Waking Up in a Different Country

I have featured several pieces by Daren Jonescu in the past. He is an excellent writer, and has a grasp of the Leftist mind that I can only think comes from living under Communist rule. I do not know that, but it has seemed to me that he writes with the authority one who has lived it. Such is today's piece entitled Time to Demythologize the Authoritarian Impulse published by the American Thinker. Go and read the whole article, then come back. I will have some comments.

We have been losing our liberties a small piece at a time for over a hundred years.  We have been losing our freedoms, and our abilities to determine our own lives and happiness.  We have also been enslaved.  Oh, not in the classical sense of a slave being owned by another, who can do with him what he wants, but in the strictest sense of being forced to work for an other's benefit.  Care to see just who it is you are being enslaved to? Or how about her. We may laugh at these people, but who is getting something for nothing here?

The excuses for taking away some piece of our liberty have been many and varied. Perhaps it was a crime spree, such as during Prohibition, where gangsters sought to feed the demand for liquor by selling illegal smuggled booze. To protect their illegal goods, however, they couldn't call upon the police, so they were forced to supply their own security.  They ended up killing innocents as well as other gangsters, not being particularly finicky about who got hurt. Perhaps it was a war, or a trumped up environmental hazard. Perhaps people have been stampeded into accepting security checkpoints at airports and along highways because of fear of terrorists. Why doesn't really matter. What matters is they have stampeded people into going along with it because they to be saved from whatever evil is being trumpeted, and they are willing to sacrifice some of their liberty for safety. Unfortunately, the promise of safety is never delivered, but people have lost their liberty none the less.  This is the true evil that is Progressivism.

In recent years, I have become ever more alarmed.  With the majority of my life in the rear view mirror, I can see how our freedoms have been taken from us, and I have tried sounding the alarm.  All too often, as Mrs. PolyKahr points out, I just come across as a crank.  When GM was in trouble, and about to go into bankruptcy, the Left set up a drum beat that bankruptcy would mean the end of GM. I pointed out that some unproductive parts of the company might close, and that a number of contracts would be renegotiated to save other parts, but that the company would emerge from bankruptcy stronger than it was.  Instead, our bankruptcy laws were tossed out, and the President substituted his own ad hoc rules.  In taking this action, the President destroyed the rule of law that has governed this nation since the ratification of the Constitution.  Now, every case potentially becomes a matter of who are the parties involved, who are the victims, how has the press treated the case,  If the victims are part of a protected minority, of course they will get sympathetic press.  On the other hand, of the victims are part of the designated oppressor class, the case will be ignored.

Despite claims to the contrary, ObamaCare really will take over 1/6th of the United States economy.  It really does take what were your, and your family's private decisions about your health care, and put these decisions into the hands of unelected bureaucrats in Washington.  As we have seen with Catholic charities, it destroys the protection of religions freedoms in the First Amendment, unless you are a Muslim.  But more than that, it is an intolerable act of tyranny.  The founding generation would be rolling over in their graves.

The Fast and Furious scandal shows the moral depravity to which tyrants will stoop, and how far they will go to cover it up.  The Leftist press has tried to use the Staling excuse "If Uncle Barry only knew!"  Personally, I believe BHO did know, and has the blood of hundreds of innocent Mexicans on his hands, as does Attorney General Holder, and those lower level persons named in the IG report.  I believe that because in a bureaucracy nobody is going to take on more risk that the potential rewards.  There was a huge risk that the Fast and Furious operation could get out of hand, but where were the rewards for lower level civil servants?

Tyrants are lurking everywhere.  Your homeowners association probably has at least one "grass nazi" who goes about measuring the lawns and playing "gotcha."  Or, perhaps it will have an architectural committee that wants all the houses to have the same color paint on the front doors, or the mailboxes.  You imagine that Hitler was seen in his own day as evil, but the fact is that he was a rock star to the German people.  Many felt that it had been Hitler's policies that had pulled them out of the depression that had impoverished them only a few years earlier, and they were grateful.  Similarly, when the Russian secret police came and took someone, the Russians generally thought they were doing it against Uncle Joe's orders. If only Stalin knew! Saddam Hussein ruled in Iraq despite the fact that Iraq was awash in fully automatic AK 47s.  Tyranny is never really like George Orwell's 1984.  Someone can be likable, and personally popular, and still be a tyrant.  With all that in mind, if you are one of those who keeps saying that it can't happen here, wake up, open your eyes, and look around.  You won't recognize your country anymore.