Red Star Over Denver
By Robert Klein Engler (08/28/08)
The Denver Pepsi Center is decorated for the Democratic National Convention. Sections of the entrance to the center are draped with banners that at first glance seem odd for a political convention.
The banners look like inversions of the American flag. They display blue stripes and red stars. You have to wonder if it is intentional that at the convention for a major political party leaning towards socialism, we look up and see a red star over Denver. Has the dictatorship of the proletariat snuck up on us?
I remember taking the British troop train from Amsterdam to West Berlin when the Soviets controlled East Germany. You could see red stars on the Soviet tanks parked along the railroad tracks and even on the caps the soldiers wore when they searched the train just outside the city.
Is the battle for control of the Democrat Party between the Clintons and Obama at the Pepsi Center an echo of the argument between Kautsky and Lenin? What would the dictatorship of the proletariat look like in a postindustrial society like the United States?
These are questions few Marxist at the DNC or elsewhere attempt to answer because they have either an old world view of Marxism or are lost in the jungle of liberation theology.
The answer to these questions are simple, just follow the red star over Denver back to where the Democratic candidate for president got his start in politics. The dictatorship of the proletariat in a postindustrial society would look like Chicago, today.
Marxists do have something of a moral vision. It motivates the party's rank and file to move towards a secular vision of a just society where the state will wither away. Before the state withers away, however, we must "suffer" the dictatorship of the proletariat.
V. I. Lenin was not at the DNC when he wrote in his pamphlet, The State and Revolution, "In capitalist society we have a democracy that is curtailed, wretched, false; a democracy only for the rich, for the minority." The dictatorship of the proletariat will correct all that, it will bring about "Change we can believe in."
Of course, the state never withers away. It just gets bigger and bigger, like the nanny state of Chicago. Violence also does not diminish under a Marxist regime, it just shifts like quick silver. Look at the rising taxes and murder rate in Chicago and you have further evidence of the vision V. I. Lenin dressed up in rhetoric.
This is what Michelle Obama says about her vision, "Barack... talked about "'The world as it is' and 'The world as it should be.' But he reminded us that we know what our world should look like. We know what fairness and justice and opportunity look like."
Yet this earthly, Marxist vision of Senator Obama's wife has something theoretical and inhuman about it. Most specifically in Chicago, it is a vision that requires the destruction of the local by a theory of "urban renewal" and the triumph of death over life by state funded abortions. These values come to us by the Democrat Party's control of public education.
The destruction of the local to further a theory of society is one of the consequences of Marxist politics. The Chicago Sun-Times newspaper ran a headline the morning after Michelle Obama's speech that read, "South Side Pride."
Where are the local roots for that south side pride? Neither Barack Obama nor his wife were born in Chicago. They never worked to reconstruct the history of the communities they claimed to help.
Certainly the local cannot be protected by the propaganda that is public education in Chicago. We read in the Chicago Tribune newspaper that City Colleges chancellor Wayne Watson is to retire next summer. Watson heads up a system of "community" colleges that serves about 115,000 students with a $476 million budget and 5,700 employees.
The Tribune claims, "During his 10 years as chancellor...Watson oversaw the development of the new Kennedy-King College in the Englewood neighborhood..."
That same paper refuses to document the destruction of the previous community that was bulldozed so a new campus could be built. It would be interesting to hear Watson's explanation as to way he had to build upon the ashes of Englewood.
Perry Buckley, who heads the Cook County College Teachers Union, may be nothing more than a fellow traveler with Watson. He says the chancellor made the City Colleges into a true community college system. It seems that for Obama supports Watson and Buckley, the so-called community colleges in Chicago educate best when they abolish the history of a community.
Then, there is the issue of abortion in Chicago. Marxists educators prefer abortion. They want it so much they even invasion retroactive abortion. Senator Obama holds one of the more extreme views on abortion of any elected official when it comes to partial birth abortion.
Rebecca Albury tells us about abortion from a Marxist point of view in her essay, "Human Life and Fetal Images." A review of her article claims, "Marxist believe that personality and human value are imparted by the external and economic environment, not by any inherent spiritual value. The fetus, becomes a person when he is judged as such by 'someone of higher wisdom.'" In Senator Obama's words, this is someone "above my pay grade."
Citizen magazine claims, "Stroger Hospital in Cook County, Ill., ...performs about 4,000 abortions a year--and bills taxpayers more than $1 million a year for those abortions." That's about 10 abortions a day, about one every two hours, just in Chicago. In the words of Michelle Obama, is that, "...the thread that connects our hearts?"
Marxist politicians play fast and lose with the future after they have abolished the past. They claim, "The future is now" or, "We are the ones we have been waiting for."
In spite of these claims, we can only see into a glass darkly when we look to the future. Yet, even in this darkness some shapes are discernible.
A future historian may uncover the truth about the barbarian invasion that abolished so many local Chicago communities under the regime of the mayors Daley.
Another historian may document the human cost of abortion, and perhaps in a bunker, an aging author, writing a revisionist history, will remember that Barack Obama turned out to be the first Marxist from a major political party to run for President of the United States.
Robert Klein Engler lives in Oak Park, Illinois. His book CONTRA OBAMA is available from Lulu.com.
(Printer friendly version) Email: Robert Klein Engler
