Showing posts with label Oswald Spengler. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Oswald Spengler. Show all posts

Saturday, February 22, 2025

The Putin-Trump Piece Plan demonstrates that neither Russia nor America has any respect whatsover for Ukraine's property

Left is, finally and above all, lack of respect for property.

-- Oswald Spengler, The Hour of Decision, 1934

 


Tuesday, December 24, 2024

To Mark Tooley a Protestant America means, among other things, the routinized revolution of periodic elections criticized by Oswald Spengler as a mark of the blindness and cowardice of Liberalism

 Our democracy is a constant state of revolution, overthrowing incumbents in favor of successors who also will soon face revolution. 

Here

Revolution, in the form of periodic mass elections fought by all available means of money, brains, and even - after the Gracchan method - physical violence, is exalted into a constitutional process.

-- Oswald Spengler, The Hour of Decision, 1934

 

The real conservative cannot stand it that eternal truths, laws, and morals are subjected to a referendum every few years. A country which does this is perverse. And no real Lutheran would abide it, let alone a true Roman Catholic.


Sunday, June 16, 2024

Platitudinous Glenn Loury thinks like a Marxist in his old age: Workers of all races have a common bond, he says

This kind of politics is universal.

The lapdogs lick it up here.

Glenn Loury last worked in a factory, when, in 1972? More than 12% of the civilian population had a manufacturing job back then. Today fewer than 5% have one. But in neither case was there anything universal about being working class.


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What have miners, sailors, tailors' apprentices, metalworkers, waiters, bank officials, ploughmen, and scavengers in common with one another?

-- Oswald Spengler

 


Wednesday, July 7, 2021

It is now common to blame the invention of the cotton gin, a labor-saving device, for the increase in the US slave population

Can anything good come out of Oregon?

This garbage from a Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Oregon State University, is anti-white anti-capitalism rearing its ugly head, not "historical scholarship". It's what Oswald Spengler warned us about in 1934.

In the U.S., Baptists formed a national organization, the Triennial Convention, in 1814. Around the same time, attitudes of Baptists in the South toward the enslavement of Africans began to harden as the 1792 invention of the cotton gin, a machine that made it easier to separate the cotton fibers from their seeds, made enslavement more profitable. By the 1830s, abolitionism took firm hold among Northern Baptists, and both they and Baptists in the South argued they were upholding Scripture through their views on slavery.
 
Blaming the cotton gin for an increase of enslavement appears to be a new, and stupid, argument of the anti-white-anti-capitalist industry, advanced since about 2009, in tandem with the advent of the Obama era when hostility to capitalism began to become more widely racialized, along with everything else.
 
The claim, as per the Wikipedia article on the cotton gin, is that "The number of slaves rose in concert with the increase in cotton production, increasing from around 700,000 in 1790 to around 3.2 million in 1850".
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
But the cotton production figures cited don't match the population "production" facts:
 
"Cotton production expanded from 750,000 bales in 1830 to 2.85 million bales in 1850." You are led to believe with this sleight of hand that slave population was dramatically increased by 2.5 million (357%) to accomplish that 280% production increase in cotton.
 
That isn't the case.
 
From 1830 to 1850 slave population increased by 1.2 million, from 2 million to 3.2 million, or 60%, not 357% obviously. Automation meant fewer slaves were needed, not more. The increase in slave population over the period has nothing to do with the invention of the cotton gin. 
 
Importation of slaves to the US had been halted from 1808 by act of Congress. By 1850 fewer than 305,000 had been brought to America. Slave population increased in the US naturally through reproduction over the period, by 60%, in contrast with the free population which increased in the US by about 84% (from 10.85 million to 19.99 million) through both reproduction and immigration between 1830-1850.
 
You can't even make the argument that slaves were bred to serve, however aspirational that might have been for a very small minority of white race schemers of the plantation enterprise. The data shows whatever the intentions were, they didn't succeed, and slave population increased at a rate lower than the free population.
 
You could make the argument that the invention of the cotton gin enabled slave owners to get by much longer with fewer slave laborers*, some of whom enjoyed better working conditions as a result, thus perpetuating the economics of slavery in a situation where increased supply of that labor had been cut off, but that's not the argument they are making. They aren't smart enough to make it.
 
 
*Cotton production per slave increased from 188 pounds in 1830 to 445 pounds in 1850.

Friday, June 11, 2021

Conflict is the original fact of life and is life itself


They shout: "No more war" -- but they desire class war. They are indignant when a murderer is executed for a crime of passion, but they feel a secret pleasure in hearing of the murder of a political opponent. What objection have they ever raised to the Bolshevist slaughters? There is no getting away from it: conflict is the original fact of life, is life itself, and not the most pitiful pacifist is able entirely to uproot the pleasure it gives his inmost soul. Theoretically, at least, he would like to fight and destroy all opponents of pacifism.

-- Oswald Spengler, The Hour of Decision (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1934), p. 40f.

Monday, June 7, 2021

The default position of liberalism is to blame obstruction by reactionaries for republican failure, not the revolutionary impulses of the autocrat

"The republicans made me seize power".

You know whose side they are on when people talk like this. Spengler long ago observed how liberalism is all about tyranny, but does anyone still read him?

"The dictatorship of the bourgeoisie is all that Liberalism sets out to be."

The voices opposed to the US Senate filibuster, are, to put it bluntly, not related to our founding.

"However high-minded":

Caesar would soon seize autocratic power, and Cato would commit suicide rather than live under Caesar’s rule. Goodman and Soni argue Cato’s obstructionism — however high-minded — was a contributing factor to the Roman Republic’s collapse. America’s Founding Fathers, however, idolized Cato. George Washington’s soldiers staged a play about Cato at Valley Forge.  Patrick Henry’s famous quote, “Give me liberty of give me death,” is derived from a line in that play.


Thursday, August 20, 2020

Looting is reparations

"What if, one day, class war and race war joined forces to make an end of the white world?" -- Oswald Spengler, 1934

Wednesday, June 24, 2020

If it isn't obvious by now that you're an idiot, Johnny Reb tried to tell you

The Civil War was obviously a waste of time, blood and property.

For every Confederate statue now coming down at the hands of BLM there will eventually be three of a founder of America, a Yankee, or an abolitionist to match it. Eventually, the symbols of your country will be gone. That you'll just let them go shows the actual country is already gone.

This isn't a war on racism. It's a revolution against America. Racism is simply the pretext for it. It is led by the "worldly" type of communist, the black radical who:

"with the realist political outlook, hopes through its followers to destroy society, either from envy or revenge, because of the low place assigned in it to their personality and talents, or, alternatively, to carry away the masses by some program or other for the satisfaction of his own will-to-power".

Think Shaun King the "Christian", who now explicitly aims to obliterate the white Jesus from every one of America's ~375,000 congregations.

No good deed is going unpunished, but fools like Ann Coulter will still argue that blacks deserve and should be paid reparations: Those who have done no wrong should pay those who have suffered no harm, we are told.

140,414 dead Yankees are just chopped liver to these ingrates and fools.

Pay all you want, it won't change a thing. Still more will be required of you.

They now think they have the upper hand and are out to replace you. "Diversity is our strength" means "their" strength, not yours. Diversity means your weakness, and the unchecked riots and looting are proof of it.

Christians 244 years ago took up arms against "tyrants" like these and called it "obedience to God".

I can't imagine finding one such person among us today. And you certainly won't find one among the paid mercenaries, the cops. They're just trying to make it to full retirement like everybody else.

Instead, most Christians have become Spengler's "credulous" type of communist, who:

"obsessed by doctrine or feminine sentimentality, remote from and hostile to the world, condemns the wealth of the wicked who prosper and also, at times, the poverty of the good who do not prosper. This lands him either in vague Utopias or throws him back upon asceticism, the monastic life, Bohemia, or vagabondism, which proclaims the futility of all economic effort".

On obsession with doctrine think First Things Magazine, think Sojourners, Christianity Today, and the Patheos crowd for the feminine sentimentalists and wealth condemners, think the Prosperity Gospel movement and the charismatic Dominionists for the critics of the Christianity which is content with little, think Rod Dreher's Benedict Option or the survivalists for the separatists, and also the libertarians who "go Galt", accountable to no one but themselves. Representative all.

Perhaps the only Christians who think in robust opposition to the communists are the followers of Adrian Vermeule who envision a once and future Roman Catholic authoritarianism from North to South America with a heavily Spanish content. In other words, when white supremacy fails, replace it with . . . not black.
 
"To put through the ideal requires dictatorship, reign of terror, armed force, the inequality of a system of masters and slaves, men in command and men in obedience - in short: Moscow".
 
The answer to Bolshevism from the foremost grandmothers of Bolshevism is to double down on the Bolshevism. Pre-modern Europe was just a dress rehearsal.
 
I'm sure Black Lives Matter will be thrilled.

Wednesday, March 13, 2019

Tuesday, January 15, 2019

Tuesday, September 4, 2018

The word 'worker' has been surrounded by a halo since 1848

"The working class does not exist in the economic structure of a single nation. ... What have miners, sailors, tailors' apprentices, metalworkers, waiters, bank officials, ploughmen, and scavengers in common with one another?"

-- Oswald Spengler

Friday, January 9, 2015

What do liberals and libertarians have most in common this week?

What do liberals and libertarians have most in common this week?

The almost giddy pleasure they take in ridicule of religious founders and their followers.

That this ridicule of religion has animated liberalism for a long time in America is a given. Just ask any devout Christian, if you can still find one, how Serrano's Piss Christ made him feel.

But conservatives, on the other hand, have always believed above all in self-restraint, without which there cannot be any such thing called limited government. As Oswald Spengler reminded us in the 1930s but everyone seems to have long since forgotten, Christianity is renunciation and nothing else. The exploding ignorance of this knowledge had already gone hand in hand with the development of totalitarian forms of government in Spengler's own time, and has only gotten worse since. The world is now dominated as a consequence by two forms of fascism which ended up winning against communism, one of the left and one of the right: the one is in China and the other in the United States. The reason? Fascism is more successful at production and consumption than communism, which is all there is to materialist philosophers. To them self-restraint is as much of an enemy as it was an opiate to Marx. 

The most uncomfortable example of self-restraint for our own time has been self-censorship, which is nothing more than the recognition of the existence of the evil inclination inside of every human being, a recognition only made possible by an openness to a moral vision of the universe. That moral vision says that that evil inclination must be restrained by the free choice of the self if civilized society is to survive. But our supposed political allies today in conservatism and libertarianism want nothing to do with that. They have together more in common with liberalism than with the transcendent world of which I am writing. 

Self-censorship in fact used to be seen as a virtue in America, when it was a more religiously informed country. "Let what you say be simply 'Yes' or 'No'; anything more than this comes from evil", said the founder of our religion. The idea was to live and let live because the evil and the good had to grow up together until the harvest. Otherwise the wheat would be lost with the tares. Accordingly, to be wise meant often to hold your tongue and keep your peace, even when you knew you were right, and to forgo arguments especially over religion because you were free to go to your church or to no church at all, and I was free to go to mine. "Strive for peace with all men", said another of our authorities. If Christians have been given their own form of jihad, that has been it, but they have failed miserably at it.

It must be stated plainly, nothing distinguishes what is different about Islam from us more than its opposition to peaceful coexistence, however poorly we have lived up to our own ideals. Islam means submission to its law, its prophet and its God. A Muslim is "one who submits". Peace only exists between the two of us when we submit to them. Which is why it follows that inviting Muslims into Christian countries is a recipe for conflict.

All around us this week so-called conservatives are urging us to join them in unloading a barrage of invective against Islam's founder, Muhammad. They do not want to live in peace. They want a war, which threatens to destroy us all.

Here's Roger Kimball at Pajamas Media:

"Were I (per impossible) editor of The New York Times, I would run those cartoons of Mohammed on the front page of the paper every day for a month." 

Here's Ralph Peters at Fox News:

"Even if those terrorists are tracked down and killed - and I hope they are killed and die miserably - the end result of this is going to be we're going to continue to self-censor."

"The correct response to this attack, by all of us in journalism ... if we had guts, those cartoons would be reprinted on the front page of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times tomorrow. They won't be."

And here's a local libertarian in Michigan, one Steve Gruber:

It was blood thirsty little pieces of crap-spawned from the repugnant womb of modern Islam that murdered a dozen innocents inside an office for a French satirical magazine. Screaming glory be to Allah while executing 10 staff members and two police officers the vile nature of modern Islam was on display for all to see once again. Why did they attack the magazine? Because the magazine routinely skewered just about anyone and everyone and had the courage to publish cartoons making fun of Mohammed. Well too damn bad. ... In the spirit of America let me say to hell with Mohammed and any of his followers if they think it proper to murder cartoonists or anyone else in the name of Allah.

What these individuals, were they conservatives, should be calling for is separation, keeping Muslims at a distance from Christian civilization, because the two are fundamentally not reconcilable until Muslims undergo a reformation of their own which renounces the inspiration of Koranic surahs legitimating violence against infidels. I predict it will be a cold day in hell before that happens because the so-called conservatives cannot see that the so-called innocents were anything but. They were as much the enemies of what made the West the West as the Muslims are.

Instead all that these ideologues of ours offer is ridicule of Islam, but from the safe distance of an increasingly less intact West. They call this courage, but shrink from what real courage requires: The courage that doesn't need to justify itself in the face of mortal danger, but which freely and quickly acts to excise the cancer and banish it, as well as abolish the tenuous economic cords made of petroleum from which it profits. Libertarian devotion to first principles of freedom of movement, trade and the like all work together to sabotage this doctor from performing the necessary surgery. All they can do is insult, and retreat to the safety of the drone war against an implacable enemy, ala John Galt.

Having grown up in a Christian denomination which held very dim views of everyone else's religion but was convinced everyone else was worth converting to our way of thinking because Christ died for them too, I find the overt lack of charity toward a whole religion and its founder a sign of profound decadence in our own civilization, criminal acts by religious fanatics notwithstanding.

We have to live together in the same world, but it were better if we grew in separate gardens to the extent that that is possible. The only constructive policy with Islam going forward is utter disengagement with its worst elements, and repression of those when called for, such as now in Yemen. Unfortunately for the West, this means withdrawing from Muslim lands, especially Arabia, and actively choosing to promote independence in energy to the extent that whether Islam reforms or does not reform, we can live without them and prevent them from harming others.

We cannot continue to serve God and mammon. Otherwise we are no different than them.