Category Archives: History
“Question authority”
"Until we take over", the new authoritarians said to themselves
Writes Tom Woods in today’s newsletter:
What are the textbooks going to say?
That’s what I asked Scott Horton on the Tom Woods Show in our episode on the Durham Report [also here], which definitively exposed the “Russiagate” nonsense as the hoax any non-comatose person knew it was.
But here’s the problem.
American historians are reliable stenographers of the regime. They tell the story the way the Establishment wants it told. Can you imagine an American history textbook admitting that in their zeal to get Trump, entire agencies compromised themselves and major political figures fabricated bizarre stories of Russian collusion?
Historians — some of whom probably once believed the old leftist slogan “question authority” — dearly love the FBI, the CIA, all these agencies. A handful tell bad stories about them from the past, but those stories from the past evidently inspire zero skepticism about them among historians today.
“Question authority” was never meant to be taken seriously. It meant: undermine authority until we take over, and then use that authority to entrench ourselves via lies and dirty tricks.
Matt Taibbi has been on the left his whole life, and has no particular reason to want to exonerate Donald Trump. Except for one thing: he dislikes lies and liars.
Here’s Taibbi’s response to the report:
“I read Special Counsel John Durham’s ‘Report on Matters Related to Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016 Presidential Campaigns’ yesterday in a state I can only describe as psychic exhaustion. As Sue Schmidt’s ‘Eight Key Takeaways’ summary shows, the stuff in this report should kill the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory ten times over, but we know better than that. This story never dies. Every time you shoot at it, it splits into six new deep state fantasies.
“I’ve given up. Nearly seven years ago this idiotic tale dropped in my relatively uncomplicated life like a grenade, upending professional relationships, friendships, even family life. Those of us in media who were skeptics or even just uninterested were cast out as from a religious sect — colleagues unironically called us ‘denialists’ — denounced in the best case as pathological wreckers and refuseniks, in the worst as literal agents of the FSB.”
I myself hear the words “Russian disinformation” or “Russian asset” or “Russian talking points” and instantly think: I am speaking to a very low-IQ, highly suggestible person, who repeats whatever phrases are fed to him.
Time after time these fantasies of Russian conspiracies have proven false, and yet the story won’t go away.
Here’s hoping this time they’re slayed for good — heck, even Anderson Cooper admitted the report was “devastating” to the FBI.
What Adam Smith had to say about conspiracies
They are quite common, especially if they are given protection by government regulation
We often hear people being dismissive about “conspiracy theories”. Yet one of the most eminent thinkers of the 18th century, who is often called the founder of economics (although there were others, see here), Adam Smith, knew that they were commonplace. Here is what he wrote in his famous book with the (abridged) title “The Wealth of Nations”:
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.
– The Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chapter X.
Most people who remember reading this however don’t know that the really interesting part comes after that. Smith goes on to say:
It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary. A regulation which obliges all those of the same trade in a particular town to enter their names and places of abode in a public register, facilitates such assemblies. . . . A regulation which enables those of the same trade to tax themselves in order to provide for their poor, their sick, their widows, and orphans, by giving them a common interest to manage, renders such assemblies necessary. An incorporation not only renders them necessary, but makes the act of the majority binding upon the whole.
– The Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chapter X.
Regarding this, Sam Bowman of the Adam Smith Institute writes:
As Eamonn Butler has written, Smith’s point is that the only way businessmen can succeed in a ‘conspiracy against the public’ is if they are given protection by government regulation. If not, the pressures of competition will ensure that conspiring businesses are quickly undermined by their competitors.
It’s Not Just That Global Warming Is Fake. What Matters Is Why This Fakery Is Being Promoted.
Article by Gary North from July 3, 2009
[The original is here.]
Global warming is based 100% on junk science. The most vocal promoters are not interested in the details of physical science. They are interested in two things: political control over the general public and the establishment of international socialism.
Junk Science vs. Real Science
For a detailed, footnoted, 12-page article, written by three scientists, two with Ph.D’s from CalTech, click here.
This paper was sent to tens of thousands of natural scientists in the United States.
Over 31,000 scientists have put their reputations on the line and signed a politically incorrect petition opposing the 1997 Kyoto agreement or protocol. Here is a photocopy of a signed petition.
Here is a letter from a former president of the National Academy of Sciences. He asks recipients of the petition to sign it.
Back in the 1970’s, the bugaboo was the coming ice age, as this Time Magazine article promoted. Not to be outdone, Newsweek got on board. The article warned: “Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects.” Want more examples? Click here.
It, too, was based on junk science. It, too, had the same solution: government control over the economy. The goal never changes: government management over the economy. The justification has changed. If the voters won’t accept control over their lives on the basis of one brand of junk science, maybe they will accept another. As they used to say in the Nixon Administration: “Let’s run this up the flagpole and see if anyone salutes.”
Socialism’s Last Stand
The global warming movement is not about global warming. It is about the creation of an international political control arrangement by which bureaucrats who favor socialism can gain control over the international economy.
This strategy was stated boldly by economist Robert Heilbroner in 1990. Heilbroner, the multi-millionaire socialist and author of the best-selling history of economic thought, The Worldly Philosophers, wrote the manifesto for these bureaucrats. He did this in an article, “Reflections: After Communism,” published by The New Yorker (Sept. 10, 1990).
In this article, he made an astounding admission. He said that Ludwig von Mises had been right in 1920 in his article, “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth.” Mises argued that without private ownership, central planners could not know what any resource is worth to consumers. With no capital market, the planners would be flying blind.
Heilbroner said that for 70 years, academic economists had either ignored this article or dismissed it without answering it. Then Heilbroner wrote these words: “Mises was right.”
Heilbroner was one of these people. There is no reference to Mises in The Worldly Philosophers.
This admission was the preliminary section of Heilbroner’s manifesto. He was cutting off all hope by socialists that there is a theoretically plausible response to Mises. The free market economy will always outproduce a socialist economy. Get used to it, he said.
Then, in the second section, he called on his socialist peers to get behind the ecology movement. Here, he said, is the best political means for promoting central planning, despite its inefficiency. In the name of ecology, he said, socialists can get a hearing from politicians and voters.
The article is not online. An abstract is. Here is the concluding thought of the abstract.
The direction in which things are headed is some version of capitalism, whatever its title. In Eastern Europe, the new system is referred to as Not Socialism. Socialism may not continue as an important force now that Communism is finished. But another way of looking at socialism is as the society that must emerge if humanity is to cope with the ecological burden that economic growth is placing on the environment. From this perspective, the long vista after Communism leads through capitalism into a still unexplored world that roust [must?] be safely attained and settled before it can be named.
Heilbroner did not care that a worldwide government-run economic planning system would not be called called socialism. He just wanted to see the system set up.
Heilbroner’s peers got the message. That was what Kyoto was all about.
Conclusion
If you like poverty, inefficiency, and bureaucratic controls over the economy, and therefore control over your choices, the “climate change” movement is ideal.
If you want to subsidize China and India, neither of which will enforce the rules laid down by unelected international bureaucrats, this movement is for you.
If you want to pay more for less energy, there is no better way than to pass the cap and tax bill which the House has passed. It will be sent to the U.S. Senate next week.
The rest of us should oppose it.
I hereby authorize anyone to reprint this article or post it on any website, just so long as the text is not changed.
Neil Oliver warns against digital central bank currency
In this 15 minute video.
Reminds of the “mark of the beast“:
“Also it causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead, so that no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of its name.” (From Revelation 13:16-17)
Thomas R. Schreiner writes about this on crossway.org:
“The beast is not confined to the Roman Empire; it refers to Rome but applies also to every manifestation of evil in all governments throughout history, and also to the final conflict to come at the end.”
The New ‘Good German’ and Totalitarian Technocracy
Ominous parallels to today
Article (from 21st October 2021) here.
Excerpts:
The 20th century watched in horror as the rising of dictatorial regimes quickly took the form of totalitarian technocracies. Technocracy is the science of social engineering, a regime of broad control over the population that grows in the shadow of power and under the guise of scientific knowledge and ‘consent’. The democratic process becomes increasingly irrelevant as decision-making ends up in the hands of unelected bureaucrats and favoured advisers, with public debate stifled by a homogeneous discourse, avidly propagated by the media, that favours the ruling elite’s diktats being imposed by so-called “experts” who claim the salvitic status of ultimate defenders of human life and guardians of a “science”.
Since the spread of the Wuhan virus at the dawn of 2020, it is possible to observe some visible signs that something remarkably strange is happening across the world in general, and the West in particular. Today, those who manage to resist the sweeping mesmerism of the media are able to observe disturbing signs that point to the rapid consolidation of a technocratic agenda on a global scale, one whose strength seems to far surpass the political, legal, and theological structures that had so far sustained the edifice of Western civilisation and cost centuries of conflicts to be consolidated.
[…]
After an extensive political and media campaign aimed at instilling, on a large scale and relentlessly, fear and anxiety amongst the population, a sophisticated media campaign with utilitarian and scientific overtones prepared the spirit of the average citizen to consent to the point of complicity with the atrocities that would be perpetrated on a massive scale on “undesirables”. Thus a kind of “new normal” can be gradually developed to potentially justify any atrocity that might be supposed on the basis of public safety and health of the people.
Accordingly, under the Nazi technocratic apparatus in full operation, every form of political dissent had to be meticulously silenced. Books or tracts opposed to the dominant narrative of the government were burned on huge pyres amid scenic parades, while the media (newspapers, magazines, cinema and radio) were committed to consolidating the prevailing governmental discourse, according to the censorship engendered by its notorious propaganda minister, Herr Doktor Joseph Goebbels.
[…]
Under Hitler, the dissident scientist risked imprisonment and death. Today’s dissenters do not risk death, but certainly the loss of the professional accreditation and, although we have not yet seen a case, even imprisonment. Will medical scientists, heavily dependent on government payments to pursue their vocations, behave like the fellow travellers of National Socialism – taking benefits from government while claiming that, as individuals, they are not in any way responsible for the dictated policies they nevertheless implement?
The good medical practitioner will reject the use of individuals as instruments, as a means to an end. There is an urgent need today for medical scientists and pharmacologists not only skilled practitioners in their disciplines but who also possess a high sense of moral responsibility to question, probe, pose and criticise the trends of government-dominated science. The best defence against the prostitution and abuse of science is for scientists to unite in unofficial constituencies, both small and large, to create independent communities of individuals who are human beings first and scientists second. These constituencies will provide the pluralist checks and balances that alert the public to the irresponsible exploitation of medical science which poses threats not just to personal freedom and the rule of law but to the health of the average citizen.
As you read this article, you may be surprised to see that so many similarities between then and now are unfolding before our eyes. Yes, Nazi Germany might indeed have some lessons to teach us. The grave danger is that the State and its apparatchiks have embraced the wrong ones.
King Charles: a reactionary ruler
Our green, mystical monarch harbours a deep suspicion of modernity, science and freedom.
Article by Tim Black.
Excerpt:
The problem is that Charles’s ultra-reactionary worldview no longer provokes the ridicule it might once have done. Quite the opposite. Our political and media classes now seem in love with his reactionary rantings – albeit their more diluted versions. They may have no idea what Traditionalism means or stands for, but they certainly share his climate-change apocalypticism. They may not be yearning for a conservative revolution, but in the declinist ambience of Charles’s screeds and speeches, they see a dim reflection of their own green-tinged disillusionment with modernity. Their own disenchantment with liberalism and democracy. And so they have been actively calling for him to abandon the neutrality of his predecessor. They even claim that his views on the environment are ‘uncontroversial’ and that expressing them would not violate any constitutional protocols.
US president Joe Biden’s climate envoy, John Kerry, says he hopes Charles will continue to press for action on climate, claiming it ‘is a universal issue… not ideology’. ‘King Charles has been an environmentalist for 50 years’, opines the Washington Post. ‘Now is the time for him to make his case to the British people.’ Others have gone even further. ‘We are fortunate that our new king possesses a willingness to intercede in public life’, wrote one particularly excited ‘post-liberal’, just after Charles’s accession to the throne. ‘His instincts are good and just, and his decades-long critiques of globalisation, of our despoliation of our natural and built environments and our pell-mell rush towards the mythical horizon of progress have been tragically borne out by events’, he wrote.
This is what is most troubling. Not that Charles likes to think of himself as a 1920s-style conservative revolutionary, engaged in a project of often bizarre avant-gardist reaction. But the fact that these views chime so well with those of our political and cultural elites. His reactionary views, once the source of ridicule, are now theirs, too.
Economic Storms are Gathering
Jordan Peterson interviews Peter Schiff
From the video description:
Peterson draws upon his extensive research and relatable real-life experiences to illustrate how to develop attainable goals for intimate relationships, meaningful friendships, and your career. Transform the chaotic potential of the future into actuality — with a vision.
Dr. Jordan B. Peterson and economist Peter Schiff discuss the gold standard, the corruption and impending failure of the fiat system in the wake of inflation, why politicians are pushing inflation to astronomical new levels, and why they’re lying about it.
Peter Schiff is an economist, financial broker, author, frequent guest on national news, and host of the podcast, “the Peter Schiff Show.” Starting in 2005 Schiff took notice of the red flags signaling that economic unrest was looming, and correctly predicted the 2008 housing crisis. His attempts to warn the general public across a multitude of news and radio networks earned him the nickname “Dr. Doom,” and ever since then he has been looked on as a source not only to watch, but heavily consider.
In 2006, Schiff predicted the financial crisis that eventually hit in 2008. At the time, other economists laughed at him. See this clip for example.
Decline of Christian faith during Covid
Some proof from the US
Chuck Baldwin is a conservative American Christian who has been heavily involved in politics in the past. He has recently written a piece commenting on a survey showing a sharp decline in faith among nominal Christians in his country: “America’s Pulpits Under Indictment: Let the Adjustments Begin!”
The findings of that survey confirm something I predicted based on what I learned from Gary North. When I saw how churches throughout the world, but particularly in the Western world, reacted to Covid, I predicted a further decline of faith. The clergy’s reaction was in principle identical to what they did, according to North, during the Plague or Black Death. Back then, they fled the towns for the countryside instead of ministering to the sick and dying. This cost the church a lot of credibility and paved the way for the Renaissance. The Renaissance was an intellectual movement that delved into the writings and philosophies of pre-Christian ancient Greece and Rome, looking for sources of truth other than the Bible. This ultimately led to thought centred on the human being instead of God.
The Renaissance in turn led to the enlightenment which first relegated God to a role of disinterested and distant Creator (so-called “Deism“), until essentially discarding God entirely. The “death of God” (Nietzsche) then led to the horrors of the French Revolution which, after having been defeated and staved off (just about) for a century (in which time the Industrial Revolution brought untold blessings to untold millions), led to the various horrific, ideologically driven mass slaughters by the millions in the 20th century, a phenomenon which essentially has to this day not yet abated.
During Covid, the clergy didn’t flee the towns. Instead, they locked the churches, implicitly declared their services “non-essential” and fled into cyberspace and Zoom services. They thus relinquished spiritual space, so to speak, which will now be populated by alternative beliefs of all sorts. They had been seeping in for some time, but this seepage is now becoming a torrent.
It will be interesting to watch how the churches recover from this blow.
Addendum: There is an interesting other recent survey with a somewhat contrary message: “Surprising Surge Of Young Americans Turn To Religion“.
Zero Hedge writes:
The story of religious trends in America has been one of increasing disaffiliation among younger generations. But a new study reveals an unexpected resurgence of faith among youngsters in a post-Covid era.
Some young adults had an awakening during Covid as the entire world crumbled around them. They were in search of a higher power to get through the government-forced lockdowns and controlled demolition of the economy, as well as watching loved ones and friends contract Covid-19 that some federal government agencies believe leaked from a Chinese lab.
As reported by the Wall Street Journal, a new study commissioned by Springtide Research Institute found about one-third of 18-to-25-year-olds believe in a higher power, up from one-quarter in 2021. The findings were based on polling data from December.
Continue reading here.
However: Will the churches be able to offer these young people a long-term spiritual home?
Beware Perfidious Albion as Britain Takes Lead Role in War Provocation
Perhaps more dangerous than a dying imperial power is a dying imperial side-kick flunky
Writes Finian Cunningham:
For the most part of the past century, the failed British empire was assigned the junior role as the butler to service the needs of the American empire. This special relationship involved London giving political and diplomatic cover for its American boss, as well as military services when required for one dirty war or another.
It is axiomatic that a dying empire is a dangerous beast, liable to lash out to salvage its waning power. The American empire has reached its death throes moment. But perhaps more dangerous than a dying imperial power is a dying imperial side-kick flunky.
Today, Britain is a broken-down impoverished de-industrialized wasteland whose shocking numbers of poor are like an army of living dead. It has long ago lost former colonies to parasite off. But there is one former colony – the United States – that might just be stupid enough to allow Perfidious Albion to manipulate a catastrophic war.
The tensions over the NATO proxy war in Ukraine with Russia are a powder-keg situation. And the British dirty-tricks brigade are the past masters that merit being closely watched.
Read the whole piece here.