Tuesday, June 26, 2018

Know your enemy #1: The violent "progressives"


It helps when the enemy defines him- or herself, so that we know at whom to aim.

Do you think that being asked to leave a restaurant, or having your meal interrupted, or being called by the public is bad? My fascism-enabling friends, this is only the beginning.

. . .

Rather than detail a laundry list of all the Trump outrages, I ask you simply to consider all of the very real human costs that those outrages have already inflicted on human beings in America and abroad. Some of those outrages, like ripping families apart at the border, show their costs immediately; others, like eschewing the fight against climate change and neutering the EPA and mainstreaming white nationalist ideas, will be manifesting their costs for many decades to come. But the costs are real. We are the ones who are suffering and will suffer them. By and large, the people responsible for these decisions will be wealthy and famous and powerful enough to insulate themselves from those costs. Unless we decide to see to it that they must face them.

. . .

People die because of political decisions every day. Politics is real. This is what is on one side of our current disagreement: death, and human rights, and freedom, and equality. And this is what is on the other side: wanting to eat at a nice restaurant without having anyone remind you that you are ruining people’s lives. The sides of this scale are not even close to balancing yet.

This is all going to get more extreme. And it should. We are living in extreme times. The harm that is being done to all of us by the people in the American government is extreme. To imagine that Mexican immigrants should happily cook for and serve meals to people who enable a man who is determined to demonize and persecute them as subhuman criminals is far more outrageous than the idea that those enablers should not be served in restaurants. I do not believe that Trump administration officials should be able to live their lives in peace and affluence while they inflict serious harms on large portions of the American population. Not being able to go to restaurants and attend parties and be celebrated is just the minimum baseline here. These people, who are pushing America merrily down the road to fascism and white nationalism, are delusional if they do not think that the backlash is going to get much worse. Wait until the recession comes. Wait until Trump starts a war. Wait until the racism this administration is stoking begins to explode into violence more frequently. Read a ******* history book. Read a recent history book. The U.S. had thousands of domestic bombings per year in the early 1970s. This is what happens when citizens decide en masse that their political system is corrupt, racist, and unresponsive. The people out of power have only just begun to flex their dissatisfaction. The day will come, sooner that you all think, when Trump administration officials will look back fondly on the time when all they had to worry about was getting hollered at at a Mexican restaurant. When you aggressively **** with people’s lives, you should not be surprised when they decide to **** with yours.

There's more at the link.

The amount of drivel in that screed is so vast as to be almost impossible to quantify.  It makes up its own alleged "truth" out of whole cloth, ignoring reality.  Consider just a few:
  • "the Trump outrages" - that's subjective opinion, not quantified as objective fact.
  • "persecute them as subhuman criminals" - I haven't heard anyone refer to illegal aliens as "subhuman", but they are, by definition, criminals.  This has been true for as long as US laws, and the Constitution on which they are based, have been in effect, under both liberals and conservatives, and from both left- and right-wing legal perspectives.  It's objective fact;  and if you deny that it is, you deny the rule of law.
  • "These people, who are pushing America merrily down the road to fascism and white nationalism" - really?  The author can say that with a straight face, when the tactics of his side are far more fascist than anything I've seen from Trump supporters?  He claims to understand history, but historically, progressives and far-left individuals and groups are much closer to fascism than their ideological opponents.  That's why so few of them, who so freely fling the label "Nazi", refuse to admit that the proper name of that group was the "National Socialist German Workers' Party".  Yes, Nazis were, by factual, historical definition, left-wing, not right-wing.  Put that in your historical pipe and smoke it.

George Santayana famously observed, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it".  Given his self-asserted understanding of history, one wonders why the author of that article fails to remember or understand so much of history.  Rest assured, sooner or later he and his ilk will mess with the wrong people, in the wrong place;  and when they do, they will learn the hard way that the lessons of history - about what happens to those who fail to think things through - are still valid;  because those lessons will be inflicted upon them.

I note that none of the vitriolic in-your-face reprisals upon the author's ideological enemies have been reported from, shall we say, areas more rational and less ideological.  That's because right-thinking people will most likely soon put a stop to them, probably without bothering to call the police except to clean up the resulting mess.  We understand what happens when you allow violence to reign unchecked . . . so we check it, to make sure it doesn't come back.

As for the "Nazi" label, flung around so freely by progressives and far-left individuals and organizations:  both of my parents fought Nazism during World War II, my father in uniform, my mother on the "Home Front".  I fought it in South Africa.  If necessary, I have no problem doing so again - and I know how to identify it, and I know who's exhibiting its characteristics right now.  Hint:  it's not the Trump administration.

Peter

13 comments:

Shark said...

I fear that this encouraged threatening and ostracizing behavior will boil over into shattering violence (a la the baseball field shootings). Maxine Waters - - the lunatic Democratic representative from the 43rd Congressional District in California - - continues to prove why she is unfit for office by encouraging such insane behavior. More threats from the "tolerant leftists"/socialists. Patience is a virtue...up to a point. We'll see what happens when conservatives run out of it.

urbane legend said...

Some of my relatives are hard core leftists. One of them participated in the Million Women March ( been there, got the hat ). I always want to say to her, " I see Roe v Wade was struck down, then say, uh, wait; it hasn't been, like you said it would be. And where are those camps you said homosexuals would be put in? There aren't any, are there? So maybe you should take a deep breath and recognize that you were wrong. " I am afraid she would have a screaming, spitting fit of madness and do one of us harm. Yet otherwise she is an intelligent person.

How do people get like that? There are things in the world that bother me, but unless it obviously affects the future of mankind I don't let it control me. Why do these leftists do it? Any reasonable person would declare that a mental illness.

kamas716 said...

The more they talk, the more I think stocking up on ammo is a good investment (even out here in the sticks). Outing themselves like this just provides a more target rich environment.

kamas716 said...

Wow! I went and looked at some of the other "articles" that dude has had a bowel movement over, and they are special. I'm not sure he could find a non-progressive that wasn't a caricature if you plopped him down in the middle of Williston, ND.

Rob said...

It's part of a propaganda campaign. It appears well planned, well financed & far reaching.

Look how fast the publicity was in high gear after the shooting in Florida. The talk today isn't about all the warning signs & ignored public posting it's about disarming America. That's just another part to the campaign.

This is wide spread, they are pulling out pictures & stories of things the last administration did and spreading wide spread blame for this action on Trump.

With the MSM is 90% owned by those who are doing this to America it's way easier than it would have been 20 years ago.

Did you see where Mrs Clinton is out bad mouthing the Electoral College? Without the Electoral College the NY-NJ-CT tri-state area & SoCal would control the Presidential elections.
I've no doubt that the MSM can contol those urban areas, they did it in the last election.

America is in the middle of a propaganda attack to change how things are.

MadMcAl said...

While I agree with most of what you wrote here, you made an error with the NSDAP (the Nazi party for the uninformed).
It is of course true that they had socialist in their name, but that was merely a fig leaf to pander to the more impressionable left leaning idiots in the Weimar Republic.
Despite the inclusion they where pretty much right extremists.

Of course the important word here is extremist, and that, more than their right leaning defined their actions. That may be the reason why so many modern left extremist groups seem so very familiar in their actions.

Beans said...

MadMcAl. The Nazis were National Socialists. They believed the Government was the source of all direction and control. One can make money, and make objects to make money, but the Government still controls what you make and who you sell it to (which, unfortunately, makes us in the USA... National Socialists. Yes, I admit it, our government is a national socialist form of government. Rule by bureaucrat.)

What the Nazis were was far righter (but still left) of the Reds and other international communist and international socialist groups that were in existence at the time. The far right Germans were the ones that sat back and gleefully or warily watched the internationalists get their asses handed to them by the nationalists, with the hope that the two groups of socialists would beat each other up and end up weak.

Socialism as a political concept has been part of the Germanic soul since at least the medieval era. Constant wars and struggles have been fought by various 'people's movements' all intent on various spread the wealth programs. Nazi-ism was just the most shocking of these groups to appear. Socialism still existed after the Nazis were forcefully punched in the snout, leading us to the socialistic crapfest of Merkle's party.

Fig Leaf? No. It was, just like the Democrat or American Socialist Parties, definitely a political system of "All for the top tier, none for the proles." (As witnessed by our fine American socialist Bernie Sanders, who has managed in the last two years to amass over $1M per year while owning 3 houses. Yet he wants people who make $200k to donate a good portion of their money and assets to the 'less fortunate.' All for me and none for thee philosophy.)(Or by the past president leaving office richer than when he went in.)

Same with Fascism, in Italy. Yes, it was right wing, for Italy, at that time, to an extent. But... still very socialist and left of center on the political spectrum.

FDR and his administration did a very good job of nationally socializing our nation during his mishandling of the Great Depression, but that's a whole nother blogpost worth of talking points, arguments and counter-arguments.

Will said...

MadMcAl:

The media and the socialists here in the US made a concerted effort to paint the NAZI Party as right wing because they were very displeased that socialism was getting such bad PR due to the Germans. That effort started during the war, and was ramped up greatly afterwards. It was so effective that most people here believe it, as you do. You have been fooled. The media and schools, twin propaganda arms.

MadMcAl said...

Just a few points here.

1. Socialism != Communism. It baffles me every time when people begin to talk or write about the horrors of socialism and what they describe is communism. Socialism if used in moderation is IMO essential to modern society. But only insofar that those that REALLY can't work are taken care of. In other words, children, disabled people and the old who can't work anymore. No more, no less. And that the government regulates the market to establish a level playing field (meaning that no Rockefeller can send his goons to break up the equipment - and workers - of his competitors). The rest is the duty of the market economy.

2. As I see it, the difference between the left and right extremists are more or less just philosophical. And the philosophies of the left more or less demand that everyone is equal (and the left demagogues use that to demand a nanny state) while the right insists that there is a hierarchy of groups, with group x (and that is strangely always the group that the leaders of a right wing association belong to, funny that right?) at the very top and then group y as being at fault (the right demagogues use that to demand a autocracy, aka nanny state). Usually you can replace the word group with race, but not always, as sexual orientation, religion and so on have been used as well. In this context the Nazis where very much right extremists. Don't get me wrong, I am not saying that these are the differences between right normal and left normal. The extremist version has barely anything in common with the normal version. And much less with the people.

3. I carefully use the word extremists here, as they are at best loosely connected to the philosophy they pretend to follow. Extremists are essentially the proof that Terry Pratchett was right with his description of mob IQ. They would believe that the moon is made out of cheese if the right person (with the right kind of association) tells them that, but one person declared as enemy of their group couldn't convince them that water is wet.

Unknown said...

A full third of the Nazi's political platform was textbook socialism.
And they implemented those planks as soon as they took power.

In Europe, right wing vs. left wing came from the French Revolution.
The sticking point wasn't about who controlled the factors of production. Outside of the UK, there was broad-based consensus that the State controlled the factors of production.
The left/right divide was over the aristocracy.
The Nazis were fully socialist, and promptly divested the nobility of their capital. But the nobility of Germany retained high status, and were honored for their generations of service to the German State and the German people.
This made the Nazi's "right-wing" in the European sense.
Add in a few generations of prominent useful idiots desperate to confuse the issue, and you get people declaring with a straight face that the German Socialist Worker's Party was somehow not Socialist. (Spoiler: They were vehemently socialist.)

Will said...

MadMcAl:

Wow! Lots of fantasy in your views, all that utopianism. Unfortunately, Human Nature has the deciding vote. People like you are the reason that socialism and communism continue to be attempted. "Do it again, only harder! Surely it will work this time, if only we put the RIGHT people into power". Well, that, and the craving for power over people.

The Overgrown Hobbit said...

Ah... You don't see it. Just apply that goober's rules to HIM and these the wealthy Democrats and progressives like him in the media and politics.

He shouldn't want to implement a national policy of "we get to abuse people who fit those criteria". Really. There are a LOT of crazy Bernie Bros. in the U.S.

deb harvey said...

extend your right hand behind you as far as it goes, do the same with the left.
they are now in the same place. in politics this place is fascism.
the graph of right and left is not a line, it is a circle.
add in fallen human nature-that is, greed and envy- and you have fascism.