Posted on 05/13/2002 5:02:32 PM PDT by Ohioan
I have just posted the article, which I have been working on for the past several days, prompted by the recent vicious turn in Leftwing politics in Europe.
It is called The Big Truth, and basically suggests that Conservatives trying to defend their respective traditions in the various nations under attack from the Left--including America--should answer their foes by a simple iteration of basic truths.
Comments are invited. Suggested revisions will be carefully considered.
William Flax
Few people vote on the basis of deep analysis of issues or candidates. Few have deep ideological perceptions, much less commitments. Most people vote according to the patterns of subjective personal identification. The success of the Left in the Twentieth Century may be largely explained by a ruthless application of this reality.
Thus every form of Socialism seeks to rally those within whom they can instill a sense of grievance, into group identifications based upon such negative emotions as resentment, envy and greed. At the same time, there has been a studied Leftwing campaign to confuse understanding of positive human motivations for so long as there has been an organized Left. Thus, in many of their manifestations, they have been trying since well before World War II, to suggest that people who have strong identification with their own race, tribe, state, nation, community or faith, must be motivated by fear or hatred. In this, propagandists hasten to seize upon any vile act committed against a member of an identifiable minority by a rooted citizen of a Nation, being infested by Socialists, as proof that all who would defend their heritage--a cause ordinarily motivated by love--are really acting out of suppressed hatred or fear.
There were a number of news items early this month (May, 2002), which illustrated both the malaise of the West and, in a rather compelling fashion, exactly why Conservatives, in many lands, have been losing the battle to preserve their respective ways of life. While the problem has been discussed in earlier essays, it is clear that our foes are growing bolder; hence their urgency and ours is now greater.
Bill Flax
Hell, I was listening to BBC news reports this weekend on NPR (don't shoot me, I was bored! Besides, I pay for it...), and everything that ran counter to their orthodoxy was venomously labeled "right wing". They even called the recently cobbled together French government "Chirac's interim right wing government".
Yep, they're in trouble and they know it.
This seems to be a central theme/point/supposition. Can you source it? (because it may not seem apparent to all) By "subjective identification", do you mean group identities?
Have you ever worked on a political campaign? The concept is basic in American political history. Voting patterns based on identification--often with the party of ones grandparents, go on for generations. Subjective identification means how the individual voter identifies himself. It is often with a group, but not inevitably. The politicians will almost invariably target him as a member of one of more groups, but they may pick the wrong groups, if they do not understand how he is personally "wrapped."
The success of the Left in the Twentieth Century may be largely explained by a ruthless application of this reality. Ruthless in what way? The rest of the essay, illustrates some of the ways. But for another example, did you catch Al Gore's pandering to notorious hatemongers at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem, during the last election. Did you catch the way the Democrats mobilized the susceptible elderly around Medicare, to create a definable political identity as "Medicare Recipients." (They are also, of course, mail recipients, water users, etc.. By contrast, the definable political identity that Conservatives want them to take is that of a proud generation of Americans who honor their forebears, and want to preserve their legacy.) The entire game is over how people are induced to see themselves in relation to a very wide array of considerations.
Application of what? Which reality? That people are shallow or that personal identification or group identity plays a significant role? I would not call it shallow. There are some profoundly deep people, who still vote according to group identity. Very few, even among the well educated, critically weigh the issues at each election; just witness the moronic sound bites that now form the bulk of every campaign.
Le Pen has also been pointedly called an "Anti-semite" and a "Vichy-sympathizer." Is there any substance to these charges or can you effectvely refute them? You seem to be giving him blanket dispensation of these charges. If so, you might as well list the charges comprehensively.
Le Pen is not the real subject, as you will find if you read the essay through. He is a subtopic, intended to illustrate the point. For me to list every single smear and reply to them separately would have been to miss the forest for the trees.
I have no knowledge as to whether Le Pen personally likes Semites or not. His opposition to largely Semitic immigration from North Africa is based upon a desire to preserve the character of the French Nation. Since those migrants have lately proven a real threat to the safety of French Jews, in this he must be seen as something of a protector of the Jewish part of the Semitic equation. On the other hand, I do not know what his personal feelings towards Jews may be. While he has offered a bit of very Gallic reverse hyperbole--the usual basis given for the anti-Semitic charge--to suggest that there has been too much emphasis placed on the Nazi slaughter of Jews, he has certainly not suggested that it was in any sense acceptable conduct. (To put this in perspective, the parties on the Left in both Europe and America, have virtually totally ignored the even worse slaughter in Russia and the Ukraine of 7-10,000,000 farmers, resisting collectivization. Does that mean that they are all Anti-Farmer? Of course not!)
The "Vichy" charge is a bit ridiculous, because Le Pen would have been a child when the Vichy Government was set up. Later, as a teenager, he fought in the resistance against the Nazis. But the image of the Vichy Government (1940-1942), as being some completely evil force in French history, is itself not only a gross exaggeration, if not an outright lie, but a very much over-worked French political football. The head of the Vichy Government was the French hero of World War I, Marshal Petain. His motive was obviously to save what he could of France, which was being soundly defeated in the North by an extremely formidable German army, supported by an air force that at the time had virtually complete domination of the French sky; and was suddenly also being stabbed in the back by Mussolini, in the South.
It was one thing for DeGaulle to go on fighting from a base outside the country. But the choice in France proper came down to some form of negotiation to save something, or total conquest and abject surrender. Regardless of how it looks from hindsight, most of those who supported the Vichy Government were not Nazi sympathizers--although with a victorious German army occupying much of their country, the new Government did not dare exclude anyone who was a Nazi sympathizer.
Having pointed all of that out, it should be obvious to anyone that no French Patriot, of any political stripe, would want to revive those totally humiliating days for the French Nation.
"Anti-Semite" and "Vichy sympathizer" were part of the stream of epithets hurled. They had nothing to do with the issues in the still active 2002 campaign, and were in fact typical of the way the Left smears, rather than debates.
William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site
Things are coming to a head, no question. But with a writer for Radio Free Europe, no less, actually writing a piece that contains at least a subliminal justification for assassinating those of us who seek to preserve traditional societies, watch your back. The coming battle will be uglier than anything seen in America since frontier days.
William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site
But so far as macro analysis vs. micro analysis, I would shun the former except as a recorder of historic trends in the aggregate. In preparing for an election, they are of interest; but in the actual day to day campaign, they tend to lead one into the same errors as the poll driven campaign. True political leaders, I think, have an instinct as to how the individual voter is wrapped, and find the way to so structure issues, as to create new "macro" patterns--if you like the term macro--rather than rely solely on yesterday's. It is a little like the fallacy of macro economics.
The macro is basically an aggregate of diverse micros, never an entity in itself.
The Big Lie is, of course, the technique, not one specific lie. You are perfectly correct in associating the technique with Joseph Goebbels, who may even have exceeded Clinton in his ability to use the technique--but our former President was very skilled in it. Goebbels boss, Hitler, was also an expert in his own right. (See The Lies of Socialism, for more on how the Nazis and other Socialists have used the Lie as a formidable weapon.)
I cannot agree with you that the best that we can expect is a 50% Conservative vote--which we certainly do not have, anyway. While there are some good Conservatives in the Republican party, most Republican Officeholders are Moderates, and some are even Liberals. But to return to the question of possible targets, I would aim much higher. Why? Because despite the media and academia, who pursue every big and little lie of the Left as newly revealed truth, there are still ways to reach people. And in reaching people--as individual voters--we need to rally them on the issues on which they are Conservative. Most normal people have such issues.
For example, as I suggested earlier, the way to counter the Left's use of Medicare recipients as a Left leaning interest group is to appeal to their earlier and still latent identity as heirs to the American heritage; to whatever patriotic desire may be within them to pass that heritage on untrammeled to the future. There are all sorts of emotional levers that can be pulled--or if you prefer the figure, "buttons pushed"--to do this. Unfortunately, the poll driven politicos are more likely to urge the supposed Conservative candidate to try to compete with those who would buy this vote with an unconscionable Federal program! That approach loses on both fronts. They do not have the credibility with the elderly, when the latter are thinking of themselves as grasping Medicare recipients, because of the past propaganda of the Left. And in trying to bribe voters with unconscionable programs, they lose the support of more youthful idealists--as well as those voters who want to reduce the cost of Government, part of what was once the Conservatives' natural constituency.
Well, I am rambling a bit, but you get the idea.
William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site
But it is one that makes me uncomfortable. French, Vichy, police were very active in rounding up French jews for deportation. That is a chapter in French history that should be cause for some national introspection. What is Le Pen's nuanced view of that era?
Like a lot of conservatives, I am sympathetic to anyone who is the butt of leftist, irrational, attacks. But I have held back from defending him until I understand precisely what kind of man he is.
The easy answer to your point is the simple truth. I do not know what Le Pen's nuanced view of that era may be. I am not a student of Le Pen. My comments are simply based upon what has been printed recently in a variety of places, which I recognized as involving typical Leftwing distortions of logic, such as I have witnessed used repeatedly in the past over many years, against decent patriotic men who loved their countries and their people.
But while I do not know the answer to your question, I will address the problem that it touches upon. There is an inherent vulnerability in any movement--right or left--if your opponents can tar you by associations, with ideas or associates, who are questionable or worse. There is almost no one who cannot be challenged on this basis. Let me give you some not so well remembered examples:
After World War II, the American Armed Forces helped round up a huge numbers of refugees from Communism, who had fought with the Germans, and sent them back to certain death in Stalin's Russia. This operation was so cruel, that it led to accusations that Generals Marshall and Eisenhower were actually Communist sympathizers. While I do not believe for one moment that that accusation was true, it was an ugly episode, that has been largely ignored since. (On the other hand, it was justified on the basis that these people were Russian and Ukranian Nationals, who had fought against their homeland, which had been our wartime ally. That explanation, under ordinary circumstances might make sense, until you realize that Stalin had orchestrated the murder of perhaps as many as 10,000,000 Russian and Ukranian farmers before the War, and these people had seen the Germans not as enemies of Russia and the Ukraine, but as possible liberators.)
There are also cases, in our own domestic history, when otherwise very good and decent American leaders, really did look the other way, while some very nasty things were done to American Indian Tribes. We don't really like to talk about that, but it sometimes happened. Does that put those otherwise decent leaders beyond the pale? Or should we limit the blame for atrocities to those who actually committed them?
The Vichy era is one subject to various interpretations; which means that at the time, those collaborating or initiating the Vichy Government had many different motives. Do you blame all of them because the Police, with what up until that point had just demonstrated itself to the most effective land based army in the world a few miles away--we are talking about 1942 now--in a position to take over at any time--cooperated with a despicable Nazi pogrom?
And the other question is this. Whatever your personal ideas on what happened under Vichy, does that--should that--mean that one seeking office in France almost 60 years later, should be disqualified, because he had some association with someone who had identified with Vichy? It is widely understood that the previous Socialist President Mitterand, did have Vichy ties, for example. The issue is not so simple.
For another example, have you seen the absurd attribution of Nazi sympathies to President Bush's Grandfather--the very Liberal Republican Senator from Connecticut, Prescott Bush--because he had close business relations with German firms in the 1930s? This association business, when the spin-masters take hold of it, can be truly vicious. Get too deeply into it, and after a while, you may find yourself unable to trust anyone.
It is surely better to give one the benefit of the doubt, and accept that the platform on which he runs, is in fact his platform. (I know that that is not satisfactory either, for we all know politicians do not always keep their promises; but it should tell us more than trying to look under 60 year old rocks.)
It is never mean to take care of your duties to your own first. That is one of the primary rules for the continuity of sentient life. As for the Left, they have never relied on anything but lies, envy and deception + plus greed, pure and simple.
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