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Essays, Opinion, & Commentary |
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March 7, 2008
by Eugene E. Narrett, Ph.D.
"A social system based on lies will bring ruin to mankind more than any overtly brutal force…the most dangerous symptom of moral corruption is the depravity of human speech… whatever is done nowadays ostensibly for the common good is actually motivated by clever calculation of the advantages such acts will bring to those initiating them…[1] Few are more cruel than those endlessly prating about "compassion"; few more intolerant than those forever prating, and enforcing codes about tolerance and diversity. Corruption of language marches together with corruption of youth, families, social relations, law and the Constitution itself. Communists are masters of grandiloquent promises of utopian beneficence that actually "banish faith, honesty, compassion, [and] the sense of what is proper" [2]. The destruction of tradition, norms, the very sense and honor of 'the traditional' has been destroyed by Gramscian Communism's "revaluation of values" that reaches its peak in post-modern dogma that all meaning is "a social construct." In effect, this means that nothing is true or legal except what those in power say it is: as Humpty Dumpty told Alice, "the [only real] question is 'who is the master,' that's all." To know where we are today, insert mistress for master and one sees how the world goes. That's what happens when Darwinism becomes dogma and the "survival of the fittest" the implicit creed of society, with fittest meaning those most able to speak smoothly and crush those who dissent from the idea that human beings are simply clever animals. Once "speech has been polished" in postmodern fashion, shaved of context, history and tradition one gets the "power knowledge" of Francis Bacon and Machiavelli's focus on appearances, perception and the control of same: that is, the dominance of "spin" over any comment, word or question that might lead to some truth. Spin polishes words and expressions "to the extent that they offer no firm foundation for anything"; words lose their meanings, "things fall apart; the center cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed; and everywhere, the ceremony of innocence is drowned" [3]. With these verses, Yeats described the entire trajectory of modern and post-modern culture, high and low, the courts, public 'education,' the Culturetainment industry and the corruption of language that pervades and fuses all events in thoughtless conformity. Before examining the hypnotic, omnipresent chant-words, "liberal" and "conservative" and offering a simple graph to help rouse us from the slumber on which the corruption preys, consider another quote relevant to the dilemmas of our days: "You begin to liquidate a people by taking away its memory. You destroy its books, its culture and, its history. Then others write books for it, give another culture to it, invent another history for it; the people slowly begins to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it forgets still faster." [4] Forgetting, denial, revaluation, re-education, "sensitivity training," "anger management" for those who dare speak out, however intelligibly when they or theirs are wronged; at the higher levels, "counter-factual history" as a ticket to tenure; re-imagining the past, newer, ever more degraded forms of replacement theology: theosophy, New Age, the Elder Faith, gender-neutral language and harangues against boys, 'death education,' offspring of the eugenicists and population controllers who desolate seed, turn peace to war, and then destroy the meaning of war with 'wars' on drugs, of terror, and other convenient fictions of enslavement... the power lusts of those who believe the State is god and that they are the State; who believe, ultimately, that they are god. Study of the great texts of the past, teaching them, remembering, maintaining compassion and a pre-modern sense of right and wrong: these are the saving graces of this darkening day. And so we come to those terms of enchantment, "liberal" and "conservative." The more the ideas, behaviors, attitudes and policies they represent are destroyed and effectively banned, the more these terms are drummed into our heads by the sorcerers of the fascist collective. As preface to considering them, I add that this was the key point dramatized by Huxley in Brave New World and Orwell in 1984: it essentially is the Communist dogma that any thought, word or deed that does not assert the official truths (which are lies) of "the Party," the one party that rules us too, almost completely, is "thought crime." Hence the need for "double think," self-hatred and fear, the seedbed for cruelty. Trust becomes impossible, terror omnipresent: this is the goal of those who rule. Thus the need to preserve and defend the simplest relationships and the words and truths rooted in them… The "liberal and conservative commentators" and all those who bandy about those terms, everyone involved with politics in the media "utter vanities to one another, smooth speech from a double heart" (psalm 12:3). Here's the graph from 'left' to 'right': Communist -- Corporate Collectivist -- Socialist -- Progressive -- Fascist -- Social Democrat -- Liberal -- Conservative -- Jeffersonian -- Revolutionary. These all are adjectives describing attitudes, policies, habits and categories of thought and behaviors. Their origin and analysis merits a multi-volume work. Discussion here is a thumbnail working definition to cleanse our language and senses of the stupor shouted at us for decades. The terms "left" and "right" in modern Western political idiom date from the French Revolution and the more Communist, atheist and violent Jacobins against their less revolutionary Girondist faction (did you learn that in school?); they retain interpretive value and can be applied to the graph above and to our condition. As you see at a glance, the left side of the graph is overloaded with the dominant ideologies of the past one hundred fifty years. From Social Democratic to Communist these may be termed Statist. This is partly why "revolutionary" now is placed at the right or red end of the spectrum, closer to the source. Adjacent terms overlap to varying degrees, for example, the median and, in some salutary manner, moderate positions of Liberal and Conservative. Check the etymology of "liberal" to see how much its attitude shares and relies on a "conservative" approach to and hopes for life (conserve means to remember, honor or save). "Liberal" associates the wisdom of the past and literacy based in books (liber, as in library) with the measure and balance (libra) life requires for meaningful freedom (libertas). These qualities conduce to generosity of spirit and behavior while maintaining the distinctions between individuals, families, neighborhoods and nations that make them human; to study what has been done and said. To keep with modern ideas about Liberalism, it emphasizes free trade as an aspect of free will and individual choices about using one's property but is concerned that free will choices, in business or family have consequences. The Conservative stance at once point might have functionally been termed traditionalist or normative; this now is a hate crime and those called "conservatives" strew the spectrum from Liberal (a very few) and Social Democratic to Communist. As a politically distinct term, conservative arose from the root meanings of liberal when the latter's emphases on internationalism (free trade at first), openness and lack of prejudice became increasingly matters, respectively of government policy and support (via fiscal policies, corporatism), and later, collapsing the boundaries of social and moral norms. In earlier periods, one might place "conservative" with Corporate-Feudal, hierarchical arrangements whose various oppressions gave appeal to what became liberalism. These terms and the categories of thought and deed to which they referred achieved a brief period of balance in the late eighteenth century and have been mutating since then. Almost as soon as these terms became political descriptors, liberalism split into progressive-coercive modes like Utilitarianism, "social democracy" (which itself sought to retain some conservative elements, at first) and progressivism. All became Statist and thus began the "corruption of language," thought, heart and deed that has today's Statists being termed "liberal" to keep the "masses" (Communist) or "consumers" (Gramscian Communist term and view) hypnotized, pliable and enslaved (Machiavelli). From the Social Democrats through the Corporate Collectivists and Communists, the corruption of the concept of "equality," given enormous cachet by America's Founders and the maniac, Jean Jacques Rousseau led to ideas of social harmony that were increasingly about control, as his Social Contract and the epigraph suggests [5]. "They speak loftily about oppression, from on high do they speak…their tongue struts on earth" and one observes Senator Obama and his supporters push their global poverty relief tax down the throats and onto the backs of America's staggering middle class. These Corporate Collectivists, progeny of the alliance of bureaucrats, glib liars and corporate titans, Globalist by nature, Fascist in arrogance and Communist in hypocrisy, brutality and untrustworthiness are the oligarchy that rules this nation. Indeed, through a Globalist, Corporate Collective stance, nearly all nations now are oligarchies, some with smaller, some larger groups of the "inner party"; some with strong Tyrannical aspects, some with varying mixtures of democratic and even republican aspects, as in America. But increasingly, unelected bureaucrats, or "representatives" who, once elected, fairly or not (remember, they say that "everything is relative") become concubines of lobbyists for the CC whether its Big Pharma, the NEA, foreign nations awash in petrodollars or gold acquired by ruling a nation of wage-slaves and living body-part banks. What helped this entire grouping of the modern Left, whose salesman-sorcerers cloak them in the veiling word of "liberal," forget and bury their origin is that the Founders said that we "are created equal and endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights…" We are created equal in being human, having free will and the ability to err and amend; not equal in abilities, intelligence, physique, tradition, etc. They also forgot the Creator, helped, as has been noted, by Jefferson's very regrettable error (oh the power, for good and evil, of free will and limited capabilities even in the wisest) in that phrase about "the pursuit of happiness." Scripture shows and explains repeatedly that property is inalienable and is defended by numerous laws and fines or other punishments for its theft or confiscation; that liberty is ordered liberty or it becomes libertinism, that differences of wealth are inevitable -- and here the Constitution was, for a while, an ordering bulwark, until the lust for power, the ancient desire "to be as gods" infected those for whom power, money and control were everything. The model of ordered liberty in Exodus 18:19-21, the criteria for elected leaders of specific merits to judge the people's disagreements was forgotten. Perhaps in those revolutionary and implicitly progressive times they were deemed archaic, superfluous. "Those who are fascinated by the idea of progress do not suspect that everything moving forward is at the same time bringing the end neare,r and that joyous watchwords like 'forward' and 'farther' are the lascivious voice of death urging us to hasten to it." [6] Indeed, our high-tech feudal masters are in a hurry, and they rush on onward, their harlots telling us we must hasten to find consensus and unify behind the leader with momentum who will take us where they want us to go, to the realm of the living dead. As this writer has explained before, by the late 19th century, great and influential authors (who also were social analysts, historians and progressives of various views) sensed that progress was regression and reversion, that "the whole realm reels back into the beast" [7]. Jefferson famously observed that "the tree of liberty needs to be fertilized regularly with the blood of patriots and tyrants." Because God gave man free will, he was right. And this is why today, given the above summary, the Revolutionary party is to the right, the side of Jefferson, overlapping it. We suffer a New Age feudalism that takes more and more of the earth, meant for settlement and farming and abundance and puts it off limits to most of us, creating vast "savage reservations" and so-called "wild-life preserves" under the rubric of "environmentalism," as if they knew or cared more about that than the Creator (Genesis 1:28-30, 2:15-24, 9:1-7). True conservatism is with Jefferson, the remarkable iconoclast, revolution for life, and the Scriptures, our origins, grace, freedom and immortal souls. There are many ways that one can and must struggle to restore and strengthen this inheritance. Heroism is required. Because we must all do our parts, in order to remain human and humane, in closing recall the three anonymous servants in King Lear (see archived essay, "the Anonymous Hero"). We all are created, our parents in partnership with the wonders of the Eternal One, but we all are different. Thus, Servant 1 confronts his brutal, power-mad master directly, fights him and is killed, but not before inflicting the wound that leads the evil to undo themselves. Not everyone has this degree of self-sacrifice, or the skills to apply it when the moment is ripe. But Gloucester would not have survived to repent, defeat despair and bless his son without the bandages supplied by Servant 2 or the guide found, at risk of life by Servant 3. There are many more examples: the aged peasant farmer, the anonymous doctor, the disguised and disgraced Kent and Edgar. All have a part to play in restoring a better Jeffersonian model and defeating the brutal Statists and their corruption of language, thought and deed. Perhaps the renewal party must be like the fish of the sea, all but invisible, blessed for abundance (Genesis 1:22). With these efforts, the haste of the oligarchs and their fast-talking servants may turn to the good, with less pain and quicker healing. Revolution now means purposeful, vigorous, canny and loving resistance: anonymous heroes.
Notes: 1. Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch on socialism and language in his commentary on similar points made by David in Psalm 12 (1881), in English Hirsch, Psalms (Feldheim 1960; 1997). 3. Ibid.; Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida 1.3.84-133 (1607); W.B. Yeats, "The Second Coming" (1919). 4. A historian speaking in Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1978; new English translation Aaron Asher, 1996), Part 6, section 2, "the Angels, II." 5. See for example, radical "equality" in music, as in the twelve-tone system where no note can dominate, lead or set a framework of coherence for others. See Kundera, op. cit. 6.17. 7. Alfred Tennyson, Idylls of the King (1873) made this a refrain of his epic on the difficult founding of culture on faith, trust and ordered liberty and its quick disintegration by the appetites. Also see the works of H.G. Wells, like The Island of Dr. Moreau who turned toward control despite "the horror" he saw in its mania, Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling ("Recessional" and other works), and many others creating fictions about what Hirsch described precisely, a truth known from ancient days. "Be on guard against an autocratic government" warn the sages of the oral records just beginning to be generated when Jethro gave his counsel to Moshe (Ethics of the Fathers 2:3) a Mishna ("oral record" of Torah elucidation) compiled two thousand years ago.
Dr. Eugene Narrett is a writer and teacher in Massachusetts and is the author of Gathered Against Jerusalem: Essays on a False Peace (Dec. 2000). His book, Israel Awakened: A Chronicle of the Oslo War (2001), is currently available at www.1stbooks.com/bookview/7421. His latest book, WW III: the War on the Jews and the Rise of the World Security State (2007), is available at www.lightcatcherbooks.com. Visit his website at www.israelendtimes.com.
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