THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

BACKBAYGROUCH | 2009-02-17

Off topic. Put it here as The General Comments seem to have died in a switchover. Michael Barone did a fair column on the stimulus bill today, but in it as an aside he touched upon one of Bob's shrewder observation.

Money quote: "It was the war effort, the mobilization of big government, big business and big labor, that much more than the New Deal enhanced the prestige of the state. It got Americans proud of thinking of themselves as small cogs in very large machines. It made them amenable to statist policies that they would never have accepted in the 1920s and at which many of them were bridling in the late 1930s."

In short, war kills liberty.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/02/the_real_lessons_of_the_great.html

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Yes, the World War II Obedience Training I keep pushing.  It is great to live in the Internet Age, when you can, with monomaniacal effort, put ideas into the top of the filter-down process without becoming part of the Establishment to do it.

More bluntly, I don't have to pimp for the respectable conservatives anymore.

It is a wonderful new age.   USE it!

COMMENTS (1)

#1 Dave | 2009-02-18 00:34

Here's a connected observation that BW's view alludes to also, the draft is dead, and when I say dead, truly dead (as in gone forever).

This lets us know the real trend, which is a country that has limited its options because it is a country that has lost the loyalty of its people from the Federal standpoint.

Wordism is weak and the reason for that is moral, but very few people understand why.

You may traffic all you wish in the semantic domains of "conscience" and "moral duty", but no person, no matter how charismatic, can fashion a crucible for anything in those domains where the final product is anything but puny.

That reason for that is we owe God SO MUCH MORE.

What does hatred have to do with Wordism? And this is exactly where Orwell went wrong. The world he imagined is NOT DOABLE. You cannot condition a society in hatred and simultaneously contain their knowledge of God.

For that you need Political Correctness and its doctrine of PEACE and LOVE; a Martin Luther King making appeals to CONSCIENCE; and a John Lennon singing songs of our COMMON HUMANITY.

It all comes around (provided you don't die first before you know it.)