Is America Becoming a Fear Society?

From Natan Sharansky’s The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny & Terror, pp. 196–197:

For dissidents within the former Soviet Union, these moral lines [between good and evil, right and wrong] were practically self-evident. Unlike philosophers and rights activists in the West, we dissidents did not feel the need to split hairs over the precise nature of human rights.
We knew that to determine whether or not human rights were being generally upheld in a particular country, we only had to ask a few simple questions:
Could the people in that country speak their minds?
Could they publish their opinions?
Could they practice their faith?
Could they learn the history and culture of their people?

We understood that for those living in a fear society, the answer to most of our questions, if not all of them, was no. The structural elements that enable democratic societies to respect human rights—independent courts, the rule of law, a free press, a freely elected government, meaningful opposition parties, not to mention human rights organizations—were all glaringly absent in fear societies. While these structures are not always sufficient to ensure the protection of human rights, our experience had convinced us that without them. human rights would inevitably be crushed. Every political prisoner in the Gulag recognized the moral chasm that separated free societies and fear societies. We recognized that a free society did not guarantee the protection of human rights, but we knew that a fear society guaranteed their violation.

When someone like Phil Robertson is excoriated by society for speaking his mind, for having his opinion published, for expressing his religious beliefs, I have to wonder whether America is not turning into the type of fear society described in Sharansky’s book; when courts are packed with liberal judges who legislate from the bench, when the press blatantly shows its bias for one particular party, when efforts to insist on proper voter identification are characterized by the press and one political party as voter suppression rather than its opposite, when the press and the political party in power try to convince the minority party to remake itself in the opposition’s image, I have to wonder whether America is not turning into the type of fear society described in Sharansky’s book.

Edmund Burke

It's funny how Edmund Burke anticipated the Occupy movement, and its support by the Democrat party, by over 200 years:

The plunder of the few would indeed give but a share inconceivably small in the distribution to the many. But the many are not capable of making this calculation ; and those who lead them to rapine never intend this distribution.

Reflections on the Revolution in France, page 55.

(There have been several earlier passages in this book that have been evocative of current events, but none more so than this.)

The Marketing of Evil

I recently finished reading David Kupelian’s 2005 book, The Marketing of Evil: How Radicals, Elitists, and Pseudo-Experts Sell Us Corruption Disguised as Freedom.

I found it generally interesting, although I thought his characterization of Catholicism did not make a lot of sense in that he dismissed it for being hierarchical and yet blamed its perceived problems on the seminaries rather than on the hierarchy.

I liked his characterization of the dangers of a leftist, subversive press, though:

[A] subversive press…generates a subtle but powerful pressure on [a Republican] president and other [Republican] leaders. Put yourself in the president’s place. You’re basically always surrounded by the press corps—professional on the surface but secretly hostile to you and, in fact, hostile to the foundational values underlying Western civilization. They’re watching every move you make, recording every word that comes out of your [mouth], looking for ways to undermine you. Remember—they wanted someone else to win the office you hold.

The leftist, subversive press has been anything but subtle and secretly hostile, though, where Sarah Palin is concerned, and she knows it—and so does everyone else, for that matter; fortunately for her, they’ve overplayed their hand, in my opinion, marginalizing themselves instead of her.

More on The Little Toy Dog

While most of The Little Toy Dog deals with the flyers’ imprisonment in Lubyanka, the part that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end occurred near the end of the book, during their transit back to the United States:

Meanwhile at nine-thirty that morning, the big Constellation from Amsterdam was letting down her landing gear on the approach to snow-covered Goose Bay Field. Bruce Olmstead had slept soundly across the Atlantic since, just before take-off, he had been given a sedative. John McKone had dozed fitfully. When they opened the plane’s door, there by the runway was a cluster of staff cars—in the lead, one flying the flag of a four-star general. For whom could this be? They had no brass like this aboard. At the foot of the ramp the two captains were greeted by the Wing Commander, a smiling bird colonel who told them to pile in, that car was theirs; the Air Force at Goose was giving four-star honors today to its two recovered goslings.

I guess one probably would have to have been in the military to realize the significance of this. Officers above the rank of Colonel are called flag officers because they get their own flags—one-star flags for Brigadier Generals up through four-star flags for Generals. When a flag officer is in his car, the car gets a flag mounted on it; when a car with a flag on it goes past everyone salutes that flag.

The Little Toy Dog

I read The Little Toy Dog this past weekend. It’s the true story of the two surviving crewmembers of a reconnaissance plane that was shot down in the Barents Sea who were imprisoned by the Soviets from July 1960 to January 1961.

I liked the book very much. My favorite part, strangely enough, is from the Preface, where the author talks about the publisher “graciously accepting [the book’s] title against his seasoned judgment,” going on to say:

Anyone in the book trade will realize why he warned us, for our colorless, understated title utterly ignores both the excitement of the shoot-down and the high drama in the interrogations, refers to an utterly unimportant episode in the book, and is meaningless to anyone who has not finished it.

I wonder, though, if the book might not have gotten more notice if the author could have at least settled on a concise subtitle. Instead, there is one subtitle (or no subtitle, but a longer description instead) on the dust jacket, a different subtitle on the half title (which is not supposed to have a subtitle at all), and yet another subtitle on the title page.

And, besides, I wouldn’t call the figurine a little toy dog, anyway. I’d call it a little plastic (or rubber?) dog—or I’d call it a little Snoopy dog. Maybe the publisher couldn’t get permission from Charles Schultz to call it a little Snoopy dog—or maybe Michelle Marie Palm never called it that.

1984

I just finished reading (re-reading?) 1984. I thought I’d read it before, but what I remembered as my favorite part of the book ... was not even in the book. My new theory is that what I remembered as my favorite part of 1984 is actually a scene from Fahrenheit 451.

George Orwell was a Socialist, in any case. His ideas on Capitalism were seriously flawed.

That is all.

Fascist Is as Fascist Does

Compare President Obama's statement exhorting “businesses to ‘step up’ and hire workers” with the approach taken by the Nazis to end the depression in Germany—from The Nazi Seizure of Power, p. 270:

After the initial discussion [Local Group Leader] Girmann spoke in summary. He promised to attack legal [?] competition. He affirmed that Nazism was committed to the idea of decent profits. But he also swore he would crack down on anyone cutting wages, hoarding money instead of investing it, or working employees overtime.

Talk about ominous parallels...

On How Media Bias Can Be So Pernicious

From Herman Cain’s book, They Think You’re Stupid: Why Democrats Lost Your Vote and What Republicans Must Do to Keep It, page 105:

Both political parties spend millions of dollars trying to sell their brand identity during elections, when a lot of the perception of their brand is created between elections by . . . (drum roll) the media.

It’s been a busy month.

I just finished David Horowitz’s autobiography.

Books

When I was a young man, my favorite authors were Stephen King, Robert Heinlein, and Ray Bradbury; while I’ve always liked history, I read mostly science fiction in those days.

Now, as a middle-aged man, I read mostly non-fiction, especially history; my favorite author currently is David Horowitz—I’ve just started reading his autobiography, Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey.

Rush to Judgment

This government will not content itself with administering and governing the masses politically, as all governments do today. It will also administer the masses economically, concentrating in the hands of the State the production and division of wealth, the cultivation of land. . . . All this will demand . . . the reign of scientific intelligence, the most aristocratic, despotic, arrogant, and elitist of all regimes. There will be a new class, a new hierarchy . . . the world will be divided into a minority ruling in the name of knowledge, and an ignorant majority. And then, woe unto the mass of ignorant ones!

From Rush Limbaugh, describing the Obama administration? No, from “the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, Marx’s archrival in the First International, describ[ing] the political life of the future that Marx had in mind” [quoted on pages 108–109 of David Horowitz’s The Politics of Bad Faith.]

Bad Faith

In reading The Politics of Bad Faith, by David Horowitz, I have finally come to understand that the Radical Left’s protests against the war in Vietnam over forty years ago were motivated not by any high-minded aversion to war in general but, instead, by admiration and support of North Vietnam as a Communist nation and as a surrogate for the Soviet Union. And now the inmates are running the asylum. God help us all.

The Science is Settled?

This passage from pp. 235–236 of Icons of Evolution: Science or Myth? Why Much of What We Teach About Evolution is Wrong, by Jonathan Wells, illustrates perfectly how the myth of Anthropogenic Global Warming was likewise perpetuated:

As we saw in Kevin Padian’s “cracked kettle” approach to biology, dogmatic Darwinists begin by imposing a narrow interpretation on the evidence and declaring it to be the only way to do science. Critics are then labeled unscientific; their articles are rejected by mainstream journals, whose editorial boards are dominated by the dogmatists; the critics are denied funding by government agencies, who send grant proposals to the dogmatists for “peer” review; and eventually the critics are hounded out of the scientific community altogether.
     In the process, evidence against the Darwinian view simply disappears, like witnesses against the Mob. Or the evidence is buried in specialized publications, where only a dedicated researcher can find it. Once critics have been silenced and counter-evidence has been buried, the dogmatists announce that there is no scientific debate about their theory, and no evidence against it. Using such tactics, defenders of Darwinian orthodoxy have managed to establish a near-monopoly over research grants, faculty appointments, and peer-reviewed journals in the United States.

Vindicating the Founders

In an earlier post I wrote about the ideals enshrined in this country’s founding documents. Recently, I’ve been reading Thomas G. West’s Vindicating the Founders: Race, Sex, Class, and Justice in the Origins of America; it’s a bit of a slog, so I don’t know if I’ll be able to get all the way through it, but I have found one passage (a quote from “Alexander Stephens, the Confederate vice president”, actually) that not only vindicates the founders but also puts the lie to the claim that the Civil War was about anything other than slavery:

Jefferson in his forecast had anticipated this [slavery] as the “rock upon which the old Union would split.” He was right. . . . But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. . . . These ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of the races. This was an error. . . .
     Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its corner-stone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition.
     This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.

Thus, one can see that the Confederate States of America was based on the enshrinement of slavery; the United States of America was not.

Velvet Revolution?

In The Shadow Party, by David Horowitz and Richard Poe, the authors describe George Soros’s funding of “velvet revolutions” in countries such as Croatia, Serbia, and Georgia, using elements of “ ‘civil society’ ” to stage protests and demonstrations in order to bring about what Soros calls an “ ‘open society.’ ”

With the SEIU staging protests in various places, including outside a bank executive’s home, are we starting to see the first signs of Soros’s attempts to fund a Velvet Revolution in the United States?

Finally, A Contemporary Answer

…to the question posed in the title of an earlier post. And it’s in the first full paragraph on page 4 (which is the second page of the Introduction) of Party of Defeat, by David Horowitz and Ben Johnson:

The warriors of the jihad are promised salvation for slaughtering innocents; their highest honor is to sacrifice themselves for Allah by murdering infidels; their goal is to restore an Islamic empire that once stretched into the heart of Europe, until it was defeated in the battle of Vienna on September 11, 1683. Three hundred years later, Osama bin Laden turned this date of humiliation into a day of vengeance—and revival. Striking America’s homeland on September 11, 2001, jihadists murdered thousands of unsuspecting civilians, and came within a terrorist attack or two of destabilizing the American economy and unleashing chaos.

And the book as a whole serves as a very lucid answer, also, to the question of how the war in Iraq fits into the overall Global War on Terror—or, more precisely, the global war on Islamic jihadists.

From The Housing Boom and Bust, by Thomas Sowell, p. 97.

“However irrelevant the empirical validity of claims of racial discrimination may be to those who use such claims to advance their own political or financial interests, the truth or falsity of these claims is crucial for the society as a whole.”

From The Housing Boom and Bust, by Thomas Sowell, p. 71.

[T]he market learns—even if only the hard way—and adjusts with remarkable speed, when staring financial ruin in the face is the alternative. The question is whether politicians and government bureaucrats learn, especially when they pay no price for being wrong, and are able to deflect blame toward the market with denunciations of “greed,” “Wall Street” or whatever other convenient scapegoats are available.

From The Forgotten Man, page 368

“In the decade beginning 1930 you have told us that our day is finished, that we can grow no more, and that the future cannot be equal to the past. But we, the people, do not believe this, and we say to you: give up this vested interest you have in a depression, open your eyes to the future and help us to build a New World.”

 Amen.

More “Ominous Parallels”?

Read The Forgotten Man, about the Great Depression—which lasted as long as it did because of the policies of FDR, whose progressivism and political tinkering are exceeded only by BHO.