Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s nephews have admitted to drug-trafficking in partnership with the FARC, according to news report by El Nuevo Herald: http://www.elnuevoherald.com/noticias/mundo/america-latina/venezuela-es/article91491757.html
David Horowitz is a political thinker and cultural critic who enjoys challenging leftist shibboleths. His main contribution to contemporary political discourse is a passionate commitment to an outspoken, unabashed, myth-breaking version of conservatism. If communism was the triumph of mendaciousness, he argues in this poignant collection of writings, conservatism cannot accept the proliferation of self-serving legends and half-truths.
This makes his public interventions refreshingly unpredictable, iconoclastic, and engaging. He is a former insider, and his views have the veracity of the firsthand witness. Horowitz knows better than anybody else the hypocrisies of the left, the unacknowledged skeletons in its closet, and its fear to come to terms with past ignominies. He is an apostate who sees no reason to mince his words to please the religion of political and historical correctness. His masters are other critics of totalitarian delusions, from George Orwell to Leszek Kolakowski; in fact, Horowitz’s awakening from his leftist dreams was decisively catalyzed by the illuminating effect of Kolakowski’s devastating critique of socialist ideas. Unlike his former comrades, however, Horowitz believes in the healing value of second thoughts.
Vilified by enemies as a right-wing crusader, Horowitz is, in fact, a lucid thinker for whom ideas matter and words have consequences. His break with the left in the late 1970s was a response to what he perceived to be its rampant sense of self-righteousness, combined with its readiness to endorse obsolete and pernicious utopian ideals. Born to a Communist family in Queens, Horowitz flirted with the Leninist creed as a teenager but found out early that the Communist sect was insufferably obtuse and irretrievably sclerotic. He attended Columbia, where he discovered Western Marxism and other non-Bolshevik revolutionary doctrines. From the very beginning, he had an appetite for heresy.
He joined the emerging New Left and went to England, where he became a disciple and close associate of the socialist historian Isaac Deutscher, author of once-celebrated biographies of Stalin and Trotsky. Thanks to Deutscher, Horowitz met other British leftists, including the sociologist Ralph Miliband (father of the current leader of the Labour party). Consumed by revolutionary pathos, he wrote books, pamphlets, and manifestoes, denounced Western imperialism, and condemned the Vietnam war.
Once back in the United States, he became the editor, with Peter Collier, of Ramparts, the New Left’s most influential publication. In later books, Horowitz engages in soul-searching analyses of his attraction to the extreme radicalism of the Black Panthers and other far-left groups. Under tragic circumstances—a friend of his was murdered by the Panthers—he discovered that these celebrated antiestablishment fighters were fundamentally sociopaths. What followed was an itinerary of self-scrutiny, self-understanding, and moral epiphany. He reinvented himself as an anti-Marxist, antitotalitarian, anti-utopian thinker.
Obviously, David Horowitz is not the first to have deplored the spellbinding effects of what Raymond Aron called the opium of the intellectuals. Before him, social and cultural critics (Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Nathan Glazer, to name only the most famous ones) took the same path; Bertolt Brecht’s Marxist mentor, Karl Korsch, broke with his revolutionary past in the 1950s. Even Max Horkheimer, one of the Frankfurt School’s luminaries, ended as a conservative thinker. As Ignazio Silone, himself a former Leninist, put it: The ultimate struggle would be between Communists and ex-Communists.
In Horowitz’s case, however, it is a struggle waged by an ex-leftist ideologue against political mythologies that have made whole generations run amok. Like Kolakowski and Václav Havel, Horowitz identifies ideological blindness as the source of radical zealotry. He knows that ideologies are coercive structures with immense enthralling effects—indeed, what Kenneth Minogue called “alien powers.” Putting together his fervid writings is, for him, a duty of conscience. He does not claim to be nonpartisan and proudly recognizes his attachment to a conservative vision of politics. But he is a pluralist: He refuses the idea of infallible ideological revelation, admits that human beings can err, and invites his readers to exercise their critical faculties. He does not pontificate.
Judith Shklar once wrote about a liberalism of fear, a philosophy rooted in the awareness that the onslaught against liberal values in totalitarian experiments inevitably results in catastrophe. Horowitz’s conservatism is inspired by the conviction that utopian hubris is always conducive to moral, social, and political disaster. It is not an optimistic conservatism, but a tragic one. Horowitz confesses that he is an agnostic, yet he realizes that liberty, as a nonnegotiable human value, has a transcendent legitimation in religion. In the absence of a moral ground, individuals are suspended in a moral no-man’s land: Rebels become revolutionaries and exert their logical fallacies to eliminate deviation from a sacralized ideology.
For Horowitz, the main battle is now related to cultural hegemony. He understands that political rivalries are directly linked to clashes of values. Refusing to be pigeonholed into a formula, he combines themes belonging to classical liberalism, Burkean conservatism, and neoconservatism. His social criticism is a response to what he perceives to be the collapse of the center in American politics and the takeover of the liberal mainstream by proponents of refurbished leftist fallacies. He regards anticapitalism, anti-Americanism, and anti-Zionism as ideological mantras meant to camouflage a deep contempt for human rights.
The Black Book of the American Left is an illuminating contribution to our understanding of what Hannah Arendt once called the ideological storms of the 20th century. It shows how American radicals partook of the same romantic passions and redemptive fantasies as their European peers. The philosophical languages were different, of course, but the electrifying desire to negate the existing order, no matter the human costs, was the same.
Vladimir Tismaneanu is IAI’s Distinguished Senior Fellow in Western Civilization and the History of Ideas.
This article was originally published on TheWeeklyStandard.
The opinions published here are those of the writer and are not necessarily endorsed by the Institute.
A Brief “Family” Anthropological Backgrounder: Fear and Yale’s Stinging Ants
For thousands of years, across cultures, the most prosperous civil societies emerged from a working “family” structure of one faithful woman wed to one (faithful) man who, secure in his bloodline, provided for and protected his family and tried to leave some legacy for his progeny.All three major world religions – Judaism, Christianity, Islam – do share a belief in a state of future rewards and punishments. All profess a belief that families are protected by preserving childhood sexual innocence versus children’s exposure to sexually explicit talk, images, knowledge and activity. Despite common violation of these beliefs, (of which “child brides” are the most obvious) most religious systems tend to hold to the moral premise that the solvency of family and society is endangered when children engage in sex with, other children or adults. Indeed “fear” of children’s sexual exposure may be seen as an intuitive, biological imperative.
Modern assaults on traditional religions and culture claim to stand on “scientific” data, on proofs that traditional rules for sexual taboos are “fear” based and thus irrational. Absent hard evidence of a prosperous culture that historically normalized novel sexual conduct, modern sexual/gender revolutionary advocates have cut their dystopian human sexuality canon out of whole cloth. Despite the overwhelming statistical proof of sexual freedom failures, sex/gender revolutionaries implicitly suggest they possess a higher intelligence than that of our ancestors and our nation’s founders. Sexologists cite “enlightened” cultures from history that have normalized dis-orientations, pointing to the failed hedonistic culture of ancient Greece but more often to anthropologists like Margaret Mead and the Ford and Beach, Yale Human Relations Area Files.
These cross cultural studies point to the sex lives of obscure tribes in remote areas to support their modern advocacy of “free” sex uninhibited by fear . A critical reading of these Malinowski, Mead, Yale, etc., reports tell a different story. For example, Yale’s Ford and Beach editors report the “tolerant” “sexually positive” Ponapean people as models for western emulation without question or contradiction.
Desired by whom? Such modern ‘scholars’ ignore the fact that cultures practicing “sexual freedom” have not progressed (if one believes in Darwinian evolution) or who, as above, commonly still engage in savage child sex abuse practices. Lloyd DeMause writes in The Journal of Psychohistory that incest was “universal for most people in most places at most times… [T]he earlier in history one searches, the more evidence there is of universal incest, just as there is more evidence of other forms of child abuse.”
Just as we do not advocate cannibalism or eating our enemies’ brains because the South Fore people of New Guinea did so, we don’t advocate early child sexual experiences because Ponapean and other tribes do so. These studies cannot be endorsed to promote the overthrow of our nation’s reasoned ancestral morals; they should be an example of what not to do. The current “gender” family experiments follow a long history of failed dystopias built on unconventional special interests and deviant adult desires.
The following ‘good and bad’ forms of family and marriage data briefly note some critical key events that erupted in thousands of legal expositions and cases from 1948-to today in which local and federal courts have debated what is “family,” “marriage,” “human sexuality,” “gender,” and “sexual orientation.” Arguably, the law’s early reliance on fraudulent social science sexuality data have inevitably produced legal cases, journal articles, agencies, institutions and hidden interests that tragically overload the judicial system and that regularly yield bad legal and social decisions. Unless the fraudulent historical events that shaped our current sexual anarchy are exposed and excised, our legal system will next be facing claims for the right to sex with children, multiple people of any age, animals, other species, flora and fauna.
The following information is presented in the hopes of stirring an interest in revisiting our fraudulent sex foundations with an aim to correct our growing sexual anarchy. No extant scientific, anthropological, religious or evolutionary data support normalizing any form of novel dis-orientation and/or novel early sex “education.” On the contrary, the hard data presented below fully support a return to traditional treatment of sexual morality in our schools, laws, media, religious institutions and culture.
To be continued.
Dr. Judith Reisman is a Distinguished Senior Fellow in the Study of Social Trends, Human Rights, and Media Forensics.
The opinions published here are those of the writer and are not necessarily endorsed by the Institute. This article was originally published on DrJudithReisman.com. You can buy Dr. Reisman’s book Sexual Sabotage on her website.
Dr. Edwin Vieira, IAI’s Distinguished Senior Fellow in Jurisprudence and Constitutional and Monetary Law, lectures on the nature of currency.
Olavo de Carvalho explains why Liberation Theology is alive and well in Latin America.
I.
Why are still there people who subscribe to liberation theology? Apparently no reasonable person should do that. From a theological standpoint the doctrine that Peruvian Gustavo Gutierrez and Brazilians Leonardo Boff and Frei Betto have spread throughout the world was already demolished by then-cardinal Joseph Ratzinger[i] in 1984, two years after being condemned by Pope John Paul II[ii]. In 1994 theologian Edward Lynch stated that liberation theology had already been reduced to a mere intellectual curiosity[iii]. In 1996 the Spanish historian Ricardo de la Cierva, whom nobody would deem to be uneducated on these matters, considered it to be dead and buried[iv].
And yet the fact is that, more than a decade and a half after its death, liberation theology is practically official doctrine in twelve countries in Latin America. What happened? That is the question that I propose to examine in this essay.
In order to answer it properly we need to examine the problem from three different angles:
(1) Is liberation theology a Catholic theology influenced by Marxist ideas, or is it only a communist ruse camouflaged with Catholic language?
(2) What is the relation between liberation theology as theoretical discourse and as an activist political organization?
(3) Once those two questions are answered, then we will be able to grasp liberation theology as a precise phenomenon and describe the particular forma mentis of their theoreticians by means of a stylistic analysis of their writings.
The first question is given remarkably uniform answers by both Professor Lynch and Cardinal Ratzinger, as well as by innumerable other Catholic authors (for example, Hubert Lepargneur’s Liberation Theology: An Assessment[v], and Sobral Pinto’s Liberation Theology: Marxist Materialism in Spiritualist Theology[vi]): based on the premise that liberation theology presents itself as a Catholic theology, they proceed to examine it in that light, praising its possible humanitarian and justice-making intentions, but concluding that liberation theology is, in essence, incompatible with the Church’s traditional doctrine and is therefore heretical in the strict sense of the word. They also add to that assessment a denunciation of some of its internal contradictions and a criticism of its social agenda founded upon utterly discredited Marxist economics.
From this they move on to decreeing its death, asserting that (the following words are Professor Lynch’s),
Twenty-five years later, however, liberation theology has been reduced to an intellectual curiosity. While still attractive to many North American and European scholars, it has failed in what the liberationists always said was their main mission, the complete renovation of Latin American Catholicism. [vii]
All ideological revolutionary discourse can be understood according to at least three levels of meaning, all of which first need to be distinguished through analysis and then hierarchically rearranged when one of them reveals itself to be the most decisive factor in concrete political situations, subordinating the others.
The first level is a descriptive one: the ideological revolutionary discourse presents a diagnosis or explanation of reality, or an interpretation of a previous theory. On this level, the revolutionary discourse can be judged by its veracity, correspondence, or faithfulness to facts, to the current state of available knowledge, or to the doctrine it is interpreting. When the discourse presents a defined proposal for action, it can be judged by the viability or convenience of the action to be taken.
The second level is that of ideological self-definition, where the theoretician or doctrinarian expresses the symbols in which the revolutionary group recognizes itself and by which it can distinguish insiders and outsiders, friends and foes. On this level the ideological revolutionary discourse can be judged by its psychological efficacy or correspondence with its audience’s expectations and longings.
The third level is that of strategic disinformation, providing false clues designed to throw its enemies off course and ward off any attempt that can be made to block the revolutionary proposal for action, or neutralize any other effects the discourse aims to produce.
On its first level, the revolutionary discourse ideally addresses an impartial audience, whose support it intends to win over by means of persuasion. On the second level, it addresses its actual or potential supporters, with the aim of reinforcing their loyalty to the group and obtaining from them their maximum possible collaboration. On the third, it addresses its enemy, the target of the operation.
Practically all the criticisms that Catholic intellectuals leveled at liberation theology have been confined to the examination of its first level of meaning. From an intellectual standpoint, they completely discredited it, demonstrated its heretical character, and pointed out those old flaws that make any proposal for a socialist remodeling of society destructive and inviable.
If the masterminds behind liberation theology were Catholics sincerely devoted to “renewing Latin American Catholicism,” even if through the use of means contaminated with Marxist ideology, those devastating criticisms would have been enough to completely deactivate their theology. Once those critical analyses left the field of intellectual debate to become the Church’s official teaching, with the 1984 study by Cardinal Ratzinger, liberation theology could be regarded, from a theoretical point of view, as extinct and intellectually overcome.
Now read this testimony given by General Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest-ranking KGB official who has ever defected to the West, and you will begin to understand why the intellectual and theological discredit of the liberation theology was not enough to put an end to it. In 1959, as the head of the Romanian intelligence station in West Germany, General Pacepa heard from Nikita Khrushchev himself the following words, “We’ll use Cuba as springboard to launch a KGB-devised religion into Latin America.”[viii]
And his testimony goes on like this,
Khrushchev called the new KGB-invented religion Liberation Theology. His penchant for “liberation” was inherited by the KGB, which later created the Palestine Liberation Organization, the National Liberation Army of Columbia (FARC), and the National Liberation Army of Bolivia. Romania was a Latin country, and Khrushchev wanted our “Latin view” about his new religious “liberation” war. He also wanted us to send a few priests who were cooptees or deep cover officers to Latin America, to see how “we” could make his new Liberation Theology palatable to that part of the world. Khrushchev got our best effort.
Launching a new religion was a historic event, and the KGB had thoroughly prepared for it. At that very moment, the KGB was building a new international religious organization in Prague called the Christian Peace Conference (CPC), whose task would be to spread Liberation Theology within Latin America. . . .
In 1968, the KGB-created CPC was able to maneuver a group of leftist South American bishops into holding a Conference of Latin American Bishops at Medellin, Colombia. The Conference’s official task was to ameliorate poverty. Its undeclared goal was to recognize a new religious movement encouraging the poor to rebel against the “institutionalized violence of poverty,” and to recommend it to the World Council of Churches for official approval. The Medellin Conference did both. It also swallowed the KGB-born name “Liberation Theology.”
That is, in its essentials, the idea of liberation theology came ready-made from Moscow three years before Peruvian Jesuit Gustavo Gutierrez, with his book Teología de la Liberación[ix], presented himself as its original creator, something which probably happened with the approval by its true creators, who were not interested at all in a public acknowledgment of paternity. The legal guardians of the child, Leonardo Boff and Frei Betto (Carlos Alberto Libânio Christo) would come onto the scene even later, not before 1977. Until today popular information sources, as for example Wikipedia, repeat like trained parrots that Fr. Gutierrez was indeed the father of liberation theology and that Mr Boff and Mr Betto were his most outstanding continuators.
Read Part II here.
Translated from the Portuguese by Alessandro Cota.
[i] Cardinal Ratzinger, Joseph. Liberation Theology. Christendom-awake.org, http://www.christendomawake.org/ pages/ratzinger/liberationtheol.htm, (accessed February 2, 2015).
[ii] Quentin L. Quade, ed., The Pope and Revolution: John Paul II Confronts Liberation Theology (Washington, D.C.: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1982).
[iii] Lynch, Edward A., “The retreat of Liberation Theology,” EWTN.com, https://www.ewtn.com/ library/ISSUES/LIBERATE.TXT (accessed February 2, 2015)
[iv] Cierva, Ricardo de la. La Hoz y la Cruz. Auge y Caída del Marxismo y la Teología de la Liberación (Toledo: Fénix, 1996).
[v] Lepargneur, Hubert. Teologia da Libertação. Uma Avaliação (São Paulo: Convívio, 1979). The Brazilian translation of the work was used.
[vi] Pinto, Sobral. Teologia da Libertação. O Materialismo Marxista na Teologia Espiritualista (Rio: Lidador, 1984). The Portuguese original was used.
[vii] Lynch, loc. cit.
[viii] Pacepa, Ion Mihai,“Kremlin’s religious Crusade,” Frontpage Magazine, June 30, 2009, http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=35388 (accessed February 2, 2015).
[ix] Gutierrez, Gustavo. Teología de la Liberación(Lima: Centro de Estudios y Publicaciones, 1971).
Olavo de Carvalho is the President of The Inter-American Institute and Distinguished Senior Fellow in Philosophy, Political Science, and the Humanities. The opinions published here are those of the writer and are not necessarily endorsed by the Institute.
Last Sunday, July 10, 2016, Nicolás Maduro opened the borders and the result was a mass exodus to Colombia. Venezuelans crossed the border to buy food and supplies in order to escape Venezuela’s Socialist Paradise crisis. See reports by Al-Jazeera and PanamPost.
The wise leaders that Carlyle believed necessary are the only possible palliative. But such men, in truth, are reticent and timid – not eager for the limelight. After all, being a leader of fools is dangerous business.
Alas, our noble men of genius, Heaven’s real messengers to us, they also rendered nearly futile by the wasteful time; – preappointed they everywhere, and assiduously trained by their pedagogues and monitors, to ‘rise in Parliament,’ to compose orations, write books, or in short speak words, for the approval of reviewers; instead of doing real kingly work to be approved of by the gods! Our ‘Government,’ a highly ‘responsible’ one; responsible to no God that I can hear of, but to the twenty-seven million gods of the shilling gallery.
-Thomas Carlyle, Latter-Day Pamphlets, 1850
Part I of this series touched on the politicization of education through a dumbing-down of students and through the denial of human nature in the social sciences. Considering today’s educational system from a strategist’s standpoint, it appears to be an attempt to subvert the larger society, perhaps even to destroy it. Such a system could only have been created by an enemy. This enemy’s trick has been to disable human instinct, denying the very existence of instinctual things. We no longer accept that there are two sexes. We are taught to deny what is noble.
Our internal enemy has attempted to paralyze all those moving parts within the human psyche that make reason possible. And he has made a school that is, in fact, a concentration camp for the child. He has encircled our children with a fence and he calls roll every hour to make sure that none have escaped. It is important, at the outset, that the students find themselves institutionalized. To expose the child to something brilliant, to something interesting, to something inspired, is forbidden. One must accustom the child to the most mediocre thinking, to the most uninspired ideas – to profound boredom from which only an entertainment culture can offer escape.
The new teaching refrains from laying a foundation; for the new educator, as revolutionary, is a destroyer who seeks to annihilate everything. He seeks to eradicate the past, to eradicate man and woman, to eradicate the parent, to eradicate both the nation and the patriot – and finally, to eradicate God. This is the work of today’s education. It is a work of disorganization, disintegration, and hatred. The revolutionary seeks a blank canvass upon which to paint in whatever color he chooses. The chosen color, of course, will be red. Those countries already submerged by the nihilist dictators are arming themselves. They are getting ready to unleash a wider destruction. Like all psychopaths they are motivated to find victims wherever they can. The consumption of victims is their mode of self-affirmation.
The Revolution, called down upon us by the Left, has been with us a long while. It marches from victory to victory. The long retreat of civilization has been happening before our very eyes, by a slow and almost imperceptible process. Our educational system proves to be a revolutionary success, for the experiment has not been turned back. It has been turned up like the burner of a stove on which we are all being cooked. The majority is indoctrinated, their evaluations contaminated by revolutionary lies, so that they do not even know they have been brainwashed. And yes, on every news channel you hear but different variations on the same political message. The message always includes a dash of feminism, multiculturalism, socialism, and the celebration of polymorphous perversity. Our enemy has attempted to indoctrinate our children with these themes. They socialize the young to accept their revolution. They educate and organize. They shape the public’s mentality. They give out the ideas that will carry them forward – and it isn’t long before the process takes on a life of its own. After a few generations, when the old teaching has been forgotten, the leaders of the new generation will have only one lexicon, only one vision, and freedom will be dead. In its place will come a new tyranny, sold as a new and higher form of morality in which the chief sins are (1) sexism, (2) classicism, and (3) racism.
See how adept the revolutionary teachers are at carrying forward their new teaching – as morality. Thomas Carlyle once observed that “man never yields himself wholly to brute Force, but always to moral Greatness.” But men, being stupid, sometimes yield to a counterfeit moral Greatness. That is what we have today. As a prime example, consider the moral outrage expressed by our political and media elites in response to Donald Trump’s desire to curtail Muslim immigration. By the most ancient and time-tested standards of morality, this suggestion was not immoral. He did not break the Ten Commandments in uttering it. Yet it is taken as proof of Trump’s moral depravity. Those within the Republican Party who did not denounce the racism of Trump’s remark nonetheless judged him guilty of a “ridiculous position” (Chris Christie), or of being unserious (Jeb Bush), or of “being downright dangerous with his bombastic rhetoric.” (Lindsey Graham.) Carly Fiorina said that Trump’s “overreaction is as dangerous as Obama’s under reaction.” John Kasich called Trump’s proposal “outrageous.” Former New York Governor George Pataki said Trump’s remarks “are idiotic, next thing we will be banning loudmouth, racist billionaires.” Marco Rubio said that Trump’s “habit of making offensive and outlandish statements will not bring Americans together.” Former Virginia governor Jim Gilmore said that “Trump’s fascist talk drives all minorities from [the] GOP.” And, of course, Hillary Clinton vilified Trump by saying, “This is reprehensible, prejudiced and divisive.”
Here is a great example of the revolutionary ideology at work. A simple, common sense statement, uttered by someone seeking a leadership position, is likened to Hitlerism. The new teaching has taken hold. It predetermines the mentality of the ruling class, which now consists of the persons whose thinking has been pre-programmed by our national enemies. In saying what he said, Donald Trump did not deprive anyone of their rights under the Constitution. He did not vilify anyone. He is not a hater, or an advocate of racist theories, or an advocate of genocide. How has it come about that he is slandered as such? Of course, we know perfectly well that he has transgressed. Should we publicly agree with Trump, we might also suffer ostracism; and feeling alone in our agreement with him, we are afraid.
The instinct that remains undestroyed in us knows that Trump is right. His concerns are patriotic, perhaps even “patriarchal.” We shudder at the political incorrectness of it. But deep down, we feel something contrary, something counter-subversive. We have been indoctrinated to believe that everyone is equal when everyone is different. We have been told that a Muslim is interchangeable with a Christian, that the populations of the Middle East are interchangeable with the populations of Europe – as if humanity were a bottle of milk that must be homogenized. When Trump says that his own Muslim friends agree with him, the journalists disbelieve him. He must be demented or insane, they say to themselves. He is not to be taken seriously. It is some kind of “stunt.” Trump tries to explain that he is motivated by considerations of safety and prudence. The elite sneer. But the public, still possessing a shadow of its old instinct, twitch with buried feelings that are breaking through to the surface.
Trump did not say Muslims are bad people. He did not say “all Muslims are enemies.” But everyone instinctually knows there is a risk associated with admitting thousands or millions of Muslims into a non-Muslim country. Common sense therefore begs the question: “Why take an unnecessary risk?” For why is it necessary that thousands of Muslims immigrate to the United States? If there is a risk associated with this immigration, why should it continue? What is to be gained?
This great example of Trump’s statement on Muslim immigration reveals the kind of leadership we have today – in the media and in government. We do not have leaders, in fact, but – as Thomas Carlyle noted – “assiduously trained by their pedagogues and monitors, to ‘rise in Parliament,’ to compose orations, write books, or in short speak words, for the approval of reviewers; instead of doing real kingly work….” Consider the kind of men and women we have in positions of leadership today. For such a large percentage to denounce Trump, when he has only made a common sense recommendation, suggests that these men and women are frauds; that they are the creatures of Leftist groupthink, lacking the moral courage required for independent thought. It could not be more clear what this example shows; namely, that our own leaders – excepting Mr. Trump – deny that we have the right to defend our sovereignty and our culture. They imagine that such a defense is racist.
One might ask what else they imagine?!
The Left dreams of a world without America on the assumption that America is the fountainhead of sexism, racism and war. The United States, under the control of Leftist politicians like President Obama, slowly commits suicide. Instead of an instinct for survival, our leadership of today shows us that theirs is an instinct for self-destruction. Merely listen to Mr. Trump, then listen to the nonsense of the elitsts who denounce him. These have no vision for distant things, no power of thought – mere dummies to some unseen ventriloquist. The reader should ask: Would George Washington have opened the United States to Muslim immigration in 1795? If this was such a good and glorious thing to do, why didn’t he think to do it? The idea of allowing masses of Muslim immigrants into the United States in 1795 would have been judged crazy by all educated Americans of the time. (And were they not better educated than we are now?)
Why do the “educated” of today think Muslim immigration so necessary? It cannot be that today’s leaders are so much wiser, or possess better character, than George Washington.
I believe that President Washington, if he could speak to our generation, would pour such abuse upon our present leaders, that it would ring in their ears ever after. And for them, in response, to reproach Washington as a sexist or racist, would illicit such fiery contempt from the great man, that they would be forced to own their shame. For are they not all feminists? Are they not all multiculturalists? – that is to say, advocates of national suicide? These mock leaders who raise the banners of so many mock faiths are yet the destroyers of their country. Yet there they stand, condemning Mr. Trump.
The real leader and the mock leader are here side-by-side. The one is concerned for the safety of his country while the other feigns concern for Islam. Where is the concern which is owed to Americans? Cannot we glimpse, behind it all, that common theme of hatred for what is good and normal, and a sick preference for what is harmful and abnormal? Is this not the malice of the inferior man – the malice of the demagogue, usurping high office with a sack of clever lies? Our modern age, with its mass media and mass politics, has aroused the envy of the inferior to a fever pitch. This envy has organized itself through political self-hatred, turning malevolence into a science. The irony appears at once, as the man who loves America is denounced as a hater by those who are the real haters; that is, haters of America. Of course, some of those denouncing Trump are the puppets of political correctness – sad shills who have no business leading anyone. But hatred is at the bottom of it.
Notice how the inferior man, as leader, must always pretend to be a champion of humanity. Even in this, he is a faker. He has no dignity, but gives himself airs. His own mind is numbed by the facile nonsense that passes his own lips. Reality does not register with him. Only when a great tragedy has occurred, does the shock of the moment lay bare the feeble human being that is struggling to emerge from beneath the ideological garbage dump of a clouded mind. The terrorist attacks on France offer a rare example of clarity breaking forth from one such “leader.” On the day following the attacks, President Francois Hollande made a speech in which he said: “Fellow citizens, what happened yesterday in Paris and Saint Denis near the Stade de France was an act of war.” But the President of the United States, in his press conference, affirmed the altruistic duty of every Christian country to take in Muslim refugees. He denied that Christianity and Islam have stood opposed to one another for over a thousand years, that the principles of Islam are as obnoxious to Christianity as the principles of Christianity are to Islam. Obama effectively denied that admitting millions of Muslims into Europe is a recipe for civil strife. Even more, he suggested that the integration of Muslim and Christian (under the auspices of safeguarding Muslim refugees) is a solemn moral obligation.
The international demagogue who styles himself a champion of humanity turns out to be the enemy of his own country. How can he be a champion of humanity when his own people are so disregarded? Take Hillary Clinton as a further example. This regrettable deviant has been heralded as the most brilliant women in America. But she doesn’t have an original bone in her body; neither is she distinguished for her scholarship, or her contributions to science. She is an intellectual nullity. Her thinking is taken from leftist ideological tracts. Her moral courage consists in parroting the latest politically correct ideas. She does not regard private property as sacrosanct. She does not accept that marriage is between a man and a woman. She does not believe in the nation state. Her politics is that of Robin Hood, a famous bandit whose motto was to “rob from the rich and give to the poor.” On the subject of same-sex marriage and gay rights, Secretary of State Clinton made the following extraordinary statement:
I will never forget the young Tunisian who asked me, after the revolution in his country, how America could teach his new democracy to protect the rights of its LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered] citizens. He saw America as an example for the world, and as a beacon of hope. That’s what was in my mind as I engaged in some pretty tough conversations with foreign leaders who did not accept that human rights applied to everyone, gay and straight. When I directed our diplomats around the world to combat repressive laws and reach out to the brave activists fighting on the front lines … I changed State Department policy to ensure that our LGBT families are treated more fairly.
Here we see Clinton openly advocating U.S. interference in the internal affairs of Muslim countries. Here is an American homosexual imperialism that not only flies in the face of American diplomatic tradition, but flies in the face of traditional American folkways. The greatest U.S. Secretary of State is generally said to have been John Quincy Adams. In 1821 Adams asked what America has “done for the benefit of mankind?” As our greatest and wisest Secretary of State, Adams said that America “has invariably, though often fruitlessly, held forth” to the nations on the virtues of liberty and justice and equal rights. Adams stated:
She has, in the lapse of nearly half a century, without a single exception, respected the independence of other nations while asserting and maintaining her own. She has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart. She has seen that probably for centuries to come, all the contests of … the European world, will be contests of inveterate power, and emerging right. Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force…. She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit….
How different we find the policy of Secretary of State Clinton, who initiated a global campaign supportive of sodomy. Is this now our banner – our sacred cause among the nations? In the annals of imperial ambition God and man has never seen the like. According to Secretary Clinton herself, it was (in effect) the policy of her State Department to combat all those local laws and government edicts which forbade homosexual activity. Clinton not only engaged in “some pretty tough conversations with foreign leaders,” she directed “our diplomats around the world” to engage in a new form of warfare. Under her guidance, U.S. representatives in 70 countries (where sodomy is yet illegal) were to act as “change agents.”
In other words, American resources and personnel were deployed in support of sodomy. Whatever the reader may think of sodomy, let us objectively consider the policy repercussions. Was this in the best interests of the United States? Most curious of all: Is there not a declaration of war against Islam in Mrs. Clinton’s policy? Yet this declaration of war is not seen or acknowledged as such, though it is certainly there. The unreality of Clinton’s worldview allows her to advocate diametrically incompatible policies. On the one hand she provokes Islam. On the other hand, she wants millions of Muslims to immigrate here. From the strategist’s point of view, this policy is entirely obvious. Yet our pundits and political observers see nothing. They have no idea there is a game, and could never guess that someone stands to gain from it.
While homosexuality is allegedly widespread in the Muslim world, it is nonetheless forbidden by traditional Islamic teachings. In a collection of Mohammad’s sayings, set down by Abu ‘Isa Muhammad ibn ‘Isa at-Tirmidhis around A.D. 884, we learn that Muhammad cursed sodomites and recommended the death penalty for men involved in homosexual acts.
If the central principle of Islam is that “there is one God and Mohammed is his Prophet,” the words of the Prophet on this matter are highly significant. To show that traditional Islam is far from homogenized into the Unitarianism that has supplanted Christianity in the West, a Muslim cleric in Hungary recently stated [JihadWatch.org], “These homosexuals are the filthiest of Allah’s creatures. A Muslim must never accept this disease, this terrible depraved thing.” To show that this was hardly an isolated instance, a Muslim cleric in Uganda has threatened to organize death squads against homosexuals. In Great Britain Christians have been unsuccessful in opposing pro-homosexual education in schools; but two primary schools in Bristol have shelved anti-homophobia storybooks in the face of local Muslim “fury.”
In 2007 an Iranian MP, Mohsen Yahyavi, told British officials that, “According to Islamic law, homosexuality is a grave crime.” Yahyavi explained that homosexuality is only tolerated if done behind closed doors. If this behavior becomes public, the offender “should be put to death.” It is, indeed, against traditional Islam that Hillary Clinton’s homosexual imperialism wages a peculiar kind of war. Yet Hillary says that Trump is divisive for suggesting a temporary suspension of Muslim immigration into the United States! At the same time she would deny that any seed of enmity has been planted against Islam by her campaign of promoting homosexual activism in Islamic countries. Inexplicably, during last month’s Democratic presidential debate, when asked whether we are at war with radical Islam, Mrs. Clinton said the following:
I don’t think with we’re at war with Islam…. I think we’re at war with jihadists. I think we’ve got to reach out to Muslim countries and have them be part of our coalition. If they hear people running for president who basically shortcut it to say that we are somehow against Islam – that was one of the real contributions, despite all the other problems, that George W. Bush made after 9/11 when he basically said, after going to a Mosque in Washington, we are not at war with Islam or Muslims. We are at war with violent extremism. We are at war with people who use their religion for purposes of power and repression; and yes, we are at war with those people. But I don’t want us to be painting with too broad a brush.
Is Hillary Clinton such a fool that she doesn’t know what Islam teaches? If the leaders of various Muslim countries hear a tough-talking U.S. Secretary of State actively subverting traditional Islamic law, they are unlikely to see her as a genuine ally. Here, Clinton is not merely playing the usual political game of having her cake and eating it. In this context one needs to appreciate the ingredients of this cake; for every cake is made from a recipe, and every recipe has been carefully devised to produce specific culinary effects. One has to ask if this pro-homosexual policy was purposely designed to alienate traditional Muslims and incite further jihadist activities against the United States. Was that her real purpose in advancing the homosexual agenda in the Muslim world?
To understand the game of putting two scorpions in a bottle, one has to look beyond the madness of the stated agenda. Why would cynical people, concerned mostly with their own power, make use of the LGBT issue in the first place? For that matter, why is the forcible integration of Muslims into Europe and America so important? The answer is simple. Hillary Clinton and others of her ilk, who believe themselves figures of destiny, are advancing a hidden agenda. Does Hillary Clinton know whose agenda it is? We may doubt that she fully understands. Failing to look within, she never finds herself out. Lacking personal integrity, honor, and compassion, there is no real organ of discernment left to guide her. She is mere appetite, representing a desire for power and self-aggrandizement. There is nothing genuine or good in her. There is nothing of lasting value in what she does. She and her ilk are, as Carlyle said, “windy Counterfeits” who seek to take the place of better men. In our egalitarian stupor we are confused about the differences between the fraudulent and the authentic, between true and false, between hollow and full. To get ourselves out of this mess, noted Carlyle, it will require that
the few Wise will have, by one method or another, to take command of the innumerable Foolish; that they must be got to take it; – and that, in fact, since Wisdom, which means also Valor and heroic Nobleness, is alone strong in this world, and one wise man is stronger than all men unwise…. That they must take it; and having taken, must keep it, and do their God’s Message in it, and defend the same, at their life’s peril, against all men and devils. This I do clearly believe to be the backbone of all Future Society, as it has been of all Past; and that without it, there is no Society possible in the world.
Carlyle was born of humble origins in 1795. He was against, as he explained, “INSINCERITY in Politics and in Life, DEMOCRACY without Reverence, and PHILANTHROPY without Sense.” In this we find a more nuanced position, more precise in the warning it offers us. He saw the growth of insincerity, irreverence and muddleheaded altruism – and he sounded an alarm. Today his message goes to the heart of the present leadership crisis.
It may be observed that we choose leaders who espouse shallow optimism, not realizing how dangerously insincere they are. Notice how our political debates are peppered with irreverence and cynicism. To top it off, we soothe ourselves with a promiscuous philanthropy tending toward national bankruptcy. Is this so hard to see? The wise leaders that Carlyle believed necessary are the only possible palliative. But such men, in truth, are reticent and timid – not eager for the limelight. After all, being a leader of fools is dangerous business. The wise man sacrifices his peace of mind when taking up political office, while the mediocrity sacrifices nothing (having neither peace nor mind worth saving). As the fool is nothing, the attainment of office means everything to him. He overruns the state in his eagerness for power. He shouts down the wise. It is what he calls “democracy.”
Jeffrey Nyquist is the President of the Strategic Crisis Center and Distinguished Senior Fellow in Political Science at the Inter-American Institute for Philosophy, Government, and Social Thought.
This article was originally published at jrnyquist.com . The opinions published here are those of the writer and are not necessarily endorsed by the Institute.
Thus wrote the hardened atheist and Darwin critic David Stove in “Darwinian Fairytales: Selfish Genes, Errors of Heredity and Other Fables of Evolution.” The “new religion of selfish genes” classifies all humans as biological errors.
In his posthumously published sparkling tome, science philosopher Stove dubs Darwin’s theory of evolution a religious creation myth. Why, moral philosopher Mary Midgley writes apologetically (in the “Royal Institute of Philosophy”) that “Social Darwinism” is perhaps “the unofficial religion of the West,” even blessed by Richard Dawkins (of “The Selfish Gene”).
That worries prominent Social Darwinist Michael Ruse: “If Darwinism equals atheism, then it can’t be taught in U.S. schools because of the constitutional separation of church and state.”
Stove’s book then crashes headlong into the “what do we teach the children” controversy. Do we teach them, asks Stove, Dawkins’ fantasy–that “selfish genes … leap from body to body down the generations … the genes are the immortals?” Are they our gods and we their puppets? Although Stove agrees with Darwin’s theories for “pines or cod,” he also sees a cosmology that equates human and cod reproduction as ludicrous junk science.
Stove begins before Darwin with T.H. Huxley, pasha of the Huxley dynasty, who defined humans as savages in a “continual free fight” for survival–when not involved with “temporary” family ties. “Darwinian Fairytales” asks the obvious. Why would killer savages have any family in the first place? Stove answers:
“Huxley’s man, if he wanted to maximize his own chances of survival, and had even half a brain, would simply eat his wife and child before some other man did. They are first-class protein.” Women and children would be “easy meat” on the daily menu, making life a very short, open-pit outdoor barbeque.
Stove poses core questions. If “every single organic being … [is] striving to the utmost to increase in numbers,” and only the most fit survive, then why do, as the song goes, “the rich get rich and the poor get children?”
On that musical note, says Stove, the “fitness” genes collapse further when we consider childless geniuses like: “Newton, Faraday and Mendel; Vivaldi, Handel and Beethoven; Gibbon, Macaulay and Carlyle; Plato, Aquinas, Bacon, Locke, Leibniz, Hume, Kant and Mill. . . . No rational person will suppose that this association of extremely low fertility with the highest intellectual or musical genius is accidental” or due to starvation.
Humans, not being cod or pines, often prefer to do something other than copulate–such as writing books and symphonies, painting and even sleeping. Moreover, few families that stay together commonly mate together. And beyond incest prohibitions, humans, not cod, restrict birth via infanticide, abortion and contraception, says Stove, “and we appear to have done so always.”
Obviously, if “survival of the fittest” or “natural selection” were true, we’d have neither homosexuals nor celibate altruists caring for unrelated others. “Hospitals, welfare programs, priesthoods,” heroes and such exist in most civil societies. Yet, quips Stove, Neo-Darwinians reject direct proofs of human altruism, preferring selfishness piloted by invisible genes.
Stove delights in Darwin’s delusional claim that child mortality is “about 80% at least,” observing that his wife Emma should have birthed thirty-five babies in order to get her seven “to puberty.”
Ideas Have Consequences
Yet Darwinians ignore such glaring theoretical silliness. “Having been to college, he believes all the right things: That Darwin was basically right, that Darwin bridged the gap between man and animals, etc., etc.”
One almost slap-stick Stovism involves monkey-mom “baby snatching.” Like humans, sometimes a bereaved monkey mom steals another mother’s baby, adopts and cares for it like her own.
Dr. “selfish gene” Dawkins is mystified by such monkey-love. Why does the dippy adopting mom waste her time and release a rival to make more babies? Dawkins wonders if maybe real moms deceive “naïve young females into adopting their children” for some selfish gain? Stove replies that Dawkins might ask “his own mother why she did not offload him?” (One wonders if any fit socio-biologists have survived?)
‘Sexual Freedom’
“Darwinian Fairytales” reveals how such “selfish gene” and “natural selection” fancies have led us into savage waters. To save his disproved theories, Darwin charged that humans often allow “one’s worst animals to breed,” thereby justifying eugenics and sterilization. Soon “the fit” would run the state and cull out the weak–one infamous example among many of how bogus science has licensed barbarism.
Finally, Darwin’s fairytales advanced sexual freedom says Stove–that is, if animals and plants have sex, “sexual intercourse is innocent.” Naturally, “the great sexual emancipators after 1859”–Ellis, Freud, Lenin, Stopes, Sanger, Mead, Reich– “were all Darwinians.” Genetics gave “the new religionists,” he said, “their gods … the chromosomes of the sex cells.” On point, Stove warned, “freedom of the press, except for really precious things like pornography, has greatly diminished in the last hundred years, and especially in the last twenty” [emphasis added].
Yet, with roughly 33,000 Americans infected daily by a venereal disease, the cost of “sex science” controlled by ideologues and sexual psychopaths is dear indeed. Stove was apparently unaware that Hugh Hefner, the father of “precious things like pornography,” launched Playboy as “Kinsey’s Pamphleteer” after reading Alfred Kinsey’s two sexuality books in college.
Nor did Stove know that Kinsey, the high priest of sex, decided to sexually reform America after reading Darwin in college.
In 2005, HUMAN EVENTS scholars voted Kinsey’s reports among the “most harmful” American books published in the last 200 years. Although Darwin’s “The Origin of Species” made it only as an “honorable mention” in that pantheon of injury, just as Hefner was a Kinsey clone, Kinsey was a Darwin clone. Genes may not leap and travel from generation to generation but ideas certainly do.
Ideas have consequences. Stove’s “Darwinian Fairytales” is required reading for anyone still on inquiry.
Dr. Judith Reisman is a Distinguished Senior Fellow in the Study of Social Trends, Human Rights, and Media Forensics.
The opinions published here are those of the writer and are not necessarily endorsed by the Institute. This article was originally published on HumanEvents. You can buy Dr. Reisman’s book Sexual Sabotage on her website.
