Saturday, February 29, 2020

February 29, 2020


MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

Equality vs. Liberty: You Can’t Have Both

Friends,

The March 2020 issue of The New English Review contains a new essay that I’ve authored, a bit longer than what I send out usually via this Blog format. It is titled: “Facing the Egalitarian Heresy of the 21st Century.” It’s the fifth piece I have written for NER, and essentially it makes the point, historically and practically (and from Divine and Natural law), that the application in society of equality is antithetical to liberty, that the more “equality” is imposed, the less liberty you will have.  My argument goes against the sacred “talking points” of current conservative elites, the conservative establishment, who have bought into a Leftist narrative. That template is distinctly not conservative, not traditional, and in fact, not really tenable. A major and central tenet of historic conservatism is that it is resolutely “anti-egalitarian.”

Whether you cite Edmund Burke or any of the American Framers, even Thomas Jefferson, you will not find equality held up as a founding principle. Yes, there is wording in the Declaration of Independence about “all men created equal,” but understanding that document (which lacks constitutional status) demonstrates that the equality meant was one of fair and equitable representation of the colonists in the British government. The Declaration, in a real sense, is a kind of propaganda document, and obviously did not address such topics as slavery, property-determined voting, or women’s rights: those things were individual state issues. That was not its purpose. To attempt to incorporate it into our constitutional fabric and perversely read it is truly destructive of the republic. I won’t go on further. 

My essay addresses some of the essential philosophical aspects. I pass it on to you today with the hope that you will read it:

Facing the Egalitarian Heresy of the 21st Century




by Boyd Cathey (March 2020)
 

Poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, in The Masque of Pandora, writes, “Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.” He was not the first to use a version of the phrase, which is found in Sophocles’ play, Antigone. But the meaning has been fairly consistent for over two millennia.
Aren’t we witnessing this today?
A large number of our fellow citizens seem possessed by a kind of madness. They seem to exist in a kind of parallel universe, with its own set of beliefs, its own standards of truth and particular narrative of facts. In almost every respect this universe represents the contrary, the negation, of the inherited, rooted foundation on which our historic Western and Christian civilization is based.
This contrary reality did not all of a sudden spring up, it has existed and been cultivated and nurtured for centuries. Its founding ideologues understood that their premises and desired objectives ran up full force against the ingrained traditions and historic legacy of a culture and civilization that traced its origins not only to the beliefs of the ancient Hebrews, but also to the highest art, philosophy and statecraft of the Greeks and Romans.
Encouraged by the Emperor Constantine at the First Council of Nicaea (325 A.D.) and two centuries later by the Emperor Justinian the Great, the empire both East and West recognized the primacy of Divine Positive Law—the laws and revealed teachings of God and His Church. But not only that: this transformation signaled the explicit foundation of Europe based not only on Revelation, but also upon the reality of Natural Law, those rules inscribed in nature and integral to it that also have as their Author, God Himself. The Christian civilization that came about was built securely and firmly not only on Holy Scripture but also the traditions and the legacy of those ancient cultures that were not destroyed by the Faith, but fulfilled and completed by it.
In the incredibly rich inheritance of ancient philosophy there was a recognition that there were discernible “laws” which govern the orderly operation and functioning of the social order and make possible a harmonious communal existence within society. What the Christian church did was to confirm the existence of those laws while adding a capstone, a divine sanction and specificity derived from Revelation and the teachings of Jesus Christ and the Church. Thus, this transformation of ancient society was prescriptive, conservative in the best sense of that word.
Is this template not the exact opposite of the modernist, progressivist revolution which seeks to cut society off from its inheritance, depriving it of the accumulated wealth of that heritage?
No doubt, change and reform, in some degree, always must occur in society. But these changes do not affect the necessity of our acceptance of the unaltered and unalterable higher laws given by God or the laws inscribed in nature. Rather, they occur on a practical level in any well-functioning society. There is a quote from Prince Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s famous novel describing the revolutionary turmoil of mid-19th century Italy, The Leopard (Il Gattopardo): “Things will have to change in order that they remain the same.” In 1963 director Luchino Visconti directed an exquisite film of the same name based on that novel, starring, quite improbably, Burt Lancaster. The film vividly portrays the tensions between the immemorial past and the circumstances created by political and social change.
What Lampedusa’s principle character, the Prince of Salina is saying is that no society—no culture—can completely denude itself of its inheritance and its history and actually survive. And more, a denial of natural law and the Divine Positive Law ends catastrophically. Such experiments in total revolutionary transformation have inevitably ended in violent bloodshed and incredible destructiveness—in the massacres of the French Revolution, and more recently, in the Gulag and the concentration camp, or in blood-soaked Maoism.
Over the past half century and more we have witnessed a different kind of revolution; it does not employ as weapons of choice the tank and bayonet, nor the Gulag as the final destination for unrepentant opponents. It leaves nothing of substance behind in its wake. It is an unfolding, all-encompassing cultural movement, subverting and then incorporating in its service diverse extreme revolutionary elements injected into our educational system, into our entertainment industry, into our politics, even into the very language we use to communicate with each other. The “violence” it metes out is mostly of a cerebral nature, not of the physical kind, but rather predicated on shame, humiliation, and the fear of the loss of a job or reputation. It plays on the natural human desire for conformity, while steadily upping the ante in our laws—constantly moving the goalposts of what are acceptable and unacceptable. It is the kind of intellectual “violence” now writ large that once impelled people to look the other way when their neighbors were hauled off to Siberia under Comrade Stalin, or to Dachau under Hitler. But, arguably, it is worse, for it denies the very existence of those immutable laws that govern the universe.
It has been highly effective, utilizing as its major weaponry the terrifying twins, the inexpungable accusations of “racism” and “sexism,” and a whole panoply of sub-terms that accompany such charges: “white supremacy,” “historic white oppression,” “colonialist imperialism,” “misogyny,” “toxic masculinity,” and increasingly expanded to incorporate terms like “anti-migrant” or “anti-transgender” bigotry.
The overarching desire of this progressivist revolution is, in fact, not reform—not what Lampedusa’s Prince of Salina says consolingly about some things changing so that other things can remain the same. No, it is incredibly “post-Marxian,” making the older Communist and Marxist revolutionary dreams seem tame in comparison. It invokes and demands a total transformation in which nearly all, if not all, of those institutions, those traditions, and that inheritance vouchsafed to us from our ancestors is rudely discarded, rejected, and condemned as racist, sexist, fascist—in other words, our remembered past is cut off from us.
This progressive revolution is predicated on the idea of equality. Yet, in fact, the equality as envisaged does not exist and has never existed in nature. For revolutionary “equality” is a slogan, in reality an exercise in guile and subterfuge employed to shame and cajole a weak-willed and gullible citizenry into eventually dissolving the traditional social bonds and inherited natural (and moral) laws that have governed our culture for two millennia. Its true objective is domination over and power in society.
As an increasingly independent outgrowth of an historic cultural Marxism formulated decades ago and insinuated into our educational systems and entertainment industry, this assault on our historic culture makes the template of the old Soviet Communists appear conservative. Josef Stalin would never have, and never did, put up with same sex marriage, transgenderism, or the kind of feminist extremism we see around us today. True, the Soviets talked of equality, and women occupied some professional positions, but for the Reds a strong family and observance of supposedly “outdated” traditional morality were still important.
Revolutionary equality, in the form of egalitarianism, is not only a rebellion against the Divine Positive Law, but also against Nature, that is, against the way things are and function naturally in our world, those workings and that usual consistency observed as prescriptive laws for thousands of years.
There is a parable in the Gospel of St. Matthew, the Parable of the Talents (Mt. 25:14-30; The Parable of the Bags of Gold/NIV), which both mirrors and confirms those laws. The three servants of the Master are given unequal amounts and told to be faithful stewards and invest the talents wisely. The first two, those with the largest amounts, comply and double their accounts; but the servant with the least amount fails to use his one Talent, and thus is condemned: “You wicked and lazy slave! You knew, did you, that I reap where I did not sow, and gather where I did not scatter? . . . So take the talent from him, and give it to the one with the ten talents . . . As for this worthless slave, throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
The parable’s message is that men are created unequally in abilities, in status, in kinds and types of intelligence, in physicality, in position. We must not compare our status invidiously with those around us, for we are not judged by the talents or positions of others, but by our own God-given unique capacity, our own talents, and how well we measure up and fulfill our own specific roles in society. Thus, perhaps ironically and to emphasize this point, the servant with more Talents is blessed, but the servant with the fewest is condemned, not because of rank or possession but because of non-compliance with the mandate of the Master.
Egalitarianism as a movement is, as the late Mel Bradford termed it, a heresy, fraught with extreme consequences for Western society: “Equality as a moral or political imperative, pursued as an end in itself—Equality with a capital ‘E’—is the antonym of every legitimate conservative principle…there is no man equal to any other, except perhaps in the special, and politically untranslatable, understanding of the Deity. Not intellectually or physically or economically or even morally. Not equal!” (Modern Age, Winter 1976, p. 62.)
It is in the realm of morality and the observance of moral law that the effects of egalitarianism have been most aggravated. Indeed, the destruction of masculinity and emasculation of men has been a disastrous consequence of the “women’s movement.” For centuries—indeed, not that long ago—an inherited code of honor, deference and respect on how to treat women, prevailed in Western society. While, it is true, certain functions and roles were generally not open to women historically, that in no way diminished or lessened their critical importance and special position in society. Indeed, as child bearers and mothers it was they who most uniquely governed the essential running of the family and were the substantial foundation of society.
The Church understood that women were not the same as men, that women were different and that they had unique God-given roles. Like the Blessed Virgin in Bethlehem who cared for the Cradle in the Stable and nourished the Son of God who would bring grace and salvation to the world, the primary role of women was the nourishing of familial offspring and the continuation of the human race. There could be no more significant role than this and, in that sense, women occupy in Christian teaching an exalted and unequalled position, modeled on that of the Blessed Virgin.
What folly, then, to even discuss “equality” in this sense.
Our present culture is filled with raging egalitarian revolutionaries—many political, many academic, many in entertainment, many in media. They are, to quote T. S. Eliot, “destroying our ancient edifices to make ready the ground upon which the barbarian nomads of the future will encamp in their mechanized caravans.” (Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, 1948, p. 108.)
These revolutionaries tell us that they strive for “correcting historic inequality” and “freedom from oppression.” But their program—their revolution—is a dystopian nightmare which pushes the unobtainable goal of egalitarianism. That program destroys true liberty and succeeds in enslaving millions in unrequited passions and envy, unbound and unreasoned, cocooned in a pseudo-reality. In their quest for an abstract equality they destroy the historic liberties which define and give texture to human society.
The late author-essayist, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, in his classic volume,Liberty or Equality, wrote:
. . . it suffices to say that the artificial establishment of equality is as little compatible with liberty as the enforcement of unjust laws of discrimination . . . ‘Nature’ is anything but egalitarian; if we want to establish a complete plain we have to blast the mountains away and fill the valleys; equality thus presupposes the continuous intervention of force which, as a principle, is opposed to freedom. Liberty and equality are in essence contradictory. (Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Liberty or Equality, 1952, p. 3.)
And again Bradford: “The only freedom which can last is a freedom embodied somewhere, rooted in a history, located in space, sanctioned by a genealogy, and blessed by a religious establishment. The only equality which abstract rights, insisted upon outside the context of politics, are likely to provide is the equality of universal slavery.” (Bradford, A Better Guide than Reason, 1979, “Preface,” p. xii.)
In their frenzied revolt against the laws of nature and nature’s God, the revolutionaries qualify as what the great English writer G. K. Chesterton called “lunatics.” In his volume, The Poet and the Lunatics (1929), Chesterton’s character Gale asks the question: “What exactly is liberty?” He responds, in part:
First and foremost, surely, it is the power of a thing to be itself. In some ways the yellow bird was free in the cage . . . We are limited by our brains and bodies; and if we break out, we cease to be ourselves, and, perhaps, to be anything.
The lunatic is he who loses his way and cannot return. Now, almost before my eyes, this man had made a great stride from liberty to lunacy. The man who opened the bird-cage loved freedom; possibly too much . . . But the man who broke the bowl merely because he thought it a prison for the fish, when it was their only possible house of life—that man was already outside the world of reason, raging with a desire to be outside of everything.
Our modern egalitarian revolutionaries have, to use Chesterton’s parable, gone mad. In their frenetic quest for abstract equality and a freedom not rooted in place, family and history, they are men and women “already outside the world of reason,” enslaved by an unrestrained rage to destroy the edifice of Western Christian civilization which is grounded on both Divine Positive and natural law. That destructive rage is matched only by their profound inability to create anything of real and lasting value to replace what is destroyed.
This is where we find ourselves in America today.
It is no exaggeration to state that millions of our fellow citizens have been infected by an ideology that posits a mythical, egalitarian “counter-reality” which has poisoned their thinking and worldview to the point that co-existing with them in the same nation, in the same geography, becomes increasingly difficult if not impossible. Their template is highly aggressive and contagious; it must increase and grow, or it dies. And, if opposed, it fights back viciously and with total war.
The nightmare scenario described by Chesterton nearly a century ago has arrived today with full force: it surrounds us, it cajoles us, it demands total subservience . . . especially if we have the slightest inclination to think for ourselves, to doubt the new dogmatic and constantly advancing egalitarian templates on feminism and racism. What was perhaps tolerable five years ago is now met with demands for the execution of a social and political death sentence, and what may be tolerable today will soon be seen as a sin against the triumphant and ever-evolving social justice warrior mantra of truth.
That is, until men stand and forcefully oppose this lunacy, completely, honestly, rationally, and without hesitation.
________________________
Boyd D. Cathey was educated at the University of Virginia (MA, Thomas Jefferson Fellow) and the Universidad de Navarra, Pamplona, Spain (PhD, Richard M. Weaver Fellow). He is a former assistant to the late author, Dr. Russell Kirk, taught on the college level, and is retired State Registrar of the North Carolina State Archives. Has published widely and in various languages, and is the author of The Land We Love: The South and Its Heritage (Scuppernong Press, November 2018). He resides in North Carolina

Wednesday, February 26, 2020

February 26, 2020

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

Tucker Carlson: American Elites Have Wrecked America

Friends,

I pass on today the transcript of a short commentary Tucker Carlson made last Friday night (February 21) on his prime time program. Carlson has been featured before in these pages; he has critical things to say about what has happened and is happening to the American nation and to our future. In fact, on an increasingly left-leaning Fox News with its normalization of behaviors that would have been considered flagrantly immoral and outside the bounds of morality only a few years ago, and its acceptance of an ahistorical Neoconservative view of the world, Tucker Carlson—on occasion—can be a breath of fresh air, something that is becoming rare in the mainstream media.

Once again I also recommend highly his recent book, Ship of Fools: How a Selfish Ruling Class is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution, which should be a primer for all concerned Americans.

Here is the transcript:

US Elites Wrecked America, Cling to Power by Any Means

February 21, 2020

The story of American decline is the story of an incompetent ruling class. You'll hear many self-serving explanations for it. But the truth is, it's that simple.
The people in charge inherited an industrial superpower with unchallenged military dominance. In a little more than a generation, they squandered all of it. In exchange for short-term profits, bigger vacation homes and cheaper household help they wrecked what they did not build.
They outsourced entire sectors of our economy to China. They imported a serf class to drive down wages, and they crippled the middle class while doing it.
They ran up trillions of dollars in unpayable debt. They turned the finest universities in the world into a joke. They watched from their decadent little bubbles of affluence as families, faith and public decency died in this country and they laughed because they didn't care.
How people so awful wound up in charge of a nation as great as ours is a question historians will have to answer – and they will, someday. But at this point, it's clear the population has grown tired of it. Donald Trump's election is one clear sign of that. The rise of Bernie Sanders is another.
The ruling class in other words, is losing its grip on power and the ruling class members can feel it. They can smell it. It terrifies them.
Their first response was denial. It always is. They retreated into fantasy. They wondered why can't we be just like Joe Biden and make it 2009 again? Well, that didn't work and when it didn't, they reverted to their governing instinct, which is authoritarianism.
They stopped trying to convince the public of anything and instead decided to scare them. Fearful people are easier to control. You saw it on the front page of their newspaper Friday morning – The New York Times. “Lawmakers are warning that Russia is meddling to re-elect Trump,” read the headline. Inside the story, there was nothing – no evidence, no detail, not even a coherent set of accusations.
But it was enough to alert the morons on cable news. It was time to do their job, which is now and always to run interference for the people in charge. Now remember, most of the people on television have no idea what they're saying, even as they're saying it.
They're just reading the scripts that were written for them by some 23-year-old women's studies major from Wesleyan – somebody who knows even less than they do.
On MSNBC, host Chris Matthews said: “It's official. Russia has endorsed the reelection of President Donald Trump, who is trying desperately right now to keep that matter secret.” Also on MSNBC, former CIA Chief of Staff Jeremy Bash said: “If the Russians are attacking our election processes, and they're doing so to benefit Donald Trump, I think frankly, the president welcomes it. He wants it.”
On CNN, host Don Lemon said: “So as bad as it is … the Russians are back at it. Trying to help Trump get reelected. It's far worse that the president of the United States is – he is trying to cover it up.”
On MSNBC, host Lawrence O’Donnell said: “The president is a Russian operative. That sounds like the description of a bad Hollywood screenplay, but it is real. And it is Vladimir Putin's greatest achievement. This is one of those shocking news days if you retain the capacity to be shocked in the Trump era by the Trump regime, which might be better labeled the Trump-Putin regime.”
So these people claim the president of the United States has colluded with Russian President Vladimir Putin to steal an election. No, not just the last one, but the next one, too. Be afraid, says Don Lemon, be very afraid.
Yet the public doesn't seem especially afraid. Maybe they've heard it before somewhere. Their lack of panic is deeply distressing to the Democratic Party, which is counting on another Red Scare sometime between now and November.
So Brian Williams – trustworthy Brian Williams – stepped in to scold America for not being more terrified.  Williams said on his show on MSNBC: “We begin tonight with sad word that funeral services are pending this evening after the death of outrage earlier today – outrage officially died of exhaustion though buoyed at the very end by the one bright spot, the realization that its close relative, apathy survives and is thriving.”
Got that? They are saying: screw you, America. You ought to be falling for it a second time. How dare you? You can see the frustration on their faces.
On the other hand, you think they might take the time to come up with a new hoax occasionally. Why can't they invent Argentine sappers once in a while or saboteurs from Malawi? Something new and interesting. But no, like a robot vacuum cleaner stuck carving circles under a chair, they are going to keep doing the same thing over and over and over until the batteries run out.
And now they're trying it on Bernie Sanders.
New York Times reporter Peter Baker said on MSNBC, where he is an analyst: “Now you might ask the question as some people have, would they want Trump over Bernie Sanders? Sanders, of course, a democratic socialist is, you know, more ideologically in tune with the old Russia anyway and remember, of course, the Russians did favor Bernie Sanders in the primary in 2016 over Hillary Clinton.”
Wait. Bernie Sanders? He is a Putin Stooge, too? We thought he was a Brezhnev stooge, whatever. He's colluding with the Russians. He's got to be because he's not with the program. Just this afternoon, The Washington Post reported: "Bernie Sanders was briefed by U.S. officials (Intel officials) that Russia is trying to help his presidential campaign."
Now that happened weeks ago, he learned about it weeks ago, but the Sanders campaign never leaked the story. Now, on the eve of the Nevada caucuses, someone in the so-called intelligence community did leak it, just as they repeatedly leaked selective information in the first Russia hoax in an effort of course, to derail Donald Trump, whose policies they disagree with.
You see what's going on here? Yes, you do. Our democratic system is in fact under attack. That much is true. But it's not the Russians who are attacking it. It's not even the Chinese. It's being attacked by our own ruling class. They're undermining democracy because they have no choice.
If they left it up to voters to decide where to go next, they'd be out of a job tomorrow, because they've been terrible stewards of this country. Some of them would be in jail.
So they've got to subvert our system. Their livelihoods depend on it.



Monday, February 24, 2020

February 24, 2020

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

The Russia Hoax Unravels…Again
Friends,

Once again yesterday and this morning, Russia and its supposed meddling in American politics was in the news. And it’s frankly quite difficult to keep up with the latest permutations in this rank amateurish attempt to breathe more life into what is palpably an immense and fraudulent effort to advance a particular template while deceiving (as strenuously as possible) the American public.  What I wrote first back on February 14 in MY CORNER, then picked up by LewRockwell.com on February 17, and finally updated and rewritten as something new, now appearing on The Unz Review (February 22), can’t do justice to this latest Deep State maneuver.

Back on Friday, February 21 we were told in solemn “I-told-you-so” tones by CNN and The New York Times—those paragons of journalistic malfeasance—thatthe intelligence community believes Russia is already taking steps to interfere in the 2020 election with the goal of helping President Donald Trump win, three sources familiar with the matter tell CNN.”  The Times’ headline—in bold letters—said it all: “Lawmakers Are Warned That Russia Is Meddling to Re-elect Trump.”  With the usual kind of insufferable assurance—based on nothing but the desire to “get” Donald Trump—CNN with unconcealed glee declared:


Last week's briefing [before Adam Schiff’s committee], led by election security official Shelby Pierson and first reported by The New York Times, addressed the overall picture of Russia's efforts, including hacking, weaponizing social media and attacks on election infrastructure, one of the sources said. The briefers said Russia does favor Trump, but that helping Trump wasn't the only thing they were trying to do as it was also designed to raise questions about the integrity of the elections process, the source added.

CNN’s story surfaced on Friday, February 21…Ah! but wait, just two days later, February 23, there appeared an “update.” And, well, you see CNN’s new headline alludes to what happened:  “US intelligence briefer appears to have overstated assessment of 2020 Russian interference.” CNN goes on:


…Shelby Pierson, told lawmakers on the House Intelligence Committee that Russia is interfering in the 2020 election with the goal of helping President Donald Trump get reelected. The US intelligence community has assessed that Russia is interfering in the 2020 election and has separately assessed that Russia views Trump as a leader they can work with. But the US does not have evidence that Russia's interference this cycle is aimed at reelecting Trump, the officials said. [Italics mine]

Overstated!?  What about using the correct word: lying?

Not only that but the same Deep State spooks who have foisted off this Russia Hoax, ideologically-tendentious mythology also have briefed Bernie Sandersabout Russian efforts to help his presidential campaign, intensifying concerns about the Kremlin's role in the US presidential race.

It remains unclear how Russia is attempting to help Sanders, according to The Washington Post, which first reported the effort. The revelation comes a day after it was reported that the US intelligence community believes Moscow is taking steps to help President Donald Trump win and at a time when Sanders is emerging as the Democratic front-runner.

This was too good to pass up for spokesmen of the “conservative movement inc.” and the neoconservative shills on Fox and on radio. Former Governor John Sununu, former Chief of Staff for President George W. Bush—demonstrating the fact that God did in fact create some humans without brains at all—lept into the fetid defecation Monday morning (February 24) with both feet: of course, he opined, the Russkies would assist Sanders since Sanders is a socialist, having spent his honeymoon in the old Soviet Union, and those evil men (e.g., Vladimir Putin) in the Kremlin certainly would support a like-minded type!  And Rush Limbaugh, despite his at times past decent analysis of the attempts to unseat the president, in the noon hour led off with the same talking point: “It is,” he said, “logical for the Russians to be supporting Sanders.”  

Such comments betray an utter incomprehension of the history and politics of post-Communist Russia since the fall of the Soviets in August 1991.  Indeed, comments like these must be called out for what they are: at best representative of a woeful ignorance, a crass stupidity, or at worst, indicative of a mind filled with ideological dross and perverted by globalist Neocon talking points, but without the gloss of the more gussied-up scribbles of Max Boot or John Bolton (who at least make a pretense at sounding intelligent when they spew forth this narrative).


To quote the late Peter O’Toole in one of my favorite films, “Dean Spanley” (2008): “Poppycock!” This narrative is balderdash that does nothing but attempt to enforce a badly hemorrhaging Neocon globalist policy plank that has been badly listing port-side since their debacle back in the Iraq incursion. It totally ignores the significant studies by Professor Allen Lynch (University of Virginia) in his Vladimir Putin & Russian Statecraft, Paul Robinson (University of Ottawa) in Russian Conservatism, Stephen Cohen (Princeton University) in several books and numerous articles on the topic, John Garrard (University of Arizona) in Russian Orthodoxy Resurgent: Faith and Power in the New Russia, and others who write sensibly and with some knowledge of the recent history of post-Communist Russia.

I pass on my latest piece published by The Unz Review…but with a plea: Will someone in proper authority please fire that obvious Deep Stater Shelby Pierson?

THE UNZ REVIEW
The Russians Are Coming! Build That Bomb Shelter Now!
BOYD D. CATHEY • FEBRUARY 22, 2020
You may remember the satirical movie, “The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!” made during the height of the Cold War (1966). In that film a Russian sub runs aground on a sandbar near the fictional Gloucester Island, off the New England coast. Both the inhabitants of the island and the submarine crew panic: is this an incident that will set off World War III? What ensues is a comedy of errors, and in the end conflict is happily avoided, but barely.
That movie repays re-watching, especially in our day, for what it says about how our impressions—our views—of Russia continue to influence our politics and foreign policy action across the globe, for good or for, mostly, ill.
I recently wrote a column about the persistence among most Americans of an irrational Russophobia on my blog, MY CORNER, and it was picked up and published nationally by LewRockwell.com on February 17. No sooner than it had appeared than the news broke from the Intelligence community that the Russians were at it again—attempting to throw the 2020 election for Donald Trump!
It was almost as if some well-placed Intel spook had met with me at “Rick’s Café Americain” (remember the film “Casablanca”?) and secretly revealed what was going to happen just a few days before it became public. The “Russia Hoax” was going to be fully reborn (in fact, as I wrote, it had never gone away). Like Dr. Frankenstein’s monster it has emerged again from our corrupted and corrupt Intelligence agencies (those government apparatchiks who are beginning to make Inspector Clouseau look like a genius) and the bowels of the frenetically ideological New York Times (and those poisoned zombie-brains in Congress, e.g. Adam Schiff). The Mueller Commission, try as it did, couldn’t find anything substantive because there isn’t and wasn’t anything there, save for the putrid defecation of three years of strenuous Deep State “investigation.” But with the crop of Establishment Democrat candidates for president looking increasingly like a lesser version the Keystone Kops, something—anything—had to be found, some additional obstacle, some roadblock to stop “the Donald,” and much more dangerously, the counter-revolution that he has (quite unwittingly) unleashed.
How better to do this than have the president’s own Director of National Intelligence, along with his Deep State ideological “Intel savants” (a true oxymoron!), brief Schiff and top Democrats, and without the president even knowing it! Ha! Talk about your own team sabotaging you—anyone remember those words of Julius Caesar: “Et tu, Brute?” And you also, Brutus? But it doesn’t take a Shakespeare play to instruct us on what is going on. As I have repeated too many times to count, one of President Trump’s major problems is that he has surrounded himself with Neoconservative and Deep State minions who diametrically oppose his announced 2016 agenda, and they have done everything possible—with some real success, especially in foreign affairs—to stymie and obstruct it.
Those once highly regarded agencies—the FBI, the CIA, the NSA—haven’t gotten much right since they officiously proclaimed from on high their infallible judgment about “weapons of mass destruction” hiding in Saddam Hussein’s outdoor outhouse. Their active immersion in the government-engineered plot to bring down a president—the Steele Dossier, the inveigling of General Flynn, Roger Stone, George Papadopoulos, etc., their use of British “intelligence” (the Brits stopped having “intelligence” after Enoch Powell’s warnings about unlimited immigration were ignored)—has revealed for anyone with eyes to see the fact that, at least in the upper echelons, those agencies form an integral part, an active arm of the managerial state apparatus that seeks to strangle any real dissent or opposition to its New World Order designs.
Most so-called “conservatives”—the Neoconservatives—accept the Russia boogeyman narrative. But it’s not so much Trump who is the target, it seems, but in their version the Russkies are just warmed-over Communists who want to “destroy our democracy.” The Cold War, in their pygmy-sized brains, continues unabated, and even the vaunted Rush Limbaugh has very real difficulty distinguishing the Communist Soviet Union and post-1991 Russia. Flying in the face of subsequent history and fact, he uses the terms interchangeably: palpable historical ignorance on parade. For him and the zealous Neocon interventionists it is still October 1962 and we are still mired in the Cuban Missile Crisis, although now it has been miraculously transported over to Ukraine. Just ask John Bolton (or the late, unlamented John McCain).
The other night I made myself listen to “Special Report with Bret Baier,” where the Fox News “All Stars” held forth, fully accepting the Hoax—yes, of course, they solemnly declared, the Russians are meddling in our 2020 election cycle, just like in 2016. The Intel folks—whose probity and diligence must not be doubted!—say so, and we must believe them. And Chris Wallace (who is by no means a “conservative” of any flavor) pronounced to Ed Henry on another segment that very simply “we must take these active threats very, very seriously. The Russians are AGAIN manipulating our elections.”
Got that?
I almost regretted not signing up with that contractor who offered to build me a bomb shelter in my ample back yard. For only $125,000 he could construct for me an underground bunker that would withstand those incoming Russian MiGs….
Suddenly, I was put in mind of that satirical film from 1964, “Dr. Strangelove.” And I wondered if, echoing Peter Sellers in that scintillating cinema, the likes of Bolton, Bill Kristol, Max Boot, and those agents of Russophobia who now surround the president and have turned our Intel agencies and Congress into little more than a herd of docile bovines (with the connivance of all our television networks), would finally usher in the “Doomsday Weapon” (like in the final scene of the film).
Although from somewhat different perspectives and viewpoints, Establishment Conservatism (i.e, the Neocons) and the Left have made post-Communist Russia their target. Yet, the major threat by far—very far—is what the actually Communist Chinese are doing and have done. Adam Schiff doesn’t talk about that, and neither do most politicians or major American big name capitalists, because the Chinese Reds already own and dominate so much of this country’s infrastructure and business.
And the fact—still hidden from most Americans—that post-1991 Russia has actually turned towards its traditional religious faith and conservative (especially moral) traditions doesn’t go over well with the transgender-pushing, pro-same sex marriage establishment which dominates both political parties, both Leftwingers AND Conservatives, here in the United States. Recall John McCain bitterly criticizing Vladimir Putin for his “persecution” and suppression of lesbians (i.e., “Pussy Riot”) and same sex supporters in Mother Russia?
This is what Mainstream Conservatism has become: a sordid and disreputable second cousin of the rapidly advancing Leftist juggernaut. About what conservatism had become in the later part of the nineteenth century, I quote the words of the noted Southern critic Robert Lewis Dabney (1820-1898). His description readily applies today:
This is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is to-day one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will to-morrow be forced upon its timidity, and will be succeeded by some third revolution, to be denounced and then adopted in its turn.
American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader. This pretended salt hath utterly lost its savor: wherewith shall it he salted? Its impotency is not hard, indeed, to explain. It is worthless because it is the conservatism of expediency only, and not of sturdy principle. It intends to risk nothing serious, for the sake of the truth, and has no idea of being guilty of the folly of martyrdom. It always—when about to enter a protest—very blandly informs the wild beast whose path it essays to stop, that its ‘bark is worse than its bite,’ and that it only means to save its manners by enacting its decent rôle of resistance.
The only practical purpose which it now subserves in American politics is to give enough exercise to Radicalism to keep it ‘in wind,’ and to prevent its becoming pursy and lazy from having nothing to whip. No doubt, after a few years, when women’s suffrage shall have become an accomplished fact, conservatism will tacitly admit it into its creed, and thenceforward plume itself upon its wise firmness in opposing with similar weapons the extreme of baby suffrage; and when that too shall have been won, it will be heard declaring that the integrity of the American Constitution requires at least the refusal of suffrage to asses. There it will assume, with great dignity, its final position.
As we hurdle on to diabolical moral degradation in America, each step worse than the last, even though our masters tell us not to worry and just accept it, our supposed opponents in Moscow, Kazan and Novgorod recover and celebrate their Christian and moral beliefs and inheritance.
What irony! Is this not a full exemplification of Gilbert and Sullivan’s image of “topsy-turvy”?
And for the American traditionalist, for the orthodox Christian, to quote Patrick Buchanan, the question is: “On whose side is God NOW on?

This essay appeared in a slightly different version at MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey.

Saturday, February 22, 2020


February 22, 2020

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

They’re Coming to Get You! Build that Bomb Shelter NOW!

Friends,
Right after the installment of MY CORNER of February 14 appeared, it was picked up and published nationally by LewRockwell.com. It was almost as if some well-placed Intel spook had met with me at “Rick’s Café Americain” (remember the film “Casablanca”?) and secretly revealed what was going to happen. The “Russia Hoax” was going to be fully reborn (in fact, as I wrote, it had never gone away). Like Dr. Frankenstein’s monster it emerged again from our corrupted and corrupt Intelligence agencies (those government apparatchiks who are beginning to make Inspector Clouseau look like a genius) and the bowels of the frenetically ideological New York Times (and those poisoned zombie-brains in Congress, e.g. Adam Schiff). The Mueller Commission, try as it did, couldn’t find anything substantive because there isn’t and wasn’t anything there, save for the putrid defecation of three years of strenuous Deep State “investigation.” But with the crop of Establishment Democrat candidates for president looking increasingly like a lesser version the Keystone Kops, something—anything—had to be found, some additional obstacle, some roadblock to stop “the Donald,” and much more dangerously, the counter-revolution that he has (at times, quite unwittingly) unleashed. 

How better to do this than have the president’s own Director of National Intelligence, along with his Deep State ideological “Intel savants” (a true oxymoron!), brief Schiff and top Democrats, and without the president even knowing it!  Ha! Talk about your own team sabotaging you—anyone remember those words of Julius Caesar: “Et tu, Brute?” And you also, Brutus? But it doesn’t take a Shakespeare play to instruct us on what is going on. As I have repeated too many times to count, President Trump’s major problem is that he has surrounded himself with Neoconservative and Deep State minions who diametrically oppose his announced agenda, and they have done everything possible—with some real success, especially in foreign affairs—to stymy and obstruct it.

Those once highly regarded agencies—the FBI, the CIA, the NSA—haven’t gotten much right since they officiously proclaimed from on high their dogmatic, infallible judgment about “weapons of mass destruction” hiding in Saddam Hussein’s outdoor outhouse. Their active immersion in the government-engineered plot to bring down a president—the Steele Dossier, the inveigling of General Flynn, Roger Stone, George Papadopoulos, etc., their use of British “intelligence” (the Brits stopped having “intelligence” after Enoch Powell’s warnings about unlimited immigration were ignored)—has revealed for anyone with eyes to see the fact that, at least in the upper echelons, those agencies form an integral part, an active arm of the managerial state apparatus that seeks to strangle any real dissent or opposition  to its New World Order designs.

Even so-called “conservatives”—the Neoconservatives, whom I often criticize—accept the Russia boogeyman narrative. But it’s not so much Trump who is the target, it seems, but in their version the Russkies are just warmed-over Communists who want to “destroy our democracy.” The Cold War, in their pygmy-sized brains, continues unabated, and even the vaunted Rush Limbaugh has very real difficulty distinguishing the Communist Soviet Union and post-1991 Russia. Flying in the face of subsequent history and fact, he uses the terms interchangeably: true, palpable historical ignorance on parade. For him and the zealous Neocon interventionists it is still October 1962 and we are still mired in the Cuban Missile Crisis, although now it has been miraculously transposed over to Ukraine. Just ask John Bolton (or the late, unlamented John McCain).

The other night I made myself listen to “Special Report with Bret Baier,” where the Fox News “All Stars” held forth, fully accepting the Hoax—yes, of course, they solemnly declared, the Russians are messing with and meddling in our 2020 election cycle, just like in 2016.  The Intel folks—whose probity and diligence cannot be doubted!—say so. And Chris Wallace (who is by no means a “conservative” of any flavor) pronounced to Ed Henry on another segment that very simply “we must take these active threats very, very seriously. The Russians are AGAIN manipulating our elections.”  

Got that?

I almost regretted not signing up with that contractor who offered to build me a bomb shelter in my ample back yard. For only $125,000 he could construct for me an underground bunker that would withstand those incoming Russian MiGs….

Suddenly, I was put in mind of that satirical film from 1964, Dr. Strangelove. And I wondered if, echoing Peter Sellers in that scintillating cinema, the likes of Bolton, Bill Kristol, Max Boot, and those agents of Russophobia who now surround the president and have turned our Intel agencies and Congress into little more than a herd of docile bovines (with the connivance of all our television networks), we would finally see and experience the “Doomsday Weapon” (as in the final scene of the film).

Although from somewhat different perspectives and viewpoints, Establishment Conservatism (i.e, the Neocons) and the Left have made post-Communist Russia their target. Yet, the major threat by far—very far—is what the actually Communist Chinese are doing and have done. Adam Schiff doesn’t talk about that, and neither do most politicians or major American big name capitalists, because the Chinese Reds already own and dominate so much of this country’s infrastructure and business.

And the fact—still mostly hidden from most Americans—that post-1991 Russia has actually turned towards its traditional religious faith and conservative (especially moral) traditions doesn’t go over well with the transgender-pushing, pro-same sex marriage establishment which dominates both political parties, both Leftwing AND Conservative, here in the United States. Recall John McCain bitterly criticizing Vladimir Putin for his “persecution” and suppression of lesbians (i.e., “Pussy Riot”) and same sex supporters in Mother Russia?

This is what Mainstream Conservatism has become: a sordid and decrepit second cousin of the rapidly advancing Leftist juggernaut. And, once again, I quote Robert Lewis Dabney’s apposite words:

This is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is to-day one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will to-morrow be forced upon its timidity, and will be succeeded by some third revolution, to be denounced and then adopted in its turn.
American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader. This pretended salt hath utterly lost its savor: wherewith shall it he salted? Its impotency is not hard, indeed, to explain. It is worthless because it is the conservatism of expediency only, and not of sturdy principle. It intends to risk nothing serious, for the sake of the truth, and has no idea of being guilty of the folly of martyrdom. It always—when about to enter a protest—very blandly informs the wild beast whose path it essays to stop, that its ‘bark is worse than its bite,’ and that it only means to save its manners by enacting its decent rôle of resistance.
The only practical purpose which it now subserves in American politics is to give enough exercise to Radicalism to keep it ‘in wind,’ and to prevent its becoming pursy and lazy from having nothing to whip. No doubt, after a few years, when women's suffrage shall have become an accomplished fact, conservatism will tacitly admit it into its creed, and thenceforward plume itself upon its wise firmness in opposing with similar weapons the extreme of baby suffrage; and when that too shall have been won, it will be heard declaring that the integrity of the American Constitution requires at least the refusal of suffrage to asses. There it will assume, with great dignity, its final position.

As we hurdle on to diabolical moral degradation in America, each step worse than the last, even though our masters tell us not to worry and just accept it, our supposed opponents in Moscow, Kazan and Novgorod recover and celebrate their Christian and moral beliefs and inheritance.

What irony! Is this not a full exemplification of Gilbert and Sullivan’s image of "topsy-turvy"?

And for the American traditionalist, for the orthodox Christian, to quote Patrick Buchanan:   “On whose side is God NOW on?

**********
I pass on the LewRockwell.com issue from February 17:
LewRockwell.comanti-stateanti-warpro-market

The Russia Hoax Continues and Both Dems and Republicans Push It


By Boyd D. Cathey     My Corner    February 17, 2020

Although the farcical Mueller Commission is now ended and even the results it came up with, practically speaking, effectively exonerated the president, to listen to various members of the media, including many Fox pundits, most Democrats and many Republicans, it was if there was no “investigation” at all. The same “Russia Hoax” narrative continues: just listen to Representative Adam Schiff spiel on for a while. For such national personalities nothing has really changed.
This template, despite what we now know and always have known, continues frenetically and unabated before our eyes. It’s why Roger Stone faces prison time, essentially because he was convicted for lying about non-existent Russian subversion in America elections.
“Russia is bad,” we are told, and its president, Vladimir Putin, is really, really bad. Why, he may be as bad as, let’s see, maybe those old Commies prior to 1991, or maybe he IS a Commie? Certainly, say Fox interviewees like Representatives Dan Crenshaw and Adan Kinzinger, or Neoconservative publicists such as Jonah Goldberg. Communism, it seems, still rampages and “Russia is still our Number One Enemy” (remember Mitt Romney saying that?).
friend Dr. Paul Gottfried just recently sent me a news article; it concerns something President Vladimir Putin recently said and was quoted by Reuters news service (February 13), specifically, that in no uncertain terms he totally ruled out homosexual marriage in Russia. In reference to discussions over modifications to the Russian constitution he declared: “As far as ‘parent number 1’ and ‘parent number 2’ goes, I’ve already spoken publicly about this and I’ll repeat it again: as long as I’m president this will not happen. There will be dad and mum.”
Indeed, back in December, addressing a meeting in the Kremlin Putin forcefully reaffirmed his nation’s commitment to traditional matrimony:
President Vladimir Putin remarked at a recent Kremlin meeting that some countries are replacing the word “mother” out of concerns for political correctness, something he hoped ‘would never happen in Russia’. Putin was referring to a law passed in France earlier this year which mandates that schools refrain from using ‘father’ and ‘mother’ and instead use ‘parent 1’ and ‘parent 2’. According to government MP Valérie Petit, the change was necessary because using ‘father’ and ‘mother’ is “old fashioned” and doesn’t meet the needs of “social equality.” Don’t expect to see Russia following suit.
During a meeting of the Council for Interethnic Relations, a Kremlin advisory group, Putin told delegates, “You said the word mother ‘can’t be replaced.’ It turns out, perhaps, it can; in some countries, they now have ‘parent number one’ and ‘parent number two.’ I hope we will never have that (in Russia). I will do everything to stop it.”
Back in June, Vladimir Putin commented on a similar topic, asserting that liberalism was in its death throws thanks to forced multiculturalism. “The ruling elites have broken away from the people,” Putin told the Financial Times, adding that the “so-called liberal idea has outlived its purpose.”
This is not new; Putin’s statements and vision for Russia are not secret. Yet, to listen to the American media, very little of what he has said and very little of the legislative action of the Russian Duma (parliament) is reported by the American press. Or, if it is reported, it is done in such a way as to portray the Russian president and his country in an extremely negative and hostile light. Russia, it is repeated daily, is “authoritarian,” anti-democratic, does not respect human rights and persecutes minorities (e.g., homosexuals, lesbians, etc.); it is aggressive and has “invaded” its neighbors (e.g., Ukraine, Georgia). And Putin is a “KGB thug” who “wants to restore the Soviet Union” (cf., Representative Kinzinger).
Over the past six or so years I have written extensively about this narrative. Very simply it is the iron-cage ideological framework that now dominates both Democratic and Republican parties, with a few exceptions. There are voices raised in objection to it: Professors Stephen Cohen (Princeton University) and Paul Robinson (University of Ottawa), and Tucker Carlson on his nightly television program (with guests like former colonel and consultant Douglas MacGregor), and maybe Senator Rand Paul in Congress. But those voices are few in the spectrum of political opinion here in the United States.
The major media, including to a large extent Fox, simply avoid actually quoting Putin, and every action taken in Russia is a perceived threat to America, or to “the sanctity of our democratic elections.”
When was the last time, for instance, that you heard a major American news outlet actually cite something Putin said, a speech, an official statement of Russian policy? Just to take one example—there are many—back on September 20, 2013 he spoke to the annual International Valdai Forum. Here is just a portion of that speech, made before a gathering of representatives from around the world:
“…We can see how many of the Euro-Atlantic countries are actually rejecting their roots, including the Christian values that constitute the basis of Western civilisation. They are denying moral principles and all traditional identities: national, cultural, religious and even sexual. They are implementing policies that equate large families with same-sex partnerships, belief in God with the belief in Satan.
“The excesses of political correctness have reached the point where people are seriously talking about registering political parties whose aim is to promote paedophilia. People in many European countries are embarrassed or afraid to talk about their religious affiliations. Holidays are abolished or even called something different; their essence is hidden away, as is their moral foundation. And people are aggressively trying to export this model all over the world. I am convinced that this opens a direct path to degradation and primitivism, resulting in a profound demographic and moral crisis.
“What else but the loss of the ability to self-reproduce could act as the greatest testimony of the moral crisis facing a human society? Today almost all developed nations are no longer able to reproduce themselves, even with the help of migration. Without the values ​​embedded in Christianity and other world religions, without the standards of morality that have taken shape over millennia, people will inevitably lose their human dignity. We consider it natural and right to defend these values​​. One must respect every minority’s right to be different, but the rights of the majority must not be put into question.”
I have cited these remarks previously; they are not unique. For Putin has been saying the same thing for years—and enacting legislation mirroring what he says that also reflects the desires and aspirations of the great majority of Russia’s citizenry.
Back a little over five years ago I authored a longish researched essay on Vladimir Putin and what has been and is going on in Russia since the fall of Communism in the fall of 1991. Although the essay could use some updating, the essential information I provide remains accurate and, I believe, useful.
I am passing it along today:
Reprinted from My Corner by Boyd Cathey.

                                    February 11, 2024     MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey Descent into Madness: Dostoevsky and the End of...