Americans face two basic alternatives about how they want to live: under our U.S. Constitution with its individual freedoms, responsibilities, and protections with limited government intrusion into our lives on one side
or under Socialism or the "Tyranny of the Collective" which divides us into groups and forces the individual into submission to the collective. The individual becomes Ralph Ellison's,
Invisible Man.
The post will be long and several subtopics will be mentioned:
- individual freedoms and responsibilities;
- Saul Alinsky: the patron saint of "community organizers" and of "it takes a village" people;
- the "unholy" alliance of Progressives, the Far-Left, and Islamic Theocracy;
- the march of globalization's oppression and tyranny; and
- the goal of our overlords to "divide and conquer" us. How're they doing?
Americans have tried their communes on small scales and do so even today but the population at large was allowed to "live and let live" as were the communes generally. Waco and Ruby Ridge excepted.
Our basic individual freedoms and liberties combined with those attendant responsibilities remained intact. Yet, over the years of the 20th Century, the American Progressive movement under different names, guises, and leadership has been working for the "collective", for the incorporation of the "commune-at-large" and its leaders have been chipping away at the U.S. Constitution and our individual freedoms and responsibilities to each other for a good 100 years now.
America was not created as a democracy which at its worse is mob rule; America was created as a democratic representative republic with emphasis on the freedoms and responsibilities of the individual. We have long since been shoved over the cliff from that ideal.
The Russian model did not work because the serfs in Russia back in the mid-1800's essentially lived in villages which were communes. The serfs were freed and all heck broke loose. To put it simply, it seems that the Industrial Revolution did many things, one of which was to grow large population centers. From these centers grew all sorts of good and evil to be controlled or "solved" by the elite.
The ideas of
Saul Alinsky and other "collectivists" or Marxists have been used successfully to divide the American public along the lines of class warfare, ethnicity, religious ideology, and any other wedge points of division that could be devised to tear us apart from our Founders' brilliant ideal. And of course, our Founders found themselves in tussles and tugs-of-ideological warfare. Ideological disagreements are not new; arguably they can be healthy.
In contrast to Islamism, the goal of the Progressives was to eradicate God, the 'opiate of the masses', from the American psyche. In a stroke of brilliance, Islam applied to god as the controller of the individual setting up a political theocracy that appears to be heavily based in peer pressure applied upon the individual to suppress his or her individuality and to conform.
In a broader sense, Progressivism heralded by today's Socialist Democrats or liberals is - in premise - not far removed from the basic goals of Islamic Theocracy - to bend the individual to the collective will, to mob rule controlled by the elite. Both demand the submission of the individual - if he or she is not a Socialist Democrat - to the overlords by whatever name they take. The individual is suppressed and even ground under the control of the collective or the ummah, as it were. The eradication of the individual and the individual's spirit or soul is only used as fodder for the "collective," grist for the mill.
Make no mistake, I do not direct these comments toward any of the three major political parties to the exclusion of the other including "political Islam" as it is classified by proponents of the theocracy. One of the best descriptions I have found about the brilliance of Islam is from Citizen Warrior:
The Terrifying Brilliance of the Islamic Memeplex. There is one more link that belongs here by Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser:
Getting Real on Shariah in which Dr. Jasser discusses Islamism - the collective - and Shariah, and our secular law.
To varying degrees, we have all been duped by any number of administrations or activists within those administrations - I make no distinction between either political "party", each of which has acted from time to time with the full thrust and power of the legislative branch to replace traditional religions with new brands: Marxism, The Theology of Global Warming/Climate Change, The Theology of Environmentalism / Going Green, et al. I submit that even the idealists - who are working to destroy capitalism and individual freedoms worldwide - do not know the result of the monster they will have unleashed. They believe that they can control it but my guess is no.
My guess - they may well destroy the systems that enabled them the freedom to thrive and thus create a vacuum which the theocracy of Imperial or "political" Islam is poised to fill; the world domination of which Mahmoud Ahmadinejad dreams and toward which he strives.
The men and women who practice what is known as spiritual Islam and who call for the reformation of Islam - those who want to live peacefully within the American representative republic based upon the separation of church and state which meant that we would not have a "state religion" as Islam is - will simply be swept up in the cascade like pebbles tumbling in waves crashing on the shore along with the rest of us if the "collectivists" succeed.
We average citizens who at heart basically agree in the good of our people, of our nation, have been primed, starved for statesmanship-leadership, torn from the basics of our founding principles - and like the starved and baited, abused dogs of a brutal athlete - we have been left to tear each other apart - like the gladiators in the Roman Coliseum for the amusement of our overlords who "create" the crisis designed to divide us. Didn't someone recently say, "Never waste a crisis" that can be used toward advancing the goal of restricting freedoms.
From The Limbaugh Letter, April 2009, page 2, comes this quotation.
In 1995 Barack Obama told The Chicago Reader:
"In America we have this strong bias toward individual action. You know, we idolize the John Wayne hero who comes in to correct things with both guns blazing. But individual actions, individual dreams are not sufficient. We must unite in collective action, build collective institutions and organizations."
In Limbaugh's use of the word "collective" in his article, not Obama's quotation above, Rush seems to mean that we who support individual freedoms must act together or be steam-rolled. I recommend this issue of the Limbaugh Letter and the rest of that article with quotations from the March 24, 2009 news story in The Washington Post: "U.S. Seeks Expanded Power to Seize Firms." We see that in action every day.
In this post, imagine that we are civil human beings sitting around our own small conference room table with our different views and before us we have print-outs of:
I'll leave the research on the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and Sharia Finance as well as Sharia Law to interested souls.
One recent post that you may find informative is
The End of Collectivism by Tristan Yates at Pajamas Media (May 11, 2009). An excellent work.
The major point before us is a question that was asked of me by a reader several years ago. The question essentially was, when we sit back from the table a bit and remove ourselves emotionally from the "red meat" issues thrown to the starved tigers of the Roman Circus, how are these various listed "initiatives" such as those addressed at the G-20 meeting and at dozens of other such gatherings bringing about global collective oppression or tyranny?
Some of us would hail Mr. Obama for meeting with Hugo Chavez for example - but others may see it as simply an extension of Mr. Bush II's handshake on the North American Union and the SPP with Vicente Fox and Paul Martin of Canada.
I'm asking that we all start looking at the strategy of these geo-political undertakings and moves designed to end national sovereignty and individual freedoms and individual accountability.
I'm asking that we start looking at some issues from a broader perspective: every action (national and international) that moves individual freedoms and liberties forward and every action that restricts and oppresses individual freedoms and responsibilities. Start looking at every action that restricts free enterprise and every action that puts entrepreneurs under the thumb of regulators who have never run a business. For example, do you want to trust decisions about your medical treatment to administrative assistants with check lists in triplicate?
And then - if you have looked at the world map and seen how it is being carved up with individual nations being annihilated under groups such as the European Union or Islamic Republics - take a look at the books:
American Progressivism: A Reader by Ronald J. Pestritto mentioned by Glenn Beck,
1984, and Ray Bradbury's
Fahrenheit 451 to read about the "book people", arguably the home schoolers of our times. Of course, we cannot omit the great
Animal Farm.
Many heavy-hitter American bloggers are on top of the battle for the survival of our Bill of Rights and they are well on top of scrutinizing the Obama "Play for Power" Monopoly Board Administration. I may begin to include more of what is going on in the fight for their same freedoms by our brothers and sisters in the EU with the Treaty of Lisbon and the Mediterranean Union. Don't know yet...
At my core, I believe in the goodness of the American people. I believe that more joins us than separates us. A friend living at another beach tells me that I am deluded; that Americans are weak and lazy but I say we are overwhelmed.
Equally, I believe that our overlords in the Roman Circus, pointing their thumbs down to destroy our freedoms and our lives through socialized "health care" which is like the newspeak of 1984 where "health care" means "rationing of medical assistance, have been extraordinarily successful at driving us apart.
These divisions are not new endeavors, certainly not originating with Mr. Obama; no, the baton has simply been passed to him from his predecessors; he is only the most recent in a long line of presidential standard bearers with the agenda of ending American sovereignty and weakening our nation, moving us into the "New World Order." As I have said in earlier posts, making America just a "rest stop" on the highway to Canada. But who are the "king-makers" and "king-controllers"? Who controls America's "kings" once they enter the White House?
The "war for the survival for individual freedoms vs universal socialism" has progressed way beyond the borders of the United States of America and way beyond the provencial ideologies of political parties and politically-based theocracies.
So, how do we keep our freedoms to be able to disagree with each other and yet keep our nation intact? And solve issues without making our producers "slaves" and our non-producers "de facto thieves" bound as tightly in their chains of "class warfare" from which they can never free themselves just as the chains that bind the producers cannot be cut? Yet what incentive is there for the producers to remain producers?
How do we expand our view to see that we are but one nation under attack - from within and from without - which in some way explains why things are moving so quickly during these first days of Obama's reign?
Under the "Tyranny of the Collective", the individual passes away and only the herd remains. The individual is trampled under foot. We're better than that. Western Civilization is better than that. Warts and all - we have done more to right our wrongs but these take time and they take us working together. But as I watch the American people vote, sitting in the poling places watching and listening, I am beginning to see confirmed for me again that "freedom is hard work" and, as a collective, we may just be tired of the hard work and vigilance that freedom demands.
Have we given up our freedoms - "Government is best which governs least." - for illusions of our mama government nanny nursing us?
If we just lean back from the edge of the conference room table a bit and look at the bigger picture, look at the global map, we may see that much more rests on our selections at election time if we want to keep the light shining in that "Shining City on a Hill."
Or as Mark Steyn writes when addressing "freedom of speech", is it already
Lights Out?
In our search for solutions and answers, we cannot be naive in the face of this:
Peace and dialogue between Islam and faiths...
Mr. Obama had religious symbols covered over when he spoke recently. How long before the cross must be removed from the steeples of your churches to make room for the new "theocracy"? I don't know what name 'it' will take. It is in your hands to protect our freedoms
non-violently to be sure but acting with your political voice.
Perhaps saving our representative republic and our individual freedoms is the "challenge" of our times. As Voltaire said, "It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong."
It is time to return to our roots, IN GOD WE TRUST... to our roots of individual rights, freedoms, responsibilities, and accountability; and end the growth of the "collective". No room exists for the individual within the collective.
Under the collective, no one is equal because the individual is gone and only the 'group' remains. Is that what Americans want? Will we settle for the 'tyranny of the collective?"
Or as Tristan Yates admirably writes have we reached
The End of the Collectivism?
Labels: Individual Freedoms, tyranny
