They Thought They Were Free; The Obama Legacy

The current battle over the 2nd amendment is simply a continuation of the left's attempt to do away with individual rights. Our forefathers founded the United states on individual rights and personal freedom, which is the diametrically opposed by the left; or to be more accurate the collectivists. The collectivists believe that to achieve a safe and fair government, individual rights and personal freedoms must disappear; and in it's place will be forced equality. But most Americans would not agree to give up their personnel freedoms, so the collectivists hide their true in intentions and try to steer society incrementally toward collectivism.

Below is a statement made by Barrack Obama before his first election; every word speaks of need for collectivist government (the collectivists have been trying to back peddle these comments from the day they were made public). 

But the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society. And, to that extent, as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn't that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution, at least as its been interpreted and Warren Court interpreted in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. Says what the states can’t do to you. Says what the Federal government can’t do to you, but doesn’t say what the Federal government or State government must do on your behalf, and that hasn’t shifted and one of the, I think, tragedies of the civil rights movement was, um, because the civil rights movement became so court focused I think there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalition of powers through which you bring about redistributive change.

When Obama calls the Constitution a charter of negative liberties, while not really redefining the meaning, but he is bemoaning that the Constitutions restricts government from forcing collective policies on the citizenry and making it sound negative liberties are bad; Erich Fromm, a humanistic philosopher praised negative freedom, saying it marks the beginning of humanity as a species conscious of its own existence free from base instinct; doesn't sound bad to me. The collectivist have taken the General Welfare clause of the constitution and redefined it when they say individual rights must be given up for the general welfare of society, or the need for Social Justice, which has become a collectivist metaphor for the redistribution of wealth. Other collectivist speak is the need to sacrifice for the "greater good" and the rich needing to pay a little more in taxes. President Obama's only economical plan seems to be a 3% marginal increase for those that make over $250,000, and it's well known that this plan will have no real effect on the debt and is symbolic at best; that is symbolic of a collectivist stoking the fires of class warfare and the need for the intervention of government for the purpose of the redistribution of wealth.

This is a small portion from a book about the rise of fascism (a form of collectivism) from the prospective of the German citizenry; book is called "They Thought They Were Free"; I have included this in an earlier blog but it bears repeating.

 "What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if he people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it."

 "This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter." 

 "To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it - please try to believe me - unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, "regretted," that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these "little measures" that no "patriotic German" could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head."