Paul Craig Roberts - March 25th, 2010
During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act. — George Orwell
There was a time when the pen was mightier than the sword. That was a time when people believed in truth and regarded truth as an independent power and not as an auxiliary for government, class, race, ideological, personal, or financial interest.
Today Americans are ruled by propaganda. Americans have little regard for truth, little access to it, and little ability to recognize it.
Truth is an unwelcome entity. It is disturbing. It is off limits. Those who speak it run the risk of being branded “anti-American,” “anti-semite” or “conspiracy theorist.”
Truth is an inconvenience for government and for the interest groups whose campaign contributions control government.
Truth is an inconvenience for prosecutors who want convictions, not the discovery of innocence or guilt.
Truth is inconvenient for ideologues.
Today many whose goal once was the discovery of truth are now paid handsomely to hide it. “Free market economists” are paid to sell offshoring to the American people. High-productivity, high value-added American jobs are denigrated as dirty, old industrial jobs. Relicts from long ago, we are best shed of them. Their place has been taken by “the New Economy,” a mythical economy that allegedly consists of high-tech white collar jobs in which Americans innovate and finance activities that occur offshore. All Americans need in order to participate in this “new economy” are finance degrees from Ivy League universities, and then they will work on Wall Street at million dollar jobs.
Economists who were once respectable took money to contribute to this myth of “the New Economy.”
And not only economists sell their souls for filthy lucre. Recently we have had reports of medical doctors who, for money, have published in peer-reviewed journals concocted “studies” that hype this or that new medicine produced by pharmaceutical companies that paid for the “studies.”
The Council of Europe is investigating big pharma’s role in hyping a false swine flu pandemic in order to gain billions of dollars in sales of the vaccine.
The media helped the US military hype its recent Marja offensive in Afghanistan, describing Marja as a city of 80,000 under Taliban control. It turns out that Marja is not urban but a collection of village farms.
And there is the global warming scandal, in which climate scientists, financed by Wall Street and corporations anxious to get their mitts on “cap and trade” and by a U.N. agency anxious to redistribute income from rich to poor countries, concocted a doomsday scenario in order to create profit in pollution.
Wherever one looks, truth has fallen to money.
Wherever money is insufficient to bury the truth, ignorance, propaganda, and short memories finish the job.
I remember when, following CIA director William Colby’s testimony before the Church Committee in the mid-1970s, presidents Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan issued executive orders preventing the CIA and U.S. black-op groups from assassinating foreign leaders. In 2010 the US Congress was told by Dennis Blair, head of national intelligence, that the US now assassinates its own citizens in addition to foreign leaders.
When Blair told the House Intelligence Committee that US citizens no longer needed to be arrested, charged, tried, and convicted of a capital crime, just murdered on suspicion alone of being a “threat,” he wasn’t impeached. No investigation pursued. Nothing happened. There was no Church Committee. In the mid-1970s the CIA got into trouble for plots to kill Castro. Today it is American citizens who are on the hit list. Whatever objections there might be don’t carry any weight. No one in government is in any trouble over the assassination of U.S. citizens by the U.S. government.
As an economist, I am astonished that the American economics profession has no awareness whatsoever that the U.S. economy has been destroyed by the offshoring of U.S. GDP to overseas countries. U.S. corporations, in pursuit of absolute advantage or lowest labor costs and maximum CEO “performance bonuses,” have moved the production of goods and services marketed to Americans to China, India, and elsewhere abroad. When I read economists describe offshoring as free trade based on comparative advantage, I realize that there is no intelligence or integrity in the American economics profession.
Intelligence and integrity have been purchased by money. The transnational or global U.S. corporations pay multi-million dollar compensation packages to top managers, who achieve these “performance awards” by replacing U.S. labor with foreign labor. While Washington worries about “the Muslim threat,” Wall Street, U.S. corporations and “free market” shills destroy the U.S. economy and the prospects of tens of millions of Americans.
Americans, or most of them, have proved to be putty in the hands of the police state.
Americans have bought into the government’s claim that security requires the suspension of civil liberties and accountable government. Astonishingly, Americans, or most of them, believe that civil liberties, such as habeas corpus and due process, protect “terrorists,” and not themselves. Many also believe that the Constitution is a tired old document that prevents government from exercising the kind of police state powers necessary to keep Americans safe and free.
Most Americans are unlikely to hear from anyone who would tell them any different.
I was associate editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal. I was Business Week’s first outside columnist, a position I held for 15 years. I was columnist for a decade for Scripps Howard News Service, carried in 300 newspapers. I was a columnist for the Washington Times and for newspapers in France and Italy and for a magazine in Germany. I was a contributor to the New York Times and a regular feature in the Los Angeles Times. Today I cannot publish in, or appear on, the American “mainstream media.”
For the last six years I have been banned from the “mainstream media.” My last column in the New York Times appeared in January, 2004, coauthored with Democratic U.S. Senator Charles Schumer representing New York. We addressed the offshoring of U.S. jobs. Our op-ed article produced a conference at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. and live coverage by C-Span. A debate was launched. No such thing could happen today.
For years I was a mainstay at the Washington Times, producing credibility for the Moony newspaper as a Business Week columnist, former Wall Street Journal editor, and former Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. But when I began criticizing Bush’s wars of aggression, the order came down to Mary Lou Forbes to cancel my column.
The American media does not serve the truth. It serves the government and the interest groups that empower the government.
America’s fate was sealed when the public and the anti-war movement bought the government’s 9/11 conspiracy theory. The government’s account of 9/11 is contradicted by much evidence. Nevertheless, this defining event of our time, which has launched the US on interminable wars of aggression and a domestic police state, is a taboo topic for investigation in the media. It is pointless to complain of war and a police state when one accepts the premise upon which they are based.
These trillion dollar wars have created financing problems for Washington’s deficits and threaten the U.S. dollar’s role as world reserve currency. The wars and the pressure that the budget deficits put on the dollar’s value have put Social Security and Medicare on the chopping block. Former Goldman Sachs chairman and U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson is after these protections for the elderly. Fed chairman Bernanke is also after them. The Republicans are after them as well. These protections are called “entitlements” as if they are some sort of welfare that people have not paid for in payroll taxes all their working lives.
With over 21 percent unemployment as measured by the methodology of 1980, with American jobs, GDP, and technology having been given to China and India, with war being Washington’s greatest commitment, with the dollar over-burdened with debt, with civil liberty sacrificed to the “war on terror,” the liberty and prosperity of the American people have been thrown into the trash bin of history.
The militarism of the U.S. and Israeli states, and Wall Street and corporate greed, will now run their course. As the pen is censored and its might extinguished, I am signing off.
March 28, 2010
March 23, 2010
Impact of Voyeurism
Voyeurism is regarded as a fetish. It conjures images of masturbating old men, peering from the corner of the curtain to catch a glimpse of a young woman in the street. This description is appropriate for that particular type of voyeur, but it hides the reality of voyeurism. Voyeurism is not limited to a few deviants who like to spy on their neighbours, but is rather a behaviour which has become so commonplace as to be the norm.
Western society has been corrupted by alien influences and degenerates from within for many years. With the advent of television, the decline of culture and morality accelerated. With the internet, that decline has become such that it can be felt to worsen on a near continuous basis.
So what has voyeurism to do with the decline of the West? Is the relationship one of cause, or one of effect? The relationship is in fact both - voyeurism is a result of the decline of Europe, and acts as an accelerant of that decline. The same can be said for other parts of the world which have succumbed to the media age, but analysis of the entire world is far beyond the scope of this article.
Voyeurism is the act of obtaining gratification by observation. It is much more than a non-productive sexual activity. Voyeurs include all those who watch sport on the television but do not actively play. To that end, even people who regularly attend football matches (or any other sport), but do not participate on the field, are voyeurs. They satisfy their need to feel that they belong to the tribe by diverting what is a natural and vital instinct, into watching a game - and in some cases into literally violently opposing those who pledge allegiance to a different team. Football hooligans are obeying a natural drive to defend the tribe - but such is the degeneracy of the West, that rather than defending their families and their people, they commit acts of violence against their kinsmen who wear different colours and have different chants. Can there be anything more ridiculous than a man in a Leeds United shirt kicking unconscious a man in a Manchester United shirt? Yet these oafs take pride in such destructive actions against their compatriots.
Not all sports fans are hooligans, but, with the exception of those who play the sport in question, they are voyeurs. To hear a typical football fan speak after a match, one would be forgiven for thinking that the individual boasting of how 'we won' had actively contributed to the team effort to kick a ball into the opposing goal more often than the other team - rather than in actuality screaming abuse at players in different shirts whilst shouting at the players he idolises. To witness the anger and tears gushed forth by football fans when the favoured team doesn't manage to kick the ball in the desired manner, one would fear for the mental well-being of the individual who doesn't understand the difference between trivial games designed as entertainment, and matters of importance.
The internet has greatly exaggerated sexual voyeurism, and the availability of the most bizarre pornography imaginable (and unimaginable!) Before the arrival of the internet, being 'into' Scat meant having an appreciation for a type of singing found in Jazz music! The easy availability of all manner of pornography has undermined the sanctity of a stable and meaningful monogamous relationship. Whereas the traditional society was built upon marriage with each partner remaining celibate until after the wedding ceremony, and faithful thereafter until the couple were separated by death, the era of mass pornography has introduced the mass of society to un-natural sexual practices which can be explored without taking part. Sadly, this perversion of the mind does lead to a desire to experience the bizarre acts witnessed on the screen. Just as how during the televising of cricket or tennis, the urge to play manifests in a healthy game amongst friends, so with pornography, curiosity manifests in anonymous acts of degeneracy far from the bosom of the family. The diseases thus caught, and the destruction of the bond of monogamy invariably take their toll.
The promotion of promiscuity and perversion are not confined to seedy shops and websites. By far the greater source of the family-destroying material is the television. Politically correct soap operas such as Eastenders and Coronation Street only show perverts in a positive light, with any objectors being painted as bigots, haters, and insane. School children are especially vulnerable to the drive to reduce society to a collection of valueless individuals. In school, children voyeuristically absorb the social conditioning of the indoctrination system which provides no education whatsoever. They are not allowed to question their 'teachers' or to have a different opinion to that which is ordained by the Establishment. They are told that internationalism is desirable, that man made global warming is true, that 9/11 was carried out by Sin-Laden Obama, sorry, Osama Bin Laden, and that it is the child's duty to experiment with many different sexual partners of every race, age, sex, and sexual proclivity. Marriage and family are presented as outmoded and oppressive institutions. Denied the ability to question the lies of the 'education' system, children are reduced to observers of a bizarre cult, which is replicated on the television and due to its pervasive nature, becomes accepted as normal reality.
The music industry has become a driving force for the destruction of society. Britney Spears' 'If You Seek Amy' (F U C K Me), Lady Gaga's 'Poker Face' (Poke Her Face), Beyonce's 'Video Phone', to mention but a few, promote promiscuity to impressionable children. Children are further sexualised by modern Disney films which present 'adult' themes to children, implanting ideas into the subconscious which the child should not be exposed to. Advertising hoardings in the street assault the passer by with imagery which works its way into the mind - corrupting the natural healthy mind with decadent individualist materialism. Again, these media instruments are viewed voyeuristically.
The news media present crime and violence in a sensational manner, which breaks down the horror and revulsion which a healthy individual feels when confronted by the unacceptable. In exactly the same way as people have become desensitized to murder, rape and torture by horror films, so people become desensitized to the crimes of the State which are presented on the news. Before television, a government which stole from the people, enacted policies which they expressly promised not to (such as being pro-immigration, committing wars of aggression against civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia etc), would have provoked mass action, even to the point of revolution. Now, the TV screens corruption and Zionism around the clock, with barely a whimper of indignation.
Voyeurism is a state of mind where the individual observes but does not participate. It creates a desire which must eventually be acted upon. The football fan who is frustrated by not having a real input and thereby is powerless to make his team win, may express this frustration with violence. The child who is lied to by the school system but is prevented from getting his or her point across may become 'anti-social', finding power in rebellion. This rebellion is pre-channelled into hostility to authority which mistakenly becomes hostility to the family. Not being in a position to even fully appreciate the fact that the family is the safe haven from the anti-human society created by the (pseudo-) libertine materialist Establishment, the child unwittingly follows the programming of the media and the indoctrination of the school and becomes promiscuous and immoral - exactly as the Establishment wish.
The West is in a trance. We are sleep-walking our way to oblivion. We have become so used to passively absorbing the diseased programming of the Establishment, that even though we may be aware that something is wrong, the same programming has led us into false rebellions which serve to protect the enemy. All is not lost however. By studying how subliminal control is placed in our homes and streets, we can awaken our minds to the point where subliminals no longer work. By making the effort to participate in sports rather than observing them, we can achieve some personal control, which can then be used as a self-esteem builder which will enable us to shake off the shackles of despondency. Sport is but one option - the individual must fond what he or she enjoys and can use to self-actualise.
Turning off the television and radio, not reading the mass media, listening to wholesome music (maybe to instrumental music), home-schooling our children, participating in the community rather than vegetating in front of the media box - these are just some of the ways we can remove the hypnotic power which keeps our minds enslaved. We cannot avoid all advertising, but we can limit what we are exposed to by not inviting the media into our homes and voluntarily exposing ourselves to their poison.
We are voyeurs. Maybe not sexual voyeurs, but voyeurs nonetheless. This is the key to our psychological enslavement. We are asleep to our peril, but we can easily awaken. Once awake we can never be beaten down. Freed from the oppression of media manipulation we will see the liars and their lies with fresh eyes. Then, they will flee like rats back into the sewers. All we need to defeat our enemies to to wake up and sense our own strength - and see their power for the illusion it is. It really is that simple.
By news from atlantis March 2010
Western society has been corrupted by alien influences and degenerates from within for many years. With the advent of television, the decline of culture and morality accelerated. With the internet, that decline has become such that it can be felt to worsen on a near continuous basis.
So what has voyeurism to do with the decline of the West? Is the relationship one of cause, or one of effect? The relationship is in fact both - voyeurism is a result of the decline of Europe, and acts as an accelerant of that decline. The same can be said for other parts of the world which have succumbed to the media age, but analysis of the entire world is far beyond the scope of this article.
Voyeurism is the act of obtaining gratification by observation. It is much more than a non-productive sexual activity. Voyeurs include all those who watch sport on the television but do not actively play. To that end, even people who regularly attend football matches (or any other sport), but do not participate on the field, are voyeurs. They satisfy their need to feel that they belong to the tribe by diverting what is a natural and vital instinct, into watching a game - and in some cases into literally violently opposing those who pledge allegiance to a different team. Football hooligans are obeying a natural drive to defend the tribe - but such is the degeneracy of the West, that rather than defending their families and their people, they commit acts of violence against their kinsmen who wear different colours and have different chants. Can there be anything more ridiculous than a man in a Leeds United shirt kicking unconscious a man in a Manchester United shirt? Yet these oafs take pride in such destructive actions against their compatriots.
Not all sports fans are hooligans, but, with the exception of those who play the sport in question, they are voyeurs. To hear a typical football fan speak after a match, one would be forgiven for thinking that the individual boasting of how 'we won' had actively contributed to the team effort to kick a ball into the opposing goal more often than the other team - rather than in actuality screaming abuse at players in different shirts whilst shouting at the players he idolises. To witness the anger and tears gushed forth by football fans when the favoured team doesn't manage to kick the ball in the desired manner, one would fear for the mental well-being of the individual who doesn't understand the difference between trivial games designed as entertainment, and matters of importance.
The internet has greatly exaggerated sexual voyeurism, and the availability of the most bizarre pornography imaginable (and unimaginable!) Before the arrival of the internet, being 'into' Scat meant having an appreciation for a type of singing found in Jazz music! The easy availability of all manner of pornography has undermined the sanctity of a stable and meaningful monogamous relationship. Whereas the traditional society was built upon marriage with each partner remaining celibate until after the wedding ceremony, and faithful thereafter until the couple were separated by death, the era of mass pornography has introduced the mass of society to un-natural sexual practices which can be explored without taking part. Sadly, this perversion of the mind does lead to a desire to experience the bizarre acts witnessed on the screen. Just as how during the televising of cricket or tennis, the urge to play manifests in a healthy game amongst friends, so with pornography, curiosity manifests in anonymous acts of degeneracy far from the bosom of the family. The diseases thus caught, and the destruction of the bond of monogamy invariably take their toll.
The promotion of promiscuity and perversion are not confined to seedy shops and websites. By far the greater source of the family-destroying material is the television. Politically correct soap operas such as Eastenders and Coronation Street only show perverts in a positive light, with any objectors being painted as bigots, haters, and insane. School children are especially vulnerable to the drive to reduce society to a collection of valueless individuals. In school, children voyeuristically absorb the social conditioning of the indoctrination system which provides no education whatsoever. They are not allowed to question their 'teachers' or to have a different opinion to that which is ordained by the Establishment. They are told that internationalism is desirable, that man made global warming is true, that 9/11 was carried out by Sin-Laden Obama, sorry, Osama Bin Laden, and that it is the child's duty to experiment with many different sexual partners of every race, age, sex, and sexual proclivity. Marriage and family are presented as outmoded and oppressive institutions. Denied the ability to question the lies of the 'education' system, children are reduced to observers of a bizarre cult, which is replicated on the television and due to its pervasive nature, becomes accepted as normal reality.
The music industry has become a driving force for the destruction of society. Britney Spears' 'If You Seek Amy' (F U C K Me), Lady Gaga's 'Poker Face' (Poke Her Face), Beyonce's 'Video Phone', to mention but a few, promote promiscuity to impressionable children. Children are further sexualised by modern Disney films which present 'adult' themes to children, implanting ideas into the subconscious which the child should not be exposed to. Advertising hoardings in the street assault the passer by with imagery which works its way into the mind - corrupting the natural healthy mind with decadent individualist materialism. Again, these media instruments are viewed voyeuristically.
The news media present crime and violence in a sensational manner, which breaks down the horror and revulsion which a healthy individual feels when confronted by the unacceptable. In exactly the same way as people have become desensitized to murder, rape and torture by horror films, so people become desensitized to the crimes of the State which are presented on the news. Before television, a government which stole from the people, enacted policies which they expressly promised not to (such as being pro-immigration, committing wars of aggression against civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia etc), would have provoked mass action, even to the point of revolution. Now, the TV screens corruption and Zionism around the clock, with barely a whimper of indignation.
Voyeurism is a state of mind where the individual observes but does not participate. It creates a desire which must eventually be acted upon. The football fan who is frustrated by not having a real input and thereby is powerless to make his team win, may express this frustration with violence. The child who is lied to by the school system but is prevented from getting his or her point across may become 'anti-social', finding power in rebellion. This rebellion is pre-channelled into hostility to authority which mistakenly becomes hostility to the family. Not being in a position to even fully appreciate the fact that the family is the safe haven from the anti-human society created by the (pseudo-) libertine materialist Establishment, the child unwittingly follows the programming of the media and the indoctrination of the school and becomes promiscuous and immoral - exactly as the Establishment wish.
The West is in a trance. We are sleep-walking our way to oblivion. We have become so used to passively absorbing the diseased programming of the Establishment, that even though we may be aware that something is wrong, the same programming has led us into false rebellions which serve to protect the enemy. All is not lost however. By studying how subliminal control is placed in our homes and streets, we can awaken our minds to the point where subliminals no longer work. By making the effort to participate in sports rather than observing them, we can achieve some personal control, which can then be used as a self-esteem builder which will enable us to shake off the shackles of despondency. Sport is but one option - the individual must fond what he or she enjoys and can use to self-actualise.
Turning off the television and radio, not reading the mass media, listening to wholesome music (maybe to instrumental music), home-schooling our children, participating in the community rather than vegetating in front of the media box - these are just some of the ways we can remove the hypnotic power which keeps our minds enslaved. We cannot avoid all advertising, but we can limit what we are exposed to by not inviting the media into our homes and voluntarily exposing ourselves to their poison.
We are voyeurs. Maybe not sexual voyeurs, but voyeurs nonetheless. This is the key to our psychological enslavement. We are asleep to our peril, but we can easily awaken. Once awake we can never be beaten down. Freed from the oppression of media manipulation we will see the liars and their lies with fresh eyes. Then, they will flee like rats back into the sewers. All we need to defeat our enemies to to wake up and sense our own strength - and see their power for the illusion it is. It really is that simple.
By news from atlantis March 2010
Death of the West: The Cultural Revolution
Note from TTHC: The following review came from the blog Victory or Death back in 2007.
A while ago I finished reading Death of the West by Patrick Buchanan. I was not familiar with the author prior to reading the book, and would in all likelihood not have come across his book had a close friend not urged me to read it. I'm glad I did read it, and for a number of reasons which I will endeavor to share with you. It discusses a number of crucial issues which may be summarized as the following: a dying population, mass immigration, an anti-Christian culture, and 'the breakup of nations and the defections of the ruling elites to a world government whose rise entails the end of nations'. I intend to post about all of those issues but if I'm to give each area the proper attention I'm going to have to do it one by one. So I'll start with the cultural revolution. This post is actually less of a review, and more of a summary. I quote Buchanan at length, and keep my commentary to a minimum, so as to keep the post as short as possible (even so its pretty long). First things first though; although I think the book is immensely useful when it comes to explaining certain things, it does have some drawbacks, so I'll start with them.
Drawbacks
There are 4 main faults. First is the use of the term Judao-Christian throughout the book. Although the author is not a Christian Zionist he persists in using the phrase and I can only assume that he is covering his back after having been accused of being an anti-Semite many times. Therefore since he is already bringing up very controversial issues such as the cultural revolution (and naming Jewish names), and promoting Christian values, he feels a need to temper the possible fallout and not rock the boat even more. Usually the nonchalant use of the term bothers me, but in the context of the information and values he conveys in his book, I'm willing to overlook it in this instance.
Secondly, being an American, a large portion of the book is understandably devoted to examining American problems and possible solutions. While I found his information and thoughts interesting, I confess that I have no emotional attachment to America. Even though it has patently been hijacked for malevolent means, I don't have much affinity for the founding fathers or the Old America. If Buchanan thinks America can climb out of the present hole it has dug for itself then good luck to him. But I'm not holding my breath, and I'm more concerned with Europe, and most of all with Orthodox nations.
Thirdly, being an ex-Presidential candidate, and Republican, Buchanan does show some flicker of hope in the democratic process and even his former party. To his credit he does ravage Republican policy, Republican politicians, the political and judicial system, but out of some sort of nostalgia or wishful thinking, hopes that the situation can be reversed using the democratic process. That after he spent the whole book outlining that the media, political, educational institutions are all firmly tied up in the hands of those he opposes.
Fourthly he talks in broad terms about the West without really giving a definition.
Cultural Revolution
Buchanan starts off by stating that America has 'undergone a cultural revolution, with a new elite now occupying the commanding heights.' He observes: 'What was immoral and shameful- promiscuity, abortion, euthanasia, suicide- has become progressive and praiseworthy'.
He traces the start of this revolution to 1914, which in my opinion doesn't go back far enough, but in his analysis of the situation from that moment on, he brings up some very interesting points. He describes how during WW1, that apart from in Russia, the workers had failed to rally to the revolutions launched in their name. Nothing the marxists had predicted had come to pass. Two of Marx's disciples advanced an explanation: 'they had not risen in revolution because their souls had been saturated in two thousand years of Christianity, which blinded them to their true class interests.' Until Christianity were uprooted the revolution would be betrayed by the workers in whose name it was to be fought.
The first 'dissenting disciple' was Hungarian Georg Lukacs who had the following solution to the problem: 'I saw the revolutionary destruction of society as the one and only solution. A worldwide overturning of values cannot take place without the annihilation of the old values and the creation of new ones by the revolutionaries'. As deputy commissar for culture in the Hungarian communist regime, Lukacs put his self-described 'demonic' ideas into action in what came to be known as 'cultural terrorism'. Buchanan summarises:
As part of this terrorism he instituted a radical sex education program in Hungarian schools. Children were instructed in free love, sexual intercourse, the archaic nature of middle-class family codes, the outdatedness of monogamy, and the irrelevance of religion, which deprives man of all pleasures.
The second disciple was Antonio Gramsci, an Italian communist who had seen that Bolshevism did not work, and that the regime could only compel obedience through terror.
A while ago I finished reading Death of the West by Patrick Buchanan. I was not familiar with the author prior to reading the book, and would in all likelihood not have come across his book had a close friend not urged me to read it. I'm glad I did read it, and for a number of reasons which I will endeavor to share with you. It discusses a number of crucial issues which may be summarized as the following: a dying population, mass immigration, an anti-Christian culture, and 'the breakup of nations and the defections of the ruling elites to a world government whose rise entails the end of nations'. I intend to post about all of those issues but if I'm to give each area the proper attention I'm going to have to do it one by one. So I'll start with the cultural revolution. This post is actually less of a review, and more of a summary. I quote Buchanan at length, and keep my commentary to a minimum, so as to keep the post as short as possible (even so its pretty long). First things first though; although I think the book is immensely useful when it comes to explaining certain things, it does have some drawbacks, so I'll start with them.
Drawbacks
There are 4 main faults. First is the use of the term Judao-Christian throughout the book. Although the author is not a Christian Zionist he persists in using the phrase and I can only assume that he is covering his back after having been accused of being an anti-Semite many times. Therefore since he is already bringing up very controversial issues such as the cultural revolution (and naming Jewish names), and promoting Christian values, he feels a need to temper the possible fallout and not rock the boat even more. Usually the nonchalant use of the term bothers me, but in the context of the information and values he conveys in his book, I'm willing to overlook it in this instance.
Secondly, being an American, a large portion of the book is understandably devoted to examining American problems and possible solutions. While I found his information and thoughts interesting, I confess that I have no emotional attachment to America. Even though it has patently been hijacked for malevolent means, I don't have much affinity for the founding fathers or the Old America. If Buchanan thinks America can climb out of the present hole it has dug for itself then good luck to him. But I'm not holding my breath, and I'm more concerned with Europe, and most of all with Orthodox nations.
Thirdly, being an ex-Presidential candidate, and Republican, Buchanan does show some flicker of hope in the democratic process and even his former party. To his credit he does ravage Republican policy, Republican politicians, the political and judicial system, but out of some sort of nostalgia or wishful thinking, hopes that the situation can be reversed using the democratic process. That after he spent the whole book outlining that the media, political, educational institutions are all firmly tied up in the hands of those he opposes.
Fourthly he talks in broad terms about the West without really giving a definition.
Cultural Revolution
Buchanan starts off by stating that America has 'undergone a cultural revolution, with a new elite now occupying the commanding heights.' He observes: 'What was immoral and shameful- promiscuity, abortion, euthanasia, suicide- has become progressive and praiseworthy'.
He traces the start of this revolution to 1914, which in my opinion doesn't go back far enough, but in his analysis of the situation from that moment on, he brings up some very interesting points. He describes how during WW1, that apart from in Russia, the workers had failed to rally to the revolutions launched in their name. Nothing the marxists had predicted had come to pass. Two of Marx's disciples advanced an explanation: 'they had not risen in revolution because their souls had been saturated in two thousand years of Christianity, which blinded them to their true class interests.' Until Christianity were uprooted the revolution would be betrayed by the workers in whose name it was to be fought.
The first 'dissenting disciple' was Hungarian Georg Lukacs who had the following solution to the problem: 'I saw the revolutionary destruction of society as the one and only solution. A worldwide overturning of values cannot take place without the annihilation of the old values and the creation of new ones by the revolutionaries'. As deputy commissar for culture in the Hungarian communist regime, Lukacs put his self-described 'demonic' ideas into action in what came to be known as 'cultural terrorism'. Buchanan summarises:
As part of this terrorism he instituted a radical sex education program in Hungarian schools. Children were instructed in free love, sexual intercourse, the archaic nature of middle-class family codes, the outdatedness of monogamy, and the irrelevance of religion, which deprives man of all pleasures.
The second disciple was Antonio Gramsci, an Italian communist who had seen that Bolshevism did not work, and that the regime could only compel obedience through terror.
Gramsci concluded it was their Christian souls that prevented the Russian people from embracing their Communist revolution. 'The civilized world had been thoroughly saturated with Christianity for 2000 years', Gramsci wrote; and a regime grounded in Judeo-Christian beliefs and values could not be overthrown until those roots were cut... Marxists must first de-Christianize the West.
Rather than seize power first and impose a cultural revolution from above, Gramsci argued, Marxists in the West must first change the culture; then power would fall into their laps like ripened fruit. But to change the culture would require a 'long march through the institutions'- the arts, cinema, theater, schools, colleges, seminaries, newspapers, magazines, and the new electronic medium, radio. One by one, each had to be captured and converted and politicized into an agency of revolution. Then the people could be slowly educated to understand even welcome the revolution. Gramsci urged his fellow Marxists to form popular fronts with Western intellectuals who shared their contempt for Christianity and bourgeois culture and who shaped the minds of the young.
On the cover of his 1970 runaway bestseller The Greening of America, the manifesto of the counterculture, author Charles Reich parroted Gramsci perfectly: There is a revolution coming. It will not be like revolutions of the past. It will originate with the individual and with culture, and it will change the political structure only as its final act. It will not require violence to succeed, and it cannot be successfully resisted with violence. It is now spreading with amazing rapidity, and already our laws, institutions, and social structure are changing in consequence... This is the revolution of the new generation.
In 1923, Lukacs and members of the German Communist party set up, at Frankfurt University, an Institute for Marxism modelled on the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow which would come to be known as the Frankfurt School. The Jewish Max Horkheimer became its director.
At Horkheimer's direction, the Frankfurt School began to retranslate Marxism into cultural terms...To old Marxists the enemy was capitalism; to new Marxists, the enemy was Western culture... Victory would come only after Christian beliefs had died in the soul of Western man. And that would happen only after the institutions of culture and education had been captured and conscripted by allies and agents of the revolution.
The following extract from the book could easily be passed over by many, but it is telling:
...in 1933, history rudely intruded. Adolf Hitler ascended to power in Berlin, and as the leading lights of the Frankfurt School were Jewish and Marxist, they were not a good fit for the Third Reich. The Frankfurt School packed its ideology and fled to America.
Two of the more famous Jews were Erich Fromm and Theodor Adorno (who changed his surname from Wiesengrund). Among the new weapons of cultural conflict that the Frankfurt School was to develop was Critical Theory. One student described it as the 'essentially destructive criticism of all the main elements of Western culture, including Christianity, capitalism, authority, the family, patriarchy, hierarchy, morality, tradition, sexual restraint, loyalty, patriotism, nationalism, heredity, ethnocentrism, convention and conservatism'.
Under Critical Theory, one repeats that Western societies are history's greatest repositories of racism, sexism, nativism, xenophobia, homophobia, anti-semitism, fascism, and Nazism. Under critical theory, the crimes of the West flow from the character of the West, as shaped by Christianity...Critical Theory eventually induces 'cultural pessimism', a sense of alienation, of hopelessness, of despair where, even though prosperous and free, a people comes to see its society and country as oppressive, evil and unworthy of loyalty or love. The new Marxists considered cultural pessimism a necessary precondition of revolutionary change.
They flatly asserted that individuals raised in families dominated by the father, who are flag-waving patriots and follow the old-time religion, are incipient fascists and potential Nazis. As a conservative Christian culture breeds fascism, those deeply immersed in such a culture must be closely watched for fascist tendencies.... As early as the mid-1960s, conservatives and authority figures who denounced or opposed the campus revolution were routinely branded 'fascists'. Baby boomers were unknowingly following a script that ran parallel to the party line laid down by the Moscow Central Committee in 1943:
Members and front organizations must continually embarrass, discredit and degrade our critics. When obstructionists become too irritating, label them a fascist, or Nazi or anti-Semitic...The association will, after enough repetition, become 'fact' in the public mind.
Since the 1960s, branding opponents as haters or mentally sick has been the most effective weapon in the arsenal of the left.
During the 1950s, the Frankfurt School lacked a personality to popularize the ideas buried in the glutinous prose of Horkheimer and Adorno. Enter Herbert Marcuse. (Editors note: another Jew)
Marcuse provided the answer to Horkheimer's question: Who will play the role of the proletariat in the coming cultural revolution? Marcuse's candidates: radical youth, feminists, black militants, homosexuals, the alienated, the asocial, Third World revolutionaries, all the angry voices of the persecuted 'victims' of the West.
Past societies had been subverted by words and books, but Marcuse believed that sex and drugs were superior weapons. In Eros and Civilization, Marcuse urged a universal embrace of the Pleasure Principle. Reject the cultural order entirely, said Marcuse, and we can create a world of 'polymorphous perversity'.
For cultural Marxists, no cause ranked higher than the abolition of the family, which they despised as a dictatorship and the incubator of sexism and social injustice... Wilhelm Reich believed the way to destroy the family was through revolutionary sexual politics and early sex education. The appearance of sex education in elementary schools in America owes a debt to Lukacs, Reich and the Frankfurt School.
In the death of the West, the Frankfurt School must be held as a prime suspect and principal accomplice. The propaganda assault on the family it advocated has contributed to the collapse of the family.
The pill and condom have become the hammer and sickle of the cultural revolution.
In a third of a century, what was denounced as the counterculture has become the dominant culture, and what was the dominant culture has become, in Gertrude Himmelfarb's (Editors note: yet another Jew) phrase, a 'dissident culture'. We see it in the mandatory requirement for 'sensitivity training' in the military, in business, and in government. Turn on the TV and observe. The values of the revolution dominate the medium. Political correctness rules. Defiance of our new orthodoxy qualifies as 'hate speech', disrespect for its dogmas as a sign of mental sickness.
Political correctness is cultural Marxism, a regime to punish dissent and to stigmatize social heresy as the Inquisition punished religious heresy.
People who today accept these ideas 'cannot know that they were hatched in a Marxist nursery in Weimar Germany' or that their purpose was to 'subvert our culture and overturn our civilization'.
Why they succeeded
Buchanan proposes a number of elements that came together:
First was 'the message in a bottle', as the men of the Frankfurt School called their ideas.
Second, there arrived on campus, beginning in 1964, a huge cohort of youth who had known niether hardship nor war. The cultural revolution now had a huge, captive, and receptive audience. Spoiled and affluent, carefree, confident, liberated, and bored, these young people were ready for rebellion.
Third, 1960s television could convey the tactics and triumphs of campus radicals and urban revolutionaries instantly to their peers.
Through its control of the culture, the Left dictates not only the answers, but the questions asked. In short, it controls the cosmological apparatus by which most Americans comprehend the meaning of events. This cosmology is based on two great axioms: the first is that there are no absolute values in the universe, no standards of ugliness, good and evil. The second axiom is- in a Godless universe- the Left holds moral superiority as the final arbiter of man's activities.
I'll end today's commentary with a rousing quote:
Political adversaries who use terms like Nazi, fascist, anti-Semite, nativist, homophone, bigot, xenophobe, and extremist have started a fight and should be accommodated.
I'll add that its time, not to be silenced, but to take their 'Critical Theory' and shove it right back in their faces with the same gusto that they try to shove it into ours. Two can play the game of constant repetition and demonisation, and since the truth is not on the side of those degenerates, we can beat that at their own game!
Death of the West & The Age of Man-Gods
What a sorry state we live in, or rather that of the rotting and dieing West. A people without morality, an amoral humanity made of tens of millions of individual man-gods, each nurtured from birth on the value of his own self worth above that of all of humanity.
It started a long time before, the roots planted in the Renaissance, nurtured in the Reformation and given full birth in the explosion of Nihilism that prevailed the world and especially the West in post Great War countries.
Western tradition, long ago, planted the roots of its own destruction, when it started to view itself as the center of the universe. Sure, people learned that the Sun did not rotate around the earth, but the earth around the Sun, however, at the same time they learned that the world, that reality, also rotated around something and that something was no and could not be God, it was them, each and everyone of them.
The Nihilism lead to the Marxisms: Stalinist Communism on one hand, Leninist-Trotskyte War Fascism on the other and 3rd War Socialism in the Anglo-spheres, Marx with a kinder gentler face and velvet lined club behind his back.
The veterans of the 1940s did not believe in large families, they believed in "quality" families. What this really meant was one or two children that could be spoiled rotten...give the "proper" amount of attention, that is, enough to make them think that they were the centers of the universe.
These spoiled and listless brats were the hope of that generation, not God. God, you see, was already on the way out, replaced with militant atheism or some pseudo Eastern mombo jumbo in half understood fashion or fashionably replaced by a neo-paganism that thought to take only the kinder parts of the pagan world and ignore the blood and guts. Just like the modern Druids running around in circles and chanting but avoiding, at least in public, the human sacrifices demanded by their blood thirsty gods. What no humans sacrificed inside the Burning Man every year? Where's the tradition? Where's the authenticity?
And so here we are, a West immoral, trying through bombs to instill its "correct" form of life upon all of humanity, while itself dieing from the now not so slow rot of its putrid moral guts. Everywhere in the West, a Christless, traditionaless, amoral elite has taken over, raped the dumbed down sheep that pass for citizens, and instilled a police state under which they control the very life and death of their public.
But these were the supposed enlightened republics and democracies for which the public over threw their age old, and God chosen Kings, bound by faith, the Church and tradition to take care of the people. As the populace abandoned God, so has God abandoned the populace, driven insane by the very inadequacies that they feel as man-gods at their own lacking statures.
After all, they were told that they were so ever very special, the centers of Creation itself, the purpose of the world's creation, each and everyone. Yet they are passed by life, aging, sagging and dieing, unable, through their vaunted science to live forever and have everything, finding that the material junk they have collected does not replace the relationships with God, family and friends that they have lost or worse never known.
They cling ever stronger to their own self worth, as they slide into the long night, feeling ever stronger their own self-loathing. These are the people who lead the West and populate the majority of its citizens. These are the fools who will quite willingly drag their fellow man into the Hell that they so well prepared for themselves.
I would say repent, but what has a man-god to repent for?
By Stanislav Mishin Saturday, March 20, 2010
It started a long time before, the roots planted in the Renaissance, nurtured in the Reformation and given full birth in the explosion of Nihilism that prevailed the world and especially the West in post Great War countries.
Western tradition, long ago, planted the roots of its own destruction, when it started to view itself as the center of the universe. Sure, people learned that the Sun did not rotate around the earth, but the earth around the Sun, however, at the same time they learned that the world, that reality, also rotated around something and that something was no and could not be God, it was them, each and everyone of them.
The Nihilism lead to the Marxisms: Stalinist Communism on one hand, Leninist-Trotskyte War Fascism on the other and 3rd War Socialism in the Anglo-spheres, Marx with a kinder gentler face and velvet lined club behind his back.
The veterans of the 1940s did not believe in large families, they believed in "quality" families. What this really meant was one or two children that could be spoiled rotten...give the "proper" amount of attention, that is, enough to make them think that they were the centers of the universe.
These spoiled and listless brats were the hope of that generation, not God. God, you see, was already on the way out, replaced with militant atheism or some pseudo Eastern mombo jumbo in half understood fashion or fashionably replaced by a neo-paganism that thought to take only the kinder parts of the pagan world and ignore the blood and guts. Just like the modern Druids running around in circles and chanting but avoiding, at least in public, the human sacrifices demanded by their blood thirsty gods. What no humans sacrificed inside the Burning Man every year? Where's the tradition? Where's the authenticity?
And so here we are, a West immoral, trying through bombs to instill its "correct" form of life upon all of humanity, while itself dieing from the now not so slow rot of its putrid moral guts. Everywhere in the West, a Christless, traditionaless, amoral elite has taken over, raped the dumbed down sheep that pass for citizens, and instilled a police state under which they control the very life and death of their public.
But these were the supposed enlightened republics and democracies for which the public over threw their age old, and God chosen Kings, bound by faith, the Church and tradition to take care of the people. As the populace abandoned God, so has God abandoned the populace, driven insane by the very inadequacies that they feel as man-gods at their own lacking statures.
After all, they were told that they were so ever very special, the centers of Creation itself, the purpose of the world's creation, each and everyone. Yet they are passed by life, aging, sagging and dieing, unable, through their vaunted science to live forever and have everything, finding that the material junk they have collected does not replace the relationships with God, family and friends that they have lost or worse never known.
They cling ever stronger to their own self worth, as they slide into the long night, feeling ever stronger their own self-loathing. These are the people who lead the West and populate the majority of its citizens. These are the fools who will quite willingly drag their fellow man into the Hell that they so well prepared for themselves.
I would say repent, but what has a man-god to repent for?
By Stanislav Mishin Saturday, March 20, 2010
March 07, 2010
Quit You Like Men
Sermon on the First Epistle of St. Paul to the Corinthians (16:13-24), Thirteenth Sunday After Pentecost by Father James Thornton
Some years ago a distinguished academic published a work in which he put forth a thesis that Christianity during the first millennium was, like its Jewish ancestor, a highly masculine religion. Christianity was distinguished, he contended, by certain masculine traits, which arose from its traditional worldview and traditional theology, and from physiological, psychological, and sociological realities that are as old as mankind itself.
The lives of Christian believers of both genders were delineated in terms of a masculine imagery that rested especially upon the traditions of the Holy Martyrs and Ascetics. Christians, both male and female, thought of themselves and described themselves as "athletes" and as "soldiers" or "warriors." Christian life was seen as ongoing warfare against the powers of darkness, a struggle in which one must don spiritual armor and fight with spiritual weapons. Monastics, specifically, and the great monastic Saints, were thought of as fighters who battled heroically against the demons.
The author went on to say that modern Judaism—but only in its traditional forms—preserves its essentially masculine character. And though he is not an Orthodox Christian, the author contended that Eastern Orthodox Christianity also preserves the masculine attributes prevalent during the first millennium. That is not surprising, of course, because Orthodoxy continues to uphold the Biblical-Patristic theology and lifestyle of early Christianity. Orthodoxy is one with early Christianity. Orthodoxy is early Christianity.
In contrast, Western Christianity, losing its understanding of Biblical-Patristic Christianity and imagining it to be unsophisticated, dabbled in highly innovative theologies that gradually sapped that religion of its masculine characteristics. Thus, Western Christianity has become largely a religion of women in the sense that formal attendees at religious services are overwhelmingly female, instead of, as during the first millennium, roughly equally balanced between men and women.
This fact, needless to say, has had a tremendous effect upon the nature of the Eastern and Western forms of Christianity. Contrast the "sweet," almost feminine, pictures of Christ prevailing in Western religious art with the austere image of our Christ Pantokrator. Contrast the sugary hymnography of the West with the sternly Biblical-theological music of the Christian East. And consider the ease with which various fads and fashions dramatically influence the course of events in Western religious groups, while Eastern Orthodox Christianity holds firmly to its tradition.
In our age of "political correctness" and hyper-sensitivity in matters touching upon gender and the like, let us take pains to elucidate what we mean when we use terminology like "masculine" and "feminine" when describing religions. This has nothing whatever to do with the value of men or women in the eyes of God. Both are of precisely equal value. Rather, what we refer to here are psychological characteristics.
Would one wish to have personnel in charge of a nursery full of newborn babies with largely masculine or feminine attributes? Obviously, the tenderness and the nurturing qualities that we associate with the feminine side of human nature are preferable, even indispensable, here. If, however, a nation fields an army, arrayed in its helmets, armor, weapons, and flags, would one wish masculine or feminine qualities to predominate in such an army? The answer is crystal clear. The traits we associate with the masculine side of human nature are requisite to winning a military battle.
Those truths do not denigrate either men or women, but simply point to certain innate characteristics established by God when He created the two sexes. The Church, in its public aspect, is more like an army arrayed in its battle gear than it is like a nursery of children. Though the latter comparison is not wholly inadmissible when speaking of the Church, this aspect involves more the private than the public.
St. Paul was, without question, a decidedly tough man, thoroughly masculine in his bearing and attitudes, characteristics he doubtless inherited at birth and characteristics which were accentuated by his rigorous training in Judaism in his youth. His admonitions to the local Churches he founded read like the commands of a great general to his soldiers. In today's reading he gives this order to the Christians of Corinth to: "Watch ye, stand fast in the faith, quit you like men, be strong." Consider each command.
"Watch Ye:" In modern English we would say, "be vigilant." Soldiers and armies that fail to be watchful at every moment, day and night, are doomed to defeat. Many times in history, larger armies with better equipment have suffered defeat because overconfidence engendered carelessness and a lack of vigilance. So, too, with ourselves, if we fail to appreciate that our mortal enemy, led by the Evil One, is perpetually probing our defenses, looking for the smallest signs of weakness, in order to attack and overwhelm us. The Christian man or woman, if he or she is earnest, is ever vigilant over every detail of life, being certain that every thought and act is harmonious with Christian teaching. The Christian man or woman is particularly aware of weaknesses peculiar to his or her own person, so that in such things he or she may be especially watchful.
"Stand fast in the faith:" In other words, one might also say "in your faith and all that it teaches be absolutely firm, absolutely unyielding." In our own time, where flabbiness, looseness, and compromise are, sad to relate, looked upon as virtues, we are under constant pressure not to stand fast, not to be firm, with regard to many things. We are told, for example, that one religion is just as good as another, a falsehood that, if we consider it, would make a liar out of Christ Jesus, Who said forthrightly: "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life; no man cometh unto the Father, but by Me."[10] Likewise, in matters of moral uprightness, we are tempted to believe, nowadays, that transgressions from time to time, or on certain occasions, do not really matter, so long we act like Christians on Sunday. Nothing could be further from the truth and nothing could be further from St. Paul's demand that we must "stand fast in the faith." An army, however lavishly it may be equipped, will fail in its mission if it does not truly believe in its mission, if it is not truly determined to "stand fast," come what may.
"Quit you like men:" In the English of King James' time, "quit you like men" meant "conduct yourselves like men" or, better yet, "behave courageously."
During a particular battle in Africa during the Second World War, history records that a certain unit of more than four thousand men promptly surrendered after it suffered only six casualties and before it had expended any of its own ammunition. What a piteous example of a dearth of courage! And what shame that unit brought to its own nation! Those men, and their commanders, failed to grasp that to be a soldier in wartime is not simply a matter of grand music, colorful banners, and smart uniforms. War is a grim duty, a serious struggle of life or death, requiring genuine courage. It is no different for us. To be a real Christian, in this day and age especially, is not simply a matter of grand words or of beautiful crosses to adorn our necks. It is also a grim duty, and a serious struggle involving spiritual life or death, a struggle requiring genuine courage.
If the word "Christian" has any meaning at all consonant with Christ's life and teaching, it takes more courage, at least in one respect, to be a Christian today than it did to be a soldier in the deserts of North Africa during the last great war. The soldier in North Africa knew that the danger and hardships were of comparatively short duration, lasting a few months or, at most, a few years. Our danger and hardships as Christians last our whole lives, from the time we are able to understand the difference between right and wrong until the moment we draw our final breath. In the Army of Christ, we enlist for life.
"Be strong:" Armies do not recruit the infirm, the disabled, or the elderly. Armies must be composed of healthy, vigorous, and relatively young men, for only such men possess sufficient stamina to endure the hardship likely to be required of them. Even in peacetime, soldiers undergo continuous physical training to keep them fit for the battles of tomorrow. Similarly, to be a Christian requires stamina, not physical stamina but spiritual stamina, to endure the hardships of Christian life. Unlike the soldier, the Christian experiences no intervals of peace and war. All of life is a war between good and evil, between light and darkness, and so the spiritual exercises that keep us spiritually strong must never cease. And if we should assert that we need not be strong since we encounter no hardships and make no sacrifices for the sake of Christ, then it must be questioned whether our lives are truly Christian in the full sense of that word.
St. John of San Francisco was not a man of great physical strength, but if we speak of the spiritual, he was healthy, vigorous, and young throughout his earthly days, enduring even the pain of ridicule and unjust criticism from members of his own flock. No one would compare the strength of a young soldier to the physical strength of St. Xenia of Petersburg, but of her spiritual strength there can be no doubt or question, living as she did in rags, a Fool for Christ.
My brothers and sisters in Christ, St. Paul's admonitions "Watch ye, stand fast in the faith, quit you like men, be strong" reverberate down two thousand years of Church history, like the sharp, exacting commands of a general. They are no less compelling, no less urgent, after twenty centuries, and they obligate us no less than they did the Corinthian Christians. May we, like soldiers in a grand army on a battlefield, resolve never to give the least ground, never to despair, never to surrender, but instead to conquer and to triumph.
March 01, 2010
Losing the Ties that Bind
By Paul Craig Roberts
Whatever became of marriage? Cultural conservatives blame the decline of marriage on the sexual revolution, which destroyed the chastity of women. Men don’t marry, say the conservatives, because sex is available outside marriage.
There is, of course, something to this view, but it is hardly the whole story. Sex has always been available outside marriage. Call girls are cheaper than wives, and a prostitute costs no more than a date.
Men married for love, children and family. They would still do so, only the culture—and women—have changed.
When I inquire of men in their thirties why they remain unmarried, a few give the hedonistic answer, but most deny that they are unable to make commitments and assume responsibility. Marriage, men say, has been undermined by a lack of female and societal commitment.
The fickleness of women, men argue, is no longer constrained by concerns with reputation and by laws that require real grounds for breaking up a marriage and a family.
A wife can walk out at any time—with another man if she wishes—and take your children, your house, half of your pension and half of your income. If you make a fuss over child custody, she can gun you down with accusations of child molestation.
Even if a father is awarded joint legal custody, the mother usually has actual custody. It is up to her whether the father’s visitation rights are honored.
Professor Stephen Baskerville at Howard University in Washington, D.C., is an expert on family courts. For most men, divorce and its aftermath are a Gestapo experience. There’s not a man alive who doesn’t know someone who has been through the experience. Indeed, the experience never finishes with a man.
Men say that women’s lack of commitment is evident in the fact that the vast majority of divorces, family quarrels and acts of domestic violence are initiated by women. Yet, from start to finish, men are regarded as the villain. Society’s image of divorce is the successful executive who dumps his dowdy wife for a young blonde bombshell. The propaganda is ubiquitous that domestic violence means men beating women.
Men maintain that the position of a husband in a marriage is untenable. Formerly, there was a division of labor and authority among the spouses. Today, working wives have financial independence, and divorce laws and family courts give them the upper hand in any dissolution of the relationship. Husbands know this and, consequently, have lost their share of authority. The wife cracks the whip, and when she is no longer pleased, she leaves with your assets.
I have listened to men debate what can be done. They doubt Baskerville will succeed in reforming family courts and don’t believe that heterosexual men will organize politically like feminists and homosexuals.
Recently, I heard the view expressed that multiculturalism would provide a solution. Men will return to marriage, a young man said, when the bride brings a large dowry that remains the husband’s property regardless of what happens to the relationship. The dowry would offset the risks that make it foolish for men to marry.
Heads nodded in agreement, but one spoke out, saying that more would need to be imported from India’s customs. He had in mind child betrothals and child brides. It was the only way in this day and time, he said, to acquire a wife who didn’t have the sexual experience of a prostitute by the time she reaches marriage age.
Conservatives are right—but for the wrong reason—that the sexual revolution has undermined marriage. Men see women as damaged goods and feel funny about marrying a woman who might have shared a bed with a number of the wedding guests.
It is called the double-standard, but many men believe that promiscuity does not suit women. They believe that a woman who has had many partners cannot bind emotionally with a husband. She is never his. The emotive ties that bind a woman to a man are lost to professionalism or to indifference.
None of this is to deny that individual men can be jerks, neglectful and abusive, but the decline of marriage is not caused by personalities.
Women think men don’t care, but men are far more aware of the problem than women. I was a young professor when it all started and watched a campus turn into a brothel. The male students were perplexed, even the left-wing ones who had been taught to regard female chastity as oppression. I still remember the resident Marxist who, high on peyote, came to me to complain that “nice girls are ruining themselves.”
Twilight of the Godless
Feminism is a Darwinian blind alley. In biological terms, there is nothing that identifies a maladaptive pattern so quickly as a below-replacement level of reproduction; an immediate consequence of feminism is what appears to be an irreversible decline in the birth rate. Nations pursue feminist policies at their peril.
It’s no secret that Western man has given up breeding. A society needs to have 2.1 births per women in a lifetime if it’s going to maintain a steady population. Besides the U.S. and Iceland, no western nation is even close.
Putting the problem in chart form may help to illustrate its enormity. Here are some of the fertility rates for western countries and their projected white populations by 2050, not counting migration. I estimated 4.9 million nonwhites for the UK and knocked that out of the population, 6.4 in France, 1.7 in the Netherlands, 2.5 in Germany, and 10 million for all other EU countries. The total EU white population is 491.5 million- 25.5 million nonwhites = 466 million. Also, the TFR was adjusted from the official number of 1.51 to 1.45 due to the higher nonwhite birth rate. Canada has around 2.7 million nonwhites. Their overall TFR is 1.58; I estimated the white number at 1.5. Russia is about 20 percent nonwhite.
![[Image]](http://lh5.ggpht.com/_ialE7-GoQ48/SvDk8HfUsNI/AAAAAAAAAog/ew6aTpr8w2c/s800/FertilityTable.jpg)
^EU member
*ex Soviet state, non EU member
It can be projected that the total number of white people lost from the EU, Canada, Switzerland, the Balkans, Norway and the ex-Soviet states including Russia will be around 279,000,000. To put that in perspective, that’s more than the losses due to World War I, World War II, the Nazi regime and all communist governments in history combined. Of course, deciding against having children is not equivalent to starving people in gulags. Still, whatever the causes of the birth slump, the result is hundreds of millions of lives not existing that otherwise would have.
Perhaps low birth rates are not a cultural phenomenon and the number of children people have is based more on economic considerations. Looking at birth rates for the world as a whole casts doubt on that possibility. The top five countries are Congo, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Niger and Afghanistan. Not exactly places known for their prosperous middle-classes. Even within first-world countries, if there’s a correlation between wealth and fertility, it’s negative. In the U.S., black and Hispanic households are worth about one tenth of what white household are. But according to estimates, Hispanic women have 3.0 children each, blacks 2.2, and whites 2.0. Ukraine’s nominal GDP per capita is less than $4,000 a year while its TFR is indistinguishable from that of Italy ($39,000), Spain ($35,000) or the Czech Republic ($21,000).
We must conclude that there is something besides economics that is going on here. If you find a white population somewhere, it’s almost certain that it’s not going to be reproducing itself enough to survive.
There is one major exception.
After the 2004 presidential election, Steve Sailer famously analyzed Caucasian fertility rates in Red (those that voted for the Republican candidate) and Blue (those that voted Democratic) states. He found that the top 19 states in fertility (and 25 out of the top 26) voted for George W. Bush. Amongst the 50 states and Washington, DC, the correlation between white fertility rate and the Republican share of the white vote was 0.86 (0.84 in 2000).
Sailer hypothesizes that the lower cost of living in Red States makes child bearing more feasible.
In a tempting contrast, the cost-of-living calculator provided by Realtor.com says that a $100,000 salary in liberal Manhattan buys only as much as a $38,000 salary in conservative Pinehurst, North Carolina. Likewise, a San Francisco couple earning $100,000 between them can afford just as much in Cedar City, Utah, if the husband can find a $44,000-a-year job—and then the wife can stay home with their children. Moreover, the culture of Cedar City is more conducive to child rearing than San Francisco.
While this kind of thinking is on the right track, it doesn’t address why some women choose carriers and others families as much as it does why those with particular characteristics end up in one place rather than another. After all, those from New York are free to move to Idaho and vice versa. But it does show that we’re dealing with a cultural issue—one of the soul, not the pocketbook. Utah, the only majority Mormon state in the Union, has a 2.45 TFR. That’s pretty impressive, especially considering Utahans watch the same TV and listen to the same music (both of which encourage libertinism and nihilism) as the rest of America. While cost of living considerations may explain some of the difference in TFR between New York and Utah, they do less to shed light on the disparity between Utah and the rest on the socially conservative and sparsely populated heartland.
Taking an international perspective, there seems to be two ways to have a replacement fertility rate in the modern world.
A) Be really religious.
B) Be really r-selected.
Since Europeans aren’t Africans, that leaves option (A) as the only proven method for replacement Caucasian fertility. The potential success in this area of any secular philosophical system is speculative. Remember that next time you see Bill Maher on TV foaming at the mouth about those stupid Christians who won’t bow before the god of evolution. The ultimate irony is that championing Darwinism has, as Katarina Runske wrote of feminism, been a Darwinian dead end.
Put bluntly, liberal secular humanists are on the verge of extinction.
To get an idea of the cluelessness of the evangelical Darwinians, look not further than Richard Dawkins’s recent article “What Use is Religion?” The author begins by distinguishing between proximate and ultimate causes. To get an idea of what he’s talking about, think of a moth that flies into a lamp and kills itself. The proximate cause is that the physiology of the insect and physical properties of light cause the moth to behave in a suicidal way. An ultimate cause is evolutionary: in the conditions in which the insect evolved, the only light in the night sky was the moon, which the moth was able to use as a compass without ever running into it.
Saying we believe in religion because it feels good is a proximate explanation, the same way that saying we eat sugary foods because they taste good is. The evolutionary “why” just isn’t there.
Dawkins’ answer to “what use is religion?” has something to do with children, but nothing to do with the likelihood of having them.
My specific hypothesis of the necessity of religion is all about children.
More than any other species, we survive by the accumulated experience of previous generations. Theoretically, children might learn from experience not to swim in crocodile-infested waters. But to say the least, the child whose brain includes this rule of thumb will be at a selective advantage: Believe whatever the grown-ups tell you. Natural selection builds child brains just this way.
In addition, this very quality automatically makes them vulnerable to infection by mind viruses. For excellent survival reasons, child brains trusts parents and elders whom their parents tell them to trust. An automatic consequence is that the “truster” has no way of distinguishing good advice from bad. The child cannot tell that “If you swim in the river, you’ll be eaten by crocodiles” is good advice but “If you don’t sacrifice a goat at the time of the full moon, the crops will fail” is bad (or at least, unnecessary) advice.
Dawkins compares religion to an Internet virus in this way. A good computer does what you tell it. That makes it a wonderful machine capable of doing spreadsheets, but also likely to follow harmful instructions. To Dawkins, religion is a late arriver like the artificial light which kills the moth that is behaving in ways that in other conditions were evolutionarily adaptive.
The problem with using that explanation for religion is that spirituality has been around for too long. There has been plenty of time for evolution to preserve the positive results of blind obedience and do away with what’s harmful and wasteful. For similar reasons, Harpending and Cochran theorize in The 10,000 Year Explosion
Since man’s been talking a lot longer than he’s been writing, it’s hard to date the birth spirituality or belief in life after death. As good a guess as any for the start of religion is when humans started taking the trouble to ceremoniously bury their dead. That’s been happening for at least 100,000 years. We may trace spirituality even further. OriginsNet.org has put together the evidence for religiosity in the great apes in their “Appendices for Chimp Spirituality.” As the article recounts, after a 10-year old female bonobo was killed by a leopard, the tribal elders encircled the body almost immediately, some making loud displays and calls, others sitting in solemn silence. The body was eventually groomed and cared for, and the high-status apes wouldn’t allow any other apes access to the body. Surely if these alpha apes could talk, they would’ve declared themselves a priesthood and said they were praying for the poor child’s soul!
There’s also evidence that animism and a certain reverence for nature has a very long lineage. Jane Goodall observered that at the onset of thunderstorms, chimpanzee males would often perform spectacular aggression displays, charging, swaying back and forth, and brandishing and shaking branches. Goodall sensed that the Chimpanzees were expressing something like the emotion of awe.
Religion may have evolved to protect us from slipping into hedonism, or to instill a sense of duty in order to go bear the difficulties of childbearing. It may simply be that those who thought God was on their side exterminated the prissy atheist cavemen (who probably also believed their women should be “liberated” and hunt for themselves.) The issues of the evolution of religion and exactly why it’s good for the fertility rate in the modern world are outside the scope of the article. There isn’t even an established theory on the evolution of the brain yet. (I’m partial to Geoffrey Miller’s belief that it has something to do with sexual selection, but I wouldn’t bet a week’s salary on it.)
What we can say with certainty is that Dawkins’s idea that religion brings nothing to man, or, indeed, harms him, is patently false, whether we see things from the perspective of how long faith has been around or what’s happening today to people without it. A quick look at the CIA Factbook proves that Dawkins is very wrong when he claims, “religion has no survival value for individual human beings, or for the benefit of their genes.” If, in the end, all evolution cares about is survival, it’s liberalism that must be considered the virus. Our ancestors who had religion survived while those of us without it might not.
The two most evolutionarily successful men in written history were probably Genghis Khan and the Prophet Muhammad. But only the latter invented a religious justification for his conquests. Now his ethny (loosely defined) continues to claim land while the Mongolians are a measly five million and dwindling. Among whites, the two most fertile groups are by far the mentioned Mormons and the Anabaptists. Though the Old Testament ignores the afterlife, the Hebrews’ great reward for pleasing God was that the they could spread their genes. Millennia later, God’s chosen are still around, while the Canaanites exist only in word.
There may be nothing we can do to stop the current trends. Whites may simply not be fit for the world they created. Perhaps the few that are have already become religious fanatics and simply need time to expand their numbers. We won’t know until there’s a white elite that doesn’t declare war on the traditional beliefs of their people. Russia may be providing a test case (albeit not a perfect one. The government may have started to encourage nationalism and religion, but there’s still the poisonous effects of the Western-American media).
Even if it was granted that the modern world, with its feminism and secularism, produced all the happiness one can imagine, it cannot last. A baby born today may live to see the extinction of the Lithuanians (projected to be a population of 760,000 by 2100, possibly all assimilated into other ethnicities). Any philosophy that guarantees that those that adopt it will be gone within a few generations can only be embraced by nihilists. The patriarchal and god-fearing will inherit the earth, one way or another.
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