Posted by
Bull 67 on Wednesday, June 04, 2008 5:16:36 PM
Prologue: A New Leftist Movement is Born.
According to a recent US News and World Report article, “A study…that [found] breast cancer is nearly twice as common in brightly lit communities as in dark ones can only be added to a growing body of evidence that artificial light threatens not just stargazing but also public health, wildlife, and possibly even safety.” This article came on the eve of the Earth Hour, where everyone could save the planet by turning off the lights for one hour.
A new environmental sub-movement is emerging; the Darkness Movement. It asserts the bright night lighting associated with civilization is detrimental to the environment, health, and promotes global warming.
Electric light, the miracle of Western Civilization illuminating the globe for the last 100 years is being attacked and demonized. One of this movement’s strongest ‘arguments’ is a composite satellite image of the nighttime earth as seen from space. The image shows vast swaths of the planet illuminated in brilliant artificial light. The photo is intended to be alarming. The growing Darkness Movement wants you to be shocked. Light is now bad.
Next we’ll hear we should make individual sacrifices lighting our homes and cities. Expect the media and Hollywood to carry the banner for the movement. University activist will protest. Politicians will hold hearings, and laws will be passed. Citizens will be taxed, fined, and maybe imprisoned for doing what used to be the normal activity of turning on the lights. The progressive elite will buy “lighting credits,” indulgences allowing them to keep their mansions burning bright. Our cities and homes, our lives, will dim. Perhaps you think I’m exaggerating, but mark my words, this movement will piggy back on the climate change movement and will seek to alter our way of life forever.
This Darkness Movement and many others are really part of the same, much larger, movement, an emerging global cult-like belief system sweeping across the world. The Darkness Movement is only this cult’s latest manifestation. The cult’s sub-movements share similar traits, goals, and membership. This global cult is not a single movement, nor is it organized. It’s not a conspiracy and its adherents aren’t even aware they’re part of a global movement. Instead, it’s an underlying leftist philosophy shared by many different social and political movements. This philosophy is the toxic by-product of Western Civilization’s incredibly successful legacy.
I. Leftist Membership Defined
The most common trait among all these leftist sub-movements is their followership, a hierarchal structure which changes little from one movement to the next. Recognizing this followership is the easiest way to identify one of the global cult’s sub-movements. Like Dante’s Hell, these movements have levels.
At the bottom are the hard core believers, the revolutionaries. They are the legacy of the 1960’s campus radical movement. These anarchists often populate universities and are the faithful shock-troops. Bored, self-centered, immature, and spoiled they are society’s bitter and disaffected. Their anger gives them purpose and makes them difficult to reason with. These movements exploit and focus that anger. Usually men, I label them the Angry Ones. The first to protest, their zeal and mindless devotion make them easy to mobilize and prone to radicalism. For this reason sometimes their role is denied by the organization’s higher levels. The 9/11 suicide terrorist were part of this level within Al Qaeda.
The Angry Ones are supported by a larger group I used to call Feelers until I heard a radio talk show host call them Emos, or emotionals. I like Emos better so I’m borrowing the term. Emos abandon logical thought for pure emotionalism. Only simple sound bytes and slogans are needed to draw them to a cause. Whereas Angry Ones need an outlet for their anger, Emos use their movements as therapy and external validation to feel good about themselves. Many times they’re trying to assuage personal guilt. Many single women fall into this category. Wealthy people (like celebrities), guilty over their good fortune, often fall into this category as well. Emos are non-threatening, they don’t scare the masses. They are the public face of their movements and are tasked with fund raising, public appearances, and basic political activism. Emos are also easily mobilized since they usually have spare time (unemployed, government workers, well-to-do).
The Angry Ones and Emos are their movements’ true believers, the common foot soldiers. They operate under the illusion they are expressing individualism. In reality, they surrender their identity to the movement and independent thought for dogma. The issues are conveniently framed for them by the next level of the hierarchy, Crusaders.
Crusaders seek to fix the shortcomings in their own lives by meddling in the lives of others. They dwell in the media, entertainment industry, universities and mid-level bureaucracies. Many are true believers and rose from the ranks of the Angry Ones and Emos. Some, however, no longer truly believe in their movement, and only use it as a means to further their career. They frame the debate, carry it to the masses, and convert raw political power into policy and opinion. They’re the movement’s enforcers and political officers. They keep the faithful in line, demonize and marginalize anyone who opposes them, and work to alter the very social fabric to suit the ends of the movement. They are the conduits for the movement’s next level, High Priests.
High Priests come in many varieties. They produce the science or philosophy from which these movements are born and grow. They are the prophets, calling the faithful to action. Often they are scientist and intellectuals. Many earnestly seek the betterment of mankind, while others only seek advancement and produce results which further that aim, regardless of the truth. Ultimately, the fruits of their labor will be used and twisted to suit the needs of the movement, usually at its highest level, Power Barons.
Power Barons use these movements as convenient tools to acquire, expand and defend political power. Seldom true believers, they usually come from the ranks of the Crusaders and are politicians, national and international high-level bureaucrats, dictators, and despots. They carry the torch for the High Priests, but only as a way to gain power. In their hearts they serve no ideology other than their own personal interest, even to the detriment of the society around them. They will ride the movement until it serves their ends. Then, like locusts, they’ll move on.
Crusaders, High Priest and Power Barons are their movements’ elite. They consider themselves anointed, privy to special knowledge making them uniquely suited to dictate to others. Often, they secretly disdain the true believers. This can be seen when the elites “exempt” themselves from the more rigorous tenets of their faith.
From communism to animal rights these sub-movements follow a very similar membership pattern. If their core membership follows a pattern, do their core beliefs?
II. Leftist Core Beliefs
All leftist movements are built on two elements. The first element is the crisis. The crisis is a victim class, a disaster (imminent or occurring), or both. The second element is the grievance. The grievance is always targeted at a villain, who by action or inaction is responsible for the crisis. The crisis is an excuse to file the grievance. The grievance serves two purposes. It’s is a lighting rod to manipulate the movement’s faithful - a conduit to channel hate, anger or guilt. It also serves to punish the villain. Built on fear and envy, these movements are never for something, but always against something.
The cause, whatever it may be, initially it may be touted in a positive way. For example, an environmental group may say, “We are for clean water.” This is usually how High Priests originally present their causes. Once the Crusaders and Power Barons get involved, the cause will change to something like this, “Dirty water hurts children.” Now a victim is created. Crusaders and Power Barons may take it a step further, “If we don’t clean the water now the children will die in ten years.” Not only have they created a victim class, but an imminent crisis as well. Finally, they roll out the villain, “The chemical industry is polluting the water and killing the children.” To stop the crisis and rectify the injustice against the victim the villain must be punished.
The grievance drives the next common behavior - these movements will always be socialist in nature, leftist to some degree. The villain is a source of wealth, power, or resources. The crisis can only be stopped by curtailing, confiscating, or redistributing these resources. This can be done only by wielding government power and why these movements attractive Power Barons. This power includes increased regulation, criminalization of previously normal behavior, increased taxes, wealth redistribution or reductions in quality of life. As government gains more power, the cause is elevated…and everything else must diminish.
These movements are always relativist in nature, believing nothing has inherent value over anything else - except the cause. The cause is their god. Like many religions, the individual must be diminished to elevate the movement’s god. They may preach individualism, but in actuality they enforce strict and unquestioning adherence to ideology and group-think. This role falls to the Crusaders. Once a movement attains a certain level of power, the individual becomes the ultimate villain. When taken to an extreme, this is when enforcement becomes the privy of the shock-troops, the Angry Ones. Communism and fascism are two examples of this phenomenon.
Another reason they are relativists is because their causes never concern individual issues (like freedom or human dignity) but instead group identity issues or things. Individuals are only important in how they relate to the group or object in question. For example, the animal rights movement considers creatures a protected victim class. To elevate the victim they must lower humans. The slogan 'meat is murder' is an example of this. It doesn't matter if people have to eat, their needs are no greater than those of beasts.
Since free-thinking individuals ultimately challenge such movements’ ideologies, these movements often attempt to diminish intellectual thought. This is why I often refer to them as “cult-like.” Like a cult, they target the young who are easier to indoctrinate with slogans and ideology. The young can be easily swayed with emotion as opposed to logic. Always a fertile breeding ground for fads, Crusaders start in education and universities. In fact, this is how most Emos and Angry Ones are recruited. Infiltration into popular culture soon follows, where Crusaders embrace and legitimize the cause. Once the cause and movement are legitimized Power Barons manipulate it to their purposes. At this point the movement’s elites will marginalize any criticism, debate and opposition. Even if they silence critics within their own nation, opposition may exist beyond their borders. This is why these movements must always spread to survive.
For this reason, these leftist movements are always international in nature. Their crisis must be your crisis. They seek to spread their faith far and wide like a virus. If a movement cannot grow it will eventually be seen for what it is, diminish and die. For example, because communism was contained, it withered and died. Unfortunately, with today’s global telecommunication such movements cannot be contained.
Finally, because the cause is their ‘god’ these movements will always hostile to certain religions, specifically Christianity and Judaism. These movements define morality as devotion the cause and zeal against the villain. In fact, to them victim-hood and sainthood are one in the same. In contrast, Christianity and Judaism emphasize the individual, free will, absolutes, and morality-based law. Therefore, these movements view them as mortal enemies.
III. Leftist Lifecycle
As we’ve seen so far, these leftist movements share a predictable core following and common behavioral traits. They also follow a predictable pattern as they emerge, rise, and spread. Let’s use feminism as an example to illustrate this point.
Going back to the1800s, this relatively old movement originated with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, notable early feminist and the movement’s first High Priestesses. Women’s right to vote was their cause. This is an example of Phase One: Purity.
In Phase One, a movement’s High Priests are alone in the cause, visionary prophets sounding an alarm in the wilderness. Their cause involves a victim (in this case, women) or crisis, but not always a villain. The message is usually positive; it is for something. In the feminist case, it was equal rights. These “first wave” feminists attained victory with passage of the 19th Amendment.
The feminist movement simmered until after World War II, when it flared up again in what feminists call the “second wave.” Its new High Priestesses included the likes of Betty Freidan, Gloria Steinem, and Shulamith Firestone. The main difference between the first and second waves was the emphasis on male domination and oppression versus equality emphasized in the first wave. This is when the feminist movement entered Phase Two: Villainization. The movement was now against something, in this case men. In Phase Two, movements lose their purity and become aggressive. Feminist writings darkened during this time, treating all women as victims and all men as oppressors. Phases One and Two can be entered simultaneously, but once a movement identifies a villain the other phases often follow in quick succession.
By the 1970s feminism’s emerged as a powerful force on college campuses and the in media. Feminist ideals spread across the globe and seeped into popular culture. From “I am Woman” to “Maude” this era saw feminism go mainstream and enter Phase Three: Ascendancy, when a movement gains legitimate public recognition and spreads internationally. In this phase Crusaders emerge in the media and academia to carry the message and frame the debate. Their slogans become sacred dogma and accepted as undisputed truth. This is another reason facts and logic will not sway members of these movements – they’re invested in groupthink and emotionalism. Not surprisingly, this is when the movement’s Emos emerge. As public awareness increases the movement’s villain is put on the defensive.
Where there are Emos, Angry Ones are soon to follow. They often appear as revolutionaries who sometimes (though not always) resort to violence. For the feminists the Angry Ones appeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s when terms like ‘sexual revolution” and “sex war” debuted. This is Phase Four: Radicalization. Not only do Angry Ones appear in this stage, but grievances often change and shift. For example, when women attained equal political rights the movement changed focus to cultural inequality. When cultural grievances no longer held appeal, the grievance changed to sexual oppression. For the Angry Ones the cause is only an excuse for revolution. If a villain is defeated on one front, they will produce another grievance to keep the revolution alive. It’s the struggle, not the cause, which holds the lure for the true believers and yet another reason logical debate fails to sway members of these movements. Once a movement is radicalized it is ripe for the next stage.
When a given movement attains radicalization, like the feminist movement leading up to the 1990s, Power Barons swoop in to use them during Phase Five: Politicalization. The feminist movement didn’t reach this stage during ratification of the 19th Amendment or during the heydays of the Equal Rights Amendment campaign. No, these fights were still mostly about bettering the plight of women. The feminist movement entered Phase Five during the 1991 Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill senate hearings. During this time a new grievance, ‘sexual harassment,’ was invented to further the political power of those not necessarily connected with the feminist movement. Democratic Party Power Barons like Rep John Murtha (who called for cutting Navy funding 10,000 sailors in the wake of the scandal) found the feminist movement a convenient weapon against the first Bush Administration. This grievance was used during the Naval Tail Hook Scandal to similar ends – to strip power and prestige from the largely male military establishment. Of all the grievances touted by the feminist movement, sexual harassment was the first truly successful political weapon. In the wake of these scandals, the Democratic Party achieved new levels of political power. According to author Susan J. Douglas: “…Barbara Boxer, Diane Feinstein, Carol Moseley Braun and Patty Murray all won Senate seats; a year later, President Clinton appointed a record number of women to government positions, including Janet Reno as the first female attorney general.”
Once a movement has crossed the Phase Five threshold, the final stage is close behind. For the feminists it happened when their leaders (the same ones who railed so strongly against Clarence Thomas) remained silent when President Clinton used his own power to seduce Monica Lewinsky. They also said nothing about the credible allegations of him sexually assaulting Anita Brodrick and Kathleen Willy. Phase Six is Corruption - when the power brokers have completely compromised a movement and power itself becomes the new cause.
From Purity to Corruption, these movements follow a predictable developmental path. When this developmental template is combined with the membership and behavior traits it yields a usable model for identifying which movements are part of this global cult-like belief system.
IV. The Communist Connection
What was the first movement of this global ‘cult-like’ belief system? Not only does communism fit the template described so far, it built the template.
Communism’s High Priests were Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels, who invented the original victim and villain scenario: the victim proletariat versus the villain bourgeois. If one reads Manifesto of the Communist Party it becomes obvious communism isn’t really for anything as it was against anyone with wealth and power.
Since the communist movement identifies a villain from the onset, Phases One and Two occurred simultaneously. This was in the late 1800’s, prior to the Russian Revolution, when communism spread through Europe’s intellectual circles.
Communism quickly internationalized and entered Phase Three and Four. In Russia, the revolutionaries (Angry Ones) dominated the movement in their struggle against the Czar and became the archetypes for all revolutionaries to follow. From their ranks came the movement’s future Power Barons. Because the communist movement was purely political from the outset Phases Five and Six happened almost simultaneously. It’s important to note here that in EVERY case where communism achieved power a Power Baron rose immediately from the ranks of the Angry Ones, seized power and corrupted the movement. Stalin, Mao, Castro, Pol Pot, Kim Il-Jong…if there is no exception. The only difference between communism and socialism is the speed at which it reaches Phase Six: Communism = Corruption; Socialism = Slow corruption.
The Emos emerged in Western Europe and the United States in the midst of freedom and affluence. Emos were few and far between in Czarist Russia but abundant in places like London, Paris and New York. It is rumored Lenin called these western sympathizers “useful idiots.” In the east Crusaders were called propaganda ministers and came from the ranks of the Angry Ones. In the west Crusaders were college professors, journalists, and intellectuals and came from the ranks of the Emos.
Behaviors of these cult-like movements also originated with communism. The communist grievance is as simple as it gets: the bourgeois are ‘haves’ and the proletariat ‘have nots.’ This argument has been at the heart of every leftist movement since then. Communists are also the ultimate relativist, believing nothing has inherent value over anything else - except the revolution. The dialectic has no other dimensions. Communism is internationalist because they cannot co-exist with other economic systems or forms of government and must spread to survive. Where communism spreads, free thought dies, often quickly and violently. Since they are relativists they cannot co-exists with religion faiths which teach absolutes. Therefore communism is openly hostile to religion, especially Christianity and Judaism.
An important note on the subject of religion: Someone once said Islam was not so much a religion as a political movement. If viewed through that lens, radical Islam (as practiced since the Iranian Revolution) falls neatly in this template. It’s gone though every phase, from Purity to Corruption. It has every class, from Emos to Power Barons. It’s international, socialist in nature (Iran), intolerant of free thought, and openly hostile to Christianity and Judaism. This explains why other cult sub-movements are silent or accommodating in the face of radical Islam’s onslaught. On some level, conscious or unconscious, they recognize a kindred movement. Even more ominous is the rise of Christian churches which follow this template, like the Trinity Church of Christ. Reverend Wright's political sermons put his church firmly in this template and paint him as a Crusader turned Power Baron.
What other modern movements share this template hammered out by the communists over the last century? I’ve already discussed feminism but there are many others. Find a victim or a crisis and you’ll probably find one of these movements in one of its six phases. Environmental movements are the most powerful at the moment, with the Global Warming movement at the forefront. Many civil rights movements follow this template: gay rights, animal rights, consumer rights, and immigrant rights. Peace and labor movements may also use this template.
V. The Cult of Nothing
The belief system shared by these movements is global, but unorganized. Perhaps the most dangerous thing for liberty and freedom would be someone, or some organization, drawing them together under one banner. Unfortunately, this has already happened.
The Democratic Party has been drawing these seemingly separate and unrelated movements into its fold since the late 1960s. Today, it is nothing more than a collection of these cult-like movements tied together under a central group of Power Barons - the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and leading democratic government officials.
So what makes this different than any other political machine? There is no central ideology at the heart of the Democratic Party; its ideology is power. The Democratic Party is a Power Syndicate.
The 2004 Democratic Party platform is a vague document revolving around current events with no central belief system. It discusses policies and programs, but nowhere does it define fundamental beliefs. It can be summed up as: “More of this, less of that, Bush is bad.” The party platform is really only for being against a common villain its sub-movements can agree on. This villain will always be the leading republican figure, whether that’s a sitting republican president, speaker of the house, or a special prosecutor. Because the common villain is key to the Power Syndicate’s core strategy bi-partisanship will always be one-way and short term.
The Client/Syndicate Power Exchange: The Machine.
Pundits often refer to the inner workings of the party as “the machine.” In reality, ‘the Machine’ isn’t how the party picks candidates or holds primaries. The true Machine is the relationship between the Democratic Party (the Power Syndicate) and its movements. The Machine is simple and direct. The party views each movement as a client, or a power bloc: an immediately accessible and reliable group of votes. The each client’s leading Power Barons pledge their power bloc’s fealty in exchange for personal power and privilege within the party itself and in government. Once in power, the party rewards clients with favorable legislation, access, privileges and taxpayer funds. The real (and only) Democratic Party platform is feed the Machine, power for powers sake: Acquire Power, Expand Power, and Defend Power.
Acquire Power
The Syndicate acquires power by successfully employing the political version of two military strategies: Centralized Planning, Decentralized Execution; and Parallel Attack. Clausewitz said, “War is politics by other means.” However, the corollary is equally true, “Politics is war by other means.”
1. Centralized Planning/Decentralized Execution
The Power Syndicate provides resources to each independent client group and orchestrates over-arching strategic guidance. It rarely issues direct orders to individual clients; usually only in specific elections or to ensure movements aren’t at cross-purposes. Each movement in turn charts its own battle strategy against its own villain(s) and/or the unifying villain (conservatives). It is nourished by an endless supply of resources from the patron Power Syndicate.
2. Parallel Attack
Because each movement is seemingly independent they usually operate that way. Conservative institutions are simultaneously attacked from multiple directions by different, seemingly unrelated, clients. A perfect example of parallel attack is the current immigration battle. Conservatives won a victory with a bill to build a border fence only to see that victory quickly nullified by environmentalist in the courts. The more clients, the more axis of attacks the Power Syndicate can bring to bear simultaneously against its enemies. Conservatives can’t focus their forces against a dispersed enemy. This is the political equivalent to the Hydra. It is difficult to counter and conservatives have yet to adapt.
Expand Power: Infiltrate