"In advocating the case of the persons thus dispossessed, it is a right, and not a charity, that I am pleading for" - Thomas Paine
Conservatives are professional "eliminationists". And if they can't eliminate something then they revise it, warp it and co-opt it to suit their own purposes. If the right-wing can twist the message of Jesus so thoroughly that you might believe that Jesus was a moneylender, poor old Thomas Paine doesn't stand a chance. But why should we care about Thomas Paine? Wasn't he just another rich, white Founding Father spouting platitude of "Liberty" all the while profiting from the backs of enslaved Africans? That's certainly what Glenn Beck would have us believe. So who was Thomas Paine and why do we Progressives have a much stronger claim to his legacy than the Tea Party?
Most of us have heard of Paine's Common Sense. A pamphlet that Paine distributed before the Revolutionary War. It has been credited by many as the impetus for the American Revolution. But Paine wrote much more than just Common Sense.
One of the toughest concepts challenging contemporary conservatives today is getting their acknowledgement that words and ideas have specific meanings. They are not infinitely mutable. Too many conservatives like to play Orwellian games with language. They seem to revel in the redefinition of words or the reassignment of meaning to words and ideas that have well established definitions.
One of my favorite conservative word corruptions, because the word gets slung about like yesterday's canned hash, is fascism. Fascism has a very specific meaning in the context of a political discussion. Fascism is an authoritarian, nationalist political ideology characterized by a totalitarian one-party state with tight integration between the capitalist sector and the government. Because of it's drive towards national identity (as opposed to an international identity) it is characterized as an ideology of the right. No matter how many books Jonah Goldberg writes, there will never be such a thing as Liberal Fascism. Intolerance? Perhaps. Fascism? Not so much.
The Boston Tea Party was not, as you might have heard, a revolt against the oppressive British Government, but rather a revolt against the British East India Company, the largest trans-national corporation of the day. Our current Tea Party Patriots aren't "revolting" against their corporate masters as the Colonial Tea Party activists did, instead, they are enthralled to their corporate masters. They are reacting to change, to the fact that a black man lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Paine's Real Agenda
In Agrarian Justice, published in 1795, Paine outlines an 18th century vision of a just society. He sets out his course to explain the origins of agricultural property in the origins of agriculture itself. People took control of the land to cultivate it. But this left people disenfranchised. Because of this disenfranchisement, Paine advocates for public assistance to help people.
Paine wrote,
"Cultivation is at least one of the greatest natural improvements ever made by human invention. It has given to created earth a tenfold value. But the landed monopoly that began with it has produced the greatest evil. It has dispossessed more than half the inhabitants of every nation of their natural inheritance, without providing for them, as ought to have been done, an indemnification for that loss, and has thereby created a species of poverty and wretchedness that did not exist before.
In advocating the case of the persons thus dispossessed, it is a right, and not a charity, that I am pleading for. But it is that kind of right which, being neglected at first, could not be brought forward afterwards till heaven had opened the way by a revolution in the system of government. Let us then do honour to revolutions by justice, and give currency to their principles by blessings.
Having thus in a few words, opened the merits of the case, I shall now proceed to the plan I have to propose, which is,
To create a National Fund, out of which there shall be paid to every person, when arrived at the age of twenty-one years, the sum of fifteen pounds sterling, as a compensation in part, for the loss of his or her natural inheritance, by the introduction of the system of landed property.
Paine is advocating for a program very much like Social Security which wouldn't be implemented until 1935, some 140 years after the publication of Agrarian Justice. Paine further elaborates on the necessity for additional government assistance for these dispossessed.
It is not charity but a right, not bounty but justice, that I am pleading for. The present state of civilization is as odious as it is unjust. It is absolutely the opposite of what it should be, and it is necessary that a revolution should be made in it. The contrast of affluence and wretchedness continually meeting and offending the eye, is like dead and living bodies chained together."
http://themassesareangry.blogspot.com/2011/04/thomas-paine-and-radical-foundations-of.html
Conservatives are professional "eliminationists". And if they can't eliminate something then they revise it, warp it and co-opt it to suit their own purposes. If the right-wing can twist the message of Jesus so thoroughly that you might believe that Jesus was a moneylender, poor old Thomas Paine doesn't stand a chance. But why should we care about Thomas Paine? Wasn't he just another rich, white Founding Father spouting platitude of "Liberty" all the while profiting from the backs of enslaved Africans? That's certainly what Glenn Beck would have us believe. So who was Thomas Paine and why do we Progressives have a much stronger claim to his legacy than the Tea Party?
Most of us have heard of Paine's Common Sense. A pamphlet that Paine distributed before the Revolutionary War. It has been credited by many as the impetus for the American Revolution. But Paine wrote much more than just Common Sense.
One of the toughest concepts challenging contemporary conservatives today is getting their acknowledgement that words and ideas have specific meanings. They are not infinitely mutable. Too many conservatives like to play Orwellian games with language. They seem to revel in the redefinition of words or the reassignment of meaning to words and ideas that have well established definitions.
One of my favorite conservative word corruptions, because the word gets slung about like yesterday's canned hash, is fascism. Fascism has a very specific meaning in the context of a political discussion. Fascism is an authoritarian, nationalist political ideology characterized by a totalitarian one-party state with tight integration between the capitalist sector and the government. Because of it's drive towards national identity (as opposed to an international identity) it is characterized as an ideology of the right. No matter how many books Jonah Goldberg writes, there will never be such a thing as Liberal Fascism. Intolerance? Perhaps. Fascism? Not so much.
The Boston Tea Party was not, as you might have heard, a revolt against the oppressive British Government, but rather a revolt against the British East India Company, the largest trans-national corporation of the day. Our current Tea Party Patriots aren't "revolting" against their corporate masters as the Colonial Tea Party activists did, instead, they are enthralled to their corporate masters. They are reacting to change, to the fact that a black man lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Paine's Real Agenda
In Agrarian Justice, published in 1795, Paine outlines an 18th century vision of a just society. He sets out his course to explain the origins of agricultural property in the origins of agriculture itself. People took control of the land to cultivate it. But this left people disenfranchised. Because of this disenfranchisement, Paine advocates for public assistance to help people.
Paine wrote,
"Cultivation is at least one of the greatest natural improvements ever made by human invention. It has given to created earth a tenfold value. But the landed monopoly that began with it has produced the greatest evil. It has dispossessed more than half the inhabitants of every nation of their natural inheritance, without providing for them, as ought to have been done, an indemnification for that loss, and has thereby created a species of poverty and wretchedness that did not exist before.
In advocating the case of the persons thus dispossessed, it is a right, and not a charity, that I am pleading for. But it is that kind of right which, being neglected at first, could not be brought forward afterwards till heaven had opened the way by a revolution in the system of government. Let us then do honour to revolutions by justice, and give currency to their principles by blessings.
Having thus in a few words, opened the merits of the case, I shall now proceed to the plan I have to propose, which is,
To create a National Fund, out of which there shall be paid to every person, when arrived at the age of twenty-one years, the sum of fifteen pounds sterling, as a compensation in part, for the loss of his or her natural inheritance, by the introduction of the system of landed property.
Paine is advocating for a program very much like Social Security which wouldn't be implemented until 1935, some 140 years after the publication of Agrarian Justice. Paine further elaborates on the necessity for additional government assistance for these dispossessed.
It is not charity but a right, not bounty but justice, that I am pleading for. The present state of civilization is as odious as it is unjust. It is absolutely the opposite of what it should be, and it is necessary that a revolution should be made in it. The contrast of affluence and wretchedness continually meeting and offending the eye, is like dead and living bodies chained together."
http://themassesareangry.blogspot.com/2011/04/thomas-paine-and-radical-foundations-of.html
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