My Beauty Best Teacher

Originally I was going to put together a post about how the Occupy Wall Street movement has been endorsed by the American Nazi Party. It was news-worthy- the ANP said in a statement that

The fact that its these “lefties” as you call them, who are picking up the ball and running with it – only shows how much more in tune THEY are with the fed up masses of White Workers, than the fossilized, reactionary “right-wing”. WHO holds the WEALTH and POWER in this country – the JUDEO-CAPITALISTS. WHO is therefore the #1 ENEMY who makes all this filth happen – the JUDEO-CAPITALISTS. WHO therefore do WN need to FIGHT? My heart is right there with these people, perhaps someday the “movement” will SHOW the same COURAGE and DEDICATION that these people OUT THERE FIGHTING are SHOWING!

Yeah, so there is that out there, the fact that the fascists in the Nazi party clearly recognize that this movement fits into their goals and agenda. But really this isn't so much what I want to post about today, because when I was doing research for this post, I came across something more stunning, something that I had written about before after Obama's election as President and something that I think is relevant today.

In December 2008, I linked over to a piece at the American Thinker from Bruce Walker called Orwell's Children, and I think we should all take a minute to re-read it today, because it describes this Occupy Wall Street movement very well. Picture the people at these protests and rallies as you read the following (edited for brevity)...

It has been sixty years since George Orwell wrote his chilling dystopian classic, 1984....

...We are drifting into the sort of horrific future he described. Too many of us for comfort or solace have become just like the denizens of Jonestown: Orwell's children -- a new generation of creature enraged into constant militancy against eternal enemies, oblivious to the notion of a Blessed Creator, melded into the consciousness of the party hive, divorced from history, hypnotized by images, inoculated against reason, stripped of family, and existing only to serve the cause...

...There were specific elements necessary for nations with a heritage of freedom to slide into the most absolute and abject slavery. These elements existed in Nazi Germany, they existed in Soviet Russia, and they exist in our free democracies today. What are the characteristics of the Orwellian state?

Start with God. He must go.... A generation of Orwell's Children are growing up without thinking about God at all or thinking that God is a silly idea cherished by sillier old fogies.

Truth must go too. Nazis embraced the "Big Lie." Soviets denied that honesty, per se, mattered. In Orwell's Oceania, the Inner Party members learn to even lie to themselves and to hold utterly contradictory beliefs at the same time. Truth and honesty have little meaning to Orwell's Children in our world. All truth is relative, all honesty a sham.
Language must be brought to heel... Politically correct language is rampant.

Image and symbols replace words... We live in a word of symbols and images. Conservatives succeed in books and talk radio, media that deal in words- but Orwell's Children live in the realm of symbols and images...

..Immutable oppressors are the final nasty element in dystopia. Hitler blamed Jews for everything. Stalin blamed kulaks and his enemies in the party for everything. Subjects of Orwell's Oceania saw Emmanuel Goldstein as the eternal, immutable enemy of the party. Today there is a drearily predictable list of oppressors. Christians, men, white people, the "rich" (whatever that is supposed to mean), America, and Israel are oppressors and nothing can ever change that.

Orwell even told us, by name, the professionals who would lead us into the nightmare of 1984: "sociologists," "teachers," "bureaucrats," "journalists," "professional politicians," "scientists," "trade union organizers," "publicity experts," and "technicians." (The term "community organizer" was unknown to him.) Those who enslave were those who taught students, who created the news, who sat in the halls of government power, and who defined official "truth" (at least truth de jour.)

Orwell's Children live among us now, not in tiny numbers in weird Marxist cults like Jim Jones' People Temple, but as leaders of Congress, as the establishment of academia, as the producers of news and entertainment, as the administrators of public schools, as the "experts" in a thousand myriad and odd fields of putative "expertise." They infatuate our bored children with the only reality and the only diversion that many can find. They wait for the rest of us to grow older and to die....

Education, science, technological gadgetry, good medical care - all of this can not stop us from sliding into a massive Jonestown, a realized Oceania, a place marked by Dante's grim caution "Abandon hope, all you who enter here." We are all anchored in belief, but it is what we believe that matters. We can believe in the lies of Big Brother, which change each day with the needs of the party or we can believe in the truth of a living God. We can become the children of Orwell or the special creatures of God. Everything -- our nation, our world, our families, our communities -- flows from that choice.

Go back and look at the Occupy Wall Street movement with this lens- listen to the interviews from these people, look at the signs they hold up, and have conversations with them. They are inarticulate slogan-shouting, God-hating, lying children who endlessly talk about 'oppressors' that need to be overthrown by empowering an all powerful government to take property from those who they do not like, attack and kill those who they hate (like Jews), and control all of our choices through regulations and taxes. The people who go to these Occupy Wall Street rallies and support them and talk favorably of them are Orwell's Children, and are the enemies of the protection of life, liberty, and property, and deserve nothing but the full and complete opposition of all true patriots.

According to a recent poll by CBS, most Americans believe that taxes on millionaires should be increased in order to reduce the deficit. When asked "should taxes on millionaires be raised in order to lower the the deficit," 64% of those responding to this poll said "yes." This is exactly why our founding fathers rejected a democracy in favor of building a republic.

When our founding fathers built our nation, they knew from history that democracies inevitably fail. Democracies are governments built on majority rule, where the majority has the power to decide what to do with your property, your liberties, and eventually your life. In a democracy, votes are held, and if the majority decides that they want to take more of your money, property, wealth, or business in order to 'lower the deficit', that is exactly what happens. Although those who are voting played no part in you earning this wealth and those who are voting did not expend any effort for you to gain this wealth, they derive their power from the fact that there are more of them than you, and majority rules. On this basis, they feel that they can gather as mobs and demand higher taxes on you and more control over your choices, simply because there are more of them than you. This sort of mob rule is exactly the sort of rule that was common in ancient Greece and common at the end of the Roman Republic, and eventually both of these republics-turned-democracies slide into governments ruled by Caesars and Tyrants.

Our founding fathers knew this was the nature of man and knew that although democracies and majority rule have some favorable aspects to them, the only way that people's lives, liberty, and property could be properly protected is by building a republic. A republic is a government where political power is limited by the law, which sets up a government of limited powers that is frequently checked by separation of powers, checks and balances, and federalism. In a republic, minority rights are protected and the government is unable to threaten your life, liberty, and property because it lacks the power and capacity to do so- it does not rule on majority rule, but rather rules based on the majority properly running a firmly established and defined political entity which performs certain needed tasks well, such as national defense and establishing police services, but which does not have the real power to inject itself into tasks which it can not do well, like setting up social values and controlling the free market of exchange. In a republic, the government lacks the capacity and power to take money from those who earn it simply because they have it- rather, taxes are raised on people because it is argued that those people benefit the most from the services of the state so should pay more. This argument only works to a certain point, and assumes that even the poor pay taxes into the system to a rate comparable to what the services that they receive from the state- it is not just 'loot the rich because they have money and there is more of us than them.'

Our nation is approaching a key election in 2012, much as Rome faced a key turning point in its history when Lucius Sergius Catilina attempted to overthrow the Roman Republic by playing to the lures of democracy and populism. Catiline rallied the poor to his banner by arguing for debt relief for the poor people of Rome, and many supported him because there are always more people who are poor than there are people who are truly wealthy. Because of the destructive policies of the government, which had collapsed the housing market and had taxed and regulated the small farms and small businesses to the brink of destruction, there were many people out of work who listened to the siren song of 'support me, I'll claim majority rule, and take from those who have wealth and give to those who do not.' Thankfully, Rome had an ardent defender of the Republic in a man like Cicero, and the conspiracy was foiled, but I believe that it had come close enough to succeeding to inspire men like Julius Caesar and Pompey to try again soon after, and they were successful in harassing the forces of democracy to institute a dictatorship over the masses.

So, after reading that the majority of Americans believe that taxes on millionaires should be increased in order to reduce the deficit, I once again thankful that our nation is a Republic- if only we can keep it that way.

Following up on his recent calls for Israel to return to its 1967 border, Obama is now calling on France to return to its 1917 border and return the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine back to Germany. For the first time ever, here is President Barack Obama's upcoming speech on Peace in the Middle Europe:

A strong and secure France is in the national security interest of the United States not simply because of a long and boring list of reasons which I shall list and wait for you to clap after each one, but flows from a deeper and magical place that I will not name-- and that place is the values we share. As two people who struggled to win our freedom against overwhelming odds, America and France, we understand that preserving the security for which our forefathers -- and foremothers -- and rearbrothers-- and sidesisters-- and yoregrandfadders-- fought must be the work of every generation. As two vibrant democracies, we recognize that the liberties and freedoms we cherish must be constantly tortured. And as the nation that recognized the French Republic first after its independence, we have a profound commitment to its survival as a strong, secure homeland for the French people.

And so, in both word and deed, we have been unwavering in our support of France's security.  And it is precisely because of our commitment to France's long-term security that we have worked to advance peace between France and Germany. Now after all these words, just words, prepare to get a knife in your back. (Big Applause.)

The status quo between France and Germany is unsustainable. And so, in advance of a five-day trip to Europe in which I will go to parties and concerts and sight-see, I chose to ignore pressing topics like the collapse of the world economy and instead stick my nose into an issue which I have neither experience or training to speak on. There was nothing particularly original in my proposal earlier this week; this basic framework for negotiations has long been the basis for discussions among the parties, and is something with Germany has long requested. But, since others have deemed to question me, the One, let me simply lecture you all again and knock down a series of strawmen arguments to appear smart and sophisticated.

I said that the United States believes that negotiations should result in two states, with permanent borders for Germany and France based on the 1917 lines with mutually agreed swaps. In doing so, I give to Germany things which they do not own, and then demand that France trade for those things, as if I have the authority or ability to do any of this. (applause)

As for security, every state has the right to self-defense, and France must be able to defend itself –- by itself -– against any threat. (Applause.)  Meaningless guarantees must be issued to France that the Alsace and Lorraine regions will not become platforms for invasion. Now, that is what I said previously. And it was my reference to the 1917 lines -- with mutually agreed swaps -- that received the lion’s share of the attention, including just now. And since my position has been misrepresented several times, let me reaffirm what “1917 lines with mutually agreed swaps” means. If you look up the phrase "border lines with mutually agreed swaps" in any dictionary or online, you will see that it plainly means that the parties themselves -– France and Germany -– will negotiate a border that is different than the one that existed in 1917.  If it is different, that is good, because I want it to start from the same framework that existed when things were different so that it reflects the same level of fairness present in the now different reality.

Thank you. God bless you. God bless Germany, and God bless the United States of America. Thank you. (Applause.)

Of course, this is satire. I took the speech that Obama gave at the AIPAC policy conference in May of 2011 and simply edited it a bit. This guy is a joke, and anyone who votes for him is a joke, and he is making a mockery of our nation and our foreign policy.

UPDATE: To be fair, I got the idea for this post after reading John Lillpop's post "Obama to Call for Return of U.S. –Mexico Borders to 1843?". In my case, I thought it was even more absurd for the President of the United States to be demanding that two non-US countries set a border to our liking than it was for Obama to call for the US to return to our own 1843 border, but I guess the other point is that the past is the past- whether it is 1843 or 1967, those borders are not as relevant as the real situation on the ground, and it is a joke to refer to them as any sort of starting point for negotiations.

Cameroon becomes a tourism destination-Global Voices
"Copycat Dictators and Cartoon Democracies..." Alemayehu G. Mariam in Ethiopian Review
"Formal education is not advancing Africa"-Nana Yaw Asiedu
Ivory Coast's descent into madness-Richard Dowden
Taking a look at Land 'Grabs' in Africa-African Arguments
African Export Successes by William Easterly & Ariell Reshef

Firstly over at CIPE:

Betty Maina and others on developing "a link between fighting corruption and strengthening democracies."

In addition Global Voices on The Scandal of the “Ill-gotten Gains”:

On November 9, 2010, the French Supreme Court of Appeals overturned a decision rendered a year ago by the Paris Court of Appeals, agreeing to hear the case brought by the French section of the NGO Transparency International [fr] called “the ill-gotten gains” of the heads of state of Congo-Brazzaville, Gabon, and Equatorial Guinee and members of their entourage...[continue reading]

Paul Collier in Foreign Policy writes:

Sure, some of Asia's "benign" autocrats have turned their ambitions to building strong national economies. But not in Africa and many of the other countries that I call the bottom billion -- quite a number of which crowd the upper reaches of the Failed States Index. There, the most common form of autocracy is anything but benign. These leaders not only neglect to build the economy, they actively avoid doing so.

He contends that:

Bad guys matter, and when they rule, they make weak states weaker. And the countless anecdotes are backed up by numbers: In a celebrated study, economists Benjamin Jones and Benjamin Olken looked at whether the death of a country's leader altered economic growth. It did, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse. Recently, an Oxford colleague, Anke Hoeffler, and I sifted through their results again, distinguishing this time between democrats and autocrats. We found that in democracies, changing the leader does not change growth -- all leaders are disciplined to perform tolerably. But in autocracies, the growth rates are as unpredictably varied as the leaders' personalities. Here lies the difference between good leaders and great ones: Good leaders put right the policy catastrophes of bad leaders; great leaders, like the men who shaped the U.S. Constitution, build the democratic checks and balances that make good leaders redundant.

More here

The rehabilitation of George W. Bush continues. After spending eight years listening to my favorite sports radio show go 'off sports' every now and then to bash Bush, I was very happy this morning to hear the solid liberals who do the show say "I had never before realized that George Bush was that funny," or "you know, he really is a decent guy," or "out of all the Presidents, he's a guy I think would be the most fun to sit down and have a beer with." The radio hosts had all watched W's interview the day before on Oprah or had seen his interview with Matt Lauer, and were being 'reintroduced' to Bush after he's been out of the political scene for a year or two, and what struck me the most was that now that Bush is no longer the 'evil enemy', myths about him are exploding left and right.

From the Washington Post, via powerlineblog, here are some other myths about President George W. Bush that are being exploded by time, analysis, research, and retrospection. Here are excerpts from the article (some editing by me for brevity), but please go here to read the whole thing:

Myth: George W. Bush was an uninformed Texas cowboy.
During his 2000 campaign against Vice President Al Gore, then-Gov. Bush went to great lengths to depict himself as a down-home Texan whom voters could relate to. But that image was at odds with his upbringing. Bush had plenty of blue in his blood. In 2004, Republicans again deployed the president's folksy image and manner of speech, contrasting Democratic nominee Sen. John Kerry (the elitist who windsurfs off Nantucket) with Bush (the guy you'd rather have a beer with - even if he doesn't drink). But as the administration stumbled in crises from Katrina to Iraq, the reputation that had helped Bush win office turned into a huge liability as Americans increasingly questioned his competence.

Myth: "Compassionate conservatism" was just a campaign slogan.
Many critics dismiss Bush's talk about "compassionate conservatism" as nothing more than a cynical ploy to win over moderate voters in 2000. Liberals never believed that Bush truly wanted to bring racial and ethnic diversity to the Republican Party or that he accepted the need for the federal government to deal with entrenched social problems. The administration's bungled response to the Hurricane Katrina disaster, along with regressive fiscal policies that disproportionately benefited wealthier Americans, also seemed to contradict the promise of compassion. Yet, as Vanderbilt University historian Gary Gerstle has shown, Bush was personally invested in compassionate conservatism. Bush's experience as a born-again Christian led him to empathize with individuals' personal struggles and to respect the role of religion in civic life. As president, he insisted that the war on terrorism must not become a war against Muslims. And his signature legislative accomplishments included expansive domestic programs, such as the No Child Left Behind Act (a huge extension of the federal government into primary education) and the Medicare prescription drug benefit (the biggest expansion of the system since its creation 40 years earlier).

Myth: Bush committed America to nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan.
After the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush appeared to commit the United States to remaking enemy nations into pro-Western democracies. Yet in many ways, Bush's commitment to nation-building was primarily a rhetorical tool to build domestic support for military operations. This lack of commitment became clear when U.S. resources were hastily diverted from Afghanistan toward Iraq, and when then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld emphasized in the spring of 2002 that the Afghan people would have to handle most of the reconstruction themselves.

Myth: Dick Cheney ran the Bush White House.
The Bush era produced a stream of good books examining the vice president's hidden influence. In these accounts, Bush appears as a puppet to the real leader, Cheney, who lurked in the shadows. However, much of the subsequent writing about the Bush presidency - including works by journalists such as The Washington Post's Bob Woodward - challenges this portrait. We have begun to see instead that Bush, surrounded by political advisers such as Karl Rove, didn't allow power to move too far away from his control. And according to reports on Bush's memoir, the president even considered removing Cheney from the 2004 presidential ticket, given the vice president's "Darth Vader" reputation.

Myth: Bush left conservatism in ruins.
On election night in 2008, the conservative era appeared to be over, and the age of Obama seemed set to begin. Except it didn't happen that way. A recent poll by The Post, the Kaiser Foundation and Harvard University found that Americans dislike government more now than they did 10 years ago (though they support many specific programs). The Republican victories in the midterm elections suggest that, for all the problems that still face the GOP, conservatism is alive and well - even if it is a far different brand of conservatism than the kind Bush championed when he took office in 2001.

These myths will not die easily- a lot of people have a lot of time and money and effort invested into making us believe them, and to these people it is still important for us to believe them because if history is re-written to reflect the reality of Bush, it will have different lessons for the future. So, look for the left to fight any hint that that he is a funny, self-effacing, tad awkward, tough, honest, decent, and generally human person.

Be sure to get a copy of Bush's new book, Decision Points.

Tesfaye Habisso writes in Friends of Ethiopia:

It must also be understood by all that elections alone will not produce democracy and do not necessarily bring about democratic culture. Authoritarian traditions take a long time to wash away. Creating a democracy in poverty -stricken and illiterate societies such as ours itself takes a long time and exacts huge costs, and is often accompanied by violence, disorder, and a period of uncertainty, even chaos. After all, democracies do not at a stroke make societies more civil and stable; they require strong civil institutions and a long period of time. It is only those who are committed to the values of democracy, rule of law, civil liberties and are prepared for the long-haul, and support less than perfect results as long as the efforts are sincere, who will succeed in realizing democracy and development, peace and stability

.More here

Via Foreign Policy:

President Obama said last Sunday that the United States is still "working on" democracy and a top aide said he has taken "historic steps" to improve democracy in the United States during his time in office.

The remarks came as Obama met with Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev -- one of the U.S. president's many meetings with world leaders ahead of this week's nuclear summit.

NSC senior director Mike McFaul said on a conference call with reporters Sunday. "Both presidents agreed that you don't ever reach democracy; you always have to work at it. And in particular, President Obama reminded his Kazakh counterpart that we, too, are working to improve our democracy." McFaul further said. "[Obama's] taken, I think, rather historic steps to improve our own democracy since coming to office here in the United States."

Kazakh Ambassador Erlan Idrissov later told Wall Street Journal's Jonathan Weisman, "There was no pressure at all in the meeting," and that "Obama quoted Winston Churchill as saying that democracy is "the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried."

Churchill was wrong- there was one form of government better than democracy, and that's a republic, and that is the nation that our founding fathers built for us- a republic, if we can keep it. Democracies are not that great- they are unstable and usually lead the rise of dictatorships, or at least that his what students of history recognize.

One has to wonder- what aspects of democracy aren't working for Obama and what historic steps is he taking to improve democracy? Democracies either lead to a republic- which is a nation based on rule of law- or to a dictatorship- which is a nation based on the rule of men. Which way is Obama taking our nation, and what steps has he and his buddies in Congress like Pelosi, Reid, and Peters taken?

If you haven't already, watch this video, about the American Form of Government:

Anna Nadgrodkiewicz  at CIPE highlights Richard Joseph's contentions on a "key weakness" of 'frontier Africa' one:

...that undermines not only political stability, but also sustained growth: the overwhelming power of the executive. Despite the introduction of formal elections, many African democracies persist in the old ways of seeing the government as a way of getting rich. Newly elected leaders tend to move toward accumulating more power and influence with the end result not much different from the personal rule of their authoritarian predecessors.

More here

David Kashangaki adds to the conversation about Decorative Democracies:

In a situation in which 'democratic' institutions are the product of a flawed understanding of democracy (that says all the grass roots have to do is vote for the person who gives them the most money and promises everything that people want to hear- knowing that they will deliver nothing), it is highly unrealistic to expect proper institutions to be formed, and that this civil society will be the backbone of them.

It just will not happen. Similarly, trying to transform these institutions by spending vast amounts of donor aid on 'workshops' for the elite won't transform them either. The transformation will come when there is an educated civil society that understands what democracy means; that can tell the difference between empty promises and what is truly realistic about what can be done to develop; that is able to see participation as more than just voting

More here
Via AllAfrica

Related articles by Zemanta

• An Opposition Flaw-The "Pat Utomi tendency" (my-beauty-best-teacher.blogspot.com)
• Decorative Democracies (my-beauty-best-teacher.blogspot.com)

David Kashangaki adds to the conversation about Decorative Democracies:

In a situation in which 'democratic' institutions are the product of a flawed understanding of democracy (that says all the grass roots have to do is vote for the person who gives them the most money and promises everything that people want to hear- knowing that they will deliver nothing), it is highly unrealistic to expect proper institutions to be formed, and that this civil society will be the backbone of them.

It just will not happen. Similarly, trying to transform these institutions by spending vast amounts of donor aid on 'workshops' for the elite won't transform them either. The transformation will come when there is an educated civil society that understands what democracy means; that can tell the difference between empty promises and what is truly realistic about what can be done to develop; that is able to see participation as more than just voting

More here
Via AllAfrica

Related articles by Zemanta

• An Opposition Flaw-The "Pat Utomi tendency" (my-beauty-best-teacher.blogspot.com)
• Decorative Democracies (my-beauty-best-teacher.blogspot.com)

Michael Hendrix in CIPE:

A new generation of authoritarians is creating “decorative democracies,” where pre-determined elections allow the state to co-opt the legitimacy of liberty without the substance to support it. At the grassroots, democracy holds little meaning. People are told that they are living in a democracy, but everything around them belies the trappings of fairness and liberty. This result is often achieved by touting economic success, as well as belittling civic institutions and the disaggregated nature of democracy...The greatest response to decorative democracy lies in nurturing local civil societies from the ground up, laying the foundation for institutions responsive to the voice of reform. CIPE helps local private sector organizations across the globe to institutionalize the democratic process – supporting the very characteristics that set true democracies apart from the merely decorative ones...[continue reading]

From Pambazuka, The Kenyan Section of the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ Kenya) and the Konrad Adenaur Foundation invite contributions to be published in a Special Issue on Electoral Systems Reform in Sub Saharan Africa:

It is increasingly becoming a trend in Africa, that, whilst elections are supposed to anchor and ensure sustainable growth in democracies, in countries such as Kenya and Zimbabwe, elections have become a liability. Instead of institutionalising democracy, they have fueled political instability. Consequently, the essential question is: to what extend do electoral systems and institutions in Sub Saharan Africa turn into political assets and / or liabilities?

There have been a couple situations in my school over the last month about having pictures of various politicians in school. What prompted this was the sudden appearance of several large Obama pictures in teachers classrooms, days after the election. Students and parents were concerned about having their children gaze on images of our great leader every day, to which those teachers replied that there were pictures of Bush in other teachers classrooms.

The pictures of Obama are meant to be gazed at in worship. The picture of Bush usually serves as a focal point for 2 minutes of hate. In this spirit, I direct you to Bruce Walker's piece over at the American Thinker. It is really good. Here is it in a somewhat edited form:

It has been sixty years since George Orwell wrote his chilling dystopian classic, 1984.

(It is possible for) Americans like you and I, (to) become so decoupled from reality and morality that they could be led to surrender everything, even their lives, intoxicated only with the venom of modern Leftism, (and become) Orwell's Children.

We are drifting into the sort of horrific future he described. Too many of us for comfort or solace have become just like the denizens of Jonestown: Orwell's children -- a new generation of creature enraged into constant militancy against eternal enemies, oblivious to the notion of a Blessed Creator, melded into the consciousness of the party hive, divorced from history, hypnotized by images, inoculated against reason, stripped of family, and existing only to serve the cause.

Orwell did not write his book in a vacuum. 1984 describes the Soviet Union (the book describes Stalinist Russia so well so that subjects of that evil empire wondered when Orwell had lived there, though he had just described what he saw from the outside.) 1984 also describes Nazism and every other odious totalitarianism, which its secret police and propaganda machine and atomized subjects. But Orwell was very much also writing about the democratic western nations. His book was a warning of what could happen here. Oceania, the only totalitarian superstate actually descried in 1984, was largely America and the British Empire.

There were specific elements necessary for nations with a heritage of freedom to slide into the most absolute and abject slavery. These elements existed in Nazi Germany, they existed in Soviet Russia, and they exist in our free democracies today. What are the characteristics of the Orwellian state?

Start with God. He must go. The great Russian novelists knew this: "Without God, everything is permitted." In Oceania, God simply does not exist. The Nazis bragged that they would raise a generation "...without ever having heard of the Sermon on the Mount or the Golden Rule, to say nothing of the Ten Commandments." The Soviet persecuted anyone who followed the God of Jews and Christians. God is hounded in our world today. A generation of Orwell's Children are growing up without thinking about God at all or thinking that God is a silly idea cherished by sillier old fogies.

Truth must go too. Nazis embraced the "Big Lie." Soviets denied that honesty, per se, mattered. In Orwell's Oceania, the Inner Party members learn to even lie to themselves and to hold utterly contradictory beliefs at the same time. Truth and honesty have little meaning to Orwell's Children in our world. All truth is relative, all honesty a sham.

Language must be brought to heel. The Nazis did this by inventing meaningless words like "Aryan science." Marxism foisted upon us words like "capitalism," which means nothing at all but which has so infected our minds that we reflexively use this silly nonsense word instead of freedom. Politically correct language is rampant. We come to view words like "discriminate" as inherently evil, and other words like "viable fetal mass" have replaced the reality of murdered babies.

Image and symbols replace words. Hitler, whose disciples seldom recalled what Hitler said, always recalled the raw imagery of their leader. Stalin's portrait was as inescapable in the Soviet Union as the portrait of Big Brother in Oceania. We live in a word of symbols and images. Conservatives succeed in books and talk radio, media that deal in words. Orwell's Children live in the realm of symbols and images.

The books of the Nazis and Soviets were unreadable tomes like Mein Kampf, The Myth of the Twentieth Century (the two Nazi "masterpieces") or vast empty volumes of Marxist-Leninism. Is it an accident that the giant who most resisted this evil, Solzhenitsyn, was a devout Christian who mastered the written word better than any stooge of Hitler or the Politburo ever could?

Immutable oppressors are the final nasty element in dystopia. Hitler blamed Jews for everything. Stalin blamed kulaks and his enemies in the party for everything. Subjects of Orwell's Oceania saw Emmanuel Goldstein as the eternal, immutable enemy of the party. Today there is a drearily predictable list of oppressors. Christians, men, white people, the "rich" (whatever that is supposed to mean), America, and Israel are oppressors and nothing can ever change that.

Orwell even told us, by name, the professionals who would lead us into the nightmare of 1984: "sociologists," "teachers," "bureaucrats," "journalists," "professional politicians," "scientists," "trade union organizers," "publicity experts," and "technicians." (The term "community organizer" was unknown to him.) Those who enslave were those who taught students, who created the news, who sat in the halls of government power, and who defined official "truth" (at least truth de jour.)

Orwell's Children live among us now, not in tiny numbers in weird Marxist cults like Jim Jones' People Temple, but as leaders of Congress, as the establishment of academia, as the producers of news and entertainment, as the administrators of public schools, as the "experts" in a thousand myriad and odd fields of putative "expertise." They infatuate our bored children with the only reality and the only diversion that many can find. They wait for the rest of us to grow older and to die.

Will these children inherit the earth? History, not theology, has shown a single defense against the spreading contagion of Orwell's Children. Solzhenitsyn found God in the godless Gulag. Michael Power in early 1939 wrote: "In the Christianity of the German people, the National Socialist has found the one enemy it could not vanquish" - and Christians in Germany, alone, chose to voluntarily seek death before selling their souls to Nazism.

The Jewish refusniks proved indigestible to the brutal Soviet police state. When all else failed the Jewish people under the Nazis, devout Jews like my wife's mother clung to the Blessed Creator and survived the Holocaust. God can touch us all. God can protect us all from evil (not from harm - we all suffer and we all die - but from the much greater danger of the sort of evil Orwell described.)

Education, science, technological gadgetry, good medical care - all of this can not stop us from sliding into a massive Jonestown, a realized Oceania, a place marked by Dante's grim caution "Abandon hope, all you who enter here." We are all anchored in belief, but it is what we believe that matters. We can believe in the lies of Big Brother, which change each day with the needs of the party or we can believe in the truth of a living God. We can become the children of Orwell or the special creatures of God. Everything -- our nation, our world, our families, our communities -- flows from that choice.

I'm so glad I read 1984 recently- I actually hadn't read it until a couple years ago- in high school, the advanced students didn't read Animal Farm and 1984, and instead read highly intelligent liberal drivel. But my brother and I often talk about these books nowdays, as America sadly descends into the fascism and socialism that was described in them.

UPDATE: One of my brother's disagree's with me- he says it won't be 1984 that we see, but rather a Brave New World- happy, fluffy, smiley-faced fascism. This actually fits with an earlier post of mine called "Happy-Nicing Ourselves into Dictatorship."- Maybe there is something here- doped up kids, random sex, mindless entertainment, no morality or religion. Just gnostic overlords ruling over us stupid masses- a heartless, ghastly prison, with walls painted up with bright murals of MLK and Mother Earth singing kumbya. Kind of like the school I teach at right now!