It changed, Merleliz, because the present American left is the lineal descendent of the 60s "New Left" which while it was unquestionably left, was not "new", based as it was on the thoughts of the 30s "Old Left", which was not just Marxist, but actually Stalinist in its approach to notions of dissent and public discourse. For them, disse…
It changed, Merleliz, because the present American left is the lineal descendent of the 60s "New Left" which while it was unquestionably left, was not "new", based as it was on the thoughts of the 30s "Old Left", which was not just Marxist, but actually Stalinist in its approach to notions of dissent and public discourse. For them, dissent was, and is, something to be ridiculed, marginalized, and suppressed under the guise of "political education"
The late Saul Alinsky explained this perfectly in his 1971 "Rules For Radicals", which really didn't represent particularly new ideas, but which rehashed concepts successfully used by revolutionaries for many years. They were used in 1789 in France, again in 1917 by the Bolsheviks in Russia, and again in 1933 by Hitler's National Socialist, and a fourth time by Mao's Red Guards during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. In all four cases, the result was a society which descended into effective anarchy, which was replaced by a monstrous totalitarian government and the crushing of the people's essential liberties.
What we really have in America today is nothing new, but rather a sort of "back to the future" movement which, if not opposed and defeated in a nonviolent democratic manner, will lead to yet another totalitarian leviathan state. That is truly how high the stakes are in all this.
It changed, Merleliz, because the present American left is the lineal descendent of the 60s "New Left" which while it was unquestionably left, was not "new", based as it was on the thoughts of the 30s "Old Left", which was not just Marxist, but actually Stalinist in its approach to notions of dissent and public discourse. For them, dissent was, and is, something to be ridiculed, marginalized, and suppressed under the guise of "political education"
The late Saul Alinsky explained this perfectly in his 1971 "Rules For Radicals", which really didn't represent particularly new ideas, but which rehashed concepts successfully used by revolutionaries for many years. They were used in 1789 in France, again in 1917 by the Bolsheviks in Russia, and again in 1933 by Hitler's National Socialist, and a fourth time by Mao's Red Guards during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. In all four cases, the result was a society which descended into effective anarchy, which was replaced by a monstrous totalitarian government and the crushing of the people's essential liberties.
What we really have in America today is nothing new, but rather a sort of "back to the future" movement which, if not opposed and defeated in a nonviolent democratic manner, will lead to yet another totalitarian leviathan state. That is truly how high the stakes are in all this.