The Borg: Captain Jean-Luc Picard. You lead the strongest ship of the Federation fleet. You speak for your people.
Picard: I have nothing to say to you. And I will resist you with my last ounce of strength!
The Borg: Strength is irrelevant. Resistance is futile. We wish to improve ourselves. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service ours.
Picard: Impossible! My culture is based on freedom and self-determination!
The Borg: Freedom is irrelevant. Self-determination is irrelevant. You must comply.
-Star Trek: The Next Generation The Best of Both Worlds Part 1 ( Quote Source – Video )
My how far we have fallen since that episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation was aired in 1990. The most feared enemy in science fiction was a collectivist alien species. If it was produced in 2017, the Borg would probably be hailed as heroes of the revolution. Just a few short years after this episode aired, Hillarycare went down to a crushing and historic defeat in the Democrat controlled Congress, and Bill Clinton actually asked for more border security. In the last column on Knowing Your Enemies, I didn’t explicitly call out Socialists but was harsh on their pitiful collectivist souls.
We hate socialists just as much as we hate communists. More so in some instances because Socialists have become the respectable form of Marxism in modern society. (As far as we are concerned, the only difference between a fascist and a socialist is that one recognizes national borders and the other does not).
This produced some complaints in the comments, which you may read at the original post if you so desire. But upon reflecting on it, I decided that we needed to explore the issue a little further because the cancerous tendrils of Marxism have made their way into our society and our culture. And this cancer will destroy the West if we do nothing.
Let us first get the broad overview of the tenets of Socialism are. Via Infogalactic:
Socialism is a political ideology and movement which has proposed a set of social and economic measures, policies and systems characterised by social ownership and democratic control of the means of production. Social ownership may refer to public ownership, cooperative ownership, citizen ownership of equity, or any combination of these. Although there are many varieties of socialism and there is no single definition encapsulating all of them, social ownership is the common element shared by its various forms.
Early socialism was heavily influenced by Karl Marx, and as such is properly grouped in the Marxist family tree with Communism and National Socialism. Let’s start with some of the most common Socialist planks.
- Socialized Medicine – In the United States, we know it as Obamacare, the intentionally fouled up scheme to collapse the health care market and usher in “Single Payer”, which is socialist talk for government control of health care. Canada and the United Kingdom have medical systems that are generally considered Socialist in that the government controls medicine. It is within the capacity of socialism for the government to own the hospitals and doctors offices and have all the medical professionals be employees of the state, or to simply regulate every move they make and every breath they take (they’ll be watching you).
- Open Borders – socialists believe in the demise of the nation state, the end of the individual cultures of the world, and the coming together of all the proletariat.
- Progressive Taxation – socialists think that at some point, you’ve made enough money. And they are more than happy to relieve you of it – it’s an issue of fairness.
These are just the first few things that we want to start with where they are at odds with Western Civilization. Men of the West believe in freedom, and the rights of the people to be secure in their possessions. Socialized medicine steals the labor of the doctor by refusing to let him charge a fair price for his time and expertise. There is no fundamental right to health care – you cannot have a right to somebody else’s labor, forcing somebody to perform a service on your behalf by force of law without just compensation or right of refusal is known as slavery.
Open borders are likewise a blight upon the West. As we have seen from the European experiment with letting in millions of refugees, mixing cultures is not something that is good for a country. It is very well documented the way that Middle Eastern cultures treat women and consider their status in society, yet Europe has permitted people who grew up in that culture to enter by the millions. And the elites feign surprise that the refugees from the Middle East not only aren’t good feminists (we can hardly complain about that…) but that they do not treat women with the respect that women have become accustomed to receiving in the West.
Progressive taxation is one of the most widely documented of socialism’s failed policies. The law of diminishing returns is in full effect in taxation. We don’t know exactly where the “perfect” tax rate is, but let us take the question given to then Senator Obama in his debate with Senator Hillary Clinton in 2008 – when the capital gains tax was lowered under Bill Clinton, and then lowered again under George W. Bush, each time the government actually saw an increase in the tax monies that it received. So, the government brings in more money at a 15% capital gains tax rate than it did at a 30% rate. We have actual real world data that shows that once you raise taxes above a certain level, you actually decrease the amount of money you take in. But to the socialist, it’s not about raising money to fund the government or making sure that a successful businessman provides jobs to a community – it’s about soaking the rich.
So, you may be asking yourself, was there a reason that I chose those three particular ideas of socialism to talk about? Well, I’m glad you asked, because yes I did choose them on purpose. Socialism has not only infected the west, but it has infected what we have in the past referred to as the political right. Over the past few months, the Republican Party has torn itself apart over whether or not they can repeal Obamacare. And the answer is that as a whole, the House Republicans cannot get their caucus to vote for repeal of Obamacare in sufficient numbers to pass a bill. They were more than happy to send symbolic repeals to President Obama for him to veto, and by their own admission, they thought they were going to get President Hillary so that they could continue their theater to take advantage of the poor saps who actually wanted it repealed. The House won’t even take a vote on a straight repeal so that we can see who the traitors are. And the reason that they cannot get it repealed is that the Republican Party has accepted the socialist presuppositions that the State must regulate and collectivize medicine.
Likewise, the Republican party has accepted the socialist premise of open borders. Libertarians share this particular fetish and think that they actually influenced the Republicans into doing something. But no, as per usual, the Libertarians are completely ineffectual at advancing any policy and merely enjoy success where they share common ground with the socialists. This is why they are so resistant to building The Wall, and why their 2012 election autopsy recommended they go full potato on open borders and amnesty.
And the next fight we have coming up is tax reform. President Trump wants to go to a 15% corporate tax rate. Look for the socialists in the Republican ranks to act as quislings for the Left and do their best to sabotage this initiative as well.
But we are the answer. We are not the Republican Party. We are the Hard Right. And the future is ours.
Conservatives exist to conserve the political victories of last generation’s liberals. This was recently illustrated by my congressional representative in a debate against her Democrat challenger. When the subject of raising the minimum wage arose, she stated, “I’m a free market girl. Let the market decide.” What a great answer.
Until she was pushed on it. Does she really want to let the market decide, i.e. repeal minimum wage laws? “Oh, no,” she replied. It turns out she fully supports the current wage law, she’s just against an increase.
So a conservative is a person who opposes an increase in the wage, instead supporting the current wage, which he opposed when it was an increase but supported the then-current wage, which he opposed when it was an increase, instead supporting the then-current wage, which he opposed when it was an increase. This is called intellectual consistency, I guess.
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Even before the word ‘socialism’ was coined, there were “proto-socialists”, whose fundamental ideas are so independently similar to modern socialists, that it illustrates the one, common thread they hold between them. That is, in its essence, socialism is a corrupt, atheistic parody of mythological Christianity. And the parallels are glaring, though the goals are completely different. If you strip the Bible of all references to God, and insert mankind in His place, reducing society to elite nobility ruling over the peasantry, you develop great insights to their motivations. For example, when mankind ate of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, he stopped belonging in nature and created civilization. So the socialist reasoning becomes that if mankind renounces civilization, and embraces moral relativism, then they can return to nature, to Eden. Socialist radical environmentalism in a nutshell.
A profound early example of their elitist mindset, and contempt for the peasantry can be found in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, a guiding light of transcendentalism. “A core belief of transcendentalism is in the inherent goodness of people and nature. Adherents believe that society and its institutions have corrupted the purity of the individual.” Emerson’s ideal was of a much reduced mankind living in small, isolated villages with primitive technologies, kept in this state by itinerant elites, called “Orphic poets”, who would spread misinformation to keep them from technological advance, for which they would be respected and rewarded as masters.
Nearing the time of the US Civil War, another proto-socialist, George Fitzhugh, wrote his defense of slavery, “Cannibals All!, or Slaves Without Masters” (1857). Fitzhugh’s ideas were based on his view that the “negro slaves of the South” were considerably more free than those trapped by the oppression of capitalist exploitation. His idea to rectify social inequality created by capitalism was to institute a system of universal slavery, based on his belief that “nineteen out of every twenty individuals have… a natural and inalienable right to be slaves.” Under this same context, Fitzhugh asserted that society was obligated to protect the weak by controlling and subjugating them. Of course he encouraged his readers to believe that they were of the one in twenty wise enough to be masters.
His ideas of reform can be seen in terms of a non-Marxist socialist ideology. But how far removed are both of them from the ideals of National Socialism? Not far. The only great distinction is the fascist recognition that both ethnic races and nations matter, that the idea of a generic “mankind” fails unless it takes such things into account, especially Nietzschean individuality instead of an effort to normalize all differences in a hypothetical equality.
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[…] we talked about Knowing Your Enemies – Socialists. I focused on things that I thought were most relevant to the political discussion in America […]