Guest Editorial
BY LAWRENCE SELLIN | FEBRUARY 5, 2014
Liberalism Embraces the Soul of the Soviet Union
American liberalism, like all such political philosophies that ultimately rely on coercion for policy implementation, has completed its historical journey from altruism to totalitarianism.
Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY), like the Obama Administration, recommends that the Internal Revenue Service be used to suppress the activities of the Tea Party because its members engage in political speech with which he disagrees.
Schumer proves that it is not unintentional bureaucratic malpractice, but brute governmental force perpetrated by one political party against those holding alternative political beliefs in order to restrict free speech and impose its own ideology on the country.
Liberals, deeming themselves morally superior, have developed the capacity to ignore a record of consistent failure because they mistakenly equate intentions with results. For liberals, public policy becomes an extension of their own self-deception and intellectual dishonesty.
Like the Soviet politburo i.e. "just one more five-year plan and we will be there, comrade," liberals are driven to retain power in order to prove that if extensive government intervention is tried often enough the results will eventually match their intentions.
It is a form of fanaticism which leads liberals to adopt an ends justify the means mentality and to apply an increasing amount of force to elicit outcomes that are not possible using the strategies they employ.
Liberals cannot win arguments on the basis of empirical evidence or logic. In a debate, they must resort to lying about their own policies, personally discrediting their opponents or suppressing the truth.
To explain their policies liberals speak in euphemisms, vague expressions or outright lies used to disguise their intent and obscure the harsh reality that will result through the implementation of those policies. It is the expropriation of language as a prelude to the expropriation of property and individual liberty. It is the fictional "Newspeak" of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four come to life, a political construction to make lies sound truthful and tyranny appear acceptable.
Liberal morality is based on the selective exploitation of, but not a belief in words like "justice" and "rights." Whether it is social, economic, racial, immigrant, reproductive or whatever faux-noble camouflage is required, it is little more than a means to leverage the politics of tribalism.
Liberal policies can only succeed in an atmosphere of totalitarian uniformity of thought and behavior, where we celebrate our collective indoctrination and genuflect at the altar of leftist orthodoxy.
Common Core, for example, is being marketed as a national standard for educational excellence, not the lowest common denominator for socialist brainwashing and homogeneity.
Abortion becomes reproductive rights, racial quotas become diversity, illegal aliens become undocumented workers, socialized medicine becomes healthcare reform, taxes become investment, propaganda becomes news, lies become spin and free speech becomes hate speech.
In Mountain of Crumbs, a memoir of childhood in the 1960s and 1970s Soviet Union, Elena Gorokhova explains the meaning of "vranyo", the Russian word for a lie or half-truth:
"In Russia we played the ‘vranyo' game on a daily basis. The government lied to us, we knew they were lying, they knew we knew they were lying, but they kept lying anyway and we pretended to believe them. "
During the Soviet era, "vranyo" became the de facto way of life, an instrument of governmental coercion as well as a coping mechanism to endure both unbearable calamities and trivial annoyances of life in a totalitarian state.
A society cannot be built on a foundation of lies. In America today we are asked to accept Liberalism's promises of a bright future, which bear no resemblance to its disastrous present.
It is time to puncture that delusion.
Lawrence Sellin, Ph.D. is a retired colonel with 29 years of service in the US Army Reserve and a veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq. Colonel Sellin is the author of "Restoring the Republic: Arguments for a Second American Revolution." He receives email at [email protected]. Visit http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/liberalism-embraces-the-soul-of-the-soviet-union?f=must_reads.
