Peter Robinson has an article at Forbes called the Point of No Return which helps clearly quantify the ideological differences between the constrained (Center/Right) vision and the unconstrained (far Left) vision of politics. Markos Moulitsas has a chilling article (for those of us on the Center/Right, anyway) in Newsweek called We Say We Want a Revolution which helps clearly define the agenda of the New Left/Progressives, whom I have inevitably come to believe represent the latest incarnation of "small-c" communism launched so effectively by the polar opposite leaders in the Students for a Democratic Society, (moderate) Carl Oglesby and (violent radicals) Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.
Back in the Sixties, the genesis of the New Left Revolution, there was a saying: "The Revolution Will be Televised." We certainly saw the Revolution on our televisions along with the attendant jokes about it on Laugh-In (precursor both politically and comedically to SNL), both from the perspective of the war and from the perspective of the anti-war movement. The latter was very effectively organized and managed with many of the same agitation tactics employed by the organized industrial labor movements of the first half of the 20th Century. And just as the seeds of public support for organized labor were sown by the media covering events like the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in 1911, the seeds of public support for the Sixties anti-war movement were likewise sown by photographs of hideous violence against innocent children, Buddhist priests and college students by the print and television media. The power of media propaganda in support of these movements cannot be de-coupled from the power of the movement's ideological appeal and its idealistic, youthful energy. In other words, what we're witnessing today is not new.
There's a renaissance of Sixties literature and video, much of which will undoubtedly be used to romanticize the movement much more than to condemn it. However, like Joe Biden's gaffes about an international crisis and Barack Obama's occasional revelations of his spread the wealth agenda, some well-documented history of the Sixties Radical Movements is irrefutably alarming in its glimpse of a very dark flip side to the Golden Age of Utopian Peace and Prosperity for All.
The first video clip below features Larry Grathwohl, who became a member of the Weather Underground as an undercover operative for law enforcement agencies in Cincinnati. His role within the organization was to carry directives from the Central Committee to the operating units in the field.
This is part of Larry's testimony in the 1982 documentary No Place to Hide (h/t Confederate Yankee):
"I brought up the subject of what's going to happen after we take over the government. We...we become responsible then for administrating 250 million people. And there was no answer[s]. No one had given any thought to economics. How are you gonna clothe and feed these people? The only thing that I could get was that they expected that the Cubans and the North Vietnamese and the Chinese and the Russians would all want to occupy different portions of the United States.
They also believed that their immediate responsibility would be to protect against what they called "the counter-revolution". They felt that this counter-revolution could best be guarded against by creating and establishing reeducation centers in the Southwest, where we would take all the people who needed to be reeducated into the new way of thinking and teach them how things were going to be.
I asked, "well what is going to happen to those people we can't reeducate, that are die-hard capitalists?" and the reply was that they'd have to be eliminated. And when I pursued this further, they estimated they would have to eliminate 25 million people in these reeducation centers. And when I say "eliminate," I mean "kill."
Twenty-five million people.
I want you to imagine sitting in a room with 25 people, most of which have graduate degrees, from Columbia and other well-known educational centers, and hear them figuring out the logistics for the elimination of 25 million people.
And they were dead serious."
For all you counter-revolutionaries out there who are wondering exactly how we've been brought to this type of public dialogue, here is a Rabbity review of radical reading and viewing options which, taken holistically, can help make sense of how we find ourselves in the midst of a New Left Revolution. For those who have neither the time nor the economy to pursue these separately, I'll be reviewing each item in upcoming articles (not necessarily in this order). Why will I be doing that? Because I hope that in the process, I may learn enough to understand how to leverage the Left's success into the Next Right Revolution.
The video below, titled Empire or Humanity? What the Classroom Didn't Teach Me about the American Empire by Howard Zinn, narrated by Viggo Mortensen, will help you discover what progress has been made on behalf of your children to assist them in learning the diverse history of the United States compared to the one you might have been taught. Zinn's A People's History of the United States is now considered a standard textbook in high schools, colleges and universities throughout the country.
