“I like to think of these types as bottom-feeders, really, lying around semi-dormant, like spores, until some problem comes along that offers the opportunity to be exploited as a crisis. When they finally seize power they’ll be in a position to create crises. Then they can mobilize all manner of fools that buy into their line of drivel. Think of them as shepherds for the vast herds of Lenin’s ‘useful idiots.’
“Ray, you’ve seen how these guys operate. Perhaps their most effective method to date is to co-opt some worthwhile endeavor and carry it to extremes. For example, they supported labor reforms and then co-opted the efforts of decent workers by subverting unions and turning them into criminal power bases. There will be many future opportunities to subvert worthwhile causes and they can bank on human stupidity to increase their power and control. Churches will become unrecognizable.
“You know they also remind me of the Ellsworth Toohey character from that cool novel that came out during the war. Remember? He was the journalist with the single-minded agenda to smear talented people and promote the mediocrity of socialism. He was a good example of the kind of decadent collectivist pseudo-intellectual whose actual abilities are limited to destructive pursuits like arson and slander, and whose greatest pleasure is to watch things burn and people enslaved.”
“How do people get like this?” Veronica wondered.
“Fundamentally, they suffer from personality disorders too numerous to easily understand. Lupe has been studying up on this. If there is any one common condition that seems to afflict the domestic enemy it is envy. Perhaps this is symptomatic of arrested development—they behave like children. Beyond that it seems to be whatever else an evil or demented mind can conceive.
“Take for example your average urban pseudo-intellectual that takes pride in living a Spartan existence, forgoing some worthwhile job in favor of more ‘worthy’ intellectual or artistic pursuits. That person could actually work hard, be productive in society, and enjoy some of the fruits of his labor, like a home, a nice car, and a family. However, his envy is not to acquire these for himself, but to deny them to you. He could have these things, but he’d rather you didn’t. So their goal is to control you, tax your income away, regulate your freedom, or, better still, to destroy everything desirable in this life.”
“People like that don’t get very far in my territory,” Mack chuckled.
“We on the other hand would wish them every liberty to pursue the life they choose, as long as they are not damaging others. That is the difference between us and domestic enemy, and that is why we are good and they are evil.
“Some of these personality issues result from actual mental illnesses. As has always been the case, movement leaders usually succumb to delusions of grandeur. Like Stalin, a failed priest, that probably still believes he will unify the world under the USSR. They may rule as untouchable tyrants, but they are still very sick people and doomed, ultimately, to fail.
“I’m certain that the mole selected to take down America will suffer from some similar condition, maybe a narcissistic personality disorder. Like Stalin, he will be as thin-skilled of well-earned criticism as a Disney princess and absolutely tone-deaf to the real needs and desires of his people.”
“One could only hope for their failure,” Moe retorted. “So what do you think they want, ultimately?
“I imagine initially to hijack our birthright to think and say what we believe. You know, the Bill of Rights. First the 2nd Amendment, then the 1st. Try to steal our love for liberty. Ultimately, I guess it’s to create the same kind of slave state same as they made behind the Iron Curtain.
“I believe their primary operational goal will be long-term impoverishment of the country with outrageous and unsustainable debt coupled with crippling taxation and debasement of the currency, thus setting the stage for a quick power grab disguised as a number of supposed solutions. These so-called solutions will involve wresting control of financial markets and government takeover of large sectors of the private economy, the way the German fascists did. And these efforts will be overseen and implemented by the same criminals that engineered the crises. Also, like the Nazis did, they will enforce their edicts using a corps of uneducated, easily manipulated thugs.
“What might be more surprising is that the press, both newspapers and radio programs, will be thoroughly corrupted to function as a fifth column, in collusion with the power grab. So will the universities and education at all levels, as will business interests that might be in position to benefit. In cooperation with each other, and under the direction of the Red leadership, the so-called journalists and educators will attempt to control access to useful information through suppression, distortion and fabrication. Even selected churches will be infiltrated, and of course all of the government agencies, Congress, and the courts.
“The corrupted newspapers and radio stations will operate in lock-step with the government, having perfected techniques of omission, suppression, distortion and fabrication, to advance government propaganda while obfuscating and confounding the patriotic opposition. Another trick is to slant all of the headlines, because a lot of folks only scan the headlines. It’s one of the most effective ways to corrupt a message. Josef Goebbels was their professor and role model.
“The schools are probably going to get hit the hardest since they are already under government control. American universities will end up ideologically pure, like something from Heidelberg in 1938. The professors and administrators alike will be card-carrying members or fellow travelers, and they will brook no dissent from the Red orthodoxy. The lunacy will eventually extend to engineering and the sciences and, before you know it, the higher education system will be so degraded that our best corporations will be forced to look outside our own country for talent.
“Eventually, the young will only know the propaganda and depression instilled in them by their teachers. They will know mostly everything wrong with American and hold close a hatred for their own country. Excepting those with exceptionally effective parents, the young will have little understanding of the wonderful people and their sacrifices and successes that gave us our priceless freedom and rich life.
”I don’t know. I’ve heard the Russians accused of historical revisionism...” Moe interjected.
“Trust me. This will happen here. The charismatic leader himself will be a result of the brainwashing. Perhaps he will be a Red-diaper baby, born from and raised by died-in-the-wool Communists to parrot the Party line. In any case he will be carefully groomed by both foreign enemies and domestic traitors to further their aims.
“Jesus, Yuki! Where did you get all this?” asked Mack in some dismay.
“I’ve had a lot of time now to think about it. I’ve tried hard to project forward impressions Lupe gave me about the leadership of this crowd, what they want, and the methods they use.
“But more than that I paid attention in school and read between the lines. I knew when the teachers were being dishonest—they were more transparent than they thought—and I learned where to go to get the real story. “It’s really not that hard. Most of the time it simply came back to the words of the Founding Fathers; they as much as predicted this outcome. They knew that government was intrinsically evil, people often weak and susceptible to tyranny, and freedom as elusive as mist throughout human history.
“Their wisdom is unparalleled and reading them at the right times made my teacher’s occasional forays into Red propaganda sound illiterate. If more citizens took their education into their own hands they wouldn’t be so easily fooled by these pathetic tools.”
“In future parents will teach their children the American values that will be banished in the public schools. They’ll find ways to inoculate their children from the subversive propaganda of their teachers, and the kids will come home from school and laugh with their families about the ridiculous freedom-hating foolishness they were subjected to that day. Resisting the bumbling fools will become top family entertainment, until the day of reckoni
ng comes.”
“Also, the entire profession of American journalism will lose credibility and self-immolate as a consequence of their devotion to the establishment. The foreign press will look on with amusement and fill in the blanks because they will have retained some professionalism and have no particular dog in this hunt. Americans will be able to look to foreign news sources to get truthful coverage of what the tyrants are up to, although they might have to wait a few days to get it. Americans will find other means of learning and communicating the truth. The country will become divided between moral degenerates and self-styled underlings slopping up government-programmed drivel from the so-called unbiased media and free men who will seek elsewhere for the truth.
“One might wonder how this minority of creeps succeeds in thwarting the dreams of an entire society, but the truth will be, as it is now, that they are very effective at making noise and are masters at manipulation.
“And they will have lots of deputies. These moles will foster the kind of America that grows a large underclass of non-productive bums and parasites. As the Founding Fathers foresaw, these turds will learn to vote themselves all kinds of benefits at the expense of their betters.
“The establishment will start this by finding ways to divide us as a society. You all know how this country is a Melting Pot of peoples from every part of the world that assimilated around the privilege of living as free Americans. Well the communists will find a way to cleave apart this Melting Pot. They’ll come up with lots of devious little ways to carve us up and set us one against another. They’ll divide us by race, by culture, by religion into little tribes, calling it ‘multi-culturalism’ or some other meaningless but catchy absurdity.
“What are you talking about?” Manny asked. “Bums, homos, gimps, rubbies?
“Yeah, them. And colored folks. And other people of foreign heritage. Asians. Mexicans. Mostly good folks, but also bad folks. Habitual criminals and n’er do wells. Lazy bastards. Men with no spine. Ugly women. Women who hate men. Not that any of us has anything much in common, apart from being Americans, but just pretty much any group they can organize to kick up a beef, consider themselves victims, and enjoy a good pity party. For lots of people self-pity is its own reward. Many others in these groups will have too much pride to participate, but eventually they will be viewed as turncoats and be ostracized .
“Another from their bag of tricks involves speech and thought control. You may have heard about the Frankfort school that was influential in Germany around the 1920s or 1930s. They came up with a concept they called ‘political correctness,’ sort of a tool to transform speech and thought to conform to what’s acceptable to the establishment. For example certain acceptable thoughts and speech will be mandatory, and others will be banned. The press will know which thoughts to promote for public consumption and which to banish. People who use banned speech will be ostracized or persecuted.
“The trick is to create a body of false precepts and get people to accept them as truth. The goal is to create confusion, normalize irrational thoughts and behaviors, enforce conformity, and silence dissent. This has been well thought out already and is in practice behind the Iron Curtain. It will be popularized in our society someday.”
“How stupid is that?” Norton spat with disgust.
“Well, most of the stupidity underlying this concept is only there for purposes of conditioning people to police their own thoughts and speech. In our case, the principle use of this weapon will be to attack the ideals on which the country was founded and that have made it thrive, to ridicule and sanction those ideals until they vanish.
“But getting back to your question: ‘How stupid?’ Try this. What if some simple descriptive language we all use today, for example ‘colored people’ were changed to something different like, say, ‘people of color.’ And what if use of the latter phrase was a code word for acceptance in polite society while use of the former could get you fired from your job?”
Yuki paused while Norton stared in disbelief.
“Yeah, just that stupid,” she summarized.
“Hogwash! Mack grunted. “That will never happen in this country.”
“Maybe they believed that in Eastern Europe too toward the end of the war. At least until the Russians were in their back yards and the writing was on the wall. Now they are told what to think and say and they live their lives under continuous threat of torture or murder for any deviation.
“Think of it as two parallel universes: ours and theirs. Here we have freedom of thought and speech, not to mention economic freedom and prosperity. Behind the Iron Curtain they have only repression and economic slavery, enforced by terror. Two entirely different worlds and the only thing they have in common is they both exist on this earth. Well, the Communists can effect ‘change’ in this country by layering their universe on ours bit by bit until ours is eliminated.
“Lupe told me that Antonio Gramsci, the Italian communist, developed this strategy. He convinced Stalin to be patient and work it like this. He knew that the USSR could never conquer the West militarily, but it could win over time by subverting the culture, the economy, and all institutions.
“The plan was to demoralize the country over the period of a couple of generations, say 25 to 30 years, then destabilize it through a series of economic or social shocks. Demoralization might be summed up as the killing off of common sense and the embrace of debasement. For example, promoting deviancy, sexualizing children, that sort of thing. After a couple of years of destabilization, with demoralization more or less complete, the communist elite will seize power and begin the final stage, normalization. It is during this stage that the legions of useful idiots are put up against a wall and executed. Why? Because they know too much and their usefulness has passed.
“Levrenti Beria also thought along these lines. Lupe told me about an address he made to a group of American Marxist psychology students at Lenin University. He told them the USSR intended use of ‘psychopolitics’ to promote cultural chaos, distrust, phony science, and economic mayhem, and engender distrust in Western societies. They would do this using various professional organizations, medical and legal associations, the legislatures, the courts, the judges, and the Constitution itself. Beria was also a big mover in the Great Terror, where the founding revolutionaries were eliminated during the USSR’s normalization.
“Gramsci believed that the only means necessary to subvert the West were a dedicated fifth column, easy enough to arrange in a free society, and a legion of ‘useful idiots,’ unfortunately found everywhere. They thrive on the ignorant. Most people don’t know that the Constitution was created to limit government and protect individual liberty. You’d think they would have picked up a clue in the last war, but…
“Yeah, you’d think,” I mused. “The way I remember it taught back in the schoolhouse the states had simply formed a compact under the Constitution that established a common government for special purposes only. The Constitution, as a contract between the states, delegated this entity certain defined powers, reserving all others to the states.
‘Thomas Jefferson foresaw the likelihood of abuse of power which could be constitutionally remedied by the people through their choice of representation. But where Federal powers were assumed that were not delegated by the Constitution then the states had a right to nullify such actions within its boundaries that were deemed unconstitutional. As parties to the contract between states a state is obligated only to the compact and not to any party outside the contract. The Congress and Supreme Court were created by the Constitution and neither is a party to the contract.”
“And that is, ultimately, how the States are supposed to protect Americans from an over-reaching federal bureaucracy. But you’ve never heard any mention of this in recent memory, have you?”
“Our domestic enemies are very aware of Gramsci’s strategy and serve Stalin’s purposes today. Already the network of fifth columns is widely established, and they have organized a huge vanguard of
their idiot legionnaires. After all this trickery is pushed on us for a while our dear leaders will reward the ‘right-thinking’ boot-lickers with taxpayer-funded freebies, and punish resisters with character assassination and denial of livelihood.
“This will work probably well in our part of the country and in the big cities. In your state, Mack, it likely won’t. Texas was a Republic once; maybe it will be again before the dust settles. California was a Republic too, but it is far too thoroughly infiltrated and is already ripe for division and attack.
“You just watch. One day common sense will be thoroughly discredited and will not exist far beyond the individual and the family. Based on the Cult of Personality, or some vacuous, meaningless campaign slogans like ‘Hope’ and ‘Change,’ millions of Americans will vote away not only their rights and freedoms, but their livelihoods and high standards of living. It will be an awesome insanity to behold. It will result in rationing, poverty, bankruptcy, and near complete erosion of all our fundamental civil rights. Under no circumstances will the Red bastards let up until they have consolidated total power and squelched any meaningful opposition.
“Lupe told me a lot about these old New York commies running around now. There were these law professors at City University calling themselves the National Emergency Conference for Democratic Rights, later renamed the National Federation for Constitutional Liberties. Just last month the House Un-American Activities Committee branded them a subversive group.
“You just watch, they’ll branch out, morph into a few new slick-sounding organizations, and go nationwide. They aren’t going away. They’ll recruit a network of freedom-hating lawyers and hand-picked corrupt judges and implement outright their agenda of fascism through litigation. When they find people living free outside the commie agenda they’ll destroy them in the courts. They’ll find a hundred ways to shred the Constitution and enforce unequal protection under the law. ”
“Unfortunately from what you are saying it sounds like America’s finest hours might be behind us,” Johnny opined.