bump
Intersting read
I did this one. It's superb piece.
great article!
My oh My!!! What a wonderful analogy of what has happened, this is perfect. Explained simply to what we know has happened. Thanks
Blame the GOP. We had control of the Congress and POTUS under GWB for 6 years. We could have used 9/11 to go after the left, under Bush 41 we could have used the fall of the Soviet Union and subsequent access of the KGB archives to go after the left. Many in the left were guilty of treason during the Cold War. Instead the RINO just wanted bygones be bygones. They thought the left was defeated. It was not because they took root in our schools and colleges, and from their they planned their comeback. It took many years but they finally created a network and illicit fund raising machine that took advantage of technology to funnel foreign money to support BHO. ACORN, SEIU, foreign sources for donation via credit card w/o encryption paved the way for BHO record fundraising and Wall Street recklessness provided the catalyst to tilt the election in 2008. Many of these factors could have been eliminated when the GOP took power under Bush41 and GWB. Of course Rove’s harebrain scheme to gain Hispanic voters by giving amnesty did not help and McCain’s campaign reform was a real boner to boot.
Right on target, plus, a real eye opener for all of us !!!!!
Right on target, plus, a real eye opener for all of us !!!!!
But he is right it is America's fault. They get the government they deserve.
ping
Excellent piece.
We have to build the culture we want to live in. We can’t be passive passengers on someone else’s bus.
Good article!
Thanks for posting this great article. Anyone who quotes Cicero immediately has my attention.
Personally, I'd blame the Roman aristocrats like Cicero and Caesar who used the country like their own personal chewtoy, fighting nearly constant civil wars for almost a century over its control.
That's quite likely to wear any people out, to where they will support any ambitious pol who looks like he will give them peace in which they can live their own lives without being killed in the squabbles of nobles.
The Roman common people and especially the provincials were indisputably better off under the early Empire than the late Republic.
To be fair to Cicero, he was among the less despicable of the aristos. But his solution was just to prop a comprehensively failed system back up for another round of aristocratic games.
The contemporary Democratic Party has corrupted itself to such a degree that it is in every sense at odds with the Constitution its elected members have sworn to abide by and protect.
I judge this observation to be very true but there is an underlying explanation which is very revealing of the psychic state of the Democrat party which offers us equally hope for its eventual healing and considerable alarm that it could ultimately be our nation's undoing. First a stipulation, I'm about to charge the Democrat party with a psychic state of mind which a critic might parallel to those open letters printed in mainstream newspapers just before our presidential elections which declare - no, which diagnose -the Republican candidate to be somehow mentally lacking. I confess I have absolutely no credentials to diagnose anyone's mental condition, much less the state of an entire political party. So I concede that what follows is my own prejudice.
Why has the modern Democratic Party so corrupted itself? There loathing of America and their visceral opposition to the constitution has proceeded so far that members of the party act contrary to their sworn oaths. I'm not here to argue the truth of this proposition, I assume it to be so as do virtually all of the posters on these threads because the evidence, especially arising out of the war on terror, has become so pervasive that it can no longer be dismissed. Why do Democrats loathe America so much? Are they aware that they loathe America? Are they aware that they are violating their oaths to the Constitution because of their loathing? [One might might well ask these questions about many of the policies of the Obama administration to bring this post up to date.]
If you are not a poster on these threads and you do not share our virtually universal opinion about Democrats, I invite you to read this thread which alleges that a former Democrat speaker of the House, a former Democrat president of the United States of America, and a sitting Democrat Senator have all, singly or as part of a conspiracy, treacherously undermined the national security of the United States to advance their party's electoral chances! [This is the new story which describes than Sen. Kennedy's overtures through the KGB to the Soviet Union to attempt to undermine Pres. Reagan's foreign policy and pave the way for Teddy to become president.]
Kennedy-KGB collaboration
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1727448/posts
I have no doubt that these three Democrats at the very same time they were undermining their country's national security actually believed they were behaving patriotically. For them, white had become black, up had become down, evil had become good and good, evil. The author describes this process of rationalization and ultimate distortion of reality as it occurred in Russia until every human instinct was perverted into its exact opposite meaning. I can recall writing notes to myself on a flight homeward from Moscow in which the single overwhelming reaction that I drew from what I saw was the utter, debased, cynicism of the Russians.
How ironic that the author cites the perverse cynicism of the Russians as part of his description, although not necessarily an explanation, of the debased state of the Democratic Party. But the Democrat party is more than debased, worse than merely cynical, it is in a psychic state in which it can do no other. The Democrats are entrapped and they can't get out. Rare are the David Horowitzs of the world who can break free of the. One author has described this syndrome as being in a "psychic cage."
That's author's thesis is that this psychic cage did not settle upon the psyches of Democrats by accident but was the deliberate, calculated contrivance of THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL which was established in Germany in 1923 with the funding of a millionaire, a George Soros like figure, to create the conditions to bring the Russian Revolution to Germany. He assembled a group of brilliant Jewish intellectuals and established what became known as The School for Social Research which identified those parts of society which acted to retard the coming of the glorious socialist Revolution. These intellectuals then set out systematically to "deconstruct" those impediments to communism: the family, the church, the school, the nation, capitalism, Western civilization. Coming to power in 1933, Hitler, who if nothing else could always recognize an enemy, suppressed the group as much for their Jewishness is for their philosophy which caused a kind of modern Frankfurt School diaspora into the rest of the Western world, primarily the United States and Britain. Here the refugees found remarkable influence, becoming associated with the OAS, Columbia, Harvard, the State Department and etc. The cancer metastasized.
They took their ambitions to make the world ready for communism with them and by now they had invented some formidable weapons. To deconstruct the first impediment to communist revolution, the family, they attacked patriarchal authority and sought to substitute matriarchal authority. From there it is an easy jump to attack all authority. That was handy for the next cultural institution they wished to undermine, the church. We all know what happened here. Together, our church and our school construct for us our epistemology, what we know and how we know it. If we can destroy that, we have destroyed everything and left man soulless. The author quotes Dostoevsky: Well, my fact is precisely that Russian liberalism is not an attack on the existing order of things, but an attack on the very essence of things, on the things themselves, not merely on their order, on the established order in Russia, but on Russia herself. We are now very nearly at nihilism. So we see today in our universities, for example, abnegation of their whole purpose and the abandonment of the scientific method, logic, or historical actuality for a so-called "critical theory." Reality means nothing, everything is relative, utterly disposable. The author of The Psychic Cage describes how the universities were seduced and converted before they even realized what had happened to them. One might say the same for the National Council of Churches, for example.
This phenomenon has been described with many terms besides the critical theory such as, cultural Marxism, feminism, multiculturalism etc. and they all seem to fall under the rubric of "Political Correctness." I think it is important to understand how insidious is the brainwashing which found its roots in The Frankfurt School and blossomed with the boomer generation. We in the West are beginning to understand, at least intellectually, a phenomenon of Islam, it's fanatical, anti-rational, murderous-suicidal tendencies. We're beginning to see that the phenomenon is not a matter of rational choice. Interestingly, the Germans make the same argument as they outlaw Scientology claiming that it is a cult which disarms the rational powers of its victims. The Germans ought to know about these things for they learned from the masters, Hitler and Goebbels. When you succeed in tearing away every prop that lets man know what he knows and believe what he believes, you have achieved what Dostoevsky has described-a psychic cage. So this is how the modern Democratic Party got itself into its present fix, a soulless zombie? Contemporary political scientists might describe them more prosaically, a party without a core message and possessed only of a methodology and a very destructive methodology at that. I do not know whether this means that it is unlikely to get a message or that it's likely to take on any message. Is it likely in its cynicism and nihilism to turn upon itself and destroy itself or is it likely to become dangerous and aggressive? At least we know what we are dealing with and why. We know that we cannot persuade these people with logic. We must "un--deconstruct" the psychic cage, bolt by bolt and nut by nut so that the cult-mentality becomes open to human discourse.
By way of illustration, those of us who abhor abortion often scratch our heads at the obduracy of its defenders. We have even described it as a sacramental act in some perverse religion in an effort to explain the otherwise inexplicable. We can make no logic in the face of its ghastliness. The left is untroubled by this even to the point of condoning partial-birth abortion or screaming hysterically at the apparition of posters bearing images of aborted fetuses. We are on different planets. We must understand that these people have not just smashed the order of things, they have smashed the things themselves-as Dostoevsky said. If abortion is not the destruction of the thing itself, what is it?
And so we now understand why Senator Kennedy could sell out his country's national security to advance his own march to the presidency.
The scary part of all this is that we are immersed in a war of survival against mindless, fundamentalist Islam while a political party which represents nearly half the electorate is dysfunctional.
[One can endlessly bring this up to date simply by referring to the daily headlines. Why does Hollywood support Roman Polanski? Because they represent the leading edge of a psychic nihilism in which facts and values are deadweights be abandoned on the trail toward today's new thing.
On rereading this it occurs to me that we ought to distinguish between the psychic effects of the deliberate destruction of our eschatology as it applies to the Democrat party and its apparatchiks vs. the lesser degree to which it applies to middle America. Most folks are not so far along the trail of political correctness that they are already in psychic cage. They have not entirely submerged the power of discernment in the swamps of cynicism but I think our powers have been substantially diminished.
I think the ease with which Obama was able to gull middle America into a mindless acceptance of "hope and change" despite his dubious origins and associations is ample evidence of the success the apostles of The Frankfurt School had in putting the whole of America into a psychic cage.]
“Did they miss the activist 1947 “separation of church and state ruling”? Have they learned about FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society? Don’t they realize that the federal government long ago exceeded its constitutional bounds? Where is the constitutional mandate for Uncle Scam to involve itself in and/or fund housing, food stamps, farm subsidies, Medicaid, global-warming research, mass transit, and school sports programs?”
I didn’t miss it. I’ve been complaining about this for a few decades...add to your list NASA, Dept of Education...cripes, 95% of the federal government...