WHAT ARE WE FIGHTING FOR?

I picked up a copy of Paul Tillich's Wartime Radio Broadcasts into Nazi Germany entitled Against the Third Reich (Westminster John Knox Press, 1998).

Tillich is a major Lutheran theologian of the 20th century. He started out as a socialist, but never got down with the National Socialists. He emigrated to NYC during Hitler's rise, and remained here much of his life. He is often contrasted negatively with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the other great mind of 20th century Lutheran Germany. Bonhoeffer went back to Germany from America and fought a clandestine and losing battle with the Nazis, and was finally hanged for his efforts shortly before the armistice.

Tillich on the other hand, partied down in America. There are rumors of orgies, and at least long affairs (I haven't read his wife's autobiography, but she had a lot to complain about). But Tillich apparently made over 50 broadcasts into Nazi Germany which attempted to rouse anti-Nazi fervor from within the country.

On October 6, 1942 he made an address entitled What Is Worth Defending? At that point Hitler's power had spread from the Balkans to Poland, and he owned much of France and some of Scandinavia. And he was beginning to talk about defending his gains. Tillich argued that the German nation was worth defending, but only in the older sense of its traditional boundaries and freedoms. He argued that the Nazis had taken away all freedoms.

"What, then, is the Germany it would be worthy to defend? Its freedom is certainly the first answer. But this freedom was certainly taken from it when it came under the power of a tyranny. Who is free today in Germany, free from fear, free to speak, free to act? A few at the top: all others are less free than they ever were in German history" (69).

Tillich argues that Germans should participate in the liberation of Germany from the Nazi totalitarians, because then the rubble at the end of the war will not be perhaps as deep.

Reading this made me ask: why am I so against the Democrats, after a lifetime of being on their side? I think it is because they are acting like Nazis.

While Tillich may have never completed abandoned socialism, he did not see the deeper nature of the struggle. Friedrich Hayek said that socialism is invariably a form of Nazism, or that it easily lends itself to Nazism, and that Hitlerism and Stalinism were almost identical in their structure. They are both one-party states, in which individual freedom is one of the first things to vanish.

"...it would be a mistake to believe that the specific German rather than the socialist element produced totalitarianism. It was the prevalance of socialist views and not Prussiansim that Germany had in common with Italy and Russia -- and it was from the masses and not from the classes steeped in the Prussian tradition, and favored by it, that National Socialism arose" (The Road to Serfdom, 62-63).

In socialist countries the second thing to disappear after the freedom to speak is the rule of law as an objective matter. In a true democracy, law is for everyone. In a socialist system, those who are in charge, are also above the law. Once the government has "unlimited powers" (Hayek 119) it "may do what it pleases" (119), and any "arbitrary rule can be made legal" (119).

Hayek cites Locke in arguing that there are two kinds of law. One is that which is universal, and which will "enable the individual to foresee how the coercive apparatus of the state will be used" (119), and the other is a kind of "ad hoc" law, in which government decides what to do 'on its merits'" (Hayek citing Locke 119).

Locke argued that there are four basic God-given rights: life, health, liberty and property. These rights are absolute.

And yet they are increasingly and unceasingly under attack by the Democrats, who are increasingly using a Marxian rather than a Lockean value system.

(The great difference is that Locke wanted a universal system of laws available to all citizens equally, whereas Marx wanted the proletariat to have laws available to them that were not available to the bourgeoisie -- in a similar way there are now race and gender separations coming through in Democratic thinking, in which Puerto Rican female judges (for example) declare that their justice is greater than that of white male justice.)

Empathy for a given group is against the Lockean norm. Whereas this was often abandoned in practice, it was never abandoned in principle. One can see how it was abandoned in the Deep South in a novel like Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. But this was never the case for the intelligentsia. Atticus Finch fought hard and nearly lost his life for the principle of universal fairness. But the left has decided that all justice is always unfair and unprincipled, so they want to corner it. Now the very notion of fairness is increasingly being abandoned in principle as well as in practice.

But these are not the only rights that are being destroyed in this country.

Life itself is under attack. Babies declared unfit, or unwanted, are being destroyed, and now it's the government of the Democrats who argue that it's ok to kill a baby for any reason whatsoever and for the government to condone and even pay for the murder. And the elderly, too, are under attack. It's now ok to kill someone whose "quality of life" has slipped (the Death Panels will decide this -- each case 'on its own merits' in an Ad hoc manner).

Liberty is under attack. Nancy Pelosi has declared that it's "un-American" to want freedom from the nationalization of healthcare, or to voice opposition to the Democratic party's mandates. And she has said that those who speak out against the Democratic party are Nazis, when in fact she's the Nazi.

Health is under attack, and is no longer a personal prerogative, but something that must answer to the state.

Property is going to be increasingly "redistributed" as the Democratic president stated off the record to Joe the Plumber.

All four of Locke's God-given rights have been rescinded, and are being destroyed under the Democratic regime at present.

Against this we have what's left of the other party (we have only two, and it's foolish to think that any third party can compete in our winner take all system). Freedom of speech has never been under attack by the right, whereas the left has made the campus systems into a virtual Gulag in which only leftist speech and leftist professors may get jobs, publish, or receive tenure. The situation is even worse for students, who are frequently refused the right to gather as Christians, or to publish a newspaper whose thought doesn't coincide with the Democratic regime.

The Republicans want health care to be left as a personal decision, rather than something to be monitored by a gigantic state apparatus on an ad hoc basis by increasingly proliferating committees.

The Republicans want personal property to remain in the hands of those who have earned it. The Democrats want to redistribute property, seizing the wealth of the middle and upper classes, and redistributing it to the poor and to illegal aliens, in order to secure their votes. Voting is one remaining block to total power by the Democrats, but even that is under attack by groups such as Acorn, who are increasingly not only abided but condoned by Democratic party members.

The Republicans are still Lockean in nature. The Democrats are increasingly Marxian.

I was never loyal to one party or the other. I was loyal to Democratic pluralism, and remain loyal to that notion. I simply prefer Locke to Marx, because of the freedoms that Lockean systems enjoy, and because of a well-founded fear of the lack of freedoms that Marxians employ for everyone but the few at the top.

Socialism is slavery. It may present itself as benign. It may argue that your children will be better off protected by the state. It may argue that it's a good trade-off -- your freedoms for your life. But it's still slavery. Any chicken or pig can get a roof over its head and its life may be protected by the farmer. But the farmer doesn't really care in the long run about the chicken.

He's just using it, until such time as he wants to cut its head off.

Marxian thought resembles that of the benign farmer.

But we are human, and we are not chickens. We are individuals, and cannot live a truly human life unless we are allowed to be individuals in terms of our thought, our choice of career and mate, our choice of lifestyle, and what we value.

Let's not let the Democratic state and its institutions decide these things for us, even if they crow that its for our own good. Let's fight the encroaching powers of the totalitarian Democrats, and return to Locke, away from Marx and his minions in the Democratic Party.