http://spectator.org/archives/2012/03/27/the-plot-to-get-rush/print
Excerpt:
• The Left’s Dependence on Fear and Intimidation: The left has centuries ago trademarked themselves as history’s thugs, the grim, intolerant people with the brass knuckles and more if you get out of line and dare to speak your mind.
From the guillotine of 1789 to the lists of enemies of the people in the 1920s to Chinese Roulette in the 1960s.
In America it has run the gamut from the lynching of blacks to union thuggery to intimidating sponsors of talk radio in the twittering 21st century. It’s all to the same purpose.
Another excerpt from same article...
The late Austrian free-market economist Ludwig von Mises described the leftist method of operation as “fanatical and intolerant.” It works, he said, this way:
Socialism… works on the emotions…to stifle the voice of reason by awakening primitive instincts.
Primitive instincts.
And that most primitive of human instincts? You got it.
Fear.
The skillful, clever use of fear (not to mention hate) is the defining trait of leftists throughout history. Fear is the primitive emotion the left feeds on like a junkie needs drugs. It is a trait repeatedly manifested in history by the use of intimidation or bully-boy tactics to assert raw power. It is the vividly identifiable scarlet thread of intolerance that has shown itself in one leftist movement after another on down through the centuries, regardless of nationality.
Leftist French Revolutionaries launched the “Reign of Terror,” dragging terrified opponents to the guillotine. The moment Lenin’s triumphant Communists overwhelmed Russia, notes The Black Book of Communism, the triumphant left “institutionalized the notion of ‘enemy of the people.’”
People so identified were to be “arrested immediately,” charged with “crimes” like “abuse of one’s position” — essentially the American left’s charge right now about Rush Limbaugh. In short order, millions of Soviet citizens in the new order were shot outright when not sent to the Gulag.
In the 1930s the newly powerful National Socialists of Germany — aka the Nazis — began sending storm troopers to terrify Jews by painting crude yellow signs reading “Not for Aryans” on the windows of Jewish shopkeepers. Eventually, Jews were forced to wear a yellow patch in the shape of the Star of David, bearing a single word Jude — Jew.
In Mao’s China, this leftist fanaticism appeared as the “Cultural Revolution,” which targeted all manner of dissenters with both psychological intimidation as well as physical violence. One of the favorite weapons of Mao’s Red Guards was “Chinese Roulette.”
The game?
A group of dissenters would be rounded up and delivered to a firing squad — but at the last minute only a random few would be pulled from the group and shot. The rest who had survived were said to have suffered something worse than death: a “bullet” of fear and repression inside the brain.
In America, the leftists beneath the hoods of the Ku Klux Klan lynched terrified blacks at night while running America’s Democratic Party by day. No less than future president Ronald Reagan was threatened with having acid tossed in his face if he didn’t cease fighting the infiltration of Communists in Hollywood.
Today SEIU thugs are captured on video beating up those who dissent on Obamacare, calling their victim the “n—word”.
Fear. Intimidation. Bullying. Racism. Hatred of the “other.”
Without these tactics, the left is naked in the war of ideas. By coincidence, R. Emmett Tyrrell, the founder and editor-in-chief of The American Spectator has a book coming out in May titled The Death of Liberalism.