When civility disappears you have tyranny

I left a comment over at Mr. Z's place after seeing how those on the Left were following various marching orders for how to 'stop disruption' at town hall meetings held by Congresscritters: bus people in with the same outfits, with pre-printed pamphlets, surround the Congresscritter to 'protect' them, and then work to shout down citizens who were vocally complaining about health care, the stimulus that isn't stimulation, bail outs, not actually reading bills before passing them, expectations of the National Debt crushing the Nation, and so on.

Here is the comment verbatim, all spelling errors and such left intact for the amusement of the audience:

The mask slips on the Left and we now see organized violence, unions threatening to 'confront' people like the SEIU and disrespect of our elders by organizations purporting to support their wishes... and forget that those people are from The Greatest Generation and will not go down without a fight when opposed by tyrants be they monsters at the head of mighty nations or sweet mouthed deceivers looking to snooker them out of the very care they say they will provide.

Yes there is an 'astroturf' campaign going on... HCAN, SEIU and others are all following a script... saying the same things, intimidating their fellow citizens and seeking to end debate by their presence and closing out those who disagree with them.

If this were Bush doing that, the Left would howl in outrage over 'civil rights violations' and corruption at the highest levels of government. Instead we get the sockpuppets of repetition who are part of the campaign, itself. Those wishing to dissent are not starting this fight. That takes those wanting to intimidate, coerce and stifle debate to do that. It is clearly stated, clearly laid out and enunciated.

Not by those wishing to hold their Representatives accountable.

But by those wishing to stop speech and democracy in action.

Amazing how the Left decries 'astroturf' campaigns after committing so many in the past few decades on everything from 'global warming' (or is the PC term now 'climate change', as if the climate never changes?), 'race relations', housing, expanding 'entitlements', and doing such lovely things as attacking the character of a US General during an active military campaign. Yes the Code Pink, MoveOn, anti-war groups, global warming/climate change priests, million being marches that don't get 10% of a million... all of the usual suspects have been 'astroturfing' with Big Money backing from various individuals and corporations for years. The problem was that they got so used to that style of money-backed 'organizing' in politics that they didn't ever expect to see any other kind... and aren't able to RECOGNIZE any other kind due to the hot house theatrics the Leftist 'organizers' have been staging for decades.

The nature of American political movements is not top-down, but bottom-up.

Martin Luther King showed up a couple of years after protests were actively going on and were bolstered by men coming from the integrated Armed Forces who had fought with their fellow Americans of all races in Korea. The bottom part of racism in the south, that held by individual men of a young age, had changed due to military service post-WWII.

The Anti-Viet Nam war movement did not start out as a National scale movement, but one of isolated protests in the early to mid-1960's. The civil rights 'organizers' who moved to that venue saw success of a limited kind, and their grand idea that this would 'save lives' overseas proved to be drastically wrong with the North Vietnamese killing their way through the south, the collapse of Laos to Communism and the take-over of Cambodia by the genocidal Pol Pot. Those dominos plunked on the beach with no further to follow, but the wash of red, in blood, told a tale quite different than the lovely scenario painted by the 'activists' of how everything would just go perfectly once the US left. Well, the silence of the grave is a form of perfection, I guess, but not the one predicted.

That 'activist' generation has a lot to answer for on that, but no one ever held their feet to the fire to put forward that the ideology presented was self-serving, nihilistic and lethal to those we supported overseas and those that depended on us to hold a line we said we would hold.

That generation also got the space program gutted and then ensured that the authoritarian presence of government would stifle private space industry by limiting space access. When I hear complaints about global warming/climate change and the dangers of nuclear power, plus how industry is so very, very bad... I look back to Gerard K. O'Neill's group of engineers who had put forth a perfectly good plan to start removing fossil fuel based power stations via a system of expanding space based presence and industry. That was done from 1968-1972. Somehow the idea of expanding industry to the one, guaranteed, non-polluting basis that is still available so as to expand the economy and start getting industry moved off the planet just never did get to those who wanted to get more money spent on welfare and expand the power of government. Say, did all those billions put out in anti-poverty programs actually end poverty?

Just asking.

Wanting government to do the hard work for you misses the point that government is non-productive: it has a negative role in our economy and our lives by design. Any government that tries to get a 'positive' role seems to end up being expensive, authoritarian, expansive against personal liberty, and starts to dictate your life, your health and when you should die to you. And stifle your freedom of expression, your liberty and your pursuit of happiness to boot. I don't need to go back to the 1930's for that! I just have to see a President wanting a 'snitch list' of Americans who have the temerity to DISAGREE WITH HIM and that self-same President getting up and saying that those who 'caused the health care problem' need to shut up.

Say, that's the LEFT! They have been the #1 cause of inefficiency via government through increased regulation and encroachment on personal liberties AND productivity for decades, now. Congress, too. And the President himself, come to that.

Meanwhile 'youths' in decaying France hold more 'car-b-que' events, and that sort of thing is now spreading to Germany not on the ethnic 'youths' side but from the LEFT. In Great Britain, meanwhile, those in constant back pain don't get to have access to medication for it via 'the government plan', so that the POOR are deprived of pain relief. Why, that is just so compassionate, isn't it? And forget about defending yourself or your home in the UK: try to do that and YOU will be arrested on assault charges and tried. They disarmed the public a few years ago, the Red Mafia saw fertile fields to deploy lots of illegal automatic weapons, and the UK police, the grand, old 'Bobbies' are now in body armor and ALSO toting rifles and automatic weapons.

That worked out so well, didn't it?

All these lovely, grand, multi-culti ideals of the Left tend to wind up with property destroyed, economies in the doldrums, birth rates below sustaining levels, crime on the rise, and individuals oppressed by government in large ways and small: from their life to their health, there is no end to the 'good' government can't do.

I remember, clearly, going through university in the mid-1980's that the largest, number one, by far out distancing all other Leftist complaints, bar none, no exceptions was the following: that the American people weren't 'activist' and wouldn't join marches, etc.

And now... now... when the American people actually do start to attend meetings, rallies, and hold protests, what do we get from the Left?

Complaints that this is 'organized'!

One...

Two...

Three....

AWWWWWWWWWW!! Poor Babies!!!

You got what you wished for.

Deal with it.

The people most effected by 'health care reform'? You know the ones that are being called 'fascists' for complaining?

Yeah, as I put up above, 'The Greatest Generation'.

Amazing to think that men who had stormed the Beaches of Normandy, Iwo Jima, Tarawa, Sicily... these guys who fought and killed fascists for years are being called 'fascists' by an ungrateful, wretched Left that can't appreciate just how much they have twisted the language around to protect themselves from reading history and understanding what fascism is. I am not seeing anyone in protests standing up for more government, for socialism, and for fascism.

No only those following the lock-step orders on the Left are doing that. They did, indeed, read 1984 as a training manual. That describes Europe, however, not America. When you follow socialist doctrine aimed towards limited transportation societies with a history of authoritarian regimes going back centuries, you can get Orwell. When you do that in America, however, you get Alice in Wonderland and find yourself not supporting Big Brother but the Red Queen with her races and your words meaning just whatever you want them to. Which is Duckspeak.

That winds up with 'Off with their heads', in case its been forgotten.

Yes, 1984 through the Looking Glass... what a grotesquely horrific thing these events portend.

As civility decreases on the part of the Left, we hear the voice of ordering authority.

The Big Red Queen arises.

In the most well armed civilian population on the planet.

The violence has already started from the Left.

They either step back, now, and disown the authoritarianism... or they find out just what happens in a Nation like America when the public actually DOES become active.

And it is not what they wanted, I'll tell you that right now having seen their expectations from the '80s onwards.

The Passing of Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

My recollections of Mr. Schlesinger are few, but I have always known his heart was in the right place, even when he did some things I have no toleration of.

He gave us insight into Jackson and FDR, two Presidents who did, indeed, change the world in their outlook. He staunchly supported American Exceptionalism and the power of people to use their rights creatively. He fought to ensure that the Communist Party in America would not be seen as acceptable, and was purely partisan of his old-line fealty to the Democratic Party. He embraced the values that America had to create a new world because we could work together as a People, and he rejected multiculturalism and a host of ills that go with it. In his latter years he staunchly supported the positions he had held and those that he had admired, even when evidence of their lacks came to the forefront. He walked well and firmly as an 'old school' defender of the Nation and his Party and those beliefs.

What he forgot in his views from Jackson was that one never, ever hands permanent power to government to cure temporary ills. Nor is government a means to enforce the public good, but to ensure that the public can be good and cause no ill to the common weal. By supporting those things he helped to lay the foundation of the ever increasing government we see today, and its encroachment upon the Rights and Liberties of the Citizenry. He had sought to help those poor oppressed by circumstances, and forgot that the Republic offers a hand up to those so beleaguered, but never a hand-out to make individuals beholden to the government. In that forgetting he undid much good that he did in life and lost grasp of the world that changed around him in ways he did not like, because of that.

He was a good man, all told, even with the problems caused by his fierce partisanship to his party... even when his party stepped from the Nation as a whole. A true 'Cold Warrior' who supported his Country, even when the commonality was disappearing because of those things he advocated. And a man who held to his beliefs even when they had turned on the Nation itself so that it now finds it difficult to even defend the Republic. For all the good that he did for many, we now pay for the drawbacks of those outlooks upon us to this day.

For the simple problem that We the People are the Government.

Not the Government over We the People.

The first of the 20th century liberals who would forget that the 19th century liberals warned and hard against many things, and that government needed to be checked so that People could be Free.

I honor his life even in disagreeing with what has come of it.