Wednesday, June 17, 2009

[great work of ages] proceeds apace


There is one quite fundamental difference of opinion between this blog and the majority of other political blogs. Let me illustrate with cases in point.

This article makes what appear, on the surface, fanciful claims but they're anything but fanciful when laid alongside the weight of other evidence:

There are meetings being held Monday and Tuesday in Yekaterinburg, Russia, (formerly Sverdlovsk) among Chinese President Hu Jintao, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and other top officials of the six-nation Shanghai Cooperation Organization. The United States, which asked to attend, was denied admittance. Watch what happens there carefully. The gathering is, in the words of economist Michael Hudson, “the most important meeting of the 21st century so far.”

It is the first formal step by our major trading partners to replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. If they succeed, the dollar will dramatically plummet in value, the cost of imports, including oil, will skyrocket, interest rates will climb and jobs will hemorrhage at a rate that will make the last few months look like boom times. State and federal services will be reduced or shut down for lack of funds. The United States will begin to resemble the Weimar Republic or Zimbabwe.

The governor of China’s central bank has openly called for the abandonment of the dollar as reserve currency, suggesting in its place the use of the International Monetary Fund’s
Special Drawing Rights. What the new system will be remains unclear, but the flight from the dollar has clearly begun. The goal, in the words of the Russian president, is to build a “multipolar world order” which will break the economic and, by extension, military domination by the United States.

This article was written from the American perspective and is therefore quite paranoid about the hegemony of the U.S. being broken and let's face it, that should worry us too. What is less apparent is that it was known well in advance that this collapse was coming. Time and again I refer to the FOMC report of October, 2006, where it was clearly anticipated.

My and other bloggers' posts [read the Sonus articles in the sidebar, on the Fed ] on the NAAC, SPPNA and NAU have shown that the CFR, at least in their own minds, saw themselves in an openly validated advisory role to the U.S. government. What really annoys me is when blogger friends of mine, involved in and commenting on the financial world, see this CFR as an association of loons. Sorry but the Morgans, Rockefellers et al are not loons. At least, they are loons in terms of their crazed 'Great Work of Ages' - intergenerationally, they should all be in loony bins.

What I mean though is that they are so cold, manipulative, all-pervasive and clever in the way they operate. They find every fissure in the world of power, insinuate themselves into it and eventually control it. I keep going back to Senator William Jenner of Indiana, from Feb. 23, 1954, who said before the U.S. Senate:

"Today the path to total dictatorship in the United States can be laid by strictly legal means, unseen and unheard by Congress, the President, or the people.

We have a well-organized political action group in this country, determined to destroy our Constitution and establish a one-party state. It has a foothold within our Government, and its own propaganda apparatus. One may call this group by many names. Some people call it socialism, some collectivism. I prefer to call it 'democratic centralism.'

The important point to remember about this group is not its ideology but its organization. It is a dynamic, aggressive, elite corps, forcing its way through every opening, to make a breach for a collectivist one-party state. It operates secretly, silently, continuously to transform our Government without our suspecting the change is underway.

This secret revolutionary corps understands well the power to influence the people by an elegant form of brainwashing. We see this, for example, in the innocent use of words like 'democracy' in place of 'representative government.' "

Remember, of course, that those were the days of the communist fear and McCarthy. What he wasn't aware of, in the times he lived, was that he was referring to, in reality, the power which Ike also referred to, behind the scenes. Wilson had referred to it too, FDR had begun to refer to it but ended up doing its bidding by calling in gold and converting the dollar to fiat money, a most necessary precursor of the current troubles.

No one wants to read about these things.

Fellow bloggers will look at this post and say, like Graham Chapman's Colonel, 'Too long, too long. Get some discipline into this post, Sergeant-Major!' People just will not accept that Obama did not come to power through democratic process but rather by a three-card trick.

Here's one take on it.

On Nov. 25, 1959, a Council on Foreign Relations Study Number 7 called for a "...new international order which must be responsive to world aspirations for peace, for social and economic change...an international order...including states labeling themselves as 'socialist' [communist]."

The CFR were anything but innocent and pro-Yankee.

In 1962, a study entitled "A World Effectively Controlled by the United Nations" was published, in which CFR member Lincoln Bloomfield stated:

"...if the Communist dynamic was greatly abated, the West might lose whatever incentive it has for world government."

In 1966, Professor Carroll Quigley, Bill Clinton's mentor at Georgetown University, wrote "Tragedy and Hope" in which he stated:

"There does exist and has existed for a generation, an international network which operates, to some extent, in the way the radical right believes the Communists act. In fact, this network, which we may identify as the Round Table Groups, has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists, or any other groups, and frequently does so.

I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960s, to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for much of my life, been close to it and to many of its instruments.
I have objected, both in the past and recently, to a few of its policies, but in general my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is significant enough to be known."

Military-industrial complex, subversive group, conspiracy? All of this skirts around the real issue which is that these are but one or two tentacles of something which has been lurking in the sewers of the world's great nations for eons and metamorphosing themselves in different ways. You can say the CFR has little influence - it is only a pressure group.

Really? Even Wiki acknowledges:

The Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP) is a region-level dialogue with the stated purpose of providing greater cooperation on security and economic issues.[1] The Partnership was founded in Waco, Texas on March 23, 2005 by Paul Martin, Prime Minister of Canada, Vicente Fox, President of Mexico, and George W. Bush, President of the United States. It is the second of such regional-level agreements involving the United States of America following the 1997 Partnership for Prosperity and Security in the Caribbean (PPS).

Greater cooperation? My ass! Read the post and the original document linked from it. Here is what will be controlled, taken from their own notes:

a. defense

b. the judiciary

c. education

d. social security

e. opens the borders and creates access and egress via the state constructed NAFTA Superhighways

f. creates a free economic zone within NA shores

g is advised by the North American Advisory Council [CFR appointees - p53]

Please get it clear that Bush, Martin and Fox thought the CFR proposal sufficiently important to attend that meeting and make that pact. They're not going to do that with loons.

The Law

Back to Britain and the 'three-card tricks continue apace. Charon QC comments:

The Law Society Gazette has an interesting article in the edition today “Inherent prejudice in judicial selection”

I quote from the opening to the article: “Official research published today reveals a ‘widespread and underlying perception’ of ‘inherent prejudice’ in the judicial application process and suggests that solicitors still see the bench as a career for ‘other people’.
The study, sponsored by the Judicial Appointments Commission, surveyed barristers and solicitors eligible for appointment. Of the 2,182 respondents, more than half (55%) said there is prejudice in the selection process, and a quarter said that the process is unfair. Only 51% felt judges are selected purely on merit.”

To be fair to Charon, I have no wish to misconstrue his comments, which were referring to the choice of barristers over solicitors but the point about prejudice stands and inevitably, the question of 'stacking'. Sotomayor is a case in point and so was the 2000 election, the other way round. The issue is not whether the bench is stacked or not - it clearly is, as this pro-Republican article makes clear.

No, the issue is more who has the hegemony at the time? Who is at the reins because the judiciary will be more at their beck and call as time goes on. Did Obama cause the stacking? He hasn't been there long enough but he's sure trying. Of course it's all part of an ongoing process.

Medicine

Karl Denninger brings our attention to this [hat tip to my Anon]:

ABC TURNS PROGRAMMING OVER TO OBAMA; NEWS TO BE ANCHORED FROM INSIDE WHITE HOUSE
Tue Jun 16 2009 08:45:10 ET

On the night of June 24, the media and government become one, when ABC turns its programming over to President Obama and White House officials to push government run health care -- a move that has ignited an ethical firestorm!

Highlights on the agenda:

ABCNEWS anchor Charlie Gibson will deliver WORLD NEWS from the Blue Room of the White House. The network plans a primetime special -- 'Prescription for America' -- originating from the East Room, exclude opposing voices on the debate.

Pause for breath

In the speed with which we've got to this point of the post, we've focussed on a nefarious organization being behind the governments but what has not been spelled out clearly is the treasonous aspect of it.

Gordo has done the same over here. By working to insinuate Europe into our regions, he could be said to be a traitor to the country. He'd answer, 'Traitor to some old, outmoded concept called Britain, yes, to the dismantling of England, yes but I'm no traitor to the new ideal, one step in the Great Work of Ages - the European Bloc with its prescriptive uniformity.'

So no, he's not a traitor. Obama's not a traitor. They are working to create the one state panacea they believe in and there are people of influence in both countries, occupying chairs in universities, heading medical boards, appointing the judiciary with 'sound people' who equally believe.

Even some of my dearest friends, particularly of the female persuasion, are convinced that this is what it's all about - love for one's fellows, fairness, equality, equal distribution of wealth, supporting the needy. They really believe that Obama's and Brown's path are leading to this. This post is hardly going to alter something so ingrained it can't be shifted.

Others have tumbled to the messianic elements in this, the religious. This is the fundamental difference I referred to in the first sentence of this post. This is indeed just as much a religion as Christianity or Islam. These people genuinely believe in transforming society - hence all the blame on 'capitalism' for the ills, the ordinary person-in the-street not understanding who the Fed and the central British financial power really are, hence the need, according to Brown, for a new model of economics, hence the proliferation of the welfare state.

It has its fanatical devotees, absolutely convinced that they are helping lead the world to a New Enlightenment, which is the Great Work of Ages. The sheer weight of Masons, Rotary, Rhodes scholars, Tavistock, people in high places, employment tribunal magistrates, respectable, well-spoken people, people with position in society, all support Mr. White's words in Quantum of Solace:

The first thing you have to understand is that we have people everywhere.

And meanwhile, we slide towards the new-feudalism where you and yours will be numbers in a vast database.

21 comments:

  1. You're singing with the choir here James, so I'll add just a little.

    Human progress does not come during periods of control, it comes during periods of relative freedom.

    The Renaissance a few centuries ago and the flowering of art and science and music.

    The birth of science in England when relative freedom was created briefly by the restoration of Charles 2nd.
    A group of 12 men including Robert Boyle, and Christopher Wren met in London to set up a society to study the mechanisms of nature. At a time when superstition and magic governed reason, the repressive dogma of christian belief silenced many with the threat of conflagration, and where post war loyalties ruined careers, these men forbade the discussion of religion and politics at their meetings. The Royal Society was born, and with it modern experimental science.

    Some forty years ago, man walked on the moon. Short termism, and concern for the immediate bottom line caused the gradual reduction of funds, and ignored the benefits of many scientific spin-offs.

    Now China has plans to replicate that success within a short time-frame.

    The same country that walked on the moon was first to commercialise the internet. Now they lag most of SEA on bandwidth. The UK just published, to great fan fare, a white paper on broad band in the UK, with proposed speeds currently laughable in SEA. The Israelis were producing modular chips for SEA, (Korea, Japan) giving home users 100mb/s, back in 2001.

    Where ever control is centalised, innovation dies, gov't determines industrial/commercial winners, and ignores new upstarts. Society standards plummet, society dies, when hope is extinguished.
    There can be no cross fertilisation of ideas under a centralised control of thought patterns.

    That is the future the insane CFR, BB, TC, Tavistock, CP, Fabians, Marxists, will create.

    And throwing off their yoke will be bloody and decades in the process.

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  2. Human progress does not come during periods of control, it comes during periods of relative freedom.

    Yes, yes - that's so right.

    t a time when superstition and magic governed reason, the repressive dogma of christian belief silenced many with the threat of conflagration, and where post war loyalties ruined careers, these men forbade the discussion of religion and politics at their meetings. The Royal Society was born, and with it modern experimental science.

    Not arguing, except to say, predicatably, that these were not Christians in the real sense. It was the state utilization of an obscure sect's religion to produce command and control but let's proceed.

    The Israelis were producing modular chips for SEA, (Korea, Japan) giving home users 100mb/s, back in 2001.

    Yes - and was it the four core computer which made its way first to Israel? I'm hazy about this.

    Finally - it will be bloody because the poor people who've been taken in by it, as they must [and that's what's so goddamn cynical about it all] are going to see you and I as, at best [for us] subversive andat worst, irrelevant.

    Marginalization.

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  3. Interesting they still speak of peak oil, which many have said is now an outdated concept.

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  4. Yes, I am aware of those quotes and have used one or two from time to time but usually I don't like referring to certain buzzwords out loud.

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  5. Does this mammoth post mean you're feeling better today, james? Or are you still lying down blogging?

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  6. Much of the technology that we have relied on for the past couple of generations actually came out of the Second World War:- penicillin (UK), jet engines (UK & Third Reich), radar (UK), ballistic missiles (Third Reich), nuclear fission (UK and US), computers (UK), etc, etc.

    Post WWII gave nuclear fusion (US), transistors (disputed), double helix (UK and US), improved cereals (US and Mexico).

    I'm sure that I've omitted a few key things, but you could make the case that this mainly derived from War Socialism, with the irony that the great Socialist Economies contributed sweet FA.

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  7. Mr Higham,

    I am not sure why you keep calling the movement to greater centralised control "new-feudalism". Feudalism (or rather manorialism) was a diffuse and decentralised order --- quite the opposite of what has been growing in lieu of it. I for one would like to see a "new feudalism".

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  8. Dearieme - interesting logic.

    Analogy 1:

    Tim Berners-Lee wrote a proposal called HyperText and CERN and circulated his proposal for comments at CERN in 1989. The proposal was the solution to the technologies that would enable collaboration in the high energy physics community.

    So this spin-off has benefitted the world, despite the other things CERN and Fermilab are up to and the defence?

    "These days, more antiprotons are being made by the accelerator complex at Fermilab in the U.S. than are being produced at CERN.”

    Therefore, according to this logic, we must excuse the blackhole because of positive spin-offs like the internet [leaving the porn and white slave trade in eastern Europe aside for the moment.

    Analogy 2:

    Advanced rocket technology, plane technology, worlds first jet, experimental weapons, nuclear technology, anti-grav, submarines, tanks and so on nd so on

    Why stop there? It is likely that the work compiled and completed by Crick and Watson on DNA would have taken much longer without some of the discoveries made by nazi doctors, possibly leaving us 25 years or more behind in the Human Genome Project.

    Modern medicine owes a lot to Adolph's boys and girls.

    Just one thing though dot dot dot

    Ethical dilemma, yes?

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  9. And, I should add, the langauge of feudalism, unlike the present monstrosity, was little of liberty and rights, and much of authority and duties.

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  10. Deogolwulf


    Feudalism, as far as I can see, refers to, in its classic sense, the layered society with the barons at the top and with varying degrees of success, acknowledging a monarch. Then there is the aspect of fealty of the vassal to the lord, the system, which meshed so well with the Church, of everyone staying in his place, with little social mobility, encouraged not to think and certainly not to be well read – bibles chained in monasteries, no health system beyond the church.

    You write, dear Deogolwulf:

    Feudalism (or rather manorialism) was a diffuse and decentralised order --- quite the opposite of what has been growing in lieu of it.

    Most certainly diffuse, most certainly decentralized, hence the constant battle over fealty. Yet you know very well the state of the people in that situation, compared to, say, the thinkers in the Renaissance.

    We have a Warhol situation for the moment where everyone with a computer can be a thinker and a sage – not the greatest situation but the alternative – a primitive existence, pledging allegiance to some lord while we work the land or remain in our boxes, curfewed at night and fed soma, where advancement is by toeing the party line but worst of all:

    This new feudalism is enforced by means of the new technology.

    Do you really suggest that there will not be an oligarchy in charge and that a shadowy tithe from them will not be paid to one who sits behind them, the once and future king?

    Deogolwulf, you also write:

    the langauge of feudalism, unlike the present monstrosity, was little of liberty and rights, and much of authority and duties

    No argument at what you're driving at here. I vigorously underscore what you write here. Authority and duties have become an endangered phraseology and the sight of the Paris Hiltons and whining 'rights' moaners lording it over us is an affront to the senses.

    Yes but what we don't realize is that the agenda to return us to a state of ignorance in a technologically enforced [don't forget the verichip in the wrist] state of subservience and dependence has little to do with the admirable model of the Family – Pater, Mater, extended family and servants, everyone knowing his/her role and each gaining sustenance from the whole.

    The idea the Great Work of Ages embodies is the misery of humankind.

    The idyll of the rustic lifestyle in an unpolluted England of yore lends weight to your criticism that it is not really feudalism I'm referring to. I do think we might be cross purposes here because I failed to explain myself.

    I see where you're coming from and agree with you. The problem is that those in the driving seat are allowing the current deplorable state of «the present monstrosity» in order to produce a reaction which will lead to savage reprisals and a «return» to something which, as you rightly state, never actually existed before.

    That's how I use the term new-feudalism and I'd best write it out and link it from my nav bar.

    Both of you gentlemen, I do greatly value you giving of your time like this.

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  11. Liz - no, I'm feeling awful. I have an earache and am feeling faint. Hopefully, it will pass.

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  12. This is the company I was referring to

    Speeds have improved since I last looked.

    Makes UK aspirations look.....

    With transmission speeds reaching 300 Mbps, WLANPlus provides a cutting edge solution for VoIP, gaming and HD video streaming applications, with complete and reliable coverage throughout the home. The WLANPlus chipset includes MIMO technology, featuring advanced coding (LDPC), Maximum Likelihood MIMO detector, market-leading 2.4/5 GHz performance, and packet aggregation with channel bonding. The WLANPlus family of products supports a full suite of 802.11n applications.

    Metalink also offers a broad range of DSL products used by operators as a cost-effective network upgrade to support triple-play services. Millions of DSL lines have already been deployed by the largest service providers in Europe, North America and Asia Pacific using Metalink-based quality products, which have been integrated into the equipment of leading system manufacturers.

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  13. "Dearieme - interesting logic": there was no need to be quite so cruel.

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  14. Dearieme - forgive me. The ear is killing me and the leg [see last night's post'. I'm a grumpy old sod today. Shouldn't be blogging by rights.

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  15. Mr Higham, I appreciate what you are saying as to the powerlessness of a man against the modern regimes, but I’m afraid I can see little reason for the use of the word “feudalism” except to take advantage of its negative connotations, which themselves do not point to the nature of feudalism but rather to a dark caricature of the middle-ages first conjured up in the Age of Enlightenment by that gang of mediocrities otherwise known as the philosophes, not one of whom, by the way, was the intellectual equal of those medieval men -- Roger Bacon, Thomas Aquinas, Nicole Oresme, and so on -- whom they saw fit to impugn.

    “Yet you know very well the state of the people in that situation, compared to, say, the thinkers in the Renaissance.”

    I know of no such thing. The so-called Renaissance saw a rise in poverty, disease, strife, persecution, and superstition, and it saw a decline in creative originality, especially in philosophy and science. It can boast few original thinkers. Only in the field of art did the Renaissance surpass the Medieval, though already Giotto di Bondone had begun that development in the High Middle Ages. In the field of science, it was Galileo who took up where Oresme left off --- with a gap of two hundred years, a gap which we have filled with a name denoting something opposite to that of decline, thereby giving it perhaps the most ill-judged name of all ages, apart, of course, from that of the Enlightenment, in which the dim view of the Middle-Ages became popular.

    Besides all this, however, we are not here much interested in feudalism in its historical-accidental circumstances, but rather in the essence of feudalism as a form of social and political organisation, in whatever time it may be situated. In thinking about the essence of a form of government, one must dissociate it as much as possible from all its accidental features with which it becomes associated merely by its being in a particular time and place. Think, for instance, about superimposing parliamentary democracy onto the Middle-Ages, and then think about how absurd it would be to believe that essential to that form of government is the governance of societies without health-care and televisions. The same holds for feudalism or any other organisational form. (One must take care that circumstantial factors which may look accidental are not in fact caused by the essential form of the government or social organisation under question.) Anyway, present regimes and social organisations are very far from feudal, and the trend is not towards it, but explicitly against it.

    “Do you really suggest that there will not be an oligarchy in charge . . . ?”

    Will? There already is! There always has been a small number of governors and there always will be, unless something almost unimaginably terrible happens. The difference now, and especially over the last hundred years or so, is that a multitude of people has kept adding its consent to the growth of political power, rather than burning down government buildings and stringing up ministers, because those people are deluded by a fantasy to believe that the government is theirs and that it works in their natural interests, at least better than any other form of government. (It often does work in their interests, because it has the power to determine what those interests are.) I would suggest that if you really wish for a word that denotes the greatest servitude imaginable, then there is no better than “democracy”. The trouble is, unlike feudalism, it has good connotations in almost every head. And that, my friend, is partly the reason why we are stuffed.

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  16. A Russian lady friend of mine a year or so ago asked who in the 'English blogosphere' [that was sweet] speaks and writes better than me.

    I said probably a lot of people but so far there are three I'm very wary of and they can best me in a debate too.

    One is someone called Stuart A, of Indecent Left who intensely dislikes people like Oliver Kamm attacking Chomsky [Stuart's in my blogrolls]and whom I consider won an argument, on Stephen Pollard's old site, about Christianity and atheism although he called it a draw, another is called Deogolwulf and the third is called Dearieme.

    There's something slightly too intellectual about those chaps. They don't seem to fall into the logical pitfalls like some bloggers who hand it to you on a plate.

    So, for that reason, I want to know more about your views on Democracy, Deogolwulf.

    ...first conjured up in the Age of Enlightenment by that gang of mediocrities otherwise known as the philosophes, not one of whom, by the way, was the intellectual equal of those medieval men -- Roger Bacon, Thomas Aquinas, Nicole Oresme, and so on -- whom they saw fit to impugn ...

    Now I think I understand your comment better on the philosophy post of mine. You clearly have an affection for this time and read in the original. Perhaps you speak Chaucer's English [although that was a bit later, of course]?

    I've been reading references and asides at your site about Democracy for some considerable time but do you have something definitive, something meaty, I could read up on?

    Could you point me to a few urls of yours which best lay this out?

    1. What is the inevitable consequence of Democracy societally and politically?

    2. Is a feudal model [which you appear to admire] applicable today, i.e. could it be implemented through guilds or some such or would it revert to a new-primitivism? Would there be a new model of Liberal arts education?

    Your comment above seemed to indicate no. Do you value the Liberal arts or are they also an excrescence?

    I'm no stranger to doom and gloom myself but can you propose a political solution?

    You ascribe our present sorry state to Democracy but what of servitude? Could you explain this more?

    If I appear ignorant of your views on Democracy, it's because I haven't read them yet in great detail but I'm not going to maintain a flawed or false model if yours is obviously sounder.

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  17. The paragraphs are Deogolwulf's, the bracketed comments are mine.

    To strengthen their rule, to make it safe, whether or not by an earnest desire to make it safe for democracy, the governors must temper their oligarchy with the democratic spirit. So it is that they become more democratic.

    [Because in the spirit, rather than the actuality, they can claim their legitimacy in the eyes of the governed?]

    Under the jealous eye of a people spoiled by the ideal of democracy — a people, that is to say, made jealous of inequalities of power and antipathetic to authority — governors must become “ordinary” men, embodiments of an abstraction by which they might appear no different from the governed who are likewise becoming embodiments thereof.

    [The levelling tendency?]

    ...it is one side of a relation between public opinion and government, the latter of which is oligarchic by its very nature ...

    Marxist’s failure to envisage the democratic ideal in its purest form. [6] Under the condition of the ideal, democracy does not wither away; on the contrary, it stands as total fulfilment. Only the politicking and striving of democracy, along with the government of the state, become logically superfluous; for, in the total victory of pure democracy, each unit of the whole is exactly equal in influence to every other: there are no governors and governed, and no striving after equality, and thus no need for democratic politics. If this utopia is to be fulfilled for all time, and not just for five seconds, there must be no individual differences from which any advantage or domination can arise.

    ...whilst the dehumanising effects of technology allow men to substitute inhuman indifference for human care or cruelty. Together they form modernism as a state of mind: a confident barbarism which not only feels no reverence or awe for the state of culture and civility, but which actually hates it.

    Regarding the great source of power that democracy invests in government, one ought not to be surprised that men will harness that power for their own ends and indeed use that power to change majority opinion towards those ends.

    Totalitarianism is the perfect democratic ideal, as it first welled up in Rousseau, who let it dribble forth into all the currents of modern democratic-republicanism to greater and lesser degrees.

    [Interesting.]

    Like Mr Hume, “I should rather wish to see an absolute monarch than a republic in this island.”

    [Ah.]

    Now, if Jean-Jacques Rousseau was not a figure of the Enlightenment, then I’m a national-socialist Dutchman.

    Immanuel Kant’s more famous definition of enlightenment — “mankind’s exit from its self-incurred immaturity” [15] — looks fine at first sight, so long as we do not take it to refer to an actual and general process in the so-called Age of Enlightenment.

    It is perhaps not necessary here to make explicit the connection between bureaucracy and totalitarian government ...

    Friedrich Karl von Moser, an advocate of enlightened absolutism, was even more doubtful of some of its trends:

    My short and candid avowal is this: all enlightenment that is not grounded in and supported by religion . . . is not only the way to destruction, immorality, and depravity but also to the dissolution and ruin of all civil society, and to a war of the human race within itself, that begins with philosophy and ends with scalping and cannibalism. [23]

    [I wish I had read you more closely now.]

    Voltaire, for instance, one of the most celebrated liberals of the Enlightenment was not a modern liberal, that is to say, he did not believe in liberal democracy, but rather in enlightened despotism.

    [Je deteste Voltaire.]

    [Hmmmm - all that having been said, how does one, today, move to the state of affairs you'd like to see in society? How do you deal with the nagging problem of the Bad Ruler?]

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  18. Anon wrote:

    Where ever control is centralised, innovation dies, gov't determines industrial/commercial winners, and ignores new upstarts. Society standards plummet, society dies, when hope is extinguished.

    Dearieme wrote:

    I'm sure that I've omitted a few key things, but you could make the case that this mainly derived from War Socialism, with the irony that the great Socialist Economies contributed sweet FA.

    I'd like Deogolwulf's opinion of the former and I'd like to apologize to Dearieme for not reading him more thoroughly.

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