I have heard many times that gay marriage is simply about two peoples right to express their love for each other. Here are a few things that make me ask, really?
In 2006 a Christian photographer was sued for refusing to take pictures at a same sex wedding:
http://www.thealaskastandard.com/?q=content/christian-photographer-sued-same-sex-couple
In 2005 the on-line dating service e-harmony was sued because it did not cater to same-sex couples.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,454904,00.html
The Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association is sued for use of a pavilion.
Yeshiva University was ordered to allow same-sex couples in its married dormitory.
A Christian school has been sued for expelling two allegedly lesbian students.
Catholic Charities abandoned its adoption service in Massachusetts after it was told to place children with same-sex couples.
The same happened with a private company operating in California.
A psychologist in Mississippi who refused to counsel a lesbian couple lost her case
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=91486340
If same-sex marriage is simply about their expressions of love, why are they suing private and religious groups that do not wish to participate in their unions? There is always the possibility that these are cases of extremist couples in the gay community and they do not represent the whole gay community. If this is the case, let the moderates in the gay community stand up and say that we also have a right to live our lives the way we feel is right.
Sunday, October 17, 2010
Saturday, October 16, 2010
The liberal/progressive strength: Why the socialists are winning the conflict.
“Meet me on the battlefield of ideas”
This quote, attributed to the great George Washington, is the reason the liberal progressives are winning the struggle for our country. They have retained the fact that socialism is an ideal, a philosophy, and it is spread from person to person and they have never missed a chance to spread this ideal to any and all that would listen.
It is easy to see that constitutional Americans have forgotten that they are fighting a battle of ideas; because, we have allowed the battlefield to be completely taken by the opposing side. While we have focused our efforts on political action, the other side has focused their efforts on saturating the education system and the television and movie industries with their ideals. The true battlefields of idea in our country are the institutions that educate the young and the industries that bombard our citizens with ideas twenty-four hours a day.
If we are ever going to win this conflict we have to get back into the battle of education and ideas. We have to start taking every opportunity to teach anyone that will listen the philosophies of self-government, free market capitalism and what a social contract system is, ideals almost no one can explain anymore. If we get back into the fray in these fields, the political field will work itself out.
This quote, attributed to the great George Washington, is the reason the liberal progressives are winning the struggle for our country. They have retained the fact that socialism is an ideal, a philosophy, and it is spread from person to person and they have never missed a chance to spread this ideal to any and all that would listen.
It is easy to see that constitutional Americans have forgotten that they are fighting a battle of ideas; because, we have allowed the battlefield to be completely taken by the opposing side. While we have focused our efforts on political action, the other side has focused their efforts on saturating the education system and the television and movie industries with their ideals. The true battlefields of idea in our country are the institutions that educate the young and the industries that bombard our citizens with ideas twenty-four hours a day.
If we are ever going to win this conflict we have to get back into the battle of education and ideas. We have to start taking every opportunity to teach anyone that will listen the philosophies of self-government, free market capitalism and what a social contract system is, ideals almost no one can explain anymore. If we get back into the fray in these fields, the political field will work itself out.
Monday, October 11, 2010
Masters of Deceit
I am going to try and do a book review every couple of months or so, we will see how it goes. My first book was written by J Edgar Hoover, a man that I believe is one of America's great unsung hero's.
Masters of Deceit was written to expose the communist threat to America in the 1950's, but it has an even greater relevance today. This book stands as a witness that the efforts of the left today have a very long history that has not varied from the time our grandparents fought against it. We are facing very dangerous times, against very patient and committed foes.
Here are a few quotes that I found very interesting and relevant to our day.
Page 247
The communist party has stated: "The negro race must understand that capitalism means racial oppression and communism means social and racial equality."
The left has not changed this message, only some of the words in it.
Page 259
On January 23, 1918, the soviets issued a sweeping decree"on the separation of the church from the state, and of the school from the church."
Ever wonder about the origins of the often repeated mantra of separation of church and state.
Page 507
Lenin was more pointed "As long as capitalism and socialism exist, we cannot live in peace; in the end one or the other will triumph."
He is right, they cannot both exist in the same place, it is one or the other.
Masters of Deceit was written to expose the communist threat to America in the 1950's, but it has an even greater relevance today. This book stands as a witness that the efforts of the left today have a very long history that has not varied from the time our grandparents fought against it. We are facing very dangerous times, against very patient and committed foes.
Here are a few quotes that I found very interesting and relevant to our day.
Page 247
The communist party has stated: "The negro race must understand that capitalism means racial oppression and communism means social and racial equality."
The left has not changed this message, only some of the words in it.
Page 259
On January 23, 1918, the soviets issued a sweeping decree"on the separation of the church from the state, and of the school from the church."
Ever wonder about the origins of the often repeated mantra of separation of church and state.
Page 507
Lenin was more pointed "As long as capitalism and socialism exist, we cannot live in peace; in the end one or the other will triumph."
He is right, they cannot both exist in the same place, it is one or the other.
Saturday, March 28, 2009
Welcome
The Lincoln Club is meant to be a place where we can gather to discuss theological and social-political ideas. With the intent to educate ourselves on good principles and in turn use that knowledge to teach our fellowman.
Why "The Lincoln Club"? This whole idea started from a frustration with the current president trying to liken himself unto President Abraham Lincoln. Perhaps there are some superficial similarities however the surface is where they end. Addressing this became very aggressive and contentious. Trying to avoid that contention spawned the idea of focusing on one mans correct principles as opposed to highlighting another mans weaknesses.
The idea has since grown to any good principle worthy of our study not simply those Lincoln himself possessed.
Using the blog forum allows all who wish to participate to do so at their leisure. Life is often too busy to add one more meeting or group affiliation. This allows us participate whenever we find the time. It gives the freedom to log on at anytime and view what has been written.
There will be multiple ideas being discussed simultaneously the first being a book of the month, which will function much like a book club. The others will simply be topics picked up by contributing authors to this blog. All discussions will be labeled allowing a reader to only focus on posts pertaining to the specific subject chosen.
With your invitation is the opportunity to become a contributing author. This allows you to post in response to any topic being discussed or even begin one you may wish.
Please feel free to post ideas with supporting arguments using quotations and sources allowing for documented argument.
Along with your arguments being posted remember that this forum is intended to strengthen our ideas and understanding. We welcome opposing thoughts or objections to help locate a weakness in our logic. Note that these are not attacks on you or your understanding it is simply to strengthen the discussion. I would also add that to many of those invited to this forum the words of the scriptures and the prophets are definitive.
Again welcome and enjoy the feast.
I am your host
Why "The Lincoln Club"? This whole idea started from a frustration with the current president trying to liken himself unto President Abraham Lincoln. Perhaps there are some superficial similarities however the surface is where they end. Addressing this became very aggressive and contentious. Trying to avoid that contention spawned the idea of focusing on one mans correct principles as opposed to highlighting another mans weaknesses.
The idea has since grown to any good principle worthy of our study not simply those Lincoln himself possessed.
Using the blog forum allows all who wish to participate to do so at their leisure. Life is often too busy to add one more meeting or group affiliation. This allows us participate whenever we find the time. It gives the freedom to log on at anytime and view what has been written.
There will be multiple ideas being discussed simultaneously the first being a book of the month, which will function much like a book club. The others will simply be topics picked up by contributing authors to this blog. All discussions will be labeled allowing a reader to only focus on posts pertaining to the specific subject chosen.
With your invitation is the opportunity to become a contributing author. This allows you to post in response to any topic being discussed or even begin one you may wish.
Please feel free to post ideas with supporting arguments using quotations and sources allowing for documented argument.
Along with your arguments being posted remember that this forum is intended to strengthen our ideas and understanding. We welcome opposing thoughts or objections to help locate a weakness in our logic. Note that these are not attacks on you or your understanding it is simply to strengthen the discussion. I would also add that to many of those invited to this forum the words of the scriptures and the prophets are definitive.
Again welcome and enjoy the feast.
I am your host
Friday, March 27, 2009
Everyone needs to read this!
I got the assignment to read this article in my philosophy class, I believe that every person in the civilized world needs to read it on a regular basis. This article shows the affect that our personal, social and political choices have on other people.
The Frivolity of Evil
Theodore Dalrymple
When prisoners are released from prison, they often say that they have paid their debt to society. This is absurd, of course: crime is not a matter of double-entry bookkeeping. You cannot pay a debt by having caused even greater expense, nor can you pay in advance for a bank robbery by offering to serve a prison sentence before you commit it. Perhaps, metaphorically speaking, the slate is wiped clean once a prisoner is released from prison, but the debt is not paid off.
It would be just as absurd for me to say, on my imminent retirement after 14 years of my hospital and prison work, that I have paid my debt to society. I had the choice to do something more pleasing if I had wished, and I was paid, if not munificently, at least adequately. I chose the disagreeable neighborhood in which I practiced because, medically speaking, the poor are more interesting, at least to me, than the rich: their pathology is more florid, their need for attention greater. Their dilemmas, if cruder, seem to me more compelling, nearer to the fundamentals of human existence. No doubt I also felt my services would be more valuable there: in other words, that I had some kind of duty to perform. Perhaps for that reason, like the prisoner on his release, I feel I have paid my debt to society. Certainly, the work has taken a toll on me, and it is time to do something else. Someone else can do battle with the metastasizing social pathology of Great Britain, while I lead a life aesthetically more pleasing to me.
My work has caused me to become perhaps unhealthily preoccupied with the problem of evil. Why do people commit evil? What conditions allow it to flourish? How is it best prevented and, when necessary, suppressed? Each time I listen to a patient recounting the cruelty to which he or she has been subjected, or has committed (and I have listened to several such patients every day for 14 years), these questions revolve endlessly in my mind.
No doubt my previous experiences fostered my preoccupation with this problem. My mother was a refugee from Nazi Germany, and though she spoke very little of her life before she came to Britain, the mere fact that there was much of which she did not speak gave evil a ghostly presence in our household.
Later, I spent several years touring the world, often in places where atrocity had recently been, or still was being, committed. In Central America, I witnessed civil war fought between guerrilla groups intent on imposing totalitarian tyranny on their societies, opposed by armies that didn't scruple to resort to massacre. In Equatorial Guinea, the current dictator was the nephew and henchman of the last dictator, who had killed or driven into exile a third of the population, executing every last person who wore glasses or possessed a page of printed matter for being a disaffected or potentially disaffected intellectual. In Liberia, I visited a church in which more than 600 people had taken refuge and been slaughtered, possibly by the president himself (soon to be videotaped being tortured to death). The outlines of the bodies were still visible on the dried blood on the floor, and the long mound of the mass grave began only a few yards from the entrance. In North Korea I saw the acme of tyranny, millions of people in terrorized, abject obeisance to a personality cult whose object, the Great Leader Kim Il Sung, made the Sun King look like the personification of modesty.
Still, all these were political evils, which my own country had entirely escaped. I optimistically supposed that, in the absence of the worst political deformations, widespread evil was impossible. I soon discovered my error. Of course, nothing that I was to see in a British slum approached the scale or depth of what I had witnessed elsewhere. Beating a woman from motives of jealousy, locking her in a closet, breaking her arms deliberately, terrible though it may be, is not the same, by a long way, as mass murder. More than enough of the constitutional, traditional, institutional, and social restraints on large-scale political evil still existed in Britain to prevent anything like what I had witnessed elsewhere.
Yet the scale of a man's evil is not entirely to be measured by its practical consequences. Men commit evil within the scope available to them. Some evil geniuses, of course, devote their lives to increasing that scope as widely as possible, but no such character has yet arisen in Britain, and most evildoers merely make the most of their opportunities. They do what they can get away with.
In any case, the extent of the evil that I found, though far more modest than the disasters of modern history, is nonetheless impressive. From the vantage point of one six-bedded hospital ward, I have met at least 5,000 perpetrators of the kind of violence I have just described and 5,000 victims of it: nearly 1 percent of the population of my city—or a higher percentage, if one considers the age-specificity of the behavior. And when you take the life histories of these people, as I have, you soon realize that their existence is as saturated with arbitrary violence as that of the inhabitants of many a dictatorship. Instead of one dictator, though, there are thousands, each the absolute ruler of his own little sphere, his power circumscribed by the proximity of another such as he.
Violent conflict, not confined to the home and hearth, spills out onto the streets. Moreover, I discovered that British cities such as my own even had torture chambers: run not by the government, as in dictatorships, but by those representatives of slum enterprise, the drug dealers. Young men and women in debt to drug dealers are kidnapped, taken to the torture chambers, tied to beds, and beaten or whipped. Of compunction there is none—only a residual fear of the consequences of going too far.
Perhaps the most alarming feature of this low-level but endemic evil, the one that brings it close to the conception of original sin, is that it is unforced and spontaneous. No one requires people to commit it. In the worst dictatorships, some of the evil ordinary men and women do they do out of fear of not committing it. There, goodness requires heroism. In the Soviet Union in the 1930s, for example, a man who failed to report a political joke to the authorities was himself guilty of an offense that could lead to deportation or death. But in modern Britain, no such conditions exist: the government does not require citizens to behave as I have described and punish them if they do not. The evil is freely chosen.
Not that the government is blameless in the matter—far from it. Intellectuals propounded the idea that man should be freed from the shackles of social convention and self-control, and the government, without any demand from below, enacted laws that promoted unrestrained behavior and created a welfare system that protected people from some of its economic consequences. When the barriers to evil are brought down, it flourishes; and never again will I be tempted to believe in the fundamental goodness of man, or that evil is something exceptional or alien to human nature.
Of course, my personal experience is just that—personal experience. Admittedly, I have looked out at the social world of my city and my country from a peculiar and possibly unrepresentative vantage point, from a prison and from a hospital ward where practically all the patients have tried to kill themselves, or at least made suicidal gestures. But it is not small or slight personal experience, and each of my thousands, even scores of thousands, of cases has given me a window into the world in which that person lives.
And when my mother asks me whether I am not in danger of letting my personal experience embitter me or cause me to look at the world through bile-colored spectacles, I ask her why she thinks that she, in common with all old people in Britain today, feels the need to be indoors by sundown or face the consequences, and why this should be the case in a country that within living memory was law-abiding and safe? Did she not herself tell me that, as a young woman during the blackouts in the Blitz, she felt perfectly safe, at least from the depredations of her fellow citizens, walking home in the pitch dark, and that it never occurred to her that she might be the victim of a crime, whereas nowadays she has only to put her nose out of her door at dusk for her to think of nothing else? Is it not true that her purse has been stolen twice in the last two years, in broad daylight, and is it not true that statistics—however manipulated by governments to put the best possible gloss upon them—bear out the accuracy of the conclusions that I have drawn from my personal experience? In 1921, the year of my mother's birth, there was one crime recorded for every 370 inhabitants of England and Wales; 80 years later, it was one for every ten inhabitants. There has been a 12-fold increase since 1941 and an even greater increase in crimes of violence. So while personal experience is hardly a complete guide to social reality, the historical data certainly back up my impressions.
A single case can be illuminating, especially when it is statistically banal—in other words, not at all exceptional. Yesterday, for example, a 21-year-old woman consulted me, claiming to be depressed. She had swallowed an overdose of her antidepressants and then called an ambulance.
There is something to be said here about the word "depression," which has almost entirely eliminated the word and even the concept of unhappiness from modern life. Of the thousands of patients I have seen, only two or three have ever claimed to be unhappy: all the rest have said that they were depressed. This semantic shift is deeply significant, for it implies that dissatisfaction with life is itself pathological, a medical condition, which it is the responsibility of the doctor to alleviate by medical means. Everyone has a right to health; depression is unhealthy; therefore everyone has a right to be happy (the opposite of being depressed). This idea in turn implies that one's state of mind, or one's mood, is or should be independent of the way that one lives one's life, a belief that must deprive human existence of all meaning, radically disconnecting reward from conduct.
A ridiculous pas de deux between doctor and patient ensues: the patient pretends to be ill, and the doctor pretends to cure him. In the process, the patient is willfully blinded to the conduct that inevitably causes his misery in the first place. I have therefore come to see that one of the most important tasks of the doctor today is the disavowal of his own power and responsibility. The patient's notion that he is ill stands in the way of his understanding of the situation, without which moral change cannot take place. The doctor who pretends to treat is an obstacle to this change, blinding rather than enlightening.
My patient already had had three children by three different men, by no means unusual among my patients, or indeed in the country as a whole. The father of her first child had been violent, and she had left him; the second died in an accident while driving a stolen car; the third, with whom she had been living, had demanded that she should leave his apartment because, a week after their child was born, he decided that he no longer wished to live with her. (The discovery of incompatibility a week after the birth of a child is now so common as to be statistically normal.) She had nowhere to go, no one to fall back on, and the hospital was a temporary sanctuary from her woes. She hoped that we would fix her up with some accommodation.
She could not return to her mother, because of conflict with her "stepfather," or her mother's latest boyfriend, who, in fact, was only nine years older than she and seven years younger than her mother. This compression of the generations is also now a common pattern and is seldom a recipe for happiness. (It goes without saying that her own father had disappeared at her birth, and she had never seen him since.) The latest boyfriend in this kind of ménage either wants the daughter around to abuse her sexually or else wants her out of the house as being a nuisance and an unnecessary expense. This boyfriend wanted her out of the house, and set about creating an atmosphere certain to make her leave as soon as possible.
The father of her first child had, of course, recognized her vulnerability. A girl of 16 living on her own is easy prey. He beat her from the first, being drunken, possessive, and jealous, as well as flagrantly unfaithful. She thought that a child would make him more responsible—sober him up and calm him down. It had the reverse effect. She left him.
The father of her second child was a career criminal, already imprisoned several times. A drug addict who took whatever drugs he could get, he died under the influence. She had known all about his past before she had his child.
The father of her third child was much older than she. It was he who suggested that they have a child—in fact he demanded it as a condition of staying with her. He had five children already by three different women, none of whom he supported in any way whatever.
The conditions for the perpetuation of evil were now complete. She was a young woman who would not want to remain alone, without a man, for very long; but with three children already, she would attract precisely the kind of man, like the father of her first child—of whom there are now many—looking for vulnerable, exploitable women. More than likely, at least one of them (for there would undoubtedly be a succession of them) would abuse her children sexually, physically, or both.
She was, of course, a victim of her mother's behavior at a time when she had little control over her destiny. Her mother had thought that her own sexual liaison was more important than the welfare of her child, a common way of thinking in today's welfare Britain. That same day, for example, I was consulted by a young woman whose mother's consort had raped her many times between the ages of eight and 15, with her mother's full knowledge. Her mother had allowed this solely so that her relationship with her consort might continue. It could happen that my patient will one day do the same thing.
My patient was not just a victim of her mother, however: she had knowingly borne children of men of whom no good could be expected. She knew perfectly well the consequences and the meaning of what she was doing, as her reaction to something that I said to her—and say to hundreds of women patients in a similar situation—proved: next time you are thinking of going out with a man, bring him to me for my inspection, and I'll tell you if you can go out with him.
This never fails to make the most wretched, the most "depressed" of women smile broadly or laugh heartily. They know exactly what I mean, and I need not spell it out further. They know that I mean that most of the men they have chosen have their evil written all over them, sometimes quite literally in the form of tattoos, saying "FUCK OFF" or "MAD DOG." And they understand that if I can spot the evil instantly, because they know what I would look for, so can they—and therefore they are in large part responsible for their own downfall at the hands of evil men.
Moreover, they are aware that I believe that it is both foolish and wicked to have children by men without having considered even for a second or a fraction of a second whether the men have any qualities that might make them good fathers. Mistakes are possible, of course: a man may turn out not to be as expected. But not even to consider the question is to act as irresponsibly as it is possible for a human being to act. It is knowingly to increase the sum of evil in the world, and sooner or later the summation of small evils leads to the triumph of evil itself.
My patient did not start out with the intention of abetting, much less of committing, evil. And yet her refusal to take seriously and act upon the signs that she saw and the knowledge that she had was not the consequence of blindness and ignorance. It was utterly willful. She knew from her own experience, and that of many people around her, that her choices, based on the pleasure or the desire of the moment, would lead to the misery and suffering not only of herself, but—especially—of her own children.
This truly is not so much the banality as the frivolity of evil: the elevation of passing pleasure for oneself over the long-term misery of others to whom one owes a duty. What better phrase than the frivolity of evil describes the conduct of a mother who turns her own 14-year-old child out of doors because her latest boyfriend does not want him or her in the house? And what better phrase describes the attitude of those intellectuals who see in this conduct nothing but an extension of human freedom and choice, another thread in life's rich tapestry?
The men in these situations also know perfectly well the meaning and consequences of what they are doing. The same day that I saw the patient I have just described, a man aged 25 came into our ward, in need of an operation to remove foil-wrapped packets of cocaine that he had swallowed in order to evade being caught by the police in possession of them. (Had a packet burst, he would have died immediately.) As it happened, he had just left his latest girlfriend—one week after she had given birth to their child. They weren't getting along, he said; he needed his space. Of the child, he thought not for an instant.
I asked him whether he had any other children.
"Four," he replied.
"How many mothers?"
"Three."
"Do you see any of your children?"
He shook his head. It is supposedly the duty of the doctor not to pass judgment on how his patients have elected to live, but I think I may have raised my eyebrows slightly. At any rate, the patient caught a whiff of my disapproval.
"I know," he said. "I know. Don't tell me."
These words were a complete confession of guilt. I have had hundreds of conversations with men who have abandoned their children in this fashion, and they all know perfectly well what the consequences are for the mother and, more important, for the children. They all know that they are condemning their children to lives of brutality, poverty, abuse, and hopelessness. They tell me so themselves. And yet they do it over and over again, to such an extent that I should guess that nearly a quarter of British children are now brought up this way.
The result is a rising tide of neglect, cruelty, sadism, and joyous malignity that staggers and appalls me. I am more horrified after 14 years than the day I started.
Where does this evil come from? There is obviously something flawed in the heart of man that he should wish to behave in this depraved fashion—the legacy of original sin, to speak metaphorically. But if, not so long ago, such conduct was much less widespread than it is now (in a time of much lesser prosperity, be it remembered by those who think that poverty explains everything), then something more is needed to explain it.
A necessary, though not sufficient, condition is the welfare state, which makes it possible, and sometimes advantageous, to behave like this. Just as the IMF is the bank of last resort, encouraging commercial banks to make unwise loans to countries that they know the IMF will bail out, so the state is the parent of last resort—or, more often than not, of first resort. The state, guided by the apparently generous and humane philosophy that no child, whatever its origins, should suffer deprivation, gives assistance to any child, or rather the mother of any child, once it has come into being. In matters of public housing, it is actually advantageous for a mother to put herself at a disadvantage, to be a single mother, without support from the fathers of the children and dependent on the state for income. She is then a priority; she won't pay local taxes, rent, or utility bills.
As for the men, the state absolves them of all responsibility for their children. The state is now father to the child. The biological father is therefore free to use whatever income he has as pocket money, for entertainment and little treats. He is thereby reduced to the status of a child, though a spoiled child with the physical capabilities of a man: petulant, demanding, querulous, self-centered, and violent if he doesn't get his own way. The violence escalates and becomes a habit. A spoiled brat becomes an evil tyrant.
But if the welfare state is a necessary condition for the spread of evil, it is not sufficient. After all, the British welfare state is neither the most extensive nor the most generous in the world, and yet our rates of social pathology—public drunkenness, drug-taking, teenage pregnancy, venereal disease, hooliganism, criminality—are the highest in the world. Something more was necessary to produce this result.
Here we enter the realm of culture and ideas. For it is necessary not only to believe that it is economically feasible to behave in the irresponsible and egotistical fashion that I have described, but also to believe that it is morally permissible to do so. And this idea has been peddled by the intellectual elite in Britain for many years, more assiduously than anywhere else, to the extent that it is now taken for granted. There has been a long march not only through the institutions but through the minds of the young. When young people want to praise themselves, they describe themselves as "nonjudgmental." For them, the highest form of morality is amorality.
There has been an unholy alliance between those on the Left, who believe that man is endowed with rights but no duties, and libertarians on the Right, who believe that consumer choice is the answer to all social questions, an idea eagerly adopted by the Left in precisely those areas where it does not apply. Thus people have a right to bring forth children any way they like, and the children, of course, have the right not to be deprived of anything, at least anything material. How men and women associate and have children is merely a matter of consumer choice, of no more moral consequence than the choice between dark and milk chocolate, and the state must not discriminate among different forms of association and child rearing, even if such non-discrimination has the same effect as British and French neutrality during the Spanish Civil War.
The consequences to the children and to society do not enter into the matter: for in any case it is the function of the state to ameliorate by redistributive taxation the material effects of individual irresponsibility, and to ameliorate the emotional, educational, and spiritual effects by an army of social workers, psychologists, educators, counselors, and the like, who have themselves come to form a powerful vested interest of dependence on the government.
So while my patients know in their hearts that what they are doing is wrong, and worse than wrong, they are encouraged nevertheless to do it by the strong belief that they have the right to do it, because everything is merely a matter of choice. Almost no one in Britain ever publicly challenges this belief. Nor has any politician the courage to demand a withdrawal of the public subsidy that allows the intensifying evil I have seen over the past 14 years—violence, rape, intimidation, cruelty, drug addiction, neglect—to flourish so exuberantly. With 40 percent of children in Britain born out of wedlock, and the proportion still rising, and with divorce the norm rather than the exception, there soon will be no electoral constituency for reversal. It is already deemed to be electoral suicide to advocate it by those who, in their hearts, know that such a reversal is necessary.
I am not sure they are right. They lack courage. My only cause for optimism during the past 14 years has been the fact that my patients, with a few exceptions, can be brought to see the truth of what I say: that they are not depressed; they are unhappy—and they are unhappy because they have chosen to live in a way that they ought not to live, and in which it is impossible to be happy. Without exception, they say that they would not want their children to live as they have lived. But the social, economic, and ideological pressures—and, above all, the parental example—make it likely that their children's choices will be as bad as theirs.
Ultimately, the moral cowardice of the intellectual and political elites is responsible for the continuing social disaster that has overtaken Britain, a disaster whose full social and economic consequences have yet to be seen. A sharp economic downturn would expose how far the policies of successive governments, all in the direction of libertinism, have atomized British society, so that all social solidarity within families and communities, so protective in times of hardship, has been destroyed. The elites cannot even acknowledge what has happened, however obvious it is, for to do so would be to admit their past responsibility for it, and that would make them feel bad. Better that millions should live in wretchedness and squalor than that they should feel bad about themselves—another aspect of the frivolity of evil. Moreover, if members of the elite acknowledged the social disaster brought about by their ideological libertinism, they might feel called upon to place restraints upon their own behavior, for you cannot long demand of others what you balk at doing yourself.
There are pleasures, no doubt, to be had in crying in the wilderness, in being a man who thinks he has seen further and more keenly than others, but they grow fewer with time. The wilderness has lost its charms for me.
I'm leaving—I hope for good.
The Frivolity of Evil
Theodore Dalrymple
When prisoners are released from prison, they often say that they have paid their debt to society. This is absurd, of course: crime is not a matter of double-entry bookkeeping. You cannot pay a debt by having caused even greater expense, nor can you pay in advance for a bank robbery by offering to serve a prison sentence before you commit it. Perhaps, metaphorically speaking, the slate is wiped clean once a prisoner is released from prison, but the debt is not paid off.
It would be just as absurd for me to say, on my imminent retirement after 14 years of my hospital and prison work, that I have paid my debt to society. I had the choice to do something more pleasing if I had wished, and I was paid, if not munificently, at least adequately. I chose the disagreeable neighborhood in which I practiced because, medically speaking, the poor are more interesting, at least to me, than the rich: their pathology is more florid, their need for attention greater. Their dilemmas, if cruder, seem to me more compelling, nearer to the fundamentals of human existence. No doubt I also felt my services would be more valuable there: in other words, that I had some kind of duty to perform. Perhaps for that reason, like the prisoner on his release, I feel I have paid my debt to society. Certainly, the work has taken a toll on me, and it is time to do something else. Someone else can do battle with the metastasizing social pathology of Great Britain, while I lead a life aesthetically more pleasing to me.
My work has caused me to become perhaps unhealthily preoccupied with the problem of evil. Why do people commit evil? What conditions allow it to flourish? How is it best prevented and, when necessary, suppressed? Each time I listen to a patient recounting the cruelty to which he or she has been subjected, or has committed (and I have listened to several such patients every day for 14 years), these questions revolve endlessly in my mind.
No doubt my previous experiences fostered my preoccupation with this problem. My mother was a refugee from Nazi Germany, and though she spoke very little of her life before she came to Britain, the mere fact that there was much of which she did not speak gave evil a ghostly presence in our household.
Later, I spent several years touring the world, often in places where atrocity had recently been, or still was being, committed. In Central America, I witnessed civil war fought between guerrilla groups intent on imposing totalitarian tyranny on their societies, opposed by armies that didn't scruple to resort to massacre. In Equatorial Guinea, the current dictator was the nephew and henchman of the last dictator, who had killed or driven into exile a third of the population, executing every last person who wore glasses or possessed a page of printed matter for being a disaffected or potentially disaffected intellectual. In Liberia, I visited a church in which more than 600 people had taken refuge and been slaughtered, possibly by the president himself (soon to be videotaped being tortured to death). The outlines of the bodies were still visible on the dried blood on the floor, and the long mound of the mass grave began only a few yards from the entrance. In North Korea I saw the acme of tyranny, millions of people in terrorized, abject obeisance to a personality cult whose object, the Great Leader Kim Il Sung, made the Sun King look like the personification of modesty.
Still, all these were political evils, which my own country had entirely escaped. I optimistically supposed that, in the absence of the worst political deformations, widespread evil was impossible. I soon discovered my error. Of course, nothing that I was to see in a British slum approached the scale or depth of what I had witnessed elsewhere. Beating a woman from motives of jealousy, locking her in a closet, breaking her arms deliberately, terrible though it may be, is not the same, by a long way, as mass murder. More than enough of the constitutional, traditional, institutional, and social restraints on large-scale political evil still existed in Britain to prevent anything like what I had witnessed elsewhere.
Yet the scale of a man's evil is not entirely to be measured by its practical consequences. Men commit evil within the scope available to them. Some evil geniuses, of course, devote their lives to increasing that scope as widely as possible, but no such character has yet arisen in Britain, and most evildoers merely make the most of their opportunities. They do what they can get away with.
In any case, the extent of the evil that I found, though far more modest than the disasters of modern history, is nonetheless impressive. From the vantage point of one six-bedded hospital ward, I have met at least 5,000 perpetrators of the kind of violence I have just described and 5,000 victims of it: nearly 1 percent of the population of my city—or a higher percentage, if one considers the age-specificity of the behavior. And when you take the life histories of these people, as I have, you soon realize that their existence is as saturated with arbitrary violence as that of the inhabitants of many a dictatorship. Instead of one dictator, though, there are thousands, each the absolute ruler of his own little sphere, his power circumscribed by the proximity of another such as he.
Violent conflict, not confined to the home and hearth, spills out onto the streets. Moreover, I discovered that British cities such as my own even had torture chambers: run not by the government, as in dictatorships, but by those representatives of slum enterprise, the drug dealers. Young men and women in debt to drug dealers are kidnapped, taken to the torture chambers, tied to beds, and beaten or whipped. Of compunction there is none—only a residual fear of the consequences of going too far.
Perhaps the most alarming feature of this low-level but endemic evil, the one that brings it close to the conception of original sin, is that it is unforced and spontaneous. No one requires people to commit it. In the worst dictatorships, some of the evil ordinary men and women do they do out of fear of not committing it. There, goodness requires heroism. In the Soviet Union in the 1930s, for example, a man who failed to report a political joke to the authorities was himself guilty of an offense that could lead to deportation or death. But in modern Britain, no such conditions exist: the government does not require citizens to behave as I have described and punish them if they do not. The evil is freely chosen.
Not that the government is blameless in the matter—far from it. Intellectuals propounded the idea that man should be freed from the shackles of social convention and self-control, and the government, without any demand from below, enacted laws that promoted unrestrained behavior and created a welfare system that protected people from some of its economic consequences. When the barriers to evil are brought down, it flourishes; and never again will I be tempted to believe in the fundamental goodness of man, or that evil is something exceptional or alien to human nature.
Of course, my personal experience is just that—personal experience. Admittedly, I have looked out at the social world of my city and my country from a peculiar and possibly unrepresentative vantage point, from a prison and from a hospital ward where practically all the patients have tried to kill themselves, or at least made suicidal gestures. But it is not small or slight personal experience, and each of my thousands, even scores of thousands, of cases has given me a window into the world in which that person lives.
And when my mother asks me whether I am not in danger of letting my personal experience embitter me or cause me to look at the world through bile-colored spectacles, I ask her why she thinks that she, in common with all old people in Britain today, feels the need to be indoors by sundown or face the consequences, and why this should be the case in a country that within living memory was law-abiding and safe? Did she not herself tell me that, as a young woman during the blackouts in the Blitz, she felt perfectly safe, at least from the depredations of her fellow citizens, walking home in the pitch dark, and that it never occurred to her that she might be the victim of a crime, whereas nowadays she has only to put her nose out of her door at dusk for her to think of nothing else? Is it not true that her purse has been stolen twice in the last two years, in broad daylight, and is it not true that statistics—however manipulated by governments to put the best possible gloss upon them—bear out the accuracy of the conclusions that I have drawn from my personal experience? In 1921, the year of my mother's birth, there was one crime recorded for every 370 inhabitants of England and Wales; 80 years later, it was one for every ten inhabitants. There has been a 12-fold increase since 1941 and an even greater increase in crimes of violence. So while personal experience is hardly a complete guide to social reality, the historical data certainly back up my impressions.
A single case can be illuminating, especially when it is statistically banal—in other words, not at all exceptional. Yesterday, for example, a 21-year-old woman consulted me, claiming to be depressed. She had swallowed an overdose of her antidepressants and then called an ambulance.
There is something to be said here about the word "depression," which has almost entirely eliminated the word and even the concept of unhappiness from modern life. Of the thousands of patients I have seen, only two or three have ever claimed to be unhappy: all the rest have said that they were depressed. This semantic shift is deeply significant, for it implies that dissatisfaction with life is itself pathological, a medical condition, which it is the responsibility of the doctor to alleviate by medical means. Everyone has a right to health; depression is unhealthy; therefore everyone has a right to be happy (the opposite of being depressed). This idea in turn implies that one's state of mind, or one's mood, is or should be independent of the way that one lives one's life, a belief that must deprive human existence of all meaning, radically disconnecting reward from conduct.
A ridiculous pas de deux between doctor and patient ensues: the patient pretends to be ill, and the doctor pretends to cure him. In the process, the patient is willfully blinded to the conduct that inevitably causes his misery in the first place. I have therefore come to see that one of the most important tasks of the doctor today is the disavowal of his own power and responsibility. The patient's notion that he is ill stands in the way of his understanding of the situation, without which moral change cannot take place. The doctor who pretends to treat is an obstacle to this change, blinding rather than enlightening.
My patient already had had three children by three different men, by no means unusual among my patients, or indeed in the country as a whole. The father of her first child had been violent, and she had left him; the second died in an accident while driving a stolen car; the third, with whom she had been living, had demanded that she should leave his apartment because, a week after their child was born, he decided that he no longer wished to live with her. (The discovery of incompatibility a week after the birth of a child is now so common as to be statistically normal.) She had nowhere to go, no one to fall back on, and the hospital was a temporary sanctuary from her woes. She hoped that we would fix her up with some accommodation.
She could not return to her mother, because of conflict with her "stepfather," or her mother's latest boyfriend, who, in fact, was only nine years older than she and seven years younger than her mother. This compression of the generations is also now a common pattern and is seldom a recipe for happiness. (It goes without saying that her own father had disappeared at her birth, and she had never seen him since.) The latest boyfriend in this kind of ménage either wants the daughter around to abuse her sexually or else wants her out of the house as being a nuisance and an unnecessary expense. This boyfriend wanted her out of the house, and set about creating an atmosphere certain to make her leave as soon as possible.
The father of her first child had, of course, recognized her vulnerability. A girl of 16 living on her own is easy prey. He beat her from the first, being drunken, possessive, and jealous, as well as flagrantly unfaithful. She thought that a child would make him more responsible—sober him up and calm him down. It had the reverse effect. She left him.
The father of her second child was a career criminal, already imprisoned several times. A drug addict who took whatever drugs he could get, he died under the influence. She had known all about his past before she had his child.
The father of her third child was much older than she. It was he who suggested that they have a child—in fact he demanded it as a condition of staying with her. He had five children already by three different women, none of whom he supported in any way whatever.
The conditions for the perpetuation of evil were now complete. She was a young woman who would not want to remain alone, without a man, for very long; but with three children already, she would attract precisely the kind of man, like the father of her first child—of whom there are now many—looking for vulnerable, exploitable women. More than likely, at least one of them (for there would undoubtedly be a succession of them) would abuse her children sexually, physically, or both.
She was, of course, a victim of her mother's behavior at a time when she had little control over her destiny. Her mother had thought that her own sexual liaison was more important than the welfare of her child, a common way of thinking in today's welfare Britain. That same day, for example, I was consulted by a young woman whose mother's consort had raped her many times between the ages of eight and 15, with her mother's full knowledge. Her mother had allowed this solely so that her relationship with her consort might continue. It could happen that my patient will one day do the same thing.
My patient was not just a victim of her mother, however: she had knowingly borne children of men of whom no good could be expected. She knew perfectly well the consequences and the meaning of what she was doing, as her reaction to something that I said to her—and say to hundreds of women patients in a similar situation—proved: next time you are thinking of going out with a man, bring him to me for my inspection, and I'll tell you if you can go out with him.
This never fails to make the most wretched, the most "depressed" of women smile broadly or laugh heartily. They know exactly what I mean, and I need not spell it out further. They know that I mean that most of the men they have chosen have their evil written all over them, sometimes quite literally in the form of tattoos, saying "FUCK OFF" or "MAD DOG." And they understand that if I can spot the evil instantly, because they know what I would look for, so can they—and therefore they are in large part responsible for their own downfall at the hands of evil men.
Moreover, they are aware that I believe that it is both foolish and wicked to have children by men without having considered even for a second or a fraction of a second whether the men have any qualities that might make them good fathers. Mistakes are possible, of course: a man may turn out not to be as expected. But not even to consider the question is to act as irresponsibly as it is possible for a human being to act. It is knowingly to increase the sum of evil in the world, and sooner or later the summation of small evils leads to the triumph of evil itself.
My patient did not start out with the intention of abetting, much less of committing, evil. And yet her refusal to take seriously and act upon the signs that she saw and the knowledge that she had was not the consequence of blindness and ignorance. It was utterly willful. She knew from her own experience, and that of many people around her, that her choices, based on the pleasure or the desire of the moment, would lead to the misery and suffering not only of herself, but—especially—of her own children.
This truly is not so much the banality as the frivolity of evil: the elevation of passing pleasure for oneself over the long-term misery of others to whom one owes a duty. What better phrase than the frivolity of evil describes the conduct of a mother who turns her own 14-year-old child out of doors because her latest boyfriend does not want him or her in the house? And what better phrase describes the attitude of those intellectuals who see in this conduct nothing but an extension of human freedom and choice, another thread in life's rich tapestry?
The men in these situations also know perfectly well the meaning and consequences of what they are doing. The same day that I saw the patient I have just described, a man aged 25 came into our ward, in need of an operation to remove foil-wrapped packets of cocaine that he had swallowed in order to evade being caught by the police in possession of them. (Had a packet burst, he would have died immediately.) As it happened, he had just left his latest girlfriend—one week after she had given birth to their child. They weren't getting along, he said; he needed his space. Of the child, he thought not for an instant.
I asked him whether he had any other children.
"Four," he replied.
"How many mothers?"
"Three."
"Do you see any of your children?"
He shook his head. It is supposedly the duty of the doctor not to pass judgment on how his patients have elected to live, but I think I may have raised my eyebrows slightly. At any rate, the patient caught a whiff of my disapproval.
"I know," he said. "I know. Don't tell me."
These words were a complete confession of guilt. I have had hundreds of conversations with men who have abandoned their children in this fashion, and they all know perfectly well what the consequences are for the mother and, more important, for the children. They all know that they are condemning their children to lives of brutality, poverty, abuse, and hopelessness. They tell me so themselves. And yet they do it over and over again, to such an extent that I should guess that nearly a quarter of British children are now brought up this way.
The result is a rising tide of neglect, cruelty, sadism, and joyous malignity that staggers and appalls me. I am more horrified after 14 years than the day I started.
Where does this evil come from? There is obviously something flawed in the heart of man that he should wish to behave in this depraved fashion—the legacy of original sin, to speak metaphorically. But if, not so long ago, such conduct was much less widespread than it is now (in a time of much lesser prosperity, be it remembered by those who think that poverty explains everything), then something more is needed to explain it.
A necessary, though not sufficient, condition is the welfare state, which makes it possible, and sometimes advantageous, to behave like this. Just as the IMF is the bank of last resort, encouraging commercial banks to make unwise loans to countries that they know the IMF will bail out, so the state is the parent of last resort—or, more often than not, of first resort. The state, guided by the apparently generous and humane philosophy that no child, whatever its origins, should suffer deprivation, gives assistance to any child, or rather the mother of any child, once it has come into being. In matters of public housing, it is actually advantageous for a mother to put herself at a disadvantage, to be a single mother, without support from the fathers of the children and dependent on the state for income. She is then a priority; she won't pay local taxes, rent, or utility bills.
As for the men, the state absolves them of all responsibility for their children. The state is now father to the child. The biological father is therefore free to use whatever income he has as pocket money, for entertainment and little treats. He is thereby reduced to the status of a child, though a spoiled child with the physical capabilities of a man: petulant, demanding, querulous, self-centered, and violent if he doesn't get his own way. The violence escalates and becomes a habit. A spoiled brat becomes an evil tyrant.
But if the welfare state is a necessary condition for the spread of evil, it is not sufficient. After all, the British welfare state is neither the most extensive nor the most generous in the world, and yet our rates of social pathology—public drunkenness, drug-taking, teenage pregnancy, venereal disease, hooliganism, criminality—are the highest in the world. Something more was necessary to produce this result.
Here we enter the realm of culture and ideas. For it is necessary not only to believe that it is economically feasible to behave in the irresponsible and egotistical fashion that I have described, but also to believe that it is morally permissible to do so. And this idea has been peddled by the intellectual elite in Britain for many years, more assiduously than anywhere else, to the extent that it is now taken for granted. There has been a long march not only through the institutions but through the minds of the young. When young people want to praise themselves, they describe themselves as "nonjudgmental." For them, the highest form of morality is amorality.
There has been an unholy alliance between those on the Left, who believe that man is endowed with rights but no duties, and libertarians on the Right, who believe that consumer choice is the answer to all social questions, an idea eagerly adopted by the Left in precisely those areas where it does not apply. Thus people have a right to bring forth children any way they like, and the children, of course, have the right not to be deprived of anything, at least anything material. How men and women associate and have children is merely a matter of consumer choice, of no more moral consequence than the choice between dark and milk chocolate, and the state must not discriminate among different forms of association and child rearing, even if such non-discrimination has the same effect as British and French neutrality during the Spanish Civil War.
The consequences to the children and to society do not enter into the matter: for in any case it is the function of the state to ameliorate by redistributive taxation the material effects of individual irresponsibility, and to ameliorate the emotional, educational, and spiritual effects by an army of social workers, psychologists, educators, counselors, and the like, who have themselves come to form a powerful vested interest of dependence on the government.
So while my patients know in their hearts that what they are doing is wrong, and worse than wrong, they are encouraged nevertheless to do it by the strong belief that they have the right to do it, because everything is merely a matter of choice. Almost no one in Britain ever publicly challenges this belief. Nor has any politician the courage to demand a withdrawal of the public subsidy that allows the intensifying evil I have seen over the past 14 years—violence, rape, intimidation, cruelty, drug addiction, neglect—to flourish so exuberantly. With 40 percent of children in Britain born out of wedlock, and the proportion still rising, and with divorce the norm rather than the exception, there soon will be no electoral constituency for reversal. It is already deemed to be electoral suicide to advocate it by those who, in their hearts, know that such a reversal is necessary.
I am not sure they are right. They lack courage. My only cause for optimism during the past 14 years has been the fact that my patients, with a few exceptions, can be brought to see the truth of what I say: that they are not depressed; they are unhappy—and they are unhappy because they have chosen to live in a way that they ought not to live, and in which it is impossible to be happy. Without exception, they say that they would not want their children to live as they have lived. But the social, economic, and ideological pressures—and, above all, the parental example—make it likely that their children's choices will be as bad as theirs.
Ultimately, the moral cowardice of the intellectual and political elites is responsible for the continuing social disaster that has overtaken Britain, a disaster whose full social and economic consequences have yet to be seen. A sharp economic downturn would expose how far the policies of successive governments, all in the direction of libertinism, have atomized British society, so that all social solidarity within families and communities, so protective in times of hardship, has been destroyed. The elites cannot even acknowledge what has happened, however obvious it is, for to do so would be to admit their past responsibility for it, and that would make them feel bad. Better that millions should live in wretchedness and squalor than that they should feel bad about themselves—another aspect of the frivolity of evil. Moreover, if members of the elite acknowledged the social disaster brought about by their ideological libertinism, they might feel called upon to place restraints upon their own behavior, for you cannot long demand of others what you balk at doing yourself.
There are pleasures, no doubt, to be had in crying in the wilderness, in being a man who thinks he has seen further and more keenly than others, but they grow fewer with time. The wilderness has lost its charms for me.
I'm leaving—I hope for good.
Saturday, March 21, 2009
America and the Third Reich
I call for a sense of extreme caution to descend upon all Americans at this time. We find ourselves at a crossroads in history that will define us for the rest of our nations existence. We stand at the edge a of a precipice that once stumbled into, it will be impossible to scale back out of. I have always found it perplexing that in this great land (with so much freedom and education so readily available), that we have not looked to the past for the wisdom of it’s triumphs and mistakes. Let us follow Patrick Henry‘s great example when he said:
“For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth -- to know the worst and to provide for it. I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided; and that is the lamp of experience. I know of no way of judging of the future but by the past.”
Let us, at “what ever anguish of spirit it may cost” look to the past that we may “know the whole truth” and “provide for it”. I use the words of this great founding father of ours here because it is; indeed, painful to the spirit when you look into the face of evil and find there a shadow of the country you so dearly love. I do not say these things to hurt any person in this country. I do not say these things because I hate this country. I say them because I love my country and wish to protect it from grave peril that is in fact present.
When our great nation declared its independence from England, the document declaring that independence bore these magnificent words:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”
Notice that it says “all men” not all Americans, “ALL MEN”. Hitler’s Germany did not believe in this simple statement. This statement that our founding fathers found to be “self-evident”. The contrast could not be any clearer than in this example given by Kurt Hilmar Eitzen (part of the Nazi propaganda machine) written in an article on how to respond to arguments made against the nazi anti-Semitic doctrines:
“Argument 8: "Everything with a human face is equal." — Counterargument: Thirteen years ago, the "Stürmer" carried a cartoon. In it, a miserable pig looked up from his sty to a royal lion. "Everything with an animal face is equal!" But what did the lion growl in reply? "That's what you swine would like to think!"“
This statement is a stark contrast to our declaration of independence, but how do we today stand in comparison to these two examples? Are we closer to the declaration of independence, or the Third Reich’s “royal lion”?
It fills me with great trepidation that I now hear, openly stated, the opinion that people who are in our country, but not citizens of it, should not have the protection of the constitution. The idea that somehow the rights of the constitution should be held out for the citizens of this country alone.
In George Orwell’s book Animal Farm, (A book about a farm where the farmer is driven off and the animals begin to govern themselves. This story is about the decay of the government they established) some very relevant things happen. Upon setting up their government the animals write the rules of the farm on the wall of the barn, among them is the statement that “all animals are equal”(p.21). Over a period of time the statement is changed from “all animals are equal” to “ All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others” (p. 118). As the idea of all are equal changes to some are more equal than others the entire fabric of the animals society is changed.
Why are the words “all men are created equal” so very important? If only some people are equal, or some are more equal, then the government has the responsibility of deciding who are equals and who are not. Our founding fathers clearly saw the terrible end of giving a government this kind of power. To us all men should be equal no matter what there statues, legal, illegal, citizen, P.O.W or even enemy combatant.
When I say all are equal I mean that all rights are given, because all men have these rights “endowed by their Creator” and they are “unalienable Rights”.
These right are not given to men by their government, but are inherent to all men upon birth. We should be able to apply our laws and rights to all men, from what ever land they come from. According to the declaration of independence “to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men”. It is clear that the American government was meant to secure the inalienable rights of men and be limited to that responsibility. As our government moves away from that limited responsibility and takes on an ever expanding role, we run into the next similarity between us and the Third Reich. In the same article, Kurt Hilmar Eitzen supported the Nazi’s anti-Semitic policies with this defense:
“Argument 3: "The Jew has better prices than the German businessman." — Counterargument: Any crook can sell junk. Jewish crooks have driven thousands of German businessmen to bankruptcy with the glittering trash in their department store palaces. When someone does get good products more cheaply from the Jews than from Germans, it is only because the united Jewish firms force down prices from the manufacturers, which means reducing workers' wages. He who has bought good products cheaply from the Jew should never forget that the curse of a German worker and the tears of his hungry children come with them!”
How many times do we hear today about how the “illegal” worker is destroying our economy? How the “illegal” immigrant is driving down the wages of the American worker? Many people say their race has nothing to do with our feelings, it is simply that they are here illegally. I want you to ask your self the question, when I see a Hispanic person cutting grass, changing tires, gathering carts, or a truck load of them heading to a job, do you not get the automatic idea that they are illegal? You have to remember that the German society did not start out racist either.
It is not the immigrant worker, legal or illegal, that is hurting our economy. The socialist policies that our government has adopted is what is hurting us. If our government was limited to protecting men’s inalienable rights and not redistributing their wealth, all immigration, legal or not, would stimulate our economy. Socialist policies always fail in the end because more and more people start taking from the system without putting anything into it. We have many Americans that are doing the very same thing.
Socialist governments have to find scapegoats for the failing policies. The Germans had the Jews and the Americans have the illegal immigrant, which we all know to mean the Hispanic immigrant. The plain fact is that human nature will not allow a socialist economic system to work. Human nature is, if I can get something for nothing, I will. Let us not blame the flaws in these policies on a specific group of people. Let the blame fall to the policy itself.
Let us remember: it is a very dark and gruesome road ahead when people start seeing others as less than equals. In Germany it lead to the torture and death of millions of Jews. I pray with all of my heart that we will not let things go so far in our country. Let us stand up, with all of the passion and power of our great nation, and reaffirm “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights”.
Henry, Patrick. Meeting of the Virginia colony delegate
http://www.historyplace.com/speeches/henry.htm
The declaration of independence.
http://www.law.indiana.edu/uslawdocs/declaration.html
Eitzen, Kurt Hilmar. Ten responses to Jewish lackeys. http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/responses.htm
Orwell, George. Animal Farm.
“For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth -- to know the worst and to provide for it. I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided; and that is the lamp of experience. I know of no way of judging of the future but by the past.”
Let us, at “what ever anguish of spirit it may cost” look to the past that we may “know the whole truth” and “provide for it”. I use the words of this great founding father of ours here because it is; indeed, painful to the spirit when you look into the face of evil and find there a shadow of the country you so dearly love. I do not say these things to hurt any person in this country. I do not say these things because I hate this country. I say them because I love my country and wish to protect it from grave peril that is in fact present.
When our great nation declared its independence from England, the document declaring that independence bore these magnificent words:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”
Notice that it says “all men” not all Americans, “ALL MEN”. Hitler’s Germany did not believe in this simple statement. This statement that our founding fathers found to be “self-evident”. The contrast could not be any clearer than in this example given by Kurt Hilmar Eitzen (part of the Nazi propaganda machine) written in an article on how to respond to arguments made against the nazi anti-Semitic doctrines:
“Argument 8: "Everything with a human face is equal." — Counterargument: Thirteen years ago, the "Stürmer" carried a cartoon. In it, a miserable pig looked up from his sty to a royal lion. "Everything with an animal face is equal!" But what did the lion growl in reply? "That's what you swine would like to think!"“
This statement is a stark contrast to our declaration of independence, but how do we today stand in comparison to these two examples? Are we closer to the declaration of independence, or the Third Reich’s “royal lion”?
It fills me with great trepidation that I now hear, openly stated, the opinion that people who are in our country, but not citizens of it, should not have the protection of the constitution. The idea that somehow the rights of the constitution should be held out for the citizens of this country alone.
In George Orwell’s book Animal Farm, (A book about a farm where the farmer is driven off and the animals begin to govern themselves. This story is about the decay of the government they established) some very relevant things happen. Upon setting up their government the animals write the rules of the farm on the wall of the barn, among them is the statement that “all animals are equal”(p.21). Over a period of time the statement is changed from “all animals are equal” to “ All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others” (p. 118). As the idea of all are equal changes to some are more equal than others the entire fabric of the animals society is changed.
Why are the words “all men are created equal” so very important? If only some people are equal, or some are more equal, then the government has the responsibility of deciding who are equals and who are not. Our founding fathers clearly saw the terrible end of giving a government this kind of power. To us all men should be equal no matter what there statues, legal, illegal, citizen, P.O.W or even enemy combatant.
When I say all are equal I mean that all rights are given, because all men have these rights “endowed by their Creator” and they are “unalienable Rights”.
These right are not given to men by their government, but are inherent to all men upon birth. We should be able to apply our laws and rights to all men, from what ever land they come from. According to the declaration of independence “to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men”. It is clear that the American government was meant to secure the inalienable rights of men and be limited to that responsibility. As our government moves away from that limited responsibility and takes on an ever expanding role, we run into the next similarity between us and the Third Reich. In the same article, Kurt Hilmar Eitzen supported the Nazi’s anti-Semitic policies with this defense:
“Argument 3: "The Jew has better prices than the German businessman." — Counterargument: Any crook can sell junk. Jewish crooks have driven thousands of German businessmen to bankruptcy with the glittering trash in their department store palaces. When someone does get good products more cheaply from the Jews than from Germans, it is only because the united Jewish firms force down prices from the manufacturers, which means reducing workers' wages. He who has bought good products cheaply from the Jew should never forget that the curse of a German worker and the tears of his hungry children come with them!”
How many times do we hear today about how the “illegal” worker is destroying our economy? How the “illegal” immigrant is driving down the wages of the American worker? Many people say their race has nothing to do with our feelings, it is simply that they are here illegally. I want you to ask your self the question, when I see a Hispanic person cutting grass, changing tires, gathering carts, or a truck load of them heading to a job, do you not get the automatic idea that they are illegal? You have to remember that the German society did not start out racist either.
It is not the immigrant worker, legal or illegal, that is hurting our economy. The socialist policies that our government has adopted is what is hurting us. If our government was limited to protecting men’s inalienable rights and not redistributing their wealth, all immigration, legal or not, would stimulate our economy. Socialist policies always fail in the end because more and more people start taking from the system without putting anything into it. We have many Americans that are doing the very same thing.
Socialist governments have to find scapegoats for the failing policies. The Germans had the Jews and the Americans have the illegal immigrant, which we all know to mean the Hispanic immigrant. The plain fact is that human nature will not allow a socialist economic system to work. Human nature is, if I can get something for nothing, I will. Let us not blame the flaws in these policies on a specific group of people. Let the blame fall to the policy itself.
Let us remember: it is a very dark and gruesome road ahead when people start seeing others as less than equals. In Germany it lead to the torture and death of millions of Jews. I pray with all of my heart that we will not let things go so far in our country. Let us stand up, with all of the passion and power of our great nation, and reaffirm “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights”.
Henry, Patrick. Meeting of the Virginia colony delegate
http://www.historyplace.com/speeches/henry.htm
The declaration of independence.
http://www.law.indiana.edu/uslawdocs/declaration.html
Eitzen, Kurt Hilmar. Ten responses to Jewish lackeys. http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/responses.htm
Orwell, George. Animal Farm.
Sunday, March 15, 2009
True Americans
There is a notion out there, especially among many politicians, that there is no such thing as a true American. They are saying you can be and believe anything you want, no matter what, you are still “American”, and we should all just except each other. I agree we should embrace many cultures, beliefs and people. This should be a place where every person should be able to come to and have the opportunity to become whatever they are willing to work to become. This should be a place where everyone can explore their beliefs with little interference and with out the fear of persecution. With all this being said however; there is still such a thing as a “true” American. Not everyone in this country fills that bill. In order to be a true American, you must believe in freedom. On the statue of liberty there is a beckoning call, a call to all Americans at heart to gather here. That call is: "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free: The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door." It does not matter what condition you are in before or after you get here, as long as you “yearn to breath free”. This is a call to all people that yearn for freedom. A call to all true Americans, no matter where they may now reside. This is the land of freedom. The land where we have the freedom to try and succeed, and the freedom to try and fail. This is a country for those that want to have the freedom to scratch out their lives as best they can, at the price of security.
Freedom is not always pretty or fair or kind. Sometimes it is painful, ugly and hard. To live a free life is to live with no guarantee of success or happiness and to live with great risk. Somewhere along the way someone started selling the idea that we could have freedom with out risk. On January 6th 1941 President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in his annual address to congress, outlined four freedoms that the world should be founded on. Among those freedoms, two are in our constitution, the freedom of speech and religion. President Roosevelt then added two that are not in the constitution, the freedom from want and fear.
The question is, can one have freedom without risking want at the same time? In order for a government to remove want, they must also take freedom of the citizens. Security and freedom are mutually exclusive ideals. The more secure you are, the less free you become. The more free you are the more vulnerable you become to disaster of all sorts. If a man is free to build up a business that makes him wealthy, he also has the risk of that business failing and leaving me broke. If we are free to move about our country, we are also at risk of attack of all sorts.A socialist government is one that is based on the idea of security above freedom. I am not saying that socialism is bad, I do not think people that believe in that type of government are evil. Socialism is just another type of government. The question is, is it the American type of government? I am not even trying to discuss the question of which type of government is better. I am just asking which one is American? At the time of the revolution, Patrick Henry ended his speech to the leaders of Virginia with the famous words: “give me liberty or give me death!”. As great as these words are, it is unfortunate for us that the first part of the statement is left off. Unfortunate because it makes his statement even more powerful. Mr. Henry’s full closing was: “Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!” The people that built our country into such a great nation, believed that liberty, (freedom) was more important and sweeter than both life and peace. A Democracy and freedom can only be had by a people that love freedom. Love freedom more than success, more than wealth, more than life itself. Democracy and freedom can only be had by people that love freedom more than everything else. If we look back to the men that founded our great nation, it is evident that they were all people of this type. Our founding fathers, in the declaration of independence, pledged their “ lives, fortunes, and sacred honor” for the opportunity to be free. America is the one country that was founded on the idea that liberty is the most important aspect of human life. There are many countries that have been founded on the idea that security is the most important aspect of life. This country is unique, it is the only one of its kind. I understand the desire for security over freedom. There is nothing wrong with that idea; however, I implore the people of this country: Please do not rob those of us that value our liberty more than security of the only place on this earth designed for us! I end with this warning to those that would change this country. Like our founding fathers before us, we will sacrifice everything for our liberty. Like Patrick Henry, to us liberty is dearer than life, sweeter than peace.
Freedom is not always pretty or fair or kind. Sometimes it is painful, ugly and hard. To live a free life is to live with no guarantee of success or happiness and to live with great risk. Somewhere along the way someone started selling the idea that we could have freedom with out risk. On January 6th 1941 President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in his annual address to congress, outlined four freedoms that the world should be founded on. Among those freedoms, two are in our constitution, the freedom of speech and religion. President Roosevelt then added two that are not in the constitution, the freedom from want and fear.
The question is, can one have freedom without risking want at the same time? In order for a government to remove want, they must also take freedom of the citizens. Security and freedom are mutually exclusive ideals. The more secure you are, the less free you become. The more free you are the more vulnerable you become to disaster of all sorts. If a man is free to build up a business that makes him wealthy, he also has the risk of that business failing and leaving me broke. If we are free to move about our country, we are also at risk of attack of all sorts.A socialist government is one that is based on the idea of security above freedom. I am not saying that socialism is bad, I do not think people that believe in that type of government are evil. Socialism is just another type of government. The question is, is it the American type of government? I am not even trying to discuss the question of which type of government is better. I am just asking which one is American? At the time of the revolution, Patrick Henry ended his speech to the leaders of Virginia with the famous words: “give me liberty or give me death!”. As great as these words are, it is unfortunate for us that the first part of the statement is left off. Unfortunate because it makes his statement even more powerful. Mr. Henry’s full closing was: “Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!” The people that built our country into such a great nation, believed that liberty, (freedom) was more important and sweeter than both life and peace. A Democracy and freedom can only be had by a people that love freedom. Love freedom more than success, more than wealth, more than life itself. Democracy and freedom can only be had by people that love freedom more than everything else. If we look back to the men that founded our great nation, it is evident that they were all people of this type. Our founding fathers, in the declaration of independence, pledged their “ lives, fortunes, and sacred honor” for the opportunity to be free. America is the one country that was founded on the idea that liberty is the most important aspect of human life. There are many countries that have been founded on the idea that security is the most important aspect of life. This country is unique, it is the only one of its kind. I understand the desire for security over freedom. There is nothing wrong with that idea; however, I implore the people of this country: Please do not rob those of us that value our liberty more than security of the only place on this earth designed for us! I end with this warning to those that would change this country. Like our founding fathers before us, we will sacrifice everything for our liberty. Like Patrick Henry, to us liberty is dearer than life, sweeter than peace.
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