The Left -- Celebrating One Hundred and Fifty Years of Adolescence

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.  (1^st Corinthians, 13:11)

One has to envy the people of the left.  They have managed to cling tenaciously to adolescence for at least a century and a half.   To remain on the Left is to lock one’s self into a permanent state of arrested development.  The upset election of Donald Trump has brought leftist adolescence into the streets, demonstrating how an ideology turns adults, young and old into emotional children.

One of the most distinctive marks of adolescence is a relentless self-centered view of one’s place in the world.  Work, with its often tedious, routine and time-demanding nature, is not readily embraced by highly self-centered creatures like adolescents.  Full time work is something that Leftists devoutly believe other people should do since they have higher callings like dismantling the corrupt old order and installing a regime of virtue in its place – grandiosity being another stage of late childhood.  Karl Marx spent his adult life dodging gainful full time employment.  His wife, Jenny, and the Marx children languished in squalor while Karl scribbled away and sponged off his pal, Engels.  Stalin as a young, ambitious Bolshevik robbed banks.  Mao wrote poetry.  Sartre lounged about in Paris cafes affecting a distinctively French anti-bourgeois style while producing reams of unreadable bilge that that aspiring sophisticates in college dorms and faculty lounges could flaunt as deep Existentialist thought.  Bill Ayers tried to blow up the Pentagon before he settled into his sinecure as an “education” professor and aging celebrity-radical. 

The “Occupy Wall Street” youngsters  a few years back, with the encouragement of their Hope and Change President, squated in public places and railed and fumed at “rich, greedy bankers” ignoring a couple of seemingly obvious questions: why would anyone want to be a banker if he couldn’t be rich? Presumably, they don't object to poor bankers, but why would any sane person trust their savings to one?  “Greedy,” by the way, is “adolescent-speak” to describe “someone who makes more money or has more than you think he should.”  I believe that it is safe to conjecture that in the history of the world it would be exceedingly difficult to discover many examples of individuals confessing, themselves, to being greedy.  No one on the Left would ever make such a confession.  Greed is the cardinal sin for the Leftist, and its application is most flexible.  George Clooney,  Michael Moore and Hillary Clinton have more money than most of us could dream of. Yet, I have never heard of anyone calling them greedy.

As well, adolescents also tend to be know-it-alls.  They gaze around at the world observing and deeply resenting all of its injustices and pettiness.  They know exactly what is wrong and how to fix it -- If only they were allowed to.  Most pass through what their elders patronizingly and euphemistically call the “idealistic” stage, come to terms with the imperfections, live out their imperfect lives, in this most imperfect world.  
    
However, we have the amply sad history of permanent adolescent know-it-alls, professional Leftists, in charge of fixing things.   One word is sufficient to summarize the state of the paradise that two of the more ambitious adolescents promised would unfold if they were put in charge – “starvation.”  The world’s two most populous countries, Russia and China were run for decades by a couple of men widely proclaimed to be “geniuses” and paragons of virtue.  No field of study or body of wisdom was beyond their mastery.  No aspect of the character or personality of either leader was sullied by self-interest.  Both Stalin and Mao went on to engineer famines that killed tens of millions of their own countrymen. Mao, whose real forte was poetry, untrained and wholly ignorant of agronomy and basic science, nevertheless overturned traditional Chinese agricultural practice, and inserted his whims and fantasies as law.  The Great Leap Forward is the ultimate demographer’s challenge to this day as researchers try to determine how many millions of Chinese people perished as the result of Mao’s policies.    

In addition to starving a sizable portion of Ukrainian farmers in the 1930s Stalin put the ignorant know-it-all, Trofim Lysenko, in charge of Soviet agronomy who managed to damage it even more than Lenin and Stalin.  One single statistic that forcefully expresses the staggering ignorance and incompetence of the adolescent know-it-alls that governed the Soviet Union from 1917 to 1991 is the following:  “In 1917 Russia had been the world’s largest exporter of grain; by 1989 it was the world’s largest importer.” [Quoted from John Mosier, Hitler vs. Stalin: the Eastern Front, 1941-1945, New York, Simon & Schuster, 2010, 11.]     
    
When adolescents do not get their way those who disappoint them are made to feel the extreme effects of their resentment.  At the hard rock bottom of all Leftist ideology is the premise that social conflict and struggle both underlies and explains all human interaction.  Leftists are perennial grievance-mongers.  The social world is always and inevitably about one group exploiting and dominating another.   All that is wrong with the world becomes the doing of the unfairly advantaged Exploiter-Dominators (ED's) who pummel the lowly Exploited-Victims (EV's).   Being an EV means that there is always an ED to resent and to blame.  An EV in good standing must have a grievance to polish and villains to excoriate.   EV's are heroes (Marx, Che, Joe Hill). ED's are villains (Capitalists, Bankers -- the latest, Donald Trump).  EV's are virtuous – compassionate, selfless and wise.  ED's are greedy, selfish and mean-spirited.     
     
This stark, Manichean, hero-villain picture of the world is perfect for the adolescent theorist-moralist. With it he can feel down-trodden, virtuous and special, all at the same time.  The source of his discomfort always redounds to those self-centered adults (projection) who lack the insight and knowledge he does (more projection).  From this picture flows what Bertrand Russell called, “The Doctrine of the Superior Virtue of the Oppressed,” which means that whatever the EV's do to the ED's is morally justified.   Lies, character assassination, bombing the Pentagon – all can be justified because the ED's are all the moral equivalent of Adolf Hitler, even though they pretend not to be. When everyone who opposes you is some variety of Nazi, Fascist or Klansman your toolbox of weapons is quite expansive.
In 2018 we will celebrate the 200^th Birthday of the original adolescent- philosopher. Happy Birthday in advance, Karl.   You would be pleased to see that so many of your “children” rule.

The Left: Masters of Extortion

 

Make me, make me your victim,

Re.sis.tance is only a symptom…

       Of bigotry

       I am so guil.ty, so                                                      

Make me your victim.

Make me, make me your victim

Elect Hillary Clinton…

            She knows the score

            Reparations and more, so                                                        

Make me your victim.

(Parody of Barbara Lewis, “Make Me your Baby”, 1965)

Extortion = by definition: the practice of obtaining (something, such as money) from a person by the use of force or threats

Let’s begin with extortion in its crudest, most elemental form: a physical threat to get something you want – money or some other object of material value.  “Give me your wallet or I’ll knock your teeth out” – direct, easy to understand, transactional.  I get your wallet with your money and credit cards: you keep only part of what you started out with, your teeth. Obviously a better deal for me.

Now, let’s move up a slight notch in criminal sophistication to what I would call a “reputational” threat against someone.  “Give me five thousand dollars or I’ll show your wife and daughter the photos I have of you in the sack with your secretary last year.”  No physical threat but I get five thousand dollars I didn’t have to work very hard for: you hang on (at least for a while) to what you already had, your good reputation and the affection of your wife and daughter.

These examples are of individuals at work, but “give me or else…” also works well as a group exercise – protection rackets, for example.  You make regular monthly payments to some churlish local gangster who in exchange does not let any of his associates burn down your family store. Again, a nice, easy deal for him; for you, one more business expense, one you cannot even write off.

Some political regimes are extortion machines.   The Castro brothers are a splendid example. In 1959 they chased Fulgencio Batista out of the Presidential palace in Havana and off the island and proceeded to murder, imprison and exile anyone whose Leninist bona fides were suspect, some of whom had fought with them, helped to bring Batista down and naïve enough to believe Fidel’s deceitful promise of democracy and free elections.  Firmly in power, here was the extortionist deal they offered the Cuban people: “pretend you love the Maximum Lider and the socialist paradise he is building for you.  Don’t even think about criticizing the regime or mounting political opposition or openly practice your religious beliefs and ideals, and be ready to squeal on your friends and neighbors if they seem less than enthusiastic. In exchange: for you, no firing squad, forced labor camps, re-education centers or social ostracism. You may get to keep your crappy, low paying job with no future, can go to the local clinic for free when you get sick, oh, and eat rice and beans every day, sold to you cheap by the Party that loves you.  Viva la Revolución!”

Let’s, however, continue with a very sophisticated extortionist system that is currently in vogue and has been for some time, identity politics, the staple, now it seems, of the Democrat party assisted by the organs of the mainstream media.

Identity politics, no matter what the particular version you’re currently saddled with, rests on a single fundamental premise: the historical domination and exploitation of one group by another group explains every aspect of today’s disparities in social positioning, economic achievement and individual success. This gift came from Karl Marx stated in a more turgid form at the beginning of the Communist Manifesto, written in 1848. “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” 

For the romantics at heart there is something wildly exciting and extremely appealing with this formulation. It is simple, rich with drama and the promise of violence, and the potential for sweeping change, for revolution. Just like Fidel and Che, you grow a beard, pick up a gun, and take on the old, corrupt power structure. It is particularly appealing to young people perpetually out of sorts because the world does not seem to be the perfectly fair, peaceful and harmonious place they think it should be. Not surprising then that Marx’s theoretical ghost continues to haunt us all in ways we may not even realize.

For today’s Marxists “class struggle” (the workers versus the capitalists) does not begin to capture the range of the struggles and the multiplicity of domination and oppression that is the real picture of our predatory, have/have-nots world. The aggressions of the ruling class must now be measured in “micro” units “micro-aggressions” as we have come to know them, detected by “diversity” specialists professionally trained to decode the daily slights experienced by the historically underrepresented have-nots. Blacks oppressed by whites, women by men, gays and transgendered by heterosexuals, indigenous peoples by European colonialists, animals by humans, etc., each group with their own unique set of grievances and demands for redress.  And so the “history of all hitherto society”, yes, Mr. Marx, is still all about “struggle”, but it is far more complicated, persistent and extensive than you ever imagined. Your followers, though, have risen to meet the challenge. You would be proud.

Within this complex picture of domination and oppression “identity politics” was born. This world is made up exclusively of victims and victimizers and one’s search for identity becomes the task of discovering which particular victim group has a history that best captures the narrative of one’s personal grievances. Once the awful picture of the victims and their oppressors becomes clear, then the next and most important step is to know where the ongoing “struggle”, envisioned by the German prophet and the mental dwarfs who still carry on his message, is going.  The struggle has a conclusion and the good guys win.  As Marx puts it technically, “The expropriators are expropriated.”    

We are now fully immersed in the “expropriation” phase of identity politics which is where the professional expropriators (extortionists) step in and turn up the heat. First they have to sell the scam, the bogus, collectivist fable that everyone belongs to a victim community or an oppressor group. Many if not most individuals may not even realize that they are victims or oppressors.  They need to be tutored in this regard and made to understand their position in this equation of domination and exploitation.

“White privilege” is a good example of how this brainwashing works, a recent invention of racial-extortion agitprop that is now making its way into the schools, universities and workplaces.

 “White skin privilege is not something that white people necessarily do, create or enjoy on purpose. Unlike the more overt individual and institutional manifestations of racism described above, white skin privilege is a transparent preference for whiteness that saturates our society. White skin privilege serves several functions. First, it provides white people with “perks” that we do not earn and that people of color do not enjoy. Second, it creates real advantages for us. White people are immune to a lot of challenges. Finally, white privilege shapes the world in which we live — the way that we navigate and interact with one another and with the world.” (http://www.tolerance.org/article/racism-and-white-privilege)

Convinced? Ready to relinquish those “perks” and “advantages” you don’t deserve and didn’t earn and once mistakenly believed had nothing to do with that “whiteness” you’ve been flaunting around since Mom pushed you out into the hands of the nurses?  The point is, once I believe that the all the folks in my tribe have been permanently injured and you are convinced that your tribe has done it, then the “squeeze” is set up and the “marks” are primed for the plucking.  Into the room strolls Al or Barack – it is payback time. The leverage they use to extract (extort) what they want from white America is guilt. And the guilt is of what? Racism. “Please, really, I am not a racist. I swear! What can I do to convince you? Something tells me that this is not a strong bargaining position.  Here then is the deal they offer: “do what we want and someday you may be forgiven for the sin of racism.”  It sounds like extortion to me.  Please understand that “someday” is a very long way away and only they get to say when.  What do they want? Here is how it works: 

“There is an old saying that the victors of war get to write the history of the world. White privilege works this way, too. Since white folks have been in control for so long, we have determined what is valuable or interesting or useful in terms of education. Greek and Roman mythology, Chaucer, and other canonized works have been selected and revered through the ages as critical components of any “solid liberal arts education.” (http://www.tolerance.org/article/racism-and-white-privilege) 

Nothing subtle here. It’s all about power – “white folks have been in control for so long…”  There is no win-win, only winners and losers. The expropriators are about to be expropriated.

This, obviously, was written by a lobotomized white person who has surrendered himself to the extortionists.  In his pathetic world there are only victims and victimizers. Chocking on his guilt as a victimizer, he must now become a victim.  “I plead guilty: as the oppressor, my mind and heart and the my power of whiteness now belong to you, you who have been my victims. Please … make me your victim!”

Slavery, Jim Crow and segregation are all dark stains on America’s past.  Slavery has been dead for 150 years.  Jim Crow and forced segregation are fifty years past.  But for extortionists like Al Sharpton they are timeless, permanent levers of guilt.  Here is how President Obama, Mr. Eloquence, himself, recently formulated this feature of permanence.  “What is also true is that the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination is in almost every institution of our lives — you know, that casts a long shadow. And that's still part of our DNA that's passed on. We're not cured of it.” (http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/06/22/416476377/we-are-not-cured-obama-discusses-racism-in-america-with-marc-maron) 

Not much eloquence in this. Yes, “you know”, the “cure” will be someday, but not for a very long time.

Obama did not talk like this when he was running for President.  Remember this gem from the speech that launched his national career at the Democratic Convention in 2004? “There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America—there's the United States of America.” I guess he didn't learn about DNA until later.

What happened? The community organizer was plotting to be President. He needed white votes.  Many if not most white voters would not be thrilled with a President preoccupied with racial grievances, a President who wanted to keep them on the hook for what some or even none of their ancestors had done one hundred and fifty years ago, a President who talked like every white police officer was another Bull Connor. Openly extortionist campaigners don’t make good Presidential candidates. Once in office the fake “make nice” routine dropped away and the “we’re all in it together” shtick turned into the racism “that’s still part of our DNA that’s passed on.” Ok, the guy we thought was supposed to be our Nelson Mandela instead turned out to be Robert Mugabe. The candidate who was going to help us “transcend” the racial divide became the President who is close to and consults regularly with Al Sharpton, one of the most scurrilous, lying, bottom-feeding, shakedown artists to be found anywhere under a rock. This President sent three White House representatives to the funeral of a black criminal (Michael Brown) but cannot even bring himself to mention the tragic, violent death of the highly decorated U.S. Navy SEAL Christopher Kyle (two Silver Star Medals and Five Bronze Star Medals) who, you guessed it, just happened to be white.

Identity politics and its extortionist methods work because the ideological snake oil of collective victimhood and guilt has been ceaselessly peddled for so long by the cultural Marxists and has now penetrated deeply into American metapolitics and makes resistance to it nearly impossible. The hysterical, mass-slander carried out by the mainstream media against Trump and his supporters and Hillary Clinton’s recent reduction of Trump supporters to “Untermenschen” (that “basket of deplorables” who are “unredeemable”) signals perhaps some sort of endgame for traditional American politics.

Barack meets Raúl

                                                      





In the eight year of his rock star style Presidency Barack Hussein Obama made his way to Havana to pay homage to Raúl Modesto Castro Ruz.  We read that in anticipation Raúl had ordered his people to spruce up a bit the slum of his long making and it is likely that any of those unruly types who dared to occasionally complain about life in the Socialist Workers paradise were rounded up and dropped into the deep freeze during the President’s Potemkin tour.  Just to show who was boss, Raúl snubbed the American President, sending one of his flunkies to greet him on his arrival on the Havana tarmac.  Hermano mayor for decades enjoyed waving his middle finger at Uncle Sam. This occasion was, however, unique: Obama was the first American President to fly down and willingly get himself dissed in person.

Obama did not even catch a glimpse of the Damas Blancas (the Ladies in White), those brave women who Raúl’s goons regularly beat up for publically asking about the fate of their husbands, brothers and sons rotting as political prisoners in Castro’s vast dungeons. “Just hours before President Obama landed Sunday in Cuba for his historic visit to the communist island, Cuban authorities arrested more than 50 dissidents who were marching to demand improved human rights.”

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2016/03/20/cuba-dissidents-protesters-arrested-president-obama-visit/82048950/

From the Washington Post: “A group of dissidents known as the Ladies in White was met outside Havana’s Santa Rita church by an organized crowd of Castro loyalists shouting insults and revolutionary slogans. Then, The Post reports, Castro’s secret police pounced on the women and ‘half-dragged, half-carried them to waiting buses,’ while men marching with the women “were chased, thrown to the curb and handcuffed.” As they were arrested, the crowd chanted ‘This is Fidel’s street!  https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/castros-welcome-obama-to-cuba-with-a-slap-in-the-face/2016/03/21/c9d8d2c0-ef6b-11e5-a61f-e9c95c06edca_story.html.  Yes, those Fidelistas had it exactly right:  Cuba belongs exclusively to Fidel and Raúl, not the peons they boss around. It is their personal fiefdom and the clowns who spout that human rights nonsense deserve whatever abuse comes their way from the the guardians of “The Revolution.”

But that was probably just fine with Obama who apparently was willing to bear whatever indignities the regime cared to dispense, and who cares about the dissidents, anyway?  They have universal health care. What else do they want?  He was likely wearing his Che tee-shirt from his college days beneath his suit jacket.  Fidel, Raúl and Che, after all, were the young Hope and Change guys of the Caribbean when BHO was, as they say, just a twinkle in the eye of Barack Sr. Like President Obama during his 2008 Presidential campaign, “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrefKCaV8m4), the Castros in 1959 promised a  complete transformation of  their homeland with some smoke and mirrors palaver about free elections and democracy.  And “transformation” is a handy euphemism for exactly what they did, namely make the island into a hell hole (gulags, summary executions and all) that Cubans have for decades been (literally) dying to leave.  It is now a vast slum which not withstanding the 60-year iron fisted rule of Fidel and Raúl is entirely, they claim, the fault of the U.S.    

One suspects that Obama feels much more at home in Havana, yukking it up with a decrepit dictator than in those red states in the U.S and has a much higher regard for Raúl than for any of those Republicans back home whom he likes to speak of as his “enemies.”   Obama’s comfort with Raul, one also suspects has its origins in a deeply shared conviction that the U.S. is a country, as his wife Michelle, so eloquently put it in 2008 that is “just a downright mean.”

(http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2008/03/05/michelle-obama-america-just-downright-mean.) 

Beyond that, for some striking evidence of the President’s affinity for the Castro brothers’ version of Hope and Change we have Obama’s very own testimonial in his autobiography.

"To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students, the foreign students, the Chicanos, the Marxist Professors and the structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets….  At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz [sic] Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy. When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our stereos so loud that the walls began to shake, we were resisting bourgeois society's stifling constraints. We weren't indifferent or careless or insecure. We were alienated."  [Dreams from my Father, 100-101]

Granted, this was how Obama represented his Marxist bona fides as a youth at the university.  That was then, and now is, well ….  One remains hard pressed to discover much of a difference in conviction and attitude between the twenty-something university student and forty-forth U.S. President.  Since his university days up to the present Obama has continued to choose friends and associates strikingly similar to his university pals – Bill Ayres, Jeremiah Wright, Father Pfleger, Van Jones, and, of course, the race-baiting, riot-fomenting Al Sharpton.  While we hope he is not grinding out his cigarettes in the While House carpet to express his alienation, Obama has demonized policemen (“bourgeois society’s” armed enforcers) and given tacit support to rioters, as in Ferguson, who burned the place down.  In 2011 Obama celebrated American poetry and prose with a gathering of poets, musicians and artists at the White House.   According to the Associated Press he invited Lonnie Rashid Lynn, Jr. aka  “Common,” a notorious hip-hop artist famous for celebrating the killing of police officers and one notorious cop killer in general. http://www.newsmax.com/InsideCover/obama-common-poetry-jeremiah/2011/05/10/id/395900/#ixzz43rTSr0KP   So, Obama, the alienated, Marxist university student, and Obama, the racial polarizing, Castro-enthusiast President seem to be separated only by years.  There is no evidence in word or deed that Barack Obama has ever relinquished the resentment and his affinity for the leftist radicalism that motivated him as a young man: he is just much more sophisticated in managing it. 

One, however, should be careful with comparing Obama and Raúl  Castro.  To be fair to Raúl, as a Marxist, he is the real McCoy, one tough hombre, enduring in his youth the precarious Granma expedition from Mexico and the harsh rigors of the Sierra Maestra mountains as a guerrilla fighter, taking on Batista’s troops, getting shot at, taking hostages and executing them.  In the early days of the Revolution Raúl was even by his older brother's estimate a brutal fellow.  

"As the 'brothers show' developed, Fidel carefully and deliberately nurtured the myth of 'good brother, bad brother.' Whenever he wanted to threaten people with the results of his possible demise, he pointed to Raúl — 'He will be much worse than I,' he warned repeatedly. And he may have been right. Sierra fighters like Lucas Morán called Raúl's front a "small totalitarian state in which discipline was rooted in the terrible drama of death by execution." Geyer, Georgie (2011-02-01). Guerrilla Prince: The Untold Story Of Fi (Kindle Locations 3285-3288). Garrett County Press. Kindle Edition.   

Obama would not know which end of a gun the bullet comes out of, and it is doubtful that the man has an ounce of physical courage.  His Marxism is of the prissy, academic sort with all of its usual hand wringing devotion to the oppressed and its self-righteous, self-congratulatory posturing but is personally squeamish with a preference for softer approaches to coercion and, as he said in 2010  “punish[ing] our enemies and … reward[ing] our friends.”http://www.weeklystandard.com/obama-to-latinos-punish-your-enemies-in-the-voting-booth/article/511932  Like his close friend, Al Sharpton, his style (dropping his “g’s” when necessary) is to demonize his critics and keep the rabble on a slow boil with artful demagoguery while working the system for all of its perks – golf, basketball,  jet-set vacations, celebrity hob knobbing, etc. 

From Havana the Commander and Chief flew to Buenos Aires where he was photographed practicing his Tango steps with a luscious Argentine partner.   When he becomes an ex-President and Hope and Change is long forgotten, when asked about his years at the top he can with a smirk quote Sen. George Washington Plunkett of the old Tammany Hall days: who in his memoirs wrote, “I seen my opportunities and I took ‘em.”