McCarthyism, Paranoia, and Things that Really Happened that You Don’t Know About

While reading about the newest Superman movie and how the writers decided to purposefully omit the phrase “the American way” from the movie, I ran into a phrase a few times that intrigued me. So, curious, I did what any geek would do; I googled it. When asked, Google reported that over 700,000 pages contained both the word ‘paranoia’ and the term ‘Cold War’, virtually always in reference to western feelings (especially American feelings) about Communism.

The conventional wisdom is, and has been since at least the ‘80’s, that the American fear of Communism, especially Soviet communism, was completely overblown. When I write “conventional wisdom” I mean it in the same way as the writers for Newsweek, Time, and the New York Times do – what academics, journalists, and Hollywood believe and tell the unwashed masses is true.

This sort of division between the self-appointed ‘intelligentsia’ and the ‘common man’ plays itself out in pop culture all the time. Overtly patriotic songs are automatically considered Country Music; critics pan patriotic films movies like Red Dawn and Invasion, USA while they do great business in the theaters; critics praise anti-American movies like Three Kings and Three Days of the Condor, films that are demonstrably no better than stuff like Rambo and certainly don’t pull in nearly as much money.

Quick Aside: before its release I read time and time again how super realistic Three Kings was supposed to be; heck, in one interview a member of the crew had to deny the use of a cadaver in filming a scene of a bullet entering a body. As a veteran of the Gulf War I was looking forward to seeing this film and went to a matinee on the first day it was open. Everything from uniforms to attitudes to gear to physics was so wrong I left after 35 minutes and demanded my money back.

So now, of course, ‘everybody knows’ that the paranoia of the Cold War was just a Red Scare; an unreasoning terror of Communism artificially created by Conservatives to whip up fervor for foreign wars and pump money into the military-industrial complex whole garnering the votes of the terrified sheep or middle America for the Republican war machine. Just ask Glenn Greenwald, Clint Willis, Jack Huberman, and Noam Chomsky. These best-selling authors, the critics who promote them, the academics who assign their books, and the actors who shill for them all want you to know that what was really going on during the height of the Cold War was a group of rabid Conservatives trying to gain fascist control of the nation by unfairly portraying innocent artists and Liberals of being baby-eaters, charges believed by the easily-deluded inhabitants of flyover country.

As usual with the topics I pick, all is not as we are told in school.

Long before World War II began, the Soviet Union was placing spies throughout the US. By the beginning of the war, the Soviet Union had spies placed very highly within the United States Government. While there had been some early successes for Soviet spymasters, the true breakthrough was the New Deal, when FDR and his cabinet swept hundred of academics into positions of political and economic control – academics who were unelected, untested, and largely uninvestigated. This led to literally hundreds of agents of the Soviet Union being in positions of power within the US on the eve of war.

During WWII a highly-classified program led to the decryption of thousands of classified telegrams from the Soviet Embassy. This project, called Venona, was so secret and its discoveries so profound that some presidents weren’t told of its existence, although they were told of some of the results. What Venona revealed was that Soviet spies were working at literally the highest levels in the US government, including agents within the OSS, the wartime precursor to the CIA, the State Department, Treasury Department, and War Department. Even a top presidential aide was a Soviet agent. Together, these various assets worked to not only hide and protect Soviet spies within the government, but to actually divert funds to allow these spy rings to exist; in effect, the US government was so badly compromised that taxpayer money was being used to fund Soviet spy rings in the US government.

The system was working so well, in fact, that the Soviet Union failed to properly ‘compartmentalize’ its system; members of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) working in espionage routinely interacted with Soviet Intelligence agents doing the same. In the end, the defection of just a few people threw a bright light onto what was occurring in the shadows. These defectors painted a harsh world where a high-ranking member of the US State Department who attended Yalta and helped write the charter of the United Nations was, in fact, a Soviet agent. That the production and allocation of war materials to the Soviet Union was planned and controlled largely by Soviet agents, and that these agents were also stealing nuclear secrets and facilitating the illegal shipment of nuclear materials to the Soviet Union.

In the ‘30’s the Soviet Union had used its intelligence agencies (then called the NKGB or NKVD) to provide military assistance to the Republican government of Spain, to round up tens of thousands of Soviet citizens for the gulags, abduct Spanish anti-communists for torture and execution, to assassinate political leaders all over the world, and to destabilize foreign governments in preparation for Communist takeovers of power. The Soviet Union had begun WWII as an ally of Hitler and wasted no time after the war in seizing control of as many European nations as they could, in direct violation of a number of treaties and agreements. The level of oppression within the Soviet bloc was horrendous, the spectre of deportation to the gulags omnipresent, and the use of torture and murder by the leaders routine.

Communism had never made secret its disdain for Capitalism, Democracy, or America. The fomentation of war and revolution all over the globe was not only their stated goal, but an active project. Through the 1950’s it became more and more obvious that the brutal, oppressive Communist regime of the Soviet Union, a group that was publicly bent on world domination and the eradication of differing political and economic systems and openly advocated the use of assassination, terror, and violence to achieve their goals, had a large number of spies and agents highly placed within the US government. As time went on there was increasing proof that agents and sympathetic ‘fellow travelers’ in the media and entertainment were working to paint Communism and the Soviet Union in the best possible light as a way of aiding the subversion of existing political and economic systems, and that similar agents were well-placed in academia, as well.

In the face of this, is it any wonder that many people were openly terrified? Soviet tanks were crushing the native governments of Poland, Lithuania, and other Warsaw Pact nations – would that happen here? The KGB routinely assassinated people all over Europe and Asia – would that happen in America, too? The Chinese government had been subverted by Soviet agents and overthrown by violent revolutionaries – was America next? The government not only seemed powerless to stop foreign incursions, but all evidence seemed to point to America’s own government being unable to root out Communist agents inside itself. Many people reacted not with paranoia, but with genuine, justifiable fear.

The reaction of the media? Largely ridicule. Newspapers routinely referred to concerns about Communist agents ‘paranoia’. Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible, comparing the search for Communist agents to a witch hunt. Movies since that day extol the “Hollywood 10” as heroes, unjustly accused of being foreign agents. The movie Good Night, and Good Luck, released recently, again painted the search for Communists as a fool’s errand, or the work of fanatics. Indeed, years later when James Angleton, a counter-intelligence agent with a stunning record of dedication and insight, warned that there must be Soviet agents within US counter-intelligence groups, he was laughed right out of his career.

The term witch hunt is still commonly used today, implying that the House Un-American Activities Committee was chasing after something that never existed. Even at the time the Crucible was written many people pointed out that, while witches are a superstition, Communists were real and busily butchering millions of their own people. A number of people in Hollywood came forward and agreed that yes, there were Communists in Hollywood doing their best to create propaganda, not art. Philip Dunne, who actively opposed the HUAC for potentially trampling American civil rights stated that in Hollywood “the industrious Communist tail wags the lazy Liberal dog”, admitting that Communists existed in Hollywood and often dictated projects and message. Of the Hollywood 10, one had fought with the Soviet-supplied pro-Communist forces in the Spanish Civil War and another had raised funds to supply them with arms, three were members of the Communist Party, some of whom admitted that officers of the CPUSA gave them orders on what to include and exclude in their work to promote Communism, and many of the rest were identified by witnesses as pressuring people to include pro-Communist propaganda in their films and books.

After the fall of the Soviet Union in the ‘90’s western researchers gained access to the Soviet archives and many KGB records. This allowed for definitive proof of a number of allegations; Angleton was right and American counter-intelligence had been deeply compromised for over a decade; the CPUSA was funded by the Soviet Union and was explicitly and espionage and subversion tool; Alger Hiss was a Soviet Agent; the witnesses who testified to the HUAC that they were former Soviet spies were, indeed, ‘turned’ Soviet spies; the ‘loyalty boards’ and ‘loyalty oaths’, investigations, and clearances forced on Truman by Republicans (to cries of outrage from the Left) did force spies out and did make it much, much harder for the Soviets to introduce new spies.

Despite the evidence of the day, the revelation of the Venona transcripts, and the contents of the Soviet archives, many still dismiss the time as period of oppression by America and point to Conservatives as fanatics and fools for believing there was any danger. This view is especially prevalent in the “reality-based community”. No matter what was really going on, despite the fact that history has proven McCarthy and the HUAC correct, regardless of the violence, oppression, and slaughter inherent in every Communist regime, and in defiance of the stated Communist goal of making America just like the Soviet Union, all of the Conservative of the time were in the grips of “paranoia”.

The Communists were probably most effective in their penetration of art and academe. As the New Left spread out in an attempt to find a niche, it took root in academia, often with a vengeance. The basic ideology of the New Left was the use of Marxist theory applied to culture rather than labor in an attempt to transform society and seize control through social engineering, not violent revolution. For example, some openly Marxists historians argued that America was not responding to outside pressures but rather actively building an Empire; this highly revisionist picture, virtually devoid of actual evidence, became accepted as fact for decades before rebuttals were published. The revisionists scholars ignored the rebuttals and continued to paint the Soviet Union (with its purges, gulags, totalitarian policies, and assassinations) as morally equal to America. This attitude was accepted in academia and was the ruling paradigm in the 1960’s and 70’s, continuing on to the present day.

The fall of the Soviet Union was a heavy blow to Leftists everywhere. Over the course of the 20th Century Communism had had every chance to succeed; the sole result was economic collapse, the loss of civil and human rights, and the slaughter of tens of millions of innocent people. Marxism, Leninism, Trotskyism, Maoism – all had proven completely incompatible with their goals (equality, freedom, plenty), but very efficient at oppression and murder. Cultural Marxism flourished in the West within academia, the arts, and the media; what were its adherents to do? Well, the same thing they had been doing. After their success in portraying America as no different than the Soviet Union (despite the lack of secret police, gulags, or work quotas in America), they decided to portray America as the worst nation on Earth. While portraying America’s victories as defeats, triumphs as evil, and ideals as false, they also focused on undermining the core institutions, morals, and concepts of the society. The main tool of this attack is Critical Theory.

By ‘critical theory’ I don’t mean the majority of thought about the nature and structure of literature. I am referring to the philosophy coming out of the Frankfort School. The Frankfort School was a collection of Marxist ideologues in Frankfort, Germany. The academics of the Frankfort School were dedicated Communists of one stripe or another, primarily what would be called in modern America “paleo-Marxists”. They seemed dismayed by the opposition to Communism they saw in Europe and how Fascists were able to tap into this opposition to gain power. Over the course of decades the various members of the Frankfort School (who spent WWII in America to escape the Nazis) developed Critical Theory. Unlike sociology prior to this, critical theory is not conceptualized as a method of observing and understanding society/culture as it is but is rather designed to be a tool to attack culture/society and change it into what the theorist wants it to become.

This proved to be a very fruitful path for Marxists everywhere. Much of the early work of the members of the Frankfort School was aimed at discrediting reason itself as a tool; the argument that reason leads to totalitarian societies was routinely put forward. Another common argument is that morals and ethics are totally subjective or arbitrary side-effects of language. Oddly, there is also the occasional argument that all morals other than Marxist ones are subjective (perhaps not so odd when you consider the rejection of logic). A common tactic is to change the definitions of words to “subvert” the culture that uses them, or to deny that words have any meaning other than what the reader decides to give them (where the Frankfort School’s critical theory overlaps with literary critical theory).

The concepts of Critical Theory are very seductive to some; if you don’t like a particular aspect of society or believe that you have a superior vision of society, simply redefine the terms, attack what exists, describe a utopic vision of what you want, and stick to the script. Elements of this are strong in feminist theory, regional studies (especially post-colonial conceptualizations and studies of the Middle East), and the entire crop of new “disciplines” such as Women’s Studies, Gender Studies, etc. Indeed, it can be argued that these various “disciplines” were created out of whole cloth via Critical Theory specifically as a praxis of the subversion of culture/society.

Two threads that can be seen running through all these various fields of discourse are a commitment to Marxist theory and a disparagement of Western society, especially American society. Key members of the Frankfort School felt the Enlightenment itself was the key step toward fascism and only by rejecting reason and positivism can Man be free of the tyranny of, well, reason. Government, politics, mass culture, popular music, popular art, norms of speech, selection of words, literature, folktales – all are attacked, all are torn down, each is shown (through new definitions, the rejection of reason, or the imposition of meaning that the critic wishes the thing to have) to be a tool of fear, oppression, slavery, and death.

After 50 years Critical Theory suffuses academia; from [something] studies to sociology to literature to political science, Critical Theory holds sway. It is the cornerstone of people such as Noam Chomsky or Ward Churchill and the basis of feminist theory. The entirety of gender theory boils down to a redefinition of words (or the stripping of meaning from words) in an attempt to change society. Journalists and educators are trained in the halls of Critical Theory and yearn for acceptance by the ideologues (if they do not, in fact, hope to some day join them), motivating them to embrace Critical Theory in the classroom and in the media. Entertainers, so very desperate to appear erudite, clasp Critical Theorists to their bosom and hope that some of the sheen of the self-appointed intelligentsia clings to them like fairy dust.

In the end, the result of the constant attacks, redefinition of terms, and utopic visions of what could be if the nature of Man/the world were different, is that Western culture in general and America in particular is portrayed not as imperfect, or flawed, or even evil – but as the most evil, the worst ever nation/culture/society. All elements of American society must be remade/abolished to erase the stain of being successful and surviving when socialism has failed and died.

And thus we return to the new Superman movie. Of course the Hollywood writers refuse to have an American icon support the American way. After all, what is so great about life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, hard work, sacrifice, democracy, and the certainty that good is its own reward? While foreigners may be dying to come to America and live here, that doesn’t mean they want to hear something as offensive as the concept that America is worth living in, or that the ideals that it is built upon are worthy of respect or emulation.

In a few months the outrage over this most recent attack on America will fade, then become accepted, and then the attack will shift. In 20 more years another Superman movie will come out and they will drop the ‘justice’ (after all, how can an American icon speak of justice? Don’t you know that America is the most unjust nation ever?). And by the time another restart is made in about the year 2050 ‘truth’ will be dropped as an archaic notion, too (since you can’t be sure that anything is true. Well, other than Marxism, of course).


Thanks to the Miami Art Exchange

And hello to The Blorg

Civic Virtue, Civilization, and Society

There is a concept that I don’t hear much about anymore; civic virtue. Heck, virtue in general is seen as a quaint, obsolete idea. But these two closely linked but distinct ideas, virtue and civic virtue, are as critical today as ever.
The simple definition of "virtue" is ‘ a character trait that is inherently good’, so that developing and holding these traits is something that makes a person better than they would otherwise be. The Four Cardinal Virtues are Prudence, Temperance, Courage, and Justice. While I grew up hearing of these traits (for all his faults, my father is of the Greatest Generation, after all), they are so outrÈ today that many don’t know what they mean.
‘Prudence’ is not caution (although that is the usual modern meaning) or timidity – it means ‘sound judgment’, the ability to distinguish between acting with courage and acting recklessly, for example. Prudence is seen not as action, but the knowledge and wisdom that guides actions.
‘Temperance’ is usually seen as another word for ‘moderation’, but it is more. It really means ‘moderation through control of the self’. The ability to control oneself is a key element of acting virtuously. After all, a person with the prudence to know which actions are proper and which are immoral but without the self-control to avoid the immoral in favor of the good cannot act in a proper manner. Temperance is seen as guiding not just eating, drinking, and sex, but also the choice of words and courses of action.
‘Justice’ is the impartial treatment of all individuals, regardless of race, creed, or origin, and thereby according them what they actually deserve. This is not some blanket ‘everyone is OK’ PC tolerance concept. Justice encompasses punishment as well as reward, rejection as well as acceptance. A stranger is judged by his actions, not the color of his skin – but if his actions merit punishment, then the color of his skin is no shield against justice. This is also true of gender, religion; you name it.
The fourth cardinal virtue is Courage. ‘Courage’ means the trait of acting in a moral manner in the face of fear. Regardless of shame, pain, loss, or death, the courageous man acts properly.
These virtues are Cardinal because they are each necessary; without prudence, you cannot know when or how to act; without courage, you will not act when it is risky (and moral behavior is almost always risky); etc. In short, you either have them all, or you effectively have none of them.
The ancient Greeks, especially Socrates, identified these virtues and their central, critical role is moral life and it was soon assumed by his intellectual heirs to be proven that these virtues were key to living a proper, moral life. Thus, these virtues form the foundation of the concepts ‘good’ behavior.
This brings us to the Civic Virtues. Where the Cardinal Virtues are seen as the elements that make a person’s own life worthwhile, the Civic Virtues are the elements that make a person a good citizen and the building blocks of a good society. In other words, just as the Cardinal Virtues make you an objectively good person, Civic Virtues build an objectively good society.
There is some debate on exactly what is meant by ‘civic virtue’, with some arguing that it means simply to be involved in the community, or even to send our children to public school. In the end, however, the definition of ‘Civic Virtue’ boils down to the core concepts that each individual has a duty to society as a whole and that this duty is to act in a moral, selfless manner. In The Discourses, Machiavelli sets out to use history to prove that a classical republican government founded upon the concepts of liberty and civic virtue as co-dependent ideas is the most just form of government possible. Political leaders and philosophers from Hannah Arendt to Thomas Jefferson agree with Machiavelli both in regards to republican government and the concept that liberty is only achievable in conjunction with the classical view of civic virtue as ‘selflessly moral actions by citizens for the society’. Machiavelli’s conclusion that when citizens reject civic virtue in favor of self-interest the inevitable result is subjugation (either to a despotic ruler or a despotic foreign invader) is also widely accepted.
The fascinating thing about civic virtue is that it is a virtue of individuals, not the group; it is not about the government helping the people or forcing certain activities with laws, but about individuals placing the common good above their own narrow interests of their own free will. Especially in the initial conceptualization of America by the founders, government was seen as a tool to prevent citizens from being denied freedom, thus allowing citizens to act as they should. It was assumed that proper citizens (i.e., those practicing the Cardinal Virtues) would be driven by their very character to embrace Civic Virtue. An untrammeled version of this drove the Anti-Federalists to aim for a very limited government. A fear that some day the majority would discard the Cardinal Virtues drove the Federalists to do such things as insist on the Bill of Rights being added as amendments to the Constitution.
As the Anti-Federalists saw it, the benefits of living a virtuous life were so overwhelmingly positive and so readily apparent that there was little need to do more than make sure people knew what they were and were afforded an opportunity to see the results; the rest was inevitable. At first it seemed hard to argue with them; a life lived virtuously is one that leads to peaceful prosperity, after all. Prudent people married with as much attention to the future as to their impulses, thought issues and events through, and were courteous. Temperant people saved their money, invested carefully, and avoided excess. Just people were open-minded, but not to the point of being gullible. Courageous people did what needed doing. Combined, these traits were the character traits that formed the core of the American Dream [while Hollywood may tell you that the American Dream is to ‘get rich or die trying’, the real American dream is to live free beholden to no one]. Rich or poor, virtuous people live the best life they can, strive to better themselves, and also strive to help fellow citizens.
The Federalists were quick to point out that even in the face of evidence plenty of people weren’t virtuous. Furthermore, vicious people (people of virtue are virtuous; people of vice are vicious) were capable of taking advantage of the virtuous society around them to simultaneously ‘artificially’ improve their own life, avoid contributing to society, and make that same society worse. This threat, they argued, was serious enough to warrant safeguards.
In the end, I fear the Federalists were correct. More and more people "realized" that if they lived within a virtuous society and acted in a selfish manner, they could reap the benefits of both society as a whole and of the hard work of others without developing virtues of their own. This is attractive in the short term because being virtuous is hard work; you must live by the most onerous of all limitations – self-imposed limitations. Why deny yourself anything if most of the tab is going to be picked up by someone else?
Indeed, the ethos of the Baby Boomer generation is just that; discarded virtue. ‘Turn on, tune in, and drop out’ is a pretty thorough rejection of virtue, after all – ‘turn on’ is ‘forget temperance and indulge in whatever you want’; ‘tune in’ is ‘ignore prudence and do what’s popular; and ‘drop out’ is ‘justice and courage are for saps who enjoy hard work, man’. The problem is, so many people of that generation rejected personal and civic virtue that the remaining virtuous couldn’t maintain stability as it had been.
Thus we have the fruits of the embrace of vice. The horrifying escalation in violent crime of the ‘70’s, the siphoning of billions of dollars to murderous drug lords in the ‘80’s, the financial malfeasance of the ‘90’s, the devil-may-care explosion and collapse of businesses in the early ‘00’s. Police are the most visible personification of authority and order, so they were hated and reviled (and under-funded and demoralized) – resulting in robbery, rape, and murder. ‘I’m just getting high, man, I’m not hurting anyone’ led to murderous billionaire criminals that effectively control the governments and armies of a handful of nations. ‘greed is good’ led to junk bond fiascos and the dot.com bust as people focused not on building, but looting.
The personal toll is worse. Addiction, fatherless children, alcoholism are endemic, especially in the young (who are told that temperance is a bad thing). The phenomena of ‘helicopter parents’ is a symptom, showing how a broad section of people reject prudence and justice in favor of their own child getting special treatment. Even the sharp declines in fertility are symptomatic; our primary social responsibility, the social group we are to sacrifice for first and most, is our family. More and more people are refusing to have children, and most openly admit that it is because they are ‘too selfish’ to endure the hard work, expense, and emotional investment children demand. In the end, when these childless people are elderly, society as a whole will be forced to care for them when they can no longer care for themselves. Of course, if enough of their fellow travelers join them in having one or none, then there won’t be enough young people to pay for and care for them as they age. Their abandonment of family duties and rejection of the future will not be deferred until after they are dead, but only until they face death.
While many in the blogosphere and MSM speak of a ‘clash of civilizations’, I think this lack of virtue is more critical. Indeed, the rejection of virtue and civic duty is a clash f civilization itself with barbarism.
The Greek writers who coined the term ‘barbarian’ originally used it to refer to ‘someone who doesn’t speak Greek’. It was expanded, however, until it meant ‘cowardly hedonists unable to control their own appetites’. The rejection of reason and culture was assumed to be inescapable from these self-same traits. Interesting, isn’t it, that the same Greeks who formalized logic, prized reason, invented geometry, etc. dismissed those who ‘turn on, tune in, and drop out’ as being incapable of reason?
Today, the barbarians aren’t at the gates, they are in the university faculty lounge. From Hollywood to New York they fill printed pages, the airwaves, and theatres with glorification of a life without virtue while painting the virtuous as stupid, foolish, or actively evil. Attempts to teach virtuous behavior (abstinence education, for example) provoke howls from the tribes of hedonists who shriek that teaching temperance is fruitless, even evil.
So immorality and selfishness are described by the self-styled intellectuals of the West as good, while morality and selflessness are derided as traps for the foolish. Like the grasshopper and the ant, the barbarians mock those who built the city they are burning, not noticing how very close Winter has become. When the snows do arrive never doubt that the barbarians will insist, nay demand! that the builders put them up and feed them until Spring comes.

101st Fightin' Keyboardists

Please go say hello to Captain Ed at Captain's Quarters. He is where I learned of the 101st Finghtin' Keyboardists, a great new set of bloggers who are pro-military.

As a combat veteran, Conservative, and blogger, I have asked to join this illustrious company. Please join me is welcoming them all.

Sad Boy

I recently read an article by Nina Burleigh in Salon.com called “Country Boy”. While I was stunned by the content and tone while reading it, I am even more upset after I have had time to reflect on it. Please go read the article before continuing; the entirety of her work is important.

While the intro paragraph is simply expository, the contempt begins very quickly. Despite the evident beauty of the region (which she admits later) her description of the small American town of Narrowsurg is of a ‘depressed’ and ‘harsh’ realm, oh-so distant from the lost, ‘idyllic’ existence in Paris with its superior culture and social services.

Her contempt for the town and those in it never flags. She reveals that her friends were other ‘city folk’ – who were openly contemptuous of the institution of the town (without bothering to visit or investigating them, she admits). At one point she feels the need to pause and inform the readers that the ‘Narrows’ in Narrowsburg refers to the local river narrows, not the mindset of the residents. Despite he early references to the principal and other school staff being open and friendly, the narrative shows her and her husband as deeply suspicious of the local residents, constantly fearful of maliciousness and being ‘singled out’ – even though she has no examples of such behavior. Indeed, the bucolic atmosphere of the town and its people keeps seeping through her narrative despite her best efforts to justify her own paranoia.

Her over-reaction was based upon her perception of an incident she describes. The incident began simply; a flyer in her son’s backpack with an open invitation to a bible study, obviously described as not part of regular school. How did she and her husband react? With ‘panic’! They did not send a note back; they did not call and ask, or complain, or request a conference. No – they immediately called the ACLU! The ACLU assured them that such information being made available is, indeed, not felonious, but the ACLU did call to complain about the flyer perhaps looking official (well, it did cause two grown people to immediately seek legal help).

She seems upset that the principal who had to field the call, was forced to apologize for a harmless incident, and was as aware as the author that only one set of parents in town would be so reactionary, was ‘less warm’ to her and her husband thereafter.

Her revelations of their fear of religion and the religious actually gets worse. When she and her husband discovered that their son’s kindergarten teacher was actually devout (in a conservative church, yet) they were very careful not to express their own political and religious views. Why? They feared their son would be ‘singled out’ by the same woman she had earlier described as a ‘cheery’, ‘enthusiastic’ teacher with almost two decades of teaching experience. If the teacher had been a member of MoveOn, would Mrs. Burleigh have worried about the ability of conservative parents to speak freely without fear? Somehow, I doubt it.

She also betrays a distrust of the military and veterans; her and her husband were ‘uneasy’ that 25% of the town adults were veterans and that 10% of the local graduates had gone on to military service (and this after her discussion of the economic woes of the area). She mentions wanting to ‘protest’ the Pledge of Allegiance by sitting down as her son recited it in the mornings. The only favorable mention of a veteran comes from one who expressed his desire that no child experience war. She interpreted the following silence as an acknowledgement of rebuke by the townspeople.

I assume Mrs. Burleigh has never spent any time in a Legion hall or a VFW post. As a proud member of the VFW I can tell you this – every veteran shares this desire to spare all people from war. When it is expressed by a veteran, especially on Veterans Day and Memorial Day, the proper response is silence. The silence veterans all share when remembering the sacrifices made by the living and the dead, the horror of destruction, and the desire for peace. You don’t applaud the acknowledgement of death; you don’t cheer the memory of friends who died to save your life. Non-veterans with a sense of decency who hear these things are silent out of respect and the clear knowledge that the pains and sacrifices of American veterans were given up to provide those young men and women, those children, and the author herself her freedom from slavery, terror, and death. Her sheer inability to understand this silence is almost the most self-damning thing she writes in this piece.

I said ‘almost’ the most self-damning thing she writes. The most self-damning is the very heart of the text; her attitudes toward her own son.

Her son sounds like a cheerful, outgoing sort. Based upon his mother’s writing, it seems that being exposed to the influences of a ‘traditional’ school was quite good for the young man. He also seems to have absorbed the patriotism that is so very common in America. Well, if you avoid the largest cities and college towns, that is. He recites the Pledge of Allegiance with gusto, sings ‘the Star Spangled Banner’ and ‘America the Beautiful’, and comes to love his country.

This is a major problem for his parents. His mother views patriotism as “childish” and naïve, something to be shed sooner than a belief in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and far, far more fantastical than those two mythical beasts. She mentions how she and her husband are careful to explain all of America’s faults to their son. She wistfully wishes she could believe in a land where ‘good and brotherhood’ co-exist while making it clear that Narnia is much more real than an America where such things as that could be.

Her son now goes to school in Manhattan. He doesn’t say the Pledge anymore and doesn’t favor the flag’s colors as he once did. While the small, ‘conservative, traditional’ school taught him to read two grades above his placement in the “well rated” school he now attends, I doubt that he will continue to be challenged to the same level of performance. She admits what this metropolitan, certainly large, absolutely ‘liberal, modern’ school has already expanded his horizons” now he wants an xbox, knows how to curse, and knows what the word ‘sexy’ means.

Oddly enough, his new school doesn’t even seem to have a single American flag.

Update:
See also the Colossus of Rhodey
and Alarming News
Another Update:
Dr. Sanity
More Updating:
The Anchoress, Sadly, No!, Instapundit, Crush Liberalism, The Corner, Teahouse on the Tracks, NewsBusters, Clear and Present, The Urban Grind, Rebecca Hartong, and many others.
Yet More:
LeatherneckM31

The Peaceful Left

There was recently an article talking about the angry Left. There has been a lot of pushback from the Left blogosphere, but the blog featured in the WaPo article, My Left Wing, actually claims that they (although Maryscott runs it, it is a joint blog in some ways) are not angry, but wrathful; they claim that wrath, a ‘just’ emotion, motivates the Left while anger (seemingly an ‘unjust’ emotion) motivates the Right. The author of the piece draws parallels with the Grapes of Wrath and mentions that the anger of the Right led to the Know-Nothings, the Moral Majority, Huey Long, and other ‘repressive, jingoistic’ movements. The wrath of the Left, the author contends, led to Populist and Progressive movements and the protests against the Vietnam War (with the implication that these things are righteous).

The author explicitly admits that ‘out of context’ the vitriol of the Left (as exemplified by Maryscott), seen as anger, can be “jagged and shockingly hateful”. Well, I must agree that many see it that way. But, the author continues, when seen ‘in context’ it is a passionate force that ‘unites readers’ by having them share her wrath and this shared wrath creates a sense of ‘empowered community’. So, what context is it that transforms the expletive-laden foamed ranting of this self-described ‘insanely angry’ woman into an exercise in community building? What type of context could forge a reality where the Ann Coulters of the world seethe with the impotent rage of the powerless while Maryscott and fellow wrathful Leftists roar with the empowered rage of those abandoned by their government?

Why, nothing less than the “call-to-action of a people’s revolution”, of course.

Oh, that context.

Let’s be honest, here – this guy is actually a pretty good example of the typical Modern American Leftist. These sorts, seemingly immune to self-reflection, point to Ann Coulter and attempt to savage her as angry but look to Howard Dean as a man driven to anger by the injustices of this dusty Earth. Or the scores of leftwing bloggers who rant on and on about how much they hate ‘ignorant, mouth-breathing, close-minded, inbred, racist, xenophobic, theocratic, greedy, homophobic, wingnut, fundie rightwingers’ who are inherently evil because they are so… bigoted. That is why the author of this piece can sneer down his nose at Huey Long and the Moral Majority while holding up Populism, Progressivism, and the Vietnam Protests as paragons of ‘righteous action’.

Maryscott O’Connor, the boss of My Left Wing, describes herself as a “leftist Liberal Socialist commie” with obvious pride. The author refers to the ‘context’ of a ‘call-to-action of a people’s revolution’ transforming ‘shockingly hateful’ words and actions into a righteous cause – all part and parcel of the Communist agitators of 3-4 decades ago. It is all part of the whole; the Left in America still embraces Socialism and Communism very closely, often very publicly. The Nation calls for the Left to openly admit that they are, indeed, Socialists. In that article for the Nation the author, Ronald Aronson, argues that the Democrats lack a vision because they have abandoned Socialism (at least publicly) and he calls on them, much like the Daily Kos and many other leftwing bloggers, to move further to the Left and embrace Socialism proudly and publicly.

How many times must Socialism and Communism fail before the Left admits that they are failures? No Communist government has survived the 20th century with anything resembling actual Communism fully in place without massive pain. Communist China is a capitalist’s paradise, only lacking civil rights. Vietnam is quickly joining China as a “we’re run by dictators called Communists, but we want time and a half for overtime so little Suzy can get a new cell phone” style state. The Soviet Union slaughtered tens of millions of its own people with purges, pogroms, and purposeful starvation campaigns. The repressions of Communist dictatorships in South America were terrible. The repression in Cambodia under Communism were horrific. The concept of Communism permitting civil rights is a joke, let alone the sometimes-heard argument that Communist nations were “more free’.

Communism is primarily an economic system. The Soviet Union collapsed because of a total failure of its economy. Cuba went from being the envy of Latin America, a nation so wealthy that it had positive migration to Cuba from all over the world, to being one of the poorest nations on Earth. The only reason Cuba survived was the more than $100 billion dollars in aid poured in by the Soviet Union prior to its collapse. Since then Cuba has subsisted on aid, tourism, and similar means. The devastation of the Communist economic system looks like it will last two to three generations after Communism ends. Even Germany, which had half of its economy remain non-Communist, will take decades more to recover. Mentioned earlier, the only reason China and Vietnam are doing well economically is – they no longer have Communist economies. Venezuela’s quasi-Communist president’s attempts to create a Communist-style economy have already damaged the Venezuelan GDP (which is shrinking per capita), even with its large oil wealth.

So Communism is a complete failure as a economic system (its primary purpose) and all Communist nations have been marked with repression, terror, and injustice. Every. Single. One. It seems obvious that, in this day and age, Communists are one of three sorts of people: the first sort are totally ignorant of history. They don’t know about the routine repression, murder, torture, and other repressions of all past Communist regimes, nor the economic stagnation, mismanagement, and waste. This allows them to believe the propaganda that Communism will ‘make things better’. Most “four year Communists” (i.e., college students majoring in Peace and Justice Studies) are of this sort. The second sort of people want a world where the few people who are left are simple, largely-ignorant peasants who till the soil for subsistence and have no access to industry or technology. Surprisingly, there are a fair number of modern Communists like this.

The third sort are the ones that believe that they will be the apparatchiks, the Party Members, the movers and shakers. You know, the dictators. No scratching in the earth for wheat for them; no bone-crushing quota at the smelter to achieve the newest Five Year Plan in their Communist Utopias. No, sir, they will be giving speeches at the Party Congress, addressing the UN, and setting those Five Year Plan quotas! I personally believe that there are more of these types leading marches, writing columns, and updating their blogs than most suspect.

“But Deep,” you say, “That Aronson fella’ was talking about Socialism, not Communism.”

Six of one, half a dozen of the other, I say.

Way back when Marx was talking about such things originally, he envisioned an ‘intermediate stage’ between the chains of Capitalism and the liberation that would be the new era of the Communist Man. Marx and later theorist theorists termed this halfway house of the soul ‘Socialism’. Before that difference became effectively formalized by the Bolshevik Revolution, Socialism and Communism were completely interchangeable terms. After the foundation of the Soviet Union the Socialists of Europe began to drift away from what became Stalinist Communism. But Socialism retained the essentially Communist ideas of the exploitation of labor, the class struggle, and that the means of production need to be controlled and centrally planned.

In other words, Socialism is still Communism Lite. There is still great debate over how close to Communism Socialism is, should be, could be, ever was, etc. In the end, however, the European Socialist nations share certain characteristics – they accept as true the central arguments behind Communism (as I mentioned, the class struggle, the labor theory of value, the historical inevitability of the advance of Socialism, that all profit is theft, and the belief that at least the main elements of production need to be controlled by the state. Many toss in a distrust or hate of any personal property); they have a mixed economy (either because their nation is not fully Socialist and Capitalist elements resist the transition, or they have modified their view of Socialism to face reality); and they are all in decline.

Of course they are in decline; after all, many if not all of the core ideas they base their economic theories on are simply wrong. Its like trying to research genetics by studying DNA while thinking that Lamarck fellow certainly had it right. The two ideas are in conflict.

As I have written before, the economic decline of Europe may be irreversible. Their per capita GDP and median income are lower than in America, their tax base is shrinking rapidly, and they are facing the vastly increased cost of pensions and healthcare for a population of elderly that will increase 50% in the next 20 years. As the recent riots in France have proven, the Socialist elements of Europe will certainly continue to resist any attempts to change the status quo – effectively dooming themselves to a squalid future.

So while Communism promises poverty immediately, Socialism defers it for a generation or two down the road. I’m sure that you’ll agree with me that one is not really an improvement over the other.

But what about the examples the author uses? Populism, Progressivism, and the Vietnam Protests? These were surely noble!

Maybe. But I don’t think so. To begin, the first time I read the author praise Populism as “visionary” and then hold up Huey Long for contempt in the same sentence I burst into a long, loud laugh. After all, Huey Long was a Democrat and master populist whose tremendous local political power was based upon his plan to soak the rich, provide a minimum income to all people, and create a universal pension system fueled by a steeply progressive income tax. The man was a Socialist populist if their ever was one in this country. I suspect he is rejected by the modern Left for the crime of being a Southerner. While the most recent Populist Party in America was a vehicle for a former Klansman, the original was a far-left party of union members and poor farmers. Let’s just say that populism has had a checkered history that the author seems largely ignorant of and move on.

Progressivism is largely a synonym for Socialism, although many self-identified Progressives of my acquaintance seem to be more focused on social issues rather than economic theory. This doesn’t mean that they don’t support ideas like a living wage, steeply progressive taxes, universal health care, etc. It just means that they don’t understand economics. Progressives traditional oppose Capitalism and embrace Socialist ideas of labor, markets, and wages. This means, of course, that they are ignoring the reality of Europe, Asia, South America, and Africa that show that these economic concepts are flawed. As Socialism is Communism Lite, Progressivism is Socialism Lite. “All of the faulty premises, none of the history of failure!”

The protests against the war in Vietnam sometimes had a noble aim. While I always have (and always will) suspect that a great deal of the reluctance to fight by many of the protestors was born of fear of battle (or even just fear of the regimentation of army life), there were many who seemed willing to face prison for their opposition. So I give at least some of them the benefit of my own doubts. However, many involved were involved for selfish reasons, and some were involved out of (wait for it) Communist ideals.

The Vietnam Veterans Against the War were eventually found to be collaborating with North Vietnam to cause mass rebellion in the US Army and, eventually, to stage a POW release as political capital for VVAW. The VVAW also promoted the view that the legitimate government of Vietnam was the Communist party of the North. The protests led to the formation and activities of groups like the Symbionese Liberation Army (a Communist group dedicated to the violent overthrow not just of the American government, but American society as a whole), the Weather Underground (a similar group), and other groups (the Black Panthers, the White Panthers, etc.) were all avowedly Communist and most either embraced/advocated/performed violence or condoned it – if that violence was aimed at Capitalism. Indeed, the Yippies (Abbie Hoffman’s group) were anti-Capitalism first, anti-American culture second, anti-war third or fourth.

Again and again when we look at the Left we see Communist errors about the nature of people, society, and economics at the core of their beliefs. No matter how many times Communism is tried and failed, the Left returns to it. The more wounded and ineffectual Socialist governments become, the more the Left in America wants to emulate them. While Cuban refugees become millionaires in Miami, the Left claims that Cuba is a poor nation because America exploits them. While Venezuela’s GDP shrinks and the country morphs from a coffee exporter to a country where coffee is scarce, the American Left praises its quasi-Communist president for his sound economic ideas. At the same time that scholars are still struggling to quantify the perhaps 120 million dead as a result of Communism, the Left points to its ideals as the best way of life.

How is it possible for people who speak intelligently, can document an education, and claim to be motivated by compassion be so blind to the horrors that Communism has inflicted on the world? How is it possible that they watch the once-great material wealth and rich culture of Europe drain away like water poured onto sand and decide that they want to emulate them and their ideas?

The short answer is, one thing motivates their embrace of Communism/Socialism: fear.

Democracy is an inherently messy process. Sometimes the things that you support don’t rise to the top. Sometimes the things you want don’t get into the law. Sometimes the things you hate prevail. Leftists don’t like this. Thus we witness their push to use the courts to avoid the democratic process, or to reverse democratic decisions. Don’t like the actual will of the people (as expressed through their elected representatives)? Just use a sympathetic judge to force through the changes you want and claim the moral high ground as “the real majority” or “the voice of the people” or as representatives of the “historical inevitability of Progressive thought”.

Capitalism is also an inherently risky venture. Two people with equal backgrounds, equal education, equal money can start out at the same time with the same goals. Twenty years later, one could be the richest man in the world, the other could be an assistant manager at a Quickie Mart. Another twenty years and the first man could be slinging hash in a greasy spoon and the second could be buying a private island in the Pacific. Hard work and determination can take you far, but there are no guarantees; luck and uncertainty are always part of the equation (although they can be planned for). While some people embrace this as a chance to achieve, others are terrified of the potential to fail.

I’ve always suspected that this fear underlies at least some of the many young people born into the middle and middle-upper class who turn to Communism; they are terrified of both the possibility of failing and, perhaps even more, the spectre of being mediocre. After all, if success is largely a result of hard work and determination, who and what do you blame if you aren’t the richest man in the world? So they turn to a system that wants to make everyone the same – no losers. No winners, but no losers.

In the end, Communism and Socialism are just more utopian schemes. They both promise perfection on Earth if you just believe and follow the rituals, people will change into perfect people, society will be transformed into a perfect society, and hunger and want will vanish forever. Because of this vision of Heaven on Earth, it will probably continue to lure the immature, the frightened, the confused, and the ignorant for decades to come.

[For the record, this utopic vision is why the Catholic Church has always distrusted Communism and Socialism. Despite all of the rhetoric from the Left, the Church understands that the people and things of this world will never be perfect.]




(note: I am unsure of the author Nonpartisan’s gender and use male pronouns throughout. If I am wrong, too bad.)

Shame

I often drop by Coturnix/Bora’s site Science and Politics to look around. Bora is a one-note political commentator, and a bit shrill at times, but he has some of the best links around. Yesterday he linked to an article on Pharyngula, a blog dedicated to evolution and anti-Christian rants (more the former than the latter, but the emotional investment seems about equal). The specific article has very little, if anything, to offer anyone with even a cursory knowledge of Christianity (I’ll save the puzzle of why so many people who declaim that ‘religious nuts’ have no authority to speak about science without an advanced degree, but feel perfectly fine in discussing theology without even minimal study for another time). Reading it out of a sense of duty, to see if there was perhaps some insight I might miss, I came across this little gem;

“…our nation tortures to the death… … brown-skinned Middle Eastern people right now. How can we look at the Passion spectacles now and not feel a deep shame?”

There are so many errors and assumption in this one quote that I feel compelled to respond.

First of all, PZ Myers, the author, is so very quick to refer to Middle Easterners as “brown people” that I am stunned. I travel in diverse circles and I find that many more Liberals are willing to describe a population as “brown people” than Conservatives. From this author to George Carlin, the description of Semitic people as “brown” is all too common. Not only are Arabs of a variety of skin tones, just like, say, Caucasian Americans, but not all Middle Easterners are even Semitic. The Iranians, for example, are Aryan; in Tehran blue eyes and blonde hair are not uncommon. Most of the soldiers I know are aware of this; a great many of the conservatives I know are as shocked by the Liberal use of the term as I am, so I suspect they either know these things, or would simply never utter the phrase.

Second, PZ Myers is comparing current day Middle Easterners to Jesus, implying He was also a “brown person”. Well, I wasn’t there, so I don’t know. While I don’t think he was a blonde with blue eyes, modern genetic research indicates that Jews of the 1st Century almost certainly looked much like Jews of today – in other words, what modern minds would call “White”. While intermarriage has always occurred, the people of the Middle East are largely what you and I would call “White” and , essentially, always have been. Seriously, look at Tariq Azziz, or Ayatollah Khomeini – my black Irish father-in-law is much darker than either of them. So PZ Myers’ knowledge of the people of the Middle East seems a bit sparse.

Of course, he could have put it that way to imply that the American military had racist motives for going into Iraq, but that makes less sense. After all, the military is a very integrated group and, most critically, the military is told where to go – it doesn’t get to decide. Maybe he meant the administration had racist motives for sending the army? Well, one would hope that the Black Secretary of State, Black National Security Advisor, or one of the other minority members of the most diverse administration in history would have mentioned any racist overtones to policy, but maybe they are all race traitors. After all, so many Liberals seem to think that any minority that isn’t Liberal is automatically a traitor to their own people.

But Conservatives are the ones obsessed by race. Go figure.

Even more egregious is his statement that ‘our nation tortures people’. It does? When? Where? Who?

Let’s assume he is referring to Abu Ghraib. If so, he seems confused about the facts of that terrible incident. As is well documented, the abuse was by soldiers acting outside of the rules. The proof that such actions were not condoned is not just the many army regulations in dozens of manuals and training programs, but the prompt response of army investigators when they were approached by a witness. The military criminal investigation division promptly removed almost 20 enlisted and officers from duty and began an in-depth investigation. The evidence was not classified, but was instead largely made public. Two more investigations followed, with the report of one being briefly classified before being released.

The results were criminal charges against the soldiers where evidence could prove their criminal activities (six in total). The remainder were removed from duty, a serious blow to their careers (especially considering that there was too little evidence to go to courts-martial in those cases). Included in this was Brigadier General Janis Karpinsky, who was removed from command and demoted.

So it sounds to me like a group of soldiers violated orders, acted outside the law, were caught, investigated, charged, and found guilty. The people who allowed an environment where such things happened were removed from their positions and put places where they couldn’t be that lax again. These actions – investigation, trial, punishment – were conducted by my government and punished people who broke the law. So PZ Myers must not have been referring to Abu Ghraib.

Maybe he meant the Guantanamo Bay detainment camp? Well, I do have serious issues with the legality of how people held there are classified under the law – but despite the release of dozens of detainees, the only person injured thus far where the injuries could be proven is an American soldier. Despite many allegations, no one has been able to prove anything. And some of the accusations are, frankly, ludicrous. One prisoner claimed he was forced to walk on glass shards and then had his face ground into glass while cigarettes were put out on his body – without a mark left on him. Are the prisoners in a stressful situation? Certainly. Are they sometimes made uncomfortable? Absolutely. Are the conditions as extreme as a standard French prison? No, they are much better than the usual French prison. In other words, while the French decry the ‘terrible conditions’ of the prisoners at Gitmo, those self-same prisoners are in much better condition than check-forgers in Paris jails.

Maybe Prof. Myers is referring to the secret prisons America maintains in Europe? You know, the ones that no one can seem to find, that no one can report being held in, and with all the nations putatively involved denying it. Heck, even the EU commission says there weren’t any secret American prisons in Europe.

So – Middle Easterners aren’t “brown people”, they are just people. The U.S. has investigated and punished people who tortured prisoners and made the evidence and related proceedings public. Despite outrageous claims of secret prisons, none have been found. Despite the fact that virtually everyone in the world knows exactly where the Guantanamo facility is and each person leaving it is an instant media target, no one can prove anything concerning actual torture.

I may be mistaken, but I can’t Google anytime the Pharyngula blog has condemned beheadings, or terror. It seems innocent reporters, aid workers, etc. snatched off the streets, tortured with actual, you know, blood drawn, and then beheaded on camera is No Big Deal ™ compared to non-existent secret prisons, Gitmo prisoners forced to listen to the Go-Go’s and, of course, a half-dozen criminals rotting in American prisons for breaking American laws.

Christus Ressurexit!

Follow the Money

During my discussions of population implosion and the dangers that a shrinking workforce poses to economic stability, I sometimes get the response “Well, Europe has a better standard of living than America, so they must be doing something right!”. In similar veins, I am regaled with stories that we need a social services system like European Socialist nations (Sweden is usually mentioned, often as a ‘socialist paradise’) or that the American preference for Capitalism over Socialism is why so many Americans are poor.

As usual, my response was to dive into the numbers, look around, and see what is *really* going on.

Poverty in America exists; trust me, I grew up in a prime example of what poverty in America can look like. According to the U.S. government, 12% of Americans live below the poverty line, or about 1 in 8 people. That seems pretty serious.

France officially reports that 6.5% of its citizens live below the poverty line. It is probably no surprise that many Eastern European nations, all recovering from communism, report higher percentages of their citizens living in poverty. What may surprise you are the Western European nations that report the same thing. Britain reports that 17% of its citizens live in poverty, for example.

One important thing to remember, though, is that these numbers are all measurements of “relative poverty”, meaning each nation has its own definition of what “poverty” is. In poorer nations, the definition is lower than in rich nations. The generally accepted definition of ‘relative poverty’ in Europe is 60% of the median income, although sometimes it is 50% or even 40% of the median income.

The U.S. doesn’t do it this way. The American government calculates a national average cost to provide a minimum number of calories for an average adult and an average child and adds in a calculation of minimum cost of living expenses for housing, utilities, etc. in short, while the American definition of poverty is an attempt to determine how many people may have trouble paying for shelter or trying to eat enough, the European measure is a variable based on how much the ‘average’ person makes.

At first blush, this sounds even worse for America; after all, while European nations are trying to define who isn’t earning “enough”, America is trying to define who is actually hungry – and America’s numbers are supposedly higher. Sweden, for example, with its combination of taxes and welfare programs designed to eliminate poverty has a poverty rate of about 6.4%.

But when you start to compare things, however, they may not be so rosy. For example, while Sweden officially has no one living in relative poverty, this may be because the average Swede is simply much less affluent than the average American. The American per capita GDP is about $42,000 while the Swedish per capita GDP is about $30,000. These numbers are called Purchasing Power Parity numbers, or (in non-government terms) they have been adjusted for cost of living.

The median Swedish income is about $27,000 while the median American income is about $43,000, so Americans in general make almost 40% more (in actual purchasing power) than Swedes. As was pointed out recently by Swedish researchers, 40% of all Swedes would be counted as “low income” Americans based on what they can purchase with their income. Also, the tax ratio (or the comparison of total taxes compared to the GDP) in Sweden is an amazing 51.3%; America’s tax ratio is about 17.5%.

This means that, adjusted for cost of living, an average American earns $1.40 for every $1.00 earned by a Swede.

Now, some argue that Swede still “win” because Americans have to pay for health care, something provided for free by the Swedish government. Well, first of all the Swedish health coverage isn’t free (see those tax burden numbers back in that last paragraph?). Secondly, the average out-of-pocket health care costs of an average American totals about $3,850 a year. That leaves a purchasing power difference of 30%. Even if you add in student loan payments of about $50 a month (this is the average for all working Americans, reflecting that some have no debt and some have paid it off, and some expenses are related to public schools), this leaves a purchasing power difference of 20%. So even with the generous government benefits (which are, after all, paid for by taxes on earnings) Americans are better off by over 28%.

Some people have argues that since Swedish households are smaller than American households, the differences are moot, since more people depend in each wage-earner in America. I am being careful to use per capita numbers, not per household numbers.

Another counter argument is that Americans work many more hours than Swedes, an average of 158 more work hours a year, or about 2 more months of work. Since Swedes get much more time off, they have a “better standard of living”. Perhaps; this may be a cultural artifact. But let us adjust the incomes again to reflect either the lost Swedish income or the lost American leisure. The difference is (rounding up) 17%, leaving Americans with ‘only’ about 12% greater purchasing power than Swedes, on average.

So even after paying for health care and education and subtracting the ‘extra’ money earned by working more hours, Americans are financially better-off than Swedes to the tune of putting $1.12 in our pockets for each $1.00 earned by a Swedish worker after the differences is services and life style are removed.

So why am I focusing on Sweden? Well, Sweden is spoken of as the epitome of Socialist Europe, routinely being ranked as having the highest standard of living, best welfare programs, etc. So if the people of Sweden don’t have the purchasing power of Americans, then Europe as a whole is further behind.

The definition of poverty as “a percentage of the median income” is a lousy way to score things. For example, if a nation goes through an economic recession making everyone poorer, but a higher percentage of the top 5% of the income earners loos more ground, statistics will show there are less people living in poverty because the median income has gone down. Also, in a nation that is generally poor the official poverty line may be well below the minimum needed to actually survive. Be that as it may, the official poverty level of Europe is 17% and their unemployment of about 9% is almost double that of America.

The obvious truth, that America is much richer and getting even richer faster, has European leaders worried. You see, European nations have lower economic growth than America. There is some argument that this is an inevitable result of the aggressive taxation and wealth redistribution of the welfare state systems prevalent there. Regardless of the cause, the fact is that the American economy, already larger than the entire EU economy, is growing about three times faster than the EU economy. Add in the fact that the EU has a total population almost 60% larger than the U.S., and that means that the per capita GDP of Europe will continue to slide compared to America. Indeed, the OECD predicts that in 2025 the average American will have twice the purchasing power of the average European. Even after all the adjustments for social services and differences in working hours, that means the average American will have a net purchasing power advantage of about 25%.

Of course, that assumes those social services will still exist in 20 years; they may not. Although Americans are very concerned with the size of the American national debt, as a percentage of GDP, it is rather bland. At a national debt of about 65% of GDP, America has a better debt ratio than Germany, France, Belgium, Italy, or Greece. The need to pay interest on this debt coupled with slower growth mean that the debt itself will almost certainly continue to grow, and rapidly. With the retirement-age population of Europe scheduled to increase 50% over the next 20 years or so, the costs of social services will skyrocket; after all, in addition to pensions, the elderly need a lot more healthcare. During that same period, however, the population within working age will go down no less than 7%, perhaps as much as 15%. So as the costs of social services climb steeply, the tax base will be shrinking; combined with slow economic growth and mounting national debt, it is doubtful that Europe will be able to continue to provide social services at the same rate.

In fact, the changes have begun. Faced with a crippling recession in the 1990’s, Sweden reformed their tax plans and social security systems somewhat, resulting in new growth and lower inflation. In a similar way, Margaret Thatcher’s reforms of the ‘80s and ‘90s resulted in an economic revival in England that continues to this day. Time and again it has been shown that a change away from a Socialist welfare state to a Capitalist market state results in economic growth that benefits everyone.

But it is unlikely that reforms will be comprehensive enough or soon enough to avoid catastrophe. For a number of reasons, ranging from the power of labor unions to the sheer inertia of a voting public that has assumed that these services would always be there, Europeans have been resisting social security reforms all over Europe.

One interesting change in the typically protectionist attitudes of Europe is immigration. While still considering clamping down even further on immigration from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, many nations have loosened or are considering relaxing immigration from Eastern Europe.

Eastern Europe is poorer than Western Europe; the relaxation of labor laws and immigration laws will almost inevitably result in a westward migration within Europe. This will accelerate the woes of Eastern European nations without providing enough help to the West. A rolling economic crisis will erode social services and economic ability from east to west until the nations of Europe either abandon Socialism or vanish.

As for the human changes, please see my article Proud Vanguard of the Resurgent Patriarchy.

Proud Vanguard of the Resurgent Patriarchy

I am a very traditional Catholic with four children being homeschooled by my stay-at-home wife, who is almost certainly more conservative and traditional than I am. Thus the title of this piece. Continuing my series of articles about demographics, I have another prediction about the future.

Modern progressive liberals are doomed. No, I mean that literally; modern progressive liberals are as doomed as the passenger pigeon, the dodo bird, or the Tasmanian wolf, with a key difference.

They are exterminating themselves.

I have been talking about what I believe to be a crisis in demographics for some time now. I was talking about the benefits of Patriarchy even earlier. As I pointed out in these earlier posts, I think the decline in fertility and the decline of Patriarchy are connected. Well, it turns out I am in good company.

The collapse of births in Europe is still accelerating with 17 European nations burying more people per year than are born (called ‘more coffins than cradles’). Russia alone lost 1.5 million people in a five year span, while maintaining an average of about 2 million abortions per year; thus Russia’s chillingly low TFR of 1.23. The overall European TFR is only about 1.5. In 1985 the overall global TFR was about 4.2. By 1995 the global TFR had dropped to 2.9. Today the global TFR is estimated to be 2.6 (and this may be high). This means that in a single generation (well, 30 years) the average family size for the entire earth dropped from a bit more than 4 children to well less than three children. If a similar transition occurs in another generation, by 2040 the global TFR could hit 1.0. Globally, 40% of the world’s nations are below replacement fertility rates.

When the overall European TFR fell below replacement all that was needed to stabilize the population was a return to a replacement TFR of about 2.15. But that was too long ago. A large proportion of the European population is older and now the number of women of child-bearing age is smaller. Combined with the acceleration in mortality as the elderly population dies off, this means that the TFR needed just to keep the European population where it is right now is 4.0. Based upon population and lifestyle trends, this is very unlikely to happen. As time goes on, the replacement TFR will get higher until, if current trends continue, the European TFR will be about 6.0 perhaps as soon as 2025.

As the population collapses, so will the European economy. An national economy requires workers. The fact that nations provide benefits to non-workers (mainly children and the retired) means that the non-workers need the products of a certain number of active workers for their own support; this is called the ‘dependency ratio’. In 2000 the average European support ratio was 4:1, or about 4 workers for every retiree. In 2050 it will be about 1.5:1. Since Europeans are having so few children, this means the majority of the dependency will be generated by the rapidly growing population of retirees. This is completely unsustainable.

The results of this reduction in the dependency ratio will be less and less money for European social programs such as pensions, universal health care, and education as well as basic spending such as defense and infrastructure. Europenas will be forced to reduce costs and even scrap entire programs. There is some argument that the current growing acceptance of euthanasia in Europe is based on a realization that Europeans may soon no longer be able to afford the elderly. In other words, the failure of the present generation to have children may mean that future generations will euthanize them as ‘too expensive’. Scary thought.

America is a relative ‘bright spot’. With a TFR of about 2.08 and strong immigration (only counting the legal kind) America has an annual population growth rate of about 0.9%, meaning that births in excess of deaths combined with legal immigration add about 800,000 Americans per year at this time. Already the third most populous nation on earth, the U.S. could grow to over 400 million people by 2050.

But fertility rates are not homogeneous; they vary within a population, sometimes greatly. In America, for example, Hispanic women have the highest TFR at about 3 with White women at about 1.85. And the fertility rate of White Americans increased from a mid-‘70’s low of about 1.2. It should be no surprise to learn that religious families have more children than secular families. But the contrasts go deeper; traditional Catholics have more children than even evangelical Protestants. The highest fertility rates in America are among Hasidic Jews, Hutterites, the Amish, Mennonites, and “Latin Mass” Catholics where they approach 4.6!

Urbanization is seen as a major cause of reductions in fertility, but urbanization does not seem to affect Hasidim or traditional Catholics; the majority of both groups are urban-dwellers, yet they have the same high TFRs as the almost exclusively rural Hutterites, Amish, and Mennonites. Although this might imply that rural Hasidim and traditional Catholics might have TFRs approaching 6.0.

Another element that reduces fertility may be a surprise: public schooling. Demographer John Caldwell noted that the spread of government-mandated public schooling was accompanied by a decrease in fertility. In some cases, this could be tracked county by county. His research shows that each additional month added to the public school year reduces the TFR of children who attend by .23. As one reviewr put it, Caldwell demonstrates that public schools “eat children”.

It should be no surprise that homeschoolers have higher fertility, regardless of their level of religious belief or particular creed. A survey of homseschoolers found striking differences; 62% of American homeschoolers have 3 children as opposed to less than 11% in the general population. And the real difference is in large families; in the general population only 5% of American families have four or more children, while 33.5% of homeschoolers have four or more children. This means that in a nation where the average number of children in 2, over 95% of homeschoolers have 3 or more kids. That is a radical difference, and if Caldwell is right the children raised by homeschoolers will be more fertile than their parents.

To extrapolate a little (i.e., guess), this could indicate that ‘Latin Mass’ Catholic homeschoolers may have a TFR of about 6.o right now. Since I am, effectively, a ‘Latin Mass’ homeschooler who knows a lot of fellow ‘Latin Mass’ homeschoolers, my guess is based on experience.

But where is this taking us? Well, we can assume that global TFRs will continue to decline. Also, we can assume secular urban liberal families that attended public school will continue to have the lowest and most sharply declining TFRs. It is estimated that the “basement”, or lowest possible, TFR is .72, which means that about 70 percent of women have one child while about 30 percent are permanently childless. While this may sound absurdly low, TFRs of .77 have been seen in eastern Germany and a province of Italy. The TFR of Hong Kong is only .89. I believe that TFRs below 1.5 will be seen in the large cities of the American east and west coasts (“blue states” have lower fertility than “red states”) and San Francisco may dip below 1.0. Europe may well free-fall into TFRs below .90

While this occurs the religious communities of the West will increase their TFRs, mainly because of an increase in per capita GDP associated with the initial stages of population decline. Combined with the increased fertility of adults who were homeschooled, the result will be a surge in religious conservatives throughout the West, especially in America. They will largely embrace tradition concepts of family, work, and government and will likely be more conservative than their parents. The population implosion will cause large economic disruptions, movements of people, and changes in government. But the largest effect will probably be a continued increase in TFRs as more and more people realize that children are inherently valuable.

I am far from alone in making these predictions. Phillip Longman wrote an article about these very ideas called “The Return of the Patriarchy” where he argues that the ‘birth dearth’ will shatter liberal welfare systems, eliminate Liberals through sheer childlessness, and result in a return to traditional concepts such as the nuclear family, rejection of illegitimacy, the father as head of the family, and large families as a symbol of success. In other words, the resurgence of Patriarchy. This idea is supported by other facts, such as the best predictor of whether a county voted for Bush or Kerry in 2004 was the TFR of Whites in that county and the overall higher TFR of red states over blue states.

While some protest that Longman and his fellow demographers, social scientists, and pundits are wrong, the evidence seems to refute them. The radical liberalism of the Baby Boomers was based on mass actions of a large number of liberal youth. In the next generations, those liberal youth will have never been born. The staunch feminists of the Second Wave and the Radical movement aren’t having enough children to even replace themselves, let alone grow. These protestors also miss a key point; Longman is a progressive, not a conservative. He views his predictions with dread, but feels compelled to reach the conclusions he does. In fact, many of the scientist predicting a population crash followed by a resurgence of traditionalist religious types share Longman’s dislike of their own results, but find they can reach no others.

Death and the Maidens

As I have discussed previously, modern demographic predictions are of eventual under-population, not over-population, and each few years the experts must revise their estimates on population growth downwards. One of the causes of this continual downward adjustment may be quite simple.

Technology.

Specifically, sonograms. You see, up until the 1970s determination of a child’s gender before birth was difficult, expensive, time-consuming, and oft-inaccurate. With sonograms, however, it became something possible in a few minutes and, eventually, for a few dollars. Nowadays unltrasound machines fit easily in vans, allowing them to drive around and check on the health (and gender) of the unborn anywhere roads can go.

The result has been the purposeful aborting of tens of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions, of unborn children simply because they are female.

In India brides are expected to pay a dowry for the privilege of marrying. Indeed, a young bride being murdered by her husband and his family for not bringing in a large-enough dowry is common enough that it is a specific crime in India. This economic pressure, combined with the cultural and religious preferences for male children found in India, have resulted in deeply skewed sex ratios; in urban centers in the Punjab, girls make up as little as 33% of the population, depending on the specific generation.

China is similar, with ratios potentially as skewed (although it is harder to get reliable data from the Chinese interior). Although there is no dowry culture in China, the tyrannical one-child policy has resulted in at least as much pressure of female births there. The ‘official’ country-wide number shows that 44% of Chinese are women. Other estimates are that on the age range of 8-years old to 21 years old there are at least 20 million more men than women.

South Korea faces slightly less ominous numbers, with an estimated 45% girls under the age of 17. Young females are serious under-represented (less than 46% of births) in India, China, South Korea, Taiwan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bangladesh, and Nepal – as well as other nations.

While the numbers from India and China seem to reflect the effects of both sex-selective abortion and infanticide, the fact remains that some purposeful deaths of girl children may be masked from initial statistical review. In other words – the numbers may very well be worse than they look. Since the cultures that indulge in sex-selective abortion and infanticide place a lower value on the life of girls than of boys, the long-term health and survival statistics on girls are obviously lower, as well. Bluntly, girls don’t get the same access to health care, emergency treatment, and education that boys do. Already fewer by birth, by the time they are of marriageable age, their numbers will have shrunk.

What are the effects? Well, it doesn’t seem to be an increase in choices or freedom for women. In India women are already being ‘purchased’ as brides (or more precisely, as sexual partners/mothers); oddly enough, local brides are still expected to pay a dowry. Since the sex ratio is most imbalanced in wealthier Indian communities, and ‘importing’ a bride is expensive, the contradictory effect is to maintain the demands on local women of providing a dowry while money is sent out of the community for outside brides.

China seems to be a bit more chilling. Human trafficking is on the increase in China with over 42,000 women rescued from kidnappers in a single three-year period; but the problem is much, much larger than that. China’s imbalance of genders seems to have made it the largest market for internal human slavery. While many families, especially in rural areas, simply advertise for a bride for their sons, there is a growing market for kidnapped women who are delivered for a fee. They are then raped and forced into the family.

Similar tales seem to be beginning in other places with an unnaturally high male to female ratio, such as Kyrgyzstan where it has the added ‘respectability’ of being an ancient custom.

Perhaps the strangest of all the effects of the artificial skewing of sex ratios is the response of feminists. Now remember; feminists see abortion as an absolute right; any attempt to limit free access to abortion, or to convince women abortion is wrong or immoral is evil, they claim, and even the motivations for pursuing an abortion are protected as part of the right to privacy and the needs/rights of the mother to have an abortion outweigh any rights of the fetus.

Well, unless you know the fetus is female, that is.

India, China and other nations have laws making it illegal to abort a fetus based on its gender. Actually, the laws are applied in such a way to make it illegal to abort a fetus if you know that it is female. In these nations it is illegal to get an ultrasound that tells you the gender of the child to prevent you from making sex-based abortion decisions – in other words, women are denied access to all of the facts about their pregnancy to limit their abortion options.

Are feminists outraged by this abridgement? Nope, they applaud it and want stronger laws limiting abortions. More to the point, the very few feminists who speak of it are generally supportive of these laws restricting abortion access. But the majority of feminists; including NOW, Planned Parenthood, and NARAL; simply say nothing.

This is an oddly-transparent contradiction in the feminist support of abortion. We are told women must be unhindered by laws restricting abortions; that doctors, even husbands cannot really participate in or understand the decision being made; indeed, the bumper sticker buzz phrase of the pro-abortion movement is “keep your laws off my body” – yet these laws restricting access to the full data needed to make a choice about abortion are met with the deafening silence of the major pro-choice/feminist groups.

There is a simple solution – these groups recognize the inherent contradiction of their pro-abortion stance and the need for laws limiting it. Regardless of your framing, your vocabulary, or your meme choice, the facts on the ground tell us one thing: all over the world, women are using abortion to eliminate their own daughters. From India, China, South Korea, South Africa, and other ‘developing countries’ the ‘right to choose’ is being exercised to choose boy children over girl children. Why aren’t feminists crying out against this?

My theory is they will never utter a phrase that might paint abortion as something other than an absolute right, one that cannot be restricted in any way. They are horrified at the results of sex-selection in India and China, and understand the need for the laws restricting sex-selection there – but remain silent to protect their own overriding interests.

There is some evidence that Western European mothers have a slight preference for girls over boys. I assume that this would never be a topic of concern for feminists, even if it were to become as extreme as the gender imbalance in modern India.

Altogether, though, this may help to explain why demographers needs to adjust their population estimates downward so often. For years the girl deficit was largely hidden, and even now it is largely underestimated. As a result, the Total Fertility Rate estimates are accurate – it just that there are too few women available to have children anyway.

More on this topic at Protein Wisdom. Great minds think alike, I hope.

Some are More Equal than Others

There is a lot of hoopla over the Danish cartoons blasting Mohammed. I’ve even written a bit about it myself. But what I find fascinating is the reaction to be had from some in this country. America prides itself on being a bastion of freedom, and few champion free speech like progressives. Yet they seem to have two standards of speech and when it should be “free”.

Some say there is no difference between the Muslim rioters and Christians who protest against anti-Christian cartoons or other works. Some on the Left draw parallels, saying that outrage over Michael Moore speaking at a particular venue and the threats against him are equivalent to (and, by implication, the cause of) rioting, destruction, and actual murder throughout the Muslim world. This moral equivalency is a mask for the essential differences in the two stories. A few individuals in Utah threatened to do something, and were roundly criticized by their own people. A few million individuals all over the Muslim world are burning buildings and committing murder while being encouraged by some of their leaders. These are key, elemental differences.

The depiction of Jesus in horrible, mocking terms is common around the world, as is the terrible defamation of the Virgin Mary, Saints, and Christians in general. Protests against these vicious attacks, however, usually result in the Left claiming the right to freedom of expression, especially if it is offensive and accusing the protestors of hating freedom, or of being fascists. But the response to the Danish cartoons of Mohammed and, more critically, how the Left and various governments have responded, clearly indicate that some people are “more equal” than others, that certain religions are to be protected, others to be mocked.

The U.S. State Department issued a release indicating that the press should self-censor over these images. I am unaware of any similar statement being issued about the plethora of anti-Christian and anti-Judaic images published all over the world. Democratic politicians and pundits have spoken out against the cartoons Muslims find offensive, but take a position of silence or support for anti-Christian works.

There are clear indications that Muslims, at least some of them, want to limit freedom of speech, yet Christians that complain (without the rioting and murder, mind you) are labeled ‘fascists’ by the Left.

The biggest indicator of the difference in levels of respect comes from the media. In Nigeria Muslim rioters slaughtered Christians; when Christians fought back in kind the AP reported on “anti-Muslim riots”, barely mentioning that the violence began as anti-Christian riots by Muslims angry over cartoons in a distant country. Yet when covering the original riots (when Muslims burned churches and killed Christians), the AP did not refer to ‘anti-Christian riots’, but instead called the destruction of churches and murder of Christians a “protest”.

The New York Times refused to print the cartoons that upset Muslims, citing ‘sensitivity to religion’; they also printed articles blasting the cartoons. In the past, however, they compared Christians outraged at anti-Christian imagery (which they printed) to Nazis and recently printed a picture known to be offensive to Christians to make their point about how offensive the Danish cartoons are! If the refusal to show pictures offensive to Muslims is demonstrative of a sensitivity to Islam, is this proof they are insensitive to Christianity? Other media outlets, including CNN (who will routinely show images offensive to Christians), NBC, home to a wide range of anti-Christian shows and news, refused to display the cartoons for fear of offending Muslims.

Some college newspapers have published the cartoons, others have not. Some have said the violence is somewhat justified. None have taken a stand against anti-Christian cartoons/art/articles, nor have they discussed the ramifications in as much depth. Some of the college editors were fired, but I am unaware of any ever fired for an anti-Christian stance.

Throughout the media and the blogosphere, leftists are tying themselves into knots trying to show that the violence is justified or that all religions are equally to blame. NPR ran a piece that called for censorship of images offensive to Muslims.


There are some arguments that the refusal to display the Danish cartoons is out of pure fear, and there is some evidence that this is true. Despite their numbers in the West, Christians tend not to riot and murder, Muslims do. But in reality, it is larger than that. the real failure here is the failure of the Liberal concept of Identity Politics. A variety of writers point to identity politics as a sort of ‘colonial legacy’, a patronizing concept that Islam cannot stand or fall on its own, but needs protection because it is not ‘progressive’ enough. This condescending attitude toward Islamic ideas while Muslims come to the West has ironically formed and fueled the rise of militant Islam.

One of the core ideas of Identity Politics is that the groups identified must be marginal, oppressed, or both. So the self-identified groups are consigned to an eternal adolescence, never quite big enough or powerful enough to choose for themselves or speak on equal footing. The egotistical patronizing is stunning when looked at this way: women can *never* have parity, Muslims will *always* be ‘outside’, minorities will *forever* be oppressed – and, in addition, without the action of enlightened members of the majority, they wouldn’t even have a ‘voice’.

What are we to do? Reject the language of Identity Politics. There are over 1 billion Muslims and a number of nations ruled by Islamic law (Sharia) – they don’t need coddling. Incitement to riot is no excuse to riot – stop apologizing for how others are committing murder. Use legitimate, nn-violent forms of protest if you are offended, and speak out in return.

Pretty simple, really.