Tag: Soviet Union

Avoiding the Typical US American Attention Span: Critically Think about the Long View

If you have been on the “short-view” train (typical American has a very short attention span that also matches their span for the latest fad or fear the media has for them) for the past four years with impeachment, Covid-19, BLM/Antifa, ’20 Election, Election Fraud and “Capitol Insurrection” themes, you might be thinking, “what happened to America in the last four years“. If this is you, you might want to soak up some US history that you will not hear in the text books you would read in government schools (public, private primary or secondary education).

Real history is very important, but finding that can be challenging. Napoleon Bonaparte (1768-1821) was spot on when he said:

History is a set of lies agreed upon.

Those of you as old as I (three score and a few more) might think of the 1960s and 1970s as a time when the three network news hours had the unbiased truth. Sorry to burst your bubble, Project Mockingbird’s declassification has shed that myth to pieces. Since then several deep state actors have added credence that the “news” has been “narrative” for some time. Imagine how a younger me laughed at those in the Soviet Union that believed in their state news source Pravda, when in fact, the Russians were probably laughing at me!

While in the 20th century we think of the Federal Reserve’s creation in 1913 as the start of the undoing of America, we actually have to look a LOT further back to see a parallel theme to today’s media panic censorship to preserve a narrative. Consider the 1798 Alien and Sedition Act that I outlined in a previous post where I said:

It was in fact the US Government’s (called General government in those days, now labeled the Federal Government) over-reach that set-off a push back politically:

The conflict became obvious when President John Adams pushed through the 1798 Sedition Act, making it a crime to speak ill of the President or Congress. Since it was harshly enforced for some of the mildest criticisms, strict constructionists respond. Among them was future President James Madison who is known as the Father of the Constitution. He denied that the Supreme Court was the ultimate authority on States Rights. This can be seen from the 1798 Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions he helped write with Thomas Jefferson condemning the Sedition Act as unconstitutional.

Jefferson’s presidential victory in 1800 guaranteed that the 1798 Alien and Sedition Act would be eliminated ..

Since 1798-1800 we also had a major censorship produced ONLY by the Executive Branch of the US Government from April to July 1861 (Lincoln refused to call Congress into session until 04JUL1861) when Habeus Corpus (right to a quick trial) was suspended and tens of thousands of people were imprisoned for as little as being accused by a 19th century “Karen” of saying something against the Lincoln Administration. Hundreds of presses were destroyed and associated newspapers closed down by the US government for words said.

By the 1930s after the Banking coup arranged by a 1910 meeting at Jekyll Island was firmly in place, the Progressive Left was swept into power with FDR’s 1930 election. While Republican presidents and majorities in congress have come and gone, they have done little but offer a Democratic-Lite agenda to the people of the US. Whether it was New Deal Lite offered by the Eisenhower Administration in the 1950s or Obamacare Lite under the Obama administration when the GOP had control of both houses, the Republicans are basically liars that never stand on principle. The Democrats may be evil, but the Republicans have proven themselves stupid.

Listen to some of Brion McClannahan’s Saturday podcast (30 min) for some eye-opening insight into past trends and what we may expect in the future:

So here are some quotes starting from back in the 1930s that help underscore how BOTH parties in government see “We the People”:

The world is divided in to three classes of people: a very small group that makes things happen, a somewhat larger group that watches things happen, and the great multitude which never knows what happened.
– Nicholas Murray Butler, President of Columbia University, 1931 Nobel Peace Prize winner

Ninety years ago, the people were already seen as know nothings!

The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
– Henry Kissinger, National Security Advisor and Secretary of State under Richard Nixon, and Secretary of State under Gerald Ford

We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.
— William Casey, CIA Director (from first staff meeting in 1981)

The CIA owns everyone of any significance in the major media.
– William Colby, former CIA director

Is there any doubt that 40 years AFTER the CIA director said this statement that anyone with an IQ should depend on public media (MSM) for knowing what is happening in the world around them domestically or internationally?

If the personal freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution inhibit the government’s ability to govern the people, we should look to limit those guarantees.
– Bill Clinton

The purpose of government is to rein in the rights of the people.
– Bill Clinton

We can’t be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans.
– Bill Clinton, U.S.A. Today, 11 March 1993

… and so many people LOVED Bill …

See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda.
– George W. Bush, 43rd US President

.. and GW Bush, such a nice Christian man. Geez.

Two centuries of lies have yet to convince the masses that their government really does not care for them, Archie Bunker was right:

Now y’all know .. now get on with the next season of your lives (family, friend, neighbors) and prepare for what is coming ..

Peace out

-SF1

“Land of the Free”? Not So Fast – the Trend-line is Not Linear!

1938 USA Communist Party Convention -Abraham Lincoln as centerpiece

Like most people my age, #60+, I can remember a time when we all were a LOT more free. Rifles in the pickup trucks, shooting guns near suburban neighborhoods, playing outside ALL day with the parents not really knowing where their kids were at. This was all “normal”.

Also during this time, it was the college campuses that allowed and even encouraged thinking and expressing one’s own thoughts no matter how popular they might be. Anti-government speech was not just tolerated, it was at the heart of what it meant to be an American, the Spirit of ’76!

Well those days are long gone, and the transition to where we are today was not a linear one at all. At first there was some minor deviation, but in the past 5-10 years, the college campuses are more group-think than ever, where the narrative of the day is king, where thought police thrive.

This is not the first time this has happened, but it does seem to be the first time it has happened without a war in the past 150 years, but it does have some similarities to a time in American history over 220 years ago where the thought police surfaced, when the “Land of the Free” enacted the Alien and Sedition Act in 1798 which …:

made it a federal crime to publish any false, scandalous or malicious writing – even if true – about the president or the federal government

You see, freedom of speech is a natural, God-given right that governments can and will take away. In the “Land of the Free” in 1798, there were many who took issue with this course change that occurred only 22 years after the thirteen American colonies sought independence from the British Empire. When Thomas Jefferson became president, he and his administration repealed this act. However, one this course change is embedded in a nation’s/empire’s DNA, there is no going back:

Abraham Lincoln arrested Northerners who challenged the Civil War. Woodrow Wilson arrested Americans who challenged World War I. FDR arrested Americans he thought might not support World War II. LBJ and Richard Nixon used the FBI to harass hundreds whose anti-Vietnam protests frustrated them.

In our own post 9/11 era, the chief instrument of repression of personal freedom has been the government’s signature anti-terror legislation: the Patriot Act. The Patriot Act permits FBI agents to write their own search warrants and gives those warrants the patriotic and harmless-sounding name of national security letters (NSLs). This authorization is in direct violation of the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which says that the people shall be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects from unreasonable searches and seizures, and that that security can only be violated by a search warrant issued by a neutral judge and based upon probable cause of crime.

To most libertarians, this is where we are today, where the government has successfully transitioned the US Empire to a static point where the “Land of the Free” is no more. However, there is yet another effort that has been made in the past five years or so to continue the transition towards a totalitarian state, and this one comes from the corporate side of Lincoln’s dream of mercantilism, where government and big corporations become two wings of the same bird.

– Murray Rothbard on Mercantilism

As Rod Dreher of Russian Insider indicates in this article, “A Russian Woman Working as a College Professor in the US Writes About the Sovietization of Amerika”, it seems that it is the former citizens of the old USSR are the most sensitized to this trend the most while typical Americans see this as no big deal, much like the Germans in 1930’s Germany as the Nazi’s came to power.

Clarissa [not her real name] is a college professor who emigrated to the US from Russia as a young woman, a few years after the fall of the Soviet Union. She is yet another ex-Soviet bloc person who is extremely anxious about the emergence of soft totalitarianism here. Of course she can’t use her real name, because she fears professional retaliation. It should tell us something that not a single academic from a former communist country that I interviewed for this book was willing to speak using their own name — this, in the Land of the Free. Why not? Because they were afraid of facing professional consequences for speaking out against identity politics and the “social justice” regime.

I am pretty sure if I were to chart out freedom in the USA, we are now at an all-time low as both the government and corporate America are actively seeking out dissenters to the latest narratives. The tools are in place to “take out” people professionally both in social media attacks:

Totalitarianism is something that takes away from people the unbearable burden of freedom. It allows many people to hound and persecute with impunity. That is pleasant in many senses. There was a practice in the Soviet Union where people would be told to get together in groups at work and write letters to the newspaper to denounce famous poets or artists. We see that today in Twitter. People love that because it allows a little person to completely destroy somebody who has done something great.

.. as well inside universities and corporations with diversity and sensitivity training in the workplaces:

All your co-workers are enemies. Either they can get you in trouble, or they are out to destroy you with an accusation. It destroys all sorts of uncontrollable communities – friendship, families, church communities. When you set people against each other, they are much easier to control. This is what it was like under totalitarianism.

So one might think I just need to be more careful about what I share in certain social circles. But that is not how this works, to see how any flavor of totalitarianism actually works, we need to learn from those who lived there:

… wokeness in corporate America is a weapon used by white-collar professionals to weed out competitors for increasingly scarce jobs. She said, “People find ideological purity tests useful to weed out people who compete for jobs you cover. Progressive forces are completely allied with globalist capitalism.”

She also said that people have no idea how vulnerable they are to this mindset, because of social media. “You will not be able to predict what will be held against you tomorrow. You have no idea what completely normal thing you do today, or say today, will be used against you to destroy you. This is what people in the Soviet Union saw. We know how this works. This is why people like me are so upset today.

One would think that at least the church might be a place where one can be real in this regard. Anyone who understands the 1st century church, it was the underground Christians in the Roman Empire that actually turned the then-known-world upside-down NOT with violence or revolution, but with love of their neighbor where .. :

[NOTE: It seems that true “diversity” does not focus on division based on race, sex or anything else. A true team sees each unique God-created individual as part of the crew that can help to keep the ship afloat.]

Well, a note of caution, most of the churches today, especially ones with government registration in place (501c3), are part of the corporate woke-ness effort underway in this country. Most of the church of today bears little resemblance to the church in the generation after Jesus was killed by religion and empire.

Until this trend is reversed, the ‘circle of trust’ is going to get mighty small. Take your time in knowing who your friends are, it is better to be lonely than to be a fresh target for either empire or corporate-elite.

Peace out

-SF1