[Vision2020] Negative Liberties and Obama Newspeak

[No Weatherman]

Negative Liberties and Obama Newspeak
By Bruce Walker

The 2001 audio tape of Barack Obama describing the Constitution as a
document of "negative liberties" reveals an utterly Orwellian Obama.
How can liberty be anything other than negative? Liberty is the
absence of external control. Only in our age of collective thinking
and untidy language could such a thing as "positive liberty" be
conceived. The state power to coerce is not liberty.

Notions like "positive liberty" are part of the web of thought control
by language manipulation which Orwell described in 1984. If Obama
cannot think of "positive liberty" as a contradiction in terms, then
he simply cannot think. The conscious surrender of language to the
needs of the party creates a self-made prison from which escape is,
quite literally, inconceivable. These unguarded remarks by Obama
display a mind trapped in a reality in which words are phantoms.

Obama could have spoken about the limited value of liberty. Government
does some things which reduce our private rights and yet which
increase the common good. Politics is all about where the boundary
between broad notions of promoting the general welfare by state
coercion and preserving liberty should be. Politicians on the Left
have often argued that liberty should be reined in more tightly so
that "the people" can live better. But implying that more state power
somehow increases liberty is beyond mere Leftism. It is entry into
that dead realm of Newspeak in which language is pureed into nonsense,
and then nonsense is presented as argument.

Obama could also have spoken about the private duty of charity, that
moral imperative which makes the virtue of liberty pure. Charity,
though, is private. True charity is always a free act. That does not
make the moral duty of charity any less, but it means that it is a
function of liberty. But it seems as if Obama's mind cannot grasp this
sort of distinction.

Is the Orwellian character of Obama's mind a surprise? No. He is a man
young enough to have grown up in a cocoon of semantic babble. The
subliminal contradictions of popular entertainment, the indoctrinary
quality of his education, the pandemic use of "politically correct"
language, the nonexistence in Obama's universe of any need for
critical thinking, his absorption into a parish filled with surreal
anger which numb his conscience — almost every single aspect of the
life of Barack Obama dovetails into someone for whom the word
"liberties" has no authentic meaning.

This is the newness of Obama in our history. Leftists like George
McGovern and Jimmy Carter lived real lives. Both served in the
military. Both seemed to have been genuinely religious. Both worked in
private business. Both came from states that were conservative, and so
they had to defend their political philosophies. Barack Obama, by
contrast, has lived a life of utter sameness. There are no bumps or
rough edges or hints of individuality at all.

It is not just his life, so marinated in rote theory, that makes Obama
unique. He is an early prototype of a new creature in our lives:
Orwell's children, if you will. These are the people who can honestly
believe that September 11th was an "inside job" or that the CIA
invented crack cocaine to hurt blacks. This is the generation which
has grown up with no intellectual or cultural system of checks and
balances.

Iron and dull control of education, destruction of the nuclear family,
disappearance of religion in public life, degradation of art and
entertainment into tasteless mush, and, most of all, the
politicization of everything in life — these forces have created a new
sort of human being, a person who lacks from life any tools of
discernment or devices to describe life outside of the realm of
collectivist political rhetoric.

There is something about Obama, many of us sense, which is different
from any other politician. Socialism is inadequate to explain Obama.
He is both more and less than that. The Left with all its odd
menagerie of causes and claims is not enough either. Obama is part of
that but part of something more disturbing. He is someone who can say
"negative liberties" unaware that he is saying nothing at all.

Bruce Walker is the author of Sinisterism: Secular Religion of the
Lie, and the recently published book, The Swastika against the Cross:
The Nazi War on Christianity.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/10/negative_liberties_and_obama_n.html