Cpl-three weeks ago, Skeptic inquired:
Mike, why do you insist on using “Democrat Socialist” or “Socialist” as the descriptors? That is THEIR terminology. Call them what they are. Communists, Fascists, Totalitarians, Authoritarians. “Socialist” is merely the well marketed term for what they really are. I can understand retards like Ben Shapiro prattling on about “Socialism” as if he still thinks that term will dissuade anyone from voting D. I can’t understand YOU doing it.
Actually, I have a fair-to-half-decent reason for it. Some of you whippersnappers may not recall this, but see, way back in the days when Michael Steele was heading the RNC, this happened:
A member of the Republican National Committee told me Tuesday that when the RNC meets in an extraordinary special session next week, it will approve a resolution rebranding Democrats as the “Democrat Socialist Party.”
When I asked if such a resolution would force RNC Chairman Michael Steele to use that label when talking about Democrats in all his speeches and press releases, the RNC member replied: “Who cares?”
Which pretty much sums up the attitude some members of the RNC have toward their chairman these days.
Steele wrote a memo last month opposing the resolution. Steele said that while he believes Democrats “are indeed marching America toward European-style socialism,” he also said in a (rare) flash of insight that officially referring to them as the Democrat Socialist Party “will accomplish little than to give the media and our opponents the opportunity to mischaracterize Republicans.”
Bold mine, to highlight the exact brand of hapless roll-overism that so perfectly characterized the pre-Trump GOP, and still does for all too much of it.
Umm, HELLOOO?!? What further “opportunity” for “the media and our opponents” to mischaracterize us might you think they need, pray tell, when the rat bastards are constantly not just “mischaracterizing” but outright lying through their fucking teeth about their hated enemies, brazenly and without shame, 24/7/365? That being so, and it most certainly was and is, why NOT start dealing out some minor payback to return the favor simply by calling the Demonrats by their rightful name?
At any rate, Steele eventually got the common-sense resolution advocating for labeling a spade a spade and a commie a commie dumped, more’s the pity. But I liked the idea then, and I still like it now. So I went right on using the thing, and Steele’s No-Ball Bastards just be damned all to Hell and gone. If I remember right, and I betcha I do, a lot of the fragile Loser GOPe punditry who so indignantly harrumphed and spluttered over the outlandish, gauche WELL-I-NEVER of referring to the Democommies at least somewhat accurately then went on to blossom into the insufferable NeverTrumpTards we endure today.
Go figure.
As for “socialist” being a too-tepid term for them…well, okay, so stipulated. On the other hand, though, I am waxing indifferent at best to such fine distinctions myself. Far as I’m concerned nowadays, a Marxist is a Commie is a socialist is a Nazi is a fascist is a &c. They’re all adjacent stripes running up and down the Left/Prog/whatever barber pole, in the end adding up to the selfsame thing: iron-fisted, comprehensive top-down rule by totalitarian despots. Slice it however you like, it’s still baloney.
My grandpa on my mom’s side was a lifelong yellow-dog Democrat, as was/is the entirety of that side of the fam. Milton Hubbard, bless his dear departed soul, died in 1976—too early in the year to enable him to cast a vote for Jimmeh Peanut, which he surely would have done with enormous pride. But I am quite confident that he is rolling in his grave rotisserie-style at around 750 RPMs from seeing what a sordid, anti-American sewer his beloved party has crashed and burned into—a party of traitors, bigots, degenerates, saboteurs, liars, cheap two-bit con artists, the mentally ill, and HILLARY!™ Clinton.
My mom’s baby brother Larry, another stubborn Yellow Dog thanks in no small part to the malign influence of his parents and older siblings, happily abandoned the Treasoncrats for Trump right around the time the Donald took his fateful escalator ride, although for some years I had noticed his commitment to the Democreeps gradually weakning, while he watched them continue the long slide into hundred-proof, no-chaser moonbattery. Uncle Larry’s late-life transition was akin to Reagan’s: he didn’t leave the Democrat Party, the Democrat Party left him. And boy, you should hear him talk about his former party NOW.
As well he might. This, after all, is a party that flies into spittle-flecked hysterics at the very idea of trying to “make America great again”; that reflexively sides with the enemy in every military conflict we’ve been involved in since Korea, no matter how truly monstrous that enemy may be; that is depressed rather than cheered by splendid economic news; that vastly prefers amplifying our shortcomings and failures over acknowledging our achievements and good works; that is this very minute hoping fervently that a viral pandemic will exterminate massive numbers of their (erstwhile) countrymen, for no better reason than that political advantage from those deaths might be gleaned for themselves.
Perhaps Skeptic is right after all, and my favored Democrat-Socialist appellation IS a spot of weak tea at this point. He most likely is, admittedly, in an era when they’re openly running unabashed Marxists, Red in tooth and claw, for the nation’s highest elected offices. Better get cracking on finding something worse still to fling at those suppurating pustules, I reckon. Suggestions along those lines from all and sundry are more than welcome, natch. Meanwhile, I’ll just carry on as I have been.
- Entries
Since the Second World War ended, the international left – which is to say the communists – have labored long-and-hard to convince their Cold War opponents that fascism and communism are polar opposites which lie on the opposite ideological ends of the political spectrum.
In actuality, fascism and communism are closely-related and the fiction that they are not is one of the greatest triumphs of 20th-century communist propaganda and disinformation effort.
The creators of what is today considered fascism, including Benito Mussolini, regarded by most historians as the single figure most-responsible for the founding of the ideology, considered fascism to be the final and best iteration of Marxist socialism.
Following the war, the communists – in particular the East Germans – worked hard to implant into the western counter-culture movement the notion that fascism was a phenomenon of the political right, when in reality it is of the hard left ideologically, a neighbor to communism itself. Once the virus was implanted in the leftist counter-culture, it rapidly spread elsewhere in mainstream leftism and Democrat thought. The Vietnam War era saw this “great lie” spread into virtually every corner of our society and the West at large.
During WWII, it was in the interests of the communists to distance themselves from fascism once the entente between Hitler and Stalin was shattered by Operation Barbarossa, even though the exact opposite had been the case when the two nations and leaders were on friendly terms prior to the invasion. After the Second World War ended and the Cold War began, it was in the interests of the communist East Germans to distance themselves from their former West German countrymen, and from the West generally. Hence, the value of this propaganda and the creation of this “big lie.”
The contention that fascism and communism are near-neighbors, ideologically and practically-speaking, can easily be proven. If one constructs a line graph, with total anarchy (the absence of any government whatsoever) at the rightmost extreme, and the complete and total presence of government at its leftward extreme, communism and fascism must both lie well to the left of the center.
Since both systems glorify and empower the state to intervene into virtually every aspect of the life of those who live under them. Although they differ in some details, communism and fascism are alike in many more important ways than they are dissimilar and not alike.
Centrist Democrats and old-time liberals are as extinct as the dodo bird these days in the Democrat Party. The hard-core leftists, Marxists and communists are in charge now. The flavors on offer are differences in degree, not in kind. Whether you choose Bernie or Hillary or Crazy Joe, you’re still getting communism by any other name, with a healthy dose of fascism, Islam, and Cultural Marxism thrown in for good measure.