3 posts tagged “liberals”
Does anyone know where the religious-right stands on revering the flag as an image of America?
I think we can trust that they have read Exodus 20:4 in their King James: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.”
“Appease” is used as a pejorative term of weakness by those that advocates violence or the threat of its use in the solution of various kinds of disagreements--particularly those that involve conflicting interest between people of different nations.
The propagandists that use this term would like to claim that the world’s troubles with Adolph Hitler were in large part due to Neville Chamberlain traveling to in Munich1938 and entering into the Munich Agreement.
Well before September 1938, Hitler had completely consolidated his dictatorial control over Germany, and had ridden into Austria and taken over as a returning and liberating hero.
The rise of Hitler is not a lesson in appeasement, but one of slipping into being a nation of men and not law.
By using fear and the threat of foreign devils (axis of evil and WMDs comes to mind), a continuous barrage of propaganda, intimidation of the press, and with the support of a small but willing pack of sycophantic followers and opportunists, Hitler subverted the existing rule of law and crushed any opposition by claiming that those that questioned were unpatriotic, not good Germans, traitors or foolish appeasers—extraordinary means were needed in extraordinary times (and what’s the matter with a little water boarding?).
How did this happen? In part, as Edmund Burke suggested, “All that is necessary for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing.”
But the forces that the good people of Germany faced were subtle and more sinister than they could ever imagine. The subversion of freedom was also so gradual that they never recognized a point of no return; by then anyone that did not go along was as much of an enemy as were the Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, foreigners, and other evil doers.
After Hitler’s Germany came to an end, a majority of Germans could legitimately claim that they never really had seen it coming until it was too late and then there was nothing they could do. Too late, those that tried were the silent dead or missing.
As Justice William O.Douglas poetically cautioned, “As nightfall does not come all at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be aware of change in the air however slight, lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.”
And what about the small number of Germans that were loyal to Hitler to the end and those that to this day would beyond all reason defend Hitler and trumpet his cause again? They identify with their Man of Steel—the warp and weave of his nature is that of their own and no one can readily think of themselves as being rotten to the core.
Though rough and tumble, American politics has served to broaden the reach of liberty. However George W. Bush’s 2000 election campaign brought to life a freedom-killing variety that incubated in the White House and pathologically spread to extremist on the political and religious right.
It has grown into a mental malady that might be termed “culturopathy,” and though Sidney Blumenthal has not used this term, he well describes this strange affliction in his book “How Bush Rules: Chronicles of a Radical Regime.” Blumenthal quotes a “New York Times Magazine” piece in which Ron Suskind recounts a senior White House aide’s explanation of “faith-based” politics:
“The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’”
In the culturopath’s empire, the words they utter can constitute a “truer” form of reality than anything revealed by the cause-and-effect perspective of Western Civilization. What has traditionally been consider a rational, plugged-in consideration of existence, life and all else that humans can become aware of, the culturopath can view as immaterial.
Decider in Chief Bush—the Typhoid Mary of culturopathy—can bring some new condition into existence by doing no more than just saying that it is so. If that proclaimed is not readily apparent and becomes broadly doubted—like democracy or progress in —he disregards his previous claim (mission accomplished) and just repeats it anew in different words.
If some highly systematized mode of discovery, like science, presents an unacceptably “inconvenient truth,” the culturopath discredits it by proclaiming an opposing “inconvenient truth” that pooh-poohs the first one—after all, one opinion is as good as another, and nothing truer than what the culturopath says is so.
Culturopaths exhibit a wanna-be deference to people of unearned wealth and power, an acceptance of comrades of like mind, and a tolerance for some who are subserviently dependent. Beyond this, they have a limited capacity for empathy, but are willing to establish for everyone what is good and morally permissible.
In defense of their grasp of “family values,” they willing devalue differing people, places and things with a barrage of innuendo and name-calling that paints others as un-American, un-Christian, unfit, unacceptable, or at least disappointing. Thus they loose a constant harangue against liberals, public education, undocumented workers, Muslims, a woman’s freedom of choice, atheists, homosexuals, global warming, teachers, taxes, French fries, the separation of church and state, welfare, activist judges, labor unions, evolution, Hollywood, universal health care, the UN, Social Security, Halloween, pacifists, the free press, stem cell research, and anything else that reflects some order that is not of their own god’s making—only they have been blessed with an ability to know what that is.
In the culturopathic thinking of the radical right, politics is just another form of war and they take no prisoners and will not hesitate to destroy anyone or anything that gets in their way.
By Sam Osborne
