David Horowitz: what the newer left learned from the older left
David Horowitz was a leader of the American left during the tumultuous 60s and 70s. Raised by Communist parents, he was a devoted mover and shaker in the cause, and an early editor of Ramparts magazine.
But Horowitz has been on the right for quite some time now; he chronicled his change experience in his book Radical Son, which I wrote about here and here and is recommended reading.
Having looked at activist political life from both sides now for quite a while, Horowitz is uniquely positioned to comment on left and right, old and new. Here is a small portion of what he said in a searing address he recently gave to the Kohler conference of the Bradley Foundation:
There is a marked difference between the radicals of the Sixties and the radical movement Obama is part of. In the Sixties, as radicals we said what we thought and blurted out what we wanted. We wanted a revolution, and we wanted it now. It was actually very decent of us to warn others as to what we intended. But because we blurted out our goal, we didn’t get very far. Americans were onto us. Those who remained on the left when the Sixties were over, learned from their experience. They learned to lie. The strategy of the lie is progressives’ new gospel. It is what the progressive bible ”” Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals ”” is all about. Alinsky is the acknowledged political mentor to Obama and Hillary, to the service and teacher unions, and to the progressive rank and file. Alinsky understood the mistake Sixties’ radicals had made. His message to this generation is easily summed up: Don’t telegraph your goals; infiltrate their institutions and subvert them; moral principles are disposable fictions; the end justifies the means; and never forget that your political goal is always power.
An SDS radical wrote in the Sixties: “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.” The Alinsky version is this: The issue is never the issue; the issue is always power: How to wring power out of the democratic process, how turn the process into an instrument of progressive control. How to use it to fundamentally transform the United States of America ”” which is exactly what Barack Obama warned he would do on the eve of his election.
The chosen legislative instrument to begin this transformation was Obamacare. It was presented as an act of charity, a plan to cover the uninsured. That was the “issue” as they presented it. But the actual goal of Obamacare’s socialist sponsors was a “single payer system” ”“ government healthcare ”” which would put the state in control of the lives of every American, man, woman and child. That is the reason that none of the promises made about Obamacare was true, beginning with his campaign lie that Obamacare government health care was not a program he would support. Obamacare will not cover 30 million uninsured Americans, as Obama and the Democrats said it would; Obamacare will not lower costs, as they promised it would; Obamacare will deprive many Americans of their doctors and healthcare plans, as they assured everyone it would not; Obamacare is a new tax, as they swore it wouldn’t be. All these promises Obama and the Democrats made were false because they were only a camouflage for their real goal actual goal, which was universal control.
This false face of the left was not actually new. Horowitz says that in his parents’ generation, Communists were for the most part working underground and secretly, calling themselves “progressives” and “Jeffersonian democrats” instead of disclosing their true affiliation. But in the 60s, his generation of leftists came in from the cold of being undercover and declared themselves proudly for what they actually were, thinking the time was right for their brand of politics.
It wasn’t.
And it probably wasn’t in 2008, either, despite the fact that in the interim the educational system and the MSM had both come more and more under leftist control and had prepared the way, at least in part (and, by the way, many of those early 60s and 70s leftists have been instrumental in that endeavor). But if Obama had openly declared his leftism during the election of 2008 or even that of 2012 (when it could have been inferred even more easily than in 2008, although it could have and should have been figured out in both years), he most likely would have lost. The left still has to remain somewhat stealthy—although less stealthy than before—until it achieves its over-arching goal of indefinite one party rule.
[NOTE: If you followed the Ramparts link to its Wiki entry, you’d have seen see the following list of writers who contributed articles there: Robert Scheer, Murray Rothbard, Noam Chomsky, Cesar Chavez, Seymour Hersh, Tom Hayden, Angela Davis, Jonathan Kozol, Todd Gitlin, Sol Stern, Tariq Ali, Alexander Cockburn, Christopher Hitchens, Saul Landau, David Welsh, and John Beecher. A sort of who’s who of the radical left at the time. Besides Horowitz and Peter Collier, both editors of the magazine who underwent a left-to-right conversion, Christopher Hitchens had a sort of half-conversion that was equally dramatic. The Wiki entry also mentions that Brit Hume was the Washington correspondent for the magazine for a short time.
It ceased publication in 1975.]
[ADDENDUM: Commenter “kit” asks:
What is in it for them[?]
Why would they want to live in an oppressed nation. Is it because they think they will be the oppressors and they get sadistic joy from that? Do they think they will redistribute the wealth of a nation’s people and take it for themselves. Do they think they will all be the leaders living in luxury?
I dont understand. I see it happening but I cannot understand why any human born free would want to change a free land into something so abominable.
My answer:
Some are in it for the power.
Some really think that they are the ones who can figure out a way to bring justice, peace, and joy to man/womankind, and save the planet as well (see this book by Thomas Sowell). “We are the ones we have been waiting for.”
Tyranny rides in on the back of a union of the amoral/immoral power-hungry and the idealistic dreamers. The second are the tools of the first.
And what makes it easier to happen is when we get lazy and abdicate teaching our young people how to avoid it. Watch:
You know, listening to that again (and I’ve heard it several times in the last few years, and linked to it before) brings tears to my eyes. A brilliant, brilliant expression of a truth we’ve come to know very well in the years since he said it. Let’s hope we never ever have to tell our children what Reagan says at the end there.]
So the leftists are still dirty, lying commies who will cheerfully put their boot on your throat once they gain power? I’m shocked, shocked I tell ya!
As I was reading this Horowitz piece on Sunday I got an eerie sense of unreality/shock; almost deja-vu-like. A few years ago I had a similar emotional/cognitive experience when my wife and I saw a pedestrian hit by a MARTA bus one rainy night; I ran out to him to try to help. When I got there there was nothing to be done; he was obviously dying. And oddly enough that realization put ME into a kind of state of shock, like I was watching the scene from outside my own body.
When I ask myself why Horowitz gave me the heebie-jeebies, the only answer I can come up with is that although his observations are horrifying to read –“This could never happen in America!” – – they also have the unmistakable ring of Truth:
This has happened. It has been happening since before I was born. It continues to happen. And I don’t know that it can be stopped.
carl in atlanta:
Maybe we should call him “Horrorwitz” :=).
I realize there’s nothing funny about it, though. Horrorwitz is frightening precisely because of his knowledge of the left. Not only was he in the belly of the beast; he was the beast, as it were. That gives him extra force and awareness. And, like many who started out on the left (and in his case, as an activist) he doesn’t pull his punches.
I hope he’s wrong. But for many years now I’ve agreed with the sort of assessment he’s giving here.
“the actual goal of Obamacare’s socialist sponsors was a “single payer system” — government healthcare – which would put the state in control of the lives of every American, man, woman and child.” David Horowitz
“Socialized medicine is the keystone to the arch of the socialist state.” Vladimir Lenin
As the above quote and the following ones make clear, Alinsky learned from Lenin, arguably the foremost, pragmatic activist, communist intellectual of his time;
“Destroy the family, you destroy the country.”
“The way to crush the bourgeoisie (the middle class) is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.”
“The surest way to destroy a nation is to debauch its currency.” (qualitative easing)
“Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.”
“We can and must write in a language which sows among the masses hate, revulsion, and scorn toward those who disagree with us.” quotes by Lenin
As many realize, the left is attacking on multiple cultural fronts and is also attacking America’s societal infrastructure.
The inimitable Selwyn Duke asks, “Is Obama Creating a Martial-law-ready Military?”
My response to this is that a criminal strategy must have;
Motive, means and opportunity.
Obama has the motive and has declared it. To fundamentally transform America. He pretends its just about racial and class equality but the methods he is employing to achieve ‘equality’ are communistic. The ends justify the means.
Tell me, when sovereign bankruptcy occurs (a mathematical certainty) or a WMD attack (FBI: 100 Percent Chance of WMD Attack) will not the declaration of nationwide martial law also be a certainty? There is the ‘opportunity’.
Obama is ensuring that sovereign bankruptcy will occur (‘qualitative easing’ and out of control spending) and that Islamic jihadist terrorist groups will get their hands on nukes (what do we think that Iran, the foremost sponsor of terrorism in the world, will do with nukes?).
Under martial law, Obama can nullify key provisions of the constitution (there is precedent), such as 2nd amendment rights and Presidential term limits. Nationalization of the economy is certain, as are executive orders i.e. ‘sedition edicts’ that will make it a criminal offense to speak out against the martial law government’s actions.
A ‘friendly’ Congress would refuse to impeach him (as they currently do) and a left leaning military would merely need to ‘support’ the “lawfully elected government” no matter how unconstitutionally a martial law government acted.
Under such circumstances, Obama doesn’t need the US military to act as his ‘brown shirts’, he just needs them to stand by and allow his DHS brown shirts to conduct political prisoner round ups of anyone who protests too vigorously.
And if the ‘opportunity’ to declare martial law doesn’t occur during Obama’s term, the ‘preparations’ will still be in place for when they do occur. And ‘Comprehensive Amnesty’ for 11-33 million “undocumented democrats” will ensure that a leftist democrat will be in office, when (not if) the ‘opportunity’ does arrive…
The handwriting is on the wall folks and the ‘puzzle’ of Obama’s actions not that difficult to see, it just takes a willingness to face the facts.
The message is as simple as it is powerful: Does your life suck? Well, it’s not your fault, it’s all those rich people’s fault, and Uncle Sugar will fix it.
What kind of evil, sick people want to destroy the family and their own free nation and liberty and freedom of religion. What is in it for them.
Why would they want to live in an opressed nation. Is it because they think they will be the oppressors and they get sadistic joy from that? Do they think they will redistribute the wealth of a nation’s people and take it for themselves. Do they think they will all be the leaders living in luxury?
I dont understand. I see it happening but I cannot understand why any human born free would want to change a free land into something so abominable. Who wants to be a communist. That is like wanting to have leprosy.
The founding fathers drafted a Constitution that takes power away from government and gives it to the people. Is there no way, they can be stopped. I dont trust elections but I am all for impeachments. You are right, Obama has empowered the Muslims and weakened the US and that was his plan. I know what is happenening but I just cant understand why.
Man dominates man to his injury. Dont Americans see that the left wants to dominate them, oppress them and ruin their lives. Is one crummy smart phone all it takes to win over dumb people? I never thought this would happen to the American spirit.
A republic needs a virtuous people to survive. I guess we are no longer that. If we were we would rise up against Obama and his regime en masse.
One way to defund obamacare is for no American to buy it. I will not buy it. I will take my chances.
It is so depressing.
Yet , we have friends and neighbors who will say Teleprompter Stalin had to remove those awful disloyal military leaders . He needs to have people loyal personally to him so HE can lead us into enlightenment.
I think we have seen the beginning of the next Bonus Marchers and how it will be handled.
kit:
Some are in it for the power.
Some really think they are the ones who can figure out a way to bring justice, peace, and joy to man/womankind, and save the planet as well (see this book by Thomas Sowell).
Tyranny rides in on the back of a union of the amoral/immoral power-hungry and the idealistic dreamers. The second are the tools of the first.
And what makes it easier to happen is when we get lazy and abdicate the teaching of how to avoid it to our young people. Watch:
You know, listening to that again (and I’ve heard it several times in the last few years, and linked to it before) brings tears to my eyes. A brilliant, brilliant expression of a truth we’ve come to know very well in the years since he said it. Let’s hope we never have to tell our children what Reagan says at the end there.
Horowitz, Kim Z, and lots of others are and have been in this for a long time. Many of us know each other or of each other.
Horowitz converted, and has been active.
Bella Dodd not only converted politically, but spiritually and hung out with Fulton Sheen – but she was in the prior era
Freda Utley was also the prior era, but her work should be known too. like “the dreams we lost”
you see, all of these I recommended most, were people who were part and in love with it more than most ever are about anything
their awakenings are vastly more complicated, for unlike Neo, Mamet, and so on, they were an actual key part of the machine, not just a person duped by the machine (or seduced).
its one thing to ask the question of what caused a change once you realized you were duped? as the change is actually minimal, and does not require the danger or the effort, or the malaise that is required by someone in the know, deeper in, and on the payroll on some level.
for some reason, looking at people who grew up one way and discovered that what they thought represented their values didn’t, then shifted their focus as to who represents them. is more like studying the audience at a magic show to figure out how the tricks work. you aint gonna get there from there.
to read the early people is to read things when they were less mysterious and more open, and you could understand the nature. but with the later ones, as horowitz points out, or rather, with your contemporaries, your too busy following the default positions as to whether people lie, how to regard what they say, and so on. ie. serial killers have a time of it because its impolite to be cautious (since we have been taught that such thoughts are racist, or some other thing).
taken from: Reagan, In His Own Hand: The Writings of Ronald Reagan that Reveal His Revolutionary Vision for America
yes, Ronnie knew her. lots knew her. been trying to give you the grand tour… but whats good enough for Ronald Reagan, i guess is not good enough for us
and funny… but you want to know what he said about others listening to her, and these people?
.
yeah ronnie.. i tried…
but your right… no one is listening…
.
Mother Jones’ David Corn… …describes it, Horowitz’s latest book views the president — and indeed, everyone on the American left — as hell bent on destroying American society and creating a totalitarian state. A sitting U.S. senator praised the book, said the most offensive chapter in it gave him an “epiphany” about the president, and boasted at a Horowitz event that the right-wing provocateur “will make a difference” in how some Senate Republicans “approach things.”
I’m tempted to ask how the political world would react if a sitting Democratic senator was equally cozy with a left-wing radical, but I’m having trouble even imagining it — there really aren’t any comparable liberal versions of Horowitz, and if there were, Senate Dems would want nothing to do with him or her. – Maddow blog
i guess van jones, ayers, and lots of others just are not radical enough to appear on her/his radar…
Barack won the first time because many people agreed with Bill O’Reilly and thought he was a moderate. And then there was a contingent who thought it would be cool to have a Black President.
No excuse for the second term.
Artfldgr:
Many people on this blog and elsewhere were listening.
And many of us were saying something similar back then, as well. Not everyone, of course—but many.
I have linked to posts of mine going back to the 2008 campaign that say as much: Obama’s a leftist, a liar, etc. I had hoped this would be proven wrong, but I believed the evidence showed it was the case. I’m not going to take the time to post the links again. But the posts are there, and the comments are there by many commenters.
The only question (then, and even to some extent now) is whether it is 100% inevitable that the left will succeed. I have long thought there is a very very good chance it will, but I am not 100% certain that it will.
Thank you, Neo. You helped me understand this complicated thing better. And thank you for Reagan’s speech. Tears welled up in my eyes, too. Yes, it is a brilliant expression of truth.
Thank you
kit: you’re welcome.
I wouldn’t call him “Horrorwitz”.
NOTHING he says is something I take as horrible or as “shocking”. This was always the case with the Left. This is the case with the Left. This will always Be the case with the Left. This is natural.
It is just as natural to me as breathing in air as I exercise with the sword.
Perhaps to those who are new to evil, it might feel a bit shocking. I can’t say that after I’ve researched human evil for humanity’s history, that it is shocking or new to me.
I know what is happenening but I just cant understand why.
If you do not understand why evil exists in human form, then you will not understand it now.
Ymarsakar:
It’s horrible, but not shocking. It is indeed an old story.
But still, I have not reached the state of “acceptance.” I still find it horrible, although it is an old story and part of human nature.
Henry Regnery Company, 1947-1977
Regnery has published books by authors such as former Republican Party chairman Haley Barbour, Ann Coulter, former Speaker of the United States House of Representatives Newt Gingrich, columnist Michelle Malkin, commentator Robert Spencer, pundit David Horowitz and Barbara Olson.
helped to found Human Events as a weekly newsletter
Regnery’s third book was The Hitler in Our Selves, by Max Picard. Other early books included The German Opposition to Hitler by Hans Rothfels and The High Cost of Vengeance (1949) by Freda Utley which was critical of the Allies’ air campaign and post-war occupation. Utley’s book was the first Regnery book to be reviewed in The New York Times, where it was excoriated. Reinhold Niebuhr gave it a positive review in The Nation magazine.
oh, its THAT Niebuhr that wrote this:
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.
you see… i was pointing out the stuff that the people you point out read that helped form their ideas and beliefs as a common group that often knew each other – and many of them created the culture you and others were born into.
Many leading political scientists, such as George F. Kennan, Hans Morgenthau, Kenneth Waltz, and political historians, such as Richard Hofstadter, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and Christopher Lasch, have noted his influence on their thinking
its one thing to turn sides when you found out about a lie, its a whole other thing to change sides when you were part of the lie
Aside from academics, numerous politicians and activists such as U.S. President Barack Obama, former President Jimmy Carter, Martin Luther King, Jr., Hillary Rodham Clinton, Hubert Humphrey, Dean Acheson, Madeleine Albright, and John McCain have also cited his influence on their thought.
and what about Whittaker Chambers?
Albert Jay Nock? (;ibertarianism?)
and why not look at James Burnham?
James Burnham was an American philosopher and political theorist. A radical activist in the 1930s and an important factional leader of the American Trotskyist movement, in later years Burnham left Marxism and turned to the political Right, serving as a public intellectual of the American conservative movement, and producing the work for which he is best known, The Managerial Revolution, published in 1941.
how many people even know these names?
these people made the society and politics you guys keep discussing…
to most they dont even exist any more
Burnham was like horrowitz, in that he was part of the radical movement.
how much a part?
In 1933, along with Sidney Hook, Burnham helped to organize the American Workers Party led by the Dutch-born pacifist minister A.J. Muste. Burnham supported the 1934 merger with the Communist League of America which formed the U.S. Workers Party. In 1935 he allied with the Trotskyist wing of that party and favored fusion with the Socialist Party of America. During this period, he became a friend to Leon Trotsky.
On May 21, 1940, he addressed a letter to the National Committee of the Workers Party resigning from the organization
i thought you would read about some of these people who formed your thoughts (and you mostly dont know it), and had such interesting and vibrant lives
During World War II, Burnham “took a leave” from NYU and went on to work for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency. Recommended by George F. Kennan, Burnham was invited to lead the “Political and Psychological Warfare” division of the Office of Policy Coordination, a semi-autonomous part of the agency
Artfldgr:
Well, I’ve certainly written about plenty of changers in my life, and have a particular interest in people such as Horowitz (whom I’ve written about many, many times) who were activists on both sides. That’s actually one of the many things about FredHJr that gave him his unique and brilliantly insightful perspective.
As for Chambers, I’ve written about him several times, too, and have his book featured on the right sidebar in my recommendations.
I agree with you that people like Horowitz and Chambers have more to offer than the average changer, because of their inside information
Burnham’s seminal work, The Managerial Revolution, attempted to theorize about the future of world capitalism based upon observations of its development in the interwar period. Burnham argued three possible futures for capitalism:
(1) that capitalism was a permanent form of social and economic organization and that it would be continued for a protracted period of time;
(2) that capitalism was a temporary form of organization destined by its nature to collapse and be replaced by socialism;
(3) that capitalism was a temporary form of organization currently being transformed into some non-socialist future form of society
so which one was the right one?
are we getting philip dru administrator?
Burnham observed that in the last years of previous forms of economic organization, such as those of Ancient Greece and the Roman Empire, mass unemployment was “a symptom that a given type of social organization is just about finished.”
-=-=-=-
Burnham argued that over a comparatively short period, which he dated from the first world war, a new society had emerged in which a “social group or class” which Burnham called “managers” had engaged in a “drive for social dominance, for power and privilege, for the position of ruling class.
Burnham expanded upon this concept, arguing that whether ownership was corporate and private or statist and governmental, the essential demarcation between the ruling elite (executives and managers on the one hand, bureaucrats and functionaries on the other) and the mass of society was not ownership so much as it was control of the means of production.
-=-=-=-
so the point was after seeing hitler, and russia and FDR, he said that the future was the government corporatist third way kind of fascist thing we are heading now into.
n its own more confused, less advanced way, New Dealism too has spread abroad the stress on the state as against the individual, planning as against private enterprise, jobs (even if relief jobs) against opportunities, security against initiative, “human rights” against “property rights.” There can be no doubt that the psychological effect of New Dealism has been what the capitalists say it has been: to undermine public confidence in capitalist ideas and rights and institutions. Its most distinctive features help to prepare the minds of the masses for the acceptance of the managerial social structure
and
In a later book, The Machiavellians, he argued and developed his theory that the emerging new élite would better serve its own interests if it retained some democratic trappings–political opposition, a free press, and a controlled “circulation of the élites.”
and so, we have the trappings of representational government, with the control, and managed everything
managed economy, managed healthcare, and on and on…
but he is a dead white guy, why read what the people your talking about read? why learn what formed their ideas and what ideas they have? waste of time
now, slice and dice… cut it shorter..
His 1964 book Suicide of the West became a classic text for the post-war conservative movement in U.S. politics, which best expressed Burnham’s new interest in traditional moral values, classical liberal economics and anti-communism. In Suicide, he defined liberalism as a “syndrome” rendering liberals ridden with guilt and internal contradictions.
A state of “acceptance” might very well produce depression. That would not be conducive to improving fighting spirit in a battle or war.
My training focused on de-sensitization to what most people consider horrible. Operant conditioning is then used to train for the optimal, ideal response against the stimuli.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_Conditioning
That means if I’m horrified by the Left, I will try to look away, or I might become depressed, or all kinds of non ideal reactions may result. Those things need to be trained out.
To give one example, generally self defense techniques of a lethal nature are not reliable to be used by semi trained people, because people tend to look away from their targets. So they miss or they apply half hearted force. A dislocated eye from the socket is nasty. Most people can’t look at it, let alone imagine it as the result they wish for and actively work to achieve it.
Thus a lot of negative responses on the part of humans make it very hard for us to actually kill people, up close and personal. In order for the techniques I was trained with and which I developed by myself to work, these reactions must be modified a bit via conditioning, both operant and classical.
Thus I’m often more inclined to look at the horrible nature of evil direct on, and treat it as normal, because I need to act exactly as if it was normal. Slicing a sword through a limb, cat, human torso, throat, or any other target is going to cause a major mess. Yet the visualization/imagination must be made, before the result can be achieved. Otherwise people might find themselves suffering PTSD or hesitation after seeing stuff they never expected when it came time for the moment of truth and they needed to “get it done”. While PTSD won’t get you killed in a battle or war, hesitation probably will.
It’s not so much I feel acceptance of evil, the Left, or the horridness of human nature. It’s more like if I don’t treat it as normal, if I don’t look straight at it, I cannot cut it, I cannot hit it, I cannot destroy it, I cannot kill it.
In order to defeat an enemy, I must know the enemy, think like the enemy, and find counters based upon how they think. That cannot be done if human reactions and emotions get in the way.
The French nobility had a similar problem when it came time to call the retreat so their cavalry could charge again. The cavalry were made out of knights and nobility only, so they never retreated. Which is why they often charged into pikes and got slaughtered, or got stuck in on some infantry and couldn’t disengage. Thus reducing their combat potential to little more than a taller infantry unit, as they lost their mobility once they got stuck in with enemy infantry. The French aristocrats just hated running away and thought courage would win the battle alone. Which usually wasn’t true.
So there’s always hesitations or cultural beliefs that might impair a faction’s ability to war against another faction. The British didn’t like Colonial snipers either. I’m not even sure in the modern days they finally got a sniper unit.
The training I got utilized the same principles as modern military training. However, my training was designed solely for civilians whereas military training puts in limiters like obedience to authority when it comes to pulling the trigger. The only thing that commands whether I pull the trigger or not is my conscience. The law will matter before and after, but not during.
The more evil and atrocity prone an enemy is, the more we should train our allies not to be psychologically traumatized by fighting these demons.
What we have here is Cloward-Piven imposed from above.
We do not need to be 100% certain as to what’s coming, Neo. 95% will do; two standard deviations from the norm=not a chance probability (P<.05).
Sol Stern is now a conservative who writes for the Manhattan Insitute
Scratch a Socialist or neo-Socialist and watch the Stalinist or neo-Stalinist come out.
Geoffrey Britain Says:
October 14th, 2013 at 5:23 pm
Good comment, Geoffrey.
kit Says:
October 14th, 2013 at 6:30 pm
Yes, yes, and yes.
Remember what O’Brien said to Winston Smith in 1984:
Don Carlos, 7:32 pm — “95% will do; two standard deviations from the norm = not a chance probability (P<.05)."
In a normal (gaussian) distribution, two standard deviations from the norm encompasses about 95 percent of all possible events. In random sampling, that means that 1 in 20 times, the unlikely event (the remaining 5 percent probability in this example) does happen.
(Note: in probability distributions other than the "normal", two standard deviations may be other than 95 percent of the theoretical possibilities.)
Here's a true anecdote from a graduate statistics course I took long ago. The professor was endowed with two doctorates, one a Ph.D. in statistics, the other an M.D. degree. The story is, he was a research doctor and took so many statistics courses that he finally wrote a dissertation and earned a doctorate there, too.
ANYWAY: He was editor-in-chief of some medical research journal, and he related how he gets all these articles submitted for peer review, and he remarked that in the research experiments, the results are invariably analyzed with 95 percent confidence (normal distribution) — which means that, in the long run, 1 in 20 of those research results documents a *false* conclusion, not through any fault of the researcher or of the methodology, but because with 95 percent confidence, it's *wrong* 5 percent of the time.
If one such as friend Don Carlos wants a "not a chance probability", that one needs 100 percent, i.e., P = 0.00; no way around that.
(I've taught statistics at the college level since then; the Good Doctor knows what he's talking about.)
What’s in it for them is your money: You make it; they take it. Period.
That they can tell themselves the fiction they are doing it for “good” is just the story thieves tell themselves.
There is no answer for evil. Some people just are. Liberals are evil people and that is the truth of the matter.
You can ask Mitsu what he thinks he’ll get out of being an Obamacan. And that’s true even for those that don’t live in the US.
He made a comment before, so he should be back doing… stuff for his chosen Regime.
rickl,
One of the things I made a theory about is that the Left’s true power isn’t social justice, redistribution, unions, or winning elections in DC.
Their true power has something to do with mind control, literally speaking.
At the time, of course, few people wanted to believe in such things. Even though we know of various documentations of the Leftist alliance having successful field trials in this avenue.
It was just hard to connect the dots together.
After all, if you are fighting a bunch of mind controlled zombies… what hope is there for “reason”, “debate”, and “arguing the facts”?
It becomes a very different environment to fight in then.
I was thinking today what we need is to promote the stories of those who lived under communist regimes for the low information voters. The people that escaped Vietnam after the fall, the people from the Soviet Union, the Chinese Great Leap Forward, etc. We need to get those stories told.
arftdgr:
Indeed.
I am reminded of some blog where, in response to negative comments about Code Pink, some lib commenter wrote something like this: “Show me where any US Congressman or Senator has supported Code Pink-” to try to prove that Code Pink was supported only by marginal people and not by anyone of note in the Democrats’ Party. Turned out it was rather easy to find around 10 Democrat Congressmen or Senators who had actively supported Code Pink. The usual suspects: Kucinich, Rangel, etc.
From your previous mention of Bella Dodd, I looked up her autobiography, School of Darkness, and found it online: http://www.scribd.com/doc/8634527/Bella-Dodd-School-of-Darkness
While writing previously about Bella Dodd, you had alluded to a Communist plan to infiltrate the Roman Catholic Church. I have read part of a book, Murder in the Vatican: The CIA and the Bolshevik Pontiff, by Lucien Gregoire, which implies that John Paul I, the Pope of 34 days, had his seminary schooling funded by left wing sources. The book also claims that the Pope was murdered in an attempt to deal with said infiltration.
There is an interesting tale from the days when the future Pope was a young seminary student in the 1920s. Alexander Rotov, a roommate of his at the seminary, was from the Soviet Union. His son Boris became head of the Russian Orhodox Church, and in 1978 died in the presence of Pope John Paul I. According to Wiki, Boris Rotov was a KGB agent- which was not uncommon. One suspects that his father Alexander was sent to Italy under some sort of Chekist guidance. Strange coincidence. Like we have seen in the Obama story?
The future Pope did not like the way bastard or orphan children were treated in Italy. By contrast, according to Alexander Rotov,
Anyone who has done any research on the Soviet Union in the 1920s knows this was propaganda, not fact. The Soviet Union in the 1920s had millions of orphan children living on the street, the consequence of civil war and Bolshevik-induced famine. While there were orphanages established, a large number fled the orphanages, preferring life on the street.
I do not fault Alexander Rotov, then a child, for parroting Bolshevik propaganda. Nor I do I fault the future Pope, then a child, for believing it. But I wonder why the author didn’t bother to point out that what Rotov had told the future Pope was propaganda. Says something about the author’s point of view, does it not?
“Tyranny rides in on the back of a union of the amoral/immoral power-hungry and the idealistic dreamers.” That is a great line.
While writing previously about Bella Dodd, you had alluded to a Communist plan to infiltrate the Roman Catholic Church.
The number one indicator of Left wing infiltration in the Catholic church are the child molesting priests and bishops. Those would be the elder aged infiltrators put in training schools decades ago.
Look up the incidents in Britain where people have tried to bring reports of child sexual abuse, but the archbishop was covering for an entire network of gay rapists.
These incidents would never have been covered up or ignored by people with a strong moral code. But the Leftists hung out together, even if they later broke away from their controllers. It’s also been mentioned that there’s a “Lavender Mafia” or some other flower sounding name for particular factions in the Catholic Church that covered for each other’s abuse of children.
In America. In Europe. All around.
The seminal event which caused David Horowitz to leave the radical left was the murder of Betty Van Patter. David Horowitz had recommended Betty Van Patter for an accounting job with the Black Panthers in 1974. She discovered some accounting irregularities, and shortly after she informed the Panthers of having found said accounting irregularities, she disappeared. A month later her “battered body” was found in San Francisco Bay.
From the beginning, David Horowitz was convinced that the Panthers had killed Betty Van Patter.
There was minimal government investigation into Betty Van Patter’s murder. Betty Van Patter’s children scraped together the money to hire a private investigator, who concluded that the Panthers had killed her.
Nor did the media do much investigation.
The University of California Press, published book this year on the Black Panthers.Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party is more than 500 pages long. There is no mention whatsoever of Betty Van Patter in the book. There are some mentions of David Horowitz, such as this passage:
But no mention that a murder of a friend of David Horowitz for which the Panthers appear to have had the only motive for killing, is the event that caused David Horowitz to leave the left.
The authors do cite Horowitz’s and Collier’s Destructive Generation in the footnotes, which does mention Betty Van Patter, so they have most likely read about Betty Van Patter. But mentioning Betty Van Patter’s murder wouldn’t have fit the narrative the authors were constructing about the Panthers.
But what can you expect from authors who dedicate a book to “Che Patrice Lumumba… and young revolutionaries everywhere?”
http://tinyurl.com/lla6ths Amazon link: Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party
In 1858, Abraham Lincoln wrote, ” As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is not democracy.”
The continuing problem is the hordes of people who hunger and thirst to be masters.
Some interesting excerpts from Bella Dodd’s biography.
Even more significant was the fact that I had made their hates my hates. This was whatestablished me as a full-fledged Communist. In the long ago I had been unable to hateanyone; I suffered desperately when someone was mistreated; I was regarded as a peacemaker. Now, little by little, I had acquired a whole mass of people to hate: thegroups and individuals who fought the Party. How it came about I cannot tell. All I knowas I look back to that time is that my mind had responded to Marxist conditioning. For itis a fact, true and terrible, that the Party establishes such authority over its members thatit can swing their emotions now for and now against the same person or issue. It claimssuch sovereignty even over conscience as to dictate when it shall hate.Before 1935, for instance, the Party had preached hatred of John L. Lewis as a labor dictator. No stories about him were too vile. He was accused of murder and pillage in hismarch to power in the Miners Union. Suddenly, in 1936, Lewis became the hero of theCommunist Party. Again in 1940, when the Party decided to support Roosevelt againstWillkie, and John L. Lewis risked his leadership in the CIO by calling on the unions tovote for Willkie, the Communists screamed invective, and in private meetings RoyHudson and William Z. Foster, in charge of labor for the Politburo, vilified Lewis. Whenthe Communists shifted their support, Lewis was dropped as president of the CIO andPhilip Murray was elected in his place. During my years in the Teachers Union Igradually got used to these bitter expressions of hate. And since hate begets hate, oftenthose under attack also responded with hate. Hearing them, I began to take sides and inthe end accepted the Party’s hates as my own.
….
The sessions of the December National Committee were notable for their long-winded,long-spun-out, and fantastic justification of the line of “self-determination of the Negro inthe black belt.” Only the intelligence and patience of Negro leaders in America havemade possible resistance to this mischievous theory which was contrived by Stalin andwas now unleashed by Foster. Briefly told, it is the theory that the Negroes in the Southform a nation, a subjugated nation with the desire to become a free one, and that theCommunists are to give them all assistance. The Party proposed to develop the nationalaspirations of the Negro people so they would rise up and establish themselves as anation with the right to secede from the United States. It was a theory not for the benefitof the Negroes but to spur strife, and to use the American Negro in the world communist propaganda campaign to win over the colored people of the world. Ultimately, theCommunists proposed to use them as instruments in the revolution to come in the UnitedStates.
…A new plan against me developed in the following weeks, a strategy of slurs, character defamation, harassments. There were, of course, still many people in the trade-unionmovement and especially teachers who were not part of the inner communist circle whoremembered the days of my campaigning. Now the Party decided to blacken mycharacter publicly so that the simple working people in the Party who liked me would nolonger have confidence in me.
….One thing was clear: only technically could she have been called a landlord. But thecommunist leadership heard with delight that Bella Dodd had appeared as “attorney for alandlord.” At last they had the excuse for getting me politically, the excuse far which theyhad been looking. Of course they could have simply expelled me but this would involvediscussion of policies. They were looking for an excuse to expel me on charges thatwould besmirch my character, drive my friends away, and stop discussion instead of starting it. What better than to expel me for the crime of becoming a “hireling of thelandlords”?They must have realized that such an argument would scarcely be cogent to outsiders.Even to many of the Party it was weak. They must add something really unforgivable tomake me an outcast in the eyes of the simple people of the Party. They did this byspreading the story that in my court appearances I had made remarks against the PuertoRican tenants, that I had slandered them, and showed myself a racist, almost a fascist.And last of all, a charge of anti-Negro, anti-Semitism, and anti-working class was thrownin for good measure.
…
I was dismissed. As I walked down the dingy steps my heart was heavy. The futility of my life overcame me. For twenty years I had worked with this Party, and now at the end Ifound myself with only a few shabby men and women, inconsequential Partyfunctionaries, drained of all mercy, with no humanity in their eyes, with no good will of the kind that works justice. Had they been armed I know they would have pulled thetrigger against me.I thought of the others who had been through this and of those who were still to gothrough this type of terror. I shivered at the thought of harsh, dehumanized people likethese, filled with only the emotion of hate, robots of a system which was heralded as anew world. And I sorrowed for those who would be taken down the long road whose endI saw, now, was a dead end.When I reached my own house and went in, the rooms were cool and quiet. I was tiredand spent, as if I had returned from a long, nightmare journey.Of course I was certain more trouble was in store for me. This step had been merely preliminary to publicity against me, clever publicity. For this expulsion had not originatedin the dirty rooms of the Harlem Commission, but from the headquarters on TwelfthStreet, and perhaps from more distant headquarters.I dreaded the coming publicity and decided to get in touch with the one group whom Ihad regarded as my friends. I called the Teachers Union to tell the Party leaders what wassurely coming. I thought they would understand and discount any false accusations.I need not have bothered.
http://www.catholiccitizens.org/platform/platformview.asp?c=7347
Having to retrace my analysis steps, I came across this new article.
Most of the information was second verified by other sources in the past. Though not triple verified. There’s still a lot of raw data which people have not quite analyzed using the right questions concerning 5000 homosexual priests, 80% of the 5k at least.
Much of what Dodd writes is familiar to me, or to those who tried to get away from the Democrat fold. It’s not surprising that Johnson’s welfare Great Society destroyed black middle class growth. That was the intended result. It wasn’t “good intentions” gone wrong.
Obama isn’t a puzzle whatsoever to his supporters, nor is he to his critics. So, who’s puzzled?
I believe the reference was to the significant portion of Americans that think Democrats, Obama included, are mostly corrupt and incompetent, but well intentioned. Making them slightly better than the REpublicans, who are even more corrupt but “better at hiding it” while having “evil intentions”.
And most of that reasoning I have heard actually used on the public net comments. That they would vote for Democrats in 2008 because at least Democrats get charged with corruption more than Republicans, given that means Republicans are more competent at hiding corruption.
Neo, I was wondering if you ever got around to continuing this line of questioning which you commented with in 2005 at that Radical Sons link.
I haven’t really thought this one through yet—what makes a person a fanatic, on either side? Maybe some day I’ll have something intelligent or insightful to say about it—not yet, though.
True believers, fanatics, zealots, etc. I know what I think about such phenomenon.
Whittaker Chambers said something to the effect that there are no greater fighters than former-Communists turned anti-Communist. The Communists hate these apostates more than anyone else because they know the Truth.
I was never part of the left, but would like to believe my hatred of Commies runs as deeply as anyone.
As for all the apocalyptic pronouncements made by Marx, et. al. about generational indoctrination and such…I’m not impressed.
With the exception of historical precedents like the US never defaulting on its debt before, I think any damage the left can do is repairable.
Remember: there was NO pushback in Soviet Russia, and the system collapsed anyway. It turns out that reality is a powerful ally.
I got the following (see below) from my niece J., after I sent her Sultan Knish’s excellent article on how it was a shame that we are almost no longer celebrating Columbus Day; and that the Fourth of July would no doubt be next on the PC chopping block:
She spent a year in Belfast, and the Catholics there apparently worked on her sympathies. Of course they didn’t tell her a thing about their horrific persecution and massacres of Protestants for centuries.
Like most of her generation, she is historically illiterate: they all believe that White Christian Anglo-Saxons are the WORST people on earth, because that’s what their leftwing nutjob professors have told them. She followed it up by this angry postscript:
Where to start? I sent her a couple of emails enumerating some identical violent behavior by Team Native American, Team Roman Catholic (burning at the stake, anyone?), and Team Hindu. And finished by saying that anyone who’s told her that white Christians are the worst people on earth is way off the mark (though I can’t defend the Spaniards’ conduct in the New World — they really were staggeringly brutal. But we aren’t Spaniards! in fact, they are historical enemies of ours. Armada, anyone? Phillip of Spain???)
Trying to keep it civil. I love my niece, but I want to kick her in the butt right now. Good and hard! More so, I want to twist off the heads of her Marxist professors.
Like I told the young lady, “we have all known sin, just like the Bible says.”
And she’s not among the worst: she told me she’s occasionally voted Republican. But this cultural self-hatred is what she’s been taught. And we’re descended from one of England’s Protestant martyrs! (I told her that, too).
It just twists my gut to hear her prate this America-hating garbage. She’s 27 and works in finance, if you can believe it.
The whole point of Daniel Greenfield’s (Sultan Knish) article was that exactly her reaction (reflexive self-loathing, shorn of all context) is what’s being assiduously cultivated by the bastards on the Left: she is a perfect case in point (and both her parents are Liberal Asshats, so she got it early and often).
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What’s in it for them? I think a major factor is that a Cause to which they can attach themselves makes them feel significant (props to AoSHQ for that one. Also, I don’t think they really like people much. They get a warm glow of self-satisfaction from helping the poor useless plebes (see Obamacare) and that same warm glow from preventing the poor plebes from harming themselves or others (think global warming). I guess basically, aside from power, what’s in it for them is that they get off on being The Intelligensia, the vanguard of the proletariat, and therefore intrinsically better than the common ruck of folks. How sad and alienated.
jon baker(9:47pm)…’Fraid that Einstein’s tragically accurate prediction of “..a generation of idiots..”, despite all the easily accessed information availability, is making their perpetual white-noise nearly impossible to get through. Breathtaking. The DUMBING DOWN and vast narcissism of the digital, social media, blathering, Look-at-MEEEEeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee Age makes it less and less possible for a Robert Conquest, Richard Pipes, Thomas Sowell and other large minds speaking historical truth of the vast carnage, slavery and grave yards of the Left.
They are so impossibly yesterday when you’re ADD-Hyperactivity is glued to, well, YOUR OWN MIDGET SELF on Tweety, Insta, Facethingy, etc ad nauseum.
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To further comment to Kit’s: “What’s in it for them? Why would they want to live in an oppressed nation?”
The sad reality is that for many oppressors is that they don’t see themselves as oppressors.
Most recently, I had a conversation with an acquaintance about nanny Bloomberg’s anti-soda nonsense. When I pointed out that I thought people should be able to make their own choices, even if those choices were bad for them; he responded that yea, but some people are too stupid to know what’s good for them and so the decision has to be made for them.
I truly believe that he didn’t see how ignorant his own thoughts were. I truly think that he didn’t understand that if someone was given the right to think for others then it could also be someone will think and do for him. He just couldn’t grasp that concept.
While the anti-soda nonsense is hardly a major issue I think it does show how some people think. They so truly believe that their way is the only right way, that anything else must be eradicated. And since the “wrong” way is wrong it really isn’t oppression to get rid of it.
Beverly, if she wants examples of sexual slavery check out Hollywood, the Left’s elite, and the Left’s allies in Islam.
Modern day Demoncrat propaganda has not crafted sufficient defenses against that. And if it is the fault of Anglo Saxons, then are not white Democrats part of the same group they want her to hate? Yet she doesn’t hate her marxist professors….
The hate is funneled. Block up the gun tube and make it explode backwards instead.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131014/08445424864/lancaster-cops-still-unclear-publics-right-to-record-harass-same-citizen-who-recorded-them-last-week.shtml
The idea that you should be immune to wiretapping was something I first heard from the Left, used as an ideological prop against Bush’s war against Islamic terrorists in Iraq/Afghanistan.
It was somehow used to for different purpose in the police unions, where I suspect the bosses gave the command from authority to their goons, the police officers, to make sure that nothing embarassing shows up. Only the state, and the Left, has the power to “wiretap”. It is not up to citizens to record “anything” that the state should be recording for them, and using against you.
The police unions are also indoctrinating and training up a next gen Shock Corps. Their SWAT teams have already been loyalty tested and they will, and have, killed innocent civilians on command. Covered by union rules and authorizations, they feel guiltless and safe.
Now it just remains to purge the police rolls of Tea Party sympathizers and others who might have the authority to command a stop to civilian massacres, and to train the troops to pull the trigger when given an order by their Leftist leaders.
If you think this sounds crazy, wait until you see the shocking stuff.
@Ymarsakar
I think that’s only possible where majority peer-pressure can be brought to bear on the police…in other words, in liberal enclaves.
I think the left’s influence in “flyover country” is quite a bit less.
So they’ll be able to institute the police state just fine in the big cities, where the citizens were less likely to fight back anyway (with the exception of the gangs). Not so much in the rest of America.
The rest of America has police unions too, you know. Check out SWAT deaths in Florida. It’s considered one of the best concealed carry states, for protection of self defense. Doesn’t help the police kills though.
Why would they want to live in an oppressed nation? I see it happening but I cannot understand why any human born free would want to change a free land into something so abominable.
Because they wish to live in truth.
Technology and vast populations require experts to govern us. Experts in government are lawyers, who study, write, legislate, and interpret law. We can choose only from factions among the lawyers, which is why Democrats innovate (New Deal, New Frontier, Great Society, Obamacare) and Republican conserve (never repeal any innovation).
The expert politicians require expert managers to elaborate the laws and oversee the management of the subjects. These experts are bureaucrats. They require large, expensive, enduring bureaucracies. In turn they require expert concerned scientists.
These expert scientists have abandoned the search for knowledge instead to search for problems which need policy solutions.
Do you really imagine the vast technological networks in computers, water, electricity, petroleum, and trade could function without lawyers, bureaucrats and concerned scientists?
Modern technocracy cannot function without this political system, which, in terms of the past (new terms will be invented) can best be described as fascism.
Freedom is an illusion, best sustained by an ideology of self-development and self-indulgence: that is, the freedom to be a promiscuous body-builder. Any other kind of freedom is simply sabotage and, as the Soviets put it, wrecking.
Socialism more closely matches human nature than liberty. It supplies the hierarchy from Big Man to Little People; it supplies popular social justice in its persecution of racists, sexists, homophobes; it supplies the kind of liberty people really want: freedom from those old oppressive moral codes of Judaism and Christianity.
Never forget as we mourn the destruction of the West and its replacement by an as yet unnamed new civilization of feminism (started by communists de beauvoir and friedan), homosexuality, and socialism, that the American people voted to implement it at every election by voting for Democrats to further it and Republicans to conserve it.
It is the voters who are responsible.
I don’t wonder by Obama and his clique think, do and speak evil, I wonder why people vote for it, cheer for it, and submit to it.
Every single service or benefit of Western civilization would work better from a bottom up perspective than an authoritarian one.
Put Horowitz in charge.
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“Freedom is an illusion…..Socialism more closely matches human nature than liberty.”
I’d say you’re part of the problem.
The left is coming up against the largest internal arms race in history. Not even the Afghans, Somalis, and Yemenis come even close in individual armament. Half of the world’s personal weapons (the total amount of personal weapons also includes weapons in the hands of every military and police force in the world) are in the hands of American citizens. Their fate will be the same as the Afghan communists and their Soviet allies.
Erisguy said:
When the US was transitioning from an agrarian culture to a complex industrialized culture in the early 19th century, the US Senators were experts appointed by state legislatures to perform the function of the concerned scientist-regulator. The difference was that the old-time Senator was accountable to the state governments while the concerned scientist-regulator is anonymous and unaccountable. Just the way the progressives in the ruling Cathedral likes it. The Prog amendments in the early 20th century laid the foundation for the establishment of the Cathedral in the 1930’s and 1940’s.
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