https://senseofevents.blogspot.com/search?q=Revolutionary+Truth
I quit. I am not surrendering, I am quitting the fight. All that matters now is victory. It is time to understand that there are no rules any more. All that matters now is who is left standing when the war is over.
And right now, conservatives are losing, despite occasional triumphs here and there. But in sum, at least so far, we are losing and losing badly.
George Orwell foresaw these politics in his novel 1984:
"We are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. ... The object of power is power."
Get used to it, comrades, because that is what has come in tidal waves this year, though its genesis goes way, way back.
What is the dynamic at play? Here is a key point by Thomas Sowell:
There’s something Eric Hoffer said: “Intellectuals cannot operate at room temperature.” There always has to be a crisis – some terrible reason why their superior wisdom and virtue must be imposed on the unthinking masses. It doesn’t matter what the crisis is. A hundred years ago it was eugenics. At the time of the first Earth Day a generation ago, the big scare was global cooling, a big ice age. They go from one to the other. It meets their psychological needs and gives them a reason for exercising their power.
The American Left and the Democrat party (but I repeat myself) live and breathe by their sole orienting principle: "Never let a crisis go to waste."
The left needs heroes, no matter how pathetic, because their bizarro-alternate universe is in constant need of saving. In fact, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is convinced the world is going to end in 12 years. She also informed us that global warming is ‘our World War Two’.
Speaking of wars, President Biden described supposed attacks on voting rights as the ‘the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War’. This comes on the heels of Joe informing us that the January 6 riots were the ‘worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War’. According to experts on MSNBC and inexpert members of the Lincoln Project, ‘the insurrection’ was also worse than the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Are you keeping track? The world is going to end in nine or 10 or 12 years and everything that happens is the worst thing that has ever happened.
I observed 12 years ago that, "Washington does not do crisis management. It does management by crisis."
We've been had for so long by so many that we have come to think it is the norm. Whether we will - or can - wake up in time to save what's left of the American ideal is still an open question.
But one thing that recurs over and over when leaders, of whatever stripe, try to expand the power of government over individuals is the theme of looming catastrophe that must be by immediate action. War provides such opportunities in surplus, and even Abraham Lincoln suppressed individual liberties to accomplish his aims.
And if a crisis does not present itself, then one must be created. George Will wrote about the Democrats' push for a European-style Value Added Tax during the Obama administration (my italics):
A VAT will be rationalized as necessary to restore fiscal equilibrium. But without ending the income tax, a VAT would be just a gargantuan instrument for further subjugating Americans to government.
Believing that a crisis is a useful thing to create, the Obama administration -- which understands that, for liberalism, worse is better -- has deliberately aggravated the fiscal shambles that the Great Recession accelerated.
First the administration dug the hole and then they insisted that ever more dirt must be exacted from us to fill it back in. It's a crisis! Will continued:
In the context of this concatenation of troubles, the administration's highest priority was to put an enormous new health care entitlement on the welfare state's rickety scaffolding. Why? Because the liberals' lunge to maximize government's growth depends on quickly creating a crisis that can be called a threat to the entitlement menu, and to the currency as a store of value. Then the public can be panicked into accepting the addition of a VAT to the existing menu of taxes.
The creation of crises is the natural, wholly predictable result of governing from a "fierce urgency of now" mentality. And we have not seen the last of it.
From then to now, the basic MO has not changed. So what we see today is not new. But its intensity is. After all: Crisis is the health of the state.
We are now living in a permanent state of emergency, according to our Washington overlords. They are not going to waste this crisis, and rest assured there will be many more to come that they won't waste, either. And the only solution we'll be offered will one that regulates our lives at an ever-increasing rate, growing the power of government at our monetary and political expense.
And they will do anything it takes to increase and maintain power and authority over this country, as completely as they are able to and as irrevocably as they can.
And yes, they are liars, but not by their own standards of Revolutionary Truth.
One of the basic tenets of postmodernist linguistic deconstructionism (which I learned how to do in my postgraduate studies at Vanderbilt) is that all text is tainted by bias and that objective points of view are impossible. Hence, the objective of expression is to exercise power. (Formerly the type of expression so designated has been confined, mostly, to those of history, literature and politics. But now even mathematics may be considered biased and subjective.)
Hence, there is no such as thing as objective truth and statements are never more than propositional in nature. A statement's truth content is never more than opinion, and opinions are nothing but expressions of power. Therefore, in a basic sense, all speech is power directed.
This is a fundamental world view of the Left and is derived directly from Marxism, as reworked by Leninism. Since Marx held that his communist theory was literally scientific, his economic-historical forecasts were not simply likely, they were certain. That is, Marx maintained that he was not offering merely one more historical treatise of human affairs, but an actual scientific proof that the proletariat would overthrow the bourgeoisie. To understand and partner with this inevitability was to be "on the right side of history" (which is where that overused cliché comes from). As formulated by Lenin et. al., truth is therefore not statements of objective facts, but assertions that move the communist revolution and its fulfillment closer to reality. "Truth" is therefore pliable and impermanent, the concept of truth being only practical. In practice, all of language became subservient to the dominance of the party, a fact recognized by George Orwell in his novel 1984 and its concept of Newspeak.
That, comrades, is the Leftist, socialist world of Revolutionary Truth, a Marxist-Leninist doctrine that is fundamental to how the Left operates and rules. A good illustration of Revolutionary Truth" is when US Rep. and self-described socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went on 60 Minutes on Jan. 6, 2019, and said, “There's a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right."
Because Marxism is a totalist system of belief, its devotees,
... want to impose a new order based on an “all-or-nothing claim to truth.” They operate within distinctive parameters of a “theology of Armageddon — a final battle between good and evil” – in which the stakes are nothing less than universal salvation. As outlined in Eric Hoffer’s classic, The True Believer, such movements have mastered the art of “religiofication,” that is, converting political grievances into messianic aspirations and “practical purposes into holy causes.”
"Truth" is therefore whatever brings the Revolution closer to reality. This was a world view fully adopted by Leninists and their successors. Truth is only accidentally connected to objective facts, which is exactly what AOC meant when she dismissed any connection between morality and facts. She believes that the supreme morality of her personal politics overwhelms any superficial claim that something she relates did not actually happen.
Power is the only goal of the Left. When global warmists mount ad hominem attacks against skeptics, comparing them to Holocaust deniers for example, most of us see those attacks as tacit admissions of failure of the scientific argument. But the Left does not see them that way since the scientific argument is merely another form of power expression. Ad hominem attacks are, too, and so, like science, are just a tool in the toolbox of power plays. They are an attempt to change the terms of the battle (and battle it is.)
That is why the Left is immune to accusations of hypocrisy, which is, "a feigning to be what one is not or to believe what one does not : behavior that contradicts what one claims to believe or feel." Leftists frequently contradict what they have already said, and the contradictory statement is declared just as emphatically and absolutely as the one it contradicts. To accuse them of hypocrisy is to waste time. A true statement to the Left is one that advances their causes; its contradiction of an earlier declaration is simply irrelevant. The prior statement advanced their cause and the present one does too, they think, and that is the end of the "hypocrisy" debate. After all, they consider your accusation of hypocrisy to be nothing but a power play anyway, so why should it influence them? And why should they shun self-contradiction if it happens to advance their power?
A further point should be made here: Collectivism means the end of truth. To make a totalitarian system function efficiently, it is not enough that everybody should be forced to work for the ends selected by those in control; it is essential that the people should come to regard these ends as their own. This is brought about by propaganda and by complete control of all sources of information. ~ F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, 1944
I think that Hayek was a little off here. In fact it is not "essential that the people should come to regard these ends as their own," only that they act as if they regard the ends as their own. It is behavior the Left seeks to govern to the smallest detail. Read what the old Soviet dissidents wrote, and especially what some of the USSR's spies wrote after the Cold War. Almost none of them believed in Marxism-Leninism because it was so abjectly, obviously a total failure. But they knew they had to act as if they believed fully, so that is what they did.
As to be expected, Victor Davis Hanson offers a concise and bullseye summary: "The American Descent into Madness." Read the whole thing. And Ben Stein explains why "We no longer have a Constitution."
And law Prof. Jonathan Turley explains that, "The public is now required to discuss public controversies within the lines and limits set by corporate censors — with the guidance of the government." That, my friends, sits exactly in the center of actual fascism as invented by Benito Mussolini 100 years ago.
To preserve the last refuge of liberty, we cannot do business as usual. Regretfully, but necessarily, we cannot continue to trust a political system that has been deliberately broken to its very core.
