History is replete with people who, in word and deed, proposed that acquiescence with an enemy will lead to peace. Perhaps the most memorable was Neville Chamberlain – and his “Peace in our time” statement after meeting with Hitler in Munich.
From a second-floor window at 10 Downing Street, Chamberlain addressed the crowd and invoked Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli’s famous statement upon returning home from the Berlin Congress of 1878 saying to the crowd below, “My good friends, this is the second time in our history that there has come back from Germany to Downing Street peace with honor. I believe it is peace for our time.”
To jubilant applause and cheers, Chamberlain then added, “Now I recommend you to go home and sleep quietly in your beds.”
As the British people slept, the German army rolled into Czechoslovakia in “peaceful conquest” of the Sudetenland.
America is surrendering today. Some examples:
City officials have apologized for policing as their downtowns are occupied and burned (in 2018, the Baltimore police chief apologized for 200 years of policing).
Starbucks apologizes to blacks and closes for a day of “unconscious bias” training.
California cities apologize to illegal aliens for our laws.
Universities apologize to student mobs for allowing conservative thought on campus.
Critical Race Theory is adopted and hundreds of thousands of white people are taught they are “White Devils” and must surrender to blacks (not all minorities, just blacks)
Tech Oligarchs censor speech on social media and internet platforms.
CEOs decry voter “suppression” without reading the laws.
No, we are not kowtowing to Nazi Germany for “peace for our time”, but we are cowering in the face of other dangers, our own subversive internal authoritarian movements seeking the power to shut down their opposition by making opposition illegal (including speech they do not like) – and in some cases, attempting to exterminate their opposition.
America is suffering from Chamberlain Syndrome.
Far too many are bending the knee to the newest ideological movement designed to destroy the American Republic – I call it the New Woke (“new” because “woke” has taken many forms in history). The New Woke movement shares much with German Nazism – the idea of racial superiority (except this time is ABW (Anybody But White) superiority rather than Aryan), the idea of institutional oppression (Hitler convinced Germans that the other European nations were taking unfair advantage of Germany through the Treaty of Versailles) and the fascist/socialist idea of “democratic socialism”.
America fought a Civil War and underwent a Civil Rights movement to end racial discrimination, it produced myriad laws and regulations to end institutional oppression, and as F.A. Hayek notes, socialism and fascism are twin sons of different mothers - and both end in failure:
“To those who have watched the transition from socialism to fascism at close quarters, the connection between the two systems is obvious. The realization of the socialist program means the destruction of freedom. Democratic socialism, the great utopia of the last few generations, is simply not achievable.”
None of these movements – BLM, ANTIFA, MeToo, Women’s March, Fight for 15…and a myriad of others – are all part of the New Woke, and none are about freedom. They are founded on the idea that “we are good because we believe you are bad and therefore, we have a right to close you down” – except they are not good, at least in traditional terms, they merely seek unelected power over others.
Many of our liberal/progressive/socialist/Marxist/friends propose that we need to bend to the will of democratic socialism; all that we need to do is to eliminate the bourgeois and cleave to the will of the dictatorship of the proletariat – but you do not need me to prove the idea of a “democratic” socialist (or Marxist) state is impossible, history does that for us. Most of our current problems are this incompatibility of “what must be true” for a socialist/Marxist/communist system to function and the individual freedom that is the basis for America.
Professor Hayek sums it up quite well:
“There is no justification for the widespread belief that, so long as power is conferred by democratic procedure, it cannot be arbitrary; it is not the source of power which prevents it from being arbitrary; to be free from dictatorial qualities, the power must also be limited. A true “dictatorship of the proletariat,” even if democratic in form, if it undertook centrally to direct the economic system, would probably destroy personal freedom as completely as any autocracy has ever done.
Individual freedom cannot be reconciled with the supremacy of one single purpose to which the whole of society is permanently subordinated. To a limited extent we ourselves experience this fact in wartime, when subordination of almost everything to the immediate and pressing need is the price at which we preserve our freedom in the long run. The fashionable phrases about doing for the purposes of peace what we have learned to do for the purposes of war are completely misleading, for it is sensible temporarily to sacrifice freedom in order to make it more secure in the future, but it is quite a different thing to sacrifice liberty permanently in the interests of a planned economy.”
No matter how hard the New Woke tries to claim it, the fact remains that the poorest and most oppressed people in the world are not living in capitalist countries. It is no coincidence that as America becomes more socialist, government involvement, control and power grow as well, and it is also true that in every historical case, countries with the social, political, and economic systems most closely matching the Marxist ideal have also been the most autocratic and totalitarian.
The fact progressives of the New Woke continue to pursue these ends indicate that the real goal is the total control, and a totalitarian, dictatorial government in America to back them up.
The New Woke is the Nazism of our time.
As it was in the time of Neville Chamberlain, there is no peace in surrender.