Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Daniel Greenfield article: The War
on Freedom

Posted: 03 May 2010 07:27 PM PDT

How do you take away the freedom of a free people without
putting tanks on every street? You do it by transforming their culture. By
turning the very idea of freedom into something ugly and shameful. A foul
thing to be associated with extremists and other bad folk that good
citizens are advised to avoid. The goal being to convince the people that
their freedom is a thing they should be happy to give up, rather than
having to forcibly take it away from them.

And so the political War on Freedom begins by rebranding
freedom itself as selfish. In this new narrative freedom is a lie because
there is no such thing as freedom in America. The very idea of freedom is
an arrogant and privileged entitlement held by "rich white males" and used
to oppress "people of color" and all the other officially designated
minorities by the Commissars of Political Correctness. In place of the old
fashioned idea of freedom, we have the far more "equitable" system of
social justice with its myriad of organizations and departments all
created to ensure that everyone does what they're supposed to, thinks what
they're supposed to and has as many rights as they're supposed to.

As Orwell's 1984 accurately predicted, in Newspeak, Freedom
becomes Slavery, and Slavery becomes Freedom.

As the new liberal
narrative would have it, the only people who want the freedom to keep what
they earn, write what they think, choose their own health care, elect
their own leaders, read what they like and live lives apart from the great
machinery of the state-- are the White Male Oppressors, (who are
simultaneously ignorant clinging to their religion and their guns and yet
at the same time are part of a privileged elite). Freedom is clearly a bad
thing then. It's a symptom of selfishness. And selfish people are the
oppressors, The greedy ones who don't want a welfare state, illegal
aliens, impossibly priced products, inaccessible lifesaving medical
procedures, recycling bins in every room of the house and all the other
wonderful benefits of Socialism.

People who want to be free are no
longer Americans. Certainly not Constitutionalists. Instead paradoxically
they're the new parasites, the people who refuse to be cogs in the great
machine of socialism. The selfish Kulaks who hoard their wheat. The
businessmen who make too much money. The hardworking housewife who won't
pay double for a "Green" labeled product. These are the worms in the apple
of the socialist state. The people who refuse to contribute to what the
government and the alliance of unions, left wing front groups and media
pundits labels as the Public Good.

The USSR began by portraying
independent small farmers as greedy monsters who were responsible for the
people starving, because they refused to give up their land and join
collective farms. Collective farms whose workers had nothing, could not
even travel without a permit and had to steal the food they grew in order
to survive. And so war was declared on the independent farmer. Millions
were shot, deported or imprisoned in labor camps. However by eliminating
the independent farmer, the Communists also eliminated Russian
agriculture. The collective farms were an abysmal failure. Within a
generation, Russia was stuck importing wheat from the independent farmers
of its worst enemy, the United States of America.

By declaring war
on American small business, liberals are about to repeat the Soviet
experiment in the United States. The decline of the US economy is closely
tied to the war on small business. To the replacement of the businessman
with the speculator, the inflation of the dollar, the destruction of the
manufacturing sector and the transformation of the US into a service and
sales economy, not that fundamentally different from the rest of the Third
World.

But the left's war on the small businessman is about more
than just seizing wealth in order to finance their own operations. That of
course is a large part of it. The left has always believed that it must
live off the land. And from the French Revolution to their modern day
grandchildren, the Communists and Nazis, they have always know that wealth
distribution is needed to be able to live off the land. But what they
never understood is that their idea of government as a robber baron
practices a multi-generational form of economic destruction that there is
no full recovery from. It is possible to replace lost gold and silver. But
replacing an economic niche when you have wiped out the people who used to
fill it, and culturally blotted it out, can be next to
impossible.

Yet that is exactly what the left wants to accomplish.
Its goal has always been the destruction of the bourgeoisie, the middle
class, the people who are living proof that hard work and economic
aspiration leads to social mobility and political freedoms. These the left
considers banal, selfish and rotten. Their existence a subversion of the
left's own revolutionary ideology. Because they have achieved freedom
through work, rather than ideology. Because they believe that those who
work should be the masters of government, rather than properly qualified
university graduates who have spent five years penning screeds about the
unfairness of having to work for a living. And so like the Kulaks, they
must go.

The destruction of the economy is not part of the
collateral damage from liberalism's uncontrollable spending or nanny
stateism. It is the whole point.

The Founding Fathers understood
that economic freedom was also political freedom. That is why the Boston
Tea Party played such a key role in the race toward political independence
and self-government. Liberal revisionist historians typically deride the
American Revolution as a Middle Class revolution. Which of course was
exactly the point. Distance and opportunity had made political aspirations
possible in America. But economic opportunity had made them meaningful.
Thus the difference between the revolt in Haiti and the one in the 13
colonies. Much as Israel's independence differed from the independence
gained by so many other former British colonies in that part of the
world.

One cannot have political independence without
economic independence on the national level and on the individual level.
Where economic independence is compromised, political independence soon
follows. And the decline of individual liberties in America can be
directly traced to its split between socialism and corporatism, two
seeming opposites drawn together by inertia to form one great economic
black hole. A situation that the last few years of bailouts and
toobigtofails, useless regulatory bodies and political power grabs should
have amply demonstrated for anyone.

The War on Freedom therefore is geared toward portraying
freedom as selfish and greedy. As a dangerous anachronism out of place in
the modern day socialist country. There is no such thing as freedom, they
will say. Only privilege. The idea that you could believe what you wished,
say what you wished, elect your own leaders and make your own economic
decisions, was all part of the arrogance of the entitled. But now there
will be people who will distribute that privilege equally to all, within
the parameters of the public good. The public good in their eyes being
indivisible from their own good, and that of the system of redistribution
that they oversee. And that is how tyranny begins, and freedom
dies.

Freedom, real freedom, isn't perfect. It is the freedom to
make one's own mistakes, rather than having the state make everyone's
mistakes for them. At the same time. Freedom is not a selfish thing that
obstructs the public good, it is the public good. Because the public good
is best served by individual freedom, not by a collective yoked together
in the same of an impossible ideal. The tyranny of the collective has
never created its heaven on earth, but it has instead produced no shortage
of hells. It is left to the individual to pursue his happiness, and in the
process helps others find theirs. The collective has never changed the
world for the better. Only individuals have.

Liberalism insists
that freedom is a shameful thing. A rebellion against their idea of the
public good. Their War on Freedom is in truth a war on the individual. And
it is one that we must win, if freedom is to prevail.