The United Socialist States of America?

Is it really possible that the United States of America will vote to become a socialist country? Is the Democratic Party now irredeemably a socialist party? If so, does it as such have a real chance of winning the House, the Senate and the Presidency?

Victor David Hanson writes at Townhall:

A recent Harris poll showed that about half of so-called millennials would like to live in a socialist country. …

But they have no idea what socialism is. Professor Hanson gives several reason why millennials are attracted to what they think it is, including this:

Schools and colleges have replaced the empirical study of economics, history and politics with race, class and gender indoctrination.

Few young activists … know the 20th century history of … Cambodian dictator Pol Pot, Soviet Union strongman Joseph Stalin and Chinese revolutionary leader Mao Zedong [who] each killed millions of their own people.

Today’s students romanticize Che Guevara and Fidel Castro because they are clueless about their bloody careers. The Castro government for over a half-century was responsible for the murders of thousands of Cubans and Latin Americans in efforts to solidify Cuban “socialism” throughout Latin America.

When our schools and colleges do not teach unbiased economics and history, then millions of youth have no idea why the United States, Great Britain, Germany and Japan became wealthy and stable by embracing free-market capitalism and constitutional government. Few learn why naturally rich nations such as Argentina, Brazil, Mexico and Venezuela — or entire regions such as Central America, Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia — have traditionally lagged far behind due to years of destructive central planning, socialist economics and coerced communist government.

The handmaiden of failed socialist regimes has always been ignorance of the past and present. And that is never truer than among today’s American college-degreed (but otherwise economically and historically illiterate) youth.

What can be done to counter the propaganda of the Left which is winning so many with its false promises?

The offering is parceled so prettily: economic equality, guaranteed jobs, free health care, free education. But take off the wrapping, and the contents are poverty, dreariness, staleness,  hopelessness at best, agony and violent death at worst.

Here is our answer, taken almost verbatim from the article titled Tell Them (under Pages in our margin), first posted in mid October 2016, shortly before the election that fortunately brought Donald Trump to the presidency:

Why do millions of Americans “think” that economic equality is morally desirable?

Why are tens of millions content to live on state support without attempting to improve their standard of living by their own efforts?

Why do millions of university students in America admire intellectuals who hate America, such as Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, and make an icon out of the sadistic mass-murderer Che Guevara?

Why? Because they’ve been told to. They’ve been told that good people do and “think” these things. They want to be good. They believe what they’ve been taught.

The same answer applies to: Why Muslim women believe they must put up with being sexually mutilated and enslaved to men. Why multitudes the world over believe that there was a nation called Palestinians who were driven off their land by aggressive usurping Jews. Why Christians believe that a man who died long ago lives on as one part of a three-part god. Why Muslims and Christians imagine that when you are dead you are still alive in another place. Why Jews believe that their benign and omnipotent God has some unknowable but just purpose in having six million of them enslaved, starved, tortured and murdered by Nazis.

They believe these things because they were taught them. All this was drummed into them. They were raised to know that that is how it ought to be. 

Few if any ideas are easy to spread. To get an idea accepted by large numbers of people takes patience, persistence, conviction, tireless energy on the part of those who want to spread it. The idea need not make good sense, be reasonable, come with proofs that it will work as its advocates say it will. It doesn’t even have to appeal strongly to the emotions. It just needs to become what “everybody” accepts.

If you want your idea to prevail over others, this is what it takes. First the conviction that it is right and everyone should know it. Next, a decision to spread it. Then energy, persistence, patience – and eventually force.

What made Christianity catch on? It wasn’t the life-style – poor, austere, hard, humble. Even the promise of eternal life was not a reliable recommendation as anyone’s eternity could as easily be endless agony as endless bliss (it was and is a 50-50 tossup). The theology was so hard to make sense of that the Church itself to this day has not settled it. And the morality it demanded was against human nature. So what made it succeed? Energy, persistence, patience, indoctrination, force.

See how long it took. From the time St Paul invented “Jesus Christ” to the time the emperor of Rome (Constantine) accepted the new god and the doctrines that had accreted to him, thus making it fashionable to be Christian (just a few decades before force was applied and it became compulsory), nearly three hundred years had passed. Three hundred years of persistent, patient, energetic proselytizing. Even then, it was not securely implanted in the minds of the subjects. One Emperor – Julian – came along and actually tried to reverse the trend by suppressing Christianity and re-instating paganism. He didn’t have enough time. He died in battle, his successors went back to favoring Christianity, and the Emperor Theodosius decreed that Christianity was to be the religion of the state. With him the final phase of force arrived.

Marxist Communism took less time to get a real grip on the minds of multitudes. Means of communications had speeded up considerably between the 4^th and the 19^th centuries, but still it took half a century (if one arbitrarily dates it from the first publication of Marx’s Das Kapital in 1867 to the success of the Bolshevik revolution in 1917). And still the same method had to be employed: energetic, patient, persistent proselytizing. Much repetition was required. The fever of enthusiasm had to be caught by two generations of intellectuals before the infection became a pandemic. Then came force. 

The creed must become the norm. So pervasive must the doctrine be that anybody who does not subscribe to it wholeheartedly will appear egregious; an oddball, a rebel, a danger to everyone else and even to himself. The orthodoxy must be accepted without question as good, so anyone who opposes it is ipso facto a bad person.

By the late 20^th century communications had become even faster, so the New Left, rising in 1968, could achieve the peaks of power in Europe in less than thirty years, and  in America in forty years. It started as a weak revolutionary movement which brought nothing good with it to Western Europe and America, but much that was bad: recreational drugs, AIDS, and terrorism as self-expression. New Leftists complained that they had too much freedom, too much choice, that tolerance of their politics was repressive. And this irrational case was widely accepted, even while, on the other side of the iron curtain, a young man burnt himself to death to protest against the lack of freedom, choice, and tolerance.

The New Left movement was ignorant, blind, puerile, unreasonable, sadistic – yet it became, it has become, the prevailing belief-system of the greater part of the Western world, and at present in almost all “free” countries the standard ideology (or religion) of the state, no matter what political party is in power. How?

The plan was made. The plan was put into execution. Gramsci supplied the phrase for the overall strategy: “The Long March through the Institutions”.   It wasn’t enough that the New Leftists should protest, should threaten and carry out violent attacks, should shout and write and display their slogans. They must take over the institutions of power, everyone of them: the smallest citizens’ groupings – such as library committees – were not too small. But none were too big. Town councils had to be infiltrated and eventually dominated; then newspapers, radio and TV channels; boards of education very importantly; the schools, the universities; the civil service; the law courts; a major political party; then the country’s legislative body, and eventually the pinnacles of power, prime ministerships, presidencies. Police forces and the military were formidable challenges. The tactic was first to discredit them and pressure them from outside by means of public opinion guided by the converted press; then to infiltrate them; finally bend them from within to conform to the doctrine and advance the cause.

Meanwhile books, films, articles, lessons, lectures, systems of reward, prizes must all promote the cause. It took decades, but it succeeded. Even in America now there have been at least two generations raised on New Left doctrine through schools, universities, books, films, the press, and TV.

How otherwise could the free Western world, whose policies and armies opposed the oppressing, enslaving Communist Eastern world, have been successfully converted to the very doctrine that oppressed, enslaved, tortured and mass murdered? It didn’t take reason. It didn’t take persuasion. The idea was no more innately and manifestly true and good than the idea of Christianity. But as in the case of spreading Christianity –  that weird, obscure, muddled, sorrowful, other-worldly new religion – it took conviction, decision, planning, energy, persistence, repetition, on the part of its missionaries. And finally force.

Only Leftist doctrine – government control of the economy, government provision of welfare, confiscatory and punitive taxation – is politically correct now in America. Collectivist thinking is the norm. Good people vote left. (When, in 2008, a Californian woman came upon a stall set up on a main street to canvass votes for the Republican presidential candidate John McCain, she called the police, and was astonished to learn that to solicit public support for the anti-collectivist Republican Party was not illegal.) Again, as with Christianity, the allegiance to the doctrine has little or nothing to do with its ideas. Most adherents could not explain what the ideas are. But they know that good people find them good, that good people vote for them. And that is all they need to know. Who doesn’t want to think of himself as a good person?

But the question of how did this become the case has not been fully answered. There is another aspect to the story. In order for one doctrine to succeed, it is necessary for other, counter doctrines to fail.

And the success of Leftism now – would it have happened if the conservative Right had been paying attention? Remember that old saying that “the price of liberty is eternal vigilance”? Well, the Right was not being vigilant. It didn’t bother to argue against political correctness. It disregarded the cynical shenanigans going on in the United Nations as if it were nothing but a zoo housing many clamorous beasts who were safely confined and could in no way threaten American life, liberty or happiness. If it was made to feel now and then the bullying, deceitful, sly, sometimes violent tactics of the Left, it shrugged them off. Conservatives went on being civil and preferring honesty when the world’s mood had changed to favoring lies and abuse. They put their confidence in the fact that America had been founded as the political embodiment of the idea of personal freedom; had demonstrated to the world – forever, they believed – that freedom brought prosperity and might and stunning innovation. They assumed that the rightness of individual liberty, the capitalist system, and government by the people had been established forever. So strong and free a country could afford to be tolerant. Let some wild, immature, misguided persons preach despotism (Communism, Socialism, Progressivism, Greenism, whatever), the system was strong enough to be hospitable to alien ideas, and to allow dissent or even rebellion. Tested, it would prove itself inviolable. It could not only withstand opposition, it could absorb it and dissolve it. No special effort was required. American history was on the side of those who would defend freedom and the Constitution. The separation of powers would protect them. The free press would dilute propaganda. Open enquiry in the academies would ensure that all points of view were argued and the most rational, the most humane, would persuade serious scholars. But they were wrong.

In their complacency, conservatives did not even notice the Long March. They could not mark its stations of success. Even now there are deluded Republicans who have not absorbed the fact that most Americans like collectivism; that they don’t object to electoral fraud; that they accept a failing economy; that many would rather live on government handouts than become rich; that being rich has become a morally bad thing; that it’s okay for foreign powers to develop weapons that can kill vast numbers of Americans; that the press does not report what is happening in the world but only what it wants to happen; that courts of law are willing to prefer foreign law to the Constitution; that it doesn’t matter if American representatives abroad are attacked and murdered; that freedom has become a term worthy only of contempt; that American history is a trail of shame; that a cruel religion – Islam – is being allowed to seep through the body politic, and is protected and advanced by the government itself.

But now millions of conservatives are waking up and are asking, how did this happen? It happened because people patiently, energetically, persistently planned it and made it happen.

What can we do about it, they ask themselves and each other.

What they have to do about it is change the minds of the people. First they must be sure that they want the free republic the founders established; that they want to maintain free markets; that they don’t want a welfare state; that they do want to preserve national defenses; that they want indoctrination in the schools to stop; that they want to forbid the application of foreign law; that they do not want to go on funding an institution – the UN – that consistently works against their interests. Then they must decide that their political philosophy is right, uniquely right, and must be implemented at any and all costs. Then they must start teaching it. With energy, persistence, patience and fiery enthusiasm. It will take time. But that is the only way. Teach, preach, argue, use every method that works. Give up the idea that it’s better to be gentlemanly than to sink to using the methods of the opposition; that if you do as they do you will have betrayed the very values that you are fighting for. So let them win? No! They have made the fight low and dirty. Get down in the dirt and fight it.

How badly does the conservative right want to win and hold on to power in America? How important is it to them that they should?

If it is as important to you, Conservatives, as it needs to be, tell the voters, tell the children that the free market is the only means of creating general prosperity, and why. Tell them that central planning of an economy cannot work, and why. Tell them why competition is good for everyone, producers and consumers alike.

Tell them what profit is and why it is essential for ensuring abundance.

Tell them that only where people are free can there be discovery and innovation, improvement in everyone’s daily life, better technology, the advance of civilization. Explain why. Show them the proofs of history.

Tell them the truth about life in the Third World. Not politically correct sentimental drivel, but the actual awful facts about life in most other countries.

Tell them why impartial judgment is the only means to justice; why all sane adult citizens must be treated equally by the law; why people must be judged by their actions, not their intentions or feelings.

Tell them why government should be kept small and its powers limited. Tell them what the essential tasks of government are: protection of the nation, of the individual, of liberty, of the rule of law itself. And why governments should not be allowed more power and money than it needs to fulfill its few essential functions.

Shout down the shouters. Tell Muslims what is wrong with their creed and why American secularism is better. Don’t allow them to build a protective wall around themselves to shut out criticism of their absurd and savage beliefs.

Tolerate only the tolerant and tolerable.

It will take time. Start now. Tell them.

 

The American Left loved Russia when it was the USSR. Bernie Sanders took his bride to honeymoon there!

In this video, Dr. Jordan Peterson shows the Social Justice Warriors of contemporary America – so badly educated they know nothing of Stalin’s Russia – just what happened when their ideology was put into practice.

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One of the villainous deceptions that the Left has gotten away with is its labelling of Nazism as “right-wing”.

In fact the Nazis were what they said they were: National Socialists.

For a year and ten months (August 23, 1939 t0 June 22, 1941), the period during which Stalin’s Russia worked with Hitler’s Germany to carve up Poland between them, the International Socialists refrained from criticizing the Nazis. For that period, Communism was not the “opposite” of Nazism – as the Left had claimed before the iniquitous Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was signed, and has claimed ever since it was broken by Germany’s suddenly attacking the Russians’ stolen piece of Poland before invading the Soviet Union itself.

The real political Right in the Western world is conservative. It is essentially individualist and forever profoundly, immovably against collectivism. That is why real conservatism is the real opposite of both Communism and Nazism.

But as we said, the Left has brought off its lie. Nazism is commonly regarded as being a “far-right” ideology. The mass media in general, all over the Western world, habitually label politicians who oppose the Islamization of the West “right-wing”. (See for example here and here and here.) They seldom say that a politician on the Left is “left-wing”. Whenever they say “right-wing” they know, and surely intend, the connotation of “Nazi” to hover round the label.

And when they say “far-right” they certainly mean “Nazi”.

This aura, this spell, put upon the Right has worked wonders for the Left everywhere, and especially now for the left-wing governments of western Europe. (All the governments of Europe, and the Dictatorship of the European Union, are actually left-wing, even though some ruling parties call themselves “conservative”.) Any organized opposition to their nihilistic policy of handing over their countries and the continent to the ruthless Mohammedan invaders who are slowly and steadily seizing power, has only to be called “right-wing” or “far-right” for millions of their voters to reject that party, that movement, that campaign, that leader. Because Nazism.

Yet the Mohammedan invaders – invited in, richly rewarded, protected by the state and the law courts from any penalty for crimes and even from criticism –  are in fact like the Nazis. Islam preaches and practices the same authoritarianism, the same intolerance, the same genocidal intention against the Jews, the same ambition to conquer and subjugate the rest of the world.

Islam enslaves women; punishes the victims of rape and acts of private consensual sexual freedom with death; kills gays (while many Islamic leaders and imams habitually practice homosexuality); treats Blacks – even Muslim Blacks – as inferiors; routinely tortures prisoners; denies evolution; imposes theocracy; hates liberty and dreads free speech.

Yet the international Left passionately supports it, promotes it, helps its accelerating advance.

And lies about it even to itself.

Even such atrocities as the bombing of spectators at a concert in Manchester, England, on May 22, 2027 –  which killed 22 and maimed at least 59, mostly young girls – do not move the hearts of the European, and at least nominally Christian, leaders.

Here’s one who is actually a devout Christian, talking through his hat. We quote German Finance Minister Responds to Manchester Attack: Christians Can Learn from Muslim Migrants,  by Virginia Hale, at (British) Breitbart:

The growing number of Muslims in Germany represents not a threat but a learning opportunity, said Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble, discussing Islam in the wake of the Manchester attack.

 “It is fanaticism, not only in Islam, that leads to terrible crimes,” he said, speaking on German public radio station Deutschlandfunk … when asked about the Islamist attack in which 22 mostly young people, including an eight-year-old girl, lost their lives.

“It is certainly a misunderstanding of religion when belief slips into fanaticism or, at worst, violence. The world’s great religions all preach the message that one must look upon others as their sisters and brothers, and that one must live with the other because man cannot live alone,” Schäuble told presenter Christiane Florin.

Wrong! Islam does not “preach the message that one must look upon others as their sisters and brothers”. It preaches that the infidel must be forced to convert to Islam, or else be killed, or – if spared – pay tribute to Muslim overlords. Schäuble had simply not troubled to inform himself about Islam at all. Deliberate ignorance of what Islam preaches is common to the members of the ruling class of western Europe.

On top of choosing ignorance, Herr Schäuble has the cheek to assert this:

“‘Islam is part of Germany’ is a sober, factual statement,” the minister remarked, commenting on sentiments voiced by Chancellor Angela Merkel on more than one occasion – which are not shared by the majority of Germans. “Anyone who denies this denies reality and is therefore not suited to being a politician, because politics begins with the confrontation of reality,” he added.

The country’s rapidly growing Muslim demographic presents an “opportunity” for “Christians, and all who live in Germany”, Schäuble stated, adding: “We can learn from them. Many human values are very strongly realised in Islam. Think of hospitality, and other things like, what is there … And also tolerance, I believe, for example.”

He hesitated. He didn’t know what “human values are very strongly realised in Islam”. He had heard of the stereotyped Arab’s hospitality, but he was hard put to think of anything else. He opted for “tolerance”. Sucked it out of his thumb. In fact, no ideology could be more intolerant than Islam.

Discussing his recently published book, Protestantism and Politics, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) minister said the church has no monopoly on truth and criticised voices within who “argue too much in secular matters from a point of religious conviction”.

So why does he believe what he purports to believe if he doesn’t believe it is the truth? Well, other “truths”, he implies, are no less true, even though they contradict the Christian Protestant “truths” that he believes in – sort of.

And here is comment on Schäuble’s bilge, from Jihad Watch, by Christine Douglass-Williams:

The German Finance Minister’s outrageous statements may be an attempt to absolve himself and his party of any responsibility for what Muslim migrants are bringing to his country. Germany spent more than $21,000,000,000 on refugees in 2016, as its Muslim migrant crisis outstripped state budgets. In addition, the number of migrant criminal suspects soared by more than 50% in 2016.

Germany has been brutalized by Muslim migrants, with an epidemic of sex assaults, attacks on churches, and a massive crime surge. 

Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble’s shameless propaganda in the face of this chaos is the all too common pose of leftist politicians as they continue to burden taxpayers, betray their own citizenry and tradition of democratic rule. They are astoundingly insensitive to victims of Muslim migrants.

In its insane passion for protecting the invited Mohammedan conquerors from the least criticism, the present government of Germany is acting like the Nazi and Communist regimes that ruled Germany in whole or in part in the last century.

An article by Chris Tomlinson at Breitbart illustrates this:

A computer scientist in Germany has been fined over 3,000 euros after he complained in 2015 that criminal asylum seekers were being let go by police after robbing supermarkets.

The 52-year-old German made his comments on August 22nd of 2015 at the height of the migrant crisis, Wochenblatt reports. He noted that asylum seekers were going into German supermarkets and helping themselves to items and instead of being arrested they were let go with warnings.

He wrote on Facebook: “I am in favour of the setting up of civil defences and the punishment of flogging, then they might feel at home when they get their skull smashed with a truncheon. Violence is probably the only thing that they understand, and we should try to make them understand us.”

After his post, the 52-year-old was arrested by police and taken to jail. He was then put on trial and accused of attacking asylum seekers’ human dignity, slandering them, and insulting them. He was eventually convicted and forced to pay a fine of 3,150 euros. …

The case is another in a series of convictions in Germany for either speaking out about the migrant crisis or against migrant crime. Last year German police raided 60 homes in an operation against “xenophobic” speech online.  Federal Criminal Police (BKA) president Holger Münch said the raids were to prevent “verbal radicalisation” online.

A couple in the German town of Vierkirchen were also sentenced for “hate speech” after they formed an anti-asylum seeker group on Facebook.

Peter M., one of the defendants, said after the conviction: “One can not even express a critical opinion of refugees without getting labelled as a Nazi. I wanted to create a discussion forum where you can speak your mind about refugees.”

More recently the German government has set its sights on the social media companies themselves. Last month the German government was slammed by social media giants after passing a law that would introduce heavy fines for sites who do not remove hate speech posts in a timely manner.

Why cannot the electorates of western Europe see that in trying to avoid a return to Nazism, they are inviting it to come back and rule them again?

This time for keeps.