Saturday, September 8, 2012

The Godless Party

The floor fight at the DNC convention was very telling. At least as many, if not more, voices said "Nay" to the motion to put mention of God and Jerusalem (as the capitol of Israel) back into the platform after the hard left had removed it. LA Mayor Villaraigosa had the gavel and said the "Ays" had won the day with 2/3 majority even though it is very clearly not true. Why did he do so? Because the bosses higher up told him to. http://www.bostonherald.com/news/opinion/editorials/view/20220907dems_platform_mess/.
To say that the Dems are godless is not entirely true.  There are many people of many faiths who are passionate believers in the Democratic Party as well.  But it is also true that the Democratic Party attracts more than its fair share of atheists, especially secular leftists who despise religion and who despise Israel.  Not that you can't do one without doing the other.  Yes, you can be religious and believe sincerely in God and still despise Israel.  Many Muslims do just that.  But the hard-core secular left generally despises both religion and Israel.  I suspect these were the voices that were so loudly saying "Nay" to the thought of putting God and Jerusalem back into the platform.

The masters of the DNC -- Obama, Clinton, Biden, Wassermann-Schultz --  regardless of their religious beliefs or personal feelings of animosity toward Israel, were apparently more practical.  They realized that it doesn't "play well" to have their party appear to be so anti-religous -- even though it is!  You see, they are more concerned with "messaging" and playing well in Peoria.  It is all fun and games to bash religious people who cling to their guns and bibles when you think the mic is not on, but they understand it is not helpful to their cause to be open about it.  They must keep up the pretenses with the messaging. 
Conservatives have been talking about the godlessness of the left for a long time.  Ann Coulter wrote a book about it: 

  But the anti-religious fervor on the left goes much further back, at least to the French revolution, to Voltaire and Rousseau.  And the most influential anti-religious left-wing voice was, of course, none other than Karl Marx.  He's the one who said that religion is the "opiate of the people."  Big government folks  such as socialists and fascists generally substitute the state and the collective for religion.

There is a myth, perpetuated by the left -- especially in academia -- that Marxist communism represents the extreme left while the Nazism (or Fascism in general) represent the extreme right.  That's why, when they attempt to demonize conservatives, they use the straw man approach of asserting that folks on the right are Nazis.  And they use such demonization to frighten moderate folks in the middle, especially those who think of themselves as progressive and liberal and compassionate.  The left can't really come out and say who they are and what their extreme, left wing ideas are, because they know that that would also scare the folks in the middle.  So they resort to scaring the folks in the middle into thinking that folks on the right are really Nazis.  

But it is patently false to think of Nazis as the other extreme from Communists.  Nazis and Communists are cut from the same cloth.  The main difference between them was that Nazis were national socialists and Communists are internationalist socialists.  They were both big government, totalitarian statist ideologies.  They may have differed in their fantasyland, utopian ends, but their means were both the same, namely totalitarian.  The Nazis fantasy was a world ruled by the mythic Aryan race, while the Communists wanted a mythical egalitarian state in which everybody shared everything in a benevolent anarchy.  The utopian ends they desired demonstrate very clearly that both ideologies were an attempt to replace religion with an ersatz religion, and attempt to create heaven on earth without any help from God.

To be sure, the patriotic, flag-waving nationalism of American conservatives may remind us of the jingoistic, nationalistic tendencies of the Nazis, and we may be tempted to think that conservatives desire to use the power of the state to suppress those opposed to their ideas.  But this once again is a straw man attempt to paint conservatives as Nazis because they share something in common with Nazis, namely, flag-waving.  But their is nothing wrong with patriotism and it is patently false to assert that conservatives want to use the power of the state to repress anybody.  On the contrary, it is primarily folks on the right who are sounding the alarm about how the current regime is using the power of the state to suppress freedom of speech and freedom of religion, for instance.  

Perhaps one could cite the Patriot Act as an example of how the right would propose to use power to suppress the rights of people.  But the intent of Patriot Act was to protect the rights and the very lives of Americans from those like Islamic Jihadists who would take away both rights and lives.  That is a very proper function of the state -- to protect the rights and lives of its people.  Naturally, one has to be on guard that such legitimate functions are not abused and allowed to become a slippery slope downward toward a totalitarian state.  That's why we have legitimate debate about such things in this country.  But to assert that the Patriot Act is an example of how conservatives exhibit Nazi tendencies is a real stretch of the truth.  On the contrary, conservatives are very concerned about the fascist tendencies of Jihadists, something that is really not to be denied.

But the Nazis and Communists both agreed 100% on the means to obtain their absurd utopian ends:  Complete and total power for the state, and elimination of freedom.  Thus complete and total political and economic power was their immediate goal and was to be used as a means to achieve the ultimate goal of creating their visions of heaven on earth.  Both were religions of sorts, but godless religions. 

They both tried to eliminate God from their party platforms.  This time around the Democratic Party nearly achieved the same result, until Obama and Axelrod realized it wouldn't play well in Peoria or in the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

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