Sultans of Swing: over and over and over…

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: I think we all need a break from depressing politics right about now.]

There are certain songs that you love the very first time you hear them. At least, that’s the way it is for me. One of them was Dire Straits’ “Sultans of Swing” in the late 1970s. I first heard it on the radio and even though I couldn’t understand many of the lyrics at the time, I didn’t care. It got my attention – boy, did it ever – catchy, melodic, rhythmic, unusual.

Sometimes with a song like that, a person gets tired of it. But with “Sultans” – a song I’ve heard over and over in many iterations – that hasn’t happened yet. Guitarist and vocalist (and songwriter) Mark Knopfler is able to vary it each time in a way that makes it sound fresh. And this is true although the song itself features much repetition of some of its lines. It’s hypnotic and yet somehow simultaneously energizing as well as emotionally moving.

Here we have YouTube’s “British guitarist,” whose commentary I really enjoy, opining on a “Sultans” version Knopfler performed in 1996 (or rather, a portion of a version). That’s almost twenty years after the original, and Knopfler is no longer very young. But the joys of repetition never get old, as long as it’s a master at work. How does Knopfler do it? To repeat and repeat and repeat and make it different every time, and in every line? In this particular version (and many others, even more frenetic ones) he’s so calm, like a zen master. Here, he doesn’t even bother to sing the words. And yet the piece is brilliant, and so melodic it can make your heart ache with pleasure.

[NOTE: Other famous songs I recall liking immediately on first hearing them were “Yesterday” by the Beatles (actually, many songs by the Beatles), “Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones, and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” by Bob Dylan. There are plenty more. But my love for “Sultans,” and my desire to listen to it many times, is more intense than my feelings about those other songs.]

White privilege, white guilt: whites as the new Jews

The New Neo Posted on by

After I had the idea for the title of this post, I wondered if it had been said before. It has – by Jonah Goldberg back in late 2007 in his book Liberal Fascism. Whatever you think of Goldberg’s stances recently or even of that book itself, I think his metaphor was both apt and prescient.

Here’s a National Review essay he wrote not long after the book came out, in which he quotes from it and explains his use of the idea. In the 2007 book Goldberg had written:

The white male is the Jew of liberal fascism. The “key to solving the social problems of our age is to abolish the white race,” writes the whiteness studies scholar and historian Noel Ignatiev. Whiteness studies is a cutting-edge academic discipline sweeping American higher education. Some thirty universities have WS departments, but many more schools teach the essentials of whiteness studies in other courses. The executive director of the Center for the Study of White American Culture explains, “There is no crime that whiteness has not committed against people of color . . . We must blame whiteness for the continuing patterns today . . . which damage and prevent the humanity of those of us within it.” The journal Race Traitor (ironically, a Nazi term) is dedicated “to serve as an intellectual center for those seeking to abolish the white race.”…

…[T]here is the left’s shocking defense of black riot ideology and gangsterism. The glorification of violence, the romance of the street, the denunciations of “the system,” the conspiratorialism, the exaltation of racial solidarity, the misogyny of hip-hop culture: all of these things offer a disturbing sense of déjà vu. Hip-hop culture has incorporated. On college campuses, administrators routinely look the other way at classically fascist behavior, from newspaper burnings to the physical intimidation of dissident speakers. These attitudes ultimately stem from the view that the white man, like the Jew, represents every facet of what is wrong and oppressive to humanity. As Susan Sontag proclaimed in 1967, “The white race is the cancer of human history.” Meanwhile, Enlightenment notions of universal humanity are routinely mocked on the academic left as a con used to disguise entrenched white male privilege.

I would add that these days it’s not just white men who are excoriated, although that was the group emphasized in Goldberg’s quote. Note also that, as with so many things happening today, this began with intellectuals (that Sontag quote was in the 60s) and/or in the universities – who, in terms we’ve learned from the COVID pandemic, appear to be “superspreaders” of this idea and so many others.

The minute I first heard the philosophy that whites are bad and that whites therefore should feel bad about themselves as a collective whole because some whites are racist, I recognized it as dangerous and deeply racist itself. And that was back when I was a liberal and a student myself, so it’s a long long time ago. Was it Malcolm X? I’m not sure, but I recall it as a huge break from the Martin Luther King sort of activism I’d previously known, and I seem to recall that anti-Semitism was often part of the new wave.

I know the analogy of anti-white feeling to historical anti-Semitism is far from perfect. But it’s still relevant. Both have as a prominent feature the sweeping idea of inherent and collective guilt of an entire people and/or race. How can this guilt ever be erased? Perhaps never, although public self-humiliation is felt to be a small start.

So this week, after the death of George Floyd at the hands (or knee) of a policeman in Minneapolis who has now been indicted for murder, white people (or institutions that are made of a majority of white people) are required to rend their garments, wear hairshirts, and confess their sins. Many individuals as well as institutions (colleges, businesses, sports personalities) are busy saying their mea culpas in order to signal that they are suitably contrite. But can such sins ever be forgiven and these white hands ever be washed clean?

Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson says [emphasis mine]:

What the killing has done is to show us that there still persists a hardcore white supremacy racist ideology, which rejects outsiders, anyone who is not white. That ideology is now ascendant as a result of the leadership in the White House. What I see is two great traditions in America that are competing. There is the liberal tradition, and there’s the equally dominant tradition of white supremacy, which comes out of the South but traveled northward. There is real tension between them.

I’ve argued in my writings that there has been extraordinary progress in the changing attitudes of white Americans toward blacks and other minorities. As late as the early ’60s, a majority of whites openly said they saw blacks as inferior, and now there is an acceptance of equality, at least in their views. I’ve always said that this may be the great majority, but there’s still 20, 25 percent of whites who still embrace white supremacist views. This hard core of white supremacists is still there and have been encouraged and are leading a revanchist sort of movement. And that’s quite frightening.

No need to prove that Trump is a white supremacist, despite all he’s done to help black people. The Harvard Gazette‘s readership knows it’s true, everyone says it, so the argument doesn’t even need to be made properly, just stated. The incomparable Thomas Sowell, who retired from writing in 2016 at the age of 86 (and who originally had not liked Trump and yet urged people to vote for him in 2016), had this to say in March of 2019 which I think is spot on:

In March 2019, Sowell commented on the public’s response to mainstream media’s allegations that Trump was a “racist”: “What’s tragic is that there’s so many people out there who simply respond to words rather than ask themselves “Is what this person says true? How can I check it?” And so on.” One month later, Sowell again defended Trump against media charges of “racism”, stating: “I’ve seen no hard evidence. And, unfortunately, we’re living in a time where no one expects hard evidence. You just repeat some familiar words and people will react pretty much the way Pavlov’s dog was conditioned to react to certain sounds.”

Now back to Patterson. What of his assertion that twenty to twenty-five percent of whites “embrace white supremacist views”? That’s quite a claim. It certainly doesn’t match the number of actual avowed white supremacists there are in the US today, so I’d love to see the research he’s relying on (if any) when saying that. Patterson himself offers no help; he just casually throws the number out there for the reader to take on his authority without the need to check it out for him/herself. One would think such an extraordinary claim would need at least a verbal footnote, but we don’t get one.

After searching for quite some time I have found nothing that answers the question. Patterson hismelf is described by Harvard as a “historical and cultural sociologist.” He was born and raised in Jamaica and educated both there and at the London School of Economics for graduate school.

My guess is that Patterson might cite in support of his contention about the number of white supremacists some research that purports to measure – by a subtle sign involving an answer to a question on a questionnaire, perhaps – something that a sociologist has decided is a signal of irredeemable white racism. But I don’t know, and at any rate in these days the existence of widespread white supremacist beliefs is asserted as a truism without the need to prove it is true or to even demonstrate what the phrase means, so eager are so many people to nod and embrace the idea because to even question what it means makes a person instantly suspect of holding the very same white supremacism they deplore, at the very least by being “in denial.”

The left uses this as a cudgel to beat down all adherence to and reliance on what used to be nearly universally accepted beliefs and norms of behavior in the US: the existence of truth, the need for order and protection of property, the importance of teaching the history of Western civilization, equality of opportunity rather than of outcome, meritocracy, and the rejection of the idea of collective guilt of any race, creed or religion. If the left has anything to say about it, those days are gone, and good riddance to bad (white) business.

The future of the blue city: Bill de Blasio never had any intention of protecting private property

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve been reading a bunch of essays about the future of New York (see this and this, for example).

They are grim. And how could they not be?

Now, you may say “who cares, they made their bed and let them lie in it.” I care, and not just because New York is my home town, even though I left it over a half century ago. I care because I still know and love plenty of people there. I care because I don’t like to see suffering, even if the suffering is a result of choices people make. I care because cities like New York used to have wonderful things about them, and still have some of those good things. I care because I worry that as New York goes, so go more cities and perhaps ultimately the nation. Is there anything to be gained by having more and more failed and broken municipalities across the land? And doesn’t New York’s economy affect us all, as well?

New Yorkers voted for Bill de Blasio in 2013 to be mayor, and then they re-elected him in 2017. So yes, they are responsible. But it’s a curious fact that the turnout both years was incredibly low, so low that in 2017 only 8.5% of New York City’s eligible voters went for de Blasio, and it wasn’t all that different in 2013.

That’s a shocking statistic in and of itself – what was the apathy about? Was New York doing so well at the time that people felt they could coast, that it didn’t matter who was elected? Were the Republican candidates so terrible that even the specter of a socialist wasn’t enough to bring many voters out for them? Or did a lot of people want socialism? I don’t have an answer, but I do know that some areas turned out in much larger numbers to vote against him, but they were overwhelmed by the voters in many other areas who voted for him and carried the day.

There’s a map at the link that you can study if you like. It’s very informative, and shows for example that Staten Island – whose population is much less than that of the other boroughs but has long been more conservative – came out forcefully against de Blasio. But of course it doesn’t matter now; they’re along for the ride, whether they like it or not and whether they asked for it or not.

Musing about all of this today (or rather, brooding), I decided to search the blog to see if I’d written anything in the past about de Blasio that’s relevant. There is little doubt in my mind that he had no intention of stopping the riots; and perhaps in some Cloward-Piven-ish manner he wanted them in order to have an excuse to effect even greater change to his leftist ideal. And sure enough, I found a post I wrote in September of 2017 that in a moment I will reproduce in full here. It’s based on an interview he’d given, so I suppose at that point he felt he could be pretty open about his plans and his dreams. He definitely had plans for private property, and they were not supportive – essentially, he wanted its abolition and total government control.

The last line of the quote from him was, “It’s not reachable right now.”

Well, how about now, June 2020, nearly three years later? We’ve had a big dose of government control in the reaction to COVID-19, and now we have the failure to protect private property during the riots. I’m pretty sure he thinks it’s a lot more reachable at the moment. Whether it is or isn’t remains to be seen.

So here’s the post, exactly as it appeared almost three years ago:

Steven Hayward at Powerline calls our attention to an interview and quote from New York’s Mayor Bill de Blasio. It’s quite revealing not just about de Blasio, but about the leftist mindset about the role of government, our legal system, and what people themselves want [emphasis mine]:

Q: In 2013, you ran on reducing income inequality. Where has it been hardest to make progress? Wages, housing, schools?

de Blasio: What’s been hardest is the way our legal system is structured to favor private property. I think people all over this city, of every background, would like to have the city government be able to determine which building goes where, how high it will be, who gets to live in it, what the rent will be. I think there’s a socialistic impulse, which I hear every day, in every kind of community, that they would like things to be planned in accordance to their needs. And I would, too. Unfortunately, what stands in the way of that is hundreds of years of history that have elevated property rights and wealth to the point that that’s the reality that calls the tune on a lot of development…

…Look, if I had my druthers, the city government would determine every single plot of land, how development would proceed. And there would be very stringent requirements around income levels and rents. That’s a world I’d love to see, and I think what we have, in this city at least, are people who would love to have the New Deal back, on one level. They’d love to have a very, very powerful government, including a federal government, involved in directly addressing their day-to-day reality.

It’s not reachable right now. And it leaves this friction, and this anger, which is visceral.

There’s an awful lot packed in there, isn’t there?

First and foremost, we have the fact that de Blasio feels comfortable enough to express these sentiments openly rather than hide them. My guess—and it’s only a guess—is that he really believes that most New Yorkers, and maybe even most people in the US, agree with him about the function of government and how much it should dictate their lives. Sentiments and goals that just a few years ago were only whispered in private by any politician hoping to actually get elected are now declared openly by the current mayor of New York.

Next we have the scope of his vision. De Blasio would like the government to control as much as possible, and not just about real estate development. He says “[People would] love to have a very, very powerful government, including a federal government, involved in directly addressing their day-to-day reality.” And if Bill de Blasio and his cronies have anything to say about it, that’s exactly what would happen—for your own good, of course, because you know it’s really what you want. When Orwell wrote in Nineteen Eighty-Four “If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever,” it was a dystopian and horrific vision. De Blasio thinks it’s what we all secretly—and maybe not-so-secretly—want. And he thinks that he’s just the guy to do the stomping, only he’ll call it a love tap.

Next we have the idea that government is capable of doing this sort of regulation much better than the market ever could, and much better than free and autonomous human beings ever could. When he says that “[people] would like things to be planned in accordance to their needs,” he’s not only echoing Marx (“From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”), but he’s also assuming that government is capable of figuring out what people’s needs really are and designing a world that meets them. Although it’s possible that he doesn’t really believe that and he’s just cynically saying it in pursuit of power, I actually think—based on many (not all, however) of the leftists I know—that he is most likely sincere in his belief and in his hubris.

Then we have the contempt for the rule of law and for hundreds and hundreds of years of protection of property rights under it. Does de Blasio have even the remotest understanding of why our system is designed the way it is, and why property rights are so protected? I doubt it. He seems to see it as a little thing, a mere anachronism that should be pushed aside in favor of the great beneficent government he wants (“That’s a world I’d love to see..”) put in place. And he knows that you want it, too.

Lastly is the ominous phrase “right now,” found in the next-to-last sentence of the quote. We’re not there yet, folks, but if the kindly de Blasios of the world have their way, we’ll be there some day soon.

COVID and the politics of “science”

The New Neo Posted on by

I guess protestors and rioters are immune to COVID. Or at least, they pose no danger to Grandma. Or even if they do and grandma dies as a result, they’re not really granny-killers since their cause is just.

People who go to church, or have loved ones’ funerals with more than ten people, on the other hand: thoughtless killers!

Actually, I believe that, since most of the George Floyd demonstrators (and rioters) are young, if they themselves get COVID they are either really likely to have very mild or even asymptomatic cases. Hey, maybe they’re even doing a public service by helping coax along the herd immunity. Or maybe, just maybe, we won’t see any spike in COVID as a result of their mass get-togethers.

But if we do see a spike a couple of weeks later, rest assured. The media will not blame it on the protestors or the rioters. It will be the fault of the rest of us trying to open businesses and go about our lives.

The fallout of this is that expert opinion goes down several more notches in the eyes of most people noticing, although I’m not sure their reputation has any further down to go without digging underground. The hypocrisy is blatant, although they try to explain it away as some people’s causes are more important than other people’s causes, or religious observances, or funerals – or lives, for that matter. The social justice warrior health experts signing on to the idea that demonstrations are an exception to the no-crowds rule consider themselves to be what Sowell called “the anointed,” in his book The Vision of the Anointed:

The Vision of the Anointed (1995) is a book by economist and political columnist Thomas Sowell which brands the anointed as promoters of a worldview concocted out of fantasy impervious to any real-world considerations. Sowell asserts that these thinkers, writers, and activists continue to be revered even in the face of evidence disproving their positions.

Sowell argues that American thought is dominated by a “prevailing vision” which seals itself off from any empirical evidence that is inconsistent with that vision.

–the prevailing social vision is dangerously close to sealing itself off from any discordant feedback from reality.
–it is so necessary to believe in a particular vision that evidence of its incorrectness is ignored, suppressed, or discredited
–empirical evidence is neither sought beforehand nor consulted after a policy has been instituted. Facts may be marshalled for a position already taken, but that is very different from systematically testing opposing theories by evidence.

Sowell’s work, by the way, was one of the foundations for my political change experience. It was a process I was already going through even before I found Sowell’s writing. But once I started to read some of his stuff I felt an extraordinary sense of relief, as though coming home. Here was a thinker who was saying things that made sense to me, in a coherent whole that helped me realize what I think I’d always believed but had never found articulated elsewhere.

[ADDENDUM: Glenn Reynolds adds:

The public health experts had one shot, and they blew it. If deaths do result [from the riots, the public health experts] should be specifically blamed — and named — as grandma-killers. If deaths don’t result, they should be specifically blamed — and named — as business-killers. And they can’t hide behind neutral science because they abandoned neutral science for politics and preening within their own social circles.

As I said above, though, the MSM will try to blame any spike on the re-opening of businesses. But Glenn is right – and it’s not the fault of science, but of the politicization of science by scientists. It’s a practice of which the left is very fond; the Soviets were big on it.]

David Horowitz on Al Sharpton and the Floyd memorial

The New Neo Posted on by

Horowitz writes:

In a twisted way it is fitting that the most destructive week for America in living memory should be topped off by a memorial featuring the nation’s chief racial arsonist Al Sharpton…

Not the least unexpectedly, the malevolent Sharpton used the platform the mourners provided to stoke the fires of racial hatred, attacking all of white America because black America’s problems and miseries stemmed from the fact that “for 401 years white America has had its knees on our necks” – or words to that effect.

Sharpton’s four-hundred and one years ago was actually 1619, when the creation of the United States of America was still 168 years in the future, but why quibble over arithmetic when you are intent on indicting a whole race of people so you can blame them for your problems? “Four-hundred years of slavery” of course has long been a common battle cry of the racial demagogues who 50 plus years ago overwhelmed and then corrupted the civil rights movement turning it into a racial shakedown operation after the death of Martin Luther King.

That American knee that Sharpton kept referring to , of course produced the revolutionary declaration that all men are created equal and have a God-given right to liberty, which ended 3,000 years of normalizing slavery – which still exists in Africa today.

Please read the whole thing. It covers a lot of territory but isn’t very long.

[NOTE: For those of you who might be unfamiliar with Horowitz, he was a big lefty radical in his youth, but now is conservative. I’ve written many posts about him, as well as about Sharpton.]

“Unexpectedly,” jobs report is better than predicted

The New Neo Posted on by

Ah, those experts. What is it they’re expert in again? Seems like the last few months have really undermined their creds.

The rate fell somewhat instead of rising. Good news.

But it’s not good news to the left, of course. Here’s what Politico has to say:

An unexpected drop in the unemployment rate set off a fresh round of debate on Friday over how fast the economy can rebound from the coronavirus pandemic and how much the government should intervene to help.

The unemployment rate fell to 13.3 percent in May from a peak of 14.7 percent in April, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported — surprising economists who had widely expected the rate to jump to about 20 percent in May, given that more than 40 million people have applied for unemployment benefits in recent weeks.

The economy gained 2.2 million jobs last month, as states started relaxing stay-at-home orders and opening for business. Markets rallied on the news, with the S&P 500 gaining nearly three percent by mid-day. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 3.8 percent.

President Donald Trump and his economic advisers, who have been prodding governors to relax stay-at-home orders, said the numbers show the economy will recover as quickly as they have been predicting. Trump at a Friday news conference compared the pandemic to a short-lived natural disaster and said the numbers are evidence of the “greatest comeback in American history.”

But some economists warned that the unemployment rate is still at highs not seen since the Great Depression — and that it remains hard to predict whether and how rapidly the upswing will continue. The nonpartisan CBO has estimated that unemployment won’t even near pre-pandemic levels — which was at 3.5 percent in February— by the end of next year.

Well, duuuuuh. It remains hard to predict. We need experts to tell us that? And it might not recover fully right away, to previous unemployment levels that were the lowest in umpteen
decades? Fancy that.

By no means are we out of the woods, either from naturally-occurring events or the plans of the left for more crises that might be manufactured. But I don’t think the right feels that some sort of decent recovery by November would be all that “unexpected.”

Just the experts.

It may seem like a fringe and nearly insane viewpoint when it first emerges in academia, but just watch…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and it will bleed into the non-academic world soon enough, and the Overton window will move to the point where the left will think it’s just a basic truth. And then half the country – the Democrat half – will agree, as well as the majority of the under-25 crowd.

Case in point: words are violence. That’s such an absurd equivalency that it contains its own obvious contradiction within it. Words are not violence. They are words. Words can incite and inspire violence if they meet a receptive mind. Expressing a difference of opinion is not violence. Words that make a person feel bad are not violence.

Remember the old children’s saying? Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me. I wonder whether kids say that anymore. Did they stop saying it decades ago, because it talked about violence? Did it allow bullies to keep on bullying, because of its nefarious suggestion that the bully could keep bloviating and it didn’t matter because it didn’t inflict actual violence?

Why am I going on and on about this? Because of the furor at The New York Times over Tom Cotton’s op-ed.

Case in point:

And it’s based on a web of Big Lies

The New Neo Posted on by

One of the worst things about what’s been happening now, and actually for a long time, is the acceptance of lies as truth. It’s easy to spread a simple lie that grabs people and energizes them. Truth sometimes requires deeper thought, and maybe even a little math on occasion.

This is worth listening to on the subject:

And in the same vein – the lies constantly being told on the left – please read this, this, and this. I plan a longer post some day on that last article in particular, which is about the statistics on police violence against black people.

If they can’t debate on the facts, lies will do. In fact, maybe lies are better, because you can shape them as you wish. Coordinated lies are best of all, because if practically everyone is saying it, it must be true.

And the widespread acceptance of the lies encourages more lies, because they work.

Authors of the Lancet hydroxychloroquine study retract it

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday I wrote about that influential Lancet study that had become suspect. Well, today its authors have retracted it.

The statement from the journal can be found here. Excerpt:

…[O]ur independent peer reviewers informed us that Surgisphere would not transfer the full dataset, client contracts, and the full ISO audit report to their servers for analysis as such transfer would violate client agreements and confidentiality requirements. As such, our reviewers were not able to conduct an independent and private peer review and therefore notified us of their withdrawal from the peer-review process.We always aspire to perform our research in accordance with the highest ethical and professional guidelines. We can never forget the responsibility we have as researchers to scrupulously ensure that we rely on data sources that adhere to our high standards. Based on this development, we can no longer vouch for the veracity of the primary data sources. Due to this unfortunate development, the authors request that the paper be retracted.

They deeply apologize blahbity blah blah blah.

My hunch is that this is a case of garbage in garbage out, perhaps purposeful on the part of someone (although not necessarily the authors). I believe that it was one of those reports too good to fact check, since it disproved the narrative of the evil Trump. But the defects in the study were blatant enough that it didn’t take much time for online sleuths to come up with valid doubts based on anomalies in the data.

Grant Napear’s firing and Václav Havel’s greengrocer parable

The New Neo Posted on by

Grant Napear, longtime announcer for the Sacramento Kings, learned the hard way what is unacceptable speech in today’s America:

Grant Napear resigned as the Kings’ TV play-by-play announcer and was fired from KHTK radio in Sacramento on Tuesday.

Napear was previously placed on administrative leave after he tweeted “All Lives Matter… Every single one.” His tweet was in response to former Kings center DeMarcus Cousins, who asked Napear for his take on the Black Lives Matter movement amid worldwide protests stemming from the death of George Floyd.

KHTK’s parent company, Bonneville International Corporation, said in a statement that Napear’s comments “do not reflect the views or values” of the company, and the timing of his tweet was “particularly insensitive.”

So apparently Bonneville International Corporation does not subscribe to the idea that all lives matter. Some lives matter much more than others. Note duly taken.

And the people who espouse this sort of thing consider themselves righteous. I believe – although I have no way of knowing – that Martin Luther King would be extremely saddened.

A phrase – “Black Lives Matter” – that one would think might mean something like “we need to pay attention to black people’s lives every bit as much as anyone else’s, because all lives matter” – has morphed into a sacred slogan. Calling attention to the human worth of everyone – all created equal – is now a racist insult rather than a nearly universally agreed-on statement of the basis for American liberty.

As I said, duly noted.

The situation we are in today is becoming more and more like that of , Václav Havel’s greengrocer, a story I just learned about today (hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit). The parable can be found here:

The Power of the Powerless was originally written by Havel in October 1978…

Havel biographer, John Keane, describes Havel’s definition of a post-totalitarian world: “Within the system, every individual is trapped within a dense network of the state’s governing instruments…themselves legitimated by a flexible but comprehensive ideology, a ‘secularized religion’…a labyrinth of influence, repression, fear and self-censorship which swallows up everyone within it, at the very least by rendering them silent, stultified and marked by some undesirable prejudices of the powerful…”

Havel uses the example of a greengrocer who displays in his shop the sign Workers of the world, unite!. Since failure to display the sign could be seen as disloyalty, he displays it and the sign becomes not a symbol of his enthusiasm for the regime, but a symbol of both his submission to it and humiliation by it. Havel returns repeatedly to this motif to show the contradictions between the “intentions of life” and the “intentions of systems”, i.e. between the individual and the state, in a totalitarian society.

An individual living within such a system must live a lie, to hide that which he truly believes and desires, and to do that which he must do to be left in peace and to survive.This is comparable to the classical tale of “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”

…they must live within a lie. They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it. For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system…

Individuals at each level within the bureaucracy must display their own equivalent of the grocer’s Workers of the world, unite! sign, oppressing those below them and in turn oppressed by those above. Against this public lie is contrasted a life lived in truth, a title suggested by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and his essay Live Not By Lies. Havel argued that the restoration of a free society could only be achieved through a paradigm based on the individual, “human existence,” and a fundamental reconstitution of one’s “respect for self, for others and for the universe”; to refuse to give power to empty slogans and meaningless rituals, to refuse to allow the lie to oppress oneself, and to refuse to be part of the lie that oppresses others. By doing so individuals illuminate their surroundings revealing to others that they have power.

At the moment in the US, strangely enough, it’s not the central government enforcing this – although that could certainly change soon enough with a change of administration. It’s the leftist mob that frightens people into submission, and the corporate entities and academic administrators who fire people for statements such as that of Napear.

Please read the whole thing; it has come to be more and more relevant in America today. And unfortunately, it may become even more so as time goes on.

[NOTE: Perhaps you have noticed, as I have, a host of emails from various companies you’ve dealt with (even tangentially) in the past, claiming their solidarity with the demonstrations and their renewed commitment to fight the rampant racism that infects our whole society. I cannot recall this sort of mass political mailing happening before. Perhaps it did on 9/11, but I don’t think email was quite as ubiquitous back then and I certainly don’t remember it happening. At any rate, it seems to me that most companies are very much feeling the need to put that greengrocer’s sign in their own windows.]

[ADDENDUM: See also this on the struggle sessions.]