In my book L: A Novel History, revolution sweeps Louis Zander, a charismatic philosopher of art and politics known as L, into power as a Marxist dictator of England.

It is available in hardback, paperback and kindle editions here.

These are quotations from L: A Novel History illustrating themes of the book which, though set in a fictitious England in the 1980s, are applicable to the United States under President Obama.

1. Analogies to The Occupy Wall Street Movement:

There was no use in protest marches and demonstrations now. For now there was real deprivation, real tyranny, real hunger. And that was precisely what L had promised them. They were no longer rich in many poor things, as once protestors had so angrily complained to governments and authorities. Now they were poor in all things. It was those who had freedom and decried it, pretending they were oppressed; those who had material plenty and despised it, pretending they were poor; those who thus secreted a worm in their own hearts, and so at the heart of civilization – envy: the amazing unforeseen and unforeseeable envy, by the free and comfortable, of the unfree and wretched of the earth: it was these self-deceiving, would-be lovers of mankind … the affluent children who squatted in the communes and protested against freedom calling it “repressive tolerance”, and those they elected … who were caught in the trap of their own lies, and brought an end to liberty in the name of liberation; an end to plenty in the name of humanitarianism; and an end to the impersonality of the law before which all were equal, and the impersonality of the market in which all were equal, and created legal discrimination and class elitism, in the name of equality.

2. Dependency on the state:

The people had become unaccustomed to self-reliance. They did not after all want a government that would leave them to do the best they could for themselves, and only remove obstacles and restrictions. They wanted a government with paternal responsibilities: to house the citizens, educate them, inoculate them against diseases, cure them when they were ill, keep them warm, tell them to fasten their safety-harnesses in their cars, warn them against smoking tobacco, “counsel” them when they quarreled with their spouses or beat their children or drank too much … and even spend as much of their money as possible on what government considered good for them rather than let them spend it themselves! If the educated and well-off did not need all this for themselves, they believed that “the vast majority of the people of this country” did need it. … The tragedy of Britain was that a self-reliant, self-disciplined, industrious people who had valued freedom, justice, goodwill, commonsense, and had grown strong and prospered because they had the character to embrace those values, had been turned into dependants, dissatisfied and envious, demanding that the state provide what they were no longer willing to provide for themselves.

L wrote: “I look towards a time when none shall have peace, when all feel insecure, and can look only to the Party, manifestly whimsical, for any reward and any punishment, without any reason to expect justice. For there and there only authority will reside, and it will be total and incomprehensible. No aspect of their lives will be too big or too small for the Party to deal with. It will reach into the heart and mind of every man, and his person, his life, will belong not to him but to the Party. The Party will hold the monopoly of life and death. Whatever anyone has will be dispensed to him by the Party, whether it is a material thing, like food and drink, or dignity, self-respect, his mate, the company of his own children. And there will be no escape. For the power of the Party must be planetary. That is why there can be no refuge for individualism; why anyone who expresses thoughts the Party has not allowed him, or who even thinks them to himself, must be stopped.”

3. Redistribution:

L wrote: “You and I know perfectly well that a redistribution of wealth does not make everybody wealthy. In fact, it makes everybody poor.”

4. Social justice:

Increasingly it was the case that the victims of crime were less the object of concern than were the criminals who were excused on the grounds that they were the “real victims” of something called “social injustice”. Tax-payers’ money was spent lavishly on providing them with “therapy”, shelter, comfort, and rehabilitation.

5. Central planning:

The oligarchs occupied themselves with the laborious business of trying “to plan society”. Laws, rules and regulations proliferated, all emanating from the Council of Ministers. Local government was “suspended” when the Council took its “emergency powers”. Administrators were appointed in their stead: Party officials with unlimited powers over persons and property in their districts.

6. Inflation:

“It is in our interest to boost inflation … the unions which have power in the state-monopolized vital services – electricity and gas, mining, transport, shipping, the health service – must use it to keep public expenditure high. Easy enough, since members are unlikely to object to using their collective power to get wages as high as the union can squeeze out of the government for them … The more public money paid out to failing industries the better for us … High unemployment is in our long-term interest, but it is not to our short-term advantage. … Workers are less likely to strike, bring private firms to bankruptcy and generally disrupt the economy if they have real reason to fear the loss of jobs through employment reduction or closure of a business. … There is also the extreme danger that they will start selling their services privately for payment they do not declare – in other words the free ‘black’ economy might gain in strength, and far too many rediscover the personal advantages of self-employment.”

L knew that continuous inflation of the value of money was inimical not only to prosperity, but to security and hopes for the future. He knew that the most responsible, the most self-reliant, the most thrifty, would be the most cheated, because to save money was to lose money. He knew that as money bought less, demands for higher wages would be made more frequently and more exorbitantly; and that those demands could only be met by the printing of ever more paper money, worth ever less and less. And as the Conservative government tried to bring down inflation, tried to make the country live within its means, produce more to earn more real money, L’s legions howled against their efforts. .L-ite economists urged that the government print more money. Their recommendations were given wide and persistent publicity by the BBC, independent television and radio, and most – though not quite all – of the national daily newspapers.

7.  The politics of envy:

Private ownership of land could be ended forever; private education could be made illegal; private medicine entirely abolished; all the known needs of the underprivileged supplied in perfect measure, the poor made collectively rich, and – best of all – the rich made poor.

8. Freedom as a burden:

The Left feared: “The Conservatives will impose freedom on everybody, even those least able to bear it.”

9. Judging according to empathy rather than evidence:

What judges were expected to do was “manifest heart”. The important thing in what had once been called a criminal case was to “arrive at an understanding of the quality of the man” they were judging.

10. Back to the simple life:

[The citizen’s] experience of the revolution was of the decay of everything. He was poor. He was cold. Quite soon he was worse fed that he had ever imagined would be possible in England. Soon the scope of his activities became severely curtailed, and life became monotonous in its misery, unless it was suddenly made appalling and agonizing for this or that individual.

L wrote that they must feel not just cold and hunger, but terror, loneliness, despair. Only then will they understand that the Party is their savior, and that it alone can redeem them from their most terrible spiritual torment – isolation. They will give up their little selfish desires, the pathetic shallow satisfactions they have been deceived into imagining are their real needs. They will begin to understand their role in history. They will thank the power that whips them with tears in their eyes, the mastering Party, giver of bread and purposes.

11. Making the country ungovernable – on the lines of the Cloward-Piven strategy:

The assault on the “commanding heights of power” was to be done by the disruption of civil order, the stirring up of violence in the streets, to the point of serious insurrection and even civil war if possible. Hence the importance of the emotional issue of race. The idea was that liberal democratic government was to be seen not to work. Then an extreme left-dominated Party would take extraordinary powers to restore order.

12. “We all belong to the government” – as per the 2012 Democratic National Convention:

“Everyone will have the pleasure of knowing that he is being used. That what he does is what he must do. That therefore he is necessary, and has purpose. He will belong to the state and the state to him. He will be attached to the state as a babe to its mother’s breast.”

“The state must put them in houses, bring them to school, tempt them with pensions, lure them with kindness. When all have been received inside the shelter of the state, then they will be redeemable. What a harvest will then be promised of men and women for the new age, the third millennium and beyond. But the process of redemption will not be as easy as the gathering-in. They have yet to learn that beyond their material needs there are others, which they have first to discover and then to understand and then to satisfy before they are fit for the absolute community of the human spirit wherein no individual shall have an existence outside of the community, and each will joyfully give up his life at any moment for the preservation of the Greater Life of Universal Man.”

L: A Novel History may turn out to be prophetic if the new leader of the British Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, comes to power. 

Jillian Becker   November 29, 2015

On this Thanksgiving Day, we thank all our readers and commenters for their interest, support, critical appreciation and encouragement.

We specially thank one indispensable commenter, liz, on whose insightful, well-informed comments we have come to rely to reinforce and often expand our posts.

Generally speaking – and disregarding occasional attacks by believers in the Supernatural or Big Government – we must have one of the most intelligent readerships of any blogs in the world.

Quite a large number of our regular readers do not live in the US. Canada, Britain, France, Germany, the Czech Republic, Australia, South Africa and India are where most of our foreign visitors reside. But there are also a few who live in countries where it is dangerous for them even to let our title appear on their screens. They have our respectful admiration as well as our gratitude.

We wish you all long life, liberty, and success in the pursuit of happiness.

Here is our Facebook summary of this article:

Yesterday, California Governor Jerry Brown signed into law a bill allowing terminally ill patients to end life, using drugs prescribed by their doctors. (There are religious conservatives who think taking your own life is an affront to “God” and that he wants nature run its course, even when you’re deathly sick, in constant pain, and have no hope for recovery – although he loves you. ) The choice to die is not made a requirement. The law simply gives patients the option to die if that’s what they want. The act stipulates that patients must be physically capable of taking the medication themselves, that two doctors confirm the reaons for the choice, that the patients submit a series of written requests, and that there be two witnesses, one of whom is not a family member.

This is the one thing Governor Jerry Brown has done that we approve of.

But we have heard reasonable arguments against euthanasia.

So we invite readers to give us their views on the issue.

“The US and Cuba are no longer enemies or rivals but neighbors. And it is time to let the world know that we wish each other well,” said Stupid Traitorous Secretary of State John Kerry as the U.S. flag was raised in Havana, Aug, 14, 2015.

“We won the war!” Raoul Castro cried triumphantly. 

A bitter and infuriating development for refugees from the tyranny of the Castros’ Communist Cuba, and surely for all right-thinking persons everywhere!

For them, Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban refugees, spoke.

The Hill reports:

Sen. Marco Rubio on Friday blasted President Obama’s “dangerous” twin outreaches to Iran and Cuba, which he called symptoms of a broader policy of “weakness and concession”.

“The concessions to Iran and Cuba both endanger our nation,” the Florida Republican and presidential candidate said in remarks at the Foreign Policy Initiative.

“I believe they represent the convergence of nearly every flawed strategic, moral and economic notion that has driven President Obama’s foreign policy, and as such are emblematic of so many of the crises he has worsened around the world.”

The remarks came as American diplomats were preparing to raise their flag above the U.S. Embassy in Havana for the first time in more than five decades.

And Humberto Fontova, writing at Townhall, tells this story:

“I see that the flagpole still stands,” said a choked-up General Douglas MacArthur on March 2, 1945 as he entered devastated but liberated Corregidor. “Have our troops hoist the colors to its peak, and let no enemy ever haul them down. “

A U.S. Army sergeant named Manuel Perez-Garcia was on Luzon during that victorious flag-raising. Perez-Garcia was born in Cuba but immigrated to the U.S. after Pearl Harbor to join the U.S. Army and volunteer for combat. At the time of that flag-raising he’d fought almost constantly for 14 months, through New Guinea and the southern Philippines. His purple hearts, Bronze Star and Silver Star with Oak Leaf Cluster said something about his role in that victory for freedom. We can only imagine how he felt when he finally saw his beloved stars and stripes fluttering over Corregidor.

Upon the Communist invasion of South Korea in June of 1950, Manuel Perez-Garcia rallied to the U.S. colors again, volunteering for the U.S. army again at age 41. It took a gracious letter from President Harry Truman himself to explain that by U.S. law Manuel was slightly overaged but mostly that, “You, sir, have served well above and beyond your duty to the nation. You’ve written a brilliant page in service to this country.”

Mr Perez-Garcia’s son, Jorge, however, was the right age for battle in Korea and stepped to the fore. He joined the U.S. army, made sergeant and died from a hail of Communist bullets while leading his men in Korea on May 4th 1952.

When Manuel Perez Garcia was 51 years old, the Castro brothers and Che Guevara were busily converting his native country into a Soviet satrapy riddled with prison camps and mass graves. So Manuel volunteered for combat again. Like most of his Cuban Band of Brothers he fought to his very last bullet, inflicting casualties of 20 to 1 against his Soviet armed and led enemies. That bitter and bloody battleground is now known as The Bay of Pigs.

When the smoke cleared and their ammo had been expended to the very last bullet, a hundred of them lay dead and hundreds more wounded, after their very mortars and machine gun barrel had almost melted from their furious rates of fire; after three days of relentless battle, barely 1,400 Cuban freedom-fighters – without air support (from the U.S. Carriers just offshore) and without a single supporting shot by naval artillery (from U.S. cruisers and destroyers poised just offshore) – had squared off against 21,000 Castro troops, his entire air force and squadrons of Soviet tanks. The Cuban freedom-fighters inflicted casualties of 20 to 1 against their Soviet-armed and led enemies. But to hear Castro’s echo chambers in the mainstream media, think-tanks and academia, Fidel was the plucky David and the betrayed invaders the bumbling Goliath!

The battle was over in three days, but the heroism was not.

Now came almost two years in Castro’s dungeons for Mr Perez-Garcia and his captured Band of Brothers, complete with the psychological torture that always accompanies communist incarceration. During these months in Castro’s dungeons, the freedom-fighters lived under a daily firing squad-death sentence.

Escaping that sentence would have been easy, as Castro’s KGB-trained torturers “explained” almost daily: simply sign the little paper confessing they were “mercenaries of the Yankee imperialists” and go on record denouncing the U.S. In other words: publicly spit on the U.S. flag. In other words, the same stunt half of Hollywood pulls for the sake of publicity, these men could have pulled to save their lives.

None buckled. None even wobbled. None of these “men” (actually, some were as young as Audie Murphy had been upon trying to enlist in 1941) signed the document – nor uttered a word against the Stars and Stripes.

And I stress: these men were convinced that going on record trashing the U.S. would save their lives. After all, during these very months Che Guevara’s firing squads were murdering hundreds of bound and gagged Cubans weekly, and for “crimes” much less offensive than those of these men and boys.

The Cuban freedom-fighters stood tall, proud, defiant, and solidly with their commander, even sparring with Castro himself during their televised Stalinist show trials. “We will die with dignity!” snapped freedom-fighter commander Erneido Oliva at the furious Castroites again, and again, and again. To Castroites, such an attitude not only enrages but baffles.

Manuel Perez-Garcia passed away in Miami at the tender age of 102 in 2011. Today his ashes along with those of his son rest in Arlington. Maybe he’s lucky not to witness his beloved flag raised in Castro’s Havana, within walking distance of political prisons and torture chambers, a smirking Che Guevara mocking it from banners and murals in every direction.

For Manuel Perez-Garcia and his Band of Brothers that flag [the Stars and Stripes] symbolized victory and freedom.

In Havana today it symbolizes U.S. surrender to the Stalinist cowards who destroyed and defiled their homeland, and craved to nuke their adopted one.

“When at the Bay of Pigs we were abandoned, we were sad,” says Che Guevara’s captor Felix Rodriguez, who today serves as the President of the Bay of Pigs Veterans Association. “And now we feel abandoned again, betrayed by the President.”

We would only disagree with Marco Rubio’s statement of condemnation so far as to contend that Obama and his gang – especially traitorous Kerry – who so incredibly govern the United States, are not “making concessions” to their country’s enemies out of “weakness”, but pressing aid and comfort upon them out of passionate ideological affinity. 

From the Hoover Institution at Stanford University (read more here):

The Hoover Institution, today, mourns the loss of a great historian and friend, Robert Conquest.  It is with profound sadness that we reflect upon his life and intellectual contributions, which have left a lasting impression around the world. …

Conquest spent 28 years at the Hoover Institution where he was a Senior Research Fellow. A recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2005, he was a renowned historian of Soviet politics and foreign policy.  Conquest has been known for his landmark work The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties. More than 35 years after its publication, the book remains one of the most influential studies of Soviet history and has been translated into more than 20 languages.

Conquest was the author of twenty-one books on Soviet history, politics, and international affairs including Harvest of Sorrow, Stalin and the Kirov Murder, The Great Terror: A Reassessment, Stalin: Breaker of Nations and Reflections on a Ravaged Century and The Dragons of Expectation.  Conquest was literary editor of the London Spectator, brought out eight volumes of poetry and one of literary criticism, edited the seminal New Lines anthologies (1955–63), and published a verse translation of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s epic Prussian Nights (1977). …

Educated at Winchester College and the University of Grenoble, he was an exhibitioner in modern history at Magdalen College, Oxford, receiving his BA and MA in politics, philosophy, and economics and his DLitt in history.

Conquest served in the British infantry in World War II and thereafter in His Majesty’s Diplomatic Service; he was awarded the Order of the British Empire. In 1996 he was named a Companion of the Order of St. Michael and St. George.

In the late 1960s an era of terrorism began. Organized terrorist groups struck within the liberal democracies of Western Europe and North America, and in the less secure countries of South America and Africa. Groups of different nationalities acted with and for each other. One of them, the Palestine Liberation Organization, became the chief and central agency for dispensing terror and death, for supplying fighters, arms, money, training, orders and advice to customers of every shade of political and ideological coloration who were eager or willing to destroy, terrify and kill. And the power for which it acted as agent in its mission of global partisan warfare was the Soviet Union. … Those are the inescapable conclusions to which [this book] leads.

Support for terrorist organizations … now seems to be Moscow’s accepted tactic. But the author also makes it clear that from early Soviet times such support has been given in circumstances or areas where the advantages seem to outbalance the admitted negatives. It is is thus to be seen as a tactical weapon in the process of unlimited expansion as and when possible to which Leninism, and their political mind-set in general, commits Soviet leaders.

A fourth video proving that Planned Parenthood sells parts of babies is now circulating.

This latest one reveals that the trafficking in parts includes those of children actually born whole and alive.

What we’d like to know is: do the mothers get a share of the proceeds? There has been no indication that they do, but shouldn’t they?

Is a fetus the property of the mother or isn’t it?

So far it is being treated as the exclusive property of the abortionist. That doesn’t seem right to us.

If it is okay to sell fetuses and babies, whether whole or in parts, then women could establish a whole new industry.

Just think of it. Make money at your ease, ladies. All in the comfort of your own homes. And with very little labor – except perhaps at the very end of the process, if the goods ordered need to be whole and alive.

Form a union or professional association to set and control prices.

A new kind of monopoly! Women only. All over the world. No limitation by national borders. No travel. Get on with other things while your valuable crop grows inside you.

Conceive in pleasure, sell at leisure.

You can decide when to abort, or whether to go to term, depending on whether you want high turnover or one large payment once a year.

Why should you conceive children that will cost you a fortune to raise and educate when you can instead conceive them to make your fortune?

Pregnant women of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your virginity – and your mothering instinct (and who cares about that?). True, you will go through horrible mood-swings as your hormones adjust radically to one condition and then another, but medical science will soon find a way to take care of that if it hasn’t already.

But don’t forget your personal income from selling the fruits of your womb will be taxed. Which is why you will probably find that the state has nothing against the business and is even likely to encourage it.

Of course, it won’t be long before fathers will start demanding a share of the revenues. Be prepared: a big argument is looming up there.

And don’t imagine that your monopoly will last for long. The science already exists for children – and even grown ups – to be grown in laboratories. Remember Dolly the sheep?

Come to think of it,  she was grown from a cell from a mammary gland. Now you won’t be needing your breasts to feed infants, so why not sell them? Yet another source of income entirely in you own control, with no expenditure and no overheads.

Well yes, new laws will soon be needed to make it clear just who has what property rights in human eggs, sperm, cells, fetuses, children …

And international agreements will probably need to be negotiated. But that’s all in the future.

Meanwhile, ladies and pubescent girls, F*** for Fun and Fortune!

O brave new world, that has such people in it!

Barack Obama … has done more to diminish America’s standing, power, and military than any single figure in American history.

– So Mark Tapson writes at Front Page.

He goes on (in part):

Last Friday, as the week downshifted into the Memorial Day three-day holiday, the official Twitter account of the Democratic Party … tweeted a pic of – whom else? – President Obama lapping at an ice cream cone while media lapdogs zoomed their cameras in to capture the photo op. … For Barack Obama, of course, everything is about Barack Obama.

This all came in the wake of the fall of Ramadi in Iraq to the demonic forces of ISIS – you know, the JV team that has absolutely nothing to do with Islam. In the early years of the war in Iraq, more American lives were lost in the intense fighting to secure the province of Anbar, which includes Ramadi and Fallujah, than anywhere else in the country. Now our warriors who survived that fighting, and the families and friends of those who didn’t, are watching ISIS reclaim Iraq and are wondering what that sacrifice was for.