By the great Daniel Greenfield
The Obama slogan for 2012 is in and it’s “Forward”, which is a compact version of that old classic, “Don’t change horses in the middle of a stream” that every incumbent is forced to run on sooner or later. Forward implies that there’s no alternative but to go backward, which is a place that no right-thinking person wants to go.
The left has always been enamored of “Forwardism” or “Progressivism” which mean much the same thing. Before MSNBC had Lean Forward, Mao had the Great Leap Forward which killed some 40 million people, far more people than MSNBC can ever dream of tuning in to their programs.
When Lenin wanted to launch his own newspaper, he called it, “Vperod” or Forward. The name still lingers on among the left and appears on the mastheads of newspapers across the world. It’s Vorwarts in Germany, Voorwarts in the Netherlands and Ila al-Amam in the Arab world. Back in New York it’s The Forward, the venerable blotting paper of the Jewish left.
There are any number of left-wing political parties who have already named themselves “Forward”, including the Forward Communist Party of India, Kadima, the left-wing opposition party in Israel, and Vperod, a Russian political party that split off from the Socialist Resistance on account of the latter not being radical enough.
Picking “Forward” as his campaign slogan puts Obama in good company with the likes of Lenin and Mao, and it sounds positive until you stop and realize that it’s meant more as an order than a suggestion. There’s a reason most leftist newspapers with that name add an exclamation mark at the end of it. It’s not a proposal, it’s a command. Lean forward, march forward, live forward and then die forward. We’ve burned the bridges, run up the deficit and trashed the economy so there’s no going back.
An old Soviet era joke told the story of the wife of a Communist leader who upon hearing that her husband had developed a progressive paralysis, clapped her hands and exclaimed that at least it was progressive. That is the underlying message of “Forward” to voters, the country may be paralyzed, but at least it’s a progressive paralysis which leaves us unable to move our heads and stop leaning forward while the Entertainer in Chief croons to us about the wonderful world to come.
That may be why it remains a popular campaign slogan among desperate left of center candidates. When Adlai Stevenson, dean of the liberal eggheads, ran in 1952, the campaign buttons read, “Forward with Stevenson”. The country chose to go backward instead with Eisenhower winning by a landslide.
Tony Blair ran for his third term under the slogan, “Britain, forward, not back”, which despite its clumsiness did conclusively explain that”Forward” as a campaign slogan means there’s no going back. However, Blair forgot to tell voters that this referred to his immigration policy which helped create Broken Britain.
In this forward-thinking Britain, the police are being trained to look for signs of sorcery among immigrants after children have been murdered on suspicion that they might be witches. The last woman to be executed on witchcraft charges in the area was back in 1727, but now the UK is back in the witch hunting business or the hunting witchhunters business as the case may be. That’s not to mention the Islamic female genital mutilation business, which is also booming as part of Britain’s forward march into the 7th century.
Had Blair been a touch more honest, the slogan would have been, “Britain, so forward, it’s backward.” Much like having a mind so open your brains fall out, that is one of the dangers of being so forward, going so far ahead you end up in the middle of the Arabian desert praising absolute monarchies and slave states like Qatar as beacons of freedom and democracy, while your police hunt witchhunters and the mutilators of little girls.
In Australia, Julia Gillard rolled out “Moving Forward”, explaining that the slogan fit because Australians are an optimistic forward-looking people. Which they had to be as their country had suffered the worst economic decline in twenty years. When things are that bad, you might as well look forward and find something to be optimistic about.
The Grenadan Revolution had its own forward thinking slogans like “Who Controls the Minds of the People Have the Power” and “Forward Ever, Backward Never”. Sadly the revolution ended up going backward when the reactionary running dog capitalists overthrew the Cuban-backed revolutionaries and robbed them of control over the minds of the people.
The Obama campaign has largely adopted both Grenadan slogans, but its control over the minds of the people may prove to be as tenuous as that of the People’s Revolutionary Army did over Grenada. The backward view is surprisingly appealing even to Obama supporters who can’t help remembering that there used to be more jobs and more money before the Hope and Change revolution.
Romney might ask you if you are better off now than you were four years ago, but Obama will tell you to forget the past and look forward to the eternal future that is always peeking over the horizon. The mirage of the progressive world of tomorrow which we can reach over a pile of dead senior citizens, energy saving lightbulbs and multicultural coloring books.
The very use of “Forward” as a slogan summons up a century’s worth of socialist ghosts that they are blind to. But recognizing that would require looking backward, which forward thinking people do not do.
In Maryland, Governor Martin O’Malley, a liberal Democrat, turned a billion dollar surplus into a two billion dollar deficit, and then ran for reelection on what other slogan but, “Moving Maryland Forward”. The people of Maryland have moved on to what else but more billion dollar deficits. That is what you get when you move “Forward”, deficit spending today that will reap dividends in tomorrow’s utopias, economics by officials who can’t be bothered to count how much money they have because they’re too busy looking forward to the future.
Forwardistan is not some enigmatic place, it’s Lenin’s Russia, Mao’s China, O’Malley’s Maryland and Obama’s America. It’s what happens when you drive leaning forward, because maps and rear view mirrors are for backward thinking people who lack the courage to take the great leap of faith forward into the economic dead zone of uncontrolled spending and crude control of the economy.
Progressives do not like looking backward in the rearview mirror, there’s too many things there that they would rather not see, like the Great Leap Forward, the Gulags, the ghosts of Five Year Plans and a thousand failed ideologies and dead philosophies taunting them. Forwardism frees them from having to contemplate the unemployment figures or the deficit, there is no past, only the eternal future. Forget your troubles and groove to a new hopeful slogan that promises a better world tomorrow for a hamburger today.
In 1887, Edward Bellamy published the classic socialist tract, “Looking Backward” that imagined a Socialist America in the year 2000 where all industries had been nationalized, the economy had been militarized into an industrial army and retirement age was set at forty-five. Though Bellamy named his book, “Looking Backward”, he actually meant looking forward to the wonders of a new age that would apply progressive ideals and industrialization to every sphere of human affairs.
Bellamy’s utopia never quite came about, except in parts of Europe, which are swiftly going down the economic tubes, and the Soviet Union, which imploded in failed production quotas, debt and senseless tyranny. But there is one brief excerpt from “Looking Backward” that amply sums up the wrongness of Forwardism.
“It is easier for a general up in a balloon with perfect survey of the field, to manoeuvre a million men to victory than for a sergeant to manage a platoon in a thicket,” one of Bellamy’s future mouthpieces explains, laying out why the individual businessman is inferior to the wisdom of a planned economy.
Bellamy was fifteen when the Civil War ended and he died without ever seeing his country fight another major war. Had he lived to the Great War, he might have understood something of the wisdom of sergeants and the folly of generals. Perhaps he would have even realized that while generals can see farther than sergeants, they don’t know the terrain or what it takes to hold it.
After a century of Bellamy’s scientific generals of industry losing the battle on every front, his successors are still moving backward by looking forward, not to the year 2000, but perhaps to 3000, or at least 2100. Some year in the distant future when mankind will finally be run by a machine state that will run everything fairly and rationally under the guidance of the generals of the state.
That is what “Forward” really means. The “Forwardism” of that future which never seems to work, but is on the edge of working, with enough money, enough laws and enough marching orders, mankind will finally set foot into that mechanical state where leaders look upon us from their balloons and tell us how to live and how to die.
On college campuses, Obama stretches out his hand, urging students to take it and make that great leap forward with him into the future. That is what this election is really about and that is what this year will decide. Do we leap forward with him off the cliff or do we turn back and try to find a better way ahead?
@ Felix Quigley:
What they they DID know included (among other things) the fact that the MacDonald White Paper of 1939 had rendered Jewish escape from the European cauldron effectively subject to an Arab veto — and, thus, to an Axis veto as well.
And yet, when Britain, just 3 1/2 months after issuing the fatal document, declared war on Germany in Sept, Jewish Palestine — already heartsick under a cloud of well-warranted foreboding — would nonetheless proclaim, with unfrangible dignity & renewed resolve, “We shall fight the war as if there were no White Paper, and we shall fight the White Paper as if there were no war.” In a matter of days, 134,000 Palestinian Jewish men and women had volunteered for military service in the British army as the “Jewish Brigade” — the Palestine Brigade Regiment.
Never could trust those cornflakes. They’ll get you every time.
Yes, but they examine it likewise without the understanding of human nature that only experience can provide.
Net effect seems to be a maddeningly Sisyphean sentencing of every succeeding generation to the reinventing of the wheel. . . . and always from scratch.
Dweller
Wonderful, just wonderful! Such bravery and wonderful intelligent initiative.
it is doubtful that they knew in detail the plans which Hitler and Hajj Amin el Husseini had for the Jews of Palestine in 1942 (see the latest research by mallman) in which Gehlen was standing by in Athens with his team of killers, and it is certain that the model would have been to use our beloved “palestinians” to do it, as in Lithuania.
But they sensed it and there was great fear among the Jews. This is an aspect that is NEVER talked about by the Fascist Left like Chomsky.
By the way when I saw Prager place Lenin and Chomsky in the same line I nearly choked on my cornflakes.
On another issue we are told repeatedly Trotsky refused to help those jews.
For Christs sake it was 1922 and the Russians were practising cannibalism in some places. They had just fought war against 18 capitalist countries and blockade. PLUS there was the Jewish Bolshevism thing with Trotsky no 1 target.
But Prager does not tell us that Trotsky’s sister and bro in law Kamenev did big on this request, and Lenin signed it, and the Jews in that terrible year got to Palestine
Some friggin antisemites and Jewish self haters those Leninists and Trotskyists were. That is what I hate about Prager and Daniel and a thousand others, they do not give us history, they give us their prejudices dressed up as facts.
These are very complicated years. What I really resent is these people smuggling in their prejudices and not giving us the facts.
Over the years I have wasted too much time on Israpundit. Geller is an egomaniac type with many good points, Spencer an academic wasting time arguing with Fascists, Timmerman a wierdo, and so on.
I am turning to the youth. All of these have left the youth to the Fascists like J Street.
But it takes the youth to examine the past without prejudices.
yet Yamit, Dweller and Bland have things to say.
Still my best wished to all Jews because ALl jews are threatened.
@ Felix Quigley:
It wasn’t just Brits who made the North African campaign successful.
Palestinian Jews had a helluva lot to do with it themselves.
In that extraordinary episode, large numbers of Palestine’s Jews participated — even in what amounted to
• “suicide missions,” which required laying down mines under withering enemy fire.
In fact, Gen. Marie-Pierre Koenig, of the Free French, personally saluted the ragged survivors of these missions & insisted on bearing the Jewish flag on his truck (to the wrath of the Brits) — ordering his men to salute that same flag.
• Palestinian Jewish engineers organized & manned coastal defense signals;
• entire Palestinian Jewish families volunteered for the British Red Cross;
• Palestinian Jewish meteorologists helped predict weather, of critical importance in the desert campaigns;
• Palestinian Jewish builders erected bridges & fortifications;
• the Jewish Coast Guard ran speedboats along the dangerous Mediterranean;
• 2500 Palestinian Jews were bombardiers, pilots & observers with the RAF;
• Palestinian Jews manned anti-aircraft stations;
• Palestinian Jewish units penetrated & demolished enemy fortifications;
• Palestine’s Jews provided medical care in Jerusalem for injured Allied soldiers;
• Palestine’s Jews provided blankets, bandages, medicines, food, concrete, cutting tools, oil — even beer. All these were lugged to the front lines by Palestinian Jewish volunteers.
[Ruth King, “British Boycott Their History,” Mideast Outpost, 27 Aug 2007]
To this day, the UK has yet to acknowledge — let alone, express any sort of official thanks for — this vital & significant assistance at a time when Britain was still otherwise largely on her own against the Nazi juggernaut.
The crucial and, again, often sacrificial contribution to the success of that critical, summer 1942 campaign in North Africa is, all unto itself, a fascinating & inspiring, yet much overlooked or forgotten, story
— perhaps first told in detail in 1943 by Pierre Van Paassen, Dutch-born correspondent for the Toronto Globe, in “The Best Kept Secret of The War” — Chapter 4 of his book, The Forgotten Ally (Dial Press, 1943).
A new edition of Van Paassen’s book was published a few years ago by a consortium of authors & editors, led by Carol Gould.
@ Sally:
Sally,
I didn’t see any copies of “The Thought of Chairman Mao Tse Tung” when I was in PR China a year ago. Such memorabilia is considered kitch by the Chinese. There certainly was some progress in China under Mao; though whether or not most Chinese would have benefitted more under Gen. Chiang Kai-Shek (Ji?ng Jièshi) is an open question.
Stalin was a brutal dictator, the sort of Ruler Russians gravitate towards. He did save millions of Jews by defeating Hitler; but he also had plans, I believe, to exterminate them when his own death intervened.
All that is true except for:
Those who fought and defeated Hitler were the Russian youth.
Those who defeated Hitler were the Russian people.
You show such cynicism, the same which led the American elite to recruit Gehlen and tens of thousands of Nazis (www.hirhome.com) into the CIA to attack…Russia and Communism
P nachman…Sadly you misunderstand my point completely. Stalin and the Russian youth defeated the Nazis and thus saved the Jews. Similarly with The Desert Rats. Both the Russians and the British were largely antisemitic. That is the point I made. You did not get it. you just repeated my point. But you give NO credit and I do.
Laura
That is not the case Laura
He takes his education from the likes of Dennis Prager “Why the Jews” a book I have been reading. Do not get me wrong I consider these to be very intelligent people, but they are not historians, in the same way that I consider Paul Johnson’s History of the Jews not to be history either.
In dealing with history you have to look it in the eye, warts and all. Prager and Daniel do not do this.
As fot Ted he once wrote about visiting an elderly relative and his eyes lit up as the memories flooded back when he mentioned the name of Trotsky. I urged Ted to follow this man and his memories up. Urgently. You see this man may now be dead.
Trotsky made a mistake in dealing with Zionism when he visited the Sixth Congress. He corrected this mistake in the 1930s.
Herzl also made a mistake when he thought about a replacement for Zion. Again he corrected this.
But both have been treated differently by Jewish activists like Prager.
Prager did a hatchet job on Marx when he considers “On the Jewish Question”. This makes the whole book and work, with a rabbi called Joseph Telushkin in tow, suspect. Page 124 is an example where Prager deals with Marx, “On the Jewish Question”.
Marx in this book deals with complex issues and his arguments are always complex anyway. Prager does not even try to understand what Marx was saying.
Prager is already biased against Marx before he even starts.
Prager pulls out a sentence, rips it from its context, and emerges with a lie.
But cannot deal with the basic contradiction: Marx was opposing the antisemitism of bauer and Bakunin, at the same time on the critical issue of the day, calling for American Constitution rights for Jews in Prussia. So dishonest and unworthy of Prager.
The most serious part of Prager’s book is when he considers Jews in Russia like Trotsky on page 45 (Prager is close to Churchill’s antisemitism on Jewish Bolshevism, a harsh thing to say but true).
As far as I know Lenin was not antisemitic in the slightest, the reverse, he thought the Jews the most intelligent and able of Russians.
As far as I know, though I do not have the source it does figure, the Red Army and Bolsheviks passed a law making antisemitism a capital offense.
While historically it was out of the Whites that antisemitism and Nazism emerged.
I have always thought that the much quoted remark by the Chief Rabbi of Moscow, Jacob Mazeh, the most absurd thing.
What did Mazeh expect the Russian workers in 1917 to do? Just sit back, accept the status quo as Stalin and Kamenev wanted, and be subsequently massacred?
Mazeh takes a position of being above it all.
A bit like Ted and the others thought they could sit and wait out the Arab Nightmare.
But life is not like that at all.
I do not trust Greenfield or Prager one inch on these issues, while of course on other many issues we are together. They do not understand Fascism at all. They turn their faces away from the greatest expert on both Fascism and Stalinism, which was Leon Trotsky in the ten years before his murder.
And without understanding Fascism you cannot understand the Holocaust. Or anything at all.
And this means that we need new eyes to see and a new voice to speak. That is the unresolved crisis in the leadership of Jews at the present time. In a way Greenfield give people like Laura what they want to hear.
Sally Said:
Stalin started fighting Hitler only because he had no choice, as Hitler surprise-attacked the USSR breaking the Hitler-Stalin Pact to divide Poland between them.
Also, he didn’t do it on his own: without US material aid he hardly had any means to fight the Nazis, having starved millions of kulaks, deported millions more, and purged his armed forces.
If he saved any Jews, it was no more than a by-product of his scrambling to preserve his horribly repressive empire.
@ Felix Quigley:
Millions, Felix; and nearly a million of their descendants did aliyah in the 90s.
Now, on to your “verbal vomit” comment, I don’t agree with you. I think Daniel Greenfield did a pretty good job in noting that when politicians say “Forward!”, they actually mean “Forward, into the Middle Ages!”; and he also cleverly points out that when the masses are busy looking “forward”, they fail to see their own wake.
As for our all being “full of ourselves”, you’re probably right — but of course, you are also one of us 🙂
Daniel Greenfield knows history all too well.
I completely concur with P Nachman and of course Daniel Greenfield.
Sorry, I have to agree with Belman. The purpose of the Red Army was NOT to save Jews any more than it was the purpose of the US Army. If Jewish lives were saved, it was a by-product which some seem too eager to take credit for. As if the driving force behind the USSR in WWII was saving Jews! Really?
I for one agree with everything written here. I am rather backward in this regard – I like my Constitution, my Bill of Rights and my freedoms. I’m very attached to them! And I don’t like government apparatchiks of any ilk telling me what I can and cannot do.
And I tend to be very, very wary of anyone that tells me that I must sacrifice for the greater good and tells me exactly what I must sacrifice. Somehow, that illusive “greater good” never seems to include yours truly.
The British without any doubt are in competition for the “prize” of worst Antisemites.
Yet it was British youth (The Desert Rats) in the North African Campaign that saved the hundreds of thousands of Jews in Palestine from Holocaust in 1942! They were NOT fighting to save the Jews!!!
How to explain this detail? Daniel will never!
The answer to my question of how many Jews the Red Army action in World War 2 must be in the millions! An uncomfortable fact of history for Israpundit, the commie bashing site!
To the editor and readers of Israpundit how can you read this verbal vomit…well I know how you can you are full of it yourselves… as Ted continually shows me.
Well a little question out of a thousand I could ask (the whole approach of our Daniel is anti/historical) is this:
How many Jews did the Red Army in World War 2 save?
Not one?
Ten?
Millions?
The Red Army was founded by Lenin and Trotsky, especially by Trotsky. Stalin was playing a nuisance and destructive role then even as Lenin and Trotsky were leading in the fight against 18 invading capitalist armies.
With Trotsky murdered in Mexico in 1945 by Mercader, agent of Stalin, Stalin took over the leadership of the Generals of the Red Army in the War, and proceeded to deliver the blows against the Nazis that saved the lives of millions of Jews.
Stalin was an Antisemite but he did smash the Nazis. How to explain contradictions like this? Daniel has no idea and will never have any idea.
This man cannot look at history no more than could Stalin.
Not “great” Belman! A puny puny little accidental character is our Daniel!
Kadima.