Of the sons of Issachar, men who understood the times, with knowledge of what Israel should do, their chiefs were two hundred; and all their kinsmen were at their command — 1 Chronicles 12:32
Don’t let anyone capture you with empty philosophies and high-sounding nonsense that come from human thinking and from the spiritual powers of this world, rather than from Christ. – Colossians 2:8 NLT
We are human, but we don’t wage war as humans do. We use God’s mighty weapons, not worldly weapons, to knock down the strongholds of human reasoning and to destroy false arguments. We destroy every proud obstacle that keeps people from knowing God. We capture their rebellious thoughts and teach them to obey Christ. – 2 Corinthians 10:3-5 NLT
Its been nearly three years since I wrote a long article titled, “Why I Call Obama A Fascist.” And the man has EXPLODED in fascism since I wrote that with his targeting of nearly 300 conservative groups using his thug IRS as a major recent example. He is a firehose of pure fascist evil and you literally cannot keep up with it unless you stay up 24/7 trying to document it all.
But this article isn’t about Obama per se; it’s about the left that Obama is a creature of. It’s about the left that is quintessentially fascist. Which is all-too easy to prove and to document.
In a nutshell, “NAZI” stood for “National Socialist German Workers Party.” The only difference between fascist “national socialism” and “communism” was the fact that one favored “national” socialism while the other demanded “international socialism.” But socialism is socialism. Socialism is always and in every case big government run amok. Socialism is government dictating to the people what to do and how to live and what to think. If there was a National Socialist American Workers Party, is anyone actually fool enough to believe it would be the Republicans or the conservatives??? Because conservatism stands for the ANTITHESIS of socialism: we stand for LIMITED federal government, for individual liberty rather than governmental control, for laissez-faire free markets rather than government taxation and regulation.
Gene Edward Veith makes this point:
“Part of the problem in recognizing fascism is the assumption that it is conservative. [Zeev] Sternhell has observed how study of the ideology has been obscured by “the official Marxist interpretation of fascism.” Marxism defines fascism as its polar opposite. If Marxism is progressive, fascism is conservative. If Marxism is left wing, fascism is right wing. If Marxism champions the proletariat, fascism champions the bourgeoisie. If Marxism is socialist, fascism is capitalist.
The influence of Marxist scholarship has severely distorted our understanding of fascism. Communism and fascism were rival brands of socialism. Whereas Marxist socialism is predicated on an international class struggle, fascist national socialism promoted a socialism centered in national unity. Both communists and fascists opposed the bourgeoisie. Both attacked the conservatives. Both were mass movements, which had special appeal for the intelligentsia, students, and artists, as well as workers. Both favored strong centralized governments and rejected the free economy and the ideals of individual liberty. Fascists saw themselves as being neither of the right nor the left. They believed that they constituted a third force synthesizing the best of both extremes” [Gene Edward Veith, Jr., Modern Fascism: Liquidating the Judeo-Christian Worldview, p. 26].
Which is to say that you are already a far-leftist socialist – a communist – merely to believe the lie that the communist propaganda put forward about fascism being “right-wing.”
The notion that fascism/and or Nazism is “right-wing” is utter nonsense beyond this: Nazism and fascism are the extreme right of the far, radical LEFT. Socialism is inherently LEFT-WING, not right-wing. The Nazis believed in a fiercely nation-based socialism whereas the communists believed in an international, “workers of the world unite!” brand of socialism. But they BOTH wanted a giant, all-powerful, totalitarian government that is the heart of not the right but the LEFT.
So “fascism” is NOT“right-wing.” The next surprise is that “liberalism” is not “liberal” in any classical understanding of the term.
One of the things the reader must understand is how liberals have perverted the term “liberal” and “liberalism.” Yes, fascism is ideologically the opposite of liberalism; but that is “liberalism” in the CLASSICAL sense of liberalism, rather than what today’s progressive liberals believe and are doing. What is “liberalism” in the classical sense?
In other words, a limited proponent of limited government, free markets, individual liberty. THAT’S a classical liberty. Which is to say that I as a modern conservative am a classical liberal, whereas modern progressive liberals are – you guessed it – fascists. Modern liberals, like the fascists, believe in the OPPOSITE of all these things that classical liberals held and hold the most dear.
As you think about fascism and Nazism (which was merely a particular form of fascist socialism, think about some of the tenants and try to understand how what I am going to document that which is coming from the American left today is genuinely fascist.
Only a couple of months ago there was this gem of rabid fascist intolerance from the left:
A student writer at Harvard University is raising eyebrows after publishing her belief that free speech on campus should be abolished and professors with opposing views be fired.
Sandra Korn, a senior who writes a column for the Harvard Crimson newspaper, thinks radical leftism is the only permissible political philosophy, and the First Amendment only hinders colleges from brainwashing students with her viewpoint.
“Let’s give up on academic freedom in favor of justice,” states the subtitle of her Feb. 18 column, in which she insists Harvard stop guaranteeing students and professors the right to hold controversial views and conduct research putting liberalism in a negative light.
“If our university community opposes racism, sexism, and heterosexism, why should we put up with research that counters our goals?” Korn asks.
“It is tempting to decry frustrating restrictions on academic research as violations of academic freedom. Yet I would encourage student and worker organizers to instead use a framework of justice. After all, if we give up our obsessive reliance on the doctrine of academic freedom, we can consider more thoughtfully what is just.”
Korn’s view grabbed the attention of the nation’s top conservative voice, Rush Limbaugh.
“This is not unique. This is not satire. This is not parody,” Limbaugh said on his nationally broadcast radio program Tuesday. “This woman, Sandra Korn, is real, and she’s serious that free speech needs to be abridged because it is threatening liberalism. It means that liberalism cannot hold up to scrutiny. It cannot withstand a challenge. If liberalism were infallible, if liberalism were so powerful and automatic, they would welcome challenges to it – and they would welcome the attempt to persuade and to convert. But instead they’re threatened by it.”
When asked of he thought her belief was going to become a movement, Limbaugh indicated it already was one.
“This is what the left is,” he explained. “Why do you think they want to get rid of this program? Why do you think they want to get rid of Fox News? Why do they want to silence criticism? What is Obama’s modus operandi? Eliminate the opposition. This is already a movement!”
“This woman has just written a column about it at Harvard with what appears to be an extreme view of eliminating the First Amendment as a way of silencing opposition. But she’s very honest. The First Amendment, free speech, ‘threatens liberalism,’ meaning liberalism cannot thrive in an open society. Liberalism is totalitarianism. Liberalism is statism. It is authoritarianism. It is all of the horrible Isms, and it cannot thrive when there is open debate. It cannot survive challenges.”
“Ah, the ‘community organizer force’ is strong with this one,” I’m sure Darth Obama – who held a similar position writing for Harvard – must have mused when he heard this.
The question, “Is this already a movement?” – and not merely an intellectual bowel movement – has been powerfully answered in the few weeks since this article came out from Harvard (the brains of the cockroach that is the leftist organism).
Just days after taking the job, Brendan Eich has resigned as chief executive of Mozilla, the maker of Firefox, after coming under fire for his 2008 support of Proposition 8, the California constitutional amendment that disallowed the marriage of same-sex couples in the state.
Mozilla announced Eich’s resignation Thursday afternoon in a blog post, saying that his hiring did not reflect the organization’s beliefs.
“While painful, the events of the last week show exactly why we need the Web. So all of us can engage freely in the tough conversations we need to make the world better,” Mozilla Chairwoman Mitchell Baker said in a statement. “We need to put our focus back on protecting that Web. And doing so in a way that will make you proud to support Mozilla.”
The organization named Eich CEO last week after operating under an interim CEO for more than a year. Eich had worked at Mozilla for years and was known as the founder of JavaScript, a popular programming language.
But Eich came under sharp criticism for donating $1,000 to a campaign that supported Poropisition 8, Several Mozilla board members resigned to protest his appointment.
Numerous Mozilla staffers also took to Twitter to call for his resignation. One popular online dating site OKCupid displayed a message on its website asking Firefox users to access the Web using a different browser.
“We took the stand because it seemed like the right thing to do,” a spokesman for OKCupid said.
Mozilla said it is still discussing what comes next for its leadership.
This guy Eich was incredibly well qualified to run this company, which he’d helped found. But liberals hold religious purity tests having nothing to do with corporate performance – and Eich was found to be a heretic and blasphemer.
If you ask the question, “Is Sandra Korn running Mozilla?” the answer is, “She might as well be.” Because fascist leftist who are rabidly intolerant of ANY point of view that differs from their own and cannot emotionally or intellectually handle dissent are what they are whether they’re at Harvard or at Mozilla.
Imagine the fallout had a corporation purged a CEO for the death penalty-worthy crime of having exercised his or her freedom to donate to the No on 8 campaign. And said they were doing it out of a spirit of “inclusiveness” and “diversity” (which they would have as much to claim as the opposite side). But for the most part, the propaganda mill that constitutes “journalism” simply ignored this story.
What is rather fascinating is that one particular paragraph in the print article (on page B2 of the LA Times’ Business section) – was purged from the online article that you see here. It immediately follows the “did not reflect the organization’s beliefs” line of crap. Here it is:
“Our organizational culture reflects diversity and inclusiveness,” Mozilla Chairwoman Michell Baker said in a statement. “Mozilla supports equality for all.”
You can see that statement from Mozilla in broader form here.
What is funny – and I mean laugh-till-you-pee-your-pants-funny – is how these Nazis actually view themselves as “inclusive.” You can understand why the uberleftist LA Times would purge that: it is so obviously self-refuting that it could not stand the light of day and had to be hidden the way ashamed parents would hide a child molesting freak in the basement.
Hell, I still remember when Barack Obama stated the following when he was lying his way to the presidency:
“I believe that marriage is the union between a man and a woman. [big audience applause] For me as a Christian it’s also a sacred union, you know, God’s in the mix….I am not somebody who promotes same-sex marriage.” — Barack Obama, Saddleback Church debate moderated by Rick Warren, August 20, 2008
The ONLYreason the left didn’t go after Obama the way they have rabidly gone after everyone who said the same words is that they understood that – being one of them – Barack Obama was a pathological liar who said one think until it was time to say the opposite of the thing he said.
Pathological dishonesty goes hand in hand with pathological fascism.
When “inclusive” means, “If you don’t think exactly like I do, I will destroy you,” you have arrived at the spirit of Orwellianism. And the soul of the left skinny dips in Orwellian anti-thought.
If you are a Democrat, if you are a liberal, you DON’T think. You double-think. You unthink. You anti-think. Which is why you are such a complete moral idiot. And why you have no shame, no honor, no virtue, no integrity of any kind whatsoever.
Sandra Korn was also apparently running the National Young Feminist Leadership Conference – which was (laughably) all about “inclusiveness” too.
Its “safe space policy” promised the event would be “structured around inclusivity … with a focus on representing various perspectives,”according to the event’s official website(feministcampus.org).
Watch how “inclusive” they are the moment they discover “the other” and tell me about that “safe space policy” again. Tell me how this is what “structured around inclusivity” looks like. Tell me that this is what it looks like to have “a focus on representing various perspectives”:
Campus Reform’s Katherine Timpf attended the National Young Feminist Leadership Conference (NYFLC) — an event which promised to be about “inclusivity” and welcoming everyone — only to be told that “conservative” women were not welcome.
Timpf attempted to ask students’ their opinions on feminism, but conference organizers made an announcement advising participants not to talk to Campus Reform because it was a “conservative” outlet.
“You guys aren’t wanted here.”
The organizers also followed Timpf around the conference to interrupt her conversations with students to tell them the same thing.
“They’re a group that’s conservative, so what we are fighting for is not something…” one organizer told a student who was talking with Timpf, prompting the student to walk away.
“You’re just assuming that based on where I work,” Timpf told the organizer.
“Yeah, we are,” the organizer stated.
“You guys aren’t wanted here,” a participant told the reporter after the warning.
“I thought this was supposed to be an inclusive thing, why am I being excluded because of where I work?” Timpf asked another organizer after another interruption.
“Because the place that you work is not inclusive,” the organizer responded.
“You don’t know that,” Timpf said. “You don’t know anything about me or my personal beliefs, I’m just being labeled and excluded based on a label.”
Its “safe space policy” promised the event would be “structured around inclusivity … with a focus on representing various perspectives,” according to the event’s official website.
“We will not tolerate, allow, or encourage behavior which makes folks feel uncomfortable, threatened, or demoralized,” the policy continued.
The NYFLC conference was held March 29-31 at the DoubleTree by Hilton in Crystal City, VA.
The Nazis couldn’t have done it any better. One female editorialist described it as “Mean Girls with ugly women.”
But hey, I’m not done yet detailing how the left self-refutes themselves and documents their OWN rabid hypocrisy and intolerance.
Try this bit of “Sandra Korn” at other liberal universities like UC Santa Barbara and Oberlin, which are beginning to impose “trigger warnings” that would allow students to opt out of anything that might harm a liberal mind (you know, like reality or the truth):
The latest attack on academic freedom comes not from government authorities or corporate pressure but from students. At UC Santa Barbara, the student Senate recently passed a resolution that calls for mandatory “trigger warnings” — cautions from professors, to be added to their course syllabi, specifying which days’ lectures will include readings or films or discussions that might trigger feelings of emotional or physical distress.
The resolution calls for warnings if course materials will involve depictions and discussions of rape, sexual assault, suicide, pornography or graphic violence, among other things. The professors would excuse students from those classes, with no points deducted, if the students felt the material would distress them; it is left unclear how students would complete assignments or answer test questions based on the work covered in those classes.
The student resolution is only advisory, a recommendation that campus authorities can turn into policy or reject. They should not only choose the latter course but should explain firmly to students why such a policy would be antithetical to all that college is supposed to provide: a rich and diverse body of study that often requires students to confront difficult or uncomfortable material, and encourages them to discuss such topics openly. Trigger warnings are part of a campus culture that is increasingly overprotective and hypersensitive in its efforts to ensure that no student is ever offended or made to feel uncomfortable…
May I please have my liberal reality inoculation please? Because reality really, really upsets me and I have to be protected from it at all cost. That’s why I went to college where I could swim in a protective ocean where only fascist liberalism is allowed.
The police report regarding UC Santa Barbara Professor Mireille Miller-Young has been released. Miller-Young made news after tearing a sign away from an anti-abortion activist in the university’s Free Speech Zone. Here is the PDF, and here is a rather illuminating quote.
It’s worth a reminder that this professor’s areas of study include “Pornography; Sex Work; Black Film, Popular Culture and Art; Feminist & Queer Theory; African American & African Diaspora Studies,” all of which require confronting potentially upsetting material. So what exactly is the limit on what is permissible on university campuses?
Outside of Santa Barbara, this story is receiving the most attention from conservative outlets. I’m curious to know what mainstream left-of-center outlets think about this.
This post was provoked by Donald Douglas, who writes, “America’s college campuses: literally the most f-ked-up places in the nation.”
So if I’m upset by something, I have the right to employ violence? Only if I’m a liberal. If I’m a conservative, I’m going to get hauled away and prosecuted to the very fullest possible extent of the law just for SAYING that a liberal cockroach doesn’t have a right to be somewhere. That’s the kind of double-standard that also went on as “Germany” became “Nazi Germany.” Only the fascist thugs had the right to beat the hell out of somebody they didn’t like.
The amazing thing is that THESE ARE THE PEOPLE WHO CALL ME A NAZI. And they’re so pathologically dishonest and they’ve so completely deceived even themselves that they actually do it with a straight face.
You wonder how their skulls don’t explode from trying to hold so many massive contradictions, but they manage to pull it off. Because they anti-think when un-thinking or double-thinking fails them. And they are the most rabidly intolerant people that there are – and you literally have to be a full-fledged NAZI to be more rabidly intolerant than these liberals. And it is my observation that liberals are “progressives” who are progressing quite rapidly toward being full-fledged Nazis.
Do you want to know what is interesting? It is that when the Nazis came to Germany, it was these same university professor-types who were the FIRST to knuckle under and collaborate with their Nazi masters:
“Within the system of the concentration camp, something very strange took place. The first to give in, the first to collaborate—to save their lives—were the intellectuals, the liberals, the humanists, the professors of sociology, and the like. Because suddenly their whole concept of the universe broke down. They had nothing to lean on.”
Albert Einstein (a Jew who fled before the Nazis could capture him):
“Having always been an ardent partisan of freedom I turned to the Universities, as soon as the revolution broke out in Germany, to find the Universities took refuge in silence. I then turned to the editors of powerful newspapers, who, but lately in flowing articles, had claimed to be the faithful champions of liberty. These men, as well as the Universities, were reduced to silence in a few weeks. I then addressed myself to the authors individually, to those who passed themselves off as the intellectual guides of Germany, and among whom many had frequently discussed the question of freedom and its place in modern life. They are in turn very dumb. Only the church opposed the fight which Hitler was waging against liberty. Till then I had no interest in the church, but now I feel great admiration and am truly attracted to the church which had the persistent courage to fight for spiritual truth and moral freedom. I feel obliged to confess that I now admire what I used to consider of little value.”
Modern liberalism and those who cling to it had no answers or courage against Nazism. And in fact their philosophies, the values they hold today ARE the same as that of the Nazis they bowed down to when their moment to stand heroically came.
Here’s what you need to know about the university liberals who endlessly lecture us:
Soon after the end of World War II, the Jewish scholar Max Weinreich published Hitler’s Professors: The Part of Scholarship in Germany’s Crimes against the Jewish People. This exhaustive study of the complicity of German intellectuals with the Nazi regime documents how the scholarship of the time provided the intellectual justification and the conceptual framework for the Holocaust. This is not to say that these intellectuals necessarily intended the Holocaust, but, argues Weinreich, it would not have been possible without them. “Did the administer the poison?” he asks, “By no means; they only wrote the prescription.” — Veith, Modern Fascism, p. 79-80
Ask yourself if “Professor” Mireille Miller-Young did far more than “write a prescription” justifying violence.
Weinreich establishes that these many academics who supported Hitler were sophisticated thinkers. Their problem was that the “value-free” assumptions with which they pursued their research resulted in a mendacity inherent in any scholarship that overlooks or openly repudiates all moral and spiritual values. Which is THE same cancerous flaw that modern progressive intellectual liberalism suffers from today.
Now that I have documented the fascism in the left’s behavior, allow me to proceed to develop a new point about the fascism central to the left’s philosophy. Jonah Goldberg, in his great work Liberal Fascism makes this point:
For more than sixty years, liberals have insisted that the bacillus of fascism lies semi-dormant in the bloodstream of the political right. And yet with the notable exception and complicated exceptions of Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom, no top-tier American conservative intellectual was a devotee if Nietzsche or a serious admirer of Heidegger. All major conservative schools of thought trace themselves back to the champions of the Enlightenment – John Locke, Adam Smith, Montesquieu, Burke – and none of them have any direct intellectual link to Nazism or Nietzsche, to existentialism, nihilism, or even, for the most part, Pragmatism. Meanwhile, the ranks of left-wing intellectuals are infested with ideas and thinkers squarely in the fascist tradition. And yet all it takes is the abracadabra word “Marxist” to absolve most of them of any affinity with these currents. The rest get off the hook merely by attacking bourgeois morality and American values – even though such attacks are themselves little better than a reprise of fascist arguments. — pg. 175-176
The left now acknowledges that it is “common knowledge” that Martin Heidegger was a Nazi. But it’s funny that they spent most of the last eighty years denying that “common knowledge.”
The same methods—suppression of evidence, evasions and falsifications—were employed by the legions of Heidegger interpreters and apologists. They were, until the publication of Farias epochal book, largely successful in preventing any critical scrutiny of Heidegger’s ideas and their relation to his politics. An ironic chapter in this enterprise was played out by the deconstruction theorist, Paul De Man. De Man did much to publicize Heidegger among the American intelligentsia in the 1960s. Then there came the posthumous revelation in the late 1980s that De Man’s hands had not exactly been clean. He had been a Nazi collaborator in occupied Belgium during World War II and in that capacity had written some anti-Semitic articles for a Nazi-sponsored literary magazine. After De Man’s war-time essays were published there ensued a lively controversy about the relationship between De Man’s war-time activity and his subsequent ideas on deconstruction.[
And my exploration of the above distortion of Marxist scholarship of fascism and Nazism at the beginning of this article is merely part of that intellectual tradition of deceit. The left “suppressed evidence” and employed tactics of “evasions and falsifications” to conceal the “common knowledge” of their intellectual hero for most of the last century until one courageous scholar finally blew the doors off the lie. And of course then the left instantly proceeded to apologize and rationalize the man’s heart and mind of pure evil. And of course it is pointed out that the left did the exact same thing with ANOTHER hard-core Nazi intellectual hero of the left named Paul de Man. You can goose step down the list of numerous leftist intellectual heroes such as Herbert Marcuse, Frantz Fanon, Georges Sorel, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Carl Schmitt, and others to see the same damn thing. And frankly even documented PROOF of the hatefulness of these men and their ideas – and the CONSEQUENCES of their ideas – don’t matter.
The paragraph that follows the one cited above in Liberal Fascism therefore points out that:
In a seminar there may be important distinctions to be made between, say, Foucault’s “enterprise of Unreason,” Derrida’s tyrannical logocentrism, and Hitler’s “revolt against reason.” But such distinctions rarely translate beyond ivy-covered walls – and they are particularly meaningless to a movement that believes action is more important than ideas. Deconstruction, existentialism, postmodernism, Pragmatism, relativism: all of these ideas had the same purpose – to erode the iron chains of tradition, dissolve the concrete foundations of truth, and firebomb the bunkers where the defenders of the ancien regime still fought and persevered. These were ideologies of the “movement.” The late Richard Rorty admitted as much conflating Nietzsche and Heidegger with James and Dewey as part of the same grand project. — Goldberg, Modern Fascism, p. 176
And it is simply a FACT that all of those intellectual traditions and worldviews are at the very heart of the left and in radical rejection of the Classical Enlightenment foundationalism and Judeo-Christian religious worldview of the right. You can ignore it with your constant exploitation of crisis and demand for action all you want, liberal, but hateful ideas have hateful consequences. And it has been the hateful ideas that you CONTINUE to espouse to this very day that had those hateful consequences that resulted in the gas chambers and the Holocaust of Nazism AND the purges and massacres of MILLIONS of communism.
You OWN it. Even though you are too much of a hypocrite and a liar and frankly a coward to ADMIT that you own it.
One of the primary reasons that the left’s “enterprise of Unreason” (remember how I referred to the left’s “un-thinking” and “anti-thinking” and “double-thinking”?) consistently leads to moral horror boils down to this:
David Hirsch, in his study of Holocaust literature, concludes that one of the most striking characteristics of those who have carried out the exterminations was their inability to have empathy with an “other.” Hans Ebeling criticizes Heidegger in similar terms: “the power of acknowledging the other as the other, as essentially equal, is missing, and for that reason it only remains to oppress the other without any leniency.” Since existentialism focuses upon the individual consciousness, “the other” is necessarily minimized. — Veith, Modern Fascism, p. 103
At thus I reintroduce the demonization and purging of Brendan Eich for no other reason than that he gave a small financial contribution to a view of marriage that Barack Obama was HIMSELF hypocritically and dishonestly claiming at the time. Because it is the NATURE of the left – particularly the “intellectual” left – to lie without shame and cover up the truth and to suppress and to evade and to falsify the FACTS.
It ought to go without saying that if a more conservative-friendly corporation’s CEO had been found to have donated $1,000 to the “No on 8” campaign – as I’m frankly sure many have – he would still be there. Because unlike the left we value intellectual freedom.
So when Barack Hussein Obama routinely demonizes “the other” – that is absolutely everybody who doesn’t think exactly like he does – it’s what they call in golf “par for the course.” It’s who he is and what he does because the man is a fascist who has acted like a fascist his entire adult life as a “community agitator” and who very much THINKS like a fascist.
A lot of times folks would prefer the devil they know to the devil they don’t. But this law is doing what it’s supposed to do. It’s working. It’s helping people from coast to coast, all of which makes the lengths to which critics have gone to scare people or undermine the law, or try to repeal the law without offering any plausible alternative so hard to understand. I’ve got to admit, I don’t get it. Why are folks working so hard for people not to have health insurance? Why are they so mad about the idea of folks having health insurance?
The Big Lie is how Obama has governed. It is his ONLY “leadership technique.” And because he kept repeating the same lies his Big Lie governance literally got him elected and re-elected.
Find ONE Republican who would say he or she is opposed to ObamaCare because – and I quote Obama’s lie from hell here – “I don’t want people to have health insurance.” Just find ONE Republican who has said, “I’m mad about the idea of folks having health insurance.”
Obama has ALWAYS hated and demonized “the other” while maintaining the exact same hatred for the truth and willingness to engage in the “suppression of evidence, evasions and falsifications” that I cite as at the heart of the fascist intellectual tradition above.
Tell you what: I challenge any liberal to a “hate contest.” It’s Bush hate vs. Obama hate. If I can find more examples of Obama demonizing Republicans than you can find of Bush demonizing Democrats, I get to use you as proof – with your consent no less – that all Democrats are Nazi liars who participate in Obama’s campaign of hate against “the other.”
Obama does to Republicans what Hitler did to Jews on a nearly a daily basis.
I’ve been saying it and saying it. The beast is coming, the Antichrist from the Bible. He will be the ULTIMATE Democrat in that he will be the ultimate big government totalitarian who creates the State in place of God and demands worship in place of God. He will do what Democrats have tried to do and he will succeed in completely taking over the economy such that no man or woman may buy or sell without his stamp of approval (a.k.a. the mark of the beast).
Nazism didn’t just fly out of nowhere. It took DECADES for the evil in the German spirit to metastasize to the point where they were willing to murder six million Jews and five million other helpless human beings in their government extermination center.
It was from the minds of thinkers whom the American left still adores and follows today – thinkers such as Nietzsche and Heidegger and Derrida – from which the thought process that led to the death camps and the gas chambers and the ovens.
And Obama has taken that liberal descent into true fascism that will ultimately have the ugliest and darkest consequences a giant step forward.
And of course it’s nothing new when a mob of black liberals (blacks voting so overwhelmingly Democrat that to be black IS to vote Democrat) beat a white man into a coma. So it shouldn’t be any surprise whatsoever that blacks – who are fascist because they are liberals – would beat yet another white man into a coma for the crime of being white.
Religious liberty groups have grave concerns after they learned the Pentagon is vetting its guide on religious tolerance with a group that compared Christian evangelism to “rape” and advocated that military personnel who proselytize should be court martialed.
The Military Religious Freedom Foundation is calling on the Air Force to enforce a regulation that they believe calls for the court martial of any service member caught proselytizing.
President Mikey Weinstein and others from his organization met privately with Pentagon officials on April 23. He said U.S. troops who proselytize are guilty of sedition and treason and should be punished – by the hundreds if necessary – to stave off what he called a “tidal wave of fundamentalists.”
“Someone needs to be punished for this,” Weinstein told Fox News. “Until the Air Force or Army or Navy or Marine Corps punishes a member of the military for unconstitutional religious proselytizing andoppression, we will never have the ability to stop this horrible, horrendous, dehumanizing behavior.”
Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, told Fox News he was stunned that the Pentagon would be taking counsel and advice from the Military Religious Freedom Foundation.
“Why would military leadership be meeting with one of the most rabid atheists in America to discuss religious freedom in the military,” Perkins said. “That’s like consulting with China on how to improve human rights.”
The FRC has launched a petition drive urging Defense Sec. Chuck Hagel to protect the religious freedom of troops “and not to proceed with the purge of religion within the ranks called for by anti-Christian activists.”
Pentagon officials met with Weinstein and his group were to discuss a policy called “Air Force Culture, Air Force Standards,” published on Aug. 7, 2012.
“Leaders at all levels must balance constitutional protections for an individual’s free exercise of religion or other personal beliefs and the constitutional prohibition against governmental establishment of religion,” the regulation states.
Military leaders were admonished not to use their position to “promote their personal religious beliefs to their subordinates or to extend preferential treatment for any religion.”
Weinstein said it’s time for the Air Force to enforce the regulation – with zeal.
“If a member of the military is proselytizing in a manner that violates the law, well then of course they can be prosecuted,” he said. “We would love to see hundreds of prosecutions to stop this outrage of fundamentalist religious persecution.”
He compared the act of proselytizing to rape.
“It is a version of being spiritually raped and you are being spiritually raped by fundamentalist Christian religious predators,” he told Fox News.
He said there is a time and a place for those in uniform to share their faith – but he took issues with fundamentalism that he says is causing widespread problems in the military.
“When those people are in uniform and they believe there is no time, place or manner in which they can be restricted from proselytizing, they are creating tyranny, oppression, degradation, humiliation and horrible, horrible pain upon members of the military,” he said.
Perkins said the military regulations have “Weinstein’s fingerprints all over it.”
“It threatens to treat service members caught witnessing as enemies of the state,” he said, referring to a Washington Post article highlighting Weinstein’s meeting with Pentagon officials. “Non-compliance, the Pentagon suggests, even from ordained chaplains could result in court-martialing on a case-by-case basis.”
The Pentagon confirmed to Fox News that Christian evangelism is against regulations.
“Religious proselytization is not permitted within the Department of Defense, LCDR Nate Christensen said in a written statement. He declined to say if any chaplains or service members had been prosecuted for such an offense.
“Court martials and non-judicial punishments are decided on a case-by-case basis and it would be inappropriate to speculate on the outcome in specific cases,” he said.
Ron Crews, the executive director of the Chaplain Alliance for Religious Liberty, warns that the Air Force policy would “significantly impact the religious liberties of Air Force personnel.”
“Saying that a service member cannot speak of his faith is like telling a service member he cannot talk about his spouse or children,” Crews said. “I do not think the Air Force wants to ban personnel from protected religious speech, and I certainly hope that it is willing to listen to the numerous individuals and groups who protect military religious liberty without demonizing service members.”
In an interview with the Washington Post, Weinstein called proselytizing a “national security threat.”
“And what the Pentagon needs to understand is that it is sedition and treason,” he told the newspaper. “It should be punished.”
Perkins said it was troubling the Obama Administration would place so much trust in someone like Weinstein.
“Unfortunately, it appears our military is on a forced march away from the very freedoms they are sworn to protect,” he said. “This language from Weinstein that Christians who share their faith or offer comfort to others from their faith in Jesus Christ is “sedition and treason” is a treasonous statement in and of itself.”
But Weinstein said they count thousands of Protestants among their ranks – and said they are simply going after fundamentalists.
“As soon as we find a fundamentalist Muslim, atheist, Jewish person or anybody else, we will be happy to fight them – but so far they have been few and far between,” he said.
Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Jerry Boykin, an executive vice president with the Family Research Council, told Fox News that he’s deeply concerned by what he call a pattern of attacks on Christianity within the military.
“Mickey Weinstein has a very visceral hated of Christianity and those who are Christians,” he said. “He’d like to see it eliminated from the military entirely.”
If the Air Force policy is implemented, Boykin said Christians who speak of their faith “could now be prosecuted as enemies of the state.”
“This has the potential to destroy military recruiting across the services as Americans realize that their faith will be suppressed by joining the military,” Boykin said.
In the meantime, Weinstein and his group said they will continue to push for the Pentagon to fully implement its ban on proselytizing.
“There is a time, place and manner in which proselytizing is not only allowed, but it’s something we support among our Christian clients,” Weinstein said. “However, you can’t scream fire in a crowded theater and you can’t scream Jesus in a crowded theater at certain times, places, and in certain manners.”
As we speak, a Christian was just sentenced to death in Iran. His crime? Being a Christian. Which of course makes rabid atheists like Weinstein happy. He wants Iran to come to America and do unto the Christians as Iran is doing unto them. Apparently Obama agrees.
Just today, we’ve got a Christian in North Korea being sentenced to fifteen years of hard labor. What was his crime? Being a Christian. And the vicious communist monsters in North Korea view being a Christian exactly the same way that Weinstein views them: as seditious traitors.
There is a 100% correlation between “state atheism” and the most inhuman and murderous form of communism. I have repeatedly documented that fact:
We’ve seen the kinds of places that Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and numerous other atheists yearn for: they’re called “re-education camps,” and they come only from officially state atheist societies:
State atheism has been defined as the official “promotion of atheism” by a government, typically by active suppression of religious freedom and practice.[1]
“One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic.”
Chairman Mao said:
LEE EDWARDS, CHAIRMAN, VICTIMS OF COMMUNISM MEMORIAL FOUNDATION: In 1959 to 1961 was the so-called “great leap forward” which was actually a gigantic leap backwards in which he tried to collectivize and communize agriculture.
And they came to him after the first year and they said, “Chairman, five million people have died of famine.” He said, “No matter, keep going.” In the second year, they came back and they said, “Ten million Chinese have died.” He said, “No matter, continue.” The third year, 20 million Chinese have died. And he said finally, “Well, perhaps this is not the best idea that I’ve ever had.”
CHANG: When he was told that, you know, his people were dying of starvation, Mao said, “Educate the peasants to eat less. Thus they can benefit – they can fertilize the land.”
Versus Abraham Lincoln, who said:
… that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
But America has made its choice.
This is Obama’s God damn America, just as I have been saying over and over. One day every Democrat baby-murdering queer sodomy-lover will one day burn in hell.
Just watch the first 30 seconds of this and you’ll find a teacher – a public school teacher – wearing a Che Guevara shirt (red as in “communism”) who refuses to answer questions about why he’s wearing a shirt celebrating a communist terrorist murderer and says he’d rather talk about teacher’s issues – and then refuses to talk about teacher’s issues when the interviewer gives him what he said he wanted. Then you’ve got a guy waving a flag saying his flag is about “revolutionary unionism.” That man praises his union – the CTU – and says he really admires the stance they’ve taken towards organizing (a.k.a. communism), towards a social justice movement (a.k.a. MORE communism), and using unions to advance larger social issues (i.e., barf alert levels of communism):
What is going on in Chicago is a metaphor for what is going on in America. We’ve got one last chance to save ourselves as a nation. And we frankly don’t deserve to be saved.
A reader sent me a link to great conservative economist Milton Friedman appearing on the Phil Donahue program 33 years ago (just as America was in the dismal throes of the Carter administration).
You can’t put it any better than this 2 1/2 minute explanation as to why free market economies thrive and leftist economies fail.
Watch as economist Milton Freidman smacks down Donahue’s equating of capitalism with greed. If only Friedman were alive today to take Obama to school. What a debate that would be. Obama would not know what hit him, he would be left in a stuttering, stammering pile of um’s and uh’s. If only…
Milton Friedman as charming as he is brilliant. As gentle as he is razor sharp.
Transcript:
Donahue: When you see around the globe the mal-distribution of wealth, the desperate plight of millions of people in underdeveloped countries, when you see so few haves and so many have-nots, when you see the greed and the concentration of power, did you ever have a moment of doubt about capitalism and whether greed is a good idea to run on?
Friedman: Well, first of all, tell me is there some society you know that doesn’t run on greed? You think Russia doesn’t run on greed? You think China doesn’t run on greed? What is greed? Of course none of us are greedy; its only the other fellow who’s greedy.
The world runs on individuals pursuing their separate interests. The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus. Einstein didn’t construct his theory under order from a bureaucrat. Henry Ford didn’t revolutionize the automobile industry that way. In the only cases in which the masses have escaped from the kind of grinding poverty you’re talking about, the only cases in recorded history are where they have had capitalism and largely free trade. If you want to know where the masses are worst off, it’s exactly in the kinds of societies that depart from that. So that the record of history is absolutely crystal clear: that there is no alternative way so far discovered of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by a free enterprise system.
Donahue: But it seems to reward not virtue as much as ability to manipulate the system.
Friedman: And what does reward virtue? You think the communist commissar rewards virtue? You think a Hitler rewards virtue? You think – excuse me, if you will pardon me – do you think American presidents reward virtue? Do they choose their appointees on the basis of the virtue of the people appointed or on the basis of their political clout? Is it really true that political self interest is nobler somehow than economic self interest? You know I think you are taking a lot of things for granted. bJust tell me where in the world you find these angels who are going to organize society for us? Well, I don’t even trust you to do that.
Some choice Freidman quotage:
“The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit.”
“Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own. Nobody uses somebody else’s resources as carefully as he uses his own. So if you want efficiency and effectiveness, if you want knowledge to be properly utilized, you have to do it through the means of private property.”
“Governments never learn. Only people learn.”
“So the question is, do corporate executives, provided they stay within the law, have responsibilities in their business activities other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible? And my answer to that is, no they do not”
“The only way that has ever been discovered to have a lot of people cooperate together voluntarily is through the free market. And that’s why it’s so essential to preserving individual freedom.”
“Most economic fallacies derive – from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another.”
“Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.”
“What kind of society isn’t structured on greed? The problem of social organization is how to set up an arrangement under which greed will do the least harm; capitalism is that kind of a system”
“History suggests that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom. Clearly it is not a sufficient condition.”
“The society that puts equality before freedom will end up with neither. The society that puts freedom before equality will end up with a great measure of both.”
Ah! The good old days when communist leaders could sip on fine cognac and eat caviar from the luxury of their Black Sea dachas while exhorting the proletariat to keep up the heroic fight for “the workers of the world”!!!
The left loves workers, everyone knows that, right? That’s because they are fed lies by the ton by mainstream media propaganda that could have come from Stalin’s TASS or from Hitler’s Ministry of Propaganda.
“Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.” — Michele Obama
See ya at camp, and I sure hope you’re looking as forward to your “re-education” and your opportunity to “move out of your comfort zone” when you’re “required to work” as I am!!!
“We are socialists, we are enemies of today’s capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions.” — Adolf Hitler, from speech delivered on May 1, 1927
This is important to understand as we see history repeating itself (“Deja vu all over again!”).
Gene Edward Veith, Jr. pointed out many of the elements that communism and fascism held in common:
“The influence of Marxist scholarship has severely distorted our understanding of fascism. Communism and fascism were rival brands of socialism. Whereas Marxist socialism is predicated on an international class struggle, fascist national socialism promoted a socialism centered in national unity. [And in fact, Both movements were “revolutionary socialist ideologies.” Going on,] Both communists and fascists opposed the bourgeoisie. Both attacked the conservatives. Both were mass movements, which had special appeal for the intelligentsia, students, and artists, as well as workers. Both favored strong centralized governments and rejected the free economy and the ideals of individual liberty. [And finally,] Fascists saw themselves as being neither of the right nor the left. They believed that they constituted a third force synthesizing the best of both extremes” [Gene Edward Veith, Jr., Modern Fascism: Liquidating the Judeo-Christian Worldview, p. 26].
Nazis “believed that they constituted a third force synthesizing the best of both extremes” of the right AND the left even as they openly acknowledged that they were socialist. So why have they so frequently been branded as “the extreme right wing”? Because the winner gets to write the history, and in the case of the European theater, the big winner of the war between the Nazis and the communists were the communists. And far too many American writers and intellectuals were significantly influenced by leftist thinking. And these “thinkers” were motivated not by historical accuracy or by truth, but by the desire to create a “right wing bogeyman.” Which they proceeded to do and let the truth be damned.
Both fascism and communism clearly and overtly labelled themselves as “socialist” and both claimed that the “worker” was their base. Both rose to power using “workers” as their muscle.
And, as I will show, both socialist movements inevitably crushed the worker. Just as all socialist movements invariably do.
Now, I have had liberals frequently assert that Nazism/fascism was not actually socialist and they have offered as their “evidence” that Hitler abolished the labor unions.
“I am convinced that we cannot possibly dispense with the trades unions. On the contrary, they are among the most important institutions in the economic life of the nation.”
“Before everything else, the trades unions are necessary as building stones for the future economic parliament, which will be made up of chambers representing the various professions and occupations.”
“As I have already said, the germ cells of this State must lie in the administrative chambers which will represent the various occupations and professions, therefore first of all in the trades unions. If this subsequent vocational representation and the Central Economic Parliament are to be National Socialist institutions, these important germ cells must be vehicles of the National Socialist concept of life. The institutions of the movement are to be brought over into the State; for the State cannot call into existence all of a sudden and as if by magic those institutions which are necessary to its existence, unless it wishes to have institutions that are bound to remain completely lifeless.
Looking at the matter from the highest standpoint, the National Socialist Movement will have to recognize the necessity of adopting its own trade-unionist policy.”
“The National Socialist Movement, which aims at establishing the National Socialist People’s State, must always bear steadfastly in mind the principle that every future institution under that State must be rooted in the movement itself.”
And so what did Hitler do? He did NOT “abolish” labor unions, as the modern left charges; rather, the Führer – having stated categorically that such unions were essential to his National Socialism – merged labor unions into the apparatus of the State. Hitler created one mega-union that he was able to control:
“The National Socialist Trades Union is not an instrument for class warfare, but a representative organ of the various occupations and callings. The National Socialist State recognizes no ‘classes’. But, under the political aspect, it recognizes only citizens with absolutely equal rights and equal obligations corresponding thereto. And, side by side with these, it recognizes subjects of the State who have no political rights whatsoever.”
The Communist Party exerted increasing control over trade unions, which even many Communist trade union leaders resisted. By the end of the Civil War a dispute over the role of trade unions occurred within the ruling Communist Party. Leon Trotsky, Nikolay Krestinsky and some others insisted on militarization of trade unions and actually turning them into part of the government apparatus. The Workers’ Opposition (Alexander Shlyapnikov, Alexandra Kollontai) demanded that trade unions manage the economy through an “All-Union Congress of Producers” and that workers comprise a majority of Communist Party members and leaders. There were several other factions. Eventually, all of them were defeated at the 10th Congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) by the so-called “Platform of the Ten” headed by Lenin, which called for trade unions to educate workers, under the control of the Communist Party. Since these times Vladimir Lenin‘s saying, “Trade Unions are a School of Communism” become an indisputable slogan.
A resolution entitled About the Party Unity dissolved and banned any factions within the Party under the pretext that intra-Party discussions distract from “solving actual practical problems”. This resolution radically shifted the balance in the notion “democratic centralism” from “democratic” to “centralism” and enhanced the groundwork of Joseph Stalin‘s future dictatorship.
[…]
Unlike labor unions in the West, Soviet trade unions were, in fact, actually governmental organizations whose chief aim was not to represent workers but to further the goals of management, government, and the CPSU. As such, they were partners of management in attempting to promote labor discipline, worker morale, and productivity. Unions organized “socialist competitions” and awarded prizes for fulfilling quotas
Thus, both fascism and communism were rival brands of socialism (international socialism versus national socialism) which systematically dissolved workers’ rights after making whatever false promises were necessary to secure their cooperation. Both fascism and communism were revolutionary socialist ideologies. Both fascism and communism opposed the bourgeoisie. Both fascism and communism attacked the conservatives. Both fascism and communism were mass movements, which had special appeal for the intelligentsia, students, and artists, as well as workers – which they both forms of socialism continue to have as their bases to this very day. Both fascism and communism fascism and communism favored strong centralized governments and rejected the free economy and the ideals of individual liberty. Both fascism and communism were easily able to become militarized societies. Both fascism and communism were inherently totalitarian and dictatorial. And, yes, both fascism and communism exploited the labor unions the exact same way and then subsequently controlled the labor unions the exact same way.
What is most ironic is that the ultimate model the left points to – communism – has been more brutal to the workers than any ideology that has ever existed. Joseph Stalin solved the unemployment problem by declaring unemployed workers indolent and throwing some thirty million of them into slave labor camps to be worked to death. How is THAT kind of treatment for a “workers’ party”?
Communism versus Fascism is Coke Versus Pepsi. Both amount to a slightly different version of the exact same thing. And fascism and communism warred so fiercely with one another because both movements were competing for the same base of adherents using substantially the same arguments.
Why is this understanding important? Because we’re seeing these same forces that gave us first communism and then fascism banding (perhaps “mobbing” is a better verb) together to produce the same inevitable results. And in fact we have both the Nazis and the Communists joining the labor unions and the intelligentsia, students and artists in their Occupy movement. And we’re seeing this happen on a scale that the world has not seen since the WWI (Soviet communism) and WWII (Nazi fascism) eras.
The same categories of people who reared their ugly heads during the worst periods in the history of the human race are rearing their ugly heads again.
The base of the Democrat Party is composed from the same base that has ALWAYS gone the most profoundly wrong before in serving as the useful idiots that ushered in totalitarianism. And now they are mobbing together so that we can suffer the results of deja vu all over again.
Jonah Goldberg in his great book Liberal Fascism uncovers how liberal societies invariably militarize in their own way before they look to attack external enemies:
What comes to mind when you hear the word “fascism” – immediate responses are dictatorship, genocide, anti-Semitism, racism, and (of course) right wing. Delve a little deeper, and you’ll hear a lot about eugenics, social Darwinism, state capitalism, or the sinister rule of big business. War, militarism, and nationalism will also come up a lot… But very few of these things are unique to fascism, and almost none of them are distinctly right-wing or conservative – at least not in the American sense.
Consider militarism, which will come up again and again in the course of this book. Militarism was indisputably central to fascism (and communism) in countless countries. But it has a much more nuanced relationship with fascism than one might suppose… But for far more people, militarism was a pragmatic expedient: the highest, best means for organizing society in productive ways. Inspired by ideas like those in William James’ famous essay “The Moral Equivalent of War,” militarism seemed to provide a workable and sensible model for achieving desirable ends. Mussolini, who openly admired and invoked James, used this logic for his famous “Battle of the Grains” and other sweeping social initiatives. Such ideas had an immense following in the United States, with many leading progressives championing the use of “industrial armies” to create the ideal workers’ democracy. Later, Franklin Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps – as militaristic a social program as one can imagine – borrowed from these ideas, as did JFK’s Peace Corps.
This trope has hardly been purged from contemporary liberalism. Every day we hear about the “war on cancer,” the “war on drugs,” the “War on poverty,” and exhortations to make this or that social challenge the “moral equivalent of war.” From health care to gun control to global warming, liberals insist that we need to “get beyond politics” and “put ideological differences behind us” in order to “do the people’s business.” The experts and scientists know what to do, we are told; therefore the time for debate is over. This, albeit in a nicer and more benign form, is the logic of fascism – and it was on ample display in the administrations of Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and yes, even John F. Kennedy. [Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism, pp. 5-6]
“Nothing makes me more certain of the victory of our ideas than our success in the universities” – Adolf Hitler, 1930
The same people are up to the same antics. It’s deja vu all over again.
The left is also constantly demagoguing the sense of crisis to continue to ram home their increasingly failing policies. Goldberg again:
“The utility of terror was multifaceted, but among its chief benefits was its tendency to maintain a permanent sense of crisis. Crisis is routinely identified as a core mechanism of fascism because it short-circuits debate and democratic deliberation. Hence all fascistic movements commit considerable energy to prolonging a heightened state of emergency.” [Goldberg, Liberal Fascism, p. 42]
The left is plunging out into the very same dark and violent waters of class warfare that it has carried the world into before.
Allow me to re-submit the Hitler quote I began with:
“We are socialists, we are enemies of today’s capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions.”
What is frightening is that, apart from the admission “We are socialists,” it is a quote that could have come out of the mouth of Barack Obama. Think about it.
Jesus said to us, “Behold, I stand at the door and knock” (Revelation 3:20) to a world that is rejecting him. But the left is demanding in more and more shrill terms that we open the door wide for the coming of Antichrist.
Karl Marx summed up American liberalism better than anyone else (when he was actually writing about communism):
“From each according to his ability, to each according to his need”
I have often challenged Democrats to explain how their philosophy had nothing whatsoever to do with this essence-of-communism on this very blog. Never once have I had a response. Rather, I am greeted with the equivalent of the sound of “one hand clapping.”
We can all remember back to how the Obama regime, the Democrat Party and the mainstream media (the propaganda wing of the Obama regime and the Democrat Party) savaged the Tea Party. Obama went so far as to classify us as “terrorists” via his Department of Homeland Security. You know, along with combat veterans coming back from fighting for our liberty. But then there’s the liberal and Democrat-blessed Occupy movement, with all of its rapes, drug overdoses, crime, violence, criminal defacement, mass arrests, contempt for authority and law, destruction of public property, not to mention giant piles of garbage rats and lice and all sorts of other parasites attracted by these parasites.
Journalists and reporters are the worst kind of liars, and fully deserve to “occupy” the lowest level of hell. They posture themselves as “objective” and “neutral” when in fact they are shameless ideological tools of the left. And in fact we can look back over history and see how the media has again and again been used to justify the rise of all of the regimes that were the most vile and murderous in human history.
The San Diego chapter of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement has always been one of its more… colorful outposts. They’re the ones who held a moment of silence in solidarity with the guy who shot at the White House, after all. In the twilight of the Occupy saga, when only the hardcore crazies are left, places like San Diego are giving us a closer look at the “core beliefs” of the movement.
To that end, Occupy San Diego held a little seminar on the virtues of communism on Sunday. The fun begins about six minutes into the clip.
There are a few things to be learned here, besides the astonishing historical ignorance and poor critical thinking skills of the Occupiers. (Remember, a lot of these people are students.) The enduring romantic appeal of a heavily sanitized communism should not be underestimated. Communism and fascism were history’s worst ideas, but they experienced very different fates in the postwar era. Communism evaded the deep grave in which fascism was rightly buried in Western society, and is still credited with marvelous good intentions, not least because it promises to free gullible young people from material concerns… by robbing them blind.
Thus, when the introductory speaker in San Diego repeats the hoary old promises that communism “seeks to eliminate the conditions in which the majority of workers live only to increase capital to fulfill the interests of the ruling class,” and “under communism, society’s wealth would be used in the interests of the workers,” she’s making it sound like advanced Obamanomics.
Those ideas have not been discredited in the public mind, after causing a century of poverty and bloodshed, because Western academics will not allow them to be discredited. Instead of reviewing the grisly wreckage of communist dungeon states and examining why those glittering visions of “everyone sharing everything” lead directly to gulags and enforced starvation, they ask their students to forget about all the unpleasant “mistakes” of totalitarian rulers who didn’t really understand the true communist genius, and restore full faith and credit in the good intentions of an invariably brutal and squalid system.
Later, the featured speaker muses that under socialism and Marxism, “everybody has a say, and all working-class people run society.” Nothing could be further from the truth, and this delusion lies at the core of everything from the 80-proof Marxism sold at university lectures, to the white-lightning bathtub brew guzzled by the Occupiers… and the watered-down and focus-grouped socialism Barack Obama sells on a daily basis. These people are simply ignoring the staggering amount of compulsive force necessary to make collectivist systems function. The more “re-distributive” society becomes, the more force it must deploy against its people, and the less of a “say” they have in what occurs.
No amount of political activism, during the increasingly rare and ineffectual trips to the ballot box afforded under collectivist systems, can possibly replace the “say” working-class people exercise through the full ownership of their private property, and the accompanying economic liberty this provides. What a dismal cultural and educational failure it is, to see so many young people who not only fail to understand this, but believe their ignorance makes them morally superior. The Occupy Wall Street tragedy lies in its loss of appreciation for economic liberty, and the failure to appreciate that all other liberties ultimately spring from it, because if you own nothing, you can refuse nothing.
Of course, since their defining act is the forcible appropriation of property they don’t own, and the refusal to contribute to its maintenance and repair, that’s not really a surprise. The approval of compulsion for “righteous” ends is written into this movement’s DNA.
All across the country – in flagrent disregard of government orders – the Occupy movement “occupied” publicly owned areas and demonstrated the fact that they are quintessentially fascist. When they blockaded streets, they were in effect saying, “We are usurping your rights to public streets that you paid for because we the fascisti trump you. You have the right to do what we let you do, and nothing more.”
Keep in mind, while Barack Obama and Democrats self-righteously pretend that only they care about jobs that they ENDORSED and BLESSED this Marxist movement:
OAKLAND — As anti-Wall Street protesters attempt to regroup and settle in for winter after a series of police raids that stripped much of the movement of its signature camps, protesters on the West Coast are staging a comeback.
On Dec. 12, Occupy movements from Seattle to San Diego say they will shut down their local ports, temporarily stopping the flow of capital on the West Coast. Organizers say they aim to disrupt the business of the “1 percent” — in this case, the corporations that own shipping terminals and do business at the ports.
If successful, shutting down the West Coast port system would be a massive show of power for a movement that in some cities seems to have lost some of its momentum along with the camps. It would also mark the first time the loosely organized and very decentralized Occupy movements have coordinated in a major way.
The action comes at a pivotal moment for the two-month-old movement, with protesters facing down a chill both from dropping temperatures and authorities who are increasingly losing patience with tents outside City Hall.
In recent weeks, police have cleared large encampments in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia and elsewhere. In Boston, protesters were ordered Thursday to clear out by midnight, although the deadline passed and police did not evict them.
“It’s a really incredible opportunity to build infrastructure for communication between the different movements,” said Jed Johnson, a 26-year-old baker and barista who attended a recent port-shutdown planning meeting in Oakland.
“There’s a little bit of a lull right now,” he added. “Stuff like this is important to keep people out here.”
The move has also galvanized Occupy movements in other cities. Texas occupiers have called for protesters to gather in Houston and march on that city’s port. Even landlocked Denver is trying to get in on the action, with plans to protest at a local Wal-Mart distribution center.
In Oakland, protesters like Johnson are hoping for a repeat of Nov. 2, when tens of thousands converged en masse on the Port of Oakland, successfully stopping the flow of goods overnight.
It could be more complicated this time. The powerful International Longshore and Warehouse Union, which represents most of the port workers whom protesters say they are supporting, has publicly rejected the blockade effort.
“It appears here that outside groups intent on driving their own agendas outside of the ILWU and the Coast Longshore Division are attempting to co-opt the Union,” ILWU leaders wrote in a Nov. 21 memo to union locals.
Some protesters say they believe the rank-and-file port workers are with them and that union leaders are simply being careful to avoid legal problems that could arise if it appeared they were endorsing the shutdown.
Others are taking pains to avoid potential conflicts they worry could strain the warm relationship Occupy has shared with labor groups so far.
In Vancouver, Canada, Occupy member Mya Mayhem said protesters are still talking with local ILWU members and haven’t decided whether their demonstration that day will include attempting to halt port business.
“It is definitely our plan to send as much of a message as we can to union busters and environmental polluters but (we) are striving to maintain a good working relationship with our unions at the same time,” Mayhem wrote in an email.
“As soon as we find out what method will best represent the 99 percent we will go ahead,” Mayhem added.
In Oakland, officials are taking the threat of a second shutdown seriously. Port commissioners recently took out a full-page ad in local papers, reading in part:
“Shutting down the Port of Oakland is a bad idea. Another shutdown will only make things worse — diverting cargo, tax revenue, and jobs to other communities. It will hurt working people and harm our community.”
To bring port traffic to a standstill, protesters need to have enough people blocking terminal entrances so that a local arbitrator declares the situation a health and safety hazard, which will effectively stop port activity until the crowds dissipate or are cleared away.
In Oakland, it remains unclear whether protesters can mobilize those numbers the way they did on Nov. 2, when massive crowds streamed into the port and easily shut it down.
Unlike on Nov. 2, these days there is no camp outside City Hall. A small number of protesters — including at least one “tree-sitter” perched in a Sycamore — have been maintaining a vigil at the quiet plaza. But the space no longer provides the sense of community and visible reminder of the movement’s existence it did when there were 180 tents in it.
Numbers have been dwindling at general assemblies, the meetings where protesters discuss and vote on proposals. At several recent general assemblies, protesters have struggled to keep at least 100 — the number required to bring proposals to a vote — in the outdoor amphitheater that at one point swelled with crowds of more than 1,000.
“There is a sense of loss,” said Lucas, a member of Occupy Oakland’s finance committee who, like many protesters, gave only his first name. “What the camp did was provide a sense of place.”
But Lucas said he has faith that protesters will carry on without their tents. “The fact that the camp is not here does not change that we are living in a time of the most radical increase in inequality in history,” he said.
In economically hard-hit California, the movement does appear to have traction with the public. A recent Field Poll of 1,000 Californians found that 58 percent agree with the underlying reasons for the protest. A little less than half — 46 percent — said they personally identify with the movement.
For now, the toughest challenge may be simply building enough momentum to get through the winter, when protest activities — especially those by campus groups — are generally expected to quiet down.
And for those holdout cities still maintaining camps, the dropping temperatures pose a major obstacle.
Reached by phone earlier this week, Occupy Denver member Jeannie Hartley said she had more immediate concerns than her group’s involvement in the port shutdown day — mainly the roughly 50-75 people, a mix of homeless and activists, she said, who remain outside in record-cold temperatures.
“It’s going to be minus-6 degrees tonight,” Hartley said, “and we’ve got people camping.”
Los Angeles—The Occupy LA protesters are gone, but Susan Hutchinson wonders if her customers will ever come back.
The manager of a downtown farmers market stared toward a barricaded City Hall park Thursday, where vendors until recently sold baskets of plump strawberries and tomatoes, buttery croissants and bunches of fresh-cut roses. The weekly, open-air market was uprooted from the park by the two-month Occupy LA protest, and merchants suffered when relocated across the street from what became a squalid encampment of earnest activists, disenchanted youth, the homeless and drug abusers.
“We were collateral damage,” Hutchinson lamented about the political protest that became “more like a refugee camp.” A quarter of vendors stopped coming and business fell off by as much as 50 percent for those that remained.
Hutchinson’s complaints were among scores heard by City Hall leading up to the decision by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to evict hundreds of protesters from the park in a late-night raid, resulting in nearly 300 arrests last week. The behind-the-scenes pressure added weight to more obvious problems, from illegal drug use to seeping portable toilets to lice.
The left is as filthy and parasitic as the lice that inhabit their bodies.
They crush little people in the name of the little people. And then count on other little people to be too ignorant to understand that fact.
Further down the article, there’s another quote:
Occupy activists are unapologetic and say critics are missing the big picture by focusing on inconveniences instead of the broader problems of society and the camp’s efforts to raise awareness.
You see, under Marxism and under fascism, the ends justify the means. People who demand that we have more and more and more government power and government control have the right to ignore government power and government control in order to push their agenda. They have the right to shut down and destroy your business and the livelihoods of your employees to demand more “jobs.”
Hypocrisy is their quintessential essence.
Here’s the cost of just the Occupy L.A. movement alone as estimated by a liberal Democrat mayor:
Last week the park looked like a faded industrial yard—concrete barriers topped with chain-link fencing walled off what was left of the lawn, once popular with sunbathers and tourists. Villaraigosa has said the cleanup and repair to the park might cost more than $1 million.
And somehow they started out with a beautiful park paid for with Other People’s Money and they turned it into a representation of what is truly in their own ugly souls: a Berlin Wall in microcosm.
This is the true soul of liberalism and the true soul of the Democrat Party. The more power they get, the uglier they become.
These people don’t want jobs and they don’t give one damn about the little guy. All they want is power and control and the ability to decide who wins and who loses. The essence of the right is individual liberty based on the principles of free-markets and limited central government. The essence of the left is totalitarianism.
The Russian people and the German people got what was coming to them, and we’re getting what is coming to us, too. Because we all made the same mistake; we trusted in leftists to take control of our government and thus take control of our economy and our lives. The only question as to how long we will suffer and how bad our suffering will be is merely a question as to how long we are willing to allow the people that I describe above to have power.
“Obama got the ball rolling,” the communists joyfully told us.
Mind you, it turned out to be a WRECKING BALL.
This becomes another opportunity to point out the same thing I’ve pointed out before. When Karl Marx stated the central thesis of communism, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his means,” I pointed out that he would make a hell of a great Democrat today.
I’m posting the article just to point out THAT THIS SAME ARTICLE COULD HAVE BEEN WRITTEN BY A DEMOCRAT OR A MAINSTREAM MEDIA ‘JOURNALIST’. Only it was written by the same exact thing going by a different label: a communist.
In some ways last night’s State of the Union address by President Obama was a virtuoso performance. There were stirring moments, memorable turns of phrase, humor, a defense of activist government, and proposals that will be welcomed, and surely help, millions of people in need.
With the scent of Massachusetts still in the air, the president reasserted his reform agenda and took the fight to the party of obstruction. In polite, nuanced but forceful terms, he chastised the Republican Party.
In powerful oratory, he challenged some of the main ideological talking points of right-wing extremism, reminded everyone that he inherited record deficits and an unprecedented economic mess, and defended the stimulus bill and other recovery measures, including, and unfortunately the unconditional bank bailouts.
One of the high points of the evening was when the president called out the right-wing (and maybe worse) dominated Supreme Court whose members were sitting directly in front of him for their recent decision saying it’s OK for corporations to throw money into the election process.
One of the low points was his defense of the escalation of troops in Afghanistan and his threatening tone toward Iran and other “adversaries.”
Overall, I’d say that if the leaders of the “Party of No” came into the legislative chamber last night with wind in their sails, they left with their sails trimmed and a dour look on their faces. The evening for them turned out to be a “bummer.”
They had hoped to hear President Obama repeat what President Clinton said in his State of the Union address in 1994: “The era of big government is over.” But the president disappointed them.
While the broad people’s coalition that elected him will not, I’m sure, be entirely happy with the president’s speech, all signs are that his fighting tone (“I will not quit”), his focus on the economy, his defense of democratic rights (civil, labor, women, immigrant, gay and lesbian), his insistence on financial reform, and his policy initiatives outlined in the speech, including a health care bill, will reenergize this coalition, which, as of late, has been understandably dismayed by the pace and depth of change.
But this new energy will quickly dissipate if the White House and congressional Democrats go back to ignoring the rumbling from below and bending over backwards to satisfy Republicans and conservatives in their own party.
Working people expect them to draw a line in the sand, show more partisanship, push the legislative process, and tenaciously fight for the American people. If the Republicans obstruct and filibuster so be it. At least everybody will know who is blocking legislative measures that would ease the economic crisis when they go to the polls this fall.
But as good as many parts of Obama’s speech were, it didn’t fully rise in substantive terms to the challenges of our times and this era. The president could have knocked the ball out of the ballpark, but he settled for less. He had a chance to make the case for deep-going political, economic and social reform, including radical reform, but he came up short of that.
His speech didn’t have the programmatic depth that is objectively necessary at this moment. It took us an important step closer to solving the awful economic mess and relieving the human toll that comes with it, but only a step.
Politics is an art as well as a science. And part of that art includes knowing when to advance and when to retreat. Last night President Obama didn’t retreat, but he didn’t advance the people’s agenda to the degree that was possible and necessary. He roused the nation, but he didn’t hit the high note.
We would probably have to go back to Franklin Roosevelt to find a president who has the trust of our nation’s multi-racial, multi-national, male-female, young and old working class as President Obama does.
But the people’s trust has to be constantly renewed – and on the basis of practical performance, on the basis of systematically fighting for the crying needs of the American people. This president can be a transformative leader (he has that potential in my view), but only if he embraces and fights for a transformative agenda.
That agenda in a full-blown sense has yet to be articulated by him. If President Obama and the Democrats want to hail the private sector as the engine of growth, I wouldn’t quibble too much as long as they recognize that the private sector at this moment (big or small business) isn’t generating jobs and probably won’t for a long time. In these circumstances, only direct and indirect government intervention in the form of a massive public works jobs program, infrastructure repair and renewal, aid for state and local governments, and special measures for the hardest hit communities, and especially communities of racial minorities and immigrants, stands a chance of lowering unemployment in any kind of meaningful way.
In other words, the economy still has to be re-inflated and restructured along democratic, sustainable, nonmilitary, and worker-friendly lines, but the likelihood of the private sector doing that is zero. To a degree, the president is moving in this direction, but the pace and nature of the economic reforms that he prescribes is far too limited for the scope and depth of this crisis.
One of the serious missteps that he made last night was his call for a freeze on domestic discretionary spending, beginning in 2011. Hopefully the freeze is only a political calculation to ward off the Republican wolves who accuse him of being a “spend and tax” liberal. But in any case, it comes with a price insofar as it entrenches in the public mind that deficit spending is inherently bad and that our budgetary woes are caused by “handouts” to the poor and vulnerable, especially people of color and immigrants – not to mention aid to developing countries.
This is an unmitigated falsehood that ruptures our sense of social solidarity, of connectedness to every other human being. The truth of the matter is that the current budget deficit, as the president said, began during the Bush years as a result of two wars of aggression, mammoth tax breaks to the top income tier, and a bulging military budget.
Fiscal discipline and balanced budgeting are not an article of faith that has to be adhered to no matter what the circumstances. If that were the case, the U.S. and world economy could easily have tumbled into a full-blown depression last year. Capitalism isn’t a self-correcting system. Market failure and crisis are as much a reality as sustained economic growth. Vicious and reinforcing contractions of the economy can easily leave an economy stagnating at a far from optimum level or in complete ruin unless they are counteracted by aggressive government action and spending measures. The stimulus and anti-crisis measures of the Obama administration acted as a tourniquet; it stopped the hemorrhaging.
But it didn’t heal the wound.
If the president looks to the Depression years he will see more than one Roosevelt. There was the Roosevelt of 1934-1936 and the Roosevelt of 1937. The 1934-1936 Roosevelt had hit a wall as far as his reform efforts were concerned and he was faced with a moment of decision as to how to proceed – should he stay the course, retreat, or enlarge his vision. He chose the latter and thus the New Deal.
Or Obama could look to the 1937 incarnation of Roosevelt who, when seeing a surge of economic activity, decided to cut back on spending and balance the budget, which, as it turned out, was exactly the wrong medicine for an economy in its early stages of recovery.
From President Obama’s speech it seems like he hasn’t definitively decided which Roosevelt he will emulate, although I believe he leans toward the 1934-1936 Roosevelt. Which is what we need. Admittedly a bold anti-right, anti-corporate course of action won’t be easy. The opponents are many and powerful. Resist they will.
Thus to level and tilt the playing field in a progressive/radical direction, the president has to be joined, prodded, and where necessary differed with by the labor-led coalition that elected him. So far it hasn’t carried its share of the load; it is not even strong and united enough to enact even the program that the president outlined last night – let alone win more fundamental reforms. Too many of us have been content to watch, offer opinions, criticize, express our frustrations, and feel disappointed in the president.
But aren’t we part of the problem too, indeed a big part? An era of reform – and especially radical reforms – combines popular, sustained, and united action from below with new political openings from above. Both are necessary.
Last night the president got the ball rolling, but he didn’t roll it far enough or always in the right direction. So now it’s our turn to get a lot more players involved, roll the ball further and roll in the direction of economic security, equality, democracy and peace.
The only real difference between Democrats and communists is that communists are at least honest about the fact that they are communists.
I recall posting a story in which the former communist newspaper Pravda – having come through the collapse of their country caused BY communism – wrote a piece blasting Obama’s America for heading down the same disastrous path. That was in 2009.
And of course the writers of Pravda saw it coming because they’d had to live through the time when their communists were sending their country to hell.
I rather routinely call Obama the F-word. No, not that F-word (although the ability to resist doing so is dwindling); the other F-word: Fascist. Barack Obama is a fascist.
I have had quite a few liberals fixate on this word, and – while ignoring the rest of my arguments – proceed to give me a lecture about how my extremism undermines my positions and arguments (which they don’t bother to consider).
I’d like to respond to that. At length.
There are many who would argue that if a politician is not as rabid as Adolf Hitler, that one cannot use this label of “fascist” – at least not unless the target is a Republican (see below). Barack Obama is not a “dictator,” these would argue. He hasn’t launched the world into global war and he hasn’t murdered 6 million Jews (at least, he hasn’t yet). So he can’t be a “fascist.” This argument fails on two parts. First of all, by such a metric, Benito Mussolini wouldn’t be a “fascist” either (except for the “dictator” part). One of the reasons it is hard to have an easy definition of “fascist” is because fascism has taken a different character in every country and culture in which it has been embraced. Hitler is not the norm or standard of fascism; he is merely the most extreme example of its virulence and danger. Secondly, even if we were to take a Hitler as our example, let us realize that Adolf Hitler was a very cunning politician who managed to gain power in a Germany that was THE most sophisticated, educated and scientific nation and culture of its day. What I am asserting is that if an Adolf Hitler were to run for the presidency of the United States in 2012, he would run a platform that we could very easily label as “hope and change,” he would demagogue his adversaries as being the cause for the nation’s plight, he would lie both cynically and outrageously to win votes and he would then proceed to push the country as far as he possibly could toward his agenda. And so here, from the outset, I am claiming that the suggestion that either Barack Obama or anyone else does not qualify as a “fascist” simply because he or she can’t be directly compared to Adolf Hitler is nothing but a straw man.
The question thus becomes, what is fascism, and then it is what is Obama steering us toward?
THE WORD “fascism” is used broadly on the left as a term of abuse. Sometimes it is used to refer to any repressive government, whatever its political form. Most commonly on the left in the U.S., it is used to describe any Republican government–in particular, any Republican government or candidate on the eve of a presidential election.
As an experiment, I typed the words “Bush fascist” and then “Obama fascist” sans quotes. I got 3,280,000 Google hits for Bush fascist (and keep in mind an awful lot of hits would have vanished in the last 11 years as domains purged articles or simply ceased to exist) versus only 2,490,000 for Obama. That means liberals were over 45% more likely to call Bush a fascist than conservatives have been to call Obama one.
And when these liberals express their outrage that I would dare call Obama a fascist and thus lower the discourse, I invariably ask them just where the hell they were when their side was teeing off on Bush for eight unrelenting years of Bush derangement syndrome??? It was rare indeed to see a liberal excoriate his fellow liberals for demonizing the president of the United States.
With all due respect, the left started this form of “discourse.” They turned it into an art form. And how dare these hypocrites dare to tell me not to do unto Obama as they did unto Bush???
That might only be a rhetorical argument, as two wrongs clearly don’t make a right. But it remains a powerful one. Liberals have forfeited any moral right to criticize conservatives for using their own tactics against them.
But I don’t simply call Obama a fascist because liberals called Bush one. I call him one because he has exhibited all kinds of fascistic tendencies, which I shall in time describe.
But fascism has a far more precise definition. Historically, fascism is a far-right movementof the middle classes (shopkeepers, professionals, civil servants) who are economically ruined by severe economic crisis and driven to “frenzy.”
In the brilliant words of Leon Trotsky, fascism brings “to their feet those classes that are immediately above the working class and that are ever in dread of being forced down into its ranks; it organizes and militarizes them…and it directs them to the extirpation of proletarian organizations, from the most revolutionary to the most conservative.”
I have no doubt that the irony of these words were entirely lost to the “Socialist Worker” who wrote the article. But allow me to illuminate it for you: think of the most infamous fascists of all time, the Nazis. What did the word “Nazi” stand for? It was the “acronym for the ‘National Socialist German Workers Party’.” Let me try that again, just in case you missed these precious little details: “National SOCIALIST German WORKERS Party.”
But ask the “Socialist Workers” and they’ll assure you that the “Socialist Workers Party” had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Socialist Workers. Because that would certainly be awkward, wouldn’t it???
It is rather fascinating that “Socialist Worker” would cite as his authority on fascism and who should be labeled as a “fascist” the Marxist thinker . Allow me to provide one counter statement which is based not on the “brilliant words” of a Marxist, but on the plain simple facts:
“Part of the problem in recognizing fascism is the assumption that it is conservative. [Zeev] Sternhell has observed how study of the ideology has been obscured by “the official Marxist interpretation of fascism.” Marxism defines fascism as its polar opposite. If Marxism is progressive, fascism is conservative. If Marxism is left wing, fascism is right wing. If Marxism champions the proletariat, fascism champions the bourgeoisie. If Marxism is socialist, fascism is capitalist.
The influence of Marxist scholarship has severely distorted our understanding of fascism. Communism and fascism were rival brands of socialism. Whereas Marxist socialism is predicated on an international class struggle, fascist national socialism promoted a socialism centered in national unity. Both communists and fascists opposed the bourgeoisie. Both attacked the conservatives. Both were mass movements, which had special appeal for the intelligentsia, students, and artists, as well as workers. Both favored strong centralized governments and rejected the free economy and the ideals of individual liberty. Fascists saw themselves as being neither of the right nor the left. They believed that they constituted a third force synthesizing the best of both extremes” [Gene Edward Veith, Jr., Modern Fascism: Liquidating the Judeo-Christian Worldview, p. 26].
So depending on Leon Trotsky or any other Marxist-inspired academic who merely parrots “the official Marxist interpretation of fascism” has rather serious intellectual drawbacks. And yet that is largely what we get. Far too many American academics wouldn’t be so obvious as to use the phrase, “In the brilliant words of Leon Trotsky,” but they give his ideas, theories and talking points total credence, nonetheless. The term “useful idiots” was literally coined to describe these Western “intellectuals.” And their being “useful idiots” is every bit as true today as it ever was in the past.
Consider the REAL “polar opposite”: American conservatives are capitalists, not socialists. They demand a limited national/federal government, not a massive centrally planned state as does socialism, communism and fascism. They prefer the federalist idea of powerful states’ rights against a weakened federal government, not some all-powerful Führer. And to try to force conservatives into some Nazi mold invariably means either creating straw men arguments or citing irrelevant facts (such as that conservatives favor a large military just like the Nazis did, as though virtually every single communist state does not similarly favor a large military “just like the Nazis did”). If you want an all-powerful national government that gets to decide who wins and who loses, if you want to see a system where you have to come to your government for assistance and resources with all manner of strings attached rather than being allowed to depend on yourself, your family and your community, you should embrace the political left, not the right.
By the way, another favorite idiotic red herring for liberals asserting that “Nazism was right wing” was that the Nazis hated the admittedly left wing communists. But consider the fact that Coke hates Pepsi and Barbie Doll makers hate Bratz Doll makers. Are we supposed to believe that Coke is the opposite of Pepsi as opposed to water, milk or orange juice? The fact of the matter is that Nazis and Soviet Communists hated each other because both movements had a global agenda of totalitarian dominion, and both movements were competing for the same rabidly left wing converts.
Pardon me for the following insult, but the only people who believe garbage arguments like these are ignorant fools who live in a world of straw men. Even if they have the title “PhD.” after their names.
It is for that reason that I can state categorically that Marxism and fascism are not “polar opposites” at all. They are merely two potentially complementary species of socialism. That is why China has been able to easily weave blatantly fascistic (national socialist/corporatist) elements into its Maoist communism. It is also why Joseph Stalin was able to go from being an international socialist (i.e. a communist) and then appeal to nationalism (i.e., national socialism or “fascism”) when he needed to fight Hitler, only to switch back to “international socialism” after the war, as a few lines from Wikipedia on “Russian nationalism” point out:
The newborn communist republic under Vladimir Lenin proclaimed internationalism as its official ideology[4]. Russian nationalism was discouraged, as were any remnants of Imperial patriotism, such as wearing military awards received before Civil War….
The 1930s saw the evolution of the new concept of Soviet nationalism under Joseph Stalin, based on both Russian nationalism and communist internationalism. Official communist ideology always stated that Russia was the most progressive state, because it adopted socialism as its basis (which, according to the writings of Karl Marx, is the inevitable future of world socio-economic systems). Under Lenin, the USSR believed its duty to help other nations to arrange socialist revolutions (the concept of World Revolution), and made close ties with labor movements around the world[4].
[…]
The Soviet Union’s war against Nazi Germany became known as the Great Patriotic War, hearkening back to the previous use of the term in the Napoleonic Wars. The Soviet state called for Soviet citizens to defend the ‘Motherland’, a matrilineal term used to describe Russia in the past.
[…]
In 1944, the Soviet Union abandoned its communist anthem, The International, and adopted a new national anthem which citizens of the Soviet Union could identify with.
And then, with the victory secured over fascism, the Stalinist “national socialism” (a.k.a. “fascism”) suddenly became international socialism again. The Nazis’ very name was Nationalsozialistische.
One can be a “Marxist-fascist” and combine and blend elements of both totalitarian socialist systems quite easily, as both the Russian and then the Chinese communists proved. Communism and fascism have far more in common with one another than they have in opposition; especially when you examine the fact that both political systems invariably end up becoming the same big-government totalitarian police state.
So for my first two points – namely that 1) the left has routinely demagogically labeled the right “fascist” even when 2) it is clearly the left that owes far and away the most to fascistic elements – I am going to continue to shout from the rooftops who are the real fascists in America.
That said, it is still not enough to merely point out the FACT that American liberalism has much in common with fascism. And there is a lot more yet to say.
Before I begin spouting particular examples, I therefore need to further approach just what it is that would constitute a “fascist.” And then see who and how the label fits. From The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics:
The best example of a fascist economy is the regime of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. Holding that liberalism (by which he meant freedom and free markets) had “reached the end of its historical function,” Mussolini wrote: “To Fascism the world is not this material world, as it appears on the surface, where Man is an individual separated from all others and left to himself…. Fascism affirms the State as the true reality of the individual.”
This collectivism is captured in the word fascism, which comes from the Latin fasces, meaning a bundle of rods with an axe in it. In economics, fascism was seen as a third way between laissez-faire capitalism and communism. Fascist thought acknowledged the roles of private property and the profit motive as legitimate incentives for productivity—provided that they did not conflict with the interests of the state.
[…]
Mussolini’s fascism took another step at this time with the advent of the Corporative State, a supposedly pragmatic arrangement under which economic decisions were made by councils composed of workers and employers who represented trades and industries. By this device the presumed economic rivalry between employers and employees was to be resolved, preventing the class struggle from undermining the national struggle. In the Corporative State, for example, strikes would be illegal and labor disputes would be mediated by a state agency.
Theoretically, the fascist economy was to be guided by a complex network of employer, worker, and jointly run organizations representing crafts and industries at the local, provincial, and national levels. At the summit of this network was the National Council of Corporations. But although syndicalism and corporativism had a place in fascist ideology and were critical to building a consensus in support of the regime, the council did little to steer the economy. The real decisions were made by state agencies such as the Institute for Industrial Reconstruction (Istituto per la Ricosstruzione Industriale, or IRI), mediating among interest groups.
[…]
Mussolini also eliminated the ability of business to make independent decisions: the government controlled all prices and wages, and firms in any industry could be forced into a cartel when the majority voted for it. The well-connected heads of big business had a hand in making policy, but most smaller businessmen were effectively turned into state employees contending with corrupt bureaucracies. They acquiesced, hoping that the restrictions would be temporary. Land being fundamental to the nation, the fascist state regimented agriculture even more fully, dictating crops, breaking up farms, and threatening expropriation to enforce its commands.
Banking also came under extraordinary control. As Italy’s industrial and banking system sank under the weight of depression and regulation, and as unemployment rose, the government set up public works programs and took control over decisions about building and expanding factories. The government created the Istituto Mobiliare in 1931 to control credit, and the IRI later acquired all shares held by banks in industrial, agricultural, and real estate enterprises.
The image of a strong leader taking direct charge of an economy during hard times fascinated observers abroad. Italy was one of the places that Franklin Roosevelt looked to for ideas in 1933…
Fascism is all about the “community,” not the individual. Its message is about the good of the nation, or the people (or the Volk), or the community, rather than the good of a nation’s individual citizens. It is about distributing and then redistributing the wealth and returning it to “its rightful owners” under the guise of an all-powerful state rather than recognizing and rewarding individual achievement. In short, when Hillary Clinton explained that, “It takes a village,” an educated Nazi would have snapped his fingers and excitedly shouted, “Ja! JA! Das ist ES!”
For Obama, the collectivism, community or “village” thing is such a profound part of him that he has literally made it an integral part of his very heretical form of “Christianity,” which very much stresses individual salvation and individual responsibility. Obama has on several occasions put it this way:
For example, in 1995, Obama said, “my individual salvation is not going to come about without a collective salvation for the country…” and again in May of 2008, “our individual salvation depends of collective salvation.”
In the Christian faith, there is no such thing as collective salvation. Salvation is an individual choice. It is personal acceptance of Jesus as savior, Son of the living God.
Obama’s is a wildly perverted view of orthodox Christianity. It so distorts true Christianity at such a fundamental level, in fact, that one literally has to go to Hitler to find a suitable similar parallel from a “Christian” national leader. The great Protestant Reformer Martin Luther – the most famous German prior to Hitler – had written the most monumental text of German culture prior to Hitler’s Mein Kampf. It was called “The Bondage of the Will,” which was considered THE manifesto of the Reformation. According to Luther, the human will was in bondage to sin. The fallen will, if left to itself, will choose what is evil. The human will has been perversely set against the righteous will of God. For sinful human beings, the will is not in a state of liberty but is in bondage to its worst impulses. Luther wrote in this work, “When our liberty is lost we are compelled to serve sin: that is, we will sin and evil, we speak sin and evil, we do sin and evil.” Adolf Hitler infamously turned that key doctrine of Christianity on its head in his “The Triumph of the Will,” in which he exalted depraved human will to an altogether different level of human depravity. Which is to say that Hitler was so profoundly wrong that he proved Luther right.
But getting back to Obama’s profoundly anti-Christian concept of “collective salvation,” the Nazis would have been all over that, enthusiastically shouting their agreement, “Ja! JA! Das ist ES!” Recall the encyclopedia entry on fascism stating that, “Fascism affirms the State as the true reality of the individual,” which was then further defined as “collectivism.” And the Nazis repeatedly called upon loyal Germans to make horrendous sacrifices in the name of that collective.
What the Nazis pursued was a form of anti-capitalist anti-conservative communitarianism encapsulated in the concept of Volksgemeinschaft, or “people’s community.”
From the Nazi Party Platform:
– The first obligation of every citizen must be to work both spiritually and physically. The activity of individuals is not to counteract the interests of the universality, but must have its result within the framework of the whole for the benefit of all Consequently we demand:
– Abolition of unearned (work and labour) incomes. Breaking of rent-slavery.
– In consideration of the monstrous sacrifice in property and blood that each war demands of the people personal enrichment through a war must be designated as a crime against the people. Therefore we demand the total confiscation of all war profits.
– We demand the nationalization of all (previous) associated industries (trusts).
– We demand a division of profits of all heavy industries.
– We demand an expansion on a large scale of old age welfare.
– We demand the creation of a healthy middle class and its conservation, immediate communalization of the great warehouses and their being leased at low cost to small firms, the utmost consideration of all small firms in contracts with the State, county or municipality.
– We demand a land reform suitable to our needs, provision of a law for the free expropriation of land for the purposes of public utility, abolition of taxes on land and prevention of all speculation in land.
– We demand struggle without consideration against those whose activity is injurious to the general interest. Common national criminals, usurers, Schieber and so forth are to be punished with death, without consideration of confession or race.
– We demand substitution of a German common law in place of the Roman Law serving a materialistic world-order.
– The state is to be responsible for a fundamental reconstruction of our whole national education program, to enable every capable and industrious German to obtain higher education and subsequently introduction into leading positions. The plans of instruction of all educational institutions are to conform with the experiences of practical life. The comprehension of the concept of the State must be striven for by the school [Staatsbuergerkunde] as early as the beginning of understanding. We demand the education at the expense of the State of outstanding intellectually gifted children of poor parents without consideration of position or profession.
– The State is to care for the elevating national health by protecting the mother and child, by outlawing child-labor, by the encouragement of physical fitness, by means of the legal establishment of a gymnastic and sport obligation, by the utmost support of all organizations concerned with the physical instruction of the young.
– We demand abolition of the mercenary troops and formation of a national army.
– We demand legal opposition to known lies and their promulgation through the press. In order to enable the provision of a German press, we demand, that: a. All writers and employees of the newspapers appearing in the German language be members of the race: b. Non-German newspapers be required to have the express permission of the State to be published. They may not be printed in the German language: c. Non-Germans are forbidden by law any financial interest in German publications, or any influence on them, and as punishment for violations the closing of such a publication as well as the immediate expulsion from the Reich of the non-German concerned. Publications which are counter to the general good are to be forbidden. We demand legal prosecution of artistic and literary forms which exert a destructive influence on our national life, and the closure of organizations opposing the above made demands.
Ah, yes, the Nazis had their “Fairness Doctrine” long before this current generation of liberals had theirs.
You read that Nazi Party Platform carefully, and you tell me if you see small government conservative Republicans or big government liberal Democrats written all over it.
Now, you read the Nazi Party Platform, and given what American liberals want and what American conservatism opposes, it is so obvious which party is “fascist” that it isn’t even silly. Then you ADD to that the fact that fascism and American progressivism (which is liberalism) were so similar that the great fascists of the age couldn’t tell the damn difference.
Since you point out Nazism was fascist, let’s look at some history as to WHO was recognized as fascist in America.
Fascism sought to eliminate class differences and to destroy/replace capitalism and laissez-faire economics.
H.G. Wells, a great admirer of FDR and an extremely close personal friend of his, was also a great progressive of his day. He summed it up this way in a major speech at Oxford to the YOUNG LIBERALS organization under the banner of “Liberal Fascism”: “I am asking for a Liberal Fascisti, for enlightened Nazis.” He said, “And do not let me leave you in the slightest doubt as to the scope and ambition of what I am putting before you” and then said:
These new organizations are not merely organizations for the spread of defined opinions…the days of that sort of amateurism are over – they are organizations to replace the dilatory indecisiveness of democracy. The world is sick of parliamentary politics…The Fascist Party, to the best of its ability, is Italy now. The Communist Party, to the best of its ability, is Russia. Obviously the Fascists of Liberalism must carry out a parallel ambition on still a vaster scale…They must begin as a disciplined sect, but must end as the sustaining organization of a reconstituted mankind.”
H.G. Wells pronounced FDR “the most effective transmitting instrument possible for the coming of the new world order.” And of course, we easily see that the new world order Wells wanted was a fascist one. In 1941, George Orwell concluded, “Much of what Wells has imagined and worked for is physically there in Nazi Germany.”
It was from the lips of liberal progressive H.G. Wells that Jonah Goldberg got the title of his book, Liberal Fascism. Goldberg didn’t just invent this connection: H.G. Wells flagrantly admitted it and George Orwell called him on it. All Goldberg did was rediscover history that liberals buried and have used every trick imaginable to keep buried.
And as a tie-in to our modern day, who more than Barack Obama has been more associated with said FDR?
But let me move on to some real red meat. In just what specific, concrete ways can I call Obama a fascist?
Well, to begin with, there is the signature achievement of his entire presidency, his national health care system (ObamaCare). For liberals, it is nothing but the most bizarre coincidence that Nazi culture had a national health care system that was quite rightly considered the wonder of its day by socialists in America. It is the most despicable of insults that Sarah Palin excoriated ObamaCare as “death panels” – even though it is more precisely a bureaucratic maze consisting of more like 160 separate death panels:
And the “czar” thing hits a very fascist nerve, too. Obama has appointed 39 czars who are completely outside our Constitutional process. Obama signed a budget bill into law that required him to remove these czars, but why would a fascist trouble himself with outmoded things like “laws”? One of the enraged Republicans responded, “The president knew that the czar amendment was part of the overall budget deal he agreed to, and if he cannot be trusted to keep his word on this, then how can he be trusted as we negotiate on larger issues like federal spending and the economy.” And of course, he’s right.
But why do I say it’s financial fascism in 20/20 hindsight? Because of what we just learned: in spite of all the bogus lying promises and the massive takeover “for our own good,” Obama didn’t fix anything. Instead he made it WORSE:
The financial system poses an even greater risk to taxpayers than before the crisis, according to analysts at Standard & Poor’s. The next rescue could be about a trillion dollars costlier, the credit rating agency warned.
S&P put policymakers on notice, saying there’s “at least a one-in-three” chance that the U.S. government may lose its coveted AAA credit rating. Various risks could lead the agency to downgrade the Treasury’s credit worthiness, including policymakers’ penchant for rescuing bankers and traders from their failures.
“The potential for further extraordinary official assistance to large players in the U.S. financial sector poses a negative risk to the government’s credit rating,” S&P said in its Monday report.
But, the agency’s analysts warned, “we believe the risks from the U.S. financial sector are higher than we considered them to be before 2008.”
Because of the increased risk, S&P forecasts the potential initial cost to taxpayers of the next crisis cleanup to approach 34 percent of the nation’s annual economic output, or gross domestic product. In 2007, the agency’s analysts estimated it could cost 26 percent of GDP.
Last year, U.S. output neared $14.7 trillion, according to the Commerce Department. By S&P’s estimate, that means taxpayers could be hit with $5 trillion in costs in the event of another financial collapse.
Experts said that while the cost estimate seems unusually high, there’s little dispute that when the next crisis hits, it will not be anticipated — and it will likely hurt the economy more than the last financial crisis.
So much for the massive and unprecedented fascist government takeover.
Think last year’s $700 billion Wall Street rescue package was beaucoup bucks to spend bailing out the nation’s floundering financial system? That’s chump change compared to what the overall price tag could be, a government watchdog says.
The inspector general in charge of overseeing the Treasury Department’s bank-bailout program says the massive endeavor could end up costing taxpayers almost $24 trillion in a worst-case scenario. That’s more than six times President Obama’s proposed $3.55 trillion budget for 2010.
Nobody here but us fascists. And we sure aint talking.
Then there are other issues that the left usually uses to attack conservatives, such as racism. Wasn’t Hitler a racist, just like conservatives? The problem is, the liberals are as usual upside-down here. After running as the man to create racial harmony, Barack Obama has instead done more to racially polarize America than any president since other famous progressives such as Woodrow Wilson and FDR. Frankly, if one were to conduct a major study of racial politics, and the setting up in opposition of one racial group against another, just which party has emphasized race and race-baiting more?
Hitler’s Jew-baiting was all about the idea that one race had taken over the culture, had the money and the power, and was using its influence to oppress the people in the banking system and anywhere else that mattered. And Hitler’s constant screed was that Germany needed to confiscate the Jews’ wealth and then redistribute it. With all respect, all the left has done is replace “Jew” with “Caucasian” and making the exact same claims.
And with all this hard-core racist demagoguing, I’m supposed to say that, “Oh, yes, it’s the conservatives who are guilty of demagoguing race”??? Seriously???
Obama has Samantha Powers (the wife of Cass Sunstein, the man who “nudges us”) close to him and advising him on matters of war. According to the very liberal publication The Nation, “She began to see war as an instrument to achieving her liberal, even radical, values.” What if you had an ultra conservative – oh, say a Sarah Palin – openly acknowledged to pursue war and risk American lives to advance her radical values??? What would the left call this if not “fascist”?
But it’s only fascist if Republicans do it, of course.
Also in yesterday’s news is the fact that Obama is the perpetual demagogue– which is a quintessentially fascist tactic. Obama demonized Bush for trying to raise the debt ceiling until he needed to raise it. Now it would be un-American for Republicans to act the same exact way Obama acted. In the same demagogic spirit, Obama personally invited Paul Ryan to a speech just so he could personally demonize him. The same Obama who lectured Republicans that it would be counter-productive to rely on name-calling and accusations in the health care debate launched into a vicious demagogic attack. Ryan correctly said that “What we got yesterday was the opposite of what he said is necessary to fix this problem.” But that is par for the golf course for a fascist. If that wasn’t enough, Obama held a White House conference for “stake holders” in the immigration debate and refused to invite a single governor from a border state.
A Republican equivalent would have had to come out of a deep involvement with some vile racist militia organization to approximate Obama’s background. And liberals would rightly label such a politician a fascist for his past alone.
Here’s a recent Youtube video of Obama’s key union allies on camera saying, “We’re not going to rely on the law,” and, “Forget about the law” as they seek to impose their unions basically whether workers want them or not:
It generated quite a few cross postings to atheist blogs and forums.
One recent example attacked Christians as being “happy” that Japan was stricken by disaster, and, in linking to my blog, said:
Of course, maybe it’s because of all teh gay [sic] in Japan, or because the Japanese are all atheists. Or maybe it’s because they worship demons.
…
What a nasty, horrible God is the one in which they believe. What nasty, horrible sentiments they have expressed in the wake of so much suffering by their fellow human beings. What a nasty, cynical thing they do to promote their own religion by using this tragedy and other recent catastrophic events to “win converts” for Jesus.
Naming them charlatans and hypocrites does not do justice to the utter lack of compassion that resides in their hearts.
And the blogger cites my blog as an example of a fundamentalist who argues that God struck Japan “because the Japanese are all atheists.”
Well, first thing, did I actually even say that? I quote myself from that article:
But is Japan’s unbelief the reason why Japan just got hit with an awful tsunami?
My answer is, “How on earth should I know?”
I cite passages of Scripture that clearly indicate that a disaster does not necessarily mean that God is judging someone, such as Luke 13:1-5. I could have just as easily also cited passages such as John 9:1-3 about Jesus’ distinction between suffering and sin. I could have cited 2 Peter 3:9, describing God’s patience with sinners rather than His haste to judge. These passages aren’t at all out of tune with what I was saying. And I actually DO single out by name for criticism men like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell who have immediately pronounced the wrath of God following some disaster.
I begin my article saying, “That headline is a deliberate provoker. But please let me explain why I used that headline before you erupt one way or another.” Then I proceed to state two undisputed facts: that Japan is atheist, and that Japan got hit by a disaster. I urge someone to actually read the article and reflect on the possibilities. But Boomantribune is an example of most of the atheists who cross-posted or commented to my article by NOT being someone who wanted to read or reflect; he or she is someone who refused to look beneath atheist ideology and immediately began demonizing the other side to “win converts” for his religion of atheism. [And let’s get this straight: atheism IS a religion. “Religion” does not need to depend upon belief in God, or Buddhism would not qualify as a religion. The courts have ruled that atheism is a religion, and it is a simple fact that atheism has every component that any religious system has].
You can’t have a valid argument with someone like Boomantribune, I have learned. They are either too ignorant, or too dishonest, or both to accurately represent the other side’s position or arguments. They create straw men and then demolish claims that Christians like me aren’t even making.
Boomantribune viciously attacks me as harboring the “nasty, horrible sentiments they have expressed in the wake of so much suffering by their fellow human beings.” But I end my article on Japan by saying:
You need that gift of divine grace. I need that gift of divine grace. And the people of Japan desperately need it today.
I pray for those who are in Japan. I pray for their deliverance from both the tsunami and from their unbelief. And I will join with many other Christians who will send relief to the Japanese people, with prayers that they will look not at me, but at the Jesus who changed my heart and my life, and inspired me to give to others.
In the US, anyway, they don’t. Here’s just one study, done in 2003: The differences in charity between secular and religious people are dramatic. Religious people are 25 percentage points more likely than secularists to donate money (91 percent to 66 percent) and 23 points more likely to volunteer time (67 percent to 44 percent). And, consistent with the findings of other writers, these data show that practicing a religion is more important than the actual religion itself in predicting charitable behavior. For example, among those who attend worship services regularly, 92 percent of Protestants give charitably, compared with 91 percent of Catholics, 91 percent of Jews, and 89 percent from other religions…Note that neither political ideology nor income is responsible for much of the charitable differences between secular and religious people. For example, religious liberals are 19 points more likely than secular liberals to give to charity, while religious conservatives are 28 points more likely than secular conservatives to do so…The average annual giving among the religious is $2,210, whereas it is $642 among the secular. Similarly, religious people volunteer an average of 12 times per year, while secular people volunteer an average of 5.8 times.
And this is “secular” people who aren’t particularly religious. A lot of people rarely ever go to church, but still believe in God (basically 90% of Americans belive in God). Since the evidence is rather straightforward that the more religious one is, the more giving one is, it is justified to conclude that atheists who are less religious than the merely “secular” are even LESS giving.
And, guess what? My church has already taken its first of several offerings for Japan, and I have already given – and plan to give again.
I would also point out a couple of historical facts:
Also, unlike too many blogs – particularly leftwing blogs, in my experience – I don’t delete anything. When the Daily Kos hatefully attacked Sarah Palin and her daughter Bristol and claimed that Bristol Palin had been impregnated by her own father with a baby, and that Sarah Palin faked being pregnant – only to have that hateful and vile lie blown away by Bristol giving birth to a child of her own – they scrubbed it like nothing had happened.
I’m not that despicable. Every single article I have ever written remains on my blog. And with all due respect, I think that gives me more credibility, not less: I don’t hit and run and then scrub the evidence of my lies.
If I post something that turns out to be wrong, I don’t destroy the evidence; I stand up and take responsibility for my words. I apologize and correct the record. As I did in the case above.
That, by the way, is the first finger, the finger of moral dishonesty pointing back at these atheists.
That’s not the way the other side plays. History is replete with atheist regimes (e.g. ANY of the officially state atheist communist regimes) destroying the record and any debate; history is replete with atheist-warped “science” making one claim after another that turned out to be entirely false. As examples, consider Java Man, Nebraska Man, Piltdown Man, Peking Man and the various other hoaxes that the “scientific community rushed to embrace in their rush to falsify theism. In some cases “scientists” created an entire community – or even an entire race of people – around totally bogus evidence in “It takes a village” style. There was the bogus notion of “uniformitarianism” by which the “scientific community” ridiculed creationists for decades until it was proven wrong by Eugene Shoemaker who documented that the theory of “catastrophism” that they had advanced for millennia had been correct all along. And then all of a sudden the same evolutionary theory that had depended upon uniformitarianism suddenly morphed into a theory that depended upon catastrophism. It morphed so that it was equally true with both polar opposites.
In any words, evolution is no more “scientifically falsifiable” than even the most ardent young earth creationist claim. Their standard is impossible to prove. I mean, you show me that God “could not possibly have” created the earth.
The whole way they sold evolution was a lie.
There is NEVER an admission of guilt or an acknowledgment of error by these people. They simply suppress or destroy the evidence, or “morph” their argument, or anything but acknowledge that just maybe they should be open-minded and question their presuppositions.
For the scientist who has lived by faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries. -Robert Jastrow, God and the Astronomers
But those are extremely rare, indeed. The rest of the atheist-assuming “scientific community” is all about saying, “Move on, folks. Nothing to see here. Why don’t you look at our new sleight-of-hand display over in this corner instead?”
Supporting the paradigm may even require what in other contexts would be called deception. As Niles Eldredge candidly admitted, “We paleontologists have said that the history of life supports [the story of gradual adaptive change], all the while knowing it does not.”[ 1] Eldredge explained that this pattern of misrepresentation occurred because of “the certainty so characteristic of evolutionary ranks since the late 1940s, the utter assurance not only that natural selection operates in nature, but that we know precisely how it works.” This certainty produced a degree of dogmatism that Eldredge says resulted in the relegation to the “lunatic fringe” of paleontologists who reported that “they saw something out of kilter between contemporary evolutionary theory, on the one hand, and patterns of change in the fossil record on the other.”[ 2] Under the circumstances, prudent paleontologists understandably swallowed their doubts and supported the ruling ideology. To abandon the paradigm would be to abandon the scientific community; to ignore the paradigm and just gather the facts would be to earn the demeaning label of “stamp collector.”
[…]
Naturalistic philosophy has worked out a strategy to prevent this problem from arising: it labels naturalism as science and theism as religion. The former is then classified as knowledge, and the latter as mere belief. The distinction is of critical importance, because only knowledge can be objectively valid for everyone; belief is valid only for the believer, and should never be passed off as knowledge. The student who thinks that 2 and 2 make 5, or that water is not made up of hydrogen and oxygen, or that the theory of evolution is not true, is not expressing a minority viewpoint. He or she is ignorant, and the job of education is to cure that ignorance and to replace it with knowledge. Students in the public schools are thus to be taught at an early age that “evolution is a fact,” and as time goes by they will gradually learn that evolution means naturalism.
In short, the proposition that God was in any way involved in our creation is effectively outlawed, and implicitly negated. This is because naturalistic evolution is by definition in the category of scientific knowledge. What contradicts knowledge is implicitly false, or imaginary. That is why it is possible for scientific naturalists in good faith to claim on the one hand that their science says nothing about God, and on the other to claim that they have said everything that can be said about God. In naturalistic philosophy both propositions are at bottom the same. All that needs to be said about God is that there is nothing to be said of God, because on that subject we can have no knowledge.
I stand behind a tradition that has stood like an anvil while being pounded by one generation of unbelievers after another. That tradition remains constant because it is founded upon the unchanging Word of God. My adversaries constantly change and morph their positions, all the while just as constantly claiming that their latest current iteration is correct.
That is the second finger of intellectual dishonesty which so thoroughly characterizes atheism and anything atheism seems to contaminate with its assumptions.
Lastly, there is the finger of ethical dishonesty that is the ocean that the “walking fish” of atheism swims in. [Btw, when I see that fish riding a bicycle I’ll buy their “walking fish” concept].
Basically, for all the “moral outrage” of atheists who want to denounce Christians for their God’s “evil judgments,” atheism itself has absolutely no moral foundation to do so whatsoever. And the bottom line is that they are people who attack the five-thousand year tradition of Scripture with their feet firmly planted in midair.
William Lane Craig provides a devastating existential ethical refutation of atheism in an article I posted entitled, “The Absurdity of Life without God.”
To put it simply, William Lane Craig demolishes any shred of a claim that atheism can offer any ultimate meaning, any ultimate value, or any ultimate purpose whatsoever. And so atheism denounces Christianity and religion from the foundation of an entirely empty and profoundly worthless worldview. Everyone should read this incredibly powerful article. I guarantee you will learn something, whatever your perspective on religion.
The thing I would say is that atheists denounce God and Christians from some moral sort of moral posture. Which comes from what, exactly? Darwinism, or more precisely, social Darwinism? The survival of the fittest? A foundation that comes from the “secure” footing of a random, meaningless, purposeless, valueless and entirely accidental existence?
As atheists tee off on God and at Christians for being “nasty” and “horrible,” what is their foundation from which to judge?
First of all, what precisely would make one a “nasty” or “horrible” atheist?
“God’s not unjust, he doesn’t actually exist. We’ve been deceived. If God existed, he’d have made the world more just… I’ll lend you a book and you’ll see.”
Mao Tse Tung was an atheist:
“Our God is none other than the masses of the Chinese people. If they stand up and dig together with us, why can’t these two mountains be cleared away?” [Mao Tse Tung, Little Red Book, “Self-Reliance and Arduous Struggle chapter 21”].
Hitler described to them that “after difficult inner struggles I had freed myself of my remaining childhood religious conceptions. I feel as refreshed now as a foal on a meadow” (Ernst Helmreich, “The German Churches Under Hitler,” p. 285).
Joseph Goebbels, a top member of Hitler’s inner circle, noted in his personal diary, dated 8 April 1941 that “The Führer is a man totally attuned to antiquity. He hates Christianity, because it has crippled all that is noble in humanity.” Now, one may easily lie to others, but why lie to your own private diary?
Goebbels also notes in a diary entry in 1939 a conversation in which Hitler had “expressed his revulsion against Christianity. He wished that the time were ripe for him to be able to openly express that. Christianity had corrupted and infected the entire world of antiquity.”
Hitler also said, “Our epoch will certainly see the end of the disease of Christianity.” [Hitler’s Table Talk, Enigma Books; 3rd edition October 1, 2000, p. 343].
Albert Speer, another Nazi in Hitler’s intimate inner circle, stated that Hitler said, “You see, it’s been our misfortune to have the wrong religion… Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?”
Konrad Heiden quoted Hitler as stating, “We do not want any other god than Germany itself.” [Heiden, Konrad A History of National Socialism, A.A. Knopf, 1935, p. 100].
Now, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Chairman Mao were terrible, despicable, evil people. But what made them ” bad atheists,” precisely?
“The atom bomb is nothing to be afraid of,” Mao told Nehru, “China has many people. . . . The deaths of ten or twenty million people is nothing to be afraid of.” A witness said Nehru showed shock. Later, speaking in Moscow, Mao displayed yet more generosity: he boasted that he was willing to lose 300 million people, half of China’s population.” [Annie Dillard, “The Wreck of Time” in Harper’s from January 1998].
Mao put his disregard for human life and the lives of his own people to terrible work:
LEE EDWARDS, CHAIRMAN, VICTIMS OF COMMUNISM MEMORIAL FOUNDATION: In 1959 to 1961 was the so-called “great leap forward” which was actually a gigantic leap backwards in which he tried to collectivize and communize agriculture.
And they came to him after the first year and they said, “Chairman, five million people have died of famine.” He said, “No matter, keep going.” In the second year, they came back and they said, “Ten million Chinese have died.” He said, “No matter, continue.” The third year, 20 million Chinese have died. And he said finally, “Well, perhaps this is not the best idea that I’ve ever had.”
CHANG: When he was told that, you know, his people were dying of starvation, Mao said, “Educate the peasants to eat less. Thus they can benefit – they can fertilize the land.”
Did that somehow disqualify him from being an atheist? How? Based on what foundation?
Let me simply point out that the most evil human beings in human history and the most murderous and oppressive political regimes in human history have the strange tendency to be atheist. It would seem to me that these atheists should frankly do a lot less talking smack and a lot more shutting the hell up. But two verses from Scripture illustrate why they don’t: 1) The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God'” (Psalm 14:1) and 2) “A fool does not delight in understanding, But only in revealing his own mind” (Proverbs 18:2).
Let’s talk about “evil” for a few moments. I have already begun addressing the “third finger” that points back at atheists when they denounce Christians or God. But the idea of “evil” makes that “finger” the middle one.
Christians talk about evil. A lot of people do. Even atheists routinely do. But what is their foundation for evil? What is “evil”? Most give answers such as, “Murder or rape is evil.” But those would at best only qualify as examples of evil – not a definition that would allow us to make moral judgments. Christians have an actual answer. They point out that “evil” is a perversion from the way things ought to be. But what “oughtness” is there in a random, purposeless, meaningless and valueless universe that was spat out by nothing more than pure chance?
Let’s just say at this point that the atheists are right in what is in reality a straw man attack of God? So what? I ask “so what?” because even if what they were saying were somehow true, by what standard would either God or Christians be “nasty” or “horrible”? What is the objective, transcendent standard that stands above me, that stands above every Christian on the planet, that stands above the entire human race across time and space and holds it accountable, such that if Christians or even God do X or say Y, or believe Z they are “nasty” or “horrible”?
It turns out that they don’t have one. And in fact, their very worldview goes so far as to literally deny the very possibility of one. At best – and I would argue at worst – we are trapped in a world in which might makes right, and the most powerful dictator gets to make the rules. Because there is nothing above man that judges man and says, “This is the way, walk in it.” There is only other men – and men disagree with one another’s standards – leaving us with pure moral relativism.
And if moral relativism is true, then the atheists STILL lose. It would be a tie, given that atheists have no more claim to being “good” than any other human being or group of human beings, no matter how despicable and murderous they might be. But they would lose because there are a lot fewer atheists (137 million) than there are, say, Christians (2.3 billion). And it only remains for Christians to disregard their superior moral and ethical system just long enough to rise up and annihilate all the smart-mouthed atheists, and then say afterward, “Boy, we sure feel guilty for having done THAT. Let’s pray for forgiveness!” And the only possible defense atheists would have would be to abandon their “survival of the fittest” mentality and embrace superior Christian morality and cry out, “Thou shalt not kill!”
Even if Christians don’t wipe out the atheists physically, most would readily agree that the Christian worldview is still far stronger than the atheist one. Dinesh D’Souza makes a great argument to illustrate this on pages 15-16 of What’s So Great About Christianity that shows why religion is clearly the best team. He says to imagine two communities – one filled with your bitter, cynical atheists who believe that morality just happened to evolve and could have evolved very differently; and one filled with Bible-believing Christians who embrace that life and their lives have a purpose in the plan of a righteous God who put His moral standards in our hearts. And he basically asks, “Which community is going to survive and thrive?”
As a Christian, I don’t have all the answers (although I can certainly answer the question immediately above). I am a human being and my mind cannot contain the infinite plan of an infinitely complex and holy God. But I have placed my trust in a God who made the world and who has a plan for His creation which He is bringing to fruition. And that worldview doesn’t just give me explanatory powers that atheism by its very nature entirely lacks, but it gives me a strength that I never had before. Even when evil and disaster and suffering befall me beyond my ability to comprehend, I can say with Job – the master of suffering:
“But as for me, I know that my Redeemer lives, and he will stand upon the earth at last. And after my body has decayed, yet in my body I will see God! I will see him for myself. Yes, I will see him with my own eyes. I am overwhelmed at the thought!” Job 19:25-27 (NLT).
Start Thinking Right 