Liberals, Words, Misery, and Death

Some years ago, more than I care to recount, I served at the US Mission to the UN. Years later, again, more than I care to count or admit, I served at the US Mission to the OAS. Much of the work involved fighting over obscure resolutions and parsing words, trying to wring every possible definition and interpretation out of words. For some observers this exercise seemed silly, as obscure as some Talmudic scholars arguing over the meaning of a forgotten phrase in the Bible. It was certainly easy to ridicule; I, however, soon discovered that this was far from silly or "just academic" posturing. Words have meaning, and the left is very good at ever so subtly altering the meaning of words so that over time those words no longer mean what they meant. Words, of course, are the bullets of intellectual debate. If you allow your opponent to select your ammo for you, well, let's just say you are at a disadvantage.

I have thought a lot about this these last few days, as I watch our anti-war, Nobel Peace Prize President lead us into another bizarre adventure in not quite war, maybe "a pre-announced shot across the bow," I have no idea what we think we're doing in Syria (a post on that to follow). We apparently are going to put our people's lives and our nation's credibility (what's left of it) at risk for an unknown objective.

I also listened to some of the speeches at the recent event at the Lincoln Memorial allegedly commemorating Martin Luther King's awe-inspiring "I Have a Dream" speech--one of the great speeches in the English language. The words being used are bizarre with no appreciation for their original meaning. The degradation of the language, as Orwell rightly saw in 1984, is essential for regulating thought. That degradation is now on display. One example suffices: speaker after speaker at the Lincoln Memorial told us how racist America remains fifty years after MLK's speech and march. We learned that black lives are considered less valuable than white lives; that, in essence, there is little hope for black people in America, that the KKK, armed wing of the Democratic party, rides in the night as it did one hundred years ago. The event, of course, culminated in a speech by Barack Hussein Obama, black son of a Kenyan student, speaking to the crowd. Obama, of course, is the President of the United States. Would MLK ever in his wildest dreams have predicted that his children would see a black president of the United States? That alone gave the lie to all the words that preceded Obama's appearance. 

Anyhow, all this lead me to repost a little item I wrote several months ago on the disaster that is American liberalism. I am working on a couple of new pieces, at the same time that I deal with the growing demands of dog ownership.

April 30, 2013: "Poverty, Mass Murder, and Liberals: A Complete Package"

Words evolve. They take on new meaning over the years. Social and political movements appropriate certain words, redefine them, and then use them to shape the ideological battlefield. The classic example of that, of course, is "bolshevik" and "menshevik." The Bolsheviks were, in fact, the Mensheviks and vice-versa. The word bolshevik, derived from the word meaning "majority," was appropriated by the radicals who were in reality the minority of the old Social Democratic party. The minority labeled the majority the minority and got away with it. Clever. There are many other examples of this in history such as the insistence on calling nazis and fascists right-wing when they are clearly left-wing products.

In our once great, still beloved, but evermore daft United States, precisely those who are not liberal, as in broad minded and generous in their attitudes towards others, have appropriated "liberal" as theirs. The political philosophy of this "liberalism" is one which portrays life as a series of problems that needs addressing by the state--the state guided and run, mind you, by the "well-educated liberal elite" produced by our increasingly decrepit "liberal" universities and informed by "liberal" Hollywood and "liberal" Big Media. Modern U.S. liberals are a variant of European social democrats who believe in a big state and mistrust the individual; the big difference being that US liberals have much more power in the world than their European co-religionists ever could hope. They advocate the "positivist" attitude so aptly summed up in the motto emblazoned on the national flag of Brazil, "Ordem e Progresso," so long, of course, as they are in charge of imposing the order and defining the progress. They take positivism's emphasis on rational thought and logic, and its opposition to superstition and fantasy, and turn it on its head into a "science-based" fantasy that somehow just so happens to lead to more power for them and their state. Global climate change is one stirling example of how liberals have taken a legitimate scientific-based concern over pollution, and turned it into a monumental hoax, known as Manmade Climate Change. That hoax somehow, just somehow, ends up demanding more money and power for--guess who?--the liberals and their state. As we will discuss, this philosophy comprises followers who proclaim a great love for humanity while in practice exhibiting a great hatred for people.

Sorry for the long-winded intro, but it brings us to today's topic, for which I provide the following bumper sticker, "Liberals love humanity and hate people." Oh, and by the way, liberals will get you killed. Yes, killed. Modern liberalism kills people, and does so by the millions, all in the name of humanity, of course. It should have a warning label that asks you not to practice liberalism at home, or something along the lines of "I am a trained professional, do not attempt liberalism on your own."

Liberals hate all sorts of people but their special, most lethal hatred is reserved for the poor and the "uneducated." They kill the poor by the bushel, by the ton, by the hectare . . . they kill them at home and abroad. No poor person is safe from the lethal loving embrace of the liberals.

So many examples, it's hard to know where to begin. I don't pretend to provide an exhaustive account of liberal mayhem, just a glimpse at the tip of the iceberg. So, where do we start? How about with DDT? This extremely useful pesticide was virtually banned around the globe for decades because of the bogus writings of Rachel Carson, the lesbian biological mother of today's whacky environmental movement. The ban on DDT, ostensibly to save birds, puppies, and other wonderful warm things, resulted in the deaths of millions of poor persons around the globe from malaria and dengue, which came soaring back on the wings of now safe mosquitos. This tradition of sacrificing the poor on the altar of Gaia continues to this day. The insistence on the global warming hoax, long after the "science" has been shown to be false, perpetuates policies, e.g., ethanol in gasoline, opposition to domestic drilling and nuclear energy, that increases the cost of living, promotes food shortages, stifles employment, and, yes, leads to death. The opposition to cheap energy and food, the zoning restrictions in upperclass neighborhoods, all under the guise of protecting the environment, take direct aim at the lives and welfare of the poor. Liberals kill.

Liberal welfare policies create havoc throughout our society. What slavery, Jim Crow, the KKK, and racial discrimination could not do, liberal polices have done, to wit, destroy the black family and turn millions of blacks into permanent wards of the state and of the liberal political machines that control most of our cities. Liberal immigration policies, beginning with the disastrous 1965 Kennedy-Johnson immigration law, insure a constant stream of poor third world immigrants, altering irrevocably the nature of our society and ensuring that the struggling black (and white) American poor cannot compete with the ultra-poor pouring in from Mexico, El Salvador, Bangladesh, and so on. Liberal minimum wage laws ensure the disappearance of the starter jobs, once a platform for the poor to spring out of poverty. All of these people, the old poor and the newly arriving poor, need, of course, social programs and more and more government help. The liberal political machine dispenses jobs and money, and the productive sectors face rising taxes, a labyrinth of regulations, and the constant presence of "helpful" government regulators and enforcers. Let the poverty and misery spread!

Liberal gun control policies also target the poor. The poor in our cities must live with the drug dealers, gang bangers, and other hoods in the hood. The comfortable liberals live in secure high-rises, and tony suburbs well protected by overpaid and over equipped police and fire departments and expensive security firms. The poor must put up with the inability to defend themselves; they must allow themselves to be murdered in the name of ridding America of gun violence.

Likewise liberal education policies deny the poor the right to choose the schools their children will attend. Instead an alliance of politicians and teacher unions keeps the poor trapped in failing and unsafe schools, while the wealthy liberals, well, you know what they do, and it isn't to send their own kids to those schools.

The examples are endless. From the liberal refusal to allow us to become energy independent, the liberal refusal to see what Islam does everywhere it takes root, and the liberals' seemingly endless assault on the family, everywhere we look we see the death and destruction that modern liberalism brings to our shores and promotes overseas.

To speak out on this is to risk being labeled a racist and hate-monger. To fail to speak out, however, means being complicit to some of the greatest crimes on the planet: the crimes of the liberals.

WLA