Their term of art was:”Active Measures”

The decline of the West was not sui generis, not at all.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gnpCqsXE8g

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Please, please stop imagining that the flow of social events in the West was self-directed, random motion or based upon some astrological events.

I’ll snap-shot Feminism, an exemplar of Central’s command of today’s PC narrative.

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The First Directorate prioritized Feminism as a cultural weapon against marriage and babies – and Western Culture, generally.

It was not an accident that this or that Feminist icon gained her prominence. The KGB, literally, ran around buying up her political tome, so much so that she rose high on the NY Times list of top selling books.

From such prominence, she was then able to command radio and PBS airtime to spew her lesbian philosophy of life.

[ For what is Feminism but lesbianism, the way of the lesbian to make her way in the world, a world filled with the hated enemy and rival: men. ]

So now we have cohorts of women who are living their priorities — as lesbian see them.

Not surprisingly, marriage, family and childbirth are not any kind of priority.

In a nutshell: Feminism is a war on husbands; bare toleration of men as draft-laborers.

Such perverted ‘norms’ now flood the cable channels and broadcasts.

Since Reagan, the European segment of the American polity has plunged from 90% down towards 65%. It’s headed much, much lower. This vast transformation is primarily due to unmarried European American women.

They’re either having bastards or marrying too late.

Hence, their total fertility ratio is way below replacement — while open borders has non-European American women flooding in — if only to have anchor babies.

Leakers, if you will.

BTW, the famous vaccines did NOT function as advertised. Namely, they didn’t stop you from getting the disease.

That’s why there were still some ‘leakers’ that suffered even a generation after Salk.

The way the vaccine really worked was kept a public secret by the medical profession: it stopped an infected person from re-transmitting the disease.

Hence, the government pressure to have everyone, especially the children, ‘immunized.’

In fact, it offers no immunity at all.

But, when all of society is vaccinated, the parasite/ virus can’t jump to a new host and the epidemic abruptly stops.

The very nature of the vaccine, and its downside, has many omitting it. The current scheme is to mass inoculate for polio only upon its recurrence.

The cure for polio is one of the few instances where the coercive power of big government actually paid dividends.

The downside is that our betters think that such results can be replicated across all government policies.

Such is not so.

Firstly, that this was something the adults took very seriously and second, the palpable sense of relief, that we now had the Salk vaccine, which prevented one from getting a dread disease.

I also remember a general attitude prevalent at that time, a false optimism that soon, medical science would solve all of man’s common ills.

I think its the aspect of prevention, that this was something that no longer needed to be feared and, that false optimism, that led to the “surprisingly small impact in the popular memory and in art and literature” you correctly note.

I suspect that the ‘wave toward socialism’ is a result of the rise of Nietzsche’s nihilism and the post-modernist movement. Both posit that there is no such thing as objective reality, only subjective opinion. That everything is relative and that there is no such thing as objective truth. (they avoid things like gravity, which is certainly an objective ‘truth’)

The left’s acceptance of post-modernism springs from a psychological condition known as ‘arrested development’ the left’s arguments spring from the infantile protest; “That’s not fair!” and the immature juvenile’s view that their opinion is as valid as any others.

Ironically, it was Europe’s prosperity that led to individuals like Marx looking at the disparity between the haves and have not’s and, failing to understand the natural mechanisms responsible for that phenomena and their absolute necessity, he condemned and rejected Capitalism, which of course is simply an economic system in harmony with natural economic laws. But Marx, a contemporary of Nietschke, also embraced nihilism and so rejected the very concept of ‘natural’ economic laws.

The result of Europe and later the American left embracing nihilism and post-modernism’s tenets is the concomitant rejection of a Supreme being. Which of course eliminates any reason to believe in an afterlife.

Which in turn leads the left to conclude that there is only the here and now, on this planet. Lacking belief in an afterlife and confronting life’s essential ‘unfairness’ presents the leftist with but two choices; depression and acceptance that ‘life sucks and then you die’ or a determination to do something about it, that people must be persuaded if possible but forced when necessary, to comply with the strictures they believe will make the world a better place.

Ironically, in liberals trying to essentially create a utopia, they are really trying to create a heaven on earth, which of course is the only condition in which ‘unfairness’ is absent.

Given the essential unfairness of life, it’s an impossible goal of course but that factual objection is rejected both because the ‘journey toward the paradise of a utopia’ gives their lives meaning and because for liberals, the alternative is to accept that “life sucks and then you die”.

The left is literally ‘at war’ with reality.

To compound the irony, liberals all and ideological leftists, fail to understand not only the necessity but the advantage of life’s essential unfairness.

Without life’s essential ‘unfairness’ there would be no individual mutation and biological evolution would be impossible. Intellectual, musical and other forms of ‘genius’ would be unknown. Without the ‘unfairness’ of personal wealth, the fulcrum upon which societal opportunity is leveraged would not exist, which is why economic systems that forbid private property fail.

No ‘legitimate separation’ between the Lisbon earthquake and the attack at Pearl Harbor? Really? We are simply and solely our physical bodies?

Prosperity naturally progresses to socialism?

Certainly humans are susceptible to acting as “herd creatures that engage in mindless stampedes”. Yet the evidence for individualism is at least as great.

Does it have to be one or the other?

We think as individuals, but the political tsunami of sorts that has swept through America the last 50 years was not the fault of any one person or even one group. One could possibly argue that it was the natural progression of prosperity’s effects on the psychology of human beings.

We don’t normally think of humans as herd creatures that engage in mindless stampedes. But the reality may be, that’s exactly what we are.