QUOTE OF THE DAY

"Socialists can provide shelter, fill your belly with bacon and beans, treat you when you're ill, all the things that are guaranteed to a prisoner or a slave." - Ronald Reagan

As the young and the belligerently idealistic continue to push toward anything that smacks of overthrowing capitalism and ushering in the imagined golden era of socialism, despite all its past and present failures, preferably under the banner of its anointed one, the rules of the game only grow fuzzier while the strategies turn nastier. If only I had been more politically awake during the Reagan years.

MARX DEBUNKED BY TIME MAGAZINE

From TIME MAGAZINE article on May 19, 1947, Karl Marx is man is examined under the light of a man named Schwarzchild who had just written a book about the notorious political philosopher. My, how times have changed.

"If a name had to be found for the age in which we live," says the author of this book, "we might safely call it the Marxian era. For, in one way or another, the most important facts of our time lead back to one man—Karl Marx."

Biographer Leopold Schwarzschild is no admirer of Marx or Marxism. He is pointing to the fact that since World War I no other mind has so potently influenced the political and economic thinking and action of our times. There are masses of unconscious Marxists—men & women who have never read Marx's Capital, and who would rather be found dead than reading the Communist Manifesto, but whose thinking about the role of economic forces in history, the responsibility of government for the individual, and the importance of economic security v. political freedom has nevertheless been profoundly influenced by the choleric expatriate from Prussia.

Even the efforts to fight Marxism with its own weapons have inevitably taken a Marxist turn. Both Naziism and Fascism, Biographer Schwarzschild points out, are Marxist mutations whose predestined political form is therefore the police state. In Nazi concentration camps, as in Russian forced-labor camps, Karl Marx was the presiding genius. In the name of human progress, Marx has probably caused more death, misery, degradation and despair than any man who ever lived.

Complacent & Patronizing. For a mind whose consequences have been so monstrous, this biography is singularly debonair. It is certainly the most readable life of Marx available. For those who wish to see so alarming a monster debunked, it is a complacent job of debunking. Nor need readers fear exposure to the rigors of Marxist political theory or economics. Biographer Schwarzschild lightly writes off those arid involutions.

Schwarzschild's indictment is most effective when describing Marx's personal and political life from 1818 to 1883. Here is Marx the boy taken to a church in Trier, in the recently Prussianized Rhineland, and baptized a Lutheran. His father, the first lawyer in an interminable line of distinguished rabbis, admired Prussia and its official religion. Here is Marx the future socialist, unsocially shunning his school fellows while his mental acrobatics charm Ludwig von Westphalen, a much older man of a much higher social position. Marx later repaid Westphalen for this early interest by marrying his daughter, Jenny, against the wishes of her family. And here is Marx the frustrated poet, wasting his time, and his father's (and later his widowed mother's) slim resources as a shiftless college student. Marx finally received a kind of mail-order degree from the University of Jena.

Boring from Within. Marx got his start in life as editor of the Rhenish Gazette. This newspaper had been founded by a group of solid businessmen turned publishers. Like other publishers since, they were presently bewildered to discover that their paper had been infiltrated by socialists and was being used as a mouthpiece for revolutionary ideas. Marx lost his job. Then began his lifelong career as an expatriate and professional revolutionist.

In Paris he hobnobbed with Friedrich Engels, elegant, fox-hunting scion of a prosperous German textile tycoon. With him Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto (1848), with him he shared his ideas, hopes, miseries and triumphs. Engels gave him implicit intellectual and political obedience, supported him most of his life and finally settled an annuity on him. In 1848 both Marx and Engels were neckdeep in the revolutionary wave that swept over Europe.

With the first gunshots, Marx rushed back to the Rhineland to edit the New Rhenish Gazette. The chapter on this episode shows the extent to which Marx's tactics are still standard Communist equipment. The New Rhenish Gazette was a tight little dictatorship of the proletariat run by a back-room clique of case-hardened Communists. But communism or socialism were rarely mentioned in its columns ; the paper posed as a liberal organ. The Communists posed as liberal patriots. In the name of liberalism, Marx shouted for war between Prussia and Denmark. He knew that war is good growing weather for communism. The result, as always, was the gradual discrediting of the liberals.

Character Assassination. Other enlightening chapters describe Marx's tactics of character assassination (still standard Communist practice) against anybody who threatened his exclusive leadership. One of his victims was Wilhelm Weitling, a tailor's apprentice, one of the few proletarians who has ever become an intelligent Communist leader. Marx falsely accused Weitling of being a literary crook and hounded him to the U.S. Another target was Ferdinand Lassalle, brilliant founder of the German Social Democratic Party. Marx somewhat inconsistently referred to Lassalle as "Baron Izzy" and "the little Jew."

Another victim was Michael Bakunin, an ardent Russian anarchist who threatened Marx's, control of the First International (founded in 1864 in London). Marx charged Bakunin with shady financial dealings and with being a Czarist agent. He could not make the charge stick, but Bakunin withdrew to lick his wounds.

After the collapse of the 1848 revolutions, Marx spent the rest of his life fighting off creditors, plotting against the public peace, burying his son,* suffering from attacks of carbuncles that sometimes covered him from head to foot, grinding away at economics so that he could "prove" (in Capital) that capitalism was inevitably doomed and that socialism was its inevitable successor, lashing his enemies with invective sometimes worthy of an Old Testament prophet and sometimes unprintable. When he was buried in a cemetery in Highgate, London, only eight friends were at the grave.

Author Schwarzschild's biographical facts are true, as far as they go. But the Marx he presents is a man with his brain cut out. Hence the facts add up to a caricature. Schwarzschild's thesis is that Karl Marx was 1) a rabbinical thinker whose pyramids of abstract logic were brilliant, but had nothing to do with facts; 2) a vicious egomaniac determined to ruin any man or group that he could not dominate; 3) a political seer whose prognostications were almost always wrong; 4) a self-styled "scientific" socialist whose science was about as scientific as astrology; 5) an economist whose economic knowledge was perfunctory and puerile. Marx's mind was undoubtedly diabolic (history is studded with malignant political geniuses). But it is no help in understanding or combating Marxism to deny its author's perverse brilliance.

Read it all.

RIDING THE BIG WAVES

Capitalism operates in waves. I have held the opinion for a decade or so that the United States would need to eventually ease into a form of national capitalism in order to compete with similar large regimes in China, Russia, Europe, and several oil-rich quasi-socialist entities in the Middle East. Let me be perfectly clear. I am not advocating a misguided heavy-handed socialist agenda for America, or anything remotely close to the pie-eyed Marxist flim flam so popular among Left-wing bookstore café hipsters who are as personally selfish as any pickup truck-driving capitalist I've ever met. Yet so many of these lovely people with the trés chic smiles embrace an ideology which always seems to end in a pernicious totalitarianism and uninvited oppression by an elite class, quite a shell shocker or two in scale from the worse forms of capitalism ever practiced. Forget all that shuck and jive about false consciousness. It exists, but no one has a monopoly on a justifiable antidote. Life is not that damn complex, even for the uneducated. After all, even for the Big Kahuna, negotiating a Big Wave is a good thing. Negotiating a tsunami, not so much.

I predicted this need to ease into a form of national capitalism back in the 1990s to a loosely knit group of internationalists who were known as the Sworgists for no other reason than the fact that we had gathered around the fledgling Scenewash Project to discuss the future of capitalism. Back then, I was a staunch believer in the capitalist system, and at some point in the late 90s I coined the phrase, "Capitalism has proven to be the most effective and purest form of communism ever practiced."

Having founded the listserv I dubbed—THE SWORG SWILL—I was operating among several staunch Marxists, and a couple of progressives who decried all previous failed experiments, of which Situationist Marxism and formal capitalism were the two more prominent. We hailed from Washington, DC, Austin, TX, Nottingham, England, Peoria, IL, and Sidney, Australia. All of us intuited that capitalism was weakening and its constitutional faultlines deepening. Trapped in our own miasma and personal biases however, we often disagreed on how to proceed with our investigations, and the group ended rather abruptly in May, 2000, after several years of communication.

But I had I suggested that we didn't need no stinking revolution because I viscerally agreed with the poet and musician John Lennon, who rejected revolution while advocating peace. No bloody pacifist am I—given the horrid nature of the world—I however still prefer peace to war, a slap in the face or a kick in the collective ass to total war, and a purpose bounced ounce of dignity in life for everyone not waving a death sentence at me or my family. My impression then and my impression now is that capitalism would fall of its own weight and greed, and in that particular historical moment, a massive reorganization towards a kinder gentler socialist model could possibly improve the government, its daily standards, and the uncommon conditions of more common people struggling in this world, where unfortunately the many prop up the few.

I think that time has come. To that end, let's observe the festering approach in today's New York Times:

FINANCE EXPERTS SAY THAT HAVING Washington take stakes in United States banks now—like government interventions in the past—would be a promising move to address an economic emergency. The plan by the Treasury Department, they say, could supply banks with sorely needed capital and help restore confidence in financial markets.

Elsewhere, government bank-investment programs are routinely called nationalization programs. But that is not likely in the United States, where nationalization is a word to avoid, given the aversion to anything that hints of socialism.

In past times of war and national emergency, Washington has not hesitated. In 1917, the government seized the railroads to make sure goods, armaments and troops moved smoothly in the interests of national defense during World War I. After the war ended, bondholders and stockholders were compensated and railways were returned to private ownership in 1920.

During World War II, Washington seized dozens of companies, including railroads, coal mines and, briefly, the Montgomery Ward department store chain. In 1952, President Harry S. Truman seized 88 steel mills across the country, asserting that unyielding owners were determined to provoke an industrywide strike that would cripple the Korean War effort. That nationalization did not last long, though, because the Supreme Court ruled the move an unconstitutional abuse of presidential power.

In banking, the government took an 80 percent stake in the Continental Illinois Bank and Trust in 1984. Continental Illinois failed in part because of bad oil-patch loans in Oklahoma and Texas. As the nation’s seventh-largest bank, Continental Illinois was deemed “too big to fail” by federal regulators, who feared wider turmoil in the financial markets. In the end, the government lost an estimated $1 billion on the bad loans it bought as part of the takeover of Continental, which eventually became part of Bank of America.

Read it all.

UNRAVELING THE MARXIST CANDIDATE

IN THE SAUL ALINSKY MODEL, “organizing” is a euphemism for “revolution” — a wholesale revolution whose ultimate objective is the systematic acquisition of power by a purportedly oppressed segment of the population, and the radical transformation of America’s social and economic structure. The goal is to foment enough public discontent, moral confusion, and outright chaos to spark the social upheaval that Marx, Engels, and Lenin predicted—a revolution whose foot soldiers view the status quo as fatally flawed and wholly unworthy of salvation.

Thus, the theory goes, the people will settle for nothing less than that status quo’s complete collapse—to be followed by the erection of an entirely new system upon its ruins. Toward that end, they will be apt to follow the lead of charismatic radical organizers who project an aura of confidence and vision, and who profess to clearly understand what types of societal “changes” are needed.

But Alinsky’s Chicago brand of revolution was not characterized by dramatic, sweeping, overnight transformations of social institutions. As Richard Poe puts it, “Alinsky viewed revolution as a slow, patient process. The trick was to penetrate existing institutions such as churches, unions and political parties.” Alinsky advised organizers and their disciples to quietly, subtly gain influence within the decision-making ranks of these institutions, and to introduce changes from that platform.

One of Obama’s early mentors in the Alinsky method, Mike Kruglik, would later say the following about Obama:

“He was a natural, the undisputed master of agitation, who could engage a room full of recruiting targets in a rapid-fire Socratic dialogue, nudging them to admit that they were not living up to their own standards. As with the panhandler, he could be aggressive and confrontational. With probing, sometimes personal questions, he would pinpoint the source of pain in their lives, tearing down their egos just enough before dangling a carrot of hope that they could make things better.”

Read it all in the UK Spectator. And then there is the old gray elephant in the room—the concern over Obama's religious base.

But let's be honest about all this high octane gutter sleuthing. As the always insightful Max Publius puts it, "That his paternal family is Muslim or that his maternal family were communists is not the problem. After all, some of the harshest critics of Islam are ex-Muslims (Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Wafa Sultan, Ibn Warraq), and some of the harshest critics of communism were "red diaper babies" like David Horowitz.

"What is very disturbing is that Obama decided on his own to join a genuinely racist, anti-semitic, psycho-led "Christian Identity" church for African Americans, and now he is the chosen Democrat for president."

Disturbing indeed. To paraphrase what Duh Swami writes elsewhere in another online comment, "I don't think Obama is a Muslim in crass legalistic terms, but I think he is a sympathizer of the Islamic agenda. Anyone who believes, that Allah is God, and Mohammad is his messenger, is a Muslim by sympathy if not actuality. And we cannot take this admission lightly, and more than we could accept Nazi sympathy last century when at war with Nazis.

This is why the key questions we must press this presidential candidate on this topic, just as Jack Kennedy was inspected with regard to his allegiance to the Pope. Is Allah God? Is Mohammad his messenger? We deserve to know EXACTLY what Obama thinks on this topic.

If one believes that Allah is God (we all worship the same God), and acknowledge Mohammad's messengership, he has given Islam credibility as an authentic religion, he believes the Quran, even if he has not read it, even if there is no prayers, no jakat, no jihad, he is a sympathetic Muslim just the same, and Allah is his god.

For a President Barack, God help us all, how deep this sympathy goes will directly effect his behavior toward everything Islamic while he is in office.

There is a branch of magick called sympathetic magick. The magician enters into a state sympathy with the target and exerts some kind of control. In Gene Roddenberry's fictional treatment the Vulcan mind meld technique would be an example, where Spock enters into a state of sympathy with the subject and can read his mind.

It appears that most of the chattering Muslims of the world seem to agree that candidate Barack is already in a state of sympathy with them. However, despite all of his talents as a community organizer, he will not be able to control this magical act because he is not the magician. Entrenched Islam and its "true" sons are the magicians, and they will play Obama's magical sympathy like a symphony...

There is a thief in the house. We will not be silenced...

BONO WARNS ISLAMIC THREAT REAL

Bono with wife Ali
Not that this news is sweeping through the mainstream media wind tunnels, but Bono, lead singer for the Irish rock band, U2, has issued a warning in a recent Rolling Stone interview that bears repeating. A noted liberal celebrity bucking his own usual party line to engage the results of honest unbias observations is indeed real news. Because let's face it, the press loves to headline celebrities who speak out against President Bush, the war against Islamic fundamentalism and anything else that strikes paydirt in the darling media's end zone. This celebrity, however, has gone off-script.

Bono's efforts for Africa, unlike many other celebrities, appear to be sincere and he has shown himself to be unconcerned with who helps him, as shown by his collaborations with President Bush—a strange bedfellow scenario that would be anathema to most of his fellow celebrities. Now comes evidence that Bono also understands the threat posed by Islamic fundamentalists such as al-Qaeda, and his courage to call evil by it's name. In the interview with the ultra liberal magazine, Bono said of the Islamic nemesis:

"I want to be very, very clear, however: I understand and agree with the analysis of the problem. There is an imminent threat. It manifested itself on 9/11. It's real and grave. It is as serious a threat as Stalinism and National Socialism were. Let's not pretend it isn't."

Bono goes on to show that he discourages those steeped in the Bush Derangement Syndrome approach to world politics. In response to the reporter's statement that "But this Administration destroyed that." when they discussed the outpouring of support for the United States immediately following the attacks of September 11, Bono says of President Bush"

There was a plan there, you know. I think the president genuinely felt that if we could prove a model of democracy and broad prosperity in the Middle East, it might defuse the situation.

Despite his sometimes petulent ideology, this particular celebrity—in my opinion—is someone worthy of respect, because he understands that the threat is a real one and it is not one that can be defused simply by talking. In this, as in his statement that I try to stick to my pitch, and it's an abuse of my access for me to switch subjects, he earns that respect.

The rocker turned activist and philanthropist is keenly focussed on his efforts for Africa, knowing that this focus is what gets him access and he did not want to abuse it. Bravo, Bono. I for one, have never been much of a fan, but with these recent developments, while his music may still fall on deaf ears, I have gained a strong measure of respect for Bono the man.