From Tucker Carlson at Modern Age:
It happened because only one side of the revolution recognized that it was a revolution. The other side had no idea.
One side saw these changes for what they were: Let’s completely change American society, from the bottom to the top. Let’s eliminate any sense of shared culture or history. Let’s atomize the country to the point where there’s no viable opposition to what we’re doing. And once we’ve done that, let’s addle everyone with prescription drugs. Let’s encourage them to be unhealthy, unmarried, and childless, and then we can do whatever we want.
And no one’s aware on the other side—which is not just the right, but the vast bulk of everyone else, which would include a lot of Democrats and just normal people who aren’t at all interested in the revolution. They had no idea what was happening.
It’s important to understand the moment that you’re in. It cuts against the very core of human nature to understand that, because denial is the most powerful of all human instincts.
Twenty-two years ago I was in a plane that crashed in the Middle East, flying from Peshawar, Pakistan, after 9/11. I was going over to cover the Taliban, and we went down in a sand dune in Dubai.
There was an explosion in the cargo hold. The plane starts dropping, and the wing appears to detach, the right wing. The plane is struggling for altitude and going sideways. It’s three in the morning over the Arabian Sea.
Every person on that plane thought we were going to die, very much including me. We finally come in sideways into the sand dune plains. I’m in the first seat—it’s a big double-aisle Airbus—and I just had one thought, which is, “I’m getting off the plane.” It’s totally dark, but you can see burning from the wing, so it’s time to depart. I hop up, and this male flight attendant stands right in front of me and goes, “Sit down! Everything is fine! Everything is fine!”
That’s a verbatim quote. Everything is fine. It was so demonstrably unfine that I can’t even begin to describe how unfine it was. Out of pure panic, I ignored the guy and opened the door, the slide went up, and I jumped into darkness with four other Westerners in the front. Everyone in the back, though, was like, “Oh, everything’s fine.” (The pilots, by the way, went right out the front windows.)
I’ve brooded on this for over 20 years—why did the flight attendant claim everything was fine? I think he just couldn’t metabolize the change. It was so awful he just could not admit what was happening right there in front of everybody. This really bothered me all these years, despite the fact it wound up fine for me.
Then I read the biography of Pyotr Wrangel, who was the leader of the revolutionary White forces during the Russian Revolution—the Civil War, rather, that came after the Revolution. He was a Baltic German living in Russia and a general who worked for the tsar. The First World War ends, and Russia ceases its hostilities with Germany, he comes back to St. Petersburg, and the country’s in complete chaos.
The Bolsheviks have decided that discontent within the army is what we need to inflame; we need to get the army. Get the guns and the people who wield the guns: We need them. The first thing to do is destroy all discipline in the tsar’s army.
Pyotr Wrangel’s just been on the front for four years. He comes back to St. Petersburg, a totally civilized city, a two-hour drive from Helsinki—it’s Europe. He’s wandering through, and soldiers are going crazy in the streets; they’re raping women, stealing at gunpoint. Soldiers in uniform, in a monarchy which had not had any behavior like this, and he, Pyotr Wrangel, just can’t believe it. These are his soldiers; he’s a general. He goes into a movie theater, and everyone in the movie theater is completely absorbed in the movie, as if there’s no revolution happening outside. Wrangel thinks these people are insane.
He takes the train to Moscow: I have to tell the tsar this country’s falling apart. He’s very close to the Romanovs, and he goes into the imperial court—he knows all the relatives and hangers-on. He notices about 80 percent of the women in the Romanov family are wearing red ribbons in solidarity with the Bolsheviks (who wound up, of course, murdering them).
Wait, what? Pyotr Wrangel says: How is it that this country is being devoured by a violent revolution and the people who can afford movie tickets, our middle class, are refusing even to acknowledge that it’s happening, and the ruling class, against whom it is aimed, are sympathizing with it?
I’m reading this, and I couldn’t go to sleep. I was like, wait—I live in that country; that’s happening now. This is a revolution. If someone tells you you’re not allowed to speak, if someone tells you your children are not your children, these are not ideological differences. This is not, “Oh, I prefer this capital gains rate.” These are totalitarian measures that treat you as nonhuman. Human beings, free citizens, get to say what they think. Slaves must be quiet. That’s the distinction. It precedes the First Amendment. As our founding documents make clear, these are natural rights that distinguish the citizen from the slave.
We should begin to see this for what it is, which is a very big deal on which it all depends—not just our republic, but your family. (Read more.)
No comments:
Post a Comment