Daniel Greenfield writes the definitive essay on the left
The left? They’re about power. Everything else is just a pretense.
Please read it.
Oh, and by the way, the left wants you to give up in weariness and despair.
A similar idea to Greenfield’s, but expressed in a much milder way, is offered by Jonah Goldberg.
And by “the left” we mean the left—as in “activist left; hard left.” The left often pretends to be something it’s not—liberals, “progressives” (the former is somewhat different, the latter merely a euphemism). But the left is the left, and you know it when you see it.
Liberals are not the left, as I’ve written on this blog before, although they are allied with the left and used by the left to gain power. Greenfield indicates as much early in the essay when he writes, “Liberals have a long history of being the left’s useful idiots.” In my experience, some liberals can awaken to the facts of the left and how they’ve been duped by it, if they can be persuaded to pay attention and not shut their ears and shout you down. And every now and then a leftist turns (i.e. David Horowitz, some of the older neocons), and although it’s rarer, when one of them turns they tend to become very vocal and effective in talking about it. That’s because they were activists to begin with, and because they are such experts on the left and know all the tricks of the trade.
[NOTE: This other article by Greenfield (Sultan Knish)—which I confess I haven’t read but only skimmed—looks interesting too.]
Right, right, right. Something I’ve thought for a long time. Unless the conservatives/Republicans are willing to adopt the lefts tactics and fight an existential fight the Republic is permanently lost. Don’t however take bets on it happening.
Daniel Greenfield is a national treasure.
I read that ‘other article’ included in one of the comments the other day. I’ve picked my issue, and plan to implement it soon. Wish me luck!
“Men by their constitutions are naturally divided into two parties:
1. Those who fear and distrust the people, and wish to draw all powers from them into the hands of the higher classes.
2. Those who identify themselves with the people, have confidence in them, cherish and consider them as the most honest and safe, although not the most wise depository of the public interests.
In every country these two parties exist, and in every one where they are free to think, speak, and write, they will declare themselves.” —Thomas Jefferson to Henry Lee, 1824
“The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.” – Robert A. Heinlein
I believe that at base, the desire to rule over others is a spiritual issue, best expressed by Milton; “Better to rule in hell, than serve in heaven”
“The left does not care about social justice. It cares about power.
That is why no truce is possible with the left. Not on social issues. Not on any issues. The left does not care about Bruce Jenner. It does not care about gay rights, equal pay, police brutality or even slavery.
They care mainly about emotional venting and exercising power over others. The cause is progress, but the real cause is the power of its enforcers to vent their unhappiness and destructive impulses on everyone else under the guise of reform.
The left will destroy the things you care about, because you care about them. It will destroy them because that gives them power over you. It will destroy them because these things stand in the way of its power.
It will destroy them because a good deal of its militant activists need things to destroy and if they can’t attack you, they’ll turn on the left in a frenzy of ideologically incestuous purges.
the prize that the left dearly wants. Surrender.
The left exists to destroy you.
The purpose of power is power. More fundamentally it’s about the difference in human nature between the people who want to be left alone and those who want power over others.
You can’t work out a truce with tyrants. You can give in or stand up to them. There’s nothing else.” Daniel Greenfield
The Left’s rebellion is, ultimately against God, literally against life’s natural order. They just want to see the world burn.
Bottom line is that like islamists, leftism is a death cult. Death to you and your’s and me and mine.
Daniel Greenfield’s essays are generally top-rate, but (speaking frankly now) he needs to edit his (generally top-rate) essays down to where they’re more succinct. They’d be harder-hitting and as a bonus, more people, including more who *need* to read them, will read them.
Merely a matter of taste on my part, I know, . . .
Just finished the second essay by Greenfield, and it is a must-read.
Check out the comments also, especially ones by the teacher at one school, and parent at another.
That is definitely a place where the dissenters can have an immediate effect.
And in the same vein, check out this from Mark Steyn.
Even when you don’t agree with him (although, in this case, I do) he is the wittiest snark-meister in the blogosphere.
http://www.steynonline.com/7030/big-fat-greeks-and-weddings
AesopFan,
In that vein, this is a good example of counter-Left campus activism.
For the underdog activist with limited reach starting out, the campus – Education and Academy – is accessible with good cost/benefit and magnified effect.
Students are top-priority target audience for activists for several reasons.
parker,
No. The bottom line is Left activism can be countered but doing so requires dedicated full-on activism.
The Republicans can follow, but they cannot lead in the activist game.
The people of the Right must take it upon themselves to compete as Marxist-method activists in the only social cultural/political game there is.
That’s the bottom line.
Activism defines America’s DNA. Our nation was Founded by activists. Our nation can be ruined by activists. Our nation can be saved by activists.
YOu’re right. That is a must-read. Someone above said it could use some editing, which it could, but I’ve also read whole books on this and he’s boiled it down pretty well. (I’d recommned James Kalb for longer treatment, and lots of GK Chesterton). It’s about power — nothing more, nothing less. The useful idiots who help the left gain power will be its victims tomorrow. Power and destruction and nothing else.
I’m being pressured — hard — bullied by my personal trainer, of all people. I got this in my email tonight:
As you know the Supreme Court made a ruling on Friday that I was quite elated by. You were my first client that I got a chance to share the experience with and the subject was quickly changed. This leads me to my question… How do you feel about my right to marry a man?
Or “Gay” marriage?
I have about six sessions left on my contract (prepaid) with him. I’m a Christian. Jesus was quite explicit about marriage being between a man and a woman.
The trainer knows I’m a Christian: he started our working relationship by blasting his father, and Orthodox priest whom he hates (by his own account), and his father’s religion, which he ALSO hates. So I deflected him as nicely as possible and said I’m a Christian, too: Episcopalian. We’ve had a sort of detente since then, and I’ve steered him politely away from these issues wherever possible.
I was heartsick over all the disastrous Supreme Court rulings, the jihad against the South and Southerners, the endorsement of Obamacare (I’m already in its nightmarish toils), and the hooting and hollering of the gays who want to burn all the churches to the ground: starting with attacking them financially.
My trainer, who I’ve actually become fond of, disagreements aside, was delirious about the SCOTUS ruling. Said that now they can yank the tax exemptions from any churches who dare to uphold sacramental marriage. And as a parting shot the last time we worked out, declared that “all religions are MEANINGLESS.” I tried to be tactful without addressing the point directly. Said I understood how he felt. BUT THAT’S NOT GOOD ENOUGH, people. Only total submission and violation of my beliefs is good enough to mollify him.
I’m being bullied, folks. He’s angry that I haven’t bowed the knee to his ideas. OH, and by the way, he scorns the idea of fidelity in marriage. Said so emphatically: he and his partner have an open “marriage.” Well, what the hell is the point? I don’t — we don’t — hold that ANY open “marriage,” including between a man and a woman, is a marriage.
The implicit threat is that if I don’t agree with him, he can (a) make my workouts miserable, or (b) breach the contract and shunt me off to a junior trainer. All while (c) slandering me to everyone in the gym as a “bigot” — for being an old-school Episcopalian.
ANY ADVICE on how to handle this???? Coming soon to a theater near you…. the Leftists are nothing if not vindictive. :-((((
As David Horowitz said, “With the Left the issue is never the issue.” It is always about more control. About conditioning you to give in or compromise. About conditioning you to accept the new normal.
About there being two kinds of people. Those who want to be left alone and those who want to control others. It is on display here in my little homeowner’s association. I can never miss a meeting because I know how quickly the power grabbers will take over. Fortunately, we have only a small number of power grabbers and they have been blocked for the most part by those who want to be left alone.
If enough people here in the U.S. finally get fed up with all the power plays, I’m pretty confident that people are going to start pushing back. Don’t like what the ACLU’s doing? Join Judicial Watch – they’re pushing back. In Washington State we have a group called Freedom Watch. They were instrumental in helping the slim Republican majority in the legislature to pass a budget with no new taxes as the democrats were demanding. I am supporting them. The TEA Party is no longer demonstrating, but I’m ready to hit the bricks again whenever the call goes out. I only want to be left alone. The only way I can do that is to stay alert and on the job.
Beverly, if I were you I would tell him that you have found his issues to be a distraction to a good workout for you. Be frank and say that either there will be no politics during the training sessions or you will request another trainer. He may be a great trainer, but you don’t have to pay money to be abused. Get another trainer, even if he/she’s not as good as this aggressive jerk.
Beverly, you have clearly tried to respectfully defer from open disagreement. In being forced to “come clean”, the time may be coming that you will understand in an experiential way Acts 5:41, “They therefore departed from the presence of the council, rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer dishonour for the Name.” I’m preparing myself accordingly.
Beverly, this jackass is a bully, nail him to the wall
Daniel Greenfield is spot on in that article. I came to the same conclusion a while back and use every opportunity I get to make that point. The next step is to uncover the moral depravity of the left since the left is always trying to use their victims’ morality against them. For example, Beverly’s trainer is an amoral jackass who has no intellectual foundation to make moral judgments of any type.
If I were Beverly, I would welcome the exchange, take the bully head on, and expose the unstated assumptions in his positions. The saying that “people who “live in glass houses, shouldn’t throw stones” applies especially to the left when they take a moralistic position. Begin by asking him if he believes there are such things as right and wrong and if so ask him state his assumptions and to defend them rationally. That should knock a bit of the wind out of him. If he says everyone should be treated equally then challenge him to prove that from nature. Go on the attack, put the onus on him to defend his positions, and never let him shift the the argument about your own beliefs. The left are the ones who are demanding change so it is up to them to prove that their ideas are better than traditional ideas.
Incidentally, I do not give “liberals” who ally with the left (some of the most illiberal people on earth) any moral credit. To ally oneself with such destructive individuals because it advances your own personal “liberal” agenda at the moment is very dangerous and will ultimately destroy everything a true liberal stands for.
Dennis,
I have never met a liberal who understands the left. They are foils, chumps, emotion-driven idiots. Ask them about the likely result of something they’re pitching and you get a blank stare. But the sense of self-righteousness keeps them from examining the positions which make them feel so good.
It takes, at most, two back-and-forths and the lib is either going ad hom, or is on some other subject. They don’t know, and on some level some of them know they don’t know, but they won’t learn. It would cost them too much.
I’ve been thinking about the “tipping point”. When will we reach that instant where even the LIVs will begin to understand what is happening?
I have to admit that much of what is going on doesn’t really affect me so far in my personal life. I am very sensitive to the changes as I do live them on a daily basis at my job in academia. I FEEL the effects daily there, but once I leave campus hardly at all. It’s the fact that I can extrapolate what is happening within academia to the larger venue and see that all the tactics, policies, etc within academia are being implemented over the last 7 years throughout the country. The rest of my family gets annoyed with me when I continually point out the small increments of tyranny I see coming as they don’t live it each day at their jobs and have not felt it directly within their lives. It just hasn’t trickled down far enough yet.
Beverly’s story is interesting in the sense that once regular people begin to feel the bullying that comes along with all these policies maybe the tipping point will be reached. The real question becomes how the majority will react…as sheep to the slaughter, or not?
I’m not confident of the answer to that question.
As time goes on I’m having more and more trouble accepting the fine distinctions usually made between “mere liberals” on the one hand and progressives and leftists on the other. IMHO, the “liberal” label is either used by conservatives themselves in order to be ‘civil’ and provide their leftist friends a fig leaf to hide behind, or by leftists themselves as camouflage. In the last analysis I don’t think there is any meaningful ‘middle ground”: you’re either the sort of person who wants to be left alone and thinks other should be left alone, or the sort who either feels compelled to try to control others or feels a need to be controlled by others. My view, then, is that so-called ‘liberals’ are fundamentally no different than “leftists”. Just FYI.
Sorry for the length of this post. But it seems to fit Neo’s blog about the Left. Sometime ago, Limbaugh noted “Did you ever notice that those on the Left are never Happy?” Even when they achieve success, there is no rest, only anger. An example is the diatribe of George Taki about Clarence Thomas regarding the issue of same sex marriage to see this in actual Life- Instead of being Happy that his side has won the secular battle, he misquotes Thomas and attacks the misquote and attempts to belittle a man that sees things differently. And then he isn’t even “man” enough to admit his mistake. Here along with the attack on Trump and his thoughts on illegal immigration, or the people who lost their jobs because of their support for traditional marriage in CA a few years ago. With the Left, Quarter is expected in defeat but No Quarter is given in victory. There appears to be no tolerance for a different point of view. People having different points of view must be hunted down and destroyed either figuratively or actually. And the Left as a whole appears comfortable with that mindset. As Stern writes below: “The drug addict as well as the power addict makes an initial choice to obtain something, and before he realizes it that thing has obtained him.” God have mercy on us if this mindset seeps into 100% of the population. ïŒ
Love and Power. —Flight from Women Karl Stern (1965)
Now if one took the trouble, one could demonstrate that every single conflict we touched upon in the preceding essays can be reduced to one fundamental pair Love and Power. Love and Power as a moral antithesis are at work inside every human being, regardless of sex. Love and power is the polarity of all human relationships. All relationships between human beings can be reduced to one of these two, and all moral conflicts arise out of a tension between the two. All true love for another means a renunciation-painful or effortless, conscious or unconscious, intentional or unintentional-of power. (Inversely, all power over another is an impairment of love.) The reader may distrust such an axiom. At times the antithesis is disguised beyond recognition: there are clinging forms of love which mask possessiveness; there is a form of authority, in fact all true authority, which resembles power but is based on love. And so on. One could go on interminably making one’s point. Suffice it to say that the antithesis is not only one of psychology. It cannot be fully understood except ontologically. It begins with the mystery of the Godhead. God started, one might say, His relationship with man by renouncing power over him. As Creator, He could have made men marionettes, without the gift of freedom. As Savior, He could have brought salvation, without the question of cooperation. In either case it would have made for a much more ordered state of affairs than that which we see-except that this would be the orderliness of machinery.
To come back to our subject, with the present scientific-technological burst of human creativeness goes a fantastic increase in power over matter. Our ability to “master” nature is unheard-of, in comparison with the beginning of the scientific era three hundred years ago-even with fifty years ago. And this seems to be only the beginning. One might argue that here we are talking of power over matter, and to drag a hypothetical antithesis “Power versus Love” into it seems to mix things up. Obviously the antithesis of “power versus love” applies to human affairs and cannot be applied to the relationship between Man and Nature. But things are not as simple as all that. As we shall see our relationship to nature colors our relationship to our fellow-men. This is puzzling and disquieting. You cannot topple a hierarchic picture of the world in one sphere without causing upheaval in another.
We shall presently come back to the subject of “Man and Nature.” In the immediate context we cannot avoid touching on the moral problems posed by technology. For it is technological progress which, by its absurd speed, drives home to everyone the moral problem of power. When it comes to that, people stop at the problem of the Bomb. But there are other problems-concerning the power of man over man-for example the problem of managerial power and of the vast technical power to create appetites and to satisfy appetites. If the phrase were not too hackneyed one would have to say that these powers are “godlike.” In this context we frequently encounter a fallacy quite similar to the one of Goethe in his attitude to the exact sciences. When one reads certain Christian writers of the twentieth century one gets an impression that technical progress in itself is evil. Such an attitude, too, implies a subtle form of Manichaean thinking. As a matter of fact, the technological burst of creativeness has all the earmarks of the greatest phases of civilization-and of all that which is morally and aesthetically good. There is something about technology which is related to the classical and objective in the history of art. There is about this kind of “making,” say of a jet plane, some of the same creative anonymity which went with the making of medieval architecture. “In the case of a dynamic shape like an airplane there is neither any reason nor any need for the collaboration of engineer and artist. All such machines, except for their coloring, or some· surface design, to modify their shape, develop in accordance with a law of efficient evolution as absolute as that determining the shape of the tiger, the wasp, or the swallow. We are making creatures. It is as if we were called upon to populate the world with objects which relieve us of muscular exertion and of brain exertion. Bergson foresaw that, once automation is generally organized, an enormous amount of human energy will be available for creativeness. Needless to add, if this “creativeness” should not come about the resulting vacuum will be filled by some kind of instinctual “flooding.” It is obvious that such a dilemma cannot be considered outside the moral sphere. Hence the two faces of technical progress: on the one hand, a sense of aesthetic joy and moral goodness; on the other the image of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, with that vertiginous feeling of an un-ending crescendo.
In order to understand better that sense of vortex and frenzy we must come back to the phenomenology of power. All power, for power’s sake, is habit-forming. The phenomenology of power and the phenomenology of addiction show remarkable parallels. An addict gets to know an experience of euphoria, an extraordinary sense of wellbeing, at his first acquaintance with the drug. As he wants to renew the experience he will soon have to take a greater quantity. But the pattern changes; the addict without the drug is not just a normal being without a sense of happiness: he is in distress. And soon it is this distress which dominates his life. The drug is no longer needed to produce bliss: it has to be taken for a merely negative purpose-namely to escape misery. The amount of drug necessary to ward off misery increases with an inexorable law. Our man is by now a vessel with a leaking bottom; no matter how much he takes, he needs still more. Then a shuffling occurs in the hierarchy of appetites; the need for the drug is more imperious than the vital instincts, hunger, thirst or sexual desire. And there is a shuffling in the moral sphere. The need is such that any degree of deceit, any form of crime has to be committed to obtain the drug. In the end, taking the drug is no longer just a matter of avoiding distress and misery-the days of bliss being long past-but a mere avoidance of collapse and, in many cases, of death.
In order to compare this with the phenomenology of power it is best to take extreme examples-Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin and the like. In scrutinizing such lives we see that there occurs invariably an initial experience, quite comparable to that first encounter with the drug. There is the initial sense of heightened well-being through the first taste. But following a mysterious law, the “dose” must be increased to achieve the same result. Soon the initial bliss wanes, and more power has to be felt to stave off a sense of distress. Power addicts are miserable people. We say of a man like Hitler that at a certain phase he was at the “height” of his power. In reality there is no zenith, just as there is no zenith of addiction. The vessel keeps leaking and demands more. Such insatiability is a demoniacal mirage of infinity. In all cases of addiction there exists an initial sense of increased freedom, while in reality the subject becomes increasingly fettered by necessity. In the end all freedom is gone, and the subject is encased in a system of forces which are as compelling as the laws which govern inert matter. The drug addict as well as the power addict makes an initial choice to obtain something, and before he realizes it that thing has obtained him.
Gabriel Marcel once remarked that all temptation may be a temptation towards power. The inversion of this statement is more obvious: all power contains a temptation. And although it is less evident, this is also true about technological progress, the power over matter. It has been said, unjustly, that Goethe had a blind spot for the then beginning industrial revolution. On the contrary: he skipped a century-and saw the moral problem before anyone else. This is, as we have seen, one of the many facets of Faust and it is even more clearly expressed in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Either intentionally or with the un-consciousness of the poet, the absent Master is meant to be God. The apprentice, once he has imitated the creative act, does not know how to make the thing stop. Here again, we have that sense of the bottomless. Die Geister, die ich rief, die werd ich nicht mehr los, “the spirits I invoked, I can’t banish anymore,”-could also be said by an addict or by a Macbeth. The thing the apprentice first tried has finally gotten him.
carl in atlanta:
I’ve discussed the difference many times.
And I don’t use the word “liberal” for any of those reasons. I could not be less inclined to use the word for any of those reasons.
I use it as a person who was (or thought I was) a liberal for most of my life, who was and still is surrounded by liberals. It is my observation through all these years that the vast majority of liberals don’t pay attention. If they did, they don’t actually want what leftists want. The majority of liberals I know are liberals because they were raised that way, and/or their friends are liberals, and/or they are under the impression that all smart people are liberals, and/or they are (and I think the next thing is most important) under the impression that it is kind and compassionate to be liberal and mean to be conservative, and/or get their information exclusively from liberal sources, and/or don’t read the news in depth, and/or they don’t study much history. Most would be very very surprised at what the left intends and how it is using them. Very. But if you tell them, they think you’re nuts.
Very different from the left, which is aware, informed, activist, and deceiving.
(See this for more about liberals.)
The Left, including progressives and liberals, are more about environmental stability, which is secured through capital and labor controls. This is why progressives and liberals will support class diversity, selective exclusion, and selective-child policies, and other violations of human and civil rights. Then there are the narcissistic elements that suffer from delusions of [mortal] godhood as they redistribute and pardon the folks beneath them.
Here at one of the Left’s Ground Zeroes, I see this happening:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hplpQt424Ls
Sultan Knish’s post rang a bell for me; I’ve been digging thru old Day-by-Day cartoons to find the exact one:
http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/comic/the-pits-3/
The quote that stuck with me is: ” … the Left WILL NEVER LEAVE YOU ALONE. NEVER. {…} the literal history of the left is they will not stop until you are kneeling at the edge of a pit with a gun at the back of your neck.”
There is no “enough” for The Left. They will ALWAYS want “more”. And when they at last achieve their final victories, it’s on-your-knees and into-the-pit for the rest of the Useless Eaters.
There is no “enough” for The Left. They will ALWAYS want “more”. And when they at last achieve their final victories, it’s on-your-knees and into-the-pit for the rest of the Useless Eaters.
Fyodor Dostoevsky prophesied.
Not that it made much of a difference.
Of the essence: effing them off!
It works.
Prepare, train everyday, blame the voters.
Finding fine shades of difference between leftist and Libtards is a distinction without a difference for in the end …. they vote the same.
Sentimentalism will get you killed. When the time comes they’ll watch you being marched off…..
There has been enough of that already ….
G6loq:
Yes, they vote the same. That’s why they’re called “useful idiots.”
But the distinction is meaningful, and one of the reasons is that there are many liberals who (if they actually listened) could change their minds. I know some. I wrote a post about that once, but I don’t have time to find it now.
That’s why they’re called “useful idiots.”…there are many liberals who (if they actually listened) could change their minds.
Being idiots doesn’t absolve them of responsibility.
As to changing their minds, fact of the matter is … they don’t in any meaningful numbers. I repeat, they’ll watch while you’re being marched off…..
They are enablers. The worse of the worse.
Victims, helpers, perpetrators and bystanders … we have been there.
G6loq:
Who said it absolves them of responsibility?
I said it made them different than the left. They are responsible for something, but it’s not the same thing. And no, they are not the worst of the worst. The left is worse.
EXACTLY. This was me, too:
“a person who was (or thought I was) a liberal for most of my life, who was and still is surrounded by liberals. It is my observation through all these years that the vast majority of liberals don’t pay attention. If they did, they don’t actually want what leftists want. The majority of liberals I know are liberals because they were raised that way, and/or their friends are liberals, and/or they are under the impression that all smart people are liberals, and/or they are (and I think the next thing is most important) under the impression that it is kind and compassionate to be liberal and mean to be conservative, and/or get their information exclusively from liberal sources, and/or don’t read the news in depth, and/or they don’t study much history. Most would be very very surprised at what the left intends and how it is using them. Very. But if you tell them, they think you’re nuts.”
My kids are both very liberal — it’s in the culture, they certainly were taught differently at home! But when you talk about most subjects in depth, they are not actually liberal. They have independent or conservative thoughts. They just identify liberalism with compassion and kindness, and converatvism with nastiness, so they would never dream of thinking of themselves any other way than as liberals like all their friends (and teachers).
“The issue is not the issue, the revolution is the issue.”
Neo: As my mother-in-law used to say, “I hear you”. I’ll of course stipulate to your definition (this is your blog), but I think you may be cutting your liberal friends too much slack. In my experience they are 100% creatures of the left, though I take your point that they may be more benign than their politically active manipulators. I concede that your experiences as a changer make you better acquainted with the subtle gradations on the left side of the political spectrum. I guess my point is that at this point in our history I don’t see much to be gained by trying to perceive the left at that fine resolution. In my experience they are unpersuadable.
That said, I will read the link you provided. Thanks.
Carl
I guess my point is that at this point in our history I don’t see much to be gained by trying to perceive the left at that fine resolution. In my experience they are unpersuadable.
Not too sure why Néo has that syrupy tenderness for Libtards.
I stopped associating when I realized that I was providing cover … I was enabling. Their do-gooding propensities notwithstanding, in the end they’ll stand with the Facists.
In the book Village of Secrets, defying the Nazis in Vichy France, page 46:
“[Father] Glasberg had long been a critic of the Né®mes committee, of which he was a member, saying that he was maddened by its ‘tone of universal good will and forgiveness’…”
Hmmm… Committee composed of Quakers, Mennonites and such, running camp relief operations… My mother used to carp about wild-eyed do-gooders making nice to the German National Socialists and assorted enablers in the hope of awakening them to the errors of their ways…
By then Orwell had issued his warnings about pacifists.
Beware of do-gooders.
ANY ADVICE on how to handle this???? Coming soon to a theater near you…. the Leftists are nothing if not vindictive.
Turn the situation around. He’s a tyrant that cloaks himself in his victim status, his hate, and he desires support and validation from the rest of the majority (you) in propping up his fantasy convictions. They aren’t really convictions but weaknesses, displacements he uses to crush people weaker than him, in order to justify his angst and personal history with his father. He’s a weakling and always will be. No amount of social acceptance or legal power will make him any different than that, so you might as well attack his weak point on this matter.
————————————-
The Leftist alliance is first an organization, and second bent on Slavery 3.0…. whether they can be separated into leaders, priests, loyalists, or useful idiots isn’t that useful a reorganization. In a war, it doesn’t really matter if the people the US bombs are Nazis, Nazi loyalists, Nazi family members, allied family members, luke warm supporters, or people waiting for a signal to assassinate Hitler. If they do nothing, they are complicit and because they exist to serve the Regime, when people attack the Regime they cannot avoid attacking the people under the Regime. That’s the price to what we call war. The Reich doesn’t get to complain that we’re killing the Hitler Youth and starving them out, because the Reich started the war knowing the costs of defeat. Just because they were winning, doesn’t mean much when they start losing.
If useful idiots die in this conflict, it won’t be because patriots did it, it will be because the Left ordered it done or caused it to happen or failed to protect them. There’s your equality for you.
Here are some examples of people rebelling against the Left, whether they know it or not.
http://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2015/07/02/reddit-revolt-flares-again-as-ama-moderator-sacked-the-day-after-a-disastrous-jesse-jackson-qa/
The Left will annihilate segments of the civilian population if it even appears they are helping the insurgency of patriots, whether they are part of our cause or not. Should we treat the Leftists and their zombie drones with something more favorable than how they treat their enemies?
Perhaps if we out numbered them and were winning the war, mercy and compassion would be something doled out like relief packages above Berlin. A loser, a losing faction in a war, does not have that luxury quite yet. Also a mob does not outnumber an organized army, since the mob cannot concentrate all the firepower of its members, while the army can.
Most would be very very surprised at what the left intends and how it is using them. Very. But if you tell them, they think you’re nuts.
That’s why they are guilty, Neo. But they aren’t liberals the way you were a liberal, because they aren’t liberals to begin with. They don’t really care about liberty, except for themselves. You really think you can classify those people who are guilty of participating in human atrocities, as being like yourself who refused to obey the Left’s authority?
What matters is whose authority they obey. Do they obey their own conscience (which they do not given the evidence Neo has provided) or do they obey the Left’s authority? When a person obeys an enemy’s authority, they are an enemy. It doesn’t matter how good a father or mother they are, it doesn’t matter if they care for orphans or not. They are the enemy, until the enemy is broken.
there are many liberals who (if they actually listened) could change their minds.
Being idiots doesn’t absolve them of responsibility.
If they wanted to change their path, they would have. What’s stopping them? They aren’t another Neo, they don’t have the inner strength to resist.
Even Horowitz has programming remaining from the Left and sides with Soviet historians over others. He wasn’t involved in Leftist black ops as deeply as people like to think, yet he still has their habits and doesn’t necessarily use them for his new cause. Even he is a rarity, however, since usually the Leftist programming takes.
The Jim Jones methods pioneered several decades ago, are working quite well in American social life and academia.
Neo: I just read the March 2014 post from the link you provided above. Actually, I re-read it because I clearly recall having read the original. Speaking as a citizen of a “red state” (and speaking of propaganda, it’s funny that the conservative states got tagged with the color red, no?) I believe the take-away quote from that post is this:
“Most of my friends are some variation on that theme”.
To some extent we each live in the bubble of our hometown, family, the people with whom we socialize and work, and our individual past. I have cordial relations with several people who I believe you would classify as mere ‘liberals’, but I don’t consider them to be true friends because they despise my political world view and philosophy and embrace a political world view and philosophy that I know in my bones to be an existential threat to the things I hold most dear, including the very freedom of my children and grandkids. I can share some interests with them but I will always keep such people somewhat at arms’ length because I know that if push ever came to shove they would be on the side that seeks to crush liberty.
As things are, we can enjoy the same kinds of movies, sports and teams and other common interests, so I get that use of the term ‘friends’ , but I wouldn’t trust any of them to not report me to the secret police, if ever came to that.
Ymarsakar Says:
July 4th, 2015 at 9:59 am
Here are some examples of people rebelling against the Left, whether they know it or not.
Maybe there is an organic resistance built in.
This:
Charles Murray on Rebuilding Liberty without Permission.
Irish Democracy ….
“IT WILL TAKE ZEALOTS, NOT MODERATES, TO RESTORE OUR COUNTRY”
Prepare, train everyday, blame the voters ….
Concerning zealots, I always wondered how ready people really were in facing the Left. Since I cared more for behavior and deeds rather than mere words and promises, I decided to use myself as part of a multi year test.
Some people avoided me on the net, because of my partially manufactured attitude of abrasiveness and true believer stubborness. They nor any Authority they wielded, could not break through my shield. For those people, fighting a Leftist zombie would take the utmost of their mental and physical strength, and often they will be overcome.
Then there were the project results where people decided to go after me personally, but I noticed that they refused to go after their fellow Democrat friends and family members. Those were deserving of my condescension, for they needed a viable target, as they were too weak to confront their own people face to face. They had lots of justifications about them being innocent or why they should be forgiven, but that didn’t change their behavior much. They still needed someone to hate and that was an interesting test result.
Then there are the Southern Democrats still, who are still loyal unto death to the Democrat war machine, even after Democrats betrayed the South in wars too numerous to count and killed many Southerners through economic collapses, recessions, wars of hate, and various other conflicts. Democrat Southerners are like Horowitz, they seem like they have broken free, but much of the programming and ancestral memory of being under the control of Democrats/Leftists are still with them, and they act out consistent with the prior conditioning they have not defeated.
I was the test case for many people, to test their resolve and figure for my own interest, how they would do. Because they can always ignore me or downplay my personal role in many issues, just like that, if they wanted to.
You won’t be able to ignore the Leftist alliance for Human Utopia. The Left will smash your head in, I saw it years ago. They will do the convincing even if people refuse to believe my statements. So what will people do then? That will be interesting to see.
Carl is right btw, as I told GB around 2013, when his fellow Democrats and “innocent liberals” are ordered to turn the families of patriots to the Left’s death squads and the Islamo rape cells…. do I think the “innocent liberals” will obey?
Of course they will obey. What manner of strength and integrity would it take for them to resist?
Ymarsakar:
Your “of course they would obey” is too facile and too global.
Some would obey, some would not.
Actually, the same is true of non-liberals. Not everyone is courageous.
The real question is: what percentage would obey? Is it 99%? 70% 50% 25%?
I think most people would obey, and more people would obey than not, especially if the penalties for disobedience were high enough. I think more liberals would obey than non-liberals would obey. Other than that, I don’t know percentages. It’s probably a little higher in this country than the percentage of people in Germany, or German-occupied countries in WWII, who resisted either by non-cooperation or active resistance. But not tons higher. In WWII, the numbers were different in different countries. In part, it depended on personal and cultural characteristics like religion and national background, as well as politics. In part, it depended on what the punishment was for non-cooperation and/or resistance, which was different in different countries as well.
Actually, the same is true of non-liberals. Not everyone is courageous.
If a person is under authority and has little willpower of their own, then the extent of their good or evil is based merely upon the nature of their Authority. If their Authority is good, then they are good. If they receive good and proper orders, they will do work.
So yes, if the moderate Dems are guilty of following orders, then so are some of the conservatives. There are no exceptions here, I would think, other than the independent individuals that somehow resist authority to society’s surprise.
The real question is: what percentage would obey? Is it 99%? 70% 50% 25%?
I’m not sure how that matters, at this time. Certainly there may be a ladder of evil as you have described before, Neo, but how does that translate into a practical Rules of Engagement or Counter Insurgency doctrine (COIN)?
Just because people can see that the Kurds vs the Sunnis vs the Shia vs the US vs AQ exists, doesn’t mean they are a military genius capable of resolving the conflict by attracting Sunni or Kurdish allies. Practical ROEs, doctrines, and SOPs are required in a war. The theory is not enough in and of itself.
Ymarsakar:
The percentage may not matter at this time, because we’re talking on a blog. It’s just speculation at the moment. You had implied that all liberals would act a certain way, and I’m disagreeing.
But the percentages would definitely matter if things came to an actual showdown, which they certainly could.
Most people could not predict how they would act in that event. Those would be the times that try men (and women’s) souls.
I also asked by what strength would they utilize to resist Authority. If a person cannot have that, then there’s no reason to assume they are harmless. Then people would be wiser to assume the worst while hoping for the best.
It’s just speculation at the moment. You had implied that all liberals would act a certain way, and I’m disagreeing.
I would cut them some slack if once in a while they’d get outraged at such things as this:
12 Year-Old Conservative and Family Target of Death Threats After Criticizing Obama
Nope, they either ignore or rationalize…
Dangerous pets you have Néo!
What citizens can do to resist the ruling class’s redefinitions of moral and cultural norms.
Most ‘Conservatives’ I know sit on the fence yacking about how tough they are ….
Nope, they either ignore or rationalize…
later at Nuremburg II, they would say that they didn’t know what was happening. That excuse can only go so far though…
“as I told GB around 2013, when his fellow Democrats…” Ymarsakar
FWIW,
I’ve NEVER voted for a democrat for national office and have NEVER registered as either a democrat or republican. In 2013, I disagreed as to the number of liberals that would act as Nazis, ‘just following orders’ but that NEVER made them my “fellow democrats”.
IMO, liberal useful idiots bear responsibility for their support for the left. However, the prime determinate as to what degree of responsibility they bear is determined by how egregious their conscious denial of liberty to others, since the willingness to deny liberty to others (the need to control others) is the primary difference between a liberal and a leftist.
Ymasakar:
The people in the dock at Nuremberg were hardly the Nazi equivalent of liberals.
They were the Nazi equivalent of leftists using the excuse of liberals. The German rank and file Nazi-enablers-but-not-actors were not in the dock at Nuremberg.