The New Stupidity

If one wishes to ascertain the force of turpitude that is the most primary and inherent arch-villain of the liberty establishing, capitalist, reason-embracing principles that characterize the foundation and prosperity of the United States of America, one need travel no further than back to kindergarten, where the tell-all question that lies at the philosophical base of the entire boondoggle which is the modern political spectrum, was posed regularly: One plus one equals…?

“Two,” would be the answer you would get from pretty much every segment of existence, from the four-year-old to the marginally trained pubescent orangutan. Every segment, that is, but the elitist contemporary intelligentsia, who would claim that the “simplistic” answer of two could not be arrived at without factoring in the consequences of a myriad of possible impacts: the societal manipulation of four, the alienation instigated by seven, the class exploitation by nine, the spiritual implosion caused by three, and the sexual repression brought about by six.

Therefore, the ivory-towerites would continue, the question shouldn’t be “What does one plus one equal?” but rather: How do you define “one”? Or the question should be: Is one really one? Or the question should be: Was one abused as a child? Or the question should be: What prior emotional relationship does one-one have with one-two? Or the question should be:…What’s the question?

While that may sound like the type of thought that would be the consequence of a week-long acid trip spent watching Oliver Stone movies, it is precisely the groundwork of the elitist-intellectuals and the collectivism—i.e. evil—they advocate (whether it be in either of its forms: communism, socialism, fascism), the deceit and hypocrisy in which they preach it, and the outright inanity they both adopt and depend upon for its promulgation. It is the concept that nothing really exists, that everything is merely an illusion, that reality is all a matter of whim, via all of which reason, sense, and logic are all fantasies. And so, according to the intellectuals, true freedom cannot exist in a society containing horrible soul-exploitive things. Which is why, according to the intellectuals, true freedom can only be achieved through a more complex system of social idealism and communal mediation. And who better to define these “horrible soul-exploitive things,” proclaim this idealism, and create this “more complex system,” according to the intellectuals, than…the intellectuals.

Hence the proclamations that individual rights cannot merely consist of the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of property, but should also be extended to include the right to a “decent living wage,” the right to a “good quality of life,” the right to healthcare, the right to leisure and recreation, and—if you throw in consideration of sexual repression—the right to a good lay.1 Never mind the fact that, since property rights are the rights of one to own the product of his mind/labor, and every single one of the aforementioned—money, consumer products, medicine, healthcare, sexual services—are the product of a person’s mind, labor, or a combination thereof, nobody can have the right to any one of those things without violating the provider’s property rights, i.e. violating his right to life, i.e. enslaving him.

You see, it is a pretty large issue, this whole “rights” thing. So large, in fact, that it really lies at the heart of most issues with different names yet the same centrifugal moral question. The concept of individual rights is the core of freedom, the violation of which (inherent in collectivism) represents its disintegration. The only actual individual rights—life, liberty, property—are intertwined: the right to life as the base; being nonexistent without the right to free choice and speech (liberty), and the right to own and control the product of one’s mind and labor (property). Any of the frequently professed additional “rights,” which are the entitlement of certain people to violate the property rights of others, essentially constitutes the right to enslave, and is therefore the opposite and gruesome contradiction of individual rights.

Individual rights, however, pose a problem to elitist-intellectuals. This is because they, in their harshest application (capitalism), require people to obtain their food, medicine, and leisure by means of voluntary trade. In other words, work. And work is one of those “soul-exploitive” things. As says Professor Noam Chomsky, whose sordid deceit and virulence epitomizes the mind-molestation that is his domain, academia: “freedom is illusion and mockery when conditions for the exercise of free choice do not exist [which don’t exist for] the person compelled to sell his labor power to survive.”

At this point, property rights are out the window, since they maintain that if someone wants something you have, he is “compelled” to pay you for it. But then, who needs them anyway? For according to another intellectually brewed monumental Chomsky conclusion: “What is called the right to property is just the ‘right’ of certain people to own property.” And so what if individual rights follow suit in catapulting headfirst out the window, as—being attached—they have no choice but to do? After all, said socialist Ronald Dorkin, “Individual rights are political trumps held by individuals.”

Ergo the line of thinking under which it is somehow better for the “national soul” (as one pro-art-subsidies editorial put it) if instead of appropriating tax-dollars to the manufacturing of a stealth-bomber that’s essential in protecting every soul in the nation by threatening/eliminating those determined to destroy the bodies that encompass them, they’re spent in the form of a grant to some beatnik artist writing monologues comparing the fuzziness of a spring-time leaf to her awkward childhood nights spent sleeping in the same bed as her mother.

There are, of course, variations of this line of anti-thought—from this intellectual anti-intellect statement by enviro-socialist Erich Fromm: “Self-awareness, reason, and imagination have disrupted the harmony which characterizes animal existence” (a statement conveying both the means and desired end of environmentalism)—to the platform for the Brecht Forum’s New York-professor-led 24^th annual Intensive study in Marxism, which was a search for “a political response that can confront the interdependence of capital with racism, sexism, homophobia and xenophobia” (explaining the answer to the years-old enigma of why the wealthiest country on earth is Tajikistan)—to the cry shouted in the Forum by New York Labor Party chairman Brenda Stokely that “There should be free everything for everybody!” (interjecting the query at whose cost? would be as big an insult to the institution of query-interjection as calling Berkeley a “city” would be to the institution of city-labeling)—to this following isolated statement by Chomsky comrade Howard Zinn, which can be classified as nothing but outright childlike stupidity: “All war is a war against children.”2

The epochal problem, however, isn’t that such things are being said, nor, directly, the people who are saying them, nor even the despicability in which those people assert themselves the label of “human rights advocates.” There are certain institutes in operation for the specific purpose of harboring such beings who lack the faculties of reason and logic, eradicating them from where sensible people must endure their vociferous rants and the migraines that ensue. But the outrageous fact is that, far from being denounced to the depths of obscurity, they’re extolled to the level of intellectuals to whose ideas we must listen, revere, respect, make love, et cetera, enshrined as unquestionable superiors to any “simplistic” dissenter who dares challenge their “noble” crusades—and that is the problem; the problem, not that the harboring institutes don’t exist, but that they double as universities. When Princeton Professor David Singer wrote an article expressing his approbation of having sex with animals—blaming its taboo-status on “Judeo-Christian tradition”—the president of PETA agreed, calling the question of how an animal could possibly consent to being boffed “an attempt to make this so narrow and un-intellectual in its focus. You know, Peter Singer is an intellectual,” she continued.

And it is due to this problem that the horrific enslaving agendas of the non-conformists-to-the-mind—the New Stupidity—are continuing to machinate, influence, implement, and live, despite the fact that in all of their catastrophic applications throughout history, the residue of their bleeding hearts has always ended up in multiple volume on their hands.

In view of the massive literal and ideological bloodstains on the hands of collectivism, the elitist-intellectuals resort to the same practice recently used by a certain prominent figure when he was confronted with an incriminating stain: lying. There is, to be sure, a fine line between stupidity and lying. An example that straddles the two would be the inanity of which no other has resulted in more directly fatal consequences in America; the type related to protecting individual rights—pacifism.

The significant rise and influence of pacifism in America, much like every other liberty-obstructing enormity, first took place in the 1930s, and resulted in the massive exacerbation of an incident called World War II. The decade hosted a flurry of fashionable ramblings. Liberal editor Oswald Garrison Villard, writing about opponents of disarmament, wrote, “militarism, backed by all the rich and privileged, by every opponent of a new and better world,” before saying “bogies as to our coming ‘war’ with Japan.” British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain spoke of “the desire of the German people for peace” and “the passionate desire of the Italian people for peace” while declaring that war “wins nothing, cures nothing, settles nothing.” Socialist Party candidate Norman Thomas assured: “A prospective victory by Hitler over most of Europe is highly unlikely,” as leftist Senator Gerald Nye affirmed that “the masses of Japan are no more desirous of a conflict with the people of the United States than our own citizens are desirous of a war with the people of Japan.” And finally, socialist Bertrand Russell (a man who later described John F. Kennedy and British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan as “the wickedest people that ever lived in the history of man” who were “fifty times more wicked than Hitler”) added to the gaseous concoction this pep-rallying statement of pom-pom triumph: “The purpose is peace, and the way to achieve it is to say: We will not fight.”

Some pretty powerful, moving stuff. Problem was, German M-16s were slightly more powerful. And what America and England initially lacked severely in arms—due to the popularity of the aforementioned sentiments of “peace”—they had to pay for in carcasses. (Even the French, who were quite sufficiently armed, were so pacifist that they cried merde! and scattered off with their hands tucked between their legs searching desperately for something to grab hold of when Germany came knocking on the door.) The conclusion was best summed up by Winston Churchill in a post-war speech: “There never was a war in all history easier to prevent by timely action than the one which has just desolated such great areas of the globe.”

Even when the elitist-intelligentsia haven’t gotten their way in pacifism, they have been proven to be drastically wrong. When it came to the Cold War, they pounced on Ronald Reagan’s policy of tenacious armament like a pack of Polish rats on a cold kielbasa. The policy ended the Cold War in American victory, destroying the eighty-year reign of the most murderous empire in the history of mankind without the occurrence of a single battle or the loss of a single life. When it came to the Gulf War, socialist Bernie Sanders asked: “Is [a ground war] worth 30,000 to 40,000 casualties?” while Senator/Goodyear blimp Ted Kennedy said: “We’re talking about the likelihood of at least 3,000 American casualties a week, with 700 dead, for as long as the war goes on.” The war lasted shorter than one of Teddy’s hangovers. There were more American casualties at Chappaquiddick.

The same sentiments have been exerted whether directed toward America trying to defend herself in a war, or simply in precautious defense—with equally brutal effects. Nothing could be more brutal than what Noam Chomksy wrote in an essay concerning the latter:

‘National defense’ is, of course, a sick joke, which would elicit ridicule outside of a commissar culture. The U.S. faces no threats….[emphasis most ridiculously mine]

I will apply no further comment to that statement, other than to say that it was written in 1995.

***

On the outset, these just seem like examples of deadly stupidity. There is actually much more to the mindset behind the pacifism of the New Stupidity, but I’ll get into that later. First, I would like to divulge into their more explicit deceit. Lies being the expendable tools that they are, the intellectuals have been using them, in many forms and variations, from the very beginning—long before they had the bloodiness of their own effects to hide.

Some forms border on the benign, being merely consequences of having encrypted lying in one’s profession and character. An example of this is displayed by Ralph Nader, who wrote in his book Crashing The Party that a Tonight Show appearance during his campaign “went well”—a show in which he was mocked hysterically by Leno, a guest, and several newspapers after blurting out “Strawberries!”, to the question of what he does for fun (a blurt-out that may say much more about his private life than even the greenest of us care to know).

Other forms are for more baneful.

Perhaps the oldest and most persistent elitist-intellectual deception is their purported stance of “spokesman for the common person.” With all their talk about the “little man,” one would think they were salesmen trying to push some sort of endowment-enlarging pill. The phrase “little man,” to begin with, is a completely meaningless phrase used as a persuasive tool to evoke class warfare, to appeal to the lowest in men—primitive brute emotion, senselessness, gullibility, and envy. (In short, the four human characteristics most abundant at the age of five.) The meaninglessness of such a phrase put aside, however, nothing could be further from the truth. One of the first prominent socialists, Jean Jacque Rousseau, called the masses a “stupid pusillanimous invalid” in The Social Contract. Eighteenth century socialist William Godwin, in his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, said the peasant had “the contemptible insensitivity of an oyster.” And more recent socialist George Bernard Shaw declared the working class to be “detestable” people who “have no right to live.”

Acrid contempt for the “common man” (let’s disregard the ambiguity of such a label by defining the common man as one who hasn’t spent fifteen years snorting ivy and memorizing dogmas) is in fact an inherent precept of the elitist-intelligentsia. It is the underlying factor in two related respects. The first is the modern and universal equivalent of the paternalistic view of slavery, which was a belief held during the era (and even now by many advocates of racial preferences) that blacks were incapable of earning better lifestyles for themselves in freedom, and thus benefited from slavery more than anyone else. It is what puts the “elitist” in elitist-intellectual—the belief that they the intellectuals know what’s better for everybody than everybody does for themselves, therefore making it in the best-interest of the inferior masses to forfeit their freedom to the superior asses. As Ralph Nader stated: “The consumer must be protected at times from his own indiscretion and vanity.” And to quote Ronald Dorkin once more: “A more equal society is a better society even if its citizens prefer inequality.” This brings us to the second respect: their hatred for the free market. The free market is a system of voluntary trade in which values are objectively pertained via the laws of supply and demand, meaning, according to their relevance to the greatest number of people. The values determined by people acting in free will, however, are not consonant with what the elitist-intellectuals deem proper. This is the case in all instances, including the condescension towards one of the most widely-enjoyed fields: competitive sports.3 This is also the idea behind such foul-odor oral excursions as why should Bill Gates make more than the person who cleans his toilets? (try running a laptop on Windex) and why should Anna Kournikova make more than an a member of an elementary school faculty who works with our children? (try telling people to wack-off with a picture of their old lunch-lady). Howard Zinn says, “talent and hard work, defined as stupidly as the way our culture defines it,” and brings up the question: “Why not reward people according to what they contribute to society?” So if value is not properly defined by the objective free market—by whom can it possibly be? If people’s rewards in a system conducted by un-coerced free and voluntary trade do no reflect their contributions to “society” in the best and only way—then who is to decide what will and what does? The Howard Zinns, the Noam Chomskys, the intellectuals. Only the proper term isn’t “redefinition,” or even “elitism,” but totalitarian dictatorship in its purest form.

***

There never has been a greater and more constantly harangued victim of deceit than the arch-opposite of totalitarianism: capitalism, the deception beginning with its very name. Capitalism was named by its enemies, to suggest that acquisition of capital at any cost was its only concrete. While capitalism does hold production, innovation, and individual pursuit of happiness as profoundly virtuous, it is (as I mentioned before) a political philosophy based on the moral concept of freedom, of individual rights, which holds the purpose of government as the protection of those rights from criminals (police, FBI, the courts, fraud legislation, copyright/patent laws) and foreign threats (the military, defense, CIA, Geraldo Rivera), acknowledging any crusade into an area outside of protecting rights as potentially or immediately violating them (there never being a larger violator of individual rights historically than the government itself). Capitalism implies one and only one thing: freedom, not what’s going to be individually made out of it. This is linked to another purported fallacy: the claim that under capitalism, happiness is solely based on money. If some disillusioned lint-head seeks medicinal spiritual gratification and is prescribed by the president of his hemp club to “drink a pint of chamomile and read Sartre in the morning,” he is perfectly free to do so under capitalism—only nobody else is forced to pay for it.

Since, aside from theoretically being the only moral and free political system, capitalism also spearheaded vast improvements in living-standards from the very moment it was generally adopted—improvements that would continue to grow exponentially for those who maintained its adoption—the collectivist intelligentsia’s approach to refuting it has always had to include deceit about its effects. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s self-portrayals as economic historians rather than political propagandists was a lie for the specific purpose of setting a storefront to dispense such deceptions, the most popular of which was the supposed “horrible affect of capitalism on children.” (A similar claim being made regarding women.) Marx, as well as all his sultry successors, pointed to child labor insisting that the Industrial Revolution grabbed children from the sandbox and lodged them into dirty, grotesque factories. This is a description that, if reworded with the consideration of accuracy in mind, would have to say that the Industrial Revolution grabbed children from death and lodged them into life. England’s population increased from six million in pre-Industrial 1750 to nine million in somewhat industrial 1800 to twelve million in far more industrial 1820; both of which were population increases that had about as much precedent then that a Robert Altman-directed blockbuster hit would have now. And no age-bracket benefited more from the completely unparalleled (at the time) population increase than children. The infant mortality rate in London, which was 74.5 percent in the period of 1710-1729, dove to 31.8 percent in the period of 1810-1829. The late great economist Ludwig Von Mises put it in simple terms:

It is a distortion of facts to say that the factories carried off the housewives from the nurseries and the kitchen and the children from their play. These women had nothing to cook with and feed their children. These children were destitute and starving. Their only refuge was the factory. It saved them, in the strict sense of the term, from death by starvation.

Meaning that, whenever anyone, cleverly ignoring the question of compared to what?, speaks of the “horrible affects on the lives of children”—or, for that matter, anyone—in the nineteenth century, it is an automatic concession to capitalism in that they presuppose “lives.”

If deceptions about capitalism were irritable hemorrhoids, the Alec Baldwin of them all would have to be the claim: the rich get richer while the poor get poorer. This axiomatic phrase has become a religious tenet among the collectivist-intelligentsia’s anti-liberty crusades, and none with a more satanic fervor. If a claim that the “wealth of the rich is derived from the poverty of the poor” is to bear any credence, there exist three prerequisites: first, a given period in which the rich get richer must also be the same period in which the poor get poorer; second, a country with the most and richest rich people would have to have the most and poorest poor people; and third, those falling under the categories of “rich” and “poor” must be the same people over time. And while the first two have been unremittingly negated, if not by common sense, by every present and historical example around the industrial world, the following facts concerning the United States, the most capitalistic country and therefore the most viciously hated and questioned, would make the third seem just as farcical, too. In the ten-year period between 1979-1988—a period in which a general liberation of the market stirred an economic erection causing a lot of “rich” people to get richer—only three percent of those who started the period as “poor,” i.e. in the bottom 20 percent income bracket, remained there by 1988, while more became rich (traveled to the top 20 percent) than remained “poor!” This is because the low-income categories are constituted mostly of: a) young people in or just out of school whose bracket positions, as they progress, are replaced by the fresh batch of young people, and b) self-employed individuals experiencing a bad year, who may still be wealthy. Combine these facts with the fact that, as displayed by studies both in 1996 and far more capitalistic 1892, over 80 percent of American millionaires are self-made—and you can send to the dung heap any talk of a certain people “controlling” a certain percentage of “the country’s wealth.” Even to say that a microscopic three percent of Americans are consistently poor would be spurious, considering that the number would include those who migrated upward after the nine-year period, and that to be “poor” in America most often means to own several luxury, recreational, and life-easing products (including houses), which are made affordable thanks to self-interest-fueled ever-progressing industrial technology and mass-production.

(As for assertions of a “widening income gap,” studying basic math proves that claim to be meaningless, as a form of gap-expansion is consonant with prosperity. If I had 10 beers and you had 100, and our wealth increases ten-fold, our gap widens from 90 to 900. On the same token, if our wealth decreases ten-fold, our gap narrows from 90 to 9. In which case am I drunker?)

These universal and historic natures of capitalism were so evident that they actually hit home with none other than V.I. Lenin himself, leading to the creation of a contiguous lie that has since become an equally-coveted dictum of the New Stupidity. It was indeed the very fact that both the rich and the “poor” got richer—not to mention that the poor benefit most from industrial progress—that stood as the reason why Marx’s forecasts of impoverished revolutions eroded as laughable so soon after they were made. (Forecasts, notably enough, which Marx and Engels themselves divorced toward their lives’ end in lieu of their confession to the growing prosperity of the English proletariat.) Faced with this reality, Lenin ponied up the response that the rich were sharing some of their stash with the poor, just enough to make them too high to revolt. The rich did this, Lenin explained, by expanding their stash through “enormous super-profits” obtained via foreign investment (“exploitation”) in non-industrial nations. In short, Lenin redrew the blueprint of deceit to basically expand the scope of the claim; saying that the wealth of the wealthy countries is derived from the poverty of the poor countries—a noxious notion entitled “imperialism.” Lenin’s book, Imperialism, was the cunningly deceptive propaganda which outlined the notion and became a sort of bible to those prescribing to it. Its deception is best exposed and refuted by economist/scholar Thomas Sowell, in his The Quest for Cosmic Justice where, after citing and discussing the numbers Lenin used, he writes:

For the period covered by Lenin’s data and doctrine—the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—the United States was the leading recipient of British, German, and Dutch capital. At the time when Lenin wrote, the British Empire was the largest empire in the world…Contrary to Lenin, however, its investments did not go primarily to its imperial possessions. Its greatest investments were in another industrial country, the United States, which received more British investments than all of Asia or all of Africa or all of Latin America.

Sowell continues to note that “Britain’s other major overseas investments were also in European offshoot societies and economies in Australia, Canada, Rhodesia, and South Africa,” before explaining that the pattern wasn’t unique to Britain:

France and Germany were likewise reluctant to sink much of their money into Africa, for example, and commercial trade with Africa was similarly trivial for the economies of the European imperial powers.

He explains that on the eve of World War I “Germany exported more than five times as much to a small country like Belgium as to its own colonial empire, which was larger than Germany itself.” France likewise “exported ten times as much to Belgium as to all its vast holdings in Africa, which were larger than France,” while the United States “invested more in Canada than in all of Asia and Africa put together.”

Dr. Sowell concludes:

In short, the huge and heterogeneous categories used in Lenin’s Imperialism concealed evidence that showed the direct opposite of what this classic work of propaganda claimed. The idea that the non-industrial world offered a safety valve outlet for the ‘surplus’ capital of the industrial world cannot stand up if the industrial nations are investing primarily in each other. This would be adding up to their economic and social pressures, rather than relieving them, if the Marxian theory of excess capital accumulation were correct.

The situation is no different today, with the United States. As Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute Tom G. Palmer points out in an article on globalization, during the 1990’s, 81 percent of U.S. foreign direct investments went to Canada, Western Europe and Japan, with developing, wage-rising, countries such as Indonesia, Brazil, Thailand, and Mexico receiving 18 of the 19 remaining percent.

***

If there is one concrete in the elitist-intelligentsia’s deceptions about capitalism, it would have to be the consistent usage of fuzzy-vocabulary. One such term causing a particularly permeating itch is “exploitation.” The way in which “exploitation” is used to label those who deal in voluntary trade—i.e., through and by people’s free will—by the same people who advocate state control—i.e., intervention and coercion by means of force; at the point of a gun—certainly resembles a rash in a most unreachable location. The rational bewilderment at how “exploitation” is branded to the former instead of the latter can only be further expanded in light of the victim most in vogue today: corporations with factories in third-world countries, providing those country’s citizens with an outlet for survival far superior to any of their domestic alternatives (multinational corporation’s wages are on average twice as much as third-world local wages, according to The Economist). When the university-pawned teenage hooligan marionettes fasten their Cole Haan sandals and strap on their Mountainsmith backpacks in preparation of unleashing waves of cacophonous protest against these corporations being allowed to “exploit” third-worlders, it is a wonder whether they know—or, for that matter, care—about those workers, and how every pressure- or restriction-closure of a foreign corporate factory is to their detriment and destitution. (Or that one of the prime reasons for corporations paying lower wages in the third-world than in the U.S. is the fact that the productivity of third-world labor is significantly lower. Average labor productivity in far-from-world’s-worst modern sectors of India, for example, is 15 percent of what it is here.) While the protestors indulged in loafs of organic tofu in celebration over a recent victory in pressuring the companies running Ecuador’s banana plantations into releasing all their child workers, Ecuadorians were livid over the further impoverishment the lay-offs caused. One Ecuadorian mother complained, “They fired all the children, but the work they did helped us.”

Another such postulate is “redistribution of income.” Any time the claims are made that income is “distributed unevenly,” people did not “share equally” in the prosperity of a given period, or the like, they are done so in complete disregard to the simple truth that, in capitalism, wealth is not distributed—it is created and earned. Indeed, the only people whose incomes are derived from distribution in America are those in the parasitic fields, such as social-workers and tax-funded professors, whose salaries are confiscated from tax-payers by the government at gunpoint. There is no such thing as a capitalist “country’s wealth”; only the wealth of individuals within the country who produce products or services which hold value in trade with other individuals. So long as people have different talents, skills, interests, and work-ethic, those incomes are going to differ. And so long as you don’t want every woman to look like Anna Quindlen, or everyone to sing like me, you won’t wish it were otherwise. The real matter is much to the contrary: what the elitist-intellectuals intertwine in their usage and implementation of the term “redistribution” is their longing for a system in which income is distributed. A system in which all property and wealth—hence life—is owned by the collective, i.e. the state, where the elitist-intellectuals can assume the role of distributors and pass out rations according to the way they deem fit.

***

Keeping the forum of discourse directed toward the topic of what they oppose, however, is much to the preference of the elitist-intellectuals, and the reason isn’t merely that the lies regarding capitalism have been so grounded into the stone of convention that they are accepted as truths, thus tilting the atmosphere heavily to their favor. It is because, by speaking about what they oppose, they keep the discussion away from the area of what they advocate—an area in which the color red has been proven to be just as prevalent a physical description as a political symbol.

I will introduce this area by referring back to pacifism. Like other things which produce defecate-resembling results, pacifism has two sides. The first is philosophical. Pacifism, as a mentality, is the sanction and allowance of evil, by virtue of coexistence, with the cowardice goal of avoiding conflict. It is the belief that one should not protect his rights (lawfully applied, that one should not be allowed), under which rights and property are capitulated to any demanding criminal or, nationally, foreign invader—i.e., those whose tools of demand are force and violence. To coexist with evil is to permit evil. To permit evil is to submit to evil. To submit to evil is to live under the rule of tyranny and aggression. Which is why, if you think there’s turmoil now, just wait until we have complete “peace.” But the pacifism of the collectivist-intelligentsia which I previously documented consists also of a different side; it isn’t just the naïve-child’s-fright syndrome of ignorance. The intellectuals could give a Janet Reno jockstrap about the well-being of our men-in-uniform, and indeed have been giving much less than that, unless you consider the malicious slander and contemptible condescension America’s heroic soldiers received during their service at and upon their return from World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and the Gulf as anything.

So what, as it were, is the underlying factor behind their vitriolic opposition to America’s right to defend herself in war or to have any national defense? The answer is simple: they want to see America destroyed.

It brings things much into light about the pacifism concerning World War II, for instance, when one reads the following words printed in socialist-communist-“liberal” The Nation magazine in the 1930’s:

The New Deal in the United States, the new forms of economic organization in Germany and Italy, and the planned economy of the Soviet Union [are all signs of tendency] for nations and groups, capital as well as labor, [to] demand a larger measure of security than can be provided by a system of free competition.

The wonderful collective experiments of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy presented the “new and better world” Oswald Garrison Villard was talking about. Thus the fact about World War II, which also goes was for all wars since: the peacenik intellectuals admired and adored our enemies, exalting them as far more noble and superior to evil capitalistic America; as models for what America should become, not battle.

It was no different when it came to the war in Vietnam, which the polyester pariahs did not wail against because it was impractical and un-winnable, or because it was commanded by two men—Lyndon B. Johnson and Robert D. McNamara—who had sub-zero expertise in the subject and therefore conducted it like two untrained chimpanzees behind the wheel of a jetliner causing an uncountable number of otherwise avoidable American casualties. They opposed it, because they claimed it “evil”—evil to fight communism, evil to battle the dictatorial philosophy which holds man as a slave to the state, evil to try and obliterate the totalitarian system in which the government controls its unarmed and defenseless serfs by the bullet. (Note how the greatest peacenik outcry was in sympathy to the victims of the Nixon-era bombings towards the sunset of the war, which came in jest of withdrawing our troops.)

It is no different now, when it comes to the War on Terror. Several characteristics of the Islamic world are very appealing to the New Stupidity: It’s virtually untouched by the Industrial Revolution—save for the fact that its only wealth is derived from a natural resource that wouldn’t be worth the camel’s tail it anoints if not for the Western industrial inventions of gas-heating and the motored-engine (in other words, the invention of fuel out of mere oil) and if it weren’t for America providing and teaching them the operation of the later nationalized (stolen) oil-extracting technology. Its citizens live in a state that much resembles the “animal existence” that the environmentalist/spiritualists of the Fromm variety long for; indeed, a state far surpassed by the civilization of classic Greece two millennia preceding it. Its dictators extract and control the entire wealth of their countries, rendering impossible the evil, “greedy,” gap-engendering actions of production, trade, and material-progress. Oh, the intellectuals will admit that the Islamic world could use a little work in certain areas, specifically their animal-like treatment of women, before adding that America didn’t allow women to vote (!) until only eighty years ago, so who are we to talk anyway. As Democrat Senator Robert Torricelli (NJ), speaking prior to 9-11 before a group of Muslim terrorists involved in procuring the attack, announced in regards to the Islamic world: “America has little to teach, and a lot to learn.”

So this is why the United States listening to a leftist-pundit’s advice on war tactics or approach is like Road-Runner asking Wiley for advice on picking out a bullet-proof vest. But what illuminates this particular lie as especially significant is that it is an overture to the most current, gruesome, revealing deception of the New Stupidity…

It is now hardly a secret, the centimillions slaughtered by the collectivist-dictatorships throughout the 20^th century—the great majority of which by the socialist utopias—not to mention the centimillions more who lived in a state that made the thought of death appealing. What the intellectuals are attempting to keep a secret is that they, the American and Western Left in its practical entirety (and from its notoriously safe, hypocritical distance), no less than adulated the glorious experiments of those collective-dictatorships, none any more than the most pernicious slaughterhouse in human history, Soviet Russia. Any dissenter was viciously ripped to shreds as a “close-minded reactionary” for daring to question their orgasmic exaltation of the communist-dictatorships as progressive triumphs of the heart (to quote the much-quoted Jean-Paul Sartre in 1952: “Any anti-communist is a dog” and “Soviet citizens criticize their government much more…effectively than we do. There is total freedom of criticism in the U.S.S.R.” Italics mine). During the New Stupidity’s domination of Hollywood and the publishing industry in the 1930s, the atmosphere was so that actors/actresses were strongly urged against starring in a rare production with anti-communist underpinnings (Ayn Rand’s play, Night of January 16^th, to cite one specific example) by their agents for fear of career-suicide. The few Russian escapists who tarnished the touching, avuncular image the elitist-intellectuals had of “Uncle Joe” Stalin by documenting his murder of some twenty million people were shunned and impatiently lectured with that squalor-coated pointy-finger on how “you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”4

Eventually, the facts became overburdening, and the question arose: how did so many broken fresh eggs result in such a rotten omelet? And the New Stupidity has answered in their most mendacious way yet: denial. Several have taken the core-deceitful approach of denying their knowledge about the horrific facts (or “statistics,” as Uncle Joe would’ve preferred) concerning the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and its boy-toys. Some, such as Howard Zinn, have taken the barbaric approach and have described Soviet methods as “a cheap imitation of Western capitalism.” Almost all have taken the Alzheimer’s approach, and have completely denied their advocacy of their century’s-long apotheosis. Thus, Noam Chomksy has continued the Vietnam ramblings:

The real fear was that if the people of Indochina achieved independence and justice, the people of Thailand would emulate it, and if that worked, they’d try it in Malaya, and pretty soon Indonesia would pursue and independent path….

So what happened when the United States finally did withdraw (which the distinguished author neglects to mention in any of his “alternative” writings)? More Indochinese people were killed in the first two years of Communist peace than had been killed on all sides in almost ten years of anti-communist war! During the same period, 2 million Cambodians were slaughtered by the Khmer Rouge, with likewise results suffered by the denizens of Laos. It was “Independence and justice”—Chomsky style.

III

It is almost amusing, in a pathetic and hope-exacting way, to see free-market commentators wonder why “liberals” can’t grasp the fact that welfare only creates fastened cycles of dependency, minimum-wage laws reduce jobs, welfare-statism and economic-regulation rape the economy and scar no group more than the working poor, the greatest victims of racial preferences are the purportedly “preferred,” thousands are dying yearly from government control of organs and FDA regulations and restrictions of cancer-curing medicines, those between the ages of twenty-five and sixty-three will be getting from -0.34% to -1.7% return from social security whereas a conservative portfolio from 1930-1939 would’ve earned a 2.27% yearly return, price-controls drastically reduce the quantity and quality of the controlled, “affordable housing” causes housing shortages, et cetera per every form and aspect of government intervention and impingement of the free-market and human liberty. FDR’s “New Deal,” among its several other catastrophic socialization elements, featured as most outrageously imbecilic the idea that the way to solve the economic ills that socialization and New-Dealism created in the first place would be to have the government create a bunch of jobs to be paid for by extracting through taxes the money that didn’t exist and taking what money did exist to the Xerox machine at the Federal Reserve. It resulted in the worst economic decade in American history; whose increasing dwindle was only temporarily put on hiatus by World War II. What liberty-obstructing enormity did not rise into power in the thirties, did so in the sixties. The most egregious of these enormities was the advent of “Criminal’s rights”—whose advocates proclaimed that the criminals were, in fact, innocent and that it were victims who were truly guilty5—but the most eminent was the “Great Society,” which profoundly exacerbated the fatally-oriented programs of the “New Deal.” It resulted in an LBJ presidency whose affect on America could be most conclusively summarized by the last two initials of his name.

Time has witnessed many works definitively proving that socialism does to the economy, living-standard, and prosperity what Catherine the Great did to horses, and that laissez-faire capitalism is the only accurately-functioning economy possible. These works include those of Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Frederic Bastiat, David Ricardo, (and in the 20^th century) Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Henry Hazlitt, Murray Rothbard, and Milton Friedman, to name just the most renowned, and to disregard a plethora of scholars who’ve authored a myriad of conclusive works concerning specific issues. Yet despite all the economic-logic, fact, and historical evidence to the contrary, collectivist influences—in one name or another, under one disguise or another—still continue to exist and persist. Why?

This is the question that most free-marketers ask in bewilderment today. Yet these utilitarian-capitalists fault on two related counts. First, the foremost basis for capitalism is not economical, but moral; more specifically, the moral concept of individual rights. This concept was written into the framework of America under specific directions by our Founders that they are never, under any circumstances, to be abridged. Hence the word: inalienable. Every explicit form of slavery from time immemorial was justified by its benefit to “the greater good” or “society as a whole.” Ditto for genocide and, needless to say, for all the non-explicit forms of slavery most prevalent in modern times. The euphoria of herds of politicians, who haven’t in their lives produced the sweat they’ve gathered moisturizing themselves, conversing over how one plethora of legislation after another is “good” for society or will “work” in solving the “ills” that result from people controlling their own lives, was a prospect so horrifying that the mere thought of it whitened even the wigs of the Founding Fathers.

For the main argument against social-spending programs (as well as any form of welfare-statism) is not that they don’t work—work for whom?, by whose definition?, at whose cost? Enslavement of blacks “worked,” if the goal was to assure that black people wouldn’t out-earn whites. Black slavery was also maintained under the concept of “benefit to the greater good.” Such an issue, of course, shouldn’t even be an issue. And neither, for the same reason, should the issue of how some “beans-to-the-gas-heating-deprived” entitlement program benefits the “general good.” They’re both varied degrees of the same evil principle: slavery, the violation of individual rights.

The second fault is that the utilitarian-capitalists seemingly fail to realize that they’re debating steakhouses with vegans. The works of the aforementioned economists/thinkers dealt in logical proof of the best working economic system, while the New Stupidity has the abandonment of logic written into its very platform.

And that’s the skeleton key. It is impossible to understand the persistency of the lies and irrationality of the New Stupidity, as well as the frustratingly constipated arena of modern political debate, without realizing that what is most important is not so much that they’re irrational, but that they admit it; not the existence of stupidity, but its ostentatious flaunting. (The line has been drawn from the very roots of philosophy, by its two strictly opposed pillars. Aristotle was the father of logic. Meanwhile Plato claimed logic was born out of wedlock, and therefore illegitimate.)

In the face of all the truths and realities of collectivism that are brought into light by reason, collectivists have done—as they have ever since in less complete degrees—the only thing they can. They’ve thrown it out, proclaimed it evil, and denounced it, as if a malfunctioned adult toy, for not “giving joy” and the like. When everything is nothing, everything is anything—anything the elitist-intellectuals define it as. When there are no truths, there are no fallacies. Thus, the New Stupidity lies aren’t really lies, since after all, what are “lies”? Nor were the collectivist-dictatorships horrific, since after all, what is “horror”?

For that matter, what is “is”? But most importantly, the denial of the intellect is not merely a “tool” to erase the truth, the past, and every inconsistency. (That is only one of its convenient uses, and the reason why debate over rational issues with the New Stupidity is impossible.) Irrationality is the very core of the makeup of the New Stupidity, combined with a pseudo-altruistic moral code which proscribes man as a slave whose only virtue is self-sacrifice to the collective, i.e., to the state, i.e., to the best laid plans of politicians and professors in orchestrating their elite, ideal utopias.

(It is true that some of the collectivist takeovers, during their dawn, did promise material prosperity. But that cellophane wrap was so evanescent that it had TEAR HERE practically printed on it—as was proved almost instantaneously, when socialization resulted in unparalleled poverty, and prosperity was hence proclaimed “evil.”)

This is what any beholder of sense needs to realize if freedom is to be reinstated and preserved, and its continual impingement reversed.

This—not mistaken “good intentions” or even hypocrisy. Condemning the New Stupidity for their hypocrisy is like condemning Ted Turner only for his mental-retard-like articulacy. True, their hypocrisy is outlandish, in that their very existence (their salaries or the tax-dollars with which they ingratiate themselves), not to mention the many luxuries they enjoy, depends upon the production of the very people whose throats they vow to slit. Nevertheless, hypocrisy is a miniscule vice when compared to the rest of their depravity, and its isolated exposition also enables the false illusion that those who are not hypocrites are any less reprehensible.

This—as philosopher Ayn Rand knew so well and analyzed so timelessly when, over four decades ago, she wrote: “There never has been a philosophy, a theory or a doctrine that attacked (or ‘limited’) reason, which did not also preach submission to the power of some authority…Power-seekers have always known that if men are to be made submissive, the obstacle is not their feelings, their wishes or their ‘instincts,’ but their minds; if men are to be ruled, then the enemy is reason.

Whenever a political movement needs to undergo more name changes than P. Dildo (or whatever)—while its opponent continues to use the label branded it by its enemies—and relies on propagating its agenda in different cracks and creaks through a thick curtain of discretion, you can know it not to be a very good harbinger for what that political movement truly is and seeks to achieve.

Collectivism, as an open movement, is dead. With the mark it has left upon the world throughout history, it would get rejected like a bad first-novel by Americans if served open-faced. As a result, the New Stupidity has taken the indirect course of demeaning, destroying, and discrediting the one standing fountainhead that has since its conception been the living, concrete contradiction of everything they stand for: The United States of America.

With the virtuous regard of individual pursuit of happiness written into her very founding document, America has been the broad-shouldered, eagle-sharp, starkly erect middle-finger to collectivism for 227 years—the symbol of how people pursuing their own goals has uniquely resulted in, not only an ever-increasing standard of life, but also the demolition of the millennia-old institutions (albeit some more and sooner than others) of slavery, racism, and sexism by virtue of those institution’s collision with reason—of how the enabling of the more able to achieve to the extent of their ability has allowed the less able to achieve beyond the extent of theirs—of how people can live in a state of individuality and freedom instead of a state of self-sacrificial serfdom to a God, king, monarch, dictator, tribe, or mob, and how it works!

This is why the elitist-intellectuals have taken the propaganda-path, not of preaching pro-collectivism, or even purely anti-capitalism, but of anti-Americanism—including the condemnation of America for anti-capitalist actions!

They have paved their path in the most vital arena, academe; the arena in which they soil the minds of those who’ve barely learned quite how not to soil themselves. The affects of physical-molestation are usually temporary, but the affects of mind-molestation—the type the elitist-intellectuals practice—are rooted much deeper, as it rapes the psyche of its victims for life. Khmer Rouge sounds like a neat exotic perfume to 19-year-olds, and the consequential pattern is as follows: the frequent, mainstream-scenario sees people graduating with a solid collectivist mindset, while the best-case scenario mostly sees people graduating with the indented idea that the ideals of their professors, while impractical, are respectably moral and noble. This latter is cognizant of today’s conservatives, with that indentation as eventually leading to the destruction of what they have realized to work in practice.

And so the fundamental methods of deceit and disgust have continued. On October 25, 2001, Noam Chomsky delivered a speech regarding the planning of the attack on Afghanistan to an audience of students, in which he announced:

Plans are being made, and programs implemented on the assumption that they may lead to the deaths of several million people in the next—in the next couple of weeks…we’re in the midst of apparently trying to murder three or four million people…” [emphasis mine]

It has been 48 weeks since then (with the attack on Afghanistan long over) and the number of Afghani civilian casualties has been estimated by news services to be between 500 and 1,000. As for an apology, retraction, correction from Chomsky? You’d have better luck finding a gerbil within ten miles of the Richard Gere residence.

Following the 9-11 attack, Howard Zinn, in an article entitled Retaliation, also attempted to “expose” the consequences of our self-defense: “Retaliation leads to retaliation and more retaliation—war without end.” Again, one year and a thoroughly successful attack on Afghanistan later, and there hasn’t been one solitary retaliation, not even a camel’s head found in Donald Rumsfeld’s bed.

***

These are only examples representing fractions of what the two prime mind-molesters have done and continue to do (as they have devoted their entire careers now to solely blaming America for everything and, as Chomsky has, touring the Islamic world, calling America “the greatest terrorist nation on earth” and rallying violent hatred and terrorist action), and smaller fractions still of what the thousands of their educational apostles congesting practically every college/university and many high-schools partake in.

Howard Zinn’s book, A People’s History of The United States, has become a bible among anti-American history-rewriting high-school teachers and college professors everywhere, and is required reading in many classrooms and courses. The book (which is as much a history book as Zinn is an historian) is described as “America’s story told from the eyes of America’s women, the eyes of factory workers, the eyes of African-Americans, the eyes of Native Americans, the eyes of the working poor, and the eyes of immigrant laborers.” Only a mutant-monster has that many eyes, and Zinn is certainly no exception. In the afterword, Zinn writes this about the sacred founding document:

With the actual history of the American Constitution, which speaks for ‘We the people…’ in the very first words of its preamble, but which, in fact, was drawn up by 55 wealthy slave-owners, merchants, bondholders, in such a way as to assure protection of the interests in their class…

Putting aside all the philosophically asinine aspects of this passage, putting aside the revealed truth that to risk one’s life in fighting for the American cause is not un-synonymous with fighting for one’s own self, one’s own life, and even putting aside the fact that several of the Founding Fathers—most notably George Washington and Thomas Jefferson—openly condemned slavery and freed entire factions of slaves in several areas (including all their own before their deaths), this is an outright lie. The Founding Fathers, some of whom were of modest means, were men who in fact risked their entire fortunes and lives (indeed many did lose their assets in burnings) for the independence of America. They could have chosen not to bother, to live out their lives very comfortably with their fortunes—as they were relatively unaffected by the taxes and tariffs imposed by England (which were themselves miniscule compared to the taxes and regulations imposed on us today). But it wasn’t the sizes of those taxes and tariffs, or the degree of economic control that ticked off the Founding Fathers; it was their fundamental violation. So instead of taking the luxuriously harmless path, they put everything on the line for the solidification of sacred principle, namely that of freedom and individual rights. Their combined integrity—to neglect any mention of their brilliance—has never been equaled in history.

A People’s History, in a nutshell, epitomizes the acrid anti-American crusade, and contains all the lies and mendacity one would expect from a New Stupidity bible. It consists mainly of a massive exaggeration of the two unobtrusively anti-capitalist actions of Indian-aggression and slavery (these pages take up the majority of the book, and neglect to mention the facts that the only aspects of the two that were unique to America were open-admittance and abolition, while, in a very revealing instance, excuse the slavery practiced by Indians and Africans), combined with a solid dosage of disgustingly pathetic class-sex-race warfare-provoking tone of socialist jargon (that Hemmingway wrote A Farewell to Arms, is an example of the likes of the strongest justifications for the dogma), including the frequent usage of the phrase “The Establishment” as if it were Zinn’s nickname for his own private region.

***

The New Stupidity knows what and, most importantly, who it’s doing. They are well aware that the best way to lure the United States into complete collectivist-dictatorship is not to thrust their motives out into the open breeze, for then they’ll get frost-bitten, but to do just that: to lure—to slowly, habitually confiscate freedom by incrementally implementing one statist power-enhancing legislation after another (from the confiscation of economic-freedom to gun-ownership-i.e.-self-defense-freedom to choice-freedom), under one gift-wrap after another, in one field after another, over minds sculpted to susceptibility, until all remnants of liberty and reason are removed, brotherhood-by-the-gun is restored, and the New Stupidity is enthroned.

They are translating the same political methods into education. They are well aware of the importance of capturing one’s mind at its most vulnerable stage. By destroying the logic and reasoning faculties of children at a very early age—while their minds are still developing, and long before they are consciously aware of the existence of those faculties—the New Stupidity methodically prepares them to absorb the more explicit indoctrination that they’re fed through the later stages of secondary- and university-schooling.

How sad it is that, as a result, the kids with the most hope are those who don’t pay attention; the kids who, when asked “what is one plus one?” blurt out: “69!” amidst the familiar giggles of adolescence.

And how much sadder it is that, considering the analogical value of that equation in displaying the essence of the New Stupidity and what its affect equals for America, they’re actually right.

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1 For those who think that I am exaggerating, a quote from socialist Professor Bennet M. Berger, in an adulating 1974 New York Times Book Review of a book entitled More Equality: “Who knows what ‘rights’ lie in the horizon: a right to orgasm, to feel beautiful? I think these will make people better citizens.”

2 To be fair to the attendees of the Brecht Marxism Forum, it must be conceded that they’re not just a conglomeration of living evidence that God has a substantive albeit twisted sense of humor, who think that the most successful American businesses are those that refuse service to all minorities, women, and gays, and who, as one woman did during the discussion, proclaim as a problem in need of fixing something that Marxism has in fact been fixing thoroughly over the last hundred years—the problem that “not enough people are hurting” and that they are “too comfortable” to revolt. Aside from all of that, these people do have a riveting wit. Which was displayed at its utmost when the conversation turned to history, and a woman remarked: “History is his story. Now we have her story as well.”

3 The permeating excitement of competitive sports, which is unequaled in most other forms of entertainment, is notoriously vomited on by those atop the ivory-towers. To quote Noam Chomsky: “Sports plays a societal role in engendering jingoist and chauvinist attitudes. They’re designed to organize a community to be committed to their gladiators.”

4 There were, to be sure, literally half-a-handful of elitist-intellectuals during the 20s and 30s who, realizing the potentially destructive publicity that their communist ideals would receive from being linked with ostentatious genocide, expressed disapproval of their counterparts’ hero, Stalin.

5 Supreme Court Chief Justice David L. Bazelon, whose sentiments were shared among the entire elitist-intelligentsia, declared in his The Imperative to Punish that society, whose “need to punish” was a “primitive urge” that was “highly irrational,” is guilty of “creating this special class of human beings,” by its “social failure” for which “the criminal serves as a scapegoat.” Meanwhile, psychiatrist Karl Menninger said: “Society secretly wants crime, needs crime and gains definite satisfactions by the present mishandling of it. We need criminals to identify ourselves with, to secretly envy, and to stoutly punish. They do for us the forbidden, illegal things we wish to do.” The result of the Criminal’s Rights laws? The murder rate, which in 1960 was half of what it was in 1934, doubled by 1974. During the same period, a citizen’s chances of being victim to a major violent crime tripled. In a shorter amount of time—just through the 60s—policemen casualties also tripled, as did the arrest rate for juveniles between 1965 and 1990.

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