I am a subject in a kingdom of lies. At 57, I have grown up with decades of untruth — advanced for the purposes of purported social unity, the noble aim of egalitarianism, and the advancement of a cognitive elite in government, journalism, the arts, and the universities.
Alger Hiss really was a communist operative, albeit an elegant and snooty sort of one. The Rosenbergs were tag-team spies. Noble Laureate Rigoberta Menchu did not really write her own memoir. I admire the lives of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, even as I sensed there were large areas of their biographies that simply could not be disclosed and that the censorship was apparently for our own good. I know that if I did what Eliot Spitzer did I would not be hosting a TV show.
I did not quite know how “witch hunt” characterized the often disreputable tactics of Joe McCarthy — cruel and obnoxious were the better adjectives. You see, there were really communists in Hollywood at a time of a dangerous global cold war against communism, in a way there were never any witches at all in Salem.
But then for some reason I sensed that a murderous, camouflaged Fidel Castro killed more innocents than a murderous, gold-braided Augusto Pinochet. I accepted that we were to be silent about the former’s crimes since his ends were said to be good, while the latter’s crimes were for the bad — though economists of no particular political affiliations have shown that Chileans escaped poverty and dictatorship while Cubans were, and are still, plagued by both.
As far as Hollywood, goes, as I have said, I do not go to the cinema at all. The choices are meager. We can watch a George Clooney, Matt Damon, or Ben Affleck — multimillionaires all of mediocre talent — uncover some corporate or CIA conspiracy that threatens the environment (their employers and distributors are not corporate?), the non-white male, or global peace — or sit through yuppie crises whose double entendres and cute repartees are known mostly only to metrosexuals between New York and D.C., or from Malibu to Newport Beach. We are told they are films, but those too are lies; they are mere transcripts of the daily psychodramas of a privileged and bored class whose efforts are spent searching for global causes that might balance — as penance if you will — their own often angst-driven quests for influence, notoriety, and the material good life.
The media is our ministry of truth of the Oceania brand: one day Guantanamo, renditions, tribunals, preventive detention, Predators, the Patriot Act, and Iraq were bad; then one day in January 2009 I woke up and heard of them not all. I then recognized that they were now either good or at least necessary — or perhaps sinister IEDs of a sort left behind by the nefarious Emmanuel Goldstein administration, now too dangerous to even touch.
The Goldstone Report, I thought when I first scanned it, was worse than most undergraduate research papers I have graded — and therefore I expected it to be praised by the international community. And it was until even the author, like the rare guilty undergraduate who confesses to plagiarism, wants his signature off the report. But then long ago I got used to Israel being damned by reporters, NGOs, and the UN and EU types as apartheidists, racists, imperialists, and Nazis in direct proportion to the fact that visitors to the Middle East usually prefer to go Israeli cafes, hotels, and hospitals. Reporting on the West Bank is a 10 AM-2 PM day job, with a commute back across the green line. Half a million Jews ethnically cleansed in the 1960s from Baghdad, Cairo, and Damascus were opportunists; half a million who fled to the West Bank twenty years earlier are still recently arrived refugees. But then I don’t know why Jerusalem is a divided city and Nicosia is not; or why the Kuril Islands or East Prussia are not similarly said to be “occupied”; or why the fence in Israel is worse than the fence in Saudi Arabia.
I don’t want to come inside, out of the rain.
I only want to know when we married our Peace Corps with our US Military?
I want to know if bleeding a sick person is still practiced, for I think this so called president guy, the metrosexual, former community organizer who did a little blow while in college, who refuses to produce any document which would prove he was born on American soil, all the while asking John Kerry, a true patriot, a valiant thrice wounded (sure…) Viet Nam sailor/officer who grew up wishing he was a Kennedy where he has done everything since to mimic them…even to the point of not paying his new $5 million plus boat’s taxes to his home state which keeps re-electing his sorry butt…to cover for him on Libya…this guy, Obama-Mao, just might be practicing that long lost art of bleeding…my country, the USA to death!
Hippies forever! Gosh, I still love the 60′s. Bill Ayers is so sexy!
Peace, love, Hell no…we won’t go! Sex drugs and rock ‘n roll…my man!
MacDaddy Obama is out to hurt us, to make us the new slaves.
“Get even with Whitey” is the game he plays!
Bet me, yo Crackers!
You nailed home. This guy is taking us into a cosmic cluster F”^%$#.
Thanks Comrade!
1. I heard a comedian on CSPAN yesterday. The guy was black. He admitted it: he voted for Obama just because he is black and a long as he remains black, he’s got his vote 2012.
2. Doris Kearns Goodwin started the 2012 mantra for Obama: he hasn’t fixed much but GWB put him in such a deep hole that any progress is good.
3. Obama must be defeated.
Good old Doris! It used to be that plagiarism was a death knell for any public job but not anymore. Hell, look at the VP. VDH sums up my take on this Alice in Wonderland world we are now living in. I would swear I have seen this movie before. I remember it now, it was called “Being There” and it starred Peter Sellers as Chauncey the gardener who became president and even though he didn’t have a brain big enough to play with the libs all thought his stupid actions or non actions were signs of extreme cleverness. I forgot how it ended but I’m afraid this movie we are now in will end badly for us.
…. Being There starred Peter Sellers as Chance, the gardener who became “president” ….
But you actually insult Chance, the gardener, who’d actually held a job and could grow stuff.
Why even the Euro-weenies’ 1930′s-era Austrian-speaking charismatic narcissist had made Corporal on his own merits (No ghostwriting Bill Joseph Goebbels Ayres for him!) — and could hang paper.
At the end the president dies and while at the funeral they are all talking about how they should try to get Chauncy to take over and he wanders off and gets to a lake and walks on the water.
At its base every one assumed this very innocent man was super clever and that his every word have some gem inside of it.
I loved that film in how it showed how superficial all those powerful people were.
Yet he wouldn’t, I wager, vote for the likes of Water Williams, Thomas Sowell, or Herman Cain — actual *black* men whose ancestors were indeed slaves in this country. Ironic, no? Or just idiotic.
“I did not quite know how ‘witch hunt’ characterized the often disreputable tactics of Joe McCarthy — cruel and obnoxious were the better adjectives. You see, there were really communists in Hollywood at a time of a dangerous global cold war against communism, in a way there were never any witches at all in Salem.”
At last, someone dares to speak the absolute truth! In the 50′s (my era) we thought Joe McCarthy a HERO. But he went too far, got caught up in his own magnificence or something.
I would vote for Walter Williams in a heartbeat. I would have voted for Barbara Jordan or Condaleeza Rice or Alan Keys. So don’t accuse me of racism. What I am against is incompetence and communism, and this black man in the Oval Office today is determined to bring us there.
In the Mishna, Hillel declares, “In a place where there are no men, strive to be a man.”
Doc, I’ve said before, and I’ll say again until September 2012…In a place where there are ONLY LIARS, YOU, Doc, Victor Davis Hanson, MUST strive to be the ONLY honest man.
An honest man in Washington…and the WOW (Woman of Worth) with you…Now THAT would be the beginnings of a redemption for a wounded country!
Hanson/Palin 2012
I would add Allen West to that list. He’s the retired Lt. Colonel Congressman from Southern Fla. He is an honest, intelligent and courageous man, who fought for his countruy and is not afraid to speak the truth.
PS I’m white and did not vote for Obama, but would vote for a black president whose mindset is the opposite of that of Obama.
Walter Williams, Thomas Sowell and Condoleeza Rice are among their other qualities very accomplished AND proven intelligent AND smart. True Americans could/would accept any or even all, were we so lucky, as admirable representatives of America and superb examples of what America is in principle.
In contrast to Obama, Holder, Rangel etal,AND the Clintons and Kennedys ELECTED and appointed to political office to “represent” America and Americans. Praised to the heavens by persons whose only accomplishment as far as known is as members and praetorians in gangs who despise the principles, development and nature of America and her people. Who for some bizarre reasons believe itis honourable to elect persons because they are black or say they are and have some offense to revenge, as disclosed by their destructive, maleficent actions. In any other situation this would be recognized as psychosocial pathology.
Isn’t it time for Americans to pull together. We cannot avoid recognising that a person’s skin colour is not “white” but what does that have to do with what and who they are. UNLESS of course it gives them some advantage in America. And how can this be. Isn’t America a nation, an idea, a Law that denies special privilege to any individual because of any race, gender, colour, ethnic membership, age…? Or has that too changed with the advent of the “best and brightest revolutionaries of the 1960s”?
…. actual (Real American Men) whose ancestors were indeed slaves in this country ….
Get over it!
Most of EVERY man’s ancestors were slaves and my most recent (“white”) slave ancestor died, in the 1930s, in Australia.
Wonderful observations VDH. You seem a bit depressed – but then aren’t we all. It appears that the liar-bastards are wearing us down. In your next column could you please, through the lens of a great historian, outline the landscapes immediately preceeding revolutions ? Are we there yet ? Are you leading the way ? Someone needs to.
Yes! I second this.
We’re all feeling it. This sense that the world is upside down – seeing liars elevated to high office, the media slavering at their feet, it seems that hope is lost. And HOPE is now a 4-letter word. Along with CHANGE.
I’m less concerned about the landscapes preceding revolutions, as I am the ones following them. The Roman civil war was the death of the Republic, not its rebirth.
Too bad Dr VDH does not read these thoughtful comments. He is apparently a writer not a doer except for his orchard . If he only talked to his orchard it would die and it wouldn’t produce a return. Perhaps the Dr would consider leading a West Coast Truth Party. Lies seem to be winning the day. Truth needs boots on the ground. At some point more than just talk is needed to keep the orchard and the truth alive. What about it VDH ? You could be a great leader for your readers: The VDH Truth Brigade. Start DOING something.
I believe it was Zapata who admonished his followers not to look for “a man on a white horse” but to become their own leaders!
Give a Party! Ask your neighbor to bring some Tea!
I wonder, could you detail your own efforts at organizing or leading the conservative movement in the right direction?
I would like to hear the tales of your grassroots efforts, your multi-million dollar fundraisers and your work on the behalf of America to rid itself of this marxist.
And just what are _you_doing?
You present the nuggets of truth that reveal our kingdom of lies for what it is. Thank you for this.
Dark poetry.
Makes one weep and brings anger, but there is no catharsis. Retreating up into the Sierra and shoveling that snow will help.
Epitaph. Thank you, VDH, Ph.D.
Excellent as usual! Obama will be re-elected unless his term in office bites the American people. I do not think this has happened yet. It is starting at the gas pump. If he is re-elected or maybe before, we could see the loss of Israel, Iraq, Afghanistan, and/or South Korea. Under his tenure we could easily see a terrorist attack on this country. I personally feel that not enough American blood has been shed so that other than the readers here, the American people believe all that is said and printed by the main stream media and Obama. It is a shame, a very serious shame!
I clearly remember the Carter Administration. His tenure bit, and we were all aware of it with a 21% prime rate. Real estate business here completely closed down, Additional examples would be that the Russians took Afghanistan, Iran took hostages, boycott of the Olympics, etc. There has to be a bite, and it has not happened yet.
As to burning a Koran, so what? Read Diana West’s commentary about that and Patreus’ letter. She writes what I feel far more eloquently than I can.
the US Gov can fund the piss Christ exhibit with no outrage. I’ll fund Piss on the Koran million copy event and then burn the garbage left. Maggots.
How long are we gonna put up with it? There are more of us, by far, than of them.
There are more of us, by far, than of them.
I hope so.
More depressing to me than VDH’s cataloging of the Kingdom of Lies is the number of family members, co-workers, neighbors, and other acquaintances who seems to believe it all.
Agree with that – family, friends, all in line with main stream media higjacked by the left. Soros and co… Nov ’08 was time to wake up – it’s now critical.
The greatest lie of the progressive is the belief in the advancement or regeneration of human nature by human intellect and will alone. It becomes necessary to obscure the failure of this belief under the rubric of equality, social justice, fairness, diversity and the like. Who would dare be against equality or fairness? As these goals are undefinable and unreachable goals, any program or action can be put forward as being essential to their achievement. Like the utopianism of communism, the progressive ideals have been corrupted by mere mortals. The sheer magnitude of the corruption and the need to maintain it for political survival requires an ocean of deception. People will almost always look for some redemptive purpose in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Remember, the last scourge of mankind in Pandora’s Box was Hope!
There are more than one optimistic philosophies of progress. I tried to sort them out here: http://clarespark.com/2011/04/03/progressives-the-luxury-debate-and-decadence/. I also questioned VDH’s use of the term “metrosexual.” If you read my blog, you will find out why. Feminization is supposedly the cause of decadence in the minds of those holding to a cyclical view of history. I hope that VDH is not one of these.
Remember Soljenytzin? Or Orwell?
PC obedience has been succesfully seared on our reactions – even for me, the one who signs Misanthropicus and has a reputation of delivering the straight dope -
I rememember my own surprise when I found myself praising voluntarily in a company staff meeting someone who didn’t deserve any praise (or criticism) and I said a few things completely unecessary that simply didn’t advance the business, but would have been regarded well by the PC police –
I did that completely voluntarily, with no expectation of reward or approval, without believing in the marits (or flaws) of the manager in cause, and in a context that didn’t call for it – and I, myself while speaking, I was actually feeling as having been mentally abducted somehow, being guided by an outer force – and I remember the surprised figures of those hearing me: even Misanthropicus, this last bastion of reason and objectivity has gone PC?
Mental control – and my situation reminds those sinister stories from Soljenytzin, with “cadres” competing in praising Stalin -
Sorry, proreason, but that’s just wishful thinking. We live in a republic, a form of government where ignorant, greedy, self-centered voters elect amoral, ignorant, greedy, self-centered politicians. Informed, thrifty, and altruistic voters are vastly outnumbered.
Dr. T., shame on you. Any Democrat or progressive will tell you that we live in a Democracy. Even as we speak, they are trying to get rid of the Electoral College.
And that, my good friend, is the deal.
Zero tolerance to lies and untruths.
There is no debate or dialogue with anyone that subscribes to accepting this and that behaves in a manner that condones this lying.
The gloves are off, and frankly, a relative took polite, but repeated verbal body blows, until the knock out which was only to put them out of their misery.
They were hurt, wimpering, and playing victim. The only solution to these disorders is the above. The alternative is to get pulled under by the one drowning.
“How long are we going to put up with it?”
Ah, now that is the – soon to be – $64 trillion question. Since it’s been going on now with increasing ferocity and absurdity for 100 years, some days it’s hard to believe it will ever change. Still, we threw off he shackles of the Brits 235 years ago – a much tougher opponent in some ways who did outnumber us. Surely, we can remove a class of pansies, too.
The problem is that – still, after all that’s happened – 50% of the population is on the Progressive’s side, more or less (even though only 20% agree with that view). When was the last time, for example, you heard Paul Ryan say that Social Security was immoral, impractical, and unconstitutional? (For those who would argue the last criteria, read Madison.)
Would that be James “Big Government” Madison? He is the guy who masterminded all of this, which is not necessarily a bad thing, any more than it is a bad thing what 50% of the American people are. You guys seem very sad about what passes for “reality” these days.
It is what it is.
Lefties were so sad and angry about the “reality” of GWB; they couldn’t believe it. You guys do not seem able to accept the “reality” of Obama. Between the two of them, they define what’s happening, baby.
Stunning, absolutely
I am a subject of a pseudo-monarchical structure, with a galaxy of pseudo-royalty. I’ve grudgingly accepted that fact for some time now. And, at the present rate, big business will be completely subsumed into the pseudo monarchical government ministries….someday!
We have always been at war with big business (big tobacco, big oil, big coal, big businessmen, small big business, big smaller business, big taxpayer, big individual initiative, big small states and big states rights, big constitution, big anti-same sex marriage, big badness-people, etc)
how about big pharma, big “green”, big government, big government unions, big agency, big bureaucracy, big IRS, big GE businesses that bribe their way into being left alone by big government by footing the bill for big governments big rigged re-election campaign costs, big foreign donor, etc?
You forgot Big Law firms.
Sure did! How could I forget them?!
I also thought about it and realized that I have accepted the condition of living in a pseudo-monarchical structure. But it’s not a fact, as facts do not matter anymore, where a pseudo monarchical royalty churns out incessant propaganda based loosely on the overall perception of The Communist manefesto as a religious text, from mediocre talent in Hollywood that synthesizes Marx with “pro-democracy” movements in endless incantations on CNN, and their stupid, banal movies.
The big lie!
ok class., here are your theme topics:
1. Meltdown or Shutdown, which is the lesser of the two?
(analogies to the Japanese reactor are permitted and considered fair game)
2. The Black Hole of Obama.*
(*this one will of course bring on charges of *racism*, no doubt. for obvious reasons, so consider yourself forewarned).
The first essay topic has been amended to:
Meltdown, Shutdown or Smackdown?- you decide which is the lesser of the three.
And, you can submit your own third topic, No.3
Be specific, and pithy.
That is all.
VDH: I agree with your statements above and with all those comments through number 11 at least. However, that and $0.52 will buy a cup of senior coffee at my local McCoffee shop. Still, there remains the belief that somehow Obama will blame all of us so-called bitter clingers for our great malaise, lack of spirit of giving, and support for Obama’s vision of something that makes the rest of the world much greater than our smallish chunk of dirt. If only we’d all support Obama, he’d make the USA a former leader now a better follower than George W. Bush ever did.
Still, it’s up to the youger ones now to stand up for something other than what 60-Minutes wants us to be because my time here is getting shorter with every passing year. And that’s the major question, how does the younger bunch go forward? Will they re-elect Obama knowing what he protends for this country and knowing what people like M. Moore want to do except he needs to protect his own worthy wealth, So, tax and spend and it’s always the fault of someone else, especially if that person is reasonably well off and votes the right way.
Professor, you said much better than my ramblings just now, so God Bless and keep it coming. Many of us support you and like what you say, keep on saying it.
The kingdom of liars and half-truths cannot last forever, and they will never accept that concept; they being Socialists elite wannbes.
How I yearn to believe what you write… Unfortunately your hope of the young seeking out truth has been quashed by American academia. Recently a young person revealed to me that “President Obama can lead us to a higher level of consciousness, if we will only let him”.
Personally, I’m starting to look for a cave in the wilderness in case he gets re-elected.
The choices will come down to fight, flight or surrender, I think many are looking seriously at opting out in some fashion, whether it be physically, as in moving someplace where it might be easier to survive the chaos, or by finding ways to resist and move beyond the ongoing assaults to reason, logic and sanity.
Enjoyable column, but you’re not alone in being aware of these absurdities… In my family, we call it “stuff you can’t say outside the house.”
So I give you props for “saying it outside the house.”
Also, in defense of recent movies, go rent the Cohen Brothers’ TRUE GRIT, go rent Michael Caine’s HARRY BROWN, go rent Pixar’s TOY STORY 3. In a theater, go see BATTLE:LA, go see Peter Weir’s THE WAY BACK, go see Oscar-winner THE KING’S SPEECH.
Those are some diverse titles, but they all display some bravery, dignity, a strong moral core. If you want movies of a certain kind, you have to support them.
“Toy Story 3″ is a classic racist treatise based on outmoded themes of imperialism and genocide. The hero should have been a native-American and not a European interloper strutting around in the very garb that came to personify the genocide of native peoples.
Mr. Potatohead and his wife were clearly anti-Semitic characters depicted as ‘shape-changers’ and weird golems channeled from some Jewish ghetto nightmare that I found not only not funny but ‘Bigotry City, Arizona’.
Buzz Lightyear, rather than being a white mocking bird in a space suit who stole ancient technologies through dreams of future colonialist expansion, should have been a muslim whose culture was innovating math and state of the art navigation devices when Londoners were living in an agglomeration of mud huts on the Thames congratulating each other on not getting cholera that week although they probably referred to it as ‘marsh gas hiccups’ and thought they got it from looking at the sky.
Toy Story 3′s Barbie doll is a classic tool of misogyny whose non-attainable female proportions cause the starvation deaths of zillions if not trillions of young women every week. Doused in toxic chemicals to try and duplicate Barbie’s flawless skin and loaded with silicon in order to have Barbie breasts, our young teenage girls are loaded with more poison than Keith Richards pet cobra which died of second hand smoke from being given ‘shotguns’ of weed at his decadent parties.
Fair weather friends and traitors like dangerously cynical clowns and spinelessly weak phones morally trump an over weight disabled and disenfranchised teddy bear who only wants order in preference to the free wheeling baby boomer toys who would probably be having abortions wholesale if only they had genitals.
Please don’t trot out “Toy Story 3″ to me as having any virtues; there were no manifestations of people of color other than a racist depiction of an African monkey and to me it is no coincidence that every time the ‘heroes’ were in danger that it was in a ‘dark’ place.
When I saw “Toy Story 3″ I became so upset that I immediately burned sage to purify my ranch style house boat and invited my male friends over and we beat drums and read Robert Bly poems all night long.
Thanks! I needed the laughs that came from reading your post.
That’s pretty funny. I bookmarked your site to read later.
Toy Story 3
James May, how absolutely delicious is your comment. It is definately a keeper for who could say it better than you. As grandmother in chief it is my duty to preview the newest from Hollywood to see if it is fit for my youngest grandchildren. I must tell you the brainwashing in these movies is unbelievalble. Aavatar was the hardest to watch. There are many that pollute childrens minds. Disney has long been banned from my house. Even the History and Doc channels have been corrupted. As for Barbie, I refused for my daughter to have one and she is a better person, woman for it. Barbie represented the great unexpectations for little girls. I think the mothers that bought Barbies for the little girls were more taken by Barbie than the little girls. Does anyone recall a Rosie the Riveter doll. This country has fed the American citizen lies for many years. We start with government and move on to media and entertainment. Start with children and rear them to adulthood with this pap and Boom! you have self made idiots ready to cave for hope and change. It has definitely been a “Kingdom of Lies” purchased by all. Too late for Mia Culpas.
Outside the House, I have some (humbly offered) advice for you: Bite the bullet. Say it outside the house. People like you have to. And you have to keep saying it, I am sorry to tell you. Otherwise everything will continue as is or, more than likely, get worse. It’s up to us.
Yes. You are right. Enough enabling through silence.
These are the best words I am going to read all day. You are absoultely correct we need to start saying this stuff outside the house, or inside the house if we are trapped with a bunch of liberal relatives. But manners doth make cowards of us al.
Both there {US} and here {Israel}. Very true, Roger. People just talk to each other, talk to those who agree with them. All the time.
I’m not following this at all.(?) The 0bama administration has already lost the election because he will never get back the so-called ‘moderates’ and ‘independents’ he has already lost. His administrain-thin already knows this too.
So, as in Hollywood, we are dealing in perceptions.
We know that it considered a politically incorrect sin to oppose the destruction of our government for the sake of “wealth re-distribution”. It’s *racist* doncha know. So therefore, the only bitter clingers you’ll find out there are the dead-enders of the monarchy’s reparations/protection racket/bribe the constituency scheme. Until the bitter end.
So it’s up to hollywood, and msdnc, cnn to make us pay dearly for our blasphemies.
During this extended (again, yet again) election season.
So we are sinners…
…in their mind, according to their sanctified crack-pot messiah religion.
So we’re sinners? We knew that already before this admin got here, and we’ve paid dearly enough already, and we will go on paying dearly until THEY, Not WE collapse. and we are rid of their executive and parliamentarian abuses.
Fasten your seatbelts, it will continue to be a bumpy ride.
Roger Simon “Say it outside the house.” Where I live in a small rural inhabited by the Tribal people (I do believe The President called upon the Tribal people during the 2010 election cycle, I think he also said they bring knife, you bring gun). If not tribal then the largest collection of government workers in one small area. So saying many things outside the house will get you beaten or killed. Today I barely peek out my front door and only leave when necessary. This is what my country has done for me.
FREEDOM! Where? Yes we still go to vote and have to wade though garbage to do so. If you want a thrill go to B. Thompson’s district during an election. With his watchers with MAC 10′s in the trunks of their cars.
I think I like you even more than I used. It has a bit of a cathartic feel to it. When Bill Whittle’s Declaration Entertainment produces a film, perhaps you’ll find some thing more to your liking. At least one can hope so.
The problem is you, like the rest of us, refuse to be gaslighted. In the end, we will prevail for in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
Unfortunately, in the modern kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is hospitalized until the doctors – blind of course – realize that the source of his delusions is a growth under his brow, there on the right. After surgical removal and upon recovering from it, he is released with a lifetime supply of psychotropic medications to prevent any future relapses in his psychiatric condition. *sigh*
We live in interesting times. It’s a shame we can vote in all those Tea Party candidates and they seem powerless to change this Titanic course this nation is on. After Obama, the deluge.
hello. i am a citizen of America. the truth of my shame, is from our unequaled capitalist achievement. we grew beyond caring first, for people within our borders. globalists pump lies into every moment of our lives, and we grew the globalists. now that they can produce wherever they want, to sell to whomever they want: we are insignificant. we need to get globalists under control, and demand products by Americans: for Americans. we need to put America back to work. we need to take care first, of U.S. Americans. globalists lie as a mission statement, with impunity to any consequences. it’s the newest world disorder.
Leftist ideologies of all stripes are giant CON GAMES built on lies by the lying liars(Power Seekers)that run those CON GAMES. Those that believe these lies are DUPES, people easy to fool. They are the true believers that make up 98% of leftist.
Some of the Dupes will gain experience, and cease to believe. Sadly, most will go thru life as Dupes.
My dear cyberfriend, VDH…the lies are mounting.
They are an inexorable surge, unrelenting, incapable of being stopped any more than the splashing tides. Oceania indeed.
We are living in Czarist times. We indeed are subjects and we are not delivered the truth, we are prevented from it.
Our media has turned against us. It has propped up and covered up a government that does not like us, as a people. It likes others and wishes to replace us…through attrition or otherwise. It will breed us out, it will break open our borders and seal off and shackle our defenses. And it will lie to us that it is doing that very thing.
It will sue any state that tries to defend itself. It will call any dissent “angry, mean, racist, homophobic, ignorant and barbaric”.
The lies are eating away at our national soul. They are eroding our ability to fight back. And they are slandering this land of ours out of existence.
In Wisconsin. In Arizona. In California. We have been bankrupted. The leftist Ponzi scheme has depleted our national pocketbook. And we can’t get the truth out…because there is nothing but lies in Oceania. And there is nobody brave enough, smart enough, powerful enough to turn back the tide.
I agree I think it is as bad as you state.
“…And there is nobody brave enough, smart enough, powerful enough to turn back the tide.”
No. To win they will have to mow us down by the hundreds of thousands on the streets of the capital. They will learn that there are millions of us willing to put their lives on the line to protect and restore our freedom and our sovereignty.
Meanwhile there is an election to prepare for. Over the last few months I’ve been casually identifying non-voters and independents among my broader circles of friends, acquaintances and co-workers. This week I approached nine of them with whom I am on particularly friendly terms and invited them to dinner at a local restaurant next week. I intend to convince them to vote, and to vote conservative. My approach will be to outline the rise of the collectivist global state through the kinds of deceit and manipulation that the good doctor describes so well. I have found that people get especially angry when they realize they have been manipulated.
I can already tell that several of the nine are receptive to what I have to say. They sense something is wrong but don’t have the historical or political framework to understand it. I hope to provide that. There are 2 -3 others that may join us as well. The cost is minimal, a couple will walk away thinking I’m wrong (or nuts), a few will remain undecided, but if I can convince half of them to vote conservative it is a good start. My goal is to convert 50 in the next year. If half of them convert one other that will be 75. Alone it is insignificant, but if we all do it we will win in 2012.
Of course that is when the hard part begins, for we will have achieved nothing unless we shatter the wall of deception that the collectivists have built. We will need to purge the Republican party, and destroy the Democratic party. There may be a few good Dems left, but the leftists have so polluted that party that it must be abolished, to remind future generations of what happened in our time.
Part of me pities the leftists for they suffer most from their lies and hypocrisies. They are lost, drifting in a river of pure ego-gratification, with nothing to hold onto or believe in. No wonder they want to inflict their nihilism on the rest of us. It is the only way they can soothe the yawning terror that stalks them. Still they have to be stopped. Failure is not an option. By hook or by crook I refuse to be part of the generation that allowed freedom to slip away without striving to the utmost to defend it. I could not live with the shame.
cfbleachers:
You might just have nailed it. Perhaps there is not a single cajones possessing man still alive who is willing to take it to ‘em. Unless it’s Donald Trump.
He’s called out the Chinese slave masters, the butchers that inhabit the power centers at the U.N., named names as to the fatheaded pretend to be economists that drive the train toward the cliff at the Federal Reserve, and now has shown the unmitigated gall to challenge our Magic Leader to produce a real birth certificate.
Maybe it’s time for a real leader to step up to the plate?
I had hoped that it would be Victor Davis Hanson but now I realize that he is just as confused as I am as we watch the emergence of our New World Order.
cgw, there are no men left in this country. They are all metrosexuals. Didn’t you get the news. It appears Mexico is loaded with men, violent men.
While we are on this subject. America is fresh out of Heroes. No offense to you guys here, it’s what media tells us. Gives new meaning to “Of Mice and Men”.
Whether anyone exists “who can turn back the tide” is irrelevant, since the Repubs just mumble CYA ‘on this hand and that hand’ crap — and they never, but NEVER, answer a false charge or an outright lie on TV. They just go on mumbling.
The Dems play Bolshevik hardball. They can get their useful idiots into the streets on a moment’s notice from Yemen to Wisconsin. Here’s what 2012 looks like:
The back room gang at the White House and the knee-capping thugs in Chicago, LA, Philly, NYC, Atlanta, etc., will buy the mouth-breathing NEA/NTA-educated electorate with the billions they’ve got from the “bail out” and “stimulus” cash that their ward heelers now use for walk-around money — and the country club repubs let them do it! Not even a squawk, just mumbles.
You think the Repub girly-men can possibly field a tide-turner? Their only chance is a brace of two fast-talkin’ dames, and the mumble-wits of the RNC can’t muster the balls to run them.
The lies are just part of the normalization process of becoming a communist/totalitarian state. Not much time left to change direction…and educate a new generation of critical thinkers.
Yeah, we live in the kingdom of lies and deceit – the king is a liar and so are his sycophants and courtiers. The subjects are too naive to see clearly through the facade or fog of lies. Unless the subjects see it clearly and force the king to abdicate(such as by next election), the kingdom of lies will live on for four more years!!!
it used to be selective blindness of the press ..now it is just lies. not even clever lies. just outrageous stupid foolish lies.
thanks for another great essay of how the elites have destroyed honour truth and everything in-between
regards
Dr. VDH – Excellent!!
I’ve always felt so grateful that my grandparents fled Eastern Europe for the USA. Now, despite all of their sacrifices, and the accomplishments of my parents, and my accomplishments in this country, for the first time in my life I am seriously considering ex-expatriation. If, God forbid, Obama is re-elected, I might well do it.
I feel the same way, and after vacationing in Costa Rica I decided that it is a good choice. It’s the second oldest democracy in the western hemisphere. It does have state-funded education and health care, but it is much less of a nannystate and surveillance state than the USA. It has a tiny army and no air force. (The locals joke that their air force is comprised of turkey vultures.)
Costa Rica has a mix of climates (tropical jungle, tropical beach, cooler mountains, and even arid regions). Coffee is a major crop, and Costa Rican coffee is delicious.
Unless you stay in San Juan or an upscale beach community, the cost of living in Costa Rica is substantially less than in the USA.
It’s easy to emigrate their: you can stay there if you find adequate employment or if you transfer $100,000 to a Costa Rican bank or investment firm.
Now that would be an interesting picture to watch: 50 million US conservatives, disgusted with this fraud BHO and his Emirate of Lies, picking up their U-Hauls and their families and moving to Costa Rica !
I’m afraid that little tiny country might “tip over and capsize due to overpopulation,” in the words of an esteemed statesman of this Emirate of Lies, even though it isn’t an island, Dr. T.
Sober up folks, and stop drinking yourselves to oblivion. There ain’t no islands to escape. There isn’t no other choice than to rise, get your butts off your sofas, get seriously involved and fight like the 300 at Thermopylae. Or, to put it in more contemporary paralance: the Titanic is sinking fast, and we need to plug that damn hole, as the water is getting too damn high, to paraphrase a modern day deep metrophilosopher.
Just think, you can come to the USA with less than nothing and live la vida loca.
“Now, despite all of their sacrifices, and the accomplishments of my parents, and my accomplishments in this country, for the first time in my life I am seriously considering ex-expatriation.”
You’re not alone. I know of several acquaintances who have already left and made homes abroad (Australia, Thailand so far). And there is an increase of American expats giving up there citizenship directly related to the increased regulations and double taxation.
http://blogs.wsj.com/hong-kong/2011/03/10/red-white-and-through/
Hard to tell what happens in 2012, I stopped believing the press a very long time ago, but the stupidity of the American public is not to be underestimated. Disclosure: I had family members who voted for Obama– some regret and others are simply so deep into the fog to ever find their way out. It takes some intellectual courage to question your “beliefs”- you need to have an appreciation, and value, truth, and I think alot of people are to heavily invested in the lies more than they care to admit.
Good luck to you whatever you decide!
I love my nation, my ancestors built it from one of the most barren and harshest wildernesses in the world to a magnificent industrial nation.
But I wonder why an American would leave the USA and come here to escape “big government”?
Oh yes a person can sometimes and somewhat escape the reach of our federal government just because there’s so few people here and so much space, but our government makes yours look like a bunch of pikers, and our system of government is well, not so much federal anymore as a pure central bureaucracy.
Currently we have an out and proud Fabian Socialist occupying the highest elected office and a neo-fascist green party holding balance of power in our Federal Senate. One of our very few conservative columnists is currently sitting in a court of law defending himself against “race villification” charges for simply asking some uncomfortable questions.
I come and read American blogs and American sites to get ideas and hang out with like minded people. For instance I am astounded by the level of control you have over all aspects of your government. I have a pretty good grasp on the American culture and political system, and know that most Americans have far less understanding of ours (or the rest of the worlds, which is ok), please believe me when I say you’ll not find the *lasting* freedom here or anywhere outside of the US that you’re looking for.
We suffer under the lefts madness to a level you don’t understand.
Consider this: There’s no Tea Party equivalent here, and there never will be, under any circumstances, despite the current government being as overtly useless and debt prone and scandalous as yours.
Ask why that is.
There is nowhere to run, you’re it, we’ll follow. So please, please do what you’ve always done and kick some left-wing commie arse.
Try http://www.thornlesspath.com/
It can be done!
Dear Victor,
beautifully said…Virginia Wolf’s poetry for the for the 21 Century… who is listening? certainly not many of my friends and family who hail the 2000 year old “Bread and Circuses” of Rome made elequent by Obama’s magic.
Nothing is as depressing as meeting an old friend who has sucked enlightenment from Obama’s tit and sees me as the enemy or my oldest daughter who asked me “Dad,why when we were young, you took us to Civil Rights marches and now you are a “Republican”? Even though I am an incurable optomist, I often dispair at the unreason of the young.
It is the younger generations who put our buffoon in chief in the White House and it is they who will suffer the most for voting with their emotions rather than their brains. A recent study found that most college graduates are no more capable of critical thinking after for years of college than they were when they began. That helps to explain why that demographic fell in love with Obama’s rhetoric. It is also that demographic who are watching their futures destroyed before their very eyes and remain clueless.
will the censor of this site be honest with me. Why have you deleted my comments from your blog? I would really like to know. Are they offensive in any way? please let me know. Selwyn Mills
VDH is just so darned articulate and smart. Me, I am buying a few more guns and lots more ammo while looking for a bolt hole off the grid. Things are fixing to get dark and bloody around here.
Mr. Hanson should be the elite of intellectuals in this country: A hardworking, self-effacing profoundly honest intellectual. His intelligence pierces the whole tissue of lies that are the Liberal, leftist elite in this country. Their shallow self-promotion seems so transparent and disgustingly obvious. Yet, because they can’t refute him or argue with him, they simply ignore him. Tell me, unless you read Convservative blogs would you have ever heard of him? No, instead you hear from intellectuals like the looney Bill Moyers, Nina Totenberg, Michael Moore (and he called Rush a big, fat liar?), etc. The list of this ship of dangerous self-infatuated fools is enormouns. They are good at demonizing others and aggrandizing themselves in the same easy trick. Thank you, Mr. Hanson for being a beacon in the gathering darkness that was once the great light of liberty.
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
To whom may I attribute this remark? If it is originally yours, I love it…if it came from someone else, I love it…origin please!
Thanks,
It is the first line from Orwell’s 1984. An amazing read if you haven’t tried it. Enjoy!
It’s the opening line from Nineteen-Eighty-Four. Appropriate on so many levels.
Now like the teacher that I am, let me call that an official homework assignment.
I’m glad you asked. I had the same reaction. Had to google it. It’s the opening line to 1984 which I’ve never had the fortitude to read.
It’s the opening line of Orwell’s 1984.
The clocks striking thirteen is the opening line of George Orwell’s novel about the natural end and abuses of state power, no matter by what brand it might be sold to the public, “1984″.
Professor Hanson,what a marvelous and disturbing rant. How have we become a nation ruled by an elitist minority that is not just silly and stupid but committed to the destruction of reason, willfully and gleefully leading us, under the guise of “progressivism”. down the road to the hell of feudal servitude, alike to Islam?
This is not something that we have “drifted” into but the calculated product of thee strategy of an educational system dominated by Stalinists, as you are well aware from you professional experience. Today’s college is a madras, teaching the unquestionable faith. Public communications are managed and staffed by true believers who do not see their role as to inform, but to proselytize and ensure that no apostacy is revealed, much less discussed. The world Orwell warned of has arrived.
We are fortunate that a new media has emerged that enables strong and eloquent voices like ours to be heard, but the response from the elite is vicious and unrelenting with two generations of brown-shirts behind it. There is evidence of a strong body of support for a vigorous resistance. but you cannot rally under the banner of a sissy tea cup. It is really the rise of a non-party Exceptionalist Movement, also true-elievers. waiting for a strong, charismatic leader to emerge. I can visualize no effective alternative, And the “regressives”, the Pre-Magna Cartans, will make it a dirty and protracted fight. En avant, VDH! Have at!
And don’t you find it depressing to have your earnest efforts reduced to bickering over movies you care nothing about?
Oceania has always been at war with…itself.
Liberals are trying to force society to evolve in a way that does not fit reality. The longer it goes on, the farther our culture diverges from reality. But the situation is unsustainable. Honesty will win out eventually.
Doctor Hanson will feel much better if the protectors lock his head inside of a cage housing a hungry, vicious rat. Then he will see the folly of his journal writings. Then he will feel so much better. Then he will achieve peace.
Geeezz la weeez lighten up!!! As I remember we had a HISTORIC election last November and just because the left is acting like it didn’t happen doesn’t mean you should……it did so SNAP OUT OF IT!!!!! Thank God for Gov Palin or you guys would have good reason to feel the way you are. Things have changed boys, it changed 2years ago and that was just the start, we’ve been working this whole time with our allies and friends while most only hear about what “stupid thing Sarah said” well we’ve been busy. So if you think you’re going to get all snooty and think you’re going to take control and “fix” it, please just help us repair the damage Washington is doing to our great country and put someone in there that has been vetted inside and out and no other could ever withstand what she has and do you really think one of the others could get through it?? She has 20yrs of doing the right thing and she’s a policy wonk to boot, so come on, turn that frown upside down and could you help us girls out soon….or we’ll just have to do it without you!!! :)grrr
Please – Guv Palin left her own mini destructive path in Alaska – she has a lower approval rating here than Obama does.
While the rest of the country can be infatuated with her, let’s just say from all sides of the spectrum in Alaska we are happy she is moonlighting the lower 48.
Great article VDH!
Thank you for this article. I held my breath as I was reading it!
I am an amateur student of history, being retired with a lot of time on my hands. Did you realize that whenever a civilization declines and begins to shatter, this is pre-dated by a decline and moral destruction of its’ elites. The Athenians lost their sense of civic responsibility before the fall of Athens. Europeans of all stripes lost their moral clarity throughout the 20th century, reflected in the decline of educational values and sense of civic pride; costing the continent over 100 million lives as the technology of the day enabled the most efficient killing in history.
And now the US reflects all of these “lessons of history”. Of course it is personified in Obama, as it was in Hitler, Mussolini, Lenin and Stalin during the earlier period. But our decline is much faster; it is reinforced by the technology of communications which is capable of spreading lies much more quickly and much more forcefully.
Unhappily the trend is irreversible. Obama will win re-election. How can he fail. A media that dared to state that his opponent in 2008 had a sexual affair with a lobbyist as a deliberate attempt to bias the election will do ANYTHING to ensure that Obama wins again.
I never thought that Americans would elect someone with so little experience and temperament to hold the office of President. So when he wins in 2012, even as the GOP take both houses of Congress, he will simply run the country through executive fiat, and Americans will applaud him for his courage. Such a pity!
“Unhappily the trend is irreversible.”
No it isn’t. Trend lines are projections of the present into the future. If we knew the future, there would be no point in living. Winning takes mental toughness – the refusal to give up ground even when it looks hopeless. Remember, it isn’t the dog in the fight, it’s the fight in the dog.
VDH,
Don’t you understand that there is no black and white, or right and wrong? Everything and everybody is equal, I’m OK, you’re OK.
I know exactly what you are saying. As one hetro-white- male I have decided that I will no longer listen to crap and agree just so no one’s feelings are hurt. As an example today in 2011, most, not all but most people that get AIDS volunteer. If you inject street drugs and share needles, have unprotected gay sex, or involve yourself with the sex trade you have no one to blame but yourself. We as Americans have no business interfering in Libya, Syria, or the Ivory Coast. We did not cause the problem and we do not owe them a solution at our expense. All foreign aid should have strings attached, yes even food to the starving and medicine to the sick. Why make enemies strong. Why borrow money from China with interest in order to give that money away. Let China deal with directly or do without. The UN? Exactly why are we paying about 22% of the operating budget. Japan pays about `12%, Canada and Mexico less than 3%. Let someone else pick up part of the load or shut it down. To my knowledge the UN has not stopped one war or massacre, or deposed one killer despot. It just sucks money down a black hole.
Our Congress for the most part is populated with self serving,selfish, vote buying prostitutes. They buy votes with your money if you pay taxes and give your money to slackers and third generation professional welfare recipients. At least 47% of the people in the country do not pay income taxes and no Social Security and Medicare do not count as taxes. If you are really, really stupid even you should see that if what you are doing for 60 years doesn’t work then adding money to the program won’t fix it.
I hope I have made some people mad, and I don’t care what they think of me. These are my opinions I will explain or defend them but I will not apologize.
Apologize for what? Everything you said makes perfect sense. The sooner we quit apologizing for TRUTH the cleaner the air will get. C’mon, people!
God Bless you Mr. Hanson. For all the millions of words which have been written about the decay and turbulence this country has faced in the past half century have failed to articulate the widening darkness this country faces: we have been forced to live and defend DECEIT, many of us for almost all of our lives. We have been lied to by the Marxist demons who have perverted and subverted the truth in the service of their power lust to the point that as Orwell once noted telling the truth is a revolutionary act. Political correctness is a lie for a lie, a means of spreading and reinforcing lies. It attempts to condition the citizen to doubt the truth and to accept a version of reality that is illogical and runs counter to evidence, reason and the truth. It has corrupted huge swathes of the population to the point where the lie is the sanctioned narrative and the truth teller in hounded. Political correctness is a Marxist construct, a means of mass indoctrination and mind control and the sooner we all have the courage to shout what the left does not want to hear nor wants us to speak, the faster we will break the SPELL. Political correctness has turned America inside out and upside down and we are living like the slaves of the Soviet, whispering truths to each other behind closed doors and looking over our shoulders lest we be given away. Stalin would be proud and amazed.
could someone explain what “kinetic military operation” means in plain English
It’s kinda like a rapidly deflating soufflé gone wrong, only the Armée de l’Air are called in to save the puff.
Heh heh – you are awesome
It’s not really standard usage and is somewhat of a redundancy, like saying ‘firing/ shooting’. I guess if one is uncertain of what one is doing one can stutter ‘war-war’ to make sure we’re all on the same page.
Supposedly it is opposed to ‘non-kinetic’ which would be, in truth, a non-military action unless you consider psy-ops really military as if we need to understand such a distinction. I don’t think anyone is that confused as to what armies actually do which is fire weapons. Maybe President Semantics learned it in a video game about killing aliens on a space station.
It’s belaboring the obvious and bullshit all rolled into one. You can ignore it because it is in effect, a meaningless phrase that pretends to offer clarity while offering more fog to the war.
Equivalent usage might be, “I use a spoon/eat for ice cream.” I am filling the gas tank on my car/drive.”
One musn’t think a spoon is really a small shovel or miniature pry bar or that the military will go into action with dummy grenades and blanks because of all the times they actually do.
a push-up?
A kinetic military operation is when an Army physician runs around the operating table while performing surgery.
I am confident Sir you remember your history. The Communists sent Intellectuals to the Gulag for poking their finger in the Marxist’s eye.
You nailed it.
VDH — Do you ever feel like you were born 20 years too late? Or 80?
But, buck-up people. Things are a mess but the good guys & gals are making a come-back.
If the kingdom of (political) lies were not bad enough, we could talk about the kingdom of religious lies.
For example, Christians are getting ready to celebrate Easter, a holy day that is not mentioned once in any honest translation. Neither is Xmas for that matter. Nobody seems to care when Jesus was actually born, which was in the fall of the year, not the dead of winter during Saturnalia.
But there are Primitive Christians, many in the Church of God, who seek and practice the same faith as Jesus passed on to the Apostles. But to those captive in the kingdom of lies, the truth seems strange indeed.
VDH pens a modern J’Accuse: ferocious, marvelous, superb.
One small quibble. I was under the impression that McCarthy focused on Communist penetration of the State Department and the Army. I can’t find that McCarthy targeted Hollywood; perhaps concerns about Communist penetration led the studios to take their own steps. It was the House UnAmerican Committee (HUAC) that famously asked writers, actors, and producers about their politics and allegiance. One is tempted to say that McCarthy conducted a “witch hunt” in Hollywood is just another lie, one repeated so often that it is taken for granted.
Dear Mr. Hanson, Excellent!!! when Sarah becomes President I hope you are her speech writer.
The only saving grace I can see in response to all these pages of exasperation, is that this voice is resonating.
In Toronto, the very character otherwise attacked, was elected with a resounding 13% margin of victory, while the week prior the newspapers had his lead at less than 2% and within the margin of error for the same sex unioned and adopted father opponent who’d spent the previous 10 years of so in provincial office giving away hundreds of thousand dollar untendered contracts with no specifics, to his ‘friends’.
Barely a word mentioned about this in the media!!! Thankfully, a conversation of this nature is weaving itself through the world of the many, who tend to be busy with careers, parenting, and trying to have a life on top of those two responsibilities.
The issue of “rights” and entitlements, is distorted beyond recognition. It’s been more like a growth industry, then fundamental values in the fabric of our culture, reflected in policies and laws. The background is the foreground – it’s just backwards.
Mid term US elections; conservatives running a minority government in the UK; conservative mayoral win in Toronto – let’s hope this trend grows.
Far too many lies, far too many deceits.
No scholars are left, only elites.
Accept not their stories and tales.
Or watch sadly, as our nation fails.
“As far as Hollywood, goes, as I have said, I do not go to the cinema at all. The choices are meager. We can watch a George Clooney, Matt Damon, or Ben Affleck — multimillionaires all of mediocre talent…”
Well, I stopped reading right there. Out of touch is out of touch, sir. There are plenty of heroic and patriotic films being produced, and it’s nothing more than reverse elitism to suggest those actors are mediocre and should be shunned for earning vast sums of money.
i thought mediocre was a rather genorous description of their talent
“how bout dem apples”
Like VDH I too don’t go to the cinema as I have conducted my own, albeit little, boycott of all things Hollywood, and for many years. Instead of making a snarky comment it would be helpful if you were to give us some references to the good movies you say are plentiful.
Dr. Hanson, don’t expect anything from the “subjective reality” crowd and you won’t be disappointed. The good news is that a majority of adult Americans no longer see liberalism as just one of two equally relevant problem solving methodologies. This is very, very bad news for dems. The next election is likely to see them reduced in strength again and put on the road to political extinction. They could reverse some of this damage but they seem determined to double down on Obamism. Does anyone need better proof that the Democratic Party is an open-air mental ward?
That’s being disrespectful to individuals that are mentally challenged – those afflicted so often teach us love, affection, and appreciation in a way that’s difficult to even imagine which cannot be said for those to which you refer.
Cheer up, folks. We ain’t done yet. Gene Simmons USO show:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MtdIO23MKM
Well done Gene!!
No wonder this guy gets the babe from the Rock.
Mariah Carey and Beyonce singing sweet nothings in Tripoli while Gene rocks with the US forces to boost the morale and take them away from the treachery for a brief moment.
Could there be a more stark metaphor for attitudes in the US and the world!?
2001-2008: Overthrowing tyrants abroad and spreading democracy is a good and noble venture.
2011: Overthrowing tyrants abroad and spreading democracy is neither good nor noble. The rebels in Libya are actually “rebels” who clearly lack the moral fiber of, say, the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. “It’s all about the oil!” We should have left the men and women of Benghazi – who so nearly, bravely, overthrew a dictator but who alas were beaten back – to be massacred by that vengeful dictator.
See, two can play at this game.
(Incidentally, your comrade-in-arms Noam Chomsky, discussing the Libyan no-fly-zone in an interview here – http://hamsayeh.net/society/511-noam-chomsky-on-libya-and-the-unfolding-crises.html – simply changes the subject to “the murderous and destructive US-backed Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006″ and then adds: “End of discussion.” Which side are *you* on, boys?)
What a wonderful article. There are many of us here in the UK who think VDH is simply one of the greatest of the USA’s public intellectuals .
This is the best blog.
Without a doubt, the best summary of our present miasma. What is to be done?
You should go to a doctor for that. I’m sure there is a medication that will help you.
Another one hit out of the park!! I am to the point I have no problem saying “the things that can’t be said outside the house”. I shout them out for all to hear. Teach your kids the truth, and encourage them to shout too. Post Dr. Hansens stuff on Facebook. . . perhaps even there some can be reached. Never give up!!! And be prepared for a shootin’ fight, if it comes down to it.
Dear Professor Hanson,
Unless I am mistaken, you have fallen victim to one of the Big Lies of the left, even as you attempt to uncover it:
“I did not quite know how “witch hunt” characterized the often disreputable tactics of Joe McCarthy — cruel and obnoxious were the better adjectives. You see, there were really communists in Hollywood at a time of a dangerous global cold war against communism, in a way there were never any witches at all in Salem.”
As far as I know, Senator McCarthy never investigated Hollywood – that work was taken up in the House. Senator McCarthy was interested in demonstrating that there were communists -and more importantly, the protectors of communists- in the State Department and the Defense Department. He was quite right about that, and their presence was immediately more dangerous than the presence of communists in Hollywood. Although I will grant you that the influence of the Hollywood communists has been in the long run more pernicious.
Punditarian
I did not quite know how “witch hunt” characterized the tactics of Joe McCarthy …. there really were communists in Hollywood at a time of communism’s dangerous global cold war against America — and in a way there were never any witches in Salem ….
But, just as the Cold War, except perhaps in the minds of moral relativists, had an aggressor and a defender, so, as the declassification and 1995 publication of the VENONA Project files indisputably confirmed, did Senator McCarthy’s work expose many Communist traitors to America. expose many very real and very dangerous un-and-anti-American communists.
But the investigations of Hollywood’s very very many un-and-anti-American Communists were conducted by the The House Committee on Un-American Activities. By the House of Representatives, that is, not by Senator McCarthy or by the senate.
The basic strategy is to buy the votes of the 60% with the money of the 40% who actually produce and pay taxes.
How did we get here? I understand that diplomats have always uttered pleasant lies – that is their role. Somewhere along the way, the people in charge started believing the lies and making foriegn policy decisions based on them.
Marines and Rangers often tell themselves not to “believe their own B.S.” because believing lies gets us killed.
Politicians have always lied also – like an ambitious 25-year-old padding his resume and telling stories in a perpetual job interview. We should know better. Why are we accepting obvious lies when we have the internet?
Fascinating conversation.
Please remember that in the darkest days of the gulag, the human spirit did not die. We have the advantage of historical perspective and family units. Personally raising the next generation is the best revenge. In my little town not far from Bakersfield, there is a wonderful crop of moral, thoughtful teenagers, both public and home schooled, who will shoulder the future just fine.
I don’t understand those of you who have accepted as a fait accompli that the current occupant of the Oval Office will be re-elected. True, those who benefit from the corruption are deeply entrenched, but it’s easy to knock a parasite mistletoe off an oak tree; it has no strength of its own.
The harder we have to work, the stronger we will be.
But then I don’t know why Jerusalem is a divided city and Nicosia is not; or why the Kuril Islands or East Prussia are not similarly said to be “occupied”; or why the fence in Israel is worse than the fence in Saudi Arabia.
Or why the fence along the US southern border is so offenCive to Mexico while its own fence, the one Mexico is erecting along its own southern border, is just good policy implementation to keep out illegal immigration coming up through central America.
About which Mexico is adamant.
The only answer to the contradictions you mention, throughout the world, is situational politics, where “policy” has little to do with logic and is merely a function of each country’s perceived interests or agenda at any given moment on any given topic.
From free trade to gun control to oil to practically anything you can name, Barack Obama (and offshoots thereof, like his department of (in)justice) is the poster child for situational politics and situational ethics.
Bravo Professor Hansen, you have hit the target again. The former United States has turned into a Stalinist dictatorship run by pasty faced liberal dregs who have not had an original thought since Journalism 101 when they were indoctrinated. It is 1984 and as one like you who has spent my life in the grooves of academia I have seen first hand the destruction of the Americanized educational system. The new teachers who came into the schools were very poorly educated and only interested in being like the kids; the adminstrators were lying evil bastards, and the Americanized children were and are toxic creatures. I too avoid contact with the media world and its effluvia of human offal; I agree with some posters that it is time to hunder down and buy ammo; also growing your own food and raising chickens or goats is on the horizon. We are in for a long evil struggle and I almost pity those who live in the Americanized big cities. O tempora! O mores!
…but a nut burning a Koran evokes decapitations and murder and does so quite understandably — although I am never told quite why.
What hasn’t been picked up by our brain dead “gnus” reporters is the parallel between the cartoon riots and last week’s putative Koran burning riots (the wacko preacher didn’t really do it, right ?)
In both instances, the rioting/destruction/carnage happened well after the fact, the cartoon riots months after they had been published, the book burning riots months after the Koran wasn’t burned. Last Friday, those people in Afghanistan poured into the streets and the carnage began after Friday prayers. The cartoon riots happened after a radical Danish imam carried those cartoons around the middle and far east, months after they’d appeard in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten.
Point being that the rioting, in both instances, was intentionally fomented.
The brain dead west keeps falling into the Islamists’ trap.
Allahu Akbar !
Herman Cain for President,John Bolton for VP=hope and change we can believe in.
Another poignant treatise, Dr. Hanson. A fine collection of non sequiturs. Thank you.
I’m a firm believer that sarcasm keeps the mind sharp. It’s mental multi-tasking.
Perhaps you could publish a dissertation on this subject.
It is overwhelmingly depressing, that our society has devolved to such a degree, and continues it’s septicemia.
I maintain that the Make Believe Media has been so despicable for such a long time that you are actually better off to believe the opposite of what they claim. And it’s not even close.
I also don’t believe they are any longer even capable of discerning fact from fiction. They have stewed in the juices of relativism so long; they have lived in close proximity with their fellow travelers so long; they have convinced themselves so overwhelmingly that they are smarter fairer more moral more righteous more objective…they are actually incapable of being objective about ANYTHING. It’s to the point that the sportscasters can’t view sports through anything but their marxist lens. They see puppies as evidence of socialisms might. It’s so ingrained that they don’t even know they are doing it. It’s like breathing.
My favorite part of “1984″ has always been the scene where Winston Smith creates the fictitious “Comrade Ogilvy” in order to insert his exploits into the approved historical narrative. I always have thought that the most chilling thing about this was Winston’s knowledge that a number of other ministry personnel were competing with him on the same problem and that the “best lie” would become part of the historical record.
That seems to be what is going on now. The best lie is the one that most benefits the ongoing historical narrative conceived by our elites. Much of that narrative concerns the “greatness” of Barack Obama. Every passing fact and event must be dragooned in to the service of this fable. Trillions in debt, undeclared war in Libya, the continued operation of Gitmo, states teetering on bankruptcy, racial polarization and “cold civil war” (Mark Steyn’s term) at home – All of these mean nothing since they don’t serve the narrative. Naturally, as a result, we are awash in lies.
As already noted McCarthy had nothing to do with communists in Hollywood.
Moreover, those of us who have studied his life after familiarizing ourselves with classic alcoholic behavior have a different take on Joe.
No one can explain the following incident without understanding typical alcoholic behavior: At the height of his vicious attacks on Dean Acheson, Truman’s Secretary of State, claiming in essence that Acheson was either a pro-communist stooge or a conscious traitor, Acheson happened to enter an elevator in the Capitol one of whose passengers was Joe McCarthy. What did Joe do? He greeted this “pro-communist” with a big smile saying “Hi, Dean!”.
Joe didn’t give a rat’s rear end about communism. He was on an alcoholic power trip.
BTW those of us who lived through those years remember that near the end of his career he was accusing Eisenhower (yes!) of pro-communist tendencies.
He died in the drunk tank at Bethesda.
It is sad but we’ve allowed it to go on for all of our long lives. Dr Hanson doesn’t quite get to the solution does he?
As Ayn Rand stated, the left is ultimately in rebellion against the Reality and that’s the reason it will fail over and over again. They can’t actually win, the only thing they can do is destroy -when they realize they can’t win, they go for destroying the rest of us.
So if the US finally is detroyed, like the Roman Empire was, there will be a Venice-like resurgence, somewhere, somehow (Texas as the new Venice?) but Evil can’t win in the long term.
Ayn Rand the crackpot: someone who didn’t understand much about logic, consistency in argumentation, atheism and free will, theism, or disciplined social science (economics, sociology, political science etc.) A tragic free wheeling spirit, who can best be characterized as an intellectual butterfly and darling of the undisciplined libertarians.
Make your good points, but no need to cite Ayn Rand; it takes away from their credibility.
We have a rendezvous with gravity.
After half of my living in totalitarian state I have uhderstood well that freedom is the only eternal value of the humanity.Deweloped by Judeo-Christianity and cleared of the extremism(not freedom by itself) freedom is the main enemy of Islam and Communism.This movements transformed from delusion to lies becoming the mainstream(as the right conservatism in the past).
Hey author, I’m by no means illiterate, but I hate to start reading an article where it seems the writer’s first intent is to try & impress his readers with his use of words that cause many of us to keep a dictionary url open. You get the point, no need to elaborate, otherwise your thought process is on the right track, just please stop trying to dazzle us with your brilliance.
Thanks
…. please stop trying to dazzle us with your brilliance ….
Dear “scott chester”
Although it obviously seems so in the narcissistic mists of your homr Valley of the Below-Average Intelligent, Doctor Hanson isn’t even aware of your being, let alone that his actual brilliance is blinding you to enlightenment.
…. please stop trying to dazzle us with your brilliance ….
Dear “scott chester”
Although it obviously seems so in the narcissistic mists of your homr Valley of the Below-Average Intelligent, Doctor Hanson isn’t even aware of your being, let alone that his actual brilliance is blinding you to enlightenment.
Dear Anonymous Brian Richard Allen,
All of us, readers of this thread, wish to thank you very much for your enlightened sarcasm, a grade above the lowest form of wit. Poor Scott was making a point, in pure sarcasm (that being the absolute lowest form of wit)to an article by Mr. Doctor Professor Hanson, riddle with high level sarcasm (two grades above the lowest level of wit).
Sarcasm, like in good ol’ Soviet Union times, is again catching up. Our Liar-In-Chief is actually the one to thank. Please, pass our deep appreciation on to him.
Sincerely,
Eponymous
Dr. Hanson uses his blog not only to inform, persuade, and vent, but also to teach. Regular readers expect historical references and polysyllabic words and, when interested or intrigued, can use online dictionaries to look up definitions and internet search engines to look up references. If you want pure spoonfeeding, then this isn’t the site to read.
…. Doctor Hanson uses his blog not only to inform, persuade, and vent, but also to teach ….
Thank God and Doctor Hanson!
B A – L A – CA — and The Very Far Away!
Brilliantly put, professor!
The essence of the American, and “modern world”, problem is personal—politics is ALWAYS personal!
Each of us, in our own karmic fashion, just plays out our unique form of Narcissus.
So, what is the demographically obvious truth?
America is AGING, so more and more citizens, especially voters, quicker and quicker lose their youthful élan vital, and too soon PAIN arrives.
To boot, with global fattening, far too many people are old before their time, as excess weight makes them grossly sorrowful, and indeed ugly to look at, even.
It’s a risk-reward world, as well. Thus, as pain, physical, emotional, mental and psychic, comes to dominate one’s awake time, and pleasure is more and more fleeting, escape is the overwhelming desire.
Witness all the drug company ads on TV, etc!
Therefore, most Americans are ALREADY taking life PERSONALLY, and taking it out on the voting system—that is, doing whatever helps ME feel less pain.
And—-SLEEP!
Yes, 24/7 the permeating theme of Americans, at least the majority, is to either sleep or dull the self-generated pain a Narcissistic life has karmically brought.
Altogether, then, America is having a PAINFUL and SLEEPING hissy fit.
Agreed—there still exists a pocket of miraculous, vital Americans, who are raging against this storm, so the Tea Party reactionaries are putting up a fight against the dominant strain in our evolving American “DNA”.
America needs a cosmic political enema.
Washington D.C, epitomized by the fat headed Charles Schumer, say, is so full of excrement that there might not exist an enema bag large enough to purge it!
We’ll—soon enough see: ‘er, SMELL how it all “comes out”.
yeah, watching the ‘free press’ reminds me of my high school’s cheerleading squad during football season. we had maybe 3 seniors one year, couldn’t hardly get a first down, much less win a game; but, you wouldn’t know it to hear our cheering squad. loud and frisky right to that last buzzer.
obamanites are like that. they are steadily loosing ground, got a lame QB with no birth certificate, no running game, couldn’t catch a pass on a bet, and no defense to mention. they got to the game using false credentials, just now coming to light. when that last buzzer sounds the msm will be congratulating the losers on one hellava fight. been there.
real Americans need to ‘buck up’. it ain’t over, just beginning. we trounced them last time. quit listening to their cheerleaders. they got nothing. our forefathers had it much worse. you could have gotten long odds against George’s boys at Valley Forge, and dozens of other places in American History. We still have a looong way to go until November 2012.
here is an idea, instead of all this gloom and doom, let’s make a game plan. let’s make a list of ways to keep hitting them. they have weaknesses galore, from the false top on down the ladder; and, we need to keep cleaning our own house. too many wishy-washy repub’s that cave too easily. we also need more honest everyday Americans in political offices. too many lawyers in the mix. a room full of lawyers never made much of anything. just spend everybody else’s money.
Here’s a different version: Before the election, the MSM cheerleaders were in the foreground rooting for team Obama while slimy Democrat pols pulled a Tonya Harding and hired thugs to maim key players on the opposing team. The MSM cheerleaders yelled that the opponents deserved such treatment because they were evil.
The MSM cheerleaders went into a frenzy of Obama rooting after his team won the championship, though he spurned them and gave the fewest press conferences of any president in the past fifty years. They cheered about transparency and ethics while Obama established the least transparent, least accountable, and most unethical White House team since FDR. They cheered about honesty and integrity while Obama told lie after lie and broke promise after promise. They cheered about how much the people loved Obama and Team Obama’s playing when polls showed approval levels below 40%.
The mainstream media act like the stereotypical pretty but not beautiful cheerleader who will say anything and do anything, without shame, to get the quarterback to take her to the prom. And, even if he dumps her the next day, she still praises him above all others. The MSM is quite pathetic.
This defines some turning point in the American political cycle. The new concept is not the error in your opponent’s argument; it is his lies, his purposeful deception, forked tongue, no plain truth. It predates, by two generation, Bill Clinton’s infamous “It all depends on what you mean by the word is” but that too was a turning point, when fathers accepted, deep down, that they were hearing lies from their President. Soldiers were sent to die in “Nam, because of generals’ lies. The reason that the American people will not sacrifice to prevent climate change is that most people hold, without academic proof, that scientists are lying through their teeth. This is new, in America.
Both left and right have become bitter cynics, which means they/we will be impossible to be led, in the future, by anyone. Today, those who voted for hope and change, are not considered wrong; they are now considered the enemy. This is new,in America.
The vague judgment that you can not get ahead, give your children something better than you had, by your industry and struggle, because of unknown regulators is pandemic. This too, is new,in America.
We are in trouble.
@Selwyn – i feel your pain even tho we were blessed with a truly conservative beautiful young man who even today didn’t go thru the ‘no brain at 20′ thing. he even survived college, calling me frequently to document what his idiot perfessers were trying to feed him re social justice. the only thing you can do is educate, and educate again. it doesn’t mean making her read VDH (that comes later), but giving her real world examples of how socialism will ruin her young life by ruining yours first. Best of luck – remember, they only get older just like we did…
The difference between us and the Soviet state is that they used occasional force, while we use endless manipulation. Polls are portrayed as reflecting public opinion, while they actually CREATE public opinion are are used by those in power to set the agenda. Watch what the Democrats do in response to the new budget. The media will use multiple, carefully-crafted polls to set an anti-Relpublican agenda. We are now getting a barrage of phony employment stastics when it is never noted that Obama has dropped 3.2 million workers, who are no longer looking for work,from the stastics. This is never even mentioned by the media when it is the most basis this — if you refuce the size of the labor force, unemployment will appear to go down even when no one else is employed. Has our education system so failed that this elementary fact is overlooked? Another lie. Sadly, establishment Republicans do not even bring this up. Today’s Republicans exist largely to provide the APPEARANCE of an opposition to the Democrats without ever seriously challending them. They are just Democrats-lite, the Red Team as opposed to the Democrats’ Blue Team. Too cynical? Look at what has happened to the revolutionary Tea Party element of the Republcan House. We have had a constant stream by Republican leadership criticizing the Tea Party and its Representatives. Now, we learn that the Republicans are about to agree with the Democrate on $30 billion in budget cuts on the Continuing Resolution — including $10 billion included in PREVIOUS Continuing Resolutions. So the Republican elephant labored and brought forth a mouse, $20 billion, in a multi-trillion dollar budget, NOT EVEN ONE PERCENT. The is clearly being done ONLY for appearances, the Democrats throwing the Republicans a bone, and the Republicans gratefully accepting the meaningless gesture. I voted for Ronald Reagan, my first Republican, in 1976 in the North Carolina primary. I am through. The Republicans are the modern-day Whigs and will disappear in 10 years. What if this split delivers victory to the Democrats? What difference does it make when the Republicans have no intention of changing things?
The astounding thing is that the pretenders to intellectual elitism don’t even recognize their own hypocrisy. Perhaps it’s too nuanced for them.
Come next election cycle, we’ll see just what percentage of the population is stupid enough to vote for The One a second time.
“[W]e’ll see just what percentage of the population is stupid enough to vote for The One a second time.”
Unfortunately, I predict ~55%. Team Obama, with the full support of the MSM, continually will recite: “Bush’s lies got us into wars, and Bush’s policies wrecked the economy. It will take more than four years to fix things. Reelect Obama.”
Team Republicans will spend six months arguing about who should be National Chairman, will field weak candidates who either pander to lefties or to the religious right, will nominate someone worse than McCain, and will be unprepared for the predictable MSM assaults on their nominee in October 2012. Team Obama wins.
In 2013 an “independent” group launches a campaign to repeal Amendment 22 while Team Obama studies how other elected leaders became Supreme Leaders for Life (just in case).
“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?… Has it ever occurred to your, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?… The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact, there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking-not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”
- George Orwell, 1984, Book 1, Chapter 5
The West Bank is “occupied” because its Palestinian inhabitants have no representation in the government administering much of their territory. Nice to know that you’re not simply playing dumb, Dr. Victor Davis Agamemnon Hanson.
And when it comes to doublespeak, your suggestion that Augusto Pinochet (a dictator) somehow delivered Chileans from dictatorship out of sheer paternal benevolence is a fine example of the genre. Or was the distinguished professor unaware that Chile had enjoyed a democracy for many decades before National Review’s favorite general?
@ HD
“The West Bank is “occupied” because its Palestinian inhabitants have no representation in the government administering much of their territory.”
You have NO, repeat ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA what you’re blathering on about. Last I saw Mahmoud Abbas was representing the WB, Fahad Salaam was collecting taxes, the Palestinian police were taking bribes from intemperate motorists, and the Fatah bureaucracy were charging exhorbitantly for the work they are paid BY THE PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY, to do!
Also, while your reading skills may be up to 9thgrade level, your understanding of what you read is kindergarten. VDH was suggesting that Hollywood and Liberals generally find Pinchet BAD and Castro GOOD when in fact both are equally guilty of oppressing their people; the only difference was one of DEGREE; but that subtlety must have escaped you as it has most of the mentally-deficient artistes from Calipornia whose excrement you pay 10bucks a pop to swallow!
Much as you dislike it, it is not about personalities, it’s about people, of nations. Not Castro or Pinochet, but Cuba vs. Chile, in other words people, not the charismatic socialist messiah’s, like Allende, and Castro, who shut down every press organization in the country, and appropriate every mansion and the property of value in the country to the most ruthless in the party who’ve killed their way up the darwinian power ladder.
So no, it’s not about weepy stories of storied socialist heroes, but about unnamed people in their multitudes at the mercy of greedy, power mad, avaricious narcissists. Like 0bama and his administrations Potemkin, Valerie Jarrett- he doesn’t make a move without her say so.
HD, why don’t you try commenting on what Dr. Hanson actually wrote, rather than on what you would like people to believe he thinks?
Dear Mr. Hanson:
I’ve read you commentaries regularly, but, recently, you seem to be desperate and freaked. May I respectfully request that you take some time off, cool down, and return to your excellent punditry at a later date?
All my best wishes,
Jeff Bleil
Desperate and freaked is the new normal.
Dr VDH, you quietly slipped away the overlay garment of treachery, inch by inch. Well done. Who would have thought that 50+ years after McCarthy we would be in the same fight again… but this time worried that the Commies were in the White House, not just merely on the back lots of Hollywood.
Some suggested that Dr VDH provide leadership. I discovered last year how I can lead: Donate more money to conservative or Conservative causes than I can afford. It’s so simple, easy, relevant… “just do it,” LOL… but it worked, it really worked. This year I’m donating more money & going to stuff envelops too!
Whatever.
It’s one thing to point out the various excesses and hypocrisies that take place in our aptly named “Kingdom of Lies”, but it’s quite another to find the courage to repudiate (in the main) the egalitarian project that’s been driving our society since the post-war era.
To wit, is VDH willing to say that the South African system of apartheid should have stayed in place? Or that America would be better served by an immigration policy that sought to preserve its historic ethnic makeup? Is California still California when it becomes (as it now inevitably will) 80% Hispanic? Are nations founded on little more than a set of shared propositions (as so many believe today) or are they composed of flesh and blood human beings that share a common history and destiny? These are the real hot potatoes that VDH has yet to touch.
VDH’s last paragraph reminded me of this quote from Alexander Solzhenitsyn:
“At birth, violence behaves openly and even proudly. But as soon as it becomes stronger and firmly established, it senses the thinning of the air around it and cannot go on without befogging itself in lies, coating itself with lying’s sugary oratory. It does not always or necessarily go straight for the gullet; usually it demands of its victims only allegiance to the lie, only complicity in the lie.
The simple act of an ordinary courageous man is not to take part, not to support lies! Let that come into the world and even reign over it, but not through me… One word of truth outweighs the world.”
I told a friend at work I invested in a coal mining company. Another coworker jumped in about co2 this and co2 that. The lies of the left are not a problem its the paralysis that comes with the lies is the problem.
While there are far more of us than them, they made the effort to undertake “a long march through the institutions.” Now these egomaniacal loons obssessed with creating their idea of utopia control the leverage points of society. They control the schools, the legal system, and the media. Until we break these strongholds, they will continue to wear us down while indoctrinating our children, lining their pockets at our expense, and destroying America’s ability to defend herself.
Look, to win the Presidency, you need a reasonable message, not an angry message. You need someone to calmly and reasonably explain about us going broke, the budget deficit, public service wages and pensions hurting us, and China. McCarthy was an angry, erratic guy, which negated his “truth.” Think Reagan, think GWB, one smooth and genial, the other a “compassionate conservative; that it what it took to WIN.
Many of you guys are so angry and bitter that you contain the seeds of your own defeat. You don’t have to say that Obama is terrible, just that your guy can do better. Obama has been a disappointment, but our society will circle the wagons to protect him if he is attacked viciously. Hey I know you can’t help yourselves, but it is NOT a winning hand, if played that way.
And I don’t go to the movies a lot. but there are good ones out there, True Grit, The Town, The Fighter, The King’s Speech all were so different from what VDH claims is all you can find in Hollywood. Does VDH have anyone to watch them with? That makes a big difference.
Seven ideas you can never discuss on TV:
http://takimag.com/article/seven_ideas_you_can_never_discuss_on_television1
VDH: I don’t know why … why the Kuril Islands or East Prussia are not similarly said to be “occupied” …
I do. It’s easy.
The Kuril Islands and East Prussia were formally annexed to the USSR and Poland.
Israel has military control of the West Bank, but has not annexed it.
VDH: I don’t know why … why the Kuril Islands or East Prussia are not similarly said to be “occupied” …
I do. It’s easy.
The Kuril Islands and East Prussia were formally annexed to the USSR and Poland.
Israel has military control of the West Bank, but has not annexed it.
From Poe: Oh what a tangled web we weave……
and from Leonard Read: Lighting a candle in a dark room.
Thanks,
Corry
I read a comment above which says, “…[Leftist policies] have to BITE the american people [in order for them to wake up and strike back] …” The thing is that the monumental (and chronic) stupidity of the GOP is that they are fighting to stop/eliminate the Leftist POLICIES rather than the Leftists themselves. If they had even a little bit of sense they would AID the Left in implementing every possible Leftist insanity. THAT would bite. Right now, they are busy alleviating the pain of the bite so the bee will appear less of a villain, and even claim credit for the former’s efforts. But everything said and done, the bottom-line remains—you can not fight Leftist artilleries of lies and shredding of the Constitution by waving the Constitution in their faces. The Republic is going to be lost because of such childishness of the Right. The only way to fight this enemy is to eliminate all his forces—once and for all. And if you look at even past TWO years, you can see that it can not be done by ANY procedural, electoral, OR judicial means. The only way is for the people to organize enmasse and go to DC, and not leave until the enemy leaves the town. And mind you, LEADERS are many, but the people are lax and most are not even AWARE of the danger they are in, the bites they have suffered, and the future bites to come.
It is ironic and tragic that while we were courageously facing down and ultimately defeating the Soviet Empire during the Cold War, we were fatally infected by their poison and are on the verge of succumbing to it. While our soldiers manned the frontiers of freedom, keeping the forces of darkness at bay, many of our own citizens back home were burrowing in to our infrastructure, most notably the education and mass information/media systems. After 40 plus years of brainwashing they have succeeded in bringing us to the brink of communism – and most of us don’t even know it – as we sleepwalk into it’s arms through the siren calls of ‘Hope and Change’. Never once thinking to ask ourselves just what the definition of ‘Change’ is or what it is we are ‘Hoping’ for.
Standard military planning always addresses short term and long term objectives. The Soviets understood this and employed their planning masterfully, first infecting our media in quest of short term, near immediate influence while meeting the long term goal by infecting our education system and dumbing down our population so that their ever increasing influence would not be questioned – as long as their agents were clever enough to not call themselves communists. And this they have done. Just look at the derision for anyone that even dares to whisper the word socialist when it comes to Obama. Heaven help you if you call him a communist.
I know I sound pessimistic (although I prefer the term realistic – and who knows, perhaps I’m just rationalizing to make the distinction) but I think the cause is lost. No Republic like ours can survive when the the media, the apparatus that gives it’s citizens the information they need to make informed, intelligent decisions, is so hopelessly one sided in its bias. None of our troubles would even exist had we a balanced media. The inate common sense of people would prevail were they given reporting of all the facts, not just those that fit the leftist agenda. Until that changes we are fighting the ‘long defeat’. And I’m afraid that it will not change, barring some cataclysmic upheaval that shakes us back to our senses.
I wish I were confident that a great many young people had some familiarity with most of the historical incidents mentioned in this piece.
Re: “You might just have nailed it. Perhaps there is not a single cajones possessing man still alive who is willing to take it to ‘em. Unless it’s Donald Trump.”
Trump’s intestinal fortitude and guts have been inspiring, but he is far-from-the-only one with “brass” in the right place. Ever heard of LTC Allen West? How about Herman Cain? West once said of his soldiers, “I’d walk through hell with a gasoline can for my men,” and he’d do the same for America. Cain is a successful businessman, a patriot, and a man of decency and common sense.
Thanks for this one Victor. It is probably the best one you’ve written!
Another lie that’s on display is the European Union’s anti-nationalistic preening during the Bush years. Turns out, France’s Sorbonne-educated governing elite only despises national borders when America is asserting hers. But, faced with Tunisian, Egyptian and Libyan immigrants flooding her border with Italy, France has suddenly rediscovered the necessity of her administrable, national borders!
The EU’s holism is a gawdy front for an anti-American propaganda spree. Individual nation-states like Germany, France, Britain and Denmark are loath to really relinquish their national borders. And the influx of the Levant’s refugees is showing just how retrograde these nations’ governments really are.
I hope Obama’s retinue of academicians is paying attention. As France refuses travel rights to Italy’s new immigrants, so too might America refuse Mexicans’ “right of migration” into Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and California. And, so too should America be awarded the same pass that France seems to get in the global elites’ media outlets.
That is, unless the media outlets continue to lie to their paying consumers. Sadly, as your excellent essay attests, the media discovering honesty is an unlikely advent at this juncture.
VDH, some of us still have heroes, and you are one of them. Parts of my worldly opinions are gleaned from PJ, where actual journalism can still be found. The detractors are insufficiently prepared to debate, and for good reason. Their ideology is found to be false, their promises empty.
The solution is ultimately at the voting booths, and #80 is correct, the money we throw towards conservatives must accelerate. Activism is required at whatever level we can think of. Minds can be changed at work by presenting some of the many great political cartoons of conservative nature that are out there. Townhall.com has tons, just right-click, copy image, paste into a program like MSPublisher, 4 per page, print, cut, and staple. These stacks of toons have generated many a conversation at the shop where I work, giving ample opportunity to advance the cause.
One tends to lose the thread when it has not been updated for SIX days!!!
As I have stated, this is a organization tool. It’s not a miracle piece of equipment. It could without difficulty become yet another expense should you not put the commitment into finding out how to profit from it.
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