Posted on 07/08/2002 4:52:12 PM PDT by commieprof
Of course you realize that now you will be TOTALLY addicted to FR... :)
Cheers-
CD
Indeed, good job!
Just for the record, I never thought I'd say that about Texas. You boys and gals want to take your state back?
But, as yet, it has not found, or been able to preserve, a leadership capable of completing the task of the world revolution. Before 1914 the Socialist International did assemble a mass-based world movement of the working class, but this suffered degeneration and betrayal before it could create the centralised leadership necessary for victory in the approaching revolutionary crises.
Very interesting. It is with your claim of being a Trotskyite, and this little snippet where you cast your lot with Hitler. It is refreshing to see a socialist actually claim their heritage rather than trying to make the people believe that it is the heritage of the right. Herein lies a distinction that the light of truth shines for those who bother to educate themselves. Nazis are socialists, socialists are Nazis. Communists are only slightly more bloodthirsty socialists. Again I ask, how can you be what you claim to be? Are you so self-congratulatory and delusional that you actually think that yourself and those who can believe like you do can take pure evil and make it into pure good? Or are you merely pure evil and wish to make others believe otherwise so that you may seize power?
And please dont assume that I am simple minded or stupid because I believe in the principles of right and wrong. I hold these beliefs not because I am a fundamental Christian (tho I am a non-practicing Christian), but due to more secular influences in our culture, influences that could never exist in your utopia...JFK
Is the freest country on earth moving toward totalitarian dictatorship? What were the factors that enabled the Nazis to seize power in pre-war Germany? Do those same conditions exist in America today?
These are the questions raised — and answered, with frightening clarity — by Leonard Peikoff, Ayn Rand's heir, in his powerful book The Ominous Parallels.
"We are drifting to the future, not moving purposefully," Peikoff warns. "But we are drifting as Germany moved, in the same direction, for the same kind of reason."
Some of the "ominous parallels" between pre-Hitler Germany and the United States that Peikoff identifies are: Liberals who demand public control over the use and disposal of private property — social security, more taxes, more government control over the energy industry, medicine, broadcasting, etc.
Conservatives who demand government control over our intellectual and moral life — prayer in the schools, literary censorship, government intervention in the teaching of biology, the anti-abortion movement, etc. Political parties devoid of principles or direction and moved at random by pressure groups, each demanding still more controls.
A "progressive," anti-intellectual educational system that, from kindergarten to graduate school, creates students who can't read or write — students brainwashed into the feeling that their minds are helpless and they must adapt to "society," that there is no absolute truth and that morality is whatever society says it is. A student radical movement (from the 1960's through the violent anti-nukers and ecology fanatics of today) who are, Peikoff maintains, the "pre-Hitler youth movement resurrected." The radicals are nature worshippers who attack the middle class, science, technology, and business. The rise of defiant old-world racial hatreds disguised as "ethnic-identity" movements and "affirmative action." A pervasive atmosphere of decadence, moral bankruptcy, and nihilist art accompanied by the rise of escapist mystic cults of every kind — astrology, "alternative medicine," Orientalists, extrasensory perception, etc. In an introduction to Peikoff's book, Ayn Rand describes The Ominous Parallels as, "the first book by an Objectivist philosopher other than myself" and goes on to say that, "If you do not wish to be a victim of today's philosophical bankruptcy, I recommend The Ominous Parallels as protection and ammunition. It will protect you from supporting, unwittingly, the ideas that are destroying you and the world."
In brilliantly reasoned prose, Peikoff argues that the deepest roots of German Nazism lie not in existential crises, but in ideas — not in Germany's military defeat in World War I or the economic disasters of the Weimar Republic that followed, but in the philosophy that dominated pre-Nazi Germany. Although it was mediated by crises, Peikoff demonstrates that German Nazism was the inevitable climax of a centuries-long philosophic development, preaching three fundamental ideas: the worship of unreason, the demand for self-sacrifice and the elevation of society or the state above the individual.
"These ideas," Peikoff says, "are the essence of Nazism and they are exactly what our leading universities are now spreading throughout this country. This is the basic cause of all the other parallels."
Somebody in my family, very particularly, refers to himself as a Trotskyite.
I'm having a hard time figuring out whether you are being sarcastic, or asserting the truth of the zero-sum fallacy, or getting at something else.
Well, I doubt that "54 times" statistic, but I'll give it a pass for now... and I'll assume that you do not think that massive quantities of food are literally dumped off of a boat into the ocean (Greenpeace would have a conniption fit, LOL). I want to address the last line of the post.
That's our system's sick set of priorities.
Our systems single most important, significant, and historic priority is to give the individual the Freedom to produce as he sees fit. This was never tried in 6000 years of recorded history. The results are blazingly obvious. Those Western nations who have followed our example are miraculously short of famines, plagues, rampant inefficiency, etc. Those who have not are still floundering, and are somehow unable to feed themselves and unable to survive financially without Western aid, grants, and relief. Do you see this as a coinsidence?
Allow me to give you the clearest example of the inherent impossibility of success in the Socialist model. Oklahoma State University was working closely with Ethiopia in the 1950's, and the nations quickly became a net food exporter, overcoming famine, creating wealth, and even helping other African nations to feed their people. In the 1960's the Socialists took power, and the people of the region have never recovered. Millions are dead of starvation, billions of dollars of assets and wealth are consumed and never replaced, and they have never once produced the same tonnages that they did 50 years ago. This happens EVERY time Socialists enforce the "compassion" on populations. The ONLY reason some Socialism-leaning Western nations (like France) do not collapse is that they have enough of our "sick" priorities and allow the more motivated parts of the population to evade or circumvent national planning schemes and actually be productive... in SPITE of Socialism, and NEVER because of it.
It is sad that a college professor would so willfully ignore History and the plain lessons that it imparts.
With this in mind, which set of priorities is "sick"? The society that enforces a system that keeps people from producing enough to feed its people, or the system that is SO good at letting its people produce a surplus that they can voluntarily (aka, "freely") choose to waste food as they see fit?
Pure socialists are not interested in the individual but in reaching the ideal, even if this means the eventual liquidation of upwards of 90% of the population to remove them from the gene pool. After all, that is what being a member of the elite revolutionary vanguard means. Dana is obviously conversant in cliches and slogans. In the end they are good for propaganda for the masses. Unfortunately Dana actually believes his line of BS. I assume he has never met commited Stalinist leftists more conversant in the theoretical aspects of the class struggle and how to go about achieviong absolute power.
We can all take comfort in the knowledge that when my former Stalinist colleagues take over, it will be people like Dana who will be shot first. The Mensheviks have obviously never learned anything from history. All they do is pave the way and like all good cannon fodder lose out in the end.
As an academic, she has never earned an honest day's wage in the real world. Having no sense of the origins of capital, she is simply not credible attacking greed and the capitalist system that pays to pad her rather fat rump.
Instead, she is the shameless hypocrite that defines Socialism.
Want to help the world? Give them all your money, and leave America to Americans.
Disgusting creep!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.