February 20, 2022
The Power of the Powerless Is Real
By J.B. Shurk
One of the most challenging obstacles working against ordinary citizens in the West is the self-satisfying presumption that Western institutions and philosophies are inherently immune from the rise of totalitarianism. This is an understandable blind spot. Their identities have been forged, to various degrees, in the great traditions of Enlightenment notions of liberty, free speech, and natural rights. Surely the victors over communism, fascism, and Nazism cannot then fall victim to the madness of those same philosophies collapsing their systems from within. This "Us/Them" self-delusion has kept the citizenry from recognizing tyranny inside its gates.
It is good for people to take pride in the achievements and histories of their nation states. It is natural for the inhabitants of countries founded in fights for freedom to assume that the costs of obtaining that freedom are behind them and not ahead. It is easy to self-define the victors of WWII as cultures standing firmly opposed to authoritarianism, to believe that nations not bound by the Iron Curtain would never choose to build their own, and to assume that millions of graves and monuments attesting to the great human sacrifices over the last century in the defense of freedom are sufficient safeguards against future generations ever detouring from the blessings of human liberty. But all of these good and natural and easy mental prisms become mental prisons when they keep us from seeing what is happening in our own backyards.
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https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/02/the_power_of_the_powerless_is_real.html
