Americanism

Viereck, Peter wrote:

McCarthy basically is not the fascist type but the type of the left-wing anarchist agitator, by an infallible instinct and not “by accident” subverting precisely those institutions that are the most conservative and organic, everything venerable and patrician, from the Constitution, and precisely the most decorated or paternal generals (Marshall, Eisenhower, Taylor, Zwicker), to the leaders of our most deeply established religion and precisely the most ancient of our universities . . .
He satisfies the resentments of his followers, because his sincerest hatred is always against the oldest, most rooted, and most deeply educated patrician families—the Cabot Lodges, Achesons, Conants, Adlai Stevenson.

Viereck, Peter wrote:

McCarthy’s real “victims” were not sympathetic witnesses, frivolous Hollywood screenwriters, or irrelevant blow-hard college professors. They were elite WASP establishment policy-makers . . .
They were well-born and looked good in dinner jackets . . . .

The biological military activities of the US in Ukraine are merely the tip of the iceberg. There are 336 biological labs in 30 countries under its control. [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

— Lijian Zhao 赵立坚 (@zlj517) [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

This moment is when you hope a nuke does land [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

— moosh (@mongsley) [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

And you want me to give a damn about the Ukraine with this taking place on my country! [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

— Nathan Bedford Forrest (@ForestBedford) [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson did not provide a good explanation about why she repeatedly gave light sentences to sex offenders.

It really is a disturbing pattern. [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

Biden's foreign trip has been a complete disaster.

Biden called for regime change in Russia, said U.S. troops were being sent to Ukraine, and suggested he would use chemical weapons against Putin.

His staff had to correct him each time. [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

Disney’s Gay/Trans/Bi/LGBTQIA2S Hysteria Over Florida’s Bill Outlawing Gay Propaganda Aimed At Kids

Odysee [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

BitChute [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

GabTV [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

Rumble [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

— Henrik Palmgren (@Henrik_Palmgren) [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

When did chopping off young people's body parts become such a celebrated aspect of progress? [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

— Felix Rex (@navyhato) [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

LIVE NOW!!! [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

— Adam Green Know More News ️ (@Know_More_News) [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

The range of acceptable solutions to these "people" goes beyond words.

I have seen this one before, but it's one of the most enraging ones. Deformed freak preying on children. This is the essence of the groomer. [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

— ʀᴇᴍɴᴀɴᴛ. (@remnantposting) [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

Did you notice?? [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

— Figen (@TheFigen) [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

Groomer [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

— Lana (@LanaLokteff) [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

Joyce, Andrew wrote:

I wonder, if Nitobe observed Japan today, whether he would agree that bushido has survived the ruins. For my part, I find myself surveying the ruins of Western culture, and finding only debris.

[In Search of the Western Bushido]

Felton, Greg wrote:

T H E G R E AT N E O - C O N A R T I S T

Leo Strauss, a philosopher at the University of Chicago, was a reactionary moralist at a time when U.S. culture was growing increasingly progressive and égalitarian. As a Jewish German who escaped Hitler‘s Reich, Strauss judged égalitarianism to be a threat to America’s liberal democracy because of what he saw happen to the feeble Weimar Republic.
In the name of imposing equality on the country, Strauss thought, the U.S. was losing its creative essence and moral fiber. Without radical change, America would be vulnerable to attack from totalitarian regimes.
To save the U.S., Strauss said égalitarianism and secular government had to be replaced by a regime dedicated to imposing traditional political and religious views. The fact that these views would be based on the prejudices of the leaders did not bother Strauss, who considered égalitarianism itself to be a prejudice, and an inferior one at that.
The key to bringing about this new value-based order, he said, lay in the rediscovery of pre-modern philosophy. He considered Athens and Jerusalem to be the twin pillars of reason and revelation upon which all the values of Western society were built, but he saw modern philosophers undermining these pillars by working hand-in-glove with government to serve the appetites of the lowest common denominator — the masses.
As a result, philosophers were undermining the aristocratic virtues that made philosophy the noblest pursuit of the human mind—tradition, heroism, creativity and excellence. In its place, égalitarianism and historic relativism were breeding a climate in which past virtues and morality were denigrated as old and inferior, and present norms were ennobled as modern and superior.
Without objective order and traditional morality, Strauss said, the U.S. was sinking into nihilism. Philosophy and philosophers had to be separated from government, and the proof he said, lay in the trial of Socrates.
Strauss’s connection of nihilism with Socrates is not original. Friedrich Nietzsche argued that Socrates’ dialectical method of reasoning undermined peoples’ belief in religion and the Homeric myths, thus leading ultimately to the relativistic, scientific world of the Enlightenment. Nietzsche (1844-1900) belongs to the late Romantic period, which arose toward the end of the 18th century. The Romantics — in art, literature, music and philosophy — brought creativity, emotion, genius, spiritual truth and transcendent imagination to the forefront of European society. The formalistic, logical world of the Enlightenment left no room for the genius, the hero, or the exceptional individual.
Nietzsche was deeply spiritual, and he condemned the Enlightenment for rationalizing God to death because without God, he said, morality and absolute value had no meaning. To redefine value and morality, Nietzsche posited der Übermensch (‘The Superman’) — a gentle, cultured leader like the poet Johann Goethe who would live a life ‘beyond good and evil’ — not bound by the ‘slave’ Christian morality that teaches people to fear death, repress their natural desires, destroy their taste and respect for heroism, and make them afraid to trust their own will.
Although there seems to be a fair amount of agreement between the two, Strauss reads into Socrates something entirely different. Whereas Nietzsche saw Socrates as the despoiler of Western philosophy, Strauss saw in him the possibility of its renewal, and the trial provides the example.
The democratic government of Athens charged Socrates with impiety and corrupting the youth of Athens, and Strauss believed the charges to be valid, but only because Socrates made the error of taking his philosophy into the marketplace. For Strauss, the lesson of the trial was that philosophers must keep higher truths to themselves, not only to save their lives, but to keep the public from losing faith in religion and traditional values. Therefore, Strauss argued that only those equipped to rule should be privy to higher moral truths, and that the government should use religion instrumentally to keep the public in line.
Strauss, it seems, fancied himself a latter-day Plato who thought that the U.S. could become an ideal Republic run by Philosopher Kings and protected by Guardians. Plato, to his credit, understood that his ideal society could never exist; it could only be contemplated. This lesson is utterly lost on Strauss because, unlike Plato, he wasn’t interested in justice; he was trying to manufacture a case against moral relativism.

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Maligning Machiavelli
Strauss’s attack on modernity and the Enlightenment can be sourced to his misrepresentation of Machiavelli, the Renaissance Florentine who gave us our foundations of political science and realpolitik.

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Machiavelli was at heart a republican who wanted justice and order, and in his writing we find the foundations for liberal, republican government.
For Strauss, this was Machiavelli’s unpardonable crime because republicanism puts government in the hands of the people:

Strauss, Leo wrote:

Machiavelli’s admiration for the political practice of classical antiquity and especially of republican Rome is only the reverse side of his rejection of classical political philosophy. He rejected classical political philosophy, and therewith the whole tradition of political philosophy in the full sense of the term as useless.

One cannot take seriously Strauss’s charge that Machiavelli rejected classical philosophy, since one is hard-pressed to find any reference to it in either The Prince or The Discourses. This is to be expected, since Machiavelli was concerned with the practice of leadership, not the theory.
Further evidence that Strauss neither respected nor understood Machiavelli comes from this disparaging comment:

Strauss, Leo wrote:

When trying to understand the thought of Machiavelli, one does well to remember the saying that [Christopher] Marlowe was inspired to ascribe to him: ‘I… hold that there is no sin but ignorance.’ This is almost a definition of the philosopher.

The fact that he would consider a Tudor English playwright to be a legitimate critic of Machiavelli speaks volumes about Strauss’s credentials as a philosopher.

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A Hobbes of a Different Color
Strauss believed he found the remedy for Machiavelli’s republicanism in the social contractarianism of Thomas Hobbes, who, like Machiavelli, was a philosopher of peace and an analyst of power.
Hobbes (1588-1679) believed that man in ‘the state of nature’ (outside of society) lives a nasty, short, brutish life because each person is driven by natural appetites and is in mutual competition for power and prestige. Since all men are endowed with reason, Hobbes said, they would naturally want to leave this violent, competitive world, to live in peace. To achieve this end they must surrender their right of self-defence and erect a sovereign power to rule over them. Such a sovereign would be the embodiment of peace and order to whom the people would owe absolute obedience. In his seminal 1651 work Leviathan, Hobbes set out the need for a sovereign in language — albeit slightly archaic — that is virtually indistinguishable from that of Strauss:

Hobbes, Thomas wrote:

The final cause, end, or design of men (who naturally love liberty, and dominion over others)… is the foresight of their own preservation, and of a more contented life thereby; that is to say, of getting themselves out from that miserable condition of war which is necessarily consequent, as hath been shown, to the natural passions of men when there is no visible power to keep them in awe, and tie them by fear of punishment to the performance of their covenants…. For the laws of nature, as justice, equity, modesty, mercy, and, in sum, doing to others as we would be done to, of themselves, without the terror of some power to cause them to be observed, are contrary to our natural passions that carry us to partiality, pride, revenge, and the like. And covenants, without the sword, are but words and of no strength to secure a man at all.
The only way to erect such a common power, as may be able to defend them from the invasion of foreigners, and the injuries of one another, and thereby to secure them in such sort as that by their own industry and by the fruits of the earth they may nourish themselves and live contentedly, is to confer all their power and strength upon one man, or upon one assembly of men, that may reduce all their wills, by plurality of voices, unto one will.
This done, the multitude so united in one person is called a COMMONWEALTH; in Latin,
CIVITAS. This is the generation of that great LEVIATHAN, or rather, to speak more reverently, of that mortal god to which we owe, under the immortal God, our peace and defense.

There is much to admire in Hobbes’s clarity and logic, but his view of society is so mechanistic that for the sake of peace citizens must not only surrender their arms, but also their liberty and right to dissent. As we know today, such absolutism is the defining characteristic of a totalitarian regime.
Hobbes’s sovereign-ruled state might very well be peaceful, but it is the kind of peace that democracies abhor, but then Hobbes never pretended to be a democrat.
According to Strauss, Hobbes set philosophy back on course by merging natural law with realism to create the entirely new political doctrine of ‘natural right’:

Strauss, Leo wrote:

What Hobbes attempted to do on the basis of Machiavelli’s fundamental objection to the utopian teaching of the tradition, although in opposition to Machiavelli’s own solution, was to maintain the idea of natural law but to divorce it from the classical idea of man’s perfection.

Strauss’s justification for this position consists of the following deductive reasoning.
• If natural law is derived from the need for self-preservation, as Machiavelli said, then self-preservation is the root of all justice and morality.
• Morality equals self-preservation, which is fundamental and inalienable.
• Morality, therefore, is a right, not a duty.
• All duties are derived from morality.
• Duties are binding only to the extent they do not threaten the morality.
• There are only perfect rights, and no perfect duties.
• Since morality is a right, the function and limits of civil society must be defined according to man’s natural rights, not natural duties.
• The state’s function is to safeguard the natural right (morality) of each citizen.
• The power of the state finds its highest expression here and nowhere else.
Strauss’s argument is plainly unsound. For one thing, Machiavelli said nothing about natural law being derived from self-preservation; in fact, he denied the value of any overarching ethos, as we saw above: ‘The gulf between how one should live and how one does live is so wide that a man who neglects what is actually done for what should be done leans the way to self-destruction rather than self-preservation.’
Second, the conclusion ‘morality is a right’ is a solipsism. Third, the concept of ‘perfect rights’ begs the existence of perfection. Fourth, the link between morality and the function of the state is not proven, and as such the deductive relation been moral right and natural right is baseless.
Strauss gives us a perverse caricature of Machiavelli so that he can manufacture plausibility for an authoritarian doctrine of natural law. On the other hand, he gives us an unrealistically sympathetic view of Hobbes so that he can import authoritarianism into U.S. democratic tradition: ‘

Strauss, Leo wrote:

If we may call liberalism that political doctrine which regards as the fundamental political fact the rights, as distinguished from the duties, of man and which identifies the function of the state with the protection or safeguarding of those rights, we must say that the founder of liberalism was Hobbes.

***

Taking Liberties with Locke
Adler’s concept of limited freedom is the essence of American liberal republicanism. The man who articulated this vision was the Puritan English philosopher John Locke (1632-1704). Thomas Jefferson was said to have plagiarized Locke’s Second Treatise of Government while drafting the Declaration of Independence.

***

Locke belongs to the same social contractarian tradition as does Hobbes, but he has an entirely different understanding of freedom and the nature of the social contract. Hobbes speaks of a lawless negative freedom; Locke speaks of positive freedom in which citizens legislate to govern themselves. Hobbes speaks of obedience to an absolute ruler; Locke despises absolutism, and holds that a sovereign power must rule with the consent of the governed.
Since Strauss was sympathetic to Hobbes, one might have expected him to attack Locke with the same vigor as he did Machiavelli, but of course he couldn’t. To attack Locke outright would have meant attacking the moral and spiritual foundation of the U.S. Instead, Strauss had to undermine the main lines of Locke’s political theory to recast the man as a lapsed Hobbesian. Thus, Locke suffered the fate of all whom Strauss co-opted to justify his ‘natural law’ doctrine: if the political theory didn’t fit, it would be made to fit. In the next section, one must keep in mind Hobbes’s definition of Commonwealth: ‘that mortal god to which we owe, under the immortal God, our peace and defense.’
For Leo Strauss, Locke seemed to be two separate people: on the one hand, a fervent Christian who wrote detailed exegeses of the New Testament and argued for its belief; on the other, a social contract theoretician who abhorred authoritarianism. Strauss resolved this dichotomy by creating a false causality between Locke’s religious and political philosophy. In Natural Right and History, Strauss spends an inordinate amount of time on Locke’s chief religious writings—A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), The First Treatise of Government (1689-90), and The Reasonableness of Christianity as Delivered in the Scriptures (1695, published anonymously)—to make the case that Locke’s political beliefs were derived from the Bible. Strauss focused on statements such as these:
The law of nature is a declaration of the will of God. It is ‘the voice of God’ in man. It can therefore be called the ‘law of God’ or ‘divine law’ or even the ‘eternal law’; it is ‘the highest law.’ It is the law of God not only in fact. It must be known to be the law of God in order to be law. Without such knowledge, man cannot act morally. For ‘the true ground of morality…can only be the will and law of a God.’ The law of nature can be demonstrated because the existence and the attributes of God can be demonstrated. This divine law is promulgated, not only in or by reason, but by revelation as well….
By demonstrating that the New Testament is a document of revelation, one demonstrates that the law promulgated by Jesus is a law in the proper sense of the term. This divine law proves to be in full conformity with reason; it proves to be the absolutely comprehensive and perfect formulation of the law of nature… A comparison of the New Testament teaching with all other moral teaching shows that the entire law of nature is available in the New Testament, and only in the New Testament. The entire law of nature is available only in the New Testament, and is there available in perfect clarity and plainness.
Leaving aside the fanciful assertions about the facticity of God’s will and the idea that God’s existence can be demonstrated; this passage openly misrepresents Locke. Strauss’s truth claims about the New Testament violate Locke’s basic tenets against arbitrariness and religious arrogance.
That was the whole point. If Strauss could convince readers that Locke was making a unique claim for the veracity of the New Testament, the property based political theory of the Second Treatise could be seen as having divine sanction. In other words, it would allow Strauss to turn Lockean liberalism into Hobbesian liberalism, or a least a watered-down facsimile thereof.
[The Host and The Parasite – How Israel’s Fifth Column Consumed America]

Felton, Greg wrote:

Problem is, a 224-year-old republic based on a system of checks and balances simply does not self-destruct within one presidential term. For a police state to take hold, the U.S.’s political culture had to have been weakened to the point where it could not defend itself, much as a person with a weakened immune system becomes susceptible to diseases it used to be able to resist. The real cause of the police state must therefore be found at the point where the U.S. lost the will to fight off anti-democratic pressures—not in recent events like the World Trade Center attack, or the invasion of Iraq, which are mere symptoms of the disease.
This disease consists of three mutually reinforcing political ‘cancers’ that became malignant during the Vietnam War, and then coalesced, and metastasized after the election of Ronald Reagan: neo-conservative economists, evangelical Christians and Zionist Jews. Together, they set the U.S. on a downward spiral into fascism—literally. By the time of the 2000 ‘election,’ Zionists had emerged as the dominant force in the fascist troika, and it is they who bear the greatest responsibility for the corruption of America, the destruction of Iraq, and the ‘war on terrorism.’

***

Individually, none of these ‘cancers’ could have brought about the ruination of the U.S. republic. The Christians needed the Straussians’ political platform to get into government and spread their brand of neo-Puritanism. The Straussians needed the Christians to mobilize the electorate to defeat the remnants of the old rational political order. Many of the founding Straussians were Zionist Jews, so as the fortunes of Straussians improved so did the voice of Israel in Washington. For this, an early alliance with like-minded evangelical Christians was absolutely necessary, not only because many Jews rejected Zionism as a blasphemy against the Hebrew Bible and were overwhelmingly liberal, but also because it put an American veneer on subservience to Israel. Moreover, since most Jews vote Democratic, Zionists proceeded to build support within the newly theocratized Republican Party.
[The Host and The Parasite – How Israel’s Fifth Column Consumed America]