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| -Land of the Free |
| Satan in Rantburg: An Apologia |
| 2013-08-19 |
| By Chris Covert Rantburg.com Last February marked the 92nd anniversary of the 1921 Kronstadt Uprising in the nascent Soviet Union, when 11,000 sailors of the Soviet Baltic Fleet went on strike to raise demands for more democracy in the Russian Revolution. After ten days of talks to settle the matter, Soviet troops loyal to Leon Trotsky and under command of the ill-fated Mikhail Tukhachevsky put down the strike, killing about 3,000 including by summary execution. It is said that the reaction of the Soviet Union to the modest demands of the Kronstadt naval detachment caused several US and other supporters of the Soviet Union to not only stop supporting the Soviet Union, but to turn anticommunist. Those who saw what communism was really all about had formerly placed their hopes that the Russian Revolution was really about some elusive communist ideal that would make all men truly equal. Robert Conquest in his excellent history book on the Soviet Union, Harvest of Sorrow, makes mention of the Krontstadt Uprising (going by memory here), concluding in the text that even though the rebellion brought many back from supporting the communist idea, communism was not going to work in practice without terror. As an aside, Conquest's book was one of the several real life events that brought me back from the ledge and started my own road to recovery as a former liberal. So, when in 2008 Barak Obama came to power with a message of hope and change, and so many folks jumped on the idea that perhaps we can all have hope of a better future of peace, love and equality, American Thinker's Eileen Toplansky, herself a student of the Soviet Union saw through Obama's message as so many did, by comparing his message with that described by Isaac Bashevis Singer in his novel Satan in Goray. In her article she describes the destruction of a Jewish community through pogroms, but she also describes the aftermath, when the blows have fallen and those physically affected by the pain and suffering, were turned towards something even more devastating. According to Toplansky: The decay of the community is even worse than the physical destruction which had preceded it. The people lost their moral compass; they succumbed to all forms of evil. They allowed themselves to be mesmerized by the promise of a new age out of hope for a better world. Their downfall is pitiful to behold. In other words, the Kronstadt communists in 1921, Barak Obama supporters in 2008 and Singer's characters in his novel bought into the triumph of hope over experience, as Samuel Johnson put it when referring to second marriages. It would be so easy at this point to blame the president and his supporters for what I did in the pages of Rantburg, and on some level more fun, but it would not be honest and more importantly it would not help anyone. On August 7th's This Week in Guns, I included a video of a black power leader (read black supremacist) talking about how white folks were getting into better gunnery while black folks were playing video games and emptying semiautomatic weaponry at a target and not hitting anything. The title of the video was "Black Power Leader Has A Moment Of Clarity". When I saw the video framed in that way it was hard not to disagree. Unfortunately, the video was posted by someone from an antisemitic website with opinions so hateful and vile, it is hard to imagine. When I pasted the code into the story I had not investigated the website, but my editor, Trailing Wife did and alerted me to it. Once it dawned on me what the site was about, I immediately removed the video code without comment, deciding to write this article today. If I were actually paid to do this, I would have been gone, fired. The only redemption was a link to the website itself had not been posted. My excuse, my only excuse, and the only explanation I had was I wanted to believe that a black power activist finally got the message that Big Government was not his friend and that this communist would be the first to be "put on the trucks". I wanted to believe that to advance the notion that maybe the worm was finally turning; that maybe Barak Obama and his message of hope and change was close to collapse. That Barak Obama's biggest supporters were finally getting the notion that their own personal well being was now at stake, not the end of antiblack racism. This apologia is not about any shame I may have had in posting a video with a reference to the hate site, but shame about putting the notion of hope over experience. A lot of that has been going on since the summer of 2008, and indications are it is truly about to collapse. For years conservatives have been hoping that Barak Obama's biggest supporters would help dispose of the disaster of a presidency in short order. I honestly thought we were on the cusp of witnessing that happy event. I should have known better than to buy into a provably untested and unworkable ideal, and should have investigated further. I can't say it won't happen again. A lot of garbage passing for ideas floats about the Internet and I am human. I will make every effort to prevent such a thing from occurring in the future, and if it does hopefully Trailing Wife will backstop me as she did last week. Chris Covert writes Mexican Drug War and national political news for Rantburg.com and BorderlandBeat.com. He can be reached at grurkka@gmail.com |
| Posted by:badanov |
| #4 Chris that's my fear: that we have an oncoming generation that isn't so much unaware of liberty, as they are simply uncaring about it - for them liberty and individual rights have no value, and no real meaning versus feelings and group orientation. So they will never "wake up" - because how can they miss something they never seem to have learned in history, in ethics, and in their families - something that they have as a birthright, yet seem utterly unconcerned with it compared to the latest declarationn of Hope and Change and Blame The Other Guy... Its not so much Orwell's 1984 as it is Huxley's Brave New World. Rand was right as to how the collectivists go about their task of destroying the individual, and the values necessary for individuals to prevail against the state or the collective. And Huxley was right - and frightening prescient when it comes to the end-stage of where the collectivists are attempting to push us. But most of all, a rereading of Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves To Death (Public discourse in the age of show business)" on its pending 30th anniversary would do a lot of people some good. If anything, the internet has accelerated the worst of the bad trends he put forth in that book. For those of you unfamiliar with it, here is a cover blurb "a prophetic look at what happens when politics, journalism, education, and even religion become subject to the demands of entertainment" A synopsis from Wikipedia (yeah I know...) The essential premise of the book, which Postman extends to the rest of his argument(s), is that "form excludes the content," that is, a particular medium can only sustain a particular level of ideas. Thus Rational argument, integral to print typography, is militated against by the medium of television for the aforesaid reason. Owing to this shortcoming, politics and religion are diluted, and "news of the day" becomes a packaged commodity. Television de-emphasises the quality of information in favour of satisfying the far-reaching needs of entertainment, by which information is encumbered and to which it is subordinate. To apply this to the current electronic media; the way the current generation (basically those 40 and under) gets its "news", TV had to cram everything into at most an 8 minute "news" piece back in that day. Compare to TV now, which is pretty much a 30-60 second sound bite and video blast. And sadly, this has devolved even further into a single picture on instagram, a 6 second "vine" video, and at most 140 characters in a tweet. That is how we end up with people idolizing a vicious thug, Trayvon Martin, as a martyr, how Obama gets away with Benghazi, and many other things that seem to show the dearth (and death) of necessarily extended rational discourse in the public arena. Read it. And go read Huxley's Brave New World to see how people voluntarily and willingly abandon their rights once they abandon their rationality in favor of feelings. Then try ti figure out how to teach a blind man about "purple" - something he has never seen before. Because that is the task we face if we cannot change how these people see the world. |
| Posted by: OldSpook 2013-08-19 20:13 |
| #3 phil_b, if that's ALL they consumed that would be a good thing. Unfortunately they go through a whole lot of other people before they get there. |
| Posted by: AlanC 2013-08-19 13:16 |
| #2 The revolution always consumes its own. |
| Posted by: phil_b 2013-08-19 02:30 |
| #1 "... ill-fated Mikhail Tukhachevsky..." Tukhachevsky was executed in 1937 after a sham trial prior to which he was tortured into signing a confession. About 2000 other Russian officers were executed during 1937 and 1938 by stalin. |
| Posted by: lord garth 2013-08-19 00:29 |