One of the most remarkable and perhaps most relevant aspects of communism is how it regressed from an idealistic and inspirational world view to nothing more than a deeply flawed engineering project. Communism started out as a set of beliefs about liberating mankind to reach its full potential. It was not about material goods or political power, but human accomplishment. By the time the Soviet empire collapsed at the end of the 20th century, it was about making enough toilet paper and boots.
The early communists, including Marx, looked at work and the pursuit of material goods as a burden on mankind. Capitalism turned men into slaves to their own desires for wealth and property. This crude desire for material goods made them easy to exploit by the capital class. The point of overthrowing the capitalist system and replacing it with communism was to free man from that burden. The resulting material prosperity of communism would allow mankind to reach its full creative potential.
The Soviet empire that emerged from the Second World War was noticeably short on talk about mankind reaching its full potential. The practical necessity of feeding, housing and clothing its people consumed the regime. The great dream of a post-scarcity world of mankind united in brotherhood had given way to figuring out how to produce enough necessities to prevent rebellion. The last half of the 20th century was communism trying to keep pace with capitalism in the production of consumer goods.
In contrast, what we call western liberalism or liberal democracy started from the opposite end. Dating and locating the origin of what we call liberalism is a topic for endless debate, but it is reasonable to say it is an English thing. The rise of parliament in England as the counter to aristocratic rule followed by the Industrial Revolution is as good an origin story as any for liberal democracy. Its purpose was to increase individual liberty so men could pursue their own material interests.
Similarly, the American revolution was about government control of economic activity and tax policy. There was plenty of grandiose language in the Declaration of Independence about the human condition, but the founding generation had no dreams of a post-scarcity world or the universal brotherhood of man. The end game for liberalism was to leave people to live their lives in peace. Liberalism was about freeing men from their duties to grandiose schemes of other men.
The Jacobins, of course, had grand notions about the universal rights of man, but that was all about the individual. Sure, a political system that respects the natural rights of man would be fairer and more equal than monarchy, but that does not necessarily lead to some great advancement in the human condition. A free society of equals would be free to just live mundane lives as farmers and merchants. More important, they have no duty to advance mankind past his present condition.
That’s the funny thing about the last half of the 20th century. The progress of the two great competing ideological systems was in the opposite direction. The idealistic communists gave up their big dreams and focused on the basics of providing material goods for their societies. The practical minded liberals slowly abandoned the simple goals of individual liberty and started to dream of spreading democracy to every corner of the globe. Liberalism emerged as the great dram of mankind.
At the end of the Cold War, it was largely understood that central planning and communism were unworkable as economic policies. Only a fool would compare the material results of communism to capitalism and think the former had any hope of competing with the latter. As Fukuyama explained, the West has reached the end point of its intellectual development. Liberal democracy had triumphed over all competing ideologies and was now the only moral option.
You can probably write a very long book on how liberalism evolved, developed and matured in its struggles from the Magna Carta to the end of the Cold War. Maybe the starting date would be the English Civil War. It first triumphed over aristocracy, then fascism and finally communism. In the end it matured from a simple desire to set men free to pursue their own interests and individual potential into a fully developed dream of setting mankind free from his natural condition.
That would be a great book if it were written in the first years after the Cold War, but the decades since have revealed something else about liberal democracy. That is those grand dreams are nothing more than decorations. Having reached the post-scarcity world dreamed of by the communists, western liberals look around and see that there is nothing to inspire them. There is no moving past the human condition into some next phase of man. There’s just work and consumption.
The last few decades can best be described as a thrashing about by the American ruling class and to a lesser degree the minor ruling classes of Europe, looking for a reason to exist. Having conquered nature and want, defeated all ideological challengers, liberal democracy looks around asking what was the point? If the end of the long cycle of history was simply work and consumption, why did mankind make the journey and struggle to get to this point in its development?
Of course, it must be noted that the high point of communism was citizens lining up at stores only to find the shelves mostly bare. It was order being imposed by neighbors spying on neighbors. The great triumph of liberal democracy is now people lined up outside stores that are increasingly short of product. Like the communists, the liberals now rely in neighbors to spy on neighbors and the fearful to bully the skeptical. There’s no getting around the fact that America is no longer a free society.
Maybe in the end this is the fate of all ideology. The communists started with lofty goals and dreams of transcending the human condition. They descended to the greatly reduced goal of making enough stuff to survive. Liberal democracy starting with the practical goal of individual liberty, got the ideology bug and began to dream of a world beyond the human condition. It too is now collapsing into less lofty goals, like maintaining the basics of civil society and material existence.
Perhaps the great lesson of the long intellectual development known as the Enlightenment will be that the danger to humanity is the ideologue. Genuine human progress is the systematic removal of those who dream of something beyond the human condition. True enlightenment is the embrace of man’s humanity and his innate desire to work, enjoy the fruits of his labor and spend his short existence with friends and family. Human progress is simply the embrace of humanity.
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They are engineers at heart but have no head.
It is like a bridge builder that when it collapses blames the evil laws of tensile strength and gravity.
What we need is a good old fashioned alien invasion from space. Fight off the monsters, take their technology, and foray out into the universe to make mankind safe from interstellar predators.
if only humanity was, you know, human. or something.
which is part of the problem.
can’t define the bounds of individual liberty? can’t define the bounds of liberalism.
can’t define bounds of humanity? at least not without the Uncaused Cause? can’t define the bounds of humanism, then.
are the Crispr babies human? will the future transhumans be? is it human to be chipped and tracked if you don’t get the corona vaccine? would it be more human to recolonize and re-Christianize Africa/3rd world with armed volunteer crusaders, having it multiracially unstable and resentful, yet also with a friendly Westernized minority there forever? or would it be less human to just bomb the Camp of Saints boats and caravans, trying to stem the darkie tide forever with sea walls and killer drones and nukes, yet allowing them to keep their full independence and (barbaric) customs – which may or may not come back to bite us anyway?
guess we need to define first things first.
Doctor Ericsson’s video which link I have posted today has been removed by Joo tube inquisition after having been viewed 5M times
These bastards will stop only when hanging from lamp posts, and this is not a figure of speech
Here is the mirror (but it will probably be gone soon)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwbGb68aED8&feature=youtu.be
and here is bitchute
https://www.bitchute.com/video/oGVRqleTzzMi/
Communism and globalism were never ideologies in practice. They were tactics for gaining power and riches
we been pearlharbored and we dont even know it.
This is rebuffing liberalism and Marxism with more marxist writing .The author do not have minimal knowledge why we reach here and how the flow of history is happening.He even do not know that Magna Carta have nothing to do with England and everything to do with France .He even do not know who establish modern England .Anglo saxons and celts did not establish nothing in ENGLAND This a bit (ok is over the top to say that but i have to give example) that indians have something to do with establishing of modern USA..He do not even know who is the real Father of industrial revolution and USA .Great catholic cultural power like SPAIN have even more colonies than England but nothing great like USA come from that .Why is the question?The answer is simple.They did not have one man .And this man is the real father of industrial revolution and USA .His name was Martin Luther.Without him USA will be only another Brazil.The USA is on downhill now because the people who rule us in last 50 years are in open war with this who establish the country.Not everyone can build civilization.Some even cannot keep it if you give them ready one.What is the most difficult thing to do.And to some who speak that we lack Churchill.That is absolutely false .How Luther was the father of our civilization ,everything what this amoral man have done lead to where we are today .His actions lead to destruction of it.
This is the Pitch Z man/ all.
“ Perhaps the great lesson of the long intellectual development known as the Enlightenment will be that the danger to humanity is the ideologue. Genuine human progress is the systematic removal of those who dream of something beyond the human condition. True enlightenment is the embrace of man’s humanity and his innate desire to work, enjoy the fruits of his labor and spend his short existence with friends and family. Human progress is simply the embrace of humanity.”
To those unfamiliar, I recommend the British miniseries “By The Sword Divided”, If you can find a copy. Probably the only relatively pro-royalist narrative I’ve seen outside of some books on the subject.
“If you can find a copy” funny
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQRVH08xZcI&list=PLYN1J_RTwUN-2XS6kL_CRMo3DLNGt5P19
360p, have fun.
There’s a big difference between asking yourself “What shall I do today?”and “What shall he do today? or, better, “What shall I make this neighbor do for this other neighbor?”
Linking from Audacious E: https://www.unz.com/anepigone/conceived-in-corona-ubi-baby-is-on-the-way/
If they’re giving sh!t away, might as well get in line.
My God!
I have nothing to disagree with, especially the conclusion.
In fact that last paragraph is perfect pitch.
Meanwhile; while I Agree with Z here…
Others do not.
Politics makes a poor religion, Power a poor God. But once a taste – wants MORE.
The Trifecta Power Drug Cocktail of Draconian Power wielded over the submissive, Enriching the Crony Class by Trillions$$, and crushing the Oppositions Deplorable *Voters* will not be a cocktail easily refused, one is never done.
“It too is now collapsing into less lofty goals, like maintaining the basics of civil society and material existence.”
This may be the true silver lining of the WuFlu panic. Nation building, mass migration, and all the other projects of Davos Man fall by the wayside.
A bonus is the further loss of credibility of the legacy institutions of politics, academia, and media. It’s still awful but this ill wind has some good.
This may be the true silver lining of the WuFlu panic. Nation building, Gauss said: “mass migration, and all the other projects of Davos Man fall by the wayside.”
I don’t know how silver it’s going to be for the plebs. If there’s a great deal of upheaval most of the spoils will go to the tyrants who put down the chaos.That’s always the last egg the Democratic goose lays.
Davos man is both desperate AND giddy with power now.
Bella Fortuna.
Bellum Fortuna.
Solomon said “There is nothing better for a man, than that he should eat and drink and enjoy the fruits of all his labor, and rejoice with the wife of his youth.” Nothing better. Nothing.
Fodder;
Agreed. There is nothing new ‘under the sun’. But you left out “fear (honor) God and keep His commandments, which is the whole duty of man”. In the end this is what makes it all go. Else, life really is ‘vanity’.
It is a Z Man tour de force to rewrite Ecclesiates as political theory. Or is it the other way ’round. Very impressive, and I say this with no sarcastic intent at all
People got bored with God so that’s not gonna work either.
OT (or maybe not) the 5th round draft pick of the New England Patriots (ironically) has been forced to prostrate himself before the SJWs and disavow his support of the Three Percenters organization.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/patriots/2020/04/25/patriots-justin-rohrwasser-fifth-round-nfl-draft-explains-tattoo-cover/3028007001/
>The Soviet empire that emerged from the Second World War was noticeably short on talk about mankind reaching its full potential. The practical necessity of feeding, housing and clothing its people consumed the regime. The great dream of a post-scarcity world of mankind united in brotherhood had given way to figuring out how to produce enough necessities to prevent rebellion. The last half of the 20th century was communism trying to keep pace with capitalism in the production of consumer goods.
It was not all breadlines and starvation. That phase ended after Stalin died. The Soviets had a space program and were , at least for many decades, leaders in science and technology. Yeah, the Soviet Union was behind the US in terms of economic output and living standards, but what you are comparing is not necessarily capitalism vs. communism but communism vs. the US. Post-ww2 pretty much everywhere was shit with the exception the US. it stayed that way until only the 80s when Japan began to pull ahead, but the UK was (and still is) way behind the US in terms of living standards and wealth despite not being communist, but China is communist and is surpassing everyone. Even now, many emerging markets and even developed markets are still way behind the US and have stagnated despite not being communist. A model based on national IQ instead capitalism vs. communism is a better predictor of reality.
“Maybe in the end this is the fate of all ideology.” — Well yes: as the ideology gains control of the levers of power in the State it will corrupt and destroy. That is want the monopoly State does. Anywhere and everywhere.
“True enlightenment is the embrace of man’s humanity and his innate desire to work, enjoy the fruits of his labor and spend his short existence with friends and family. Human progress is simply the embrace of humanity.” — Again, yes. This is exactly what we have been saying for decades on end. The question you did not ask is: “how can we create a situation that lets people do that”.
Well, I think the key is the difference between the Sacrificial Hero and the Ego Hero. The Sacrificial Hero sacrifices himself in the interest of humanity; the Ego Hero sacrifices others in the interest of humanity.
Wanna be a hero? Don’t do it by spilling other peoples’ blood.
Human history is nothing more than an explication of Lord Acton’s dictum that power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Every ideology, including liberal democracy, is necessarily imperfect because the corollary to Acton is that it takes power to limit power, i.e. the corruption is inescapable. Or as the Derb put it pithily, “We are Doomed.”
The rate of corruption is the salient factor and never discussed; because that would mean we’re not all equal wouldn’t it?
Z Man said: “Genuine human progress is the systematic removal of those who dream of something beyond the human condition.”
My I quote you? 😀
Good post today. I would add that for both Capitalist and Communist, a significant drag on their economies was armaments. Alas, the need to defend (or attack for that matter) is probably unavoidable in civilization; visions of universal peace are just as utopian (unrealistic) as the Biblical metaphor of the lamb lying down with the lion (or the wolf and the guinea pig, whatever!) Communism works wonderfully until there are no more sheep, then the predators find they cannot eat grass and they die off. Similarly, Capitalism kills off the predators and the sheep breed out of control, eventually resulting in a surplus of sheep and utter absence of forage. Or maybe that’s socialism. Taken to logical extremes, which is a valid engineering “what-if” exercise to try to determine in advance what breaks, something that Boeing failed to do with the 737-MAX for instance, many modern systems of belief crap out just as badly as the mid-20th century Cargo Cultists of the islands did, convinced that the white men in their huge ships and flying machines will return, bearing chocolate bars, Mickey Mouse watches and other wondrous gifts.
Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. Life, after all, is made up of eating and sleeping, of meeting and saying goodbye to friends, of reunions and farewell parties, of tears and laughter, of having a haircut once in two weeks, of watering a potted plant and watching one’s neighbor fall off his roof–Lin Yutang
Haircut every two weeks? That’s some dedication right there. I’m lucky if I get it every two months.
It strikes me that ‘progressives’ are attempting yet another re-framing of the human condition, with their insistence on radical egalitarianism: the notion that all races are inherently equal in every respect, and that any differences in performance and ability are due to “discrimination”.
Likewise their notion that men and women are the same, other than the obvious physical differences. And the notion that gender is merely a social construct, and that I can choose to be a woman if I “identify” that way.
They’re misunderstanding human nature no less than Marx did.
Progressivism is just the re-emergence of gnosticism, which itself is the tendency for all enlightenments to gradually collapse back into superstition:
https://anti-gnostic.com/2018/08/20/the-other-anti-gnostic/
What we’re seeing is a gradual retrenchment of the enlightenment, with scientific inquiry fading away to be replaced with the old human standbys of mysticism and superstition. And interestingly, as the above link shows, it’s not the bible-thumping right leading the way back into gnosticism (as was so feared from 1985-2005 when they were ascendant, but they vanished almost completely by 2010), but actually the purported “science” loving left that is leading the way.
1.) Climate change has turned into the new Christianity for the western world. It’s probably at the level of the old Catholicism, with “environmental racism” trailing it at the level of the old Protestant denominations.
2.) Naked truths, such as the way genetics determine the differences between sexes and races, are shouted down with the fervor of Salem witch hunters. We literally have modern-day Galileos of genetics, intelligence, race, and sex realism being persecuted by the new church.
3.) AWFLs are increasingly distracted with all sorts of mystical voodoo practices, as are black wahmens. Just talk a bit to any AWFL you know: the stuff they believe is real is insane.
4.) Former objective organizations like the CDC and NIH are converted into madrasas, with the above AWFLs and black wahmens placed in prominent positions to deliver new superstitious scripture.
5.) Objective math and science are dropped in favor of superstitious scripture in our K-12 madrasas, which means the scientific achievements of the 50s-90s we’re currently coasting on will eventually peter out. If math and science can’t pass from one generation to the next because the next generation is trained to misunderstand or is too stupid to understand, then eventually the old achievements we’re coasting on will fade away.
We’re retrenching into a new dark age, where things like the germ theory of disease will gradually be forgotten as tuberculosis, cholera, measles, and other formerly-conquered diseases reemerge in the US. The new wahmen healers and “nurses” that will supplant old doctors will promote old garlic cures that involve things like wearing the discarded penises of MtF trannies around one’s neck to ward off “white men’s viruses.”
It goes without saying that as white people fade away, so too will modernity fade away. The West will simply reflect the everyday of Africa, Asia, and Latin America if it is peopled with Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans:
https://www.amren.com/tag/curious-customs-and-beliefs/
I was almost completely ignorant of the English civil war until I became involved in dissident politics and I got interested in it. There is a lot to learn from that time period.
On the subject of the Soviet Union I was just having a discussion this morning with a co worker about how no one knows what to believe anymore nor whom to trust?
All our institutions in the west are badly damaged now.
Trump came along and ripped open the curtain on the corrupt western media only to be taken in himself by an equally corrupt scientific community.
Trump is damaged goods now.
He should have mooned them.
All true, and it should be added that in the era of easy living, the powers that be introduced artificial scarcity, the green movement, which is the most insidious and uniquely liberal creation, the goal is to make living itself expensive, so expensive that family formation plummets to never seen before lows. Anyone with a Sierra Club membership needs his head bashed in.
Ah c’mon. I’m not going to defend the Sierra Cub because they got bribed by one of the usual subjects to drop population control.
Making inexpensive family formation the primary goal leads to endless suburban sprawl. Instead, immigration restriction and population control of the third world should be our highest priorities.
Do you really trust the GOP to keep our air and rivers clean?
I’m from Sierra Club central. I know the Sierra Club, I know people who belong to the Sierra Club and I want to run them over with my SUV.
>Do you really trust the GOP to keep our air and rivers clean?<
Have you thanked Richard Nixon for the EPA?
Yes. Greenpeace have millions of lives on their conscience.
Michael Moore, of all people, took a big, steaming dump on “green” energy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk11vI-7czE
Environmentalism really ought to be our thing.
Why are Europeans the most brainwashed on this issue? It’s green dog shit. ALL of it. I’m not talking about allowing the dumping of toxic waste in the river by mafia owned truckers like it’s 1955. Nothing outside of communism has been more economically destructive on western society (as an ideology, many social problems are worse). Not only does it destroy business, but it creates armies of useless bureaucrats to police it all. And the worst offenders are the ones who rejected religion entirely. They dropped one religion only to pick up another. The earth is trying to kill you every day. And don’t get me started on carbon taxes. A left wing money laundering operation, nothing more.
Why are Europeans the most brainwashed on this issue?
Good question. Perhaps it’s because we’re packed like sardines over here, that gives you a sense of nature being a scarce commodity.
Denmark has 125 people / square km.
China has 153 people / square km.
India has 464 people / square km.
S. Korea has 527 people / square km.
I’d say you’re not nearly as packed as Asia, and Asians are many things, but environmentalists they are not.
“Like the communists, the liberals now rely in neighbors to spy on neighbors and the fearful to bully the skeptical. There’s no getting around the fact that America is no longer a free society.” Game, set and match.
Incidentally, something tells me this essay is a precis of Z’s forthcoming tome.
It is amazing the similarities between the old Soviet Union and our present-day reality here in the US.
After all it was those images of empty store shelves and the massive amount of propaganda that proved ” our way ” was better and yet here we are. It seemed the Russian people just ignored the nonsense and went about their daily lives.
Will be interesting to see what Americans do with this new “normal”. If recent history is any indication sadly it will be nothing.
The similarities come from societies that run from truth. A society that runs from truth runs into the arms of poverty. Truth used to be the domain of religion, which is currently as far from truth as can be (see any article when the Pope opens his mouth, he’s not outside the mainstream of current Christianity). Ghetto people mostly deserve to be poor because they live shameful lives. Drugs, alcoholism, mommy changing out boyfriends every month. The country itself has become ghetto. The middle class was destroyed mostly from within, as it slumped into alley cat like morals. Sure, this was helped along by ((the media)) and ((popular culture)).
I had a hypothesis that the US and Soviet Union was actually a control experiment in population conditioning. One was media oriented propaganda via positive-oriented reward brain washing, the control group was terror and negative propaganda.
Once they had enough data to see the effects, they simply collapsed the USSR as it was no longer needed and moved some of the techniques that were useful int he USSR to the USA.
The next round of this will be West and China as 2 sides of a similar technocratic experiment, but a different control premise. I wonder which effects will be selected for for this period.
You have described the moral philosophy of “live and let live.” Of which, the other side of that coin is “don’t tread on me.” But at the root, what afflicts us is not an ideological dead-end, but a derailing of nature evolution. Affluence and altruism is killing us in slow motion. The genome is degrading because the herd is not being culled of the weak and dysfunctional. The endpoint of our current societal mode of artificial selection is a hive species made up of homogenized drones and a queen.
Not if we get a system breakdown. In that case, brutal survival traits will be favored. Alas, most of the traits that allow the building of civilizations will not be favored. Mother Nature is no lady, she’s a bitch. 🙁
Not only do I agree with you, but I am counting on it. I don’t want to live in a society of SJWs and soyboys, always looking over my shoulder for the approach of the Deep State Jackboot Corp. That is a betrayal of our ancestors and the gauntlet they fought through that bequeathed us our genomic robustness. The next revolution will select for warriors who strong, courageous, and intelligent. That is our destiny, if we earn it.
TomA, I enjoy your comments. Your focus on the dysgenic effects of affluence is spot on. But you are noticeably silent on race and tribe.
Do you believe that the fit from any race can form a community or nation?
Can self sufficient and highly functioning Asian, Indians, Jews, and Whites form an enduring society?
None of us got to pick our parents; you must play the hand you were dealt at birth regardless. And part of your inheritance is ancestry, which often times is tied to the geographical history of your ancestors. As such, each of us is optimized to thrive accordingly and that formula has existed since life first evolved. Messing with that reality is the road to extinction, for everyone.
“True enlightenment is the embrace of man’s humanity and his innate desire to work, enjoy the fruits of his labor and spend his short existence with friends and family.”
Z writes on a high level of abstraction. The points he makes ring true. One other major lesson from the Enlightenment: Tribalism is real. People in multiracial societies generally care more about the welfare of their race than the welfare of the whole society. Most people want to live around others of mostly similar breed. Whites, ignore this hard lesson at your peril.
Please spread this video far and wide It’s got almost 4.5 M of views and confirms every single thing I (and most of people here) have been saying from the day one
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=xfLVxx_lBLU&feature=emb_logo
I watched this this morning and wasn’t terribly impressed. They’re making some decent points, but I just don’t think these guys are the right ones to be the public face of these arguments. At one point, the doctor on stage left gives glowing praise to Dr. Fraudci for how he initially reacted to the virus. I’m sorry, but he’s been a shit show from day one and it’s an astounding indictment of government bureaucracy that he’s still the go-to guy for “facts” on the Wuflu.
“This video has been removed for violating YouTube’s Community Guidelines.”
The only provable evidence of “human progress” that I see is scientific and technological. Even a lot of “social progress” is just the outworking of possibilities opened up by better technology. Human slavery, for instance, was a system maintained at a certain cost. Up to a few hundred years ago the benefits to society (usually) outweighed the deficits. Once mechanical slaves were available the case for keeping the human kind weakened while the costs of slave rebellions and recapturing runaways remained.
The irony of modern times is that the modern world made its greatest strides in science and technology during a period that was still fairly religious. I don’t think this was an accident. When people’s hunger for “the transcendent” was anchored in spiritual things they could regard the physical realm with clarity and objectivity and material progress was possible. This was the real genius of classic Western Liberalism withing the moral framework of Christendom.
The Industrial Age though, had a rival intellectual current running through it that was usually expressed in the various Communist and Socialist movements. The central idea here was that one’s desire for transcendence could be shifted to what we would now call social justice and the reorganization of society.
These social progressivist movements claimed to worship “science” but they had (and still have) a massive problem in dealing with science. The core of the problem is simply that progressive ideologies make certain statements about human nature and social organization that science itself proves to be false. This leads to abominations like Lysenkoism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism) and all the nonsense we see progs today spewing about the 53 genders and the benefits of diversity.
This also explains the brutality of Communism. Once it becomes apparent that the available human substrate is not quite what the ideology asserts there are only two options: abandon the ideology or remake the people into something more amenable to that ideology. For a ruling elite to abandon its ideology though leads to disgrace, loss of power, and perhaps exile or death. Clearly only one option remains – the people themselves must be remade. You see this of course in the mass executions of Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao, etc… A somewhat more “humane” version is what our elite has been doing in simply importing huge masses of people they think will be more docile. This effort is now faltering. That’s the last card in their hand though. After that they need to resort to outright Stalinism or cede power. One small advantage of the current age is that just about everyone, top to bottom, has gone soft. The current decadent elite isn’t made of the kind of steel* that men like Stalin were. Unfortunately they are also totally out of touch with ordinary people, including ordinary soldiers and cops. If they try to go the Stalin route and order their men to start rounding people up and putting them on boxcars, most will end up getting a bullet in the head from their security chiefs or one of the remaining alpha males in the armed services. After that it’s probably some kind of military dictatorship.
* This is a bit of a pun. Stalin is actually just the revolutionary gangsta “handle” of Ио́сиф Виссарио́нович Джугашвили (Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili). It is formed from the Russian word for steel, стали (stali).
Tend to agree. In other postings, my (uhappy) vision for a future America I called “an English-speaking version of the Third Reich.” Not because it’ll be Neo-Nazis, but a dictatorship, almost for sure.
If you like fiction, consider “Joe Steele”, a novella (also full length) novel by Harry Turtledove, positing a world where “Stalin” grew up in the USA!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Steele_(novel)
Z Man – Yes, you are correct that post-religious societies have All (whatever their idology) been unable to find a positive reason for living.
This is most powerfully evident in the universality of sub-replacement fertility – which amounts to *chosen* biological extinction over the long term, for the entirety of the developed world. If we saw this pattern in an animal (in conditions of plenty) we would know that there was something very seriously psychologically wrong.
There is. Men evolved as religious. When we are not, when religion (formerly the most powerful motivator) is subtracted – en masse we can feel no reason to live.
This is because the almost universal modern materialism has excluded (by primary assumption) all purpose and meaning. It can’t be found because, ultimately, it is assumed not to exist.
From reading your blog over recent weeks, I think that you are preparing the ground for the possibility of your own Christian conversion. It is not inevitable; because Christianity is an opt-in religion that can only happen consciously and by choice.
But I predict that sooner or later – and perhaps very soon – you will find yourself at the crux when you *will* make that choice – one way or the other.
We’re being starved but since we’re well fed nobody notices.
It is recently true of the West that a loss of religious conviction either results or coincides with choosing biological extermination, but I am unclear that the Chinese historically ever had a religious conviction. And if we are to believe the Greek collection of pagan idols motivated their reproductive success, was the depopulation later described by Herodutus due to it’s loss?
Christian religions, not the gospels, are nearly full partners with the goals of the state now. Even the Mormons are losing ground rapidly, proof Mitch. The instinctive conviction of man is universalism, not liberty, and universalism is becoming his religion.
I don’t dispute what you have to say about religion here; but you seem unaware that Zman IS a Christian. He has stated that he is a baptized Roman Catholic. While he admits that he no longer goes to Mass; he apparently has not disavowed his faith.
I was unaware that the z man self identifies as a Christian, if that is true. Considering that I have read scores of posts here and none have ever taken a Christian perspective, it must be that he is not (yet) a real Christian. Because in these times the only real Christians are those who put it first.
Zman: “The idealistic communists gave up their big dreams and focused on the basics of providing material goods for their societies. The practical minded liberals slowly abandoned the simple goals of individual liberty and started to dream of spreading democracy to every corner of the globe…”
True enough, but what is unmentioned and set both the communist and liberal plans…awry, was the perceived need for unimaginable expenditures capable of bombing the other side back to the stone age in order to prove the other side’s philosophy was in error.
Kind of off topic, but I’d be interested to see if the birth rate plummets in 2020 due to the coronavirus. It might also be blackpilling to see a large increase in the number of women murdering their babies (don’t want to have a corona baby!).
Those predicting a baby boom are delusional – well maybe there will be one for the blacks and Hispanics but white and asian fertility will plummet.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/abortions-uk-figures-terminations-nhs-women-healthcare-a8957226.html
In the last Depression (not the one that just started…!) the birth rate reportedly went down, logically due to the very hard economic times. Even more remarkable when you consider there was little to no birth control then. Another mouth to feed was a big drain, and stringent moral teachings made “suckling long pig” an unlikely alternative option 😶
“The greatest danger is the ideologue.”
A thousand times amen.
It is always the fanatics and true believers who make life a misery — and they come in a thousand shapes and sizes: church ladies, Marxists, climate change loons, activists of all stripes, SJWs etc. etc. A plague on all those who are determined to foist their visions of paradise on the rest of us. Most of us just want to be left to our own devices — to participate and contribute honestly to our nation, whatever that nation may be. A quote from Jack Vance comes to mind:
“I know that the history of man is not his technical triumphs, his kills, his victories. It is a composite, a mosaic of a trillion pieces, the account of each man’s accommodation with his conscience. This is the true history of the race.”
To the extent that we all have our own worldview, we are all ideologues. Some are just more willing to reevaluate their beliefs in light of new evidence.
Do you deny that Z, for example, has an ideology?
The trick is to exit one’s ideology when the body of evidence suggests the ideology is a false one. How much human suffering has been created by people unwilling to change, and doubling down instead, when their beliefs are made to appear false by significant evidence?
Hmm, that sounds a lot like my stock account’s performance since I discovered the “magic” of leveraged ETFs this month (USO!) 😠
There is a loose set of principles, on the one hand, and an iron-clad body of doctrine, on the other. I suspect most dissidents, including Z, adhere to the former.
Dutch nails it – inflexible, dogmatic ideology is the problem. As circumstances change, you have to be able to change with them – and without throwing babies out with bathwater. Life’s a constant process of discernment and balance-shifting.
I dunno, Line, today the Zman seems to waffling a bit close to outright heresy.
Doesn’t wanting some smug, threatening asswipe off my back automatically equate to fervent belief in open borders?
Agree, we all love our ideas. That is just Ego. In practice I find it easier to get along with most of my fellow humans. This is not necessarily because I value their ideals so much as I lack the power, at least at present, to exterminate mine enemies 😈
Seems the main goal of liberal democracy was to spread it around the world and bring all non-whites up to the same living standard as whites.
This goal has morphed into importing as many non whites as possible, in order to prove that they are equal to whites. “Anybody can be British!”
Now that this has failed miserable it seems they just plan on getting rid of whites altogether. Then all races will be equal??
By hatchet, axe and saw.
“There is unrest in forest…”
The original goal was obviously a failure. So the reasoning must have been these people just had the wrong sort of soil. It was not their fault that a shithole remained a shithole even after decades of trying to graft on an industrial society.
So then lets import them all here and that will work and free them from their cursed lands. They unfortunately seem to have brought their magic dirt and are busy spreading it over the rest of the country.
Its one series of magic beliefs after another each of which has been a disaster. Eventually, no one will remember the magic dirt we built through centuries of work and toil as everywhere will be covered in shit.
And somehow it will still be our fault.
My view of Whites, the Elven race of humanity:
From tons of coal, one gets only a few small diamonds. Yet they are priced higher than all those tons of coal.
UFO – Blank slate writ large. The whole idea of a blank slate – as opposed to a unique, individual soul created by God – was itself a product of the Enlightenment, or at least part and parcel of the rejection of the transcendence of religion. Thus spreading ‘democracy’ as a gift to other blank slates became the state religion of those who denied man’s nature was set by biology (or status of birth as they termed it then). The fallacy behind the “All men are created equal” rhetorical flourish.
But Sir, surely you would agree this is just the Good Whites being magnanimous? We tried, with colonization and missionary wars, to bring some civilization to the barbaric hordes. Alas, that effort failed for the most part. Thus, it became necessary to import the actual peoples to our homelands, where they will experience the Magic Dirt® and we will be able first-hand to mould them into civilized Americans! 😀
Stasi Journal 4/27/2020: I caught a local trying to sabotage the Covid Social Distance Directive by throwing a Frisbee with his golden retriever inside of the park, when Mandate #059580 says you may only walk on a trail around-said park with leashed animal. His counterrevolutionary tendencies were reported to Prefecture 3758 (See attached video evidence, as well as his conversation with his wife bragging about said violation, which was recorded on his home’s Amazon Alexa), forwarded to Comrade De Blasio. I have been cited for heroism and my monthly allotment of Netflix Streaming and Amazon Prime has been doubled for the quarter, and I have been given an additional stamp supply for the week which entitles me to five blister packs of Percocet and an ounce of medicinal marijuana, which will be transferred to my dacha by the end of the month. We are all in this together. End Entry.
The push-back gets going in New York…
Mayor de Blasio and his wife Charlene McCray go for a stroll after being chauffeur driven to Brooklyn’s Prospect Park from Gracie Mansion and called out by a pedestrian who was yelling at him for traveling unnecessarily during the coronavirus outbreak to the park in Brooklyn when he lives literally in a park at Gracie Mansion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMDWep4rD5Q
Well, I don’t know if history is cyclic, but it is interesting to see political assassinations just getting started in Germany again (Walter Lübcke sniped on his balcony), and a despised politician like De Blasio catching static in a park reminds me a bit of what happened with Walter Rathenau when some Freikorps soldiers tossed a grenade in his car as he was driving through Grunewald (a kind of lush colony of villas in Western Berlin where a lot of rich industrialists and politicians lived). Our rulers have been paying attention to Central and South America (their ideal model for us) so they’ll probably only travel via helicopters once Operation Destroy America is complete (or via some Elon Musk designed Habitrail), but still rebels are industrious and surface-to-air attacks happen, and hope, alas, springs as eternal as herpes.
“True enlightenment is the embrace of man’s humanity and his innate desire to work, enjoy the fruits of his labor and spend his short existence with friends and family. Human progress is simply the embrace of humanity.”
Agreed. But be careful here. As we all know, it’s very easy to manipulate those ideals into exactly what TPTB have foist upon us. At some point the definition of true enlightenment needs to balance commitment to family, to tribe, with individual pursuits.
Is it really fair to judge America as a liberal democracy as was envisioned and worked for in the old world? America is not America and has not been America for at least 100 years. First was the Southern and Eastern Europeans along with Jews and now 50 years of Mestizo immigration and today actual Americans are a minority. If demographics is destiny, this failure could have been seen over 100 years ago.
It takes an English people to maintain an English society. Most America cities are under foreign rule. America is no longer a nation state, but a multi-ethnic empire in severe decline. Perhaps “Liberal Democracy” failed over 100 years ago when it failed to prevent the mass migration of incompatible people? Perhaps that is the real lesson.
“Perhaps “Liberal Democracy” failed over 100 years ago when it failed to prevent the mass migration of incompatible people?”
Oh man, that nails it.
This attends to the failure of religion as well.
It becomes political religion as the ambitious seek to expand their franchise.
Religion doesn’t scale.
“We lost God”– because we imported peoples with their own Gods.
I rail against monotheism because it masks a deceit of racial ambition. That ambition itself wears the mask of universalism, utopianism, and the blank slate.
I explain: no, this is not hopeless.
Medieval pig farmers isn’t the final state.
I’m hoping that actual measurement, exploring the mechanism of what that undefined “something Beyond” the physical is, can clarify proper goals.
Our models of the Beyond are deficient, but we became intelligent to solve that.
Life really is moving in a direction.
Nope, America was still pretty much the same country(outside of the cities) until the 80’s when it all started changing. Younger people have no clue what life was like in small town American in the 60’s and 70’s.
Who destroyed it? It wasn’t your Jews, it was the your precious WASPS who sold the country out for money and gutted it like a fish.They created the rigged political parties that stripped the people from having a voice. they created business cartels, used our military to prop up foreign business investments, fought tooth and nail to keep what amounted near slave labor in the factories. WASPS led the charge for off-shoring and importing foreign workers.
The same in England. Those upper class whites had always despised their lower classes and when the chance came under Thatcher to crush them and eventually replace them, they did.
Just because some people are of English stock doesn’t make them special. They are just as self-serving and self-destructive as any other Caucasian.
The one thing you cannot argue is that America was founded as a British nation, more specifically English and that by the time you were a kid, America was no longer a British or English nation. I can remember the later part of the 70s.
There was a lot of rivalry among the various white ethnic groups going back quite a while. It was probably a lack of homogeneity that set up such struggles in the US in the first place.
The Jews were already pretty powerful by the 20th century. The ADL was formed in 1913 to save a Jewish Child rapist/murderer.
I don’t blame Jews (exclusively) for America’s problems either.
Though I am 1/2 English, I’m not a WASP. The English ARE special, just as the Germans, Italians, Russians and Puerto Ricans and blacks etc. We are different peoples. The fact that Germans and Englishmen can co-exist in the same empire and live at roughly equal incomes and quality of life, they are also different and not necessarily compatible.
It was not just the WASPs that sold us out either. Jews played a much larger role than you are giving credit/blame for. By the time this was happening, America was already a multi-ethnic empire.
Is it fair to judge any Utopia as a failed experiment? Of course, their roots are rotten. It’s absurd to think that, if only America had done things that it conceptually could not do, everything would be great.
America was never a utopia and even if she had avoided most of the pitfalls she eventually fell in, still would not be a utopia. But there are shades of gray here. There are plenty of stops between utopia and clownworld.
The wisdom of Ecclesiastes
Communism fails because it’s a material solution for a spiritual problem. Not making excuses for it. I’ve always agreed with the basics of the Marxist critique of capitalism but he was clearly wrong about what to do.
Funny how it helped bring me back to faith. Render unto Caesar what’s his, render unto to God what’s His. Makes more sense every day. Caesar wants to be God, but he can’t be if you don’t give him what’s God’s (your soul), and you won’t if you can’t be deceived into thinking Caesar’s stuff is God’s stuff. In other words, that everything, including the soul, is material.
The answer imo is coming back to faith as a principle. Believing in something that can’t be proven by the five senses.
Anyway excellent post. Rediscovering humanity would be a great start.
I confess, for some reason I had never conceived of religion as a bulwark against tyranny, but now I do. Marvelous post, Bravo.
There was a good link at the Orthosphere to Maverick Philosopher on this:
Jesus did not command Christians to honor Caesar’s law. The Tribute episode serves as a guide for Christians to reject Caesar and that he is not a proxy for civilization, peace, and order. In support thereof, consider the following:
(1) Tiberius Caesar was, in his personal life, a pedophile, a sexual deviant, and a murderer, and who, as an emperor, claimed to be a god, and who oppressed and enslaved millions, including Jesus’ peeps;
(2) The coin which Jesus asked to examine was a denarius, likely one not in general circulation according to J. Spencer Kennard. The coin was likely used by Roman officials, soldiers, and the Jews who collaborated with the Romans;
(3) Notably, Jesus did not possess such a filthy coin;
(4) The Tribute episode takes place in the Temple, and by producing the coin, the Pharisees reveal their hypocrisy by bringing a coin of a pagan into the holy Temple;
(5) Coins in the ancient world were the major instrument of imperial propaganda, promoting the agendas and the deeds of their issuers, including the apotheosis of the emperor;
(6) Jesus’ counter-question, “whose image and inscription is this,” must mean something as his counter-question was not necessary in order to answer the original question of the profligate Pharisees;. That Jesus asked the question suggests that it and its answer are significant;
(7) The two words, “image” and “inscription,” raise fundamental issues concerning the prohibition of false images. God forbade worship of any one or anything other than God and man was not to worship false images of God. Jesus’ use of the word “image,” in the counter-question reminded the filthy Roman loving Pharisees of God’s commandment that man shall not venerate any earthly ruler. Jesus’ use of the word, “inscription,” refers to the Shema, a jewish prayer the opening line of which is “Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God – the Lord alone”;
(8) the inscription on the denarius reads, “Tiberius Caesar, Worshipful Son of the God, Augustus.” On the obverse, sits the Roman god of peace, Pax, with the abbreviation “Pontif Maxim” which stands for “Pontifex Maximus,” which, in turn, means “High Priest,”;
(9) Jesus’ answer that we are to render unto Caesar that which belongs to Caesar begs the questions of what belongs to God and what belongs to Caesar? In the Hebrew tradition, everything belonged to God, (“mine is the silver and mine is the gold”) whereas Tiberius claimed to be a worshipful son of a god and that all who transacted with the denarius owed allegiance to him; and
(10) Jesus skillfully pointed out that the claims of God and Caesar are mutually exclusive. If one’s faith is in God, then God is owed everything; Caesar’s claims are therefore illegitimate and he is owed nothing. If, on the other hand, one’s faith is in Caesar, God’s claims are illegitimate, and Caesar is owed, at the very least, his filthy coin.
Jesus simply invited his listeners to choose allegiances.
Do you pay your Income Tax?
To whom have you given your allegiance? Caesar or Christ?
Both communism and “liberal” democracy are based on violating 2 commandments: “don’t covet” and “don’t steal”. A progressive taxation is stealing what belongs to one’s neighbor.
No wonder they end same way: a desire to have power over other humans: NKVD and KGB over there, Dem governors ordering house arrests here.
“Perhaps the great lesson of the long intellectual development known as the Enlightenment will be that the danger to humanity is the ideologue.”
Agree and this is why I have given up on even bothering to notice the alt right which has become yet another secular ideology promising to cure our ills. Well really just a rehash of another secular ideology that promised to solve mans troubles.
Id say that after the reformation, and the great abandonment of transcendant Christianity towards Liberal Christianity and eventually widespread apathy and atheism, the last several hundred years has just been one unfolding tragedy after another caused by western man trying to find a way to transcend this life without appeals to solid, authoritative Christianity or belief in anything higher than man. We are creating heaven on earth because we wont have it in the afterlife, but somehow we are always creating hell instead.
The millions dead, the soul deadening modern lifestyle that resulted from that, the alienation and on and on. It does come back to us trying to make it on our own. Perhaps i lack imagination but i dont see how it could be any other way.
This may not be a popular opinion here and thats fine, but any movement that tries to overthrow liberalism which is itself secular, is a waste of time and doomed to failure.
I am now watching the old HBO mini-series Rome with a friend. Of course, no sane person now would wish to live in such a society with the mass enslavement of foreign enemies, rampant street crime and sadistic violence. However, the Romans did have the concept of citizenship.
Now our ruling classes arbitrarily shut down “non-essential” business and throw masses of people onto the unemployment rolls. Furthermore, they severely hinder personal movements and flagrantly restrict freedoms of association. Query: Is the value of our citizenship now less than that of a Roman’s?
Rome devalued their citizenship and their currency, and still hung in there for quite a while.
That being said, Rome never intentionally shut down their own tax revenue. The stupidity of the current moment is unprecedented.
Loved that miniseries BTW.
It’s astonishing to me to witness the self-destructive responses to an adverse political outcome. Twitter is now banning videos of light technology being used to kill viruses internally, because some president somewhere, that a lot of people don’t like, asked a question about such a thing. We live in times of madness, and the only thing I can identify that would explain why it is happening right now, is that this new conversational medium of the Internet has enabled mass hallucination in a broad way.
Not just the Internet, but “social media,” in general. Hysteria now spreads like wildfire before a tornado.
“light technology being used to kill viruses internally”
What?! That’s a big step, bigly big.
It’s also a head-slapper, as in, “so simple, why didn’t we think of that before?”
It’s not a new idea, and it is very likely a nutty one with no medical potential. But Twitter et al., suppressors of dissident opinion may they be, also arguably have a duty to keep the stupider members of society from harming themselves. Given all the foolish self-harm that’s been in the news (Poisoning yourself with aquarium algae killer? Really?) it’s not a stretch to worry that some idiot would (say) overexpose himself under UV lamps and die as a result. And yes, that has happened, but was a tanning enthusiast getting a bit too much.
The meaning, and hence the status, of the”citizen” in our culture has now largely been swapped for that of “consumer unit”. One never hears politicians or cultural “thought leaders” unironically refer to us as “citizens”. To accord us the dignity of “citizens” would be a recognition that we retain agency in our lives, and that would just not comport with our actual status as their Talmudic cattle, useful to them only insofar as we, individually and collectively, surrender our agency to their continuing aggrandizement.
But we, like the proles of ancient Rome, get our bread and circuses if we behave. Technically, the proles were “citizens”, but progressively as the Republic was nudged toward the Empire, the political role of_those_”citizens” was circumscribed into an increasingly smaller ambit. And so it is here. Slathered with Sauce Bernays, and shackled to the Elites’ agenda, the parallels are unmistakeable, exacerbated yet more by the rise of the Surveillance State, the Panopticon of Their dreams.
The Bezozian “Consumer/Worker”:
https://southpark.cc.com/clips/plk1vp/workerconsumers-willing-to-box
“To each according to his needs” is the key for the bureaucrats to decide what is essential and what isn’t. Another win for Marx.
The Constitution is dead.
Eastern mystics have described the human condition as “God’s sport”. Indeed, what IS the point of all this? Testing souls on the anvil of human folly? Building character by ceaseless toil? Creating civilizations on the beaches of war only to see those castles of sand washed away by the timeless waves of degeneracy and plague?
My thinking has led me to believe that the concept of beauty can save us, if we develop within us a heightened sense of aesthetic awareness. Surely building a gothic cathedral must produce a more life sustaining society than throwing up massive indoor shopping malls.
That’s precisely why those of us in the musical world that have pondered anything beyond this existence always come back to Bach. He built cathedrals. Soli Deo gloria.
Seeing that collective of idiots and apes in that gorgeous cathedral in the Jared Taylor video almost killed me.
– built by hand, by “simple”, “ignorant” and entirely white bigots!-
Beethoven beats rap.
“Beauty will save the world.” -Dostoyevsky
Mathematician’s Apprentice said: “Beauty will save the world.” -Dostoyevsky.
Beauty has been commodified like everthing else. The transactional regime has reduced all worth to a dollar amount. And the “western artistic tradition” however you define it, has disappeared up it’s own asshole. It’s all rehashing and reproductions now. I’m afraid the marriage of liberal democracy and capitalism was, in the long run a marriage made in hell. There’s simply no rolling that rock back up the hill. When the Soviet Union fell, the western leftists where freed from hauling all those dead bodies around. If our people are ever to have a future, we’ll have to cleanse our minds of the twentieth century. The future belongs to the people who can build a new, stable foundation for a strong, confident, vigerous culture and society that is free from all this silly assed white guilt. Otherwise, what’s the point?
He didn’t say “the Western artistic tradition” he said beauty. As long as reverence, awe, and wonder exist, there is hope. Even when fat acceptance becomes law of the land, the only buildings left are Brutalist monstrosities, and anything smacking of love is smeared and slandered, so long as there is one star in the sky, one beautiful woman on earth, one elephant or waterfall or mountain at which a man can marvel, there is hope. It is this glory that moves the hearts of men, and thus the world. That’s the point. Nietzsche made a similar point about the admiration of heroes: those who admire heroes the most are most likely to become such themselves. It’s quite universal among men.
Agree. It’s almost as if people are fundamentally flawed in some way that makes every idea that they can be fixed in to a monstrous and dangerous conceit. I wonder if anybody has ever thought of that. Probably not.
I wish someone had pointed out – before all this went bad – that valuing consumption as the highest good is an awful idea.
But that’s is why, _pace_ Z, I think the way forward is the way back. There is a LARPing silliness that attaches itself to the guys who think what went bad was we selected the wrong ideology – instead of realizing that you can’t grab the transcendent; it has to be a gift.
I keep saying I deeply hope the next pope contents himself with stealing enough money to support his mistresses and bastard children instead of spending all day advancing his ideology. Same is true for the next political system: I hope it can send rulers who just want to get paid. I can negotiate with criminals like that; globohomo tolerates no gods before it.
BTP, I think that “flaw” is scale. We can make most any system of organization work on a village-sized scale. Some scale up better than others but once we reach million-man entities, something witchy starts to sour the mix.
At some number, say your million, you reach a tipping point. A combination of anonymity and broken/unstable individuals who are like sand in the gears of society.
The flaw is scale, but scale protects its own. Scale protected the USSR, and protects our system too, for now. Scale can crush community economically, and also crush it bureaucratically and legally, when the economics fail to do the job. Community threatens scale, and scale knows it.
Once the scale reaches a certain level, diversity seems to intrude. There’s yer trubble.
Exile said: ” Some scale up better than others but once we reach million-man entities, something witchy starts to sour the mix.”
There’s lots of reasons why complex Civilizations decline. But one of the most interesting consepts to me is “spiteful mutations”. Here’s a V Dare artical entitled: “Of Mice and Men: ”Spiteful Mutations” Look Bad For The West.”
https://vdare.com/articles/of-mice-and-men-spiteful-mutations-look-bad-for-the-west
Definitely a factor – accumulation of dysgenic citizens. I caught Ed Dutton’s speech in Oslo last November on the “spiteful mutants” who surrounded our happy gathering that day. Not sure if he has it at Jolly Heretic, Scandza or elsewhere but Z had a link to the video in one of last winter’s post.
Perhaps this trenchant quote from C.S. Lewis speaks to your post, BTP, and to Z-Man’s sense of the arc of supposed inspiration of the idealogue’s vision from initially uplifting to in the end shackling others to service to the idealogue’s inevitably limited (Menschlich, allzu menschlich) strictures.
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
C. S. Lewis
@Jersey –
Just so. Which is why there is a lot to be said for a political organization that limits itself to acquiring more stuff, knowing that the problem of fixing mankind is someone else’s.
Scale.
Regardless of the system involved, in force-forging societies of tens of millions to billions we’ve vastly exceeded a boundary of human organization rooted in our biology and psychology.
The Roman Empire proved untenable at a size of about 6 million souls. Correlation or causation? It’s a very meta factor to properly control for.
It would be interesting to see the results of a study that correlated population size and density vs. systemic organization with factors like social cohesion, prosperity etc… Given that both Woke globalism and eternal-growth finance capitalism demand we ignore or happy-face both scale and diversity issues, I suspect such data is both hard to find and pre-skewed by “court sociologists.”
Systemantics teaches this as well:
Fixed it.
Sounds pretty damned good to me! Guess that makes me a liberal in the classical sense. True liberalism is the desire, willingness and ABILITY to tell government and its minions to “Leave us the hell alone!” Come to think of it, that pretty much sums up the Declaration.
Nor should they have! Mankind ought not to advance on the back of someone doing their duty. There is nothing wrong with self-interest – enlightened self-interest – as a motivation. One can construct a completely viable ethos based solely upon sloth and self-interest – enlightened sloth and self-interest. I have no “duty” to anyone but myself – and those whom I choose to define as part of “me”.
Truer words have never been written, Zman. That is unquestionably one of the most profound statements you have ever written.
Spoken like a true Objectivist. The entire Randian project was about constructing your “completely viable ethos.”
You might want to re-think how the Rearden Rubber meets Reality Road. Check out Ilana Mercer’s latest piece on social distancing for a comparatively hard-headed libertarian realist’s struggle with egghead moralists on a tough subject.
https://www.unz.com/imercer/the-ethics-of-social-distancing-a-libertarian-perspective/
My Brother I don’t know if people will ever get it that you can’t be an individual in a world that is collectively trying to kill you…I honestly think some people are suicidal they just don’t understand that what they advocate for equals death…If good men don’t associate/band together when evil joins forces then good men will be picked off one by one til darkness covers the land…
Oh good lord more selective bolding. Please go back to Brietbart.
“True enlightenment is the embrace of man’s humanity and his innate desire to work, enjoy the fruits of his labor, and spend his short existence with his friends and family”
A couple of posts back there was some discussion over the value of physical labor vs mental labor. While I still see physicality having its own unique qualities in this regard, ie a straighter line between a and b, whatever force generates ones labor, this statement cuts to the core.
The ideologies of the modern oppositional politics have this in common: they both dehumanize labor, turning the true liberty of ones generative capacity into something less than.
The prog capitalists made labor low status, something to be avoided by elevating to the cloud of ideas.
The commies made labor degrading and futile by decoupling ones productivity from his fruits.
United under globalism, they both seek to ‘socially distance’ all things that connect a man to his productivity. We are all Just derivatives to them, out-of-the-market options that must labor to earn those very basic ideas that have been lost in commerce.
This is made clear, repeatedly, as every edict from the cloud is a kind of humiliation exercise. The mask is running threadbare, however, and so it cannot go on. What will come next, beats me.
I am often left to wonder, “what is that one thing that can define our thing?” as I mostly come away with those things we should not embrace. The passage above comes close, a dissident enlightenment, if you will.
Which is why I’ve been advocating over and over to build Communities Brother because that is the only way you can throw their yoke of tyranny off of you… Everything else we try and do is either trying to hide or just submitting which I f#&king hate but it’s the only option right now for each one of us because we don’t come together…I don’t know what it’s going to take for men to get tired enough of it and start banding together to be able to say enough of this shit…
Lineman,
It takes a lot, Brother. It always does, and I suppose that is what makes it worth it. If it came easy then it has little value. Some of us are listening and acting. You are on the right track as always.
And OT, Thank you for keeping the lightning flowing to our homes. I do so like light and refrigeration. I know what you do by profession and I’d call it heroic and essential if those words weren’t already co-opted by grocery clerks and the migrant I saw leaf-blowing this morning. You’ll have settle for “Indispensable” and “Courageous.” At least until those words are reassigned to HR harpies and ambulance chasers at the TBD time.
Brother right back at you knowing what you do…We are the backbone of this nation and they want to tear us down…I think I’m not going to let that happen and my words to them is BFYTW…
The progression of man to the point we are at today will never be fully understood by the majority of us. Most are too busy with life. Dissident reality requires a constant refresh to maintain the proper perspective. Diligence leads to clarity. Z Land is a place.
Back in the US
Back in the US
Back in the USSA
Another interpretation is that ideology is a powerful means for expressing the natural impulse of religion in an otherwise secular period of history. The proper goal may not be so much to abandon the aspirational spirit of ideology altogether, but to express our ideals within the context of religious forms. As I am sure you’re aware, Marx saw traditional religion as a natural competitor for the kind of sentiment that he sought to leverage for political ends. The true lesson here might be that political ideology is a dangerous substitute for genuine religious expression.
Boreas, one facet of the human condition is that religious form began as politics.
Both religion and political religion seem compelled to express… something, but neither defines what it is they yearn for.
Addendum: I realized when people say “we must follow God’s will!”, that in the East, they would say, “we must follow the Tao”.
Ask either what the Will or the Tao is, exactly. They can’t tell you either.
Language is a limited tool, sometimes.
I would rephrase the warning from “the danger to humanity is the ideologue”, to “the danger to humanity is hubris”. Ideologues are often filled with hubris but they are not the only ones.
The core truth of leftism is: leftists don’t care about the things they pretend to care about.
Their “principles” are all just pretexts to trick people into giving them power.
This can be seen in what happens after they gain power. The Bolsheviks could have, for example, redistributed land relatively peacefully–if they had really believed in that. But what they did instead was launch a long nightmare of torture and murder.
If they really cared about women, if they really cared about children, if they really cared about the environment, if they really cared about blue-collar workers, then their policies would be very different from what we actually see now.
The usually wishy-washy Stefan Molynuex actually had a very good line recently, “Communism is just sadism masquerading as a political ideology.” Dead on.
In fact I would extend that insight to all of leftism.
I wonder if any particular group of people is heavily over-represented In every single Leftist movement?
The mentally deficient.
The spiritually evil.
Episcopalians? .Follovers of Jimmy Carter?
The Irish. Gach aon uair amháin
The most Irish cities in the UK such as Manchester, Glasgow and especially commie Liverpool. Boston and formerly Republican New England in general. Some pattern recognition going on here.
Our very own retarded leprechaun here in NJ, Governor Patrick Murphy. He lays waste our economy by his unfocused and misdirected shutdown of the state’s economy, and now is whining for massive (and I do mean massive) federal money to save his lefty ass from the consequences.
Ah, Zman, you have the wit of Mencken. The (((Gaeilge))) twist is the smooth cream in the black, black coffee that is life. Kudos.
More noticing.
The mere fact that even among ourselves we must tip toe around simply naming them is a testament to their power and our humiliation.
It seems Z has spac out if you keep noticing the same patterns. Magic mumble, mumble. Are you some sort of crazy person? Who even believes this stuff?
Nothing to see here. Please keep moving and pick up your guide to not noticing on the left on the way out.
True point about that over-represented group in Leftist movements. Would that group be similar to any other over-represented group in the realms of scientific breakthroughs; literature, music and the arts; medical inventions; Nobel Prizes won; the founding of Christianity? Over-representation is as over-representation does.
Seeing that he posted on Saturday, I withdraw my insinuation that Z is one of ((them)) … or did he hire a Shabbat Goy? 😀
Ben,
I noticed your little poison seed (among many) the other day. In the fashion of a true gamma: the not-apology apology, weakly applied humor as a candy coat for your veiled attack, then doubling down with another little poison pill.
Do you ever speak your mind in a manly fashion or is it always ankle-biting? Do tell, little Secret King.
You noticed that too Brother…
Jim, the crucial question to ask is, “For what causes have that group expended its power?”
Granting that a few of that group may been important in causes that we favor, we must ask:
“Has this group been a net positive or negative for white people?”
I assume that the question answers itself undeniably.
LineInSand, I grant you all of that, and (get this) also agree with what you say. It’s clear that “the tribe” has overall been a baleful influence on the interests of Europeans, particularly in the past century. I object only to indiscriminate hating on “all” jews, which causes me to note the huge benefits individual jews have conferred on humanity (which perforce includes whites). There are also jews in the DR. Does this mean all can be trusted? No. But it does mean that indiscriminate hating on them is counter-rational. Call me a semiti-cuck, that’s the way I see it.
Writing that stirred up a memory of an old Morgoth video about evil and political power. Makes the same point, very vividly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NARnGLvK9hM
For those of you who are unaware, The Babe has collected all of Morgoth’s essays into 6 volumes sorted by theme. The are available for free:
thebabe.home.blog
Wow, Babe, very impressive- yeoman’s work. Looks quite tasty, bookmarked.
And a big Thank You to Yves.
LOL, thanks for the shout-out.
Sadism is a secondary effect .
Its more a simplistic first order limited mind that has a single axis vision for your life like a child’s drawing.
There are loads of these slow-witted people in authority as it is this linear environment of the deficient that attracts them.
Any push back against the infantile single view producers a reaction that rapidly becomes:
“Do what I fucking say or else”
The inevitable failure of the vision is hollowed out and ends up with this concept as the only driving force expressed in a louder and louder rage, and nothing else.
All visionary ideas have to inevitably end up as a charnel house, unless force is used to restrain them.
“There’s no getting around the fact that America is no longer a free society.”
Yet it goes through great motions to maintain the pretense. The United States today is eerily reminiscent of the USSR in the final half of the Eighties. It engages in the contradiction of assuring citizens they have the best of all worlds while threatening the same if they take any substantive action to make that a reality. America under lock down is like much of Soviet life circa 1985-88.
As for the English Civil War, it being memoryholed is wildly successful and also inexplicable. My office has several lithographs of prominent figures from the English Civil War. I can understand when clients and associates don’t recognize a particular person, but it is mind-blowing how many highly educated people have no clue there even was an English Civil War. Maybe this ties back to the first point and the educrats simply do not want proles to know there have been several successful uprisings against authority in relatively recent history;
A great lesson I learned in marketing is that ‘new and improved” better be reality and not just a slogan. Lots of companies will respond to defects in their product and service with a campaign claiming they have moved beyond those defects, when in reality nothing has changed. This turns the dissatisfied into the angry.
That’s what we saw with Soviet communism and now with liberal democracy. Rather than invest in real reform, they invest in new propaganda. Every turn of the wheel leads to more angry people who don’t believe anything being told to them. I know a lot of mild people enraged now at these lock downs. I know more people who don’t believe anything being told to them than people who trust some of it.
Spot on. Eventually puffery only goes so far because reality intrudes. I don’t know where the United States will be in a decade, but it seems obvious the internal contradictions are leading to a place we once thought impossible.
Wow, count me among the clueless. I have never heard of it. I guess I just assumed England went from monarchy to parliament through a peaceful evolution.
Jack Dobson – The English Civil War is also an inconvenient fact for ‘murrican patriots, who insist on painting the founders as self-abnegating saints merely fighting off a tyrannical and greedy despot. Since the facts that the taxes they were in an uproar over were a pittance, and the English parliament was generally in agreement with the King, don’t support the narrative they – along with all that preceded the power parliament had – gets memory holed.
I thought THE civil war was actually the third of its kind, after the Anarchy and the Wars of the Roses.
One cannot help but notice how completely irrelevant Africans have been to the development of human ideology.
Almost as if there’s a genetic component at play.
Noticing!? NOTICING!? How dare you.
African development is an oxymoron.
What about arrested development?
You know, because they’re more likely to get arrested?
Tough crowd.
Don’t be ridiculous! Are you forgetting all the great contributions to humanity that have come out of Africa? There’s Aids, Ebola virus, refugees….erm, okay I’ll have to get back to you on the rest.
>the founding generation had no dreams of a post-scarcity world
This is misleading. The Enlightenment political project was based on the notion that the apparently endless and empty New World had (or would) eliminate scarcity.
It was this abundance of natural resources, more than parliament or reason or rereading Cicero, which would enable individual self-interest to create a positive collective outcome.
Gold actually went into something akin to hyperinflation in Spain from the massive quantities of gold flowing in from the Americas.
silver (not gold)
Hear ye the wisdom of one trained in Spanish Lit 😀
You are correct. Also, we learnt that Spain’s very successes led to future problems: Unification of Spain (15th century) led to kicking out the Jews and Moors, which seemed like a good idea to the good Catholics, but caused the exodus of business, knowledge, skills and other good stuff from the Iberian Peninsula. 16th-18th centuries: Spain’s great success at colonization led to gold, too much in fact,as you noted. Too, it brought social and economic stagnation, the Spaniard “waiting for the boat (of riches) to arrive” from the New World. Spain remained backward, compared to England surely, and arguably not until late 20th century entered the modern world. Conversos, Jews who were “encouraged” to convert to the One True Faith, yet still often were suspected and persecuted, for reasons real or imagined. Yet it wasn’t all bad: For example, anyone who’d been banished and remained in country could expect the death penalty. May I suggest the same for our immigrant problem? 🙂
O.T.
A thank you for turning me on to this site via links you dropped into threads at Sic Semper Tyrannis.
JJ
This is an under-appreciated point. The settling of New World produced an expansion of individual liberty and prosperity not seen since the dawn of the Neolithic. Land, the common denominator of wealth until late19th century Induatrialisation, was literally there for the taking. This in turn created a huge and politically dominant “middle class” of yeoman farmers, at least in British North America, who jealously guarded their property rights with their franchise.
Industry diluted the middle class, but it was temporarily revived by the high price of labor after World War 2. Eventually, however, Global labor arbitrage and third world immigration collapsed the middle class for good, Covid-19 hysteria providing the coup de grace.
It is theoretically possible that the middle class could be revived again through a strictly isolationist foreign and economic policy, with high import tariffs, Immigration restriction and repatriation, and a focus on local manufacture and 3-D printing. However, effecting this would require a revolution, and nothing less than the wholesale replacement of our current elites and the institutions they control.
How did the colonization of the New World work out for the aboriginal peoples, pray tell? 🙂
90% died from disease before they ever saw a white man. European pioneers found an essentially empty continent.
Aboriginal Americans were an evolutionary dead end, like the Neanderthal. Hard truths are still true.
My answer is becoming progressively more luddite. Media was only able to defeat the post WWII middle class by sewing technological weeds into our privacy. First was TV, then computers, and most recently, smartphones.
I think that part of the answer is also a return to a culture of land. Whenever N.E Americans talk about wealth, for example, they invariably bring up houses, cars, and gadgets; but everything that I truly value is only possible with good land. (Even the word “property” now has stronger connotations with material goods than one’s own land. Priority shift?) A little running water, space for expansion and privacy, woods to where my future children can disappear into and play: if I have these things, verily I am a free man.
When I tell this to libs, they just don’t get it. How could I want my kids to grow up as “hicks”? Fellow northerners, go out and look around you. That is why.
I agree. Before the opiod and meth epidemics, the people of the mountain south were poor, but generally proud and self-sufficient. They had a very strong attachment to their land and families.
Drugs (thanks to the (((Sacklers))) and Mexican drug cartels) have largely destroyed that culture. But it’s a way of life that I am old enough to remember and and that I greatly admired.
Why are there no neighborhood watch groups to rid those communities of drug dealers, both Mexican and doctor?
Lawdog I have all of that and it does bring peace of mind but doesn’t make me a free man because of the insidious taxes on my property and my income…
Where do you live, Lineman? And what would you have done different?
I live in the Bitterroot Valley of MT and living wise not anything different…I’m just waiting on others to join me and the others or start building their own Communities…
If you don’t mind me asking, how much (roughly) was your land?
Here’s what land is going for roughly…https://m.landwatch.com/property-images?r=/details?&id=335836360
Thank you. It seems like this might be within my reach after all. The taxes, well, I’m from NJ. We’re heavier on the taxes, no?
How many acres do you have?
Taxes on that piece after you put a house on it would be probably around a grand a year…I have enough acres to sustain me and mine…
I too am interested in moving to MT, I was considering the Eureka and Whitefish areas. Your thoughts?
Whitefish is really expensive because it’s full of Californians don’t know to much about Eureka…
The left has come up with another ideology: genocide. Of us. As a matter of principle and rightness, of course! As the Zman himself has pointed out, the revolutionary type has to pick out something as the devil. And we’re it, guys.
I could point out that the leftists’ new devil just happens to be the main competitor of a certain other racial group.
Funny how their interests always manage to be transformed into sacred principle. With the “sacred principle” changing as their interests change.
See the video I linked above.
Leftists assured one and all that the aristocracy and nobility were the impediments to utopia, and so they killed them. When utopia did not come into fruition, they told the masses that the capitalists, bourgeoisie and “kulaks” were all that stood in the way of paradise. They killed them in their tens of millions, and still heaven was not created on earth.
One might think Leftists would cease demonizing groups and singling them out for destruction. But, no. They now place blame squarely on the white race and are preparing to enslave and possibly exterminate it. If, given the history of the Left, we allow this to happen, we deserve it.
If we’re going to be devils, we need to get better at tempting.
The English civil war is the most important event of the last 500 years in the Anglo world. The fact that they don’t teach one iota of this event even though it was a direct inspiration for the American Revolution shows the lack of depth and intrigue of the American education system.
Columbus discovering the Western Hemisphere is the most important thing in the last 500 years (well, 528 years). Everything changed after that, globally .. not just the Anglo world. That’s why Columbus is constantly attacked.
I used to do posts on the English Civil War. it really is amazing how it has been flushed from the memory banks, at least in America. I wonder if the same has happened in England.
Speaking of the depths to which England has sunk, check out this video. I was working in the UK in 2011 but did not realize the extent of the the rot below the surface.
https://youtu.be/OoMsJ4ZHpTQ
“I was working in the UK in 2011 but did not realize the extent of the the rot below the surface.”
You have that much in common with the plurality of Brits. They still think this is Churchill’s Britain or Thatcher’s Britain. They simply don’t understand that that country is dead. Or perhaps they do realise but remain in denial.
My instinct told me clearly: “get out.” But is this any better? Not so sure.
Same as most Americans.
If The First World War didn’t finish the UK (& one can argue it did), the Second World War was the final nail in the coffin.
Boarwild, it did. The flower of England was sent to Flanders and turned into rat food. The remnant was mopped up by fighter and bomber command in WWII. We committed national suicide.
Till my last breath, I will mourn them.
Self-inflicted suicide. When the Muslim POCs are running amok slitting throats willy-nilly, we’ll find out just how well Churchill has held up.
“When the Muslim POCs are running amok slitting throats willy-nilly….”
I am not sure even that will work. We will be told, repeatedly, that it is an unfortunate outbreak of mental illness caused by racism and bigotry. And the Brits will buy it.
The male Brits will have no choice but to, at least publicly, buy it or they will go to the gulag. Women will rejoice.
““When the Muslim POCs are running amok slitting throats willy-nilly….”
They already are and there’s been no reaction whatsoever. Kind of how you can walk into a herd of cattle, put two of them down right there in the field, and the other cattle will just stand around watching and chewing.
Like the way little kids act when another kid gets hurt on the playground. They have not yet developed empathy. Leftists have arrested development.
“They already are…”
Not really. This is just the prelude. Read about what the Muslims did in Spain after they took over. It was 200 years of hell.
Churchill was the guy that wanted to use poison gas on German civilians and its very far from certain it was only in defense and was also part of atrocities against the Boer people.
As far as POC crimes go, certainly response has been muted but most are POC on POC and no one cares. Same as here.
Beyond that, we have far better means to rebel than IngSoc over there does and I don’t see anyone in the US doing anything but buying more guns they probably don’t need and whinging on the Internet.
Don’t get me wrong I’m glad of it but don’t expect others to do what you will not.
I saw that video last week. How depressing!
The one silver lining is how nakedly fake it is. It really does surprise me how blatant they are at making people say the most absurd things and treating them with such pomp. Hans Christian Anderson got the ending all wrong. The people did not burst out in laughter at their naked king, they killed the child for wrong think and put his parents in prison in a petting zoo for the tourists to point and shriek.
UK needs to be quarantined. I am sick of their bullshit and frankly, I am sick of all Anglo bullshit. It’s been a disaster for the human race, especially for Europe. And while we are at it, the French should be quarantined too, until they sort themselves out.
Is not Germany just as cucked, Mr. Hun?
They are a little behind. There is still hope for them, if the main offenders are quarantined.
Not so sure about that, Hun. The AfD just had to throw one of its officials under the bus for expressing pride in his Aryan background. Regardless of memes or a tenuous hold on the fringes of the political system, until White people can publicly be proud of their history and ancestry, no former western nation has any future.
@3g4m
Yes, the Germans are cucked too, but the rot is not yet as advanced as in the Anglo world. They also have the Ossies and Austrians to eventually help them recover. It’s not much, but it is something. I am not aware of any Anglo country that isn’t FUBAR.
That’s our (the Allies) fault post-1945. We kicked/shamed/forced too much Prussian spirit out of the Germans so that now you have a bunch of cucks. Been over there & traveled extensively several times; Acting proud of your culture/country is walking a very fine line: too much of it & they call you a Nazi.
Have a girlfriend who lives in Munich; average Germans hate the influx of foreigners but are shamed – by govt/the media – into accepting it because of the Hitler years.
The Nazi years will always be used by the so-called “social engineers” as a cudgel against Germany, among others.
Aren’t you glad that the USA isn’t in similar sorry shape [sarcastic] ? This is a disease of western civilization, not just the Old World.
Exactly, the finger-pointing is absurd. All these countries – UK, US, Canada, Australia, and all of western Europe – are swirling the drain and it’s absurd to say “Britain is diseased, it needs to be quarantined.” Britain ain’t special.
We laugh and point at the UK, but we ignore stuff in our own backyard. But they do the same: the British tabloids may ignore stuff in their own backyard, but they cover the widespread black-on-white violence in the US. I learned about that rampaging black that murdered several whites at a truck stop from the Daily Mail. American media ignored it.
To be fair to the lugenpresse, they do generally cover the black on white violence, they just don’t talk about it as such. A wild pack of “teens” attack a “mom,” a “shopper” or “cyclist” or other such nondescript euphemisms. Even the most blue pill sites notice the teens euphemism.
In fact, people are so good at noticing that the Houston press has said they will stop posting mugshots because it creates and reinforces stereotypes!
https://www.wral.com/wral-news-changing-policy-on-arrest-photo-galleries/19010373/
They did the same thing on BART a few years ago. Again, they didn’t want to be creating and reinforcing the false stereotypes
The picture of crime just isn’t that pretty and if you can’t spin it, well, just don’t report on it. Magically, it goes away.
AH, but our 85IQ friends have this covered! Who needs pictures when the bad guys have names like Da’Qan and La’Trene!
New headline : A Mr D. Smith and L. Doe have been arrested for brazen daytime drive by!
I mentioned the whole Anglo world. The cancer is spreading from there into the other Western countries. Downvotes will not make it any less true. You can blame the hooknosed tribe, but Anglos have agency too, don’t they?
The wrong side won WWI.
except the Anglo descends from the Germanic too. i mean, the Windsors are really Hanovers.
it would be easy for me to blame the Prots + Enlightenment/secularism as the material authors, i’d be mostly right. but the Catholic and Orthodox worlds have their own baggage which helped those philosophies along. Catholics sometimes loved their episcopal/monarchical hierarchies or Marianism too much, Orthodox loved their Caesars/Tsars or icon-filled monasteries too much.
probably also some slight genetics influence: too much Scandinavian passive-aggressive “nice” in the North Sea peoples, too much Berber/African/Semite in the Medi peoples, too much Asiatic in the Steppes/Eastern peoples. all this in a feedback loop with the more negative tribal customs that could not die after Christianization; just few examples: Roman insistence on firstborn inheritance and agrarian values, Germanic insistence on dividing up every single little thing and fighting it out over minerals, Scandinavians thinking up of rights for women while running pillaging and slave rings around Europe, Slavs and their love of serfdom.
and also material developments i guess could influence worldviews and mating choices – for example, the Age of Discovery made whites greedier, and increasingly needier of (((financiers))) btw…
The Baroness Lawrence, what an insufferable twat. Thank God we Americans have no titles of “nobility.” The mothers of Trayvon and Michael, the gentle giant of Ferguson, will have to settle for the Medal of Freedom. The inmates have taken control of the asylum.
I’m not sure The Honorable Nancy Pelosi would agree with you.
Nor would Sir Alan Greenspan.
“I wonder if the same has happened in England.”
It has. Flushed together with everything else except for slavery and WWII.
Do you have any books you would recommend on the English Civil War?
There’s a good podcast called “Revolutions”, whose first series is about the English Civil War.
It’s been several years since I listened, but I remember it being pretty through with an engaging host.
“Britain in Revolution: 1625-1660” by Austin Woolrych is quite recent and is really excellent.
Whitney, I enjoyed Thomas Carlyle’s book On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History. Not strictly about the English civil war but has a long segment about Oliver Cromwell, and you get a flavor for how Carlyle viewed the CW from his vantage point 200 yrs after.
That would be a good subject for a one-topic podcast.
Way back in the misty depths of 1980, while attending grad school in England, I joined the English Civil War Society. It was very much alive back then – we visited battle sites, practiced period dances and crafts, and did living history weekends for the entertainment of the public (I got tolerably good at using a spindle for wool, and kept my mouth shut so as not to give away my national origin).
Which is interesting seeing how the last battle of the English civil war was fought in Maryland of all places. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Severn
Hey – my hometown! Thanks Hoyos – did not know that!!!
One of the interesting things to come out of the English Civil War was that attention was for the first time given to the observation of the effects of “siege diseases”: measles, typhus, plague, infections, malnutrition…on mortality. It was estimated that more than half died from siege diseases and not from wounds received in battle. It was observed that non fatal wounds treated with fresh onions would keep that wound from becoming infected (a death sentence). Onions have an anti-microbial compound that keeps wounds from becoming infected and helps with healing. Onion and garlic juice then became a staple of army med units. It continued to be used through WWII.