Communication and Community

Since introducing the idea for Agnes’s Fireside Chats, I’ve limited my online activity to a bare minimum while researching ideas.  Sunday morning, I intentionally turned on a “news” outlet to see what I had missed in the handful of days since I read any blog articles beyond the briefest of glimpses.  I watched long enough to see that Anderson Cooper is either planning to interview a former mistress of our president or has already done so. I flashed back to the 1990s, remembering another powerful man and another scandal involving a college-aged intern and a blue dress that happened in an oval office in front of a generation of young women who saw a president and his wife debase and degrade a young woman for behavior now lauded and praised as HashTag MeToo.  Well, it is praised as long as you are a beautiful starlet or have a powerful media voice.

So, I turned the screen off, picked up one of the books I’ve been reading since having cataract surgery and reviewed some of my own and some others’ history. I haven’t watched anymore, limiting myself to email and books.  I’ve tried to dismiss the sense of déjà vu which seems so heavy in the atmosphere these days and I discussed it with my doctor last Friday.  He and I agree it is the whole threat of Nuclear Annihilation which has me down, irrationally.  We thought we ended Cold War threats after that wall in Germany came down.

My doctor is a cranky old retired US Navy doctor who is not immediately likeable, but immensely personable once the doctor-patient barrier is breached.  Since my own background includes a decade of military service and at least another ten in military contractual business of one type or another, the barrier was easy to step over.  We talk quite frankly and openly about many issues of the day, his 40-something years in medicine offering knowledge and perspective I might not otherwise hear.  When I moved here and became his patient, my own son started college.  His sons in medical school and a military academy give us additional common ground.   Add his own child-of-immigrants-in-Jersey story compared and blended with my father-in-law’s stories about Italian and Irish neighborhoods in Cleveland and we might have a chat session interrupted by a nurse demanding the doctor see other patients.

His military son, the pilot, just went through the equivalent of survival school training.  Those who went through the Air Force version as I did admit it being the least strenuous of all military survival schools, except for those entering specific career fields requiring additional “field” training. In my own training, we were “captured” while in the field and taken to a faux POW camp.  I had sprained a leg while escaping and evading from the pretended air crash after walking off the bus dumping us in the wilderness.  The doctor who’d seen to my injury issued me a red armband which excused me from strenuous aspects of enemy confrontation and interrogation, so I got to listen to others being berated and tortured, which was far better than participating, but still stressful since I didn’t realize the armband excused me.  Throughout the experience, I expected to be “next” until the huge stars and stripes dropped down behind the enemy commandant who was declaring our imminent execution and we prisoners broke out in cheers, realizing the ordeal was over.  It was later when I reviewed my medical records and saw the armband had given me “shelter” from an unknown source.

The doctor’s son, the pilot, had no problems surviving the treatment, even without an armband.  His training was, I’m sure, quite a bit more strenuous than my own experience at Fairchild AFB, and the doctor told me some of the details.  One of the other young pilots was interrogated, berated and finally removed from the class because of commentary he’d made on social media years before, when he was a teenager.   His own son hadn’t opened a Facebook account (my doctor’s wise counsel in early teen years) but they had found enough about him to assure him they had access to details about his youth from online sources that surprised him.  He shared with his father his own worries about the kind of access implied and what that meant regarding personal privacy.

I think about my own teen years and like many of you, I’m sure, I’m thankful the continual recording and collecting of data about every aspect of our lives had not yet started.  Now that it started without our knowledge, all those young people with electronic devices in their hands should be aware they are putting every impulsive thought and comment into files saved on the hard drive of every unconstitutional entity attached to our government as well as those of our government’s enemies and friends, especially those wanting to sell them something.  I find it abhorrent that a young man’s career was derailed for comments and thoughts shared on a social media platform years earlier at a time in his life when no one except his parents should have been listening or paying attention to his private thoughts and comments.  And for those who believe a parents’ interest in their children is invasion of privacy?  Therein lays the crux of it all.  We have a government which grants itself the power and ability to invade our privacy while demanding we have no rights to any private form of communication, even in our own thoughts.  When a young man can be boarded for wrongful-thinking and commentary made years earlier, it is the equivalent of conviction without charge or trial.  What justice does that serve Mr. Bastiat?

“We are trying to save children’s lives!” the academicians shout from their towers while they have the crowd below scanned for facial recognition of any “known” radicals who might be Trotsky’s Jacson.  (For those who believe I may have spelled something wrong, I’ve just read a little book called “Leon Trotsky” by Irving Howe, a comparatively small book explaining the important role Trotsky played in the development of the Soviet state after the Revolution.)  Trotsky was Lenin’s Thomas Paine, a skilled and passionate propagandist proclaiming the Ideal of utopia while the chains of bureaucratic slavery were being fitted to the Russian peoples in the gulags.   To Trotsky, the goal of the Soviet collective would provide individuals with economic freedom and Stalin’s bureaucracy was but another pathway to that utopia.

My doctor is the son of immigrants, as are many successful American citizens.  His parents emigrated from Lithuania in 1914, when the Bolsheviks were just beginning to inspire workers’ protests in regions outside Moscow.   The Tsars had conceded civil rights after the 1905 peasant uprisings, but conditions were still terrible for peasants and common laborers.  The support for the Motherland during the Great War put weapons in the hands of soldiers who would soon use those weapons against the Bourgeoisie and eventually assassinate the Romanov line.

Bolshevik pamphlets like the one below were common:

“The government is to blame [for all the suffering of the people]! It started the war and cannot end it. The government is ruining the country and causing us to go hungry. The capitalists are to blame! The war brings them profits. It is high time to cry out to them: ‘Enough!’ ‘Down with the criminal government and its whole gang of robbers and murderers. Long live peace!’”

http://russiasgreatwar.org/about.shtml

The art of revolutionary leadership in its most critical moments consists nine-tenths in knowing how to sense the mood of the masses and to influence the intensity of that mood.  An unexcelled ability to detect the mood of the masses was Lenin’s great power.  Trotsky’s skill was propaganda and he excelled at developing speeches, editorials for Pravda and inspiring rhetoric.  Trotsky compromised his peasant’s perspective of an agrarian utopia where community worked for common good.  Stalin’s more military-minded view of socialism, structured and controlled, would achieve the Ideal by alternate means, Trotsky believed, so he continued to write and support the Ideal in spite of evidence the bureaucracy was creating its own oppressive nature. Trotsky’s ability to focus on his own ideals of communism prevented his seeing the danger he was in and his murder was probably not a surprise to anyone except him.

Trotsky perceived Communism as liberation of the oppressed masses, not simply the management of them.  The difference in his and Stalin’s view of socialism in a country inhabited by small groups and clusters of peoples tracing their roots to a variety of ancient civilizations was of moral and political significance that remains relevant today.  What happens when a powerful central government, given the power to remove large and small populations of peoples from Kulaks and outlying villages, decides to not only promote the idea of equality but to enforce it through forced removal to education and work camps?

When asked by his biographer, Isaac Deutscher, about potential failure by Stalin’s bureaucratic path to the ideal socialist state?  What if the structure of the state is oppressive to the people? Trotsky said “It is self-evident a new minimum program would be needed to defend the slaves of the totalitarian bureaucratic system.”

Trotsky’s Ideal of socialism was a society where men were capable and willing to participate in the collective effort, retaining their autonomous nature as free and independent man.  However, the bureaucratic model requires economic and political control, since free and independent man is unnecessary when all workers are equal.   Deutscher, the biographer, believes that if Trotsky had lived to see his ideal of the Socialist State turned bureaucratic nightmare and slavery, he would have been on the side of the exploited and oppressed, even as he grasped they were doomed to be forever oppressed.  Trotsky, like other progressive thinkers of his day, seemed to believe people played no role in bringing about their own oppression.

He had not heard of The Gulag Archipelago, another book I’ve reviewed during my weeklong hiatus from the internet.

I will leave you with this little bit from Frederick Bastiat, whose 54-page book “The Law” should be required reading in a country where law really is justice and people really are free to form their own opinions and control their own destinies.

But, that country does not really exist, does it?

Frederick Bastiat:

“The law is justice.

Nothing can be more clear and simple, more perfectly defined and bounded, or more visible to every eye; for justice is a given quantity, immutable and unchangeable, and which admits of neither increase or diminution. Depart from this point, make the law religious, fraternal, equalizing, industrial, literary, or artistic, and you will be lost in vagueness and uncertainty; you will be upon unknown ground, in a forced Utopia, or, what is worse, in the midst of a multitude of contending Utopias, each striving to gain possession of the law, and to impose it upon you; for fraternity and philanthropy have no fixed limits, as justice has.

Where will you stop? Where is the law to stop? One person, Mr. de Saint Cricq, will only extend his philanthropy to some of the industrial classes, and will require the law to slight the consumers in favor of the producers. Another, like Mr. Considerant, will take up the cause of the working classes, and claim for them by means of the law, at a fixed rate, clothing, lodging, food, and everything necessary for the support of life. A third, Mr. Louis Blanc, will say, and with reason, that this would be an incomplete fraternity, and that the law ought to provide them with tools of labor and education. A fourth will observe that such an arrangement still leaves room for inequality, and that the law ought to introduce into the most remote hamlets luxury, literature, and the arts. This is the high road to communism; in other words, legislation will be—as it now is—the battlefield for everybody’s dreams and everybody’s covetousness.”

https://mises.org/sites/default/files/thelaw.pdf

As I continue reading this big box of books thrown away by a professor of history at a college who needs them no more now that electronic archiving is so convenient and simple, I might pop in with my thoughts.   And, occasionally, I will update you on Narnia where we raise rabbits and goats and live off the fat of the land.

And, I will limit my photographs to those germane to the discussion  to avoid image bloat.