23A032 Glimmers from the Left by Jim Davies, 8/8/2023

It's inconsistent and surprising, but the fact is that light can be detected even on the Left of the political spectrum, here and there; and when found, it's bright.

The most recent and spectacular example is that of Robert F Kennedy Jr, whose monumental exposure of the Medical Industrial Complex is reviewed here and who has announced he's running for Prez as a Democrat. Here is his interview by Tucker Carlson on Fox TV. I wish him luck; he'll need it. Sadly he has a larynx deficiency which destroys his oratorical skill, and his Democrat pals are viciously undermining him.

The right term for him may be "Old Left", which stood for some individual rights, small government and no war; a distant echo of Thomas Jefferson who was the Party's founder. His uncle John F had his virtues (which probably got him assassinated) in that after inheriting the Vietnam War he took action to wind it down, contrary to the interests of the other (Military) MIC. JFK may also have planned to scrap the Federal Reserve, that thinly disguised Central Bank and bottomless well of money for government to spend. And of course his father RFK Sr was on-track to win the White House and bring an end to the Vietnam War, so he was shot dead. RFK Jr is still with us at this writing, even though the Dems have so far denied him the usual Secret Service protection.

Let's delve further back in time; in mid-Century (the 20th, that is) there were three seminal books written about where mankind may be heading; they were all dystopian (they took a gloomy view) and recognized at once as important. Two of them, at least, were written by authors on the Left.

George Orwell's 1984 was the best-known and perhaps the most ominous, with examples of its predictions all around us right now. Orwell wrote it in 1948 when he was in the process of emerging from Socialism, in England. His parents were comfortably off and he'd had a good education but in the fashion of many in that class in the first half of the Century he swallowed Communism. In 1936 he put beliefs into action and joined the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. Disillusion followed fast, as he saw the disunity on that side of the conflict, compared to the well-ordered military machine of Franco's Falangists; he noted even that the Soviet help received came not freely, as contributions to the proletarian struggle, but with a price tag and many attached strings.

Even so after escaping the trap in Catalonia he was invited to Moscow as a promising apostle of the Red religion ready for his return to England; that too didn't work out well for the Stalin Gang but became a model for his later novel Animal Farm. After WW2 he had figured out correctly that the whole Leftist thing was a charade, a method of fooling the people into accepting domination. And hence, his famous portrayal of Big Brother.

Aldous Huxley was another English Leftist, older than Orwell and from a very intellectual and talented family, who in the course of his studies and writing of books came to realize the awful danger of totalitarian rule. His Brave New World visualizes a society completely programmed by Authority, consisting of "people" almost fully zombified, grouped as young children into classes destined to carry out specific kinds of task for the Collective. In 1949 Huxley met Orwell and wrote to him a letter including this perceptive insight:

"Within the next generation I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narcohypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience."

"Infant conditioning and narcohypnosis." Schools, jabs and hypnotism; who'd ever ha' thunk it?

Ray Bradbury was another prolific author, youngest of this trio and American; he came from the Left but migrated to the Right as he matured and even moved towards anarchism in later life:

"I don't believe in government. I hate politics. I'm against it. And I hope that sometime... we can destroy part of our government, and [later] destroy even more of it. The less government, the happier I will be."

Ray's masterpiece was Fahrenheit 451, which I reviewed here. It tells of a future day in which nobody is permitted to read any books at all, and if government's secret police / fire department find one they burn it (at that temperature.) In some ways this is my favorite of the three, for it tells of resistance; how a few good people found a way around that mind-destroying law.

So there are three good books to read on the beach this Summer (while that's still allowed.) Enjoy!