Their condition—and it is an enslaving one—is that all these groups and genders agree to be victims. That is, we will be the leaders and you will follow us, hewing to the socialist line with nary a deviation to be made as long as we both shall live, Amen.
The godless aspire to godhead.
Perfecting governance. Who needs God when socialist leaders have perfected human governance? So a little blood is spilled, say a few billion gallons, but that’s just the price that must be paid for an egalitarian utopia to be created. So you are dead, and every member of your family along with you, but just think how wonderful this new world of equals is. Ask Lenin. Ask Stalin. Ask Mao. Ask Hitler—remember, national socialism was the ideology of the Nazi Party, officially the National Socialist German Workers’ Party.
Selling your soul. In other words, give me your soul and I will, if it suits the current socialist goals, provide the basics of life. Or as Churchill summed it up, “The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.” Or as Orwell asked, in reply to the socialist bromide that you must break a few eggs to get to the socialist utopia, “Where’s the omelette?”, and Orwell was a fellow traveler. When he witnessed the horror of Soviet communism, he wrote Animal Farm depicting Stalin’s regime, and then Nineteen Eighty-four depicting a communist utopia where newspeak reigns supreme: “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” A perfect example of this is San Francisco’s current renaming of convicted felons as “justice-involved persons”—if that doesn’t send a shiver up your spine, God help our liberal democracies!
Celebrating victimhood. As a wee girl, I saw through the leftist bluster of championing victims. When the price of going to a family wedding a few hundred miles away—that was far away and trips were rare for my family in the 1950s—was to play the victim, I recoiled because the degradation of that role appalled me. And I vowed never to be a victim as long as I lived. Unlike in the movies when the right decision is rewarded, I didn’t get to go. But I did get to keep my dignity, a characteristic I’ve cherished in my three score years and ten+ on Planet Earth.
MittelEuropa looks to the left.
Leading the left. The leftist cant always seems to start with the intelligentsia, the so-called best & brightest who live in the coddled arms of society. The disruption of the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire led these deep thinkers to conclude that the rule of the aristocracy must be replaced with the rule of the proletariat. Except the proletariat needed leaders and who better to lead the unwashed masses than the washed & perfumed intellectual dandies.
Writing despair. Many of the writers painted a vivid picture of this disintegrating empire—some of the best writers of the 20th century include MittelEuropeans – Robert Musil, Joseph Roth, Arthur Schnitzel, Thomas Mann—but too many of them always turned to the left when proposing a solution. Why? There’s a tinge of laziness in this leftward turn: It is easier to portray wickedness than goodness, and the chattering classes will always be on your side. You can loudly proclaim your virtue, while actually doing nothing virtuous, and making damn sure you never actually come in contact with the rabble.
Featuring lowlife. I just finished reading Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Doblin, a fellow MittelEuropean writer who shared Musil and Roth’s bleak take on their world. The main characters in Doblin’s novel are all from the criminal class: the hero is an ex-con who becomes a petty thief and then a pimp; his girlfriend loves him as she supports him with prostitution; his milieu is petty criminals, with one moving ‘up’ to murder. The people are stupid at best, nasty at worst, and their entire world is dreary and repugnant. Yes, life can be tough, but why focus on the worst of humanity and suggest everyone is ‘the worst’ at bottom?
The lowest common denominator is celebrated.
Critically acclaimed. But the critics loved it. Michael Hofmann, who translated the novel from German, writes, “One of the ways in which things have moved Doblin’s way is that language—including the language of books—has become so much more demotic (that is, the popular colloquial form of the language). It is hard to imagine a contemporary novel being taken to task for this.” Certainly not by the taste-makers in our liberal democracies, although this degradation of the language is one reason I rarely read a contemporary novel because it’s boring as hell.
Critically condemned. I agree with some critics’ reaction in 1931 to Eugene Jolas’ translation: “There is not a word known to our profanity, vulgarity, obscenity, slang and gangsterdom that is not found in it…It has been, however, a bit overworked; there was really no need of perfect indecency.” Hofmann writes, “Standard practice has, to some extent, caught up; we all talk like thieves, and some of us write more that way too. Doblin got there early, and was waiting for us. Perfect indecency is more or less where we’re at.” And this is progress?
Critics vs me. The critics laud this as a state devotedly to be wished, and applaud Doblin for leading the way. I mourn this degradation of the language—fuck used to be a powerful expletive to be used sparingly to vent extreme emotion; now it’s common as dirt and has become just another garden-variety vulgarity—and condemn the laziness of current writers who fill their novels with lowlifes and profanity. The more the writer tries to shock, the more pathetic the novel becomes.
Degradation begets degradation.
Lowering standards. The left laud the lowering of standards, condemning them as elitist. Everyone is encouraged to say anything in anyplace at anytime—a bit of ‘anywhere’ philosophy in sharp contrast to the ‘somewhere’ philosophy. And now we have an epidemic of loneliness, exacerbated at both ends of the human journey—the young with missing parents and often no siblings, and the old with children distant in thought and mileage. The left’s solution is always to throw more money at the problems—otherpeople’s money, of course—and another layer of bureaucracy clogs the system even more. But the historically ignorant youth mistake this for compassion and vociferously support them. It is to weep.
Tattooing our skin. A similar degradation has happened to our skin. It used to be that only sailors, circus people and their ilk covered their bodies in tattoos. Now, it’s the progressives, the young especially, who are inking their bodies with the tattoos rapidly getting bigger and bolder. The gaudier the outside, the emptier the inside seems an apt description of this phenomenon. So it was with a deep sense of irony I noted that the Cirque de Soleil performers were unmarked. They donned the gaudy paint and costumes for the act, and then stripped everything off to become a naked canvas for their next act. How beautiful.
The homeless become their captive audience.
Pernicious compassion. One of the most pernicious trends started in the 1980s when the left decided to exercise their compassion and ‘free’ the mentally ill. Mental hospitals and psychiatric institutions were shut down because they were ‘barbaric’, and their patients were released. With no families or families unable to care for them, most ended up on the streets—a conservative estimate is that 80% of homeless people have a mental disorder of some kind. But lefties patted themselves on the back for their deep concern for their fellow man over wine & canapes at yet another conference on social engineering.
Soft bigotry. But as homeless numbers mount in our cities, lefties refuse to learn anything, and continue to practise their soft bigotry. The more legally promiscuous the city becomes, the more homeless degrade the landscape. The poop maps are an infamous feature of leftie cities: Seattle, San Francisco. Portland. Los Angeles. So the rich barricade themselves in gated communities, insulating themselves from the results of their so-called compassion, while the working classes and businesses have to deal with the drug, dirt and disease problems of homelessness everywhere—at home and at work. Naturally, these are the same people who pay the bulk of the taxes.
Law enforcement. A working-class city near Seattle, Burien, Washington, is seeing some success in a new approach to homelessness. It has begun to enforce the law against using public sites for sleeping, eating and shitting in. Who would have thunk it—enforcement works! So it will be interesting whether this common-sense solution spreads or is thwarted by the soft bigotry of the hard leftists who simply cannot conceive of any homeless person capable of changing their way of life. The suspicion lurks, of course, that it’s not altruism that is their motive, but power and cash because thousands of bureaucrats would lose their influence and jobs.
Wash. Rinse. Spin. Repeat.
Attack from the left. It’s never-ending, the pushback against the hard-left enemies of capitalism & liberal democracy. But no one said democracy would be easy, with its basis in compromise and collaboration. And no one said its enemies wouldn’t attack from every side, with the current attack from the left, red in tooth & claw.
Counter-attack by conservatives. We conservatives must counter their attack with facts and truth—neither their truth nor our truth, but the truth. Yes, it falls on the stony ground of the historically ignorant young led by the compassionately camouflaged despots, but the young grow up and become taxpapers. Spending one’s own money tends to fertilize the ground quickly, making the citizen much more receptive to the conservative credo: capitalism, private property, private enterprise and fiscal responsibility.
Justice is blind. And I know no more compassionate people than conservatives: The left talk. We do. Starting on a level playing field demands that everyone has the same rights and responsibilities. No race or gender as a group is treated differently, only individuals as individual cases demand. Soft bigotry shall not apply.
