As setup, Cody is in various places in Europe working on raising funds to get Defense Distributed enough funding to complete the liberator pistol. Shortly before leaving he has a late night talk with a former American, Mike, who has renounced his citizenship and left the States.
"These Slovaks," I said. "I mean, it's a hideous race, isn't it? You see it in how they walk,how they carry themselves. Defeat is just bred into them."Frankly, I find that heartbreaking. More so than the other trials and problems Wilson went through in the book. Millions of people, and millions yet to come have had something vital, something central to being human, sucked out of their souls by communism.
"I think it's fair to say the legacy of State communism here today is with the people who are past middle age, generally fifty plus, if they're not part of the ruling elite. They've learned a mentality that's beaten down, subservient. No initiative, " Mike said.
His eyes searched around while he dragged on the cigarette he'd just lit with the butt of the first. "But they've taught this to their children".
I think that is true of prison, whether it is experienced in a facility, or as your life in a culture of tyranny. I would expect to see it in most Cubans who have suffered under Fidel and Raoul for so many years.
ReplyDeleteLiberals have had rationality - reason, logic - sucked out of their brains by communism, via the Left and their control of the schools, universities, and the "glass teat" (as Harlan Ellison called television). It is my personal opinion that many of them don't _have_ souls - they have rejected them, along with the Judeo-Christian moral code, much like some have rejected their citizenship in America.
Sadly that is true to one extent or another for so many cultures and ideologies. It is true for Muslims. Perhaps not the patriarch of the family but certainly to so many of the other family members. This is what most of the world was like 200 years ago and very likely what most of the world will be like again some day soon. An oppressive power elite that must crush any resistance if they want to hold onto power. Watching what is going on in Venezuela is very enlightening and should be a lesson for those on the left.
ReplyDeleteI live 15 miles from Oroville Dam and work at the local university. I see this beaten down mentality in the local populace and especially in engineering students. They have forgotten how to think logically and make a rational decision. Everyone waits for "someone in authority" to tell them what to do. Until then, they sit, worry and don't know what to do. Sad.
ReplyDeleteAnon@3:33
ReplyDeleteI attended UCSD back in '74, and even then they were leaning way left, which surprised me since they had a medical school (I was pre-med) and a strong (or so it seemed) STEM faculty. Nonetheless, Herbert Marcuse - a real brain-dead commie that the Left was in love with who has always preached the "relativity" of truth, of reality, and was such an obvious Marxist that I can't imagine him being accepted as a member of the staff of a university anywhere but California, especially back in 1974.
I believe it has gotten so much worse that students of the STEM curricula must have really suffered taking classes and getting their degrees. When every principle of physics and the properties of materials and any other discipline where being in touch with reality was necessary ran counter to what their professors were teaching in all of the other non-STEM classes, it must have been both confusing and/or disheartening. Especially with the social conditioning they had received in grade school and high school there in California, where they were taught to wait for someone in authority to tell them what - and how - to think.
Can you imagine an electrical engineer who wired his devices in a rainbow of colors because it was wrong to be rigid about using red, black, white, and green in those ridiculous, old-fashioned methods used in the past? STEM students who were able to graduate must have been nearly suicidal, in the California university system.