By Tim Dunkin
“During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.” - George Orwell
If there was anyone who should know about deceit, it was George Orwell. Orwell – the pen-name for Eric Arthur Blair – was quite an idealistic man. Unfortunately for idealistic people, they are also often naïve, and susceptible to being deceived. Many are unaware of this, but George Orwell – despite the popularity of his antitotalitarian book 1984 – was a socialist. And as a good socialist in the mid-1930s, he went to Spain, to “fight against fascism,” as he put it. What he found out after he had been there for a while, however, was that his erstwhile Stalinist allies in the Spanish Communist Party were not so much interested in rescuing Spain from the fascist clutches of Francisco Franco (which they signally failed to do anyhow) as they were in coercing all the other leftists – including Orwell's Marxist-but-not-Stalinist group – into seeing things the Stalinist way, or arresting them if they wouldn't. Orwell - and a lot of other idealists like him – got snookered, but fortunately for him, he was able to get out of Spain without ending up on the wrong end of a firing squad.
He shouldn't have been surprised, however, but the deceptions of his “allies” and “compatriots.” After all, the first half of the 20th century was a high-water mark for the radical Left. In Russia you had a genuine successful Communist revolution that put the forces of ultrabig government firmly in control of the largest piece of property in the world. Meanwhile, fascism (also a Left-statist philosophy) was rolling to victory in Italy, Germany, and in a host of smaller eastern European countries. The Left – those people who wanted to use the power of government to stamp out traditional society and replace it with devotion to the all-powerful State – were on the march, and could afford a little backstabbing against their useful idiots.
Given all the propaganda flying around in those days, it's no surprise that Orwell would have thought himself living in a time of universal deceit. The Communists, the Socialists, the Fascists – everyone on the Left was constantly engaged in trying to dupe people into believing falsehoods that would make their particular version of Statism seem acceptable, or at least palatable. This was so even in the USA – let's not forget the whitewash of the Soviet-engineered famine which killed several million Ukrainians, conveniently covered up by Walter Duranty of the New York Times.
Unfortunately, we here and now in the United States find ourselves living in a similar time of universal deceit.
Let's not kid ourselves. We have a President who brazenly lies to the American people. He tells us that he's “saved” hndreds of thousands of jobs – even though several million jobs have been lost so far in the nine months he's been on the job. To get elected in the first place, he had to lie to the voters, telling them that he was going to “cut taxes on 95% of all Americans”, knowing all along that around 43% of Americans don't even PAY taxes, and that he jolly well had no intention of cutting the rates for the rest of those who do. Now we see his Democrat Congress – with his approval – proposing tax after tax after tax, on everything from cigarettes to our company-provided health care benefits. During the campaign, he ran an ad saying he supported medical care for infants who survive abortions – actually, he supported a bill that would have allowed such infants to die. He said the family of a dead soldier wanted him to wear a bracelet bearing the hero's name (which, if you saw the debates, he had a hard time remembering). Actually, the soldier's family had asked him (to no avail) to STOP wearing it. On and on and on, we see that we have a President with a serious case of mythomania.
Or, as Orwell put it elsewhere, “Political language....is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
It's not like those he surrounds himself with are much better. His economic advisors are all the time telling how the first green shoots of economic recovery are sprouting all around us. Yet, unemployment continues to rise, layoffs are still in the sextuple digits, housing prices are still languishing in the doldrums, and worldwide heavy manufacturing and transportation sectors remain depressed. Tim Geithner, our esteemed Treasury Secretary, can't ever seem to get his facts straight, whether he's talking about those AIG bonuses that he approved of before he disapproved of them, or trying to sell the Chinese – who are no fools, and laughed him to scorn – on the idea of buying yet more trillions of dollars in US debt, secured by a wink and a nod. Seems the only thing Geithner's been straight with us about is his admission before the Senate that he doesn't have a clue how to use TurboTax. As for Joe Biden, well, do any of us really think that he congregates with the other blue-collar stiffs down at the local Home Depot? At least he didn't try to claim that he hangs out with them at another one of his favorite restaurants that he goes to weekly, even though it's been closed down for five years now.
Aiding and abetting this, of course, is a complicit mainstream news media which seems to think that, instead of actually reporting the news, it's job is to pick out the news that can be spun to make Obama look good, while filtering out the rest, all the while telling you how to think about it. Seriously, we have a left-wing press corp that literally thinks it is more important that President Obama likes pizza (I'm not kidding - http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31172985/) than it is that he is in the process of selling our closest ally in the Middle East down the river. We know more about the Obama's dog Bo than we do about what Obama is really planning on doing to exacerbate the health care “crisis.” The attitude of the press towards the President ranges from adulatory to hyper-adulatory, and reporters have spiked more unflattering and politically damaging stories about him than one of those nutso antilogging environmentalists.
And it all is fed by the fact that our young people are learning anything but truth in the schools, ranging from elementary to graduate school. Granted, our schools still generally teach facts to our children, so that they can do things like multiplication and long division (well, some of them can, at least). But they also teach them a whole lot of lies about the culture, about politics, about the world around them. If you spent a day in a public school in America, and believed everything you heard, you would come away convinced that global warming is an undeniable fact, that abstinence from sexual activity before marriage could never prevent teen pregnancy, that conservatives and Republicans are evil people who want to kick your grandmother out of the nursing home and into the street, and that homosexuals constitute their own third (or fourth, or fifth) gender and are perfectly normal. In short, you'd be lied to, you'd be a dupe.
At college, it's not much better. Despite the claims for their “intellectualism”, we need to understand that most university professors – at least in the “soft” fields, i.e. not math and science where you actually have to consistently get the right answers to be successful – are completely averse to truth. I mean that literally. They are averse to the idea of objective right and wrong, and use any amount of philosophical legerdemain to try to justify this position. They also hate anything, such as Republicans, conservatives, Christians, moral traditionalists, and so forth, which make claims to objective truth and rely upon truth as the basis for their worldview. Leftwing professors will ridicule conservative students. They will punish them with bad grades and public reprimands. They will try to sabotage their chances of doing graduate studies, or getting a good job after graduation.
Concurrently, they will try to propagandize the weaker-minded students who don't rest on objective truth, and who therefore are susceptible to being turned into leftists themselves. I've seen it happen. It is from this class of student that the future leaders of the leftist vanguard are drawn. It's these kids who will end up as future Barack Obamas and Nancy Pelosis.
So, in these times of universal deceit, when it seems that all the forces of government, the media, the popular culture, and academia are against us, what are we as conservatives to do?
Well, if I may be permitted yet another quote from George Orwell, I would suggest we take to heart these words, "Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."
What we need to understand about the Left is that it is a knowledge-control cult. It seeks to limit the flow of information available to people so that they are unable to rationally assess whatever question is before them. On any question – global warming, health care, taxes, gay marriage, pick your poison – the leftist media, its academia, its politicians, have a vested interest in making sure that you and I and 300 million other Americans only hear, see, and read what they want us to. This is because when we only get the information they deem acceptable, then we should only come to the conclusions they want us to come to.
This is why the Democrats want to muzzle talk radio and FOX News. Limbaugh, Hannity, Glenn Beck, and the rest have already been responsible for waking too many people up to the truth about leftists. This is also why the leftists in academia have tried so hard to eliminate any sort of traditionalist curricula (Hey Hey Ho Ho Western Civ has got to go!) that would encourage students to familiarize themselves with the bases of our civilization, law, and morals. This is why leftists everywhere would love to see Christianity eliminated from all public discourse – loving God first and foremost means your loyalty is not to the collectivist state.
So, understanding this fact about the Left, we may then proceed to confute it. How do we do so? By counteracting the things the leftists are trying to control us with.
First, the media. Scrap it. Don't watch ABCNNBCBS. Cancel your subscription to your local fishwrap. Give the leftist-controlled outlets the old heave-ho. Don't let them direct your thinking anymore. Tap into alternate sources of information instead. Pick a couple of conservative blogs to follow daily, and expand from there. Despite the bad reputation that internet information has, the blogs in aggregate do a good job of distilling down what's really important in the news, and bringing it to the forefront. Many, many times, a combination of conservative blogs and the Drudge Report have brought out into the open something the mainstream media wanted to keep hidden. Also, listen to talk radio – Limbaugh, Hannity, Levin (if you can stand his anger level) – and get the straight dope about what's going on in politics.
Also, counteract the anti-intellectualism of the so-called “intellectuals” in our schools and other leftist outlets. Don't let the Left decide for you which books are “smart” to read and which aren't. Don't let them filter the ideas that you are “allowed” to think about. And by all means, don't let them withhold from you vital segments of academic knowledge that are vitally important to being a well-rounded, well-informed citizen. Take the time to read some Locke. Spend an hour a night going through de Tocqueville, or the Federalist Papers, or Hayek, or Voegelin – anybody that your typical leftist philosophy or literature professor would disapprove of. Reacquaint yourself with the great thinkers of Western civilization, all the way back to the roots in classical history. Bone up on your economics, study up on that moral philosophy, open your mind to a rational assessment of history. And by all means, if you want to read the latest tome by Ann Coulter or Mark Levin, then don't let them intimidate you into passing it up.
In short, make autodidacty (self-teaching) your friend. It was good enough for Jefferson and Lincoln, so it ought to be good enough for us. Our leftist-controlled public schools, at all levels, are cheating us of our birthright and heritage. Reclaim it, one book at a time, so you can refute the leftists one debate at a time.
Most importantly, consider deepening your relationship with God, if you already know Him, or consider trusting on Him through the sacrifice and shed blood of His Son Jesus Christ, if you haven't. The Left hates the Christian principles and Christian roots of this country – and yes, this country was founded on Christian principles. This is not meant to denigrate those who are not Christians, but is meant to affirm truth. Our Founders were not all Christians, but they all did have a respect for and an aquiescence to the principles of Biblical morality. Find out what all the fuss is about. If the Left hates Christianity, investigate why and see what it is they're trying to hide from you. Get yourself a King James Bible and start reading it. Even if you are not a believer, understand that the Bible is a foundation stone to our Western civilization, and that so much out there – our ethics, our laws, our morals, our traditional priorities – rely upon that Book. You'd even be surprised how many allusions to it you will see in our civilization's poetry and other literature. Don't believe the Left's meme that Christianity and the Bible are for slackjawed denizens of the backwoods. Find out what it is that has motivated some of the finest scholars, thinkers, and statesmen our civilization has produced.
Finally, if we wish to undermine the Left's efforts at controlling the free flow of information, we have to make sure that we don't keep what we know to ourselves. We have to get out there and engage people. We have to “get in their faces” (though not in the Barack Obama street-thugs-on-your-doorstep way, of course). We have to kindly confront people with the truths that they are missing, and which they may not want to hear, but which we still have the freedom to tell them. We have to stand firm on our principles, and make those principles heard. We have to counteract lies as they are told. That means showing up to the town hall meetings. That means writing letters to the editor. That means planting the seeds of doubt in the minds of your sheep-like neighbors as they hear and repeat the lies they get from the media.
When we do all this, we WILL be revolutionaries. We will subvert the dominant paradigm, the lies that the whole leftist house of cards is built upon. We will cut through the deceit. Let the revolution begin!
