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For the Possibility That She Can Live, Kira Argounova Gives the Criminal Gang More Rope

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Now that we are deep into Part I of We the Living, its interesting that on Sunday August 16th, philosopher Harry Binswanger recalled his first experience with Ayn Rand’s 1936 novel. As a freshman at MIT in 1960, he attended a lecture and became not only enchanted with Rand’s ideas, but also the clarity of her convictions. Soon after, he tackled an intellectual and emotional tour de force, Atlas Shrugged.

After returning from John Galt’s world, he was surprised by the equally impressive and psychological The Fountainhead, then the science fiction-like Anthem, and lastly We the Living. Aware that Rand’s earliest novel was the closest to an autobiography, he thought, “It won’t be very much. It will be one of these novels about a person’s childhood.”

It was the same thing over again! And I fell in love with Kira. So I love We the Living. I can see now that it was Ayn Rand from the beginning. True, it wasn’t as philosophical, but it was love of life, the love of freedom, and the love of a woman for a man.

That man is Leo Kovalensky, a fugitive from the Soviet police. Chapter 7 sealed Kira’s emotional desire when she whispered, “I was thinking about you, today. Were you thinking about me?” Leo replied, “You know what I wanted to tell you?”

Without thought, without will or question, in a voice that was someone’s order to her, not her voice, she answered, “Yes.” And someone’s order to her repeated through her lips, persistently, hungrily, insanely: “Leo, I love you.”

However, Soviet friend Andrei had taken her to the opera the previous evening. To prepare for the event, Kira spent hours with her mother and sister to create a new dress from an old one. Later that night at home, the girl who didn’t care what she wore “remembered regretfully that he had said nothing about her new dress.” The dress was something she made, because she wanted it, and recognition for what is good.

While Andrei’s Communist pathology prevents him from recognizing the desires of others, Chapter 8 illustrates the same disregard for human life that was inflicted on his family by the Czar’s police. Yet during the Revolution, the morning after a battle, he shows mercy to an enemy soldier. “As long as one can walk . . . ,” said Andrei. “One walks,” finished the man. They fight for the sake of the fight. Is this a contradiction? In our online forum, Doctor J checks its premise,

Andrei is not noble. He has allowed himself to be brainwashed. An honorable man thinks for himself. Like a lot of citizens during that time in Russia, honorable behavior was only on display when leadership wasn’t watching. When they were, they towed the party line.

And Kira understood the Party line, as well as the punch line. When interrogated by Andrei’s accomplice, Pavel Syerov, about meeting with Leo, “Who was that man at the gate with you last night?” She replies, “What man? He repeats, “Who was that man?  Kira resists, I wasn’t interested enough to ask him.” Syerov continues, “Very well. I won’t ask you that.” Kira then asks, “Who was that man?” Syerov pounds the table, “Citizen Argounova, do you have to be reminded that this is no joke?” Kira was ready, “If it isn’t, will you tell me what it is?” Pavel unravels, “You’ll understand what it is and damn quick.”

Here, Gen Z’er Kira has exposed Rand’s sense of humor and Pavel’s greatest weakness – he has nothing without public cooperation. She knows his object is unearned wealth, his carrot is social justice, and his stick is his criminal gang. Greed, envy, and fear are also the hallmarks of today’s Democratic party.

In chapter 3, we were treated to Kira’s sense of justice. A bully at her school in Crimea had “declared a boycott against a freckled little girl.” Kira, who normally ate lunch alone, was confronted while sitting with this girl. “Do you know what you’re doing, Argounova?” demanded the leader of the girl gang. “Eating mush. Won’t you sit down?” Instead, the thug asks, “Do you know what this girl here has done?” Kira replies, “I haven’t the slightest idea.”

In both cases, Kira adopts the technique of playing by their rules and giving them more rope for hanging themselves. The bully responds, “You haven’t? Then why are you doing this for her?” Kira was ready, “You’re mistaken, I am not doing this for her. I am doing it against twenty-eight other girls.” The bully unravels, “So you think its smart to go against the majority?” Democracy in action.

Today, the joke is the so-called Democratic National Convention – a show about nothing except airing grievances. A Festivus celebration of wiseguys embalming Joe Biden as honorary crime boss, er, beacon of hope and change. Lurking at the forum, Uncle Bob relates, “I briefly studied education at Moscow State in 1973. I have a feel for the dialectic of those times and how, even now, people who grew up in that respond to the world.“

In 2020 America, Democratic mob hatred of the individual is focused on President Trump, so he’s out there giving them more rope, ‘if this convention isn’t a joke, will you tell me what it is? I haven’t the slightest idea.’ The malevolent universe of President Obama’s hope and change is why Trump ran for President. Portland’s punks, Chicago’s chaos, Baltimore’s blight and the destruction of New York as a world-class city come to mind.

In 1920’s Russia, Andrei’s criminal mob religion was political propaganda, its church was government, and its baptism was fire. Their goal was to wrest power from the feudalism of Czarist Russia, whose church was medieval. Their shared enemy was, and is, the individual. In Chapter 9, Kira explains,

If I asked people whether they believed in life, they never understand what I meant. So I ask if they believe in God. If they say they do, then I know they don’t believe in life. Whoever places his highest conception above his own possibility thinks very little of himself and his life.

Kira continues, “It’s a rare gift to feel reverence for your own life. To want the highest possible, now, for your very own.” Andrei unravels, “You’re a strange girl.” To which Kira tells him, and us, “You see, you and I, we believe in life. But you want to fight for it, to kill for it, even to die – for life. I only want to live it.”

In America.

Do You know the Names Gramsci, Marcuse, Adorno, Horkheimer and Brecht? They’re The Ones Destroying American Values.

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Have you ever heard of Antonio Gramsci? How about Herbert Marcuse? Or the Frankfurt School?

These names are probably meaningless to all but a small minority of scholars academics and political theorists throughout the world. Yet, Americans — and indeed all those who treasure the religion, culture and history of Western Civilization — should become acquainted with these names if they are to understand the forces that are currently tearing society apart.

Marxism appeared on the scene in Europe in the mid-19th century. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels posited a thesis that capitalist society was doomed to demise as the “proletariat” — the working class — rose up to overthrow their oppressors, the “bourgeoisie” — the middle class of property owners. Marx and Engels saw world history through the prism of a perpetual class struggle between these two implacable enemies. Marx predicted that socialist revolutions would spring up throughout the West as the proletariat overthrew the bourgeoisie and established dictatorships in the name of the “people.”

Fortunately for us, but unfortunately for Marx, his prediction fell short.  The socialist revolutions largely failed to materialize in Europe or America. The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 arrived in Russia — vanguard of the East — and had as much to do with the tragic casualties and deprivations of World War I as anything to do with the wealth of the propertied classes. Subsequent communist revolutions that attempted to replicate what Lenin achieved in Russia — be they in postwar Hungary under Bela Kun or Germany under Rosa Luxemburg were either short-lived or failed altogether.

Aside from Mao’s communist takeover of mainland China in 1949 — which again happened in the East, not the West and again on the heels of a major destructive world war — most communist successes in the post-World War II era occurred not as a result of a spontaneous uprising of the proletariat but at the point of a bayonet. Communist regimes were forcibly imposed by Moscow on most of central and eastern Europe as an Iron Curtain darkened the continent for the next 40 years.

The intellectual followers of Marx were disappointed. Their vision of a worldwide uprising against the propertied classes — based on economics alone — had not caught fire.

It was time for a new strategy. These left-wing academics — with names like Gramsci, Marcuse, Adorno, Horkheimer and Brecht — collectively represented something called the Frankfurt School. The Frankfurt School — associated with the Institute for Social Research at Goethe University in Germany — was an assembly of political dissidents and malcontents who determined that Marx had gotten it  backwards. Instead of an economic revolution igniting a cultural revolution, they believed only by a “long march through the institutions” of the West could they achieve their communist objectives.

To that end, they launched a broad-based attack on all the traditional institutions of Western society: The universities, the media, publishing, motion pictures, as well as the church and the family. Everything was fair game, if it reflected the traditional Judeo-Christian values of existing society — from sexual mores to national sovereignty.

According to Cultural Marxists like Antonio Gramsci, a “cultural hegemony” of the capitalist class was using institutions like traditional marriage as an instrument of oppression. Everyone was now a victim of these cultural oppressors: Women, racial minorities, immigrants, homosexuals, Muslims — it was the rise of identity politics embraced by today’s Democratic Party that attempts to pit one group against another in order to achieve permanent political power.

As Gerald Warner wrote in Breitbart News: “By the post-War era the Cultural Marxist program had a wide-reaching agenda of destruction. It aimed to destroy the family, denying the specific roles of the father and mother, and advocated the teaching of sex and homosexuality to children; mobilization of women as revolutionaries against men, through aggressive feminism; large-scale immigration to abolish national identity; dependency on the state and state benefits; control and infantilisation of the media.”

Of course, most Americans began recognizing the signs of cultural upheaval in the 1960s, particularly after 1965, culminating in what Pope Benedict XVI called the “Revolution of 1968.” Suddenly, everything was under attack; even the very notion of civil government and law. Authority was automatically to be questioned and anything and everything associated with the established order and traditional societal norms and values, traditions and ideas was to be wiped out.

Cultural Marxism is the father of the Democratic Party’s identity politics and political correctness. It is the father of transgender insanity and racial polarization. It is the father of open borders and rights for illegal immigrants. And, yes, it is even the father of the anarchy and nihilism that gives rise to mass  shooters and to Hollywood movies that portray hunting human beings for sport as  “entertainment.”

Yes, Marx’s economic theories may have failed, but his wicked offspring in the Cultural Marxist movement are having the last laugh on all of us who believe in a society rooted in religion, morality and law. The fact that their “culture-first, economics-second” strategy is working can be seen in how the millennials — brainwashed for years by their Cultural Marxist professors in America’s colleges and universities — are now so enthusiastic about socialism.

James Veltmeyer via Washington Times

How Much Of Your Economic Freedom Do You Want To Preserve? Democrats Aim To Double The Size Of Government.

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Leading Democrats are pushing an agenda that would more than double the size of the federal government. This comes as a new Gallup Poll finds that the public views government as the most important problem facing the country today.

Gallup regularly asks what are the biggest problems facing the country today. The latest shows “government” well in the lead, with “immigration” No. 2.

Another Gallup poll finds that, despite all the focus on left-wing celebrities like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, the country remains far more conservative than liberal — with 35% saying they are conservative compared with 26% who are liberal. The rest fall in the middle.

More ‘Socialist’ Than Sweden

Nevertheless, many in the Democratic Party are rushing to embrace policies that would, if enacted, result in government controlling a bigger share of the U.S. economy than “socialist” countries like Sweden or Norway.

There’s no doubt that each of these proposals has a bumper sticker appeal: “Medicare for all,” “universal Pre-K,” “universal free college,” “guaranteed jobs,” “paid family leave,” expanded Social Security benefits, a federal $15 minimum wage. They all poll well, at least.

But the costs to implement any one of them would be staggering. “Medicare for all,” for example, would cost, conservatively, $32 trillion in its first 10 years. The “guaranteed jobs” price tag is about $7 trillion over a decade. Universal Pre-K: $150 billion. Free college: $750 billion. The “Green New Deal” — untold billions.

When the Manhattan Institute added up the cost of this expansive agenda, the price tag totaled $42.5 trillion over 10 years, or roughly $4.2 trillion a year. And that’s likely a lowball estimate, since government programs almost always end up costing far more than expected.

Exactly how big is this tab? Well, consider that in 2018, the federal government spent a grand total of $4.1 trillion.

So, we are talking about more than doubling the size of the federal government.

58% of GDP

It would result in the federal government controlling more than 40% of the nation’s GDP. When you add in state and local spending, the result would be that government would control 58% of the nation’s economy.

That’s a bigger share than supposed socialist role model countries like Finland, where government spending accounts for 57% of that country’s economy, Sweden (49%), Norway (48.8%), the Netherlands (44.5%), or the U.K. (42%).

In fact, this Democratic agenda would, if enacted, result in a bigger government than any of the other 35 industrialized countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. So much for Democratic President Bill Clinton’s declaration that “the era of big government is over.”

What would it take to finance a government of this magnitude?

225% Tax Hike

As it stands today, federal tax revenues are about 17% of GDP. That’s about the average since World War II, despite the myriad changes in the tax code over those years.

To pay for those new programs — without adding to the already nearly $1 trillion in annual deficits — would require a 225% increase in federal taxes.

However appealing this agenda might sound. It would constitute economic suicide.

 

This editorial first appeared at Investors Business Daily (https://www.investors.com) on Jan 18th, 2019

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