My exploration of the language and propaganda tools of the left will provisionally end here, although I'll be making additions and emendations from time to time. This edition should give us enough tools to be able to meaningfully criticize the astonishing assault on American core values that's being undertaken by the current Administration, their radical allies in Congress, and their unwitting, nearly clueless allies in the voting public--the latter of whom are only beginning to get a clue as to what's about to be taken from them.
A key to understanding the Marxist-Leninist universe is the concept of the dialectic. Until recent generations, any college graduate, particularly in the liberal arts, was reasonably well schooled in classical Western concepts such as syllogistic logic and the scientific method of experimentation, both of which were intended to allow the student to arrive at objective, dispassionate, and therefore valid conclusions when presented with a set of circumstances or data.
The Marxian dialectic, however, is an entirely different way of reaching conclusions. To oversimplify somewhat, the dialectic replaces objective reasoning as a tool for achieving valid results. The dialectical way of thinking views life as a constant struggle, a dynamic that involves and even requires a continuous, evolutionary battle of opposites in order to move toward a conclusion that is itself evolving. It's a dynamic rather than a system.
William Blake once famously observed that without opposites there is no motion--a very early and primitive way of expressing the same thing and one that he explored extensively in his difficult and complicated "prophetic" books of poetry. For a Marxist, you can never arrive--you are always arriving. The battle of opposites is never done. You merely struggle toward the next (temporary) conclusion.
In the Marxian political and economic realm, the dialectic is best expressed in terms of "class struggle," a concept that's much easier to understand. Here the rich are pitted against the poor even as both are effectively pitted against the middle class. It's a recipe for continuous chaos, a chaos that's supposed to proceed in dialectical fits and starts toward its inevitable if provisional conclusion in the "dictatorship of the proletariat." In the process, of course, there must "temporarily" be a Marxist-Leninist state to help guide the outcome, after which the state will usefully "wither away." In current practice, that's wishful thinking, since this state, once achieved, perpetuates its power by continually recasting the definition of class struggle.
Since the social classes in America, while they exist, are more malleable and changeable than in almost every other state on the planet, deeper leftists hit upon the perfect plan. They'd recreate (economic) class struggle by recasting it in terms of race and gender.
To make a long story short, beginning in the 1960s in this country, the left infiltrated, took over, and ultimately dominated the legitimate political battles for racial and gender equality and rechanneled the energy of those efforts to create precisely the opposite effect. Even as Americans began to work genuinely toward achieving both objectives, the leftists continued to agitate as if this were not so, serving not to overcome but to perpetuate real or perceived racial or gender barriers. In so doing, they have been able to perpetuate rather than end any real or perceived discrimination.
The dialectical logic of this is compelling. Were racial and gender problems really to be solved or even to be perceived to be solved, it would immediately cause an end to this new "class struggle," thus robbing the hard left of a valuable tool for continuing the kind of agitation that was (and is) tearing the fabric of traditional American values apart.
Furthermore, to perpetuate racial and gender class struggle, the left employed and continues to employ the type of Stalinist language tricks described in earlier installments, in this case promiscuously throwing around the slanderous terms "racist" and "sexist" to smear opponents and drive them from the public sphere. This is key to understanding what's been going on behind the scenes in the current administration. But it's also a key to understanding where the hard left, after a nearly insurmountable string of successes, may have jumped the shark with this tactic. With the election of Barack Obama as President of the United States, the hard left may have unwittingly and permanently lost the use of a pair of phenomenally useful propaganda tools not to mention an easy way to smear and discredit their opponents.
As I mentioned above, we'll wrap this mini-series for now with this entry. But I hope it will provide any skeptics in the audience with the rationale behind a series of blog entries I hope to post over the next couple of weeks that will describe and unmask the near-Herculean effort being mounted by the current Administration and its Congressional and media minions to turn America into a socialist country in under two years. It's an effort that is at now being at least dimly perceived by the average citizen. But a dim perception is not going to be enough to stop what's going on, which even a lot of traditional contemporary liberals might very well oppose. It's going to take a concerted effort to mount an effective counterattack before the left achieves its ultimate objective of socialism and world order. And understanding the left's underhanded language tricks and methodology is an important first step in this counterattack.
Until next time.
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