Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past – George Orwell
The quote most often deployed in defense of the sentiment –
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do
nothing” -- has been misattributed, Reuter’s fact checkers tell us, to Edmond
Burke. A cynic might say, “Well, if Burke didn’t say it, he should have.”
Scouring Burke’s texts, the fact checkers have concluded Burke
may have said something similar, but no cigar. This is what Burke said: “No
man, who is not inflamed by vain-glory into enthusiasm, can flatter himself
that his single, unsupported, desultory, unsystematic endeavors are of power to
defeat the subtle designs and united Cabals of ambitious citizens. When bad men
combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied
sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.”
For anyone who has spent much time wandering through the dim
corridors of politics, The Burke quote cited above may be more useful in
attaining a faithful understanding of modern politics than the misattribution.
Party politics in the Western world encourages party participation, without
which political power is tightly managed by political overseers and corrective
opposition to political tyranny, the capture of active politics by a single
party, is both futile and fatal to liberty. Burke’s “contemptible struggle”
suggests that even he sometimes yielded to a cautionary cynicism.
Was Burke cynical? Were the founders of the American
republic cynical? If they were not skeptical of power, why did they arrange a
constitutional system in which power is divided between three branches of
government? Is a good monarch or political association of good men a sufficient
answer to the evil designs of ambitious politicians? If what the moderns call
“agency” is wanting, how are the evil designs of contemptible men and women to
be turned aside? Agency is political power. In a one party state, resistance to
political combinations is futile; that is the message of every active Caesar
who has ever trod his opponents underfoot in a contemptible struggle to center
political power in one person or one party. Connecticut Democrat Party agents
regularly promote the command economy and a one party state that we know from
even a cursory review of history is the active element in all loathsome
tyrannies.
Russia, but for a brief and shining moment following the
collapse of the country’s socialist/communist tyranny, appeared to be open to
Western notions of liberty. Putin, who might have continued the reforms of
Gorbachev, turned his eyes eastward to China, a fatal error. The political
leaders of socialist states in Latin America -- Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua –
have lingered in the dark halls of tyranny for decades. The American Democrat
Socialist (ADA) combine is little more than a worm in the apple of American democracy.
George Orwell, we know, was a lifelong socialist and
a journalist dedicated, both as a fiction writer and a serious critic of
spurious politics – Fascism and Communism both – to the mission of a rigorous
journalist. Orwell shouts at us in all of his writings: Every political
corruption begins as a corruption of the language. The Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics (USSR) was in reality a collection of captive states answerable
only to the Supreme Soviet and Communism’s ruthless Czar, the murderous Joseph
Stalin. Orwell saw through all the masks. The mission of journalism is to say
the truth without fear or favor. Modern journalism falls very far short of
Orwell’s mark.
It should trouble lovers of liberty in Connecticut that “the
Constitution State” has been for decades little more than a one party state,
and it should surprise no lover of liberty in Connecticut that the one party
state is an indispensable precondition for what the Connecticut Democrat Party robustly
condemns as a perversion of democracy.
John Adams often said that “America is the friend of
democracy everywhere, but the custodian only of its own,” a not-so-subtle
warning that the republic the founders had established should not engage in
colonialism of a kind practiced by strongman executives everywhere: kings,
Russian czars, a title that derives from the pre-historic Old Slavic tsesari, from the Greek kaisar, and from the Latin caesar. It is important to unmask
corruptions in the language, almost always a prelude to political corruption. Political
corruption is an eruption within the state of anti-republican elements and a
rupture of the vital connection between the people and their government.
When Orwell sent his novel Animal Farm: A Fairy Story, to
various publishers, he was told by
one publishing house – sorry, we don’t publish children’s stories. Modern political critics have found a route
around Orwell; He is an old writer, unread and unheeded by modern left of
center political commentators. Ignorance covers a multitude of political sins,
and fashionable political writers inflamed by vain-glory into enthusiasm do not
often blush at the subtle designs and united Cabals of ambitious socialists.
When the Democratic Socialists of America
(DSA), threw off every mask in their manifesto and declared forthrightly it was
their purpose -- to reopen to unprocessed entrants all borders closed by
President Donald Trump, to definance American aid to a “genocidal” Israel, to eliminate
a filibuster that in the past has prevented a congressional majority from asserting
questionable legislative claims without a fulsome debate in the U.S. Congress, to repeal the U.S. Senate,
and other anarchic, anti-Constitutional measures, to treat the U.S.
Constitution as if its provisions were no more authoritative than statutory
laws, to elect by popular vote Supreme Court Justices, and other destabilizing
measures that would disable a 250-year-old constitutional republic – the silence from
Connecticut Democrats was ear-splitting.
Try to imagine the scene in an updated Orwell novel: Pigs –
always more equal than other barnyard animals in Orwell’s Animal Farm -- propose
to eliminate the U.S. Senate, and the two U.S. Senators in Connecticut’s political
barnyard swallow their tongues at the prospect of their own political
annihilation. And all this is received by Connecticut’s brave, non-partisan
media without a cynical snicker.
An unpublishable fairytale do you think?
Think again.
Comments