The other kind of revolution

Last week’s editorial concluded that revolutions are no longer possible because of the vast power of modern weapons available to governments. Prior to the beginning of the last century, revolutionaries could grab their swords and muskets and meet the tyrant’s soldiers on an even footing with the outcome weighted in favor of which side could muster and sustain the largest army.

The development of aircraft, tanks, nuclear weapons, poison gases, bacteriological agents, laser weapons, microwave weapons, GPS, guided missiles and drones has eliminated that equality forever. It now is possible for an oligarchy of less than one percent of the population, wielding such weapons, to easily defeat any mass uprising.

Does that mean we are doomed to be subjects of a global tyranny that, in the name of disarmament, controls all weapons of mass destruction? Or is it possible for another kind of revolution to succeed?

TWO KINDS OF REVOLUTION
Dictionaries have two definitions for the word revolution. One is the forceful overthrow of a government leading to a new regime, and the other is a drastic change in the attitudes and mores of society. Although history books usually focus on the first type, the second type is equally important, if not more so, because physical revolutions cannot happen unless they are preceded by a revolution of ideas.

The American Revolution, for example, was fired by a cluster of ideas related to the single concept of freedom from the oppressive yoke of government. That was the fire in the mind that brought the revolutionaries onto the battlefield and sustained them through great hardship and suffering.

Yes, you say, but don’t forget that, if the mental revolution had not been followed by a physical one, nothing would have changed. Ideas without actions are useless.

ALL ACTIONS ARE NOT EQUAL
True, but what kind of actions are open to us today? Is physical action the only option? As Mao expressed it: “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” Are military-style revolutions the only way to replace a tyrannical oligarchy?

That question can be answered by asking another question: Did the present collectivist oligarchy seize control of government by physical revolution? The United States once had an enviable political system of checks and balances, once enjoyed no bureaucratic control over the lives of the people, once had local police who actually served and protected its citizens, once had almost no confiscation of personal income or wealth, and once was admired around the world.

All that now is history. A revolution began in America starting full force in the early 1900s and was complete fifty years later. Were there barricades in the streets, mobs storming the White House, raging gun battles between patriots and soldiers?

None of that happened. It was a “soft” revolution. The government was seized through the mass media, the educational system, the entertainment industry, the banking system, and the ballot. Had it been attempted through force and violence it would have failed.

That is the key to how we must shape our own strategy. There are new battlefields out there. Why would we want to grab our muskets and head for the monuments of our forefathers? The new battlefields are the power centers of society: the organizations and institutions that shape national policy. That’s where we lost control to the collectivists and, if we are ever going to get it back, that’s where we will do it.

THE KIDS ARE AWAKENING
In the 1960s, when I began studying the ideology of collectivism, I recall reading a statement from a Communist organizer in which he explained why Communism eventually would conquer the United States. He said something like this: “You wealthy and powerful capitalists are in control today, but we will be in control tomorrow. Why am I so sure? It’s because we are recruiting your children. Right now, we are winning their hearts and minds and, when you die, your empire will belong to us.”

In retrospect, I can see that he was half right. In the universities, large numbers of wealthy kids were recruited into the Marxist/Leninist ideology but, what the comrades had not anticipated was that the empire they were hoping to replace with communism was well on its way to BEING communism under a different name.

So, when the kids eventually inherited the empires of their fathers, they were able to implement the collectivist ideology they learned in school without having to join the Communist Party. They merely continued to call themselves capitalists, and very few noticed the switch.

We who are hoping to bring about a revolution of ideas on behalf of freedom are in much the same situation as the comrades back in the 1920s and 1930s. Collectivists are in control today but, have you noticed? Their kids are awakening! The ideology of individualism is rapidly spreading through the universities, which are the incubators of future leaders. If we follow the strategy of a soft revolution, we will possess the future.

55
2016 January 29