Wednesday, May 25, 2016

Is the progressive Left taking a leaf out of the Marine Corps' book?


That's the intriguing idea posited by Timothy Birdnow in this article.  Here's an excerpt.

A thought occurred to me the other day, which does actually happen to me now and then; the whole of modern culture, the political correctness, the way the left approaches the rest of us, is very much a kind of boot camp for communism. The purpose of military boot camp is to break down the individual, to wed him to the group, to get him to believe things and do things that are clearly irrational, and to get him to obey orders unquestioningly. In the military this serves a real purpose, because a soldier has to act in ways contrary to personal interest and security.

Here is a good explanation of the purpose of boot camp from a Marine drill instructor:

“You have to train 18-year-olds to run to the sound of gunfire and perform under fire and the threat of death.

This act defies all logic, goes against all human instinct, and takes one of the most intensive acts of psychological reprogramming to overcome.”

Which is precisely what the Progressive Left must do; convince the public to defy logic, to defy human instinct, to fundamentally reprogram the American citizen.

The article continues:

“Another thing that is important is that everything they do is for a purpose, a rehearsed, manufactured, and engineered purpose.

It is about something else entirely.

[...]

“The most important single thing to know about boot camp is that it is 100 percent designed to reprogram children and civilians into warriors. It places within them a sense that they are expected to do important things, far more important things than could be expected from other 18-year-olds. This is all happening during one of the most intensely stressful periods of your life, when you are kept isolated from contact with your family and friends and taught that everything you were before entering the Marines was weak and lacking any real value until you too are a Marine. Cults are made this way too. I’m just saying. But in all seriousness, the psychological transformation of boot camp is a very intense and intentional effort by the Marine Corps to make warriors able to fight and kill out of kids who have just barely left high school. From the point that you graduate boot camp, you will be different and have parts of the Marine Corps culture as part of your psyche.”

See where I’m going with this?  Everything the Progressives do has a purpose, and usually not the one that is stated by them. Gay marriage, for instance, or transgendered bathrooms, or Black Lives Matter uprisings, have little to do with fairness for homosexuals and everything to do with breaking down the dominant culture.

It recruits a certain number of children or young people and turns them into social justice warriors, telling them they are fighting for freedom and justice. Those who won’t joint the campaigns are seen as the enemy, and are forced into silence through shaming, through bullying, through acts of aggression. You are taught that everything you were was weak and pathetic, oppressive and, well, wrong or even evil. You have to change, to become one of them.

Some of the ways that this is done is through a series of extremely well planned and timed events that, by themselves, are meaningless, but when strategically combined together will change a person.

The idea is to change people. While some won’t go along, many others - particularly the youths - will embrace the change, become social justice warriors.

There's much more at the link.  Challenging and recommended reading.

I've long known how all-encompassing are the demands imposed by Communism, Marxism, socialism, or any other kind of far-left-wing 'ism' on their followers.  I saw it at first hand in Africa, where hard-left-ideology terrorists thought nothing of blowing up infants so long as they could kill an enemy soldier by doing so, or gutting the corpse of a babe in arms and using its body to smuggle weapons through police roadblocks.  (Think I'm exaggerating?  I'm not.  Those things really happened.)  That sort of ideology dehumanizes those professing it, and they proceed to dehumanize all the 'converts' to their cause.  It's the only way they can succeed, and they know it.

For myself, I hold to the teachings of Christianity.  Those teachings tell us that there will come a Judgment for all of us.  I wouldn't like to be in the shoes of those who did such things when that time comes . . .

Peter

3 comments:

Gorges Smythe said...

Amen.

Akatsukami said...

"You have to train 18-year-olds to run to the sound of gunfire and perform under fire and the threat of death."

What will be the reaction of the social justice whores when they realize that that's just they were trained for?

JK Brown said...

I'm just reading Ludwig von Mises' 'Planned Chaos'. Writing in 1947, he is very informative on the rise of socialism, and the variant communism which was redefined by Lenin to oppose the nationalist socialist who wanted to bring socialism via democracy as opposed to one giant international socialist dictatorship by Lenin, then Stalin brought about through revolution and civil war.

One recurring element is the seemingly systemic resistance of the US to socialism/communism due to our backwardness in class consciousness. When I read that it occurred to me that raising such class consciousness seems to be one major goal of our current Leftists.


"But they are not too dull to see that Marx considered those Western countries [Great Britain, France, Germany] as much more advanced than Russia. Then some of these students of economic policies and statistics begin to suspect that the standard of living of the masses is much higher in the capitalist countries than in their own country. How can this be? Why are conditions much more propitious in the United States which—although foremost in capitalist production—is most backward in awakening class-consciousness in the proletarians?

"The inference from these facts seems inescapable. If the most advanced countries do not adopt communism and fare rather well under capitalism, if communism is limited to a country which Marx considered as backward [Russia] and does not bring about riches for all, is not perhaps the correct interpretation that communism is a feature of backward countries and results in general poverty? Must not a Russian patriot be ashamed of the fact that his country is committed to this system?"

von Mises, Ludwig (2010-12-16). Planned Chaos (LvMI)

von Mises points out that the aggressiveness of the Soviet Union was driven by the need to keep the intelligentsia from considering the reality

"The Soviets must conquer the world or else they are menaced in their own country by a defection of the intelligentsia. It is concern about the ideological state of Russia’s shrewdest minds that pushes Stalin’s Russia towards unflinching aggression."

von Mises, Ludwig (2010-12-16). Planned Chaos

With the fall of Communism, all that happened was the field was cleared for more aggression by the incremental socialists to push toward their goal by increasing interventionism and, of course, the conditioning of the weak minds of children of what many assume are the bourgeoisie, but ironically, are the working class as so few of those kids parents own the means of production and are rather just managers who work for a wage. What is termed the working class, in the US, are the trades. Many of whom own their own businesses and means of production.