Occupied! A blast from the past 8/14

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

Occupied!  A blast from the past August 2014

We’ve talked about this before, but in fact, I don’t think there has ever been a country like ours, where our elites are deliberately taught – in our best schools – to hate and despise everything that we are, everything that makes us unique.  I don’t think there has ever been another country where our elites are taught to be ashamed to call themselves by our national name.

Or rather, there have been countries like that – but they were countries which had lost a war, and where the governing elite were in fact puppets of their erstwhile enemy, sent in to utterly destroy what the country used to be and to make sure that it did not rise again and (maybe) next time win the war.

Did we lose the cold war?  Well, of course not.  Of course we didn’t. The Sov Union fell apart.  Their internal economy was a shambles – communism does that – and they are suffering the fate of the defeated in a material and obvious way.  The name for prostitute in most of Europe (and the Arab countries) is Natasha. Their population is crashing.  Their men are dying of alcoholism and internally they are being taken over by a hostile minority.  Ignore the invasion of Georgia, those are the spasms of the dying bear.  It’s inevitable, in material term,s to be aware that when it comes to the si devant Sov union  the applicable Latin phrase is Vae Victis.

But here’s the thing – long before communism had lost the cold war, it had won the propaganda war.

Part of this was their saber rattling and the craven and sheltered nature of our intellectual classes.  Craven because they know themselves to be weak.  Dueling with your mind might be an exciting sport – it is, I know, I do it – but it avails nothing when confronted by thugs with hobnail boots.  Most of those who labor in the vineyard of words find themselves utterly naked and defenseless in even the most minor physical confrontation.  (Note, I said most, not all.  I would not advise you to pick a fight with most of Baen.  Even myself and Dave Freer who are relatively mild put bite into any fight – he, because he’s a devious bastage and I say that in the most profound affection [if I ever govern anything he’ll be my secretary of dirty tricks.  The man has no bounds.] and I because I’m built like a tank and I berserk.)  So they both turn coward – and justify it in big words – by cleaving to the people they think are going to invade and kick their butts.  Now it’s Islam, but once upon a time it was communism; and they glorify and have a sort of hard on for violent sorts.  Hence, their worship of that despicable, blood tinged psychopath, Che.

And they were really scared of communism.  It also made sense in their minds – communism, I mean – as it can only make sense in the minds of people who live in the sheltered world of academia or the irrational world of art.  And so… they turned.

And they do influence public opinion.

I wonder how much the Sov Union had to put behind the effort.  My dad told me that the Sov Union spent quite a lot on Agit prop in western countries, the United states most of all.

But then there’s the nature of the beast, as it were – most communists in the US were by nature what we’d class as “radical losers”.  They were outcasts, for some reason or another, (the ugly women, the little men – no, seriously, in Europe in the seventies this was as good a predictor as any of who would go commie.) And most of them were not very effective.  There are stories that some guy in NYC got millions from the Sov Union for which he wrote careful receipts, and which he spent in the most bizarre projects imaginable, failing even to enrich himself.  (Whether it’s true or not that they bought influence in the SF magazines wholesale, I’m not equipped to comment.  The rumor does go around and one does wonder how they could afford to play with New Wave and crash their readership.  Never mind.  A lot of others are doing it, so it might be an ideology uber alas thing.  Something to which humans are prone.  I think it was more like most of the media coordination, a matter of people wanting to be “cool” and “with it” – but then there is always journolist.  This might be one of those watchmacallits of history because those who know will take it with them to their unquiet graves.)

So you see, communism doesn’t work, and no one who has ever run a business, or worked for a business that actually depends on selling its products, or in fact done anything productive can believe it does.

But it makes a total conquest of intellectuals, academics, and people who feel the “real” world doesn’t compensate them enough and that they’re way too smart for the common herd.

There was a time back in the eighties and early nineties when the edifice tottered.  There were whispers about how things really were in the USSR and the more moral of the communists distanced themselves.

They’ve gone back now.  Embraced the mantra that it just wasn’t done “right”.

Which of course is the fault – sorry, but it is – of the US when the crash happened.  At the time they were dying for aid.  They must have it, or the collapse would have turned violent.

The price for that help should have been trials.  We should have – in Heinlein’s phrase – Hung the commissars with their own guts. More importantly, we should have exposed it all, and let the effluvium of seventy years of human wretchedness, perfidy, greed and horror wash out over our mass media.

We didn’t.  They were allowed to save face.  They were allowed to recoup – here if not at home.  (Though the reign of Putin means something.)

Few people have read The Black Book of Communism – which should be taught in our schools, in every grade, in grade-appropriate chunks – but our high schools teach Howard Zin’s People’s History which is the Soviet view of America; they flourish Young Hegelians clubs and hipsters decked in Che Guevara.

The “Well educated” are in fact indoctrinated, taught communist propaganda and syllogisms until they’re UNABLE to think.  We now have an administration composed of people like this, who are unable to connect to reality.  They might be our first Marxist administration, but they suffer from third generation blight, not having come to their opinions from their own mind, but having been browbeaten into them.  They are the good kids, trapped in an illusion from which they can’t break out.

But the d*mned ineradicable fact about communism and its cousin “state capitalism” and the hellish hybrid they’re trying out here is that it doesn’t work.  IT NEVER WORKS.  It doesn’t work even when instituted by very bright psychopaths.  It works even less when instituted by people so indoctrinated they can’t SEE reality.

And it will crash here – hard or soft, with a bang or a whimper.  It will crash and it might drag the rest of the world with us into the endless night.

Tell me how would an alien think the Cold War ended?

Is the cold war ended?

When will it end?

Must we fight it here, on our soil, as it turns hot, and hang our own commissars from their own guts?

Vae Victis!

104 thoughts on “Occupied! A blast from the past 8/14”

        2. RES, you are one of the few people I never worry about being ill-fed. Question, though – what does a steady diet of carp do for you?

          Fish are supposed to be good for the complexion, I hear, and very thinning. So I have this image of a lean gangly person with fabulous skin…

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        3. i always heard that fish was ‘brain’ food. great, now RES, with all the carp he has been getting, will be a smart ass …. make that smarter ass

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    2. Maybe re-occupied – like the Sudetenland, or the Rheinland. Two examples of what you can get away with if one side is willing to enjoy peace at all costs in the face of a belligerent opponent.

      Perhaps we should adapt, and take” Re-occupy America” as our slogan?

      Liked by 1 person

  3. BTW, Paul Sperry raised the question about the financing of these “activists” in an interesting NY Post column recently:
    How Obama is bankrolling a nonstop protest against invented outrage
    Barack Obama’s presidency has been pockmarked by rioting, looting and protests. That’s no coincidence. It’s what the former community organizer sought from Day One. And it’s just going to get worse before he leaves office.

    The senseless protests we’re seeing break out on the campuses of the University of Missouri, Yale and other colleges, as well as on bridges and highway overpasses and outside police stations, are precisely the kind of thing Obama was trained to organize while attending leftist agitation schools founded by Chicago communist Saul Alinsky. He learned to a fare-thee-well how to “rub raw the sores of discontent.”

    Now Obama is returning the favor of his Alinsky masters, training and cloning an army of social justice bullies to carry on his revolution to “fundamentally transform America.” He’s doing it mainly through a little-known but well-funded group called Organizing for Action, or OFA, which will outlast his administration.

    OFA, formerly Obama for America, has trained more than 10,000 leftist organizers, who, in turn, are training more than 2 million youths in Alinsky street tactics.

    The leftist group, which recently registered as a 501c4 nonprofit eligible for unlimited contributions, holds regular “organizing summits” on college campuses.

    RTWT

    Worst. President. Ever!

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    3. Since early 2009 I’ve wondered over the troubling possibility that Obama simply does not have an endgame. This both makes sense as an endgame for him, and explains the purposes behind his choices and certain events.

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      1. I’ve always thought the original intent was that he would be summarily removed in favor of the unelectable Biden, but proved such a good puppet that martyrdom was a needless bother and expense.

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    4. And people still don’t believe me when I mention that these protests aren’t spontaneous; they’re run by paid professional agitators and populated by paid professional demonstrators, and have been for a long time (long before Obama entered the picture). Incidentally a few years ago the documented wage for a protestor was $15/hour, not bad for someone with no other skills or prospects.

      As to Soviet agitprop, go thou to YouTube and look up any of the videos of Yuri Bezmenov. They are most enlightening.

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  5. “So they both turn coward – and justify it in big words …”

    Cowards choose their side based on who they think likely to win.

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    1. To quote a rather fun little movie “There’s bound to be more around… that kind ONLY run in packs.” (Which does suggest a way of dealing with them.

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    1. It never works, but in the short term it works pretty well for the kind of people most incapable of prospering in free markets. Now that they are effectively banned from selling real snake oil they’re forced to hawk philosophical snake oil.

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  7. There’s a movie in the downtown theater called “Trumbo.” A lionization of Dalton Trumbo, Hollywood screenwriter and Communist in the forties through sixties. There’s been a huge kerfuffle in the Ebert reviews comments because the reviewer assigned to “Trumbo,” Godfrey Cheshire, is knowledgeable and absolutely honest about the real life story. Here: http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/trumbo-2015

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      1. From Trumbo: “If you have a cheese sandwich, and you give a hungry classmate half your sandwich instead of charging him for it, you’re a Communist.”

        No. Communism is when the government steals your sandwich and gives it to a stranger and then imprisons you if you complain.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. Communism is where you and your followers take your classmates’ lunch money and use them as bread shuttles. Because the weaker kids must come from better families, and hence have it coming to them.

          Cheese sandwiches are triggering because of gluten and dairy. Trumbo is insensitive and hurtful.

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          2. naah, they warehouse it until it is rotten, slice it into thin pieces, give it to you and your neighbors and you’re glad for your thin slice of rotten cheese sandwich!

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            1. We are so accustomed to the miracles we take them for granted.

              What a Burger Can Tell You
              By Jay Nordlinger — November 28, 2015
              A lovely piece was written by David Feith for the Wall Street Journal — lovely and true. It’s entitled “A Roy Rogers Thanksgiving Lesson,” and it quotes Bernie Sanders, the Vermont socialist who’s running for the Democratic presidential nomination.

              [SNIP]

              Feith writes,

              My grandfather marveled at the Roy Rogers restaurant by our home in Maryland. Each hamburger there was fresh and inexpensive, yet individually wrapped to stay warm, clean and ready to eat. Customers expected no less. But my grandfather came from the Soviet Union. On first visiting America in the 1980s, he saw Roy Rogers’s humble burger as a sign of awesome bounty.

              [SNIP]

              Many years ago, I did a public interview of René Pape, the great German bass, at the Salzburg Festival. Pape grew up in Dresden, in East Germany. When he first came to Salzburg, he was agog at many things — especially the food. The sheer abundance and quality of the food.

              Some years later, I interviewed Angela Gheorghiu, the great Romanian soprano. She described to me her first trip to the West, which was to Vienna. She wondered why people weren’t dancing in the streets. There was all this abundance, this fantastic plenty. She couldn’t stop staring at the food in the markets — especially the meat and the fruit. She kept taking photos of these things, to show her parents. She did not take pictures of monuments and buildings (which in Vienna are splendid). She took pictures of meat, fruit, and flowers. Otherwise, how would anyone believe her?

              I mentioned to Gheorghiu that Pape had had a similar experience. She was a bit cross: “The shops in Romania — not like in Germany, excuse me — were completely empty. Just white. Just white.”

              RTWT

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              1. Romania was a bit unusual in the annals of European communism. Under Ceausescu, Romanian communism went berserk. The country had Stalinist controls that were probably the most extreme in the entire Warsaw Pact. Pretty much every noteworthy scientific accomplishment performed in the country during his reign was ascribed to his wife (who was a not very bright scientist). He banned birth control in an attempt to raise the country’s population (and that happened… though many of the resulting kids ended up in horribly run orphanages). And in order to pay off the country’s foreign debt, he used most of the goods produced within the country. He actually did manage to pay off the country’s foreign debt by the late ’80s, but the country had the worst shortages of any of the Warsaw Pact nations.

                AFAIK, he was the only Eastern Bloc leader who was killed during the collapse of the Iron Curtain in 1989, and Romania had a brief and very confused bit of civil war following his death.

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        3. “If you have a cheese sandwich you stole it from the proletariate. We are taking your cheese sandwich and executing you and your entire extended family in the local mall with mandatory attendance by all your neighbors as a lesson for the other cheese stealers.”

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        4. First, Trumbo is lies. Trumbo was a liar and any movie about him which does not tell the truth about that is lying. Therefore, Trumbo‘s explanation of Communism is a lie.

          Second, Communism is not when the government steals your sandwich, because it is not your sandwich. You didn’t build that and you have no right to it.

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        5. (Paraphrase from memory of a scene in a Shell Scott thriller from the Fifties)

          “Isn’t this a *beautiful* yacht?”

          Sure, doll. Everybody ought to have one.”

          “Why Mr. Scott! That sounds like communism!”

          “Naw, babe. With communism, everybody gets an oar. But nobody gets a yacht.”

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    2. And despite being handed the clue on a silver platter, so many commenters still haven’t figured out that the House Un-American Activities Committee and Senator McCarthy’s hearings were two separate things.

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    2. Ofay. Pig Latin. Work it out. Derogatory term used by Black Power activists to refer to White Folk. See also honkies.

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  9. While I’m not a big fan of Rush Limbaugh (like many “commentators” he uses bombast when facts will do), he made a telling comment recently. The President of France doesn’t badmouth the French people. Putin doesn’t badmouth the Russian people. Abe doesn’t badmouth the Japanese people. Nobody (else) badmouths their own people.

    Only American politicians (mostly those of a particular party) badmouth the American people–and get away with it.

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      1. Remember that Eric Holder explicitly said that the reason he arranged minimal punishment for blacks who committed voting intimidation was because he didn’t want to punish his people. A position that Obama must agree with, since he did nothing about Holder.

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  10. I am reminded both of the r-type vs K-type argument regarding alliances (r-types aligning with an enemy as they see them as doing more damage to the K-type, therefore a ‘gain’ for them… until.) and of ESR’s post(s) about Gramscian damage.

    The Cold War has leftover munitions, some still quite live and deployed. The hard part is the de-mining of the… memesphere? (I can’t think of a better/the proper name for whatever that ought to be at the moment.)

    Hrmm.. history of civilization as a relaxation oscillator? The voltage is nearing the breakdown point of the neon bulb. Hope it’s only neon – and not in a an Cl2 H2 mix atmosphere…

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  11. This is a bit like how ebola survivors still have the virus in their eyeballs and other out of the way places for decades. Academia is well shielded from reality so not only do these memetic viruses (remember that “virus” comes from the Latin word for poison) survive, they can mutate without the kind of culling reality performs on bad ideas.

    There is a reason why free college tuition is a major part of the Democrat platform. They know that they need to keep infecting people if they are to survive as a national party. I bet that if we restricted federal student aid to those in STEM majors, Progressives would be done nationally in a decade.

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    1. They say princes learn no art truly but the art of horsemanship. The reason is the brave beast is no flatterer. He will throw a prince as soon as his groom. ~Ben Jonson

      And the laws of physics treat with a decided equality.

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      1. Hater! Racist!! They do not!!! Because reasons!!!! I didn’t vote for no laws of physics – put them to the ballot!!!!! Or we’ll burn this place to the ground!!!!!!! /snark

        Seriously, if 2+2=5, and all people are the same while we celebrate their diversity (but not of thought), and if black and white and male and female are just choices, and if minorities who “benefit” from preferential practices in college are the moral superiors of those who actually have to succeed on their own merits, and if the most violent subgroups among us are rioting in the name of peace, and if foreign invaders get preferential treatment over natural citizens, then why should that Anglo-Christian-cis-hetero-male created science be any better? /run-on-sentence /rant

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        3. if 2+2=5

          Consider:
          let: a = b
          multiply both sides by a: a^2 = ab
          Subtract b^2 from both sides: a^2 – b^2 = ab – b^2
          factor: (a+b)(a-b) = b(a-b)
          cancel a-b: a+b = b
          since a = b: a + a = a or 2a = a
          cancel a: 2 = 1

          Once you have that, then 2+2=5 is a trivial exercise.

          :P

          Let this be a parable for arguments “supporting” socialism/communism.

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            2. Unless you are studying pre-calculus, where the limit as the divisor approaches zero is infinity! Learned that back in grade school.

              Unfortunately, that is apparently the math being taught to the “Womyn and Myn of Ethnicity and Fluidic Gender” majors – they seem to believe that as labor approaches zero, their remuneration should approach infinity.

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              1. Actually the limit(x->0) 1/x does not exist. To exist, the limit as x approaches zero from above (1, .1, .01, .001, .0001, etc), and as x approaches zero from below (-1, -.1, -.01, etc) must both converge on the same value. However the limit from the right goes toward infinity (i.e. grows without bound) while the one on the left heads to _negative_ infinity. This tends to get elided over in pre-calc but is covered in some detail in actual calculus (at least in the schools I attended).

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            3. Yes, this is one of the standard “fake” proofs out there. By using different variable names the illegal step is masked.

              Which is why it’s a parable for socialist/communist “thought”.

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  12. Must we fight it here, on our soil, as it turns hot, and hang our own commissars from their own guts?

    To paraphrase General George S. Patton (and begging the General’s eternal pardon):

    “We’ll win this war, but we’ll win it only by fighting and showing the Commies that we’ve got more guts than they have or ever will have. We’re not just going to shoot the bastards, we’re going to rip out their living g*d-damned guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks. We’re going to murder those lousy Commie c*******ers by the bushel-f***ing-basket.”

    Make no mistake, I do not want it to come to that. But as I (repeatedly) say, I feel that such and endgame is now inevitable. Therefore, let it happen in my time, so that my children will know only peace.

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    1. *such an endgame is now inevitable.

      Sorry. Way too much blood in my caffeine system this morning. Either that or I’m still hungover on tryptophan.

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      1. I have a saying to the family whenever things look bleak (probably not original, but I have no idea where I got it from).

        “The only way that the situation is disastrous is if we do nothing to change the situation.”

        Usually followed by “Now sit down and start WORKING the problem, not bemoaning it!”

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    3. It is an ironic truth (or ought that be truthful irony?) that the perceived willingness to exercise extreme sanctions often obviates any need to resort to extreme sanctions.

      Alternately, the understood desire to do anything to avoid breaking the peace seems to inevitably guarantee having to tolerate anything.

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    4. >…so that children will know only peace.

      Yeah, and as my father put it “And an elephant will jump out of my ass at noon.”

      There is no peace.

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      1. Sure there is, when your enemies are so beaten and/or intimidated that they will not start a fight. How beaten or intimidated that is depends on what you are trying to do to them.

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    2. I love the line, “There’s only one of him and he’s it.” I’ve used it myself, often on/for myself. Or the variant, “There’s only one of me, {and, but} I am all of them.”

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          1. I find myself able to face myself in the morning, although this is not always the case as I sometimes lose track of where I am and what I am up to. One reason I no longer imbibe alcohol is that I found too easy to forget myself.

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  15. “But it makes a total conquest of intellectuals, academics, and people who feel the “real” world doesn’t compensate them enough and that they’re way too smart for the common herd.”

    Exactly! Never seen it put more succinctly. Well said.

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    1. Their conceptual failure is in believing that being smart entitles them to higher rewards, just as thugs believe that being strong entitles them. Under the rules of free markets, the only thing that “entitles” you to “disproportionate” rewards is the production of goods/services which people disproportionately desire.

      There is a world of difference between “deserving” benefits and “earning” benefits.

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  17. > I don’t think there has ever been a country like ours, where our
    > elites are deliberately taught – in our best schools – to hate and
    > despise everything that we are, everything that makes us unique.

    I would counter with England.

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  18. ” Now it’s Islam, but once upon a time it was communism;” Still is. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TC9kuG5Q83s via http://tercalivre.com/en/ The Soviet bear did not die, it collapsed and was resuscitated with Western money and credulity.

    It is still possible that the current train of events will not come to full out fratricidal violence, however much the Left longs for the day. Events are beginning to cascade, which means that the great and the good are getting swept up in unforeseen consequences that will undo much of the plan.

    Be ready. Allow no SJW to preen without at least trying to knock them off their high horse. They don’t like to be shot at any more than anybody else; firing back makes them keep their head down.

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