If you're like me, and you've been steeped in human rights for 35 years, you will read this handy meme poster from wh.gov and ask yourself "what's wrong with this picture".
If you're looking for the "guidestar" for the struggles for women's rights, the rights of blacks, and the rights of LGBT, and you were mining the preamble of the Constitution, wouldn't you pick "they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalieable rights"? Isn't the inherency of rights acknowledged in the Constitution -- regardless of whether you believe in God -- your lodestone? Sure, "all men are created equal" -- but given that the "men" who first wrote that line didn't include women, blacks, or gays, don't you think it's helpful to root your struggle in the second line, about "inalieable rights" -- the means by which "equality" actually got its meaning? And couldn't you put them BOTH, when it comes down to it? Why would you go out of your way to accentuate the first as "the most self evident" in this fashion? Why?
I hope you will be sincere and think about this and realize that the answer to this question comes in the socialism that informs Obama's persona, regardless of whether or not "he is a socialist" in some rigid definition.
Let's go through and find the socialist memes in Obama's Inauguration Speech, shall we?
Already, whitehouse.gov is busy making social-media-ready posterlets you can meme around -- like this one above -- and there is gushing on Facebook and Twitter everywhere in the land about all the moving things the president says.
Well, I didn't vote for him so I beg to differ. I'm glad he mentioned gay rights and climate change -- but of course, even there he is merely dog-whistling and meming to leftist constituencies and not really going to the mat for a federal law on gay marriage rights -- but as I'm finding, gays are apparently easily placated. The climate change stuff sticks out to somebody like Newt Ginrich, who derided the "goofy leftism" in the speech, but only by responding to that red meat, then he doesn't take any intellectual leadership on the real intellectual problems of socialistic thinking in the speech -- and maybe that's deliberate.
Climate change doesn't bother me as a topic: if somebody wants to stop pollution, improve recycling, use alternative energy, I don't see anything wrong with it -- I don't have a car and I live in a small apartment. The theology and righteousness around the climate change crowd is annoying, and unlike Naomi Wolf, I surely don't think we need to install communism to have it, but eventually, I'm confident reason will prevail and compromises will be found. To be sure, what Obama tries to pull off here -- as so many do -- is a confusion between consciousness of the facts of climate change that appear before us like floods with an imperative then to all think the same way about what should be done about these realities. The debate that is always about whether or not to believe the dogma on climate change should be transposed to a debate about what leftists then want to do about it, because then we can smoke out the ideological from the practical.
What worries me much, much more is the culture of socialism propagated in this speech.
I've noted it before in general about Obama's platform, and specifically in speeches like the Human Rights Day speech that torqued age-old memes in the socialist direction. The Inauguration Speech will likely get many more views than some of these other speeches and that's why it's more worrisome.
He begins by affirming faith in "the enduring strength of our Constitution" and "the promise of our democracy" so that you can't possibly suspect any socialism/communism here and if you do, why, you aren't as American as the president!
What makes us American -- and I agree -- is our allegiance "to an idea articulated in a declaration made more than two centuries ago," says Obama:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
No one has ever successfully used these words to try to back up their socialist platform, let along their communist platform because they speak about rights and liberty, two things that those systems, in the hands of authoritarians (let's not have that usual boring debate about Sweden) never have.
But Obama's speech writers cunningly succeed in twisting this.
Today we continue a never-ending journey to bridge the meaning of those words with the realities of our time.
Right. Translate that as: "let's adopt these very well-worn and familiar memes to our socialist agenda if we can".
For history tells us that while these truths may be self-evident, they’ve never been self-executing; that while freedom is a gift from God, it must be secured by His people here on Earth. (Applause.)
Well, they can't be self-executing, big guy, invoking God as you will. That's because freedom means that they don't self-execute. But when you talk about securing him by "His people here on earth," you must mean yourself, because what you lay out is a vision of state-supplied security.
The patriots of 1776 did not fight to replace the tyranny of a king with the privileges of a few or the rule of a mob. They gave to us a republic, a government of, and by, and for the people, entrusting each generation to keep safe our founding creed.
Oh, bollocks. "We are the 99%," eh? The US isn't a country with only "the privileges of a few," even though the New York Times breathlessly reports that distribution of wealth in Manhattan is "like Sierra Leone". Sigh. At least he is willing to concede that we shouldn't replace tyranny of a king with "rule of a mob," although that is exactly what we are getting with technocommunism on the Internet. See SOPA.
Now Obama warms to his topic. This republic was never very great because it was only "half-free" because it was "half-slave". Not everyone would see it that way. Increasingly, there is a school of thought that says the institutions created by these framers are tainted because they did not include women, minorities, and gays at the very beginning. That people used the second sentence in the preamble to get the first sentence for all seems to escape them..
Together, we discovered that a free market only thrives when there are rules to ensure competition and fair play.
Together, we resolved that a great nation must care for the vulnerable, and protect its people from life’s worst hazards and misfortune.
I'm actually in agreement with the idea that there have to be rules against monopolies and cronyism and fair play; I'm not a Randism, a Friedmanite, a market absolutist as some of the libertarians are that dislike Obama (or on the contrary, voted for him for other reasons). Social justice doesn't bother me. Laws against pollution or for clean air or alternative energy don't seem to me to threaten business, but require innovation for business because we can't endlessly use up resources. But I'm not sure that when Obama, the product of DSA, the Socialist Scholars' Conference and the community organizing movement talks about "rules" that he means the same thing as I would. I suspect not.
Here is where everything goes horribly, nightmarishly wrong in the speech, and I hope people are paying attention:
Through it all, we have never relinquished our skepticism of central authority, nor have we succumbed to the fiction that all society’s ills can be cured through government alone. Our celebration of initiative and enterprise, our insistence on hard work and personal responsibility, these are constants in our character.
But we have always understood that when times change, so must we; that fidelity to our founding principles requires new responses to new challenges; that preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action.
No. No. No.
First, despite the changes of times, er, we do retain our skepticism of central authority -- especially of Obama. Those constants in our character I think will bring us out of the Obama socialistic phase. We do not need "collective action" -- code word for collectivism. You preserve individual freedoms by exercising individual freedoms, not forming collectives and embracing collectivism. Don't confuse collaboration of free individuals with collectivism.
How dare Obama invoke the fight against facism or communism as something that people "couldn't do alone" in service to his collectivist ideology?! There's a difference between people forming associations, parties, movements, concerted factions in government and fighting these things through celebration of the rights of the individual, and what he's talking about, which is collectivism of the very sort that those ideologies fought. That's why this is so sneaky.
And here's where it gets preposterous, demagogic and dangerous:
No single person can train all the math and science teachers we’ll need to equip our children for the future, or build the roads and networks and research labs that will bring new jobs and businesses to our shores. Now, more than ever, we must do these things together, as one nation and one people. (Applause.)
Er, really, what the hell is that all about? We've never had a single person who did those things. It wasn't Ford or Rockefeller, if that's your point; it wasn't Robert Moses. Obama seems to be dog-whistling here to those who hate rich industrialists but it's an absurdity -- communities, religious organizations, unions, these have always been what built and trained and researched and did business, not big industrialists, who are only part of the economy. What is he going on about?
And more woo-woo about "endless capacity for risk and a gift for reinvention"; we are "made for this moment, and we will seizit it" -- but again, that collectivist call "so long as we seize it together"
No. We don't to collectivize even to have a spirit of bi-partisan cooperation -- which we don't really have and I'm really not certain that it's a bad thing. So often when we get the eye-rolls from Michelle Obama about Boehner or the ranting about how Congress is "blocking progress," we're getting a socialist steam-roll -- we're not allowed to have debate; we're not allowed to question where the hell we will get all the money to pay out all those social entitlements. Too often this debate is caricaturized on the left as a "call to abolish Social Security and Medicare" and blah blah, even if somebody just wants cuts. It's insane.
And here -- more 99% hogwash -- "For we, the people, understand that our country cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it.
If there is a shrinking few, the reasons are complex, and are not fixed by socialism. Does anybody ever ask whether the boom in credit cards in the 1970s that preceded the boom in mortgages in the 1990s might all be part of an excessive realization of the dream by living beyond your means, i.e. an end to that ethos of hard work and sacrifice the president wanted to invoke earlier? These "shrinking few" still pay the overwhelming percentage of the state budget with their taxes. Shouldn't somebody say thankyou?
The rhetoric about little girls born in poverty brought applause, but that little girl existed even before Obama, in a country that made it possible for Michelle Obama herself to come to power.
And now comes the Soviet speed-up, the Soviet Stakhanovite labour; the Soviet collective farm; the Soviet perestroika:
We understand that outworn programs are inadequate to the needs of our time. So we must harness new ideas and technology to remake our government, revamp our tax code, reform our schools, and empower our citizens with the skills they need to work harder, learn more, reach higher. But while the means will change, our purpose endures: a nation that rewards the effort and determination of every single American. That is what this moment requires. That is what will give real meaning to our creed.
Whenever someone tells you they need to empower you, head for the hills.
And now, the deft emotional manipulation to try to get the people who complain about too many entitlements to feel as if they are uncaring -- but with a heavy dollop again of collectivization:
We do not believe that in this country freedom is reserved for the lucky, or happiness for the few. We recognize that no matter how responsibly we live our lives, any one of us at any time may face a job loss, or a sudden illness, or a home swept away in a terrible storm. The commitments we make to each other through Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security, these things do not sap our initiative, they strengthen us. (Applause.) They do not make us a nation of takers; they free us to take the risks that make this country great. (Applause.)
It's fashionable for the New Realists to slam the neo-cons whom they think brought us war for democracy abroad to ensure our safety at home and failed at both. But they should realize their favourite president is far more an idealist than the neo-cons. For one, he thinks that the decade of war is "over" merely because he decided to withdraw troops from Afghanistan. It is far from the case. For two, he thinks "enduring security and lasting peace do not require perpetual war" as if automatically, all terrorists and hostile nations will stand down just because he thinks so. His policy of "engagement" which can "more durably lift suspicion and fear" and avoid war hasn't worked through his first term (see Iran; see Russia).
And look out here for what is to replace that "perpetual war" and what will animate that "engagement" -- no human rights:
And we must be a source of hope to the poor, the sick, the marginalized, the victims of prejudice –- not out of mere charity, but because peace in our time requires the constant advance of those principles that our common creed describes: tolerance and opportunity, human dignity and justice.
None of those four things mentioned are about human rights; they are about careful progression of the status quo, at best.
Now comes the money graph that no one will criticize because they find it the most stirring:
We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths –- that all of us are created equal –- is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall; just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great Mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone; to hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth. (Applause.)
I'm all for Seneca Falls (women's rights, and I bet not everybody got that reference), Selma (black rights) and Stonewall (gay rights). This is all indeed a stirring and alliterative section of the speech.
But no framer -- no interpreter -- nobody -- ever said that there are some truths that are more evident that others -- that "the most evident of truths" was that "all of us are created equal".
That's just not true. In fact -- while that is mentioned first in the preamble -- I wouldn't say that this is "the star that guides us" . The star that guided us through Seneca Falls, Selma, and Stonewall (I guess the speech-writers couldn't think up an S-word for disabled rights) is in fact the second sentence in the preamble: "that they are endowed by their Creator by certain inalieable rights".
It has always been the characterization of struggles in the US that they fight for MORE rights by invoking the inalieability -- and the inherency -- of rights and by invoking "equality before the law" (that's why I oppose fighting for gay rights by trying to take away the rights of businesses or people who don't agree by trying to silence and boycott them -- I think the fight through the legislature is more rewarding and doesn't undermine all human rights for all).
The guiding star is the inalieability, but then, this president is not a human rights president. He doesn't like the term. He doesn't like the talk. He doesn't like the walk. It's alien, as it is for all the DSA types -- it doesn't fit.
Our individual freedom, actually, isn't inextricably bound to every soul on Earth. This is important, because this is where liberals and even leftists can disagree. Some people think that if a country is not totally free, and only some are free in it (South Africa), why, then the country is not free. Unfortunately, that isn't the case; you can have some free people and some unfree people, and the state then is partly-free. That's why you would not get a lot of people to somehow concede that America wasn't free until it could free all slaves or that it isn't free today until every minority reaches if not prosperity, at least a decent standard of living. They will persist in seeing in pre-Civil War America some free, and not free, again, because of how they look at inherency; they won't even concede a country as "half-free" if a minority in it are not. This seems like an unimportant wrangle over semantics until you realize what is happening when you try to declare "unfreeness" -- you are undermining inherency. You are saying freedom or rights are *conditional on* some sort of state arrangement. But I would submit that the emancipation of the slaves came about not because of some collectivism but because of a widening application of equality, based on the inherency of rights.
I really don't think inherency of rights exists for Obama, in his ideological framework.
Oh, but here comes Mr. Magnanimous, Mr. Ideologically Open: "Progress does not compel us to settle centuries-long debates about the role of government for all time, but it does require us to act in our time."
Doesn't that sound like someone not conditioned to the socialist meme? Willing to concede there is a debate about collectivism?
Oh, no. Because like all socialists always do in every debate or controversy, at some point they claim, "let's stop all this talk now and get down to action" as a technique, as an instrument for getting their way.
"We cannot mistake absolutism for principle, or substitute spectacle for politics, or treat name-calling as reasoned debate," says our Community-Organizer-in-Chief; says our Net Nanny-in-Chief. Each one of these things is in the eye of the beholder, but Obama actualy thinks that if he can just demonize Republicans opposing his socialism, and make it seem as if they are a "spectacle" or merely engaged in "name-calling," he can prevail. Naturally his own fellow leftists do the same.
I'm not interested in making a "common effort" with this president because I really don't believe we have a "common purpose," no matter how stirring he makes his words. That's because I do not believe he has at the heart of his ideology a robust view of all human rights for all, but what he has done instead is replaced it with uravnilovka, equalization, collectivization and invoked the language of equality to cover his tracks.
Now, I'm well aware that challenging the socialism of Obama is the greatest taboo of our time. I first realized this when I went on Steve Gilmor's Gilmor Gang show back in 2008 and actually had my mike cut off when I tried to explain that Obama's infamous comment at the Silicon Valley dinner about "clinging to guns and religion" was straight out of the "opiate of the people" lexicon of Marx. (And now Clinton is recycling it.)
Unfortunately, the critique of Obama's socialism has almost exclusively been on the right; not enough effort has been made by true liberals to call out his utter absence of a human rights paradigm and absence of a forthright embrace of capitalism and free market economics. Worse, there's never any endorsement for free speech -- there is only calls for "dignity" or denunciation of other people with other views as "a spectacle" or guilty of "name-calling" -- as if that were against the law (it's not, see Times v. Sullivan -- from the very era of civil rights that Obama purports to draw inspiration from -- and about the right to call a racist names).
David Horowitz, a former student radical who became conservative when he saw all the ills produced by the illiberal extremists of the 1960s, calls out the new communism in a debunking of Oliver Stone's new agitprop film.
Stanley Kurz, who doesn't seem to be any kind of entrenched conservative but who is only recognized by conservatives, is the author of Radical in Chief about Obama's socialism. Here's an article of his that summarizes the background:
the people who trained Obama, who funded Obama and who sponsored Obama’s political career right through the Illinois State Senate to the U.S. Senate, and frankly they’re working with him today in ways I can talk about, if we have time, these people were all the Socialists–the stealth Socialist leaders of the Midwest Academy who very deliberately decided that you don’t talk about your Socialism out loud.
Independently of him -- and because I went to those same Socialist Scholars' conferences and all the sort of DSA activities in New York of that time -- I came to that same term, "stealth socialism" to describe that strategy of deliberately dividing up the hard-core socialist agenda into "single issues" and trying to form community fronts with unsuspecting liberals to push those single issues, and then slip in the rest of the socialist sectarianism.
The result of all those two decades of "stealth socialism" since the 1980s when the Socialist Scholars decided the strategy in the Reagan years was essentially to go underground was that the "s" word was scrubbed out of frank speach. No one could ever say the "s" word. Socialists got very, very good at this scrubbing -- so good that they got conservatives to be scared to use it as well, for fear of seeming too triumphalist and even McCarthyist.
Nonsense. In Europe, people call themselves socialists without hesitation; even in Canada. Get over yourselves and start being honest.
I'm also well aware that there is an effort to deflect criticism of socialism in culture by having demonized something called "cultural Marxism".
I must say I had never heard of this term and its associations until recently. I read Gramsci or Adorno long ago and didn't feel I was necessarily imbibing cultural Marxism, just reading socialist theories on civil society or whatever. But then, I studed at the University of Toronto, then went to a country of "really existing socialism," the Soviet Union, and studied at the University of Leningrad. So maybe I missed this.
Apparently there has sprung up a school of thought that argues against the "Frankfurt School" and sees them as "taking over everything". No theory of people "taking over everything" will ever be credible because there is always that human nature that surprises you. For example, I think we're all headed to damnation in a Wired State run by technocommunists that Obama is helping to usher in with stealth socialism. But I think it will be a fight and a struggle, the result will be something like that 1970s commercialism that remained after that 1960s idealism, with the beads and the bong pipes and the roach clips turned into recipe card folders in head shops. Oh, and I could be wrong!
Apparently this "cultural Marxist" set has become so rabid that the Southern Poverty Law Center has declared them a "hate group". I'm happy to take their word for it, but that doesn't mean we can't criticize Marxism, communism and stealth socialism -- if anything, it makes it important for liberals to draw the distinctions. I myself have had people grab me by the lapels at big conferences and tell me that Obama is a "homosexual Muslim sabboteur". Just because that's crazy doesn't mean that you can't call out the socialism he was busy nurturing and studying for years before he became an Illinois senator.
As always, what I fear more than Obama, are his passionate supporters, who come up with gems like this guy on Facebook:
Jose Rosa on Facebook
This speech was so beautiful, so inclusive, so far reaching, so grounded, so based in
history, so longing for the future, so patriotic, so realistic, so eloquent and made me
so proud.
If you know someone who can listen to these words and say they take issue with them, then you know who the struggle is against.
So vindictive; so nasty; so tear-jerking, and then so hateful. If somebody disagrees, let's get them. Let's make it personal; we know "who the struggle is against". So full of that viciousness of Latin American revolutionary movements -- echoing the Soviet Bolsheviks. Ugh.
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