By John Burtis
Wednesday, December 28, 2005
Monolithic political parties always adopt ways to curb intellectual dissent in order to maintain their grip on power and to insure the survival of a pure strain of orthodox beliefs.
In the those halcyon days of the dictators, the Nazis operated destructive labor camps like Mauthausen and the vast complex at Monowitz, while the Soviets employed the Gulag archipelago, peppered with names like Kolyma and Karagan, and built huge useless works projects like the White Sea Canal. all designed to harness the energies of those who balked at the demands of the party and failed to toe its line.
These victims, cut down by the millions like so many of sheaves of wheat and whose graves populate the same wastelands as the rubble of their accomplishments, serve as monuments to the horrors which totalitarian parties and their leaders can perpetrate on the deviationists.
Today, we no longer have to worry about these manifold horrors, except to recognize their reality, to view them as lessons and to keep them in perspective. This is not to say, however, that the Democrats do not punish those who part with their autocratic precepts and reality. They practice, in open union with their alter egos in the mass media, the politics of attrition warfare and media assassination instead of the bullet and the labor camp. For now, anyway.
Take Senator Joe Lieberman, for example. a hawk on the war on terrorism, he realizes that the fruits of victory in Iraq will be greater freedom in a world too long dominated by the horrors of a destructive 12th century theocracy, a victory for the rights of women, the spread of market capitalism, the establishment of a western based educational system, and a strong understanding that all these improvements are "liberal" in nature and will benefit america. Joe also recognizes that a failure or a retreat will mean a defeat for america and a weakening of our security at home, a diminution of our image abroad, further death and destruction visited on the inhabitants of Iraq and the continuation and growth of international terrorism.
For these "conservative" and "dangerous" convictions, held by a majority of american citizens, the Connecticut Senator is vilified in the liberal press and lampooned by the talking heads on the television. The unkindest cut of all concerns the growing demand that he be replaced as Senator because he's off track and way off base with the party's core constituents. There's a growing scrum about who can challenge him in the primary as a result of his radical effrontery and his failure to get back in line and boot him out of the party.
Out of lockstep with the leadership, dissenting courageously from the party line, Joe will be marginalized, eventually purged and then, following Khrushchev and others of a similar ilk, become an "unperson." The NY Times will conveniently forget him. Chris Matthews will no longer deign to humiliate him. The noted political savant and cartoonish radio commentator al Franken will cease skewering him. Soon he will be called a Tory by Ted Kennedy for supporting King George, as the Senator so termed President Bush in his latest billingsgate in The Boston Globe, the wholly owned subsidiary of the NY Times.
abandoned by his former friends and one time political supporters, Joe will shortly roam the Democratic netherworld, like Schrˆdinger's cat, neither alive nor dead, to be greeted by al Gore privately and quietly, but never spoken of publicly.
Yet Joe may have the last laugh, for it is often said that, "Time wounds all heels."
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