What we say:
I pledge allegiance to the flag, of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands; One Nation under God, with liberty and justice for all,
What we do:
I submit fealty to the Stag, of the Federated States of America, and to the fascist Autocracy for which it’s destined, a world Dominion beyond restraint, with retribution, terror, and death upon all.
A century ago the world was plunged into a terrible human conflagration, threatening to destroy the underpinnings of human solidarity, by governments and businesses seeking enlargement of their dominions without restraint. It culminated in unheard of homicide, poverty, the scapegoating of a feudalistic culture, propagation of disillusionment and superfluity, diminishing moral judgment and devotion to justice. A quarter century later the world was enveloped again in greater conflict, fueled by piety, patriotism, paternalism, and obsession with the consolidation of power. It culminated in the birth of annihilative technology, imminent death of moral judgment and devotion to justice, festering suspicion, mistrust, and trepidation across mankind. A half century later the world is consumed with terror, vengeance, sanctimony, fascist greed, and colossal vanity. Our governing institutions are saturated with petty power mongers, profligate spendthrifts of wealth and virtue. Our national leader is an elected tyrant. Our moral institutions are suffused with Zionistic zeal and millennial salvation, invoking God as their vanquisher of the heathen for justification of their atrocities. Spiritual impotence and the disappearance of natural affection defines the soul in the chapel, mosque, temple, and synagogue.
Hannah Arendt, Jewish refugee and expatriate studied this human malignancy at the birth of the Cold War. She characterized in her essays the forces behind Totalitarianism, tracing them to their root, only to find Man is engaged in the gratification of personal confidence and purpose with substitutes. This feeling of impotence and superfluity is the fuel of domination in all its manifestations. It reaches its apex in the Totalitarian engine bent on the demolition of the autonomous, juridical, and morally sagacious soul. Once this state of diffuse identity and moral boundlessness is achieved by the oppression begun with mass movements, terror is instigated against the unresisting, indifferent, and innocent. The sole objective is the Mein Kampf declaration of being Right, through the elimination of all opposition to its supremacy.
“The aggressiveness of totalitarianism springs not from lust for power, and if it feverishly seeks to expand, it does so neither for expansion’s sake nor for profit, but only for ideological reasons: to make the world consistent, to prove that its respective supersense has been right.” (The Origin of Totalitarianism p458)
What Hannah missed was that Totalitarianism is not the end-game. It, like the propaganda of anti-semitism, racism, and imperialism of the previous century and the destruction of humanity it produced, are all tools to one end--the establishment of an elite group of people left to inherit the earth in the wake of mass annihilation unwittingly self-consummated. It is the very conspiracy she denied, and only grudgingly conceded which created the ideologically driven extermination of the last century. No, there was not a world-wide conspiracy on the part of the Jews, but there was and there remains, a world-wide conspiracy which used the Jews both as scapegoats and as implementers of the fascist/communist revolutions. The conspiracy was documented as early as 1798 by professor John Robison, (Proofs of a Conspiracy), by investigative journalist Douglas Reed (The Controversy of Zion) in the mid 1950s, by Benjamin Freedman, business associate and protogé of Bernard Baruch, also in the 1950s and early 60s, and numerous authors who chronicle the continuing debacle.
But this post is not intended to belabor the existence of this Conspiracy, which incidentally, is no longer secret at the level Hannah knew it. Today Congress is in session, bickering over scraps of power in the form of concessions to the opposition, holding hostage the Federal government and 90% of the populace. The end-game is the same--the collapse of our economy and wholesale destitution on a wider scale than Germany ever endured. We have cooked our own goose, feathers and claw, by petitioning the Federal government to solve our domestic and economic difficulties. Whether the Fed continues to debauch the currency, or Congress immediately fails to pay its bills, the debt for our collective and individual profligacy is about to come due. I'm not convinced that having been apprised of Hannah Arendt's works would have made any difference in my political or economic choices. But they have enlarged my understanding of the world I inherited, and I am a pariah in my own generation.
While intellectualism is obviously missing in large segments of the world's population, Hannah is not so dismayed by it as she is of sheer stupidity:
“Stupidity has become as common as common sense was before; and this does not mean that it is a symptom of mass society or that "intelligent" people are exempt from it. The only difference is that stupidity remains blissfully inarticulate among the non-intellectuals and becomes unbearably offensive among "intelligent" people. Within the intelligentsia, one may even say that the more intelligent an individual happens to be, the more irritating is the stupidity which he has in common with all.” (Essays on Understanding p314)
Actually I think this is an eternal condition of Man. All generations consider their predecessors more moral than themselves. It is an universal lament that corruption today is worse than it ever was. And yet we can observe through our own records the decline of the ability to reason and analyze. A decline in the ability to make discerning moral judgment. Education and knowledge is more wide-spread than ever. But that education and knowledge is the indoctrination and inculcation of meaningless facts. All one need do is behold the spectacle of Miss America pageants to discover how little wisdom and sagacity exists in the minds of these Americanese dolls. Endowed with the physical emoluments of external beauty, we have a representation of a growing class of brainless prospective mothers. What is to be done when women debauch themselves through such female operated corporations as Madmoiselle, Playboy, and Barbie? The cerebral vacancy is not restricted to feminine chromosomes.The spectacle of male physiognomy infests the media and art platforms with productions of pre-adolescent rap by performers twice that age. Every boy dreams of being an athletic or musical superstar. Despite the technological tools to assist reading, spelling, and writing skills, their performance standard is decreasing. The shift from the hard sciences as majors in education is dropping to lows of a century earlier. With the pervasiveness of technology we see a concomitant disinterest in its innovation. The rising generation of engineers are focused on games. Communication hardware and services belie a reduction in verbal and writing communication skill.
One would think that stupidity and immaturity is the contrivance of affluence. But this is nothing new. Anyone well acquainted with the history of aristocracy during the Age of Reason knows it was just as bad among them then. The difference is, it is spreading, seemingly at the same rate as technological innovation. The more of it we have, and the higher the standard of living, the less we find in the population those possessed of the intellectual acumen of our ancestral pioneers.
Some hope manifests with the growing interest among the youth of this nation in libertarian principles and free market economy. But I fear their power of change will be confined to the rise of the Phoenix. Perhaps some salvation lies in the Web and the effect it is having like the printing press of Luther's day.
SethSmee
