If my father’s nation
Devolves into a fascist regime,
I’m a dead man—
Because I’m a freeman blogger.
If the country of my youth
Evolves into a communist state,
I’m an imprisoned man,
Cause’ I’m also—a propagandist.
By: ElRoyPoet © 2019
“How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause…. It is such a splendid sunny day, and I have to go. But how many have to die on the battlefield in these days, how many young, promising lives. What does my death matter if by our acts thousands are warned and alerted. Among the student body there will certainly be a revolt.” By: Sophie Scholl
“Though liberty is established by law, we must be vigilant, for liberty to enslave us is always present under that same liberty. Our Constitution speaks of the ‘general welfare of the people’. Under that phrase all sorts of excesses can be employed by [authoritarian] tyrants—to make us bondsmen.” By: Marcus Tullius Cicero
“Do we—do we liberals—want to accept that? If we do, we accept, though perhaps without knowing it, the claim that democracy is unsustainable, which brings us back to accepting the view of status-quo elites who are already engaged in war by other means.
Liberals believe democracy is sustainable. They believe freedom is a birthright. They believe individuals born with inalienable rights. They believe the government should maximize opportunity and minimize suffering. So liberals must reject the definition of politics as war by other means and replace it with something constructive, creative and liberating. Fortunately, the president is modeling that.
In his historic paradigm-shifting speech earlier this month, Joe Biden said, rightly, that ‘democracy endures only if … we the people see politics, not as total war, but the mediation of our differences.’ Politics, in other words, is how democracies solve their collective problems.
So we should oppose anyone who wants to ‘keep politics out of it.’ We should fight, using politics, those who depoliticize politics.
Excerpt from The problem isn’t that Ron DeSantis is politicizing immigration. It’s that he’s depoliticizing it
“Governments are good at recognizing the faults in other places and times, but they are terrible judges of the injustices built into their own foundations. If a country could sail the seas unrivaled and put humans into outer space, it had little incentive to look inward at what was rotten at the core. “The regime considers itself the acme of perfection and therefore has no wish to change its ways either of its own free will or, still less, by making concessions to anyone or anything.”
Countries decay only in retrospect. Powerful states, as well as their inhabitants, tend to be congenital conservatives when it comes to their own futures. The “comfort cult,” as Andrei Amalrik called it—the tendency in seemingly stable societies to believe “that ‘Reason will prevail’ and that ‘Everything will be all right’”—is seductive. As a result, when a terminal crisis comes, it is likely to be unexpected, confusing, and catastrophic, with the causes so seemingly trivial, the consequences so easily reparable if political leaders would only do the right thing, that no one can quite believe it has come to this.
“This isolation has created for all—from the bureaucratic elite to the lowest social levels—an almost surrealistic picture of the world and of their place in it”, “Yet the longer this state of affairs helps to perpetuate the status quo, the more rapid and decisive will be its collapse when confrontation with reality becomes inevitable.”
Where is the breaking point? How long can a political system seek to remake itself before triggering one of two reactions—a devastating backlash from those most threatened by change or a realization by the change makers that their goals can no longer be realized within the institutions and ideologies of the present order?” Excerpts from: How a Great Power Falls Apart, Decline Is Invisible From the Inside
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between true and false no longer exists.” By: Hannah Arendt
elroypoet.blog 