The following thread is about a booklet written by a conservative in 1938 talking about the New Deal as Revolution. A very important and foretelling read for 2008.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/929392/posts
Here’s an excerpt - I added a couple of names to bring it up to date seventy years later:
“There was a prodigious literature of revolutionary thought concealed only by the respectability of its dress.”.....
“To the revolutionary this same dreary stuff was the most exciting reading in the world. It was knowledge that gave him a sense of power. One who mastered the subject to the point of excellence could be fairly sure of a livelihood by teaching and writing [AYERS], that is, by imparting it to others, and meanwhile dream of passing at a single leap from this mean obscurity to the prestige of one who assists in the manipulation of great happenings; while one who mastered it to the point of genius [OBAMA] that one might dream of becoming himself the next Lenin.”
Thank you 21twelve!
Here’s something chilling from the booklet you mentioned:
“Until it was too late few understood one like Julius C. Smith, of the American Bar Association, saying: “Is there any labor leader, any businessman, any lawyer or any other citizen of America so blind that he cannot see that this country is drifting at an accelerated pace into administrative absolutism similar to that which prevailed in the governments of antiquity, the governments of the Middle Ages, and in the great totalitarian governments of today? Make no mistake about it. Even as Mussolini and Hitler rose to absolute power under the forms of law... so may administrative absolutism be fastened upon this country within the Constitution and within the forms of law.”
From the 1938 article that 21 twelve mentioned are the nine steps that the author sees as needed to take over a country from within. Most of these look contemporary:
“Now given (1) the opportunity, (2) a country whose fabulous wealth was in the modern forms dynamic, functional, non-portable, (3) a people so politically naive as to have passed a law against any attempt to overthrow their government by force and, (4) the intention to bring about what Aristotle called a revolution in the state, within the frame of existing law Then from the point of view of scientific revolutionary technic what would the problems be?
They set themselves down in sequence as follows:
The first, naturally, would be to capture the seat of government.
The second would be to seize economic power.
The third would be to mobilize by propaganda the forces of hatred.
The fourth would he to reconcile and then attach to the revolution the two great classes whose adherence is indispensable but whose interests are economically antagonistic, namely, the industrial wage earners and the farmers, called in Europe workers and peasants.
The fifth would be what to do with business whether to liquidate or shackle it.
(These five would have a certain imperative order in time and require immediate decisions because they belong to the program of conquest. That would not be the end. What would then ensue? A program of consolidation. Under that head the problems continue.)
The sixth, in Burckhardt’s devastating phrase, would be “the domestication of individuality” by any means that would make the individual more dependent upon government.
The seventh would be the systematic reduction of all forms of rival authority.
The eighth would be to sustain popular faith in an unlimited public debt, for if that faith should break the government would be unable to borrow, if it could not borrow it could not spend, and the revolution must be able to borrow and spend the wealth of the rich or else it will be bankrupt.
The ninth would be to make the government itself the great capitalist and enterpriser, so that the ultimate power in initiative would pass from the hands of private enterprise to the all-powerful state.”