Alan Keyes
Totalitarian subversion- -can we awaken from the nightmare?
By Alan Keyes
Whatever Obama, Hilary Clinton, Susan Rice, and other Obama faction officials were seeking to achieve with their lies about the terrorist murders of U.S. officials in Benghazi; whatever the full extent of the ideologically motivated political abuses at the IRS, one thing is clear. Except for mindless apparatchiks, thoughtlessly loyal to the Obama cult (like Chris Matthews and Al Sharpton, for example), no sane person can now consider it crazy or irrational to distrust the words and actions of those presently controlling the U.S. government. These scandals show the self-serving "chutzpah" of Obama's snide dismissal of people who, he said, "warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that's at the root of all our problems.... They'll warn that tyranny [is] always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices."
In one respect, Obama's words ring true. Tyranny isn't just around the corner. It is already upon us. Its forces are not yet confident enough to employ the "Gestapo" tactics routinely associated with socialist dictatorship. But they have obviously been using their control of the federal bureaucracy to repress and intimidate individuals and grassroots organizations, preoccupying their time and depleting their resources. Should we be encouraged by the fact that these abuses are now being openly discussed and decried? Only if the stir actually leads to actions that effectively curtail them, while establishing an oversight mechanism that assures continually formal and public scrutiny, to make sure they cannot be repeated without an immediate outcry.
But what if no such action is taken? Inaction is likely, given the collaborative mindset of the GOP leaders in the U.S. House and the Obama faction's solid majority in the U.S. Senate. If this happens, these abuses will recur in a more virulent form. And they will spread, like an infection treated with an inadequate course of antibiotics. People will realize that the abuses are still in train, and that their elected officials have done nothing to reduce each individual's vulnerability. Increasingly tinged with fear, the angry public reaction against the abuses will wane. Spreading from one individual to another, as episodes of abuse proliferate, this individual fear will gradually intensify until it dominates the public mind. This is the way tyranny subverts peace of mind.
Is this part of the reason the Obama faction volunteered these revelations? Is it part of the reason elements of the elitist faction are so willing to air this dirty laundry? If no effective controls are put in place, the result could generate a corrosive atmosphere of fearful expectation that predisposes people to forestall abuse by submitting to those responsible for it. Was it from wise precaution against this corrosion of the spirit of liberty that, unlike Barack Obama, America's founders saw it as "proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties"; and went on to praise the "free men of America" who "did not wait till usurped power had strengthened itself by exercise.... They saw all the consequences in the principle, and they avoided the consequences by denying the principle." (James Madison, Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments)
Barack Obama is a man whose ruthless ideological consistency leads him to disdain the natural rightness of human life, in its most affecting and helpless form. For example, his advocacy of unconstrained access to abortion is so extreme that he countenanced infanticide in order to assure it. He understood and frankly accepted that this ruthless position was a necessary consequence of the logic that justifies so-called "abortion rights." The heartily soul-destroying effect of his logical extremism was recently revealed at trial, in the jocular morbidity of Kermit Gosnell, who now stands convicted of such murders.
Given his calculated fanaticism, Obama is just the type to deploy the heartless bureaucratic, police, and military forces of government against citizens whose only crime is to exercise the rights that are their birthright, under God and the Constitution. Today, public attention focuses on the IRS, abused to attack the resources and curtail the political activity of those who oppose the design for despotism. Soon and very soon, it will be the IRS and the police, abused to attack free speech and the free exercise of religion. Then it will be Homeland Security and local police forces, under the guise of anti-terrorist martial law, abused to arrest and detain evangelical Christians, Catholics, homeschoolers, and those who exercise their 2nd Amendment rights. Then it will be Obama's fondly imagined domestic army, as large and well-funded as the military, moving against states whose officials refuse to acquiesce in the unconstitutional abridgment of the residual sovereign rights guaranteed to the states, respectively, and to the people, by the U.S. Constitution's 10th Amendment.
Please don't make the mistake of believing that this design for despotism is exclusively the sinister ambition of Democrats like Obama. For years, I tried to warn people in the GOP about Obama's commitment to totalitarian communist approaches to politics and economics. For years, I tried to help them recognize his rejection of the principles whereby the requirements of God-endowed right limit the just powers of government. For years, I inveighed against his pro-abortion extremism; his disdain for the God-endowed rights of the natural family; his hostility to America's international and national security requirements.
I gradually came to realize that the leadership of the Republican Party is incapable of responding effectively to Obama's treacherous betrayal of constitutional self-government, or even admitting it. Why? Because that leadership is itself in the grip of forces that differ from Obama only in the more openly self-serving style of their betrayal. They purport to represent and speak for the large plurality of Americans loyal to the Constitution. They pretend to respect the ideas of God-endowed unalienable rights and limited government from which the Constitution derives. But they have in fact abandoned every goal of political life except the successful pursuit of governmental power, and the self-aggrandizing abuses it makes possible.
In my WND article published on Friday, I argued that, because the IRS "overturns the priority of natural right over humanly instituted authority," it is a design woven into the fabric of tyranny. In similar fashion, because it has substituted power for justice as the end of civil society, the elitist faction's sham two-party system is also a design woven into the fabric of tyranny. When America's founders framed our form of government, they did so with justice in view (see Federalist #51). Institutions like the IRS and the elitist faction's sham two-party system are like viruses. Though written in the language the founders used, they have been introduced into the program of American government in order to rewrite its code for a different purpose. They exist, as it were, to reweave the whole cloth of American life. They are part of a phalanx of similarly-viral mechanisms, including now the public schools, and much of the news and entertainment media, that have been transformed from factors of liberty into engines of elitist totalitarian indoctrination and control.
This is, in the tactical sense, the realization of Antonio Gramsci's comprehensive vision of totalitarian, socialist, political subversion. We can awaken from it, as from a stifling nightmare, but only if we are willing to exert our minds to see all its fabrications for what they are. Only then will we cease to be manipulated and subdued by the delusory hopes and fears they represent.
May 23, 2013
Whatever Obama, Hilary Clinton, Susan Rice, and other Obama faction officials were seeking to achieve with their lies about the terrorist murders of U.S. officials in Benghazi; whatever the full extent of the ideologically motivated political abuses at the IRS, one thing is clear. Except for mindless apparatchiks, thoughtlessly loyal to the Obama cult (like Chris Matthews and Al Sharpton, for example), no sane person can now consider it crazy or irrational to distrust the words and actions of those presently controlling the U.S. government. These scandals show the self-serving "chutzpah" of Obama's snide dismissal of people who, he said, "warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that's at the root of all our problems.... They'll warn that tyranny [is] always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices."
In one respect, Obama's words ring true. Tyranny isn't just around the corner. It is already upon us. Its forces are not yet confident enough to employ the "Gestapo" tactics routinely associated with socialist dictatorship. But they have obviously been using their control of the federal bureaucracy to repress and intimidate individuals and grassroots organizations, preoccupying their time and depleting their resources. Should we be encouraged by the fact that these abuses are now being openly discussed and decried? Only if the stir actually leads to actions that effectively curtail them, while establishing an oversight mechanism that assures continually formal and public scrutiny, to make sure they cannot be repeated without an immediate outcry.
But what if no such action is taken? Inaction is likely, given the collaborative mindset of the GOP leaders in the U.S. House and the Obama faction's solid majority in the U.S. Senate. If this happens, these abuses will recur in a more virulent form. And they will spread, like an infection treated with an inadequate course of antibiotics. People will realize that the abuses are still in train, and that their elected officials have done nothing to reduce each individual's vulnerability. Increasingly tinged with fear, the angry public reaction against the abuses will wane. Spreading from one individual to another, as episodes of abuse proliferate, this individual fear will gradually intensify until it dominates the public mind. This is the way tyranny subverts peace of mind.
Is this part of the reason the Obama faction volunteered these revelations? Is it part of the reason elements of the elitist faction are so willing to air this dirty laundry? If no effective controls are put in place, the result could generate a corrosive atmosphere of fearful expectation that predisposes people to forestall abuse by submitting to those responsible for it. Was it from wise precaution against this corrosion of the spirit of liberty that, unlike Barack Obama, America's founders saw it as "proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties"; and went on to praise the "free men of America" who "did not wait till usurped power had strengthened itself by exercise.... They saw all the consequences in the principle, and they avoided the consequences by denying the principle." (James Madison, Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments)
Barack Obama is a man whose ruthless ideological consistency leads him to disdain the natural rightness of human life, in its most affecting and helpless form. For example, his advocacy of unconstrained access to abortion is so extreme that he countenanced infanticide in order to assure it. He understood and frankly accepted that this ruthless position was a necessary consequence of the logic that justifies so-called "abortion rights." The heartily soul-destroying effect of his logical extremism was recently revealed at trial, in the jocular morbidity of Kermit Gosnell, who now stands convicted of such murders.
Given his calculated fanaticism, Obama is just the type to deploy the heartless bureaucratic, police, and military forces of government against citizens whose only crime is to exercise the rights that are their birthright, under God and the Constitution. Today, public attention focuses on the IRS, abused to attack the resources and curtail the political activity of those who oppose the design for despotism. Soon and very soon, it will be the IRS and the police, abused to attack free speech and the free exercise of religion. Then it will be Homeland Security and local police forces, under the guise of anti-terrorist martial law, abused to arrest and detain evangelical Christians, Catholics, homeschoolers, and those who exercise their 2nd Amendment rights. Then it will be Obama's fondly imagined domestic army, as large and well-funded as the military, moving against states whose officials refuse to acquiesce in the unconstitutional abridgment of the residual sovereign rights guaranteed to the states, respectively, and to the people, by the U.S. Constitution's 10th Amendment.
Please don't make the mistake of believing that this design for despotism is exclusively the sinister ambition of Democrats like Obama. For years, I tried to warn people in the GOP about Obama's commitment to totalitarian communist approaches to politics and economics. For years, I tried to help them recognize his rejection of the principles whereby the requirements of God-endowed right limit the just powers of government. For years, I inveighed against his pro-abortion extremism; his disdain for the God-endowed rights of the natural family; his hostility to America's international and national security requirements.
I gradually came to realize that the leadership of the Republican Party is incapable of responding effectively to Obama's treacherous betrayal of constitutional self-government, or even admitting it. Why? Because that leadership is itself in the grip of forces that differ from Obama only in the more openly self-serving style of their betrayal. They purport to represent and speak for the large plurality of Americans loyal to the Constitution. They pretend to respect the ideas of God-endowed unalienable rights and limited government from which the Constitution derives. But they have in fact abandoned every goal of political life except the successful pursuit of governmental power, and the self-aggrandizing abuses it makes possible.
In my WND article published on Friday, I argued that, because the IRS "overturns the priority of natural right over humanly instituted authority," it is a design woven into the fabric of tyranny. In similar fashion, because it has substituted power for justice as the end of civil society, the elitist faction's sham two-party system is also a design woven into the fabric of tyranny. When America's founders framed our form of government, they did so with justice in view (see Federalist #51). Institutions like the IRS and the elitist faction's sham two-party system are like viruses. Though written in the language the founders used, they have been introduced into the program of American government in order to rewrite its code for a different purpose. They exist, as it were, to reweave the whole cloth of American life. They are part of a phalanx of similarly-viral mechanisms, including now the public schools, and much of the news and entertainment media, that have been transformed from factors of liberty into engines of elitist totalitarian indoctrination and control.
This is, in the tactical sense, the realization of Antonio Gramsci's comprehensive vision of totalitarian, socialist, political subversion. We can awaken from it, as from a stifling nightmare, but only if we are willing to exert our minds to see all its fabrications for what they are. Only then will we cease to be manipulated and subdued by the delusory hopes and fears they represent.
To see more articles by Dr. Keyes, visit his blog at LoyalToLiberty.com and his commentary at WND.com and BarbWire.com.
© Alan KeyesThe views expressed by RenewAmerica columnists are their own and do not necessarily reflect the position of RenewAmerica or its affiliates.
(See RenewAmerica's publishing standards.)
