The funny thing is that if bureaucratic records can serve as personal assassination orders to justify kill shots, why is the Leftist Regime in the US building so many data centers to store open source and encrypted source data mined material?

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Well, it worked on Justice Roberts, didn’t it?

In this new era, it’s unnecessary for a tyrant to operate concentration camps or any sort of gulag.

Data mining permits the Big Man to economically coerce most — and socially coerce the rest.

This explains why you’re seeing so feeble an assault against his reign.

Those media figures that see the light of reason — have yet other reasons to shut down their word processor. Everyone’s on notice that their career in the media is at hazard.

Since said careers are being terminated all over the nation by the digital retrenchment — economics is keeping the faithful in line — and on the party-line.

but i note that you like strangers with no association, rather than associated ppl whose family are similar people, and could answer questions…

then again, i note that women follow the advice of strangers and books and magazines, and generally ignore their family, and those concerned for them…

the stranger you dont know has an appeal that familiarity only breeds contempt… (And the idea that “if you know them, then they are not great, cause you dont know great people”… a common formulation)

weird…

The Medals Discus Event.

JFK threw the Silver.

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Ellsburg intended to shame LBJ — but the historical onus fell on RMN.

(The Pentagon Papers were drafted as a critique of the LBJ-McNamara era of the Vietnam War. You never hear of that in the Press. Instead, It’s his run-in with RMN and his status as a listed opponent of America — by RMN.)

Volkogonov had the gift of timing. The result is that he looked ever better as time passed; Kerry and McNamara, not so much.

Why the Socratic query?

There was more to fomenting the Revolutionary War than Thomas Jefferson at his desk burning the midnight oil with his schoolboy notes on John Locke and well-dressed gentlemen posing just so in Independence Hall.

For example, part of my alma mater’s lore is student activists who hounded British soldiers in NYC, likely their age, who were innocent of anything other than being British soldiers stationed in NYC – legally, peacefully, on British soil – in a manner foreshadowing the Vietnam War radicals who hounded and vilified servicemen, likely their age. Both in the 18th and 20th centuries, the student activists deliberately acted provocatively, antagonistically, and at times, violently, with deliberate purpose: transform the social-political ecosystem from a cohesive, stable environment into a fractured, revolutionary environment. It worked both times.

There just aren’t many solemn portraits of roving gangs of students ambushing scared young British soldiers for some guerilla theater to turn them into enemies, rile up the crowd, and create grist for the pro-independence propagandists. Maybe rough them up a little as justice for grievances real and invented – same difference.

That’s how we became a free and independent nation. The tree of liberty was planted by activists. That’s also how we lost the Vietnam War.

It is just a method. Anyone can use it. Either use it to win a nation or don’t, and have it used it against you, so you lose your nation.

You could look at possession of forbidden knowledge as a status marker for the elites, but then any recognition of that status would be confined to other elites.

I think as agents of History, Communist leaders felt obliged to record the truth *somewhere*. The archivists continued this pattern with the added flavor of documenting historic leaders’ thoughts on specific subjects.

“many Soviet higher-ups understood their own hypocrisy and cooperation in a system they knew to be corrupt and even evil”

Yes they did, though hypocrisy assumes an objective standard but essentially the justification as always was that the end sought justified whatever means were necessary.

“Sometimes, I wonder if the people we call conservatives or classical liberals, can really accept, or even intellectually comprehend the fact that when the people we call leftists deny a human nature or intrinsic rights or even an objective right and wrong, that they mean it.” DNW

I too, suspect that many do not and I suspect the reason is because of differing premises, which are far more profoundly consequential than many credit. Conservative and classical liberal beliefs extend from the premise that reality consists of objective parameters outside our personal perceptions. The left posits that objective reality does not exist, at all…

At base, for objective reality to exist something must have created it because it could not have arisen spontaneously and without direction. Scientists are in agreement that our universe’s basic physical parameters (speed of light, gravitational constant, etc) are exquisitely constructed and interrelated to a mathematical precision so far beyond chance as to make the lottery a sure thing by comparison.

But if, as post modernistic relativism posits, all is subjective, then the divine cannot exist and “If there is no God, then nothing is forbidden” becomes the ‘subjective’ reality within we each exist and then indeed, the end sought justifies the means.

We’re speaking the ‘King’s English’ and they’re speaking Mandarin Chinese and there simply is no frame of reference.

Eric,

I can’t agree that “America’s founding fathers were Marxist-method activists” they were certainly revolutionaries who mostly acted within the laws of war as practiced in Europe at that time. They did not practice the atrocities that were common among Indian tribes of the time. Nor was the injustices that occurred justified by victory but rather to some extent unavoidable in a time of war.

“In the real world, the ends do justify the means.”

No, some things cannot be justified no matter the value of the end sought. If I could, I would not take away Obama’s freedom of speech to win the argument. Truth stands on its own, it has no need for deceit. Deceit may carry the day but it can never erase the truth. If nothing else, Volkogonov’s life proved that.

Why do you think we kept the provocative records released by Snowden, Manning, and whoever did the Abu Ghraib leak? The Soviets had a big nation, plus a bigger confederation, to run. They were actually doing stuff besides propagandizing us and themselves. At some level, bureaucrats and operators on the ground need to work with information based on something real.

For propagandists, their job is to spin narratives that are, at least theoretically, plausible for witnesses on the ground. As any novelist can tell you, creating compelling historical fiction requires knowledge of the historical truth.

For advocates, of whom propagandists are a subset, understanding opposing arguments is part of the job. Every trial lawyer is responsible for knowing the ins and outs of opposing counsel’s arguments as well as he knows his own. That’s a main reason lawyers make good politicians. Criminal defense attorneys are ethically bound to zealously defend murderer clients. Knowing the cost of Communism will not stop ethically committed Communist advocates from advocating for the benefits.

Finally, ambitious visionary enterprises, including noble endeavors that work out in the end, normally aren’t all rainbows, sprinkles, and sunshine.

Context matters.

As I said earlier, I believe the US mission in Korea is honorable. The US soldiers who killed and/or died in the Korean War did so in a noble cause. The various accounts of awful acts committed by US soldiers in the Korean War doesn’t change that. The Abu Ghraib and other US military scandals don’t change the essential nobility of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Does anyone believe that *many* good people weren’t harmed unjustly – though justifiably in the big picture – in order to found our American nation? That the hands of our founding fathers weren’t both noble and bloody?

I have no doubt most of the Americans loyalists, many of whom had long generational roots in America, were good people who did not deserve what was done to them by our founders and were disenfranchised then-illegally by covetous neighbors. But our founding fathers did what was needed to be done, and harmed who they needed to harm, in order to found the enduring free and independent American nation.

As I’ve said, America’s founding fathers were Marxist-method activists – and radical ones at that – before Marx. The Marxist-method activist game is a fundamentally American social-political game.

In the real world, the ends do justify the means.

Achieving visionary goals normally necessitates a steep cost in order to realize the vision. Changing the world does not come cheap. Depending on the scale of the vision, people will get hurt and even die. Things will get damaged and destroyed.

If you succeed in your visionary goal, then the harm you caused while displacing the status quo will be justified. If you fail in your goal, as the Soviets failed in theirs, then only the harm remains and your punishment will be deserved.

That’s the risk you accept if you want to make a difference in this world.

Soldiers who kill and destroy, and perhaps thereby condemn their Christian souls to hell, for a good cause understand and accept this trade-off.

The key is whether you believe the cause is worth the price. Benedict Arnold, hitherto a trusted general and a hero of the revolution, didn’t believe American independence was worth the price. Manning didn’t believe our peace operations countering the mass-murdering insurgents were worth the price. Snowden didn’t believe Homeland Security is worth the price. General Volkogonov didn’t believe the Communist undertaking of the Soviet Union were worth the price.

This reminds me of my comparatively mini-change experience, except mine worked in the other direction from General Volkogonov: I changed from skeptic to believer.

My 1st duty station as a soldier was Korea. Before serving in Korea, I was skeptical about the US military’s purpose in Korea, and elsewhere, in the leftist fashion.

My job in Korea included working with top secret go-to-war plans. There, I discovered that, contrary to my youthful doubts, the stated USFK mission – to defend the ROK from nK aggression – is genuine. All the plans were defensive and triggered only by an nK attack on the ROK. Coupled to the war plans on paper, from a practical standpoint, I knew any US military attack or defense in Korea would only be done by us, and we were only trained to defend the ROK.

It wasn’t stated as such in the war plans, but I (and all the soldiers with access to the war plans) could add 2+2:

I realized that my unit’s advanced position astride the main avenue of approach for a mass armored attack across the DMZ to Seoul meant our real job was to blunt nK’s 1st attack wave in order to buy (hopefully) enough time to evacuate Korean civilians from Seoul and for USFK/ROK/UN reinforcements to deploy. In other words, my fellow soldiers and I were going to die if nK attacked, but if we did our jobs well enough before we died, we (and the ROK soldiers to our left and right) would pay with our lives to save millions of Korean lives.

Since then, I have understood US military role in the world, particularly in the War on Terror, through the lens of what I know to be the honorable mission of US soldiers in Korea.