On the sixth anniversary of FredHjr’s death
[NOTE: For those of you who don’t know who FredHJr was, please see this and this, as well as these. The following is a slightly-edited post that appeared previously on this blog.]
Unbelievable that it’s been six years since commenter FredHJr died suddenly and tragically.
It was extremely tragic for his family. But it was tragic for this blog, too, because he was an invaluable and irreplaceable member of our community, a “changer” who knew a lot about the Left and a keen observer of politics, history, religion, culture—of life itself. I still think about him often, wondering what he’d have to say about everything that’s happened in these last six years.
One thing I don’t think he’d say, though, is that he was surprised by any of it. In light of this, I offer the following excerpts from some of Fred’s comments here. Note the dates, which show how early he caught on. Fred had a succinct and distinctive way of putting things, didn’t he?
This comment is from October 18, 2008, just a few weeks before Obama was elected president for the first time:
It’s the Marxist/Leninist ethics of expediency. No regrets. Whatever it takes to discredit anything the other side does and excuse the sins of your own side.
Part of Neo’s original point was that this reveals a lot about who is about to take power and how they will wield it against the rest of us. They get away with it and many will not at all be troubled by it because they are shaped by the post-modernism, cultural Marxism that they imbibed during their formative and educational experience. If we as a people cannot name this accurately and expunge its corrosive influence over our lives, then down into the wages of perdition and disaster we go.
This one was written just a couple of days later:
I will tell you from personal experience of the depths of deceitfulness of the Marxists. From about 1977 until 1987 I was an academic Marxist and only rubbed elbows with the activist kind on an occasional demonstration. I was into books and theory, debating within my own mind the various critiques that the respective positions would level at each other. The few times I was gathered on those very social of occasions that demonstrations are, when I would try to strike up a conversation with others, the activist leaders would INSTRUCT ME to never identify myself as a Marxist. I was never to use the word “socialism” and never to have conversations about socialist theory. I was instructed to refer to myself and the others as “Progressives.” I was admonished a few times when I more or less did whatever the hell I wanted and said whatever I wanted to say.
I had violated a speech code. And did so flagrantly. I was a headstrong, stubborn young man who also was not fond of being deceptive. I am still that way, although I am now 53 and more inclined to keep my mouth shut when in the company of people who would take a dim view of my being a traitor to the Left…
I wish I could scream into these kids’ brains that they are being lured on by enormously evil liars.
I am not afraid of the Obamabots for calling Obama a socialist. I know the provenance of his ideas thoroughly and I know exactly who the formative influences were in his settled thinking. They were Socialists and they espouse socialism.
About a week later, on October 28, 2008. The election is getting closer:
Barack Obama is not a natural leader. Community organizers are facilitators and manipulators. Manipulators may try to be leaders, but they lack a core of courage and integrity and enables them to make difficult choices and sacrifices of a high moral nature.
Obama is part of a nexus of interests. What the American dopes who will put him in office are getting is a NETWORK of alliances and interests, running the gamut from Finance (Soros) to academia to media to law. Thus far, in order to appeal to the Middle Muddle he has been packaged as a moderate or centrist. But once in office the venomous swarm of this network will burst out of the nest and devour the host. You wait and see. And I’m not eager for the moment to say “I told you so.” I really would it be the case that it never happens at all. Why? Because the lives of tens of millions of human beings hang in the balance of this and mushroom clouds on the horizon. I put the value of human life far above my own frustrated rantings.
Those who think that the media does not have any ideological agenda invested in Obama’s candidacy, save their own pecuniary interests, is not familiar with the academic culture in the universities out of which the journalists come to the real world.
They won’t savage Obama’s failures or the crises that will attend. They will try to spin it so as to minimize the damage.
The real Obama will stand up starting in January. I find that to be rather depressing, given what I know him to be and what Pelosi wants.
I did the due diligence that my vote requires. It isn’t my fault that over half the nation was stuck on stupid. I am especially disappointed in two demographics: the college age crowd and single, white females. They want socialism, and get it they shall.
This one is from a couple of weeks after the 2008 election:
The Big Epistemological Flaw in Socialist Thought:
Look up the technical term from philosophy called “telos.” It means the logical endpoint of the cosmology inherent in any body of thought. The telos of socialism is Utopia. And that’s the flaw. Originally, when I was a Marxist and Liberation Theology adherent, it was the Pelagian vision which attracted me. But Michael Novak saw it right away back in the Seventies and published many articles wherein he critiqued socialism as incompatible with human nature. His critiques were the ones that I always kept in the back of my mind, because I was always striving to see if there was a way in which human nature could be malleable enough to change and be compatible with collectivist goals. It could not be done, and I tried investigating every conceivable angle. The coup de grace came AFTER I broke with the Left in 1987, which break happened because I came to realize that the socialist experiments before my eyes did not create the New Moral Man. What I later did was some intensive reading into human psychology, genetics, and neuroscience and discovered that evil will always be there. Selfishness will always be there. There will always be sociopaths, messing up the tidy plans to make Heaven come down to Earth. Evil has an organic basis. There is a titanic cosmic battle between the Creator and The Evil One. This thing is way bigger than we are and what our minds can comprehend.
Right around the time of Obama’s first inauguration (Fred sometimes referred to Obama as “Obonga” in a reference to his pot-smoking youth):
Sometimes I think that with Obonga’s ascendancy we are reaping divine retribution, being given over to our worst impulses, for the eight years we savaged this good and decent man [Bush]. We were lucky to have him at that moment in history.
I must admit that I am rather pessimistic these days. In my Leftist days, years ago, I was anthropologically an optimist. When I left the Left I was realist. And now I am pessimistic about humanity and about the long term endurance of our civilization when I look at what most of humanity has done to [Bush]. It shows most people have very bad judgment and even worse morals.
In June of 2009, three days before Fred’s death:
It’s in the open now, what BarryO is up to. He is going for it all, and going to govern from the Hard Left.
All of this is no surprise to me. Those of us who did our homework knew it would be this way.
Krauthammer says the same thing I’ve been saying for months: don’t pay attention to what BarryO says; pay attention to what he DOES.
The only kind of enemy that Obama is capable of waging war against are us capitalist pig dog conservatives. Otherwise, he’s a pussy. And with his internal enemies, even there he uses proxies to do the dirty work.
This is a guy who does not like to get his hands dirty. He is not a leader in any way that I can discern. Which is why I think he will be even more unpopular with the military than he was during the election campaign.
If you were a foreign enemy you would think that manna from heaven just dropped into your lap, complete with honey coating.
Posted the next day, this one refers to Obama’s Cairo speech:
There are overtones of appeasement in Obonga’s speech. You can almost picture him as the dog that gets on its back and shows its belly in submission.
I’ll stop there. These are chosen somewhat randomly, as you can see, because they cluster in time. Almost everything I looked at that Fred had written was on target, but I thought these in particular showed how early and how well he understood what was happening.
RIP Fred, and may your family be comforted in their grief. We miss you.
[NOTE: There are other commenters here who may have died, and I would like to mention them too, but for no one else did I actually get official word of the person’s death. One commenter who comes to mind is “strcpy,” who announced that he was very ill and then disappeared shortly thereafter, about four years ago. I wrote him an email but never heard back, and I fear he’s gone. But I don’t know for sure. Another who disappeared was Occam’s Beard.
There may be others, as well. I wouldn’t necessarily find out; sometimes people just stop commenting, but it stands to reason some of them will have died. So I’ll take this opportunity to say RIP for all of them, whoever they may be.]
“Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.”
Thanks for bringing those comments back into our consciousness, Neo. It is easy to see why you miss his contributions to your blog.
It is clear that FredHjr did his due diligence, and more. Are you aware of his professional pursuits? Obviously an intellectual, was he an Academic?
WRT to his citing Charles Krauthammer, my wife gave me a copy of his book “Things that Matter” for Father’s Day. I commend it as an enjoyable and informative read containing, as it does, a mix of serious and light hearted commentary.
Ah, ah, the old breed… (I wasn’t even a part of it, due to my late blooming as a blog reader – maybe I’m a second or even third wave neoneoconian…).
I never knew Fred, but still through the annual remembrance and the tales of other on here I’ve come to appreciate just how sharp and perceptive he was. I did know strcpy and occam – not personally, but through the blog – and both of them were joys to read every day. I still cast a prayerful thought strcpy’s way, as the news of his illness hit me particularly hard (he was extremely young, about three years older than me, and I’d just lost someone dear to me who was younger still).
I’ve never been the sunshine on this blog – to say the least – and I’ve been AWOL for some time (though always lurking), but one thing that gives me some solace is the “small township” community feel neo’s blog has always had. There’s memory here, and tradition, an etiquette, a standard of discourse (high but not stuffy, ethereal, or academic – “Orwellian” in the sense of Orwell’s own style); in essence; it’s good for the spirit as well as the mind, a full human experience, not just a political one.
Cheers to neo, and to everyone else in this our haven in the wasteland.
Good for Fred.
Now let me ask a question, about those erstwhile fellow Marxist friends he had. That would be the ones who admonished and directed him and admitted their duplicity to him both tacitly and explicitly.
Did Fred name names? Or did he still have some reluctance based on fellowship or fear?
Ignore my questions Neo. I should have read your links before asking.
Don’t feel bad. Your story about that son-of-a-bitch Rorty will live forever. LOL
kolnai:
Good to hear from you.
Your comments are always appreciated. And even if you want to just lurk, your presence is appreciated.
I remember reading one or two comments from Fred, I also remember str and Occam.
Occam had too much faith in the scientist mainstream dogma or authoritarian truthfulness, as compared to individual dissenters like me or non authoritarian discoveries.
As a result of Occam’s scientific background, his logic was much superior to the Leftists. However, scientific consensus was never as good as people thought it was. And it often blinds people to the fact that mainstream science is wrong or at least fatally flawed in certain fields.
Subjects like gut bacteria, biological effects of doctor recommendations against fat or other intakes, were something I wanted to continue to talk about, especially recent experimentations.
Your post brought a tear to my eye. Thanks for remembering.
🙁
Thanks for the memories Neo,
On the sixth anniversary of FredHjr’s death
I do remember FredHjr and I am amazed to see how true his perceptions were and predictions have come to be. Your blog and on line community have been a daily part of my life for some time and the information has always helped me process current information. Thank you, just thank you’all.
I can’t believe FredHJr had been gone this long. I barely got to “know” him from here. I miss him.
Fred was exceptional, no doubt about it.
He had Barry’s number… straight off.
A wonderful way to honor and remember him, Neo. Thank You.
Thanks for bringing these guys up Neo. Last night I thought of another person that I use to read that is now gone is Noel Sheppard of Newsbusters who died rather quickly after being diagnosed with cancer.
jon baker:
Another writer who is sorely missed is Dean Barnett.
Six years already! Hard to believe ….RIP
Neo,
Thank your for the annual reminder and for this small isle of sanity in otherwise muddled times.
May I suggest an e-mail to his family letting them know that he is remembered here?
In memory of FredHjr let me express my own appreciation to all of the current commenters while they are still active in this forum to receive my thanks. The lively conversation and depth of knowledge here provides some small glimmer of hope in even the darkest of times.
Kolnai,
I join Neo and DNW saying good to hear from you.
A very nice remembrance of FredHJr. He was a good man and very insightful. A gentlemanly voice of wisdom and a changer. No one knows the evils of Marxism quite like a man who was a believer at one time.
RIP, Fred.
FredHjr’s pessimism brings to mind this pessimistic post on another blog I read today:
http://www.cotwa.info/2015/06/the-campus-rape-war-is-over-and-boys.html
Jimmy J: “No one knows the evils of Marxism quite like a man who was a believer at one time.”
Based on the selected quotes, it doesn’t sound like he was an activist, though.
Yes, I’ve been around long enough to remember FredHjr.
He also posted at Belmont Club (as Fred, I think), and I broke the news to them based on Neo’s post here.
I guess it’s a sign of the maturity of the blogosphere that bloggers and commenters are dying off.
I didn’t notice Occam’s Beard’s absence. Hopefully he just left for whatever reason. I’ve left other blogs due to conflicts with administrators and such. I’ve also just kind of pulled in my horns and don’t comment on as many blogs as I used to. I’ve also resolved to comment less here with regard to electoral politics, since I think it’s basically useless now.
As a not-changer–I’ve always been a conservative grump–I’d like to say something about Fred:
To make an analogy: I see a building. On the outside it looks as it looks to anybody looking. I wonder what holds it up. There are only so many possibilities. If it’s a skyscraper, we’re not talking 2x4s. It it’s an igloo, no steel beams. More than one level of windows…stairs and possibly elevators. People in it…plumbing.
What Fred described about the left looks to a no-changer like describing the wallpaper in a building whose most important internal characteristics are obvious from the outside.
The left is not, of course, like a building. When the wind blows, the building, mostly, stands there. Nothing happens. When something socially or politidally important happens, the left does not stand there, it reacts. IOW, you can watch it in action and get much more detailed information about it from the outside than our building analogy.
We know. Lies. Lust for power. Lies. Internal policiing of thought and speech. Fomenting violence. Lies. Intimidation. Lies. Taking over insititutions large and small. As Ron Radosh said of his commie college career, we got there–any meeting–early and stayed after it was over and never missed. So we took over. Lies.
That our knowledge is only speculation doesn’t mean we’re wrong. Once we see the inside for ourselves–thanks, Fred–we see we were right. Always.
Neo:
Thanks for the nice recollections. I, too, find it hard to believe he’s been gone 6 years. His wisdom is sorely missed.
DNW Says:
June 26th, 2015 at 3:06 pm
“I’ve never been the sunshine on this blog — to say the least — and I’ve been AWOL for some time …”
Don’t feel bad. Your story about that son-of-a-bitch Rorty will live forever. LOL.
Here:
kolnai Says:
June 7th, 2013 at 5:49 pm
DNW –
Story about Rorty.
When I was an undergrad I drove up with some fellow philosophy majors to see him speak at the University of Florida. It was a surprisingly small audience, maybe 30-40 people, with Rorty standing up at the front.
He stood there, stiff as a board, and just straight up read something he’d written, in an extremely snooze-inducing monotone. It was one of the dullest speeches I’d ever heard — basically, “Hear Rorty read Rorty.”
Anyway, after the speech a friend of mine asked him a question about how he would square his dismissal of metaphysics starting with Plato with is pragmatism, which was just a metaphysical conventionalism going back to Protagoras, if not further.
Rorty’s response? “I don’t see any value in talking about Plato.” (or words to that effect — I’m paraphrasing from memory).
Silence.
End of response.
For the record, I can’t stand the Rortyan Style. Everything he writes just makes my skin crawl. Rarely have I had such a visceral negative reaction to a thinker — not Marx, not Merleau-Ponty or Sartre in their execrable apologias for Red Terror, not Schmitt in Full Nazi mode…
I can’t really explain it — it’s like disgust. I just find him to be insufferably smug and, frankly, annoying.
Putnam, by contrast, is a lefty (not sure if he’s a commie or not, though his dad was, I think), but I just love his work. I’ll just say it: I adore Putnam.
What, in fact, is the decisive difference between them, though? I’d just say that it seems to me Putnam, despite his avowals to the contrary, always works within and around the metaphysical tradition, and so at least has some respect for it, or perhaps one could say, is ambivalent about it. Rorty just sort of stuck his tongue out and made a fart noise.
rickl: “I’ve also resolved to comment less here with regard to electoral politics, since I think it’s basically useless now.”
They’re not useless, but they’re not sufficient and they’re not primary factor.
Activism is the only social cultural/political game there is.
Richard Aubrey: “Once we see the inside for ourselves—thanks, Fred—we see we were right.”
Gotta apply that knowledge in the arena.
Left activists may be all you say, but they are, above all else, zealous competitors with the will to win dominion “by any means necessary”.
And when they win dominion, they will not be absorbed like mongols in China. They cleanse, remake, and replace for paradigm shift – cultural revolution.
You can be right or even as wrong as you like about them, but to make a difference, you gotta compete in the arena. And the activist game is the only social cultural/political game there is.
rickl:
Well, Occam’s Beard had no conflict here, as far as I know.
If he left, it was for a different reason.
There is a titanic cosmic battle between the Creator and The Evil One. This thing is way bigger than we are and what our minds can comprehend.
Hmmm … He came to sound like some of my deeply religious apostolic friends.
In this world but not of this world.
Problem is, we can’t retreat to the mountains no more … with modern technology they’d find us in no time …. Sometimes all you can do is fight. Fighting is dirty.
This thing is way bigger than we are and what our minds can comprehend.
Think of the glacier that sunk the Titanic. The Left appears much like that to the Normals, some foggy piece of ice that can’t harm them in their safe steel house.
The Left’s power and back can only be broken by Death. In that respect, there’s a kind of problem, concerning the logistics, strategy, and tactical decisions in war.
The Left’s power and back can only be broken by Death. In that respect, there’s a kind of problem, concerning the logistics, strategy, and tactical decisions in war.
Yes. We can’t retreat to the mountains anymore given modern technology. Anyways, you’d be surprised how remote the monasteries sacked by the Red Guards in China or by the Magyars.
Implementation of the Benedict Option will be difficult.
Prepare, train each and everyday. Blame the voters.
Also, the Titanic suffered internal leaks because the mass of the ice combined with the ship’s evasion movement, created a “cut” on the side. Even a blunt blade can cut if it is dense enough and fast enough.
If the Titanic had shut down the engines and went no steam ahead, straight on at the ice, they would have bounced off, the steel would have compressed instead of being cut. The angle of the titanic’s bow would have cut through the ice, given the mass and edge angle.
Many people are afraid of the Left’s power to the extent that they don’t want to deal with, they don’t want to see it, they don’t want to talk about it, and they don’t want to recognize the rest of us that do see it for what it is.
They delay, compromise, and BS us to the point where are right up next to the iceberg and can’t dodge it any more. Then instead of going through the ice and relying on our fundamental strength and geometry, they instead order the ship to verve off course, thinking that they got time (after wasting 99% of it).
Humans are pathetic, and they can’t really say that they lack enough time to figure it out. Unlike the Titanic scouts and captains, Western civ has had plenty of time to see this coming.
Every time Neo pulls up old comment threads like those ones above, I find it ironic reading my own comments back in time.
Like this one Oblio responded to:
http://neoneocon.com/2008/11/17/airing-ayers/#comment-93595
Ymarsakar, your point has some merit, and I agree with the value statement that people matter most.
So at best, Ymarsakar, I think you have a half-truth, and I continue to share Neo’s sense of outrage over the systematic lying and misrepresentation in the Ayers Affair.
At the time, I didn’t want to come out in the open and directly say that the fate of such people should be Death. I didn’t want to get flagged nor did I want to “persuade” people that Civil War II was inevitable. Ambiguity thus led people to think I was making the obverse point, a different priority, for people and facts. When in fact, I agreed that facts matter. Facts matter because of the people, when there’s no more Leftists… then the facts will matter even more. Death is a fact and its effectiveness is also a fact, is it not.
http://neoneocon.com/2008/10/18/its-the-free-speech-stupid/#comment-89189
In other threads, it probably looks from the outside that I’m by myself talking about unrelated topics. Everybody else was talking about the election and with the Leftist agents on that thread, I was talking about the 2nd Amendment and “resistance against government”.
Fifth wheel just flying off into space. I saw Hussein’s attack on Joe the Plumber merely as the opening moves of Hussein’s War. There would be more to come. People hadn’t seen anything yet. For the Left’s war had been going on for decades and people didn’t even notice it. If they hadn’t noticed it by then, there was no reason for me to say anything direct about it, they can figure it out if they connect the dots between the lines.