The Revolution Was

I thought it appropriate to follow propagandawerks' post with this excerpt from Garet Garrett. He dates the revolution that killed America to the New Deal era. The full story can be found at these and other sites.

http://mises.org/story/2726#4
http://www.geocities.com/Pentagon/6315/revolutn.html

THE REVOLUTION WAS
by Garet Garrett

1938

There are those who still think they are holding the pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong direction. The revolution is behind them. It went by in the Night of Depression, singing songs to freedom.

There are those who have never ceased to say very earnestly, "Something is going to happen to the American form of government if we don't watch out." These were the innocent disarmers. Their trust was in words. They had forgotten their Aristotle. More than 2,000 years ago he wrote of what can happen within the form, when "one thing takes the place of another, so that the ancient laws will remain, while the power will be in the hands of those who have brought about revolution in the state."

Worse outwitted were those who kept trying to make sense of the New Deal from the point of view of all that was implicit in the American scheme, charging it therefore with contradiction, fallacy, economic ignorance, and general incompetence to govern.

But it could not be so embarrassed and all that line was wasted, because, in the first place, it never intended to make that kind of sense, and secondly, it took off from nothing that was implicit in the American scheme. It took off from a revolutionary base. The design was European. Regarded from the point of view of revolutionary technic it made perfect sense. Its meaning was revolutionary and it had no other. For what it meant to do it was from the beginning consistent in principle, resourceful, intelligent, masterly in workmanship, and it made not one mistake.

The test came in the first one hundred days.

No matter how carefully a revolution may have been planned there is bound to be a crucial time. That comes when the actual seizure of power is taking place. In this case certain steps were necessary. They were difficult and daring steps. But more than that, they had to be taken in a certain sequence, with forethought and precision of timing. One out of place might have been fatal. What happened was that one followed another in exactly the right order, not one out of time or out of place.

Having passed this crisis, the New Deal went on from one problem to another, taking them in the proper order, according to revolutionary technic; and if the handling of one was inconsistent with the handling of another, even to the point of nullity, that was blunder in reverse. The effect was to keep people excited about one thing at a time, and divided, while steadily through all the uproar of outrage and confusion a certain end, held constantly in view, was pursued by main intention.

The end held constantly in view was power.

In a revolutionary situation mistakes and failures are not what they seem. They are scaffolding. Error is not repealed. It is compounded by a longer law, by more decrees and regulations, by further extensions of the administrative hand. As deLawd said in The Green Pastures, that when you have passed a miracle you have to pass another one to take care of it, so it was with the New Deal. Every miracle it passed, whether it went right or wrong, had one result. Executive power over the social and economic life of the nation was increased. Draw a curve to represent the rise of executive power and look there for the mistakes. You will not find them. The curve is consistent.

At the end of the first year, in his annual message to the Congress, January 4, 1934, President Roosevelt said: "It is to the eternal credit of the American people that this tremendous readjustment of our national life is being accomplished peacefully."

Peacefully if possible — of course.

But the revolutionary historian will go much further. Writing at some distance in time he will be much less impressed by the fact that it was peacefully accomplished than by the marvelous technic of bringing it to pass not only within the form but within the word, so that people were all the while fixed in the delusion that they were talking about the same things because they were using the same words. Opposite and violently hostile ideas were represented by the same word signs. This was the American people's first experience with dialectic according to Marx and Lenin.

Until it was too late few understood one like Julius C. Smith, of the American Bar Association, saying: "Is there any labor leader, any businessman, any lawyer or any other citizen of America so blind that he cannot see that this country is drifting at an accelerated pace into administrative absolutism similar to that which prevailed in the governments of antiquity, the governments of the Middle Ages, and in the great totalitarian governments of today? Make no mistake about it. Even as Mussolini and Hitler rose to absolute power under the forms of law... so may administrative absolutism be fastened upon this country within the Constitution and within the forms of law."

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Good Summary of Our Current Condition

[I regret that the article is no longer available at "propagandawerks" blog. The blog has moved to word press and apparently much of the old posts of value have been lost. The author says he is taking a different approach. Unfortunately, the nude woman seems to have taken a more prominent position, so, with regret, I've removed the blog from my favorites.] [Note added 3/29/10]

I stole the following verbatim from "propagandawerks" blog. (See my favorite blogs list) I tended to shy away from this site at first because some of his (her?) posts seemed a little crude, especially the one with the nude photos of a woman with a thinly veiled suggestion that it's Obama's mother, but, what the hell. The enemies of liberty may put up a air of politeness and decorum, but that doesn't stop them from stealing everything we have and murdering our sons and daughters and the sons and daughters of the many peoples of the world in their wars for global empire. An ally is an ally, and I think this ally is a good one. Let's make bare knuckle fighting respectable again! BTW, my answer to his question is: "My America died in 1913."

http://propagandawerks.blogspot.com/

"Is America dead? I have to ask this question because the answer may have serious ramifications to our lives. Each successive generation does not know what it has lost from the previous generations. This country has been in a steady decline to the point we find ourselves now.

This country as of this moment represents absolutely none of its former glory. Think about that for a moment and what that means. We are no beacon of light to the world. Oh sure, third worlders view our nation as an improvement, but to a roach... a kitchen is Shangri La.

People have been under an organized attack for a long time, and due to our lack of resistance they have been taking our liberties slowly and deliberately. Our state of affairs is so poor that our flag should be flown upside down in a state of emergency. Our constitution is so weak from our lack of interest that it barely protects us anymore.

Inch by inch America is being overthrown. September the 11th was the incident that put an already in motion agenda on a fast track. We are one step away from total chaos with tyranny looming in the background.

What is their one big dilemma? How to get an armed society to surrender it's guns and submit to a high tech nanny state. Take off your shoes citizen, your flip flops may be wired. Get chipped citizen, your identity must be known. Give up your sovereignty citizen, the global community awaits.

Citizen slave. This is your reward for not giving a shit, for not resisting, for caring more about Paris Hilton than your own freedoms, for allowing yourself to be divided on every issue. And it's not just this generation. This result is the outcome of the apathy of our parents and grandparents as well. For allowing the Central Banks to steal our gold standard from us in the dark of night, to waging bogus wars for empire in our name... on and on.

Get pissed off and fight. Not against smokers or old cars that smoke... but for your freedom. Fight for America not in foreign lands, but here at home. Take your own oath to defend the Constitution from all enemies foreign and domestic. Don't accept being put on a terrorist watch list for some trumped up reason you don't even know of. Stop acting like a caged animal and identify what freedom means to you and fight for it. What do you have to lose? A bunch of shit you don't own anyway? A night without American Idol?"

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