Better Government

‘PC’, ‘Woke’ Orwellian censorship – 1984, official lies, media lies, ‘socialism’ and modern ‘democracy’. NB if you like this post, check some others.

Many from the ‘Left’, progressives, Cultural Marxists and activists keep trying to stymie democracy with their shrill, often illogical, Orwellian and ideological views and variations of mind control. The following articles provide evidence.

A light in the Darkness

A light in the Darkness  By Paul Craig Roberts, 2 April 2020

Diana Johnstone’s just published book, Circle in the Darkness: Memoir of a World Watcher, is the best book I have ever read, the most revealing, the most accurate, the most truthful, the most moral and humane, the most sincere and heartfelt, and the best written.  Her book is far more than a memoir.  It is a history that has not previously been written.  If you want the truth of the last 60 years in place of the contrived reality constructed for us by controlled explanations, it is in this book.

This book is so extraordinary in its truthfulness and conciseness that it is difficult for a less gifted writer to do it justice.  It is a book without a superfluous sentence.

Herein I will provide some of the books message.  In future columns I hope to present some of the  history in the book.

In the Western World the legitimate national interest of people has become identified with racism and fascism.  Corporate globalism requires open borders, and the left has aligned with globalism and has become the most zealous enforcer of open borders, which has come to mean the right of refugees with victim status to other peoples’ countries.  The left has abandoned the working class and anti-war activity.  Today the left is pro-war in order to enforce “human rights” on alleged dictators by bombing their peoples into oblivion, thus producing refugees and tag along opportunistic immigrants that flock to the Western aggressor nations.

Self-styled moral censors, such as Antifa, denounce hate while violently hating those they denounce. Everything is settled by controlled explanations that cannot be questioned or examined in debate.  Those who engage in critical free thinking are censored, shouted down, beaten up, fired, and cancelled.  The cancel culture permits no debate, only enthusiastic acquiesce to explanations that have been settled in advance.

Antifa by shutting down open debate actually serves to protect the authoritarian center consisting of “the Clintonian Democratic Party, mainstream media, the military industrial complex and globalized neoliberal finance capital.”  Antifa turns the left into a support group for the authoritarian center.

In the European Union’s so-called constitution, private corporate interests take precedence over—indeed do not permit—the socialized elements of European mixed economies that made the societies livable communities. Today people are sacrificed to the greed of the global elite as social services are curtailed and privatized.

In the “Western democracies,” democracy–that is, rule by the people and a rule of law– has been extinguished. European peoples were forced into the European Union at the expense of their national sovereignty despite having voted down EU membership.  The French people voted 54.7% against EU membership and 45.3% for.  The Dutch people voted 61% against the EU and 39% for.  Faced with an unacceptable democratic outcome, the ruling elites removed the question from the people by turning EU membership into a “treaty” that could be signed by governments without input from the peoples.  When the French Constitutional Court ruled that the “treaty” was contrary to the French Constitution, the French Constitution was changed to accommodate the “treaty.”  Only the Irish government gave the people a choice by putting the “treaty” to a referendum, and the people rejected it. Chastised for allowing the people to decide their own fate, the Irish government collapsed under elite pressure and after a period of intense propaganda in favor of the “treaty” forced it through on a second referendum.  The Western “democratic” media were principal agents of the elite in stripping European peoples of any control over how they are governed.

In the West lies and orchestrated deceit have replaced truth in government and media. Instead of spreading facts and mutual understanding, media have deceived the public in order to gain support for unjustifiable wars.  Deceit “reached an extravagant new peak of danger with the campaign of calumny against Russia” culminating in the preposterous charge investigated by a “special prosecutor” that Hillary Clinton’s defeat was caused by a Putin/Trump plot involving Russian interference in the US presidential election.

“Western values” are constantly invoked, but what are these values?  They are not the values that made the West what it is, or rather was.  These values are rejected.  Free speech is out if it challenges official explanations whether the government’s or the left’s or uses any words that can be misrepresented as “hate speech.”  Democracy is out as demonstrated by the anti-democratic formation of the European Union. Truth is out as it is “offensive.”  Rational inquiry is regarded as denial of emotion-based proclamations.  It goes on and on.  Diana Johnstone notes that government repression is most significant not against violent acts of rebellion but against Julian Assange for exercising press freedom to convey information to the public.

Where does this leave us?  We have the West against the world, the West against itself, and the people against themselves.  Washington is unable “to view the world other than as a field for exercising US ‘leadership,’ and all who balk are considered deadly enemies.”  The diplomacy of the US and its NATO vassals consists of dropping sanctions and bombs on those who refuse to submit to Washington’s will, while the West itself dissolves into “diversity” and the mutual hatred of Identity Politics, which has progressed to the point that the transgendered are busy at work hating feminists. Diana Johnstone puts it best:

“When individuals are bunched into groups assigned intrinsic qualities—from victimhood to racism—normal human ties of mutual concern, shared purpose, comprehension and compassion are severed. In a grotesque development, new gender identities are invented, whose ‘cause’ overshadows the real problems of genuinely disadvantaged people. Economic issues are forgotten as groups mobilize solely to police attitudes.  Billionaires prosper more than ever before, while down below people bicker over safe spaces and toilet use.”

Hubris has destroyed humanity:

“The countries of the Western world are in a state of schizophrenic overconfidence and self-doubt. Their leaders persist in proclaiming ‘our values’ as the model for the rest of humanity, while their own people are increasingly divided and disillusioned.

“The 18th century was the century of the liberated mind. The 19th century was the century of Great Men. The 20th century was the century of the common man. And the 21st century’s looks like it may become a negation of all of them. The century of nobody at all.

“Irrationality and censorship restore chains to thought. Great Men are only statues to be demolished. The common man, once hailed as the hero of a radiant future, has been degraded to a superfluous nuisance, probably racist and homophobic. Ordinary folks have been reassigned from the glorious concept of ‘the people’ to their derogatory redefinition under the rubric of populism’ [and Trump deplorables].

People are reduced to ‘consumers,’ while being told that by consuming, they are destroying the planet. Identity Politics has not only turned people against each other by group, but its late manifestation, Vegan speciesism, even turns people against people altogether, for being an overprivileged life form.”

What will our future be? Currently we live in a dystopia of deceit.  But the failure of our leaders to deal adequately with a health crisis and their hostility to an economic system that serves people rather than the wealth of elites are marking the Western world as a massive failure. Will realization of this failure cause the people to revolt as the Yellow Vests have, or will it break the people and further diminish them?

As we are confined at home in an effort to avoid infection and to limit the spread of infection, now is a good time to read a clear explanation of what has happened to us in our time, assess the failures that have undermined our existence as a united and free people, and prepare for reconstructing a livable and humane society.   Diana Johnstone’s book is available

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Will We Allow the Coronapocalypse to Bail Out the Failure of Socialism?

 

Will We Allow the Coronapocalypse to Bail Out the Failure of Socialism  By Thomas Luongo, Gold Goats ‘n Guns, 25 March, 2020

The fear over COVID-19 has gone ballistic. We have moved from rational precaution to mass insanity in a matter of days. The speed with which those seeking power are moving is astounding.

With each passing day another person is jumping up, Alexander Haig like, to assume powers they do not have to demand control over the population they legally govern.

And it always seems to be in places with a particular type of government. They are the ones with the most advanced social safety nets, most outwardly compassionate policies and the ones with the most corrupt and failing infrastructures.

They are the ones that have squandered the hard-earned wealth of generations while trumpeting their own wisdom and foresight. And now that they are facing threats they cannot possibly manage, they expect to arrogate even more power to obfuscate the fact that they have failed to provide even the most basic services for the trillions wasted.

You might think I’m talking about California or New York, and in some ways I am. But, in reality, I’m talking about Europe.Dust Mask for Kids,Ani…

Europe stands at the brink of monetary and economic collapse. Its rot is far more advanced than that of the U.S. and China. And because of that the spread of COVID-19 there can have the most devastating effects. Therefore they are justified in shutting down whole countries.

But the counter argument is also valid, if not more valid. It says quite clearly that by keeping the economy flowing, by keeping people productive and working you retain the infrastructure necessary to save more people than would die otherwise, despite the threat of transmission.

We are living through a time when the democratic socialist nation state, a concept less than three hundred years old, is on trial. How countries respond to COVID-19 will be a litmus test. And I can assure you that anyone not openly embracing full on Fascistic control over their countries will be lambasted as heartless do-nothings.

Why? Because we’re already there.

Any temperance exhibited by local leadership is met with hysterical cries of murder. We’re seeing it here in the U.S. President Trump, rightly, didn’t order a national top-down approach to COVID-19, he left it up to the states to handle.

Some have reacted like Europe. Others not. And the amount of vitriol and political axe grinding going on in the U.S. to this point is ridiculous. And again, I’m seeing it quickly becoming a cudgel to bludgeon skeptics by all-knowing, smug authoritarians seeing the opportunity to justify their worldview.

In Europe, for the past seventy years or so The Davos Crowd have been obsessed with creating a European superstate to entrench their own power at the top of an unelected bureaucracy.

But they have failed.

Their political union is failing. The economy of Europe is quickly imploding into something only seen in a dystopian science fiction movie. And they need something to keep the dream alive. From their perspective COVID-19 is the kind of deus ex machina that can save that dream.

Whole countries are being put on lock down, nominally, to stem the spread of a disease whose biggest threat is overwhelming a woefully prepared medical infrastructure not killing a large swath of the population.

But it’s not about compassion. Every dead Italian or German is grist for the mill of saving socialism from itself. The EU leadership is using this crisis right now to set up centralizing economic control over the whole of Europe by breaking the will of the German people in the face of a civilization-ending pandemic that, to date, hasn’t killed more people worldwide than the flu does in the U.S. annually.

By setting the wheels in motion to cancel cash, outlaw gold buying and digitize the entire money supply. How again is this part of saving lives afflicted with COVID-19?

Oh right, it doesn’t.

Congress is paralyzed by partisan bickering seeing this opportunity. They’ve overwhelmed social media with patent nonsense on both sides. The Republicans are wrapping themselves in the moral high ground of sending out UBI checks and the Democrats decry corporate handouts.

While I’m not interested in the least in seeing $1.8 trillion in new spending coming from the Federal government it’s clear this time the Democrats only blocked the first vote to play games.

And guess what? Not one bit of the spending is necessary. It’s just more socialist destruction of wealth through debt issuance while we all go broke sitting in our homes in fear of a bug.

Whatever happens, you can bet that whatever form of the bill passes, and one will pass, it will be materially worse than the one just shot down. Such is the way of ‘bipartisanship’ in D.C.

In the U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s response has been the most reasonable, refusing to shut the country down. But he may soon succumb to the insanity of newly-minted virologists on Twitter screaming ‘flatten the curve!’

It’s so painfully obvious that this is now a crisis actively being made worse to distract us from the root cause of the economic meltdown that was already here.

Our near completely socialized capital markets, the furthest things from free markets, are imploding because their multiple layers of Ponzi scheme have been revealed as fictions. COVID-19 just blew up their false assumptions.

They exist to support through bureaucracy and taxation the desperate promises of governments acting like absentee parents buying their children presents instead of being proper role models and leaders.

That’s what these ‘aid’ packages being discussed in capitols around the world right now are, just more unpaid-for promises of dysfunctional absentee Boomers, trying to buy our love for another day.

But, the truth is staring us in the face. The institutions of socialism are revealed to be inadequate. Make no mistake, as I said in my last article, that’s no reason to suppress your humanity. The threat of COVID-19 is real, but it isn’t existential.

And I applaud the diversion of our economic output to support fighting this disease and helping as many people survive it as possible. And that means not locking everyone indoors and shutting down their lives.

It doesn’t mean nationalizing every manufacturing plant to make N-95 masks and PPE. And it certainly doesn’t mean prepping the country for the suspension of civilian rule.

By turning the amp up to eleven on fears of a biblical plague they are doing what all good screenwriters do as the movie goes along. They raise the stakes. COVID-19, while by all reports is a tough virus to beat, isn’t world ending. But it’s being treated as such.

This isn’t The Stand, folks. It’s not the Simian Flu from Planet of the Apes. Yes, the hospitals and medical community will be overworked. They will need help. And we need to be able to provide that help however we can.

In some cases it means staying at home if you can. In others it means donating your time, money, energy to help your community get through this. And in still others it means being brave enough to show up for work.

But it doesn’t mean allowing power-hungry maniacs to run roughshod over us because we’re fearful of a plague we can name rather than the ones that dog us every year.100 Pcs Latex Nitrile …Buy New $17.98 ($0.18 / Count)(as of 01:35 EDT – Details)

But to sell this fear to us and save themselves, they keep telling us that markets don’t work. That individuals cannot be trusted. And that only the State can coordinate such a monumental task such as saving humanity from nature.

Because without the State we would be left in a Hobbesian state of ‘war of all against all.’

If you listen very closely to their carefully prepared hysterics you’ll hear the echoes of Agent Smith telling Morpheus that the real virus we are fighting here is humanity itself.

And that a little culling of the bad people who won’t get with their Brave New World is what we have to accept to survive.

In Europe they are cynically using this pandemic to lock down countries where the civil unrest was already at the breaking point — France, Spain, Italy.

The stories coming out of Germany now are designed for maximum fear. Chancellor Angela Merkel shook hands with the wrong person, she’s in quarantine. Germany has knuckled under, finally, to new fiscal rules. The EU commission is finally allowing massive government spending. The U.S. will authorize, in the end, tens of trillions in new loans, handouts, bailouts and bribes.

All to try one last time to paper over the broken promises and false hope of socialized markets to maintain the one-way trades of a few thousand oligarchs.

Because some pigs are more equal than others.

And when the worst of the COVID-19 spread is over. When the hospitals finally see fewer cases we will be looking at a much different world. The decisions we allow our governments to take now will determine what that world looks like then.

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Socialism: A Brief Taxonomy

Socialism, A Brief Taxonomy  By Allen Grindler, Mises Institute, 23 February 2020

There are myriads of words written about socialism, and yet lots of misconceptions about it still exist even in the minds of those who are on the opposite side of the political spectrum. The most striking and frequent blunders are the identification of socialism exclusively with Marxism, the confusion between the concepts of socialism and communism, and the claim that fascism and National Socialism belong to the right, to name a few.

It is necessary to give a comprehensive definition of socialism, determine the principal attributes that indicate belonging to socialism, and to classify the socialist trends on these grounds to clarify the concept once and for all.

The contemporary meaning of socialism often runs along the lines that it is a politico-economic theory in which the means of production, wealth distribution, and exchange are supposed to be owned and regulated by the community as a whole. This characterization of socialism emphasizes its important economic features; however, it cannot be considered a comprehensive definition. The wording implies a narrow understanding of socialism from the point of view of materialist and positivist currents of socialism but does not fully encompass the features exhibited in antimaterialist, anti-Cartesian, and Kantian members of the socialist family.

It seems to me that the most inclusive definition of socialism is as follows:

Socialism is a set of artificial socioeconomic systems that are characterized by varying degrees of collectivization of property, or consciousness, or the redistribution of wealth.

Notice that socialism is designated as an artificial entity, meaning that it does not occur naturally during the evolution of human society but is imposed on nations coarsely through the actions of activists.

This definition derives from the parsimonious solution of qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) of the twelve most relevant currents of socialism, and it meets the criterion of necessity and sufficiency. In other words, socialization of property, collectivization of consciousness, and wealth redistribution are necessary and sufficient causative factors that taken separately or in combination unambiguously define an ideology as socialistic and designate preferred paths to socialism.

Given these three main causative conditions, it is easy to identify and classify socialist movements in the universe of political philosophies. The nuanced distinction between socialist movements is explained by attributes that seem essential but not general enough to influence the grouping of political philosophy in one direction or another. At the same time, any of the following ideologies has at least one causative factor that fully characterizes the doctrine as socialist.

The generic realm of socialism comprises several ideologies, which, more often than not, have historically been hostile to each other:

Marxism is the particular and extreme case of socialism named communism. Marx did not invent the notion of socialism. The ideas of socialism were known long before Marx and indisputably influenced his worldview. Instead, Marx created the theory of “scientific communism.” Communism is characterized by the complete socialization of property and the total collectivization of consciousness. The orthodox Marxism has never materialized.

Marxism-Leninism, also known as Bolshevism, is a revision of Marxism regarding the scope and driving forces of the communist revolution. If, as according to Marx, the revolution should be brought on simultaneously in developed industrialized countries by the mass proletarian movement, then, for Lenin, the Bolshevik revolution might take place in a single agrarian country under the leadership of the vanguard of revolutionaries. Nevertheless, the goal of Marxism-Leninism was communism, implying total collectivization of everything and everyone. A Bolshevik coup succeeded in the Russian Empire, and the communist regime existed from 1917 to 1991.

Trotskyism is, in essence, genuine Marxism-Leninism, which tries politically to preserve its theoretical purity. Trotsky was a founder of the theory of “permanent revolution,” which posits that a proletarian revolution in one country should spread to neighboring nations until communist revolutionary transformations embrace the whole world. He criticized Stalin’s policy from the left, arguing that building communism in one separate country was a deviation from the original intent, that the expropriation of peasant property should have been completed immediately, and that the proletariat had been deceived and continued to be exploited but this time by the Soviet nomenclature. In general, Trotsky accused Stalin of betraying the ideals of the proletarian revolution.

Anarcho-communism also implies the complete collectivization of property and consciousness. However, the doctrine does not accept the Marxist idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the appointment of the working class as the sole agent of the revolution, and two stages on the path to a communist society. The anarcho-communists hoped to build a stateless communist society as soon as they gained power during the revolutionary war. Anarcho-communism was briefly institutionalized on the free territory of southeastern Ukraine from 1918 to 1921, during the revolution and the civil war in the Russian Empire.

Reformism or Social Democracy (Europe), also known as Democratic Socialism in the USA, is a significant revision to Marxism, which practically does not leave even the foundation of genuine Marxist principles. Reformism has been a mainstream form of socialist ideology and practice since the end of the nineteenth century. Redistribution of wealth and partial socialization of consciousness are the main paths being utilized by the doctrine. Socialism is supposed to be gradually built within a capitalistic society by methodically changing the socioeconomic laws of the land using parliamentary procedures. Great importance is also attached to the mental transformation of members of the society through the indoctrination of the population in educational institutions and the propaganda of the socialistic ideals in the mass media, social networks, and materials of pop culture.

Revolutionary Syndicalism (in Italy, France), Anarcho-syndicalism (in Spain), and Guild Socialism (in Great Britain) are non-Marxian currents of socialism, meaning that they did not adhere to the tenets of scientific communism. The main path to socialism is the expropriation of private property from its rightful owners, with its subsequent collectivization and transfer to the management of the labor collective. It was assumed that the fruits of labor would be exchanged in the market between various producers as well as between the villages and the cities. Anarcho-syndicalists managed to gain political power in Aragon, Andalusia, and Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39).

Fascism (Italy) is a non-Marxian, antimaterialist, antipositivist current of socialism. Italian fascism envisioned a new type of society that would supersede both communism and classical liberalism; it was conceived as neither on the right nor the left. However, the practical implementation of fascism was the complete socialization of the consciousness, the partial collectivization of the means of production, and unprecedented wealth redistribution. The means of production de jure remained in possession of the owners, but de facto they could not freely dispose of them. Fascism was imposed on Italian society from 1922 to 1945.

National Socialism (Germany) is a non-Marxian flavor of socialism, based on the racial and pseudo-scientific theory of the superiority of Aryans. National Socialism pursued complete collectivization of the consciousness, partial socialization of the means of production, and aggressive wealth redistribution as a method of achieving a socialist paradise for das Volk. As in any other totalitarian society, the state was the ultimate owner of the means of production, despite a de jure allowance of private ownership. Contrary to fascism, National Socialism did not believe in the antagonism between labor and capital and insisted on the unity of the nation in the face of socioeconomic and military challenges. National Socialism materialized in Germany and lasted from 1933 to 1945.

It should be noted that if a socialist current of any flavor is given sufficient run time, then, regardless of the chosen path, all causative factors will reach their maximum value. That is, in the limit, as mathematicians say, all means of production will inevitably be socialized, and the individual will be coercively subjugated to the collective. In this sense, such a seemingly mild current like democratic socialism is just as dangerous as all the other members of the socialist family.

Author:

Allen Gindler

Allen Gindler is a scholar from the former U.S.S.R., specializing in Political Economy, Econometrics, and Industrial Engineering. He taught Economic Cybernetics, Standard Data Systems, and Computer-Aided Work Design in the Khmelnytskyi National University, Ukraine. He is currently a private consultant to IT industry on Database Administration and Cryptography. As a hobby, he is interested in political philosophy, history, population genetics, and Biblical archaeology. He has published articles and opinion pieces in Mises Wire, American Thinker, Foundation for Economic Education, and Biblical Archaeology Review.

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