Constructing the 21st-Century Socialist State

In a speech at the University of Missouri on October 30th, 2008, just before he was elected President of the United States, Barack Hussein Obama famously said, “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”

His words possessed a chilling resonance with those of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known to history as Lenin. In November 1917, after the Bolsheviks occupied the Tsar’s Winter Palace, Lenin sat down with his comrades in their opulent new offices and said calmly, “We shall now proceed to construct the socialist state.”

And so he did — and we all know how that turned out.

The new rulers of Soviet Russia needed money, so Stalin was sent with an armed detachment to the central bank, where he ordered employees to open up the vaults. He and his men hauled big sacks of money back to their offices and set up the brand new Soviet treasury.

Then, once the new system was up and running, Lenin ordered the complete abolition of money. When the country ground to a halt and starvation set in, he backed off a bit from his radical utopian measures, and instead substituted absolute control by the state. The result was mass slaughter, strategic famines, a huge network of slave labor camps, the export of terror and subversion abroad, and the all but total destruction of traditional Russian culture as it had existed before 1917.

Seventy-four years of brutality and degradation would elapse before the Russian people escaped from their nightmare, and the lingering effects of the Bolshevik Revolution are far from over, even today.

Unfortunately for the ambitions of President Obama, America in 2010 is not Russia in 1917. For their human raw material Lenin and Stalin had millions of penniless and illiterate peasants who were relatively easy to coerce. Obama, in contrast, faces a nation of affluent suburbanites. Russia in 1917 was all but undeveloped, and the Bolsheviks could forcibly industrialize it to build a permanent power base for themselves. Obama, on the other hand, must destroy the existing structures if he ever hopes to effect his fundamental transformation.

The Husseinization of America over the last year and a half has involved inconceivable amounts of new debt, increased government control over an already damaged economy, abandonment of America’s allies, outreach to its enemies, unprecedented interference in the private decisions of citizens, and proposed restrictions on our civil liberties.

From Obamacare to the Gulf oil spill, one can’t escape the feeling that all of this is going according to plan, and that the plan depends on the systematic ruin of the United States as an economic and military power.

But why? What possible end can Obama and his far-left handlers hope to achieve?

Totalitarian control of a completely devastated country?

Anyone of modest intelligence, even a totalitarian Marxist, should be able to discern that the policies of the Obama administration cannot possibly produce the desired results. The United States can be destroyed, but it cannot be transformed by debt and disarmament into a revenant 21st-century Soviet Union.

So why do it?

I keep circling round and round that question, and the only answer I can come up with is stupidity. The mandarins of Washington D.C. believe, against all the available evidence, that they can pull a socialist utopian rabbit out of a threadbare fiscal hat.

In other words, collectively speaking, they’re dumber than a box of rocks.

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I bring all this up because I just read a fascinating article by Gregory R. Copley that was published last week in OilPrice.com. It’s entitled “The New Civil Wars Within the West”, and it outlines the mass hysteria and folly that are running wild across the entire Western world, and not just among the Obamanoids in the United States.

Mr. Copley has this to say in his introduction:

Internecine civil wars are underway almost everywhere within the West, and most virulently in the United States of America. They are not yet kinetic wars, but wars of grinding prepositioning, the kind which lead to foregone conclusions without a shot being fired. They are wars of survival, nonetheless, because the basic architecture for national strength is being altered incrementally or dramatically. And, in many cases, consciously.

Almost all of the strategic restructuring of states is occurring in large part as a result of an accumulation of wealth; an accumulation and value of which is seen as permanent. This has resulted in the hubris — expressed by those who did not earn it — of triumph in the Cold War. This is a Western phenomenon because the widespread growth of wealth, the creation of freedoms classically associated with democracy, resulted — as it must inevitably result — in complacencies which in turn led to a “vote too far”: the extension of the democratic franchise to those who do not help in the creation of wealth.

Once the voting franchise of the West reached the point where those who sought benefits outweighed those who created benefits, the tipping point was reached. The situation of de facto “class warfare” thus emerges automatically under such circumstances, and the envy of those who take against those who provide erupts into “rights” and “entitlement”. By deifying “democracy” above justice, the enfranchised non-producers could always outvote the producers. We are at this point. The result can only be collapse, or restructuring around a Cæsar or a Bonaparte until, eventually, a productive hierarchy reappears, usually after considerable pain.

His first case study is the United States of America:
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Virtually every conscious step of the Administration of Pres. Barack Obama and the overwhelming Democratic Party majority in Congress has been to increase the size and role of government in the economy and society, and to decrease, limit, and control the position of private enterprise and capital formation. Given that this progressively contracts and ultimately eliminates production, and reduces the inherent asset base of the country — its raw materials and productive intellect — to a null value, the tradable value of the US currency will inevitably decline. We cannot be swayed by the enormous wealth of the North American continent. Almost all areas have an inherent wealth of some kind, but assets left idle in the ground or infertile in the brain define countries which fail, or are not victorious in their quest for unbridled sovereignty.

Thus, a decline in currency value is exacerbated, or accelerated, by the increasing supply of money, inextricably depreciating its value, particularly at a time of decreasing productivity in vital perishable and non-perishable output.

The US Obama Administration has focused entirely on an agenda of expanding government — the seizure of the envied (and often ephemeral) “wealth” of the producers — without addressing the process of facilitating the production of essential commodities and goods. Even the USSR and the People’s Republic of China, during their communist periods, focused — albeit badly — on the production of goods and services, when they realized that the “wealth” to be “redistributed” existed only as the result of production and innovation. The US, meanwhile, heavily as a result of policies of the former Clinton Administration, has “outsourced” production, and the State — that is, the Government — cannot easily, in the US, become the producer.

Pres. Obama has addressed the US’ economic crisis by expanding government, and government-related, employment in non-productive sectors, while at the same time blaming and punishing the private sector for all of the US’ ills. Empowered by the extended franchise, this was the politics of envy now becoming enabled.

Moreover, the populist, short-term response to the major oil-spill in the Gulf of Mexico was clearly geared toward (a) transforming a crisis into an opportunity to pursue a green energy agenda by highlighting the evils of the fossil fuels on which the US remains dependent; (b) ensuring that the President was not blamed for the poor crisis response; and (c) ensuring that the Democratic Party did not suffer from the crisis in the November 2010 mid-term Congressional elections.

The result of all the Obama initiatives has been to expand government and reduce or absolutely control and tax the private sector, even though, without the private sector, the US has no viable export or self-sustaining capability. The net effect has been to mirror — and overtake — the situation in which, for example, Germany found itself a decade ago: without the ability to retain capital investment or attract new capital investment.

Mr. Copley then outlines the foolish (or diabolical) policies that will ensure capital flight, the decline of productive capacity, recession, and inflation in the USA and other Western countries. I recommend reading the entire article, but here are some snips from his analysis of Europe:

Artificial, wealth-induced complacency following the end of the Cold War led to fury when economic collapse inevitably occurred in 2010, leading to draconian restraint in public spending in many societies, but particularly Greece and Spain. It is said that tourists are warned not to feed bears in Yellowstone National Park (in the US) because the bears do not understand when the tourists have run out of food. State-fed populations in Europe, the US, and Australia (see below) equally do not understand when the free ride is over, and work must recommence.

Germany, France, and the United Kingdom have begun the arduous path back to recovery, but the euro may, as a currency, have been irrevocably damaged, and the European Union itself may have spent the term of its virility. Clearly, the wealth-induced complacency, which had the compounding effect of allowing a decline in a sense of national survival and national identity among the European Union (EU) component states, has led now to a revived — but as yet unrealized — sense of nationalism.

This is beginning to lead to the recognition of the cohesive national efficiency required for survival and competitiveness. It can be said that the EU destroyed nationalism, without replacing it with any mechanism to create a new sense of social cohesion, thus removing Europe’s capability for economic competitiveness, self-defense, or ability to define a new culture (and identity) to replace the national identities.

Had the British Labour Party Government of outgoing Prime Minister Gordon Brown persisted in office with his slavishly doctrinaire governance — and demonstrably unworkable socialism, led by a privileged élite of Labour mandarins wallowing at the trough — it is possible that an economic recovery in the UK would have been problematic. It may still be problematic. And in this, Brown was a prototype Obama, with his rank sense of entitlement.

Even now, the British political psyche is fractured along geographic lines, and, wealth-induced, considers itself effectively “post-industrial”, and therefore beyond the need for a manufacturing (or even agricultural base). Thus, even though the UK is now far more dependent on a maritime trade base than at any time in its history, it is incapable of defending or projecting that maritime base; neither does it have the wherewithal to trade.

Mr. Copley goes on to examine Australia, and then wraps up with his general conclusions, which include this observation:

The West is at its watershed, not because of a threat from a less-productive society. The collapse of the West is not because Islam is at the gates. Islam is at the gates because of the collapse of the West.

This is precisely the case. Islam is a virus of opportunity, and in the purulent corpse of the post-capitalist Western welfare state it has found a source of plunder unprecedented in its 1400-year history.

And, based on recent events, one cannot help but believe that our current self-destruction is intentional.

In 1917 Lenin intentionally destroyed the ancien régime in Russia. But even he intended to build something on the ruins. Twisted and demonic as the Bolsheviks were, they envisioned a shining utopia in the new Soviet Russia.

But what does Obama intend for us?

Beyond a smoking ruin where the United States used to be, what does he envision?


Hat tip: Arius.