How to identify American totalitarians

Townhall.com ^ | May 2, 2006 | Dennis Prager

[KurtZ]

In the Soviet Union, the future is known; it's the past that is always changing. -- old Soviet dissident joke As a graduate student in international affairs at Columbia University, I specialized in the study of totalitarianism, especially, though not only, the communist variety. I found the subject fascinating, but I never for a moment imagined that any expertise gained in this field would prove relevant to American life.

Sad to say, it has turned out to be the most valuable subject I could have studied. The totalitarian temptation is not confined to Nazis and communists; it can rear its head in any society and gradually destroy it. And as the Soviet dissident joke notes, one quick way to identify totalitarian threats to liberty is to identify those who falsify the historical record on behalf of their cause.

In America today, two groups are most actively engaged in falsifying history: the ACLU and the anti-smoking movement.

Townhall.com

[Rakkasan1]

so the moniker given to "smoke Nazis" IS accurate.

[Always Right]

The sad part is, we are paying the ACLU to destroy the country. My Congressman has introduced legislation that stops these large awards of attorney fees that goes to the ACLU in these cherry picked districts. These large awards scare cities and schools districts from even fighting the ACLU when they threaten.

[Billthedrill]

The totalitarians do want to control history - look, for example, at the job they've done with respect to redefining American history in terms of race, sex, and class. They also want to control language. There is not a single "speech code" movement on any university campus that is not spawned, nurtured, and enforced by totalitarian impulse. And these, sadly, are no longer restricted to university campuses but have metastasized into corporations, the press, the entertainment media.

How far this process of thought control has gone is exemplified in the responses by the various media to the threat of violence resulting from the publication of some perfectly innocuous cartoons in a Danish newspaper. That response was an abject and sniveling surrender that not even the most tortuous uses of Newspeak could cover up. These totalitarians are, underneath, willing slaves. Neither is the posture of a free man or woman.

[Proud_USA_Republican]

[The Electrician]

As a columnist in the MIT student newspaper wrote at that time, "To strip Pollock of his cigarette would be like taking away the character-defining cigar from Sigmund Freud. Would you replace Freud's cigar with a fat pencil?"

To strip Pollock of his cigarette would be like taking away the character-defining intern from Bill Clinton... Would you replace Bill Clinton's cigar with a fat pencil? (oops, guess that I shouldn't go there, sorry)...

[Cacique]

Bump

CACIQUE'S RECOMENDED READING LIST

[King Prout]

great tagline, great reading list