What If…

Our British correspondent JP has collected a number of quotations relating to various themes that are swirling around: The Big Lie, Orwellianism, Emperor Obama, etc. He includes this introductory note:

The process that is now underway in the West might be described as Gleichschaltung — a word that is well-known to students of the Third Reich, an umbrella term used to describe the stifling of dissent. Synonymous phrases in our context might be: to make sharia-compliant, render into dhimmitude, make the general population accepting of the Big Lie. If we can put words, even loan words, to processes such as these, we can chip away at the bewilderment so many people experience when faced with the apparent intransigence of politicians and others to recognise what is staring us in the face.

Perhaps Gleichscharisierung would be the right neologism, analogous with Islamisierung — the German word for “Islamization”.

The Wikipedia definition of Gleichschaltung does a good job of describing what I have been trying to get a fix on:

Bringing into line … Among the goals of this policy were to bring about adherence to a specific doctrine and way of thinking and to control as many aspects of life as possible.

Richard J Evans’ translation of the term: forcible coordination.

Islam and Sharia in a nutshell.

What If…

Collected by JP

American Iron Curtain

Only when Americans see the wall, when they sense its shadow over Missouri and Florida, over New York and California, from ocean to ocean and border to border, will they be ready to tear it down.

Arab Spring

There are two narratives of the Arab Spring. In one of them, the people rose up against the tyrants. In the other an international conspiracy of Western and Muslim countries collaborated with the Muslim Brotherhood to take over Arab countries.

~  ~  ~  ~

To the Muslim Brotherhood, democratization means the same thing that a plane ticket does to their Al Qaeda splinter group. A Muslim Brotherhood Supreme Guide was once quoted as saying, “Democracy is like a pair of slippers that we wear until we reach the bathroom, and then we take them off.” The Brotherhood was booted out of power because it decided that Egypt was already in the toilet and that it could take off its democracy slippers prematurely.

Big Lie

In the minds of that paper’s editors [Aftenposten], the impulse to appease would seem to have become utterly reflexive — along with the ability to deny effectively, even to themselves, in precisely the way Orwell outlines, that they’re acting on such an impulse.

~  ~  ~  ~

Non-recognition of reality is the first principle.

~  ~  ~  ~

Being human, politicians lie. Even in the best regimes. The distinguishing feature of totalitarian regimes however, is that they are built on words that the rulers know to be false, and on somehow constraining the people to speak and act as if the lies were true. Thus the people hold up the regime by partnering in its lies. Thus, when we use language that is “politically correct” — when we speak words acceptable to the regime even if unfaithful to reality — or when we don’t call out politicians who lie to our faces, we take part in degrading America.

~  ~  ~  ~

Like a band that only knows one song, politicians only know one response to Islamic terrorism.

Central Planning

The moral argument for freedom is the self-organizing principle of individuals. The moral argument for compulsion is that the system is superior to individuals. The left has chosen central planning in human rights as it has in every other area of life. It believes with the paradoxical perversity of doublethink that freedom can only come from government because only a central authority is qualified to provide the equal distribution of freedom within carefully planned limits.

This abrogation of freedom is the logical end result of the left’s entire pattern of reasoning which rejects the individual for the collective, the working man for the planner and the people for the ideological expert. These forms of repression are expressions of its rotten notion that the left may do anything and everything in the name of freedom except actually allow the people to be free.

Church and State

The United States is following the European course of rendering the distinction between the state and the church irrelevant by making the state into the church and mandating that everyone worship it. As in 19th century Europe, deliberate clashes are being stirred up between the values of the state and religious values for the purpose of demonstrating that the values of the state are supreme.

Colonization

The UK is filled with Pakistani, Afghani and Somali settlers who live by the values of their home countries and inflict those values on the natives as they colonize the physical and social territory of the United Kingdom.

~  ~  ~  ~

We are now on the cusp of colonization by an imperial juggernaut that has found a winning strategy: not confrontation but infiltration. It need no longer frontally assault the gates of Vienna; it enters the civil nexus and the body politic surreptitiously, taking out citizenship as a way of taking out the opposition. Terror, for all the devastation it wreaks, is merely a tactic that accompanies this larger strategy. And we who are Islam’s victims are really, for the most part, its collaborators, for if we are to be defeated, then we will have defeated ourselves, succumbing to our own weakness and obsequiousness, or to an erroneous calculation of where our interests lie.

Conformity

The “security” of Liberal Newspeak comes from that sense of mutual identity through conformity. Everyone has access, community and shares their concerns which are all about conformity. It’s an unbroken loop of reassuring gibberish punctuated by bursts of anger at outsiders who are not part of the hive and don’t understand how important community access and engaged listening really are.

Conspiracy

The real conspiracy is the Open Conspiracy, it’s completely out there.

~  ~  ~  ~

Sometimes a conspiracy theory exposes a conspiracy. Sometimes the conspiracy theory is the conspiracy.

Dark Age

It should not be forgotten that previous dark ages were limited geographically, a future one may not be. In the past, enlightenment in one part of the world helped end a dark ages in another. But in the age of globalization this may prove much more difficult. Hence, the stakes today are higher than they have ever been. So, following Mansfield one may ask, shall we go backwards? Shall free institutions fall? Shall the world and its hopes fall with us? In other words, will the Dark ages return?

~  ~  ~  ~

We may agree or disagree, but at the present juncture, there can be little doubt that an Islamic volkswanderung is well on the way to completing its mission of Musliming our teetering democracies, and a new “Dark Age” is looming on the western horizon.

Diversity

There is nothing diverse about a diversity that collectivizes the experience of every individual to ensure mass conformity even in the industrialization of celebration.

~  ~  ~  ~

The left liberals who think that respect for diversity is the recipe for their tolerant paradise on earth will soon come up against the hard reality of the culture war where the Islamists merely use our tolerance, until they get power — and then will end all diversity representation just like they will end all tolerance.

Freedom of Religion

We didn’t ban the Communist party, but we should have. Freedom of Religion is absolute, but it does exist on the assumption that the religion in question is not a criminal ideology dedicated to the destruction of the United States. And that is exactly what Islam, like Nazism or Communism is. Freedom of Religion was meant to protect religious freedom, not protect religious terrorism.

~  ~  ~  ~

It [the mosque] is probably the most insinuatingly effective weapon in the Islamic arsenal that threatens the faltering integrity of a once virile and self-confident culture. Weakening the host culture against the assault on its cohesiveness and longevity are the elitist, self-proclaimed guardians and promoters of what they regard as cultural propriety, aka the multicultural swindle that erodes national coherence. The scourge of Islamic supremacist doctrine and practice, operating under the phony rubric of “religious freedom,” should be resisted at every turn.

Freedom of Speech

The first line of offense by a totalitarian society against freedom of speech is crowdsourced to the people in the streets. It begins with the imposition of a social norm, escalates to punishments for violating that norm and concludes with gulags and firing squads.

Ideal

Liberalism, progressivism and the various names by which the modern left identifies and is identified is the belief that the ideal can and must be made real. That anything short of the ideal is a savage state of repression, tyranny, patriarchy, fascism and the whole litany of crimes against ideal humanity. […] The ideal is slain by the real…

The secular god of the progressive ideal has become an entity of life, death and rebirth. Its failures only incite its followers to believe that it will come again. It does not matter how many gulags and mass graves lie in its wake. It is a matter of faith. And in a secular world, there is nothing left to believe in except a better world.

Imperial Presidency

Of all the troubling aspects of the Obama presidency, none is more dangerous than the president’s persistent pattern of lawlessness, his willingness to disregard the written law and instead enforce his own policies via executive fiat. On Monday, Mr. Obama acted unilaterally to raise the minimum wage paid by federal contracts, the first of many executive actions the White House promised would be a theme of his State of the Union address Tuesday night

Islam

[I]t insists on being a public religion because theocracy is what it was built to do. Islam was not the religion of the oppressed. It was the religion of the oppressors. It equates morality with authority. If it doesn’t control the public square, then it has no function.

~  ~  ~  ~

Islam is a religion of Peace. That is as certain as the three slogans of the Ministry of Truth; War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery and Ignorance is Strength. […]

George Orwell struggled to publish Animal Farm because no one wanted to hear anything negative about Stalin and the Soviet Union. Today, Islam and the Caliphate have taken the place of Communism and the Soviet Union. The new Doublethinkers of the left have drafted Orwell into their Ministry of Truth that claims Islam is a religion of peace, that the Freedom and Justice Party of the Muslim Brotherhood does not stand for the enslavement of half the population and that ignorance of these things is not a weakness, but a strength.

~  ~  ~  ~

Islam, like the left, pursues the ideal at gunpoint and destroys its followers and the ideal in the process leaving behind obscenity and abomination. By the time it’s all over, what is, is worse than what was. Not only is the ideal unmet, but the real has been defiled beyond all imagination.

~  ~  ~  ~

And what is the source of Islam’s power? Comedy Central reminds us of that again. Its power is simple enough. Its followers are more willing to kill those who resist, than those who are not its followers are willing to resist them.

~  ~  ~  ~

The operation of “stealth jihad” coupled with the “rule of numbers” — predicated on the unwillingness of Western leaders to recognize the enormity of what is transpiring, and the self-delusion or ignorance of the majority of ordinary citizens — together render the coming hegemony of triumphalist Islam entirely probable.

Islamerica

Obama has claimed that the United States is “one of the largest Muslim countries in the world.” While the actual number of Muslims is in dispute, Islamerica is no match for Eurabia or Eurasia.

Israel

Young Israeli men today, young Israeli Women today, are fighting for our freedom, are fighting for our civilization, and like Bosnia, like Kosovo, like Nigeria, like Sudan, like the Caucasus, like Kashmir, like Southern Thailand, like Western China and the South of the Philippines, Israel is situated exactly on the dividing line between Dar al-Islam, the Islamic World and Da al-Harb the non-Islamic World. It is no coincidence that it is precisely this dividing line, where blood is flowing and war is raging in many many areas.

Jihad

Jihad isn’t an act of violence; it’s an act of faith.

Left

The big point about Obama is that he is the incarnation of the left. A very pure incarnation. The rest follows from that. The left doesn’t follow laws. It doesn’t compromise. It has no regard for any external ethics other than its own. Its goal is absolute power.

~  ~  ~  ~

The left cannot escape its own materialism. Its attempts at adding an ethical dimension to materialism fail because its ethical dimension is still materialistic. Its pathetic efforts at injecting pastiches of Third World and minority spirituality into its politics to provide the illusion of a spiritual dimension are hollow and racist. The left cannot fill its own hole, because it is the hole.

Like Islam, it provides something for people to believe in, but the thing it provides is the compulsion to find meaning by forcibly remaking other people’s lives in a perpetual revolution which becomes its own purpose.

Liberal Intelligence

Liberal intelligence exists on the illusion of its self-worth. The magical thinking that guides it in every other area from economics to diplomacy also convinces it that if it believes it is smart, that it will be. The impenetrable liberal consensus in every area is based on this delusion of intelligence. Every policy is right because it’s smart and it’s smart because it’s progressive and it’s progressive because smart progressives say that it is. Progressives manufacture the consensus of their own intelligence and insist that it proves them right.

Liberals

Liberals don’t believe that the people they lie to are their equals. If they did, not only wouldn’t they lie to them, but they wouldn’t subscribe to a skewed leftist take on liberalism that compels them to take away choices from people for their own good.

Moderate Islam

Both the moderates and the extremists are Islamists. They both want an Islam that is a public religion. And that is not only a public religion, but the public religion. It is not only the extremism of means by those who wish to make Islam into the religion of the state rapidly and violently that ought to concern Cameron; but it is also the extremism of ends that is Islam regardless of whether its rule is achieved by the bomb or the ballot box that ought to worry him.

~  ~  ~  ~

Distinguishing moderate and extreme Muslims is as useful as making distinctions between moderate and extreme Nazis and Communists. These distinctions did and do exist, but they are less relevant in the context of an overall ideology whose goals are war, dominance and subjugation.

Mosque

[A] mosque is not like a church, synagogue or temple; it is “a center of power used for political and military purposes.” Studies have shown that a large majority of mosques act as recruitment hubs for jihad, foster the imposition of Sharia law, and labor to drive a sanctified wedge between Muslims and non-Muslims. For Islam, which makes no distinction between church and state, between the things which are God’s and the things which are Caesar’s, between synod and politburo, is not a religion like Christianity or Judaism; it is a political movement garbed in the trappings of a religion, or alternately, a religion whose primary agenda is the conquest of the world through political, cultural and military means.

~  ~  ~  ~

One mosque in Europe is worse than nuclear.

Muslim

“We must close the door before they Muslim this country too.” For him, the word “Muslim” has become a verb.

~  ~  ~  ~

While Western societies in general define a good person as being open and tolerant, Muslims are told that they are superior to non-Muslims, destined to dominate non-Muslims, and that they must distance themselves socially and emotionally from non-Muslims. The many hateful and dehumanising verses in the Quran and the Hadiths against non-Muslims closely resemble the psychological propaganda that leaders use against their own people in order to prepare them mentally for fighting and killing the enemy. Killing another person is easier if you hate him and do not perceive him as fully human.

Obama

Let me begin with a categorical statement that, given current events and recent political history, can be easily defended: Barack Hussein Obama is a wilful, indoctrinated child of the Left with strong Islamic sympathies who is not fit to govern.

~  ~  ~  ~

Obama isn’t a normal politician; Chuck Schumer and Lindsay Graham are normal politicians. They annoy us because they’re so transparently from the same planet as us. We and they have the same touchstones for fact, meaning, mendacity, excess. Frankly, I suspected back in 2007 that this wasn’t the case with Obama — and then he went to Berlin for his Riefenstahl moment, and set up Grecian columns to frame himself in Denver, and I was sure of it. Common sense enables us to recognize that Obama is an outlier. We don’t have to rethink our comfortably cynical ideas about politics and politicians because of Obama. But quite a few of us probably need to rethink Obama.

~  ~  ~  ~

I’ve got a pen, and I’ve got a phone.”

~  ~  ~  ~

The liberal media manipulates its readers, listeners and viewers the same way that liberal governments manipulate their citizens. Unlike Clinton’s lie, Obama’s lie was not one man’s mistake, but a movement’s arrogance. And not only hasn’t Obama stopped lying about his lie, but the media and the rest of his movement haven’t stopped lying about his lie.

~  ~  ~  ~

I can do whatever I want.”

He believes that ObamaCare will work because socialized medicine is on the right side of history and the free market is on the wrong side of history. It is this faith in a radical muse of history that will fix websites, soothe terrorists and calm the angry peasants that moves him from one disaster to another.

~  ~  ~  ~

Ideology drives the Obama agenda. And American allies, like Americans, are expected to be grateful for the privilege of sacrificing their own interests for his political agenda. It hasn’t worked out that way in the real world. The millions of Americans who work for a living may have no other option but to endure the depredations of a radical activist, but American allies have begun making different arrangements.

~  ~  ~  ~

The Obama administration’s indictment of critic Dinesh D’Souza on campaign finance law violations is a reminder that it’s dangerous to be in the opposition when the president is a lawless strongman who knows the media will protect him no matter what.

~  ~  ~  ~

And what is his modus operandi? “Obama,” writes Dinesh D’Souza in Obama’s America: Unmaking the American Dream, published just prior to the 2012 election, “is possessed of a certain low cunning that makes him politically formidable. Obama’s skill…is to figure out what the American people want to see and hear, and then give it to them, while doing something entirely different.”

~  ~  ~  ~

What I’m describing here is the classic tin-pot dictatorship. We never thought it could happen here, and yet, here it is. It’s taken a while. Those of us in this room knew what was going on from the beginning before he was even elected president, but now it’s starting to dawn on more and more people what is really happening here.

Open System — Closed System

In an open system, you choose the life you live. In a closed system, your life is mandated for you. An open system believes in the genius of the individual while the closed system believes in the genius of the visionaries of the ideology and the moral purity of the bureaucrats who implement it.

Orwellianism

No question about it: Orwell was the prophet of our times. But did he ever imagine that Orwellianism would begin to take serious root in the West not as an outgrowth of European fascism and Communism but as a cowardly response to the religion of Muhammed?

Right Side of History

“As frustrating as HealthCare.gov may be sometimes,” Obama told ObamaCare navigators and volunteers. “We’re on the right side of history.”

Soros Socialists

They are the “Soros Socialists,” successful people who want to stay rich and powerful. They do this by espousing social programs and making pronouncements, few of which affect them even minimally. But they have the image of being generous egalitarians and the image is all. It prevents them (their power and greed) from being scrutinized by others — and even more importantly it can prevent them from scrutinizing themselves.

Statist Collectivism

The larger truth is that statist collectivism is the Thing out there that is all about lies. In an important sense, this isn’t about Obama; it’s about what is inevitably involved when an idea of statism seeks to take over our lives. If it hadn’t been the person Barack Obama, it would have been someone else. A bottomless well of lies stretching all the way down to a dark underworld of fear and death is what statist collectivism offers. Few peoples have had the warning period we have, in which to watch a lengthy, surreal panorama of lies unfolding in slow motion while we are still standing aboveground, in the light.

Tolerance

When ordinary Americans talk about tolerance, they mean tolerance. When the left talks about tolerance, it means intolerance.

Totalitarianism

Totalitarianism relies on harnessing the darker emotions in the human catalog; fear, sadism, hate, contempt and the sense of power that derives from causing harm to another beneath the mask of the self-righteous inquistioner whose moral authority allows him to both inflict and enjoy the torment.

~  ~  ~  ~

America is drifting into totalitarianism because of the left’s exploitation of social failures. The critical mass of social breakdowns, from gang violence to terrorism to poverty, justify the nanny state, the police state and all the other totalitarian states of authority. When there is nothing and no one else to trust, a failed society turns to a tyrant who can cut through all the red tape and govern with pen and phone.

~  ~  ~  ~

Solzhenitsyn showed that totalitarianism works by leading people to take part in the regime’s lies, and that it does so mostly by a host of petty incentives. Then he wrote: “the simplest and most accessible key to our self-neglected liberation lies right here: Personal non-participation in lies. Though lies conceal everything, though lies embrace everything, but not with any help from me.”

Warrior’s Tale

An army of millions is worth little, without the warrior’s tale. Strategy is technique, firepower is capacity, both begin and end with the human mind. “Why do we fight,” is the question that the warrior’s tale answers far better than any politician could. “We fight because this is ours. It is our honour, our duty and our war. We have been fighting for hundreds and thousands of years. This is what makes us who we are.”

Western Elites

For Western elites, Islamic acts of terror are not an outrage, but an inconvenience, that upsets the public and makes it harder to push forward on the larger agenda of integrating the Muslim world into the modern world through immigration and democratization.

What if?

Another answer to the “What if?” question is this one: it means human government can, in fact, be hijacked and perverted — even when we’re the ones who cast the votes on it, and even when the chief executive is brought to power by the means specified in the U.S. Constitution. Yes, we can be deceived. The most highly credentialed among us can be the most deceived of all. This is as good a time as any to take that to heart.

~  ~  ~  ~

Great damage has been done. Consider for a moment that whatever theories we have about Obama, whatever prevarications and deceptions of which we are aware or unaware, are known equally to our adversaries — the intelligence agencies of China, Russia and Iran. Even if they were too dumb to figure it out for themselves, which they’re not, they read our newspapers and blogs.

These totalitarian — or near totalitarian, depending on how you want to parse it — states depend on lies for their existence. In Obama they have found a partner in crime, a semblable, as Baudelaire would say. They are currently exploiting this. In all likelihood our world will never be the same. This is no cause for celebration by any American.

36 thoughts on “What If…

  1. Totalitarianism is a mental illness.Psychopaths-sociopaths-personality disorders….Of this fact I am utterly convinced…

    • On a meta level, you’re right. But on the level of individual decision, the choices that the totalitarians present to the average low-information sportster seem reasonable enough.

      Mainly because it’s easier to go along than to think.

      Ask the average person if they themselves are tolerant and they’ll assure you – perhaps in offended tones that you might even think they’re not – that they are their friends are indeed tolerant and that tolerance is the summum bonum for everyone.

      Umm…everyone except for those extremists, perhaps. But we all know how they are. And the authorities will put those people where they belong.

      • OTOH, get them started on their favorite football team and who the likely contenders are. The passion, the partisan faith, the absolutes will flow forth. Or froth forth…

        Just be sure to stand out of arm’s reach. Or is that ‘spittle-reach’?

  2. Let me congratulate the author of this, and what I would consider, a comprehensive summation of what troubles the West and America in particular.

    Digesting what has been put up leaves one with the realization that politically speaking, there will be no magic political panaceas to alter or to even reverse what has now been set in play by those who care little for their own kind.

    Those who have done this to us, and who have no wish to accompany them on their long march to a soul less existence, and thence to oblivion, will leave no stone unturned in their desire to retain what they have so far achieved. It is now so very obvious there can be no peaceful resolution or even if it comes to it, a compromise, because Totalitarians and Collectivists like Islam, have no tolerance for those who do not share their ideals.

    All that now remains to ponder is – will it be a slow process like it has been up until now so that the end arrives before we even realize it, or will it be series of fight backs through revolutions and civil wars that may erupt at any time from now?

  3. Thanks, great resource with many fantastic links to places I never went to. Bookmarked.

    Reading this, I once more realized how deeply cultural Marxism has advanced in its project of erasing Western civilization. The populace is so far gone – through (mal-)education, through the unanimist media, and through what now are learned reflexes, that this nexus of concepts shown here is literally irreversible.

    The difference between what is happening now in the West and the Big Lie of the Soviets is that here, the populace (through mal-education, media indoctrination and the snobbism of holding “enlightened” opinions on a certain foreign religion) is so far gone that they actually believe the lie. Being no expert on the old Soviet Union, I still suppose that there were people who believed the Lie back then.

    Even in Canada – you get genuinely frightened when you hear some people say one of the Big Lies and believe it. The other day, I was passing by a TV set and a talking head was saying, in French, that “Obama is a great hope for mankind, he has done marvels for the US and it’s a shame we have Harper here instead.” Needless to say, that language denotes an refusal of reality that is so profound that one can doubt whether one could awake from it. That person in Canada was unconsequential, but what untold millions hold the same views?

    How many of us can see through the Big Lie? At what point is a critical mass of disbelievers is reached so that the Evil Empire crumbles?

    May I go out on a limb and say that a secret society must be created, that would take action behind the scenes? Or, as the previous poster wrote, is the end -slow or quick – inevitable?

    • Secret societies simply give your oppressors further room to take action. Individuals making their own decisions will give us more enduring change in the long run…as much in what they refuse to do as in any positive action.

    • The Roman empire must have felt much like this, especially as it morphed from Senate to Caesar to Praetorian Guard backed Flavians though to the Pontiffs and pan-European feudalism.

      That Feudal stage lasted hundreds of years and was ‘multicultural’, it was finally bought low by an ‘act of God’ – The Black Death.

      The “bread and circuses” proto-Nazism of Rome and the sinister influences of the Praetorian Guard would fit very well into the modern political scenario. Emperor Barak Hussein oNero out on the Royal Golf Links whilst Washington burns and the Christians are routed.

      Et Tu Lyndon!

  4. What If…

    There is no ideological prime motivators and all is the incidental toxic by-product of a morally bankrupt laissez-faire economic environment.

    • Can you source this wonderment? Obviously your attack is on laissez-faire economic theory and praxis. Care to offer a proven alternative? Laissez-faire capitalism is one of those things that has never been tried either since it is regulated.

      • A morally bankrupt laissez-faire economic environment – do you have a better description of the moral bankruptcy of the self-styled Masters of the Universe and the fraud and corruption of the financial institutions.

        • I thought you’d say that. Sigh.

          Laissez-faire capitalism is NOT what is going on now. If you think so, you are sadly misinformed. Try reading Frederic Bastiat if you want to see how it would work if it existed.

          • Did not say it was laissez-faire capitalism, said it was a morally bankrupt laissez-faire economic environment with the intended emphasis being on morally bankrupt. Can not be denied that the Masters of the Universe self identify as laissez-faire adherents.

        • I thought you’d say that…or something similar. Sigh.

          Yes, I do have a better description of what is currently ruining free enterprise. It’s called crony capitalism.

          There isn’t a scintilla of laissez-faire capitalism in C.C., which has the run of the place and will eventually lead to our ruin.

          It would appear that your pov is drawn from the usual socialist squint on economic theory and no matter how often reality punctures that balloon, True Believers insist on attempting to make it fly whilst misnaming reality.

          This is more accurate:

          Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest and Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics

          Or try this one, by Frederic Bastiat:

          The Law (Illustrated)

          That one is a dollar on Amazon. The UK version is probably as cheap.

          Bastiat travelled to England to understand how the Corn Laws had affected that country. He was anxious to avoid having that particular plague visit France.

          http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_Laws

          Tariffs probably served as the catalyst for America’s entry into the first Great Depression. They are always bad economics but the fearful – those who operate out of a sense of scarcity, or the get-rich-quick fraudsters, perennially insist that they are “good for business”. Translated, that means “good for me”.

          Our current situation is more internal at first glance, due to the legal fraud enacted by the banksters combined with the efforts of government & legislators to ensure their friends’ sale of a lot of real estate – often “bundling” those mortgages and selling over and over again… Now that the bubble has burst there is money to be made in, guess what?…destroying all those houses. Knocking them down and hauling off the remains.

          None of that even slightly resembles laissez-faire capitalism. Time to put down your Marx & Co and start reading real economists, not that envious fellow who never held a job in his life and lived off the largesse of his capitalist friends and their families. Oh wait. I just described our current Marxist socialist – Obama.

          NOTE: this is an old, old conversation. Since you began it, by all means have the last word. I don’t have the energy to reason with ideas which weren’t reached via Reason. Have to conserve what energy I have left.

          • @Dymphna,

            Sympathise with and understand your rage those pseudo laissez-faire crony capitalists of the Thatcher\Blair era have brought laissez-faire economics into disrepute probably for several generations.

            Please refrain from hitting the shortcut keys. 🙂

          • It’s always hard to read another’s feeling states online.

            Thus, I don’t feel rage toward the criminals in charge; they do what they do and have always done any chance they get. The rare honest politician is refreshing.

            However it’s important to call the productivity-killers by their right names. Just putting pseudo in front of laissez-faire doesn’t make the accusation more accurate; it creates a mirage. If you won’t read the economists, try the novelists: Nevil Shute’s comparisons between Australia post WWII and the grey poverty extant in socialist Britain after the war are telling.

            A Town Like Alice (Vintage International)
            The changes have lasted down the years and are obvious even now. Australia refused to listen to the siren-song of socialism, becoming prosperous and abundant. When that former prime minister (have forgotten her name) imposed an energy tax, Oz got busy and booted her. Now that killing tax is being rescinded – or soon will be, and Oz will remain prosperous.

            There are times I really wish we had a parliamentary form of government. This “two party” version of Dumb & Dumber is dragging us into the depths.

            Thatcher did some things right but like Reagan she was too hemmed in by the regulators who cripple free enterprise and the entrepreneurial spirit because they operate from a sense of scarcity and a profound mistrust of human creativity. Instead of cutting government as he’d promised, Reagan actually added another bureaucracy. Shameful.

            Socialists have never trusted free markets and as soon as they get the opportunity they begin skewing them. The first way to skew them is to call them something other than what they are. Socialism says government knows best; libertarianism says the less government the better.

            The latest example of socialism’s failure is Venezuela. Wretchard, my mentor, has a brilliant post-mortem:

            The suddenness of Venezuela’s collapse should have come as no surprise because downfalls are inherently abrupt. Collapse is a phase change. One moment something is sailing along fat, dumb and happy and the next moment it is sinking beneath the waves. The change from two to one is a loss of 50%; but the change from one to zero is binary.
            […]
            A society can survive the loss of things, but it cannot survive without institutions or the destruction of culture. Culture is to nations what an immune system is to people. Nations under siege fall back on some atavistic condition. Thus, occupied Poland becomes more Catholic, as does Ireland, and as Egypt perhaps becomes more Muslim. They fall back on the known and the comforting. City Hall might collapse and the factory temporarily closed but if culture and identity survive these things can be reopened again.

            The apocalypse of Syria means that many people don’t even want to reopen things any more. They hate their neighbors, individually and collectively.

            The genius of the Left — Chavez’s for example — is that it destroys things from the inside out. They pervert religion, collapse the mores, abolish the family, shred the constitution and gradually expropriate the property. The differences from one day to the next are apparently imperceptible, but it is harder and harder to go back until finally there is no reversal of ‘progressive gains’ possible at all. The public is finally faced with the stark choice between chaos or authoritarianism. And most people will chose the Boss over the Mob.
            […]
            One reason why Japan recovered relatively quickly after the Second World War was while the massive aerial assault leveled Japan’s cities it did not destroy the cultural and social institutions of Japan. When the smoke cleared the Japanese were still there and they rebuilt. By contrast destroying culture is so much more lethal. Detroit was untouched by the war. Not a bomb fell on it. But years of public education worked their magic. It dismantled the culture and social institutions which once built its factories. Time [magazine] reports Detroit had posted the lowest math scores in the history of the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

            http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2014/02/13/postmortem/

            ?Hitting the shortcut keys? I don’t understand…

  5. God, this is a depressing article, more so because I can’t find much to dispute about the author’s case, apart from details here and there.

    Leaving aside the chief danger concerning us all, Islamism and its enablers, do readers see any chance of removing corrupt, crony capitalism, and trying to make some version of the laissez-faire version work? With, of course, necessary safeguards to prevent such ills as pollution and the exploitation of the unempowered.

    • It is the ‘safeguards’ that destroy Laissez faire because government and regulation are the real evils. Communist states have a terrible pollution and exploitation records.

      Under Laissez Faire, the polluters would be liable for the pollution, and the directors of the companies doing the polluting would be liable down to their last penny, and also face prison sentances if criminality is involved, no hiding behind limited liabilities etc.

      Exploitation? this is a relative term like ‘poor’, what is needed is enablement, when ‘poverty’ becomes a local problem, it can be dealt with in the community without hoards of government employees as parasites of the system. Unemployment (as opposed to sheer laziness) was almost unknown until governments destroyed ‘domestic service’ by imposing employment taxes. In a full employment scenario (with no artificial importing of cheap immigrant labour), wages have to be competitive.

      It is C.C. that needs unemployment and poverty to leverage its exploitation. Such things as Working Mothers (cheap labour) and ‘tax credits’ (in reality state subsidies to employers) are nasty side effects of C.C. and doing massive harm.

      • “safeguards”?? Lovely.

        I quit a social services position with loverly benefits because the work was corrupt, a scam.

        Middle-class people doling out niggardly ‘benefits’ to the ‘stakeholders’…It was a way to keep an increasingly unproductive middle class employed.

        My next job, cleaning houses, was wonderful. Made my own hours, listened to music on my ipod – in fact, eventually listened to all of Jane Austen’s works – and got a better rate of pay than I had doing “social “work”. My customers were grateful and happy and I got lots of exercise.

        There is great joy to be had in creating order.

        • I completely understand your joy in housecleaning. It’s dignified work that makes things better for other people, and like most jobs it can be done well or poorly, joyfully or resentfully.

          There’s a great poverty of spirit in looking down upon any work that you or other people want or need to have done.

          • Being a housecleaner is NOT a high-status job. Thus it was sometimes necessary to set boundaries for those who ask for such services; many of them viewed not only the work as demeaning but the person choosing to do it as somehow an object of scorn and/or pity. Some people whose houses I cleaned or whose meals I cooked (I am a brilliant cook) wanted to help me find more prestigious work. It was hard to make them understand how freeing I found the labor. A few even offered to hire me as their office manager- which would have put me right back in office politics with all its attendant woes.

            That period of working by myself was an enlightening one and quite creative: I did some of my best writing then. It wasn’t my “best-job-ever” but it was up there among the top. I miss being able to work so productively.

      • Imagine there was a time in England when ‘domestic service’ was dignified and recognised, a place where the employer’s portrait hung side by side with the employee’s.

        When did that transaction move into the upstairs – downstairs construct of master and slave, was that political mindset of servitude an influence of travels abroad and encounters with an “excotic and romantic” religion?

        • In caste-paralyzed England there was never a time when domestic service was dignified. We could perhaps make an exception for Churchill’s nanny, whom he loved and whose picture he kept at his bedside table.

          I have often puzzled over the destructive class system in Britain. Those of you who know England’s history better than I- did it date back to the Norman invasion, when the language eventually bifurcated into high and low words, for eample in denoting the foods allowed to the lower orders and the ones only the upper classes could have?

          Over here, I notice that hunters offer to share their deer meat while restaurants have venison on the menu. The hunters sneer at the pretension, but any restaurant knows that calling these victuals “deer meat” will make their customers envision the death of Bambi’s mother so don’t-even-go-there.

          But back in, say, the 12th century, before the Black Death came and raised the level for whatever peasants survived the horror, did the Norman language borrowings get set in stone? The mansion vs the house…?

          • Even as late as the late 19th century good, well trained servants; Butlers, cooks and housekeepers were much sought after and were paid well.

            Some of my aunts were in service, as was my grandmother and her mother; they used to talk about it occasionally. The stigma was only really a 20th century thing. Before that it was what one did….

            Of course there were good positions and bad positions to be had, and one only reads about the extremes. Most were just mundane, and with no iPods…..

          • Even an iPod doesn’t lift the work out of the mundane, thank heavens. There has to be necessary work that makes the world go ’round a bit more smoothly but on whose performance there hangs no crucial matter…

            Thus, a perfectly folded pile of laundry makes my heart sing, but others find lyrical meaning via different employments.

      • MC- With respect and admiration for Dymphna (& others) below (I hate cleaning!), can you name a society/period in which true laissez-faire capitalism has been tried, without adverse effects? Off the top of my head, I think of Victorian England, where small boys were sent up chimneys to clean them, or modern Singapore, where media criticism of the status quo is censored- not ideal examples with which to make your case.

        Making polluters personally financially responsible for ills such as pollution would mean removing limited liability, without which the expansion of capitalism could never have taken place.

        Unemployment is not a new phenomenon; I believe you’ve lived in England, so have probably heard of workhouses.

        Apologies for the delay in responding; I was ill yesterday, and am catching up.

  6. “There are two narratives of the Arab Spring. In one of them, the people rose up against the tyrants. In the other an international conspiracy of Western and Muslim countries collaborated with the Muslim Brotherhood to take over Arab countries.”

    Yes; these reflect the two “wings” Breivik wrote about: the latter being the wing Breivik feels ideologically closer to (even if some of their emphases vary somewhat from his). I reject this wing as conspiratorial and irrational, if not afflicted with aspects of Gnosticism.

  7. Wonder if Churchill putting his sentimentality aside would have recognised their relationship as the product of a master and slave construct of domestic servitude.

    • I wonder if Churchill’s love for this mother figure, and her devotion to him, permitted him to live a life far above the level of his parents’ woeful existence.

      • Elizabeth Anne Everest, of that strong Christian influence there is no doubt that it was Churchill’s saving grace.

  8. I truly believe that the most perverted word in America these days is “tolerance” in that it has lost its original meaning. What used to mean “I may not like it but I will put up with it” now means “I better agree with everything he or she says or is.” To me it means this: “I can tolerate a bit of pain, but it doesn’t mean I like it.”

    • Not just in America. Anthony Daniels, a British psychiatrist who often treated the lowest of the low “yobs” for various psychiatric ailments, said in one of his books that the virtue about which this group most prided itself was…”tolerance”. Of course that was ten years or more ago and he’s retired now. There may be a new public virtue that cries for easy allegiance.

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