Posted on 11/05/2013 4:54:46 AM PST by SJackson
In March 1946, Winston Churchill told a Missouri audience, “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia.”
Today a new iron curtain is descending. It encloses the small Missouri town where Churchill gave his speech and all the great capitals of a great nation. Behind the iron curtain lie New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia and countless others.
It covers a million streets and hundreds of millions of people. Its shadow passes over stores and factories, homes and schools. It is not a physical wall. There are no border guards with rifles to shoot those wanting to leave.
It is a wall of words, of laws, regulations and mandates. The 2012 Federal Register had 78,961 pages. There are 11 million words of ObamaCare regulations alone. With so many regulations, everyone violates a few of them without even knowing it. Assemble all the millions of them together and you have a great wall that would dwarf anything in China
The American iron curtain is still made out of paper, but in time it will be made out of cement and iron. Tyrannies begin with paper, but end with metal. The state begins by imposing bureaucracy on a free people and ends by imposing tyranny on them. When they will not obey the paper, it resorts to steel, iron and lead.
Four decades after Churchill invoked the Iron Curtain, in his Evil Empire speech Reagan named the Soviet enemy as those who “preach the supremacy of the state, declare its omnipotence over individual man, predict its eventual domination of all peoples of the Earth.”
“They are the focus of evil in the modern world,” he said.
That is the struggle now before us.
Conservatives have lost the ability to lay out the stakes in the clear and simple language of a Churchill or a Reagan, to let the people know that they are not choosing between politicians, but choosing whether they will be able to have the car of their choice, the doctor of their choice, the meal of their choice and the book of their choice.
The struggle is over whether America will be an open system or a closed system. In an open system, you choose the life you live. In a closed system, your life is mandated for you.
In the open system you are in control. In the closed system you are being controlled for the good of the state and the five-year-plan and the policy paper and the sub-paragraph of the regulation of page 50,261 as reinterpreted by a Federal judge in a court ruling that you never even heard of.
In an age where the internet has proven the supremacy of open systems, liberals insist on pursuing the iron dream of the 19th century. The iron dream has failed everywhere. Its ruins dot the Russian landscape. Its corpses fill the tundra from Asia to Europe and the statues of its visionaries fill the scrap heaps of the east.
But there are still men who need to believe in the supremacy of the state, in the closed system and the iron dream; in 78,000 pages of regulations and all their millions and millions of words.
The American iron curtain is not substantively different than the iron curtain anywhere else; its descent is only slower and the men and women lowering it are more familiar. The politicians speak of American values and invoke American history even as they dismantle both; they stand in front of flags and speak of social justice at state fairs.
They claim that the old system is broken; that it’s unfair and unequal. They talk up the power of the people, but they only mean certain people will have power and other people will have the power to support them. And they build their paper walls higher and higher.
The laws are effectively infinite. Even if one were to try to read through them, going without food or sleep around the clock, it would be a hopeless task because no sooner will he have finished 100 pages than a fresh delivery of another 200 pages will have already been added.
There is too much law being made to count.
Laws are being passed to find out what’s in them and even reading them is useless because the added regulations define what the law does and judges decide how they should be implemented. Nearly 100 million Americans will have their health plans taken away because of how the regulations were written.
That is the power of the paper wall.
In 1912, Theodore Roosevelt said, “The great fundamental issue now before the Republican party and before our people can be stated briefly. It is: Are the American people fit to govern themselves, to rule themselves, to control themselves? I believe they are. My opponents do not.”
“I believe in the right of the people to rule,” he continued. “I believe the majority of the plain people of the United States will, day in and day out, make fewer mistakes in governing themselves than any smaller class or body of men, no matter what their training, will make in trying to govern them.”
A hundred years later, that is still the issue before us. Will we have an open system in which the American people govern themselves or a closed system in which they are governed by bureaucrats and politicians who promise to protect them from their own choices?
America has been moving toward the closed system whose bureaucratic chains come wrapped in populist rhetoric, whose power plays take the moral high ground for the oppressed and whose worst abuses are kept out of the headlines.
Each generation has less freedom than the last. And each generation fails to make the connection between its incremental poverty, its incremental loss of freedom and its growing government.
The iron curtain, like the Berlin Wall, is vulnerable. It can be torn down when enough men converge on it. Its greatest strength is that men do not even know that it is there.
When Churchill named the iron curtain, he expressed a reality that people were familiar with, but lacked the words to describe.
The Communists had seized control of Eastern Europe through deception and double-dealing; they had promised freedom and delivered tyranny with the collaboration of politicians and media abroad who spoke of them as humanitarians. Until they were named for what they were, it was impossible to see the iron curtain and the evil empire that Churchill and Reagan made real.
That is true of the American iron curtain, which goes by a thousand names like liberal, progressive, humanitarian, social justice, equality, opportunity, reform… and 993 others like it. To destroy it; it has to be named.
People do not try to tear down a wall that they do not even know is there. It is only when they see the wall, when they sense its shadow over their lives, that they will be ready to tear it down.
Until the men and women of the open system come with a clear message warning of the wall that is being built around a free people, then they will go on losing elections and the cause of freedom will be lost, drowned in iron and paper.
Only when Americans see the wall from ocean to ocean, will they be ready to tear it down. Only then will they be ready to be free.
The time of tribulation is coming. Americans are not immune to it, and I believe true struggle and hardship is right around the corner for most of us.
Sadly, I believe, like the fascists of the past, the people will be too hungry to fight and too scared to resist. The Liberals are playing the game step-by-step according to how it’s been done over the centuries. The people will cry out for food, and they will be given morsels. They’ll cry out for shelter, and they’ll be huddled into shacks or bunkhouses.
America is exceptional in her founding. Americans are exceptional when they’re together. They are, however, uninspired and weak when apart. America’s divisions are greater than they ever have been. Racial and cultural lines are so distinct across the country, yet many of us refuse to see it.
I still believe I will die at the hands of a Federal government agent. I truly believe that, because when they try to force me to my knees, I will remain standing. When they try to force me to lick their boot, I will spit in their faces. And when they try to take my life, I will fight to take theirs. God help me and God bless America, the IDEA of America... not the dessicated shell of a nation we call America today.
The challenge is thrown down, what will our response be?
Not a wall. It’s a web. A spider named Satan invited us into his parlor, and we thought it looked cozy. Now we’re trying to get unstuck.
Excellent commentary on an excellent article — two thumbs up!!! I echo every word of your post, even when the final paragraph is also expresses my fear for the future. I’m in anticipation of 2016 revising that vision and God help us if that does not happen.
It is a wall of money, as well, for both takers and makers. For takers, it's the side of a baby's crib that keeps them dependent on the state. For makers, it's a greased surface that makes it nigh on impossible to achieve their dreams.
As good an article as anyone can write about the current situation
A good article but one that still believes in the ballot box. We went beyond the ballot box in Nov 2012.
Churchill names Stettin (now Szczecin), in the former German territory which had been recently handed over to Poland—he doesn’t include the Soviet occupation zone of Germany as being behind the Iron Curtain. Of course until August 1961 it was relatively easy for inhabitants of the Soviet zone to escape to the West. Trieste had been briefly occupied by Tito’s forces in 1945 but they had been forced to withdraw, so by the time of Churchill’s speech Trieste wasn’t really behind the Iron Curtain...but he probably named it as a reasonably well-known city instead of some obscure town on the Italian/Yugoslav border.
>>>I still believe I will die at the hands of a Federal government agent. I truly believe that, because when they try to force me to my knees, I will remain standing. When they try to force me to lick their boot, I will spit in their faces. And when they try to take my life, I will fight to take theirs.<<<
My friend. My heroic friend. I really, really respect your fighting spirit, but this incarnation of tyranny has learned from the Soviets, the various national socialisms, and the tyrants of the past. If we had the simple dictatorial opponent who proposed a thousand flowers blooming as he emptied the cities, there would be a million people arrayed against him. We are facing something far, far worse.
In the American incarnation of totalitarianism, you’ll still be able to say what you want to say. It just won’t matter. Go to church every Sunday. The subtle erosion of this week’s sermon is accomplished on a hundred cable channels and in hundred thousand classrooms. No one will shut up Rush or Levin. Let them rant, and if they are mentioned, gently mock them, or boldly insult their intelligence, or slyly hint at their motives. Goebbels was wrong about the big lie. Tell a million tiny lies, and soon the populace is overwhelmed with apathy and disgust, and you can proceed unimpeded. And, sadly, no one will come to kill you. No federal agents will knock at the door. Someone might talk to your boss about this regulation or that, thereby preventing your advancement. There might be a fine here and there, just enough to feel the presence of the state, but not enough to anger you to violence. And for those who conform, a shower of cheap goodies, from food stamps to birth control and, coming soon, cheap weed, and further out, perhaps cheap housing. Sure, there are strings attached, but what the hell? We’ll have Internet porn, and weed, and enough Doritos and burgers to go around. If you’re lucky, cheap sex, too. Pick your partner. Don’t be homophobic! And you are welcome to rant in a land of people who no longer care. I would imagine that anyone who really gets out of line will be dealt with quietly, deftly, and without much notice, as if Breitbart’s death was actually an assassination, not a heart attack.
We’re not on the way to “1984.” But we are on the way to “Brave New World,” where the slaves are so well appointed that they no longer care about their lack of freedom and liberty. The tribulation that those of us expect who were raised in a Christian culture will never arrive for those who have no clue about the nature of the tribulation.
I agree with you, though. God help us.
bump
Yup.
Damn. Re-reading my post really makes the hair stand on the back of my neck. The Chinese are also experimenting with a similar model in which the servants of the state are satiated with enough material wealth to prevent revolution or civil conflict. I really hope I’m just some crazy guy in the Alaska wilderness way out of touch. I don’t think so, however.
“The laws are effectively infinite. Even if one were to try to read through them, going without food or sleep around the clock, it would be a hopeless task because no sooner will he have finished 100 pages than a fresh delivery of another 200 pages will have already been added.”
Que The Doors’ “This Is The End, My Friend”.
No trough feeder ever willingly removed its snout from the Gubment Trough, and when the system does collapse, as the historian Paul Johnson said, “If the American experiment in self government fails, that which will come after will be unspeakably worse.”
We were given Free Will, the Founding Documents, and an entire continent.
All were squandered for a mess of socialist pottage.
Mr. Franklin, we could/would not keep the Republic. Consequently, we richly deserve what we are about to bring down on ourselves.
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