Dylan, Berlin, Bay of Pigs invasion
"Lawrence of Arabia", British Beatlemania
Ole Miss, John Glenn, Liston beats Patterson
Pope Paul, Malcolm X, British politician sex.
JFK – blown away, what else do I have to say?
It was always burning, since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No, we didn't light it, but we tried to fight it. ~Billy Joel, We Didn't Start The Fire.
Better Dead Than Red.
As I've said many times, I grew up in the 1970's and 1980's when Anti-Communism was still very much a thing. The Soviet Union was still a very real threat, the Red Army still faced off against NATO armies, and US Army and Air Force units in Europe across a no-man's land of fences, booby traps and barbed wire and NATO and US Navy ships played an endless game of chicken with the Soviet Navy on the high seas. The Berlin Wall was the very symbol of Communist oppression. The Chinese "Cultural Revolution" the very bogeyman of murderous Communist excess brought up by Christian preachers and conservative politicians (be they Republican or, yes, Democratic) any time political points needed to be made or the reason for religious belief underscored for any reason.
And do I really have to tell you what such people would have thought of using the words "Confucian roots" and "natural virtue" in the same sentence...especially in the decades when arch Anti-Communist Pope John Paul II was essentially considered by conservatives to speak for all of Christendom? For fuck's sake in my childhood, in America, outside of the Abrahamic faiths of Christianity, Islam and Judaism...well, other religions were often not acknowledged at all. Yes, I know that actually sucks.
Praising "Confucian virtues" at that time sure as hell wasn't a thing for anybody as far to the Right as Sohab Amari says he is.
Maybe that's wrong, but it's a fact.
I'm serious, that's how it was.
I was raised with the idea of American exceptionalism embodied in Ronald Reagan's campaign slogan of "Morning In America." That is, back when America actually strove for greatness and such things could be considered more than bigoted, jingoistic tripe.
Maybe you had to be there, hell, maybe you had to be an idealist or a young person.
But that's what I remember.
This fucking guy right here, then as governor of California, said this over a decade before I was even born:
"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it on to our children in the bloodstream. The only way they can inherit the freedom we have known is if we fight for it, protect it, defend it, and then hand it to them with the well fought lessons of how they in their lifetime must do the same. And if you and I don't do this, then you and I may well spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it once was like in America when men were free."
This is the context of what I was raised up in. Yes, libertarian Reaganite conservatism ultimately made a mess of things, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.
Needless to say, at a bare minimum any conservative praising the "Civilization" of Communist China at that time or any time until I was well into middle age would not have been allowed to claim that label for much longer. Up until at least my mid-20's they'd likely have been pantsed, tarred and feathered and run out of town (and the political movement as it then existed) on a fucking rail for saying it.
We believed in freedom, sure. But not to the extent that we actually believed arguing against freedom itself was somehow a good or valid sentiment. The ACLU, the Constitution or the Supreme Court might say that you're allowed to say it, but it would've been a lot safer to argue such a thing from the pages of the New York Times than from a seat at the bar in any of the places I ever lived. Trust me on this one.
And that somebody had said it in a big-city, liberal-leaning newspaper would itself have been a scandal for weeks.
But yesterday, Sohab Amari, who once argued that David French was "too liberal" for insisting on decent conduct and shared American values, Tweeted out that he was perfectly fine with a "Chinese-led 21st Century" because "America is too liberal."
The Chinese government, and its only political party (and the two are utterly synonymous) are still explicitly Communist, in name and theory even if they have not been so in practice for over forty years.
As recently as 20 years ago, conservatives took this seriously as a threat. Many do still use it, if dishonestly, as a trope to rally their base.
But I can remember when such things were for real.
Funny thing, but I can remember when anything even remotely associated with Communism was automatically considered not only "liberal" but Far-Left and thus forbidden, and when movement Conservatives routinely tried to smear anything even remotely left-of-center with that "Commie" label. This happened in my lifetime. This happened in my town, for fuck's sake.
I'm not quite old enough to remember hippies as more than a curious relic of a decade or two gone by, or dudes dressing like Che Guevara, or Americans waving North Vietnamese flags in protests, or Jane Fonda disgracing herself...and frankly I'm not old enough to stay mad about it.
To be honest, I've never actually cared about stuff that mostly was flaming out by the time I was even born in the decade where a hell of a lot of those same people got the Jesus and became conservatives when the realities of adulthood and how much drug addiction sucked set in and the Vietnam War ended and there wasn't as much to protest anymore and most of it wasn't a direct threat to them...that last truly being the most important part.
But I'm Damned well old enough to remember that such things stamped themselves on the conservative mind for two generations, and in fact they're only now truly fading out as the Baby Boomers have begun to fade out and gradually become outnumbered politically and otherwise by the rest of us.
And again we find out how much the "Them" part of that stuff back in the day was the really important part.
The "rest of us" now including former moderate conservatives like myself who got thrown overboard years ago by wealthy Baby Boomers and their forcing the Republican party on its Long March ever-Rightward...until now that shit is virtually unrecognizable from what my parents grew up with, much less anything Ronald Reagan believed...except maybe for the racism that the Gipper mostly expressed in private and generally did not govern by.
Donald Trump was what these fucking people hoped Richard Nixon, or Ronald Reagan, was going to be but wasn't. And in fact, now these people are in effect arguing that even he didn't...maybe couldn't...go far enough...and certainly not under our system as it currently exists.
Thus they're arguing for full-on authoritarian Statism, where the State is the only god one is even allowed to have...where deviation from the norm can be punished literally by being thrown into a concentration camp and where citizens have no rights that the State is bound to respect.
And if you think this will somehow magically only apply to Black people or whoever else you don't like, I'm here to tell you you're wrong.
Murderous authoritarianism is what these fucking people want. They want you farting out their government talking points through your mouth because the Sword and Shield of the Party has its fist jammed so far up your ass that that's the only exit point.
They want a world where 1/6 is like May Day in the old Soviet Union, celebrated with marching soldiers, missiles on transportable erector-launchers and tanks in the fucking streets.
They want a world where non-conformity from what the Party or the State preaches...and preach it they will, literally...is punished with violence.
And if you think they'll let you keep your guns so you can defend yourself you have another thing coming.
You think China's government "Social credit score" system is bad?
I'm here to tell you, given their druthers these motherfuckers would institute a scale of political reliability scores, use that to determine literally everything you can do in your life, and have it administered not by the government but by some unaccountable private corporation whose details end up kept blacker than the blackest CIA or Special Operations Command operation...and they'd pay those unaccountable wealthy motherfuckers many billions of dollars for the privilege of running your life.
Think I'm kidding?
These people are telling you this shit themselves. That's what they're saying when they say they want to do things like nationalize Facebook and Twitter.
That's what Sohab Amari is saying, that's where the rabbit hole of what people like him and Josh Hawley are saying goes down.
And because they'll use the rampantly swirling madness of conspiracy theories as a justification, it's a virtual certainty that the truth of whatever actually happened will be no defense.
Indeed, the Constitution and the Law, if they continued to exist at all, would mean nothing more than what the unaccountable private bastards say they mean.
That's what these fucking people are saying they want.
Now...
How, exactly, is any of that "Conservative?"
I'm serious. Answer the fucking question.
Don't look away.
Answer the motherfucking question.
Moonshot, Woodstock, Watergate, punk rock
Begin, Reagan, Palestine, terror on the airline
Ayatollah's in Iran, Russians in Afghanistan
Foreign debts, homeless vets, AIDS, crack, Bernie Goetz
Hypodermics on the shore, China's under martial law
Rock and roller, cola wars, I can't take it anymore
It was always burning, since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
But when we are gone
It will still burn on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on. ~Billy Joel, We Didn't Start The Fire.
Somebody lost the plot somewhere along the way, and conservatives or the rest of the country better find it real damn fast.
Or the rest of us best get it into our heads that we're going to have to fight this out and be prepared to act accordingly. This is life now.
For half a decade I've been saying that "Republicans are basically Communists now" and that these people hungered for a dictator and that they'd be fine with being slaves, so long as they were a better class of slaves than all the other slaves.
That's what Sohab Amari just said.
That's five years of everything I've been saying in one Tweet.
I don't like being proven right. Not when it comes to this shit.
Now what are we going to do about it.
That's not just the real question, it's the only question.
From Stettin on the Baltic to Varna on the Black Sea, the regimes planted by totalitarianism have had more than thirty years to establish their legitimacy. But none — not one regime — has yet been able to risk free elections. Regimes planted by bayonets do not take root....If history teaches anything, it teaches self-delusion in the face of unpleasant facts is folly....Our military strength is a prerequisite to peace, but let it be clear we maintain this strength in the hope it will never be used, for the ultimate determinant in the struggle that's now going on in the world will not be bombs and rockets but a test of wills and ideas, a trial of spiritual resolve, the values we hold, the beliefs we cherish, the ideals to which we are dedicated. ~Ronald Reagan
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