“…the future is not so much a place as it is a state of mind. It is a fervent faith in the inevitability of human progress. Men have died for this faith and men are still dying for it.” ~ Daniel Greenfield ~
“Forward.” proclaims Obama’s reelection campaign, urging the country to keep moving… ostensibly, to four more years of “Hope and Change.”
If “Forward” sounds a bit backward, that’s because it’s eerily reminiscent of last century’s totalitarian movements. Forward, Onward, Upward – these are always bywords of the Progressives, relentlessly moving toward the future, ever in their futile pursuit of utopia.
Progressives are never satisfied with the world as they find it. They’re forever concocting schemes to perfect things, particularly human nature, which can be so inconveniently messy. Progressives love dreaming about the future.
As Daniel Greenfield at Sultan Knish points out in an insightful piece, The World of Tomorrow ~
The last century has represented a great love affair with the future. A hundred years of spring cleaning accompanied by the resounding cry, “Out with the old, in with the new.” Everyone was a progressive now. The one thing that all the participants in the Second World War had in common was that they were all dreaming of the future. A Thousand Year Reich, a United Nations or Communism: millions died for the sake of a wonderful future.
And let’s not forget China’s ironically-named “Great Leap Forward” in which some 40 million lives were sacrificed in pursuit of Mao’s vision of a socialist paradise.
Because progressives never learn from history (or more frightening, perhaps because they do), here they are in the 21st century, still marching back-to-the-future wearing rose-colored glasses. Consider the London Olympics opening ceremony ~
Britain’s Olympics opener celebrated the journey from the industrial revolution to the NHS euthanasia bed. While capitalism killed workers randomly and unscientifically, the progressive state kills them scientifically and methodically. Any old factory can kill a worker by dropping a load on his head or allowing him to inhale fumes that in retrospect turn out to be toxic, but it takes a genuinely progressive turn of mind to leave him lying in bed for three days begging for a drink of water while he dies because he has become, in the fine German phrase, “Lebensunwertes Leben” or “Life Unworthy of Life…”
Hey, guess that’s progress!
Today’s western Progressives will never actually come out and admit it, but they really don’t buy the idea of inalienable rights like life and liberty. Those are merely obstacles to the collectivist dream of world peace and harmony. And well, sometimes you gotta break a few eggs…*
When our modern institutions aren’t starving retired workers to death in soiled hospital beds, they are rationing out water and air, earth and sky. They warn us that there are iceberg shortages, shortages of soil and swampland. Our rationing has gone planetary. We imprison men for filling in wetlands and cap and trade the heat of the planet. Our collectivist world state allows no sparrow to fall without charging someone with unlicensed hunting.
I don’t know about you comrade, but “Forward.” sounds awfully backward to me.
* “Omelettes are not made without breaking eggs.” ~ Robespierre, mastermind of the French Reign of Terror
Related:
Forward with Obama, Mao and Lenin ~ Another great read from Daniel Greenfield ~
Romney might ask you if you are better off now than you were four years ago, but Obama will tell you to forget the past and look forward to the eternal future that is always peeking over the horizon. The mirage of the progressive world of tomorrow, which we can reach over a pile of dead senior citizens, energy saving lightbulbs and multicultural coloring books.
