Opening the Abscess

I’ve previously quoted a passage from the memoirs of General Edward Spears, who was Churchill’s emissary to France in 1940. There was a disturbing amount of defeatism, and in some cases actual sympathy with the Nazi enemy, among certain government officials and other French elites. Weygand’s friend Henri de Kerillis, a Deputy and newpaper editor, had been consistently pressing Prime Minister Daladier to investigate some sinister behavior by members of the extreme Right.

“Il faut de’brider l’abces,” he had said time and time again to the Premier. He had done so again lately and received this strange answer: I have done exactly what you urged, I have opened the abscess, but it was so deep the scalpal disappeared down it, and had I gone on, my arm would have followed.” This was really very frightening, and I said so. “You cannot be more frightened than I am,” said Kerillis.

I was reminded again of this passage by some links concerning the abuse of power by Obama’s IRS. See the below excerpts from a video interview with Cleta Mitchell, an attorney who represents several individuals victimized by IRS misconduct over the past four years:

Part I

Part II

Part III

As Don Sensing says, “The IRS has become an enforcement tool of political hegemony.”  I hope he is wrong when he continues:

And what is going to be done about it? Nothing. Obama has already said there is “not a smidgen of corruption” in the IRS, and as far as the news media Ministry of Truth is concerned, that’s the end of the story.It does not matter that this information is coming to light and being made public. From the president on down, the despotism will continue unabated — secretly if possible, in the open if necessary. There is no one in the country who has both the ability and the desire to stop it.The Democrats can stop it, but they are the perpetrators and even the ones who are not actively committing these crimes support them. They have the ability but certainly not the desire.

The Republicans (but by no means even half of them) have the desire but not the ability. They have abandoned the fight anyway.

The national media and the Democrat party are indistinguishable so there will be no protest raised by them.

All of these abuses will repeat in 2016 with the same effect as in 2012: opposition to the ruling party will be smothered and the election will be stolen. Again.

…but I am afraid he may be right.  Those Americans who place value on individual freedom and open government had better be very, very active and assertive over the next 3 years, or it is going to be too late, and things are going to be very dark for a long, long time.

The things that we know about paint a very sinister picture of the Obama administration’s operations and intentions…imagine what sorts of corrupt, anti-liberty, and quite likely outright illegal activities lurk among the things we do not know about.

In Another Era, She’d Be a Gigantic Star

At the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago they have a lot of great films. In addition to interesting and artistic films, I also enjoy the fact that they have very few previews and no commercials as well as the fact that you can buy a beer while you are watching a movie.

Bettie Page Reveals All is a documentary about the iconic fashion / fetish model Bettie Page. For me, the most interesting facet of the movie was not discussed at all; what would have happened had Bettie Page been a modern celebrity instead of one who retired from public life in the late 1950s.

When Bettie Page stopped doing photo shoots, she simply fell off the face of the earth. In those days it was easy to hide; records weren’t online, the web doesn’t provide a central place for people to (inadvertently) pool information, and it doesn’t take an instant to upload a stalker photo to twitter. She never provided any other photos after her shoots, so that’s how the world knows her today. As George said in Seinfeld, she “left on a high note”.

Bettie Page, however, had actual skills and intelligence. In the documentary they showed her high school transcript and she barely missed being the valedictorian of her high school class which would have given her a college scholarship. Unlike modern “celebrities” who became famous solely due to a “s*x tape”, Bettie Page designed and sewed many of her own costumes. She also had a lot of personality and took control of the photo shoots and could (sort of) act. Compared to 99% of the “celebrities” today, she had talent.

Alas, like many of the modern celebrities we wouldn’t name her because we don’t want the traffic, she was bi-polar and ended up spending several years in a mental institution after she stabbed her landlord in a psychotic episode. In the end her story had a semi-happy ending because Hugh Hefner found her a lawyer who got her royalties for all the various things being made with her iconic image on it so that she at least had some money in her retirement years.

Cross posted at LITGM

Gleichschaltung

Here’s a Democratic candidate for Congress who tweeted:

Fox News does nothing but tell lies and mistruths. They have unqualified political analysts. We need FCC to monitor and regulate them.

The vast majority of the traditional media, of course, fervently supports the Democrats. Evidently this candidate cannot stand the presence of any source of diverse reporting and opinion.

With this tweet, Mike Dickenson  declared war on American free speech.

Unfortunately, this kind of thinking is by no means rare among Democrats and “progressives.” For example, this story is about  threats of legal action and potential loss of license against a TV station that dared to broadcast ads critical of Democratic candidate Gary Peters. (The lawyers who sent the letter work for the law firm of Bob Bauer, who was general counsel of the Obama campaign.)

The hostility to free expression and discussion of ideas is especially strong in many universities. For example, here’s a Swarthmore student who was appalled that conservative Princeton professor Robert George was allowed to debate against leftist Princeton prof Cornell West:  ““What really bothered me is, the whole idea is that at a liberal arts college, we need to be hearing a diversity of opinion,” Ching told the Daily Gazette, the school’s newspaper. “I don’t think we should be tolerating [George’s] conservative views because that dominant culture embeds these deep inequalities in our society.” The same link mentions an article by a Harvard student, who calls for replacing academic freedom with something she calls “academic justice.”

Gleichschaltung is a German word which means “coordination,” “making the same,” “bringing into line.” It was a term much favored by the Nazis, who used it in the sense of “forcible coordination.” Under the Nazi regime, all aspects of society–all organizations ranging from major professional associations such as those representing the country’s legal profession, down to to folk-singing groups and small local hiking clubs–were subjected to Gleichschaltung. Not only was there to be no criticism of National Socialism in the explicitly political sphere, there was to be no truly non-political sphere at all. Everything had to be about the propagation and strengthening of the ideology of National Socialism.

The Democratic Party, the “progressive” Left, and the Obama administration are clearly attempting to establish more and more control over public discourse about political and social matters, and also about anything that could relate to these matters.

And what is “political correctness,” after all, other than a contemporary American form of Gleichschaltung?

 

Establishment Media

Yes, I know very well that that is; to be the in-house media functionary. Not quite the so-called ‘real’ news media, but to be an employee/technician/writer/personality for the in-house public affairs media of a large government element – the US Air Force. I wouldn’t be so bitchy as to call the various offices that I worked in – base Public Affairs, the stint with a couple of production detachments focusing on informational elements for various departments of government, and for the largest part of my service life as a low-level minion of the keeping-up-the-morale-of-our-overseas-stationed-troops effort – as an in-house claque … but yeah. I’m almost two decades retired from the game, so maybe I can. Yes, I – and all the other AFRTS, PA pukes and military videographers – we were hired, paid and maintained in order to further the public affair goals of the US military. No shame in admitting that. Good outfits in the main; paid only moderately well, and a smidgen of a retirement after all that – but good on the whole to work for, and any number of former military public affairs personnel have used the experience as a stepping-stone to careers in journalism, television, and politics, to name just a few fields.

The thing is – we all knew who we worked for; the military. And one of those lessons was that we should never reflect discredit on the military in our productions or in our actions in uniform. Fair go, being employees, we could not be seen to wash the institutional dirty laundry in public, and all. Public Affairs’ mission in the event of the dirty laundry coming out, was to spin so as to make it seem somewhat less dirty.

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As of this Weekend…

I am a business owner. My partner and founder of Watercress Press has always intended that I should take over the business eventually … and as of this weekend, the papers have been signed. Oh, there are a couple of more things to be sorted out, and essentially I have been the active partner for more than a year … but here I start on the next big part of my life, as a business owner and raving capitalist. Although I do promise not to starve and flog the employees while chuckling manically and swan-diving into my pool of gold coins.

Too much. The blood spatters get everywhere after a good flogging, and the stains never come out.

This is by way of apologizing for no History Friday post from me. There was just too much going on, I didn’t have the time to sit down and focus on the post I was thinking about – Billy the Kid, a definite contrast to the last Wild West frontier character that I posted about on History Friday. I did manage to finish a chapter in the next book, and start another adventure in my reworking of a certain popular Wild West character, so the week hasn’t all been given up to real life in this present world.