Something's been sighted on radar! Obama said to admit working quietly on restricting gun rights

You’ve touched upon something that has intrigued me for some time. First of all, your premise is correct: the Left has actively been engaged in behavior, ideas and policies that history has plainly shown to have mnurderous outcomes. It’s a pedigree of ideas and an axis of thought that can be followed from Machiavelli through Antonio Gramsci, Herbert Marcuse, Georges Sorel, Saul Alinsky and the Cloward-Piven duo. That is, you cannot rule a free and prosperous people. The operating principle is as Machiavelli laid out so long ago:

“When cities or provinces have been accustomed to live under a prince… they do not know how to live in freedom… and a prince can win them over with greater faculty and establish himself securely. But in republics, there is greater life…they do not and cannot cast aside the memory of their ancient liberty, so that the surest way to conquer them is to lay them waste.”
–This, from Machiavelli’s most famous and enduring work, and the bedside reading of our ruling elites, The Prince

This is precisely what is happening and what has been happening for some time now. We are being "laid waste", and it’s happening to the approval and the applause of many of our own countrymen. By every measure of reason, this regime is working to destroy our republic for their own ends. And what is that end? The answer to that question is simple, and all else follows from it: it is the acquisition and the exercise of absolute power. Pure, murderous power. Power for its own sake. The power to control and to harm others without consequence. George Orwell, who understood this side of the Left all too well, laid it out for us in his classic 1984:

‘…The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power… We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites.’
‘The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.’
‘Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.’
The object of persecution is persecution.
The object of torture is torture.
The object of power is power.’

And so you have it. But why the curious blindness given to this undeniable aspect of human nature? Why do so many scholars – above all, those who should know better – such as Victor Davis Hanson, Lee Harris (for both of whom I have the utmost and most profound respect) and even Chantal Delsol, whose landmark The Unlearned Lessons of the Twentieth Century comes so close to the truth either ignore or dance around this subject? Is it because it is too monstrous to contemplate? Is it because it reveals an aspect of human nature that we’d all prefer not to recognize?

If that premise is true, it’s not hard to understand the reluctance: look at the slaughter, atrocity and abomination perpetrated by totalitarian monsters over the last 200 years. How can one make sense of so much killing, such utter, profound and psychopathic cruelty? How can one acknowledge that that reality is an undeniable part of our history and that it is also inextricably linked to our human nature, our human condition? Human beings did these things. Human beings treated other human beings as objects, as machines, as things, as targets for their own monstrosity, savagery and murderous cruelty – and in the end, as animals for slaughter.

Perhaps there’s another reason behind the reluctance to acknowledge this historical truth and its corollary: the realization that monstrous acts are sometimes required to deal with monsters. And that is precisely what we must face if we wish to preserve Western civilization from our internal enemies – mindless utopians and will-to-power driven serial nihilists – and from the threat that the abomination of Islam poses today.

None of us have a Get Out of History Free card. We ignore the lessons of history at our peril. 2000 years or so ago, Titus Livy, in the introduction to his monumental history of Rome remarked that his purpose in writing was “to trace the progress of our moral decline, to watch, first, the sinking of the foundations of morality as the old teaching was allowed to lapse, then the rapidly increasing disintegration, then the final collapse of the whole edifice, and the dark dawning of our modern day when we can neither endure our vices nor face the remedies needed to cure them.”

The people of Rome could do neither, Rome perished in a spread of ruin ands slaughter, and night fell in the Western world for a thousand years.

This is our watershed of history. We face the same decisions that so many others who have gone before us could not make, and who perished for their lack of courage and resolve, their unwillingness to take the measures necessary to rid themselves of their cultures' corruption and and the monsters who perpetrated it for their own sickening ends.

You've touched on a very large theme, one that unfortunately has a very large body count.

Something that occurred to me is that liberalism has been a major impediment to problem recognition, when it comes to identifying and scoping the possible damage Communist and other totalitarian ideologies could do to our society.

First, liberals like to whine that we are being big meanies to the nice totalitarians. They talk about causes, about poverty. They talk about "blowback." They don't want to grapple, to engage evil. They are themselves purblind -- I use that word with precision -- to the evil represented by the people you describe so well.

Liberals live in an airy-fairy "Mr. Rogers's Neighborhood" (their fatuousness wonderfully pilloried by Eddie Murphy) in which they constantly insist on seeing only the good in people, or preferentially the good, in denial of the central truth that men can be evil because they are flawed. This is their "perfectibility" belief, inflicted by Condorcet, coming around to bite them, and in the alleged interest of comity and community peace, they insist that all of us permit it to bite us, too -- we must participate in the fantasy.

Liberals arrive at this condition by denying God, making Man their god, and then insisting that man can become "like" God -- the old Edenic lie -- which traduces their common sense when they encounter solid evidence of evil in a person, especially in a juvenile.

In the second place, having succumbed to this "Brutus syndrome", they then go on to blink the horror produced by the truly monstrous, Cadmus-like totalitarians and their grisly accomplishments; this is the fault you speak of in the scholars you've been reading. It is a simple squeamishness that does not require Condorcet's "moral Lysenkoism" to explain it.

And then beyond that, third, is the other unwillingness you mentioned, to contemplate the measures needed to defeat, or even just to forfend, the monsters, and the counsel of cowardice that looks for some way to adjust, to accommodate to the toll of boys or whatever other horrors are likely to be inflicted in a failure case.

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