De Witte Man

Naar aanleiding van het volgende interview dat door Café Weltschmerz wordt uitgezonden

Bestaat er nog academische vrijheid als het om de MH17 gaat? Stan van Houcke met Kees van der Pijl

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPdYUtTBxd0

schreef een mij verder onbekende meneer Andreas Rasito de volgende reactie:

Stan haalt er plosteling 'de witte man' (albino's?) bij die de wereld zou onderdrukken, en die nog liever de wereld zou willen opblazen dan zijn positie van heerser in de wereld op te geven. Wij in het Westen zouden onze welvaart te danken hebben aan het witte privilege, wat goddank ten einde zou komen nu de blanken demografisch en economisch op hun plaats worden gezet. Niet dat 'de witte man' de toegenomen welvaart in het Westen te danken zou hebben aan wetenschappelijke en technische vooruitgang, ben je gek. Of dat we het stammenverband en de eerwraak te boven zijn gekomen middels instelling van een rechtstaat. Hoe kom je erbij. Nee, het is allemaal brute onderdrukking van de edele gekleurde medemens door het witte monster, dat z.s.m. terug moet in zijn hok, c.q. zijn plaggenhut. Het is een geperverteerde versie van de christelijke leer van de erfzonde zoals die in de Linkse Kerk wordt aangehangen. God is dood, nu de witte man nog.

Dit soort reacties zijn kenmerkend voor de houding in Nederland zodra het over het westerse kolonialisme en neo-kolonialisme handelt. De meeste witte Hollanders zijn gewend het begrip 'zwarten' te gebruiken, maar niet het woord 'witten.' Eerder al schreef ik hierover:

Wat mij opvalt aan een aanzienlijk aantal reacties op mijn gesprek met Freek de Jonge is de angstaanjagende rancune, de bitterheid, de haat en de verongelijktheid van Nederlandse kleinburgers, die het gevoel hebben zelf niet helemaal uit de verf te zijn gekomen. Zo schreef een mij verder onbekende Bert Heemst ondermeer over Freek: Verder wordt wat 'de witte man' fout heeft gedaan zo opgeblazen, dat het niet meer dan normaal is dat hij het binnen niet al te lange tijd een stuk moeilijker krijgt. http://stanvanhoucke.blogspot.it/2018/05/bert-heemst.html Vijf eeuwen westers genocidaal kolonialisme en imperialisme wordt door deze Heemst afgedaan als iets dat door Freek en mij werd 'opgeblazen.' Ontelbare miljoenen gekleurde mensen werden vermoord om de westerse rijkdom mogelijk te maken, zodat nu ongeveer 20 procent van de mensheid rond de tachtig procent van alle rijkdommen op aarde bezit. De mening van de reageerders verraadt niet alleen een gebrek aan kennis, maar tevens aan een onvermogen om verantwoording te accepteren. Onze huidige rijkdom is gebaseerd op slavernij, moord en roof. Het heeft de westerling nooit aan ‘ideologische rechtvaardigingen’ ontbroken, zo constateerde de Zuid-Amerikaanse auteur Eduardo Galeano, wiens bekende trilogie Kroniek van het vuur (1991) in 20 talen is verschenen. Met betrekking tot de verovering van het Amerikaanse continent schreef hij over de ‘woeste vloedgolf van hebzucht, terreur en wreedheid,’ die ten grondslag ligt aan een alles behalve 'opgeblazen' genocide. Galeano: Volgens de meest betrouwbare recente onderzoekingen had Mexico in de tijd vóór Columbus tussen de 30 en 37,5 miljoen inwoners en men schat dat in het Andesgebied nog eens zoveel indianen woonden; Midden-Amerika telde tussen de 10 en 13 miljoen inwoners. In totaal waren er tussen de 70 en 90 miljoen Azteken, Inca's en Maya's toen de buitenlandse veroveraars aan de horizon verschenen: anderhalve eeuw later was dat aantal teruggelopen tot slechts 3,5 miljoen. En nogmaals, net als nu ontbraken destijds ideologische rechtvaardigingen niet. Het bloedbad dat in de Nieuwe Wereld werd aangericht veranderde in een daad van naastenliefde of kreeg geloofsmotieven. Tegelijk met de schuld ontstond er een heel systeem van alibi's voor de schuldige gewetens, die nog steeds er heilig van overtuigd zijn dat dit alles is 'opgeblazen.' Wat deze praatjesmakers niet beseffen is dat, zoals Galeano in zijn boek De aderlating van een continent. Vijf eeuwen economische exploitatie van Latijns-Amerika (1971) vaststelde:

Dankzij het offer van de slaven in het Caribisch gebied kwamen James Watts stoommachine en George Washington’s kanonnen op de wereld... De suiker uit de Latijns-Amerikaanse tropen vormde een grote stimulans voor de accumulatie van het kapitaal ten behoeve van de industriële ontwikkeling van Engeland, Frankrijk, Nederland en ook de Verenigde Staten, terwijl tegelijkertijd de economie van Noordoost-Brazilië en de Caribische eilanden erdoor verminkt en de historische ruïnering van Afrika erdoor bezegeld werden. De steunpilaar voor de driehoek-handel tussen Europa, Afrika en Amerika was de slavenhandel met als bestemming de suikerplantages.

Zo wordt al vijf eeuwen lang een onmenselijk systeem in stand gehouden. Galeano: 

Adam Smith zei dat de ontdekking van Amerika 'het mercantilistische systeem tot een stadium van schittering en glorie had verheven dat het anders nooit bereikt zou hebben,'

met als uiteindelijk resultaat dat de

landen die in onze tijd ontwikkeld zijn, ontwikkelden zich; de onderontwikkelden onderontwikkelden zich. 

Daardoor werd het mogelijk dat anno 2018 slechts 64 individuen op aarde evenveel bezitten als de helft van de hele mensheid tezamen. De kracht van Galeano’s werk is dat het verborgen processen bloot legt en in simpele bewoordingen lezers erop attent maakt dat 

De rijkdom van veel mensen op deze wereld het resultaat [is] van de armoede van anderen. Het wordt tijd dat we de kloof tussen rijk en arm kleiner maken. 

Galeano behoort bij een voorbije tijd en hij wist het. Over zichzelf zei hij: 

Ik realiseer me dat praten over de machtigen en de underdogs absoluut niet in de mode is. Maar ik ben dan ook een prehistorisch mens.

Daarentegen geloven Bert Heemst en zijn gelijkgestemden in het postmodernisme, waarin geen enkele waarheid meer bestaat, behalve die van de waan van de dag. Daarom zullen zij nooit de mening kunnen delen van Galeano dat: 

To justify itself, state terrorism manufactures terrorists: it sows hate and harvests alibis. Everything indicates that this slaughterhouse of Gaza, which according to its perpetrators is for finishing off the terrorists, will achieve boosting them.

Since 1948, the Palestinians live condemned to perpetual humiliation. They cannot even breathe without permission. They have lost their country, their land, their water, their freedom, everything of theirs. They do not even have the right to choose their governments. When they vote for those they should not, they are punished. Gaza is being punished. It turned into a mousetrap without exit since Hamas cleanly won the elections of 2006. Something similar happened in 1932 when the Communist Party triumphed in the elections of El Salvador. Drenched in blood, the Salvadorans atoned for their bad behavior and since then have lived under military dictatorships. Democracy is a luxury which not everyone deserves.

Voor de twijfelaars onder degenen die weigeren volwassen te worden zijn hier de woorden van de neo-conservatieve geleerde Samuel Huntington in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996):

The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion, but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do.

Andreas Rasito 'albino's?' Waarom is het zo moeilijk voor een aanzienlijk aantal witte Nederlanders om hun zelfbeeld bij te stellen? Waarom wel kritiek op het zelfbeeld van de Amerikaan, de Turk, de Joods-Israeli, etcetera en geen kritiek op de witte Nederlander kunnen accepteren?

Slow Suicide and the Abandonment of the World

JUNE 22, 2018

Slow Suicide and the Abandonment of the World

by EDWARD CURTINFacebook

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Photo by Athena Iluz | CC BY 2.0

“The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man.  Society highly values its normal man.  It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal.  Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.  Our behavior is a function of our experience.  We act the way we see things.  If our experience is destroyed, our behavior will be destructive.  If our experience is destroyed, we have lost our own selves.”

– R.D. Laing, The Politics of Experience, 1967

“The artist is the man who refuses initiation through education into the existing order, remains faithful to his own childhood being, and thus becomes ‘a human being in the spirit of all times, an artist.’”

– Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death

Most suicides die of natural causes, slowly and in silence.

But we hear a lot about the small number of suicides, by comparison, who kill themselves quickly by their own hands. Of course their sudden deaths elicit shock and sadness since their deaths, usually so unexpected even when not a surprise, allow for no return. Such sudden once-and-for-all endings are even more jarring in a high-tech world where people are subconsciously habituated to thinking that everything can be played back, repeated, and rewound, even lives.

If the suicides are celebrities, the mass media can obsess over why they did it.  How shocking!  Wasn’t she at the peak of her career?  Didn’t he finally seem happy?  And then the speculative stories will appear about the reasons for the rise or fall of suicide rates, only to disappear as quickly as the celebrities are dropped by the media and forgotten by the public.

The suicides of ordinary people will be mourned privately by their loved ones in their individual ways and in the silent recesses of their hearts.  A hush will fall over their departures that will often be viewed as accidental.

And the world will roll on as the earth absorbs the bodies and the blood.  “Where’s it all going all this spilled blood,” writes the poet Jacques Prévert.  “Murder’s blood…war’s blood… blood of suicides…the earth that turns and turns with its great streams of blood.”

Of such suicides Albert Camus said, “Dying voluntarily implies you have recognized, even instinctively, the ridiculous character of that habit [of living], the absence of any profound reason for living, the insane character of that daily agitation, and the uselessness of suffering.”  He called this feeling the absurd, and said it was widespread and involved the feeling of being an alien or stranger in a world that couldn’t be explained and didn’t make sense.  Assuming this experience of the absurd, Camus wished to explore whether suicide was a solution to it.  He concluded that it wasn’t.

Like Camus, I am interested in asking what is the meaning of life.  “How to answer it?” he asked in The Myth of Sisyphus.  He added that “the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions.”  But I don’t want to explore his line of reasoning to his conclusions, whether to agree or disagree.  I wish, rather, to explore the reasons why so many people choose to commit slow suicide by immersing themselves in the herd mentality and following a way of life that leads to inauthenticity and despair; why so many people so easily and early give up their dreams of a life of freedom for a proverbial mess of pottage, which these days can be translated to mean a consumer’s life, one focused on staying safe by embracing conventional bromides and making sure to never openly question a system based on systemic violence in all its forms; why, despite all evidence to the contrary, so many people embrace getting and spending and the accumulation of wealth in the pursuit of a chimerical “happiness” that leaves them depressed and conscience dead.  Why so many people do not rebel but wish to take their places on this ship of fools.

So what can we say about the vast numbers of people who commit slow suicide by a series of acts and inactions that last a long lifetime and render them the living dead, those whom Thoreau so famously said were the mass of people who “lead lives of quiet desperation”?  Is the meaning of life for them simply the habit of living they fell into at the start of life before they thought or wondered what’s it all about?  Or is it the habit they embraced after shrinking back in fear from the disturbing revelations thinking once brought them?  Or did they ever seriously question their place in the lethal fraud that is organized society, what Tolstoy called the Social Lie?  Why do so many people kill their authentic selves and their consciences that could awaken them to break through the social habits of thought, speech, and action that lead them to live “jiffy lube” lives, periodically oiled and greased to smoothly roll down the conventional highway of getting and spending and refusing to resist the murderous actions of their government?

An unconscious despair rumbles beneath the frenetic surface of American society today.  An unspoken nothingness.  I think the Italian writer Robert Calasso says it well: “The new society is an agnostic theocracy based on nihilism.”  It’s as though we are floating on nothing, sustained by nothing, in love with nothing – all the while embracing any thingthat a materialistic, capitalist consumer culture can throw at us.  We are living in an empire of illusions, propagandized and self-deluded.  Most people will tell you they are stressed and depressed, but will often add – “who wouldn’t be with the state of the world” – ignoring their complicity through the way they have chosen compromised, conventional lives devoid of the spirit of rebellion.

I keep meeting people who, when I ask them how they are, will respond by saying, “I’m hanging in there.”

Don’t common sayings intimate unconscious truths?  Hang – among its possible derivatives is the word “habit” and the meaning of “coming to a standstill.”  Stuck in one’s habits, dangling over nothing, up in the air, going nowhere, hanging by a string. Slow suicides. The Beatles’ sang it melodically: “He’s a real nowhere man/Sitting in his nowhere land/Making all his nowhere plans for nobody/Doesn’t have a point of view/Knows not where he’s going to/Isn’t he a bit like you and me.” It’s a far cry from having “the world on a string,” as Harold Arlen wrote many years before.

Maybe if we listen to how people talk or what popular culture throws up, we will learn more through creative associations than through all the theories the experts have to offer.

There have been many learned tomes over the years trying to explain the actof suicide, an early and very famous one being Emile Durkheim’s groundbreaking sociological analysisSuicide(1897).  In thousands of books and articles other thinkers have approached the subject from various perspectives – psychological, philosophical, biological, etc.  They contain much truth and a vast amount of data that appeal to the rational mind seeking general explanations.  But in the end, general explanations are exactly that – general – while a mystery usually haunts the living whose loved ones have killed themselves.

But what about the slow suicides, those D. H. Lawrence called the living dead (don’t let “the living dead eat you up”), those who have departed the real world for a conscienceless complacency from which they can cast aspersions on those whose rebellious spirits give them little rest.  Where are the expert disquisitions about them?

We’ve had more than a century of pseudo-scientific studies of suicide and the world has gotten much worse. More than a century of psychotherapy and people have grown progressively more depressed.  Large and increasing numbers are drugged to the teeth with pharmaceutical drugs and television and the internet and cell phones and shopping and endless talk about food and diets and sports and nothing. Talk to talk, surface to surface. Pundits pontificate daily in streams of endless bullshit for which they are paid enormous sums as they smile with their fake whiter-than-white teeth flashing from their makeup masks.  People actually listen to these fools to “inform” themselves. They even watch television news and think they know what is happening in the world.  We are drowning in a “universe of disembodied data,” as playwright John Steppling has so aptly phrased it.  People obsessively hover over their cell phones, searching for the key that will unlock the cells they have locked themselves in. Postliteracy, mediated reality, and digital dementia have become the norm.  Minds are packaged and commodified.  Perhaps you think I exaggerate, but I feel that madness is much more the norm today than when Laing penned his epigraphic comment.

Not stark raving screaming madness, just a slow, whimpering acceptance of an insane society whose very fabric is toxic and which continues its God-ordained mission of spreading death and destruction around the world in the name of freedom and democracy, while so many of its walking dead citizens measure out their lives with coffee spoons. A nice madness, you could say, a pleasant, depressed and repressed madness.  A madness in which people might say with T. S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock (if they still read or could remember):  “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons…And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, / and snicker, / And in short, I was afraid.”

But why are so many so afraid?  Everyone has fears, but so many normal people seem extremely fearful, so fearful they choose to blend into the social woodwork so they don’t stand out as dissenters or oddballs.  They kill their authentic selves; become conscience-less.  And they do this in a society where their leaders are hell-bent on destroying the world and who justify their nuclear madness at every turn. I think Laing was right that this goes back to our experience.  When genuine experience is denied or mystified (it’s now disappeared into digital reality), real people disappear.  Laing wrote:

In order to rationalize our industrial-military complex, we have to destroy our capacity to see clearly any more what is in front of, and to imagine what is beyond, our noses.  Long before a thermonuclear war can come about, we have had to lay waste our sanity.  We begin with the children.  It is imperative to catch them in time.

Without the most thorough and rapid brainwashing their dirty minds would see through our dirty tricks.  Children are not yet fools, but we shall turn them into imbeciles like ourselves, with high I. Q.’s if possible.  From the moment of birth, when the Stone Age baby confronts the twentieth century mother, the baby is subjected to these forces of violence, called love, as its mother and father, as their parents and their parents before them, have been.  These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of it potentialities, and on the whole this enterprise is successful.  By the time the new human is fifteen or so, we are left with a being like ourselves, a half-crazed creature more or less adjusted to a mad world.  This is normality in our present age.

Love and violence, properly speaking, are polar opposites. Love lets the other be, but with affection and concern.  Violence attempts to constrain the other’s freedom, to force him to act in the way we desire, but with ultimate lack of concern, with indifference to the other’s own existence or destiny.  We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love…We live equally out of our bodies and out of our minds.

So yes, I do think most people are victims.  No one chooses their parents, or to be born into poverty, or to be discriminated against for one’s race, etc.  No one chooses to have their genuine experience poisoned from childhood.  No one chooses to be born into a mad society. This is all true.  Some are luckier than others.  Suicides, fast and slow, are victims.  But not just victims.  This is not about blame, but understanding.  For those who commit to lives of slow suicide, to the squelching of their true selves and their consciences in the face of a rapacious and murderous society, there is always the chance they can break with the norm and go sane.  Redemption is always possible.  But it primarily involves overcoming the fear of death, a fear that manifests itself in the extreme need to preserve one’s life, so-called social identity, and sense of self by embracing social conventions, no matter how insane they may be or whether or not they bring satisfaction or fulfillment.  Whether or not they give life a meaning that goes deep.

But for those who have taken their lives and are no longer among us, hope is gone.  But we can learn from their tragedies if we are truthful.   For them the fear of life was primary, and death seemed like an escape from that fear. Life was too much for them. Why?  We must ask.  So they chose a life-in-death approach through fast suicide.  Everyone is joined to them in that fear, just as everyone is joined by the fear of death.  It is a question of which dominates, and when, and how much courage we can muster to live daringly.  The fear of death leads one to constrict one’s life in the safe surround of conventional society in the illusion that such false security will save one in the end. Death is too much for them.  So they accept a death-in-life approach that I call slow suicide.

But in the end as in the beginning and throughout our lives, there is really no escape.  The more alive we are, the closer death feels because really living involves risks and living outside the cocoon of the social lie. Mr. Pumpkin Head might seize you, whether he is conceived as your boss, an accident, disease, social ostracism, or some government assassin.  But the deader we feel, the further away death seems because we feel safe.  Pick your poison.

But better yet, perhaps there is no need to choose if we can regain our genuine experience that parents and society, for different reasons, conspire to deny us.  Could the meaning of our lives be found, not in statements or beliefs, but in true experience?  Most people think of experience as inner or outer.  This is not true.  It is a form of conventional brainwashing that makes us schizoid. It is the essence of the neuro-biological materialism that reduces humans to unfree automatons. Proffered as the wisdom of the super intelligent, it is sheer stupidity.

All experience is in-between, not the most eloquent of phrasing, I admit, but accurate.  Laing, a psychiatrist, puts it in the same way as do the mystics and those who embrace the Tao.  He says, “The relation of my experience to behavior is not that of inner to outer.  My experience is not inside my head.  My experience of this room is outside in this room.  To say that my experience is intrapsychic is to presuppose that there is a psyche that my experience is in.  My psyche is my experience, my experience is my psyche.”  Reverie, imagination, prayer, dream, etc. are as much outer as inner, they are modalities of experience that exist in-between. We live in-between, and if we could experience that, we would realize the meaning of life and our connection to all living beings, including those our government massacres daily, and we would awaken our consciences to our complicity in the killing.  We would realize that the victims of the American killing machine are human beings like us; are us, and we, them.  We would rebel.

Thoreau said a life without principle was not worth living.  Yet for so many of the slow suicides the only principals they ever had were those they had in high school.  Such word confusion is understandable when illiteracy is the order of the day and spelling passé. Has anyone when in high school ever had Thoreau’s admonition drummed into his head: “The ways by which you may get money almost without exception lead downward. To have done anything by which you earned money merely is to have been truly idle or worse.”  Of course not, since getting a “good” living is never thought to involve living in an honest, inviting, and honorable way.  It is considered a means to an end, the end being a consumer’s paradise.  “As for the means of living,” Thoreau added, “it is wonderful how indifferent men of all classes are about it, even reformers, so called – whether they inherit, or earn, or steal it.”  Is it any wonder so many people end up committing slow suicide?  “Is it that men are too much disgusted with their own experience to speak of it?”

What the hell –TGIH!

I believe the story has it that when he was in jail for refusing the poll tax that supported slavery and the Mexican-American war, Thoreau was visited by his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, who asked him, “Henry, what are you doing in there?”  To which Thoreau responded, “Ralph, what are you doing out there?”  Today, however, most folks don’t realize that being outside their cells is being in them, and such imprisonment is far from principled.  That’s not a text message they’re likely to receive.

I recently met a woman, where or when I can’t recall.  It might have been when walking on the open road or falling in a dreaming hole.  She told me “if you look through a window, you can see the world outside.  If you look in a mirror, you can see yourself outside.  If you look into the outside world, you can see everyone inside out. When the inside is seen outside and the outside is seen inside, you will know what you face.  Everything becomes simple then,” as she looked straight through me and my face fell off.

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More articles by:EDWARD CURTIN

Edward Curtin is a writer whose work has appeared widely.  He teaches sociology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. His website is http://edwardcurtin.com/

https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/06/22/103106/

Paul Craig Roberts 279

The Persecution of Julian Assange Proves That Western Values No Longer Exist

The Persecution of Julian Assange Proves That Western Values No Longer Exist

Paul Craig Roberts

The Western world never ceases to speak of its “democratic values.” In Western political theory, the way democracy works is by free speech and a free press. By speaking out, citizens and media keep the government accountable. 

This liberal tradition means that there are no words or terms that cannot be used because some designated “victim group” can claim to feel offended. The inroads into free speech made by political correctness, now institutionalized in universities and the public school system, in the presstitute media, in American corporations such as Google, and in the enculturated habits of Americans, demonstrate a decline in the status of free speech. Governments have also made inroads, with the “war on terror” becoming a justification for warrantless spying, mass surveillance, and a clampdown on dissent.

The free press has declined even more dramatically than free speech. The NY Times of the Pentagon Papers disappeared during George W. Bush’s first term when the newspaper sat on the story that the Bush regime was spying without warrants. The NY Times sat on the story for a year, allowing Bush to be reelected without controversy and allowing the government time to legalize the spying on an ex post facto basis.

Today the media are a propaganda ministry engaged in the demonization of Russia and Trump and justifying the war crimes of Washington and its vassal states. 

This is why there is no media uproar over the 6-year incarceration of Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. 

Wikileaks is a news organization and has not done anything that a free press has not always done. Julian Assange is a citizen of Australia and Ecuador. He is not an American and thus cannot be guilty of treason. Yet Washington is believed to have used a grand jury to concoct such a case against him.

The new president of Ecuador is not the strong and good man than his predecessor was. Under Washington’s pressure Moreno is making life in the Ecuadorian embassy as unbearable as possible for Assange in an effort to force him out into British hands. Responding to Washington’s pressure, the British government will not honor his asylum, which prevents Assange from being able to leave the embassy. 

There is no presence of “democratic values” in this affair. It is a repeat of the Soviet Union’s treatment of Cardinal Mindszenty, only it is Washington, not Moscow, who is stamping on the face of freedom. https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2013/07/23/role-reversal-how-the-us-became-the-ussr-paul-craig-roberts/

The Australian government, also in deference to Washington, has done nothing to help Assange. Australia, like every other vassal state, puts Washington’s interest ahead of both law and the interest of citizens.

This week there were protests in Australia in support of Assange. However, Western governments are now so far removed from citizens who are today little more than subjects that it is unlikely that anything short of revolution can restore accountability to governments in the West.

“Western democracy” has become an oxymoron. This article by Mike Head shows the distain that the Western elites have for free speech, freedom of the press, truth, and the rights of citizens:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/49687.htm

https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2018/06/23/persecution-julian-assange-proves-western-values-no-longer-exist/

Liberalism Will Only Lead Russia to Destruction

19C Philosopher’s Prophetic Warning: Liberalism Will Only Lead Russia to Destruction

 From 1861 our system has fallen sick with egalitarian liberalism… And now we are treating it…

Shall we cure it?

Mark Hackard(The soul of the east) Jun 20, 2018 |  

Originally appeared at: The soul of the east

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Konstantin Nikolaevich Leontiev (1831-1891) was a doctor, diplomat and philosopher. One of Russia’s premier conservative thinkers in the second half of the nineteenth century, Leontiev advocated in erudite fashion the principles of faith, authority and hierarchy. The concluding chapter to his work Soloviev vs. Danilevsky provides an excellent reflection of this worldview. Translated by Mark Hackard.

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Church, state, cultural type, class and nation – their past is decidedly beyond our control. Yet we (children of the past, living in the present) can nonetheless significantly influence these social groups within the parameters of a model given by the past; we can enable the rise and the fall of their further development or disintegration.

And, of course, it is much easier to serve the degradation of the model, the derangement of an organism and even its final destruction, than to serve its ascent and strengthening.

Using the word “easier,” I refer here not to the question of when it is more convenient or safer for individuals to accomplish those deeds leading to the development or disintegration of one or another social organism, whether in the period of a model’s rise or during its downfall and demoralization.

This is a very complex affair; every age has had its share of sadness, trouble and dangers, and so it continues. I speak about social organisms the same way that Strakhov speaks about physical organisms. Their systems more easily give way to corruption and disorder than to optimum development and recovery.

To mature from Hugo Capet to Louis XIV, France needed around 500 years, and to debase her sovereignty and cultural model from the time of Napoleon I to the Republic of Thiers, Grévy and Carnot, a little over half a century was sufficient (1815-1871).

And our dear Fatherland developed (i.e. underwent differentiation and stratified while uniting at the same time in faith and authority) very slowly. Around 800 years had flowed by from the age of St. Vladimir to that of Emperors Alexander I and Nicholas.

Under St. Vladimir there were first defined those cultural qualities intended to develop (i.e. refine while uniting) in their depths a sovereign and national Russian model. Orthodoxy and patrimonial apanage, which in the natural course of history would be resolved in patrimonial monarchy – here are the essential features, or the unique markers of the future of our historical model, that were already outlined in their first contours 900 years ago.

From Prince Vladimir to Ivan the Great and Ivan the Dread; from the Great and the Dread to Peter; and from Peter to the nineteenth century, Russia’s system became ever more defined, unified, strengthened and grew. In the nineteenth century, after Catherine the Great, it continued to grow, being enriched with new territories and new acquisitions alien to the Russian cultural nucleus; the unity of authority and the dominant faith remained unshakable, but internal stratification ended after Catherine.

Under the last two Emperors (not counting the short-lived rule of Paul I), the differentiating process of Russian historical life continued only in the vertical (provincial) direction. If it can be so expressed, the process of horizontal (class) differentiation ceased for more than half a century.

Those insignificant changes that were brought into class relations under Nicholas Pavlovich and Alexander I can be overlooked in comparison with such acts or stages of development as Peter’s Table of Ranks or Catherine’s Charter of Nobility.

Peter and Catherine’s stratifying measures encompassed all the life of an enormous state with an iron grid of systematic discipline; this discipline, accustoming some to authority and others to obedience, facilitated the development of strong personalities – the passionate and the reserved, refined and integrated, delicate and courageous and rough.

Transitions, transfers and leaps from position to another, frequent changes in lifestyle, quick careers and sudden downfalls – all were rare and difficult. All of this was accessible only to a chosen few, the most rich and pedigreed or the most talented and strong of will (even if for evil purposes). As soon as we name three great representatives of that epoch we can term our historical respite, the three giants of religion, sovereignty and national poetry, Philaret, Nicholas Pavlovich and Pushkin, we have said it all.

How much in common they have in fundamentals and what little resemblance they share in their temperaments and types of development! Internal differentiation was halted in the lull after a long struggle with an external enemy (democratic France, which had rejected distinctions once and forever).

Differentiation stopped and bore great fruits in all fields during this lull.

But what shall be next?

Next, I won’t resolve to say what the intelligent and blunt landholder said to Levin in Anna Karenina: “The Emancipation ruined Russia.”

And I won’t say it – not because even our best reactionaries won’t resolve to pronounce these “harsh words,” but because I myself am unsure of the unconditional correctness of this landholder.

What does “ruin” mean in such a case?

To ruin means to hasten by means of dangerous measures the date of the final downfall of a great power, the day of its final subordination to foreigners or its voluntary merger with some neighboring state. It’s impossible to understand the word “death” for the state in any other way.

It stands to reason that any man can see clearly how Russia is not only far from this; to the contrary, she is even entering the twentieth century in a period of multifaceted superiority over others.

This is felt not by us alone, but by those nations we designate both as our political competitors and our teachers in matters of intellectual development.

That much is clear, but what’s also clear is that dominance can be either durable or transitory, longstanding or quickly passing. Degradation and downfall can be quick and unexpected only in the state’s declining years, in which Russia undoubtedly dwells.

We cannot wish our Motherland only an artificial and ephemeral dominance of the kind that France enjoyed under Napoleon III over the course of some twenty years!

From this standpoint, the fate of the ancient Athenian republic is also an unenviable one. Her dominant position lasted only a half century, from the victory at Plataea until the death of Pericles (479-429 B.C.).

Contemporary Germany ascended politically before our eyes and now vainly exerts her last powers to preserve her high international standing.

Behind the magnificent figure of Bismarck, the weaker aspects of his construction went unnoticed. Yet the colossus withdrew, and Germany little by little ceases to be frightening.

We are not speaking of such an ephemeral, and very likely unnecessary, preeminence.

I said clearly that not only is the death of the state far from us, but that Russia is entering the twentieth century in a period of multifaceted dominance over others.

However, from what I, like many others, see as a growing superiority, it does not follow that I have been unconditionally glad over the superiority itself.

For the only desirable outer superiority is that which will further our inner independence from democratic and undoubtedly decaying Europe. External successes and good fortune are needed for what is called the internal “ascent of the spirit.” They are necessary for the reinforcement of our national consciousness, for the restoration of the shaky foundations of internal development, and for our inner discipline.

Neither Athens in the age of Themistocles and Pericles nor France of the two Bonapartes should serve as exemplars for us, but Rome and the previous England that was “making haste ever so slowly.”

Someday we must perish; no earthly social organism can escape from death and destruction, whether it be sovereign, cultural or religious. The Savior foretold the obliteration of Christianity itself on the earth, and those who prophesy a certain unprecedented and complete triumph of the “militant” (earthly) Church in this world are preaching something akin to heresy at odds not only with the teachings of the Orthodox clergy, but with those of the Gospel.

And Russia will perish someday. Even when casting a glance over the whole globe and the entire composition of its population, you’ll see that there is nowhere to expect new and unknown tribes strong in spirit, for there are none left in the environs of an undoubtedly aged humanity. Then one can almost certainly predict that Russia may perish only by dual means – either from the East, by the sword of the roused Chinese, or by a voluntary merger with a European republican federation. (The latter outcome could be tremendously aided by the formation of a liberal, classless society.)

There is a third possible outcome, upon which Europeans hostile to us point with horror and revulsion: “Russia is something like a gigantic Macedon, which by exploiting the conflicts among Western peoples will gradually subject them all to her monarchical authority.”

As far as I know, we haven’t been granted the title of Rome. And at first glance, such Europeans may seem correct. Macedon had neither its own institutions nor its own customs and tastes. She had power alone, a powerful habit for royal authority; in all other facets of her history, we do not see any further characteristics.

Rome, weak and complacent in matters of everyday life, customs and tastes, was strong not so much by personal authority as by her institutions, both native and profound. Thanks to the cultivating influence of these native institutions, autocracy was established in timely fashion and held out in the West for a whole 500 years (from Augustus to Romulus Augustulus). In the East this authority was transferred to Byzantium for another entire millennium. Religion and customs changed, but the laws remained.

We have no such laws and institutions that surpass the surrounding world, and in this sense we cannot teach anyone anything. Our royal authority is enduring (now after leveling reforms) not so much through wise native institutions as through our feelings and vital requirements.

In this aspect we are indeed closer to Macedon than to Rome, yet aside from the habit and love for autocracy that has entered the bloodstream of the majority of the Russian people, there is something grand that Macedon did not possess. We have our religion, which may receive a universal purpose with the flow of time.

At the present time, Orthodoxy has by the essence of its teaching only universal meaning; but in our hands, it has not yet expressed that purpose which we would have every basis and right to call truly universal. Neither the Western peoples nor the Asians are crowding to join it.

And we do not know whether they will convert.

But we sense and even know that the time is quickly approaching when two great questions, two mighty currents will seize and captivate humanity, it may be, unto the oblivion of everything else.

“Bread and circuses!” shouted the Roman mobs.

“Bread and faith!” soon will shout all the peoples of Europe, even at the cost of new forms of slavery.

Fortunate and powerful will be the nation whose faith and habit of obedience is stronger than that of others in such times.

Will these qualities be stronger in us by that time than in all others?

There are indications that they shall be, and there are hopes. There are also well-known signs of the opposite.

So many examples are there of one and the other over recent years, that with only a short and matter-fact list of them, one could fill a rather large book.

And if I was asked on conscience what my most intimate and heartfelt, so to speak, conclusion would be from this multitude of conflicting examples, I wouldn’t know what to answer. I say heartfelt because a clear, intellectual conclusion in our time is as impossible as it was impossible, for example, to decisively prophesy in the era of the iconoclasts over whose beliefs would win out – those of Leo III the Isaurian or St. Theodore the Studite. And even my hazy heartfelt conclusion, accessible in our time, is indecisive.

To the question of what, by my heart’s feeling, should emerge victorious in the not too remote future – what I love or what I hate (i.e. faith, authority and inequality of rights or faithlessness, anarchy and equality?), I would answer frankly: “I don’t know!” For a strong love for the ideals of faith, authority and inequality is one matter, while a firm hope for even their incomplete realization in life is another.

“Social organisms are akin to physical organisms…”

To harm an organism is easier than to bring it benefit. It is easier to ruin an organism that to enable the full development of its nature! From 1861 our system has fallen sick with egalitarian liberalism… And now we are treating it…

Shall we cure it?

https://russian-faith.com/philosophy/ready-19c-philosophers-warning-liberalism-will-only-lead-russia-destruction-n1393

Trump's Goal to Keep China From Dumping US Debt

Trump's goal to keep China from using 'nuclear option' of dumping US debt – Max Keiser

Published time: 23 Jun, 2018 11:34 Edited time: 23 Jun, 2018 13:13 

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Nuclear Bomb Test, Bikini atoll and Enewetak, June 25 1956 © Getty Images 

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President Donald Trump is cutting US military spending to be less exposed to the skyrocketing interest rates that would become unavoidable when China opts to dump US Treasury bonds, Max Keiser has told RT.

“To understand US trade policies – and in particular Trump’s policies on China – from Trump’s point of view you have to think like Trump,” the host of RT's Keiser Report explained. “When Trump took office, he inherited the biggest debt load that any country had ever accumulated. He also inherited a military budget that eats up 50 percent of America’s annual tax revenues of $1.5 trillion.”

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China can hurt America in trade war six ways from Sunday

According to Keiser, after taking the helm as president, Donald Trump realized it was vital to reduce defense spending to pare the huge US debt.

“He looked at the geo-political chess board and saw that – the low hanging fruit, in terms of saving money – is America’s huge military spending in South Korea,” said Keiser, stressing that after the historic summit with North Korean leader Kim Jing-un the US would start pulling military presence out of the region.

The US president is currently arranging deals with Saudi Arabia and Israel, in preparation for the US pulling out of the Middle East as well, Keiser added, highlighting that Trump had previously signaled to Germany that the US would to cut its military presence in NATO there too.

“That brings us to China, and the ‘nuclear option’ they have of dumping US treasuries to financially attack America. This is their one big play. Trump knows it, and he’s been protecting the US against it,” the financial commentator said.

Downsizing the Pentagon, according to Keiser, will shrink US debt, diminishing the possibility of a Chinese financial attack via the dumping of US bonds.

RT‏Geverifieerd account @RT_com

Dumping US securities moved Russia to 22nd place on list of major foreign holders of US debt

08:20 - 19 jun. 2018

“By reducing its debt load, the US becomes a smaller target, and less exposed to the skyrocketing interest rates that would accompany a Chinese multi-trillion Treasury bond dump,” Keiser said. “Additionally, China’s internal debts are harder to cut without causing a more generalized, across-the-board economic wipeout – giving rise to severe, unpredictable social unrest.”

The commentator said that cutting the Pentagon budget in half will cut the stock market in half and cause a short and sharp recession in the US. However, the economy can rapidly recover if Trump “allocates part of the defense-spending-cut dividend to stimulus programs, pushing credit opportunities for small and medium-sized enterprises and infrastructure spending.”

RT‏Geverifieerd account @RT_com

Chinese investments totaled $1.8 billion from January through May, that’s the lowest level in 7 years

04:30 - 20 jun. 2018

According to Keiser, China’s stock market will also be cut in half. However, the country’s government, in the absence of a fully-developed consumer economy, will have to “fall back on its tried and true Mercantilist policies of exporting its way to growth by pegging its currency at below market rates – which means holding, not selling US dollars.”

“In the end, Trump wins. China’s growth rate is cut sharply, (but it keeps going without a revolution). Germany is free to partner with Russia in a post-NATO world (long overdue, IMO) and over in the mid-East, the oil is running out – so they’re transitioning to solar,” said Keiser.

For more stories on economy & finance visit RT's business section

https://www.rt.com/business/430645-trump-china-us-debt-keiser/