Reporter David Weigel’s feverish imaginings about the group he pretends to cover objectively have surfaced in emails sent to the liberal listserv, Journolist, according to Fishbowl DC (hat-tip to LRC blog).
Why am I not surprised?
Global-warming “scientists” turn out to be political hacks grinding over-sized axes; “educators” preaching “tolerance” and “love” turn out to be sexual Bolsheviks; green “activists” turn out to be shills for billionaire speculators…..(more…)
An interesting piece by Nathan Lewis at The Daily Reckoning that should be tattooed on the forehead of every misbegotten pundit confusing the airwaves with his bad definitions and sorrier prescriptions. Lewis doesn’t make the usual libertarian mistake of discussing concepts without refining the context in which those concepts are applied. First, he distinguishes between types of spending cuts. Second, he also addresses the issue of public perception and attitude, which most libertarians don’t even consider part of the debate. Third, he takes into account the order in which things are done. (more…)
The new atheism is as bigoted as that old-time religion, says a Kentucky pastor:
“Atheists remain a tiny minority, but they’re far more vocal and combative than they used to be, an approach advocated by Dawkins and others. They have every right to state their views.
Atheists and agnostics often imply that they are a persecuted minority. I decided to look it up.
Turns out that after Christianity and Islam (which the elites have conveniently set at each others’ throats), secularists command the largest following (along with Hindus). By the time the Christians and Muslims get done polishing each other of, I guess they’d be the most dominant group. Hmm..mm, as my friends at the Daily Bell would say. For the record, I define myself as an esoteric Christian, neo-Hindu, skeptical spiritualist, and ethical occultist (“God’s Son, Falwell’s Mother, and the Rest of Us Ho’s,” Dissident Voice, May 18, 2007). (more…)
In an interview with Reason magazine, February 1986, Eldridge Cleaver, the Black Panther who converted later to Christianity, showed a keen appreciation of many free-market principles:
Cleaver: I’ve come to basically the same conclusions. My life, I think, spans the whole era of the welfare state. I was born in 1935. I remember when people were ashamed to be on welfare and receive state aid and all that, but we developed a situation where black people to a large degree and a lot of other groups such as elderly people, children and a lot of poor white people ended being harnessed by political forces, particularly the Democratic Party. In return for the federal appropriations that we now dependent upon, our leaders were obligated to get out the black vote for the Democratic Party. So this put us in a negative relationship with the economic system. We were dependent upon the federal budget—a very precarious situation, because when the political winds change, we get our living cut off.
“The propagandists for the Israel Lobby, who occupy the Wall Street Journal editorial page while pretending to be journalists, are determined to remove Helen Thomas from the annals of journalism. In case you have already forgotten, a few days ago the distinguished career of Helen Thomas, the 89-year-old doyen of the White House Press Corps, was ended by the Israel Lobby, which made an issue about her opinion that immigrant Jews should leave Palestine and go back to their home countries.
“Only in the case of primitive peoples does war lead to the selection of the stronger and more gifted, and that among civilized peoples it leads to a deterioration of the race by unfavorable selection.”
“What a shame. All that time fighting capitalism only to end up making capitalists rich selling t-shirts of his face to ignorant, white, middle class, wannabes who wear his image with their name brand sneakers, designer jeans, and Axe body spray while sipping Starbuck’s Coffee. Karma is definitely real.”
In the old days, people who did things for love of their community, for idealism, or for a cause they believed in, were in it just for that. They deserved the respect they got. Today, volunteer work has been festooned with all kinds of goodies, and, not unnaturally, it’s drawing people more interested in the goodies than the good. And not unexpectedly, the king of “doing well by doing good” - Goldman Sachs - is in the thick of it. (more…)
The Battle Hymn of the Republic Updated by Mark Twain
Mine eyes have seen the orgy of the launching of the Sword;
He is searching out the hoardings where the stranger’s wealth is stored;
He hath loosed his fateful lightnings, and with woe and death has scored;
His lust is marching on.
“The Spanish government pays over $800,000 for every “green job” on a solar-panel assembly line. This money is taken from real workers with real jobs at real businesses whose growth is being squashed to divert funds to endeavours that have no rationale other than their government subsidies—and which would collapse as soon as the subsidies end. Yet Tim Flannery, the Aussie climate-alarmist who chaired the Copenhagen racket, says we need to redouble our efforts. “We’re trying to act as a species,” he says, “to regulate the atmosphere.”
“Left to himself, Man can in a matter of minutes justify the incineration of populated cities; the deportation, slaughter, disease and starvation of inconvenient people and the mass murder of the unborn. I have heard people who believe themselves to be good, defend all these things, and convince themselves as well as others. Quite often the same people will condemn similar actions committed by different countries, often with great vigour.
“Furthermore, what exacerbates the image problem for the Israeli government is that it is no longer Arab blood that has been spilt, but nice “white” or “European” blood that, in the West, is different from Arab or Muslim blood. The international reverberations and the trial against Israeli officials in the case of Rachel Corrie, who was deliberately murdered by an Israeli bulldozer driver for attempting to stop the demolition of a Palestinian home, should have provided sufficient warning to the Israeli regime of what is now about to unfold. Having chosen to confront the flotilla, it has now fallen into the proverbial biblical pit of its own making!
“It is interesting that the excellent statement was made in 1910 [by Francis Delaisi, La Démocratie et les Financiers, 1910]: ‘… that big capital has succeeded in creating out of democracy the most wonderful, the most effective, the most flexible instrument for the exploitation of the population as a whole.
I should clarify that I think that Icke actually misunderstands many of the concepts he repackages - especially relating to kundalini energy (snake energy). I don’t know if this misunderstanding is deliberate or not, never having read his writing to any great extent. (more…)
“I know how at least 80 percent of all of the incidents there started. In my opinion, more than 80 percent, but let’s speak about 80 percent. It would go like this: we would send a tractor to plowin the demilitarized area, and we would know ahead of time that the Syrians would start shooting. (more…)
“In spring of 1988, White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater acknowledged publicly what journalists had whispered for years: Ronald and Nancy Reagan were devotees of astrology. A tell-all memoir had definitively linked the first lady to a San Francisco stargazer, confirming speculation that started decades earlier when Reagan, as California’s governor-elect, scheduled his first oath of office at the eyebrow-raising hour of 12:10 a.m. Many detected an effort to align the inaugural with promising heavenly signs. Fitzwater also confirmed the president’s penchant for “lucky numbers,” or what is sometimes called numerology.
In 1980, shortly after making a dramatic exit from Cuba, the
magnificent writer Reinaldo Arenas collected in a book his more
combative articles and essays and titled it The Need for Freedom.
It was a shout. Reinaldo felt the need to be free. Human beings
need to be free. He was asphyxiating in Cuba. He lived in sadness, fear
and indignation. None of those three emotions is pleasant, and sometimes
they twisted in his heart to the point of desperation.
“The Soviet strategists who were in control of Poland saw significant advantage in fostering an animosity between Jewish and gentile Poles. This animosity was used as a tool to aid in the subjugation of Poland early in its capture into the Soviet empire in 1944. After World War II, Soviet machinations in this regard succeeded in converting the image of Jewish victims of German-Nazi genocide into the image of Jewish oppressors (Kersten, p. 130). This was purposely done to put the Polish gentile population between “a rock and a hard place.” Polish gentiles were left with two options: either don’t respond to the Soviet oppression, or respond to the Soviet oppression and thus appear to be anti-Semitic.
Although the image of Jews as oppressors was spread beyond Poland, this phenomenon was very noticeable in Poland, where there was a steady flow of news and often well-substantiated (if sometimes exaggerated) rumors of executions of anti-communist Poles by Jewish executioners serving in the Soviet-controlled terror apparatus. Kersten describes this unfortunate development when Soviet policies created the impression that Jews played the main role in the subjugation of Poland and other satellite countries to the communist system. At the same time, the communist propaganda machine equated opposition to the “socialist” regimes with anti-Semitism. So, if a Polish person opposed the socialist Sovietization of Poland, that person was branded as an anti-Semite. This smoke screen was used successfully to obscure the reality of the Soviet subjugation of Poland by the Soviet Union.
The Soviet terror apparatus in Poland included the so-called Polish military counterintelligence. It was initially integrated with the Soviet Smersh [Death to Spies] organization directed against German spying and subversion. However, when the front crossed the prewar Polish territory, Smersh was used increasingly against the significant Polish resistance to Soviet domination. In November 1944, the Polish section of Smersh became renamed Informacja, in which Col. Checinski later served for 10 years. Informacja remained under the close supervision of Smersh and was at first headed by Soviet Col. Nicolai Kozhushko. Soviet officers assigned to the Polish army were considered vulnerable to Polish influence and were under close surveillance by a special Informacja [Information] department. Informacja was clearly a Soviet-led force, not at all an independent force loyal to Poland.
At the time of the most intensive terror, between 1944 and 1955, Smersh used its Informacja branch to have agents pose as members of the military prosecutor’s office. They used this apparatus to conduct political trials in military courts in Poland. Tortured witnesses were “prepared” for these trials and later were secretly executed “to remove any trace of the provocation” (Checinski, p. 57). In that period, of the 120 officers serving in Informacja, only about 18 were Polish-born. Most of these 18 were Polish Jews and the rest were Soviet citizens, some of them Jews.
The Soviets were creative in inventing their own opportunities to manufacture conflict between Polish Jews and gentiles. For example, it was Soviet policy in Poland to change Yiddish names of Jews into Slavic-Polish names. This practice was resented by both Jewish and gentile Poles. An American journalist, Samuel Loeb Shneiderman, who visited Warsaw in 1946, wrote in his book “Between Fear and Hope” (New York, 1946) that under the cover of Polish names Jews were continuing their ethnic identity and must have felt like their ancestors forced into conversion to Christianity during their persecution in Spain (Kersten, pp.76, 108). The name-changing became widespread. It served to deprive the Jews of their cultural heritage in order to form a “progressive Jewish nation,” to use Stalin’s expression.
Checinski describes how Stalin ordered the NKVD to prepare a civilian network of police terror and repression, called the UB [Urzad Bezpieczenstwa), to work in parallel with the Informacja in Poland. The "Polish intelligentsia boycotted the security service, which was treated with universal contempt as an instrument of foreign domination" (Checinski, p. 61). Thus, the NKVD, despite its deep-rooted anti-Semitism, "could not do without Jews. Jewish officials were often placed in the most conspicuous posts; hence they could easily be blamed for all of the regime's crimes" (Checinski, p. 62). The Soviet strategy of using people with striking Semitic features as the most visible executioners of Soviet policy in Poland was also aimed at presenting understandable anti-communist feelings within Poland as anti-Semitism. In 1945, the upper echelons of the terror apparatus were staffed with Jews. This created the appearance that many Jews in Poland were members of the Soviet-controlled terror apparatus. A public proclamation, made at a convention of Jewish members of the ruling communist party [PPR, Polska Pania Robotnicza] on October 7-9, 1945, stated that in postwar Poland, conditions were created for the Jews to find an outlet for their political, social, and national ambitions. Needless to say, neither Poles nor Jews trusted this official statement. The Zionists openly advocated a massive emigration to Palestine (Kersten, p.80), which for different reasons was also desired by the Soviet leadership.”
and
” Is hatred for a person simply because of his ethnicity more acceptable today, as long as the object of the hatred is a Pole rather than a Jew? And once it is decided that it is important to instill hatred against members of a given ethnic group, can there be any limit to the perpetration of lies, myths, and mischaracterizations to drive the hatred home? And once ethnic hatred is started and nurtured in a people, where will it end? The Holocaust itself unfortunately provides one answer, one such ending point.”
The Ukrainian genocide at the hands of Stalin was as great as the Holocaust engineered by the Nazis, but is much less well known. The silence of prominent Western journalists is one reason why. Walter Duranty of The New York Times, a Pulitzer prize-winner, admitted privately that ten million or so peasants had been intentionally starved and/or killed, but in public he dismissed reports of this as exaggeration and anti-Soviet propaganda. It turned out later that Duranty was being sexually blackmailed by the KGB.
“Estimates of how many people died in Stalin’s engineered famine of 1933 vary. But they are staggering in their scale – between seven and 11 million people.
But despite the horrific number of people who died, the world is relatively unfamiliar with this grisly chapter in Soviet history which claimed lives on the same scale as the holocaust. One of the main reasons is that the Germans were eventually defeated, and thousands of eyewitnesses told their stories about concentration camps and massacres. The experience was also captured unforgettably in photographs, film, and written accounts, and many of those responsible for the genocide were captured and put on trial………
British historian Robert Conquest is an expert on the period and his 1986 study of the famine, “Harvest of Sorrow,” brought much information about the tragedy to Western audiences for the first time. Conquest said another contrast between the famine and the holocaust is that while Adolf Hitler had written down much of what he intended to do, Stalin did not go on record about the famine.
“In the first place, [the Germans] were caught, so it ended and they had themselves got into an operation where they said what they were doing. Stalin never said he was trying to starve anyone to death. He just took away their food. He never went on record. It was all done under the auspices of humanist talk, socialist talk — or else denied altogether. The operations were different. And in other ways they were different, too. Hitler did many horrible things but he didn’t torture his friends to tell lies. The operation was a different one.”
Conquest is in no doubt that the famine was primarily aimed at Ukrainians and that Stalin hated not only the country peasants but even senior Communist leaders, like Mykola Skrypnyk, who eventually killed himself…………
“[Stalin] was trying to break the Ukrainians, as you know, with the leading Ukrainian Bolshevik Skrypnyk committing suicide under the pressures that were put on them when they tried to defend just the ordinary alphabet of the Ukrainians. Here [Stalin] was trying to alter it, things like that. I think he also proved he never trusted Ukrainian Communists. The whole Ukrainian Central Committee was totally purged in 1937, even the ones who supported him. He had this terrific distrust of everybody, but particularly of Ukraine.”
Luciuk of the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association has a different theory for why news of the famine never reached the West. He blamed a number of Western journalists based in Moscow at the time who knew of the forced starvation but chose not to write about it or deliberately covered it up.
The journalist he says played the most influential role in the cover-up was “The New York Times” correspondent Walter Duranty. A drug addict with a shady reputation, Duranty was also an avid fan of Stalin’s, whom he described as “the world’s greatest living statesman.” He was granted the first American interview with the Soviet leader and received privileged information from the secretive regime.
Duranty confided to a British diplomat at the time that he thought 10 million people had perished in the famine. But when other journalists who had traveled to Ukraine began writing about the horrific famine raging there, Duranty branded their information as anti-Soviet lies. Conquest believes that Duranty was being blackmailed by the Soviet secret police over his sexual activities, which reportedly included bisexuality and necrophilia.
The year before the famine, in 1932, Duranty won the Pulitzer Prize, America’s most coveted journalism award, for a series of articles on the Soviet economy. Luciuk says members of the Ukrainian diaspora, as well as Ukrainian politicians and academics, earlier this month launched a campaign to have Duranty’s award posthumously revoked. He said he hopes the campaign will make more people in the world aware of the famine….”
“Borrow the resources of an ally to attack a common enemy. Once the enemy is defeated, use those resources to turn on the ally that lent you them in the first place.”
—- Chinese strategies for creating chaos, “Obtain Safe Passage To Conquer The State of Guo“
“Those who have studied history know that nothing invigorates and empowers an authoritarian regime more than a spectacular act of violence, some sudden and senseless loss of life that allows the autocrat to stand on the smoking rubble and identify himself as the hero. It is at moments like this that the public—still in shock from the horror of the tragedy that has just unfolded before them—can be led into the most ruthless despotism: despotism that now bears the mantle of “security.”
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Russian dissident writer, in Part II of The Gulag Archipelago:
“It has granted me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience: how a human being becomes evil and how good. In the intoxication of my youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In the surfeit of power I was a murderer, and an oppressor. In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments. And it was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first strivings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and then all human hearts… And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains… an unuprooted small corner of evil.”
1. The 1960s - 1980s is the period of demoralization
2. 1990s - 2001 The fall of the Berlin Wall marks the acceleration of this into active destabilization of the US’s economy and foreign policy (the neo-conservative paper, “A Clean Break,” as well as proposals for “full-spectrum” dominance; Yugoslav and Iraq wars; the total financialization and electronification of the US capital markets, leading to the stock market bubble). This period is initiated by the fall of the Berlin Wall, on November 9, 1989 (11-9-1989) and George Bush’s statement about a “new world order” on September 11, 9-11-1990.
3. 2001 - 2008 Period that entails vast changes in the political and economic systems, following two crises - one, political, on 9-11 and another exactly 7 years later, economic, around 9-11 too.
We are now still in the period of crisis, which, in my opinion, will throw up further catalyzing “events’ of all kinds, whether occurring spontaneously in the realm of politics/economics/nature, or whether manufactured.
Note:
Bezmenov was talking about Soviet society and propaganda in the 1960s and 1970s. That means his analysis of the general dynamics of propaganda has to be cautiously reconfigured, when it comes to specifics. The US and USSR he was describing (prior to the 1980s) had clearly differentiated economic/political systems. In the 30 years that have passed since then, the ideological convergence he mentions elsewhere, has in many ways occurred or is in the process of occurring. [I describe this in much greater depth in "The Language of Empire."]
The USA hasn’t been free-market capitalist in any real way for some 20-30 years certainly, even longer. Instead, its experienced ever-accelerating state intervention/mercantilism and crony capitalism. Now that has turned into the final danse macabre of casino capitalism and pure plunder.
Thus the Bezmenovian analyis might plausibly be applied both to the actual situation in the US, as well as to the propaganda the US directs toward its enemies.
Bezmenov didn’t know, or perhaps chose not to voice (since this was the country he defected to), the fact that US propaganda and psyops have been subtler, and thus in the long run much more effective, than Soviet propaganda.
He also doesn’t acknowledge that at many levels “capitalist” and “communist” leaderships have become symbiotic and created a globalized kleptocracy in which the two ideological forms, while retaining different emphases, copulate and spawn a “third way.” This is the corporatized politically correct social democracy that increasingly seems to be the benign face of corrupt neo-liberalism, which is the power behind the throne of the multilateral institutions - the World Bank, IMF, EU, UN, and others.
ORIGINAL POST
March 07, 2009 — Yuri Bezmenov 1983 Soviet subversion of Western Society
Yuri Bezmenov, a.k.a. Tomas Schuman, soviet KGB defector, explains in detail his scheme for the KGB process of subversion and takeover of target societies at a lecture in Los Angeles, 1983.
Yuri Alexandrovitch Bezmenov is a former KGB propagandist who was assigned to New Dehli, India, defected to the West in 1970, and was interviewed by Edward Griffin in 1985. Bezmenov explains his background, some of his training, and exactly how Soviet propaganda is spread in other countries in order to subvert their teachers, politicians, and other policy makers to a mindset receptive to the Soviet ideology.
He also explains in detail the goal of Soviet propaganda as total subversion of another country and the 4 step formula for achieving this goal. He recalls the details of how he escaped India, defected to the West, and settled in Montreal as an announcer for the CBC.
Note: As I said before about the wikileaks video, the notion that you need to ferret out secret documents, hack computers, or conduct spy v spy ops to understand what’s going on is simply romantic myth. 85% of KGB intelligence ops in the US, according to Schuman, is about ideological subversion or aggressive propaganda, which is intended to demoralize the population so that even when presented with all possible information it’s unable to draw common sense conclusions, protect its own self-interest, or act rationally. Even when confronted with evidence of war atrocities, such as those on the video, people will simply reframe the facts to fit their ideological predisposition.
“The adoption of the central axiom of Rand’s greatness was made possible by Rand’s undoubted personal charisma, a charisma buttressed by her air of unshakeable arrogance and self-assurance. It was a charisma and an arrogance that was partially emulated by her leading disciples. Since the rank-and-file disciple knew in his heart that he was not all-wise or totally self-assured, it became all too easy to subordinate his own will and intellect to that of Rand. Rand became the living embodiment of Reason and Reality and by some quality of personality Rand was able to bring about the mind-set in her disciples that their highest value was to earn her approval while the gravest sin was to incur her displeasure. The ardent belief in Rand’s supreme originality was of course reinforced by the disciples’ not having read (or been able to read) anyone whom they might have discovered had said the same things long before.
Ejection From Paradise
The Rand cult grew and flourished until the irrevocable split between the Greatest and the Second Greatest, until Satan was ejected from Paradise in the fall of 1968. The Rand-Branden split destroyed NBI, and with it the organized Randian movement. Rand has not displayed the ability or the desire to pick up the pieces and reconstitute an equivalent organization. The Objectivist fell back to The Ayn Rand Letter, and now that too has gone.
With the death of NBI, the Randian cultists were cast adrift, for the first time in a decade, to think for themselves. Generally, their personalities rebounded to their non-robotic, pre-Randian selves. But there were some unfortunate legacies of the cult. In the first place, there is the problem of what the Thomists call invincible ignorance. For many ex-cultists remain imbued with the Randian belief that every individual is armed with the means of spinning out all truths a priori from his own head – hence there is felt to be no need to learn the concrete facts about the real world, either about contemporary history or the laws of the social sciences. Armed with axiomatic first principles, many ex-Randians see no need of learning very much else. Furthermore, lingering Randian hubris imbues many ex-members with the idea that each one is able and qualified to spin out an entire philosophy of life and of the world a priori. Such aberrations as the “Students of Objectivism for Rational Bestiality” are not far from the bizarreries of many neo-Randian philosophies, preaching to a handful of zealous partisans. On the other hand, there is another understandable but unfortunate reaction. After many years of subjection to Randian dictates in the name of “reason,” there is a tendency among some ex-cultists to bend the stick the other way, to reject reason or thinking altogether in the name of hedonistic sensation and caprice.
We conclude our analysis of the Rand cult with the observation that here was an extreme example of contradiction between the exoteric and the esoteric creed. That in the name of individuality, reason, and liberty, the Rand cult in effect preached something totally different. The Rand cult was concerned not with every man’s individuality, but only with Rand’s individuality, not with everyone’s right reason but only with Rand’s reason. The only individuality that flowered to the extent of blotting out all others, was Ayn Rand’s herself; everyone else was to become a cipher subject to Rand’s mind and will.
Nikolai Bukharin’s famous denunciation of the Stalin cult, masked during the Russia of the 1930’s as a critique of the Jesuit order, does not seem very overdrawn as a portrayal of the Randian reality:
It has been correctly said that there isn’t a meanness in the world which would not find for itself and ideological justification. The king of the Jesuits, Loyola, developed a theory of subordination, of “cadaver discipline,” every member of the order was supposed to obey his superior “like a corpse which could be turned in all directions, like a stick which follows every movement, like a ball of wax which could be changed and extended in all directions”… This corpse is characterized by three degrees of perfection: subordination by action, subordination of the will, subordination of the intellect. When the last degree is reached, when the man substitutes naked subordination for intellect, renouncing all his convictions, then you have a hundred percent Jesuit.3
It has been remarked that a curious contradiction existed with the strategic perspective of the Randian movement. For, on the one hand, disciples were not allowed to read or talk to other persons who might be quite close to them as libertarians or Objectivists. Within the broad rationalist or libertarian movement, the Randians took a 100% pure, ultra-sectarian stance. And yet, in the larger political world, the Randian strategy shifted drastically, and Rand and her disciples were willing to endorse and work with politicians who might only be one millimeter more conservative than their opponents. In the larger world, concern with purity or principles seemed to be totally abandoned. Hence, Rand’s whole-hearted endorsement of Goldwater, Nixon, and Ford, and even of Senators Henry Jackson and Daniel P. Moynihan.
Neither Liberty Nor Reason
There seems to be only one way to resolve the contradiction in the Randian strategic outlook of extreme sectarianism within the libertarian movement, coupled with extreme opportunism, and willingness to coalesce with slightly more conservative heads of State, in the outside world. That resolution, confirmed by the remainder of our analysis of the cult, holds that the guiding spirit of the Randian movement was not individual liberty – as it seemed to many young members – but rather personal power for Ayn Randand her leading disciples. For power within the movement could be secured by totalitarian isolation and control of the minds and lives of every member; but such tactics could scarcely work outside the movement, where power could only hopefully be achieved by cozying up the President and his inner circles of dominion.
Thus, power not liberty or reason, was the central thrust of the Randian movement. despite explicit devotion to reason and individuality, are not exempt from the mystical and totalitarian cultism that pervades other ideological as well as religious movements. Hopefully, libertarians, once bitten by the virus, may now prove immune.” The major lesson of the history of the movement to libertarians is that It Can Happen Here, that libertarians,
Of the several works on Randianism, only one has concentrated on the cult itself: Leslie Hanscom, “Born Eccentric,” Newsweek (March 27, 1961), pp. 104–05. Hanscom brilliantly and wittily captured the spirit of the Rand cult from attending and reporting on one of the Branden lectures. Thus, Hanscom wrote: After three hours of heroically rapt attention to Branden’s droning delivery, the fans were rewarded by the personal apparition of Miss Rand herself – a lady with drilling black eyes and Russian accent who often wears a brooch in the shape of a dollar sign as her private icon….
“Her books,” said one member of the congregation, “are so good that most people should not be allowed to read them. I used to want to lock up nine-tenths of the world in a cage, and after reading her books, I want to lock them all up.” Later on, this same chap – a self-employed “investment counselor” of 22 – got a lash of his idol’s logic full in the face. Submitting a question from the floor – a privilege open to paying students only – the budding Baruch revealed himself as a mere visitor. Miss Rand – a lady whose glare would wilt a cactus – bawled him out from the platform as a “cheap fraud.” Other seekers of wisdom came off better. One worried disciple was told that it was permissible to celebrate Christmas and Easter so long as one rejected the religious significance (the topic of the night’s lecture was the folly of faith). A housewife was assured that she needn’t feel guilty about being a housewife so long as she chose the job for non-emotional
Although mysticism is one of the nastiest words in her political arsenal, there hasn’t been a she-messiah since Aimee McPherson who can so hypnotize a live audience.”
At least as revelatory as Hanscom’s article were the predictable howls of overkill outrage by the cult members. Thus, two weeks later, under the caption “Thugs and Hoodlums?”, Newsweek printed excerpts from Randian letters sent in reaction to the article. One letter stated: “Your vicious, vile, and obscene tirade against Ayn Rand is a new low, even for you. To have sanctioned such a stream of abusive invective…is an act of unprecedented moral depravity. A magazine staffed with irresponsible hoodlums has no place in my home.” Another man wrote that “one who has read the works of Miss Rand and proceeds to write an article of this caliber can only be motivated by villainy. It is the work of a literary thug.” Another warned, “Since you propose to behave like cockroaches, be prepared to be treated as such.” And finally, one Bonnie Benov revealed the inner axiom: “Ayn Rand is…the greatest individual that has ever lived.” Having fun with the cult, Newsweek printed a particularly unprepossessing picture of Rand underneath the Benov letter, and captioned it: “Greatest Ever?”5
My Comment:
I was repelled when I first read “The Fountainhead” when I was about twenty. To tell the truth, I didn’t really read it. I read about 20 pages and then got someone else to tell me about it.
That was natural, I think. I was reading a lot of Catholic philosophy and was surrounded by socialists. In India, that book and the kind of people who read it were people who lived in a different world from mine.
My friends and I tended to laugh at them, as well as at the crowd we called “JNU Marxists” (upper class and upper middle-class Indian students who affected Marxism and usually attended the Marxist dominated university, Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi). These Randian contemporaries of mine, like the JNU Marxists, were usually affluent and enamored of the West, which they saw through the eyes of Western counter-culture.
It was only 15 years later, when I reread Ayn Rand, that I came to appreciate what had first seemed repellent to me.
I thought about this when I was reading Shikha Dalmia’s recent commentary about Rand at Forbes. She writes that a love of Rand is a sign of adolescence and is something you leave behind when you become an adult with adult responsibilities. Dalmia’s criticism is a common one, but for me it’s unconvincing, because in my case, I came to admire Ayn Rand relatively late in life.
As for Rothbard, as always, he presents many useful insights, but he was perhaps temperamentally unsuited to understand a woman of Rand’s nature. There’s a whiff of male chauvinism here. Despite all her pretentiousness (and the pretentiousness of her acolytes), despite the flaws in her thinking and in her character, to reduce her to a power-hungry, narcissistic “wicked witch of Capitalism” is just mistaken.
Whatever warping of her personality took place, we have to remember when and where she grew up. She had to struggle mightily simply to maintain her vision of individualism intact, floating in a sea of collectivism and political ideology in the middle of the twentieth century. That, more than pathology, probably accounts for those ideological and personal alignments she made that seem opportunistic to us today….
“I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”
Call this what you will but it’s not narcissism…and it is very very far from selfishness.
As for what is is that sends people screaming to the exits when they hear her name:
“The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody had decided not to see.”
Let me put this as bluntly as possible. A state cannot be “compassionate.” Policies might have well-intentioned goals, but they are policies - that is, legal and administrative enactments, often backed by force, that must be followed by whoever falls under their jurisdiction, regardless of their state of mind.
On the other hand, compassion is a quality of heart and intention. An involuntary A non-voluntary action consequent to a policy cannot be compassionate. Obedience to a legal requirement cannot be compassionate. Compassion can be understood only by the context and the state of mind of an individual.
Libertarianism is not..should not be…and cannot be… compassionate.
Instead, it is the attitude to government policy and law that best allows human beings to act with the compassion each is capable of. To force “compassion” on people who don’t want to be “compassionate” is simply force, just as surely as if you were forcing anything else on them that they didn’t want. What looks like “compassion” to you might, after all, look like “expropriation” to me.
“Compassionate” policies might indeed achieve some immediate goal that makes some group of people more satisfied than they previously were. But it surely makes another group unhappy in order to do so. Now, the trade off might..or might not…be worth it. But the entity making that utilitarian calculation isn’t an individual, it’s at best a committee of hacks, at worst, a mafia of thugs….or worst of all, some economic model cooked up in a Harvard professor’s study.
By transferring “compassion” to the state, “compassionate conservatism” encourages people to become less compassionate personally. People actually become meaner. Why wouldn’t they? They’re already being taxed at a third to half their money, effectively. Even the good lord only asked for ten percent.
(Note: I don’t necessarily agree with Robert Ringer’s other views on defense. I don’t see a necessity for the US to be on a perma-war footing that involves aggressive wars overseas and an extensive network of bases. As a libertarian, I endorse a strong defense but one that’s decentralized and limited to volunteers, not mercenaries. It would be based on universal ownership of and training in firearms and would refrain from interfering in foreign internal affairs. This would go along with a decentralized government, supported by state and citizen militias. Most of all, I endorse economic freedom and prosperity as our greatest defense. The more attractive the US is as a trade partner, the less foreign states are going to hurt their own economic interests by turning hostile.
Far from strengthening the country, anti-market economic policies and a perpetually intrusive foreign policy are draining money, time, and energy from it.
(Nonetheless, I don’t think we can disarm unilaterally “at one fell swoop,” without opening up a can of worms, now that the government has actually created multiple foreign threats by its belligerence).
“I repeat what I said earlier: If anything, I believe the tea-party rally on tax day was far too docile. It once again demonstrated just how intimidating the far left can be. Not only intimidating, but clever.
How so? The BHO oligarchy has managed to change the Big Question from ”Is Obama a socialist?” to ”Is the tea-party movement dangerously immersed in racism, hate speech, and violence-prone affiliations with paramilitary groups?” Never sell the Saul Alinsky crowd short when it comes to turning every negative around and pointing it in the direction of its accusers.
I honestly believe that Der Fuhrbama believes his verbal skills are so powerful that he can embarrass the tea-party people into submission. He may be a lightweight in most respects, but he’s a lightweight with an abundance of (over)confidence. The tea-party people had better take a page from Rules from Radicals and press down twice as hard on the accelerator, lest they lose their momentum long before November 2.
Docile simply doesn’t cut it. Just ask the compassionate conservatives who are now in the process of going down in flames.”
Did I mention that 19th-century America was not only the most prosperous nation in history but also the most charitable nation in history? In a land with no income tax and no welfare state, it was voluntary contributions that built the churches, opera houses, museums, and so much more.
Update: Antiwar has a good piece about Dr. Lani Kass, Senior Special Assistant to the Chief of Staff to the US Air Force General Norton A. Schwartz, who reached the rank of Major in the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) before rising to her present highly sensitive position at the Pentagon. Dr. Kass is also rumored to be an unofficial adviser to Admiral Mike Mullen, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on Middle East Policy.
“There are indications that Dr. Kass is a major player in shaping US security policy. She has been described as a “key participant” in the development of the national strategy for combating terrorism, as well as the national military strategic plan for the Global War on Terrorism. In September 2007, The Times of London reported that she was a leading participant in “Project CHECKMATE, a “highly confidential strategic planning group tasked with ‘fighting the next war’ as tensions rise with Iran” that was “quietly established” by the US Air Force in June 2007 as a “successor to the group that planned the 1991 Gulf War’s air campaign.”
Also per The Times, CHECKMATE “consists of 20-30 top air force officers and defense and cyberspace experts with ready access to the White House, the CIA and other intelligence agencies.” Its director Brigadier-General Lawrence A. Stutzriem and Kass reported directly to General Michael Moseley, at the time chief of staff of the Air Force. The Times cited Defense sources saying, “detailed contingency planning for a possible attack on Iran has been carried out for more than two years.” Regarding Iran operations, Kass was quoted as saying “We can defeat Iran, but are Americans willing to pay the price?”
“Leaving aside the legal issues involved, one does wonder at America’s insistence that Iran remain nuke-free. Back in the 1950s, America participated in a regime change in Iran and there is considerable evidence that America might have destabilized Iran again in the late 1970s. And despite mistranslations, Iran has never directly threatened Israel with nuclear weapons – even if it had them. Israel on the other hand is said to have up to 400 nuclear missiles or more, though Israel has never confirmed their existence.
States, in fact, usually do not commit suicide. The idea that a nuclear Iran would suddenly start lobbing nukes at Israel strikes us as preposterous. Even if Israel did not strike back, the US has enough firepower to turn all of Iran into molten slag. The regime would not survive the first missile. But none of this seems to matter. The US is the de facto policeman of the new global “Power Elite” order. It is harrying nations around the world into falling in line with the US position that so long as there is any hint of a possibility that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons, Iran ought to be severely boycotted, its economy squeezed and its businesses barred.
It is a serious situation. Boycotts are not inevitably a prelude to war, but they are often destabilizing and can well be a cynical prelude to action. In this case, we believe that certain US leaders seem to want to ratchet up the pressure on Iran to a point that is positively dangerous. Why would the US put world peace at risk over an atomic program that has not yet been proven to exist?”
Why?
Here is one answer: “The Zionist Power Configuration” (James Petras). (Note: The tone of this is shriller than necessary, but because it is a systematic and superbly documented critique that I can’t really find any where else, and because of Lieberman’s new, extremely dangerous call for war in Iran at a time of maximum global fragility (and with the very suspicious downing of the Polish plane in the background), I am going to post it anyway.
And here is more on the IL:
PY TRADE: How Israel’s Lobby Undermines America’s Economy by Grant F. Smith
Foreword by Michael Scheuer, former chief, CIA Bin Laden unit Large Cover Image
Buy now at:
Praise for Spy Trade:
“This terrific historical expose ought to be required background reading for those FBI agents assigned to investigate foreign espionage and public corruption matters. For many reasons, such cases are amongst the most challenging to investigate and prosecute, but are made even harder when undue political pressures enter into the picture. FBI officials responsible for setting investigative priorities and allocating resources would also do well therefore to read Spy Trade so they are aware of the historical linkage between Israel’s ‘Uzi diplomacy’ arms dealing, the Iran-Contra scandal, and the Jonathan Pollard spy incident with AIPAC’s nefarious ‘lobbying’ activities.” Coleen Rowley, former FBI agent and 2002 Time Magazine “Person of the Year.”
“Grant F. Smith’s excellent, deeply disturbing book..is a welcome addition to a growing scholarly literature.” Michael Scheuer, former senior CIA analyst and author of “Imperial Hubris”
“Like political parties, lobbies are groups of citizens with shared interests, an important part of a functioning democracy. When they have enormous power, however, and especially if their activities remain almost completely hidden, lobbies can be dangerous.
Meticulously detailed in this riveting addition to his earlier exposes, Grant Smith reveals yet another facet of the extent to which the pro-Israel Lobby is beyond dangerous, and has become a serious threat to a broad range of American ideals, objectives and interests abroad, as well as here at home. This book contains many highly disturbing, documented revelations. Read it.” Ambassador Edward L. Peck, former Chief of Mission in Iraq and Former Deputy Director, Cabinet Task Force on Terrorism, Reagan White House
“This book presents formidable and dangerous new evidence of spying by Israel and the corrosive long term influence of its lobby on US governance.” Paul Findley, member of Congress from 1961 to 1983 and author of three books on the US-Israeli relationship, including the Washington Post bestseller They Dare to Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel’s Lobby
“Grant F. Smith is without peer as an archival scholar of the history of the Zionist power configuration operating in tandem inside and outside of the US government. His meticulous research on the long-term operations of AIPAC in shaping US Middle East policy provides the best contemporary framework for understanding our involvement in Middle East wars. He shows how American foreign policy in the Middle East follows Israel’s agenda and documents the enormous cost to our Treasury and economy as well as the loss of American lives. This is a book that should be read by all citizens who are concerned about the aggressive manipulation of our media and political institutions to enhance Israel’s power and further its privileged position in the Middle East.”James Petras, Bartle Professor (Emeritus) of Sociology at Binghamton University, New York
About the Book
Israel and its American lobby have committed audacious but generally unknown crimes against the United States. Government secrecy across the CIA, FBI, Department of Justice and Pentagon long kept files about Israeli espionage, weapons smuggling and covert operations on American soil classified…until now.
Spy Trade begins on the trail of a vast smuggler network funneling stolen and illegally purchased surplus WWII arms to Jewish fighters in Palestine. When the FBI threatened to crack down–a clandestine summit meeting yielded minor convictions for small time operators–but not the financial masterminds behind the scheme. This germ of immunity soon flowered into a full scale assault on American industry, the electoral system, national defense secrets and rule of law itself.
Spy Trade probes Israel lobby smuggling operations diverting uranium from the US to Israel’s Dimona nuclear weapons facility. The US Department Justice battled mightily to regulate two key enablers–the Jewish Agency and American Zionist Council–as Israeli foreign agents in the 1960s. But when the effort failed it generated a massive counterstrike.
Israel lobby campaign finance violations unleashed a network of coordinated stealth political action committees that intimidated American politicians and made a “pro-Israel” outlook and voting record requirements for staying in government. A new legal battle to regulate the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) as a political action committee–this time launched by concerned citizens–began two decades ago but has not yet been resolved.
Spy Trade alsoreveals the long term impact of a newly declassified “third scandal” that began in the 1980s. In the midst of both the Iran-Contra affair and Jonathan Pollard espionage incident AIPAC and the Israeli embassy conducted a spectacular clandestine operation against American industries and workers. It has so far cost the US economy $71 billion and a hundred thousand jobs each year by shutting down or diverting US exports. Trade privileges obtained by Israel under the treaty not only permit financing illegal settlement construction with proceeds from diamonds sold in the US. The US pharmaceutical industry faces an unrelenting onslaught against its capacity to innovate and protect its intellectual property.
Spy Trade is much more than a groundbreaking dissection of the tactics Israel and its American lobby repeatedly use to evade justice. The book also provides stunningly simple strategies for ending criminal immunity and subversion of law enforcement that may someday restore American governance.
See below for the real thing. Note also the references to “masses”. The people appealing to the masses aren’t the Randy Weavers of the world who are lone wolves who see themselves ranged against the blind masses. The people appealing to the masses are the bland bureaucrats and apparatchiks of the government, our corpocrats and kleptocrats, and the charismatic politicians who front for them, who never met a public need they couldn’t massage. “Homeland,” perpetual war, forced labor camps are all things the militias are afraid of.
“Few cars in the history of auto manufacturing can match the sentimentality and nostalgia felt for the Volkswagen Beetle. But years before we’d come to associate our beloved Bug with the emblem of the peace sign, Volkswagen’s long strange trip began with a swastika. The iconic, quirky little car often dubbed the “hippie-mobile” was originally, quite literally, the Hitler-mobile.
The brainchild of the Führer himself, the car was masterminded as a gift to the German common man. Translated as the “people’s car,” Volkswagen would provide a cheap, fast, and fuel-efficient means of travel to a country where only a wealthy few owned cars. According to the Vintage Volkswagen Club of America, Hitler opened the 1934 Berlin Auto Show proclaiming, “A car for the people, an affordable Volkswagen, would bring great joy to the masses and the problems of building such a car must be faced with courage.”
In 1937, the Nazi Party, allied with auto engineer and Beetle designer Ferdinand Porsche, formed the state-owned Volkswagen company. A year later, Hitler presided over the tightly controlled, propaganda-heavy groundbreaking ceremony for the new Volkswagen plant before a crowd of 70,000 “Heil!”-chanting faithful. Production on the Beetle, then called the KdF-Wagen or “strength through joy” car, was ill-timed to begin in September of 1939. Only a few cars made it out of the factory before World War II forced Porsche to halt production and turn the Volkswagen plant into a war armaments labor camp. Hitler never lived to see his pet project come to fruition since the Beetle wouldn’t be mass produced until after the Nazi surrender.
In the 1980s, Volkswagen, in the spirit of candor about its Nazi past, commissioned a 10-year $2 million investigation led by historian Hans Mommsen into the extent of its role in the use of wartime slave labor. Titled “Volkswagen and Its Workers During the Third Reich,” the mea culpa reveals Ferdinand Porsche was a willing, “morally indifferent” participant in Hitler’s regime. Volkswagen hired some 20,000 forced laborers, prisoners of war, and concentration camp inmates from Auschwitz, Dachau, and Bergen-Belsen. Kept behind barbed wire in horrible living conditions, they worked for Volkswagen to manufacture grenades, land mines, military vehicles, warplanes, and V-1 flying bombs. They were subjected to malnutrition and savagely beaten for trying to feed themselves from food scraps off the floor.
Volkswagen wasn’t the only automaker with war blood on its hands. One of the most profitable companies to emerge from World War II was SS aider and abetter Daimler Benz whose production skyrocketed thanks to arms contracts, tax breaks, and tens of thousands of slave laborers. BMW similarly exploited 25,000-30,000 forced workers to repair airplane engines for the Nazi war machine.
If the unseemly pasts of these automakers has you ready to boycott German cars and pledge your consumer allegiance to the American auto industry, well don’t wrap yourself in Old Glory just yet.
A car enthusiast first and murdering psychopath second, Hitler drew inspiration — both technically and ideologically — from Ford Motor Company (F) founder and fellow anti-Semite Henry Ford. As creator of the mass produced and inexpensive Model T and publisher of a four-volume conspiracy manifesto titled The International Jew, the bigoted automaker paved the road and Hitler vowed to follow in his muddy tire tracks. In fact, Hitler so reveredFord, the Chancellor hung a life-size portrait of him in his Munich office, gave him a personal shout-out in Mein Kampf, and awarded him the Third Reich’s highest decoration for foreigners, the Grand Cross of the German Eagle. For his part, Ford served as leader of the America First Committee, the foremost interest group opposing American entry into the war, and authored Ford’s overseas subsidiaries to produce Nazi war materials.
Not to be outdone, General Motors rendered its Nazi salute if only to protect its $100 million investment in Germany. GM not only resisted Roosevelt’s call to military production duty in its US factories but assisted the Axis arms effort instead. James Mooney, senior executive for General Motors, was rewarded for his loyalty to Hitler when he was also bestowed with a medal for his “distinguished service to the Reich.”
“The soldier does not wish to appear a coward, disloyal, or un-American. The situation has been so defined that he can see himself as patriotic, courageous, and manly only through compliance.”
Sir James Michael Goldsmith, Anglo-French financier and corporate raider of the 1980s, is most infamous for taking over Goodyear Tires and restructuring it, thereby putting its many employees out of work.
In this deeply prophetic interview with Charlie Rose in 1994 he discusses his book about globalization, The Trap, and displays a more humane side of his complex intelligence.
In the earlier part of the interview (not shown here), Goldsmith gets into a heated debate with Clinton economic honcho Laura Tyson over the benefits of NAFTA and GATT in which Tyson comes off as both naive and uninformed.
In another part,Goldsmith calls Indian physicist and environmental activist Vandana Shiva “remarkable” and asks why it is that global “free” trade, supposedly so beneficial to developing countries, was protested widely and vigorously by huge numbers of people in India.
Take away points from the interview:
*This (globalization) is the establishment against the rest of society
*I am for big business until it devours society
*Big business loves total access to unlimited give-away labor
*In every developing nation you have a handful of people who control everything, the oligarchs
*This (globalization) is the poor in rich countries subsidizing the rich in the poor countries (Lila: I’d add that the poor in poor countries are also subsidizing the rich in rich countries)
*Free trade within homogeneous regions is to be preferred to global trade
(Lila: This coincides with something I’ve advocated for a while, on the principle of subsidiarity)
*The European parliament is a force for pseudo-democratic institutions
*It’s already fixed by the two main parties, the Christian Democrats and the Socialists
*The people have a right to vote on the single most important economic decision of their life times
*Here in the USA we’ve had no debate on it (GATT) while we’ve had a huge debate about NAFTA which was a pimple
*GATT is going through because business wants it
*It’s a fix here (the US), as it is in Europe
*We’ve allowed instruments that are supposed to serve us to become our masters
*GATT is an example of how an economic doctrine is going to destabilize our society
*Nuclear is another example. Here in Europe, we’ve not been allowed to discuss this disastrous form of energy, disastrous in terms both of economics and in terms of security
*Corporate agriculture is a third example of how we are destroying our societies
*The ruling machinery of government power in Europe is imposing this (GATT) without a debate
Note: My comments are at the end under the heading, “My Comment”; the article is in light gray text; the quotes from the Bible have been underlined; the Bible commentary by Scofield and Hagee that the article cites are in italics, as are titles of books and reports; the quotes from all other authors, including Sizer, Adelman, and various newspapers, as well as subheadings, are bolded] :
“Central to Christian Zionist belief is Scofield’s commentary on Genesis 12:3. For the sake of clarity, Scofield’s notes have been italicized in the following passage:
“‘I will bless them that bless thee.’ [Bible]
In fulfilment closely related to the next clause [Scofield]
‘And curse him that curseth thee”[Bible]
Wonderfully fulfilled in the history of the dispersion. It has invariably fared ill with the people who have persecuted the Jew — well with those who have protected him. The future will still more remarkably prove this principle.” [Scofield]
Drawing on Scofield’s speculative interpretation, John Hagee claims,
“The man or nation that lifts a voice or hand against Israel invites the wrath of God.”[Hagee]
However, as Stephen Sizer points out, in his definitive critique,“Christian Zionism: Road-map to Armageddon?”,
“The promise, when referring to Abraham’s descendants speaks of God blessing them,not of entire nations ‘blessing’ the Hebrew nation, still less the contemporary and secular State of Israel.” [Sizer]
Apparently unaware of this more orthodox reading, The New Scofield Study Bible, published by Oxford University Press in 1984,enhanced Scofield’s interpretation, by adding,
“For a nation to commit the sin of anti-Semitism brings inevitable judgment.”[Bible]
Reading such tendentious comments, a bible-believing Christian could easily assume, for example, that God will punish the 114 countries which endorsed the Goldstone Report.
Stephen Sizer writes,
“Sustained by a dubious exegesis of selective biblical texts, Christian Zionism’s particular reading of history and contemporary events . . . sets Israel and the Jewish people apart from other peoples in the Middle East . . . it justifies the endemic racism intrinsic to Zionism, exacerbates tensions between Jews and Palestinians and undermines attempts to find a peaceful resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, all because ‘the Bible tells them so.’” [Sizer]
[Lila: I am not sure if I agree entirely with the statement that "racism is inherent to Zionism." I have made a similar argument in "The Language of Empire," (2005) but would like to qualify it, because of the special circumstances of the Jewish people in relation to European Christianity, as well as their relatively small numbers compared to the ethnic populations around them. However, those small numbers must be balanced against the enormous power wielded by Israel and its support by the US and UK government, as well as the corporate economic structure.
In sum, without demonizing Israel, it's necessary to ask if its exceptionalist religious narrative - in which Zionism is inextricably intertwined - isn't ripe for modification, the same modification that state Christianity underwent during the enlightenment (and thereafter), and that Islamicism is, rightfully, being asked to undergo today].
The incredible Scofield
In his 2008 book, The Rise of Israel: A History of a Revolutionary State, Jonathan R. Adelman describes the crucial support Israel receives from Christian fundamentalists as “totally fortuitous.” The incredible career of the man who wrote “the Bible of Fundamentalism,” however, casts considerable doubt on that assertion.
Two years after Scofield’s reported conversion to Christianity in 1879, the Atchison Patriot was less than impressed. Describing the former Atchison resident as the “late lawyer, politician and shyster generally,” the article went on to recount a few of Scofield’s “many malicious acts.” These included a series of forgeries in St. Louis, for which he was sentenced to six months in jail.
Being a “born again” preacher, however, did not preclude Scofield from becoming a member of an exclusive New York men’s club in 1901. In his devastating biography, “The Incredible Scofield and His Book,” Joseph M. Canfield comments,
“The admission of Scofield to the Lotos Club, which could not have been sought by Scofield, strengthens the suspicion that has cropped up before, that someone was directing the career of C. I. Scofield.” [Canfield]
That someone, Canfield suspects, was associated with one of the club’s committee members, theWall Street lawyer Samuel Untermeyer.As Canfield intimates,Scofield’s theology was
“most helpful in getting Fundamentalist Christians to back the international interest in one of Untermeyer’s pet projects – the Zionist Movement.” [Canfield]
Others, however, have been more explicit about the nature of Scofield’s service to the Zionist agenda. In “Unjust War Theory: Christian Zionism and the Road to Jerusalem,” Prof. David W. Lutz claims,
“Untermeyer used Scofield, a Kansas city lawyer with no formal training in theology, to inject Zionist ideas into American Protestantism. Untermeyer and other wealthy and influential Zionists whom he introduced to Scofield promoted and funded the latter’s career, including travel in Europe.”[Lutz]
Absent such powerful connections, it is hard to imagine “this peer among scalawags” ever getting a contract with Oxford University Press to publish his bible. Nevertheless, it remains a mystery why OUP chose to endorse such a sectarian work.
Atonement
If there had been no Scofield Bible, American presidents influenced by Christian Zionism, such as Truman, Johnson, Reagan and George W. Bush, would most likely have been less sympathetic to Israeli demands, and consequently more attentive to U.S. interests. Moreover, the American people might have been spared the well-publicized pro-Israeli rants of John Hagee, Pat Robertson and the late Jerry Falwell,not to mention the lucrative End Times “prophecy” peddled by Hal Lindsey and Tim LaHaye.
But it is the people of the Middle East who have suffered most at the hands of an expansionist Israel, emboldened by the unswerving allegiance of America’s Christian Zionists, who were led to believe that Scofield’s words were God’s will.
Although much needless suffering has already been caused by the Scofield Bible, perhaps it’s not too late for Oxford University Press to publicly disavow its harmful book. Among its many victims are 3.5 million Palestinian refugees whose right to return is fervently opposed by Christian Zionists, who believe that the land belongs exclusively to “God’s chosen people.” At the very least, OUP could demonstrate remorse for its role in promoting ethnic cleansing by compensating those refugees with the considerable profits accrued over the past century from sales of its Zionist bible.”
My Comment
Not many people know about the role of the Scofield Bible in fostering one relatively marginal interpretation of the Scriptures, the dispensationalist views of John Darby, a 19th century minister of the Plymouth Brethren.
Dispensationalism went onto become so influential among American Protestants that it changed the political dynamics of the country. However, while the article cited above demonstrates how financial interests actively promoted the Scofield Bible, it wouldn’t have become so influential if the culture into which it was introduced wasn’t already receptive to it at many levels.
This is the argument I make in “Language of Empire” (MR Press, 2005), in which I analyzed the influence of Christian Zionism on the practice of torture as well as on the rhetoric that justified the war on terror.
You can find the core of the argument in “Christian Zionism: An Ideological Tower of Babel” (Counterpunch, January 15, 16, 2005), finished a year before the book actually came out. The main point I make is that while Christian Zionism is important to the justification of American empire and of Israel’s role in it, it isn’t the only source of justification. There are broader streams in American religious and intellectual history with which Christian Zionism coincides. Those streams are identified below in the Counterpunch piece, which forms a concluding chapter in the book. Note, I’ve defined them below each part of the excerpt):
“Both secular and religious exceptionalists also share a unique relationship to the law that suggests that law and legal institutions are themselves implicated in the policies of Abu Ghraib and clarifies why it may not be possible to look to them alone for salvation.
[Legalism - the tendency to turn every moral/political/social debate into a courtroom drama over technical legality]
Both groups share the heritage of covenant theology which reads holy scripture as the record oflegal contracts between God and man, a heritage which both privileges the law while simultaneously also promoting a sense of not being subject to it. The written contract binds us, but the interpretation of that contract remains with the state whose favored status has been granted by the law.”
[Voluntarism - the belief that the essence of divinity is not rationality, but will, and that God's acts are beyond or even contradictory to reason]
“Dispensationalists read the final book of the Bible, Revelations, as a literal account of a post-war progression to a world-consuming conflagration, Armageddon. In doing so, they discount the importance of reason, learning, or social consensus in their interpretations in favor of what they see as a literal reading of the Biblical text. Parallel to this is their reading of the unfolding of human history as also a literal record where that text transparently reveals itself.”
[Dispensationalism - the belief that Biblical prophesies can be seen unfolding in history today and that God's promises in the Bible relate to the political state of Israel]
“Just as fundamentalism disdains mediation, an anti-intellectual culture might find an oral tradition based on a continuing interpretative dialogue between past and present actually less attractive than the fixed guidelines of a written contract, whether made between one nation and another or between nations and God.”
[Literalism, Anti-intellectualism - the acceptance of the literal meaning of texts, the devaluation of interpretation, and a dislike for intellectual theories and intellectuals]
“From Biblical righteousness, the Promethean sense of the state as virtue incarnate; fromChristian dominionism, the impetus to expand; from apocalyptic ruminations, the Promethean obsession with terror. And through all of these runs an unexamined sense of supreme moral satisfaction, a Puritan certainty about the nature and precise physical location of evil in the other that is translated not simply in the messianic language of Americanism but even in the shibboleths of liberalism. Evil is outside, out there in the world, radically disordered, deserving of eradication.”
[Dominionism, Puritanism, Apocalyptic Millenarianism -- the belief that society should be ordered by the Christian religion working through the state; the belief in the essential depravity of human beings and the need for salvation by grace that is unearned and not universal; a belief in the return of Christ as prophesied in Revelations, accompanied by a world-wide confrontation with the forces of evil, followed by a golden age of a 1000 years]
How these beliefs impact policy-making in the west can be seen most clearly and stunningly in the Declaration of the first Jerusalem Summit (October 12-14, 2003) which reads in part thus:
“ISRAEL AS THE KEY TO THE HARMONY OF CIVILIZATIONS
Billions of people believe that Jerusalem’s spiritual and historical importance endows it with a special authority to become a center of world’s unity.
Israel’s unique geographic and historic position at the crossroads of civilizations enables it to reconcile their conflicts. Israel’s unique spiritual experience enables it to find a golden mean between the fault lines dividing civilizations: between tradition and modernity, religion and science, authority and democracy.
We call upon all nations to choose Jerusalem, the eternal and indivisible capital of Israel, as a center for this evolving new unity. We believe that one of the objectives of Israel’s divinely-inspired rebirth is to make it the center of the new unity of the nations, which will lead to an era of peace and prosperity, foretold by the Prophets.”
Note: Many religions and nations have exceptionalist narrratives.
The unique problem at work here is in the lack of self-awareness of this innate chauvinism and the role it plays in the political positions taken by the US, UK, and Israel (the Anglo-sphere), as well as by their allied and client states.
This unique problem becomes a global one when the chauvinists, disguised as universalists, possess extraordinary nuclear arsenals and corporate power, and when the “deep capture” of the media and of legal and academic institutions has reached the point when there is no internal check whatever to its pretensions. The threat posed then is no longer simply to immediate victims of specific policies (say, Iraq) but to the entire world (the global financial crisis), and, indeed, the future of humanity (control of the gene pool, food and water and the dangers posed by bio-weapons and nuclear contamination).
“The mass-man is one who has neither the force of intellect to apprehend the principles issuing in what we know as the humane life, nor the force of character to adhere to those principles steadily and strictly as laws of conduct; and because such people make up the great and overwhelming majority of mankind, they are called collectively the masses.”
– Albert J. Nock
[I had this down before as Alfred J., sorry...
For patient readers of this blog, no, I do not have dyslexia or ADD, as you might think from the strange ways I mangle names. I'm simply a recovering word-associationist. From years of writing poetry and playing music, I'm far more aural than visual. I posted something from Four Quartets a while back, and I think "Alfred J. Prufrock" was playing somewhere in the back of my mind]
Aldous Huxley, novelist and social critic, gave a talk at the University of Berkeley on the dictatorship he saw in the future of the United States, a “scientific” dictatorship, he termed it. In it, control would be maintained by narcotizing the population with conveniences, entertainment, consumerism, and drugs. Ultimately, compliance would become pleasurable..
‘Today we are faced, I think, with the approach of what may be called the ultimate revolution, the final revolution, where man can act directly on the mind-body of his fellows.”
(Huxley, The Ultimate Revolution, University of Berkeley, March 20, 1962)
The head of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Cardinal Peter Turkson, has moved away from his predecessor’s support for developing genetically modified food to alleviate hunger in poor countries. Instead, he argues that adoption of the “precautionary principle” is warranted:
“There are a lot of claims that are disputed (like) that GMOs never call for the use of pesticides or insecticides or anything because they are resistant,” he said. Such claims have been challenged, he said, and some say “at a certain point (these crops) require insecticides whose chemicals break up later in the soil and render the soil less fertile.”
Given the disputed claims and doubts, “I think that we should go easy and probably satisfy all of these objections to the full satisfaction of those who raise these objections,” he said.
Because of the companies’ control over the patented seeds, “what is meant to alleviate hunger and poverty may actually in the hands of some people become really weapons of infliction of poverty and hunger,” Cardinal Turkson said.
Previously, opponents of GM carried the burden of proving that some harm was being inflicted. Under the PP, companies that planned on introducing genetic changes into an organism would have to bear the burden of proving that it was safe.
While this might seem counter-libertarian, I would argue it is not.
1. Since changes in genetics are impossible to regulate post facto, they cannot be subject to the usual economic arguments available to libertarians. The potential devastation is so irreparable that the principle of liberty demands that the bar be raised ahead of the event.
2. Biotechnology as an industry is concentrated in so few and such large companies, that free market conditions do not prevail at all in other respects. The companies owe their position in the market to their influence on government regulations and laws, to begin with. That suggests that there will be little in the way of normal market forces to check their natural profit-seeking from turning into rent-seeking based on preferential treatment, captive markets/monopoly, and government enforcement. PP is simply a thoughtful mechanism to prevent profit from careening into plunder.
“Hitler never abandoned the cloak of legality; he recognized the enormous psychological value of having the law (as well as the church) on his side. Instead, he turned the law inside out and made illegality legal.”
Toward the end of this video, John Taylor Gatto, the iconoclastic critic of compulsory education and state schools and ardent advocate of “unschooling,” has an especially memorable passage.
He points out that while the state can violently coerce a few people at a time (through arrest and shooting), there’s no way (outside war or genocide, I presume) to coerce large masses of people over time, except through controlling their minds.
Or more accurately, through creating the habits and attitudes that make them obedient to puppet strings in their own minds.
Compulsory schooling by the state, he argues, is a way to colonize the minds of children to make them their own police-force, eager to report other deviants.
In my view, the moral problem at the root of socialism is actually not envy, as many libertarians contend. I grew up among socialists, and they were, by far, motivated by honorable concerns: a sense of injustice, grief for the poor, compassion.
(I’m not talking here about political activists, some of whom do, in fact, have much baser motives).
The principal flaw in the socialist world view, as I see it, is a too great concern with appearances and an inability to see cause and effect in any complex way. It’s not the ‘materialism’ of dialectical materialism I object to. It’s the lack of ‘mind’ in the materialism. The reasoning is limited, superficial, and inaccurate. It lacks sufficient particularity, as Michael Oakeshott argued in “Rationalism in Politics” (1962).
And as Oakeshott argued there, that can be a problem in Hayek, as well.
Libertarian theorist, Frederic Bastiat, makes much the same point in his acute analysis of the superiority of the miser over the spendthrift, an analysis that would be iconoclastic from the point of view of traditional religious morality, where the miser’s avarice would usually be condemned and the spendthrift’s generosity praised:
Paul R. Ehrlich, a Stanford University researcher says:
“Most of our colleagues don’t seem to grasp that we’re not in a gentlepersons’ debate, we’re in a street fight against well-funded, merciless enemies who play by entirely different rules.”
Of course, climate skeptics (or rather, critics of anthropogenic global warming, AGW) would argue that it’s the climatistas who’ve brought Barrow boy(street-wise) tactics into what ought to be a nice, genteel gathering of Harrow alumni.
Popular British TV writer and eminent free-speech QC, John Mortimer, author of the serial, “Rumpole of the Bailey,” saw through this convenient sentimentality about “gentlepersons” a bit more keen-sightedly than most.
In one episode of the serial, Rumpole, Mortimer’s aging, scruffy, Shakespeare-quoting Old Bailey barrister, defends Nigel Timson, a youthful member of a clan with an inelegant and chequered past, a true Barrow boy, who’s accused of insider- trading at the silk-stocking firm where he’s a broker.
It doesn’t help things that Nigel is living with the daughter of the head of the firm, who isn’t keen on a Barrow boy for a son-in-law. The plot-twist is that the Barrow boy, despite his spotty family history, is actually innocent. I won’t tell you the rest, but the larger point is that clever crooks know how to play to their advantage on public preconceptions about class behavior.
The same holds true for university intellectuals. They also usually enjoy the general presumption that they hold to higher standards of behavior and ethics than the ‘baser sort’ outside the ivory towers. What the climate fracas shows is that that presumption might be just as outdated as the presumption about the virtues of Harrow boys that Rumpole overturns…
“We have just written “no” on 225 pages, “no” out of sympathy and “no” out of love, “no” out of hate and “no” out of passion - and now we would like to say “yes” for once. “Yes” - to the countryside and the country of Germany America. The country where we were born and whose language we speak. (…)
And now I would like to tell you something: it is not true that all those who call themselves ‘national’ and who are nothing but gentrified militants have taken out a lease on this country and its language just for them.Germany America is not just a government representative in his tailcoat, nor is it a headmaster, nor is it the ladies and gentlemen of the steel helmets. We are here too. (…)
Germany America is a divided country. We are one part of it. And whatever the situation, we quietly love our country - unshakably, without a flag, or a street organ, no sentimentality and no drawn sword.”
(Kurt Tucholsky, Heimat, in Deutschland, Deutschland über alles, Berlin 1929, p. 226)
Masterful libertarian scholar, Roderick Long, has a very long, fascinating paper, “Rituals of Freedom: Austro-Libertarian Themes In Early Confucianism,” at Mises.org. It traces libertarian ideas in Confucian thought, and makes a convincing argument that Confucianism is a better source of libertarian inspiration than the much more frequently cited Daoism.
I’m republishing a post on Long’s paper by Brian Caplan, at Marginal Revolution, because the pdf of Long’s paper isn’t very reader-friendly for a blog and Caplan has nice quotes from the piece.
“Unfortunately, Long points out, a much stronger theme in Taoist is primitivist hostility to modern civilization. Listen to Lao-tzu describe the Taoist utopia:
Lessen the population. Make sure that even though there are labor saving tools, they are never used. Make sure that the people look upon death as a weighty matter and never move to distant places. Even though they have ships and carts, they will have no use for them. … Make sure that the people return to the use of the knotted cord [in lieu of writing]. … Then even though neighboring states are within sight of each other, [and] can hear the sounds of each other’s dogs and chickens … people will grow old and die without ever having visited one another.
In contrast, Long finds much of value in the Confucians:
The early Confucians, by contrast, may not be as radical in their anti-statism as the Taoists, but in my estimation they make up for this flaw by firmly yoking their anti-statism to the cause of civilization, commerce, and the Great Society; their overall program thus looks a lot more like contemporary libertarianism than the Taoist program does. One Confucian text, while noting approvingly Laozi’s hostility to despotism, sharply criticizes Laozi for wanting to “drag the present age back to the conditions of primitive times and to stop up the eyes and ears of the people”; the best ruler instead “accepts the nature of the people,” which is to long for “beautiful sounds and forms,” “ease and comfort.”
The highlight of Long’s article is his discussion of the Sima Qian (c. 145-85 B.C.). Almost two thousand years before Adam Smith, Qian opined that “Wealth and currency should be allowed to flow as freely as water!” and had arguments to defend his position. And who said that Chinese intellectuals had no appreciation for the merchant class? Few Western thinkers match Sima’s appreciation of entrepreneurship:
These, then, are examples of outstanding and unusually wealthy men. None of them enjoyed any titles or fiefs, gifts, or salaries from the government, nor did they play tricks with the law or commit any crimes to acquire their fortunes. They simply guessed what course conditions were going to take and acted accordingly, kept a sharp eye out for the opportunities of the times, and so were able to capture a fat profit. … There was a special aptness in the way they adapted to the times …. All of these men got where they did because of their devotion and singleness of purpose. … [T]here is no fixed road to wealth, and money has no permanent master. It finds its way to the man of ability like the spokes of a wheel converging upon the hub, and from the hands of the worthless it falls like shattered tiles. … Rich men such as these deserve to be called the “untitled nobility” …
Murray Rothbard praised Sima in his history of economic thought, but Long notes that he neglected to mention that he was a Confucian!
It is hard to read this piece and not stand in awe of Long’s command of the Chinese literature. This is a body of thought comparable to Western philosophy in its intricacy and depth. Even if you couldn’t care less about Chinese proto-libertarians, this article exemplifies the true meaning of scholarship. And so the Sage says: check it out!”
Bret Stephens in the Wall Street Journal adds some nuance to Naomi Klein’s black-and-white picture of Milton Friedman’s contributions to the Chilean economy, noting how prosperity and effective enforcement of building codes have protected Chilean victims of the recent earthquake from the devastation that Haiti suffered:
“In left-wing mythology—notably Naomi Klein’s tedious 2007 screed “The Shock Doctrine”—the Chicago Boys weren’t just strange bedfellows to Pinochet’s dictatorship. They were complicit in its crimes. “If the pure Chicago economic theory can be carried out in Chile only at the price of repression, should its authors feel some responsibility?” wrote New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis in October 1975. In fact, Pinochet had been mostly indifferent to the Chicago Boys’ advice until the continuing economic crisis forced him to look for some policy alternatives. In March 1975, he had a 45-minute meeting with Friedman and asked him to write a letter proposing some remedies. Friedman responded a month later with an eight-point proposal that largely mirrored the themes of the Chicago Boys.
For his trouble, Friedman would spend the rest of his life being defamed as an accomplice to evil: at his Nobel Prize ceremony the following year, he was met by protests and hecklers. Friedman himself couldn’t decide whether to be amused or annoyed by the obloquies; he later wryly noted that he had given communist dictatorships the same advice he gave Pinochet, without raising leftist hackles.
As for Chile, Pinochet appointed a succession of Chicago Boys to senior economic posts. By 1990, the year he ceded power, per capita GDP had risen by 40% (in 2005 dollars) even as Peru and Argentina stagnated. Pinochet’s democratic successors—all of them nominally left-of-center—only deepened the liberalization drive. Result: Chileans have become South America’s richest people. They have the continent’s lowest level of corruption, the lowest infant-mortality rate, and the lowest number of people living below the poverty line.
Chile also has some of the world’s strictest building codes. That makes sense for a country that straddles two massive tectonic plates. But having codes is one thing, enforcing them is another. The quality and consistency of enforcement is typically correlated to the wealth of nations. The poorer the country, the likelier people are to scrimp on rebar, or use poor quality concrete, or lie about compliance. In the Sichuan earthquake of 2008, thousands of children were buried under schools also built according to code.
In “The Shock Doctrine,” Ms. Klein titles one of her sub-chapters “The Myth of the Chilean Miracle.” In her reading, the only thing Friedman and the Chicago Boys accomplished was to “hoover wealth up to the top and shock much of the middle class out of existence.” Actual Chileans of all classes—living in the aftermath of an actual shock—may take a different view of Friedman, who helped give them the wherewithal first to survive the quake, and now to build their lives anew.”
My Comment:
Friedman, was, of course, from an Austrian perspective, far from being an ideal free-marketer. In a devastating piece, “Milton Friedman Unraveled,” (1971), Rothbard even questioned his claim to be called a free marketer of any kind, listing among many sins, his advocacy of withholding taxes and of an absolute dollar standard.
All true, no doubt. But the fact remains, even if it was only in a very constrained sense that he advocated more freedom in the markets, he did advocate it. And as the article above suggests, contra Rothbard, even a limited advocacy of market freedom is better than an outright assault on it.
Glenn Greenwald never fails. I was just catching up on the infamous Leon Wieseltier-Andrew Sullivanethno-politico-theological brouhaha of last month that I completely missed while trekking around Latin America, and I found this simple but wise paragraph:
“What one thinks of Andrew Sullivan, or how angry he’s made one over the years, ought to be about the most irrelevant factor imaginable in determining one’s reaction to this TNR attack. Sometimes, even people you don’t like are the targets of odious and harmful accusations, and sometimes, even your Bestest Friends, fellow party members and listserv pals might do wrong things that merit criticism. Wieseltier’s polemic is a classic example of anti-semitism accusations tossed around with no conceivable basis and for purely ignoble ends. It’s the very tactic that has caused significant damage in the past. So obviously unhinged is this particular assault that it actually presents a good opportunity to discredit behavior like this once and for all. That’s all that should matter; how many grudges one nurses towards Andrew Sullivan is nice fodder for gossipy listserv chats, but no responsible or even adult commentator would allow it to influence one’s views on this matter.”
And that’s why Glenn Greenwald is one of the very few mainstream writers on politics I can read regularly without a bad case of moral indigestion.
“For the purposes of intimidation, after all, baseless charges work better than well-grounded ones. Nikolai Krylenko, Bolshevik Minister of Justice, said “we must execute not only the guilty, execution of the innocent will impress the masses even more.” And it’s much the same here. If you call anti-semites anti-semites, then people who aren’t motivated by anti-Jewish racism will figure “hey, since my political opinions aren’t motivated by anti-Jewish racism, then I’m safe.” The idea is to put everyone on notice that mere innocence will be no defense.”
The only problem was I wasn’t actually clear from reading Yglesias (apparently a long-time sparring partner of Wieseltier’s) where exactly runs the thin red line you can’t cross. Maybe that takes years of hanging out at MSM confabs, a future I’m as likely to encounter as sequestration in a Saudi harem.
Reading Sullivan, on the other hand, I felt I was reprising some of my own intellectual history:
“As a Jew and a Catholic, we read Buddhist scriptures together. We were, in fact, somewhat painfully alike in many ways: religious traditionalists whose reverence for our faiths was also marked by our rebellion within them. We share a commitment to secularism and religion, these days a very rare combination. His mentor was Isaiah Berlin; mine Michael Oakeshott.”
But, finally, it’s Jeffrey Goldberg, taking Wieseltier’s part, who - with minor adjustments- gets the final word on the whole sad business:
“I wish that he (Lila: all of them) would open up that their hearts to complexity.”
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