Clinton's Suited Barbarians
The New Australian
Feb 21-27 1999 James Henry
In my article column Clinton and Machiavelli's Prince* (No. 106, 8-14 February) I thought I had made it clear that Clinton was not in himself the real menace to the Republic and why there is no danger of him becoming our first dictator. He is certainly ruthless and ambitious enough for the role, but lacks the necessaries qualities and, above all, the right social and political environment.
I pointed out that it is not the Constitution that defends our lives and liberty but our faith in the Constitution. This is something the Founding Fathers fully understood and that is why they built checks and balances into our system of government. They were astute observers of of human nature as well as keen students of history. They knew how people can be deceived or moved by the passions of the moment. But more than anything else, they understood how seductive power can be and the attraction it holds for the worst of men and women.
There are only two ways in which a people lose their liberty: from within or from without. The threat to American liberty will not spring from militant Chinese nationalism or a resurgent Russia — it will come from a gradual loss of faith in liberty as Americans succumb to the blandishments of the state and sink into moral degradation. The latter does not mean Roman-like orgies or taking delight in gladiatorial contests. It does mean abandoning basic moral values and severing one's ties from tradition.
This process can only leave a society morally adrift, subject to philosophical absurdities such as relativism, which invariably degenerates into nihilism. When this begins to happen people at first lose their moral courage; fearing ridicule and being portrayed as ignorant they allow the sophistries and outright lies of the emerging orthodoxy to go unchecked; eventually, their own lack of moral courage is transformed into a lack of moral conviction and they lose their capacity to make moral judgements. This opens the door to despotic government.
We have not reached the final stage of moral collapse. Most people still see Clinton for the creature he really is. Yet a great many people were either unable or feared to make the final moral judgement. Is this because they accepted the dominant intellectual belief that moral judgements are expressions of intolerance (except when made by left-wing intellectuals) or is it because they are now incapable of making moral judgements? Or is it because they fear ridicule? I just do not know. But I do know that when moral values collapse barbarism moves in.
Totalitarian ideologies have been the curse of the twentieth century. The havoc they wreaked and their death toll vastly exceeds anything caused by all of history's other barbarians. The Nazis were this century's barbarians par excellence, not because of the numbers they murdered (communist states murdered vastly more people) but because they epitomised modern barbarism. Men who could casually murder men, women and children and then go home and cuddle their children, listen to Bach, play Mozart, read Goethe or discuss nineteenth century art. Barbarians in neatly tailored uniforms and highly polished boots. Barbarians wearing glasses, smoking pipes and with leather patches on the elbows of their jackets lecturing students on National Socialism and Aryan superiority. Barbarians in silk shirts and ties and oozing smarmy charm, exhibiting impeccable manners and convincing English aristocrats and naive politicians that their intentions were honorable and their ambitions limited — and all the while their thugs swaggered through the nation's streets.
What made this possible was, in a nutshell, Germany's moral collapse. A country noted for its high culture, universities and high level of education was turned virtually overnight into a nation of suited barbarians. Nothing so dramatic or murderous is going to happen in America. No, it will strike us like a cancer that if left unchecked becomes terminal. Are we seeing the signs? Perhaps. The first target of any totalitarian movement is the media, including film studios. Unlike the Nazis or communists, America's totalitarian Left has not had to capture government to control the means of communications, it has virtually done that already. It also controls nearly all of the country's humanities departments. From these it has poured out thousands of left-wing graduates who go into law, journalism, teaching, entertainment — even advertising.
The mainstream media's uniform defence of Clinton and the savagery of its ideological assault on his critics and victims clearly demonstrates who is really in control. These journalists are just some of Clinton's suited barbarians. For them there is no truth, only a cause and a pathological hatred of conservatism. True, the barbarians' control of the media is not complete, but it doesn't have to be. It only needs to be effective. There is no doubt that our leftist dominated media has had a pernicious effect on public opinion. I recall how William Shirer described that while living in Nazi Germany even he had been misled by "a steady diet over the years of falsifications and distortions" (The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich) despite his ready access to foreign sources of information, especially British and American.
Then, of course, we have the Hollywood network. Its support for left-wing causes is as legendary as its scorn for conservative values. Not content with publicly cheering Clinton on, it has joined his smear squad with NBC productions Law & Order and Homicide being used to libel Ken Starr and belittle the accusations against Clinton. Do these actors, producers and directors have any shame or any common decency? Of course not. This piece of lying pro-Clinton propaganda is all in the cause. (But it sometimes makes me wonder who will be the Hollywood Leni Riefenstahl). So is Hollywood dominated by suited barbarians? I think so. Just recall Alec Baldwin's antics.
This now leaves us with the universities. The extent of open support for Clinton in academia, mainly the humanities, has shaken quite a few people. It shouldn't have. Twentieth century academics in general have not really been noted for their devotion to democracy. German universities were so ideologically corrupt by 1933 that the great majority of those holding university chairs had already joined the Nazi Party along with thousands of other academics. The recent outbreak of academic support for Clinton suggests that the mentality many of our academics is not much better than that of those German academics of the '20s and '30s. Once again demonstrating besuited barbarism was not just a German phenomenon, especially when one considers how many American academics supported Marxist regimes that murdered scores of millions of their own citizens.
The one thing people must learn is that they are not facing a political party or a conspiracy. What they are facing is the deadliest of all political movements. The type that spontaneously emerges overtime, gradually spreading, like a plague, through civic society and the body politic. What members of this movement share is a common ideology and that is why they seem to act as if they are being directed. People who share the same ideas tend to react the same way. Therefore the movement has no head and no plan, just a self-organising network. This is much easier to understand if you think of the ideology as a plague and the ideologues as carriers. Hillary Clinton is one such carrier while Bill is basically a political parasite.
If this political plague is not stopped, and it can be stopped, it will eventually kill off American democracy. The first step in defeating this movement is to understand what it is. Fortunately, its nature is well understood in many quarters. The really good news is, it cannot withstand the antidote — and that is honest and open debate. Without a doubt, the Net will play a vital role in defeating this totalitarian disease, as Matt Drudge has already shown. I firmly believe that the good news will get even better.
@Copyright The New Australian. newaus.com.au
Posted for educational and discussion purposes only.
newaus.com.au
|
