One-world fascism chic, Obama-style

Ken Hechtman, VFR’s Canadian leftist reader, sends this message he found at a website called 43 Things (where readers are invited to “List your goals, Share your progress, Cheer each other on”):

Greeting from Montreal. While walking the streets of Old Montreal today, I saw a great T-shirt. It said “One World, One People, One Leader—United We Stand—Obama”, with a picture of Barack.

Its nice to see again the rest of the world looking at the USA for leadership and with excitement.

KH adds:

I’ve started to see them around Montreal. I’ve heard the slogan someplace before though.

If I think for a minute, I’ll be able to place it.

KH is referring of course to his own statement which I elicited from him in the thread What do liberals want? I had been questioning why he wants Muslims to come to the West, given the obvious danger this represents even to his own leftist ideals of diversity and freedom if the Muslims do not drop their beliefs and become nice Western liberals as he hopes that they will do.

I said:

Yes, yes, of course, all kinds of influences can temporarily weaken Islamic practice and change customs and manners in Islamic countries. But as long as Islam remains Islam, there is always the potential and the likelihood that it will return in force, as has happened over and over in history.

So what’s the advantage of bringing them here? Why do this thing that requires all this social engineering and may fail? Why not just leave them where they are? What is it that drives you?

To which he replied:

Because at the end of the day I want one world and one people, not 200 mutually suspicious nation-states and 5000 mutually suspicious tribes. The Brotherhood of Man and all that …

For a person of the left to state so clearly his ultimate aims was helpful, and set off quite a discussion.

- end of initial entry -

Adela G. writes:

You write:

“KH is referring of course to his own statement which I elicited from him in the thread What do liberals want?”

I’m surprised KH wastes time in being so coy. His New World Order is not yet in place.

But since he evidently has time on his hands, I suggest he mow a lawn or two. Cutting blades of grass that vary in color, texture, and size all down to the exact same height should be very gratifying to one of his radically egalitarian mindset. (Pun intended.)

A. Martin writes:

Regarding the slogan: “One World, One People, One Leader,” of which Mr. Hechtman said: “I’ve heard the slogan someplace before though. If I think for a minute, I’ll be able to place it.”—He can look further back than his own correspondence with you. It sounds suspiciously like the slogan of another popular “change agent” of the past: “Ein Reich, Ein Volk, Ein Fuhrer.” Surely this was not lost on Mr. Hechtman. In fact, I would almost suspect that the T-shirt in question was printed by someone who was aware of the reference and intended it as a dig against Barack Obama. But I could be wrong. Leftists are after all known for their short historical memory and impaired sense of irony.

[Several commenters have pointed out the the similarity to the Nazi slogan.]

Adela G. writes:

“Chic”?

I think “cheek” is more apt.

Obama’s style bears about as much relation to real chic as Mr. Hechtman’s “one world and one people” does to any true Brotherhood of Man. (As a typical liberal, he conflates the notion of brotherhood—a tie between or among men which nevertheless allows each to maintain his separate identity—with total oneness, in which individual identities are subsumed, presumably for the greater good of the now-featureless whole.)

Sam B. writes:

KH says:

Greeting from Montreal. While walking the streets of Old Montreal today, I saw a great T-shirt. It said “One World, One People, One Leader—United We Stand—Obama”, with a picture of Barack.

Over the months of suffering KH’s sophomoric sloganeering, I now suspect that he’s either a very young idealist who has not taken the time and the trouble to study history—especially 20th century history—or he is very naive. Or he is both.

“One World, One People, One Leader—United We Stand—Obama”, with a picture of Barack” chillingly echoes—and evokes—Hitler’s ideal world:—Ein Reich! Ein Volk; Ein Fuhrer! This was either an intentional—and hopefully—humorous play on words; or, perhaps, more depressing, a completely naive adoption of Der Fuhrer’s ideals—except expanded beyond Germany to the world. Come to think of it, wasn’t that Hitler’s intention—to “unite” the world under German hegemony, with the Japanese and Italians, junior (but subordinate) partners?

And even were KH’s brave new world to come within striking distance of possibility—G-d forbid!—wouldn’t he have a Sisyphean task bringing the multi-tribal, ever-internecine Moslem world into his utopian fold?

With all of the murderous dystopias introduced by the left in the 20th century—Stalin’s gulags, Mao”s hundred blooming flowers, Castro’s firing squads and prison camps (where gays are incarcerated)—given those, I sometimes wonder how KH can reconcile his vision (illusion) with the facts of history, or whether he believes that works like Brave New World, Nineteen Eighty-Four, The 25th Hour (a long forgotten novel), Jan Valtin’s Out of the Night, and, yes, again, Solzhenytzin’s Gulag Archipelago are merely the products of paranoid, if creative, imaginations, or grounded in a reality these giants knew—even before the rest of the world was aware of how dangerously seductive, especially to the young, they were—and still are; unless Mr. Hechtman has been pulling our collective legs all this time.

LA replies:

The slogan was not Ken Hechtman’s—he reporting on what he has seen and read.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 22, 2008 12:04 PM | Send