— by Polydamas
The New York Times could not wait for Superstorm Sandy to touch down on the eastern seaboard. It just could not wait until the fifty-some victims of the storm could be lain to their eternal rest. Instead, in its October 29, 2012 editorial titled “A Big Storm Requires Big Government” (http://nyti.ms/TtzdcQ), the Times seized upon what it viewed as a golden opportunity to carry water for the incumbent Obama administration and to take shots at his Republican challenger Mitt Romney. More importantly, the Times’ editorial revealed itself as an ode to absolute federal government power masquerading as compassion.
According to the Times’ misguided morality play, wise Democrat President Jimmy Carter cared so much about the American people that he created the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to make decisions “where rescuers should go, where drinking water should be shipped, and how to assist hospitals that have to evacuate”. Another compassionate Democrat President Bill Clinton wisely recognized the importance of FEMA and elevated it to a cabinet-level position. Then, the evil and heartless Republican President George W. Bush relegated FEMA to the Department of Homeland Security “in the control of political hacks”. As a result of Republican evil and stupidity, the “disaster of Hurricane Katrina was just waiting to happen”.
The morality play continues with the saintly Democrat President Barack Obama rescuing FEMA from the clutches of the evil Republicans and restoring it to its former glory. Now, FEMA is once again threatened by a dastardly Republican, one Mitt Romney. Romney, accused the Times, has the temerity to suggest that “Every time you have an occasion to take something from the federal government and send it back to the states, that’s the right direction. And if you can go even further and send it back to the private sector, that’s even better.”
The notion espoused by Mitt Romney that the states and the private sector can do anything better than the federal government was huffily dismissed by the New York Times as “an absurd notion”. The Times does not explicitly explain why it believes that this notion is absurd. Instead, it poses a false choice between the decisions of the wise and powerful federal government versus the decisions of insipid and powerless states. “Does Mr. Romney really believe that financially strapped states would do a better job than a properly functioning federal agency? Who would make decisions about where to send federal aid? Or perhaps there would be no federal aid, and every state would bear the burden of billions of dollars in damages.”
With at least the same rhetorical legerdemain and equivalent snark, one could also ask “Does the New York Times really believe that the financially-strapped federal government, which has been running at more than a trillion dollar annual deficit for the past three years, could do a better job than a properly functioning state agency or private business?” The next rhetorical question could be easily rewritten as “Who besides the affected state should make decisions about where to send state aid?”
A far more interesting issue to examine is the great allure that crises and natural disasters have for leftists. Back in 2008, Rahm Emannuel, the long-time political advisor to President Bill Clinton and the incoming President Barack Obama inadvertently revealed a hidden leftist truth in an unguarded moment of Machiavellian honesty. Overcome by joy at the election of Barack Obama in the midst of an economic crisis, Emannuel’s admission was not dissimilar to the revelation one may expect from an arch-villain in a James Bond movie. “Never let a serious crisis go to waste,” he said. “What I mean by that is it’s an opportunity to do things you couldn’t do before.”
With Emannuel’s revealing admission in mind, let us delve in deeper into the question why leftists love disasters and crises. After all, on the whole, the lives of ordinary human beings are normally governed by common sense, laws and customs, and the routine of daily life. A disaster is an uncommon, extraordinary event that, on a rare occasion, overrides the normality of life’s patterns, its established laws and customs, and accepted routines.
In non-emergency times, a person’s life, liberty, and property are protected by established law. People have ample time to make and actually do make important personal decisions about their lives, liberties, and properties as well as the lives, liberties, and properties of their family members and loved ones. In business and commerce, people voluntarily trade among themselves for the goods and services that they want and need. Other people’s personal space and private belongings are respected by all, except criminals.
The truth is that leftists love natural disasters and other crises because they provide the perfect opening they need to advocate for absolute governmental power and to override the normal legal protections afforded to people’s lives, liberties, and properties. In a state of emergency, the absolute dictator enjoys limitless emergency powers to do whatever he deems necessary in the name of the people. On the grounds of exigent circumstances, a dictator can seize wealth and properties from their rightful owners to distribute them to others, especially to their allies and supporters, much to the applause of leftists.
One of the best examples from the not-too-distant pages of history of a democratically-elected politician using an emergency to seize even more power to commit genocide is the 1933 Reichstag fire. Adolf Hitler was elected chancellor of Germany in January of 1933 and wanted to rule Germany as absolute dictator. Hitler’s problem was neatly solved when, on February 27, 1933, only six days before the election, a mysterious fire was conveniently set to the Parliament building, the Reichstag. The arson was blamed at the time on communists, but, subsequently, in the 1990s, evidence was discovered that a Nazi commando team had set fire to the Reichstag building. Hitler happily seized upon the emergency, and, on the following day after the fire, a decree was issued by the German President, titled “Verordnung des Reichspräsidenten zum Schutz von Volk und Staat” (“The Presidential Decree for the Protection of People and State”). The decree suspended the constitutional rights of German citizens, including freedom of the press and assembly, and eliminated constitutional protections against searches and seizures, and nullified prohibitions against government confiscation of private property.
Economic crises have also been used by dictators to justify their murderous agendas, again to the applause of leftists. In 1929, U.S.S.R. dictator Josef Stalin decided that socialism required that the independent peasants of his country, their farms, and livestock had to be turned into collectivized farm factories. As described by Walter Duranty, the disgraced New York Times’ Moscow bureau chief, who won the 1932 Pulitzer Prize for his despicable work as propagandist and cheerleader for Stalin, the independent peasant farmers had to be “liquidated or melted in the hot fire of exile and labor into the proletarian mass”. (Duranty Reports Russia (New York: Viking Press, 1934, p. 238). According to Professor R.J. Rummel’s monumental book “Never Again: Ending War, Democide & Famine”, Stalin’s rule exterminated 10 to 15 million independent peasant farmers and their families. Duranty also falsely denied that there was a widespread famine and mass starvation in the Ukraine in 1932-1933, claiming that “Any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda.” In reality, Professor Rummel estimates that Stalin murdered 5 million Ukrainian peasants through starvation, another 2 million in the U.S.S.R., and another million in the North Caucasus. The peasants died in droves after they were reduced to eating their dogs and cats, boiling tree bark and the soles of their shoes to make broth, eating birds and horse manure. (pp. 98-100).
It is no coincidence that leftists have long proclaimed their love and admiration for dictators such as Cuba’s Fidel Castro, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, the U.S.S.R.’s Josef Stalin, China’s Mao Tse Tung, Cambodia’s Pol Pot, and many others who used emergencies as a pretext for their ideological agenda. The American President most beloved by leftists is Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Under the pretext of combating the severe economic crisis of the Great Depression, President Roosevelt seized for himself the most far-reaching presidential powers to implement the progressive, socialist economic agenda known as the “New Deal”. The United States Constitution and the free enterprise system were the “Old Deal” that supposedly needed to be replaced.
Since President Roosevelt, every statist president has demanded and accumulated new and sweeping emergency powers for the federal government by declaring a perpetual “war” or series of “wars” against exaggerated crises or social ills. President Lyndon Johnson declared a “War on Poverty” in his State of the Union address on January 8, 1964. Half a century later in the welfare state that America has become, victory in the selfsame “War on Proverty” continues to elude “Big Brother” yet without quenching his thirst for taxes. The “War on Drugs”, the “War on Crime”, the “War on Terror”, the “War on Women”, and the variety of other wars du jour are similar unending, unwinnable wars and bottomless financial pits.
We should not be surprised, then, that Walter Duranty’s leftist heirs proudly proclaimed at the Democratic National Convention, that although Americans worship at different churches, belong to different clubs, and hail from different cities and states, “Government is the only thing that we all belong to.” Evidently, Americans are not one nation or one people under God, but, rather, fellow slaves in chains, the feudal peons of the same “Big Brother” federal government ruled by one of the noble philosopher-kings from Plato’s “Republic” named Barack Obama.
In the final analysis, the exaggeration of crises, emergencies, and disasters in an effort to extract more absolute governmental powers on behalf of “Big Brother” at the expense of individual liberties is part and parcel of the tyrant and dictator’s play book. The modern day heirs of Walter Duranty at the New York Times can always be counted upon to support such power grabs by the leftist philosopher-kings that they idolize regardless of the impact on individual liberties. The New York Times’ implicit cheerleading for the proposition that our society should be operated by Washington bureaucrats and technocrats in response to a never-ending list of sundry crises and emergencies is the truly “absurd notion” here.
