Folks, this is no longer a "liberal" vs. "conservative" issue notwithstanding the Grand Canyon like chasm that exists between the two sides. A divide that plays right into the hands of America's enemies. And they are quite a few (even so called "allies" are questionable at best for, at last measure, it is all about INTERESTS --state and otherwise).
Chinese military strategist/general Sun Tzu(death 496BC):
Meanwhile across the pond in Great Britain, it seems we have "mirror imaging" when it comes to the descent into absurdity.
A brilliant article by Peter Hitchens hits the nail right on its sad head. Here is the link:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-8418399/PETER-HITCHENS-Left-controls-lever-power-face-regime-change.html
PETER HITCHENS: From the lockdown to the destruction of statues, these febrile weeks show the pillars of our freedom and civilization are rotten. As the Left now controls every lever of power, we face nothing less than regime change.
Some excerpts from a superb --albeit depressing--article:
What we now face is regime change. That is why these strange crowds have begun to gather round ancient and forgotten monuments, demanding their removal and destruction.
That is why police chiefs kneel like conquered slaves to the new gods of woke, and the leaders of the Labour Party do likewise.
This time, as ignorant armies seek the final abolition of Britain, it is very frightening. I would not like to say where it will end. I cannot claim to have known this would happen but I will say that I had an instinctive fear of very bad things to come when the country began its mad, wild shutdown in March.
I have learned over many years to trust my instincts, to take that train, to make that phone call, to turn that corner. When I have heeded them I have either benefited or been saved from bad things. When I have ignored them I have been hurt. It may be inherited from our forebears, or learned by decades of experience. It may be a mixture of the two.
But on crucial occasions we know more than we think we do. And as the cities began to darken and empty, and the world as we knew it started to close, I feared that we should never again see the lights lit again as they had been before. It was like the start of a great war without limit, made more perplexing because there was no obvious end to it, ever.
The Diana episode had been a Dictatorship of Grief, in which even the most revered parts of the establishment had bowed to the mob. ‘Show us you care!’ shouted the headlines. And woe betide those who did not.
Then came September 11, 2001, and a Dictatorship of Security. No argument could withstand the claim that safety was paramount, and we willingly made a bonfire of our freedoms, wrongly persuaded that we could trust our governments not to take advantage.
And now we have the Dictatorship of Fear. It is not the largely fictional ‘R’ number which governs the behaviour of our feeble Government, which is only just beginning to grasp how much damage it has done and how hard it will be to repair. It is the ‘F’ number, the number of people scared into pathetic timidity by the slick but false claim we were all at risk from a terrible and devastating disease.
In fact, the country with the highest number of deaths per head is Belgium (843 per million). Yet Belgium introduced one of the tightest and most severe shutdowns on the planet. Sweden, without a shutdown at all, has suffered 472 deaths per million.
I am fairly sure these measures, like the house arrest and sunbathing bans which came before, have another purpose. They accustom us to being told what to do. Stand there. Wait there. Don’t use cash. Don’t cross that line. They permanently change the relationship between the individual and the state.
They accustom us to being told what to do. Stand there. Wait there. Don’t use cash. Don’t cross that line. They permanently change the relationship between the individual and the state.
Not only can the Government now tell us where we must live and when or if we can go out. Not only can it tell us who we can sleep with (apart from Professor Ferguson, who is still allowed to pontificate after brazenly breaking these rules). It can now even tell us what to wear.
This is something I have not had to endure since my schooldays. What is even more startling is that it can tell me what to wear on my head and on my face, which is somehow even more personal and more intrusive.
During these long dreamy weeks we have bit by bit forgotten who we were before, how we lived, what we thought, what we expected of life. I believe that forces hostile to our country, its history and nature, have seen this as an opportunity. Probably incredulous to begin with, they realised the British people really had gone soft, accepting absurd and humiliating diktats, believing the most ridiculous claims.
They also noticed that formerly great institutions and forces – the church, Parliament, the police, the armed services, much of Fleet Street, the universities – submitted to it without so much as a sigh. So did what remained of our great industrial and commercial companies.
As it happens, it was the death in Minneapolis, a city most British people will never even see, of George Floyd. Seeing the surging crowds, the rioting and the looting in the USA, the British radical Left grew jealous.
They imported the protest, converted it into outrage against some mouldering statues, and set the streets alight.
The important thing about these protesters, lauded by the Labour Party and deferred to by police chiefs, is that they help to strengthen the new establishment and destroy the old one.
They have already helped to make it very hard for traditional, normal, Christian conservative and patriotic opinions to be expressed at all. By using social media as a form of discipline, they have made everyone – including the Left-wing multimillionaire author J.K. Rowling – fear them.
Anyone, as she learned last week, can now be ‘cancelled’ – the new radicals’ chilling word for the obliteration they like to visit on their victims. She has been pursued for saying the wrong thing about the transgender issue. In fact, there is no right thing. I have known for years it was futile to try to respond with fairness and reason to the new orthodoxy.
However carefully and generously I might argue, I would still be denounced for thought crime. You cannot be right, nor can you know if you are right. That is a large part of the trick.
For the past few weeks have also demonstrated that all the pillars of British freedom and civilisation are hollow and rotten, and that we are ripe for a sweeping cultural revolution as devastating as the one Lenin and Dzerzhinsky launched in Petrograd in 1917.
Except that this time there will be no need to storm the Winter Palace, seize the railway station or the telephone exchange or the barracks. The Left are already in control of every lever of power and influence, from the schools the Tories are too weak to reopen to the police, the Civil Service, the courts and the BBC.
It is regime change. Do not worry too much about the statues which are now coming down. They mean surprisingly little. Worry more about the ones they are soon going to be putting up, and what they will represent. Perhaps our grandchildren will find the courage to pull them down.
*****
Will add my one cent to Hitchen's piece:
We have become soft, weak, lulled into complacency by our current lifestyles. Struggle and hardship, essential for building character, for most are things of the past.
Everyone must be "equal" without any input or merit
(except---dare I say it-- some are now "more equal," and they certainly aren't "white" males who apparently have been relegated to the bottom of the totem pole without a fight). Prizes for all... Wait. Nope. That's out now circa June 2020.
Prizes for ALL the "victims." That is the "new normal" circa June 2020. And it now seems that many want to get on this bizarre bandwagon of "support", or at least appear to, in order to avoid the wrath of the criminal. Those who support all the poor "victims" in such obscene, and obviously insincere, virtue signalling ways deserve what's coming their way (groveling mayor of Minneapolis for one).
The message is "you'd better get down on bended knee for all your 'sins'" (i.e. your very existence) or else.
What an absolute insult to real victims around the world.
I mean: WTF is wrong with so many privileged (yes, privileged) to live in the West?! Have so many drunk some weird kool aid that I haven't had (thank God!)?
Everyone must be "equal" without any input or merit
(except---dare I say it-- some are now "more equal," and they certainly aren't "white" males who apparently have been relegated to the bottom of the totem pole without a fight). Prizes for all... Wait. Nope. That's out now circa June 2020.
Prizes for ALL the "victims." That is the "new normal" circa June 2020. And it now seems that many want to get on this bizarre bandwagon of "support", or at least appear to, in order to avoid the wrath of the criminal. Those who support all the poor "victims" in such obscene, and obviously insincere, virtue signalling ways deserve what's coming their way (groveling mayor of Minneapolis for one).
The message is "you'd better get down on bended knee for all your 'sins'" (i.e. your very existence) or else.
What an absolute insult to real victims around the world.
I mean: WTF is wrong with so many privileged (yes, privileged) to live in the West?! Have so many drunk some weird kool aid that I haven't had (thank God!)?
Seems like we --the citizenry-- are being subdued on multiple fronts: from government surveillance to "shelter-in-place" to de-fund police departments, to remove historical statues to.....? Wait, I believe burning of books has started.
Tabula rasa. That's what malevolent forces want. Erase history. Rewrite history, and then a select group of people can DOMINATE the majority. All without firing a shot.
Alaska is beginning to really look like the final FRONTIER it actually is in more ways than one right about now. More appealing every day.
In closing:
Again, must quote Sun Tzu:
"The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting."
This all seems to be a test. And we, the people, failed (or passed) depending on one's vantage point.
