04-22-2020, 03:35 PM
(04-22-2020, 03:01 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:(04-22-2020, 12:57 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: The Red-Blue divide depends upon the Right telling the Reds that middle-class Blues are oppressors and that the distant, rapacious elites that the Blues never meet are benefactors in the struggle against exploitation and humiliation. The right-wing rhetoric is a game of deflection.
Who are telling/teaching the middle class blues that we are their oppressors and promoting and establishing themselves as their protectors/saviors these days? It's you and others here and the so called liberal Democrats who are doing that today not us. So, who are the primary benefactors in that scenario/ type of relationship?
Remember well that words offered as self-description of political causes are often contrary to their conventional meanings. "National liberation fronts" are often connected to Communist support for insurrections. Hitler's National Socialist German Workers' Party was in no way socialist and stood for gross exploitation of working people on behalf of landowners, financiers, industrialists, and executives. The Horst-Wessel Lied of the Nazi Party and Giovinezza as the anthem of the Italian Fascist Party both extolled their Parties' support for freedom; the national hymn of the Soviet Union begins "Unbreakable union of free-born republics", even all but one those sixteen "republics" were effectively colonies of the biggest of them. The Democratic People's Republic of Korea is in no way democratic; it allows no expression of the will of the Korean people, and it is in practice an absolute monarchy.
Although it is generally understood that slave-owners of the slave era in the old South were gross exploiters, it was commonplace for slave-owners to speak of themselves as benefactors to their slaves -- the best thing that could have ever happened to Africans and their descendants in America.
...as for some right-wing front groups: Citizens United wishes to polarize America into a 55-45 split forever; Freedom Works! stands for pure plutocracy; Americans for Prosperity is for prosperity only for the economic elite but poverty and harsh management for everyone else; the National Right to Work Committee simply intends to destroy labor unions, the only institutional protection of workers' rights. Make America Great Again? For whom?
The worst lie of all is the Orwellian lie, or Newspeak, in which words meant to express one thing are given the meaning of their opposite.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.