Topic: The Shape of Things To Come, Pt. 5 - "The Worse, The Better"

[Pandora]

I was reading Soup's comment, "Unlike bubba, Øbozo doesn't even try to make his lies plausible.", on another thread while mulling over this Porretto piece:

Someone made this comment over at McQ's place: "He's just a lying demagogue and he doesn't care who knows it."

I thought that he was talking about Obama (he was actually talking about another lying demagogue), and I went on to explain Obama in terms of why "he doesn't care who knows it." Try to follow this because it's key:

You're half-right that he doesn't care who knows it. The other half is that knowing he is a lying demagogue is your problem, in the sense that you are judging him with "bourgeois principles," while he's playing your "false consciousness."

That perhaps doesn't quite make sense to you, because you do not think your thoughts in orthodox Marxist terms.

    Obama's purpose is to "increase the contradictions," the goal of which is to make things worse. As things get worse, the cloud of "bourgeois ideology" will fade and the historical class struggle will re-emerge and history itself will be moving again according to the laws of socialism.

    I'm as guilty as anyone for referring to this or that Leftist, rather casually, as a Marxist. Well, now you're seeing what a real Marxist is like, his stealth aside. The vital secret as to why such unreal ideas have been able to gain power so often over the past century is not, as is often claimed, that they lead to popular uprisings; these ideas are a path to power because the leaders of Marxist revolution totally discount the bourgeois view of the world. They use it and manipulate it, but its principles and any critique of the revolution based on those principles, are irrelevant and discounted by definition.

    If you've ever run into even the most penny-ante but serious Marxist ideologues, you'll note that they own the world in a separate reality than your own and always with great arrogance and assurance. They are not on this side of the looking glass, but they know how to reach back through it in order to play your bourgeois "false consciousness" like a fiddle.

    This also explains why in the grand scheme of things, despite the inevitable catastrophe Marxism in power always causes, that the true Marxist remains undaunted: his total detachment from bourgeois principles and ideology is a source of great command and intellectual power, because you, you see, live in a false world, while he lives in the hard scientific world where the laws of socialism apply like clockwork. That is power, and it's not for nothing that it has led to the greatest death machines in human history.

    [Emphasis added by FWP.]

There simply aren't enough Americans who've read the "black books:" the books written by monsters who've sought and attained great power. One of those books, by Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov a.k.a. Nikolai Lenin, is a brief tract titled What Is To Be Done? In it, he propounds a thesis from which any decent person would recoil in horror: That for socialism to succeed in displacing the existing order, the existing order must be made to contradict itself -- to act against its core principles until the strain its actions put on its principles causes it to collapse.

...

Contradictions of principle are the key to destroying the moral confidence of the ordinary man. Clear rules of right and wrong are what make it possible for men to share a nation without bloodshed. Thou shalt not murder. Thou shalt not commit adultery. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not bear false witness. Once those rules have been cast aside, what remains is naked force: the rule of the most ruthless and best armed.

William E. Simon, in his book A Time For Truth, noted that the prevailing disgust we show for political involvement correlates powerfully with the disappearance of principle from the public discourse. Ordinary Americans, properly concerned above all else with their own vines and fig trees, began to distance themselves from politics when principle disappeared from it -- that is, when prominent politicians and officeholders started to say things such as "Well, property rights and the free market are important, but in this case we have to make an exception." "They're all thieves and liars," runs the common observation -- and allowing for the occasional outlier, it's quite correct.

Contradictions of principle can be amplified in their destructive power by mating them to rhetorical contradictions. Note that the Muslims ceaselessly proclaim their devotion to peace while Muslim terrorists kill and maim to cries of "Allahu Akhbar! They know full well that men of good will passionately desire to see other men as innocent and well-intentioned. They use the contradiction to incite political paralysis in the West, and well they should: were we ever to free ourselves from the miasma of "religion of peace" BS, we'd move on the Islamic world like a billion avenging angels. Not a stone would be left standing on a stone.

So also with the Obamunist program for reforging America in a socialist mold. Obama knows exactly what he's doing. More important, he's sensed that he can use the reluctance of conservatives and libertarians to give true coloration to his program and the motivations behind it. We're simply too cowardly, most of us, to admit that America put a destroyer, an enemy of freedom, into the highest office in the land. That would reflect badly on far too many of us, wouldn't it?

Obama and his lieutenants are increasing that tension with every move they make. As it tightens on us, ever more Americans are retreating from civic involvement and resolving merely to protect themselves as best they can. The atomization thus evoked, wherein individuals are too suspicious of everything around them to repose trust even in their neighbors, is a perfect playground for a coherent, well focused program of totalitarian control.

More anon.

[Alphabet Soup]

Thanks Pan - I love it when smart people confirm my suspicions 

[IronDioPriest]

Indeed.

"As it tightens on us, ever more Americans are retreating from civic involvement and resolving merely to protect themselves as best they can. The atomization thus evoked, wherein individuals are too suspicious of everything around them to repose trust even in their neighbors, is a perfect playground for a coherent, well focused program of totalitarian control."

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) on Friday ridiculed the size of the crowd at a Tea Party rally on Capitol Hill for deep spending cuts.

No more than a couple of hundred activists showed up for the Washington demonstration, many fewer than past Tea Party rallies in the nation's capital.

"There were tens of them here yesterday. That’s a chosen word, tens of them," Reid said on a conference call with reporters.

[Libertas]

Well, can anyone argue it is not working?  The Ruling Class clowns, RINO's, Tone Police and etc supposedly on our side are compromising principles left and right!  True conservatives see it!  Tea Party people see it!  If you don't see it, or if you see it and pretend it doesn't exist or if you actively encourage it...those are our enemies!

[Pandora]

Indeed.

"As it tightens on us, ever more Americans are retreating from civic involvement and resolving merely to protect themselves as best they can. The atomization thus evoked, wherein individuals are too suspicious of everything around them to repose trust even in their neighbors, is a perfect playground for a coherent, well focused program of totalitarian control."

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) on Friday ridiculed the size of the crowd at a Tea Party rally on Capitol Hill for deep spending cuts.

No more than a couple of hundred activists showed up for the Washington demonstration, many fewer than past Tea Party rallies in the nation's capital.

"There were tens of them here yesterday. That’s a chosen word, tens of them," Reid said on a conference call with reporters.

Let Reid scoff while it's still cold and rainy in many places.

Things will heat up, in more ways than one, soon enough.

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As long as people are showing up for peaceful demonstration, Reid and his ilk are better off, IMO.  Once people largely realize it's pointlessness, fulfilling the maxim about what the old man does when he's too tired to fight may come to be seen as the only working option left.

[BigAlSouth]

. . .
As long as people are showing up for peaceful demonstration, Reid and his ilk are better off, IMO.  Once people largely realize it's pointlessness, fulfilling the maxim about what the old man does when he's too tired to fight may come to be seen as the only working option left.

True dat.

[charlesoakwood]

He's not talking to us and the people he is talking to are not listening.  I know that for a fact because my representative is one of the people he is talking to.

[rickl]

I posted this link on an earlier thread here:  Depends on what you mean by failure

As I said before, I had been thinking about starting a thread of its own, but it belongs here.

[Pandora]

I posted this link on an earlier thread here:  Depends on what you mean by failure

As I said before, I had been thinking about starting a thread of its own, but it belongs here.

We've been saying Duh Wun knows exactly what he's doing - ain't nothing "failure" about it, so Mike's right.

And so are we.

[michelleo]

This quote describes very eloquently thoughts I've had for awhile now, but couldn't really articulate well.  It seems as though Obama's formula for making decisions in based solely on what he feels will create the greatest dissonance in the population.  When debt is clearly a problem, he does his best to spend more and more money on more ridiculous programs.  When given an opportunity to start another war in the middle east, he takes it, even though his base clearly expected him to end the wars in the middle east.  The timing of the decision to try the Gitmo detainees in military tribunals at Gitmo was just another poke in the eye of his base.  He's trying to piss everyone off, and its probably for the purpose to  "increase the contradictions" to promote social unrest.

It's worked masterfully on me, because my primary focus right now is creating a sustainable way of life for my family and hunkering down to ride out the storm.