Joe Biden And The Progressive Cleansing Of America–Channeling Pol Pot And The Year Zero

A 1959 picture of French children playing High Executioner with a scale model guillotine at first seems a bad idea, sending the wrong message; but on second thought, probably a very good way of teaching history. The French, no matter how hard they try, cannot airbrush The Terror from the history books that children read.  After the glorious days of storming the Bastille heads rolled by the hundreds – aristocrats, loyalists, sympathizers, and suspected sympathizers.  The Terror was McCarthyism in blood, a post-revolutionary gory excess to match any in history.

The armies of Genghis Khan decapitated thousands and impaled their heads on pikes on the high road into town, raped, pillaged, and marauded from Bulgaria to China.  The soldiers of the Crusades slaughtered everyone in their path as they entered the Holy City of Jerusalem.  Millions were killed or murdered by Stalin in his political purges and Siberian gulags; millions more by Mao in the Great Leap Forward and the famines that resulted; and six million by Hitler, and many millions more by Pol Pot.  Russians, Germans, Cambodians, and Chinese need a moral reckoning.  Even in the amoral sweep of history, a series of coincidental, random, or planned events which resulted in mayhem, destruction, and death need to be considered, if not remembered.

 
Here in the United States, we want no part of  history; and Americans are on a juggernaut to remove any and all references to the antebellum South, the Civil War, slavery, Jim Crow, Reconstruction. and Radical Republicanism that tore the country apart and continue to divide us.  It never happened.  Washington, the army officer who defeated the British, the first President of the new republic, and the icon of freedom and independence must be airbrushed because of his slave-owning past.  

Jefferson, perhaps the most impressive figure of American history – diplomat, writer, philosopher, inventor, and author of the Bill of Rights – has no place in the American pantheon because of his sexual dalliance with a slave and his slave-owning past.  Andrew Jackson, military hero who defeated the British at the Battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812, statesman, representative, and executor of Westward Expansion is off the shelf, off the currency, and consigned to the dust bin of American history because of his execution of Madison’s and Jefferson’s vision of Manifest Destiny, the civilizing mission to expand America from Coast to Coast.  

Taft is gone because of his support of the great industrialists of the early Twentieth Century – the men who built steel mills and railroads and mined the energy to run them; who created the the financial instruments to enable their growth.  Theodore Roosevelt is gone because under his watch the exploitive, environmentally crude, colonialist Panama Canal was built.  Franklin Roosevelt, John F Kennedy, LBJ, Clinton are persona non grata because of their sexual improprieties.  Henry Ford, despite his innovative, efficient, and productive assembly lines is dismissed as a capitalist overseer whose interest was only in cars, millions of cars, and cheap labor. 

In fact only those Americans who, because of their representativeness of race, gender, and ethnicity, have been elevated to prominence, and are considered worthy of note - Harriet Tubman will replace Jackson on the $20 bill because she was a black, formerly enslaved woman.  

The authors of slave journals, women who told ‘the truth’ about slavery from their slave quarters but whose stories of economic servitude ignored the more nuanced explication of the complex social, economic, cultural, and historical factors which determined both the persistence of slavery and the nature of Northern revolt are Pulitzer Prize candidates, not objective historical analysts. 

Harvey Milk and the San Francisco Castro gay radicals and not the critics who called out the gay lifestyle as promiscuous and contributed to the spread of HIV are lionized.  The Palestinians who after decades and billions of Western economic support, are still mired in Third World poverty and political irrelevance while Israel, which has in a few short decades become a model of modern liberal democracy, and economic enterprise, are championed.

There has never been a more myopic social policy as the cancel culture – an assumption that whatever occurred before must be judged only through the lens of today.  So it is no surprise that Joe Biden has expunged from the Oval Office any trace of what he and his coterie consider racism, colonialism, imperialism, and white supremacy. Within the first few days of his presidency  Biden sat with Kamala Harris to decide how to make it over.  The office should reflect the diversity of America, the progressive Utopia to come, and not the assumed, erroneous claims to former greatness.  

Biden’s America is not unlike Pol Pot’s Year Zero when the past was totally erased, liquidated, and forgotten in Cambodia’s transformation into what was envisaged as a Maoist Utopia.  All the bourgeoise – doctors, teachers, lawyers, administrators, and bureaucrats were to be either eliminated or re-educated.  Everything – language, attitude, ideas, and actions – would have to fall in line with the new revolutionary doctrines.

As part of a socialist Khmer Rouge-like purge, getting rid of the bust of Winston Churchill was an important, iconic statement.  Kamala Harris, his Rasputin, reminded him of Churchill’s support for Empire and the oppression and exploitation of Africans that resulted under British rule.  He was a despot, said Kamala, an arrogant, out-of-touch reminder of disgraced royalist empires of the past, and a symbol of white supremacy if there ever was one.

 

Biden thought for a minute – Churchill had after all been a brilliant statesmen and the very spirit, spine, and soul of Britain during the blitz.  He had been among the very first to understand Hitler’s military ambitions and the regional hegemony that was implied by his Thousand Year Reich.  Churchill had anticipated the geopolitical ambitions of Stalin and rejected any compromise with the Soviet dictator.  Churchill was a historian, an author, and an orator.  He embodied the greatness of Britain and Empire and was its symbol.  “What I wouldn’t give to be a leader like him”, Biden thought to himself.  Yet Kamala respectfully disagreed, and not only should Churchill go but ever white, capitalist, imperialist, misogynist, racist born.

Once Biden had been convinced that his presidency was secure and no challenges remained, he channeled Pol Pot – this was to be no less than a complete social, political, and economic revolution; and as much as the Khmer Rouge purges and pogroms were notorious for their brutality and murder, Biden took the point. The past would have to be called out for its ignorance, retrograde assumptions, and historical irrelevance.   

No references to the calumnious past would be permitted.  The words ‘empire’, ‘colonization’, ‘civilization’, ‘origin’, and ‘morality’ were to be expunged from the American English lexicon.  There were no such things as empire or colonization, only exploitation, depredation, and misery.  Empire was a concocted term based on the rapacious right of white, European kings.  Civilization only exists in the forests of Africa and Papua New Guinea, untouched by Western corrupt, disruptive and venal interests.  Origin had no salience as a concept, as narrowly defining, Western, and racist as it is.

Biden’s ‘Truth And  Veracity Commission’, organized at the outset of his presidency is an American inversion of the Académie Française; and is the body responsible for assuring correct and appropriate language.  There are not to be any ‘he, she, his, her’ pronouns in any federal document.  Only ‘they’ will do. Wherever possible loaded, sexist English terms, such as history, will be converted to their gender-neutral form or better the revisionist form, ‘herstory’.  

Anything with traditional racial, gender, or ethnic connotations or suggestions will be eliminated.  There will be no such thing as a ‘Chinese virus’, even though COVID emerged from rogue animal markets in Wuhan.  All things African must be phrased positively. Words describing the dysfunction, misappropriations,  misrule, and economic rape and pillage of African nations will not be allowed and will have to be replaced by ‘problem resolution’, ‘exogenously influenced inefficiencies’, ‘difficulties of political transition’, and ‘reordering of socio-economic priorities’.

To succeed, the Progressive Revolution can have no impediments, and the albatross of history is the heaviest and most onerous. History is done and over with, said Biden, Kamala, and the Truth and Veracity Commission, without relevance or significance.  Only the future matters in the Progressive vision.  

It is surprising to some that Biden had in his first days in office put his stamp on a radical progressive social agenda – after all his victory was assured not only by neo-socialist Bernie and The Squad, but by many Democratic moderates who simply wanted a return to some semblance of normalcy and temperance – but those observing more carefully have seen him in the thrall of exactly those who have wanted for years to remake America into a Utopian, autocratic, Orwellian, gulag world.

Biden’s heroes are not LBJ, Kennedy, and Roosevelt but Noam Chomsky, Paola Freire, Argentinian populists, Cuban apologists, and Salvador Allende.  The end justifies the means, the universalist lyrics of the Internationale. and la lutte continua are all in the first pages of Biden’s songbook. 'Unity', Biden's call to arms, will require some degree of enforced cooperation. Utopian ends are too important to worry  about the means to get there.  The enshrined principles of American democracy are relative, to be taken with a grain of salt, nothing set in stone.  If free speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, and freedom of religion interrupt, divert, or in any way impede the march to a progressive Utopia, they must be ignored. 

Biden may be a nice guy, a considerate even compassionate man; but this is politics, and he is in the hands of radical, determined, handlers who have no truck with namby-pamby collaboration and compromise.   The next four years will be as divisive and contentious as the previous four.