American_Jihad
Flaming Libs/Koranimals
WTF are we going to do with these crybabies, put them in FEMA camps for re-education...
Leftism: From Bloody Tragedy to Therapeutic Parody
But the danger is still as real as ever.
February 13, 2017
Bruce Thornton
Karl Marx famously said that historical facts and personages are repeated, first as tragedy, then as farce. But Marx could not have foreseen that the ideology he birthed would experience a third phase as well: therapeutic parody. The juvenile hysteria, tantrums, inflated “resistance,” and pointless vandalism of the left-wing Democrats are signs of leftism’s last phase. But that doesn’t make the left any less dangerous.
The “tragedy” wrought by the left is evident in its blood-stained history. The 100 million people murdered by purges and engineered famines were the victims of regimes founded on gulags, show-trials, lies, persecution, “re-education,” and censorship. Their deaths are one of history’s greatest tragedies. No more successful were the attempts to give collectivism “a human face” by creating the “soft despotism” of technocratic bureaucracies and agencies embodied in the EU and American progressivism, both increasingly sclerotic, ineffective, and desperate.
The “farce” came in the sixties, as one French ’68 leftist admitted in the famous graffito, “I am a Marxist, of the Groucho variety.” In less than a decade, the New Left’s embrace of hedonism and identity politics transformed it into a life-style choice and New Age cult for the affluent, pampered boomers rich enough to postpone adulthood indefinitely, and to avoid the consequences of their utopian fantasies. After a few spasms of terrorist attacks by outfits like the Weather Underground and the Symbionese Liberation Army, the tax-payer-subsidized graduate seminar and faculty lounge, not the factory floor or the terrorist cell, became the nursery of the “revolution.”
A booming economy subsidized whole hordes of such parlor pinks, caviar communists, and radical chic poseurs. They turned leftist slogans and symbols into status commodities that capitalists from Hollywood and Madison Avenue were eager to co-opt and profit from. “Revolution” meant wearing a Che t-shirt, rocking with The Clash, and reading Noam Chomsky, pop-cultural brands that camouflaged sexual hedonism, licentious individualism, and conspicuous consumption. Finally, the “long march through the institutions” created not the collectivist utopia, but privileged elites in media, academe, and government whose stock portfolios, bank accounts, affluent zip-codes, and tony life-styles were indistinguishable from those of the robber-baron capitalists they demonized.
...
The trivialization of the left into parody and a life-style accessory, however, doesn’t mean it’s not still dangerous. Today’s lefties may be a joke, but they still wield enormous influence over education, media, and popular culture. They are well-financed by plutocrats who find cover for their privilege by supporting a dense network of leftist foundations and organizations, as the Freedom Center’s Discover the Networks documents. And the left fights dirty, using media lies, fake news, sympathetic federal and state judges, saboteurs infesting federal agencies, George Soros rent-a-protestors, fat-cat Democrats like Elizabeth Warren (net worth $8.75 million), and mobs of vandals to advance their aims. More important, they enjoy a huge advantage in their redistributionist policies that appeal to people’s timeless instinct to get something for nothing, the classic modus operandi of the tyrant eager to seize power.
So while we laugh at and scorn “snowflake” leftists whimpering and crying and throwing fits, we need to stay vigilant, and make sure the Trump administration and the Republican Congress dismantle the governmental infrastructure and polices that empower the left. There are ways other than gulags, famines, and bloody purges to destroy a people’s freedom.
Leftism: From Bloody Tragedy to Therapeutic Parody
Leftism: From Bloody Tragedy to Therapeutic Parody
But the danger is still as real as ever.
February 13, 2017
Bruce Thornton
Karl Marx famously said that historical facts and personages are repeated, first as tragedy, then as farce. But Marx could not have foreseen that the ideology he birthed would experience a third phase as well: therapeutic parody. The juvenile hysteria, tantrums, inflated “resistance,” and pointless vandalism of the left-wing Democrats are signs of leftism’s last phase. But that doesn’t make the left any less dangerous.
The “tragedy” wrought by the left is evident in its blood-stained history. The 100 million people murdered by purges and engineered famines were the victims of regimes founded on gulags, show-trials, lies, persecution, “re-education,” and censorship. Their deaths are one of history’s greatest tragedies. No more successful were the attempts to give collectivism “a human face” by creating the “soft despotism” of technocratic bureaucracies and agencies embodied in the EU and American progressivism, both increasingly sclerotic, ineffective, and desperate.
The “farce” came in the sixties, as one French ’68 leftist admitted in the famous graffito, “I am a Marxist, of the Groucho variety.” In less than a decade, the New Left’s embrace of hedonism and identity politics transformed it into a life-style choice and New Age cult for the affluent, pampered boomers rich enough to postpone adulthood indefinitely, and to avoid the consequences of their utopian fantasies. After a few spasms of terrorist attacks by outfits like the Weather Underground and the Symbionese Liberation Army, the tax-payer-subsidized graduate seminar and faculty lounge, not the factory floor or the terrorist cell, became the nursery of the “revolution.”
A booming economy subsidized whole hordes of such parlor pinks, caviar communists, and radical chic poseurs. They turned leftist slogans and symbols into status commodities that capitalists from Hollywood and Madison Avenue were eager to co-opt and profit from. “Revolution” meant wearing a Che t-shirt, rocking with The Clash, and reading Noam Chomsky, pop-cultural brands that camouflaged sexual hedonism, licentious individualism, and conspicuous consumption. Finally, the “long march through the institutions” created not the collectivist utopia, but privileged elites in media, academe, and government whose stock portfolios, bank accounts, affluent zip-codes, and tony life-styles were indistinguishable from those of the robber-baron capitalists they demonized.
...
The trivialization of the left into parody and a life-style accessory, however, doesn’t mean it’s not still dangerous. Today’s lefties may be a joke, but they still wield enormous influence over education, media, and popular culture. They are well-financed by plutocrats who find cover for their privilege by supporting a dense network of leftist foundations and organizations, as the Freedom Center’s Discover the Networks documents. And the left fights dirty, using media lies, fake news, sympathetic federal and state judges, saboteurs infesting federal agencies, George Soros rent-a-protestors, fat-cat Democrats like Elizabeth Warren (net worth $8.75 million), and mobs of vandals to advance their aims. More important, they enjoy a huge advantage in their redistributionist policies that appeal to people’s timeless instinct to get something for nothing, the classic modus operandi of the tyrant eager to seize power.
So while we laugh at and scorn “snowflake” leftists whimpering and crying and throwing fits, we need to stay vigilant, and make sure the Trump administration and the Republican Congress dismantle the governmental infrastructure and polices that empower the left. There are ways other than gulags, famines, and bloody purges to destroy a people’s freedom.
Leftism: From Bloody Tragedy to Therapeutic Parody
