…the grim little person named Rosa Baron… who was head of my particular group during the Sacco-Vanzetti demonstrations in Boston snapped at me when I expressed the wish that we might save the lives of Sacco and Vanzetti: “Alive–what for? They are no earthly good to us alive.”

                                                       Katherine Anne Porter, The Never-Ending Wrong

 

What has happened to our concept of martyrdom?

Any history course, especially one that focuses on European history, is rife with accounts of the martyrs. The golden thread that connected nearly all of the martyrs were two essential traits. First, a religious conviction that took precedence over all other aspects of their lives. Second, a willingness to die for their beliefs.

In literature, a tragedy is the tale of a protagonist whose character and circumstances lead him into a potentially catastrophic situation. It is critical to the genre, however, for the protagonist to be given the opportunity to avert disaster. The tale becomes a tragedy because the tragic flaw in the character of the protagonist compels him toward his own demise. He is guided, it seems needlessly and fruitlessly, to his own doom by his will.

Similarly, most of those from history whom we distinguish with the title of martyr faced a critical point in their lives. That point was having to make the decision either to forsake their beliefs and deny what they had been proclaiming in order to avert being put to death by an oppressor or to decline submitting to an oppressor and willfully follow the course of their own demise.

We honor them, however, for their selflessness and for a third trait that is common to martyrs. They paved the way for others to follow their convictions without fear of oppression. For ultimately the courage to follow virtuous convictions triumphs over the oppressor’s terror.

The Left in America argues from feelings rather than reason, and thus finds its most successful campaigns waged on the battlefield of the emotions. Part of the strategy for attaining their goal of a Leviathan State is to seek out sob stories they can use as part of their arsenal of emotional pleas. This sword stroke cuts both ways: they make a powerful appeal to the emotions and compassion of the people, and if anyone dares to debate with reason, they are cast as cold-hearted, selfish villains oppressing the less fortunate.

As this is part of their modus operandi, they are always eager to adopt any person or situation to progress their cause. However, due to the relatively safe and prosperous condition of our country thanks to Western jurisprudence, liberty, and the free-market economy, they’ve had difficulty finding those they can prop up as victims of injustice and oppression. The best they have been able to find is the poor and the less fortunate they can portray as victims – living martyrs they can aim the cameras at whenever they need a piece of legislation passed or defeated.

As Leftist politicians are far more generous with other people’s money than with their own, they are also far more altruistic in sacrificing others rather than themselves. Because their ulterior motive is self empowerment, they are unwilling to sacrifice themselves too completely to any one particular cause. They must remain viable and flexible in order to ensure that they can constantly appeal to the fickle masses and retain their popularity.

Katherine Anne Porter, an American writer whose career spanned much of the 20^th century, was a devout liberal. In 1977 she wrote a piece entitled The Never-Ending Wrong, a chronicle of her involvement in the campaign to save Sacco and Vanzetti and especially what went on behind the scenes among the several groups purportedly organized to save the lives of the two anarchists eventually convicted of murder and executed.

As the epigraph to this article demonstrates, many of those involved in the Sacco-Vanzetti case did not want to prevail in saving their lives. They wanted Sacco and Vanzetti to be executed.

They wanted them to be martyred.

This is perhaps the clearest example of the difference between the martyr and the martyred. The true martyrs sacrificed their own lives for their convictions and to free others from oppression though they often had the opportunity to renounce their beliefs in exchange for self-preservation. Meanwhile the Left eagerly hunts for others they can martyr for “the cause,” to preserve their own worldly power.

We should never be surprised and yet we frequently are at the speed with which the American Left can use practically any situation to further their Leviathan goals. Whether it is turning a memorial service into an afternoon of stumping for the Democrat party or putting in front of the cameras someone who has stopped taking their medication to exacerbate the effects of a disease in order to gin up support for a piece of legislation, they waste no time. In this regard, they are the epitome of capitalism.

It was only a day or two before the American Left began speculating whether the execution of Saddam Hussein was an act of martyrdom – Saddam Hussein, one of the most vicious and demented mass murderers of the 20^th century and whose crimes against humanity rank right up there with the Nazis, Pol Pot, Mao Zedong, and Stalin’s henchmen.

While the press of 1945 had no qualms printing photographs of Mussolini’s head smashed in after the citizenry he tyrannized pulled him down off meat hooks where he’d been hung for public display, the leftist media in America lamented the pictures of a noose being slipped over Saddam’s head as an indignity – an indignity to a tyrant who gassed his own people and who is reputed to have fed his victims through plastic shredders feet-first.

The American Left, comfortable and prosperous thanks to the American and Western ideologies they deplore, have martyred a mass-murdering tyrant in order to attack America.

America has been engaged in fierce wars to defend liberty since we declared our independence. But for some forty years our worst enemies are not combatants from other nations, but from within. We have been under ruthless attack since the popularization of 1960’s-style radical liberalism.

It is America and freedom-loving Americans they are after, not the true tyrants. America, who has served as such a beacon of freedom and opportunity that millions have left behind all that they had in their native lands in order to live the American dream, while countless others have died escaping from truly oppressive regimes in the hope of reaching our shores.

America, whose patriotic sons and daughters have sacrificed terrible numbers of their own lives to pass on the torch of liberty to all the world.

A tyrant swings and America’s enemies within condemn her patriots as imperialists for meddling in world affairs for selfish reasons.

I ask you, who are the true martyrs and who is being martyred for a political cause?

 

 

 

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