In his book The Snapping of the American Mind, David Kupelian asks the following painful question that millions of Americans like myself have pondered for years and will ponder for some time to come as America slowly rips itself apart. Kupelian writes, “How could it be that hundreds of thousands of Americans fought and bled and many died on foreign shores to contain an evil and metastasizing ideology variously called communism, Marxism, socialism, collectivism, or statism, and yet now, just a few years later, we would gaze up at the pinnacle of power in our own country and behold leaders in thrall to essentially the same core ideology we fought and died to protect strangers from?”
The answer to this is can be found within the culture itself and more specifically within America’s youth who have seemingly embraced the concept of socialism with little to no understanding of what socialism even is. Yet, like frogs slowly boiling to death in the cesspools that have become our college campuses, our nation’s youth collectively embrace the ideology that will destroy them while demanding that they be “protected” from opinions that run contrary to their beliefs.
I have this issue with one of my daughters. She’s very sweet and very hard working, but like everyone who has lived she has struggled at times and dealt with situations that seemed completely unfair. She wonders why Bernie’s ideas won’t work. Why shouldn’t lots more thing be free for everyone? Why can’t that work? She received little or no history education in school, and obviously no economics. Of course, there are reasons for that. And what history they do hear is more likely to be Howard Zinn than Steven Ambrose. Without understanding the history of these movements, you cannot understand where all this leads. And they don’t recognize the road on which they are treading.
This goes back, once again, to Richard Fernandez essay on Gramsci and the empty minds of the young.
“Alex, a 23-year-old Sunday school teacher and babysitter, was trembling with excitement the day she told her Twitter followers that she had converted to Islam.”
The only Muslims she knew were those she had met online, and he encouraged her to keep it that way, arguing that Muslims are persecuted in the United States. She could be labeled a terrorist, he warned, and for now it was best for her to keep her conversion secret, even from her family.
She was one of the mush heads that American education is producing. He related this to the theories of Gramsci, a Marxist.
They are the product of a multi-decade campaign to deliberately empty people of their culture; to actually make them ashamed of it. They were purposely drained of God, country, family like chickens so they could be stuffed with the latest narrative of the progressive meme machine. The Gramscian idea was to produce a blank slate upon which the Marxist narrative could be written.
The Islamists are gathering these sheep but, meanwhile, we are dealing with the the foolishness. Orwell saw it.
The typical Socialist is not, as tremulous old ladies imagine, a ferocious-looking working man with greasy overalls and a raucous voice. He is either a youthful snob-Bolshevik who in five years’ time will quite probably have made a wealthy marriage and been converted to Roman Catholicism; or, still more typically, a prim little man with a white-collar job, usually a secret teetotaller and often with vegetarian leanings, with a history of Nonconformity behind him, and, above all, with a social position which he has no intention of forfeiting.
These students are children of privilege, even those “of color” as they have been promoted well above their merits.
What is to be done? The first task is to start gathering a circle of friends who live within walking distance of your home. Four people — a handyman, a nurse or doctor, an ex-cop or soldier and a strongback for preference — will do. Your second task is to support the causes you care about. Volunteer at your church or club. If you have no club, start one. Donate to your favorite website. If you don’t have a favorite, find one or go online yourself. Buy the book of an author you admire. And switch off the damned telescreen.
And, of course, buy a gun or several. And ammunition.
We fought peoples who were committed to these ideals but ceded our culture to the same types of people because we held ourselves to higher ideals, from our Constitution.
We ceded entertainment, and thus culture, to the people who love socialism. We ceded education to them too. We didn’t fight and so, by default, we let them win. Leftists fight, they’re committed and they fight completely and quite often, dirtily.
If one group doesn’t fight for its beliefs and another group does, it should be no surprise as to which group will come out on top.
It’s often said that the Constitution was not designed to be a collective suicide pact, but the problem is that it can actually work in that way if danger is not recognized as danger.
Why are we giving jobs to leftist academics? Why are we permitting Hollywood to warp culture like it does? Because we hold ourselves to higher ideals with respect to freedom and liberty. OK, so here is the cost we must pay for holding to those high ideals – the destruction of the type of society we value.
This is like someone who values all form of life feeling it immoral to kill cancer cells within his own body. He is true to his principles until the cancer kills him. What exactly has he achieved by being true to his principles and was it worth it?
She wonders why Bernie’s ideas won’t work. Why shouldn’t lots more thing be free for everyone? Why can’t that work?
Two methods to drive home the point. The first works particularly well with women.
1.) Star Trek nerds never get any action from women. This is unfair. Everyone should have the right to be loved, to have sex, to have intimacy. The only way to make right this wrong is to force women to by the girlfriends of these Star Trek nerds.
2.) Inequality is bad. Some people are born to wealthier families or to smarter families and they use this advantage to perform better at school. Why should poor students be penalized for their life circumstances and why should good students benefit from what their parents gave to them. To insure equality we need to take letter grades away from A students and distribute them to C students. That’s fair, right?
Solving inequality usually means harming others in some way. People who want free stuff need to understand that this means that government is going to threaten violence against innocent people in order to take wealth away from them in order to redistribute that wealth to others. Women being forced to give sex to nerds is a direct violation of the women but so too is wealth being stolen from innocents.
Everybody wants to be a parasite. But an ecology cannot consist solely of parasites.
Education and access to information would be key. I found HUAC files online from the fifties, a couple of years ago. I went looking for clues as to why the old man was so taken with this ideology, and discovered that our area had extensive activity. Growing up, we really didn’t know much different. I’ve since heard Horowitz speak on video, and read some of his writing. It would seem there are quite a few of us out there. I’d like to hear more.
http://www.horowitzfreedomcenter.org/david_horowitz
To a certain extent this is just young people being young, inexperienced and naive. Who were young people voting for from 1964 to 1984? It wasn’t until they actually saw what the alternative could do that the scales started to drop from their eyes. (Also starting to get W-2’s and families made a big difference.) Now we’ve got a big chunk of young people again who are going to have to go through the same learning curve.
“Now we’ve got a big chunk of young people again who are going to have to go through the same learning curve.”
Many not so young but just as naive.
One of the many things I found as I monitored my children’s education, and occasionally supplemented it with discussion and selected readings, was that young people have a very unsophisticated view of life before the modern era.
Oh, they know intellectually, perhaps, that there were no TV or movies or computers, but they can’t see or feel the deeper areas in which there was absolutely nothing—no medical knowledge, no schools, no books, much less radio or other entertainment/educational resources, etc. etc.
There was a show about a family attempting to recreate living in the Iron Age a few years ago. It stopped production after a few episodes, if I remember correctly, because the younger members of the family just couldn’t take the endless deprivation of everything that made up their modern life. The parents were also concerned about medical issues, but I don’t remember what they were.
I made it a point at various times during their school years to talk to them about these things—how truly miraculous the development of our society has been compared to thousands of years of subsistence, ignorance, disease, and very little progress at all for the common people.
The dysfunctional mess we have allowed our educational system to devolve into is purely the result of political interference at every level. As in the rest of the progressive program, the step by step destruction was accomplished by citing a real or imagined problem, proposing a “sounds good” solution
that seemed reasonable, then milking that first agreement for every type of more radical subversion the various ideologues in the educational establishment could come up with.
Whenever this topic comes up, I am reminded of the description that Rand gives of the young student that ends up at Reardon Metals for some obscure, political reason. His mind was a vague, formless plasma, filled with bits and pieces of ideas, axioms, assumptions, assertions, and disconnected desires disguised as reasons for this or that belief.
This is the very essence of the kind of mind one sees today among the various progressive groups, whether on campus or in the world, whenever they are interviewed or questioned about their beliefs. Any challenge to the vague assumptions upon which they base their actions and beliefs is met with confusion, an endless meandering monologue about all sorts of stuff that somehow, to them, justifies whatever it is they want to do, and immediate, screaming hostility at the merest criticism, or even question, about what they have done or said.
The slow progressive march through the various institutions of our society has taken advantage of two very powerful tendencies in our society—
The first is that the average person doesn’t eat, sleep, and breathe politics from dawn to when they collapse into bed at the end of the day. They have been working, worrying about their family, their bills, their job, and a thousand different problems.
Most people are content to think that the people charged with doing things in our society, such as education, or the legal system, or whatever, are doing their best to do the job well and properly. It doesn’t occur to them that someone may go into a career with the ideological intention to turn it against the very society it was meant to serve.
But if you read the voluminous, and very bluntly stated, writings and proposals from the progressive camp going back into the 1800’s, they are very open and clear that their intention is to dismantle, destroy, and then reconstruct our society in line with their ideological imperatives.
They always claim, of course, the very best intentions, and insist that their ideology must take precedence over any other factor, such as experience, or previous failures.
As I have said many times in these discussions, the road back from the edge of the progressive abyss will be long and difficult, requiring the committed effort of people who reject the collectivist vision, and who value the rights of the individual as the paramount purpose of our political and social system, in order to carefully dismantle the monstrous administrative authoritarian structure that has overtaken the republic.
This will not happen in one election, or because of one person. Leadership will matter, of course, but each step in the recovery will be the result of one more school board meeting, one more city council hearing, one more state legislature seat won, one more judicial ruling that favors individual rights over the collective.
If we can begin well, perhaps our grandchildren will be able to breathe a bit easier as they enjoy the fresh breeze of free air again.
Or did you think that a rebirth of freedom was only needed in 1863?
“more likely Howard Zinn than Steven Ambrose”. True, and just as well. Better a communist than a war-glorifying plagiarist
They were purposely drained of God, country, family like chickens so they could be stuffed with the latest narrative of the progressive meme machine
Rather contemptuous view of people, eh? Convincingly refutes the idea an enlightened electorate is even possible. The “drained people” live in a (mostly) capitalist democracy, but the delusions stuffed in them have triumphed over reality.
No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed by some to dream. What you are witnessing is the destruction of an ideal of human nature, the end of the Enlightenment, and end of the idea that people are rational, observation beings.
El sueño de la razón produce monstruos.
>>more likely Howard Zinn than Steven Ambrose”. True, and just as well. Better a communist than a war-glorifying plagiarist
Better a communist than to fight for freedom? I suspect you don’t deserve the freedom you were given. Maybe you should move the Venezuela or Cuba to live out your dream. It’s a shame you were too late to visit the USSR for the Great Terror. I kinda like the idea of a moron like you starving in a frozen Siberian gulag.
Contrary to what fellow reader, Jim, says eco-systems really do function as a hierarchical system of parasites. There is an old saw that goes, “Every flea has lesser fleas on their backs which do bite them. And all these fleas have lesser fleas, ad infinitum.”
“Better a communist than a war-glorifying plagiarist”
No, the communists drain life just like parasites. War glorifying is relative. When you are facing a loss, you do what you have to do. I doubt you understand that.