the beast that must be destroyed

the “conservative movement” in the united states has become a beast that must be destroyed. it is a hypocritical authoritarian movement that claims to uphold the rights of the individual. conservatives claim that they want freedom and democracy and that they are the biggest supporters of individual rights against intrusion by large organizations such as the government. or at least, that is what they used to claim. the word “conservative” is essentially meaningless nowadays, because of its misuse, just like the word “liberal” has been misused. but the mass popular movement that offers the base of support for the republican party is most commonly referred to as the “conservative movement” by people, even though some may find this to be completely erroneous usage of the word “conservative”, since modern republicans and their core base of supporters have abandoned all principles they once held, and now all they care about is power, winning, having lots of money, and keeping the political machine well oiled and having the right talking heads strategically in place in the right media markets. victory is all that matters to them, and liberals and democrats are considered the #1 enemy, even during times when liberals and democrats are unpopular and conservative republicans control all three branches of the government and much of the media. they have no concern for truth, or for right and wrong, or for anything else, unless it is convenient for them and benefits their side. anything that makes them look bad and the other side look good, they have to come up with some sort of explanation and counterattack, and never ever ever admit to being wrong about anything.

unless hillary clinton starts showing some humility and admitting that she was wrong to vote for the iraq war, or admitting she was wrong about something else important, she is showing that she is perhaps down at the same level as this so-called conservative movement. there is a saying, do not wrassle a pig in mud. or something like that. anyway, here is a book about the so-called conservatives being an authoritarian movement. you can read it for free online. i have not gotten through it yet but i have read a little about it and started to read it. the author is a friend of john dean, who is another famous author who was implicated in the watergate scandal with richard nixon, but has since seen the light. i think john dean still considers himself a conservative, but he rejects today’s so-called conservative movement because it has abandoned all of its core principles and has lost sight of right and wrong, knowing truth from fiction, and has put victory ahead of everything else.

you might wonder, well what is wrong with victory? victory at what, though? whatever the current political debate is... that is where victory is considered essential. and the truth be damned. to these people, the truth means nothing, not unless it favors their side. otherwise, they just make up a pack of lies and have their cronies in the media disseminate the talking points to all of the brainwashed dittoheads. who in the media is behind this? right-wing talk radio hosts such as rush limbaugh, who is basically the guy who pioneered this whole right-wing media operation. he was the first and many others have followed in his footsteps, first in talk radio, and then with the fox news network of syncophants. the fox news network, like right-wing talk radio, is directly committed to this authoritarian propaganda operation, where perhaps both sides are presented but the right-wing side is always presented as correct and the left-wing side is always presented as wrong. now what is the probability of that, that there would be two major political parties, and one of them would be right about everything, and the other would be wrong about everything? there are so many different issues where the 2 parties take opposite sides. it is blindingly obvious by some basic probability calculations that it is almost impossible for one side to always be right.

the republican party and american conservative movement currently happen to be an evil alliance between 2 forces who wish to do us harm, in different ways. the first of the 2 forces is the wealthy and the corporations, whose basic objective is simply to make more money and not have anyone stand in their way, or have to pay too much in taxes or follow too many regulations. the existence of the wealthy and corporations demonstrates a vibrant capitalist economy, but without government-imposed measures that the wealthy oppose, millions of poor people would starve to death in the streets. these measures are a partial, half-assed implementation of socialism, rather than complete all-out communism. there is a continuum of economic policies between the two extremes of right-wing and left-wing. but what is similar about the extremes is, both of them are authoritarian. one side would enslave us to the government, and the other would enslave us to corporations. a moderate policy that balances the interests of the rich, the poor, and the middle class and tries not to violate anyone’s rights, that tries to benefit everyone as much as possible... that is the type that is good. now, the wealthy do not really have much interest in complete authoritarianism, but they may finance such a movement if it benefits the political party they support. as such, the wealthy have formed a marriage of convenience with the religious right, who are the true authoritarians.

the religious right is by far the most authoritarian movement of any that has influence in american politics today. they have a small number of leading figures such as jerry falwell, pat robertson, and james dobson. they are a very vast movement, and are strongest in the rural heartland of the country, and weakest in the cities. their agenda is simple: outlaw abortion and homosexual acts, follow the teachings of the bible word-for-word, have creationism taught in schools either alongside or in place of evolution, post the 10 commandments in public places, have wives act as submissive slaves to their husbands, prohibit the use of contraception, have prayer in schools, convert as many non-christians to christianity as possible, and basically transition our country, one step at a time, backwards into the dark ages, until we become as backwards as the islamic fundamentalists or even more so. what is dangerous about them is that they want to reverse our social progress, the progress that has been made in the over 200 years of our nation’s history. it is clear that they are very sexist, but for the moment, it seems the religious right is acting as if it is not racist at all. they want people of all races to join their movement, because diversity is strength for a movement such as theirs, struggling for a place in a diverse country where many feel that people in this movement are hateful and intolerant towards those who are different.

social darwinism. eugenics. these are theories associated with authoritarianism, specifically the nazis in germany. while the religious right does not subscribe to either of those theories (seeing as they reject darwinism completely, how could they subscribe to social darwinism?), it is still helpful to look at those theories to see how authoritarian movements structure their ideas, and what types of things they believe in. social darwinism and eugenics, when combined, form an ideology of using selective breeding to produce superior individuals, and trying to eliminate undesirable individuals from society. social darwinism and eugenics are actually more popular among people who consider themselves superior, since naturally they think that this would benefit them, and that future generations would be more like them, more superior. so people who are highly successful or very talented or wealthy are more likely to support social darwinism and eugenics. also, those who are failures and hate their own kind, who feel that they are inferior, some of them also support it, because they would like to remove their suffering from future generations. but what do these ideas really mean in practice?

in practice, it means genocide. it means massacres. or at the very least, undesirable or troublesome people would be locked up, away from other people. or sent to re-education camps. or forcibly sterilized. there are many ways to do it. keeping certain groups of people poor and “in their place” so that they turn to things like gang violence and have their lives destroyed by drug addiction and sexually transmitted diseases. a modern eugenicist or social darwinist might look approvingly on the status of black people in the united states today. they have their b.e.t., they have their jesse jackson, they still have a slave mentality, they live in the ghetto, and are brainwashed by a culture that keeps them in a lower status than anyone else. the famous book the bell curve talks about how black people have lower iqs and are therefore, implicitly, inferior to everyone else. that book was part of the beginning of a new wave of racism. and what is the source of racism and sexism and homophobia and all those other prejudices? they all come from an authoritarian mindset.

the ultimate expression of authoritarianism is the soldier. trained to kill on behalf of authority, trained not to question authority, trained on who is the boss, trained not to think for oneself, but just do your job and follow orders to the best of your ability. and anyone who questions authority is a traitor. the training and indoctrination soldiers go through is the basis for authoritarian propaganda aimed at civilians. the same methods that have worked for thousands of years in training soldiers to be loyal and obedient also work on civilians, and can be broadcast through the mass media. while nazis and communists are famous for their propaganda, the united states has also had some pretty harsh propaganda of its own, especially during world war i and world war ii.

now certainly, not all people in the conservative movement have an authoritarian mindset, but they have to be wary of those among them who do, and the danger this poses to their own movement. the liberal/progressive movement also has some people with similar mindsets, but usually they alienate enough other people in the movement to be discredited and kicked out of the movement. that is where the neoconservative movement came from, after all. they were originally left-wing activists, decades ago, but they were kicked out for their authoritarian views.

so who is an authoritarian? someone who does not respect individual rights. these people, if they form a mass popular movement, can cause a country not to respect individual rights. or, they can simply be manipulated by a malicious government into acting as its pawns. in communist china right now, there are those who are party faithful, who respect the authorities, and who really believe in it. those people are willing to commit human rights violations in service of the authorities. people with authoritarian mindsets are too submissive to authority, but they are not submissive to everyone, and oftentimes they misdirect their anger against those whom the authorities condemn, rather than the authorities themselves.

now, i am perhaps a bit of an authoritarian, because i believe in exposing people who are authoritarians and making them publicly renounce their views, and perhaps sending them to re-education camps to teach them that authoritarianism and re-education camps are wrong, and promoting individual liberty is right. then when they come out of the re-education camps, they will denounce everything that was done to them, all of their rights that were violated. and hopefully, if someone else has their rights violated, that will be denounced too, once the former authoritarians have this new heightened awareness of oppression. and i admit, i do believe in selective breeding of humans, so i have a bit of authoritarian in me. but, for the record, i do know that it is wrong to be authoritarian, and i am working on getting rid of my authoritarian beliefs. i still sometimes say authoritarian things from time to time... like the title of this post shows a bit of my authoritarian side. of course, i wish to destroy the beast peacefully without any violent conflict. i can simply point out to those people who claim to be conservatives that it does not seem there are many conservatives who actually practice what they preach and believe in individual liberty, and they need to return to their core values, namely individual liberty and maybe a couple other things that don’t contradict the first and most important value of individual liberty. as for the liberal/progressive movement that i side with, i believe we champion the cause of individual liberty quite well, although we suffer from a dearth of objective news sources and so we have to rely on biased media from our own side which might not have an entirely accurate view of the truth at all times. the problem is, there is a lack of objective truth being told to the public, or it is overshadowed by all the half-truths, lies, and hype, and is somewhat indistinguishable from what is not true. so no wonder we have so much partisanship! we do not agree on anything, not even the basic underlying observable facts about reality that real people can observe and write down or talk about so that the rest of us find out the truth. that is because there are so many dishonest or biased people out there, who are distorting facts, propagandizing, and trying to establish their own credibility and importance through their amoral punditry (or perhaps they do have morals of the sort that values victory for their side but does not value the truth). it is frustrating for me that there is such a plethora of voices out there but nobody has established themselves as the credible bastion of truth. but we do have truthiness. thank you for that, stephen colbert! i cannot imagine what it would be like if the conservative movement actually reformed itself and ceased to be the corrupt, amoral force of oppression that it is today. imagine if they stopped advocating coercive intrusion into private matters where the only people who might be harmed all consent to it. you know, things like sexual practices, things having to do with sex or sexuality or pregnancy or marriage or anything like that. if we just removed coersion from that whole equation, it would be much better. imagine the coersion of telling a woman who was raped by her own father or brother that she cannot have an abortion, that she has to give birth to a freak, an abomination, a mutant, one that she never would have wanted to have in a million years. yes, the ultimate coersion is killing, and a fetus is killed, but it is a delicate balancing act. who is more important, a grown-up live human being who can walk and talk and has a life to live, or an embryonic new life form that has not even reached the stage where it can survive outside of its parasitic existence inside the host organism, its mother? big things are usually more important than little things. an elephant is more important than an ant. small life-forms such as fetuses are usually incapable of complex or rational thought. at that early a stage in brain development, connections are just being set up for the first time in the brain, and things are mostly instinctual and follow the same pattern in every case. in other words, there is no individuality yet... the fetus does not yet have what it takes to make it fully human. the development of that is a gradual process. or another case of government intrusion into private affairs is prohibition of illegal drugs. there is no reason for people to go to jail just for being drug addicts. addiction is a disease and ought not to be a crime. even rush limbaugh knows that, as a drug addict himself who argued that he had not committed a crime. but the hypocrisy of people like him allows for the manipulation of millions of people who are vulnerable to authoritarian propaganda, people who are unable to see through the lies. and those are the people who still support president bush. they do not follow politics that closely except from a few sources on their side, and they are not deep or critical thinkers. they do not have such a deep and abiding obsession with knowing the real truth as i do. but for me, i must know the truth, and it is intolerable not to know what the real truth is. i need everyone to stop poisoning the debate with lies and half-truths, and we all need to be a lot more honest with each other from now on. i am very honest. i hope you are too.