Progressivism: America's Brand of Socialism
“Here I encounter the most popular fallacy of our times. It is not considered sufficient that the law should be just; it must be philanthropic. Nor is it sufficient that the law should guarantee to every citizen the free and inoffensive use of his faculties for physical, intellectual, and moral self-improvement. Instead, it is demanded that the law should directly extend welfare, education, and morality throughout the nation. This is the seductive lure of socialism. … These two uses of the law are in direct contradiction to each other. We must choose between them. A citizen cannot at the same time be free and not free.”
~ Frederic Bastiat
What is the world’s most powerful and violent “ism”? The question will summon the usual demons, such as Islamism, now that communism has left the stage. The answer, wrote Harold Pinter, is only “superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged,” because only one ideology claims to be non-ideological, neither left nor right, the supreme way. This is neo-liberalism.
In his 1859 essay, On Liberty, to which modern "liberals" pay homage, John Stuart Mills described the power of empire. “Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians,” he wrote, “provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end.” The “barbarians” were large sections of humanity of whom “implicit obedience” was required. The French liberal Alexis de Tocqueville also believed in the bloody conquest of others as “a triumph of Christianity and civilization” that was “clearly pre-ordained in the sight of Providence.”
“It’s a nice and convenient myth that liberals are the peacemakers and conservatives the warmongers,” wrote the historian Hywel Williams in 2001, “but the imperialism of the neo-liberal way may be more dangerous because of its open-ended nature — its conviction that it represents a superior form of life [while denying its] self-righteous fanaticism.” He had in mind a speech by Tony Blair in the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 attacks, in which Blair promised to “reorder this world around us” according to his “moral values.” At least a million dead later – in Iraq alone – this tribune of neo-liberalism is today employed by the tyranny in Kazakhstan for a fee of $13 million.
Blair’s crimes are not unusual. Since 1945, more than a third of the membership of the United Nations – 69 countries – have suffered some or all of the following. They have been invaded, their governments overthrown, their popular movements suppressed, their elections subverted and their people bombed. The historian Mark Curtis estimates the death toll in the millions.
This has been principally the project of the neo-liberal flame carrier, the United States, whose celebrated “progressive” president John F. Kennedy, according to new research, authorized the bombing of Moscow during the Cuban crisis in 1962. “If we have to use force,” said Madeleine Albright, US Secretary of State in the neo-liberal administration of Bill Clinton, “it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future.” How succinctly she defines modern, violent neo-liberalism.
According to its own records, NATO, in its "humanitarian war," launched 9,700 “strike sorties” against Libya, of which more than a third were civilian targets. These included missiles with uranium warheads. Look at the photographs of the rubble of Misurata and Sirte, and the mass graves identified by the Red Cross. Read the UICEF report on the children killed, “most [of them] under the age of ten.” Like the destruction of the Iraqi city of Fallujah, these crimes were not news, because news as disinformation is a fully integrated weapon of attack.
On 14 July, the Libyan Observatory for Human Rights, which opposed the Gaddafi regime, reported, “The human rights situation in Libya now is far worse than under Gaddafi.” Ethnic cleansing is rife. According to Amnesty, the entire population of the town of Tawargha “are still barred from returning [while] their homes have been looted and burned down.”
In Anglo-American scholarship, influential theorists known as “liberal realists” have long taught that neo-liberal imperialists – a term they never use – are the world’s peacebrokers and crisis managers, rather than the cause of a crisis. They have taken the humanity out of the study of nations and congealed it with a jargon that serves warmongering power. Laying out whole nations for autopsy, they have identified “failed states” (nations difficult to exploit) and “rogue states” (nations resistant to western dominance).
Whether or not the regime is a democracy or dictatorship is irrelevant. The same is true of those contracted to do the dirty work. In the Middle East, from Nasser’s time to Syria today, western neo-liberalism’s collaborators have been Islamists, lately al-Qaeda, while long discredited notions of democracy and human rights serve as rhetorical cover for conquest, “as required.”
“If one understands that socialism is not a share-the-wealth program, but is in reality a method to consolidate and control the wealth, then the seeming paradox of superrich men promoting socialism becomes no paradox at all. Instead it becomes the logical, even the perfect tool of power-seeking megalomaniacs. Communism, or more accurately, socialism, is not a movement of the downtrodden masses, but of the economic elite,”
~ Gary Allen "None Dare Call It Conspiracy"
Few Americans would knowingly embrace socialism, having witnessed the destruction and misery it caused around the world during the last century. And yet, for more than a hundred years America has been slowly but inexorably inching toward a socialist form of government. The explanation for this is found in the fact that socialism is never presented as socialism but as "liberalism", or more recently, progressivism. Norman Thomas, six-time Presidential candidate of the Socialist Party of America, said in a 1944 speech, "The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism. But under the name of 'progressivism' they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist program, until one day America will be a Socialist nation, without knowing how it happened."
Since its publication in 1848, The Communist Manifesto has become the most influential political document in history. Its influence reaches into the centers of power in virtually every civilized nation on earth including our own. The overwhelming majority of America’s political class embrace its basic tenets while denying that the ideas they espouse amount to socialism. The same is true for members of the popular media, academia, and a majority of the American public.
The American progressive/socialist does not express his ideology openly. Instead, he talks in jargon and “code words” intended to entice and mislead. Words like “bourgeoisie” and “proletariat” sound foreign to the American ear, so the progressive speaks of “the rich” and the “working people”. Instead of talking about transfer payments and wealth redistribution, he talks of “social justice”. Frederic Bastiat, the nineteenth century French philosopher and legal scholar quoted earlier, describes socialism as “legal plunder” and gives a clear, unequivocal and easy to understand definition of it in his book, The Law, published in 1850, as socialism was gaining a foothold in France.
"But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime. Then abolish this law without delay, for it is not only an evil itself, but also it is a fertile source for further evils because it invites reprisals. If such a law—which may be an isolated case— is not abolished immediately, it will spread, multiply, and develop into a system."
"The person who profits from this law will complain bitterly, defending his acquired rights. He will claim that the state is obligated to protect and encourage his particular industry; that this procedure enriches the state because the protected industry is thus able to spend more and to pay higher wages to the poor workingmen."
"Do not listen to this sophistry by vested interests. The acceptance of these arguments will build legal plunder into a whole system. In fact, this has already occurred. The present day delusion is an attempt to enrich everyone at the expense of everyone else; to make plunder universal under the pretense of organizing it."
~ Frederic Bastiat (1850)
Conclusion
The essence of progressivism is deception. At first glance, it appears that its policies are motivated by the highest of human ideals: compassion, concern, caring, sympathy, etc. Progressivisms’ appeals are made on behalf of the poor, the children, the disenfranchised, and those who have been unfortunate in life’s lottery. The reality is that socialism appeals to the basest of human flaws: jealousy, hatred, greed and envy.
Masquerading as the savior of humanity, in reality all socialism, whether labeled Socialism, Nazism, Fascism, Communism, or Progressivism is the very essence of enslavement. During the twentieth century, socialism in its various forms was responsible for the slaughter of untold millions of innocent people through genocide, war, and political purges. In the Union of Soviet Socialistic Republics, 60 million were slaughtered; under the National Socialists German Workers Party, 20 million; and under the People’s Republic of China, 50 million. Add to that the millions who died under Pol Pot, Castro, Ho Chi Minh, and other socialists dictators, and you have an unbelievable amount of human suffering that can only be ascribed to evil. For those unfortunate enough to live under one of the forms of socialism, life consists of misery, oppression and deprivation.
Considering the consistent failure of socialism during its two-hundred year history, it is difficult to understand how any sane person could voluntarily choose it as the preferred systems of government and economics. There has never been an experiment in socialism of any duration that can be pointed to as an example of a successful society. Every time it is tried, it fails miserably. Deception, corruption, envy, greed, jealously, coercion, thievery and wholesale murder mark the existence of socialism in the world. That being the case, how then, does socialism continue to expand its influence?
Socialism appeals to the masses because it is based on the most ignoble elements of fallen man’s nature, envy, jealousy and greed. Real greed comes not from capitalism but from progressivism (American socialism). Its number one attraction is a promise to provide people with economic benefits they have not earned by forcefully taking from the earnings of others. To condone, and even encourage this “legal plunder” is the epitome of greed. Progressivism operates as a parasite on the body politic. It takes the earned wealth of the productive members of society and redistributes it to the less productive members until all the accumulated wealth is dissipated. If unchecked, the process continues until all members of society, with the exception of the ruling elite, are living in deprivation and poverty. Average citizens are eventually reduced to a state of servitude to the state.
What Can Be Done?
The bottom line is that there is little time left for top-down political fairytale dreams, and little utility left in standard street actions. The real solutions require blood, sweat, and tears, starting with Decentralization.
In order for a Collectivist system to prevail, its controllers MUST convince the masses that people need the system to survive. Elitists deliberately deny or forcefully remove options and choices from the public view, until we are led to believe that there is only one way to live. Only one way to subsist. Only one path to security. Collectivists must condition the populace to believe that the machine is indispensible to their prosperity, even if that same machine is actually bringing about their downfall.
Decentralization is essentially any action which removes you from dependence on the establishment. Meaning, Americans must fight back by first being able to provide for themselves the necessities of economy and of life. Any counter-movement to tyranny that thinks it can combat the system while being completely dependent on the system is wholeheartedly fooling itself. There will be no infiltration and conversion, as the Ron Paul Movement can now attest.
The concept of decentralization is often confused with so-called “isolationism” by those heavily conditioned with globalist rhetoric. What they fail to grasp is that collectivist constructs are inherently flawed. As we have seen in regions such as the European Union as well as most of the economic world overall, interdependency, especially engineered interdependency, destroys redundancy. Globalization has made us WEAK, not strong. It has tied nations together artificially, not to make them safer, but to make them unsustainable and easily toppled. Centralization removes individual imperative. It causes cultures to sacrifice their ability to self-heal. It creates incontinent invalid alzheimers societies, incapable of standing on their own two feet.
People who promote globalism unknowingly (useful idiots) are often dumbstruck by the idea that anyone would actually want to walk away from the collective entirely. They have so embraced their servitude to the con of the “greater good” that they are incapable of imagining any other alternatives. They therefore see any person who separates from the hive in any way as an immediately outlandish threat; an “isolationist”, which is just another term for “selfish hoarder”.
One can form or be a part of a community that does not require him to cast aside his individualism or sovereignty. “Community” does NOT necessarily denote “communism” as long as it respects the pursuit of independence by its members. There is such a thing as voluntary compassion, charity, mutual aid, and industry. Societies have in the past functioned quite well without overt government administration and mandatory participation. The suggestion that mankind cannot survive without being told how by some faceless bureaucracy is absurd, not to mention historically inaccurate.
Decentralization and voluntary community go hand in hand. In order to defeat a collectivist system which seeks to dissolve individual liberties and focus social power, we must build communities outside of the mainstream that foster individual liberty and disperse social power. This begins with personal sustainability, or what some of us call “prepping”. Each and every Liberty Movement proponent can and should distance himself from the globalist construct. This takes time, and planning. It requires us to learn useful skills, to produce many of our own goods, and to eventually form legitimate face-to-face networks which localize businesses and services.
International corporate chains and banks siphon wealth away from communities in exchange for a limited number of low-wage service sector jobs. This trade is highly uneven. These entities will continue to hold sway over our towns and cities as long as we continue to give them all our business. Our first goal, then, should be to remove them from the picture. By forming our own markets, whether through barter or through alternative currencies (as long as those currencies are backed by something tangible), Americans can break the false paradigm of the consumerist cycle, and support themselves and each other while keeping wealth steadily flowing within a region.
The method here is obvious; make the corrupt system obsolete by building a better one ourselves. It is, however, not simple, or easy. I do not deny that the government as it exists now would use force to ensure that the public conforms to centralization. That is a given. But, I will say that decentralization makes resistance possible. The Founding Fathers of our nation took steps to decentralize economically from Great Britain long before they ever fired a shot against them. The advantage of walking away from the chessboard should be clear; when the enemy pulls out his gun in order to make you play the game, he loses all semblance of the moral high ground. Spectators who once sat on the fence finally discover the true nature of their rulers, and are forced by conscience to pick a side. The activists then control the pace and the tone of the conflict, rather than the elites. All honorable revolutions begin with decentralization.
Decentralization breeds redundancy and strength within local economies. It makes citizens more independent and able to cope with disaster. And, it forms real, meaningful community, an advantage that has been all but lost in this country for generations. Its most fantastic advantage, though, is that it removes any excuse the government could use to convince the public and the military that martial law and executive dominance is needed. If towns, counties, and states all over America are decentralized and self-sustaining, they will not need federal help regardless of the calamity. The argument for government intervention becomes moot.
The urgency of this situation cannot be misunderstood. Those who do not decentralize here in America right now will not survive. The scale of fiscal disaster on the horizon is immense. There is no question, no debate. There is only life, and death. Decentralization, or apathy and indecision. Either we decentralize, or, we cease to be.
