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+---- Thread: The cancer infecting the political Left (/thread-6280.html)
RE: The cancer infecting the political Left - pbrower2a - 12-15-2020
I have found a better video treatment of a cult of personality, again that of Miklos Horthy, military dictator and regent of basically a kingdom without a king. (Have a reigning monarch who does not really rule, or call the system a republic... don't try to be in between).
Horthy was a reactionary dictator, much less nasty than the likes of the Kim dynasty, Pinochet, Amin, or Saddam... but still, the elements of a cult of personality are there. Given a choice between Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Soviet Union, or Franco's Spain, I would have rather been in Hungary when Horthy called the shots (after he had suppressed a Commie revolution soon after World War I in Hungary) than any any of those other places.
Horthy was obviously too old to lead any army in battle, yet he is called "Hungary's best and most gallant soldier".
Can you imagine the elderly Sir Winston Churchill getting such treatment, let alone the crippled FDR?
This is a better video and one more illustrative of the personality cult than I showed of the same dictator. The depiction of Hungary is of Hungary after dismembering Czechoslovakia, taking a bite out of Romania with the connivance of Hitler, and making a cheap annexation of a piece of Yugoslavia.
This goes further than anything that Trump did. Again, at least the music is good.
RE: The cancer infecting the political Left - pbrower2a - 12-15-2020
Election posters can resemble a personality cult in a dictatorship -- but the difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that one at least has choices.
The French would eventually tire of the man who was at first the conscience and hope of Free France, then its leading French liberator... I did a search for "personality cult" and "de Gaulle", and this was the closest that I got. No worse than Eisenhower. Petain was far more blatant, hollow, and objectionable.
OK, the man who saved Chile from what he saw as another Fidel Castro only to establish the repression without much pretense of social justice unless one's idea of social justice is "He who owns the gold makes the rules"...
No, I don't see him as a liberator; he is an example for the rest of the world, all right -- of how to destroy what remaining democracy there is and institute a fascist reign of terror and a cultural morgue; he is now certainly no more the pride of Chile than Saddam Hussein is the pride of Iraq.
At least he didn't start any wars. Political prisoners died, and Chile was one of the worst countries in Latin America in which to be poor at the time despite having a fairly high level of development.
Here is something a bit more subtle. A partial analogue for Charles de Gaulle is Marshal Josip Broz Tito, who was in occupied Yugoslavia throughout the Nazi occupation as a leader of partisan bands that eventually became the source of his leadership of postwar Yugoslavia. Once getting through the blood-letting paroxysms of killing off (mostly) collaborators with Nazi Germany who really did deserve to die, Tito broke with Stalin and allowed small business to flourish. Still, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia was the only political game in town, so to speak. Tito may not have been an international trouble-maker like Castro, but he did have a secret police. In the 1970's Yugoslavia had a reputation as a good place to take a vacation if you did not want to get ripped off but were not intent on seeing some particular historical or cultural site.
This video seems to be at first a travelogue with some patriotic sentiments that could as easily apply to most countries. But keep watching and you will notice some effusive praise of Marshal Tito.
Considering what happened under Milosevic, whom I considered one of the closest potential analogues for Donald Trump, maybe Tito wasn't so bad after all.
RE: The cancer infecting the political Left - Classic-Xer - 12-15-2020
(12-15-2020, 01:50 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: Election posters can resemble a personality cult in a dictatorship -- but the difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that one at least has choices.You should look at the left wing Obama posters and see the similarities. Trump will be leaving office soon enough. You don't have to worry about Trump scaring you or upsetting you for at least four more years. What you have to worry about is Joe Biden leaving office within a couple years after being sworn in. I think that it will become impossible for them to continue to hide his obvious problem. Plus, there is also an investigation involving his sons shady business dealings that may implicate him and force him to resign. Either way, I don't see him making it through a full term as President. My mother started showing the same signs as him at his age and she got noticeably worse each year that followed and she wasn't the President of the United State at the time.
The French would eventually tire of the man who was at first the conscience and hope of Free France, then its leading French liberator... I did a search for "personality cult" and "de Gaulle", and this was the closest that I got. No worse than Eisenhower. Petain was far more blatant, hollow, and objectionable.
OK, the man who saved Chile from what he saw as another Fidel Castro only to establish the repression without much pretense of social justice unless one's idea of social justice is "He who owns the gold makes the rules"...
No, I don't see him as a liberator; he is an example for the rest of the world, all right -- of how to destroy what remaining democracy there is and institute a fascist reign of terror and a cultural morgue; he is now certainly no more the pride of Chile than Saddam Hussein is the pride of Iraq.
At least he didn't start any wars. Political prisoners died, and Chile was one of the worst countries in Latin America in which to be poor at the time despite having a fairly high level of development.
Here is something a bit more subtle. A partial analogue for Charles de Gaulle is Marshal Josip Broz Tito, who was in occupied Yugoslavia throughout the Nazi occupation as a leader of partisan bands that eventually became the source of his leadership of postwar Yugoslavia. Once getting through the blood-letting paroxysms of killing off (mostly) collaborators with Nazi Germany who really did deserve to die, Tito broke with Stalin and allowed small business to flourish. Still, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia was the only political game in town, so to speak. Tito may not have been an international trouble-maker like Castro, but he did have a secret police. In the 1970's Yugoslavia had a reputation as a good place to take a vacation if you did not want to get ripped off but were not intent on seeing some particular historical or cultural site.
This video seems to be at first a travelogue with some patriotic sentiments that could as easily apply to most countries. But keep watching and you will notice some effusive praise of Marshal Tito.
Considering what happened under Milosevic, whom I considered one of the closest potential analogues for Donald Trump, maybe Tito wasn't so bad after all.
Oh, by the way, you should not expect help or support from the Republican base or the Republican party because we are going to put fire under their asses and force them to start taking much tougher positions with the Democrats and expect them to answer their threats with greater threats. I agree that Americans have the right to make their own choices. Americans can choose to completely break with the the Democratic Party and choose to leave the states that are controlled by it and move to the Republican states where American rights will be recognized and honored and protected by the state. The right to murder an unborn human may no longer exist and be outlawed but murder has always been illegal in America. Like I said, handing a couple of Senate seats to the Democratic party is probably all that's needed for a century worth of political tradition to be broken/come to an end.
RE: The cancer infecting the political Left - David Horn - 12-15-2020
(12-14-2020, 06:30 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:(12-13-2020, 11:04 AM)David Horn Wrote:(12-12-2020, 08:52 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote: Personality cults are usually indoctrinated which is why they're considered derogatory. Liberal's are into indoctrination. Trump's not. Trump's a practical businessman who built a small empire of his own and achieved celebrity status by creating his own hit show who took a major cut in pay and a reduction in lifestyle to serve as our President.
It's really hard to be wrong on every count, but you managed it this time. It's conservatives that insist on everyone behaving as they see fit, and enforcing that with the imprimatur of law. That's not to say that the PC crowd wouldn't do the same given the chance, but it's only on the right that it's there from the center-right to the several extremes in your coalition. Trump's at the front of that line. And lets' get through the "practical businessman" nonsense. He's bankrupted one endeavor after another. If he didn't have Deutsche Bank backing his action, he'd be totally bankrupt by now. His hit TV show was bad, even by reality TV standards, and I doubt he's lost a dime with all the shilling he's done while in office.
Did you know that only one out of ten new business ventures succeed and the rest fail within five years? Well, the same goes for Trump and his business ventures. He probably does better than average business person and is able to have a few other new ventures succeed as most others fail. That's business as we say. The PC crowd is currently doing the same and they're becoming a major problem that will have to dealt with harshly. You see, nothing is sacred or viewed as off limits by them which is why we're going to be clashing with them and more or less eliminating them. The reason is pretty simple, there's nothing sacred about them that we have to be concerned about with the higher powers above so to speak.
It's true that business ventures tend to fold early if they're going to fail, but underfunding is the most common reason. Trump started life with $200Million, and hasn't done much to grow it further. He's wedded to ostentatious projects he can put his grimy name on, and his record for picking winners is poor at best. This has nothing to do with the PC crowd, just simple observation. If he wasn't more than willing to shill, he would be broke already. Right now, he's fleecing his own supporters for money he'll need when he's out of office.
RE: The cancer infecting the political Left - David Horn - 12-15-2020
(12-14-2020, 11:01 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: I have blocked a goodly number, and have 3 people on ignore here. But I don't disagree with not blocking anyone. I just get somewhat more abuse than others, I guess. Most of my blocks are on facebook, which gets a lot of really undesirable participants in a number of controversial groups there, including really-boring pornography; but not too many lately. But I don't block people for their beliefs either. I decided not to put these 3 folks on ignore.
But I am now creating and offering an alternative forum now on facebook. This forum here, now seems very inadequate as a space to bring or attract people to who are interested in the fourth turning, generations, and the countless related issues. There is no moderator to remove spam, the posters are relatively few, and the rigid ideologues are getting too boring to tangle with endlessly. But I will stay on and post here too when I want to. It has been a good forum for a long time, with a wide range of discussion, and not too much censorship or too many rules.
You can join my new group here. 11 members now already, including many former members here who have not participated either here or in the secret group for a while. That should be good. Someone new already too. Many of these 11 are my facebook friends, easy to invite.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/396877864887524
I don't do Facebook. It's a hard-fast rule I follow religiously. I find the platform dangerous from too many perspectives, and, finally, the Feds seem ready to do something about it. If they do, I'll reconsider.
RE: The cancer infecting the political Left - pbrower2a - 12-15-2020
(12-15-2020, 04:21 AM)Classic-Xer Wrote:(12-15-2020, 01:50 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: Election posters can resemble a personality cult in a dictatorship -- but the difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that one at least has choices.
The French would eventually tire of the man who was at first the conscience and hope of Free France, then its leading French liberator... I did a search for "personality cult" and "de Gaulle", and this was the closest that I got. No worse than Eisenhower. Petain was far more blatant, hollow, and objectionable.
OK, the man who saved Chile from what he saw as another Fidel Castro only to establish the repression without much pretense of social justice unless one's idea of social justice is "He who owns the gold makes the rules"...
No, I don't see him as a liberator; he is an example for the rest of the world, all right -- of how to destroy what remaining democracy there is and institute a fascist reign of terror and a cultural morgue; he is now certainly no more the pride of Chile than Saddam Hussein is the pride of Iraq.
At least he didn't start any wars. Political prisoners died, and Chile was one of the worst countries in Latin America in which to be poor at the time despite having a fairly high level of development.
Here is something a bit more subtle. A partial analogue for Charles de Gaulle is Marshal Josip Broz Tito, who was in occupied Yugoslavia throughout the Nazi occupation as a leader of partisan bands that eventually became the source of his leadership of postwar Yugoslavia. Once getting through the blood-letting paroxysms of killing off (mostly) collaborators with Nazi Germany who really did deserve to die, Tito broke with Stalin and allowed small business to flourish. Still, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia was the only political game in town, so to speak. Tito may not have been an international trouble-maker like Castro, but he did have a secret police. In the 1970's Yugoslavia had a reputation as a good place to take a vacation if you did not want to get ripped off but were not intent on seeing some particular historical or cultural site.
This video seems to be at first a travelogue with some patriotic sentiments that could as easily apply to most countries. But keep watching and you will notice some effusive praise of Marshal Tito.
Considering what happened under Milosevic, whom I considered one of the closest potential analogues for Donald Trump, maybe Tito wasn't so bad after all.
You should look at the left wing Obama posters and see the similarities. Trump will be leaving office soon enough. You don't have to worry about Trump scaring you or upsetting you for at least four more years. What you have to worry about is Joe Biden leaving office within a couple years after being sworn in. I think that it will become impossible for them to continue to hide his obvious problem. Plus, there is also an investigation involving his sons shady business dealings that may implicate him and force him to resign. Either way, I don't see him making it through a full term as President. My mother started showing the same signs as him at his age and she got noticeably worse each year that followed and she wasn't the President of the United State at the time.
A personality cult is, above all else, a lie. It is the assertion that something horrible is the diametric opposite -- the ideal. I can think of something else that deliberately confuses opposites and prevents thought: the Newspeak that George Orwell associates with the monstrous "Oceania" in which words are turned into lies, as was so in Stalinland and Hitlerland. A personality cult is a fraud, as in an attempt to make a thug seem a saint.
I searched "cult of personality Obama" and found only crackpot sites such as The American Thinker. I also checked on some other Presidents (OK, Kennedy and Hoover -- and Hoover was looked upon very highly soon after he was elected -- before the Stock Market Crash). About the same. I checked Wikipedia for cults of personality and found mostly the Bad Guys of history. The personality cults included the Left (Castro), Right (Mussolini), and people hard to place either way (Ataturk, Pilsudski). No democratic figures.
Quote:Oh, by the way, you should not expect help or support from the Republican base or the Republican party because we are going to put fire under their asses and force them to start taking much tougher positions with the Democrats and expect them to answer their threats with greater threats. I agree that Americans have the right to make their own choices. Americans can choose to completely break with the the Democratic Party and choose to leave the states that are controlled by it and move to the Republican states where American rights will be recognized and honored and protected by the state. The right to murder an unborn human may no longer exist and be outlawed but murder has always been illegal in America. Like I said, handing a couple of Senate seats to the Democratic party is probably all that's needed for a century worth of political tradition to be broken/come to an end.
We Democrats have adopted some conservative traits, including respect for tradition, law and order, and protocol. We will use those traits because they are good for America. We are no longer radical Leftists.
I'd be wary of saying which way America is going. Liberals leaving Illinois for Texas are taking their values with them. Voters under 40 are much more D than R, and the GOP has little to offer them than economic abuse of ther precious children. We liberals give a d@mn about those kids of poor working-class minorities. We want them to get solid education so that they not be consigned to a permanent underclass. We have a healthy respect for science and learning, and we will need the first to get any economic gain and the second to make life something other than numbing absurdity.
RE: The cancer infecting the political Left - pbrower2a - 12-15-2020
(12-15-2020, 11:43 AM)David Horn Wrote:(12-14-2020, 06:30 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:(12-13-2020, 11:04 AM)David Horn Wrote:(12-12-2020, 08:52 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote: Personality cults are usually indoctrinated which is why they're considered derogatory. Liberal's are into indoctrination. Trump's not. Trump's a practical businessman who built a small empire of his own and achieved celebrity status by creating his own hit show who took a major cut in pay and a reduction in lifestyle to serve as our President.
It's really hard to be wrong on every count, but you managed it this time. It's conservatives that insist on everyone behaving as they see fit, and enforcing that with the imprimatur of law. That's not to say that the PC crowd wouldn't do the same given the chance, but it's only on the right that it's there from the center-right to the several extremes in your coalition. Trump's at the front of that line. And lets' get through the "practical businessman" nonsense. He's bankrupted one endeavor after another. If he didn't have Deutsche Bank backing his action, he'd be totally bankrupt by now. His hit TV show was bad, even by reality TV standards, and I doubt he's lost a dime with all the shilling he's done while in office.
Did you know that only one out of ten new business ventures succeed and the rest fail within five years? Well, the same goes for Trump and his business ventures. He probably does better than average business person and is able to have a few other new ventures succeed as most others fail. That's business as we say. The PC crowd is currently doing the same and they're becoming a major problem that will have to dealt with harshly. You see, nothing is sacred or viewed as off limits by them which is why we're going to be clashing with them and more or less eliminating them. The reason is pretty simple, there's nothing sacred about them that we have to be concerned about with the higher powers above so to speak.
It's true that business ventures tend to fold early if they're going to fail, but underfunding is the most common reason. Trump started life with $200Million, and hasn't done much to grow it further. He's wedded to ostentatious projects he can put his grimy name on, and his record for picking winners is poor at best. This has nothing to do with the PC crowd, just simple observation. If he wasn't more than willing to shill, he would be broke already. Right now, he's fleecing his own supporters for money he'll need when he's out of office.
Most of the small business failures are restaurants and stores, with small farms disappearing as corporate entities buy them out. Starting a restaurant or store is fairly easy, but operating them isn't as easy as it looks. The husband can do the cleaning and running the cash register, the kids can serve the meals and clean dishes, and the mother is a superb cook... oh, maybe she isn't! The kids get drawn into the usual attractions such as dating... and there goes the reliable wait-staff.
RE: The cancer infecting the political Left - pbrower2a - 02-01-2021
(12-15-2020, 04:21 AM)Classic-Xer Wrote: You should look at the left wing Obama posters and see the similarities. Trump will be leaving office soon enough. You don't have to worry about Trump scaring you or upsetting you for at least four more years. What you have to worry about is Joe Biden leaving office within a couple years after being sworn in. I think that it will become impossible for them to continue to hide his obvious problem. Plus, there is also an investigation involving his sons shady business dealings that may implicate him and force him to resign. Either way, I don't see him making it through a full term as President. My mother started showing the same signs as him at his age and she got noticeably worse each year that followed and she wasn't the President of the United State at the time.
Oh, by the way, you should not expect help or support from the Republican base or the Republican party because we are going to put fire under their asses and force them to start taking much tougher positions with the Democrats and expect them to answer their threats with greater threats. I agree that Americans have the right to make their own choices. Americans can choose to completely break with the the Democratic Party and choose to leave the states that are controlled by it and move to the Republican states where American rights will be recognized and honored and protected by the state. The right to murder an unborn human may no longer exist and be outlawed but murder has always been illegal in America. Like I said, handing a couple of Senate seats to the Democratic party is probably all that's needed for a century worth of political tradition to be broken/come to an end.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2016/03/donald-trump-supporters-cult-personality/
The arch-conservative Michael Medved wrote an essay for the arch-conservative National Review back when Trump was running for the Republican nomination, and he attributed a cult of personality to Donald Trump. To be sure, many conservatives would back Trump when he seemed the best vehicle for the time for making a God-fearing, cheap-labor, faith-driven (as long as that is Christian), war-mongering, corporate-friendly America in which abortion and perhaps even contraception are outlawed.
I won't give you any excerpts because it is nearly five years old, but note well: Donald Trump is neither a conservative nor a Christian. I find Christian morality useful (if anyone thinks that I undercut Jews on that... Jewish morality is practically the same). I would have found it easy enough to vote for Joe Biden against Donald Trump solely because Joe Biden is a devout Christian and Donald Trump seems to be more a devotee of Ayn Rand and Hugh Hefner than of Jesus.
Well, we got Trump. Conservatives got much of their agenda for a while, and they got to watch liberals cry while right-wingers drank out of cups and tumblers that read "I love the taste of liberal tears".
I would prefer that conservatives not lament as fully what happens to America what we liberals lamented when Trump was President. Politics is ideally about cutting deals good for both and not for sticking the Other Side. I hope that we can be far better than Trump, and if we are as bad as he was, then we will deserve a defeat in 2024 as Trump had in 2020. No, the election was not stolen, and for this I give credit to pols in both Parties that have done everything possible to eliminate fraud and even error in the electoral process. Republicans did better than one might have expected in 2020.
I don't want conservatives to cry or convert. I want them to ditch the cult of personality around Donald Trump. I want them to know that the rule of law is more precious than getting one's way.
All in all, Barack Obama will get far more respect in American history than will Donald Trump. Far more schools will be named after Barack Obama than after Donald Trump... OK, Obama was far more respectful of formal learning, and prose by Obama is far more coherent than the bilge that emanated from Trump. Surely you would prefer that your children write more like Obama than like Trump?
This post to which I respond comes from before the January 6 insurrection, one in which people taken in by the Trump cult could not recognize the result of a close election that did not go their way. They stormed the Capitol. They brought partisan banners into the Capitol. Some committed horrible crimes, including murder, on behalf of their hero. Some had zip-cuffs of the sort used in making arrests. Someone showed a mock gallows and some shouted "Hang Mike Pence!" when he showed that he was not going to go along with that mob's desired rescission of the Presidential election.
Nothing matters but the leader, his image, and his agenda? That is a personality cult. The more extreme that such is, the more dangerous is the personality cult.
People have done horrible things in the name of Donald Trump. I hope that we have learned our lesson.
RE: The cancer infecting the political Left - Bob Butler 54 - 02-01-2021
(02-01-2021, 08:01 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Nothing matters but the leader, his image, and his agenda? That is a personality cult. The more extreme that such is, the more dangerous is the personality cult.
People have done horrible things in the name of Donald Trump. I hope that we have learned our lesson.
I think it is more racism than a personality cult. Black Lives Matter was on the cusp of winning another round of legislation, which the radical racists could not tolerate. Trump is one of them, and the only way to keep the status quo going was to be keeping Trump in power. All for an insurrection that would only buy them a few hours? As it turned out, they lost planned protests of several more states so the delay was about a wash?
At least it makes the issue clearer.
RE: The cancer infecting the political Left - Eric the Green - 02-01-2021
(02-01-2021, 08:54 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(02-01-2021, 08:01 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Nothing matters but the leader, his image, and his agenda? That is a personality cult. The more extreme that such is, the more dangerous is the personality cult.
People have done horrible things in the name of Donald Trump. I hope that we have learned our lesson.
I think it is more racism than a personality cult. Black Lives Matter was on the cusp of winning another round of legislation, which the radical racists could not tolerate. Trump is one of them, and the only way to keep the status quo going was to be keeping Trump in power. All for an insurrection that would only buy them a few hours? As it turned out, they lost planned protests of several more states so the delay was about a wash?
At least it makes the issue clearer.
Racism is certainly an important aspect of the reactionary cult in America. Or in a more general sense, xenophobia-- make America white and christian again.
RE: The cancer infecting the political Left - pbrower2a - 02-01-2021
(02-01-2021, 11:03 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:(02-01-2021, 08:54 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(02-01-2021, 08:01 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Nothing matters but the leader, his image, and his agenda? That is a personality cult. The more extreme that such is, the more dangerous is the personality cult.
People have done horrible things in the name of Donald Trump. I hope that we have learned our lesson.
I think it is more racism than a personality cult. Black Lives Matter was on the cusp of winning another round of legislation, which the radical racists could not tolerate. Trump is one of them, and the only way to keep the status quo going was to be keeping Trump in power. All for an insurrection that would only buy them a few hours? As it turned out, they lost planned protests of several more states so the delay was about a wash?
At least it makes the issue clearer.
Racism is certainly an important aspect of the reactionary cult in America. Or in a more general sense, xenophobia-- make America white and Christian again.
Much so. These folks would have never made Barack Obama an object of a personality cult. He was instead a bogeyman. Never mind that Obama ran a squeaky-clean administration, adhered closely to precedent and protocol, and had a conservative lifestyle.
Still, a black man who grabbed white women by their 'kitty-cats' without giving consent, consorted with a white porn star, had multiple wives, had a shady record with business dealings, and exhibited free-floating anger ... well, that would simply be a criminal, would it not?