Petty Tyranny

From The Z Man:

One of the stranger things about the current age is that very few people talk about the Cold War or the events that drove it. For people living from the 1950’s through the 1980’s, it was the central topic of politics. When the Soviet Empire collapsed, it was if everyone decided to forget about the whole thing. If it is mentioned at all it is usually a conservative trying to remind people that socialism does not produce high quality consumer goods or not enough choices in the cereal aisle. 

The great ideological battle between socialism and liberalism has been reduced to a battle between market economics versus command economics. The winner was the one that made better home electronics. Yet, right up to the end of the Cold War, the battle was not about economics. Sure, the lack of blue jeans and rock music was a popular way to mock the Soviet system, but even there it was not about the products, but the reason why they existed in the West and not the East. 

The West opposed communism not because of GDP numbers or cheap consumer goods, but because communism was not just immoral, but evil. Controlling the granular details of people’s lives was monstrous. Communist countries did not allow their people to voice their opinions or choose how they lived. They could not even choose where they lived, as the government assigned apartments. The image of the “iron curtain” was to compare the Soviet system to a penal colony. 

On the other side, the Soviets were fond of pointing out how blacks in America were treated poorly. There was also the urban squalor and poverty. Some Americans might enjoy blue jeans and rock music, but millions lived in squalor. Of course, the existence of super rich living in mansions was immoral on its face, given that so many people were living in poverty. The communist could privately concede that their system was not making equal consumer goods, but it was still morally superior. 

It’s strange how the great ideological struggle of the last century is largely forgotten or reduced to a contest over breakfast cereal selections at the market, while the short fight between liberalism and fascism is cast entirely in moral terms. The West won the fight with fascism on material grounds. America could make more planes, guns and tanks than the fascists. There was the normal wartime propaganda about the evilness of the fascist, but it was never an ideological struggle. 

The battle with communism, on the other hand, was always a about the basic moral difference between the two systems. There was never any doubt that the communist could match the west militarily. In fact, a frequent theme of American politics in the Cold War was how we had to rededicate ourselves to liberty in order to keep pace with the Soviets in missiles, the space race and technology. Again, the material aspect was just a part of the much larger moral argument against communism. (Read more.)

From Front Page Mag:

It can, and already has, led to incalculable pain and suffering. It is no stretch to call these evils. Consider all that has occurred over the last six or seven weeks or so, since the dawn of The Great UnReason: 

(1Thirty million Americans have been forced into the ranks of the unemployed by government fiat; 

(2)Hundreds of thousands of small business owners, upon being forced by the same governmental decrees to close their doors, have been divested of their livelihoods, robbed of the blood, sweat, and tears that they spent years investing in pursuit of their versions of the American Dream; 

(3)The Constitutional rights and liberties that define America as the unique nation that it is and for which generations of Americans have sacrificed their “lives, fortunes, and sacred honor” have been indefinitely revoked by politicians who pledged to protect them; 

(4)All of those associations, the myriad of communities that, comprising as they do the whole of civil society, constitute our very identities as the unique human beings that we are; those relationships that transfigure us from the atomistic individuals of liberal political theory and the two-legged animals of Darwinian biology into persons and citizens—these have been substantially eroded by “social distancing;” 

(5)People with serious, potentially terminal medical conditions in need of life-saving treatment have been either denied this treatment by hospitals that have cleared the way for COVID patients or they have been discouraged from seeking out that treatment by merchants of fear in positions of power; 

(6)Domestic violence has increased substantially; 

(7)Suicides are undoubtedly on the rise (though exact numbers are not yet forthcoming), but “news of suicide linked to the COVID-19 crisis have swept the globe” since late March “and sadly show no signs of abating.” 

(These suicides, incidentally, are caused both by the panic stoked by a fear-mongering media as well as by the dread of the isolation produced by what Drs. Fauci and Birx and their supporters euphemistically call “mitigation.”)

(8) Depression, anxiety, dejection, despondency, loneliness—all have been observed to have “spiked” in the UK, and in the US; (Read more.)  

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