Category Archives: History

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Forgotten Lesson on Good and Evil

There are neither good people nor bad people, but individuals struggling between good and evil from within.

Article by Annie Holmquist.

Excerpt:

Although a decorated commander in the Russian army, Solzhenitsyn was imprisoned near the end of World War II for disparaging comments made privately about Joseph Stalin. His years in prison were hardly pleasant, but as Solzhenitsyn writes in The Gulag Archipelago, those years gave him striking insight into the reality of human nature:

It was granted me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience: how a human being becomes evil and how good. In the intoxication of youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In the surfeit of power I was a murderer, and an oppressor. In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments. And it was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains … an unuprooted small corner of evil.

Solzhenitsyn goes on to say:

Since then I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world: They struggle with the evil inside a human being (inside every human being). It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person.

This realization led Solzhenitsyn to recognize the problem with revolutions, namely, “They destroy only those carriers of evil contemporary with them…. And they then take to themselves as their heritage the actual evil itself, magnified still more.”

How the West Was Defeated

Article by Pepe Escobar.

Excerpt:

Emmanuel Todd, historian, demographer, anthropologist, sociologist and political analyst, is part of a dying breed: one of the very few remaining exponents of old school French intelligentzia – a heir to those like Braudel, Sartre, Deleuze and Foucault who dazzled successive young Cold War generations from the West down to the East.

The first nugget concerning his latest book, La Défaite de L’Occident (“The Defeat of the West”) is the minor miracle of actually being published last week in France, right within the NATO sphere: a hand grenade of a book, by an independent thinker, based on facts and verified data, blowing up the whole Russophobia edifice erected around the “aggression” by “Tsar” Putin.

At least some sectors of strictly oligarch-controlled corporate media in France simply could not ignore Todd this time around for several reasons. Most of all because he was the first Western intellectual, already in 1976, to have predicted the fall of the USSR in his book La Chute Finale, with his research based on Soviet infant mortality rates.

Another key reason was his 2002 book Apres L’Empire, a sort of preview of the Empire’s Decline and Fall published a few months before Shock & Awe in Iraq.

Now Todd, in what he has defined as his last book (“I closed the circle”) allows himself to go for broke and meticulously depict the defeat not only of the US but of the West as a whole – with his research focusing in and around the war in Ukraine.

How the Bible influenced the Founding Fathers

Which political traditions and thinkers shaped the ideas and aspirations of the American founding? Late eighteenth-century Americans were influenced by diverse perspectives, including British constitutionalism, classical and civic republicanism, and Enlightenment liberalism. Among the works frequently said to have influenced the founders are John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws, and William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England.

Another, often overlooked or discounted source of influence is the Bible. Its expansive influence on the political culture of the age should not surprise us because the population was overwhelming Protestant, and it informed significant aspects of public culture, including language, letters, education, and law. No book at the time was more accessible or familiar than the English Bible, specifically the King James Bible. And the people were biblically literate.

Continue reading here.

How the Climate Hysteria Is Lowering Your Standard of Living

Interview with Doug Casey.

Excerpts:

But perhaps the average person doesn’t think about these things or care. The standard of living has gone up for so long that we tend to think it’s automatic and divinely ordained. I’m not so sure about that. Everything tends to wind down unless there is enough outside force to counteract it.

The planet will be just fine. It’s been here for 4.5 billion years and will be here for billions more, long after humanity has disappeared or gone elsewhere. Anyway, the climate hysterics don’t really care about “saving the planet”; even they aren’t quite that stupid. What’s going on is that they actually hate humanity. And themselves. The world is suffering from an episode of mass psychosis.

One currently fashionable indication of this is the 15-minute city, which governments are trying to impose all over the world. These would penalize you if you exit your designated 15-minute zone more than X number of times per month. The idea is green. And, like most green notions, it is very retrogressive. They want to return people to the status of medieval serfs, when few ventured more than 15 minutes from their hovels.

I hate to think something so dire is in the cards. But Dark Riders are at large, and the eye of Sauron is scanning the world. The tendency towards authoritarianism or even totalitarianism worldwide is growing—not to mention the possibility of World War III.

The negative trends go way beyond carbon hysteria and appliances that don’t work very well.

New Survey: Fewer Germans feel free to express their political opinions in 2023

. . . than in any year since the early days of the Federal Republic

Article by eugyppius.

Excerpt:

The impression of a closed and stifling discourse is present across the political spectrum. Only 39% of centre-right CDU voters feel free to express their views, but for Die Linke, or the Left Party (the successors of the East German SED), that number falls to 36%, and for AfD voters it is lowest of all, a mere 11%. A clear majority (75%) of Greens alone feel that they can speak their minds, and so here we learn who feels best represented by our present discourse.

“Do you have the feeling, that you can freely express your political opinion today in Germany, or is it better to be cautious?” Blue: “I can speak freely.” Orange: “It is better to be cautious.”

No surprises lurk in the breakdown by education: 51% of those with university degrees or an Abitur feel their political expression is unhampered, while clear majorities of everybody else say they cannot speak their minds.

The historical perspective is sobering. The Federal Republic was only five years old in 1953; the Allied occupation and denazification were recent events, and even then Germans enjoyed a substantially greater subjective sense of political expression than they do today. This sense peaked under Willy Brandt during the Cold War, but has been in a state of decay since the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989. This would be good evidence in favour of Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s thesis, that Western liberal states rapidly lose their enthusiasm for principles like free expression in the absence of competition from rival systems.

Yet it was not the end of the Cold War, but rather the chancellorship of Angela Merkel that saw the most dramatic decline in free political expression. Specifically, Merkel’s strategy of “asymmetric demobilisation,” via which she sought to disarm the leftist opposition by adopting central elements of their political programme, had a very perverse influence. German voters and hence the politicians who appeal to them have always had pronounced conservative tendencies, while the media here as everywhere else lean to the left. Before 2005, politicians provided an important counterweight to the line taken by our press, but Merkel’s triangulations created a new system of soft political enforcement sustained by establishment politicians and mainstream journalism alike.

The consequence is a system that has placed all of us in thrall to the whims of an eccentric minority. The opinions which govern German society, as I’ve written many times before, are not those of most people, but rather of an increasingly insular, university-educated urbanite class, who are relatively affluent, who vote overwhelmingly Green and who constitute no more than 15% of the population. I doubt the old socialist countries of the Warsaw Pact were any different in this respect. More and more, it feels like we defeated communism only to recreate an equivalent system, which threatens to be much worse, insofar as its informal nature and soft asymmetrical methods confuse everybody and thwart opposition.

Who destroyed Western Civilization?

Asks Paul Craig Roberts.

His answer:

I once offered this explanation:

The liberals’ stress on social purification flows from an inconsistency in the intellectual foundation of Western civilization.  The Enlightenment had two results that combined to produce a destructive formula.  On the one hand, Christian moral fervor was secularized, which produced demands for the moral perfection of society.  On the other hand, modern science hammered epistemology into a critical philosophical positivism that is skeptical of the reality of moral motives.  From the one we get moral indignation and from the other, moral skepticism.  How can two such disparate tendencies be reconciled?

The answer seems to be that this inconsistent combination is held together by their joint attack on existing society.  One pre-empts existing society’s defense, while the other focuses moral indignation against it.  Together, they support a social and political dynamism that seeks to achieve progress by remaking society.

Affirmations of society’s achievements run into this dynamism, which mows them down with skepticism and indignation.  People who are motivated by moral purposes  find that they have a safe outlet only in accusations of immorality against existing society, and the West’s morality becomes immanent in attacks on itself.

Others, such as Richard Knight, believe Western civilization was destroyed by German Jewish cultural marxists whose march through the institutions discredited every institution of Western civilization. I don’t disagree that this has occurred, but I think Cultural Marxism is itself a product of the inconsistency in the Western intellectual foundation that I described. 

It seems unlikely that the West’s intellectuals can escape the destructive dynamism of moral indignation and moral skepticism.  When civilization is destroyed, nirvana is not standing ready to take its place.  The replacement is barbarism into which we are already descending.

How Inflation Poisoned Our Food

Video interview (54 min) that Tom Woods conducts with Matthew Lysiak.

Description:

Matthew Lysiak discusses the various interests that combined to substitute cheap, fake food for the real food Americans used to eat. A key driving force: trying to conceal the effects of inflation on food prices by persuading Americans to consume cheap — and, it turns out, unhealthy — alternatives.