Liberty, equality, security
[BUMPED UP]
Commenter “Mrs Whatsit” observes:
“In my lifetime I never thought I would see anything like this,” said [commenter] Mythx. Oh, me too. In the early 1980s one of my law professors (wish I could remember which one) cautioned us that all that kept the Constitution going was the choice of our lawmakers and citizens to continue to respect it and continue to observe it ”” that whenever that choice ceased, so would the Constitution cease, and so would cease our greatness as a country. At the time, I listened uneasily and told myself that of course that respect would continue, that Americans would never be dumb enough to toss aside what made us great. Of course not. Only I was wrong, we are that dumb ”“and here we are.
We are that dumb. We are that ignorant of the lessons of history.
And we are that human. There seems to be something in human nature that inclines societies in this direction. For every person who values liberty, how many are there who would prefer security (or at least what they perceive as security)? I don’t know the ratio and I think it varies over time and place, but right now the latter group appears to be markedly in the ascendance.
But the tendency is there in all times and places, and there are always those who would dearly love to exploit that tendency for the sake of power and control. Sometimes it’s done “for their own good,” and sometimes just for the sake of power and control itself and/or riches and/or glory, although they usually pretend to be more well-intended than that.
In this context, the classic passage from Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor keeps coming to mind. I’ve published it so many times on this blog I’ve lost count, but it never grows old and it never ceases to be relevant—unfortunately:
Oh, never, never can [people] feed themselves without us [the Inquisitors and controllers]! No science will give them bread so long as they remain free. In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet, and say to us, “Make us your slaves, but feed us.” They will understand themselves, at last, that freedom and bread enough for all are inconceivable together, for never, never will they be able to share between them! They will be convinced, too, that they can never be free, for they are weak, vicious, worthless, and rebellious. Thou didst promise them the bread of Heaven, but, I repeat again, can it compare with earthly bread in the eyes of the weak, ever sinful and ignoble race of man?
Obama is the perfect vehicle for disregarding the constitution. He has no cultural ties with this country- we can argue about where he was born, but a good part of his upbringing, both foreign and domestic, was devoid of American culture or values. Crapping all over the constitution and the office he occupies don’t warrant any second guessing on his part. The mission in his mind has always been to transform America into what he thinks it should be like, with no regard to its historical or cultural foundations.
A document drafted by statesmen, scholars, regular men, patriots, debated by millions of Americans before him, refined and amended over generations, are things he couldn’t care less about- such is the scope and size of his ego, that the basis of the most prosperous and lucky country in history aren’t worth understanding or considering as relevant compared with his own opinions about the governance of a nation.
Americans voted for this creature, largely because they have no grasp of its importance themselves, and they deserve the consequences of their apathy and ignorance, but mostly for their lack of interest in understanding it is their responsibility to defend it from dictators, kings, and scumbags like Obama.
Harriet Tubman was said to carry a pistol when she went through the UNderground Railroad of Christian abolitionist safehouses.
This wasn’t to defend herself and her slaves from bounty hunters or Slave masters looking for their property…it was actually to kill the slaves that were with her, that wanted to go back to Massa.
Essentially, a lot of people don’t like being outside the walls where the consequences of liberty is so stark and harsh. They may think they like freedom, but only intellectually. When they feel the physical deprivation, pain, and hunger due to lack of food… they then want to go back to the plantation.
Criminals feel the same way. One of my sources said that a lot of career crooks and con artists, will set it up so that when they get too fatigued in the outside jungle, to be caught by the police and put into prison, where they will be medically checked out, food will be brought to them, and they can restore their mind and body. Since often times criminals that stay outside too long, will start making fatal mistakes and get killed. It’s much better to rotate through prison a few times and ensure one is at “top notch condition” before heading back into the urban jungle.
So Harriet Tubman, even for who she was and what she did, knew at the time that you couldn’t free a slave by getting them off the plantation. Mentally, they were still slaves and had to be forced or threatened, to take the hand of freedom. If they want to remain slaves back at the plantation, that was fine, but not when it threatened the lives and liberty of her flock and the UNderground Railroad safe houses.
Americans will once again have to face these stark decisions and ethical dilemmas, if they want victory.
Ymarsakar:
That is also a reason given as to why the Israelites were forced to wander in the desert forty years before finding the promised land. The generation born in slavery had to mostly die out, and a new one, born in freedom, take its place.
Right.
I also notice the Left is camping our spawn points, the youngest, weakest, most vulnerable generations.
Most people have no idea what the Left is doing to the children. And they don’t want to know either.
I view it all as a consequence of too much success: too much peace and prosperity have led to generations not knowing anything different. They assume peace and prosperity are a given, and start forsaking the wisdom of previous generations.
That’s fine. In the long arc of history, we need reminders.
I’m not sure that there is something intrinsically fascist in all humans. And you don’t actually seem to be suggesting that there is some such physio-psychological undercurrent in all who can be categorized as men.
But what I have noticed is that even among people I have thought of as being similar to myself all of my life, Americans in fact, there are those possessing radically different and highly collectivist moral presuppositions and mind-sets. They, these others, seem to take the “society” of all and any others for granted as a kind of self-evident right, to name this mystery a thing as “society”, and to reify, if not deify it.
What they would not try to justify on their own authority, they imagine legitimized by some mysterious collective authority greater than the sum of its parts. In fact this obscurantist assertion about the supper-additive moral magic of summing individuals is often made outright by the collectivist minded.
All one then needs in order to effect the desired change is the installation of the high priest of “society” or a queen bee.
Whether this is a “move” made out of politically manipulative and cynical self-interest, or whether they really “feel” it for whatever reason, it’s nonetheless shocking to encounter when experienced raw – human to human.
It’s sad to come to the place in life where you look at your political peers and think of some of them, not that they are mistaken fellows, but that they are actual moral aliens.
” neo-neocon Says:
December 23rd, 2013 at 2:03 pm
Ymarsakar:
That’s an acute, but ominously stated parallel.
And so it went, and so it goes …
I know a couple who claim to be devout Christians and ardently pro-life. They are mad about Obama, adore him for letting their 26 year old “child,” who can’t hold down a job, stay on their company paid health insurance. They have jettisoned every principle they claim to ever have in exchange for all of Obama’s promised goodies.
It is not security that people are exchanging for liberty, it is the promise of someone else paying their bills. The Pauls will gladly jettsion liberty in order to keep picking Peter’s pocket.
Matt_SE,
Too much prosperity is indeed a factor. We no longer know the difference between things we need or truly want and things that others tell us we need. When kids don’t see mom peeling potatoes to put dinner on the table or dad saving up to buy a piece of furniture or painting an old flea market piece, the connection between effort and well being is severed. Everything is just there at the fast food restaurant or on the shelves at Target. People are bored and they want something to relieve them of the boredom, even at the cost of their souls.
“It’s sad to come to the place in life where you look at your political peers and think of some of them, not that they are mistaken fellows, but that they are actual moral aliens.”
I faced this challenge of resolve some odd years ago.
When people tell me they have equal status, as a human, to me when those people refuse to use their free will for anything except slavery, it’s laughable.
They were given a choice, at least once in their life, and they chose to be slaves. Yet they think themselves my equal and able to command me to Obey their Authorities.
“it’s nonetheless shocking to encounter when experienced raw — human to human.”
The shock only comes from the mind and soul that still continues to recognize them as human. The shock penetrates deeply, because one sees the enemy’s fate as one’s own. But it was not fate nor dna nor predestination that put them where they are. It was by their own choice. For once they were human, but not any more.
BurkeanMama, that’s a good thing though. Because it is always good to know Truth from Illusion, no matter what the cost.
Ignorance is only bliss for those unworthy of command. A human must first and foremost, learn to command themselves. A human being cannot avoid evil by Obeying Authority all the time, when that Authority is outside one’s control. An individual must absorb the source of authority that humans need for cooperation, and place that authority either as themselves or as an external observer to the universe that cannot be affected nor affect the universe: divinity.
If people doubt themselves and considers themselves sinners or weaklings, then they can obtain individual control by recognizing the authority of an omnipotent God, as the sole rightful authority. That way no man may command them to violate God itself.
If a person places their confidence solely in their own judgment and abilities, and is willing to accept death and any other consequence for it, then obeying their own authority, resistant or immune to any external force of will, will render them the virtue of an individual soul.
So it is always good to know, no matter the consequences, whether your friends or family consider A, B, or C as their final ultimate authority on life and death. It makes a critical difference which one it is.
25 years ago in Toronto I heard Richard Epstein remark “A constitution has a half-life.”
I put the U.S.’ at about 70 years.
Elaboration: C that Leftists choose for themselves, is neither God nor themselves: it is the king, the authority of human society, human evil, human ambitions. If Obama tells them killing and raping children is right and good for the world, they will come to Believe it. Then they will come to Obey it. Then it will be Natural, and it will be Right, and without God nor individual will, it will also be Eternal.
The Left must destroy individual free will and the Left must destroy any God or divinity that commands humans to exercise free will (Islam does not, thus the Left are their allies). So long as individual free will and divine authority is recognized by humans as legitimate sources of authority, the Left cannot mold human judgment as they see fit.
Even before Jesus Christ, humanity has had to face the same kind of decisions. Decisions that nobody was taught in public education, because it wasn’t allowed.
I would rather die having spoken in my manner, than speak in your manner and live. For neither in war nor yet in law ought any man use every way of escaping death. For often in battle there is no doubt that if a man will throw away his arms, and fall on his knees before his pursuers, he may escape death, if a man is willing to say or do anything. The difficulty, my friends, is not in avoiding death, but in avoiding unrighteousness; for that runs deeper than death.-Socrates before the Athenian Death Panel.
As was true then and as it is true now, people didn’t get why he acted like that. They thought he was clowning around or making a farce of the Law. They think we are just clowning around when we talk about civil war.
“We are that dumb. We are that ignorant of the lessons of history.
And we are that human. There seems to be something in human nature that inclines societies in this direction. For every person who values liberty, how many are there who would prefer security…?” neo
I suspect it’s about half and half, which reflects the electorate rather closely.
I wonder if what is going on is about half crave the freedom of self-determination and about half are readily willing to trade “a little liberty to gain a little security” and I suspect those percentages remain stable across all times and places.
History seems to cycle between various degrees of oppression and freedom. I suspect it may have to do with the ‘fight or flight’ response in human beings. If we wish to be free, we do have to fight for it on a semi-regular basis. Jefferson’s “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” comes to mind. And liberalism is based in a fundamental denial of reality, literally a flight from reality. As all attempts at utopia (the base desire of liberals) must rely.
But what may drive that cyclic historical dynamic is the ascendancy and decline, the ‘waxing and waning’ of the two poles of human nature.
A December 5-8 Gallup poll shows 72% think big government is the biggest threat to the U.S. Gallup speculates that this “suggests that government policies specific to the period, such as the Affordable Care Act — perhaps coupled with recent revelations of government spying tactics by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden — may be factors.”
The ACA and the Snowden revelations have made it “personal” for many people, and maybe that’s what’s needed to bring home the importance of the liberty and the Constitution.
Ymarsakar 3:11 —
Well said. Responsibility must be taught from an early age and reinforced by the consequences of the actions we take and the decisions that we make. Liberty can never be traded for security because security can not be obtained through barter or be purchased. Whatever the king may grant can always be taken away.
Many LIVs are finding this out as the ACA slowly decimates their bank accounts and takes way their ability to choose for themselves what form of health insurance they may purchase. They are slowly discovering that faceless, uncaring bureaucrats and mendacious politicians are treating them in the same manner a pimp treats his whores.
“To minimize suffering and to maximize security were natural and proper ends of society and Caesar. But then they became the only ends, somehow, and the only basis of law–a perversion. Inevitably, then, in seeking only them, we found only their opposites: maximum suffering and minimum security.”
–Walter Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz
Geoffrey Britain: “And liberalism is based in a fundamental denial of reality, literally a flight from reality. As all attempts at utopia (the base desire of liberals) must rely.”
Here’s the thing: The radical form of American government implemented by our founding fathers is a “fundamental denial of reality, literally a flight from reality”.
Theirs was an attempt at a social utopia, though one with an emphasis on English methodological individualism rather than Continental methodological collectivism. The Jeffersonian vision was idealistic, not realistic, even in his time among his fellow Founding Fathers, even in his own subsequent Presidency.
American liberty isn’t a natural truth. It’s an artificial construct.
You know which Americans first lamented ‘liberal’ neighbors who they regarded as Those Who Are No Longer My Countrymen? Today we call them Canadians. In Canadian history, the American revolutionaries were traitors and scoundrels who betrayed the precepts of their nation and disenfranchised their fellow Americans for selfish reasons.
And Canadians are correct – our founders did commit the crimes that Canadians accuse of them. That’s why it’s called a Revolution. A crime stops being a crime when ownership of the law is seized by the no-longer-a criminal.
When I learned Hobbes and Locke, I was biased towards Locke because I knew from American history class about the role of Locke’s theory in the founding. It was unpleasant to realize that Locke followed in Hobbes’s footsteps but where Locke jumped away from Hobbes, Locke took an unfounded optimistic leap of faith on human nature.
Hobbes’s theory makes more sense in accordance with our nature.
Locke’s social theory is artificial and must be strictly maintained and periodically reconstructed in order to endure.
Based on his famous quote about renewing the tree of liberty, I believe Jefferson recognized the Lockean theory he championed was artificial. Jefferson the founding father was a liberal – unrealistic, utopian, and idealistic.
The reason that American liberalism is vulnerable to Marxist corruption is that the mental gymnastics required to maintain Jeffersonian liberalism are the same mental gymnastics required for Marxist-corrupted liberalism. The software is the same. A few subtle tweaks here and there in the code are all it takes to corrupt the program in succeeding generations.
The choice to maintain and reconstruct the grand American experiment established by the founding fathers is itself a “fundamental denial of reality, literally a flight from reality”. It’s a choice that is as unrealistic and utopian as the choice championed by Marxist-corrupted liberals.
If you want your unrealistic, utopian vision of America to be the normal and dominant choice for America, then you have to fight for it in the same Marxist (method, not ideology) social-political arena as the Marxist-corrupted liberals.
You won’t be the first. The founding fathers pre-dated Marx, but they were every bit Marxist-method activists. If you want their original vision of the nation to endure, then you need to be Marxist-method activists, too.
But, if you choose not to fight vigorously for your choice in the Marxist-method arena like they did, then there’s a precedent for that: Canadians. You can follow those expats who left their homeland when their homes were taken from them by our liberal utopian, unrealistic founding fathers.
You can’t buy American liberty reasonably priced and neatly, hygienically wrapped in the meat refrigerator of your local grocery. If you want that sausage, you have to get dirty and earn it by making it yourself from scratch, like the Marxist-corrupted liberals have been doing.
Add: When main factions of the American Right and Left opposed our championing the principles of American liberalism in post-Saddam Iraq as then-leader of the free world, I knew for certain those same principles were on shaky ground at home.
“The reason that American liberalism is vulnerable to Marxist corruption is that the mental gymnastics required to maintain Jeffersonian liberalism are the same mental gymnastics required for Marxist-corrupted liberalism. The software is the same. A few subtle tweaks here and there in the code are all it takes to corrupt the program in succeeding generations.”
That’s because Marxism itself is the product of the EUropean Enlightenment. It was just a different path than others took.
In China, Mao considered Russian socialism and communism to be the advancements of European technology and cultural enlightenment. Mao was going to get rid of Ancient Chinese methods and culture, and replace it with the modern era. We know how that turned out. But the Chinese still call him Father Mao. As will American children call Obama in the future, should people stick their head in the sand and think the tsunami of civil war will just pass them by unharmed.
Well, maybe if you move to Japan or Australia, it will. South America might not be safe even there. I heard nukes have windage issues.
The methods of civil war, warfare, Sun Tzu’s the Art of War, and various other insurgency vs occupation strategies and tactics aren’t Marxist. They didn’t create them. They don’t own them.
What Nature and Divine Power recognizes is results. Ownership doesn’t mean much when the war is stalemated.
“Liberty can never be traded for security because security can not be obtained through barter or be purchased.”
Ancient China, before the advent of communism stripped families of ancient heritage and knowledge, often had a civilian self defense force for every village, based upon that village’s warrior clan or political clan. Warrior virtues and political virtues were combined, in an era where the aristocrats were also originally the front line vanguard fighters.
As we’ve seen with Islamic Jihad, centralized reaction forces are too slow to defend against every attack. The enemy will always find a weakness, if they try hard enough. So hardening the local forces, providing them with defense forces recruited from the target population itself, provides the best front line defense. As well as promoting civic virtue and political virtues.
It starts with an individual’s self defense abilities. If they can’t defend themselves, they can’t speak truth to power, cause any bully can just smash their face in and shut them up. Nor can they defend their women folk from rape and attacks by the enemy’s death squads or thugs. So their clan’s political power is limited because they are always submitting to the threat of violence.
That’s why ancient societies favored kings, feudalism, and civilian militias. The best and only defense started with the individual and grew from there. But as Western civilization was able to save up firepower and security, each new successive generaion became weaker and more corrupt, because they could just withdraw from the bank account left to them by their ancestors. The draft and other required involuntary service has often been flown around, but that is still training people to adhere to the central federal authority. It does not, in and of itself, generate individual warrior virtues. It is better than a life of crime in Democrat Chicago, but there’s no guarantee people who serve the federal defense forces will always be loyal to the home. If central authority becomes corrupt, then the military and bureacrats are also corrupted. Often what we see is the best and brightest of a nation, are sent to the front lines to die so that the political families back home can win uncontested power, now having gotten rid of their competitor families that had warrior virtues. It doesn’t happen immediately, but as a nation grows in power, it will happen eventually. So the individual virtue that causes people to volunteer (not wait to be drafted) for Vietnam and WWII, exists due to cultural generational knowledge. But in one or two generations, it will end because the next generation are intentionally sent into a meat grinder to attrit them.
Ymarsakar,
To add to your point and apply it to us, Mao’s revolution didn’t jump off directly from dynastic Chinese government. Mao’s revolution jumped off the Chinese nationalist government that was designed from the American template.
The Enlightenment looked at this human history that kept cycling itself and tried to make it stop or at least control it. Western civilization then dug up the ideas of Plato’s Republic, Athen’s Democracy, and various other methods to control human instinct and greed for better purposes.
The Marxists decided human strife could be ended by getting rid of romantic love and re directing hate towards state approved targets. Love of ideals became the preferred mandate. Love of authorities became the only approved way to express individual will.
The Capitalists like Locke, decided that since people were going to be greedy no matter what you did, one might as well give them sand box tools so tha their greed helps the rest of society.
The Pro Life camp decided that individual rights would motivate people to take care of themselves and prevent corruption and wars at the highest levels of government. If every single life is considered sacrosanct, then wars and cruelty would be reduced.
A lot of details has been left out, but those tend to be the highlights of Western civilization in general.
So, China and Japan were modernizing and beginning to accept Western concepts. Russia considered itself the New Model Utopia based on the Enlightenment. Europe and America considered themselves the height of tradition or liberty or religious piety, as listed in the ideals of the Enlightenment.
The two world wars between these different ideologies of Western civilization destroyed a substantial number of people’s faith in not only the system, but their civilization. Their best and most virtuous lay dead on the battlefield. Their worst and most cowardly of males and females, were safe back at home orchestrating the atrocities and defeats. Amidst this decay and depression, Germany was hammered into economic ruin and wished for hope and change. This transformation was unfortunately lead by a malignant narcissist. So was China’s road to modernity. So was Russia’s.
The second world war finished the destruction of Western civilization’s popular concepts amongst intellectuals. Russia long ago stopped pretending the revolution was about idealism and reshaping mankind.
So now that China, Russia, and Europe have fallen and accepted the validity of a Slave Empire, all that is left is America, South Korea, and Japan. Rhodesia already fell. South Africa is already being destroyed and will be finalized soon enough. Australia and Britain are well on the road to being the next South Africa.
North Korea is there to take care of South Korea. And China will take care of Japan.
And America? Americans will take care of Americans.
What this means… well that doesn’t really matter. It’s just a pattern. The enemies in WWI were never defeated. The enemies and allies in WWII were not finalized. Iraq, vietnam, South Korea, Afghanistan, were not finalized. The US Civil War did not finish the job.
A lot of loose ends going around. It’s like an author that loves cliffhangers. Hate those. It’s better for universal harmony that things get wrapped up in one book. Because then the climax to the story is much more satisfying.
“To add to your point and apply it to us, Mao’s revolution didn’t jump off directly from dynastic Chinese government. Mao’s revolution jumped off the Chinese nationalist government that was designed from the American template.”
Mao was allied with the Russian scientists and Marxist economies. But Chiang was allied with American/British concerns more, it seems.
The inflation of printing paper money, though, really hammered China’s national anti communist government. They successfully escaped to Taiwan, taking with them much of China’s traditional knowledge that Mao wanted to eradicate (Like Taiji Chuan knowledge and theories), but the mainland was occupied by the “agrarian” Mao.
Mao, btw in the Japanese vocabulary means “Great Demon Lord”. Everyone who plays fantasy rpgs know this. Talk about counter cultural conditioning.
American Betrayal seems to have more sources on the Mao vs Chiang war, at least from the Chaing-US alliance side.
Years ago I talked to some Chinese youths who were educated after the Great Revolution or Reform or whatever they call it in China these days. They were basically singing the praises of Mao Ze whatever. They were perfectly conditioned and trained.
Obamacans didn’t surprise me because I had studied their sort of zombiefication before. It wasn’t new to me. I also studied death cults like Jim Jones. Mind control has been studied and improved upon for a significant number of human centuries now. People should get used to it and learn it, even if public education refuse to teach the theory and applications.
Sadly It not that I think the left is ignorant of history. In many ways they understand where this lead all too well. The sheer glee in which they have embraced it to me is the stunning part. They seem to completely fail to understand that they..every single one of them.. is one minor transgression, one minor thought crime to being on the wrong side of their glorious new history.
Look at the twitter uproars over the last week. A once leftie in good standing makes a (very) poor joke. For her trouble she is pilloried by nearly everyone, vilified to the point her own father states
“I’m so incredibly ashamed of her. She’s a fucking idiot”
This part of their new world never occurs to them. They have no idea how their entire movement is eager for these screw ups to continue to solidify its own power. And they will be happily sacrificed to it
My family, going back generations to the decision to leave the old world for the new in the early 1740s, is an outlier from Eric’s generational scheme of events. We have been inoculated at birth to deeply distrust government. I know in my body-mind-spirit that I am the sovereign of my fate. There is no compromise where a morsel of liberty can be traded for a slice of security. Its always a good day to die for liberty and if that boomerangs back on my children and grandchildren, so be it. My children do not want to live in a brave new world and we do not want to condemn the new generation to live in an authoritarian state. Better to burn out than rust.
parker,
If you want your family to be part of an American nation that’s compatible with your values, then you have to compete for your preferred vision of America in the Marxist-method social-political arena. Same as the founding fathers did. Same as the Marxist-corrupted liberals are doing.
Say what you want about the Left, but they’re putting in the work to earn normalized dominance of America like the founding fathers worked for it. The Right is not working for it.
Tory loyalists could escape north when their American nation was taken from them in the Revolution. Where will you escape to if and when your American nation is taken from you? Where can you go?
“The radical form of American government implemented by our founding fathers is a “fundamental denial of reality, literally a flight from reality”.” Eric
There’s a difference between denial of reality and the reasoned expectation that in a free society, the preponderance of men will aspire to their best. America, despite all her human frailties, has undeniably performed at a higher moral and ethical standard than any previous society.
“Theirs was an attempt at a social utopia, though one with an emphasis on English methodological individualism rather than Continental methodological collectivism. The Jeffersonian vision was idealistic, not realistic, even in his time among his fellow Founding Fathers, even in his own subsequent Presidency.
Though Jefferson was influential, so were others. It is a mistake to imply that the American form of government ever was a “Jeffersonian vision”.
“Few men have virtue enough to withstand the highest bidder. “ George Washington
“There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power sufficient to endanger the public liberty. The essence of a free government consists in an effectual control of rivalries. There is no good government but what is republican…the very definition of a republic is “an empire of laws, and not of men…a single assembly, possessed of all the powers of government, would make arbitrary laws for their own interest, execute all laws arbitrarily for their own interest, and adjudge all controversies in their own favor.” John Adams
“Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.” Thomas Jefferson
“Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.” Benjamin Franklin
“Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors, must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives. A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy or perhaps both” James Madison, ‘father’ of the US Constitution and fourth President of the United States
The above quotes are arguably by the most influential of the Founding Fathers. Personally I can find little to any utopianism or naivete in them regarding the human condition or man’s nature. I do find in them a hard honesty regarding mankind’s flaws.
“American liberty isn’t a natural truth. It’s an artificial construct.”
We shall have to disagree regarding the natural truth contained in the proposition that, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
“In Canadian history, the American revolutionaries were traitors and scoundrels who betrayed the precepts of their nation and disenfranchised their fellow Americans for selfish reasons.”
If it be treason to resist tyranny then “make the most of it”.
The scoundrels who betrayed the precepts of their nation were ‘good King George’ and his Parliament. Who posited that Englishmen who emigrated to an English colony and their descendants forfeited their rights as Englishmen. Thus, “No taxation without representation’.
“If the public are bound to yield obedience, to laws to which they cannot give their approbation, they are slaves to those who make such laws and enforce them.” — Candidus in the Boston Gazette, 1772
By “disenfranchised their fellow Americans for selfish reasons” I presume you mean the Tory loyalists who supported armed oppression of their fellow Americans and thus were culpable in that tyrannical oppression. Nor was there widespread disenfranchisement of loyalists after the war. Which is in direct contradiction to the assertion of disenfranchisement for “selfish reasons”.
“Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”
“Locke took an unfounded optimistic leap of faith on human nature. Hobbes’s theory makes more sense in accordance with our nature.”
Our premises and beliefs determines what “makes more sense” to us. Here, you’re closer to the side of Hitler’s and Stalin’s view of human nature, rather than Gandhi’s “When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall — think of it, ALWAYS.” I’ll stick with Gandhi’s view.
“The reason that American liberalism is vulnerable to Marxist corruption is that the mental gymnastics required to maintain Jeffersonian liberalism are the same mental gymnastics required for Marxist-corrupted liberalism.”
That’s a serious assertion. Rather than guess at your rationale, I would ask you to provide a greater explanation than simply an unsubstantiated assertion of fact.
“If you want your unrealistic, utopian vision of America to be the normal and dominant choice for America, then you have to fight for it in the same Marxist (method, not ideology) social-political arena as the Marxist-corrupted liberals.”
Setting aside our disagreement over the founders vision of America being an unrealistic utopian one, the Marxist method in the social-political arena is to lie, cheat and defame. It rejects the very concept of objective morality and ethics. It does so because of a lust for power over men collectively and because it cannot win on its own merits.
We certainly need to confront the left and ‘in the dirt’ but employing the same means is to justify the means by the end and past a certain point, you become what you fight. Cockroaches must be stepped upon but you flush them with light not darkness.
The left cannot withstand the light of exposure which is why they have seduced the media “over to the dark side”.
“Oppressors can tyrannize only when they achieve a standing army, an enslaved press, and a disarmed populace… Crisis is the rallying cry of the tyrant.” James Madison
Thomas Jefferson once said that, “When Injustice becomes Law, Resistance becomes Duty”
But resistance must be proportional to injustice, which is why the founders endured “a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object which undeniably evinced a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism”. The time is not yet where even the low-info voter cannot deny the despotism. That time will come though for the Marxist left is evil and, “Evil talks about tolerance only when it’s weak. When it gains the upper hand, its vanity always requires the destruction of the good and the innocent, because the example of good and innocent lives as an ongoing witness against it. So it always has been. So it always will be.” Archbishop Chaput
“The reason that American liberalism is vulnerable to Marxist corruption is that the mental gymnastics required to maintain Jeffersonian liberalism are the same mental gymnastics required for Marxist-corrupted liberalism.” Eric
“That’s because Marxism itself is the product of the EUropean Enlightenment. It was just a different path than others took.” Ymarsakar
An alternative explanation is that Marxism was/is the European Enlightenment’s shadow. As for every action there is an equal but opposite reaction. For instance, arguably, Islam is the ‘opposite reaction’ to Christianity’s ‘enlightenment’.
“They have no idea how their entire movement is eager for these screw ups to continue to solidify its own power. And they will be happily sacrificed to it” Mythx
The apparent blindness is explained by recognizing that there are three broad categories to those on the left; the hard core Marxist/leftist (who will do the sacrificing), the gullibly naive ivory tower liberal/leftist and the duped majority, the liberally inclined low-info voters. Of the three, it is the gullibly naive ivory tower liberal/leftists who will be stunned when they are sacrificed. The duped, liberally inclined low-info voter hasn’t a clue.
The Celtic blood, which has been refined over centuries of independence and fiery emotions, ended up traveling to Turkey one time. The Aryans may have been related to them or to the East European tribes.
So essentially any tribe of humans that would be able to travel from Western Europe, all the way over, via land, to Turkey, has a kind of “vision quest” bloodline that is hard to break. The risk vs rewards equation is not normal for those tribes.
This was in the days where every 10 miles, some guy and his clan would try to kill you and take your stuff, too. Maybe cause he was bored too.
Some human traits breed true. This is due to genetic activation after birth, rather than before birth. A kind of “racial DNA knowledge”, where the life experiences of humans when they are alive, can activate DNA sequences which are then passed down to their children as genetic coding.
America has benefited greatly from immigration, because the collection of “high risk” explorers and their DNA sequences was bound to have certain long term genetic and cultural effects. Bound to.
Super science or meta science has discovered things which humans knew intuitively, but could never really explain.
“Where will you escape to if and when your American nation is taken from you? Where can you go?”
There is no place to go, there is no escape. If there was a refuge of real liberty I would have taken me and mine there 20 years ago. When/if it all comes down to dust all one can do is rally with family and like minded (trustworthy) friends and stand your ground. I hope enough people will wake up and turn it around at the ballot box, but I suspect it will come down to the cartridge box. Once it comes down to the cartridge box all bets are off and no one can foresee the end game. What I am certain about is that it is better to die than to submit. Just say no to the boxcar.
Say what you want about the Left, but they’re putting in the work to earn normalized dominance of America like the founding fathers worked for it. The Right is not working for it.
Why is the Duck clan making millions then off reality tv and normalizing Republican values then?
Somebody is doing the work. But no patriot is stupid enough to work and put his family at risk, for no reward. That’s just not in the cards.
There is an American writer named Garet Garrett who wrote a series of essays called “The People’s Pottage”. It was published in the 1950’s. It is three essays that were written between 1938 and 1951 and were published seperately:
The Revolution Was – 1938
Ex America – 1951
Rise of Empire – 1951
The author is from the old right, the anti-war right, who in the 1930’s were isolationists along with the progressives until the progressives made an about face when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union.
He writes beautifully and tells the story of how we lost control of our government starting with the FDR administration. I am certain that the regular posters here will be edified if they read them — to steal a line from Dorothy, “Toto, I don’t think we’re in America any more.” My impression upon reading the first essay was a sense of heartache because I recognized its verity and realized that I had been clueless all my life about my country.
I am going to include in this post first the concluding lines of the final essay, “The Rise of Empire”. Next, the concluding lines of the second essay, “Ex America”. Finally, some of the Foreword to the book. This is to give you a little bit of a taste for the entire work so you can see if you like it and want to continue reading it online here: http://voluntarysociety.org/conditioning/misc/peoplespottage.html
And now I cry for my beloved country, a land that I never really knew because I did not live in it because I lived after it was changed by FDR.
CONCLUSION of “Rise of Empire”:
“When Moses had brought his people near to the Promised Land he sent out scouts to explore it. They returned with rapturous words for its beauties and its fruits, whereupon the people were shrill with joy, until the scouts said: “The only thing is, this land is inhabited by very fierce men.”
Moses said: “Come. Let us fall upon them and take the land. It is ours from the Lord.”
At that the people turned bitterly on Moses, and said: “What a prophet you have turned out to be! So the land is ours if we can take it? We needed no prophet to tell us that.”
No doubt the people know they can have their Republic back if they want it enough to fight for it and to pay the price. The only point is that no leader has yet appeared with the courage to make them choose.”
CONCLUSION of “Ex America”:
“By a long lure of planned grass a society of bison may be decoyed to captivity in the Valley of Security.
In moments of uneasiness its bulls may be soothed by the voices of the herders saying: “You are free at any time to go back to the plains. Remember the grass there? It was poor and many of you were hungry.”
There is no going back, because, first, these gentle herders are rough with the few who try to start a stampede, and secondly, tame grass is sweet poison. From the eating of it the way of life on the plains is soon forgotten. To many whose stomachs were never so full before, even the memory of it is harrowing. If one asks, “But will the herders always be good to us?” another answers, “Nature was sometimes cruel.””
FOREWORD:
“A time came when the only people who had ever been free began to ask: What is freedom?
Who wrote its articles–the strong or the weak?
Was it an absolute good?
Could there be such a thing as unconditional freedom, short of anarchy?
Given the answer to be no, then was freedom an eternal truth or a political formula?
Since it was clear to reason that freedom must be conditioned, as by self-discipline, individual responsibility and many necessary laws of restraint; and since there was never in the world an absolute good, why should people not be free to say they would have less freedom in order to have more of some other good?
What other good?
Security.
What else?
Stability.
And beyond that?
Beyond that the sympathies of we, and all men as brothers, instead of the willful I, as if each man were a sovereign, self-regarding individual?
Well, where there is freedom doubt itself must be free. You shall not be forbidden to interrogate the faith of your fathers. Better that, indeed, than to take it entirely for granted.
So long as doubts such as these were wildish pebbles in the petulant waves that gnaw ceaselessly at any foundation, perhaps only because it is a foundation, no great damage was done. But when they began to be massed as a creed, then they became sharp cutting tools, wickedly set in the jaws of the flood. That was the work of a disaffected intellectual cult, mysteriously rising in the academic world; and from the same source came the violent winds of Marxian propaganda that raised the waves higher and made them angry.
Even so, the damage to the foundations might have been much slower and not beyond simple repair if it had not happened that in 1932 a group of intellectual revolutionaries, hiding behind the conservative planks of the Democratic party [platform], seized control of government.
After that it was the voice of government saying to the people there had been too much freedom. That was their trouble. Freedom was for the strong. The few had used it to exploit the many. Every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost, boom and bust, depression and unemployment, economic insecurity, want in the midst of plenty, property rights above human rights, taking it always out of the hide of labor in bad times–all of that was what came of rugged individualism, of free prices, free markets, free enterprise and freedom of contract. Let that be the price of freedom, and who would not say it was too dear?
So, instead of this willful private freedom, trust the government to administer freedom, for all the people alike, especially the weak. To begin with, the government would redistribute the national wealth in an equitable manner. Then its planners would plan production and distribution in perfect balance, and thus no more boom and bust; the government then would see to it that everybody had always enough money to buy a decent living, and beyond that it would provide for the widows and orphans, the sick and disabled, the indigent and the old.
To perform these miracles it would require more freedom for itself–that is, freedom to intervene in the lives of people for their own good; freedom from old Constitutional restraints that belonged to our horse-and-buggy days, and freedom to do as it would with the public purse. And if it should be said that this increase in the government’s own sphere of freedom meant a curtailment of the individual’s freedom, it came to this–that the individual was asked to surrender only the freedom to starve and what he received in return was freedom from want. Was that not a good bargain?
What the people did in fact surrender was control of government.
They did not intend to do that. For a long time they did not realize they had done it, and when at last it came to them they were already deeply infected with a virus that devours the copy book virtues, creates habits of dependence and destroys the valiant love of self-responsibility.
The crisis was moral.
[…]”
Finally, I hope everyone here has a Merry Christmas and/or Happy Holidays.
GB – “and because it cannot win on its own merits.”
Bingo! That is why there can be no honest discussion with the left and no compromise. The hardcore know they can not compete on the battlefield of ideas if their true objectives are exposed and the lackeys are caught up in a game of pj boy trumps duckman. That is why they default, every time, to ad hominem attacks.
The best, peaceful tactic, is to continuously expose the consequences of their agenda and point out the obvious to Main Street failures of their policies. If that doesn’t hold sway, we will all be counting the rounds in the cartridge box. On a personal level, me and mine have many boxes. Take that to your masters NSA.
It’s actually not the NSA that does most of the domestic spying in the US. For that, I would count on yahoo and google or facebook for that.
“..freedom to do as it would with the public purse..”
Today is the 100th anniversary of the Federal Reserve Act. The tolling of the bell echoing down a century of the decline of a republic.
“Give me control of a nations money supply, and I care not who makes it’s laws…” A. Rothchilds
“It’s actually not the NSA..”
You are being a bit picky and precise…. its all a bowl of alphabet bureacracy soup spilled on the floor of the 4th. 😉
Don’t call those people “liberals.” Leftists, progressives, but not liberals. We’re the liberals.
If you ask them, “Who said, ‘Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty,'” they’d say that lunatic neo-con cowboy, George W. Bush.
If you said to them, ““I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” they’d say you were a racist.
If you told them “That Government is best which governs least,” they’d say, “You must be one of those tea-baggers!”
W. H. Auden saw them coming in 1939:
The Unknown Citizen
(To JS/07 M 378
This Marble Monument
Is Erected by the State)
He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a
saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn’t a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Instalment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war, he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his
generation.
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their
education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.
K. G. Says:
December 23rd, 2013 at 7:49 pm
I’ve read Garet Garrett, and I highly recommend him.
I’m currently reading Diana West’s “American Betrayal”. I’m only halfway through it (the internet keeps sucking me back in). She seems to be making the point that a crucially important part of our history has been essentially flushed down the memory hole: the enormous extent of Communist infiltration of our government during the Roosevelt administration, to the point where much of our World War II strategy was conducted for the direct benefit of the Soviet Union.
Again, I’m only halfway through, but she seems to be saying that we lost the Cold War before it started.
Garet Garrett knew that.
K.G.,
I’m very impressed with Garrett’s perceptiveness, thanks for introducing me to him.
“That is why they default, every time, to ad hominem attacks.” parker
It’s one of the more negative aspects of human nature, pride and ego prioritized over truth. Socrates spoke of it; “When the debate is lost, slander becomes the tool of the loser.”
Also, “The surest way to destroy a nation is to debauch its currency.” Vladimir Lenin
Rickl,
We beat the Soviet Union because we had the superior culture. Marxism’s internal fifth column movement however is an especially dangerous tactic because it destroys by using Alinsky’s Rule # 4 “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” If the rule is that every letter gets a reply, send 30,000 letters. You can kill them with this because no one can possibly obey all of their own rules.” And by constantly ‘moving the goalposts’ you create the impression of inherent injustice in the society being attacked.
Geoffrey Britain:
I’m not at all convinced that we beat the Soviet Union. We did have a superior culture at one time, but it has been steadily hollowed out by Communist termites since the 1930s, to the point where only a dry husk remains.
See Garet Garrett’s essay “The Revolution Was”, published in 1938. Even at that early date, he was saying that it already happened. Pay attention to his concept of “the revolution within the form”. We still have the outward symbols and trappings of the American Republic, but it has been altered beyond recognition.
This is why the modern Republican Party is incapable of standing up for the principles of free enterprise and limited government. Not only do they no longer believe it themselves any more, there’s literally nothing left of those principles to defend. They’ve been eroded and subsumed within the ever-growing and ever-controlling state.
See also the list of Communist Goals, which originally appeared in a book entitled “The Naked Communist” by Cleon Skousen in the late 1950s. I can find very few that haven’t already come to pass. Consider what American culture was like in the late 1950s and early 1960s, compared to today. We have fallen very far.
rickl,
I can’t agree that only a dry husk remains of our superior culture. It is wounded yes but perhaps 70% of the country still holds allegiance to that culture. 20% of that 70% are duped liberals.
I’ve read enough of Garet Garrett’s eyeopening essay “The Revolution Was” to see what he meant by “the revolution within the form” and while I agree with his analysis, time has proven his conclusions to be somewhat flawed, as he underestimated his own observation, that in place of Europe’s ‘revolutionary tradition’ America had (and still has) “the strongest tradition of subject government that had ever been evolved – that is, government subject to the will of the people, not its people but the people”.
Even liberals of today strongly believe in “government subject to the will of the people” and that is true despite their attempts to coerce America in the ‘right’ direction for ‘its own good’.
The modern Republican Party’s leadership and major donors are incapable of standing up for the principles of free enterprise and limited government. That is NOT true of the great majority of those who vote republican. The modern Republican Party’s base greatly believes in the principles of free enterprise and limited government. It is not just liberal low-info voters who’ve been duped in the past but the majority of the republican Party’s base who’ve been duped by their own Party leadership.
I carefully and thoughtfully read through the “list of Communist Goals” and we disagree, I could only find 9 out of the 45 that I judged to have already come to pass and another 9 out of 45 that I judge to be perhaps 50% complete. Together that is a 40% partial success rate. I’ll agree that the momentum appears to be with them but recall Orwell’s caution regarding appearances; “Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.”
A year ago who could have imagined the incompetent collapse of ObamaCare? A year ago who could have imagined that only 22% of the American electorate would say they can trust the federal government “almost always or most of the time”?
I think we need some good cheer — what with all the bad news and all. What follows are not my words but I read it on the internet so it must be true:
“If a leftist ever passing one of his pet policies is your definition of “in decline”, then the US has been “in decline” since Thomas Jefferson. However, in the meantime it conquered the world, freed mankind, built the richest society in human history, and the freest and fairest, literally gave man wings, and saw off the deadliest tyrannies in human history. If you are not aware of and grateful for American exceptionalism and greatness, then we don’t “just disagree”.
Was America destroyed by Woodrow Wilson or the progressive era? No. Was it destroyed by the great depression or the new deal? No. Was it destroyed by world wars or the big government needed to fight them? No. Was it destroyed by domestic treason, men giving atom bombs to Joe Stalin deliberately? No. Was it destroyed by defeatism, by the destruction of patriot presidents because they made pacifists look bad? No. Was it destroyed by rampant inflation, oil shocks, presidential paralysis and inaction in the face of terrorism? No. And it isn’t going to be destroyed by a superficial lightweight from Chicago trying to play ward politics at the national level with money he doesn’t have.
You simply have no realistic assessment of the scale of the forces in play, or what we overcame to get here. None of what we are up against now even ranks. It takes abject cowardice to be daunted by this pack of nitwits and their trivial concerns. What is actually going on, instead, is that the right has decided to compete with the left in the 21st century doom mongers sweepstakes. It doing so it has abandoned its own best traditions and its trademark sense of proportion and confidence in our traditions. And why? Roughly, because it thinks screaming louder that the sky is falling is good rhetoric.
It is dumb rhetoric, and the mountebanks of the world will always scream it louder.”
The quote talks like civil war is somebody else’s problem.
A lecture isn’t good cheer. That’s not how ancient humans spent their winter.
Be in good cheer, they say, Thomas Jefferson was part of the Left after all…
What some people think cosmic justice is, I have no clue.
I talked to my godmother today; she’s 85 and sharp as a tack. Lifelong Republican, originally from Wisconsin.
She said, with some ire, that the income tax form this year will have a new line on it: you are Ordered to State Your Insurance Coverage: do you have it or not, kulak?
She was shocked when I told her the IRS will be IN CHARGE of the Obamacare enforcement. This lady doesn’t cruise the internet, so she sometimes sees Fox News or listens to Rush Limbaugh, but she doesn’t make a habit of it: ergo, even though she knows the paper is biased leftward and the TV “news” also, she doesn’t know what she doesn’t know: if you know what I mean.
For about the thousandth time, I wished we had a functioning, and HONORABLE Fourth Estate.
In the years before studying the Left’s power base in the US, I picked undiluted pieces of criticism concerning US foreign policy from Japan. At the time I took it negatively, since it sounded like much of the Left’s criticism of Iraq or anti communist foreign policies we hold near and dear.
It turned out to be the undiluted, pure, version of criticism, the only one that wasn’t polluted by communist propaganda. With the aid of that resource, I began to understand why anti American sentiment existed in the world, why they loved American welfare and security but also hated this reliance on a foreign body they called an empire, and how Russian KGB stoked the flames of anti American sentiment for evil purposes.
Another historic feature of Empire, and this a structural feature, is:
A system of satellite nations.
We use that word only for nations that have been captured in the Russian orbit, with some inflection of contempt. We speak of our own satellites as allies and friends or as freedom-loving nations. Nevertheless, satellite is the right word. The meaning of it is the hired guard. When people say we have lost China or that if we lose Europe it will be a disaster, what do they mean? How could we lose China or Europe, since they never belonged to us? What they mean is that we have lost or may lose a following of dependent people who act as an outer guard.
From the point of view of Empire the one fact common to all satellites is that their security is deemed vital to the Empire; from the opposite point of view the common fact is that a satellite nation is one that is afraid to stand alone and wants the Empire’s protection. So there is a bargain. The Empire, in its superior strength, assumes responsibility for the security and well-being of the satellite nation, and the satellite nation undertakes to stand with its back to the Empire and face the common enemy. It may desert and go over to the enemy. That will be a change of position only, not a change of status. There will be one more satellite on the other side and one less on this side.
By this definition, our principal satellite is Great Britain. Since that relationship began, in 1940, the American government has contributed first to her defense and then to her postwar recovery gifts and loans equal to more than one-fourth of her entire national wealth, and there is yet no end in sight. That would not have been for love. It could be justified to the American people only by the formula that the security of Great Britain is vital to the security of the United States. Nor is it sentiment that causes Great Britain to lean her weight against us, or to prefer, in the words of Lord Halifax, “a relationship which cannot be dissolved,” something like Mr. Churchill’s proposed political wedlock. If she could stand alone she would. She would sooner have more satellites of her own than to be one.
And by the same definition, all the thirteen foreign countries that adhere to the North Atlantic Treaty are satellites. First of all, the United States assumes responsibility for their security. By the terms of the treaty, if any one of them is attacked, that shall be deemed an attack upon the United States itself. A fighting matter. Meanwhile, we give them billions for armaments, on the ground that if they will use the armaments to defend themselves they will at the same time be defending us. We do more than that. We underwrite their economic welfare and their solvency, on the theory that a wretched or insolvent satellite is not much good.
President Truman says: “We must make sure that our friends and allies overseas continue to get the help they need to make their full contribution to security and progress for the whole free world. This means not only military aid – though that is vital – it also means real programs of economic and technical assistance. It means helping our European allies to maintain decent living standards.”
On the other side of the world, by the terms of the Pacific Pact, we assume responsibility for the security of Australia, New Zealand and the Philippines; and by treaty we undertake to protect Japan from her enemies in return for military privileges.
It is a long list, and satellite traffic in the American orbit is already pretty dense without taking into account client nations, suppliant nations and waif satellites, all looking to the American government for arms and economic aid. These are scattered all over the body of the sick world like festers. For any one of them to involve us in war it is necessary only for the Executive Power at Washington to decide that its defense is somehow essential to the security of the United States. That is how the Korean war started. Korea was a waif satellite.
This vast system of entanglement, which makes a war anywhere in the world our war too, had its origin in the Lend-Lease Act, passed by Congress in March, 1941. That was in the second year of World War II and nine months before Pearl Harbor. The American people were resolved not to get into that war. Mr. Roosevelt persuaded them that the only way to stay out of it was to adopt “measures short of war.” Churchill had promised: “Give us the tools and we will do the job.”
The Lend-Lease Act was entitled, “An Act to Promote the Defense of the United States.” It was the single most reckless delegation of power by the Congress to the President that had ever been made or imagined, amounting in fact to abdication. Literally, under the law, the President could have given away the United States Navy. When at a White House press conference that extreme point was made, the President disposed of it derisively saying: “The law doesn’t forbid the President of the United States to stand on his head, but he doesn’t expect to stand on his head.”
Under this law the President was free, without limitation, without accountability to anyone, entirely by his own will – to give not only economic and military aid of any kind but secret military information also to any country “whose defense the President deems vital to the defense of the United States,” and this “notwithstanding the provision of any other law.” On the day the bill passed the President declared the defense of Great Britain vital to the defense of the United States; four days later he added China. When the war ended Lend-Lease goods were flowing to every non-enemy port in the world. The total cost was roughly fifty billion dollars. The principal beneficiaries were Great Britain, Russia, and France, in that order.
Lend-Lease was for friends and allies during the war. After the war the American government distributed billions for the relief of human distress everywhere. Then came the Marshall Plan, which has already cost more than twelve billion dollars.
At first the Marshall Plan had no political meaning. The idea was that we were willing to share our wealth with Europe as a whole, to promote her postwar recovery. All European nations were invited to participate in that supernatural windfall, Russia included. But when Russia and her satellites spurned our capitalistic dollars, and then as the Russian mask began to slip, the character of the Marshall Plan changed. Its subsidies and benefits were for those countries of Western Europe that would align themselves against the Russian menace. The Marshall Plan was to have expired in 1951. It did not expire. Its name was changed. It is now the Mutual Security Plan. The Marshall Plan countries have become the North Atlantic Treaty countries, all looking to the American Empire for arms, economic aid and security.
“What we have tried to accomplish,” said the Secretary of State on returning from the first Brussels meeting of the North Atlantic Treaty Council – the British, French, Belgian, Dutch, and all the other North Atlantic Treaty nations – “what we have tried to accomplish has been in the light of a clear conception which we have all held. That is that the security of each one of us is tied up with the security of all of us, and therefore strength and security is a common problem and a common task. So far as the United States is concerned, that is a really national policy.”
Mr. Acheson made that statement at a press conference on December 22, 1950. That was the beginning of the first officially organized evangel of fear to which the American mind was ever exposed.
A year later Senator Flanders was saying: “Fear is felt and spread by the Department of Defense in the Pentagon. In part, the spreading of it is purposeful. Faced with what seem to be enormous armed forces aimed against us, we can scarcely expect the Department of Defense to do other than keep the people in a state of fear so that they will be prepared without limit to furnish men and munitions. . . . Another center from which fear is spread throughout our people is the State Department. Our diplomacy has gone on the defensive. The real dependence of the State Department is in arms, armies and allies. There is no confidence left in anything except force. The fearfulness of the Pentagon and that of the State Department complement and reinforce each other.”
Senator Flanders missed the point.
Empire must put its faith in arms.
Fear at last assumes the phase of a patriotic obsession. It is stronger than any political party. Any candidate for office who trifles with its basic conviction will be scourged. The basic conviction is simple. We cannot stand alone. A capitalistic economy, though it possesses half the industrial power of the whole world, cannot defend its own hemisphere. It may be able to save the world; alone it cannot save itself. It must have allies. Fortunately, it is able to buy them, bribe them, arm them, feed and clothe them; it may cost us more than we can afford, yet we must have them or perish. This voice of fear is the voice of government.
Thus the historic pattern completes itself. No Empire is secure in itself; its security is in the hands of its allies.
At the end of World War II General Marshall, then Chief of Staff, reported to the President, saying: “The security of the United States now is in its own hands.” We had won the war and were coming home. Five years later, as Secretary of Defense, he was returning American troops and American armament to Europe as our contribution to an international army which, it might be hoped, would defend the security of the United States somewhere between the river Rhine and the Pyrenees.
VI
Fear may be understood. But a curious and characteristic emotional weakness of Empire is:
A complex of vaunting and fear.
The vaunting is from what may be called that Titanic feeling. Many on the doomed Titanic would not believe that a ship so big and grand could sink. So long as it was above water her listing deck seemed safer than a lifeboat on the open sea. So with the people of Empire. They are mighty. They have performed prodigious works, even many that seemed beyond their powers. Reverses they have known but never defeat. That which has hitherto been immeasurable, how shall it be measured?
So those must have felt who lived out the grandeur that was Rome. So the British felt while they ruled the world. So now Americans feel.
As we assume unlimited political liabilities all over the world, as billions in multiples of ten are voted for the ever-expanding global intention, there is only scorn for the one who says: “We are not infinite. Let us calculate our utmost power of performance, weigh it against what we are proposing to do, and see if the scales will balance.” The answer is: “We do not know what our utmost is. What we will to do, that we can do. Let us resolve to do what is necessary. Necessity will create the means.”
Conversely, the fear. Fear of the barbarian. Fear of standing alone. Fear of world opinion, since we must have it on our side. The fear which is inseparable from the fact – or from a conviction of the fact – that security is no longer in our own hands.
Conversely, the fear. Fear of the barbarian. Fear of standing alone. Fear of world opinion, since we must have it on our side. The fear which is inseparable from the fact or from a conviction of the fact that security is no longer in our own hands.
In the Garet article, there comes an American internal criticism. A criticism we have never heard before, since all we heard before were patriots keeping the ship on course and anti Americans hoping we’d trip over our own feet. That’s because the patriots that wanted to do good with American power and wealth had little to no time to figure out where things went wrong. Given that meanwhile the Communists were intent on making things every which way worse. Fear of the Communist threat kept us from fixing the fundamental problem. However, ironically, the Communist threat was supported and allowed to exist because American policies originally aided them.
In many ways, AMerican power, wealth, and aid are a poison. Just as Western civilization itself is a kind of poison against traditional tribal governments designed upon human biological imperatives. It is an addictive poison, though. It is a useful poison, in moderate doses. It can achieve great things.
Without the Left taking full control of all branches of US government, we would never have been allowed to think of such criticisms and problems with fundamental US policies. We would have been considered traitors or pro Communists, getting in the way of Imperial Warfare and World Peace. But now that the Left has absolutely destroyed nations like South Vietnam, Rhodesia, and South Africa, they feel no guilt or hesitation in using American power to destroy Afghanistan, Iraq, and other nations like Venezuella.
Our traditional allies, what the essay author calls satellites which are foreign nations bought with US money in return for service to US military defense, are being destroyed by the Obama Regime. Weapons have been sent to AQ in Libya, Syria, and elsewhere. Sold for using American blood at Benghazi, and American power/money from the tax farmed livestock. The money from the sale rests not with the American poor or needy, but with the American elites at the top.
To frame it from a US centric perspective, having an all powerful federal government tell us what to do because they pay us for our ability to live, is not something we like. It may be tolerated if the US Daddy gov tries to moderate itself and lead us only to good times, but there’s always a sense that the evil times are next around the corner. We are as teenagers in our own nation, told to live or die in the way the Left or the government thinks is correct. In the same fashion do foreign nations and foreign patriots of their own nation, think of us. It is difficult to conceive of such notions when resisting and fighting Leftist propaganda, for they make it seem that all such criticisms and defects with American power will be used against us, but when the Left ascends to Godhood in the US much of that fear loses its efficacy.
The essays in the article provides me a new insight. We are not the first ones corralled along via Leftist propaganda.
When the LEft accused us of evil Imperialism, it was a catch 22. If we reacted with patriotism and looked forward to the future, we gave more power to the Left given they knew they could control America’s power at any time. If we reacted differently and sought to pull back to isolationism, the Left’s minions would destroy our allies and satellites, giving us grisly stories of women and children chopped up for the Pol Pot fields. Fields that the Left themselves helped create into existence. If we supported the increase in American federal power, the Left knew that in the future only they would benefit. If we did not support the increase in US Presidential and war time powers, in order to defeat the Left’s alliance of evil in the world, we would see nations and cultures fall one by one to death and corruption.
But what kind of choice was that? What was the point even, when Leftist Presidents can merely order the destruction of a Diem in South Vietnam? When Leftist Presidents can order the annihilation of the Shah of Iran, South Africa, or Rhodesia and it will come true? How can anyone in the world trust Americans or American power, when at any point we can morph into the very evil patriots claim to fight.
This is unsustainable. Cosmic justice will not allow it to be sustained. Human economics cannot even sustain it. Something will give.
As said by one Japanese author, Christmas is a time when the holy mother gave birth to a single child, and that single child gave humanity hope (for salvation).
Those who own their God-given Liberty will be human. Those who do not, will not be what they are meant to be.
Those who choose security over their own liberty will lose both liberty and security too. Since they give their power away, they can never rest secure the power of others might not snuff them out for good reason or bad reason. It will not matter.
At this Christmas time, my only prayer is that the Lord above sends Santa a a journey with a Sleigh Weighed down and overflowing with human courage.
To get our freedom back from the Democrats who have stolen it from us, we are going to need every bit of it.