RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2021/04/turgenevs-fathers-and-sons-a-novel-for-today/

Even without the COVID-19 epidemic, the Western world has been going through turbulent times, economically, socially, politically and culturally. All times are turbulent, perhaps, and we just happen to be so constituted as always to think that our present turbulence is unprecedented and greater than that of any in the past. It is only in retrospect that some or other period of the past seems peaceful and placid to us, which it never did to those who lived through it; nevertheless, there seem to us to have been periods that we are pleased to call normal, that is to say times when most important questions seemed to be settled and all problems were either minor or susceptible of easy solution.

Past travails, however, illuminate present travails. Historical analogies are never exact—that, after all, is why there are analogies rather than repetitions—and the lessons of the past are always disputable; moreover, there is no human experience from which the wrong conclusions cannot be drawn. Perhaps one of the ironies of our present conjuncture is that, while multiculturalism is extolled and treated almost as an unimpeachable orthodoxy, so many people lack historical imagination and cannot enter mentally into a world in which people had a different scale of values from their own. The past for them is not another country where they do things differently; it is the same country where they were not as enlightened as we.

Karl Marx was quite right when he said that men make their own history but not just as they choose: from this well-expressed truism, however, he drew the false conclusion that there existed historical inevitability. In his view, men could have free will only if they were free of all constraining circumstances whatever, but this is not only to invoke an impossibility, but to mistake the nature of infinity. It does not follow from the fact that some choices are closed to me—I cannot, for example, be King of England—that the number of choices before me is not infinite. A grammar limits what can meaningfully be said, but it does not limit the infinitude of what can be said.

The great Russian writer Ivan Turgenev was an exact contemporary of Karl Marx. They were born and died in the same years, 1818 and 1883. These were not the only parallels in their lives. They both came under the influence of Hegelianism in Berlin, and they were in the same place when the revolutions of 1848 broke out.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/05/05/author_qa_the_kennedys_in_the_world.html

I recently interviewed Lawrence J. Haas via email about his new book, subtitled “How Jack, Bobby, and Ted Remade America’s Empire” (Potomac Books). The exchanges have been edited for length.

Larry, hundreds of books have already been written on Kennedys, so what inspired you to write this one?

I knew a bit about Jack and Bobby from my readings over the years, and I watched Ted up close while I worked as a journalist in Washington. I became intrigued when I noticed how involved Ted was with America’s global role because, after all, he’s known overwhelmingly for his domestic achievements (civil rights, labor, health, and so on). I became further intrigued when I took a closer look at what Ted was doing on foreign affairs, which was sometimes consistent with what Jack and Bobby did and sometimes quite different. So, I began to do some research, and I discovered a new, rich, fascinating story about all three brothers.

Everybody knows that Joe and Rose Kennedy groomed their boys for success. But what nobody seems to know is that Joe and Rose pushed them toward a particular kind of success: not just to attain power, but to look beyond America’s borders — to learn about the world, to care about the world, and, once they attained power, to shape America’s role in the world. Joe and Rose led discussions about the world with the boys over breakfast and dinner; Joe invited prominent people, like Charles Lindbergh and Henry Luce, to dine with them and enrich the conversations; Joe wrote to the boys about global events when he or they were away; Joe sent them to travel overseas when they were old enough; Joe arranged meetings for them with the world’s leading figures; and Joe secured jobs for each of them as foreign correspondents when they were overseas so they could position themselves as global thinkers.

And, over time, the brothers developed a deep understanding of the world’s different peoples, and cultures, and ideologies; a keen appreciation for the challenges they presented for the United States; and a strong desire to reshape America’s response to them. Once the brothers assumed power, they each applied what they had learned from their education about the world, and their travels, to put a distinct mark on the American empire. They each shaped broad issues of war and peace as well as America’s response to almost every major global challenge of their times.

In the prologue, you relate an obscure incident from September 1939. Just days after World War II began in Europe, a British passenger ship was torpedoed by a German sub, killing 112 people and stranding some 300 Americans in Ireland and Scotland. The U.S. ambassador to the U.K. sent his 22-year-old son to console the Americans? What was Joseph Kennedy thinking?

Well, he certainly wasn’t thinking about who was the best, or most appropriate, person to send. Jack Kennedy, who was working for his father, the ambassador, in London at the time, was just 22, he looked even younger than that, and he held no official government position. So, all he could do was listen to the survivors and promise to relay their views to his father. To them, his arrival was as much insulting as reassuring.

But, as his highest priority, Joe Kennedy wasn’t all that interested in finding the best person to greet the survivors. He saw an opportunity to continue grooming Jack, as he would Bobby and Ted, for prominent roles on the world stage. As it turned out, Jack did a nice job as his father’s emissary. He visited the survivors in hotels and hospitals, and he charmed them with his warm smile and soft touch. The London newspapers labeled him the “schoolboy diplomat” and an “ambassador of mercy” who “displayed a wisdom and sympathy of a man twice his age.” After Jack returned to the embassy, he kept working for the survivors and clashed with the bureaucrats who didn’t seem to share his sense of urgency. Eventually, Joe Kennedy arranged for the survivors to return home safely on a U.S. merchant ship. 

In 1937, shortly after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s second inauguration, the two youngest sons, Bobby and Ted, along with the five Kennedy sisters, met Franklin Roosevelt in the White House. Did those children grow up with an expectation of having that proximity to power?

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/05/aldous_huxley_foresaw_our_despots__fauci_gates_and_their_vaccine_crusaders.html

In 1949, sometime after the publication of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Aldous Huxley, the author of Brave New World (1931) wrote to Orwell who by then was living in California.  Huxley had briefly taught French to Orwell as a student in high school at Eton.  Huxley generally praises Orwell’s novel which to many seemed very similar to Brave New World in its dystopian view of a possible future.  Huxley politely voices his opinion that his own version of what might come to pass would be truer than Orwell’s.  Huxley observed that the philosophy of the ruling minority in Nineteen Eight-Four is sadism whereas his own version is more likely, that controlling an ignorant and unsuspecting public would be less arduous, less wasteful by other means.  Huxley’s masses are seduced by a mind-numbing drug, Orwell’s with sadism and fear. 

The most powerful quote In Huxley’s letter to Orwell is this: 

“Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.”

Aldous Huxley

Could Huxley have more prescient?  What do we see around us?  Masses of people dependent upon drugs, legal and illegal.  The majority of advertisements that air on television seem to be for prescription drugs, some of them miraculous but most of them unnecessary.  Then comes covid, a quite possibly weaponized virus from the Fauci-funded-with-taxpayer-dollars lab in Wuhan, China.  The powers that be tragically deferred to the malevolent Fauci who had long been hoping for just such an opportunity.  Suddenly there was an opportunity to test the mRNA vaccines that had been in the works for nearly twenty years.  They could be authorized as an emergency measure but were still highly experimental.  These jabs are not really vaccines at all but a form of gene therapy.  There are potential disastrous consequences down the road. Govenment experiments on the public are nothing new.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/05/03/five-books-that-culturally-aware-citizens-should-read-this-summer/

EXCERPT:
 ‘Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters’

The transgender issue has taken the world by storm with head-spinning speed across the globe, sucking up nearly all the oxygen in the culture war room.

Few people are writing on this development with the kind of razor-sharp incisiveness as writer Abigail Shrier. In “Irreversible Damage,” Shrier details an extremely troubling and anti-human trend that has developed in the last few years with our girls — and it’s more than just about the trans issue.

Increasingly, girls suddenly don’t want to be girls anymore and important power centers are taking incredibly dangerous and ill-advised medical steps to help them actively destroy their physical and mental womanhood. It’s not even that they want to become boys, but that disturbing numbers of them want to be “nothing.”

Shrier explains these girls “want to be seen as ‘queer’… They flee womanhood like a house on fire, their minds fixed on escape, not on any particular destination.” So what’s happening here?

Shrier is highlighting the trans craze, not as merely a curious and trendy hop across the river from female to male or vice versa, but a wholly new kind of misogyny. The words of one leading therapist caring for gender dysphoric patients are emblematic of what Shrier has been witnessing. The young girls this therapist sees at her clinic are in great emotional pain.

“A common response that I get from female clients is something along these lines: ‘I don’t know exactly that I want to be a guy. I just know I don’t want to be a girl,’” she explains. Something very profound and troubling is happening to what it means to be one essential half of humanity. We would do well to get to the bottom of it and root it out.

“Irreversible Damage” is a chilling examination of this troubling development among our girls and a pointed challenge to the irresponsible ways far too many adults are uncritically responding to it.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2021/04/saul-alinsky-and-the-politics-of-hell/

After the fall of the Soviet Union, when the extent of its genocidal barbarity was made public, the uncritical support the regime had received from many of the most prominent leftist movements and intellectual buffoons suffered a serious setback. Nevertheless, Western comrades were not deterred and were soon engaged in quite a bit of self-reflection, reaching the conclusion that there were reasons why the Soviet “model” had failed. The consensus they arrived at was that it wasn’t Marxism (the doctrine) that was at fault, but those who interpreted it; the doctrine itself was beyond criticism.

It was then they embraced the idea of Leon Trotsky’s theory of internationalisation, in other words, of developing the framework for totalitarianism simultaneously in all Western countries, not from outside the institutions, but inside through what Trotsky called “permanent revolution”. Trotsky’s theory held that, historically, a socioeconomic system had to be seen as a world system rather than a national one. All national economic development was affected by the laws of the world market, even though such regional factors as location, population, available resources and pressure from surrounding countries made the rate of development different in each country. Thus, in Trotsky’s view, the permanentlsuccess of the Russian Revolution would have to depend on revolutions in other countries, particularly in Western Europe.

A brilliant strategy, yes, but one nevertheless with a very sketchy game-plan. In 1971, the hard-line totalitarian Marxist Saul Alinsky connected the dots when he wrote a book of subversive tactics based on the arts of infiltration, deception and lying, to empower future generations of activists to work together, no matter what political parties they belonged to, or what country they were in.

Alinsky’s book, Rules for Radicals, proved to be so popular that Hillary Rodham (later Clinton) wrote her graduate thesis on Alinsky and his work (she titled it “There is Only the Fight”) and later became friends with him. Apologists have attempted to water down the book’s content, saying that it is basically a harmless little “how to” book for social workers. But anyone who reads it will discover it is not—that, in fact, it advocates violent revolution when the time is

Rules for Radicals is a book anyone opposed to totalitarianism would do well to read if they want a glimpse into the devious, deeply irrational, cunning totalitarian mindset, and an understanding of contemporary leftist methodology. The purpose of Alinsky’s book was to exploit the weaknesses inherent in Western institutions, by pitting opposing forces against each other. It also opposed independent, critical, educated people because those individuals, especially in groups, can’t be manipulated too easily. Trotsky’s totalitarianism required mass support and unswerving obedience. Alinsky’s rules attempt to stifle free speech, individual rights, new ideas and any critique of Marxist (Trotskyist) ideology, gagging all opposition with consensus methods, political correctness, critical race theory, censorship, intimidation and, finally, violence. “They have the guns and therefore we are for peace and for reformation through the ballot. When we have the guns then it will be through the bullet …”

The methodology is incorporated in the form of social engineering, which aims to unfreeze a society using chaos and then refreeze it in a new predefined shape: the totalitarian state. The book is a guide to action for the imposition and gradual development of a dictatorship constructed from within the institutions of the West: “True revolutionaries do not flaunt their radicalism,” Alinsky writes, “they cut their hair, put on suits and infiltrate the system.” And also: “It is necessary to begin where the world is if we are going to change it to what we think it should be, which means working within the system.”