By Selwyn Duke
In
all my life I have never seen such intense emotion surrounding a leader as that
evoked by Barack Obama. Even Ronald
Reagan, the Gipper himself, didn’t enjoy the kind of prostration of the will
offered to the president-elect by hordes of followers. Yet, while people the world over are imbued
with “hope” and chant Obama’s slogan “Yes, we can!” – for instance, the French are
using their translation of it, “Oui, nous
pouvons!” – some of the intense emotion is of a very different species.
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It is fear.
In all my life I have never seen an
American politician who could make so many Americans’ blood run cold. Some may mention the left’s feelings
regarding Reagan or President Bush, but there is no equivalency. For all of leftists’ bluster and melodrama,
they weren’t afraid of those men as much as they, well, just hated them. Sure, leftist ideologues said those two
Republicans were scary, but the same people also said that each one was both
dumb and Machiavellian. Hatred is an
emotion, and emotion isn’t logical; it just conjures up whatever feels right at
the moment.
In Obama’s case, however, I sense a
real, palpable, go-white-in-the-face fear akin to what might be evident in
someone who has a gun put to his head or believes he has seen a demon. I know for instance, a stout-hearted man of
rough-hewn breeding and my political persuasion who has said about the
impending changing of the guard, “I’m afraid.”
However, he is a right-winger like
me, and just as with the leftist ideologues who “feared” Reagan and Bush, we
aren’t exactly a representative sample of America.
But this is what is truly, well,
scary. I have seen this fear not just in
rightist politics wonks but also in people who are not in the habit of
troubling much over politics at all. For
example, I was surprised recently when a woman I know – someone who could
easily abide by the injunction, “Never discuss religion or politics” – said in
a most sober fashion that she was thinking of leaving the country. Then
there is an elderly Jewish gentleman of my acquaintance who lived through WWII;
this man could be described as almost apolitical, was probably more apt to vote
Democrat than Republican and isn’t given to issuing political opinion, let
alone hyperbole. Yet when someone else
broached the subject of Obama’s legions of fawning admirers, he broke his
pattern and interjected, “This is like what happened with Hitler. . . .”
Then consider this statement
printed a couple of months ago:
“Big Brother had nothing on the
Obamas. They plan to herd American youth into government-funded reeducation
camps where they’ll be brainwashed into thinking America is a racist,
oppressive place in need of ‘social change.’”
Is this the rambling of some
right-wing site occupying the dark recesses of the Web or a radical on a
soapbox? I mean, after all, it’s not the
kind of thing you read in the New York
Times. Actually, it’s excerpted from
a September 4 piece
in Investor’s Business Daily (IBD), a
mainstream paper of great repute.
Are all these people
delusional? Are they simply stuck in
time and afraid of change?
Maybe it’s that they have some idea
what that change will be.
Fear can certainly be and often is
irrational. Yet, generally speaking, the
most real fear comes from real threats. A ghost story may scare a child, but not nearly as much as if he
actually sees a ghost. Imagining what
it’s like to have a gun to your head may be scary, but not as much so as if you
feel cold, blued steel pressed against your temple. And I sense real fear.
What is there to be afraid of? A good place to start is with the content of
the IBD story cited earlier.
Most of us have heard Obama state
that “We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as
powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded” as the military. This alone is enough to send shivers up an
informed spine, but it gets even worse when you hear the specifics. Obama intends to use a radical activist group
he helped found called “Public Allies” as the model for, as IBD puts it, “. . .
his Orwellian program, ‘Universal Voluntary Public Service.’”
IBD reports on the inducements used
to entice young people into this national service corps and its true aim:
. . . they’ll get a monthly stipend of up to
$1,800, plus paid health and child care. They also get a post-service education
award of $4,725 that can be used to pay off past student loans or fund future
education.
But its real mission is to radicalize
American youth and use them to bring about ‘social change’ through threats,
pressure, tension and confrontation — the tactics used by the father of
community organizing, Saul "The Red" Alinsky.
As bad as this sounds, I believe
the reality will be far worse. I’ll
explain where I think this will lead, but first we must understand a collective
psychological phenomenon that is now apparent.
When Abraham in the Bible was
prepared to obey God’s command and sacrifice his son Isaac on Mount Moriah, it
was, and this may shock some, understandable. God is perfect and the author of morality, and while we may not always
understand His ways, the Divine Mind always knows what is best. So the story is a lesson of faith and trust
in God. God cannot be wrong. You don’t question God.
Whether you have faith or not, it’s
easy enough to grasp that such deference is understandable when talking about a
perfect, divine being. But it’s downright
dangerous when applied to a human being. Any human being.
Unfortunately, while the deific
monikers applied to Obama such as “The One” or “The Messiah” have become grist
for comedians, humorists and just plain old wise-guys, they’re no laughing
matter. They reflect a real spirit that
has imbued millions, and this is why far scarier than Obama are his
followers. They have deified the man,
and you don’t question your god. I truly
believe that just as many Germans followed Hitler over the precipice during
WWII, there are many Americans today who would follow Obama unquestioningly,
unthinkingly, unknowingly – into the fires of Hell.
If this sounds as laughable as
deific labels, know that it isn’t radical to claim that a continually-recycling
historical pattern will manifest itself again and can do so here; radical is to
imply that within American borders the laws of man’s nature are somehow
suspended. In nature (not culture),
Americans are no different from the people who followed Hitler, Mussolini,
Ayatollah Khomeini, Pol Pot or Lenin. The tendency to deify leaders is universal.
With this understanding, I’ll now
give you my prediction as to how Obama’s Universal Voluntary Public Service
program will evolve.
With his oratorical skills and a
complicit media, the president-elect will be able to sell this scheme with talk
about security, equality and liberating the downtrodden. “It’s the best way to combat crime,
hopelessness and a lack of opportunity in the inner city,” he will say. “And I know this well from my days as a community
organizer on Chicago’s mean streets.” He
will tout how it provides health care, education and skills to the have-nots,
and his media-oiled silver tongue’s salesmanship will prevail. It will be sold with a low-end price tag, and
his fellow-traveler controlled Houses will echo the message and deliver the
votes. Of course, just like Social
Security and a trove of other government programs, its cost will make a mockery
of predictions. But Uncle Sam’s budget
projections aren’t designed for budgets, but for marketing.
As always happens with such groups,
program members will eventually be identified with some colloquial and catchy label. I can’t tell you what it will be, only that
it won’t be Brownshirts or Blackshirts. And the official name of the program itself may even be changed a few
years hence.
As with the Public Allies program,
members will have to attend seminars and “retreats” where they will be
indoctrinated with leftist ideology. Aside from learning how America is a “racist and “sexist” country, they will
be taught that she is also ridden with “heterosexism,” which, IBD writes, “. .
. a Public Allies training seminar in Chicago describes as a negative byproduct
of ‘capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy and male-dominated privilege.’” They will be taught that these evils can
never be vanquished until every last vestige of traditional America is utterly
destroyed.
The pressure to conform will be
immense, as it always is in politically-correct entities. The corps will have a huge core of true
believers, who will act as ideological hammers. They will preach diversity but practice conformity.
Just like Public Allies, this
program may be birthed primarily in the inner cities. That is where Obama’s main support is, and,
as stated before, he will claim this is where the corps’ help is needed
most. It will then be empowered to do
“social good,” which could mean anything from helping at soup kitchens to
recruiting those ripe for indoctrination to forming some kind of neighborhood
crime watch. As for the last task,
though, given the corps’ ideology and the fact that it will be drawing members
from high-crime areas initially, I expect it to contain a not insignificant
criminal element. It will be corrupt
from the get-go and may even assume the character of an organized crime
syndicate.
But its “security” mandate will be
chilling. In the name of combating
garden-variety crime and, more specifically, terrorism, who knows what powers the
corps will be granted? Will they one day
help enforce an order to seize firearms, if not via direct action then through
information gathering? I can’t know
exactly, but I do know the powers will be misused.
Over time, the program may be
expanded to include a corps for even younger adolescents, perhaps starting at
age 13 or 14. As before, I can’t tell
you exactly what it will be called, but it won’t be “The Obama Youth” – not
officially, anyway. And, certainly by
this time, joining it will be the thing the “cool” kids do, sort of like the
Boy Scouts’ evil twin.
Then, the result may be that we
will have, to use John Edwards’ terminology, “two Americas”: Those who belong
to the corps and those who don’t. But I
think I know which of the two will be more formidable. Remember when the student thugs at Columbia
University stormed a stage to stop Minutemen representatives from
speaking? Similar things have happened
at colleges throughout the country, and they give us a glimpse into the
character of the corps. Just picture the
same fascist-minded bullies, only more organized, more numerous, even more
ideological and far, far bolder. And
many authorities in the nation may tolerate their intimidation with a wink and
a nod.
We should also take note of the
program’s name, Universal Voluntary Public Service. One of the definitions of
“universal” is, “affecting, concerning, or involving all [emphasis mine].” And I
suspect the word most likely to be dropped from the name eventually is not
“universal” but “voluntary.”
Of course, they don’t call me the
Amazing Kreskin. I’m no soothsayer and I
could be wrong about many of the details I provided. But the fear is real and the historical
allusions are valid.
Speaking of which, Georgia
Congressman Paul Broun recently addressed the program and exhibited both fear
and a grasp of history, saying:
"That’s exactly what Hitler
did in Nazi Germany and it’s exactly what the Soviet Union did. When he’s proposing to have a national
security force that’s answering to him, that is as strong as the U.S. military,
he’s showing me signs of being Marxist."
Of course, many will nevertheless
say that such concerns are but the musings of the tin-foil hat crowd. But such scoffing is par for the course. As Professor Manfred Weidhorn of Yeshiva
University wrote:
. . . even if you are prescient enough to
observe oncoming evils, you are prevented from acting precisely because other
people, being normal, lack your prescience. They therefore see you, rather than
the evil person, as the deluded or warmongering malevolent soul. When Churchill
warned about Hitler in the 1930s, many people became more upset with Churchill
than with Hitler. The anomaly is that the prophet has therefore to wait for the
evil to manifest itself and thereby to make everyone else see things the
prophet’s way. But by then the chance to do anything may be gone.
So there is an answer for those who would say
“You’ve thoroughly Godwinned
yourself, Duke.” If you bristle at the
comparison and don’t want to wear the shoe, then the onus is on you to be vigilant,
to make sure it never, ever fits.
© 2008 Selwyn Duke — All Rights Reserved
selwynduke.com 
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