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Politics

Liberalism’s Orwellian Children

Nov. 9, 2012 11:30am

Dr. Marvin Folkertsma is a professor of political science and fellow for American studies with The Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College. The […]

Dr. Marvin Folkertsma is a professor of political science and fellow for American studies with The Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College. The author of several books, his latest release is a high-energy novel titled 'The Thirteenth Commandment.'

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mjfolkertsma@gcc.edu

Author's Website

With Halloween now in our rearview mirror, I find myself recalling when it used to be such a pleasant and harmless affair, with images of Peanuts characters dressed as witches or paper-bag shrouded scamps or hobgoblins (whatever they are) trudging from door to door, emitting the obligatory “Trick or Treat,” knowing that the tricks were non-existent and treats were plentiful, sometimes even nutritious? Can’t get scarier than that.

You can, of course. Halloween has since degenerated into a witch’s Sabbath of severed heads, bursting entrails, walls dripping blood—in fact, everything sort of oozes blood these days—all in a grotesquerie of horrors featuring vampires, zombies of various persuasions, and assorted monsters whose fright coefficient is greatly augmented by darker imaginations using special effects. Then, just when you thought it couldn’t get worse, some Horrors ‘R Us outfit concocted the most chilling scene of them all: a group of children from the future singing about the miseries of America whose parents made the wrong choice, presumably in the 2012 election:

“We are the children, builders of the future. And we the children swear to thee. Loyal devotion. Fearless devotion. And to die with dignity.”

“And to die with dignity?” What’s this all about? Actually, these lines are extracted from the hiking song in George Orwell’s “1984,” which is another possibility for our future. You can tell the difference between the two versions by the kind of future that liberal superstitions have limned: a landscape of strip mines, oil soaked seas, poisoned air, dead polar bears, endless wars, and, gasp! Big Bird is sacked! That sort of stuff. And the children singing this are straight from a Stephen King novel, mechanical voices emitting sounds against a charcoal-draped background. Chilling. Talk about your October surprise.

But why stop there? Let’s take that future more seriously and look at the rest of it as well, by drawing a few extra dimensions from Orwell’s famous novel, specifically from that book within a book excerpt that O’Brien gave to Winston to read in private. Call this “The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Progressivism,” conceived in the present to govern our affairs in the future. In Orwell’s version, the principles of Ingsoc (English Socialism) were laid out and explained. But what about AmSoc (American Socialism)? Like “1984”—Freedom is Slavery, War is Peace, Ignorance is Strength—the foundation of AmSoc, under which our children of the future will live, is based on several slogans. Let’s see what they might be.

Lying is Truth. This means that if you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes part of the public consciousness, and therefore truth. Thus, absent contrary information, which in a totalitarian society is nonexistent, vilifying your enemies, denying your own responsibilities, and frankly lying every time you open your mouth transforms what you say to “truth.” You don’t have to fool all the people all of the time, just enough of them to maintain the oligarchical state and to make elections superfluous. Like the War is Peace slogan in “1984,” Lying—by being continuous—has the same effect as truth.

Love is Hate. Political leaders profess to love their subjects. In fact, they love them so much that they shower upon them goods and services extracted from wealth producers, increasingly fewer in number, to keep subjects anesthetized from economic and political reality. Elections are meaningless, of course—see Lying is Truth, above—but they might affect who holds office even if politicians can’t do anything to change a system based most likely on environmental and healthcare totalitarianism. So leaders hate and have contempt for subjects because they need them to stay in power, but who, like the proles in “1984,” are viewed as nothing more than a collection of mindless supplicants ruled by the omnipotent state: Love is Hate.

Rich is Poor. To be rich once meant that you had more choices in life, more that you could do to affect those around you, to leave to your children, to build your country. But the rich are so often vilified and are restricted by governments in what they are allowed to do that their capabilities to act have been rendered nugatory or obsolete. Sure, they have more creature comforts, but as much as they want to invest in their country—build things, hire people, create wealth—they often find themselves as helpless as the nation’s fabled poor. Thus, Rich is Poor.

Liberty is Tyranny. To enjoy liberty is to pollute the atmosphere, to make one’s own choices for life, health, and families, to be subject to the whims of the market, to be enslaved by the vagaries of “ownthought”—in short, to be under the tyranny of one’s own desires and suffer the consequences of one’s decisions. In AmSoc, there are no consequences for one’s own decisions because they don’t exist anymore; government has stripped them away and replaced them with benefits. Subjects cannot be allowed the liberty to live their own lives, to be at the mercy of the tyrannies of individualism and personal responsibility. Because Liberty is Tyranny.

Undoubtedly, this list is incomplete, because our future children will likely create new verses to this year’s October version. But is this scenario unlikely? Consider developments of the past four years and this year’s most memorable campaign slogan: Forward. We’re going forward, all right. Forward to “1984.”

Dr. Marvin Folkertsma is a professor of political science and fellow for American studies with The Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College. The author of several books, his latest release is a high-energy novel titled “The Thirteenth Commandment.”

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Comments (12)

JeffMT
Posted on November 12, 2012 at 10:19pm
All of the slogans the author writes about above are contradictions of reality e.g. lying is truth, liberty is tyranny, etc. Why do liberals insist on behaving this way, living in denial of reality?

It’s simple – they are insecure to their core. They simply cannot handle reality when it is not the way they want it to be. So, they immediately head for that safe haven known as ‘denial’. Once in denial, it becomes very easy to create whatever ‘reality’ they want to create in order to shield themselves from the facts and truths that exist in the real world that the rest of us live in. They will deny that, too, of course, so there is no way to reason with them.

Insecurity about themselves makes people vulnerable to the emotional manipulations of liberalism. It is easy to create fear and/or anger among people who live in denial because they cannot face the hard truths about the day to day world. Once that happens, paying attention, thinking and remembering cannot take place with these people and instead those things are replaced by the emotional reactions of fear and anger. It is a process that only creates more denial and reinforces their insecurities. By definition, they are irrational.

Liberalism thrives on irrational behavior by the electorate, and once people fall into that trap it is nearly impossible for then to get out. Thus the dilemma facing conservatives as we try to dig out of this mess we are in now.

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Bodacious_Boedi
Posted on November 12, 2012 at 1:19am
http://dailycaller.com/2012/11/11/white-house-website-deluged-with-secession-petitions-from-19-states/

Sign them. I have for Missouri. You can even start one for your state if it’s not there. It’s unrealistic to think that we can, in fact, shatter The Union, however enough of this type of publicity and The Shrunken Head now looks even more inept and evil when people are ready to fragment The Republic to stop this Chicago thug.

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IdahoBlaze
Posted on November 11, 2012 at 1:59pm
May I suggest an online school? Including grade school, high school, as well as college level? Why NOT? As a longtime lover of literature, I am surprised and disheartened by seeing that the classics are no longer included in the curriculum. If we can help educate the children, we will see less inarticulate, emotional fanatic, screaming half-adults who poop on police cars. If I had kids, I would home school. I don’t, but I think this might be the way to help families who choose this path..we can call it the University of America.

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JeffMT
Posted on November 11, 2012 at 12:08pm
As a country, we need to do three things: pay attention, think and remember. We don’t do those things any longer and look at where we are as a result.

When we do not pay attention, lies become truth (one of the author’s points in the article above). The liberals can and do fool most of the voters (not necessarily most of the population but most of the voters) virtually all of the time. “Don’t tell me the way things are, just tell me what you want me to hear” – that becomes our motto. And because we aren’t paying attention, we don’t know the difference.

That leads to the next issue: thinking. Conservatism is based on fact, truth, reality, logic and reason. It is based on rational thought. Liberalism is based on emotion. That’s it – there is nothing more to it. The two primary emotions that liberalism utilizes are anger and fear. When we as an electorate become too angry and/or too afraid to think rationally, what we become are irrational, emotion-based decision makers. Liberals don’t want people to think, they only want people to feel. It then becomes easy to manipulate people into feeling good in exchange for votes.

When emotion overrides reason, it clouds our memories also. People begin to remember only what they are conditioned to remember and forget the rest. People cannot remember what they have refused to think about in the first place. Denial overrides everything and lies become truth not only in the present but in our memorie

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- JeffMT
  Posted on November 11, 2012 at 12:12pm
  … but in our memories as well. Thus, we are where we are as a country.
  
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DC070912
Posted on November 10, 2012 at 1:25pm
My oldest is 6 and she has heard my husband and I talk about how important it was to go vote during this election. She asked why do you vote so I explained it and she watched Tuesday night as the results were coming in (luckily she was sound asleep when the race was called). I will do everything I can to raise them the way I was raised. The problem will be shielding them from all the liberalism that is seen everywhere today! I hope that my kids are not the minority when it comes to their morals, values, love & respect for country.

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- StandingOnMyHead
  Posted on November 12, 2012 at 12:26pm
  I am afraid they will be if things do not take a drastic turn in this country. My child is college age and is definitely in the minority and suffers everyday for it. We thought college would be the time when lifetime friendships would be developed as it used to be, however, if you think differently than the progressives you are ostracized. It is worse than high school bullying. Thank God we live in a conservative community and our child was not subject to this behavior before college and lifetime friendships were developed there as was a very strong character to handle the college bullies!
  
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truebluepatriot
Posted on November 10, 2012 at 10:48am
It is sickening the way our children are “used” in our culture to further progressivism. Children and teens are naturally more liberal because their life experiences have not taught them the dangers of liberalism YET. This election has brought it home, HARD. We need to do more than just the “new” media. We need to get together and fund a new channel or two, one for “grownups” and one for “children” and change the discussion and insidious doctrination that is what TV is today. If all good people stopped watching the alphabet sewer stew of MSM stations and discontinued their newspapers and trashy magazines, we could bring them all down within the year. It’s easy to gripe and complain on a comment board, it’s much harder to actually make up your mind to DO something about it.

My children and grandchildren have heard nothing but conservatism from me their entire lives, so they’ve been able to resist the culture creep that surrounds us everywhere. Parents who are too wrapped up in their jobs and DWTS and American Idol have failed their children miserably. 1984 can only come about if We the People lay down and allow it to trample all over us. I for one am not feeling up to being a progressive’s doormat.

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VanceUppercut
Posted on November 9, 2012 at 11:27pm
The butthurt is strong with this one.

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jammin johnny
Posted on November 9, 2012 at 6:43pm
it all begins with an education system riddled with communists. most parents do not have much philisophical input to their kids. so teacher replaces parent.

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phillycornerboy
Posted on November 9, 2012 at 2:21pm
we must find new ways to get out the message of conservatism. we must help the conservatives in the media and hollywood, also the conservative groups on our college campuses. we can only fight propaganda with facts. we must educate the electorate and support any who share our views. we must point out the negatives of the progressives and highlight the conservative options. the history of our Founding Fathers must be re-introduced to our children and voters as a whole. the meaning and purpose of the Constitution are also very important. we must continue speaking up and speaking out. while we can, that is. good luck.

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newwell
Posted on November 9, 2012 at 12:14pm
The “classics” are no longer read in public schools. I know because I worked as an educational aide in high school for 3 years. No Orwell, no Huxley, none. Twain, Thoreau & Poe are on life support.

1984, Fahrenheit 451, Animal Farm, Brave New World, etc are no longer read as part of the regular English course curriculum (honors students read these for the summer reading list). These thought provoking novels have been replaced by multicultural, short story textbooks written by foreign authors from S America, the Middle East, Africa, etc. (Wish I could remember the name.) And I saw 500+ page short story textbook, written by American & English classical authors, sit on the shelves, collect dust & often end up in the “recycle” at the end of the school year.

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