A Terrible Clarity

     I’m something of a clarity evangelist. I despise people who deliberately muddy the waters of discourse. Yet politics being what it is, there are many such prominent ones. We seldom get a respite from their blather. That’s by design.

     Clarity is power’s greatest enemy. To achieve and maintain power, those who want to rule you must confuse you. Else you might realize what has been done to you – what is still being done to you! – and therefore, what you must do.

     If the conscious mind has any bedrock need, it is clarity. Yet clarity can be terrible beyond measure. Today we commemorate a day when things became all too clear.

     The only true power is total power: power absolute and unbounded. The truly ardent power-luster will accept nothing else. That has an implication from which most of us recoil. In the interests of clarity, let it be stated plainly, once and for all:

     George Orwell was magnificently, terrifyingly clear about what power is at its heart:

     ‘The real power, the power we have to fight for night and day, is not power over things, but over men.’ He paused, and for a moment assumed again his air of a schoolmaster questioning a promising pupil: ‘How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?’
     Winston thought. ‘By making him suffer,’ he said.
     ‘Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress towards more pain. The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy — everything. Already we are breaking down the habits of thought which have survived from before the Revolution. We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always — do not forget this, Winston — always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — for ever.’

     I know you’ve seen that passage before. You may have seen it here; I’m sure I’ve used it, though perhaps not in this context. The logic of power demands either total submission or death.

     But the full horror of the Party’s program only becomes clear when O’Brien discloses the intent behind Winston’s “re-education:”

     ‘Get up,’ said O’Brien. ‘Come here.’
     Winston stood opposite him. O’Brien took Winston’s shoulders between his strong hands and looked at him closely.
     ‘You have had thoughts of deceiving me,’ he said. ‘That was stupid. Stand up straighter. Look me in the face.’
     He paused, and went on in a gentler tone: ‘You are improving. Intellectually there is very little wrong with you. It is only emotionally that you have failed to make progress. Tell me, Winston — and remember, no lies: you know that I am always able to detect a lie — tell me, what are your true feelings towards Big Brother?’
     ‘I hate him.’
     ‘You hate him. Good. Then the time has come for you to take the last step. You must love Big Brother. It is not enough to obey him: you must love him.’

     For the Party would not allow Winston or any other man to die hating them. That would make him a martyr, and martyrs exemplify the unmaking of power. The martyr is indispensable to possibility of revolution. Therefore, they who hold power must strive to their utmost to avoid creating martyrs.

     It’s all so simple! It’s like a beginner’s first class in propositional logic. But Orwell was a genius, and the genius’s necessary qualities include the ability to accept what is terribly clear. Our contemporary power-lusters aren’t nearly as bright or penetrating as was George Orwell.

     Neither were those of First-Century Judea.

     “Christ was crucified for preaching without a police permit.” — Robert A. Heinlein

     Power, in Judea in Christ’s time, was founded on the Judaic religion. At the summit of that religion stood the Sanhedrin, which – with the indulgent cooperation of the Roman occupiers – could decree the death of any man who dared to defy its rule. Rome was perfectly happy to allow the Sanhedrin that power. To rule a great empire requires collaboration with local rulers. Without it, there’s no avoiding the repeated imposition of mass terror and bloodshed through military force.

     To the Sanhedrin, Jesus of Nazareth appeared to be a threat to their power. They couldn’t have that, so they contrived his death. The actual executioners were Roman soldiers. Rome wasn’t indulgent enough to allow the Jews to impose capital punishment themselves; that would be taking this “home rule” business a wee bit too far. But when Herod sent Jesus to Pilate, Pilate knew what he had to do to “keep the peace:” specifically, peace between the occupying power and the local power structure.

     The Gospel narrative tells us that Jesus knew what was coming. Being as human as he was divine, he feared it. He prayed for “this cup to pass from me.” [Matthew 26:39] Yet he accepted it as his Father’s will. Why?

     For Jesus himself had said it:

     This is my commandment, That ye love one another, as I have loved you. Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. Ye are my friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you. [John 15:12-14]

     Jesus’s Crucifixion was the ultimate consequence of the power-lust of the rulers of that place and time. Jesus’s acceptance of His Crucifixion was the final demonstration of his love.

     Power and love are antitheses. No one who sincerely loves seeks power. Conversely, no one who seeks power can sincerely love.

     Coincidentally and most ironically, the morning brings an irrefutable demonstration of power-lust — sanctimoniously disguised, as it must always be in our time, as a necessity in defense of ideals the writer does not truly hold:

     Evil has come to America. The present administration is engaged in barbarism; it has arbitrarily imprisoned its opponents, revoked the visas of thousands of students, imposed taxes upon us without our consent, and seeks to destroy the institutions which oppose it. Its leader has threatened those who produce unfavorable coverage, and suggested that their licenses be revoked. It has deprived us, in many cases, of trial by jury; it has subjected us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and has transported us beyond seas to be imprisoned for pretended offenses. It has scorned the orders of our courts, and threatens to alter fundamentally our form of government. It has pardoned its thugs, and extorted the lawyers who defended its opponents.
     If these actions become normal, the government could arrest anyone and deport them to prison in a foreign land, without hope of redress, for no reason. It is nothing less than the total abdication of rule of law in this country. There is no guard or protection against it. If this theory prevails, then it is the end of America as a free nation.
     I do not wish for this essay to be a mere catalogue of outrages. The conduct of the present administration is as well known to you as it is to myself, and can be understood by any sensible person. On it, no further comment is ventured.
     What remains for us to decide is when we fight. If the present administration wills it, it could sweep away the courts, it could sweep away democracy, and it could sweep away freedom. Protest is useful only insofar as it can effect action. Our words might sway the hearts of men, but not of beasts.
     If the present administration chooses this course, then the questions of the day can be settled not with legislation, but with blood and iron. In short, we must decide when we must kill them. None of us wish for war, but if the present administration wishes to destroy the nation I would accept war rather than see it perish. I hope that you would choose the same.

     In my most terrible nightmares, I could not have made matters clearer. Writer Nicholas Decker, of course, is a Leftist. He’s a Leftist of the 1984 / O’Brien stripe, albeit without the deeper understanding O’Brien displays in the passages I quoted above. I imagine he fancies himself a revolutionary theorist. But the central point must not be obscured by incidentals: he wants power, and he sees mass murder as the only route to it.

     In that regard, he’s in tune with Bill Ayres’s Weather Underground:

     I asked, “well what is going to happen to those people we can’t reeducate, that are diehard capitalists?” and the reply was that they’d have to be eliminated.
     And when I pursued this further, they estimated they would have to eliminate 25 million people in these reeducation centers.
     And when I say “eliminate,” I mean “kill.”
     Twenty-five million people.
     I want you to imagine sitting in a room with 25 people, most of which have graduate degrees, from Columbia and other well-known educational centers, and hear them figuring out the logistics for the elimination of 25 million people.
     And they were dead serious.

     The logic of power leads there and only there. Ayres and his collaborators knew where they were headed. Nicholas Decker has embraced their method unflinchingly. He has made it clear that the Left will stop at nothing. For his candor, we owe him our thanks.

     Gentle Reader, if I had been asked to compose a paean to the sort of villainy depicted above, I don’t think I could have done it. Nicholas Decker has provided us a terrible clarity, indeed – and on the day we commemorate Jesus of Nazareth’s sacrifice of himself in irrefutable demonstration of the exact opposite, at that. Could the Left’s absolute hostility to Christianity have been made that clear in any other way?

     Power or love? On this Good Friday in the Year of Our Lord 2025, let us choose wisely… and as far as possible, from love.

     May God bless and keep you all.

Yours in Christ,
Fran