In the first chapter of Russell Kirk's The Roots of American Order we read the following statement: "Our own society, like that of any other people, is held together by what is called an 'order.'" Without order, society doesn't cohere. Instead, it flies apart, breaks up, and disintegrates. And, I would argue, a process of disintegration has been underway in the United States for many years. The breakup of the American order has been masked by American prosperity, which has continued throughout the process of social disintegration. To a very great extent, the financial crisis we are experiencing today is no ordinary economic downturn. It is also the result of spiritual and moral degeneration together with the total collapse of paternal authority.
Most citizens of the Republic do not realize that a breakdown has already occurred. But many are troubled. A few days ago I spoke with a 19-year-old girl who expressed embarrassment about her peers. "People my age aren't honest," she volunteered without prompting, "and the future isn't safe." I asked what she thought would happen. "I don't know, but I have my mountain." She then motioned as if to indicate her parent's home in the country. Another young person I spoke with recently confided that her peers were mainly interested in partying and taking recreational drugs. "I want to be a history professor," she said.
It has now been 30 years since Christopher Lasch wrote The Culture of Narcissism. According to Lasch, "The psychological patterns associated with pathological narcissism, which in less exaggerated form manifests themselves in so many patterns of American culture - in the fascination with fame and celebrity, the fear of competition, the inability to suspend belief, the shallowness and transitory quality of personal relations, the horror of death - originate in the peculiar structure of the [modern] American family.... Industrial production takes the father out of the home and diminishes the role he plays in the conscious life of the child." Today one might add that the mother, too, has been largely taken out of the home. Thus the way is paved to the collapse of parental authority and the sinister process of state usurpation of the parental function.
The collapse of order has many causes, and results in a growing sickness within the American soul. "Before a person can live tolerably with himself or with others," wrote Russell Kirk, "he must know order. If we lack order in the soul and order in society, we dwell" in a land of darkness. Life becomes insufferable without harmony, meaning or purpose. Of the many signs of a breakdown, our instincts have become attenuated; we do not know our enemy (as we do not know ourselves); we do not know where we stand in history, as we do not care to know any history - imagining ourselves somehow separated from history, even to the point of being "above" history. This sense that we are excepted from history comes from a corollary sense of unreality.
We do not seem to realize that order is evaporating, or perhaps it has already evaporated entirely. Among the countless indications: people are going to the store in pajama bottoms; they are destroying their minds with drugs; they are eating junk food and drinking soft drinks so that 30 percent of the population is obese and 80 percent are said to be overweight. What is happening to us? Are we becoming a nation of slobs?
Kirk explained that "order" means a "systematic and harmonious arrangement - whether in one's own character or in the commonwealth." This cannot be represented by a drug addict, or by a bank president who is laundering drug money, or a politician who has taken bribes from a drug cartel, or the child who comes of age in a country where such activity has been normalized. Here we see what has broken down; that is to say, certain ideas and beliefs; customs and folkways. And we also see the promise of a new type of order - coming to replace the old (i.e., socialism).
And the risk is thus explained by Kirk: "If our souls are disordered, we fall into abnormality, unable to control our impulses. If our commonwealth is disordered, we fall into anarchy, every man's hand against every other man's." He further explained, "Without a high degree of private moral order among the American people, the reign of law could not have prevailed in this country. Without an orderly pattern of politics, American private character would have sunk into a ruinous egoism."
As Kirk said, "Order is the first need of the soul." It is something that takes priority over justice and freedom. For there cannot be justice or freedom without the foundation provided by order. But the machinery of order is breaking down, and optimism ought to be reserved for "the time after next." For that which immediately follows a period of excess is necessarily corrective, and therefore painful. If we want our society to be healthy, then we must accept what cannot otherwise be avoided. Furthermore, today's attempt to forgo economic pain merely promises greater pain and calamity in the future. Our disordered appetites, and our refusal to accept the discipline of the free market system leads us into a series of disastrous interventions of which socialism is the fiery pit itself. For socialism represents a false harmony, and a false form of order which does not conform to nature or the lessons of history. This is one of the things that the wise have learned from history, if they've learned anything at all.
I will finish by quoting what Kirk wrote about social democracy as a concept of order: "Having rejected the supernatural order and the possibility of a Justice more than human, the humanitarian tends to erect Envy into a pseudo-moral principle. It leads him, this principle of Envy, straight toward the dreary tableland of featureless social equality - toward Tocqueville's democratic despotism, from which not only God seems to have disappeared, but even old-fangled individual man is lacking."
by J. R. Nyquist
I believe I agree with Kirk's main point in the article, but I would put it differently; or perhaps come at it from a different point of view. I take it almost like Kirk is saying that the individual should conform with order, should dissolve himself in it, and thus order dictates one's opportunities and life path to some extent. I would put it rather in terms of civil society, and that the political order is just when the virtuous person's conscience is concordant with the aims of the community, and by extension, the legitimate state (that is to say, the rational-legal state). Order is a contingency that individuals need to achieve what Abraham Maslow termed "self-actualization." In my opinion, the self-actualization of each individual is the highest goal of the political order. This requires liberty, safety, economic opportunity, and justice.
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Leo Strauss: An Elusive Conservative Icon
Leo Strauss, Conservative Mastermind
by Robert Locke
Frontpage Magazine
IN CONTEMPORARY American intellectual life, there is only one school of conservative intellectuals that has taken root in academia as a movement. They are the Straussians, followers of the late Leo Strauss (1899-1973). The hostile New Republic referred to Straussians as "one of the top ten gangs of the millennium." Strauss is an ambiguous, sometimes even troubling, figure, but he is essential to the conservative revival of our time and he offers the intellectual depth we are so desperately in need of. As a crude measure of his importance for those readers who continue to believe that philosophical matters are of no practical importance, consider the following list of his students or students of his students: Justice Clarence Thomas; Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork; Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz; former Assistant Secretary of State Alan Keyes; former Secretary of Education William Bennett; Weekly Standard editor and former Quayle Chief of Staff William Kristol; Allan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind; former New York Post editorials editor John Podhoretz; former National Endowment for the Humanities Deputy Chairman John T. Agresto; and, not meaning to class myself with this august company but in the interests of full disclosure, myself.
The great significance of Strauss for mainstream conservatives is that his is the deepest philosophical analysis of what is wrong with liberalism. Technocratic, legalistic, and empirical criticism of liberalism is all very well, but it is not enough. He believes that contemporary liberalism is the logical outcome of the philosophical principles of modernity, taken to their extremes. In some sense, modernity itself is the problem. Strauss believed that liberalism, as practiced in the advanced nations of the West in the 20th century, contains within it an intrinsic tendency towards relativism, which leads to nihilism. He first experienced this crisis in his native Germany’s Weimar Republic of the 1920s, in which the liberal state was so ultra-tolerant that it tolerated the Communists and Nazis who eventually destroyed it and tolerated the moral disorder that turned ordinary Germans against it. A Jew, he fled Germany in 1938. We see this problem repeated today in the multiculturalism that sanctions the importation into the West of Moslem fundamentalists whose foremost aim is the destruction of the Western society that makes that tolerance possible, and in an America so frightened of offending anyone that it refuses to carry out the basic duty of any normal state to guard its own borders.
Strauss believed that America is founded on an uneasy mixture of classical (Greco-Roman), Biblical, and modern political philosophy. Conservatives have not failed to note that a significant part of the mischief of liberalism consists in abandoning the biblical element (au contraire - the trouble is precisely that modern liberalism embraces the biblical elements of altruism and self-sacrifice while secularizing it for mass consumption); this story has been told many times and is well-represented in Washington. Where Strauss comes in is that he is the outstanding critic of the abandonment of the classical element. His key contribution to fighting the crisis of modernity was to restore the intellectual legitimacy of classical political philosophy, especially Plato and Aristotle.
Strauss’s first move, which came as a stunning shock to a 1950s academic world sunk in scientism and desirous of making "political science" substitute for political philosophy, was to reactivate the legitimacy of ancient philosophy as real political critique. It is almost impossible to overstate how unlikely this seemed at the time, it being then a casual article of faith than ancient philosophy had no more to say about modern political problems than ancient physics about modern engineering. But he succeeded. When leftists today feel obliged to denounce Great Books curricula, it is because they know, consciously or unconsciously, that classical thought is very much alive and is a real threat to them. The holy grail of Straussian scholarship has been to understand the ancient philosophers not from a modern point of view but from their own point of view. The implication is that then we become free to adopt the ancient point of view towards modern political affairs, freeing us from the narrowness of the modern perspective and enabling us to step back from the distortions and corruptions of modernity. Strauss contends that the modern view of politics is artificial and that the ancient one is direct and honest about the experience of political things.
Strauss was not ignorant of the reasons modern political philosophy had come about. He saw it as a grand compromise made when the demands of virtue made by ancient political philosophy seemed too high to be attainable. Modern political philosophy provides no rational basis for higher human achievement, but it provides a very solid basis for the moderate human achievement of stability and prosperity. He famously described modernity as built on "low but solid ground." (Natural Right and History)
The key Straussian concept is the Straussian text, which is a piece of philosophical writing that is deliberately written so that the average reader will understand it as saying one ("exoteric") thing but the special few for whom it is intended will grasp its real ("esoteric") meaning. The reason for this is that philosophy is dangerous. Philosophy calls into question the conventional morality upon which civil order in society depends; it also reveals ugly truths that weaken men’s attachment to their societies. Ideally, it then offers an alternative based on reason, but understanding the reasoning is difficult and many people who read it will only understand the "calling into question" part and not the latter part that reconstructs ethics. Worse, it is unclear whether philosophy really can construct a rational basis for ethics. Therefore philosophy has a tendency to promote nihilism in mediocre minds, and they must be prevented from being exposed to it. The civil authorities are frequently aware of this, and therefore they persecute and seek to silence philosophers. Strauss shockingly admits, contrary to generations of liberal professors who have taught him as a martyr to the First Amendment, that the prosecution of Socrates was not entirely without point. This honesty about the dangers of philosophy gives Straussian thought a seriousness lacking in much contemporary philosophy; it is also a sign of the conviction that philosophy, contrary to the mythology of our "practical" (though sodden with ideology and quick to take offense at ideas) age, matters.
Strauss not only believed that the great thinkers of the past wrote Straussian texts, he approved of this. It is a kind of class system of the intellect, which mirrors the class systems of rulers and ruled, owners and workers, creators and audiences, which exist in politics, economics, and culture. He views the founding corruption of modern political philosophy, which hundreds of years later bears poisonous fruit in the form of liberal nihilism, to be the attempt to abolish this distinction. It is a kind of Bolshevism of the mind.
Some dispute whether Straussian texts exist. The great medieval Jewish Aristotelian Moses Maimonides admitted writing this way. I can only say that I have found the concept fruitful in my own readings in philosophy. On a more prosaic level, even a courageous editor like my own can’t print certain things, so I certainly write my column in code from time to time, and other writers have told me the same thing.
According to Strauss, Machiavelli is the key turning point that leads to modern political philosophy, and Machiavelli’s sin was to speak esoteric truths openly. He told all within hearing that there is no certain God who punishes wrongdoing; the essence of Machiavellianism is that one can get away with things. Because of this, he turned his back on the Christian virtue that the belief in a retributive God had upheld. Pre-Machiavellian philosophy, be in Greco-Roman or Christian, had taught that the good political order must be based upon human virtues. Machiavelli believed that sufficient virtue was not attainable and therefore taught that the good political order must be based on men as they are, i.e. upon their mediocrity and vices. This is not just realism, or mere cynicism. It amounts to a deliberate choice as to how society should be organized and a decided de-emphasis on personal virtue. It leads to the new discipline of political science, which is concerned with coldly describing men as they actually are, warts and all. It leads ultimately to Immanuel Kant’s statement that,
"We could devise a constitution for a race of devils, if only they were intelligent."
The ancient view is that this will get you nowhere, because only men with civic virtue will obey a constitution. The modern view leads naturally to value-free social science and social policies that seek to solve social problems through technocratic manipulation that refrains from "imposing value judgments" on the objects of its concern.
The key hidden step in the Machiavellian view, a bold intellectual move that is made logically rigorous and then politically palatable by Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, is to define man as outside nature. Strauss sees this as the key to modernity. Man exists in opposition to nature, conquering it to serve his comfort. Nature does not define what is good for man; man does. This view is the basis for the modern penchant to make freedom and comfort (read "prosperity") the central concerns of political philosophy, whereas the ancients made virtue the center. Once man is outside nature, he has no natural teleology or purpose, and therefore no natural virtues. Since he has no natural purpose, anything that might give him one, like God, is suspect, and thus modernity tends towards atheism. Similarly, man’s duties, as opposed to his rights, drop away, as does his natural sociability. The philosophical price of freedom is purposelessness, which ultimately gives rise to the alienation, anomie, and nihilism of modern life.
[Continued]
by Robert Locke
Frontpage Magazine
IN CONTEMPORARY American intellectual life, there is only one school of conservative intellectuals that has taken root in academia as a movement. They are the Straussians, followers of the late Leo Strauss (1899-1973). The hostile New Republic referred to Straussians as "one of the top ten gangs of the millennium." Strauss is an ambiguous, sometimes even troubling, figure, but he is essential to the conservative revival of our time and he offers the intellectual depth we are so desperately in need of. As a crude measure of his importance for those readers who continue to believe that philosophical matters are of no practical importance, consider the following list of his students or students of his students: Justice Clarence Thomas; Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork; Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz; former Assistant Secretary of State Alan Keyes; former Secretary of Education William Bennett; Weekly Standard editor and former Quayle Chief of Staff William Kristol; Allan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind; former New York Post editorials editor John Podhoretz; former National Endowment for the Humanities Deputy Chairman John T. Agresto; and, not meaning to class myself with this august company but in the interests of full disclosure, myself.
The great significance of Strauss for mainstream conservatives is that his is the deepest philosophical analysis of what is wrong with liberalism. Technocratic, legalistic, and empirical criticism of liberalism is all very well, but it is not enough. He believes that contemporary liberalism is the logical outcome of the philosophical principles of modernity, taken to their extremes. In some sense, modernity itself is the problem. Strauss believed that liberalism, as practiced in the advanced nations of the West in the 20th century, contains within it an intrinsic tendency towards relativism, which leads to nihilism. He first experienced this crisis in his native Germany’s Weimar Republic of the 1920s, in which the liberal state was so ultra-tolerant that it tolerated the Communists and Nazis who eventually destroyed it and tolerated the moral disorder that turned ordinary Germans against it. A Jew, he fled Germany in 1938. We see this problem repeated today in the multiculturalism that sanctions the importation into the West of Moslem fundamentalists whose foremost aim is the destruction of the Western society that makes that tolerance possible, and in an America so frightened of offending anyone that it refuses to carry out the basic duty of any normal state to guard its own borders.
Strauss believed that America is founded on an uneasy mixture of classical (Greco-Roman), Biblical, and modern political philosophy. Conservatives have not failed to note that a significant part of the mischief of liberalism consists in abandoning the biblical element (au contraire - the trouble is precisely that modern liberalism embraces the biblical elements of altruism and self-sacrifice while secularizing it for mass consumption); this story has been told many times and is well-represented in Washington. Where Strauss comes in is that he is the outstanding critic of the abandonment of the classical element. His key contribution to fighting the crisis of modernity was to restore the intellectual legitimacy of classical political philosophy, especially Plato and Aristotle.
Strauss’s first move, which came as a stunning shock to a 1950s academic world sunk in scientism and desirous of making "political science" substitute for political philosophy, was to reactivate the legitimacy of ancient philosophy as real political critique. It is almost impossible to overstate how unlikely this seemed at the time, it being then a casual article of faith than ancient philosophy had no more to say about modern political problems than ancient physics about modern engineering. But he succeeded. When leftists today feel obliged to denounce Great Books curricula, it is because they know, consciously or unconsciously, that classical thought is very much alive and is a real threat to them. The holy grail of Straussian scholarship has been to understand the ancient philosophers not from a modern point of view but from their own point of view. The implication is that then we become free to adopt the ancient point of view towards modern political affairs, freeing us from the narrowness of the modern perspective and enabling us to step back from the distortions and corruptions of modernity. Strauss contends that the modern view of politics is artificial and that the ancient one is direct and honest about the experience of political things.
Strauss was not ignorant of the reasons modern political philosophy had come about. He saw it as a grand compromise made when the demands of virtue made by ancient political philosophy seemed too high to be attainable. Modern political philosophy provides no rational basis for higher human achievement, but it provides a very solid basis for the moderate human achievement of stability and prosperity. He famously described modernity as built on "low but solid ground." (Natural Right and History)
The key Straussian concept is the Straussian text, which is a piece of philosophical writing that is deliberately written so that the average reader will understand it as saying one ("exoteric") thing but the special few for whom it is intended will grasp its real ("esoteric") meaning. The reason for this is that philosophy is dangerous. Philosophy calls into question the conventional morality upon which civil order in society depends; it also reveals ugly truths that weaken men’s attachment to their societies. Ideally, it then offers an alternative based on reason, but understanding the reasoning is difficult and many people who read it will only understand the "calling into question" part and not the latter part that reconstructs ethics. Worse, it is unclear whether philosophy really can construct a rational basis for ethics. Therefore philosophy has a tendency to promote nihilism in mediocre minds, and they must be prevented from being exposed to it. The civil authorities are frequently aware of this, and therefore they persecute and seek to silence philosophers. Strauss shockingly admits, contrary to generations of liberal professors who have taught him as a martyr to the First Amendment, that the prosecution of Socrates was not entirely without point. This honesty about the dangers of philosophy gives Straussian thought a seriousness lacking in much contemporary philosophy; it is also a sign of the conviction that philosophy, contrary to the mythology of our "practical" (though sodden with ideology and quick to take offense at ideas) age, matters.
Strauss not only believed that the great thinkers of the past wrote Straussian texts, he approved of this. It is a kind of class system of the intellect, which mirrors the class systems of rulers and ruled, owners and workers, creators and audiences, which exist in politics, economics, and culture. He views the founding corruption of modern political philosophy, which hundreds of years later bears poisonous fruit in the form of liberal nihilism, to be the attempt to abolish this distinction. It is a kind of Bolshevism of the mind.
Some dispute whether Straussian texts exist. The great medieval Jewish Aristotelian Moses Maimonides admitted writing this way. I can only say that I have found the concept fruitful in my own readings in philosophy. On a more prosaic level, even a courageous editor like my own can’t print certain things, so I certainly write my column in code from time to time, and other writers have told me the same thing.
According to Strauss, Machiavelli is the key turning point that leads to modern political philosophy, and Machiavelli’s sin was to speak esoteric truths openly. He told all within hearing that there is no certain God who punishes wrongdoing; the essence of Machiavellianism is that one can get away with things. Because of this, he turned his back on the Christian virtue that the belief in a retributive God had upheld. Pre-Machiavellian philosophy, be in Greco-Roman or Christian, had taught that the good political order must be based upon human virtues. Machiavelli believed that sufficient virtue was not attainable and therefore taught that the good political order must be based on men as they are, i.e. upon their mediocrity and vices. This is not just realism, or mere cynicism. It amounts to a deliberate choice as to how society should be organized and a decided de-emphasis on personal virtue. It leads to the new discipline of political science, which is concerned with coldly describing men as they actually are, warts and all. It leads ultimately to Immanuel Kant’s statement that,
"We could devise a constitution for a race of devils, if only they were intelligent."
The ancient view is that this will get you nowhere, because only men with civic virtue will obey a constitution. The modern view leads naturally to value-free social science and social policies that seek to solve social problems through technocratic manipulation that refrains from "imposing value judgments" on the objects of its concern.
The key hidden step in the Machiavellian view, a bold intellectual move that is made logically rigorous and then politically palatable by Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, is to define man as outside nature. Strauss sees this as the key to modernity. Man exists in opposition to nature, conquering it to serve his comfort. Nature does not define what is good for man; man does. This view is the basis for the modern penchant to make freedom and comfort (read "prosperity") the central concerns of political philosophy, whereas the ancients made virtue the center. Once man is outside nature, he has no natural teleology or purpose, and therefore no natural virtues. Since he has no natural purpose, anything that might give him one, like God, is suspect, and thus modernity tends towards atheism. Similarly, man’s duties, as opposed to his rights, drop away, as does his natural sociability. The philosophical price of freedom is purposelessness, which ultimately gives rise to the alienation, anomie, and nihilism of modern life.
[Continued]
Quotes That Make You Want to Grab a Torch and a Pitchfork
“The percentage of taxes on GDP (in Pakistan) is among the lowest in the world... We (the United States) tax everything that moves and doesn’t move, and that’s not what we see in Pakistan." - Hillary ClintonNow you tell me what the Democrats are trying to do - be "compassionate" or distort and implode the economy?!?
TRAITORCRATS MUST PAY FOR THEIR CRIMES AGAINT THE AMERICAN PEOPLE.
I Am the Man Who Loves His Life...
This is the first part of the final version of a project to visualize John Galt's speech from Atlas Shrugged.
The "trial" version can be watched here.
Barack's Candy Mountain
One evening as the sun went down
And the California fires were burning
Down the track came a hobo hiking.
He said "Boys I'm not turning;
I'm heading for a land that's far away
Beside that crystal fountain.
I'll see you all this coming fall
In Barack's Candy Mountains,
It's a land that's fair and bright
The handouts grow on bushes
And you sleep out ev'ry night;
The box-cars are all empty
And the sun shines ev'ry day
I'm bound to go where there ain't no snow
Where the sleet don't fall
And the wind don't blow,
In Barack's Candy Mountain
Oh the buzzing of the bees in the cigarette trees,
By the soda water fountains,
By the lemonade springs where the bluebird sings,
In Barack's Candy Mountain.
In Barack's Candy Mountains
You never change your socks,
Little streams of alky-hol
Comes trickling down the rocks.
Oh the shacks all have to tip their hats,
And the railroad bulls are blind,
There's a lake of stew and whiskey too,
And you can paddle all around it
In a big Canoe.
In Barack's Candy Mountain.
Oh the buzzing of the bees in the cigarette trees,
By the soda water fountains,
By the lemonade springs where the bluebird sings,
In Barack's Candy Mountain.
In Barack's Candy Mountains
The cops have wooden legs,
The pit-bulls all have rubber teeth
And the hens lay soft-boiled eggs.
The box-cars all are empty
And the sun shines ev'ry day
I'm bound to go where there ain't no snow
Where the sleet don't fall
And the wind don't blow,
In Barack's Candy Mountain
Oh the buzzing of the bees in the cigarettes trees,
By the soda water fountains,
By the lemonade springs where the bluebird sings,
In Barack's Candy Mountain.
In Barack's Candy Mountains
The jails are made of tin,
You can slip right out again
As soon as they put you in.
There ain't no short handled shovels,
For any shovel-ready jobs.
I'm bound to stay where you sleep all day.
Where they hung the jerk
That invented work,
In Barack's Candy Mountain.
And the California fires were burning
Down the track came a hobo hiking.
He said "Boys I'm not turning;
I'm heading for a land that's far away
Beside that crystal fountain.
I'll see you all this coming fall
In Barack's Candy Mountains,
It's a land that's fair and bright
The handouts grow on bushes
And you sleep out ev'ry night;
The box-cars are all empty
And the sun shines ev'ry day
I'm bound to go where there ain't no snow
Where the sleet don't fall
And the wind don't blow,
In Barack's Candy Mountain
Oh the buzzing of the bees in the cigarette trees,
By the soda water fountains,
By the lemonade springs where the bluebird sings,
In Barack's Candy Mountain.
In Barack's Candy Mountains
You never change your socks,
Little streams of alky-hol
Comes trickling down the rocks.
Oh the shacks all have to tip their hats,
And the railroad bulls are blind,
There's a lake of stew and whiskey too,
And you can paddle all around it
In a big Canoe.
In Barack's Candy Mountain.
Oh the buzzing of the bees in the cigarette trees,
By the soda water fountains,
By the lemonade springs where the bluebird sings,
In Barack's Candy Mountain.
In Barack's Candy Mountains
The cops have wooden legs,
The pit-bulls all have rubber teeth
And the hens lay soft-boiled eggs.
The box-cars all are empty
And the sun shines ev'ry day
I'm bound to go where there ain't no snow
Where the sleet don't fall
And the wind don't blow,
In Barack's Candy Mountain
Oh the buzzing of the bees in the cigarettes trees,
By the soda water fountains,
By the lemonade springs where the bluebird sings,
In Barack's Candy Mountain.
In Barack's Candy Mountains
The jails are made of tin,
You can slip right out again
As soon as they put you in.
There ain't no short handled shovels,
For any shovel-ready jobs.
I'm bound to stay where you sleep all day.
Where they hung the jerk
That invented work,
In Barack's Candy Mountain.
Obama's Stimulus Package: Saving Face by Creating a Myth
Recently, an AP story described how the White House grossly overstated how many jobs it "created or saved" ('saved' is not really the right word - more like 'subsidized failure' for those of us economic literates).
Obama counterattacked the AP by claiming that the Democrats directly created some 620,000 jobs and stimulated a total of about 1,000,000 jobs - a conveniently round figure that should be interpreted to mean "we have no freaking idea."
The White House's funny math ("fuzzy" doesn't even begin to describe it") is made even more ridiculous when we consider that it predicted the stimulus would create 3.5 million jobs. Instead, the country has lost a net 2.7 million jobs since the stimulus bill was passed, and 49 out of 50 states and the District of Columbia (of all places) have seen unemployment increase unabated.
Why has the "stimulus" failed? Let us demolish the White House's argument for those interested in prosperity and freedom:
The White House claims it can reallocate finite resources and "save" jobs. But how do you save jobs? By preventing them from being eliminated. Why are jobs eliminated? Because they are unneeded by employers or unwanted in the market.
So if the White House take capital and "reinvests" it using coercion (using any justification) they are de facto taking money from where it may be employed productively and putting it where it has been shown to be unwanted or unneeded by "saving" jobs. Alternatively, when the government claims it is "creating" jobs, it must be qualified that they are jobs without accountability to the consumer; these jobs are often permanently subsidized by taxpayers and lead to government dependency for those job-holders. In both cases, the government is engaging in what is called by real economists as "malinvestment."
Malinvestment leads to structural economic instability and unsustainability in the long run; this justifies further government spending to "create or save" jobs until the entire free enterprise system collapses (quite similar to the left's Cloward-Piven strategy of overwhelming the system with welfare recipients). Market collapse is what the Democrats really want, and an insight comes from a statement in Forbes magazine by a Treasury Department spokeswoman: "[The number $700 billion dollars] (Is) not based on any particular data point, we just wanted to choose a really large number."
The Socialist Worker, when reached for comment, said "the stimulus did not go far enough."
Yet even Time magazine (for the love of Obama) gets that the White House's stimulus package has failed by it's own standards!
Those who claim Keynesian economics are a way to "stimulate" countries out of recessions and depressions need to realize that Keynes was a Fabian socialist sympathetic with Soviet-style communism.
Socialism is incompatible with freedom in any meaningful sense, and it is the death knell for prosperity and job creation in every country where it is tried.
Obama counterattacked the AP by claiming that the Democrats directly created some 620,000 jobs and stimulated a total of about 1,000,000 jobs - a conveniently round figure that should be interpreted to mean "we have no freaking idea."
The White House's funny math ("fuzzy" doesn't even begin to describe it") is made even more ridiculous when we consider that it predicted the stimulus would create 3.5 million jobs. Instead, the country has lost a net 2.7 million jobs since the stimulus bill was passed, and 49 out of 50 states and the District of Columbia (of all places) have seen unemployment increase unabated.
Why has the "stimulus" failed? Let us demolish the White House's argument for those interested in prosperity and freedom:
The White House claims it can reallocate finite resources and "save" jobs. But how do you save jobs? By preventing them from being eliminated. Why are jobs eliminated? Because they are unneeded by employers or unwanted in the market.
So if the White House take capital and "reinvests" it using coercion (using any justification) they are de facto taking money from where it may be employed productively and putting it where it has been shown to be unwanted or unneeded by "saving" jobs. Alternatively, when the government claims it is "creating" jobs, it must be qualified that they are jobs without accountability to the consumer; these jobs are often permanently subsidized by taxpayers and lead to government dependency for those job-holders. In both cases, the government is engaging in what is called by real economists as "malinvestment."
Malinvestment leads to structural economic instability and unsustainability in the long run; this justifies further government spending to "create or save" jobs until the entire free enterprise system collapses (quite similar to the left's Cloward-Piven strategy of overwhelming the system with welfare recipients). Market collapse is what the Democrats really want, and an insight comes from a statement in Forbes magazine by a Treasury Department spokeswoman: "[The number $700 billion dollars] (Is) not based on any particular data point, we just wanted to choose a really large number."
The Socialist Worker, when reached for comment, said "the stimulus did not go far enough."
Yet even Time magazine (for the love of Obama) gets that the White House's stimulus package has failed by it's own standards!
Those who claim Keynesian economics are a way to "stimulate" countries out of recessions and depressions need to realize that Keynes was a Fabian socialist sympathetic with Soviet-style communism.
Socialism is incompatible with freedom in any meaningful sense, and it is the death knell for prosperity and job creation in every country where it is tried.
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Would You Have Thought One Year Ago...
Dismantling America
by Thomas Sowell
Townhall.com
Just one year ago, would you have believed that an unelected government official, not even a Cabinet member confirmed by the Senate but simply one of the many "czars" appointed by the President, could arbitrarily cut the pay of executives in private businesses by 50 percent or 90 percent?
Did you think that another "czar" would be talking about restricting talk radio? That there would be plans afloat to subsidize newspapers-- that is, to create a situation where some newspapers' survival would depend on the government liking what they publish?
Did you imagine that anyone would even be talking about having a panel of so-called "experts" deciding who could and could not get life-saving medical treatments?
Scary as that is from a medical standpoint, it is also chilling from the standpoint of freedom. If you have a mother who needs a heart operation or a child with some dire medical condition, how free would you feel to speak out against an administration that has the power to make life and death decisions about your loved ones?
Does any of this sound like America?
How about a federal agency giving school children material to enlist them on the side of the president? Merely being assigned to sing his praises in class is apparently not enough.
How much of America would be left if the federal government continued on this path? President Obama has already floated the idea of a national police force, something we have done without for more than two centuries.
We already have local police forces all across the country and military forces for national defense, as well as the FBI for federal crimes and the National Guard for local emergencies. What would be the role of a national police force created by Barack Obama, with all its leaders appointed by him? It would seem more like the brown shirts of dictators than like anything American.
How far the President will go depends of course on how much resistance he meets. But the direction in which he is trying to go tells us more than all his rhetoric or media spin.
Barack Obama has not only said that he is out to "change the United States of America," the people he has been associated with for years have expressed in words and deeds their hostility to the values, the principles and the people of this country.
Jeremiah Wright said it with words: "God damn America!" Bill Ayers said it with bombs that he planted. Community activist goons have said it with their contempt for the rights of other people.
Among the people appointed as czars by President Obama have been people who have praised enemy dictators like Mao, who have seen the public schools as places to promote sexual practices contrary to the values of most Americans, to a captive audience of children.
Those who say that the Obama administration should have investigated those people more thoroughly before appointing them are missing the point completely. Why should we assume that Barack Obama didn't know what such people were like, when he has been associating with precisely these kinds of people for decades before he reached the White House?
Nothing is more consistent with his lifelong patterns than putting such people in government-- people who reject American values, resent Americans in general and successful Americans in particular, as well as resenting America's influence in the world.
Any miscalculation on his part would be in not thinking that others would discover what these stealth appointees were like. Had it not been for the Fox News Channel, these stealth appointees might have remained unexposed for what they are. Fox News is now high on the administration's enemies list.
Nothing so epitomizes President Obama's own contempt for American values and traditions like trying to ram two bills through Congress in his first year-- each bill more than a thousand pages long-- too fast for either of them to be read, much less discussed. That he succeeded only the first time says that some people are starting to wake up. Whether enough people will wake up in time to keep America from being dismantled, piece by piece, is another question-- and the biggest question for this generation.
by Thomas Sowell
Townhall.com
Just one year ago, would you have believed that an unelected government official, not even a Cabinet member confirmed by the Senate but simply one of the many "czars" appointed by the President, could arbitrarily cut the pay of executives in private businesses by 50 percent or 90 percent?
Did you think that another "czar" would be talking about restricting talk radio? That there would be plans afloat to subsidize newspapers-- that is, to create a situation where some newspapers' survival would depend on the government liking what they publish?
Did you imagine that anyone would even be talking about having a panel of so-called "experts" deciding who could and could not get life-saving medical treatments?
Scary as that is from a medical standpoint, it is also chilling from the standpoint of freedom. If you have a mother who needs a heart operation or a child with some dire medical condition, how free would you feel to speak out against an administration that has the power to make life and death decisions about your loved ones?
Does any of this sound like America?
How about a federal agency giving school children material to enlist them on the side of the president? Merely being assigned to sing his praises in class is apparently not enough.
How much of America would be left if the federal government continued on this path? President Obama has already floated the idea of a national police force, something we have done without for more than two centuries.
We already have local police forces all across the country and military forces for national defense, as well as the FBI for federal crimes and the National Guard for local emergencies. What would be the role of a national police force created by Barack Obama, with all its leaders appointed by him? It would seem more like the brown shirts of dictators than like anything American.
How far the President will go depends of course on how much resistance he meets. But the direction in which he is trying to go tells us more than all his rhetoric or media spin.
Barack Obama has not only said that he is out to "change the United States of America," the people he has been associated with for years have expressed in words and deeds their hostility to the values, the principles and the people of this country.
Jeremiah Wright said it with words: "God damn America!" Bill Ayers said it with bombs that he planted. Community activist goons have said it with their contempt for the rights of other people.
Among the people appointed as czars by President Obama have been people who have praised enemy dictators like Mao, who have seen the public schools as places to promote sexual practices contrary to the values of most Americans, to a captive audience of children.
Those who say that the Obama administration should have investigated those people more thoroughly before appointing them are missing the point completely. Why should we assume that Barack Obama didn't know what such people were like, when he has been associating with precisely these kinds of people for decades before he reached the White House?
Nothing is more consistent with his lifelong patterns than putting such people in government-- people who reject American values, resent Americans in general and successful Americans in particular, as well as resenting America's influence in the world.
Any miscalculation on his part would be in not thinking that others would discover what these stealth appointees were like. Had it not been for the Fox News Channel, these stealth appointees might have remained unexposed for what they are. Fox News is now high on the administration's enemies list.
Nothing so epitomizes President Obama's own contempt for American values and traditions like trying to ram two bills through Congress in his first year-- each bill more than a thousand pages long-- too fast for either of them to be read, much less discussed. That he succeeded only the first time says that some people are starting to wake up. Whether enough people will wake up in time to keep America from being dismantled, piece by piece, is another question-- and the biggest question for this generation.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Lies, Damn Lies, and Leftists
Progressives lie because they think they need to in order to "change the world." And they do change the world - into a dishonest, corrupt, and chaotic mess. Ironically, it is according to their doctrine that the worse things get, the better they get - because we are getting closer to the (Hegelian-Marxist) rapture when the collapse of capitalism will lead us directly into communist nirvana (give or take 100 million bloody deaths).
The starting point for understanding why the left lies is Plato, who in the Republic pondered whether it was beneficial to lie to the people in order to benefit the state; the so-called "noble lie." It is actually unclear what Plato's verdict is on this question. One suspects that he brought up the question because he tacitly approved of the practice; and by not answering the question, he demonstrates yet another method of deception ("planting" ideas in others' minds through "naive" questions or statements).
The next great addition to the left's penchant for lying is Nietzsche, the god-slayer who cleared the path for moral relativism. Moral relativism meant that we can choose whatever moral system we think benefits us at any given point in time. This is a pseudo-Kantian notion very similar to pragmatism.
Pragmatism is a philosophy that holds that truth only exists in each moment, and can be traced back to William James and John Dewey. Pragmatism means that you can do whatever is expedient in the moment, including "lie": (though without any clear concept of continuous cause and effect, or historical embeddedness, it is unclear whether it is even possible to lie).
Another philosopher following on Nietszche who contributed to the left's tendency to lie is Georges Sorel. Sorel taught that in a morally relativistic universe, what are needed to promote the leftist cause are useful "myths." For example, Sorel denied that there was anything "scientific" about marxism, per se; but he saw marxism as a useful myth for the left to attain power (see Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism for more on Sorel).
The Nazis, or National Socialists, were in many ways quintessential leftists in the ways they used propaganda, party organization and discipline. Goebbels and Hitler's notion of the "big lie" meant that there is a tendency to believe a lie if it is big enough. People usually make little lies, and thus they are more apt detect these. But bald-faced brazen lies carry the potency of being "too absurd" to be lies.
Then you have the Frankfurt School, whose program scattered cultural marxism into numerous agendas; each complimenting one another. The main tactic here is "critical analysis." In other words, take an aspect of the system you want to destroy and focus an agenda, usually in an indirect way, to destroy it. The typical device is to pray on pure sentimentalism and have leftist cultural leader apply peer pressure, or what I refer to as "joinerism."
In the 1970s, post-modernism migrated from the literary critical analysis school of thought over into the social sciences. Everything, no matter how seemingly innocuous, became politicized. Subjectivism, or the idea that one's own thoughts and point of view are one's reality (a point of view that explains the extreme narcissism of many leftists) bled over into solipsism, which is the concept that all that exists are one's ideas (I have actually talked to philosophy students who believed this, and challenged them by asking them to jump off a building).
Subsequent to post-modernism and a related movement entitled post-structuralism (Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, e.g.) came the concept that there is no such thing as truth (not even meaning Platonic or religious "Truth," but truth, period). All that mattered to the left were "narratives." There are emancipatory narratives and narratives of oppression or exploitation, etc.
So imagine if you will, a narcissistic individual with a martyr complex; who is extremely angry at the world; who believes "the system" (meaning civilization) is destined to collapse; that the only way to save it is to destroy it or more accurately to usher it to collapse; that everything is unfair and it is his or her personal duty to right every wrong and to remedy every perceived injustice; that one's own ideas are the only things that matter or in some cases, exist; that anyone who opposes them is stupid (or indeed possesses what marxists term "false consciousness"); that individuals are inconsequential and all that matters is the collective, or more accurately, "the cause"; and in some cases, that humans are no better than other animals, or even, no better than inanimate matter (so called anti-humanism - see Heidegger, Kevourkian, Peter Singer, John Holdren, e.g.). And the masses are filled with gun-toting right-wing extremist rubes who don't agree with you.
If you were a leftist, you'd lie too.
The starting point for understanding why the left lies is Plato, who in the Republic pondered whether it was beneficial to lie to the people in order to benefit the state; the so-called "noble lie." It is actually unclear what Plato's verdict is on this question. One suspects that he brought up the question because he tacitly approved of the practice; and by not answering the question, he demonstrates yet another method of deception ("planting" ideas in others' minds through "naive" questions or statements).
The next great addition to the left's penchant for lying is Nietzsche, the god-slayer who cleared the path for moral relativism. Moral relativism meant that we can choose whatever moral system we think benefits us at any given point in time. This is a pseudo-Kantian notion very similar to pragmatism.
Pragmatism is a philosophy that holds that truth only exists in each moment, and can be traced back to William James and John Dewey. Pragmatism means that you can do whatever is expedient in the moment, including "lie": (though without any clear concept of continuous cause and effect, or historical embeddedness, it is unclear whether it is even possible to lie).
Another philosopher following on Nietszche who contributed to the left's tendency to lie is Georges Sorel. Sorel taught that in a morally relativistic universe, what are needed to promote the leftist cause are useful "myths." For example, Sorel denied that there was anything "scientific" about marxism, per se; but he saw marxism as a useful myth for the left to attain power (see Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism for more on Sorel).
The Nazis, or National Socialists, were in many ways quintessential leftists in the ways they used propaganda, party organization and discipline. Goebbels and Hitler's notion of the "big lie" meant that there is a tendency to believe a lie if it is big enough. People usually make little lies, and thus they are more apt detect these. But bald-faced brazen lies carry the potency of being "too absurd" to be lies.
Then you have the Frankfurt School, whose program scattered cultural marxism into numerous agendas; each complimenting one another. The main tactic here is "critical analysis." In other words, take an aspect of the system you want to destroy and focus an agenda, usually in an indirect way, to destroy it. The typical device is to pray on pure sentimentalism and have leftist cultural leader apply peer pressure, or what I refer to as "joinerism."
In the 1970s, post-modernism migrated from the literary critical analysis school of thought over into the social sciences. Everything, no matter how seemingly innocuous, became politicized. Subjectivism, or the idea that one's own thoughts and point of view are one's reality (a point of view that explains the extreme narcissism of many leftists) bled over into solipsism, which is the concept that all that exists are one's ideas (I have actually talked to philosophy students who believed this, and challenged them by asking them to jump off a building).
Subsequent to post-modernism and a related movement entitled post-structuralism (Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, e.g.) came the concept that there is no such thing as truth (not even meaning Platonic or religious "Truth," but truth, period). All that mattered to the left were "narratives." There are emancipatory narratives and narratives of oppression or exploitation, etc.
So imagine if you will, a narcissistic individual with a martyr complex; who is extremely angry at the world; who believes "the system" (meaning civilization) is destined to collapse; that the only way to save it is to destroy it or more accurately to usher it to collapse; that everything is unfair and it is his or her personal duty to right every wrong and to remedy every perceived injustice; that one's own ideas are the only things that matter or in some cases, exist; that anyone who opposes them is stupid (or indeed possesses what marxists term "false consciousness"); that individuals are inconsequential and all that matters is the collective, or more accurately, "the cause"; and in some cases, that humans are no better than other animals, or even, no better than inanimate matter (so called anti-humanism - see Heidegger, Kevourkian, Peter Singer, John Holdren, e.g.). And the masses are filled with gun-toting right-wing extremist rubes who don't agree with you.
If you were a leftist, you'd lie too.
Frank: "We Are Trying On Every Front To Increase The Role Of Government"
Senator Barney Frank and former has-been Ralph Nader, two morons, debate economics from the perspective of how much control over people's lives the government can usurp.
Barney's Frank: "We are trying on every front to increase the role of government." Great, cause you know that's what we pay you for - to take an oath to uphold the Constitution and then for you to wipe your ass with it.
The Largest Mass Murder in History
The Black Book of Communism is a must-read for everyone who cherishes liberty. The book depicts possibly the largest-ever genocide perpetrated in history - the communist bloodbath of the 20th century.
Most people are aware of the Great Purge and Stalin's GULAG slave labor camps. Not everyone knows, however, that Soviet Russia's entire history, from 1917 through the start of the perestroika in 1985, is one uninterrupted mass murder (and even during the perestroika repressions and oppression continued, though they took a milder form). It was the Bolshevik party's war of extermination upon its own people, far surpassing the Holocaust in its scale.
I'm going to focus on just one aspect of this genocide - the Bolsheviks' relations with the largest segment of the country's population, the peasantry. Prior to the October Revolution of 1917, peasant rebellions paved the way for Bolshevik despotism. Blinded by their medieval mentality and stirred up by the neo-medieval doctrine of socialist revolutionaries, Russian peasants were unwilling to become Western-style farmers and preferred to seize nobles' land, as opposed to earning wealth through their own productive effort. They also preferred egalitarianism to liberty. Well, one can say that they asked for it.
The Bolsheviks obtained power by promising them land and peace. They got land alright - in the graveyard - and peace too - the peace of the dead.
As far as land is concerned, the communists immediately deprived the peasants of most of that land's products. Although grain requisitions had been widely practiced in many wars before the Bolsheviks, the communist practice was by far the most destructive ever. The communists seized the bulk of agricultural products, often leaving nothing for the peasants to feed on, let alone sell. Those who refused to surrender their products were summarily shot.
As for peace, peasants returning from the trenches of World War I were soon drafted into the Red Army to wage war upon the victims of Bolshevik tyranny.
Few know that, besides the White Army and Red Army, there was a third major force in the Russian Civil War - the so-called Green Army (not to be confused with environmentalists). This was the army of the peasants. Since the self-styled "party of the workers and peasants" waged a total war upon the peasants (and upon the workers too), the peasants had to organize for self-defense. For a brief period, they even controlled almost the entire countryside in many regions, with the Bolsheviks holding on to the cities as foreign invaders in an occupied country. The communists' crackdown on the rebels was so brutal that it almost surpasses belief. They took hostages and shot them until rebels came out of the forests. Torture and rape were an everyday practice.
Soon the Bolsheviks' requisitions caused a gigantic famine in the early 1920s. Many communists even said them that famine was quite helpful for the Soviet government, since it helped crush the peasants' independence. And eventually it did.
The New Economic Policy was a brief respite in the Bolsheviks' "invasion" of the countryside. Markets were reintroduced, and relative prosperity was achieved. But as soon as the markets helped the peasants start producing wealth again, the communists resumed their brutal war against the peasants in the late 1920s to loot that wealth.
The new offensive caused another famine. This one was unprecedented - 7 million people died because of the forced collectivization and expropriation of farm produce. When piles of corpses filled the country, and cannibalism became a usual phenomenon, the Soviet government still continued exporting expropriated grain to cash in on the peasants' sufferings. Almost no domestic aid to those affected was delivered, and foreign aid was unavailable because the Soviet government hid the very fact of the famine and did not intend to apply for any aid. Once again, the famine was the Bolsheviks' ally in the genocide of the peasants.
Kulaks (which usually means "wealthy peasants" but during the collectivization it basically meant any peasant whom Soviet authorities didn't like) were either shot, imprisoned in death camps or sent to "colonize" uncultivated lands in far-away regions, often with no shelter and no means of survival, where they starved to death en masse.
It is not surprising that, during the early stage of World War 2, many peasants, who comprised the bulk of the Soviet army, viewed the Nazi occupation as a welcome respite from Bolshevik tyranny (the Nazis were not much better, though still less oppressive). Indeed, the gigantic army's rapid disintegration during this period ceases to be a mystery. This time, the peasants were on the winning side in their war with the Bolsheviks.
Considering this unprecedented gigantic genocide, one is astonished to find out that a majority of Russia's population - i.e. the victims of the Soviet mass murderers and their descendants - have nostalgic feelings about the Soviet era. During a recent poll, Stalin came third in a ranking of Russia's most venerated heroes.
The main problem with Russia is, of course, not a lack of fair elections. Moreover, the situation perhaps would be much more terrible if elections were not rigged. At a recent election of the Moscow legislature, the communists won in districts where United Russia, the Kremlin thug club, abstained from rigging for PR purposes.
The Soviet anthem still defiles the airwaves with its murderous roar as GULAG slaves are turning in their graves. The country is still being ruled by the old party and KGB elite, which changed the façade but not the essence.
That can be partially explained by the fact that many who now praise the Soviet Union were accomplices in the regime's crimes. The most terrible of all, however, is the "sanction of the victims" - that is, victims' belief that their murderers and slavedrivers had a legitimate right to run their lives and destroy them. The Bolsheviks had indeed achieved their goal - not only did they crush every independent, thinking man's resistance. They turned people's brains into piles of excrement that automatically perceive good as evil and evil as good.
Though the recent OSCE resolution equating Stalinism with Nazism and the European Parliament resolution declaring the Holodomor a crime against humanity are steps in the right direction, they are far from sufficient.
The "Stalinism" label was a misnomer, and the OSCE's unwillingness to condemn communism in general is a sign of dishonesty and ignorance. Moreover, no Nuremberg trial has been held for the communist murderers, and those remaining are still at large and even prosperous.
Even in the West communists, though weaker than previously, are still prominent. To use one example, Italy was until recently ruled by a successor party to the local communist gang (I mean Prodi's party). The party changed the veneer, but the same people remained.
The main reason is that the West, while condemning Stalin's unprecedented massacre, is unable to grasp the link between Stalinism and the essence of communism on the one hand and between communism and socialism in general on the other hand. Socialism is still viewed as something quite innocent and benign, as opposed to communism. That, however, is not the case. Fundamentally, socialism and communism are the same thing. Social democracy is a mixed condition that is destined to either collapse into communism or reject socialism and turn into a free society.
Another problem is people's inability to comprehend the conceptual connection between altruism and communism. While upholding the altruist roots of communism, they inevitably fall into a contradiction when they condemn communist crimes.
Most people are aware of the Great Purge and Stalin's GULAG slave labor camps. Not everyone knows, however, that Soviet Russia's entire history, from 1917 through the start of the perestroika in 1985, is one uninterrupted mass murder (and even during the perestroika repressions and oppression continued, though they took a milder form). It was the Bolshevik party's war of extermination upon its own people, far surpassing the Holocaust in its scale.
I'm going to focus on just one aspect of this genocide - the Bolsheviks' relations with the largest segment of the country's population, the peasantry. Prior to the October Revolution of 1917, peasant rebellions paved the way for Bolshevik despotism. Blinded by their medieval mentality and stirred up by the neo-medieval doctrine of socialist revolutionaries, Russian peasants were unwilling to become Western-style farmers and preferred to seize nobles' land, as opposed to earning wealth through their own productive effort. They also preferred egalitarianism to liberty. Well, one can say that they asked for it.
The Bolsheviks obtained power by promising them land and peace. They got land alright - in the graveyard - and peace too - the peace of the dead.
As far as land is concerned, the communists immediately deprived the peasants of most of that land's products. Although grain requisitions had been widely practiced in many wars before the Bolsheviks, the communist practice was by far the most destructive ever. The communists seized the bulk of agricultural products, often leaving nothing for the peasants to feed on, let alone sell. Those who refused to surrender their products were summarily shot.
As for peace, peasants returning from the trenches of World War I were soon drafted into the Red Army to wage war upon the victims of Bolshevik tyranny.
Few know that, besides the White Army and Red Army, there was a third major force in the Russian Civil War - the so-called Green Army (not to be confused with environmentalists). This was the army of the peasants. Since the self-styled "party of the workers and peasants" waged a total war upon the peasants (and upon the workers too), the peasants had to organize for self-defense. For a brief period, they even controlled almost the entire countryside in many regions, with the Bolsheviks holding on to the cities as foreign invaders in an occupied country. The communists' crackdown on the rebels was so brutal that it almost surpasses belief. They took hostages and shot them until rebels came out of the forests. Torture and rape were an everyday practice.
Soon the Bolsheviks' requisitions caused a gigantic famine in the early 1920s. Many communists even said them that famine was quite helpful for the Soviet government, since it helped crush the peasants' independence. And eventually it did.
The New Economic Policy was a brief respite in the Bolsheviks' "invasion" of the countryside. Markets were reintroduced, and relative prosperity was achieved. But as soon as the markets helped the peasants start producing wealth again, the communists resumed their brutal war against the peasants in the late 1920s to loot that wealth.
The new offensive caused another famine. This one was unprecedented - 7 million people died because of the forced collectivization and expropriation of farm produce. When piles of corpses filled the country, and cannibalism became a usual phenomenon, the Soviet government still continued exporting expropriated grain to cash in on the peasants' sufferings. Almost no domestic aid to those affected was delivered, and foreign aid was unavailable because the Soviet government hid the very fact of the famine and did not intend to apply for any aid. Once again, the famine was the Bolsheviks' ally in the genocide of the peasants.
Kulaks (which usually means "wealthy peasants" but during the collectivization it basically meant any peasant whom Soviet authorities didn't like) were either shot, imprisoned in death camps or sent to "colonize" uncultivated lands in far-away regions, often with no shelter and no means of survival, where they starved to death en masse.
It is not surprising that, during the early stage of World War 2, many peasants, who comprised the bulk of the Soviet army, viewed the Nazi occupation as a welcome respite from Bolshevik tyranny (the Nazis were not much better, though still less oppressive). Indeed, the gigantic army's rapid disintegration during this period ceases to be a mystery. This time, the peasants were on the winning side in their war with the Bolsheviks.
Considering this unprecedented gigantic genocide, one is astonished to find out that a majority of Russia's population - i.e. the victims of the Soviet mass murderers and their descendants - have nostalgic feelings about the Soviet era. During a recent poll, Stalin came third in a ranking of Russia's most venerated heroes.
The main problem with Russia is, of course, not a lack of fair elections. Moreover, the situation perhaps would be much more terrible if elections were not rigged. At a recent election of the Moscow legislature, the communists won in districts where United Russia, the Kremlin thug club, abstained from rigging for PR purposes.
The Soviet anthem still defiles the airwaves with its murderous roar as GULAG slaves are turning in their graves. The country is still being ruled by the old party and KGB elite, which changed the façade but not the essence.
That can be partially explained by the fact that many who now praise the Soviet Union were accomplices in the regime's crimes. The most terrible of all, however, is the "sanction of the victims" - that is, victims' belief that their murderers and slavedrivers had a legitimate right to run their lives and destroy them. The Bolsheviks had indeed achieved their goal - not only did they crush every independent, thinking man's resistance. They turned people's brains into piles of excrement that automatically perceive good as evil and evil as good.
Though the recent OSCE resolution equating Stalinism with Nazism and the European Parliament resolution declaring the Holodomor a crime against humanity are steps in the right direction, they are far from sufficient.
The "Stalinism" label was a misnomer, and the OSCE's unwillingness to condemn communism in general is a sign of dishonesty and ignorance. Moreover, no Nuremberg trial has been held for the communist murderers, and those remaining are still at large and even prosperous.
Even in the West communists, though weaker than previously, are still prominent. To use one example, Italy was until recently ruled by a successor party to the local communist gang (I mean Prodi's party). The party changed the veneer, but the same people remained.
The main reason is that the West, while condemning Stalin's unprecedented massacre, is unable to grasp the link between Stalinism and the essence of communism on the one hand and between communism and socialism in general on the other hand. Socialism is still viewed as something quite innocent and benign, as opposed to communism. That, however, is not the case. Fundamentally, socialism and communism are the same thing. Social democracy is a mixed condition that is destined to either collapse into communism or reject socialism and turn into a free society.
Another problem is people's inability to comprehend the conceptual connection between altruism and communism. While upholding the altruist roots of communism, they inevitably fall into a contradiction when they condemn communist crimes.
Monday, October 26, 2009
A WARNING ON FRONTLINE'S THE WARNING
The left cannot restrain itself. Leftists are literally incapable of presenting any information without distorting it to fit their narrative that state control is all for our own good and that freedom is a danger because we are all too stupid to lead our own lives.
A Public Broadcasting Service documentary with a promising premise entitled, "The Warning," regarding whistleblower Brooksley Born, who in 1997 warned of a potential credit derivatives disaster, somehow turns into an attack on the free market, and amazingly, a complete smear job of Ayn Rand. Anyone with any economic literacy whatsoever understands that the derivatives disaster was caused by government intervention into the market with programs like the Community Reinvestment Act, and the actions of public-private mortgage underwriters Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, along with the work of community agitators like ACORN.
The left, however, insists that the very disaster of their own making, which literally could not take place in a free market, was due to free market principles and a lack of regulation! This is a totalitarian mindset that literally cannot be reasoned with. The leftists will not stop until they run the lives of every man, woman, and child on earth. They will never admit defeat, and they will never admit failure. They will lie, fabricate, and distort without shame and they will rationalize any and all outrages in the name of the "greater good."
A brazen example of the left's intellectual dishonesty is the association in "The Warning" of Alan Greenspan with Ayn Rand. In the film, Ayn Rand says clearly that she is against all forms of control (the full context can be found in her interview with Mike Wallace), and yet, the film feigns that Ayn Rand's philosophy could be implemented at a central bank! If Rand was made Chairman of the Fed, she would probably burn the banks to the ground the first day on the job and implement free banking immediately! Joseph Stiglitz gets the irony and even says with a smirk on his face that there is a certain level of irony of a "disciple" of Rand taking office at a central bank. Still the documentary continues its narrative of Greenspan as a "disciple" of Rand! Greenspan flooded the market with money relentlessly for two decades! The market didn't set the dollar interest rates during that period, Greenspan and the Fed did!
When a country is so divided between at least two major factions, and at least half the opponents involved are so deceitful and dishonorable, there must come a day when all pretenses to civility will come to an abrupt end. The left's lying will not come without a price. If there is not a hell below for them there will be a hell on earth - one of the left's own making.
A Public Broadcasting Service documentary with a promising premise entitled, "The Warning," regarding whistleblower Brooksley Born, who in 1997 warned of a potential credit derivatives disaster, somehow turns into an attack on the free market, and amazingly, a complete smear job of Ayn Rand. Anyone with any economic literacy whatsoever understands that the derivatives disaster was caused by government intervention into the market with programs like the Community Reinvestment Act, and the actions of public-private mortgage underwriters Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, along with the work of community agitators like ACORN.
The left, however, insists that the very disaster of their own making, which literally could not take place in a free market, was due to free market principles and a lack of regulation! This is a totalitarian mindset that literally cannot be reasoned with. The leftists will not stop until they run the lives of every man, woman, and child on earth. They will never admit defeat, and they will never admit failure. They will lie, fabricate, and distort without shame and they will rationalize any and all outrages in the name of the "greater good."
A brazen example of the left's intellectual dishonesty is the association in "The Warning" of Alan Greenspan with Ayn Rand. In the film, Ayn Rand says clearly that she is against all forms of control (the full context can be found in her interview with Mike Wallace), and yet, the film feigns that Ayn Rand's philosophy could be implemented at a central bank! If Rand was made Chairman of the Fed, she would probably burn the banks to the ground the first day on the job and implement free banking immediately! Joseph Stiglitz gets the irony and even says with a smirk on his face that there is a certain level of irony of a "disciple" of Rand taking office at a central bank. Still the documentary continues its narrative of Greenspan as a "disciple" of Rand! Greenspan flooded the market with money relentlessly for two decades! The market didn't set the dollar interest rates during that period, Greenspan and the Fed did!
When a country is so divided between at least two major factions, and at least half the opponents involved are so deceitful and dishonorable, there must come a day when all pretenses to civility will come to an abrupt end. The left's lying will not come without a price. If there is not a hell below for them there will be a hell on earth - one of the left's own making.
Ponder This
From Say It With A Song, a member of the Dennis Miller Zone, with his commentary:
William Boetcker quotes: " You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift. You cannot help small men by tearing down big men. You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot lift the wage-earner by pulling down the wage-payer. You cannot help the poor man by destroying the rich. You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than your income. You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred. You cannot establish security on borrowed money. You cannot build character and courage by taking away men's initiative and independence. You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves." COMMON SENSE
Bertrand de Jouvenel: "The more one considers the matter, the clearer it becomes that redistribution is in effect far less a redistribution of free income from the richer to the poorer, as we imagined, than a redistribution of power from the individual to the State"...."A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves" FOLLOW BLINDLY - YES WE CAN
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin: "The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation." NO KIDDING
Karl Marx: "My object in life is to dethrone God and destroy capitalism"....."From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs." MAKING PROGRESS
Franklin D. Roosevelt: "I do not believe in communism any more than you do, but there is nothing wrong with the communists in this country. Several of the best friends I have are Communists." THE NEW FDR?
Josef Stalin: "America is like a healthy body and its resistance is threefold: its patriotism, its morality, and its spiritual life. If we can undermine these three areas, America will collapse from within." HALFWAY THERE
Norman Thomas : "The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism. But under the name of 'liberalism' they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist program, until one day America will be a Socialist nation, without knowing how it happened." CHANGE IT TO 'PROGRESSIVES'
Herbert Hoover: "Every collectivist revolution rides in on a Trojan horse of 'emergency.' It was the tactic of Lenin, Hitler, and Mussolini. In the collectivist sweep over a dozen minor countries of Europe....This technique of creating emergency is the greatest achievement that demagoguery attains." NEVER WASTE A GOOD CRISES
Nikita Khrushchev: "We can't expect the American People to jump from Capitalism to Communism, but we can assist their elected leaders in giving them small doses of Socialism until they awaken one day to find that they have Communism." REALLY?
Bill Clinton: 1)"The road to tyranny, we must remember, begins with the destruction of the truth." 2)"You know the one thing that's wrong with this country? Everyone gets a chance to have their fair say." 3)"If the personal freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution inhibit the government's ability to govern the people, we should look to limit those guarantees." 4)"A lot of wonderful people love their country and hate the military." 5)"When we got organized as a country and we wrote a fairly radical Constitution with a radical Bill of Rights, giving a radical amount of individual freedom to Americans.... [However, now] there's a lot of irresponsibility. And so a lot of people say there's too much freedom. When personal freedom's being abused, you have to move to limit it." CONFUSED OR A PLAN?
William Boetcker quotes: " You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift. You cannot help small men by tearing down big men. You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot lift the wage-earner by pulling down the wage-payer. You cannot help the poor man by destroying the rich. You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than your income. You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred. You cannot establish security on borrowed money. You cannot build character and courage by taking away men's initiative and independence. You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves." COMMON SENSE
Bertrand de Jouvenel: "The more one considers the matter, the clearer it becomes that redistribution is in effect far less a redistribution of free income from the richer to the poorer, as we imagined, than a redistribution of power from the individual to the State"...."A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves" FOLLOW BLINDLY - YES WE CAN
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin: "The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation." NO KIDDING
Karl Marx: "My object in life is to dethrone God and destroy capitalism"....."From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs." MAKING PROGRESS
Franklin D. Roosevelt: "I do not believe in communism any more than you do, but there is nothing wrong with the communists in this country. Several of the best friends I have are Communists." THE NEW FDR?
Josef Stalin: "America is like a healthy body and its resistance is threefold: its patriotism, its morality, and its spiritual life. If we can undermine these three areas, America will collapse from within." HALFWAY THERE
Norman Thomas : "The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism. But under the name of 'liberalism' they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist program, until one day America will be a Socialist nation, without knowing how it happened." CHANGE IT TO 'PROGRESSIVES'
Herbert Hoover: "Every collectivist revolution rides in on a Trojan horse of 'emergency.' It was the tactic of Lenin, Hitler, and Mussolini. In the collectivist sweep over a dozen minor countries of Europe....This technique of creating emergency is the greatest achievement that demagoguery attains." NEVER WASTE A GOOD CRISES
Nikita Khrushchev: "We can't expect the American People to jump from Capitalism to Communism, but we can assist their elected leaders in giving them small doses of Socialism until they awaken one day to find that they have Communism." REALLY?
Bill Clinton: 1)"The road to tyranny, we must remember, begins with the destruction of the truth." 2)"You know the one thing that's wrong with this country? Everyone gets a chance to have their fair say." 3)"If the personal freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution inhibit the government's ability to govern the people, we should look to limit those guarantees." 4)"A lot of wonderful people love their country and hate the military." 5)"When we got organized as a country and we wrote a fairly radical Constitution with a radical Bill of Rights, giving a radical amount of individual freedom to Americans.... [However, now] there's a lot of irresponsibility. And so a lot of people say there's too much freedom. When personal freedom's being abused, you have to move to limit it." CONFUSED OR A PLAN?
And You Thought the Left Would Stop at CO2? Bra-Ha-Ha!
The animal rights crowd have been agitating for people to give up meat long before the global warming ruse gave the left a fever. It's all cultural marxism - animal rights, climate change, vegetarianism - and it is no surprise that on occasion the left would attempt to cross-breed movements, like the deranged zorse, the ferocious yet confused liger, or perhaps even the infamous geep.Climate chief Lord Stern: give up meat to save the planet
October 27, 2009
(The Times) People will need to consider turning vegetarian if the world is to conquer climate change, according to a leading authority on global warming. (Apparently, the leading authority on children's bedtime stories was unavailable for comment.)
In an interview with The Times, Lord Stern of Brentford said: “Meat is a wasteful use of water and creates a lot of greenhouse gases. It puts enormous pressure on the world’s resources. A vegetarian diet is better.” (So Lord Stern has spoken, so let it be done.)
Direct emissions of methane from cows and pigs is a significant source of greenhouse gases. Methane is 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide as a global warming gas. (And water vapor is a thousand times more potent than both, so let's just outlaw that too while we're at it. Oh wait, we're not outlawing these gases, we're taxing them - I forgot.)
Lord Stern, the author of the influential (especially around The Times watercooler) 2006 Stern Review on the cost of tackling global warming, said that a successful deal at the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December would lead to soaring costs for meat and other foods that generate large quantities of greenhouse gases. (The old "let's collapse the capitalist system" card again. Gee, didn't see that coming.)
He predicted that people’s attitudes would evolve until meat eating became unacceptable. “I think it’s important that people think about what they are doing and that includes what they are eating,” he said. “I am 61 now and attitudes towards drinking and driving have changed radically since I was a student. People change their notion of what is responsible. They will increasingly ask about the carbon content of their food.” (So apparently it's up to the left to decide what people think is responsible, even if it is based on a myth.)
Lord Stern, a former chief economist of the World Bank and now I. G. Patel Professor of Economics at the (deep red) London School of Economics, warned that British taxpayers would need to contribute about £3 billion a year by 2015 to help poor countries to cope with the inevitable impact of climate change.
He also issued a clear message to President Obama that he must attend the meeting in Copenhagen in person in order for an effective deal to be reached. US leadership, he said, was “desperately needed” to secure a deal.
He said that he was deeply concerned that popular opinion had so far failed to grasp the scale of the changes needed to address climate change, or of the importance of the UN meeting in Copenhagen from December 7 to December 18. “I am not sure that people fully understand what we are talking about or the kind of changes that will be necessary,” he added. (Oh we understand you neomarxist wackjob. You'll find out after you pass this nonsense.)
Up to 20,000 delegates from 192 countries are due to attend the UN conference in the Danish capital. Its aim is to forge a deal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions sufficiently to prevent an increase in global temperatures of more than 2 degrees centigrade (this is beyond delusional, and by any honest report, even one issued by a fired EPA scientist, impossible). Any increase above this level is expected to trigger runaway climate change, threatening the lives of hundreds of millions of people. (This is news? Where is the scientific evidence? Where are opinions on both sides of the issue? Such articles show that the left cannot be reasoned with, leaving only those options involving things that go boom.)Lord Stern said that Copenhagen presented a unique opportunity for the world to break free from its catastrophic current trajectory. He said that the world needed to agree to halve global greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 to 25 gigatonnes a year from the current level of 50 gigatonnes. (Let's talk parts per million. If we are approaching 420 ppm from 380 ppm, man only directly controls less than three percent of that figure. CO2 is also one of the weakest greenhouse gases, and CH3 is only slightly stronger. But let's not forget the 1.9891×1030 kg, five million degrees Kelvin, elephant in the room - the Sun. What do you kooks intend to do if the sun goes into a low sunspot phase causing cooler temperatures? Adjust your Ponzi scheme accordingly?)
UN figures suggest that meat production is responsible for about 18 per cent of global carbon emissions, including the destruction of forest land for cattle ranching and the production of animal feeds such as soy. (You've got to be kidding me. You mean 18% of manmade global carbon emissions. And you are also noting that we have more forests in America than we did in the early 1930s, I assume?)
Lord Stern, who said that he was not a strict vegetarian himself, was speaking on the eve of an all-parliamentary debate on climate change. His remarks provoked anger from the meat industry. (Duh.)
Jonathan Scurlock, of the National Farmers Union, said: “Going vegetarian is not a worldwide solution. It’s not a view shared by the NFU (could easily stand for No, F U). Farmers in this country are interested in evidence-based policymaking. We don’t have a methane-free cow or pig available to us.” (Huh?)
On average, a British person eats 50g of protein derived from meat each day — the equivalent of a chicken breast or a lamb chop. This is a relatively low level for a wealthy country but between 25 per cent and 50 per cent higher than the amount recommended by the World Health Organisation. (Beautiful marxist speak - for a wealthy country?)
Su Taylor, a spokeswoman for the Vegetarian Society, welcomed Lord Stern’s remarks. “What we choose to eat is one of the biggest factors in our personal impact on the environment,” she said. “Meat uses up a lot of resources and a vegetarian diet consumes a lot less land and water. One of the best things you can do about climate change is reduce the amount of meat in your diet.”The UN has warned that meat consumption is on course to double by the middle of the century. (Especially if the zombies return.)
Communist Gorbachev Supports Democracy - Does This Send Up Any Red Flags?
Gorbachev raps Russia's "mockery" of democracyMOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia's disputed regional elections have made a mockery of the country's democratic credentials, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev said in an interview published on Monday.
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's ruling United Russia party won a landslide victory in the October 11 regional elections, but opposition parties have alleged the votes were rigged and briefly marched out of parliament last week in protest.
"In everyone's eyes, the elections turned into a mockery of the people and showed a deep disrespect for their voices," Gorbachev was quoted as saying in the opposition Novaya Gazeta newspaper, which he part-owns.
"The party of power gained the result it needed by discrediting political institutions and the very party itself," Gorbachev was quoted as saying.
Gorbachev, who is reviled by many Russians for presiding over the collapse of the Soviet Union, has previously said the United Russia party is more servile than the Soviet Communist Party which he used to lead. (Slight exaggeration here - the Russian people now think Gorbachev is irrelevant.) [Continued]
Sunday, October 25, 2009
The Future Arrived and the Nanny State Declared it Unsafe
I’ve Seen the Future and It Is…Safe? by Bill Willingham of BigHollywood
[...] A day or two ago I happened across the online announcement of a wonderful new technological device that made me think, “That’s it. We’re finally in the future.” And then, almost as if the words were spoken aloud, I heard the voice of my friend (and excellent Science Fiction author) Chris Roberson in my head, scolding me with his oft-repeated, always cranky, litany: “It’s not the future until we have jetpacks and flying cars. They promised us jetpacks and flying cars! Where are they?” And I realized there’s no escaping this question, either from Chris or any of a myriad other sources. The future isn’t allowed to be here until we have our jetpacks and flying cars. And that’s just the minimum. Space stations, moon cities and personal household robots are also to be desired for a fully functioning future.
I pondered this dilemma. On the one hand we have this wonderful new device (the exact nature of the device isn’t important, but for the record it’s a full tabletop sized flat computer screen you can play Dungeons & Dragons on, just like they did in the Legion of Superheroes — which is definitely in the future, so far in fact that jetpacks and flying cars are already outmoded, having been replaced by Flight Rings), and we’re blessed (and/or cursed) with so many other technological wonders hardly even imagined by those who designed our future so long ago, but we don’t have the jetpacks and the flying cars. They’re our duel required tickets to the future, without which we simply aren’t allowed to enter. Lacking those, we’re confined to an eternal and frustrating now, no matter how exciting and interesting our now might become.
I pondered, and then despaired when a terrible realization hit me. We are in the future, Chris. We got our jetpacks and flying cars. We’ve had them for years. Whoever the ‘they’ are that promised us those things, they kept their promise. They delivered. Look at this:
The Moller M400 flying car. Coming soon to an abandoned warehouse near you.
It’s the Moller M400 Skycar. They built it and it works, designed to sell for something in the neighborhood of $90k when and if it ever goes on sale (I’ll predict right now that it won’t). They also have the M200G Volantor — a saucer shaped vehicle that flies ten feet above the earth at 50 mph.
These were debuted a few years ago, and they weren’t the first personal flying cars, and saucers, and jetpacks. Not by a long shot. They’ve been building them almost for as long as you and I have been alive.
So what’s the problem then. Where are they? Why haven’t we got one in every garage in the good old US of A? That’s the depressing part, my friend. We don’t have them, not because there isn’t (or wasn’t) any entrepreneur willing to make them available. We don’t have them because we rejected them. We collectively said, and continue to say, “No thanks.”
And why is that?
Because they’re not safe.
Dr. Paul Moller at the controls of the M200 X prototype of his flying car.
Sure, they’re safer than the first airplanes were in their infancy, even safer than modern airplanes are now, when not operated by a highly-trained pilot. They may even be safer than the first ground-confined motor cars. But airplanes and motor cars were invented and introduced to the public in a more adventurous age. Here’s the thing: we want more safety now than we did then. We expect it. Hell, we demand it. If cars and airplanes were introduced for the first time today I’ve no doubt that a vast hue and cry would go up about how dangerous they are. They’d never get government approval. They’d never be able to jump through all of the regulatory hoops any new product has to overcome today. The problem with jetpacks and flying cars is that they aren’t already 100% safe to all potential users. They don’t get, and never will get, the time to develop and perfect that we’ve given our airplanes and ground cars. We have our jetpacks and flying cars and we simply aren’t going to use them. [Continued]
Are Libertarians the Greatest Threat to Liberty?
When I read We Are All Socialists Now article, which was cited by Reasonsjester, I stumbled upon Atlas Hugged: Why Mark Sanford likes Ayn Rand. I was genuinely surprised – why would a leftist rag like the Newsweek run a story that praises Ayn Rand? But then I thought better – I suspected that it is one of those panegyrics that turn out to be philippics at closer scrutiny. I was right.
The name “Mark Sanford” sounded vaguely familiar. I googled him and found out he’s the governor of South Carolina. I remembered that one or two years ago I had come across him while studying self-styled “libertarian” politicians. Back then I watched several videos featuring Sanford and was a bit disappointed – in one of them this alleged libertarian was speaking some bullshit at some environmentalist ceremony. Well, apparently he wants to have his cake and eat it too – be a libertarian and at the same time be involved in the unpleasant workings of the modern Leviathan.
Now it’s less surprising that he hacks for Newsweek, isn’t it? After praising Ayn Rand for the political and economic corollaries of her philosophy, Sanford goes on to attack the foundation of her ideas and thus destroy the root of those corollaries.
First, Sanford offhandedly repeats the usual accusation that Ayn Rand exerted dictatorial control over her followers and cites some grotesque “proofs” of that allegation reminiscent of the proofs used in Stalin’s show trials. Apart from the problem with determining the veracity of sources used, many people also have another problem with Ayn Rand – they implicitly think that any principled position is dictatorial by definition. Used to the modern world of relativism, compromise and pragmatism, they view any firm stand and any unflinching commitment as a sign of bias, dogmatism and fanaticism. Faced with the false dilemma of pragmatism vs dogmatism, they choose the former and, since pragmatism is rarely (or never) able to function in the “pure” form, they mix pragmatism with dogmatism, ending up upholding the very concept they professed to criticize. One of Ayn Rand’s greatest achievements was that she proposed a third alternative – that is, Objectivism.
Sanford then proceeds to criticize Ayn Rand for rejecting the notion of original sin and then falls into the abyss of altruism. The governor seems unable to understand that there can be no rational life or liberty once the concept of man as depraved and sinful by his very nature is stated. If human nature itself is stained, man is destined to bear the burden of unearned guilt and submit to any tyrant, divine or terrestrial, who “legitimately” punishes him for his sins. That is the problem with most libertarians today – they agree with Ayn Rand’s corollaries while rejecting her fundamental premises. There is no greater betrayal. Thus libertarians may paradoxically present the biggest threat to liberty, however bizarre it may sound.
The name “Mark Sanford” sounded vaguely familiar. I googled him and found out he’s the governor of South Carolina. I remembered that one or two years ago I had come across him while studying self-styled “libertarian” politicians. Back then I watched several videos featuring Sanford and was a bit disappointed – in one of them this alleged libertarian was speaking some bullshit at some environmentalist ceremony. Well, apparently he wants to have his cake and eat it too – be a libertarian and at the same time be involved in the unpleasant workings of the modern Leviathan.
Now it’s less surprising that he hacks for Newsweek, isn’t it? After praising Ayn Rand for the political and economic corollaries of her philosophy, Sanford goes on to attack the foundation of her ideas and thus destroy the root of those corollaries.
First, Sanford offhandedly repeats the usual accusation that Ayn Rand exerted dictatorial control over her followers and cites some grotesque “proofs” of that allegation reminiscent of the proofs used in Stalin’s show trials. Apart from the problem with determining the veracity of sources used, many people also have another problem with Ayn Rand – they implicitly think that any principled position is dictatorial by definition. Used to the modern world of relativism, compromise and pragmatism, they view any firm stand and any unflinching commitment as a sign of bias, dogmatism and fanaticism. Faced with the false dilemma of pragmatism vs dogmatism, they choose the former and, since pragmatism is rarely (or never) able to function in the “pure” form, they mix pragmatism with dogmatism, ending up upholding the very concept they professed to criticize. One of Ayn Rand’s greatest achievements was that she proposed a third alternative – that is, Objectivism.
Sanford then proceeds to criticize Ayn Rand for rejecting the notion of original sin and then falls into the abyss of altruism. The governor seems unable to understand that there can be no rational life or liberty once the concept of man as depraved and sinful by his very nature is stated. If human nature itself is stained, man is destined to bear the burden of unearned guilt and submit to any tyrant, divine or terrestrial, who “legitimately” punishes him for his sins. That is the problem with most libertarians today – they agree with Ayn Rand’s corollaries while rejecting her fundamental premises. There is no greater betrayal. Thus libertarians may paradoxically present the biggest threat to liberty, however bizarre it may sound.
The Nation is in Danger!!!
Comrades! The nation is in danger! Fascists are actively attempting to subvert and overthrow Our Democratically Elected Government!
It is reported that these racist saboteurs engage in bloody orgies and drink the blood of newborn babies! At these orgies, they worship the images of Satan and his top henchman George W. Bush and defile the Sacred Images of the One True G… Great Leader Barack Obama. They also make human sacrifices for the spirit of Ayn Rand, who is reported to have had the Number of the Beast written on her forehead.
It is also known that these racists are being financed by Big Business, which is threatening our Democracy! Remember, comrades, that every cent spent on fascist militias was obtained by Big Corporations through ruthless exploitation of the Middle Class, whose wages are getting more and more meager as tycoons and CEOs are receiving bigger and bigger profits and remuneration! You already feel the titanic burden of exploitation every time you buy goods from bloodthirsty demons working at Wal-Mart cash registers and deal with infernal Beelzebubs working at DHL! It is much better to deal with our Democratically Elected Government’s High-Speed Top-Quality United States Postal Service or with Reliable Government Stores like those that existed in the Soviet Union!
It is known for a fact that conservative militias cooperated with CIA to blow up the World Trade Center on 9/11, as well as with Hitler when he invaded Poland, with Japan when it attacked Pearl Harbor, with Mongols when they overran Eurasia and with the meteorite that destroyed the dinosaurs!
Moreover, racist conspirators are thwarting efforts by Bin Laden, the leader of Muslim freedom fighters, to combat fascist imperialism worldwide! Our Great and Noble Leader Barack Obama has pledged to aid our Muslim brethren committed to the cause of anti-imperialism!
It is also widely known that conservative saboteurs are attempting to derail the Government’s efforts to prevent the Cataclysmic Galaxy-Wide Apocalyptic Climate Change Supremegacatastrophe in order to destroy most of mankind out of pure spite. By speeding up the Climate Change Apocalypse, evil conservatives are trying to make the living conditions of the exploited and oppressed workers even more miserable.
Racist saboteurs are also impeding the Government’s efforts to make Our Healthcare System as efficient as the U.S. Postal Service and the Soviet economy. Their aim is to deprive you, comrades, of your sacred right to have the Government run your entire life and tell you what to do.
Racist militias and teabaggers are also conspiring with extraterrestrial civilizations and evil spirits to establish a New World Order in order to exploit the Third World by supplying it with evil products of capitalism (SUVs, mobile phones, the Internet, central heating, plumbing etc) and thus destroying their pristine natural environment of disease-infested jungle and excrements and their rich culture of cannibalism, human sacrifices and stoning for heresy.
Comrades! Our Founding Fathers, Founding Mothers and Founding Trans-Gender Persons endowed us with unalienable rights to live at other people’s expense and have free lunches whenever we want! Such U.S. Founding Persons as Karl Marx and Saul Alinsky fought for our right to have our cake and eat it too! Let us prevent evil racist conspirators and Zionist spies from destroying this noble heritage!
It is reported that these racist saboteurs engage in bloody orgies and drink the blood of newborn babies! At these orgies, they worship the images of Satan and his top henchman George W. Bush and defile the Sacred Images of the One True G… Great Leader Barack Obama. They also make human sacrifices for the spirit of Ayn Rand, who is reported to have had the Number of the Beast written on her forehead.
It is also known that these racists are being financed by Big Business, which is threatening our Democracy! Remember, comrades, that every cent spent on fascist militias was obtained by Big Corporations through ruthless exploitation of the Middle Class, whose wages are getting more and more meager as tycoons and CEOs are receiving bigger and bigger profits and remuneration! You already feel the titanic burden of exploitation every time you buy goods from bloodthirsty demons working at Wal-Mart cash registers and deal with infernal Beelzebubs working at DHL! It is much better to deal with our Democratically Elected Government’s High-Speed Top-Quality United States Postal Service or with Reliable Government Stores like those that existed in the Soviet Union!
It is known for a fact that conservative militias cooperated with CIA to blow up the World Trade Center on 9/11, as well as with Hitler when he invaded Poland, with Japan when it attacked Pearl Harbor, with Mongols when they overran Eurasia and with the meteorite that destroyed the dinosaurs!
Moreover, racist conspirators are thwarting efforts by Bin Laden, the leader of Muslim freedom fighters, to combat fascist imperialism worldwide! Our Great and Noble Leader Barack Obama has pledged to aid our Muslim brethren committed to the cause of anti-imperialism!
It is also widely known that conservative saboteurs are attempting to derail the Government’s efforts to prevent the Cataclysmic Galaxy-Wide Apocalyptic Climate Change Supremegacatastrophe in order to destroy most of mankind out of pure spite. By speeding up the Climate Change Apocalypse, evil conservatives are trying to make the living conditions of the exploited and oppressed workers even more miserable.
Racist saboteurs are also impeding the Government’s efforts to make Our Healthcare System as efficient as the U.S. Postal Service and the Soviet economy. Their aim is to deprive you, comrades, of your sacred right to have the Government run your entire life and tell you what to do.
Racist militias and teabaggers are also conspiring with extraterrestrial civilizations and evil spirits to establish a New World Order in order to exploit the Third World by supplying it with evil products of capitalism (SUVs, mobile phones, the Internet, central heating, plumbing etc) and thus destroying their pristine natural environment of disease-infested jungle and excrements and their rich culture of cannibalism, human sacrifices and stoning for heresy.
Comrades! Our Founding Fathers, Founding Mothers and Founding Trans-Gender Persons endowed us with unalienable rights to live at other people’s expense and have free lunches whenever we want! Such U.S. Founding Persons as Karl Marx and Saul Alinsky fought for our right to have our cake and eat it too! Let us prevent evil racist conspirators and Zionist spies from destroying this noble heritage!
We Are All Millionaires Now
Newsweek's hugely popular issue We're All Socialists Now (which sold out in under a week) has triggered a fuhrer among the proles that no amount of Barack Obama cover stories has thus far been able to quell. The perfectly reasonable article was written in specific objection to the sinister neo-con far right militant fascist racist Nazi extremist Jonah Goldberg's chapter in Liberal F****** entitled "We're all f******* now" (now available in paperback - just in time for Christmas!).
Nevertheless, when the letters began to pile up refuting the article's claim that Obama was the Marxist equivalent of Santa Claus at the Newsweek home office on 34th street (which is located conveniently next to the newly constructed Pelosi, Obama, or Reid offices, also known as the POOR House), the cheeky editors Jon Meacham and Evan Thomas came up with the idea of forwarding the letters along to the big man himself.
During the cold weeks that ensued, the air was fraught with the tense electricity of anticipation. The stillness of the February mornings enhanced the feeling of anticipation and tension that was itself heightened by the coldness. The wan pinkish sun cast a glow on the frosty tundra that glistened like the hope of a new socialist dawn.
The whisper campaign against the Santa Obama deniers continued on the front pages of Time and Newsweek until the masses were both bored and infuriated. Finally a clarion call of sanity emerged from the cacophony of tumult, allaying the fear and alarm of the people like a gentle hand soothing a wounded deer who has just been shot.
"We have to tolerate the inequality as a way to achieve greater prosperity and opportunity for all." Contessa Brewer trumpeted on a raucous MSNBC set, still up in arms over a botched Starbucks order. "Tell that to the guy making ten bucks an hour."
Tell that to the guy making ten bucks an hour. Truer words were never spoken. The words washed over the country, cleansing the open wound still festering from the ugly prosperity of the Reagan years.
The nation soon forgot the fact that Ms. Brewer (who some have claimed has an IQ of a hundred and seven) had just called the Reverend Jesse Jackson the Reverend Al Sharpton. The twelve people watching the network at the time overlooked the fact that they were watching a conversation between a chirpy teleprompter-reading communications major and a multi-millionaire race-baiting shakedown artist.
Within minutes, MSNBC cut to a live press conference where Obama was set to address the sensational Contessa Brewer statement. President Obama approached the podium and gazed into the teleprompter, distilling the wisdom of its words like a delphic oracle.
"There has been an...ummm....a rumor, that, uh, all of us are socialists now. This is....this is not true. As everyone knows I am a centrist - mine is a new way, a third way. I have been studying the economy of Zimbabwe, where an enlightened despot has bestowed great wealth upon his people. There are hushed rumors that in that great African land, uhh, everyone is a quadrillionaire. How much more is owed the people of America, the most powerful and wealthy nation on earth, where inequality remains our greatest challenge? And what indeed of the world? As the one true Santa Obama, I now declare unequivocally that we are all millionaires now."
The masses erupted in joy as all the people rushed to the banks to confirm - indeed, all of their bank accounts had been wiped out and replaced with a one followed by six zeroes.
The pandemonium was unimaginable. People quit their jobs immediately. There were drunken festivities and dancing in the streets.
Then, after the ticket tape settled, men and women finally began to think about the implications of their new found wealth. Everyone still had the same possessions, the same families, the same hopes, dreams and talents.
Fields still needed to be sown and reaped. Cars still needed to be manufactured. Roads still needed to be maintained. Energy still needed to be produced. Medicine still needed to be practiced.
Then someone picked up a broom and began to sweep away the confetti. Sanitation workers got in their garbage trucks to haul it away. Doctors and nurses went back to their hospitals to care for the sick. Engineers returned to electrical power plants to make sure the hospitals had lights and the homes had hot water.
Everything went on nearly as before. Sure, luxuries had flown from the markets in an orgy of spending, but this also drove up all prices nearly instantly. People had to resort to bartering for needed goods to smooth things over until the massive economic disruption caused by the government's "benevolent" intervention abated.
Never again did the people believe in the fairy tale of government-created wealth. Santa Obama became a laughing stock who retreated to the North Pole in Bermuda shorts and a bottle of sunscreen, only to freeze more solid than Han Solo in The Empire Strikes Back. Guided tours now take customers to visit the socialist relic (for a handsome price, of course).
Nevertheless, when the letters began to pile up refuting the article's claim that Obama was the Marxist equivalent of Santa Claus at the Newsweek home office on 34th street (which is located conveniently next to the newly constructed Pelosi, Obama, or Reid offices, also known as the POOR House), the cheeky editors Jon Meacham and Evan Thomas came up with the idea of forwarding the letters along to the big man himself.
During the cold weeks that ensued, the air was fraught with the tense electricity of anticipation. The stillness of the February mornings enhanced the feeling of anticipation and tension that was itself heightened by the coldness. The wan pinkish sun cast a glow on the frosty tundra that glistened like the hope of a new socialist dawn.
The whisper campaign against the Santa Obama deniers continued on the front pages of Time and Newsweek until the masses were both bored and infuriated. Finally a clarion call of sanity emerged from the cacophony of tumult, allaying the fear and alarm of the people like a gentle hand soothing a wounded deer who has just been shot.
"We have to tolerate the inequality as a way to achieve greater prosperity and opportunity for all." Contessa Brewer trumpeted on a raucous MSNBC set, still up in arms over a botched Starbucks order. "Tell that to the guy making ten bucks an hour."
Tell that to the guy making ten bucks an hour. Truer words were never spoken. The words washed over the country, cleansing the open wound still festering from the ugly prosperity of the Reagan years.
The nation soon forgot the fact that Ms. Brewer (who some have claimed has an IQ of a hundred and seven) had just called the Reverend Jesse Jackson the Reverend Al Sharpton. The twelve people watching the network at the time overlooked the fact that they were watching a conversation between a chirpy teleprompter-reading communications major and a multi-millionaire race-baiting shakedown artist.
Within minutes, MSNBC cut to a live press conference where Obama was set to address the sensational Contessa Brewer statement. President Obama approached the podium and gazed into the teleprompter, distilling the wisdom of its words like a delphic oracle.
"There has been an...ummm....a rumor, that, uh, all of us are socialists now. This is....this is not true. As everyone knows I am a centrist - mine is a new way, a third way. I have been studying the economy of Zimbabwe, where an enlightened despot has bestowed great wealth upon his people. There are hushed rumors that in that great African land, uhh, everyone is a quadrillionaire. How much more is owed the people of America, the most powerful and wealthy nation on earth, where inequality remains our greatest challenge? And what indeed of the world? As the one true Santa Obama, I now declare unequivocally that we are all millionaires now."
The masses erupted in joy as all the people rushed to the banks to confirm - indeed, all of their bank accounts had been wiped out and replaced with a one followed by six zeroes.
The pandemonium was unimaginable. People quit their jobs immediately. There were drunken festivities and dancing in the streets.
Then, after the ticket tape settled, men and women finally began to think about the implications of their new found wealth. Everyone still had the same possessions, the same families, the same hopes, dreams and talents.
Fields still needed to be sown and reaped. Cars still needed to be manufactured. Roads still needed to be maintained. Energy still needed to be produced. Medicine still needed to be practiced.
Then someone picked up a broom and began to sweep away the confetti. Sanitation workers got in their garbage trucks to haul it away. Doctors and nurses went back to their hospitals to care for the sick. Engineers returned to electrical power plants to make sure the hospitals had lights and the homes had hot water.
Everything went on nearly as before. Sure, luxuries had flown from the markets in an orgy of spending, but this also drove up all prices nearly instantly. People had to resort to bartering for needed goods to smooth things over until the massive economic disruption caused by the government's "benevolent" intervention abated.
Never again did the people believe in the fairy tale of government-created wealth. Santa Obama became a laughing stock who retreated to the North Pole in Bermuda shorts and a bottle of sunscreen, only to freeze more solid than Han Solo in The Empire Strikes Back. Guided tours now take customers to visit the socialist relic (for a handsome price, of course).
Saturday, October 24, 2009
The United States: Politically Subverted?
Supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting. - Sun Tzu
Grand strategy is a term familiar to generals and statesmen; it conjures up visions of smoke-filled rooms and military officers crouched over world maps moving armies like chess pieces. Yet there is another kind of grand strategy - one familiar to politicians and philosophers: It is the grand strategy of political subversion.
Political subversion is typically when you demoralize, destabilize, and economically and societally shatter a nation in order to put the pieces back together in a configuration more amenable to the subverter. Contrary to popular conception, it is not a formless art conducted in the shadows; in free societies, it can easily be carried out in the open.
It has been the goal of authoritarian countries like Russia and China during the entire post-World War II order to facilitate (not necessarily orchestrate) the ideological subversion of the United States. Why? Because both countries acknowledge freedom and capitalism to be superior to dictatorship and command economy; but neither want to relinquish authoritarian control over their peoples. Thus both states have used world bodies, and particularly the United Nations, as a means to erode the sovereignty of America in the world and Americans' influence over their own government; all while ultimately seeking to undermine those economic and military strengths that made America so formidable. The "communists" have sought to achieve this through political ideology.
The subverters of America, as it was founded, can be subsumed under the rubric of the political left. What are the goals of the political left? To capture the Democrat party; to neuter, destroy or co-opt the Republican party; to turn the United States into a single party socialist democracy; and to implement a "global transformation" from a capitalist order to an internationalist-fascist "new world order" where America can be sucked dry like marrow from a bone.
Why do I say "fascist"? Because fascism feigns to acknowledge "property," but it commands how it is utilized (usually in the name of the "greater good").
A note is in order. Some believe communism and capitalism to be anathema to one another. However, this is an illusion. Communist countries throughout history always used capitalist devices such as currency, banking, and trade to run their economies. The crucial difference between communist countries and free market capitalist countries is control. A country can be capitalist, in other words, it can use capital for economic transactions, yet the state can control the labor, the wages, and the goods and services available to the "worker." A free market capitalist country must have the characteristics of private property and other individual rights, such as free speech and personal freedom. In essence, all nominally communist countries are fascist; and to anticipate an objection, there are no truly "internationalist" regimes - only regimes that are more or less openly nationalistic in their respective forms of propaganda.
Russia and China have indirectly formed ideological alliances with leftists in the United States, who unknowingly (and rarely, knowingly) cooperate with their designs. Why do leftists in the United States cooperate with the plans of these "communist" countries? Because leftists believe that the collapse of "capitalism" is inevitable. To bring about the left's imagined socialist utopia (or dystopia as some of us would have it), the strongest capitalist country, the United States, must be destroyed.
The United States is too powerful a country (ironically due to the same capitalist system that the leftists condemn) to attack directly. Indeed, this is not only pointless but counterproductive. As Sun Tzu noted, "In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy's country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it is the inferior way."
Thus deception is key for the leftists. There is no lie a leftist won't tell to accomplish his goal of the complete destruction of the old, whether the old be "civilization" itself. In fact, the bigger the lie the better, as Goebbels and Hitler recommended. Nietzsche cleared the way for utter ruthlessness in politics, surpassing even that of the often-misunderstood Machiavelli (who saw ruthlessness as a virtue for the Prince in order to ensure the survival of the principality). Georges Sorel, another influential leftist, saw "myths" to be particularly useful in bringing about political "change"; a potent post-Nietszchean insight.
Indeed, after the Frankfurt School arrived and set up shop at Columbia after World War II, critical theory, historical revisionism, and post-modernism taught that all aspects of the culture were negotiable and truth was a purely subjective matter. The floodgates were thrown open for the type of unabashed lying we see today in our culture. The left has thus enacted the Gramscian grand strategy of capturing the institutions of popular culture and promoting democracy (while relegating the Constitution to nothing more than a dusty museum piece). The Frankfurt School scattered like a prism the leftist cultural marxist agenda by veiling the leftist program for economic destruction and cultural hijacking into dozens of fracturing agendas: Gay rights, women's rights, civil rights, animal rights, world peace, environmentalism, the list goes on and on.
It is key to recognize that the United States has been declining as a world power for decades; and this is despite its potentially high levels of skilled labor, population growth, natural resources, technological prowess, industrial capacity, real economic growth, and military expenditures. Instead, America has been weakened due to a campaign carried out by the political left to demoralize Americans culturally while creating as much economic inefficiency and chaos as possible.
The left has targeted America's work force by: (a) raising corporate taxes to the highest in the world, forcing companies overseas; (b) draining the treasury for public education, and then producing minds ill-suited for superior performance in a high-tech, industrialized economy; (c) effectively importing tens of millions of underskilled illegal aliens, who undercut wages and deplete (morally repugnant) social welfare programs; (d) fostering an entitlement mentality that deteriorates productivity, especially for manual laborers; (e) promoting unions, which generally create more inefficient and more costly laborers by design; and (f) incentivizing joblessness and laziness through mandatory unemployment insurance and public welfare programs, which are routinely abused and create a drain on the economy.
The left has sought to curb population growth in the United States by (a) promoting the practice of abortion, through groups like "Planned Parenthood" (a leftist organization that veils its agenda though its deceptive label); (b) promoting gay, lesbian, and transgender causes; including gay marriage and adoption of children and (c) overpopulation alarmism (recently tied into the "global warming" agenda through the suggestion of incentivizing the practice of forgoing children through children's credits, similar to carbon credits).
Relatedly, the left has sought to destroy healthy families by (a) providing incentives for divorce (b) promoting the idea that women should work rather than raise children, leaving children in the hands of state-run child care centers (c) making it easy for children to be removed from families for numerous reasons, even if unfounded (d) the sexualization of youth, which is linked to early rebelliousness (d) the promotion of lawlessness and drug use and (e) the subsidization and even encouragement of single mothers, no matter how many children she has out of wedlock.
The left has targeted America's use of its natural resources by (a) enacting laws to prevent drilling for oil and natural gas by American companies (not Chinese ones, apparently); (b) the creation of strict environmental regulations, to the point that no oil refinery has been built in the United States since the 1970s (c) the fear-mongering over nuclear power, even though countries like France receive much of their power from uranium (d) global warming and climate change hysteria, which impacts all fossil fuels, from coal (one of America's most abundant resources, and one that Obama specifically targeted) to shale to oil and natural gas and (e) the creation of giant wildlife reserves where many of the best natural resources are located.
The left has greatly reduced America's potential technological prowess by (a) providing extremely substandard mathematical and scientific education to American students; and (b) compromising secrets to countries like China (supercomputer technology, for example, which was compromised directly by President Clinton).
Industrial capacity in America has been greatly reduced by the left due to (a) numerous environmental regulations; (b) punitive lawsuits, replacing the legal concept of caveat emptor with a nanny state mentality; (c) economic zoning and restrictions; and (d) the promotion of tedious and expensive trade unions, all making American companies less competitive abroad.
The U.S.' economic growth has been impressive, but not nearly as impressive once you factor in that (a) seventy percent of the American economy is consumption (b) consumption is mainly debt-driven, the average household having about $100,000 in personal debt (c) the Fed's inflation of the money supply makes the economic numbers bigger (on the stock market for example), but the numbers may not reflect actual added productivity, or additional goods or services provided (in fact, money supply is so huge a factor once can almost chart one to one charts of money supply and stock market gains side by side); and (d) the national debt, much-financed by China and Japan, is in the order of trillions, and financial obligations of the U.S. government, all told, on the order of several tens of trillions of dollars.
Military expenditures since 1970 have been robust in terms of actual dollars, but not nearly as much so in terms of percent of GDP (the early Cold War era was nearly twice as high). Nevertheless, the U.S. military is well-funded. But it is also overstretched. The U.S. has military bases across the globe, and is currently engaged in two tedious wars. The drain on the military is real. How is the poliltical left involved? Nearly every Democrat voted to authorize the war in Afghanistan, and the great majority voted for Bush to carry out war in Iraq. Of course, the Democrats now feign that the war was all Bush's idea and fault. They can thus have their cake and eat it too: They can stretch the military thin and erode its morale; all the while pretending that they are the "party of peace."
One litmus test to gauge how much the U.S. has been weakened due to the policies of the Democrats is to assess the United States' raw war-making capability. This is a rough statistic America's ideological enemies abroad would be interested in. The Correlates of War data-set, second edition, carries such data up to 2001. The statistic that we would be interested in to assess how much the U.S. has been damaged by Democrat policies is the Composite Index of National Capability (CINC).
Upon investigation, the U.S.' CINC declined from .3838 in 1945 to a startling .149 in 2001. The CINC is derived from a number of statistics, including: Energy consumption, iron and steel production, military expenditure, military personnel, total population, and urban population. It is an imperfect statistic, yet one that buttresses my overall point nicely: The U.S. has been subverted from within.
Grand strategy is a term familiar to generals and statesmen; it conjures up visions of smoke-filled rooms and military officers crouched over world maps moving armies like chess pieces. Yet there is another kind of grand strategy - one familiar to politicians and philosophers: It is the grand strategy of political subversion.
Political subversion is typically when you demoralize, destabilize, and economically and societally shatter a nation in order to put the pieces back together in a configuration more amenable to the subverter. Contrary to popular conception, it is not a formless art conducted in the shadows; in free societies, it can easily be carried out in the open.
It has been the goal of authoritarian countries like Russia and China during the entire post-World War II order to facilitate (not necessarily orchestrate) the ideological subversion of the United States. Why? Because both countries acknowledge freedom and capitalism to be superior to dictatorship and command economy; but neither want to relinquish authoritarian control over their peoples. Thus both states have used world bodies, and particularly the United Nations, as a means to erode the sovereignty of America in the world and Americans' influence over their own government; all while ultimately seeking to undermine those economic and military strengths that made America so formidable. The "communists" have sought to achieve this through political ideology.
The subverters of America, as it was founded, can be subsumed under the rubric of the political left. What are the goals of the political left? To capture the Democrat party; to neuter, destroy or co-opt the Republican party; to turn the United States into a single party socialist democracy; and to implement a "global transformation" from a capitalist order to an internationalist-fascist "new world order" where America can be sucked dry like marrow from a bone.
Why do I say "fascist"? Because fascism feigns to acknowledge "property," but it commands how it is utilized (usually in the name of the "greater good").
A note is in order. Some believe communism and capitalism to be anathema to one another. However, this is an illusion. Communist countries throughout history always used capitalist devices such as currency, banking, and trade to run their economies. The crucial difference between communist countries and free market capitalist countries is control. A country can be capitalist, in other words, it can use capital for economic transactions, yet the state can control the labor, the wages, and the goods and services available to the "worker." A free market capitalist country must have the characteristics of private property and other individual rights, such as free speech and personal freedom. In essence, all nominally communist countries are fascist; and to anticipate an objection, there are no truly "internationalist" regimes - only regimes that are more or less openly nationalistic in their respective forms of propaganda.
Russia and China have indirectly formed ideological alliances with leftists in the United States, who unknowingly (and rarely, knowingly) cooperate with their designs. Why do leftists in the United States cooperate with the plans of these "communist" countries? Because leftists believe that the collapse of "capitalism" is inevitable. To bring about the left's imagined socialist utopia (or dystopia as some of us would have it), the strongest capitalist country, the United States, must be destroyed.
The United States is too powerful a country (ironically due to the same capitalist system that the leftists condemn) to attack directly. Indeed, this is not only pointless but counterproductive. As Sun Tzu noted, "In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy's country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it is the inferior way."
Thus deception is key for the leftists. There is no lie a leftist won't tell to accomplish his goal of the complete destruction of the old, whether the old be "civilization" itself. In fact, the bigger the lie the better, as Goebbels and Hitler recommended. Nietzsche cleared the way for utter ruthlessness in politics, surpassing even that of the often-misunderstood Machiavelli (who saw ruthlessness as a virtue for the Prince in order to ensure the survival of the principality). Georges Sorel, another influential leftist, saw "myths" to be particularly useful in bringing about political "change"; a potent post-Nietszchean insight.
Indeed, after the Frankfurt School arrived and set up shop at Columbia after World War II, critical theory, historical revisionism, and post-modernism taught that all aspects of the culture were negotiable and truth was a purely subjective matter. The floodgates were thrown open for the type of unabashed lying we see today in our culture. The left has thus enacted the Gramscian grand strategy of capturing the institutions of popular culture and promoting democracy (while relegating the Constitution to nothing more than a dusty museum piece). The Frankfurt School scattered like a prism the leftist cultural marxist agenda by veiling the leftist program for economic destruction and cultural hijacking into dozens of fracturing agendas: Gay rights, women's rights, civil rights, animal rights, world peace, environmentalism, the list goes on and on.
It is key to recognize that the United States has been declining as a world power for decades; and this is despite its potentially high levels of skilled labor, population growth, natural resources, technological prowess, industrial capacity, real economic growth, and military expenditures. Instead, America has been weakened due to a campaign carried out by the political left to demoralize Americans culturally while creating as much economic inefficiency and chaos as possible.
The left has targeted America's work force by: (a) raising corporate taxes to the highest in the world, forcing companies overseas; (b) draining the treasury for public education, and then producing minds ill-suited for superior performance in a high-tech, industrialized economy; (c) effectively importing tens of millions of underskilled illegal aliens, who undercut wages and deplete (morally repugnant) social welfare programs; (d) fostering an entitlement mentality that deteriorates productivity, especially for manual laborers; (e) promoting unions, which generally create more inefficient and more costly laborers by design; and (f) incentivizing joblessness and laziness through mandatory unemployment insurance and public welfare programs, which are routinely abused and create a drain on the economy.
The left has sought to curb population growth in the United States by (a) promoting the practice of abortion, through groups like "Planned Parenthood" (a leftist organization that veils its agenda though its deceptive label); (b) promoting gay, lesbian, and transgender causes; including gay marriage and adoption of children and (c) overpopulation alarmism (recently tied into the "global warming" agenda through the suggestion of incentivizing the practice of forgoing children through children's credits, similar to carbon credits).
Relatedly, the left has sought to destroy healthy families by (a) providing incentives for divorce (b) promoting the idea that women should work rather than raise children, leaving children in the hands of state-run child care centers (c) making it easy for children to be removed from families for numerous reasons, even if unfounded (d) the sexualization of youth, which is linked to early rebelliousness (d) the promotion of lawlessness and drug use and (e) the subsidization and even encouragement of single mothers, no matter how many children she has out of wedlock.
The left has targeted America's use of its natural resources by (a) enacting laws to prevent drilling for oil and natural gas by American companies (not Chinese ones, apparently); (b) the creation of strict environmental regulations, to the point that no oil refinery has been built in the United States since the 1970s (c) the fear-mongering over nuclear power, even though countries like France receive much of their power from uranium (d) global warming and climate change hysteria, which impacts all fossil fuels, from coal (one of America's most abundant resources, and one that Obama specifically targeted) to shale to oil and natural gas and (e) the creation of giant wildlife reserves where many of the best natural resources are located.
The left has greatly reduced America's potential technological prowess by (a) providing extremely substandard mathematical and scientific education to American students; and (b) compromising secrets to countries like China (supercomputer technology, for example, which was compromised directly by President Clinton).
Industrial capacity in America has been greatly reduced by the left due to (a) numerous environmental regulations; (b) punitive lawsuits, replacing the legal concept of caveat emptor with a nanny state mentality; (c) economic zoning and restrictions; and (d) the promotion of tedious and expensive trade unions, all making American companies less competitive abroad.
The U.S.' economic growth has been impressive, but not nearly as impressive once you factor in that (a) seventy percent of the American economy is consumption (b) consumption is mainly debt-driven, the average household having about $100,000 in personal debt (c) the Fed's inflation of the money supply makes the economic numbers bigger (on the stock market for example), but the numbers may not reflect actual added productivity, or additional goods or services provided (in fact, money supply is so huge a factor once can almost chart one to one charts of money supply and stock market gains side by side); and (d) the national debt, much-financed by China and Japan, is in the order of trillions, and financial obligations of the U.S. government, all told, on the order of several tens of trillions of dollars.
Military expenditures since 1970 have been robust in terms of actual dollars, but not nearly as much so in terms of percent of GDP (the early Cold War era was nearly twice as high). Nevertheless, the U.S. military is well-funded. But it is also overstretched. The U.S. has military bases across the globe, and is currently engaged in two tedious wars. The drain on the military is real. How is the poliltical left involved? Nearly every Democrat voted to authorize the war in Afghanistan, and the great majority voted for Bush to carry out war in Iraq. Of course, the Democrats now feign that the war was all Bush's idea and fault. They can thus have their cake and eat it too: They can stretch the military thin and erode its morale; all the while pretending that they are the "party of peace."
One litmus test to gauge how much the U.S. has been weakened due to the policies of the Democrats is to assess the United States' raw war-making capability. This is a rough statistic America's ideological enemies abroad would be interested in. The Correlates of War data-set, second edition, carries such data up to 2001. The statistic that we would be interested in to assess how much the U.S. has been damaged by Democrat policies is the Composite Index of National Capability (CINC).
Upon investigation, the U.S.' CINC declined from .3838 in 1945 to a startling .149 in 2001. The CINC is derived from a number of statistics, including: Energy consumption, iron and steel production, military expenditure, military personnel, total population, and urban population. It is an imperfect statistic, yet one that buttresses my overall point nicely: The U.S. has been subverted from within.
Friday, October 23, 2009
The Roots of Peaceniks
Interesting. I didn't expect the (often) left-leaning Wikipedia to have an article on the Soviet influence on the peace movement.
The Secret Betrayal
There is at least one instance when leftist scumbags Roosevelt, Truman and Attlee, as well as pseudoconservative cryptosocialist Churchill, were accomplices in a mass murder. Information about this can be found here. The nature of the Soviet Union was well-known by that time, and I don't think their actions can be attributed to ignorance alone, though it could have been a factor as well.
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Obama-Zombies to March in New York
Coming to a street parade near you?
An amazing piece of Street Theatre has been planned for this year's Village Halloween Parade... and all you patriotic New Yorkers are invited to participate -- as zombie followers of Obama!
This is a follow-up to last year's successful skit, "Zombies for Obama," led again by artistic director Reynolds Butler.
Parading up Sixth Avenue this October 31 will be a group of Obama-worshiping zombies, chanting "Hope... Change... Hope... Change..." and led by an outrageous and wonderfully offensive Barack Obama.
You can participate in several ways:
March as a zombie follower of ObamaBlog about the event to increase publicityVideotape the event and work with the artistic director to create viral YouTube videosAttend the parade and cheer on the "Zombies for Obama" skitWe know you New Yorkers are very creative, and will come up with amazing Zombie costumes to join the throng of Kool-Aid drinking worshipers. And for those of you with no extra time to plan, some masks and props will be available for last-minute zombies! So there's no reason you can't participate this year!
To R.s.v.p., sign up on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=141604606633. Further details will be provided when you join the group.
An amazing piece of Street Theatre has been planned for this year's Village Halloween Parade... and all you patriotic New Yorkers are invited to participate -- as zombie followers of Obama!
This is a follow-up to last year's successful skit, "Zombies for Obama," led again by artistic director Reynolds Butler.
Parading up Sixth Avenue this October 31 will be a group of Obama-worshiping zombies, chanting "Hope... Change... Hope... Change..." and led by an outrageous and wonderfully offensive Barack Obama.
You can participate in several ways:
March as a zombie follower of ObamaBlog about the event to increase publicityVideotape the event and work with the artistic director to create viral YouTube videosAttend the parade and cheer on the "Zombies for Obama" skitWe know you New Yorkers are very creative, and will come up with amazing Zombie costumes to join the throng of Kool-Aid drinking worshipers. And for those of you with no extra time to plan, some masks and props will be available for last-minute zombies! So there's no reason you can't participate this year!
To R.s.v.p., sign up on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=141604606633. Further details will be provided when you join the group.
Censorship in pre-Vichy France
The savage censorship imposed on the French Press played no small part in the fall of France. It encouraged defeatism, and bred complacency. A blindfolded democracy is more likely to fall than to fight. France had every reason to applaud Bismarck’s saying, “Nothing is proved finally true until it is officially denied.” The follies of the French censors taught us a healthy lesson.
No Law Means No Law
Our Government was launched in 1789 with the adoption of the Constitution. The Bill of Rights, including the First Amendment, followed in 1791. Now, for the first time in the 182 years since the founding of the Republic, the federal courts are asked to hold that the First Amendment does not mean what it says, but rather means that the Government can halt the publication of current news of vital importance to the people of this country.
(…)
Madison and the other Framers of the First Amendment, able men [403 U.S. 713, 717] that they were, wrote in language they earnestly believed could never be misunderstood: "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom . . . of the press . . . ." Both the history and language of the First Amendment support the view that the press must be left free to publish news, whatever the source, without censorship, injunctions, or prior restraints.
(...)
In the First Amendment the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The Government's power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government.
(…)
The Government's case here is based on premises entirely different from those that guided the Framers of the First Amendment. The Solicitor General has carefully and emphatically stated:
"(…) You say that no law means no law, and that should be obvious. I can only [403 U.S. 713, 718] say, Mr. Justice, that to me it is equally obvious that `no law' does not mean `no law' (sic!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!), and I would seek to persuade the Court that is true. . . "
(...)
The word "security" is a broad, vague generality whose contours should not be invoked to abrogate the fundamental law embodied in the First Amendment. The guarding of military and diplomatic secrets at the expense of informed representative government provides no real security for our Republic. The Framers of the First Amendment, fully aware of both the need to defend a new nation and the abuses of the English and Colonial governments, sought to give this new society strength and security by providing that freedom of speech, press, religion, and assembly should not be abridged. This thought was eloquently expressed in 1937 by Mr. Chief Justice Hughes - great man and great Chief Justice that he was - when the Court held a man could not be punished for attending a meeting run by Communists.
"The greater the importance of safeguarding the community from incitements to the overthrow of our institutions by force and violence, the more imperative is the need to preserve inviolate the constitutional rights of free speech, free press and free [403 U.S. 713, 720] assembly in order to maintain the opportunity for free political discussion, to the end that government may be responsive to the will of the people and that changes, if desired, may be obtained by peaceful means. Therein lies the security of the Republic, the very foundation of constitutional government."
New York Times Co. v. United States, 403 U.S. 713 (1971)
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Madison and the other Framers of the First Amendment, able men [403 U.S. 713, 717] that they were, wrote in language they earnestly believed could never be misunderstood: "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom . . . of the press . . . ." Both the history and language of the First Amendment support the view that the press must be left free to publish news, whatever the source, without censorship, injunctions, or prior restraints.
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In the First Amendment the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The Government's power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government.
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The Government's case here is based on premises entirely different from those that guided the Framers of the First Amendment. The Solicitor General has carefully and emphatically stated:
"(…) You say that no law means no law, and that should be obvious. I can only [403 U.S. 713, 718] say, Mr. Justice, that to me it is equally obvious that `no law' does not mean `no law' (sic!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!), and I would seek to persuade the Court that is true. . . "
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The word "security" is a broad, vague generality whose contours should not be invoked to abrogate the fundamental law embodied in the First Amendment. The guarding of military and diplomatic secrets at the expense of informed representative government provides no real security for our Republic. The Framers of the First Amendment, fully aware of both the need to defend a new nation and the abuses of the English and Colonial governments, sought to give this new society strength and security by providing that freedom of speech, press, religion, and assembly should not be abridged. This thought was eloquently expressed in 1937 by Mr. Chief Justice Hughes - great man and great Chief Justice that he was - when the Court held a man could not be punished for attending a meeting run by Communists.
"The greater the importance of safeguarding the community from incitements to the overthrow of our institutions by force and violence, the more imperative is the need to preserve inviolate the constitutional rights of free speech, free press and free [403 U.S. 713, 720] assembly in order to maintain the opportunity for free political discussion, to the end that government may be responsive to the will of the people and that changes, if desired, may be obtained by peaceful means. Therein lies the security of the Republic, the very foundation of constitutional government."
New York Times Co. v. United States, 403 U.S. 713 (1971)
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