Western countries, where our politically correct, mandatory multiculturalism and ''equality'' are the dictates of the day. There is, certainly, a core of people who, for whatever reason, have managed to reject the lies at the heart of the prevailing order. But are these people sufficient in numbers to form any significant opposition?
Sad to say, I think the majority in our country, and perhaps in all Western countries, are fully indoctrinated, so much so that they have no idea they have even been programmed to think as they do. I think many are indoctrinated so thoroughly that they believe the ideology of the regime to be their own, independent beliefs, and what's more, they would probably be willing to give their lives or take the lives of others for the sake of those beliefs.
True believers, no matter how bereft of truth the system to which they've pledged themselves, will do this. How many cults have made the headlines, as their benighted followers commit suicide or go to the extreme of killing the ''traitors'' who desert the cult or question its tenets?
Thomas Jefferson was a man who chose his words with great precision and care, as he did all things. When he wrote the phrase, 'tyranny over the mind of man,' he did so for a reason.
Imprisoning men's bodies does not confine their minds. The Left knows this. It's often said, however, that an idea can't be killed. When the Communist regimes imprisoned people like Solzhenitsyn, they did not destroy his ability to think freely. When a dissident or resister is killed, his ideas often spread because of his death. You truly can't kill ideas, but the tyrants know that you might kill an idea a-borning, and stop it from becoming fully formed and growing. And you might, to a great extent, render many people incapable of conceiving a free idea. You might intellectually sterilize or stunt people by steady, unrelenting propaganda, especially if it's started as early as possible in life, and sustained. You might, if you wished to do this, use everything from advertising to movies, to plays, music, literature, the visual arts, sports and games. Soon, as the propaganda takes hold, people propagate it without even realizing they are passing it on, like a virus. It becomes part and parcel of the whole culture.
To truly condition people and diminish their ability to think freely, you might also make plenty of mind-numbing, dulling drugs available, from the illegal ''street drugs'' to the respectable kind, prescribed by your kindly doctor and dispensed by the pharmacist. Have you ever noticed how many people you meet are on some kind of mood-altering drugs these days? The children are on various drugs for 'ADD", or ADHD or whatever it's called now, and the adults are often on antidepressants or sleep medications. Why are our medical professionals so eager to press these things on us? Every time I visit the doctor, the routine question ''are you depressed?'' is asked. Whose idea is it to importune people to take antidepressants? Is it some kind of official policy?
I am not impugning the character of doctors or other medical workers. I don't doubt that they believe they are doing only what is for our benefit, but I wonder why as a people we are so medicated.
A population that is harried and stressed by unstable conditions, uncertainty about tomorrow, and grieving, in some cases, the loss of the familiar, may feel more need to medicate their feelings away, and our government is probably happy to encourage this trend, as they become increasingly involved in our medical and health business. But a population that is anxious, stressed, and medicated for it will be less likely to be able to think clearly and judge rightly.
The ideologues who shape our culture do not want a populace with the time, the acuity, or the inclination to think and evaluate for themselves. The ideologues, those soft totalitarians who sit in seats of power, want to influence if not control our thoughts. Not only are our thoughts fair game, but our feelings, our emotions, our attitudes, our opinions, our moods, our wishes, aspirations, dreams, hopes, and expectations. They want to dictate the language we use, the words we choose to express ourselves. Obviously, via our entertainment, they want to shape the most private and personal fantasies and urges, too, and then enslave us to those as well.
Even our most sacred impulses are being shaped by the insidious influence of the prevailing ideology, which of course is, like the true God, a jealous 'god' who wants us to have no other deity but itself. Our churches, being led by and populated by imperfect people, has also fallen prey to the world's belief system, and the propaganda, which wants to govern how we relate to God as well as to our fellow man.
The Bible tells us not to fear those who kill the body. The soft totalitarians, the mind tyrants, may not kill dissenters outright, but they want to abort our ability to think and to feel as free men and women.
Labels: Freedom Of Expression, Freedom Of Thought, Leftism, Media Manipulation, Multiculturalism, Political Correctness, Propaganda, Totalitarianism, Tyranny
0 comment Thursday, July 31, 2014 | admin
Peter Hitchins blogs about 'Conservative liberty and left wing liberty' in Britain.
...What is the difference between conservative liberty and left-wing liberty? Does it matter? (Yes) Can they be reconciled? (Not for long.) I'm grateful to Lord Hoffmann for an interesting and clever speech last week, which made this much clearer than before. Leonard Hoffmann is no fool. He knows his stuff. A lot of the speech, which you can find on the web by Googling "Universality of Human Rights" and "Hoffmann" is perceptive and clever. I am specially grateful to him for quoting Jeremy Bentham's enjoyable savaging of the ghastly French 'Declaration of the Rights of Man', the founding scripture of several gory tyrannies.
This vicious document, a series of foggy statements of the obvious, qualified with sub-clauses making them useless when most needed, actually contained one rather clear section (article 27) which would eventually allow its own authors to have their heads sliced off by the Guillotine they had themselves set up. Should we be sorry about Robespierre and the rest of them being devoured by their own revolution? In my case, not very - though nobody ever seems to learn from these events, and the Russian Bolsheviks ended up in the same fix, devoured by their own revolution.
Otherwise the French declaration was more or less like all the other scrolls of atheistical, grandiose blethers about 'rights' which have been endorsed, acclaimed and adopted all over the world since then, culminating in the United Nations Universal Declaration and the European Convention - and now rivalled by the EU's own Charter of 'fundamental' rights, soon to be used to interfere still more in our lives. Some might also draw attention to the Soviet constitution of 1936, acclaimed by many Western leftists as the finest ever drawn up, just in time for the mass purges and the Moscow Show trials.
The problem with these declarations, with their 'rights' to private life and their 'rights' to a fair trial and their 'rights' to everything else is that it all depends what you mean by private, and fair, and so forth. And what if these 'rights' come into conflict with each other? Who decides which is supreme? ''
This ties in somewhat with my post of the other day about the different kinds of revolutions, the restorationist, the Lockean, and the Jacobin kind. What Hitchins is discussing under the heading of left wing liberty is of the Jacobin variety, which always ends in tears and bloodshed, as history has shown.
As for his questions above about the definitions of ''fair', and so on, in arbitrating these liberties, the answer, as he says, is that the answers are left intentionally vague and open -- so as to give the authors of these documents the power to interpret them.
"Human Rights" have in effect become a replacement for religion. Why is that? I think it is because their supporters see that the problem of deciding what they mean will give them power. The elite increases its power by keeping the right to interpret and enforce these vague laws. It becomes the replacement for God, which is what it has always wanted to be.
Just look at the bizarre constructions placed even on the relatively clear bits of the US Bill of Rights by the American Supreme Court, which manufactured an abortion right out of nothing, drove prayer out of the schools on spurious grounds and for a while abolished the death penalty on an equally feeble pretext, then decided the penalty was all right after all. It is really hard to see how the same document can be read to say that execution is right one year, and wrong the next. It's clear that the real power comes not from the document, but from the court - and of course from those who appoint it.
[...]
That is why left-wing rights increase the power of the state. Conservative rights, as expressed in the hard, cool, terse language of the 1689 Bill of Rights, and its Scottish Equivalent the Claim of Right, and in the grand simplicity of the 1628 Petition of Right, concentrate on saying quite clearly what government cannot do. And in the space that is left, when the ruler is restrained by such things, free men can live, write, speak and think.''
What Hitchins is saying in the above passage illustrates the difference between 'negative rights' and positive rights, which is a kind of dividing line between the left-wing and conservative views of liberty which I've touched on here before in the past.
Under the theory of positive and negative rights, a negative right is a right not to be subjected to an action of another human being, or group of people, such as a state, usually in the form of abuse or coercion. A positive right is a right to be provided with something through the action of another person or the state. In theory a negative right proscribes or forbids certain actions, while a positive right prescribes or requires certain actions.''
The idea of positive liberty is generally associated with the Jacobin-style political philosophies, and because the proponents of such thought always see themselves as being the champions of all that is good and right, and as having the blueprint for utopia, they feel constrained to impose measures on people 'for their own good' or in the service of their ideals. This is the situation we are in now in the West, wherein today's leftist ideologues believe that things like 'hate speech laws' or political correctness in general are justified, thus leading to a net loss of liberty among the population.
This piece which appeared in The Australian tells of the increase in 'thought police' activity in the UK.
''BRITAIN appears to be evolving into the first modern soft totalitarian state. As a sometime teacher of political science and international law, I do not use the term totalitarian loosely.
There are no concentration camps or gulags but there are thought police with unprecedented powers to dictate ways of thinking and sniff out heresy, and there can be harsh punishments for dissent.
Nikolai Bukharin claimed one of the Bolshevik Revolution's principal tasks was "to alter people's actual psychology". Britain is not Bolshevik, but a campaign to alter people's psychology and create a new Homo britannicus is under way without even a fig leaf of disguise.
The Government is pushing ahead with legislation that will criminalise politically incorrect jokes, with a maximum punishment of up to seven years' prison. The House of Lords tried to insert a free-speech amendment, but Justice Secretary Jack Straw knocked it out. It was Straw who previously called for a redefinition of Englishness and suggested the "global baggage of empire" was linked to soccer violence by "racist and xenophobic white males". He claimed the English "propensity for violence" was used to subjugate Ireland, Scotland and Wales, and that the English as a race were "potentially very aggressive".
In the past 10 years I have collected reports of many instances of draconian punishments, including the arrest and criminal prosecution of children, for thought-crimes and offences against political correctness.''
In this related piece by Ed West in the UK Telegraph, we read similar reports of how even private conversations are being reported to the 'thought police' by self-selected informers. This is an ominous twist to things: the government does not even have to do the monitoring; the populace have become so indoctrinated, in many cases, that they themselves will voluntarily tattle to the authorities.
On the Hitchens blog, there are some good comments, like this one:
...We must ask ourselves some searching questions about why we did this. Did we really want our country to turn into a free-loader's paradise, a place where drunks rule the streets and hospitals double up as abortion clinics? Did we want cameras on every corner, our most private details held on Government computers and to be forced to carry ID cards? Did we want to complicate our lives with regulations and red tape for everythng from selling houses to starting a business? Did we want to subsidise the pensions of millions of beaurocrats from our taxes? Did we want to take in a few million immigrants, many of whom hate our way of life and want us dead? Did we want to surrender our sovereignty to Brussels or remove Brittania from our devalued coinage?
Unfortunately, asking these questions is simple. Putting right the wrong is going to be much harder.''
We in America can ask ourselves similar questions.
Another comment from the Hitchens blog:
Contributor S. Deol writes:
"If you live in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Britain, India or the U.S.A., consider yourself lucky that you live in a nation of English liberty." adding later that " All men can think, say, write and do whatever they please with reasonable restrictions."
Aye, there's the rub, as Shakespeare might have put it. I was waiting for that "with reasonable restrictions" or some such get-out expression. It is precisely the scope and definition of that adjective "reasonable" that is the crux of the whole matter.
People must have laws and laws are there to forbid things but when a nation comes under the control of rulers determined to solve all natural inequalities by piling laws upon laws - an enterprise doomed from the outset to failure in any case, that nation soon finds that it can do very little without requesting official permission or submitting to official supervision.
[...]
A modern Briton's freedom to say or write what he pleases is -as anyone knows - nowadays severely restricted by arbitrary rules of verbal expression sanctioned by no tribunal elected for the purpose and imposed on a law-abiding populace by now cowed into submission both by threat of threat of judicial punishment and by its own intellectual inability to discern the imposture by which one of its time-honoured liberties is being quietly removed.
The extent of our people's gullibility becomes plain when realises the incredible audacity of the imposition of the so-called 'political correction'. Its authors have pulled off a trick with which it would have been impossible to hoodwink our people even a couple of decades ago.
It is well known that bad language - in some cases even obscene language - eventually suffers the fate of all metaphor and loses its power to shock and what is unspeakable in one era can become only mildly distasteful or even totally anodyne in another. However, until someone decided that the British people were so habituated to buying their opinions along with their groceries that they were were ripe, so to speak, for being PC-swindled, the semantic traffic had, as far as I know, never gone in the opposite direction.
Bad words had sometimes become good but I can think of no good words which had before PC gone bad. And most of our gullible, tele-spoon-fed fellow-citizens have bought it hook, line and sinker.
And you talk about English liberty, sir! Don't make me laugh!''
English liberty is in fact the idea on which our American ideas of liberty are based; our Founding Fathers said that they desired 'only the rights of Englishmen.' We Americans too often imagine that we invented our idea of liberty from whole cloth, and that it is based on no antecedents, when in fact it draws from longstanding English traditions, going back at least to Magna Carta and English common law.
So it is especially sad to me to see that in Britain, the fount of many of our ideas and traditions, freedom and liberty and 'the rights of Englishmen' are under attack, if not moribund.
And as the first comment above says, 'putting right the wrong is going to be much harder', and that applies to us as well as to our cousins in the UK.
Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
Have forfeited their ancient English dower
Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;
Oh! raise us up, return to us again;
And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.
William Wordsworth, 'London 1802'
...What is the difference between conservative liberty and left-wing liberty? Does it matter? (Yes) Can they be reconciled? (Not for long.) I'm grateful to Lord Hoffmann for an interesting and clever speech last week, which made this much clearer than before. Leonard Hoffmann is no fool. He knows his stuff. A lot of the speech, which you can find on the web by Googling "Universality of Human Rights" and "Hoffmann" is perceptive and clever. I am specially grateful to him for quoting Jeremy Bentham's enjoyable savaging of the ghastly French 'Declaration of the Rights of Man', the founding scripture of several gory tyrannies.
This vicious document, a series of foggy statements of the obvious, qualified with sub-clauses making them useless when most needed, actually contained one rather clear section (article 27) which would eventually allow its own authors to have their heads sliced off by the Guillotine they had themselves set up. Should we be sorry about Robespierre and the rest of them being devoured by their own revolution? In my case, not very - though nobody ever seems to learn from these events, and the Russian Bolsheviks ended up in the same fix, devoured by their own revolution.
Otherwise the French declaration was more or less like all the other scrolls of atheistical, grandiose blethers about 'rights' which have been endorsed, acclaimed and adopted all over the world since then, culminating in the United Nations Universal Declaration and the European Convention - and now rivalled by the EU's own Charter of 'fundamental' rights, soon to be used to interfere still more in our lives. Some might also draw attention to the Soviet constitution of 1936, acclaimed by many Western leftists as the finest ever drawn up, just in time for the mass purges and the Moscow Show trials.
The problem with these declarations, with their 'rights' to private life and their 'rights' to a fair trial and their 'rights' to everything else is that it all depends what you mean by private, and fair, and so forth. And what if these 'rights' come into conflict with each other? Who decides which is supreme? ''
This ties in somewhat with my post of the other day about the different kinds of revolutions, the restorationist, the Lockean, and the Jacobin kind. What Hitchins is discussing under the heading of left wing liberty is of the Jacobin variety, which always ends in tears and bloodshed, as history has shown.
As for his questions above about the definitions of ''fair', and so on, in arbitrating these liberties, the answer, as he says, is that the answers are left intentionally vague and open -- so as to give the authors of these documents the power to interpret them.
"Human Rights" have in effect become a replacement for religion. Why is that? I think it is because their supporters see that the problem of deciding what they mean will give them power. The elite increases its power by keeping the right to interpret and enforce these vague laws. It becomes the replacement for God, which is what it has always wanted to be.
Just look at the bizarre constructions placed even on the relatively clear bits of the US Bill of Rights by the American Supreme Court, which manufactured an abortion right out of nothing, drove prayer out of the schools on spurious grounds and for a while abolished the death penalty on an equally feeble pretext, then decided the penalty was all right after all. It is really hard to see how the same document can be read to say that execution is right one year, and wrong the next. It's clear that the real power comes not from the document, but from the court - and of course from those who appoint it.
[...]
That is why left-wing rights increase the power of the state. Conservative rights, as expressed in the hard, cool, terse language of the 1689 Bill of Rights, and its Scottish Equivalent the Claim of Right, and in the grand simplicity of the 1628 Petition of Right, concentrate on saying quite clearly what government cannot do. And in the space that is left, when the ruler is restrained by such things, free men can live, write, speak and think.''
What Hitchins is saying in the above passage illustrates the difference between 'negative rights' and positive rights, which is a kind of dividing line between the left-wing and conservative views of liberty which I've touched on here before in the past.
Under the theory of positive and negative rights, a negative right is a right not to be subjected to an action of another human being, or group of people, such as a state, usually in the form of abuse or coercion. A positive right is a right to be provided with something through the action of another person or the state. In theory a negative right proscribes or forbids certain actions, while a positive right prescribes or requires certain actions.''
The idea of positive liberty is generally associated with the Jacobin-style political philosophies, and because the proponents of such thought always see themselves as being the champions of all that is good and right, and as having the blueprint for utopia, they feel constrained to impose measures on people 'for their own good' or in the service of their ideals. This is the situation we are in now in the West, wherein today's leftist ideologues believe that things like 'hate speech laws' or political correctness in general are justified, thus leading to a net loss of liberty among the population.
This piece which appeared in The Australian tells of the increase in 'thought police' activity in the UK.
''BRITAIN appears to be evolving into the first modern soft totalitarian state. As a sometime teacher of political science and international law, I do not use the term totalitarian loosely.
There are no concentration camps or gulags but there are thought police with unprecedented powers to dictate ways of thinking and sniff out heresy, and there can be harsh punishments for dissent.
Nikolai Bukharin claimed one of the Bolshevik Revolution's principal tasks was "to alter people's actual psychology". Britain is not Bolshevik, but a campaign to alter people's psychology and create a new Homo britannicus is under way without even a fig leaf of disguise.
The Government is pushing ahead with legislation that will criminalise politically incorrect jokes, with a maximum punishment of up to seven years' prison. The House of Lords tried to insert a free-speech amendment, but Justice Secretary Jack Straw knocked it out. It was Straw who previously called for a redefinition of Englishness and suggested the "global baggage of empire" was linked to soccer violence by "racist and xenophobic white males". He claimed the English "propensity for violence" was used to subjugate Ireland, Scotland and Wales, and that the English as a race were "potentially very aggressive".
In the past 10 years I have collected reports of many instances of draconian punishments, including the arrest and criminal prosecution of children, for thought-crimes and offences against political correctness.''
In this related piece by Ed West in the UK Telegraph, we read similar reports of how even private conversations are being reported to the 'thought police' by self-selected informers. This is an ominous twist to things: the government does not even have to do the monitoring; the populace have become so indoctrinated, in many cases, that they themselves will voluntarily tattle to the authorities.
On the Hitchens blog, there are some good comments, like this one:
...We must ask ourselves some searching questions about why we did this. Did we really want our country to turn into a free-loader's paradise, a place where drunks rule the streets and hospitals double up as abortion clinics? Did we want cameras on every corner, our most private details held on Government computers and to be forced to carry ID cards? Did we want to complicate our lives with regulations and red tape for everythng from selling houses to starting a business? Did we want to subsidise the pensions of millions of beaurocrats from our taxes? Did we want to take in a few million immigrants, many of whom hate our way of life and want us dead? Did we want to surrender our sovereignty to Brussels or remove Brittania from our devalued coinage?
Unfortunately, asking these questions is simple. Putting right the wrong is going to be much harder.''
We in America can ask ourselves similar questions.
Another comment from the Hitchens blog:
Contributor S. Deol writes:
"If you live in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Britain, India or the U.S.A., consider yourself lucky that you live in a nation of English liberty." adding later that " All men can think, say, write and do whatever they please with reasonable restrictions."
Aye, there's the rub, as Shakespeare might have put it. I was waiting for that "with reasonable restrictions" or some such get-out expression. It is precisely the scope and definition of that adjective "reasonable" that is the crux of the whole matter.
People must have laws and laws are there to forbid things but when a nation comes under the control of rulers determined to solve all natural inequalities by piling laws upon laws - an enterprise doomed from the outset to failure in any case, that nation soon finds that it can do very little without requesting official permission or submitting to official supervision.
[...]
A modern Briton's freedom to say or write what he pleases is -as anyone knows - nowadays severely restricted by arbitrary rules of verbal expression sanctioned by no tribunal elected for the purpose and imposed on a law-abiding populace by now cowed into submission both by threat of threat of judicial punishment and by its own intellectual inability to discern the imposture by which one of its time-honoured liberties is being quietly removed.
The extent of our people's gullibility becomes plain when realises the incredible audacity of the imposition of the so-called 'political correction'. Its authors have pulled off a trick with which it would have been impossible to hoodwink our people even a couple of decades ago.
It is well known that bad language - in some cases even obscene language - eventually suffers the fate of all metaphor and loses its power to shock and what is unspeakable in one era can become only mildly distasteful or even totally anodyne in another. However, until someone decided that the British people were so habituated to buying their opinions along with their groceries that they were were ripe, so to speak, for being PC-swindled, the semantic traffic had, as far as I know, never gone in the opposite direction.
Bad words had sometimes become good but I can think of no good words which had before PC gone bad. And most of our gullible, tele-spoon-fed fellow-citizens have bought it hook, line and sinker.
And you talk about English liberty, sir! Don't make me laugh!''
English liberty is in fact the idea on which our American ideas of liberty are based; our Founding Fathers said that they desired 'only the rights of Englishmen.' We Americans too often imagine that we invented our idea of liberty from whole cloth, and that it is based on no antecedents, when in fact it draws from longstanding English traditions, going back at least to Magna Carta and English common law.
So it is especially sad to me to see that in Britain, the fount of many of our ideas and traditions, freedom and liberty and 'the rights of Englishmen' are under attack, if not moribund.
And as the first comment above says, 'putting right the wrong is going to be much harder', and that applies to us as well as to our cousins in the UK.
Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
Have forfeited their ancient English dower
Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;
Oh! raise us up, return to us again;
And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.
William Wordsworth, 'London 1802'
Labels: Free Speech, Freedom, Jacobinism, Leftism, Liberty, Political Correctness, Rights, Totalitarianism, United Kingdom
0 comment Monday, June 23, 2014 | admin
Over at Moonbattery there is a post about the fact that November 18 is the anniversary of the awful Jonestown events -- whether you call the 900+ deaths suicide (as many do) or a massacre, it was a shocking scene.
Van Helsing at Moonbattery emphasizes that cult guru Jim Jones was a collectivist, a leftist, and not simply some crazed preacher as he was depicted in most of the media coverage. He was, first and foremost, a leftist, not a Christian. There is every evidence that he did not believe in Christianity, or religion in any form, unless he was to be its 'god.'
The Moonbattery piece links to a post by Petr at the old Original Dissent forums; it makes for interesting reading.
I know I've alluded to Jones and his 'People's Temple' in previous blog entries, but it is uncanny how closely his ideology resembled 21st century multiculturalist ideals. I don't say this in a flattering way, but he was ahead of his time. In our time he would not have fled the United States (which he believed was a thoroughly 'racist' country where he and his followers were hunted people). He would have stayed here and found a comfortable niche among his kindred souls on the multicult left. Maybe he would even be the revered grey eminence of that movement.
He was ahead of his time in that his obsessions and fetishes match those of today's cultural Marxists. He preached to his very diverse group of followers that America was a racist country, a fascist regime, in which their lives would be in constant danger. It sounds very similar to what the state media imply in many of their stories about 'racism.'
Jones was obsessed with the idea of 'rainbow families' much as today's trendy liberals are. He adopted 'diverse' children, and he pressured his followers to participate in interracial intimacy, which he told them was an act of love and charity.
He encouraged, shall we say, intergenerational relationships - the young with the elderly. This was recounted in a book written by a follower -- I have it in my possession somewhere, but at the moment I can't cite the name of the writer or the book. It's lost among my stacks of books for now.
The whole disastrous episode which ended in hundreds of people dead in Jonestown is a cautionary tale about the all-too-American tendency to blindly follow charismatic personalities, and to accept what authority figures say without examining it. There is no reason why his early followers, who were Christians, should have followed this deranged pied piper over the cliff. If they had done what Christians should do, and examined his 'teachings' from a Biblical perspective, as the Bereans of the Bible did, they would not have had a tragic end.
Why are many Americans so willing to follow false shepherds, and to uncritically accept the authority of these people? This seems to be a trait that is more common than it should be in our country. And the last couple of years seem to show us that it is ever more common.
What is most appalling about figures like Jones is that their compliant followers come to believe that they are serving 'God' or the cause of 'right' and justice. Totalitarianism in the name of do-goodery is the worst kind.
As I think I said before, Jones is something of a founder of postmodern 'America'; his ideology is the offical one, the default one, the one which most leftists today will fight for and maybe even die for. The leftists' 'America' should be renamed in honor of their inspiration, Jim Jones.
Maybe one of these days he will in fact be revered and his birthday honored. Maybe he will be the co-honoree on that January holy day that honors another leftist.
Van Helsing at Moonbattery emphasizes that cult guru Jim Jones was a collectivist, a leftist, and not simply some crazed preacher as he was depicted in most of the media coverage. He was, first and foremost, a leftist, not a Christian. There is every evidence that he did not believe in Christianity, or religion in any form, unless he was to be its 'god.'
The Moonbattery piece links to a post by Petr at the old Original Dissent forums; it makes for interesting reading.
I know I've alluded to Jones and his 'People's Temple' in previous blog entries, but it is uncanny how closely his ideology resembled 21st century multiculturalist ideals. I don't say this in a flattering way, but he was ahead of his time. In our time he would not have fled the United States (which he believed was a thoroughly 'racist' country where he and his followers were hunted people). He would have stayed here and found a comfortable niche among his kindred souls on the multicult left. Maybe he would even be the revered grey eminence of that movement.
He was ahead of his time in that his obsessions and fetishes match those of today's cultural Marxists. He preached to his very diverse group of followers that America was a racist country, a fascist regime, in which their lives would be in constant danger. It sounds very similar to what the state media imply in many of their stories about 'racism.'
Jones was obsessed with the idea of 'rainbow families' much as today's trendy liberals are. He adopted 'diverse' children, and he pressured his followers to participate in interracial intimacy, which he told them was an act of love and charity.
He encouraged, shall we say, intergenerational relationships - the young with the elderly. This was recounted in a book written by a follower -- I have it in my possession somewhere, but at the moment I can't cite the name of the writer or the book. It's lost among my stacks of books for now.
The whole disastrous episode which ended in hundreds of people dead in Jonestown is a cautionary tale about the all-too-American tendency to blindly follow charismatic personalities, and to accept what authority figures say without examining it. There is no reason why his early followers, who were Christians, should have followed this deranged pied piper over the cliff. If they had done what Christians should do, and examined his 'teachings' from a Biblical perspective, as the Bereans of the Bible did, they would not have had a tragic end.
Why are many Americans so willing to follow false shepherds, and to uncritically accept the authority of these people? This seems to be a trait that is more common than it should be in our country. And the last couple of years seem to show us that it is ever more common.
What is most appalling about figures like Jones is that their compliant followers come to believe that they are serving 'God' or the cause of 'right' and justice. Totalitarianism in the name of do-goodery is the worst kind.
As I think I said before, Jones is something of a founder of postmodern 'America'; his ideology is the offical one, the default one, the one which most leftists today will fight for and maybe even die for. The leftists' 'America' should be renamed in honor of their inspiration, Jim Jones.
Maybe one of these days he will in fact be revered and his birthday honored. Maybe he will be the co-honoree on that January holy day that honors another leftist.
Labels: Authoritarianism, Cultural Marxism, Multicult, Racial Conflict, Totalitarianism
0 comment Saturday, May 17, 2014 | admin
It's becoming more and more open and brazen.
THE health bills coming out of Congress would put the de cisions about your care in the hands of presidential appointees. They'd decide what plans cover, how much leeway your doctor will have and what seniors get under Medicare. Yet at least two of President Obama's top health advisers should never be trusted with that power. Start with Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. He has already been appointed to two key positions: health-policy adviser at the Office of Management and Budget and a member of Federal Council on Comparative Effectiveness Research. Emanuel bluntly admits that the cuts will not be pain-free.
[...]
Savings, he writes, will require changing how doctors think about their patients: Doctors take the Hippocratic Oath too seriously, "as an imperative to do everything for the patient regardless of the cost or effects on others" (Journal of the American Medical Association, June 18, 2008). Yes, that's what patients want their doctors to do. But Emanuel wants doctors to look beyond the needs of their patients and consider social justice, such as whether the money could be better spent on somebody else. Many doctors are horrified by this notion; they'll tell you that a doctor's job is to achieve social justice one patient at a time. Emanuel, however, believes that "communitarianism" should guide decisions on who gets care. He says medical care should be reserved for the non-disabled, not given to those "who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens . . . An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia" (Hastings Center Report, Nov.-Dec. '96).''
This bill is not getting the attention it deserves. Many of the op-eds that are appearing are more focused on the costs of this monstrosity, not the alarming ideas about the (non)-value of human life that are becoming more and more explicit as we find out more about this thing.This should concern all of us; it does not matter if you are young, or relatively young. Even the young and fit might at any time be in a disabling accident or be diagnosed with a serious illness which these leftist social engineers deem too 'costly', especially if treatment will only sustain the life of someone who would no longer be 'productive' or of any use to the State.
So this is not just something that will affect older people, who are unfortunately regarded as useless by many people in this callous age. It might affect people of any age, and even if it does not affect you personally now, it will at some point.
It's ironic in the extreme that the very people (leftists and pseudo-compassionate liberals) who pose as ''caring'' people, and who constantly call those to the right of them ''Nazis'', are willing to support a plan like this, with its totalitarian priorities.
Back during Ronald Reagan's terms of office, the news media constantly featured stories about Republican cold-heartedness. Those of you who remember that era will remember the stories about how the evil Republican budget cuts meant that children were given ketchup in their school lunches in place of a vegetable. Then there were the cries that poor elderly people were going to be out on the street under the budget cuts, and that many old folks were forced to eat cat food because they could not afford real food under the harsh Republican administration.
Obviously that was all hyperbole, but now these same tender-hearted people are nonchalantly proposing that we write off many old and disabled people because it is too costly and 'unfair' to keep them alive.
I plan to send this article to some of the liberals I know; I would bet that many of them, being rather ill-informed except for what they hear on NPR, are not aware of the provisions in this health care bill. This needs to be discussed.
THE health bills coming out of Congress would put the de cisions about your care in the hands of presidential appointees. They'd decide what plans cover, how much leeway your doctor will have and what seniors get under Medicare. Yet at least two of President Obama's top health advisers should never be trusted with that power. Start with Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. He has already been appointed to two key positions: health-policy adviser at the Office of Management and Budget and a member of Federal Council on Comparative Effectiveness Research. Emanuel bluntly admits that the cuts will not be pain-free.
[...]
Savings, he writes, will require changing how doctors think about their patients: Doctors take the Hippocratic Oath too seriously, "as an imperative to do everything for the patient regardless of the cost or effects on others" (Journal of the American Medical Association, June 18, 2008). Yes, that's what patients want their doctors to do. But Emanuel wants doctors to look beyond the needs of their patients and consider social justice, such as whether the money could be better spent on somebody else. Many doctors are horrified by this notion; they'll tell you that a doctor's job is to achieve social justice one patient at a time. Emanuel, however, believes that "communitarianism" should guide decisions on who gets care. He says medical care should be reserved for the non-disabled, not given to those "who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens . . . An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia" (Hastings Center Report, Nov.-Dec. '96).''
This bill is not getting the attention it deserves. Many of the op-eds that are appearing are more focused on the costs of this monstrosity, not the alarming ideas about the (non)-value of human life that are becoming more and more explicit as we find out more about this thing.This should concern all of us; it does not matter if you are young, or relatively young. Even the young and fit might at any time be in a disabling accident or be diagnosed with a serious illness which these leftist social engineers deem too 'costly', especially if treatment will only sustain the life of someone who would no longer be 'productive' or of any use to the State.
So this is not just something that will affect older people, who are unfortunately regarded as useless by many people in this callous age. It might affect people of any age, and even if it does not affect you personally now, it will at some point.
It's ironic in the extreme that the very people (leftists and pseudo-compassionate liberals) who pose as ''caring'' people, and who constantly call those to the right of them ''Nazis'', are willing to support a plan like this, with its totalitarian priorities.
Back during Ronald Reagan's terms of office, the news media constantly featured stories about Republican cold-heartedness. Those of you who remember that era will remember the stories about how the evil Republican budget cuts meant that children were given ketchup in their school lunches in place of a vegetable. Then there were the cries that poor elderly people were going to be out on the street under the budget cuts, and that many old folks were forced to eat cat food because they could not afford real food under the harsh Republican administration.
Obviously that was all hyperbole, but now these same tender-hearted people are nonchalantly proposing that we write off many old and disabled people because it is too costly and 'unfair' to keep them alive.
I plan to send this article to some of the liberals I know; I would bet that many of them, being rather ill-informed except for what they hear on NPR, are not aware of the provisions in this health care bill. This needs to be discussed.
Labels: Big Government, Democrats, Euthanasia, Health Care, Liberal Hypocrisy, Liberalism, Medical Care, Medical Ethics, Nanny State, Public Health, Totalitarianism
0 comment Sunday, April 27, 2014 | admin
The question was raised in a comment the other day about why there was no searching and body scanning involved in traveling by train or bus or boat.
We all expected this, sooner or later:
''The next step in tightened security could be on U.S. public transportation, trains and boats.
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano says terrorists will continue to look for U.S. vulnerabilities, making tighter security standards necessary.
"[Terrorists] are going to continue to probe the system and try to find a way through," Napolitano said in an interview that aired Monday night on "Charlie Rose."
"I think the tighter we get on aviation, we have to also be thinking now about going on to mass transit or to trains or maritime. So, what do we need to be doing to strengthen our protections there?"
The writer of the article, Jordy Yager, mentions that others, like Joe Lieberman, have already suggested similar measures for those entering federal buildings.
''Napolitano said she hoped the U.S. could get to a place in the future where Americans would not have to be as guarded against terrorist attacks as they are and that she was actively promoting research into the psychology of how a terrorist becomes radicalized.''
'Guarded against terrorist attacks?' Who? Where? How? By leaving our southern border wide open to narco-traffickers and gangs and basically anyone who strays across the erstwhile border? Or by purposely admitting people from lawless countries like Somalia, and planting them in small towns across the U.S.? Who does she think she is fooling?
She mentions promoting research to try to understand the psychology of how terrorists develop. Typical blather about ''root causes'' and 'understanding.'
Even if we can psychoanalyze those who mean us harm, that would be a long term strategy, not a way of protecting American citizens here and now. The cliche about 'understanding' malefactors is a longstanding obsession with leftists and silly females. We used to hear the bleeding-hearts talking about how we should not execute murderers, but try to get at why they do what they do, so that we can prevent such acts in the future. Well, suppose we could see into the minds of violent people of whatever kind, and suppose we spot these theoretical telltale signs of a budding maniac. Do we then lock him up just in case? Medicate him? Put him in an institution for re-education? Drug him into harmlessness? The whole notion would not be allowable in a free country, and thus it is probably exactly what these lefties would like to do. I suspect they would not be as interested in the real threats, but in what they are now casually calling 'domestic extremists', formerly known as 'normal Americans', or perhaps just Americans who are being goaded to do something 'extreme' so as to justify abridging our rights even further.
So what's next? Internal passports? Searches at state borders, or other random places?
Whatever is next, it will not be to ensure our security, but to extend the government's power.
We all expected this, sooner or later:
''The next step in tightened security could be on U.S. public transportation, trains and boats.
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano says terrorists will continue to look for U.S. vulnerabilities, making tighter security standards necessary.
"[Terrorists] are going to continue to probe the system and try to find a way through," Napolitano said in an interview that aired Monday night on "Charlie Rose."
"I think the tighter we get on aviation, we have to also be thinking now about going on to mass transit or to trains or maritime. So, what do we need to be doing to strengthen our protections there?"
The writer of the article, Jordy Yager, mentions that others, like Joe Lieberman, have already suggested similar measures for those entering federal buildings.
''Napolitano said she hoped the U.S. could get to a place in the future where Americans would not have to be as guarded against terrorist attacks as they are and that she was actively promoting research into the psychology of how a terrorist becomes radicalized.''
'Guarded against terrorist attacks?' Who? Where? How? By leaving our southern border wide open to narco-traffickers and gangs and basically anyone who strays across the erstwhile border? Or by purposely admitting people from lawless countries like Somalia, and planting them in small towns across the U.S.? Who does she think she is fooling?
She mentions promoting research to try to understand the psychology of how terrorists develop. Typical blather about ''root causes'' and 'understanding.'
Even if we can psychoanalyze those who mean us harm, that would be a long term strategy, not a way of protecting American citizens here and now. The cliche about 'understanding' malefactors is a longstanding obsession with leftists and silly females. We used to hear the bleeding-hearts talking about how we should not execute murderers, but try to get at why they do what they do, so that we can prevent such acts in the future. Well, suppose we could see into the minds of violent people of whatever kind, and suppose we spot these theoretical telltale signs of a budding maniac. Do we then lock him up just in case? Medicate him? Put him in an institution for re-education? Drug him into harmlessness? The whole notion would not be allowable in a free country, and thus it is probably exactly what these lefties would like to do. I suspect they would not be as interested in the real threats, but in what they are now casually calling 'domestic extremists', formerly known as 'normal Americans', or perhaps just Americans who are being goaded to do something 'extreme' so as to justify abridging our rights even further.
So what's next? Internal passports? Searches at state borders, or other random places?
Whatever is next, it will not be to ensure our security, but to extend the government's power.
Labels: 4Th Amerndment, Anarcho-Tyranny, Freedom Of Movement, Terrorism, Totalitarianism