Right wing media has co-opted it. That’s the left’s biggest stumbling block more than anything. It’s the ability of the ruling class to manipulate how people think and interpret symbols/ideas like “freedom.” They have an iron grip on our media/politics. How long that can win out over conditions declining, idk.
The end result of this is no different from patriotism. Drape everything you do in
the flagfreedom and it doesn't matter if you're killing puppies or running concentration camps. Anybody who opposeses it simply hatesAmericafreedom. Klanada has learned a lot from it's big brother.Like patriotism, I see no point in wrestling with hogs over a piece of cloth. It is just a rabbit hole of idealistic rhetoric and liquified shit. You will never get anywhere by pointing out the hypocracy of reactionaries. The whole thing needs to be rejected outright. There is nothing to gain by arguing or bargaining with nazis about the definition of freedom.
If we are to do anything, it is to pin the definition of freedom to material prerequisites like peace, land, and bread.
Always amazes me that the RW idea of freedom for many almost completely revolves around the ability to own guns. Rather than the real freedom that would come with say, having a free national healthcare system, which would then literally free you up from having to stay in a shitty job just for the healthcare insurance, in which you die from the thousand paper cuts of paying a never-ending scam of deductibles and co-payments. There seems to be so little follow through in the thinking. It’s all tribal, fear-based brainwashing of an archetype the RW sells.
Again, it’s the conditioning of propaganda that makes someone feel he is “free” by owning guns, but cannot/will not see that he’d be a lot freer to go hunting or bbq with his friends if he didn’t have the albatross of dealing with the mind-numbing capitalist bureaucracy of dealing with and being pick-pocketed by insurance co middlemen, who are the real “death panels” the GOP propagandists so sinisterly turned around to hang on the modest and totally insufficient Obamacare.
George Bernard Shaw has an essay in a Woman’s Guide to Socialism basically about how if you can’t just do anything you want during the day, that is not tied to or contingent with your job, then you are not free.
Patriotism is not a left wing concept. Freedom is. If we abandon something just because the right also hypocritically champions it then why not just give up on socialism too? Everyone from soc dems to nazis champion it hypocritically.
I believe in freedom, too.
Freedom to oppress anyone I don't like:amerikkka-clap:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_of_the_Family_with_God_for_Liberty now? :yea:
