Proximity1 has a fine front-paged post up on My left Wing called Six Years On.
As is my wont, I wrote a reply that grew past simple reply size..
So here it is as a stand-alone post.
Read on if you so desire. (Read the original post first and this one will be easier to understand.)
The long view.
The ship of state is a massive craft. Apply a change of course at the helm and it is literally YEARS before the input results in a different heading. We can see what has happened quite clearly from examining the wake of the ship over the past 60 years, and many of us…more every day… see that the course upon which we now sail is headed straight for iceberg territory.
LOTS of icebergs.
Political, international and ecological, just for starters.
So WE…the remnants of the left, the NEW new left… have been dialing in course corrections to the best of our ability. November will tell us how well we have done.
If we do NOT succeed over the next two years…it’s going to be abandon ship time. Fascism, nuclear war and ecological collapse await, and there may well be no place to which we CAN escape in our little longboats.
We must keep trying to dial in those course corrections. Nowhere left to run, in the long long view.
Nice post. prox.
AG
P.S. You write:
Although I have not been politically aware all of that time…call 1963 the beginning of my own awakening…I agree with this assessment. And I ask, besides our economic and military ascendancy (After all, absolute power DOES corrupt absolutely…) what is the single most important factor in that corruption?
In other words, if a certain form of corruption has been the strategic goal of a number of powerful people and interests, what has been the most successful tactic that they have used?
And my answer is…secrecy.
Secrecy and misdirection.
In the media and in the domestic use of intelligence services.
In general, what is the only way to to combat secrecy?
Strip it away.
Shine a light on it, everywhere and always.
And in this specific system, since the designated light-shiners have largely been co-opted by intelligence efforts like Operation Mockingbird, what has happened?
WE have happened.
The blogs.
Imperfectly, as does everything else on this good green earth…still a good green earth, despite the dangers posed to it by our own dominance as a species. However, WE are the light-shiners now.
People on the left blogs tend to get pissed off at certain of us who have continually harped on the failings of dKos…although that tide of disagreement has seriously shifted over the last several months, I note…saying that all of our complaints were nothing more than sour grapes. However, what I and others have been saying boils down to this:
The owners of dKos adopted the tactics of their enemies in order to fight them. Secrecy, lockstep group action. They BECAME WHAT THEY FOUGHT. The I Ching warned us of this danger thousands of years ago.
“Therefore it is important to begin at home, to be on guard in our own persons against the faults we have branded.“
Secrecy is their sword, these Corporate PermaGovernors. In the martial art of Aikido, one is taught to present a large and open target. Then when force is directed at that target, one can effectively redirect it to its own defeat.
Yup.
This blog and a few others have found a working balance in that regard.
And the fight continues.
Step by step.
Peace…
AG
