Category Archives: History

Something is happening in Argentina

They may be about to elect the world's first AnCap president

Says Doug Casey in this interview.

Excerpt:

Milei is totally sound from an economic, political, and a philosophical point of view. But—and this is critically important—he’s sound from a moral point of view.

He deals in basic concepts of good and evil, right and wrong. That’s something that no politician anywhere discusses, certainly not in South America. It’s the equivalent of hitting a donkey between the eyes with a two-by-four to get his attention. Everyone intuitively understands that the political class is essentially criminal—but only Milei is brave enough to say it. The average guy wants to do the right thing, the moral thing. That’s what Milei is pointing out to people and why they like him. He doesn’t use doubletalk, brook compromise, or support half measures.

Silencing the Lambs. How Propaganda Works

Article by John Pilger, from 6 September 2022.

From the conclusion:

When will real journalists stand up? An inspirational samizdat  already exists on the internet: Consortium News, founded by the great reporter Robert Parry, Max Blumenthal’s  Grayzone, Mint Press News, Media Lens, Declassified UK, Alborada, Electronic Intifada, WSWS, ZNet, ICH, Counter Punch, Independent Australia, the work of Chris Hedges, Patrick Lawrence, Jonathan Cook, Diana Johnstone, Caitlin Johnstone and others who will forgive me for not mentioning them here.

And when will writers stand up, as they did against the rise of fascism in the 1930s? When will film-makers stand up, as they did against the Cold War in the 1940s? When will satirists stand up, as they did a generation ago?

Having soaked for 82 years in a deep bath of righteousness that is the official version of the last world war, isn’t it time those who are meant to keep the record straight declared their independence and decoded the propaganda? The urgency is greater than ever.

Findings of the Select Committee on Assassinations

in the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Tex., November 22, 1963

Found here.

B. Scientific acoustical evidence establishes a high probability that two gunmen fired at President John F. Kennedy. Other scientific evidence does not preclude the possibility of two gunmen firing at the President. Scientific evidence negates some specific conspiracy allegations.

C. The committee believes, on the basis of the evidence available to it, that President John F. Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy. The committee is unable to identify the other gunman or the extent of the conspiracy.

  1. The committee believes, on the basis of the evidence available to it, that the Soviet Government was not involved in the assassination of President Kennedy.
  2. The committee believes, on the basis of the evidence available to it, that the Cuban Government was not involved in the assassination of President Kennedy.
  3. The committee believes, on the basis of the evidence available to it, that anti-Castro Cuban groups, as groups, were not involved in the assassination of President Kennedy, but that the available evidence does not preclude the possibility that individual members may have been involved.
  4. The committee believes, on the basis of the evidence available to it, that the national syndicate of organized crime, as a group, was not involved in the assassination of President Kennedy, but that the available evidence does not preclude the possibility that individual members may have been involved.
  5. The Secret Service, Federal Bureau of Investigation and Central Intelligence Agency were not involved in the assassination of President Kennedy.

Who it actually was who conspired, they never managed to find out . . .

Totalitarianism Begins With Censorship

Principles of what a free society means are being redefined by collectivists.

Article by Barry Brownstein.

Excerpts:

Consider this essay: “Don’t COVID Vaccine Mandates Actually Promote Freedom?” [See link in the original.] Medical ethicists Kyle Ferguson and Arthur Caplan argue, “Those who oppose cracking down on the unvaccinated are getting it all wrong.” Ferguson and Caplan are sure their opponents have a “flawed view of freedom.” They argue “Passports and mandates are hardly ‘strong-arm tactics.’ These strategies are better seen as liberty inducers. They bring about freedom rather than deplete it.”

They add, “a successful COVID-19 vaccination campaign will liberate us — as individuals and as a collective — from the callous grip of a pandemic that just won’t seem to end.” Orwell’s “Party” proclaimed in 1984 that “Freedom is slavery.” Ferguson and Caplan come close to arguing “Slavery is freedom.”

Ferguson and Caplan assure us that the enlightenment view of “the unbound individual” is outdated. They want to reimagine freedom as communal, starting with “the individual’s participation in a community and the kind of community in which the individual lives.” 

[. . .]

For some, flowery visions of the common good have always been seductive. In The Road to Serfdom, Friedrich Hayek observes that even well-meaning people will ask, “If it be necessary to achieve important ends,” why shouldn’t the system “be run by decent people for the good of the community as a whole?”

Hayek challenges the axiomatic belief that wise people can tell others what the common good is. He explains why there is no such thing as the common good: “The welfare and happiness of millions cannot be measured on a single scale of less or more. The welfare of the people, like the happiness of a man, depends upon a great many things that can be provided in an infinite variety of combinations.”

Here’s the crucial question: Who decides what the “common good” is? With what authority?

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian James Macgregor Burns recounts in his book Fire and Light how Rousseau’s ideas of the general will led to the brutality of his disciple Robespierre. Like Hayek, Burns explains that there can be no agreement about the common good. Claiming to rule by the common good inevitably leads to excesses. Robespierre and the other eleven men who made up the Committee of Public Safety ruled France with “unlimited power” and “terror.”

Burns explains what Rousseau did not understand: “Peaceful and democratic conflict [is] crucial to the achievement of freedom.” Instead, Rousseau imagined, like Ferguson and Caplan “a new society filled with good citizens… working selflessly and with identical minds for the common good.”

Rousseau’s ideas are mantras for censors. In Rousseau’s world, there would be no pesky “long debates, dissensions and tumult” impeding implementation of the common good.

[. . .]

We can never make the best of “imperfect material” when those posing as having superior knowledge are allowed to coerce others. Hayek writes, “What individualism teaches us is that society is greater than the individual only in so far as it is free. In so far as it is controlled or directed, it is limited to the powers of the individual minds which control or direct it.” In other words, choose to be directed by the limited power of Dr. Fauci’s mind or choose a free society’s virtually unlimited and unpredictable power.

Let’s put this together. Health collectivists, behaving like Jacobins, are sure there is one best way; they believe they are the arbiter of truth. Cloaking themselves in the holy robes of the augur of the common good, dissent is not to be tolerated. The end to the pandemic requires not that we follow the collectivists but that we are free to consider different perspectives and discover in the course of an uncoerced social process what really works.

Continue reading here.

And/or watch this 10-minute video here.

Final thoughts: What scares many people into the arms of authoritarians and collectivists is precisely the “unlimited and unpredictable power” of a “free society”. That is why God sent us the commandments. They give us a framework that limits the “unlimited” power and channels it into more “predictable” developments. Not only are we free to do anything within the framework of those commandments, He says. He also promises an abundance of blessings if we adhere to them.

(P.S.: Joseph Boot, in his book “The Mission of God“, writes: “Formerly, when the incoming President of the United States took the oath of office it was done, not on a closed Bible, but on a Bible opened to Deuteronomy 28, invoking the blessings and cursings of the law for obedience or disobedience.” Unfortunately, Boot doesn’t tell us “when” this “formerly” time was. But if it’s true, it’s significant nonetheless, as he continues: “All this reveals the fact that biblical law has had a continuous history as an object of relevance and study that makes it unique amongst ancient legal systems, and gives it a ‘claim to historical influence unmatched by any other legal system of antiquity.'”)

The New Renaissance And A New Reformation

Article by Gary North from 1985

C. S. Lewis makes the observation in The Abolition of Man (1947) that occultism and humanism appeared in Western history at about the same time, during the Renaissance. They were two sides of the same revival of paganism. Thus, he argued, occultism and humanistic rationalism are not enemies in principle but rather cooperating philosophies that are united against Christianity and Christian civilization. This is the theme of his great masterpiece, the novel That Hideous Strength.

From 1964 onward, a new Renaissance took place–a recapitulation of the Renaissance’s revival of occultism, mysticism, and the quest for power. To this witches brew was added revolutionism. It hit the academic world in September of 1964, when the student riots began at the University of California at Berkeley. That revolution shook the foundations of the older liberalism. It launched a series of “scientific revolutions” or “paradigm shifts” in every social science.

The new humanism and the new occultism of the late 1960’s produced a new world view, which has in recent years begun to be called the New Age movement or New Age humanism. Such phenomena as “holistic healing,” Eastern mysticism, monistic philosophy (the world is one: pantheism), magic, astrology, and outright satanism began to multiply. It started as a campus phenomenon, and in many ways, this new Renaissance ended there, in the spring of 1970.

Continue reading here.

The human cost of Net Zero

The war on fossil fuels is far more dangerous than climate change.

Article by Ralph Schoellhammer.

Excerpts:

The truth is that our societies are still massively dependent on fossil fuels. For all the talk of the advances made in renewable energy, the proportion of our electricity production reliant on fossil fuels has barely changed over the past 40 years. In that time, only nuclear power has declined as a source of electricity.

None of this is to say that an energy transition is impossible. A target of Net Zero by 2050 could well be met. But the rapid abandonment of fossil fuels that this demands would inflict misery and hardship on billions of people.

[. . .]

Canadian political scientist Vaclav Smil lists cement, steel, plastics and ammonia as the four ingredients that make the modern world possible. For example, modern healthcare systems need enormous amounts of plastic (for everything from flexible tubes to sterile packing), making it yet another crucial ingredient in the wellbeing of humanity. And without steel and cement, nothing could be built – no roads, no houses, no harbours, no airports. Plastics, steel and cement also require fossil fuels for their production.

[. . .]

Industrialisation transforms societies. The industrialisation of agriculture, for example, enables higher outputs with less labour, freeing humans for other endeavours. In the US, the labour needed to produce a kilogram of grain fell by 98 per cent between 1800 and 2020. The share of the population working in agriculture fell by a similar margin during that period. Not every country will have to follow this development path exactly – coal, for example, could be replaced by gas and nuclear. But what is certain is that no country will be able to industrialise and develop without fossil fuels.

[. . .]

The talk of leaving fossil fuels behind is not based in reality. It’s fuelled instead by a mixture of apocalypticism, hypocrisy and sheer wishful thinking. In the future, perhaps we will be able to power hospitals using kinetic energy. But right now, the costs of abandoning fossil fuels will likely do far more harm than climate change itself.

Eric Metaxas and “Letter to American Churches”

Discussion with Jordan Peterson

I haven’t heard of this author or his new book with the above title before but he sounds immensely interesting. Not least because he, having grown up in America, has a Greek (father) and German (mother) background. His mother having lost her father in the Second World War.

Here’s the video description:

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson and Eric Metaxas discuss his most recent book, “A Letter to the American Church,” which argues a betrayal of faith by those who stay silent in the face of tyranny. They parallel the arbiters of speech across history against those populating today, and detail the responsibility to act against falsehood that is intrinsically present in the Abrahamic tradition, yet increasingly absent in the American church today.

Eric Metaxas is an American author, speaker, and radio host. He has written award winning biographies, such as “Bonhoeffer,” as well as children’s books like “Squanto and the Miracle of Thanksgiving,” Metaxas hosts Socrates in the City, a recurring popular event where he interviews writers and thinkers on theology, moralism, and philosophy. He also hosts the nationally syndicated Eric Metaxas Show, more broadly referred to as “The Show About Everything.”

In the podcast (1 h 33 min, on Youtube here, on Bitchute here), Metaxas explains that in his new book he says that the American churches are making the same mistakes the German churches made in Nazi Germany. They looked the other way and narrowed themselves down to “thin theology”. Some did speak up, but not until it was too late to achieve anything meaningful.

(I would add that this “letter” should be addressed to churches “in the American Empire”, which includes the UK and all of Europe.)

Another thing he says is that churches that defied the Covid measures and stayed open during lockdowns “increased four to fivefold”, while those that locked down “withered”.

I can certainly believe that.

He has an amazing personal conversion story that involves a dream, at the age of 25, about picking a golden fish out of the water. He knew in the dream that the fish is Christ.

He has previously written an impressive number and range of books, including biographies about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther and William Wilberforce. According to Wikipedia, the latter was “the companion book to the 2006 film [on Wilberforce: Amazing Grace].”

In 2021, he published a book titled “Is Atheism Dead?” and last year the aforementioned “Letter to American Churches.”

The Mythology of Spaceship Earth

Article by Gary North, written in 1969, the year of the first landing on the moon.

The full article is here.

Excerpts:

The gap between moral wisdom and scientific knowledge has been a problem since the scientific rev­olution of the sixteenth century. Immanuel Kant, writing in the late 1700’s, struggled mightily with this very question: How can man bridge the intellectual chasm between scientific knowledge (the realm of law and necessity) and moral knowledge (the realm of freedom and choice) without sacri­ficing the integrity of one or the other? Hegel, Marx, and the mod­ern moral philosophers have all lived in the shadow of this dilem­ma, and the crisis of modern cul­ture reflects man’s failure to re­solve it. The responses to this dilemma, as a rule, take one or the other of two forms, symbolized by Arthur Koestler as the Com­missar on the one hand, and the Yogi on the other.

The Commissar is enraptured with science and technology; he is confident that scientific planning in proper hands can so alter man’s environment as to bring about a new earth and a new mankind. The Yogi takes the opposite tack of disengagement from “the world,” laying stress on each man cultivating his own garden. Find inner peace, he urges, and the ex­ternal world will take care of it­self. His assumption is that sci­ence and technology are neutral, that developing from their inner imperatives they will eventually find their own benevolent level.

[. . .]

Mr. Wicker, unfortunately, made a great leap of faith when he be­gan to compare our heavenly achievement with our supposed capabilities for solving more earthly tasks. He was not alone in this leap. Editorial after edi­torial echoed it, and I single him out only because he is widely read and generally regarded as one of the superior liberal pundits. He makes the leap seem so plausible: “So the conclusion that enlight­ened men might draw is that if the same concentration of effort and control could be applied to some useful earthly project, a similar success might be ob­tained.” He recommends a vast program of publicly-owned hous­ing construction, say, some 26 million new units by 1980.

Flora Lewis’ column was far more optimistic; her horizons for mankind’s planning capabilities are apparently much wider. “If the moon can be grasped, why not the end of hunger, of greed, of warfare, of cruelty?” She admits that there are problems: “They seem provocatively within our new capacities and yet maddeningly distant. We are told it is only lack of will that frustrates these achievements, too.” Nature is boundless, apparently; only our “lack of will” prevents us from unlocking the secrets of paradise and ending the human condition as we know it. This is the mes­sianism of technological planning. It is basic to the thinking of a large segment of our intellectuals, and the success of the Apollo flights has brought it out into the open.

Mr. Wicker wisely set for our government a limited goal. Miss Lewis does not necessarily limit the task to government planning alone, but it is obvious that she is basing her hopes on a technological feat that was essentially a statist project. At this point, several questions should be raised. First, should the state have used some $25 billions of coerced taxes in order to send two men to the moon’s surface? Would men act­ing in a voluntary fashion have expended such a sum in this gen­eration? In short, was it worth the forfeiting of $25 billions worth of alternative uses for the money? Second, given Mr. Wick­er’s plans, could we not ask the same question? Is the construction of public housing, and the use of scarce resources involved in such construction, on a priority scale that high in the minds of the American public? Would a non­inflationary tax cut not be pref­erable?3 It is typical of socialistic thinkers to point to emergency spending (e.g., a war) or some statist rocket program and rec­ommend a transfer of funds from one branch of the state’s planning bureaucracy to another. I have never heard them recommend a reduction of spending by the state. Spending precedents set in war time, like “temporary” taxes, seem to become permanent. Finally, in Miss Lewis’ example, is the mere application of the techniques of applied science sufficient to end warfare and cruelty? Or could it be, as the Apostle James put it, that our wars come from the hearts of men? Conversion, in and of itself, may not redeem tech­nology, but can Miss Lewis be so certain that technology can redeem mankind?

[. . .]

A LEAP OF FAITH

Therefore, to take a leap of faith from some particular in­stance of a “successful” govern­ment project—success defined as the operationally satisfactory com­pletion of a certain unquestioned goal—to the realm of economic planning involves a faith far greater than anything imagined by the medieval scholastics. Yet Dr. Irving Bengelsdorf, a staff writer with the Los Angeles Times, thinks that “there may be hope” along this line of thinking, in spite of the difficulties inherent in any computerized quantification of qualitative personal prefer­ences. He states the problem well; he cannot show how his answer is linked operationally with the prob­lem he states:

In contrast to the novel and un­cluttered venture of getting to the moon, [an] uninhabited, non-social, non-political moon, the problems of society are exceedingly complex to solve because any solution demands that, people have to change their daily ways of life, their interactions with other people. This is difficult to do. For, from birth, people already come overlaid with traditional prejudices, encrusted with hoary cultures, and swaddled in ancient customs. And these are hard to change.

But, there may be hope. Both the Apollo 11 flight and the Manhattan Project of World War II show that once a clear goal has been set, a vast, complex project involving large num­bers of people with different training and skills working together can achieve a solution.

Between the first paragraph and the second lies a social revolution. Also present in the gap is the un­stated assumption that we can re­duce the complexities of society to “a clear goal,” which is pre­cisely the problem governments have not learned to solve. I am at a loss to see how a wartime bomb project or a trip to the moon in­dicate anything except the amaz­ing capacity for spending that gov­ernments possess.

SPACESHIP EARTH

Barbara Ward, one of the most respected Establishment thinkers in Britain, and former editor of The Economist, has taken Buck­minster Fuller’s spaceship analogy and has turned it into an effective neo-Fabian propaganda device: “The most rational way of con­sidering the whole race today is to see it as the ship’s crew of a single spaceship on which all of us, with a remarkable combination of security and vulnerability, are making our pilgrimage through infinity.” [. . .]

[. . .]

The problem with all of this “spaceship reasoning” is that it assumes as solved those funda­mental problems that need solving in order to make possible the spaceship analogy. The thing which strikes me as ironic is that the language of the spaceship involves a chain of command approach to the solution of human problems. Those humanitarian intellectuals who decry the petty military dicta­torships in underdeveloped nations want to impose a massive system of command over the whole earth. That is what the call to world gov­ernment implies. The spaceship analogy necessarily views society as a vast army. Yet for some reason, Hayek’s identical conclusion about the implications of socialist planning is invariably rejected as absurd. It is the mentality of the militarist. Miss Ward even is will­ing to admit that our experiences in wartime helped to create the foundation of modern economic policy:

Thus, not by theory or dogma but largely by war-induced experience, the Western market economies have come to accept the effectiveness and usefulness of a partnership between public and private activity. . . . but there is now no question of exclusive reliance on any one instrument or any one method. The pragmatic market economies have worked out their own evolving conceptions of public and private responsibility and the result is the dynamic but surprisingly stable mixed economy of the Western world.

THE CHAOS OF NONECONOMICS

I would have put it a different way. I would have pointed to the signs of our contemporary sys­tem’s increasing inefficiency, cor­ruption, and extralegal practices which we more usually associate with those warfare economies from which she says we borrowed our planning techniques. What we have created is non-economics, and Miss Ward proclaims the ben­efits of such a system:

But, on the whole, in economics the Western world can move from posi­tion to position with little sense of contradiction and incompatibility. We had no very fixed views before so we do not have to bother too much about what we believe now. It is a consider­able source of strength.

This, then, is “reason, spaceship style.” It is the triumph of intel­lectual chaos, and it is inevitably recreating the economy in its own image.

GROUNDING THE SHIP

Dr. William G. Pollard, a physi­cist who was a part of the Man­hattan Project, has written a little book which tries to undergird the spaceship analogy with a theolog­ical framework. His theology is radical, but he is honest in seeing the purpose of the Apollo flights as being ultimately religious. He thinks it marks the end of the era of science-worship. Diminishing marginal returns are about to set in:

Sending men to the moon and bringing them back in 1969 may prove to be from the perspective of the twentieth century the central symbol of the golden age of science in the twenty-first. Like the great pyramids of Egypt or the lofty cathedrals of medieval Europe, this feat will stand out as a peak expression of the spirit of the golden age; the maximum economic investment which a great civili­zation could make in a feat which served no useful purpose other than making manifest the lofty height to which the spirit of an age could rise. It will not be worth repeating except perhaps by Russia for the purpose of sharing in its glory. Thereafter, even more massive applications of science and technology to basic human needs will have become so urgently neces­sary that no further diversion of available talent and resources to manned space flights can be per­mitted.

We can hope that he is correct, but who knows for certain? The government was so successful, as it usually is, in achieving a feat “which served no useful purpose” other than its own glory, that we may have more of the same. But this much should be clear: the analogy of spaceship earth is more than an analogy; it is a call to religious commitment. The call is to faith in centralized planning.

At the beginning of this essay, I pointed to the dual theories of regeneration, symbolized by the Yogi and the Commissar. They feed on each other, take in each other’s intellectual washing, so to speak. If we are to confront the mythology of spaceship earth, it must be in terms of a rival moral philosophy, one which has social and economic implications, as well as technological implications. We must deny the validity of any vision of man as central planner, a little god who would arrange in an omniscient fashion the lives of all men in all the spheres of their existence, as if we were some per­manent military crew. We must acknowledge the validity of the late C. S. Lewis’ warning in The Abolition of Man that when we hear men speaking of “man’s tak­ing control of man,” we should understand that it implies certain men taking control of all the others.

When men seek to divinize the state, they succeed merely in cre­ating hell on earth. The Christian church fought this point out with the Roman Emperors, both pagan and Arian. The state may not claim to be God’s exclusive or even chief representative on earth.”’ The the­ology of spaceship earth would have us return to the religious political theory of the ancient world, all in the name of progres­sive technology and planning.

The astronauts are back on earth. We must seek to keep them here. It is time to ground our spaceship programs, both interplanetary and domestic. Let the captains go down with their ideological ship. There are better ways of allocating our scarce resources than in construct­ing spaceship earth.