"PROGRESSIVE" | 2008-02-11
Anyone can tell you a great deal about how the world fifty years ago was different from today, but it is not possible to accurately describe the world fifty years from now.
A newspaper from fifty years ago is a curiosity. A newspaper from fifty years in the future would be worth billions if not trillions of dollars.
To "progress" has a specific meaning. It is the movement from where you have been to where you are going, from Point A to Point B. When you say you are "progressing" it means you know exactly where you are headed. If political "progressives" knew that they would own the stock market.
Octogenarian Le Pen just got sent to prison for three months for saying that the Nazi Occupation, which he lived through, wasn't all that bad. I just pointed out that children in occupied countries didn't starve under the Nazi Occupation the way they did after it. Maurice Chevalier chose to stay in France after the Nazis took over. Elie Wiesel could have left the Nazis when the Soviet Liberators showed up, but he chose to go west with the Germans.
But I am sure William Buckley is ecstatic, just as he was over David Irving's six-year sentence for researching the subject and concluding that hundreds of thousands rather than millions of Jews died under the Nazis. Buckley would like an established Catholic Church in America, but he will settle for that of Political Correctness.
And that, of course, is why no one laughs out loud at the idea that there are people who can perfectly predict the future. Which is exactly what the term "progressive" means.
Under an established religion, the future will be what the priests WANT it to be. No matter how often they are wrong, this proposition still holds for anyone who wants to stay out of jail.