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Dictating to us: Barack Obama
loves telling us how to live
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Hallelujah! The Bush nightmare is over.
The dark night of American fascism is giving way to the dawn of hope, the
Age of Obama. The forces of truth will once again prevail and the crypto-Nazis
will be banished to their caves.
That pretty much captures a large segment
of current liberal conventional wisdom on both sides of the Atlantic.
Over the course of his presidency, President
George W. Bush and his supporters have been called fascists and Nazis thousands
of times in books, articles, documentaries and by legions of poster-wielding
'progressive' youths with open-toed shoes and closed minds.
Of course, this shouldn't surprise anyone.
For more than 70 years the Left has hurled the F-word at anyone who gets
in its way - Stalin invented this tactic to de-legitimise socialist opponents,
including Leon Trotsky, assassinated for leading a 'fascist coup'.
As early as 1946, George Orwell wrote
that: 'The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies
"something not desirable".'
Today, a better working definition of
a fascist might simply be a conservative who's winning an argument. But
what if fascism means something more than 'bad'. What if fascism was not,
and is not, a Right-wing phenomenon at all?
For instance, what were the motivating
passions of fascism? For starters, there was the cult of unity. The Nazis
mastered the spectacle of the crowd to project an aura of unity, equality
and common purpose. Submitting yourself to the movement was sold as a cleansing,
redemptive, fundamentally spiritual experience.
Such spectacles were made possible by
the cult of personality, the faith that a great leader would rise from
among 'us' and bring everyone together. Well, where have we recently seen
enormous rallies of ecstatic followers?
According to The New York Times,
Barack Obama's own recruiters were trained not to talk about issues, but
to 'testify' about how they 'came to Obama' the way one might normally
talk about coming to Jesus.
'We are the ones we've been waiting
for,' Obama told mesmerised crowds. 'Unity is the great need of the hour,'
he insisted. We need unity, he explained, 'not because it sounds pleasant
or because it makes us feel good, but because it's the only way we can
overcome the essential [empathy] deficit that exists in this country'.
Or as his wife, Michelle, put it: 'We
need a leader who's going to touch our souls because, you see, our souls
are broken.'
It's worth noting that in the Anglo-American
tradition, unity is not, in fact, the highest political value. That's why
we have constitutions, separation of powers and independent courts. The
hero in the Anglo-American tradition is not the mob, but the man who stands
up to it.
And yet the cult of unity remains seductive,
particularly in chaotic democracies. One way it manifests itself is in
the myth of the Third Way, one of Tony Blair's enthusiasms.
It's ironic how the Left is always ready
to brand a conservative who steps off the politically correct reservation
as a fascist, but sees nothing wrong with embracing concepts that fit neatly
within the fascist wheelhouse.
Italian Fascism and German National
Socialism were both sold as a Third Way that would bypass all hard choices.
'Neither Right nor Left!' was a central fascist slogan.
The trouble with the Third Way is its
core assumption that any hard choice is a 'false choice'.
Economic growth and environmental regulations,
socialised medicine and medical innovation, none of these things is at
odds with one another so long as the right enlightened geniuses are in
power.
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Micro-managing: Hillary Clinton
envisages state intervention after all births
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The brilliance of the Third Way is that
it sounds like a slogan for centrists and moderates, but is really a utopian
vision for rule by benevolent masters.
Nonetheless, it's also important to
remember that fascist isn't necessarily synonymous with 'evil'. Militarism
during the first third of the 20th Century was seen as the best means of
organising society. Since then, liberals have been searching for a moral
equivalent of war that would inspire citizens to drop their personal ambitions
and, in President Woodrow Wilson's words, 'marry their interests to the
state'.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New
Deal of the early Thirties was just such an enterprise, complete with
militarised work, environmental and youth programs - the New Deal was initially
hailed by Italian dictator Benito Mussolini as a great fascist undertaking.
These days, you cannot open a newspaper
or magazine without finding some earnest liberal hoping, predicting or
begging that Obama will launch a 'new New Deal'.
Obama styles himself after FDR and insists
Americans must rally behind his agenda the way the 'greatest generation'
fought the Second World War.
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Tony Blair's so-called 'Third Way'
was a manfestation of the cult of unity
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But today, the desire to find a moral equivalent
of war that will bind the individual to the State manifests itself in unlikely
places. Consider the ever-increasing emphasis on 'the children'.
Ever since Plato, the idea of capturing
the hearts and minds of children has fascinated social planners. Mussolini
cast himself as a 'schoolmaster' to the nation, while in the Soviet Union
a prize was given by the State in honour of a boy who informed against
his mother and father. Late last year, a British energy company created
a website to teach children how to become 'climate cops' and turn in their
own parents.
Hillary Clinton summarised the attitude
well when she insisted Americans 'have to start thinking and believing
that there isn't really any such thing as someone else's child'.
In her book, It Takes A Village,
she reveals that babies of all classes are born in a state of crisis so
profound that immediate state intervention is required.
They need immediate aid from the 'helping
professions' since even wealthy parents feel stress and 'we know that babies
sense the stress'. If ever there was a utopian goal for government, the
elimination of parental stress must be it.
Like so many progressives, Clinton seems
ignorant of how her ideas might come across to people who don't already
agree with her.
For instance, those with a memory of
Orwell's 1984 might be disturbed by her idea that the government
should mount giant television screens wherever 'people gather and have
to wait'. The screens would play, on a continuous loop, official instructions
on how to care for your children.
Across the Western world, the politically
correct micro-managing of daily life continues to intensify.
In Britain, closed-circuit
cameras, once used in the name of security, are now used to police everything
from dropping litter to eating in your car.
In Australia last month, a local government
ruled that its beaches must be cleansed of sharp seashells that might cut
children's feet.
In Canada, thought-crime prosecutions
are becoming routine.
It's also worth recalling that the mania
sweeping Britain and parts of America for bans on tobacco, alcohol, fattening
foods, non-organic foods and non-local foods has significant antecedents
in Nazi ideology.
Hitler Youth manuals proclaimed
that 'nutrition is not a private matter', a slogan that summarises vast
swathes of the eco-Left's propagandising.
Nazis led the world in researching organic
foods and alternative medicines (the concentration camp Dachau boasted
the largest alternative and organic medicine research lab in the world).
Heinrich Himmler was an animal rights
activist and proponent of 'natural healing'. Hitler and his advisers discussed
the need to move the entire nation to vegetarianism as a response to the
unhealthiness promoted by capitalism.
Even though we are greeted every day with
countless stories of 'political correctness gone mad' we tend to dismiss
them as solitary or silly.
But the reality is that they fit into
a bigger picture, a coherent Left-wing agenda. The idea is that there can
be no safe harbours from politics. If 'you're not part of the solution,
you're part of the problem'.
And it's up to the State and the social
engineers to solve problems - whether you like it or not. |