In the middle of Dan McLaughlin's essay describing the ....ahhhh..... contradictions, ironies, and pure foofoodust spewed by the O-and-Savior last night, we find this:
Obama’s reading of American history fits neatly in what Jonah Goldberg has described as the literally fascistic tendency to demand the peacetime permanent military-style mobilization of civilian society, the endless search for moral equivalents of war that has been a unifying theme since the days of Woodrow Wilson...
(Followed by the pertinent quotation, which includes railroads, high-schools, and the I-system.)
And a promise we'd like to see kept:
I’ll get some other day into my review of Goldberg’s book, which details the history of this sort of thinking in the U.S. and Europe between the rise of Bismarck in Germany and Hillary’s “politics of meaning” in much greater detail...
McLaughlin links to an earlier RedState item he penned, which includes the "10 Commandments of Socialism" written by Walter Ulbricht (yup, I recalled the name and his position!) back in East Germany.
It is important to recall that "Fascism" does not necessarily include "Socialism." Socialism, properly speaking, denies a 'right to private property;' Fascists did not necessarily adopt that line.
Given that, here are Ulbricht's "Big 10" for your careful review:
1. Thou shalt always defend the international solidarity of the working class as well as the permanent bonds that unite all socialist countries.
2. Thou shalt love thy Fatherland and always be ready to defend worker and peasant power with all thy strength and capacity.
3. Thou shalt help to eliminate the exploitation of humans by one another.
4. Thou shalt perform good deeds for socialism, since socialism produces a better life for all working people.
5. Thou shalt act in the spirit of mutual support and comradely cooperation during the construction of socialism, respect the collective, and take its criticisms to heart.
6. Thou shalt protect and increase the property of the people.
7. Thou shalt always pursue ways to improve thy performance, be thrifty, and strengthen socialist work discipline.
8. Thou shalt rear thy children in the spirit of peace and socialism to become citizens who are well-educated, strong in character, and physically healthy.
9. Thou shalt live a clean and decent life and respect thy family.
10. Thou shalt exhibit solidarity with all those people who are fighting for national liberation and defending their independence.
As McLaughlin comments,
Taken collectively as an official statement of the government's ruling class, they are an abomination, a symbol of the subservient relationship of the individual to the constantly hectoring collective state.
McLaughlin needs look no further than Doyle's Wisconsin to see a "hectoring collective."
If you think that this is a bit speculative (like, e.g., my term-of-endearment for the Obey/Kohl/Feingold "Final Solution"), you haven't considered Michelle Obama's words very carefully.
Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.
You have to stay at the seat at the table of democracy with a man like Barack Obama not just on Tuesday but in a year from now, in four years from now, in eights years from now, you will have to be engaged.
Oh?
In a free society, citizens have not just the right but the duty to have a healthy skepticism about government and politicians and what they propose to do with our liberty and our property. The Right has always known that, as far back as Madison's view that "if men were angels, no government would be necessary"
We'll not quibble with "self-improvement" and "hard work." But we WILL quibble, strenuously, about how that "hard work" is assigned--and by whom.
HOO RAH!
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