Socialism IS Barbarism

From here:

THE NEW BARBARIANS David Kupelian on how the left is erasing America's history, culture, institutions and blessings

“Socialism or barbarism!” That’s the classic Marxist theme, the title of many far-left books, and the stark existential choice posed by socialists of all stripes: Either adopt our enlightened way – or sink into barbarism. However, as with most everything else on the left, this is pure projection since history proves that, intentionally or not, barbarism is precisely the end result of socialism. Really? you ask. I know socialism ignores all the laws of economics and always seems to fail, but BARBARISM? Yes, barbarism. And we’re not talking just about the unprecedentedly barbaric death toll of over 100 million during the 20th century’s global bloom of communism, nor more recently about the once-thriving, now-socialist-hellhole nation of Venezuela. We’re talking about the looming reality that today’s ever-more-leftwing Democratic Party, right here in the United States, if given the power it craves will lead America into a level of barbarism and destruction beyond our comprehension. Stay with me here. Most people’s primary association with the word “barbarians,” of course, is savage men on horseback – like ISIS jihadists – raiding and devouring a host society. But as life teaches us, sometimes the same evil can take different forms. In fact, we don’t need to scratch very far beneath surface appearances to discover that in every meaningful way, today’s far left, which has already taken over – one might even say raided and devoured – the Democratic Party, is now dragging America down a barbaric road to ruin. ‘Bar bar bar’ The word “barbarian” comes to us from ancient Greece, initially coined to describe all non-Greek-speaking peoples, like Persians and Egyptians, whose speech sounded like babble (“bar bar bar”) to the Greeks. Hence, their ancient onomatopoetic word “bárbaros” meant “babbler.” Over the centuries, this original meaning evolved into today’s darker and more universal association of “barbarians” as wildly unmoored people raining havoc and destruction on a host society. As we will soon see, today’s increasingly unhinged American left fits both meanings of “barbarian.” To set the stage, consider what conservative author Rod Dreher writes in his bestselling book, “The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation.” Dreher observes that the cultural moment in which we live is strongly reminiscent of the fall of the Roman Empire, today’s Western World having largely abandoned both faith and reason in favor of moral relativism, emotion and maximum personal freedom. To live in a culture like today’s America, contends Dreher, “is to dwell in a society that not only can no longer agree on what constitutes virtuous belief and conduct but also doubts that virtue exists.” To arrive at such a state of social disintegration, writes Dreher, citing moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s acclaimed book “After Virtue,” requires “abandoning objective moral standards; refusing to accept any religiously or culturally binding narrative originating outside oneself” and “repudiating memory of the past as irrelevant.” “This state of mind,” Dreher concludes, “approximates the condition known as barbarism”: When we think of barbarians, we imagine wild, rapacious tribesmen rampaging through cities, heedlessly destroying the structures and institutions of civilizations, simply because they can. Barbarians are governed only by their will to power, and neither know nor care a thing about what they are annihilating. By that standard, despite our wealth and technological sophistication, we in the modern West are living under barbarism, though we do not recognize it. Our scientists, our judges, our princes, our scholars, and our scribes – they are at work demolishing the faith, the family, gender, even what it means to be human. Our barbarians have exchanged the animal pelts and spears of the past for designer suits and smartphones. Indeed, Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, commenting recently on the wildly unrestrained, ongoing coup attempt against the Trump administration, sized up the current zeitgeist this way: “It’s as if facts no longer matter at all – only emotion, ambition and the overriding will to power. These apparently are the new rules in Washington.” While there are many ways the new barbarism is ravaging American society – from identity politics dividing our nation into angry warring tribes, to today’s deranged gender orthodoxy encouraging men to invade women’s locker rooms and conquer the world of women’s sports – nothing more viscerally demonstrates the left’s capacity for hardcore barbarism than the issue of abortion. Abortion proponents call new pro-life laws ‘barbaric’ When we contemplate barbarian crimes of the past, some of the most extreme examples we might mentally conjure up – like wartime atrocities of soldiers ripping babies out of their mother’s wombs – are actually being committed right now, as you read these words, here in America. Except the carnage is all clean, clinical, legal, and most of all, hidden from view. Hundreds of second-trimester D&E (“dilation and evacuation”) abortions are performed every day on beautiful American babies, about 100,000 per year. Former abortionist Anthony Levatino, M.D., describes what the practitioner does to the unborn child after artificially inducing dilation in the mother and suctioning the amniotic fluid from her uterus: After the amniotic fluid is removed, the abortionist uses a sopher clamp – a grasping instrument with rows of sharp “teeth” – to grasp and pull the baby’s arms and legs, tearing the limbs from the child’s body. The abortionist continues to grasp intestines, spine, heart, lungs, and any other limbs or body parts. The most difficult part of the procedure is usually finding, grasping and crushing the baby’s head. After removing pieces of the child’s skull, the abortionist uses a curette to scrape the uterus and remove the placenta and any remaining parts of the baby. The abortionist then collects all of the baby’s parts and reassembles them to make sure there are two arms, two legs, and that all of the pieces have been removed. What about third-trimester abortions, which elicited such high enthusiasm among Democrat lawmakers recently that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo jubilantly lit up the spire of One World Trade Center in pink to celebrate his state’s new law explicitly permitting abortion up to the moment of birth? Third-trimester abortions today typically involve the abortionist injecting a chemical like digoxin into the fully formed, viable and pain-feeling preborn child to cause him or her to suffer a heart attack, then inducing labor over a period of two to three days and delivering a dead baby. Such “induced abortions” account for about 1.2 percent of all U.S. abortions, about 12,000 children per year, or 33 every single day. Ironically, while a few right-of-center news sources accurately used the word “barbaric” in headlines to describe New York’s new abortion law, the left’s projection machine cranked into high gear, with abortion supporters describing current efforts in more conservative states to pass legislation opposing or restricting abortion as “barbaric”! That’s right. Commenting on Georgia’s recent “heartbeat bill,” which prohibits abortion after a heartbeat can be detected in the unborn child, author Clementine Ford wrote, “The Living Infants Fairness and Equality (LIFE) Act – also known as HB 481 – was signed on Tuesday by Governor Brian Kemp, a cisgender man who will never be able to become pregnant and consequently will never have to be subjected to the barbarism of the law he’s enacting.” And while interviewing Ben Shapiro, the BBC’s Andrew Neil opined that the same Georgia law would “take us back to the dark ages.” Meanwhile, across America, vicious and sometimes violent attacks on peaceful pro-lifers demonstrating and praying outside abortion clinics are on the increase. ‘People without historical memory’ One of the most-cited characteristics of barbarians in all places and times is that they are “people without historical memory.” Indeed, some of the most appalling genocides of the last century were committed not by wild, rudderless savages, but by people in the grip of what they believed to be morally superior utopian ideologies, holding in contempt the values, history and institutions of the society they were obsessed with “reforming.” Modern history’s most egregious example, at least in terms of the staggering death count, would be China’s revolutionary communist leader Mao Zedong, whose so-called “Great Leap Forward” between 1958 and 1962 – a campaign aimed at rapidly transforming China from an agrarian economy into a socialist utopia – caused at least 30 million deaths, with some estimates ranging up to 55 million. (Eerily, during Barack Obama’s presidency, his White House communications director Anita Dunn proclaimed publicly during a speech that Mao Zedong, the greatest mass murderer in human history, was one of her two “favorite political philosophers.”) To carry out such a catastrophic “leap forward” in China, Mao – just like Pol Pot and his infamous Khmer Rouge two decades later, who slaughtered two million of their countrymen in Cambodia’s “killing fields” – had to extinguish all memory of the past and begin history anew, since what came before was of no consequence or value. (Pol Pot turned the calendar in Cambodia – which he renamed the Democratic Republic of Kampuchea – back to “Year Zero.”) This is why both Pol Pot and Mao Zedong made a point of executing teachers, lawyers, businessmen, writers, academics, scientists and other intellectuals, since they represented the impure old order that had to be purged, to allow the unpolluted new socialist utopia to be established. The point of this brief historical review is that a barbarian takeover of a country is not possible without discrediting and annihilating the shared values, history and key institutions that have unified that society and enabled it to work. With that in mind, consider what the left has already done to America, and what it currently – as unashamedly advocated by the various Democratic Party presidential candidates – claims it intends to do in the near future. This list is by no means complete, just a quick representative sampling. Institutions targeted for destruction The Supreme Court: America’s courts have long been leftists’ go-to branch of government, since radical agendas like abortion-on-demand and same-sex marriage could never have won sufficient popular support to be implemented via the legislative branch, but had to be imposed on the country by activist judges. Thus the hysteria over President Trump’s nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court last year, who along with previous Trump pick Neil Gorsuch have rendered the court’s complexion more conservative. In response, Democrats now desperately want to rig the system to render the Supreme Court a permanent servant of the left. Presidential candidates Beto O’Rourke and Pete Buttigieg, for example, both have expressed enthusiasm over a scheme to increase the number of Supreme Court justices from the current nine to 15! “What if there were five justices selected by Democrats, five justices selected by Republicans and those 10 then pick five more justices independent of those who picked the first 10,” O’Rourke suggested. Meanwhile, a progressive group unashamedly called “Pack the Courts” is pushing for Democrats to add four justices to the court so as to “nullify” Donald Trump’s two recent appointees. Why four? As the group’s executive director, Aaron Belkin, told The Hill: “To nullify the theft of the Garland seat, two justices would have to be added to nullify Gorsuch’s votes and to the extent that President [Trump] obtained the presidency by breaking the law, then two seats would have to be added to nullify the Kavanaugh seat.” Two seats are necessary to nullify each “stolen seat,” Belkin clarified, since just one liberal judge would simply cancel out a conservative justice. But the second leftwing judge, explains The Hill, would in Belkins’ mind “represent the Democratic judge that he believes should be on the court instead of Gorsuch and Kavanaugh.” The Electoral College: Democrats are openly advocating the elimination of the Electoral  College, which was put in the Constitution to prevent the tyranny of big states over small states (same reason the U.S. Senate was created). But today, the Democratic Party would like nothing more than for their massive urban concentrations of left-leaning voters on the two coasts to choose America’s president without having to worry about all those tens of millions of ignorant, MAGA hat-wearing, center-right voters in “flyover country.” (Take a look at a red-blue Election 2016 map showing which states Trump won.) Higher education: The most radically leftwing places in America, this nation’s once-great colleges and universities are increasingly considered a waste of time and money. Worse, they are transforming a sizeable segment of the next generation into hysterical, entitled narcissists obsessed with faux victimization and committed to perverse ideologies from gender anarchy to socialism. America’s history: Everyone has watched in amazement over the last several years as activists on the left have waged an ongoing campaign to eliminate America’s historical memory, starting with toppling Civil War statues across the country. But that was just the beginning. Howard Zinn’s irredeemably dark history book, “A People’s History of the United States,” is widely used in public high schools and colleges nationwide to turn American children against their founders and ancestors, painting all previous generations as racists, slaveholders and genocidal monsters. With such national self-hatred being inculcated into America’s youth, no surprise that even artwork featuring images of Abraham Lincoln and George Washington is now being targeted. The First Amendment: Not in our lifetimes has the right to free speech come under such withering assault as from today’s left, which – just to pick one example – totally controls social media where much of America’s policy debate takes place. Every day, conservatives, Christians and other right-of-center voices are banned, suspended, de-platformed, de-monetized, shadow-banned, branded “hate speech,” suppressed in search results and censored in many other ways. Likewise, the left has utterly corrupted the free press, also enshrined in the First Amendment. The classic role of the journalist – to tell the truth without fear or favor, regardless of whom it helps or hurts – is dead, except for a few courageous news outposts that are somehow managing to weather the storm. The Second Amendment: The 2020 Democratic presidential candidates unabashedly favor eliminating law-abiding Americans’ Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. Rep. Eric Swalwell, D.-Calif., literally advocates forcing law-abiding citizens to surrender their legally purchased semi-automatic firearms (aka “assault weapons,” “weapons of war”) or else go to prison. “Just take the 15 million that are out there and buy them back,” he says. Meanwhile, Sen. Kamala Harris, D.-Calif., widely anticipated to be Joe Biden’s vice presidential running mate (to balance the “old white man” at the top of the ticket), says if Congress fails to pass stricter gun control laws in her first 100 days in office, she would act on her own – citing a wide variety of gun-control executive orders like allowing victims of crimes committed with guns to sue firearms manufacturers and dealers. Free and fair elections: Democrats have long specialized in voter fraud and abuse in myriad forms, but now they’ve expanded their repertoire beyond things like opposing voter ID laws, which enables non-citizens to vote. Today they also want 16-year-olds to vote, felons to vote, voting by phone, and even – as Bernie Sanders recently called for – convicted terrorists including Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to be allowed to choose America’s next president. Democrat legislators in at least 18 states are even trying to pass laws taking Donald Trump’s name off the 2020 presidential ballot, tied to some new requirement that candidates must submit all of their tax returns. And of course, the growing Democratic Party call for “slavery reparations” is a transparent attempt at bribing black voters to continue monolithically to vote Democrat, without which support the party that spawned the Ku Klux Klan cannot hold on to power. Peaceful transfer of power: America has long taken pride in its constitutional and political stability, most evident in the fact that, however rancorous its election seasons, once the contest is over a peaceful transfer of power always follows. No more. The Democrats have never accepted the election of Donald Trump as president – as demonstrated by the incredibly damaging Russia collusion hoax, which in reality has constituted a full-fledged attempted coup d’etat. Even after the Mueller Report’s release, little has changed, with Democrats still insisting Trump is guilty and demanding he be removed from office by impeachment or otherwise. Even Joe Biden recently agreed publicly that Trump is an “illegitimate” president. Trust in government: Sadly, not only did the Obama administration weaponize federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies to illegally spy on the Trump campaign, destroying reputations and lives in the process. But even after Donald Trump became president, rogue actors within these bureaucracies continued to use America’s most respected governmental institutions, including the FBI and Department of Justice, as weapons of political war, managing to simultaneously degrade both America’s criminal justice system and her political system. Immigration and border control: What is more quintessentially barbarian than a  massive invasion of a society by people who don’t share its values, respect its Constitution, speak its language or honor its history? In its craven pursuit of votes and power, since the Obama presidency the Democratic Party has encouraged, facilitated and literally invited a massive, rolling invasion of America across her southern border, creating havoc in every area imaginable – from massive crime to wage suppression for unskilled labor, to dilution of America’s culture to a gargantuan drain on taxpayers. Indeed, the fact that today’s Democrats say they want both open borders and a massive welfare state open to all is widely recognized as a formula for the total and rapid financial ruin of America. The Islam problem There is one more form of barbarian invasion being both promoted and excused by the left, thanks to what author David Horowitz calls the “unholy alliance” between radical Islam and the American left, since both share a common enemy – namely Christianity. Islam, by its very nature, and as history proves again and again, tends not to assimilate but to conquer. It’s politically incorrect in the extreme to say so, but “barbarian invasion” is what Islam has specialized in for most of the last 14 centuries. A look across the pond to Europe, which has been transformed, probably permanently, by the massive legal and illegal Islamic immigration into that formerly Christian continent, is a harbinger of what America has in store if it continues down its current immigration path. To be offended by this plain acknowledgment of history doesn’t change the truth of it. There is a fundamental problem with Sharia Islam in that it is intrinsically at odds with America’s constitutional system of governance. That’s exactly the point Judge Jeanine Pirro was making when, referring to Rep. Ilhan Omar, D.-Minn., she said on-air (before being suspended for two weeks from her top-rated Fox News show for saying it): “Omar wears a hijab which according to the Quran 33:59 tells women to cover so they won’t get molested.  Is her adherence to this Islamic doctrine indicative of her adherence to Sharia law which in itself is antithetical to the United States Constitution?” Result of barbarian invasions In the end, what do societies look like historically after they’ve been invaded and ultimately conquered by people who don’t honor their culture, their values and their God? That’s a simple question to answer. Their past is obliterated; ever larger segments of the population have no shared memory of their nation’s history. Their former culture and value system is replaced by an angry babble of competing languages, beliefs and moral standards. Their key institutions are invaded, subverted and transformed, if not outright destroyed. Little respect remains for the transcendent value of human life because reverence for God has all but vanished. All that was previously cherished is gone – or gone underground, to live in fear. Is that not precisely what the left has been doing to America? The preceding is an abridged version of David Kupelian’s introductory story in the May issue of Whistleblower magazine, titled “THE NEW BARBARISM: How the left is erasing America’s history, culture, institutions and blessings.” Whistleblower is WND’s flagship subscription product, and becoming a subscriber is one of the very best ways to provide much-needed support to WND, while in return receiving some of our most powerful information and insights every month. Whistleblower is available in both print and digital versions, and makes a much-appreciated gift. ======================= Socialism says individuals have no rights to own or defend property, not even to the ownership and defense of their own bodies. Socialism is idolatry in that it places the rights of the individual human beneath the group and/or gang and/or state.  Therefore socialism is slavery. And simply calling slavery "socialism" will never make slavery sociable. Socialism is gang-might-makes-right barbarism, because one cannot trade freedom for security.  Because freedom from others is the only security, it can only be traded for group slavery.  ;-)