Monday, November 05, 2012
Voting Isn't Revenge, It's Resistance
Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog 17 Comments
There are plenty of ways to cast the divisions between parties and movements, but the elemental act of voting divides rhetoric from motive.
Obama called voting the best revenge, because for a sizable portion of his base that's exactly what voting is. Their votes are a violent act, a spiteful assault on a country that they can never participate in for economic or cultural reasons. Change for them is not a positive program, but a negative assault on the national majority. Bankrupting the country by robbing it for their own benefit is their revenge.
Voting for us isn't revenge, it's resistance. It isn't a choice that emerges out of reasoned debate between two sets of values, it's an act of resistance against the revengers, the looters and the destroyers. The voting booth is a form of sabotage against their regime, their corrupt interests and their oppressive regulations.
These last four years we have endured an intensified occupation of our political, religious and personal freedoms. We have been robbed, lied to, ordered around and in some cases even killed. These crimes have been carried out by elected officials and the election will allow us to remove some of them. It will not end the reign of terror, but if successful, our act of electoral resistance will inflict a severe setback on the plans of their ideological movement and the unelected officials who rely on them for funding and political support.
The election will not end the occupation, but it will interrupt the forward momentum of the occupiers. It will force them to fall back into their think tanks and formulate new strategies for dismantling the Constitution, eliminating our civil rights and ending elections as anything but empty shows with no meaning.
Some of us act as if elections will be here forever so that we can wait for the next one to come around and the one after that when the right candidate will lead us to victory. They won't be. The ideology that we are resisting believes in populism only when it serves its ends. Its judicial appointees have acted repeatedly to neuter referendums when the results do not go the right way.
The ultimate goal of the occupation is to shift power away from elected officials and into the infrastructure of unelected officials, so that their elected officials can draw on nearly unlimited powers by dictating to the bureaucratic oligarchy of the state, while elected officials not aligned with their movement will be narrowly constrained and have very little influence over the bureaucracy.
The occupation is not here to take power for another four years, but another forty years and another four-hundred years. It is not playing a short term game in a system where power shifts back and forth, but putting in place the infrastructure for the permanent occupation of the United States of America. But despite all its power and control, the miles of video screens that spew forth its propaganda, the billions of dollars that flow from its coffers into the pockets of its supporters and the cultural control that its proponents wield-- it still has one vulnerability.
A piece of paper, a push of a button, and the occupiers have to fall back, gritting their teeth and planning a renewed offensive in the spring.
The left overreached itself in the last four years. Its occupation was poorly managed and the native population has been alienated. While its Chief was sacrificing thousands of American lives to win over the natives in Afghanistan, his occupation of the United States was crumbling. The economy is rotten and the people are tired of being lied to. The resistance is popular and the community organizers are running scared.
This is our moment and in a single day we can push the occupation out of the countryside and back into the cities. We can undermine its morale, strip it of the money with which it bribes collaborators and force it to rethink whether it really wants to spend the next few decades battling to control an unruly population. We can make men like George Soros and Ted Turner decide that their money would be better spent terrorizing Eastern Europe or Africa, instead of America by making oppressing us seem like a bad investment.
The tug of war between the occupiers and the resistance comes down to morale. The occupiers are fighting to impose their will on us. To do that they have to believe that they can win. Each defeat forces them to reevaluate their tactics and each act of resistance drives them to greater acts of ruthlessness which cannot help but make them more unpopular until a point is reached where even they are forced to recognize that their plans are unfeasible.
Our goal is not an absolute victory, but like all resistance movements, it is to remain viable, to be there sabotaging their latest initiative, undermining them and remaining free of their control. The potency of a resistance movement derives from its sense of freedom. The occupation seeks to impose control while the resistance negates it. Our task is easier than theirs and every election is a chance to remind them that they have no won and that they will not win, that they must despair of going the electoral route and must impose their will without regard to popular sentiment. And once they accept that premise and abandon their facade of moderation, then we will be on the road to a true victory.
The occupation needs to believe in its own morality and its own popularity. Every time we take that away from it, we are embittering its leaders and its activists, we are teaching them to hate the people that they claim to want to help and distancing them from the people by making the people into the wedge that denies them power.
Elections must be used to humiliate the occupation, to rub its nose in its own unpopularity, to show that no matter how much it controls the means of communication, its agenda will always be rejected over and over again.
Every form of rejectionism of its agenda further drives home the message that the left can never wield power over the native population except by force. Each vote cast against it, even in blue states, even in places where the left can never lose, is an act of resistance because it reminds the left of the limits of its power and warns it that even in its own heartlands, it is not completely in control.
The left derives its power from the human impulse to conformity. No matter how many people may take issue with its insane and vicious program, most will not dissent from it in public, especially if they are barraged with countless media messages that appear to show that the vast majority of the population is in favor of it.
This national Milgram experiment is aborted every time the left loses a referendum, every time it is defeated in an election, every time it is saddled with another Carter or McGovern, every time the American people wake up and see that the rest of the country is not a hive of Obamanoids, but free people just waiting to find their voice.
Even if we lose this election, it will have been worthwhile to make it as close as possible, to bring out massive rallies of people who are waking up out of the daze and realizing that they don't have to take the occupation and that there are tens of millions of people out there who feel as they do. It will have been worthwhile to deliver a message to the left that its occupation stands on shaky feet and that the next gust of wind may tip it over. It will have been worthwhile in order to remind the left that the people are rising and that while this uprising may not have toppled over their golden throne, the next one might. It will have been worthwhile to remind the left that it is not on the path to a thousand-year world-state but to a collision with growing numbers of people who want their freedom back.
Our vote at its most potent, is not just a protest vote, but a blow aimed at the political heart of the occupation. But even if the blow does not land, then the protest vote reminds the occupation that we are united, not so much behind a man, as against them, and it will remind us that when we come together, we have the power to terrify the occupiers.
Mitt Romney is a symbol, a convenient shorthand for freedom of expression, enterprise and faith. Whether or not he embodies these values is a secondary concern. As Obama became a vehicle for the left to express its identity, Romney has become a vehicle for traditional Americans to express theirs. If Romney wins, then he will become a politician and if he loses, then the symbolic identity, which transcends him, will go on, because it is an expression, not of one man, but of the values of a country.
Resistance is grounded in values. It is grounded in the greater identity of who we are and how we want to live. That refusal to abandon who we are, to resist the political, cultural and religious assaults on our way of life is what determines the potency of a resistance. And though refusal is a negative word, it comes from a positive vision, an inner fire, the glow and light of the values that make us who we are.
The occupation does not have these values. It is a disruptive force that can borrow and mimic warped versions of these values, but it cannot put them forth except as a mockery of the values it has displaced. It urges its followers to vote for another four years of repression as a form of revenge against us because it has no inner light, no goodness and no truth. Inside it is a heart of darkness with no hope, only a ceaseless turmoil of change for the sake of change and destruction for the sake of destruction, power for the sake of power, and revenge for the sake of revenge.
Our resistance is a form of love, love for our country, our communities, our families and our values. That love has motivated us to spend the last four years fighting to preserve these things that we love. It will take us into the voting booth and whatever the outcome, it will keep us warm even in the coldest winter, as we go on fighting through our own Valley Forge for the redemption of our nation.
Voting for us isn't revenge, it's resistance. It isn't a choice that emerges out of reasoned debate between two sets of values, it's an act of resistance against the revengers, the looters and the destroyers. The voting booth is a form of sabotage against their regime, their corrupt interests and their oppressive regulations.
These last four years we have endured an intensified occupation of our political, religious and personal freedoms. We have been robbed, lied to, ordered around and in some cases even killed. These crimes have been carried out by elected officials and the election will allow us to remove some of them. It will not end the reign of terror, but if successful, our act of electoral resistance will inflict a severe setback on the plans of their ideological movement and the unelected officials who rely on them for funding and political support.
The election will not end the occupation, but it will interrupt the forward momentum of the occupiers. It will force them to fall back into their think tanks and formulate new strategies for dismantling the Constitution, eliminating our civil rights and ending elections as anything but empty shows with no meaning.
Some of us act as if elections will be here forever so that we can wait for the next one to come around and the one after that when the right candidate will lead us to victory. They won't be. The ideology that we are resisting believes in populism only when it serves its ends. Its judicial appointees have acted repeatedly to neuter referendums when the results do not go the right way.
The ultimate goal of the occupation is to shift power away from elected officials and into the infrastructure of unelected officials, so that their elected officials can draw on nearly unlimited powers by dictating to the bureaucratic oligarchy of the state, while elected officials not aligned with their movement will be narrowly constrained and have very little influence over the bureaucracy.
The occupation is not here to take power for another four years, but another forty years and another four-hundred years. It is not playing a short term game in a system where power shifts back and forth, but putting in place the infrastructure for the permanent occupation of the United States of America. But despite all its power and control, the miles of video screens that spew forth its propaganda, the billions of dollars that flow from its coffers into the pockets of its supporters and the cultural control that its proponents wield-- it still has one vulnerability.
A piece of paper, a push of a button, and the occupiers have to fall back, gritting their teeth and planning a renewed offensive in the spring.
The left overreached itself in the last four years. Its occupation was poorly managed and the native population has been alienated. While its Chief was sacrificing thousands of American lives to win over the natives in Afghanistan, his occupation of the United States was crumbling. The economy is rotten and the people are tired of being lied to. The resistance is popular and the community organizers are running scared.
This is our moment and in a single day we can push the occupation out of the countryside and back into the cities. We can undermine its morale, strip it of the money with which it bribes collaborators and force it to rethink whether it really wants to spend the next few decades battling to control an unruly population. We can make men like George Soros and Ted Turner decide that their money would be better spent terrorizing Eastern Europe or Africa, instead of America by making oppressing us seem like a bad investment.
Our goal is not an absolute victory, but like all resistance movements, it is to remain viable, to be there sabotaging their latest initiative, undermining them and remaining free of their control. The potency of a resistance movement derives from its sense of freedom. The occupation seeks to impose control while the resistance negates it. Our task is easier than theirs and every election is a chance to remind them that they have no won and that they will not win, that they must despair of going the electoral route and must impose their will without regard to popular sentiment. And once they accept that premise and abandon their facade of moderation, then we will be on the road to a true victory.
The occupation needs to believe in its own morality and its own popularity. Every time we take that away from it, we are embittering its leaders and its activists, we are teaching them to hate the people that they claim to want to help and distancing them from the people by making the people into the wedge that denies them power.
Elections must be used to humiliate the occupation, to rub its nose in its own unpopularity, to show that no matter how much it controls the means of communication, its agenda will always be rejected over and over again.
Every form of rejectionism of its agenda further drives home the message that the left can never wield power over the native population except by force. Each vote cast against it, even in blue states, even in places where the left can never lose, is an act of resistance because it reminds the left of the limits of its power and warns it that even in its own heartlands, it is not completely in control.
The left derives its power from the human impulse to conformity. No matter how many people may take issue with its insane and vicious program, most will not dissent from it in public, especially if they are barraged with countless media messages that appear to show that the vast majority of the population is in favor of it.
This national Milgram experiment is aborted every time the left loses a referendum, every time it is defeated in an election, every time it is saddled with another Carter or McGovern, every time the American people wake up and see that the rest of the country is not a hive of Obamanoids, but free people just waiting to find their voice.
Even if we lose this election, it will have been worthwhile to make it as close as possible, to bring out massive rallies of people who are waking up out of the daze and realizing that they don't have to take the occupation and that there are tens of millions of people out there who feel as they do. It will have been worthwhile to deliver a message to the left that its occupation stands on shaky feet and that the next gust of wind may tip it over. It will have been worthwhile in order to remind the left that the people are rising and that while this uprising may not have toppled over their golden throne, the next one might. It will have been worthwhile to remind the left that it is not on the path to a thousand-year world-state but to a collision with growing numbers of people who want their freedom back.
Our vote at its most potent, is not just a protest vote, but a blow aimed at the political heart of the occupation. But even if the blow does not land, then the protest vote reminds the occupation that we are united, not so much behind a man, as against them, and it will remind us that when we come together, we have the power to terrify the occupiers.
Mitt Romney is a symbol, a convenient shorthand for freedom of expression, enterprise and faith. Whether or not he embodies these values is a secondary concern. As Obama became a vehicle for the left to express its identity, Romney has become a vehicle for traditional Americans to express theirs. If Romney wins, then he will become a politician and if he loses, then the symbolic identity, which transcends him, will go on, because it is an expression, not of one man, but of the values of a country.
The occupation does not have these values. It is a disruptive force that can borrow and mimic warped versions of these values, but it cannot put them forth except as a mockery of the values it has displaced. It urges its followers to vote for another four years of repression as a form of revenge against us because it has no inner light, no goodness and no truth. Inside it is a heart of darkness with no hope, only a ceaseless turmoil of change for the sake of change and destruction for the sake of destruction, power for the sake of power, and revenge for the sake of revenge.
Our resistance is a form of love, love for our country, our communities, our families and our values. That love has motivated us to spend the last four years fighting to preserve these things that we love. It will take us into the voting booth and whatever the outcome, it will keep us warm even in the coldest winter, as we go on fighting through our own Valley Forge for the redemption of our nation.
