Part Two: Knowing that history, to many is a meaningless “old school” kind of thinking, and never using its full lessons from which to learn, but just a selection of applause lines, the current Trump Republican Party is at its keenest, with the assistance of its own Communications Division (FOX), and the easy access to groupspeak (the Russian hackers). Always using the language of doublespeak or to be precise HYPOCRISY, the Trump Crime Family has brilliantly turned the conversation a full 180 degrees, and in the whirlwind of that spin has confused an ordinary minion into voting against his or her own health, welfare, and the pursuit of happiness. Suddenly, affordable health care, pre-existing conditions, stable rent, and earnest living wage are now forms of socialism. Free speech, it seems is not a patriotic duty, questioning authority anti-American, and finding a consensus almost a ritual one might reserve for worshipping the Devil. The Big Blue Tsunami, the one the Democrats brag about, the one the Republicans have been scheming against, is more and more becoming a slight ripple in the political waters of America. We, who gives a shit about tomorrow, not just the moment, which will pass us by, need to be vigilant. Trump and his Crime Family are savvy propagandists. We the people are too often the patsies!
Socialism: a political and economic theory of social organization that advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.
“The few own the many because they possess the means of livelihood of all ... The country is governed for the richest, for the corporations, the bankers, the land speculators, and for the exploiters of labor. The majority of mankind are working people. So long as their fair demands - the ownership and control of their livelihoods - are set at naught, we can have neither men's rights nor women's rights. The majority of mankind is ground down by industrial oppression in order that the small remnant may live in ease.”
― Helen Keller, Rebel Lives: Helen Keller
“It still remains unrecognised, that to bring a child into existence without a fair prospect of being able, not only to provide food for its body, but instruction and training for its mind, is a moral crime, both against the unfortunate offspring and against society; and that if the parent does not fulfil this obligation, the State ought to see it fulfilled, at the
charge, as far as possible, of the parent.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
Authoritarian: favoring or enforcing strict obedience to authority, especially that of the government, at the expense of personal freedom.
“Processions, meetings, military parades, lectures, waxwork displays, film shows, telescreen programs all had to be organized; stands had to be erected, effigies built, slogans coined, songs written, rumours circulated, photographs faked.”
― George Orwell, 1984
“Institutions become political weapons, wielded forcefully by those who control them against those who do not. This is how elected autocrats subvert democracy—packing and “weaponizing” the courts and other neutral agencies, buying off the media and the private sector (or bullying them into silence), and rewriting the rules of politics to tilt the playing field against opponents. The tragic paradox of the electoral route to authoritarianism is that democracy’s assassins use the very institutions of democracy—gradually, subtly, and even legally—to kill it.”
― Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future
Nationalism is a political, social, and economic system characterized by the promotion of the interests of a particular nation, especially with the aim of gaining and maintaining sovereignty (self-governance) over the homeland.
“Every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud, adopts as a last resource pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and happy to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms
“But you know as well as I, patriotism is a word; and one that generally comes to mean either my country, right or wrong, which is infamous, or my country is always right, which is imbecile.”
― Patrick O'Brian, Master and Commander
I am afraid! But I will not be silent. I am not sure how to reach the American who sees nothing more than their own fear. But I know silence equals death, and we have witnessed the passive behavior of the peasant in our past!
