Spengler on the Christian Origins of Communism

From The Hour of Decision, 1933:

"But since the end of the World War the church - in Germany above all, where, being an ancient power of rigid traditions, it had to pay heavily in prestige with its own adherents by descending to street level - has sunk to class wars and association with Marxism. There is in Germany a Catholic Bolshevism which is more dangerous than the anti-Christian because it hides behind the mask of a religion.

"Now, all Communist systems in the West are in fact derived from Christian theological thought: More's Utopia, the Sun State of the Dominica Campanella, the doctrines of Luther's disciples Karlstadt and Thomas Münzer, and Fichte's State Socialism. What Fourier, Saint-Simon, Owen, Marx, and hundreds of others dreamed and wrote on the ideals of the future reaches back, quite without their knowledge and much against their intention, to priestly-moral indignation and Schoolmen concepts, which had their secret part in economic reasoning and in public opinion on social questions. How much of Thomas Aquinas' law of nature and conception of State is still to be found in Adam Smith and therefore - with the opposite sign - in the Communist Manifesto! Christian theology is the grandmother of Bolshevism. All abstract brooding over economic concepts that are remote from any economic experience must, if courageously and honestly followed out, lead in one way or another to reasoned conclusions against State and property, and only lack of vision saves these materialist Schoolmen from seeing that at the end of their chain of thought stands the beginning once more: effective Communism is authoritative bureaucracy. 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.

"But there are two sorts of Communist. The one, the credulous type, 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. But the other, the "worldly" type 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. But this, too, likes to hide itself under the cloak of some religion.

"Marxism is indeed a religion, not in the sense of its founder, but in that which his revolutionary following has imparted to it. Like any church it has its saints, apostles, martyrs, fathers, bible and mission. Like any church it has dogmas, heresy-tribunals, an orthodoxy and a scholasticism, and, above all, a popular moral - or rather two, for believers and unbelievers. And does it make any difference that its doctrine is materialistic through and through? Are those priests who agitate on economic questions any less so?"

Culture Cannot Be Had For Money

"But because culture, the tradition of enjoyment which knows how to make much out of little, is lacking and cannot be had for money, jealousy of this kind of superiority torments all vulgar-minded people."

-- Oswald Spengler

The Tea Party vs. The Vulgar Mob

Oswald Spengler, 1933:

For the Age has itself become vulgar, and most people have no idea to what extent they are themselves tainted. The bad manners of all parliaments, the general tendency to connive at a rather shady business transaction if it promises to bring in money without work, jazz and Negro dances as the spiritual outlet in all circles of society, women painted like prostitutes, the efforts of writers to win popularity by ridiculing in their novels and plays the correctness of well-bred people, and the bad taste shown even by the nobility and old princely families in throwing off every kind of social restraint and time-honoured custom: all of these go to prove that it is now the vulgar mob that gives the tone.

What I See When I See Leon Panetta

Spode

Occupy Salami!

Senate is Broken: Congress in 2011 Passed 80 Bills, Fewest Since 1947

Considering what gets passed, why is this a bad thing?

The Washington Times reports here:

The Times‘ analysis suggested that the Senate is an increasingly broken chamber. All five of the worst performances on record were in the past decade. Four of those were when Democrats were in control and Republicans were in the minority.

In the House, the record was decidedly mixed. Of the worst five years, two were in the 1950s, two were in the 1980s and one was in the past decade.

Maybe the Senate is such a mess because it views itself as a more powerful version of the House, with which it is in constant competition as an institution and over which it lords itself at every opportunity, the Senate healthcare bill of 2010, now known as ObamaCare, being the most recent prime example. Had more Democrats in the House opposed this bill in March 2010, fewer of them had lost their seats in the historic Republican sweep in November.

Arguably the Senate is more powerful, for two reasons.

One, because of popular election of Senators, which puts them in direct competition in the same electoral sphere as representatives, contrary to the original intention of the constitution. And two, the fact that the tenure of a Senator is three times longer than a representative's. The lowly two-year man is ever on guard of losing the next election, while a Senator watches him come and go, mindful of the inattention of the voters over so long a period as half a decade.

The Senators' interests should primarily be to protect the interests of the States they represent, especially the States' independence from the federal government. But they are not. Instead they seek at every turn to usurp the representative function of the members of the House, where bills should originate. Is it any wonder the States have no representation in Washington, the legislatures of which must rely on leagues of Attorneys General to file suits in federal courts to protect themselves from encroachments of federal power?

The remedy for all that starts with a much bigger House, which means repealing The Reapportionment Act of 1929.

With the will of the people once adequately represented for a change, Senators might eventually be persuaded to meddle less at pain of repeal of the 17th Amendment. Already the most expensive races in the country, the dilution of the cost of running for office at the representative level with 10,267 districts instead of 435 might occasion an unwelcome shift of focus back upon the excess and corruption evident in running for the Senate, the mean expenditure for which in 2008 was nearly $6 million, six times what it currently costs the typical representative to run.

Representatives will not need to spend $1 million buying TV and radio ads to reach 30,000 constituents instead of 700,000 now, but Senators will still have to in order to reach the millions of their constituents. They will stand out in those media in a way which they haven't been accustomed to in the past and the spotlight will be on them as never before.

And as we all know, sunlight is a marvelous disinfectant.

The Working Class Does Not Exist In The Economic Structure Of A Single Nation

rich tub-thumper

Oswald Spengler:

"[T]he uneducated and half-educated middle class believed in this picture and does so to this day. The word "worker" has been surrounded by a halo since 1848, without consideration of its meaning and the limits of its application. And the "working class," which does not exist in the economic structure of a single nation - for what have miners, sailors, tailors' apprentices, metalworkers, waiters, bank officials, ploughmen, and scavengers in common with one another? - becomes a political reality, an attacking party, which has split all "white" nations into two armies, of which the one has to feed, and to give its blood for a host of party agents, tub-thumpers, newspaper-writers, and "people's representatives," who pursue their own private aims. That is the purpose for which it exists. The contrast between Capitalism and Socialism - words for which, all this time, literature has searched in vain for a definition, for catchwords are not to be defined - is not derived from any reality, but is purely a built-up challenge. Marx introduced these terms into the English engineering industry, he did not draw them from it; and even so he could only do it by ignoring the existence of all the people engaged in agriculture, commerce, traffic, and administration. This picture of the time had so little to do with the world of reality and its inhabitants that, in theory, the South even became separated from the North: the boundary lay somewhere about the line Lyon-Milan. In the Latin South, where one needs little to live on and does little work, where there is no coal and therefore no industrialism, where thought and feeling are racially different, there developed anarchist and syndicalist tendencies whose wish-picture was the dissolution of the great national organisms into systemless, small self-sufficing groups, Bedouin- like swarms occupied in doing nothing. But in the North, where hard winters mean harder work and make such work not only possible but essential, where from time immemorial the battle has been against hunger and cold combined, there arose out of the Germanic will-to-power, and its urge to large-scale organization, systems of authoritarian Communism which aim at a proletarian dictatorship over the whole world. And, simply because in the nineteenth century the coalfields of these northern lands had attracted an assemblage of people and of national wealth of a hitherto unheard-of order of magnitude, a very different impetus was given to demagogy both within them and outwards from their boundaries. The high wages of English, German, and American factory-workers triumphed, precisely because they were anything but "starvation rates," over the low wages of the land-workers in the South, and only because of this "capitalistic" superiority of party means did Marxism triumph over the theories of Fourier and Proudhon. The peasantry had already ceased to exist for all of them. As a weapon in the class war it had small value, not merely because it was not available on the pavements at any and every moment, but also because its traditions of property and labour were contrary to the views of theory. It was therefore ignored by the catchwords of the Communist program. Bourgeoisie and proletarian - that is the picture one can take in, and the simpler one is, the less one notices how much there is left outside this scheme."

25% of GDP is Fake

Because 25 percent of GDP is government spending.

Think about it.

Richard Viguerie Smokes Mitt Romney As Anti-Capitalist On His Own TARP Petard

Here:

To Mitt Romney, venture capitalist, the average worker is an expendable line on a spreadsheet -- until that worker’s tax dollars were needed to bailout financiers who promoted the leveraged buyouts and packaged the exotic financial instruments that led to the financial meltdown of 2008.

Who is more anti-capitalist? Is it Romney’s opponents, who question whether or not a form of capitalism that allows a handful of rich people to avoid moral hazard, manipulate the lives of thousands of other people and then walk off with the money by getting a bailout from the taxpayers?

Or, are the real anti-capitalists Mitt Romney and his establishment friends in the Washington/Wall Street Axis who hypocritically enjoy having the option of firing "the little guy" and stripping the factory on Main Street on the way up -- but then use their insider power and influence to demand those same little taxpayers bail them out on the way down?

And the person chiefly responsible for misleading the troops on this issue is Rush Limbaugh, who has flip-flopped on the bank bailout issue in spectacular fashion and fed Gingrich to the wolves.

Mormons in Congress as of January 2011

Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nevada

Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah

Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho

Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah

Sen. Tom Udall, D-New Mexico

Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah

Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah

Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Arizona

Rep. Dean Heller, R-Nevada

Rep. Wally Herger, R-California

Rep. Raul Labrador, R-Idaho

Rep. Jim Matheson, D-Utah

Rep. Buck McKeon, R-California

Rep. Mike Simpson, R-Idaho

"Say I Was A Drum Major For Plagiarism"

For the controversy over the inscription on the MLK statue, see The Washington Post here:

“I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness,” the monument says. What an odd choice for a quote, I thought, when I visited in August before its scheduled dedication. It sounded almost . . . conceited. And it was past tense, as though King was speaking from the grave. It didn’t sound like King at all.

I went looking for the context, read the whole speech and found there was a reason it didn’t sound like him. “If you want to say I was a drum major, say I was . . . ” is how King began his statement. As many have since pointed out, the “if” and the “you” entirely change the meaning. To King, being a self-aggrandizing drum major was not a good thing; if you wanted to call him that, he said, at least say it was in the service of good causes.

Why such concern over an inaccurate inscription on a monument to a plagiarist? Wouldn't it be more fitting to leave it as it is?

From the Wikipedia entry here:

King's doctoral dissertation at Boston University, titled A Comparison of the Conception of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman, included large sections from a dissertation written by another student (Jack Boozer) three years earlier at Boston University.

As Clayborne Carson, director of the King Papers Project at Stanford University, has written, "instances of textual appropriation can be seen in his earliest extant writings as well as his dissertation. The pattern is also noticeable in his speeches and sermons throughout his career."

Boston University, where King got his Ph.D. in systematic theology, conducted an investigation that found he plagiarized major portions of his doctoral thesis from various other authors who wrote about the topic.

'There Is No Contradiction Between Economic Liberalism and Socialism'

Spengler:

'Labour-Socialism in every form, on the other hand, is, as I have already shown, definitely English in origin. It arose, about 1840, simultaneously with the victory of the joint-stock company and the rootless "financial" form of capital. Both were the expression of Free Trade Manchesterism: this "white" Bolshevism is capitalism from below, wage-capitalism, just as speculative finance-capital in respect of its method is Socialism from above, from the stock exchange. Both grew out of the same intellectual root: thinking in money, trading in money on the pavements of the world's capitals, whether as wage-levels or profits on exchange rates makes no odds. There is no contradiction between economic Liberalism and Socialism. The Labour market is the stock exchange of the organized proletariat. The trade unions are trusts for forcing up wages on the lines followed by oil, steel, and bank trusts of the Anglo-American type, whose finance-Socialism penetrates, dominates, sucks, and controls them to the point of systematic expropriation. The devastating dispossessing effect of bundles of shares and bonds, the separation of mere "credit" from the responsible directive work of the entrepreneur, who no longer knows to whom his work actually belongs, has not received anything like adequate consideration. Productive economy is in the last resort nothing but the will-less object of stock-exchange manoeuvres. It was only the rise of the share system to domination that enabled the stock exchange (formerly a mere aid to economy) to assume the decisive control of economic life. Finance-Socialists and trust magnates like Morgan and Kreuger correspond absolutely to the mass-leaders of Labour parties and the Russian economic commissars: dealer-natures with the same parvenu tastes. From both sides, today as in the days of the Gracchi, the conservative forces of the State - army, property, peasant, and manager - are being attacked.'

Dead Since 1936, Oswald Spengler Remarkably Described Our Own Time

'It must be stated again and again that this society . . . is sick, sick in its instincts and therefore in its mind. It offers no defence. It takes pleasure in its own vilification and disintegration. From the middle of the eighteenth century it has broken up more and more into Liberal and Conservative circles - the latter representing merely the opposition set up in desperate self-defence against the former. On the one side there is a small number of people who, possessed of the true political instinct, see what is going on and whither it is leading and exert themselves to prevent, moderate, or divert accordingly; people of the kind who formed Scipio's circle in Rome (and whose outlook inspired Polybius' historical work), and, again, Burke, Pitt, Wellington, and Disraeli in England, Metternich, Hegel, and Bismarck in Germany, and Tocqueville in France. They sought to defend the conserving forces of the old Culture - State, monarchy, army, consciousness of standing, property, peasantry - even in cases where they had reason to object, and are therefore cried down as "reactionary." This word, which the Liberals invented, is thrown back at them now by their Marxian pupils, in that they try to prevent the logical outcome of their actions: such is our reputed progress. On the other side stands almost everything that has the urban intelligence or, if not, at least looks up to it as the badge of superiority in the conditions of today and in terms of the power of the future - the future that is already the past.

'At this point journalism becomes the dominant expression of the time. It is the critical esprit of the eighteenth century diluted and lightened for intellectual mediocrity - and let us not forget that age means to part, to dissect, to disintegrate. Drama, poetry, philosophy, even science and history are turned into leading articles and feuilletons written with an unashamed bias against everything that is conservative and has formerly inspired respect. "Party" becomes the Liberal substitute for rank and State; 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; government, as the meaning and duty of State existence, is either opposed and derided or degraded to the level of a party business. But the blindness and cowardice of Liberalism goes further still. Tolerance is extended to the destructive forces of the city dregs, not demanded by them. In Western Europe Russian Nihilists and Spanish anarchists are gushed over in "good" society with revolting sentimentality and passed on from one fashionable hostess to another. In Paris and London, above all in Switzerland, both they and their undermining activities are carefully protected. The Liberal press rings with maledictions of the prisons in which the martyrs of liberty languish, and not a word is dropped in favour of the countless defenders of the State, down to the simple soldier and policeman, who are blown into the air, crippled by bullet-wounds, or slaughtered in the exercise of their duty.

'The concept of the proletariat, created of deliberate intention by Socialist theoreticians, has been accepted by the middle classes. Actually it has nothing to do with the thousand branches of strict and skilled labour - from fishing to book-printing, from tree-felling to engine-driving - and is scorned and felt as a disgrace by industrious, trained workers. It was intended solely to secure the amalgamation of these workers with the city mob for the purpose of overthrowing the social order. But Liberalism centred political thought upon it by employing it as though it were an established concept. Under the name Naturalism there arose a pitiable school of literature and painting which exalted filth to aesthetic charm, and vulgar feeling and thinking to a binding world-view. "People" no longer meant the community of the whole nation, but that section of the city masses which set up in opposition to this community. The proletarian appeared as the hero on the stage of the progressive bourgeoisie, and with him the prostitute, the shirker, the agitator, the criminal. From this time onward it has been "modern" and superior to see the world from below, from the perspective of a bar-parlour or a street of ill repute. The cult of the proletarian arose during that period, and in the Liberal circles of Western Europe, not in 1918 in Russia. A fatal notion of things, half false and half stupid, began to pervade educated and semi-educated minds: "the worker" becomes the real person, the real nation, the meaning and aim of history, politics, public care. The fact that all men work, and moreover that others - the inventor, the engineer, and organizer - do more, and more important, work is forgotten. No one any longer dares to bring forward the class or quality of his achievement as a gauge of its value. Only work measured in hours now counts as labour. And the "worker," with all this, is the poor unfortunate one, disinherited, starving, exploited. The words "care" and "distress" are applied to him alone. No one has a thought left for the countryman's less fertile strips of land, his bad harvests, his losses by hail and frost, his anxiety over the sale of his produce; or for the wretched existence of poor craftsmen in strongly industrialized areas, the tragedies of small tradesmen, fishermen on the high seas, inventors, doctors, who have to struggle amid alarms and dangers for each bite of daily bread and go down in their thousands unheeded. "The worker" alone receives sympathy. He alone is supported, cared for, insured. What is more, he is made the saint, the idol, of the age. The world revolves round him. He is the focus of the economic system and the nurseling of politics. Everybody's existence hinges on him; the majority of the nation are there to serve him. The dull lump of a peasant, the lazy official, the swindling tradesman, are legitimate targets for mirth, not to mention judges, officers, and heads of businesses, who are the popular objects of ill-natured jest; but no one would dare to pour the same scorn on "the working man." All the rest are idlers, egoists; he is the one exception. The whole middle class swings the censer before this phantom. No matter what one's own achievements in life may be, one must fall on one's knees before him. His being stands above all criticism. It was the middle classes who successfully "put over" this notion of him, and the very business-like "representatives of the people" continue to sponge upon this legend. They dinned it into the wage-earners until they believed it; until they felt themselves to be really ill-treated and wretched, until they lost all sense of proportion with regard to their output and their importance. Liberalism vis-à-vis the demagogic trend is the form of suicide adopted by our sick society. With this perspective it gives itself up. The merciless, embittered class war that is waged against it finds it prepared to capitulate politically, after having helped spiritually in the forging of the enemy weapons. Only the Conservative element - weak as it was in the nineteenth century - can, and in the future will, hinder the coming of this end. ...


'The manual worker is merely a means to the private ends of professional revolutionaries. He is to fight for the satisfaction of their hatred of the conservative forces and their thirst for power. If only workers were to be recognized as representatives of the workers, the benches of the Left would be very empty in all parliaments. Among the originators of their theoretical programs and leaders of revolutionary campaigns there is not one who actually worked for years in a factory.'

We Despise Mitt Romney To The Very Core Of Our Being

“I don’t know a single Tea Party person who does not despise Mitt Romney to the very core of their being.”

-- Karen Martin, Spartanburg South Carolina Tea Party, quoted here

Sarah Palin Follows Rush, Tries To Change The Subject to Jobs from Looting

Newt has tried to appear to take a principled stand in the war on Romney and today's Republicans don't seem to want to join him there, which just shows what a throwback Newt is and what co-dependents Republicans have become in their job-servitude.

Republicans are in thrall to the concept of The Job as much as Germany was to The Worker in the 1920s. Sarah Palin's remarks asking for full disclosure of job creation data and of Mitt's tax returns strike me as pure posturing and ass-covering in the face of Mitt's impending coronation. What was it, five colleges she attended to get a four year degree?

While Newt's gotten older the Republican Party has continued to move so far away from its old moral positions that it now considers Newt to be talking the values of the enemy. Rush Limbaugh is a case in point, who constantly derides Newt for using the language of the left, when Rush can't make up his mind from day to day whether the bank bailouts were necessary, superfluous or deceitful. A convert like Augustine of Hippo couldn't possibly have something important to contribute, could he?

The truth is Romney's capitalism is parasitic, not entrepreneurial, because it incessantly demands gains in productivity which go to the owners and investors at the expense of the workers. Please. Save. My. Crummy. Job.

No one aged 50 or more who has lost a position on a mere technicality after twenty or more years of service, and they are legion, is sympathetic to this argument. What work at year 5, 10, 14 or 18 was superior to the work at year 20, but for the fact that salary and benefits at that point represented a juicy cost savings going directly to the almighty bottom line? The young who lose their jobs are too inexperienced and too frequently abused to know any other reality than job-hopping in the world created by the corporate raider. Such lives do not produce traditional, stable families, nor committed, law-abiding communities and reliable tax bases. The business left is now in full-throated holler for simplifying taxes, removing tax deductions, and, the real point, a more mobile worker, one who doesn't own a house and who can be moved here and there at will without having to sell first.

Pat Buchanan, who twenty years ago this month made life very difficult for one President George Herbert Walker Bush in the New Hampshire primary, had a change of heart about what was really happening to American workers as he made the rounds during the campaign. It made him realize that something had begun to change in the relationship between worker and employer which went to the heart of patriotism. Today we see the full expression of businesses' loyalty, and it's not to justice, only to the letter of the law, skilfully crafted by its bought and paid for politician. 

If only we had Republican candidates today who could effectively tap this well of misery in order to alleviate it instead of merely to get elected. Democrats are better at this, which is why their future looks bright, and ours looks dim.

Senator Jim DeMint is NOT a Conservative

If he were, he'd be doing everything he can to repeal the 17th Amendment.

Raising money to elect so-called conservatives is raising money to perpetuate the status quo post. Originalism isn't just for the Supremes.

He's a phony.

The TARP Elephant Still in the Republican Living Room

BUSH:

"I've abandoned free market principles to save the free market system."

-- December 16, 2008 (video here)

Bob Rodriguez Says 2012 Will Be Languid Economically

Here:

"I’m looking for GDP growth at about 1%, probably even lower at times. It’s going to be a very languid year economically, and the stock market will face profitability issues along with governmental issues."

Mighty Dullness Crowned

"In a dull stream, which moving slow,

You hardly see the current flow;

When a small breeze obstructs the course,

It whirls about for want of force,

And in its narrow circle gathers

Nothing but chaff, and straws, and feathers:

The current of a female mind stops thus,

and turns with ev'ry wind;

Thus whirling round, together draws

Fools, fops, and rakes, for chaff and straws."

-- Swift

"No Economic Recovery Until We Deal With Housing"

They think we're turning Japanese.

So say the boys at Institutional Risk Analytics, here.

Read it.

They are right.

(video here)