I was at a Republican National Convention some years ago, strolling among the delegations. In the Indiana delegation I found former U.S. Senator Bill Jenner, who had done fine work on a committee investigating Communist infiltration of our government and institutions. By then of course the Communists who had infiltrated had long since dismantled the committee.
Bill Jenner told me the story of the young man working in a baby carriage factory in pre-war Nazi Germany, which then was secretly rearming in violation of treaty. His wife was pregnant. He decided to steal the part of the baby carriage each division of the huge factory made. When he had stolen all the parts he would put them together at home, and his wife would have a baby carriage.
So, according to Bill, he did that. The only discrepancy was that, when he emptied the sack on the living room carpet, his beaming frau at his side, spread out the parts and then assembled them, he would up, not with a baby carriage, but with a machine gun. What a surprise!
While he told it, Senator Jenner smiled like the cat that ate the conundrum, communicating the fact that it is so obviously apocryphal—no such thing could have happened—despite which it certainly packs a wallop. That is why, more and more these days, I keep coming back to it. Here, too, the government says it is manufacturing a baby carriage, but more and more I see a machine gun.
Look around and tell me what you see. Everywhere I look I see the elements of totalitarianism being assembled. Of course the would-be dictators who impose them always offer some cockamamie explanation that may make sense in part and help to conceal the truth. But “the truth is out there,” and I don’t mean to get controversial here, but one of Stang’s Laws of Warfare says that a thing is what it is.
What have we come to recognize are the endemic hallmarks of dictatorship? They are legion. One of them certainly is what students of the Soviet Union called the “cult of personality,” in which the leader is worshipped as semi-divine, as the fountain of national wisdom who cannot be contravened.
In the Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn writes about the meeting somewhere in the Soviet Union at which someone made the mistake of mentioning Stalin. Instantly, the hundreds in attendance to talk about some banal, local subject leaped to their feet and began applauding.
No problem, but now that they had started, how could they stop? Ubiquitous secret police agents would notice the first man who did so. So, the applause continued and became a torture. Try it. Smack your hands together enthusiastically. Keep doing it. And you had better not pretend, because, believe me, the secret police will notice.
A time that seemed a timeless eternity crept on. The hands of the victims were fiery and bloated. Still they continued, frenetic with pain. They loved Comrade Stalin so much. At last, a man who may have been a hero, or a coward who could endure no more, stopped the insane sacrament in that satanic belief.
As instantly as it had started, the applause stopped, didn’t peter out like normal applause, but stopped as if a curtain had abruptly fallen or a door had slammed shut. Everyone sat down, holding his fiery hands in his lap. Shortly thereafter, the ungrateful coward and freeloader who had refused to express his adulation of the man he owed everything disappeared. He was never seen again.
Yes, I agree. Such a thing has not happened here. Yet. But what is happening is that the most sensible criticism of President Smirk elicits a fury of hysterical denunciation from his media front men, denunciation not so much of what is said, but of the right to say it. How dare you criticize the President! Are you trying to sabotage the war? In such a climate, facts become irrelevant.
And all I am saying, ma’am, excuse the graphic metaphor, is that when somebody reaches under your dress and grabs you by the crotch, throws you on the bed and bites your lip, it now becomes reasonable to speculate that, unless you stick your .38 in his ear, maybe you are going to be raped. Ain’t that right, Billy Jeff?
Another hallmark of totalitarian dictatorship is totalitarianism. Hello. What is a totalitarian dictatorship? Even someone as stupid as Barbra “The Ostrich” Streisand will agree that totalitarianism is a system in which government has total power. Therefore, the more power a government gets, the closer it comes to dictatorship. (Il)liberals agree fervently that such dictatorship is wrong.
The trappings of dictatorship are everywhere. Every day, we are more controlled, more registered, more inspected, more licensed, more restricted, more taxed, more numbered, more chipped, and on and on. Now the continuing criminal enterprise that calls itself the Federal Bureau of Incineration wants to dispense entirely with the present requirement to get warrants from a judge.
Is it not a thing of marvel that no one in the media even mentions the possibility that this incredible accumulation of power is dangerous? No one in the Prostitute National Press wonders whether there is a chance we could become a totalitarian dictatorship. No one wants to mention the monster sitting near us on the carpet. How odd! How can it be that you recognize immediately what I am talking about, but television vacuum heads like Katie Kook do not.
One reason I think I see for this is a failure in the church. Surely one reason our people seem incapable of recognizing the looming evil they are looking in the face is that the church no longer preaches about evil. The church has become a business seminar, where handsome, cologned and coiffured personalities who used to be called preachers, teach the art of self- improvement.
Evil is no more. Instead of evil we have disadvantages, maladjustment, underprivileges, discrimination and failure to communicate, all of which can easily be cured by counseling, which probably isn’t necessary anyway, because we are the most successful, the happiest people on earth, people whom God has chosen to be rich because we are, let’s face it, a lot better than everybody else.
If evil is no more, there is nothing to recognize. There is nothing to fear but fear itself. The man who throws you on the bed is merely misunderstood and therefore irresponsible. Problems will arise, yes, but our sainted President, George W. Smirk, than whom no one knows, understands and feels your pain more, a man anointed to rule by the Deity Himself, will solve them with a wave of his manicured hand.
Why did the Founding Fathers give us the system they did? Because they recognized evil; because evil to them was an omnipresent force; because they understood that the fall of man brought evil to the world. That is why the preaching of the time routinely stigmatized Old Scratch. And that is why the Founding Fathers divided the power in their new government and added the Bill of Rights.
Because they knew the black heart of man—because they understood that men do bad things not because they are deprived and “underprivileged”—they divided the power into three branches, and then divided it between the new federal system and the states, to protect our people and government from the evil they knew would constantly erupt.
Let us hear no more of trust in man, said the President (Tom Jefferson) but bind him down from mischief with the chains of the Constitution, and, just in case, let’s have a bloody revolution every twenty years to replace the bureaucrats who refuse to leave and terrify the new ones. As bedraggled and riddled with imperfection as it is, the system still protects us.
Speculate with me. What kind of government would the Fathers have left us had they believed with today’s church that evil is no more? Clues are everywhere in the hostility of today’s legislators toward the Constitution that binds them down from mischief. In 2002, Illinois Congressman Henry Hyde, a Republicrud, said the Constitution today is irrelevant; that he and his colleagues pay it no mind:
“There are things in the Constitution that have been overtaken by events, by time. Declaration of war is one of them. There are things no longer relevant to a modern society. Why declare war if you don’t have to? We are saying to the President, use your judgment. So, to demand that we declare war is to strengthen something to death. You have got a hammerlock on this situation, and it is not called for. Inappropriate, anachronistic, it isn’t done anymore.”
Indeed, don’t the politicruds of either party, the politicruds on the bench and so on, consider the Constitution as an annoyance, an obstacle they need to circumvent not apply, something they wish they could be rid of? Had the Founders believed what the churches, the politicruds and, especially, the Communist government schools, believe today, they would have given us a king, an opportunity George Washington rejected.
Wouldn’t today’s totalitarians give us a totalitarian world government? We know the answer is yes, because that is what they are doing. They are getting away with it because the conspirators behind it have made it impossible for most people to recognize, because they have been taught there is no such thing as evil.
“Published originally at EtherZone.com : republication allowed with this notice and hyperlink intact.”