Obama Youth Brigade Sings For Change

Evidence of the political Messianism that surrounds Barack Obama continues unabated. Here is a creepy video of children singing out the One. A child sings, "We're gonna spread happiness. We're gonna spread freedom. Obama's gonna change it. Obama's gonna lead 'em. We're gonna change it, and rearrange it. We're goin' to change the world."



Obama's going to bring freedom, but not for people to pursue happiness. The freedom will come in the happiness that he provides. He will do this by rearranging the world. This is consistent with the messianic claims his more enthusiastic follows have made for him. The song's expectation that he will "rearrange" the world is consistent with his claim that it is not politics that is broken (as McCain claims), but America itself. His wife, Michelle, says, "our souls are broken." Perhaps he will re-arrange our souls.

If Obama is sworn in as President, can we expect an Obama catechism for children, either issued by the White House or initiated by the public schools with the approving sufferance of the White House?

Nazis and Communists have been known for this blend of patriotism (a thing that is healthy in itself), Utopian political hopes, and personality cult. I thank the Belmont Club blog for directing me to this nightmarish scene from Cabaret that depicts a wholesome young man singing a seemingly apolitical song expressing love for his fatherland. The scene slowly transforms into a passionate, mass devotion to the Fuhrer and his personal agency in uniting these people with what they believe to be the beautiful future they deserve. It is called "The Future Belongs to Me."



Consider also this Leninist exploitation of children for political purposes. (Thanks again to Belmont Club.)



I can't vouch for the translation in the sub-titles, but it sounds like Mao's Cultural Revolution and today's North Korea.

[Note: Actually, my colleague at The King's College, economist Alex Tokarev, is a native Russian speaker, and he says the words have nothing to do with what the children are singing in this video, and the reference to Lenin's little potatoes doesn't sound credible even for socialist propaganda of the period. Always go to the source, and to the original language if you can!]

Of course, this is quite distinct from the love of country that we instill in our children, though within measure, even through patriotic songs such as "America, the Beautiful" and the National Anthem. It's worth reflecting on the difference between the cultivation of patriotic sentiment in young hearts and the propagandizing of children in totalitarian states that we see in these videos.

There appears to have been difficulty keeping the "Sing For Change" video publicly accessible, as Belmont Club attests. ("BTW, the original YouTube video was withdrawn from public sharing and the embedded video stopped working for a time, but someone has reposted it (HT Sobieski) and I’ve re-embedded. There may be a struggle to keep the video visible to the public in the coming days. Who could have foreseen it would be harder to keep a video criticizing Obama up than one criticizing Hitler?") Perhaps the thugs from Obama's "truth squads" have been busy.

Of course, the other side of messianic political movements and figures is their actively fascistic (yes, I use the word advisedly) intolerance of any criticism. We observe this in American political liberals in general, as Jonah Goldberg has documented in his book, Liberal Fascism, and as Barack Obama himself has already begun to demonstrate. See Harold Kildow's post "The Dark Night of Fascism."