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A Dash of Pepper

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"We will bury you"
By SHEILAH PEPPER
The Gazette Staff
I immigrated to the United States in 1979, near the end of Jimmy Carter's term. I recall being startled at a Manhattan cocktail party shortly after my arrival. On discovering I came from Canada, people would lean closer and softly ask, "Tell me, what's wrong with the United States?"
I was dumfounded. I had just moved from a country where taxation and high prices were a crushing burden. I thought I had landed in Paradise.
Carter, deservedly, got thrown out and Ronnie Reagan came in. One summer I got a check from the U.S. Treasury. A tax cut, the postman said. Again, I was dumfounded. I had never heard of such a thing. I thought, "Is this a great country, or what?"
Later on, Reagan went to Berlin and the wall began to crumble. He initiated Strategic Missile Defense and the Soviet generals watched their budgets implode. The Baltic States became independent and Eastern Europe turned toward free markets. For someone who had lived her entire life in the shadow of the Cold War and assured mutual destruction, this was an amazing moment in history.
I recalled something Nikita Khrushchev said years earlier. In a 1963 speech in Yugoslavia, he stated, "I once said, ‘We will bury you,' and I got into trouble with it. Of course we will not bury you with a shovel. Your own working class will bury you." Marx put it very succinctly: "The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them."
I thought, "Now, that will never happen." But the author Ayn Rand, herself a refugee from Russia, had an insider's fear. She warned, "One of the methods used by statists to destroy capitalism consists in establishing controls that tie a given industry hand and foot, making (the industry) unable to solve its problems - then declaring that freedom has failed."
The commentator Michael Ledeen neatly summed up what the French writer Alexis de Tocqueville had concluded after his visits to the newly-created America, which he admired. The Frenchman was worried about our future.
To quote Ledeen, "The tyranny de Tocqueville foresees for us does not have much in common with the vicious dictatorships of the last century or with the contemporary rulers of North Korea, Iran or Saudi Arabia. He apologizes for not having the proper words with which to define it.
He hesitates to call it tyranny or despotism, because it does not rule by terror or oppression. There are no secret police, no concentration camps, and no torture.
‘The nature of depotic power in democratic ages is not to be fierce or cruel, but minute and meddling.'
Ledeen continues, "The vision and even the language anticipates Orwell's 1984, or Huxley's Brave New World. De Tocqueville describes the new tyranny as "an immense and tutelary power," and its task is to watch over us all and regulate every aspect of our lives."
Back to de Tocqueville's own words. "It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd."
Ledeen concludes, "We will not be bludgeoned into submission, we will be seduced. He foresees the collapse of American democracy as the end result of two parallel developments that ultimately render us meekly subserviant to an enlarged bureaucratic power: the corruption of our character, and the emergence of a vast welfare state that manages all the details of our lives ..."
We are all gnashing our teeth about the multi-trillion dollar deficits and the plummeting stock market. But I take Obama at his word when he says he's not much concerned about the stock market. When he should be focused on the banking and financial mess, he is already running toward socialized health care, controlling our domestic energy industry and higher taxes.
The people around him are not concerned with the giant deficit. For them, this is strictly about making more large segments of the population dependent on government and thereby creating a voter base that will form a majority in Congress for generations to come.
The opposition party, or what remains of it, will simply be window dressing, putting a respectable front on what will effectively be one-party rule, on the far Left.
Copyright©2009SheilahPepper
Last Updated on Friday, 12 June 2009 14:09  

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