SOLO-International Op-Ed: The Anti-American President, Pt. 2

By Lindsay Perigo
Created 2009-06-15 02:31

"Death to the Government" and "We want freedom" are not chants we in the West associate with Iranians, whom we more commonly hear shrieking "Death to America" and "Freedom go to Hell." As we speak, however, the former chants are rending the air in cities across Iran as youngsters in their tens of thousands, yearning to be free in spite of the theocratic brainbashing by which they've been pummeled since birth, protest against the clearly-fraudulent elections returning Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, doyen of Islamofascists, as the country's President.

Elections in which the main opposition candidate, Mir Hossein Mousavi, was outvoted in his home town. Yeah right.

Mousavi's newspaper never got to leave the printing house on Sunday. Authorities shut it down because Mousavi had already said he wasn't going to take his "defeat" lying down. The paper's web site claimed that more than 10 million votes in Friday's election were missing the national identification numbers that would legitimize them.

The regime has closed down Twitter and Facebook, jammed foreign broadcasts and sent foreign journalists packing.

Ahmadinejad has just held a press conference saying, "Don't worry about freedom in Iran. Newspapers come and go and reappear. Don't worry about it."

Yeah right, again. And by the way, there are no homosexuals in Iran.

Time will tell whether we are witnessing, in effect, a counter-revolution overturning the one in 1979 that morphed a West-friendly, secular dictatorship into a West-hostile theocratic one. It's important to remember that the election of Mousavi would have had no effect on the country's Constitution which vests ultimate power in the Supreme Leader selected by the Assembly of Experts from candidates vetted by the Council of Guardians (did anyone ever think Ayn Rand's Council of Scholars in Anthem was far-fetched?!). The Supreme Leader's brief is to keep the original revolution on track, ensuring that the stinking, stupid superstition that is Islam, started by a murderous paedophile, continues to make the lives of millions miserable and precarious. Mousavi would be powerless to change that, assuming he even wanted to.

A more potent force keeping Ahmadinejad in power is the acquiescence of the people he routinely excoriates. That, dear reader, is us. Or rather, our leaders, with too little protest from us. We are embodiments of the Great Satan whose Great Sin is our Love of Life. Rather than be flattered by the compliment, our leaders are intimidated by it and indeed partly agree with the spirit of it.

Barack Obama had already offered unconditional negotiations with Ahmadinejad. His Administration has just made clear that offer is still on the table, whatever the ultimate election outcome might be. Chavez-Obama still wants to "reach out"—to filth. In earlier times, such moral equivalencing by an American President would have been unimaginable. But this is no ordinary American President; this, I say again, is the anti-American President. This is a President who, more explicitly and conscientiously than any of his predecessors, thinks the enemies of freedom are on a par with its advocates, and that freedom pertains to the collective rather than the individual. “Spreading the wealth around” from those to whom it belongs to those to whom it doesn't is "good" because it serves the common good. Nationalizing everything in sight, including the automobile industry and health care, is required for the common good, notwithstanding that the Iranian mullahs, no less, are waking up to the benefits of privatization and proceeding with a program thereof. Appointing a bunch of bureaucratic "czars" to run the economy is required for the common good, even as the whole world apart from North Korea scoffs at the notion of central planning. Indebting the nation to a communist tyranny is necessary for the common good, even as that very tyranny pleads with him not to go down the communist path.

An attack on free speech will follow as surely as night the day this unparalleled assault on the free economy.

How did it come to this? The thumbnail version is: Marx via Gramsci via Alinsky to the likes of Obama and Hillary Clinton.

We all know what Marx advocated: pretty much what Chavez-Obama is implementing now. The Italian theoretician Antonio Gramsci realized that the overt preaching of the violent overthrow of capitalism was unpalatable to the working classes in the West who were thriving under capitalism. He proposed instead a "Long March through the Culture"—infiltrating every major institution and subverting it from within under such guises as "consensus," "equity," "national unity" and "global justice." (For elaboration, see my article Doing a Gramsci [1].)

We all know how successful that strategy has been, thanks in no small part to Gramsci's biggest fan and most conscientious student in America, the Marxist Saul Alinsky. As Richard Lawrence Poe puts it, "True revolutionaries do not flaunt their radicalism, Alinsky taught. They cut their hair, put on suits and infiltrate the system from within." Alinsky set about giving practical implementation to Gramsci's Trojan Horse strategy on a local level first of all, ingratiating himself with Chicago's corrupt political and religious establishment. He set up the Industrial Areas Foundation—a training school for radical "community organisers"—and was adept at raising money for it: “I feel confident that I could persuade a millionaire on a Friday to subsidize a revolution for Saturday out of which he would make a huge profit on Sunday even though he was certain to be executed on Monday.” He offered a besotted Hillary "It Takes a Village" Clinton a position as a community organizer but she jilted him, choosing law as a career instead (though the two remained friends till his death in 1972). Barack Obama received his training as a community organizer through the Industrial Area Foundation and in turn spent years teaching workshops in Chicago on the Alinsky method and working with Alinskyite fronts such as the now-disgraced ACORN. (Part of his brief was to build coalitions of black churches, requiring that he attend one himself, thus exposing himself to the "burn-in-hell, America" rhetoric of his friend and pastor for twenty years, Jeremiah Wright.)

In 2008, Alinksy's son David wrote:

"Obama learned his lesson well. I am proud to see that my father's model for organizing is being applied successfully beyond local community organizing to affect the Democratic campaign in 2008. It is a fine tribute to Saul Alinsky as we approach his 100th birthday."

Those who expected Obama to become "mainstream" in the face of political realities once he assumed office, rather than proceed willy-nilly and at breakneck speed with his radical agenda, as he has, can be forgiven their fantasy—after all, that's what Presidents usually do. But to entertain it in Chavez-Obama's case is not to reckon with the background in which he is steeped and the zeal with which he still embraces it.

Just like the Ayatollahs in Iran, Chavez-Obama is driven by an ideology that is irrational, anti-freedom and anti-American. If he serves a full term, America in 2012 will be unrecognizable. That is exactly what he intends. Change? You’d better believe it!

Freedom-loving Americans should be exercised at least as much by the threat from the White House as that from Tehran right now.

SOLO (Sense of Life Objectivists): SOLOPassion.com

ENDS

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