Pico Ultraorientalis

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Archive for September, 2017

Is Shakespeare’s Coriolanus a key for our crises?

Posted by nouspraktikon on September 30, 2017

Shakespeare’s unknown Roman play and what it bodes for us








The Fourfold Root of Classical Political Analysis


































Principles above Personalities: The Constitutional Reading
















In the aftermath of Irma, these volunteers won in Florida

Posted by nouspraktikon on September 19, 2017

We were still surrounded by the debris of Hurricane Irma when the Volunteers showed up

Actually, it was a football game, one of those compulsive rituals which neither “the powers that be” nor the hoi poloi can ever say no to.  After all, who could deny the local fans their bread and circuses in the aftermath of a disaster?  Well, everything depended on who won…whether the spectacle would go down in the record books as a morale booster or moral misdemeanor.  As providence (do I hear someone say luck? Nah!) would have it, Florida won in the last seconds of a crazy game who’s merits on either side will be endlessly debated.  The Tennessee Volunteers returned home, perplexed and saddened.  Florida had, once again, been saved from itself.

But there were other volunteers in town that day.  Linemen of a different sort, hailing from Indiana, Kentucky, Georgia, and even parts of the state which were nursing their own hurts.  They weren’t watching football, although sometimes they worked within earshot of cheers and jeers from the high-tension game.  And yes, they were volunteers, even though they had been sent down by mammoth utility firms and could expect to draw overtime.  This is still America and nobody is forced to do any job they can walk off from.  But instead of “You can take this job and  shove it!” they arrived in large numbers, willing to work 24/7 in the humidity, often in the dark, and among the local fauna (think “gators” of the non-football ilk) which were spreading out into newly flooded zones.

In our neighborhood we had transformers down.  On the night of the storm, people had heard the  blast and seen the blinding blue ark light as the lofty cylinders seemed to turn into electric grenades.  Then darkness.  Days later there was still no electricity, and the Florida jungle was beginning to reclaim its own.  No heat, no cool, no refrigeration, no communication, and living off of canned and dry goods.  It could have been far worse as the water mains had kept their integrity.  Still, we were starting to wonder…

Then we saw the trucks.  We noticed (by we I refer to those who could read a map) a seal with the outline of the state of Indiana on its sides.  They had come a thousand miles, but the hardest part of their journey were the days of street by street, block by block progress until the worst hit part of town was rewired and on line.  They weren’t all from Indiana.  The man who went up in the bucket to replace our utility pole was from Bowling Green, Kentucky.

Bowling Green, Bowling Green

I wish I was in Bowling Green

Good old Bowling Green

And I bet he did!  But he had heeded the call to do a job which required a critical mix of physical endurance and intelligence.  The dead transformer was dangling in a virtual cats-cradle of wires and woods. When I murmured, “I can’t see how you will ever get that pole up.”  The Kentuckian answered, “Stick around and you may see more than you wager for.”  By literal hook and crook, mechanized to be sure, it all got up, poles, wires, transformers, until we heard the go ahead signal and the power returned.

I couldn’t help thinking that these men, who had come down from the regions around the Ohio river, were lineal descendants of the “volunteers” of yore, legendary men like Boon and Crockett, and the countless others who never became legends.  Historians can argue ad infinitum whether or not these were the men who “made America great,” or as per cultural Marxism, they were just land-pirates building a sand-castle civilization called the United States.  What is not arguable is that on short notice, their descendants had been mobilized and formed into an effective army to see that the swamp (here literally!) didn’t reclaim that network of urban humanity which calls itself modern Florida.

My general impression was that the whole operation, as befits volunteers, looked more like a “spontaneous order” than a command structure.  This was not to say that there was no planning, of which there was much evidence, but that the planning was horizontal rather than vertical, with the local agency and the out-of-state personnel cooperating on a case by case basis, combining local knowledge with volunteer can-do.  The federal government was invisible, although you could say that Floridians were the beneficiaries of a “national” effort by localities which had sent their people and resources across state lines to get the job done.  In military lingo you couldn’t say they weren’t regulars…just regular folks.

And that, my friends, is what makes America great.

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The Gentile Origins of Communism: A serendipitous case of faith and freedom against anti-Semitism

Posted by nouspraktikon on September 8, 2017

 Things that go bump in the night of civilization

So the most valuable…Communist strategy was the revival, nourishment, and magnification of the dislike, distrust, and bitterness now associated with the term Anti-Semitism.  The Communists are always sharpening and using both edges of this sword.  In their efforts to weaken and destroy the John Birch Society, just for an illustration, they have dupes and agents clamoring incessantly that the Society is anti-Semetic; and at the very same time they have agents provocateurs everywhere trying to persuade members of the Society that the whole Communist movement is simply a Jewish conspiracy, and that these members are wasting their time in The John Birch Society because its leaders do not  have the courage to name the enemy.  And by this typical Communist method, they have made anti-Semitism into one of the most powerful weapons in their whole arsenal of destruction.–Robert Welch, founder of the John Birch Society, The Truth in Time.

A specter is haunting Western Civilization, and unfortunately it isn’t Communism.  If the average citizen spent more time worrying about Communism, even if Communism were only a secondary factor among the world’s ills, at least we would be, in the words of Immanuel Kant “on the road to a true science”…that is, our tenor of mind would be serious enough to get to the bottom of whatever the ultimate problem really was.  Instead we see that Communism, like the devil, has convinced most people that it no longer exists, if indeed it ever did.

It isn’t as if there was not enough fear in the world already.  Our minds are haunted by numerous specters, ghostly apparitions which often have little semblance of reality, ranging from the quasi-real, to the foolish, to the vicious.  Among the quasi-real are those derivative problems like “inflation” which is an illusion produced by monopoly banking and credit.  Another quasi-real is war itself, which is deadly in its effects but universally misunderstood as to its cause and nature. Among the foolish specters would be things like “peak oil” and rising sea levels, which are simply the result of observational error and cupidity.  Yet there are also specters which are properly called vicious, since they are the fabrications of malice as well as fear, and not only harm those who fall their victims but also corrupt the souls of those who adhere to their tenets.  Notable among such vicious specters are all forms of xenophobia, unreasoning fear and hatred of people for, as it would seem, simply being ethnically different from the xenophobe him or herself.

I interjected the qualifier “as it would seem” since, there is always some rationalization attached to the prejudice against one or another group.  Now it seems to me that of all the groups which have suffered xenophobic persecution, only the Jews have been so abused that xenophobic prejudice against them merits a basic item of English vocabulary.  “Anti-Semitism” although not particularly accurate as an ethnological term, is popularly understood as hatred, fear, and prejudice against the Jews in particular.  That all the members of one ethnic group, Jews or anyone else, would be evil without exception, is a proposition which no rational person would want to entertain without compelling arguments produced in its support.  Predictably, anti-Semites are willing to brandish arguments exposing what they deem to be a uniquely  Jewish propensity towards evil, but such poor rationalizations as ancient and early modern Anti-Semites could muster are even less convincing today than they were originally.  Indeed, most of their so-called reasons are so inane, claiming that Jews are ritual cannibals or whatnot, that only children or mentally challenged individuals would give them a instant of credibility.  Indeed, most of these traditional canards are such obvious slanders that they have fallen out of circulation even among hard core anti-Semites.  None the less, these slanders could on occasion be deadly to Jews, since most people who compose society are not reasoners, but potential hysterics.  Thus many Jews welcomed the European Enlightenment of the 18th century, a promised “Age of Reason” which would  restore the control by the rational human mind over the emotions of the crowd.  Unfortunately, this was a tragic misreading of the  so-called Enlightenment’s inner meaning.

Ironically, post-Enlightenment modernity gave birth to new arguments for Anti-Semitism, most of them as ridiculous as their ancient predecessors.  However there is a kind of argument, in two variations, a weaker and a stronger one, added in modern times to the usual libels of Anti-Semetism, which is somewhat more plausible than previous claims.  The question is posed whether it was Jews, perhaps not all Jews but disproportionately people of Jewish background, who foisted the Communist system upon the world.   While this argument is defective, for reasons which will be illustrated below, it is far more plausible than the crude slanders of pre-modern anti-Semites.  Jews, as a population, cannot be evil.  However an idea, unlike a population, can be evil.  Hence if we link a population (neither good nor evil) to an idea (good or evil) one might think that this renders the population good or evil according to our evaluation of the idea.  Think about that a moment.  Well, if you are not buying this idea of transitivity between a concrete (a population) and an abstract (idea) then good for you, because transitivity doesn’t actually hold in this case.

However as rhetoric arguments such as “the Jews gave us Communism” or “Most of the Communists I know of were Jews” might do in a pinch for a desperate Anti-Semite.  To demonstrate its effectiveness let’s turn the second proposition on its head.  Let’s suppose that Communism were a wonderful thing.  In that case the statement, “Most of Communists that I know of were Jews” would be rightfully be taken as a compliment to Jews.  Here I am working on the opposite assumption, that Communism is definitely not a good thing.  In fact, it should be fairly obvious that under a system of universal Communism everyone, including Jews, would be reduced to slavery.  Due to the negative nature of Communism the statement “Most of the Communists I know of were Jews” is morally problematic because it seem to gives aid and comfort to anti-Semites.  Of course, the Communists have their own solution to this moral dilemma, one that they would like everyone to embrace.  They want, as per the above, everyone to trans-value Communism from something evil to something good.  This, they would urge, would rob the anti-Semite of his or her best argument.  Expect to see this message pushed in the left-wing media.

Actually the statement “Most of the Communists I know of were Jews” could never have much bearing on the moral quality of Jews in general.  It rests on a subjective sample drawn from someone’s arbitrary experience, and even if it illustrated some general truth, it would still fall afoul of the intransitive relation between ideas and people, since these putative Jews, whomever they might be, might  have caught “Communism” as a kind of contagion, a kind of hysteria, as is often the case in the adoption of bad ideas, with the consequent increase in quantity by epidemic proportions.  So even in the abstract, the proposition “Most of the Communists I know of were Jews” is pure rhetoric with no possible imputation to Jews in general.  Finally, putting these logical clarifications to one side, anyone with any historical sense knows that the vast majority of Jews throughout history were either 1) blissfully unaware of Communism in its modern form, or 2) indifferent or hostile to Communism.  The Jews among the revolutionary elite were a minority within a minority.

Unfortunately we have yet to dispose of the stronger of the two Anti-Semitic arguments linking the Jewish people to Communism.  Note that “The Jews gave us Communism” and “Most of the Communists I know of were Jews” are two very different propositions.  The second was quantitative and abstract, while the first is qualitative, originary,  and historical.  The first is much stronger since it deals with the phylogeny of ideas, and originary thinkers share a relationship to their thoughts which is indeed transitive.  Rather than the accidental relationship to ideas which is characteristic of a general population, an originary thinker bears an essential relation to his or her own idea.

If it could be shown that “Communism” was invented by a Jew, might one not assume that there was some intrinsic relationship between Jews and Communism?  And was not Marx a Jew?  Not so fast!  Just as one must determine who is and is not a Jew, it is equally necessary to understand what Communism is and when it originated.   But we all know that don’t we?  On the contrary, the conventional understanding of Communism is both shallow and misleading.  One group which has sought with extreme diligence and precision to both define and understand the nature of Communism is the John Birch Society, founded by Robert Welch in 1958.  Once surprising consequence of the research uncovered and disseminated by the John Birch Society has been to deprive Anti-Semites of a major support for their ideology.  As it turns out, Communism was birthed, not by Jews but by Gentiles!

How enlightening research and education sponsored by the John Birch Society has discredited one of Anti-Semitism’s flawed assumptions

The standard textbook treatment of Communism states that it was an ideological movement born in Germany in the years surrounding the revolutions of 1848.  Furthermore, it is widely conceded that Karl Marx, while not exactly the “inventor” of Communism as an idea, was the person most responsible for fleshing out the theory of Communism and urging that this theory be applied to the practice of revolution.  Furthermore, most people are at least vaguely aware that Marx was born into a Christianized Jewish family, that he became a radical follower of Hegel’s philosophy in his university days, and that he subsequently developed his own materialistic twist on Hegel, which today we call “Marxism” and that he published an outline of this philosophy together with his collaborator Fredrick Engles (who, incidentally, was a gentile, a gentleman, and an Englishman, albeit not necessarily in that order or by conviction.)

There is nothing necessarily wrong with most of that story, except that it is woefully incomplete.  Perhaps the most damning hole in the narrative is Marx’s own disclaimer as to being the actual founder of Communism.  Marx only claimed to have sharpened Communism’s edge by making it “scientific.”  Marx was well acquainted with, and drew upon the ideas of, various schools of Communism from the early 19th century, however he criticized those schools as “utopian.”  Actually, the utopian/scientific narrative drawn by Marx has less to do with hard science and more with the jealousy of a left wing journalist who wanted to draw both the ire and admiration of the world to his work.  The “science” gambit worked because Marx claimed to discover Communism in the philosophy of G. F. W. Hegel (1770-1831) at the time the “cutting edge” of philosophical speculation in Germany, but hardly what most people would call science today.  Marx subsequently dumped Hegel’s system in favor of Darwin’s materialism in the 1860s, when materialism was in vogue. Whatever one might think about Darwin, the salient point is that Marx was willing to tack any sort of prestigious metaphysics on the front of his socialist system as long as he could justify it in the name of science.

In short, for Marx science was anything which was useful in promoting his ideas about the decline of capitalism and the rise of the proletariat.  Hence, there is really no meaningful difference between “utopian” and “scientific” communism.  Chronologically, this means that what we call Communism has a much earlier origin that its conventional dating around the 1840s.  Indeed, as both an idea and a movement, Communism goes back to the 18th century Enlightenment.  The essence of communism is its anti-Christian bias and revolt against all religious restraint, which was likewise  a major theme of the Enlightenment.  Attempts by secular apologists to claim that Communism was primarily an economic theory which, perhaps due to the religious preoccupations of Karl Marx, became allied to atheism, overlook the way in which the ideas of the Enlightenment were already spilling over into radical social movements by the late 18th century.

This would be important in and of itself, but it has a correlative import which is pertinent to how one confronts the problem of Anti-Semitism.  If Communism originated in the 18th century rather than the 19th century, its originators could only have been gentiles, not Jews.  Fundamentally, this is because the Enlightenment was a movement of Western thinkers who were rebelling against Christianity.  They started off as Christians and then became something else, i.e., they were not Jews but gentiles.  Granted, there were some Jews, such as Baruch Spinoza and Moses Mendelson, who attained stature in the pantheon of the Enlightenment, but these were exceptions who prove the rule.  They were honored guests, as it were, in the house of gentile infidelity.

One might object, “If the essence of the Enlightenment was anti-Christianity, would that not have included all Jews as well?”  However the term “anti-Christianity” in this proposition actually refers to two distinct things.  Judaism, in the form of Talmudic orthodoxy, was and is “anti-Christianity” in the sense that it rejects the person whom Christians hail as the “Christ” i.e., the Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth.  However “anti-Christianity” in its Enlightenment sense, rejects not a particular Messiah, but religion in general.  Indeed, although there were certainly “fifty shades of anti-Chritianity” among the Europeans of the 18th century, ranging from Unitarianism through skepticism…the tendency was always in the direction of unadulterated atheism.  Without undue exaggeration, one can say that the Enlightenment was essentially atheistic.

Granted the above, one might still legitimately wonder what the Enlightenment, atheistic though it might have been, had to do with Communism.  After all, Communism is a social doctrine, and atheism is a metaphysical view.  None the less, their origins are intertwined, since the common denominator of both is a quest for power, power over human beings and autonomous power over the universe, unconstrained by any Divine supervision.  The 18th century was a power quest by rebellious men, and while Jews, like all men, are rebellious, the men in question were not Jews, although they shared with unconverted Jews a rejection of Jesus as Messiah.  But more important than what or who they rejected, was what they sought.  They sought power.

This is the seldom told story which needs to be understood if we are to grasp the essential relationship between the Enlightenment and Communism.  The story which traces the main line of descent towards modern Communism concerns neither the proclamation of the pulpit nor the chat of the philosopher’s salon, but the hidden world of power…replete with secrecy, espionage, sabotage, and sundry skullduggery… a story seldom told to be sure, but seldom isn’t never.  Fortunately the secret movers and shakers of European society immediately prior to the French revolution were revealed at end-century by John Robison’s  Proofs of a Conspiracy (1798), an expose of the influence of secret societies on the French Revoluion.  This is a tome, composed in the minute style of an early modern treatise, which would have been difficult to procure had it had not been for the John Birch Society, which has kept it circulating and in print.

According to Robison, the radical wing of the Enlightenment, the Illuminati, was not just an ideology, but a conspiratorial organization.  Today, the word “Illuminati” congers up all sorts of occult and arcane images.  However Robison makes no supernatural speculations, but rather, his narrative falls well within what secular historiography would recognize as normal chains of cause and effect, albeit of a secretive and revolutionary nature.  It is this secretive and revolutionary quality which is the defining nature of Communism, and not something as academic as, say “the labor theory of value.”  If we are to recognize the data which Robison so amply references, we must recognize that a proto-Communism existed as early as the 1770s.  One symbolic indication that this backdating of communism is valid is the institution of May Day, widely recognized as Communist festival.   May Day actually commemorates the foundation of the Illuminati on May 1, 1776, shadowing the simultaneous war for the restoration of natural rights in British America, which was climaxed by the Declaration of Independence on July 4 of the same year.

From the vantage point of standard historiography, any talk of “Communism” even during the 1790s (think, French Revolution!) let alone the 1770s, seems like a gross anachronism.  However if we consider the quest for power, secrecy, and a desire to fundamentally transform society according to the whims of a revolutionary elite as the salient characteristics of Communism, then we can safely push the horizon of Communism’s advent back to the 1770s rather than the 1840s.   We can confidently refer to Robison’s description of the Illuminati as a account of early Communism because he demonstrates a seamless continuity between the secret societies of that period and the outbreak of the French Revolution.  As Robison explains, the groundwork for the revolution was laid decades in advance.  This is the hallmark of what we would call Communist propaganda and agitation.  Since the Jews of that period were still marginalized and ghettoized, the primary agitators within the movement were apostate Christians, a.k.a., “gentiles”…and only later with an enfranchised Jewry did Jews get recruited into European radical movements in significant numbers.

So yes, Communism is a conspiracy, but it is not a Jewish conspiracy.  In fact, originally it was an exclusively Gentile conspiracy.  Even in the 20th century Communism was neither exclusively nor even mainly a Jewish movement, in the sense that Hertzel’s Zionism was exclusively Jewish.  However the truncation of Communism’s history gives the impression that the movement was more Jewish than it generally has been, and moreover obscures the fact that the movement was not a Jewish movement in its origin.

It is notable that the John Birch Society, which has rejected the truncated chronology of “scientific Communism” in favor of a historiography based of Robison and like authors, has struck a blow at anti-Semitism.  The original motivation for embracing this historiography was, however, a disquisition into the facts of early European and American radicalism, not necessarily an exoneration of the Jewish people.  This is a sterling example of how the love of truth, animating research in some specialized field, can have an benign effect on a cognate area of human relations and understanding.


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