IS IT THE BLIND LEADING THE BLIND

I like Joni Mitchell’s song ‘Big Yellow Taxi,’especially the line; “don’t it always seem to go, you don’t know what you've got till its gone”. Half a century later it appears to accurately sum up a major impulse within our 21st Century youth culture, especially regarding those who appear to be hell bent on trashing the Western lifestyle and all of its benefits.

One of the downsides to true freedom is that it allows sinful people to do sinful things, and very soon stupid people and people with egregious agendas begin to exploit these stupid and sinful things and before you know it, it’s all anybody focuses on. 

Too many people (perhaps the majority?) in the West seem to think that their lifestyle of leisure, luxury, ease and plenty is the ‘normal life’. They think that everyone lives like they do, not understanding that vast populations of the world still live under dictators, thugs, fear and deprivation.

Many of these (perhaps)well meaning, naive and historically illiterate Westerners think that some form of socialism will alleviate the suffering and burdens of the ‘underprivileged’, because the problems are caused not by sin, greed, exploitation or the ‘will to power’, but on social conditions and government failures. So if we just change the government and or the social conditions we can create nirvana.

Vladimir Lenin said many things about socialism that I think the more starry-eyed amongst us should at the very least consider. These are a few:

“The goal of socialism is communism”

“We can and must write in a language which sows among the masses hate, revulsion, and scorn towards those who disagree with us.”

“Atheism is a natural and inseparable part of Marxism, of the theory and practice of scientific socialism. Our program necessarily includes the propaganda of atheism.”

 I also believe in what Ronald Reagan stood for(take note of the medical intervention in point 2) when he said:

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it on to our children in the bloodstream. The only way they can inherit the freedom we have known is if we fight for it, protect it, defend it, and then hand it to them with the well fought lessons of how they in their lifetime must do the same. And if you and I don’t do this, then you and I may well spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.– 1961

One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine. It’s very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project.– 1961

If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth. And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except to sovereign people, is still the newest and most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election. Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves. – 1964

During the 20th Century there have been almost perfect social, political, educational, cultural and philosophical, comparative ‘experiments. For example: East vs West Germany, North Vs. South Korea, North vs South America, Venezuela, Cambodia, Vietnam, Cuba, Zimbabwe, Maoist China...etc,etc.

Why have we not learned from these examples?