In The Public Square - Blog

Iran and the Bomb

nick.ellis@inthepublicsquare.com (Nick Ellis) — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 16:41:00 GMT

It is becoming irresistably evident that Iran is developing an atomic weapon. Still, the West and the United States seem to be dedicated to ignoring this horrifying possibility. What is it about our post-modern, post-Christian world that refuses to come to grips with hard facts and difficult choices. Listen in as Host John Snyder, Steven Z. Nemo (AKA Mr. Curmudgeon) and Mr. Everyman, Nick Ellis discuss, Iran and the Bomb.

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American Aristocracy

john.snyder@inthepublicsquare.com (JohnSnyder) — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 06:19:00 GMT

Allow me to test some ideas by means of a kind of thought experiment.

Image that I was to sit down with a group of Chinese Communist leaders. And imagine that I was to ask them—off the record—whether it was a good policy or not for the United States to undertake massive social spending in the midst of a deep recession. Imagine further that I was to ask these socialists whether accumulating debt for “healthcare reform,” and undertaking trillion dollar deficits would harm America productivity.

What do you imagine a boardroom full of Red Chinese Economic Wonks would answer?

I believe they would respond by saying something like this: America’s exorbitant social spending, especially in the midst of a deep recession unquestionably endangers the world economy and especially the Chinese investment in American treasury instruments. This spendthrift policy is so dangerous it threatens to destroy the value of America’s currency.

Of course, this is not just a fanciful invention of a thought experiment. In fact, this is the very message of concern that is coming from Communist China. Apparently, the Chinese Communists have become smarter Capitalists than the new and improved “progressive” America of Barack Obama.

So what does it mean when a nation that has long shown the world the wonders of free-enterprise has moved so far toward economic experimentation that even Chinese Communists doubt the wisdom of America’s “progressive” left?

I do not mean this as a flippant throwaway rhetorical question.

Allow me to offer a different perspective on this phenomenon, something which I hope will result in a much needed paradigm shift away from the standard model of political discourse which presently prevails in the conservative public square.

We are told that all the forces of “leftism” in America are presently arrayed to seize the golden moment of their political ascendency. Swiftly are they hog tying the America economy and siphoning off as much wealth as possible in re-distributive payoffs to their various constituents.

The voices of opposition, which once were called Republican, (but I restrain myself from using such meaningless expressions), voices like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage and Mark Levin declare emphatically that this constitutes a radical swing to the left, a monstrous power grab by the Bolsheviki to seize control of the engines of production and distribute American wealth as a grand socialist scheme of social engineering.

Isn’t this the common perspective of the political right?

The problem is that while these indictments describe what is going on, they do not explain. Why would Communists and European Socialists view with skepticism the policies of Obama and the American Progressive Left, as they are euphemistically called, if their ideas were truly socialist? The last socialist experiment in America under FDR, for all its foolish inefficiency and injustice, resulted in the electrification of rural America and the building a network of dams that were the envy of the world. One of them was the Grand Cooley Dam-one of the great electricity producing machines in the world. Many of the greatest public works in our history were products of big government. Despite its wrongheadedness, New Deal socialism could proudly point to accomplishments that indisputably enriched and improved our country. On the other hand, what policies advocated by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid aim at bettering our lives or signal great economic improvement in any real “progressive” sense?

Allow me to offer another, perhaps more sobering, assessment of what is really going on, one that I believe explains more than the rather pedestrian analysis that is common among talk show hosts and Fox News personalities.

I really do not think Nancy Pelosi or Barack Obama is a socialist in any meaningful sense. I do not think they are coherent enough to have a comprehensive if flawed view of man and the state. I do not think Harry Reid is a socialist either for the same reasons. What I think America is witnessing is something much more ordinary in the life cycle of declining states than anything as romantically revolutionary as a social or Marxist revolution. What we are witnessing is the formation of a political cleptocracy. Cleptocracy is and has always been, since time immemorial, the principle enemy of economic and political society. International socialism is a relatively new phenomenon in history—and while it shares some striking resemblances, socialism and ruling class cleptocracy are not identical. Cleptocracy is as old as the world.

This “revolution” is nothing more ideological than that which motivated Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, or Idi Amin, or Hosni Mubarak, or Anastasio Somoza or even Pablo Escobar. All this is to say, that there is no ideological underpinning to what we are witnessing. Rather, what we are watching before our very eyes is something vastly simpler and more obvious and it is not a conspiracy of socialist ideologues. We are watching our nation becoming a banana republic, not a Soviet styled communist state.

Allow me, at the risk of being didactic, to begin with certain assumptions that are presently lost on our culture.

The conservative mind in this most recent chapter of the culture war has fallen into the pathetic dialectical trap of arguing that the first and greatest enemy of the American experiment is socialism. I am no friend of socialism. I despise the notion that man is but a piece of a collective. Nevertheless, the presumptions of this school of thinking have evolved out of the Cold War necessity of vigilance. It declares that leftism is the greatest natural enemy of our way of life—that the enemies of our republic are primarily Saul Alinsky leftists or European style socialists or even Trotskyite communists.

Yet if you were to ask candidly those same Chinese Communists, in my thought experiment, whether or not this present course of America economic profligacy were good for us or for them, a committee of high Level Chinese Communists would probably uniformly tell us that we are behaving irrationally and self-destructively. How can the Obama revolution be communists when the communists themselves think we are behaving with some kind of death wish?

Allow me to offer a different paradigm than the shrill champions of anti-communism.

You see the first and greatest enemy of self-government is, and always will be ARISTOCRACY, which is to say, elitism and rule by a privileged class— not, socialism.

· The American Revolution was not fought to overcome Russian style communism; it was fought against the prerogatives of a king who felt entitled to rule other men without consent.

· The War of 1812 was not fought against socialism; it was fought against the imperious high handedness of royal policies that disregarded the rights of men.

· The Civil War, the greatest conflict in our history, was not fought against European style leftism; it was fought against a ruling class in our own country who presumed to order the lives of men without their consent.

· The First War World and the Second World War were not fought against Communists; they were fought against rulers who presumed that their countries were personal estates. So was the War in Panama, the War in Iraq and the War in Afghanistan. So was the first war we ever fought as an independent country: the war against the Barbary Pirates.

The oldest and most ancient foe of human liberty is— and always will be— the fallen instincts of power and privilege to steal from and order the lives of other people without their consent. Where did we get the idea that communism, in its narrow ideological strain, is the ultimate threat to our Great Republic? Like so many armchair generals, the right wing political class is fighting the last ideological war.

Because we are using the language of the Cold War, we are unable to see what is plainly before our eyes. What America is witnessing, is the war of the Aristoi on the bourgeoisie, the war of royalty against the power of those who would and can govern themselves without the prerogatives of a ruling class.

Enlisted into this modern royal army against the middle class is first, the age-old ally of aristocracy—the university trained bureaucrat. Universities were created and patronized in Medieval Ages primarily as institutions for training up men to work in the administration and counting houses of kings. That is what the great Universities in America have become, training grounds for the apologists of a new aristocracy, those who take seriously the “rights and privileges” of their special training to manage and order society better than ordinary “untrained” people themselves.

The second natural ally of a ruling class is hard for the America mind to fathom. Nevertheless, there has always been a natural relationship between the underclass mentality and the ascendency of an aristocracy.

The underclass, notwithstanding popular myth, has been throughout history, the greatest champions of monarchy. Why? Because aristocrats profess to protect the poor man from the rich man. That is what Jefferson Davis professed to do by resisting Northern industrialism. We laugh now. But he claimed to be protecting the wretched slave from the oppression of the industrialist and the overwhelming challenges of an overwhelming freedom That was the claim of all the great monarchs of Europe. Only men of special talent and class have wisdom and prudence enough to govern men who are too lazy and unwise to govern themselves. That was the argument of Alexander Stephens and John C. Calhoun against the soulless urbanization of the North.

An aristocrat always claims to protect the poor and lowly from the exploitation of self-sufficient men. Indeed, the very promise of a king, as we witness in the Book of Samuel is that a king and his men will fight our wars for us. No longer must free men oblige themselves to fight for their own interests. Royalty serves the instincts of sloth by providing a class of nobility that will do the business of governing in behalf of those who cede that power to them. The Southern aristocracy used this argument to assure to the world that slavery was a positive good for those intrinsically unable to govern themselves.

At the risk of over-explaining, the French Revolution was not an uprising of the poor; it was an uprising of the middle class. The poor loved the monarchy. They wept at the death of their beloved royalty who had provided them with cakes and circuses. Indeed, history shows that the poor serfs of France stood beneath the scaffolding in the Place de Concord to bathe their unwashed bodies in the blood of the monarchs they adored. You see aristocracy, professes its moral right to rule because of a superior sensitivity to things, particularly benevolence for the common person. And why? First, because the poor generally work for and are organized by middle class people. The middle class is the stratum of society that creates wealth and organizes labor. This makes the middle class the apparent enemy of the poor. This makes the middle class the common object of hatred of both those who feel they are morally superior and those below who resent their order and self-discipline of success. Second, the common man believes he cannot protect himself—at least that is the opinion nurtured by the ruling class. The king and his nobility rule in order to govern for the benefit of the weak and the poor.

The impulse of aristocracy is to operate with contempt for self-sufficiency. Aristocracy by its nature needs to be needed. It needs to be justified. Despite the aphorism of the political right that limousine liberals are motivated by guilt, the better answer is more obvious. The wealth of the left, accumulated primarily as a result of privilege, and university training, and not work, is justified by the noblesse oblige of being members of a ruling class that “cares” more deeply for the down trodden and the destitute than heartless businessmen. It is not guilt. It is the noble duty and obligation of a ruling class. Even where there are no destitute or downtrodden, the creation of such a class is necessary for the self-justification of a ruling class.

For those who are naturally independent and self-sufficient, they have no need of kings. People who earn and make money, design and create things do not need the king’s men to assist them. The middle class, or what has been contemptuously referred to as Bourgeoisie, do not need the largess of monarchs or the vicarious excitement of royalty to fill up otherwise empty lives. Free men are free because they distain the instinct to find meaning through the glitter and awe of a ruling class. Freemen have identity outside and apart from men who claim to rule over them. The despondent, the undisciplined, the depressed, the drug addict, the mindless drone of TV dramas, must live through the energy and vicarious thrill of celebrities, TV stars, basketball heroes, and “Camelot”-like political celebrities, like Louis XIV, John F. Kennedy and now, Barack Obama. These are men of style, charisma and je ne sais quoi,—or to rephrase it: the ruling class.

Noblesse oblige: it provided the games in the Coliseum of ancient Rome at public expense. It explains why Obama worked so hard to get the Olympics into Chicago. It explains the deep psychological need to lead and manager others. It is the age-old formula of despots. An aristocracy casts farthings from their royal coaches in return for the adoration of those who have little or no respect for themselves.

The enemy of our country today is not socialism; rather it is the emergence of a definitive ruling elite. But more tragically, it is the emergence of an indoctrinated class of men and women who view themselves as objects of charity rather than respect. It is the slow decaying of the dignity of liberty and self-sufficiency. Too many of us have been told too many times by elitist advancing their agenda— that we are disenfranchised-- and we believe it, because it caters to the worst qualities of self-pity. Hard work and self-sufficiency takes character. Then behold! The champion of those wretched underlings arrives on horseback to share not the promise of equality, or the challenges of liberty, but an equal promise that allows men to live through the greatness of those who are above them. In short, we may work so that a better class of men and women can do great things in our behalf. For this rising class of modern thralls, we are no longer the land of the free, or the home of the brave. We just want to live through the majesty of those we set over ourselves for great tasks, and for the honor of receiving on occasion a deigning look and brass penny from the passing royal coach.

The Folly of Premature Nation Building

john.snyder@inthepublicsquare.com (JohnSnyder) — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 03:30:00 GMT

As usual, the US is desiring to do the right thing in the wrong way.

With the recent political embarrassments in Afghanistan and Iraq, we are now faced with the unpleasant consequences of having undertaken nation building before having fully defeated our enemies.

America’s instinct to rebuild defeated nations with whom we have fought is a correct and noble one. Indeed, it is the moral obligation of the United States, as with every civilized nation, that once we have achieved victory over an enemy, we also assist him in his return to the community of nations governed by the rule of law. Victory in a military sense is not the final purpose of war. While our enemies rage against moral order and behave in ways that outrage conscience, the violence of war is only the first order of business in bringing into submission rebellion to moral truth. Once that state of war is past, it is a duty born out of the responsibility which accrues to just understanding, to assist the rehabilitation of former enemies who struggle to rediscover the suppressed moral conscience that once made them thralls of depravity and the enemies of peace.

There are, however, necessary preconditions to the moral responsibilities of nation building. First, we must defeat our enemy. Second, and only then, the enemy must confess and truly repent of his evil—and in so doing, allow us and the world to become friends again.

Rebuilding a nation that remains in rebellion to moral truth is not just folly; it constructs an unwitting foundation for future wars and hazards to peace.

The purpose of war is precisely to return nations to the benevolence of community. It is not to destroy but rather to bring about the contrition and rehabilitation that are necessary for the moral reordering of reprobate society.

The potential tragedy of pre-mature nation building is the same rebuilding a fire-ravaged home while windblown flames continue to consume the neighborhood. First, we must put out the fire. Second, we should be wise to design a house according to stringent fire codes and then, and only then— should we begin to rebuild.

This nation has undertake all of these elements in good faith, but undertaken them in the wrong order. Indeed, we have allowed the arsonists themselves to draw up the fire codes (if I must explain the metaphor), in the form of constitutions and laws that govern those societies!

Nevertheless every nation that acknowledges the natural law, understands that war is more than killing, destroying and breaking things. War is the first element in the rehabilitation of a nation that is at war with moral truth. Like re-breaking a bone that has not set right or cutting out a cancer, violence is only the first part of a complete remedy. Rehabilitation occurs only after the surgery is successful. Once an enemy has yielded to the violence of war, it is the obligation of good men and good nations to help restore the former enemy into the ordained community of nations according to a moral understanding given by common grace to the entire human family. We are all the children of Adam and being made in the Image of God means that all of us have access to moral truth and may achieve just government by moral reasoning. All men have access to these attributes of the Imago Dei.

To bring into the family of nations or honor a recalcitrant foe with the imprimatur of community without he first submitting his will and mind to the authority of moral truth is an error of wisdom that has often resulted in profound tragedy. Such was the incomplete rehabilitation of the German people after the First World War, as was the unreconstructed racism of the Confederate South. This, in fact, is the great problems with the United Nations as an institution for resolving human conflict. When we attempt to reconcile with peoples who are deludes with monstrous ideas, we presume to find a commonality with criminality. For even after killing and breaking things in wars, if we fail to come to a common understanding of what the moral law requires of all parties, we have shed blood and destroyed treasure in the vanity of believing that violence in itself is sufficient to rehabilitate human evil. As Jesus taught in the New Testament, moral instruction and example are necessary. And as God teaches in the Old Testament, unrepentant wickedness is the object of wrath and judgment.

The challenge to our age, which is greater than the challenge of war, is no different than it ever was. We have seen in the massive power of overwhelming American strength that wars may be won in the course of days or years. Sometimes they can be won in hours. But reconstruction, as with the Confederate South, or post Nazi Germany, or the imperial ambitions of Japan, may take decades, if not centuries. Without accepting the moral corollaries of war this age of multiculturalism and post-modern doubt about the universality of moral order, is sending young men and women to their deaths for the purpose only of temporarily forestalling an ultimate day of reckoning.

While pragmatic economic constraint may in some ways council us to undertake half-measures, prudence always instructs that if we go to war, we should do so with the full understanding of the totality of what war requires of our society when we undertake violence to reestablish justice and moral order.

We in America, through the folly and delusion of out leaders (particularly George Bush, but now Barack Obama) are demonstrating that our blindness to the requirements of war crosses party lines, and is the consequence not of ideology so much as a general character weakness of American culture itself. Attempting to wrestle by violent half-measures a sulky and insincere concession to moral authority without first bringing into submission the stiff-necked and moral cruelty of our adversaries, is to abuse the use of force in war, without properly understanding its purpose. It does violence to violence. It means we remove from the awful carnage of battle, the very moral antecedent that justifies it.

I have concluded after witnessing the folly of our leaders in both political parties, that war is too important an undertaking to be considered merely a policy judgment of a President, or a police action approved by a Congress. I am now of the opinion that military force by our government should never be employed without an actual Declaration of War, as is required by our Constitution, directed against an actual specific non-abstract enemy—no matter how small the nation or distant the threat. If the remedy is war, the threat must not be speculative or abstract. It must be so clear that no reasonable party could object to the use of violence to remedy the evil.

War must not be merely an extension of politics as Clausewitz said, if we presume to cover ourselves in the mantle of a moral people. War, properly understood, is a profoundly important decision that must be undertaken with the soundest moral reasoning and only prosecuted by a democratic people who overwhelming agree that the moral threat and the remedy is a “settled” political question. To undertake violence without the righteous instinct that the teeth of the wicked must be shattered and that without his full abject submission to moral order, he must be utterly destroyed or enslaved, is to turn war either into a political game of foreign policy wonks, or to provoke irrational violence from people who see only the carnage of war without the necessary moral context of it. As surely as it is medical malpractice to excise a cancer without sewing up the patient, it is morally indefensible to undertake a war without a willingness to prosecute it properly to its full conclusion. War, like surgery, is more than the letting of blood; it is a long hard road to recovery that will cost much treasure. Such are the necessities of making men and nations whole again.

If we do not soundly defeat our enemies before we rehabilitate them-we are shedding blood not just in vain, but also in ways that will aggrieve and agitate the opinions of every witness to the conflict, friend and foe alike. If we are unwilling to bring the enemy into full submission to moral judgment, then war is the wrong remedy or it is an immoral application of violence. A just rehabilitation of the defeated is the only proper end of war—anything else leaves a greater future conflict to be fought.

Hence, this country and the noble young soldiers who defend it are not only hostages to the savageness of Middle Eastern Barbarians but also to the political disease of a morally confused electorate who declines in pleasant middle class distraction to comprehend the grievous and heavy responsibilities of ravaging nations and spilling human blood. Perhaps we think we are just playing another computer game.

War is not politics. Politics is not war-not by other means, not by any means. It is not political entertainment for the ruling class. It is awe-full and rife with great responsibility.

Let us right the conscience of our country, and treat war as the dread instrument of uncompromising moral righteousness, and politics as the felicitous and domestic sphere of compromise and debate. We must not confuse the two. Wars are fought to destroy evil and conserve the lives, liberty and property of men. It is an instrument of justice. Politics can only order men once evil is suppressed. Public discourse is only possible once the authority of just and righteous law is enforced by physical might. In failing to understand this, we threaten in our foreign relations to make war on things and people that should not be made war on. And more destructive to country, and ourselves we threaten to confuse the nature of politics, thinking like Clausewitz, Hobbes and Marx, that war is just politics, and politics is just war by other means.

If we fail to recant of this folly, our lack of wisdom becomes wickedness. We will sow the wind and reap the whirlwind.

The Present Republican Leadership Must GO!

john.snyder@inthepublicsquare.com (JohnSnyder) — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 06:04:00 GMT

After the Second Battle of Newbury in 1644, (a pivotal battle during the English Civil War), it became clear that some commanders in the Parliamentary Army which had been formed to preserve ancient English liberties against the encroachment of authoritarian power, were only fighting in a half-hearted way.

It was after this battle, that Oliver Cromwell and other great Puritan captains realized that the Charles I, King of England and Scotland, had been intentionally allowed to escape almost certain defeat. Some Parliamentary soldiers in high places were not fighting for victory so much as a political compromise that would return Charles to the throne of England, with only modest revisions of his power status quo ante bellum.

Cromwell, much maligned by monarchial revisionists, was so incensed at the half-hearted war against Charles, that he proposed that he and all the officers in the Parliamentary Army resign, so that new leadership would prosecute the war with deadly earnest.

This was called The Self-denying Ordinance. Accordingly, the English Parliament upon the advice of that great cavalry commander (who had never suffered defeat at the hand of the Monarchy) required all officers serving Parliament above the Rank of Colonel to resign from service in the army. Oliver Cromwell also resigned his commission as he promised with no collusion or understanding that he would ever return to command.

Cromwell loved his Puritan faith and his country more than power.

Events brought Cromwell back to lead the Parliamentary Army against the despotism of Charles I and because of that remarkable man, the world was given the first true taste of the supremacy of a democratic body rather than the prerogatives and unconstitutional authority of kings.

We are today, in this country, in a similar crisis, as was Parliament after the Second Battle of Newbury. There are many who appear to serve the cause of liberty, but only work for political compromise with their enemy.

This cannot stand.

If we desire to bring forth victory over the descending hand of despotism in its modern incarnation of unconstitutional assertions of power, there must be an immediate transformation of the leaders of the resistance to that unlawful authority. The desire to rule over other men is very old. There is nothing unique to our age that has not been witnessed before. History teaches us what must be done.

With the defection of Olympia Snowe in the face of the unlawful and far-reaching social reorganization of American society, we find there are many in high places in our Republic who seek only political compromise and do not fully comprehend the scope or reach of the conflict we are entered in. The contest is not one of deficits and budgetary numbers. It goes directly to the issues of Liberty and Constitutional governance. The stakes are nothing less than the future of our Country, and any who fail to understand this, must be made to get out of the way of those who would fight in behalf of the rights of a free people.

The Republican Party which is truly the heir of that Old Parliamentary Army must turn out it leaders and find men and women who wish to fight the present Princes of Despotism with the ferocity and incorrigible tenacity of those who understand the consequence of failure. The present leadership does not understand the gravity of the conflict. As it is composed now, there are no great Cromwells to lead our army against the marching political armies of the Left. There is a palpable crisis in leadership—and all those who fight for compromise rather than victory must to be turned out. As with the half-hearted political generals prior to the construction of the New Model Army of Cromwell, there is presently no hope of victory.

Those who are fighting the prerogatives of men who do not understand Republican Democracy, must reform or perish. They must demand fierce and obstinate resistance to the usurpation of would-be Autocrats and men who feel government is a tool of social reorganization, just as Charles I did.

Boehner, McConnell and Snowe— and all others who cannot or will not fight— MUST GO! They are just tired old marshals who cannot win the war as it is presently being fought.

We need new wine in new bottles.

The Green Aristocracy

john.snyder@inthepublicsquare.com (JohnSnyder) — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 08:54:00 GMT

There is inescapable fact in human history, something the foolish Green Aristocracy cannot fathom.

Nations and people are in competition with one another. And those who are effete, delusional and weak, will be overwhelmed and supplanted by those who hold to the messy facts of existence: things like crying babies, sweat equity, and the rugged elation of making and building things with callous hands.

The Green Mind surveys these uncouth distractions with bemused condescension. Such proletarian preoccupations belong to those who hold no graduate degrees—the Heraldry of the Green Nobility. Such soiling indignities are not part of the life of privilege promised to Green Princes who live on the inheritance of their parents and their countrymen. Like all children of Royalty, they live their thoughtless lives through the work, thrift and blood of other men.

The Green Nobility, rather, spiritedly undertakes the noblesse oblige of all privileged classes to rule over other men-- always ruling for the sake of others, and always from spacious estates overlooking Malibu. Common folk, you see, with common dreams, are but uneducable subjects to peep about beneath the mighty protecting limbs of their Green Overlords-- For they, by right of intellectual primogeniture wield the Green Royal Mace and manage the affairs of man and nature in Adam’s behalf.

Of course, that is the same claim of every king of antiquity. The Green Aristocracy, however, is clearly of better breeding than those nasty brutes of the Old World. Whilst the Boubons and Stewart ruled in Royal Purple. These better, more progressive Rulers, wield unchallengable power in a more lovely shade of Green.

There is nothing new under the sun. You see, the Green Nobility wraps itself in the same mantel that claims royal prerogative over the entire inheritance of Adam-just as Louis XIVof France or Charles I of England or Phillip of Spain. The Aristocracy of Environmentism rules the Earth with the same imperious certainty of those who claimed to rule as an inheritance of Adam. (I encourage you to read Sir Robert Filmer's justification for the rule of kings).

For all its education, The modern Green Mind is really the Old Purple mind. They, like the Hapsburg princes of Austria are whispered lies by their tutors--and told they hold perogative power over an estate to which no one has given them authority. Like the georgic kings of legend which they imagine themselves to be, they are not friends of the common people, a la Wendell Berry, they having never turned a plot of earth with a hoe or worn their backs stiff with a scythe. They, in their affluence, preach the dignity of poverty, and carefully catechize other men in the dogma of “less is more”--all this while sipping lattes in Carmel in the remote tranquility of their own Versailles.

Nevertheless, and in spite of these vain imaginings, every nation and race, who raises children and joys in building things and creating wealth, will transform the world in their simple bourgoise appetites, whether or not the ancien regime has decreed it, or whether the Green Intelligentsia likes it or not. Whether their vassals in the UN declare Africa a World Heritage Site or California goes solar and never drills off Santa Barbara again, or whether Congress declares Alaska out of bounds to development, men of different languages and races, the seething, moving population of the world, will change the physical landscape of earth in an inevitable urge that cannot be stopped--because God put it in man and commanded it of man.

There are forces at work in the world beyond the silly dicta of little Green Princes.

You see, God’s second commandment to the entire family of man (after he enjoined us from eating of the forbidden fruit) was and remains even now-- “go forth and multiple and subdue the earth.” To stand against this commandment of Nature’s God, is to stand before the tsunami of history with a trite Green incantation to stop. It is King Canute striking the sea to command the waves to cease.

The impulse of man will transform nature whether the Old Order likes it or not. Man will do it, because it is part of the nature of a Creator to make and build things. And man is made in the image of that First Creator. It is only the claim of a Pretender to rule over things to which he holds no title. The order of God's creation resonates in every human bosom that still holds warmth and breath, brcause the world is given to every man to make a place in it. The Wide World is not the dominion of some few to rule over in our stead. That is but the presumption of a Green Aristocracy.

One would think that the modern secular humanists who embrace this desire to reclaim the Patrimony of Eden, would understand the basics of what Darwinism teaches and the materialist creedo the Green Aristocract uniformly claim to embrace. To understand nature as Darwin and Hobbes described it, only the strong survive in a world where life is "nasty, brutis and short." The world is no place for those who embrace the delusion of peace and natural prosperity in a fallen world. The world is a hard place that demands blood.

Only the old and senile of this ancien regime, who are lost in the fantasies of second-childhood, could image the world as anything but a place of struggle and conflict. They, like the spoiled Princes of yore, see nature as a child’s playground to return to—like the faux ruins in the gardens of French aristocrats. Little do they understand how the world really works.

Without repentance, the world is hard. It eats the old. It pitilessly consumes the weak. It devours the dreamer, the poet, the diffident and the coddled children of universities. It breaks the teeth of those who do not fight or grow strong or reproduce or stand four-square in the certainty of their moral preeminence. This is the true inheritance of Adam--in his sin. It is a fallen world.

Gardens without men are but graveyards. That is all the Greening of America promises this generation that kills babies, tears down the work of human hands ,and worships the Sun as a mythic source of power.

What the Green Aristocracy does not understand, like the insular Boubons who presuppose them, is that the only sources of energy and authority in this world is God, and the "image of God" in man. And the latter is the only royalty that exists by right to rule in this world. Green Princes have no such authority. You see, every man, woman and child possesses a royal coat of arms called the Imago Dei. It is not a special lineage of Green Academics, or Autocratic Green Czars. There is an irrepressible revolution that the Green Aristocracy cannot now suppress or ever will.

Fallen Nature and the Preists of the Green Aristocracy are but grotesque counterfeits to the goodness, truth and beauty of the one true and transcendent God and the image impressed in the spirit of his preeminent creation: man. There is nothing in Nature's unsubdued, pestilent and postlapsarian condition to worship or preserve without human refinement Nature without the work of human hands offers but malaria, yellow fever, infant mortality and cave bears. Unrepentant nature is but a feast for flies. Fallen nature devours the innocent like Moloch's brazen furnace. She laughs with the buzzing wings of Baal at the children of men struggling by wits, sticks and stones to claim his narrow space in a brutal fallen cosmos. Nature offers nothing but eternal blood-letting conflict, because there is no surplus to be had outside the energy and imagination of man’s transforming hand.

The Green Aristocracy is just the most recent geriatric pathology of a culture that is growing old and still desires to courtiers to defer to their royal prerogatives. theirs is the incestuous intellectualism that breed Professorial Hapsburgs. And like that ancient royal family, the Dynasty of the Green Nobility will fade into irrelevance. There are energetic nations and races that do not genuflect before their feeble imaginary authority.

But more tragically, for those who are ruled by these intellectual in-breds, it is the death of our civilization, the Necrosance of the West, that age of the West which (unlike the restless, imaginative energy of the Renaissance and Reformation) desires to sit in the lovely sunset security of walled gardens, and delight, like Kublai Khan at Xanadu, in the large acreage of his national parks. It is just another extravagant dream of the self-indulgent children of privilege. He thinks he may cast breadcrumbs to the pigeons where hungry lions roam.

All his worship of Nature is the stuff of octogenarian despair. Having rejected the True Source of Order and Truth, he has nothing to cling to but a false goddess who promised that he would reign triumphant. It is the babbling of the senile monarchy who knows there is no dynastic line to follow him. In his dying, cold premonition of the coming fate of tired old age and irrelevance-- his is a feeble, sentimental hand pulling weeds from a special plot of earth, for those who no longer view the broad expanse of the wide world as a place of hope and adventure. Rather, the Green Aristocracy dwells in a very small place of his own dim imagination to be protected and cared for, as the shadow grows longer over the open pit of faithless and terrifying mortality.

The Greening of America is not the resurrection of nature, or a triumphant regeneration of fallen human sensitivity to God's Creation as it ought to be; rather it is but the feeble death rattle and dying of the West.

Barack Obama and His False God of Mammon

john.snyder@inthepublicsquare.com (JohnSnyder) — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 04:10:00 GMT

Confronted with unsavory choices regarding the deteriorating war in Afghanistan, President Barack Obama is contemplating offering a cash incentive to Taliban soldiers in order to encourage them to lay down their arms. Boy, how I hope his strategy works!

Unlike our secular-humanist President, however, I am not disposed to believe, like democrats, that the cure to all policy hiccoughs and inconvenient truths, is to throw money at problems. This is the naïveté of materialist assumptions about man and what motivates people at the most basic level.

The underlying assumption of the political Left is money is the source of human salvation and happiness--that beliefs, dreams, identity, and even religion, on the other hand, are all emanation of material things. To them, there is no invisible world; physical stuff gives rise to the illusion of metaphysic things-things like truth, nationalism and God, all of which are just pyschological constructs brought about by physical conditions. This false-credo is the proto-Marxist narrative religiously embraced by the intellectual class in America, which includes Barack Obama.

If you give a student a book and a brand new school, he becomes educated. If you give free medical care to irresponsible people, they will become healthy. If you underwrite a mortgage, people will embrace that benefit and become responsible homeowners.

Of course, only the effete dogmas and the auto-de-fes of their political correct social religion could support such absurdities. The idea that Taliban gunmen, fanatic nationalists and Islamic fundamentalists will throw down their weapons for a bribe is so euphorically fantastic it makes Joan of Arc and St. Theresa seem like staid homestuns.

What Obama and his nihilist coterie of materialists cannot fathom is this—most men and women in the real world--
that terra-incognita outside the narrow curtelage of octogenarian European or the faux medievalism of American Academia, those people actually believe in things, and what they believe in is not for sale.

President Obama’s false religion holds that the whole world works like ACORN, on the principle of bribes and filthy lucre. These offerings of other people's blood to propitiate the irrational appetite of the Taliban, is all part of the counterfeit faith whose false Messiah and Priest King presently occupies the White House.

If one really wants to be enlightened, sensitive and educated to other cultures in the true tradition of modern multiculturalism, Mr. President, one should begin by assuming that what people say they believe in, is in fact, what they believe in. For good or no, we discredit ourselves and misunderstand our enemies when we are too arrogant to take others at their own words. Just maybe, everyone in the world doesn't embrace money as a saving faith as you do.

“Allah is God and Mohammed is his prophet. There is no other God but Allah.”

I do not for a single moment believe any part of this ancient Islamic incantation. I am a Christian. But I am too well grounded in history and the experience of belief, to think they do not believe what they say they believe. Only a cynical peddler of false religion could fail to understand the foundation that solemnly held beliefs play for ordinary people, even people who are your enemy.

There is only one thing I share in common with the enemies of my God and my country, Mr. President,—and that is—I don’t believe in the god of Mammon, either.

The Constitution is Not a Suicide Pact

john.snyder@inthepublicsquare.com (JohnSnyder) — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 01:44:00 GMT

Forgive me for elucidating on this famous maxim: "The Constitution is not a suicide pact,” but there has been some discussion circulating on the web about this expression.

The statement became currency after Justice Robert Jackson's decent in the Terminiello case where race baiters had assembled and began to stir up so much trouble that they were shut down. This of course gave rise to a First Amendment Free Speech question. Jackson had been the United States Prosecutor in the famous Nuremburg Trials. He had left the court temporarily at the request of the President to prosecute Reich Marshal Herman Goering among other nefarious Nazi war criminals.

The experience deeply affected him, and he came back to the US Supreme Court a markedly different kind of legal thinker (see his Youngstown opinion--where he slaps down Truman's power grab of the Steel Mills). Justice Jackson realized that certain kinds of behavior and even speech are dangerous to the public welfare--as were the circulating agitating gangs of brown shirt prior to the ascendency of Hitler.

The idea that the Constitution is "not a suicide pact" derives also from Abraham Lincoln's defense of his suspension of the Writ of Habeas Corpus as necessary during civil insurrection. Lincoln's retort to his critics was: "shall all the laws go unenforced, except one"--meaning: shall the constitution be destroyed so that Habeas Corpus be preserved?

There are practical and prudential limits around the edges of law and how it works when the survival of civil society is in danger. Poor feckless George W. Bush and his sub-mediocre Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, both tragically over their heads, had no clue as to how to explain the country’s predicament to the American people. Of them, neither knew enough law or history to explain Guantanamo or the FISA court. In the light of American history, there should have been much to revisit and illustrate. Alack the day.

We've been here before. And we will be here again. There is nothing new under the sun...except for the Frat Boy sons of former presidents and the simpletons who play Mafia Wars rather than adventure into the much more interesting and dangerous world of reality.

John Snyder

Unlike Douglas MacArthur, General McChrystal is Challenging Policy the Right Way

john.snyder@inthepublicsquare.com (JohnSnyder) — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 02:59:00 GMT

My support for Lt. General Stanley McChrystal is not partisan. No one should turn to partisanship arguments regarding a war of such magnitude and seriousness. There are only two important questions to ask: is McChrystal's assessment accurate? Second, are his criticisms within the constraints and scope of his duty to the Constitution and to the Commander-In-Chief?

I believe the answer to both questions is, "yes."

America needed more forthrightness from the Pentagon earlier in its War Against Terror- certainly more than our country received under the feckless President George Bush II.

The success of the "surge" demonstrated that the Pentagon, as it had done during Westmoreland's catastrophic tenure in Vietnam, was only telling the White House what it wanted to hear. Up until the devastating Congressional elections of 2006, which shook the Republican Party power base, and the onerous personal attacks on Gen. Petraeus, the Pentagon, Defense Secretary and President Bush flatly refused to acknowledge what everyone, especially the American people, already knew: that the war was not going well.

Unlike General Douglas MacArthur in Korea, General Stanley McChrystal is edifying his country and Commander-in-Chief rather than defying the policy of the Executive. Unlike MacArthur who was right about Korea, as McChrystal is about Afghanistan, McChrystal is not secretly soliciting alliances or defying the instructions of his President as to the conduct of the war. This time McChrystal is doing his duty the right way. He is protecting his country, as his oath to the Constitution requires. McArthur undermined and defied Truman and thereby violated his oath to the Constitution, which requires a soldier to execute lawful orders. McChrystal is just explaining, and no President has lawful power to deprive a General or any man, from expressing his opinion. There is nothing that deprives a man in uniform from exercising his First Amendment Rights, unless he is divulging state secrets, or undermining the will to fight. No such accusation can be seriously entertained in reading McChrystal's London Speech.

McChrystal is a hero because he may lose his job for speaking truth to power. MacArthur, although strategically right in my estimation, destroyed himself by challenging and acting in ways that were unconstitutional and destructive of orders of his President. McChrystal has risked his career and his reputation to protect his country. MacArthur simply undermined the policy and power of our then-elected Commander-in-Chief, Harry S. Truman.

In this is all the difference...

Cash for Bankrupt Old Physiocrat Ideas

john.snyder@inthepublicsquare.com (JohnSnyder) — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 21:08:00 GMT

It was "cash for clunkers.” Now its washing machines.

If destroying property creates wealth, (it employs autoworkers and auto dealerships--and now appliance manufacturers), why not just ante up, drink deep the magic potion of recovery-- and torch all the cities in United States! Image the number of jobs we'd create rebuilding urban America!

I NEVER imagined that when we bombed Tokyo or Dresden into ashes during the Second World War that we were really delivering to them major injections of economic stimulus. In retrospect, we now may classify these sickening tragedies as Obama Recovery Plans.

All this, of course, is a pathetic reincarnation of the economic stupidity that extended and deepened the Great Depression. The New Deal Democrats PAID farmers not to grow crops or raise hogs. They supported dairy prices by pouring milk down gutters. Democrats never learn. Or what I should say is-- arrogant elitists never learn.

Theologically, Obama holds to a hybridized idea--the idea that wealth can be created but is really part of a zero sum-game. Christians, on the other hand, unenthralled with the pseudo-intellectualism of Continental Philosophers realize that being made in the image of God (The Imago Dei) means we CAN and DO create wealth with almost no physical contribution of matter! (An example is a motion picture, or computer program or the designing of a super-computer; the total value of which is almost entirely derived from the non-physical component.) Obamanomics, is but the intellectual atavism of scientific socialism. The idea of the zero sum game of physicalism, or more precisely, its economic grandfather, monarchial physiocratism. These ideas have their origin, first in monarchy, then mercantilism, then laborite Marxism and now a kind of childish populism. It is the notion that physical stuff, here LABOR, and labor alone, creates value, and therefore men put to work create prosperity (i.e. wealth).

Wrong. DEMAND creates value. The best example of this is a theological example: if God loves you: you have value; the moment God hates you, you are utterly without worth or value.

Value is a spiritual commodity. Wealth is the creation of work, both physical and intellectual, directed by human desire--an invisible, metaphysical thing. This is why philosophical naturalists, and Marxists do not understand the "first things" about the world that we live in. All they see is physical stuff. Whether evolution or economics, they cannot see the invisible components of design in the world that we live in. Most (but not all) of the universe of men and things is invisible and non-physical. Invisible things like moral hazard.

The things we desire and work for in life are ulimately the source of our wealth. If you do not want or desire certain things, they have no value. (I am speaking of commodities and not things of intrinsic value, like human beings or freedom.) When government creates artificial demand for something--something that people really do not want in proportion to its cost, people labor to create worthless or wrongheaded things like: yap rings, pyramids or collect plastic bottles for enviromental recycling centers. The cars that were created were not desired, and the cars that were destroyed were declared worthless, by government subsidy. As soon as the fiat of state subsidy ends, those old cars would have been a more exact expression of the true value of automobiles proportionate to our effort to own them. But the old monarchists are back, and the witchcraft of statism has prevailed. America is destroying wealth in order to employee special interests, i.e. labor unions. It is just another form of shamanic potlatch.

The Democratic Party is not so much an ideological camp as a party of arrogance unbounded by the wisdom of history or experience, untouched by the assumptions of Christian theology. That camp of monarchists and physiocrats feel they are so smart that history, wisdom and experience are irrelevant to their utopian visions. For them, true sovereignty is to command the invisible world through the agency of physical things. That is what magic is. That is what materialists are.

Obama and the Left are in reality, just old refitted mercantilists and monarchists whose theology is the theology of Pharaoh and the brick-pits of Goshen.

...altogether wrong...

alexandra.berauer@inthepublicsquare.com (AlexandraBerauer) — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 04:55:00 GMT

"Yes, the ruling about that surprised me. [Harris v. McRae — in 1980 the court upheld the Hyde Amendment, which forbids the use of Medicaid for abortions.] Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of. So that Roe was going to be then set up for Medicaid funding for abortion. Which some people felt would risk coercing women into having abortions when they didn’t really want them. But when the court decided McRae, the case came out the other way. And then I realized that my perception of it had been altogether wrong."

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
New York Times: July 7, 2009

Maafa 21

alexandra.berauer@inthepublicsquare.com (AlexandraBerauer) — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 00:57:00 GMT

Saw an amazing movie a couple of weeks ago – an carefully and passionately crafted documentation of intentional genocide against the poor in America as carried out by Planned Parenthood and others. The film is titled ”Maafa 21,” after the Swahilli word for holocaust.

"They were stolen from their homes, locked in chains and taken across an ocean. And for more than 200 years, their blood and sweat would help to build the richest and most powerful nation the world has ever known.

But when slavery ended, their welcome was over. America’s wealthy elite had decided it was time for them to disappear and they were not particular about how it might be done.

What you are about to see is that the plan these people set in motion 150 years ago is still being carried out today. So don’t think that this is history. It is not. It is happening right here, and it’s happening right now."

From Maafa 21 website.

Gendercide and the Sacred Cow

alexandra.berauer@inthepublicsquare.com (AlexandraBerauer) — Thu, 14 May 2009 07:01:00 GMT

Sweden’s National Board of Health and Welfare has issued new guidelines under which doctors cannot refuse to perform abortions through the 18th week of pregnancy for any reason, including sex selection.

You should know from the outset that I believe abortion is wrong in all circumstances, except in cases of medical necessity to preserve the mother’s life. I think the evidence reveals beyond a reasonable doubt that unborn babies are people too and we simply don’t kill people – even small people – indiscriminately (well we do, but we shouldn’t). But I also think that even if you are in favor of abortions in certain situations, you have to wonder what in the Helsingborg this Board has been smoking. How can a Board of physicians – which, even in Sweden, has a duty to draft its policies on the basis of something more than expedience - say it’s a-okay by them to eliminate people on the basis of gender? This practice has been condemned by virtually every human rights body on the planet as a form of genocide, yet Sweden is happily declaring it legal. Where’s a good UN Human Rights Council Resolution when you need one?

Meanwhile in India…

A doctor and his assistant were sent to jail for telling patients they could “take care of” unborn babies who were of the wrong sex – i.e., who were girls. Sex selection abortions have been banned in India since 1994.

Dr. Vinary Agarwal, president of the Indian Medical Association (IMA) responding to the sentences, said, “”The medical profession is doing all it can though we have to address this as a social evil.”

Now, that’s my kind of medical board. Who would have thought India’s physicians to be far more progressive in terms of protecting basic human rights than Sweden’s?

In the US, however…

The jury is still out. We haven’t formally banned the practice (yet – see HR 1822), but we certainly don’t endorse it. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists used to say sex-selection abortion is “innapropriate” – something akin to popping gum at the opera, I suppose. Their newly scrubbed revised document ”opposes meeting requests for sex selection for personal and family reasons…because…such requests may ultimately support sexist practices.” It’s not exactly India, but thankfully, it’s not Sweden either. But it does prompt me to ask: Why are people so afraid to approach the sacred cow of abortion? Are they really afraid that if they say abortion is just flat-out wrong in some cases, they will have caved in to the right-wing fringe? If so, they’re giving the right-wing fringe much more credit than they deserve. Where is the voice of reason? For that matter, where are the feminists on this issue? After all, in most countries where sex-selection abortion is practiced, the victims are female. But there’s no outcry because there’s no interfering with one’s veneration of the sacred cow…unless, ironically, you’re in India.

Walter Hoye

alexandra.berauer@inthepublicsquare.com (AlexandraBerauer) — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 11:04:00 GMT

I have to keep this short because it is nearly 3:00am and I have an early meeting tomorrow. Just returned from a long day in San Francisco which began with the sentencing hearing of my friend Walter Hoye. Walter was arrested last year for violating Oakland’s newly enacted “bubble” statute, which prohibits approaching, without permission, within eight feet of anyone entering an abortion clinic. The law is modeled after the Colorado statute upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in Hill v. Colorado in 2000.

Anyway, Walter was convicted in January of two counts of violating the statute – each of which carry a maximum penalty of a $2000 fine and/or one year in jail.

At the hearing today, the judge attempted to offer Walter 3 years probation on the condition that he agree to stay at least 100 yards from the Oakland clinic where he was arrested. The DA had recommended probation and a ”stay away order”, stipulating that if Walter did not agree to the sentence, he should be required to serve the maximum 2 year jail term. This for holding a sign and handing out pamphlets with alternatives to abortion.

As it turned out, Walter did not agree to the stay away order! He did agree to abide by the law, but he would not – could not – forfeit his constitutional right to speak on the public sidewalk at 200 Webster Street. Nevertheless, the judge tried to impose the “sentence” three times and each time painted himself further into a corner. I think the judge was shocked that anyone would risk his freedom simply to inform women that they have choices to abortion. As a result, Walter will return for another hearing next month while the judge scratches his head.

Here is an example of the type of egregious behavior Walter has been convicted of. Please note that Mr. Hoye is not the woman in the orange vest (that would be a clinic volunteer), nor is he shoving his sign in anyone’s face.

The San Francisco Chronicle wrote a decent piece on today’s events – complete with this fully loaded quote from Katrina Cantrell, executive director of Women’s Health Specialists:

“When anyone restricts access to reproductive health services, every woman affected is a living example of a colonized body.”

Wow. Did she really say that? First of all, Walter never restricted the access of women (”colonized” or not) to the abortion clinic. He simply asked them if they were interested in hearing about their choices. Aren’t clinic directors part of the ”pro-choice” movement? If so, why this unfounded paranoia when another choice (besides the one that puts $$$ in your purse) is suggested?

Second, I object to the term “reproductive health clinic” as a euphemism for abortion clinic. Just call it what it is. Because “reproductive” it certainly is NOT.

Finally, the idea that a woman’s relationship vis-a-vis her unborn child resembles that of a ”colonized body” is indefensibly ignorant…at best. It is not just wrong…it is exactly wrong. Not only is the phrase “colonized body” pregnant with all kinds of imperial and racial overtones, the inconvenient fact is that if anyone is the colonizer in this absurd analogy, it would be the mother. The fetus is merely the “colonizee,” subject to, and at the mercy of, his or her protector.

Since Katrina brought it up, let’s see what role the Women’s Health Specialists play in the colonization scenario. Because the clinic provides the colonizer a means of ridding herself of her unwanted populace, I guess it would be the Royal African Company pillaging the West African Coast for lucrative human commodities.

Maybe she’s not exactly wrong after all.

A kinder, gentler eugenic?

alexandra.berauer@inthepublicsquare.com (AlexandraBerauer) — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 05:07:00 GMT

Well, the family planning services reduce cost. They reduce cost. The states are in terrible fiscal budget crises now and part of what we do for children’s health, education and some of those elements are to help the states meet their financial needs. One of those — one of the initiatives you mentioned, the contraception, will reduce costs to the states and to the federal government.

Nancy Pelosi: Speaker. U.S. House of Representatives. 2009

The problem of the dependent, delinquent and defective elements in modern society, we must repeat, cannot be minimized because of the alleged small numerical proportion to the rest of the population. The proportion seems small only because we accustom ourselves to the habit of looking upon feeble-mindedness as a separate and distinct calamity to the race, as a chance phenomenon unrelated to the sexual and biological customs not only condoned by even encouraged by our so-called civilization. The actual dangers can only be fully realized when we have acquired definite information concerning the financial and cultural cost of these classes to the community . . . when we see the funds that should be available for human development, for scientific, artistic and philosophic research, being diverted annually, by hundreds of millions of dollars, to the care and segregation of men, women, and children who should have never been born.

Margaret Sanger: Founder. Planned Parenthood. 1922