Posted on 11/21/2001 12:49:58 PM PST by Askel5
(Caps were sorta purposefully screwy, of course. It's the tinfoil tagger in me ... )
Check's in the mail, memo reads: "Moderators Can be Cool!" =)
I expect this thread to get ALL KINDS of traffic and am pleased I'll not be making us look like morons by having my slips showing every third or fourth entry in "Latest Posts" ... =)
I could have given one more example which is perhaps still more striking: Catholics have never been discouraged even in the hardest trials, because they have always pictured the history of the Church as a series of battles between Satan and the hierarchy supported by Christ; every new difficulty which arises is only an episode in a war which must finally end in the victory of Catholicism.
Just a little teaser from the Sorel link within.
I couldn't help myself ... =)
I guess this is why the "former communists" every overture in favor of Capitalism and Privatization must needs be met by the West's support of Democracy (in lieu of constitutional republics).
Momma always told me to pay close attention to the pre- and suf-FIX'is IN the words folks use.
In both cases, the civitas and the state, capable of maintaining and guaranteeing peace, security, and predictability, ceased to exist, and the political condition of the anarchic war of all against all that characterized the external international order was introduced inside state and society."
Republics and Democracies
"By the time of the American Revolution and Constitution, the meanings of the words “republic” and “democracy” had been well established and were readily understood. And most of this accepted meaning derived from the Roman and Greek experiences. The two words are not, as most of today’s Liberals would have you believe -- and as most of them probably believe themselves -- parallels in etymology, or history, or meaning. The word Democracy (in a political rather than a social sense, of course) had always referred to a type of government, as distinguished from monarchy, or autocracy, or oligarchy, or principate. The word Republic, before 1789, had designated the quality and nature of a government, rather than its structure. When Tacitus complained that “it is easier for a republican form of government to be applauded than realized,” he was living in an empire under the Caesars and knew it. But he was bemoaning the loss of that adherence to the laws and to the protections of the constitution which made the nation no longer a republic; and not to the f act that it was headed by an emperor.
The word democracy comes from the Greek and means, literally, government by the people. The word “republic” comes from the Latin, res publica, and means literally “the public affairs.” The word “commonwealth,” as once widely used, and as still used in the official title of my state, “the Commonwealth of Massachusetts,” is almost an exact translation and continuation of the original meaning of res publica. And it was only in this sense that the Greeks, such as Plato, used the term that has been translated as “republic.” Plato was writing about an imaginary “commonwealth”; and while he certainly had strong ideas about the kind of government this Utopia should have, those ideas were not conveyed nor foreshadowed by his title.
The historical development of the meaning of the word republic might be summarized as follows. The Greeks learned that, as Dr. Durant puts it, “man became free when he recognized that he was subject to law.” The Romans applied the formerly general term “republic” specifically to that system of government in which both the people and their rulers were subject to law. That meaning was recognized throughout all later history, as when the term was applied, however inappropriately in fact and optimistically in self-deception, to the “Republic of Venice” or to the “Dutch Republic.” The meaning was thoroughly understood by our Founding Fathers. As early as 1775 John Adams had pointed out that Aristotle (representing Greek thought), Livy (whom he chose to represent Roman thought), and Harington (a British statesman), all “define a republic to be a government of laws and not of men.” And it was with this full understanding that our constitution-makers proceeded to establish a government which, by its very structure, would require that both the people and their rulers obey certain basic laws -- laws which could not be changed without laborious and deliberate changes in the very structure of that government. When our Founding Fathers established a “republic,” in the hope, as Benjamin Franklin said, that we could keep it, and when they guaranteed to every state within that “republic” a “republican form” of government, they well knew the significance of the terms they were using. And were doing all in their power to make the features of government signified by those terms as permanent as possible. They also knew very well indeed the meaning of the word democracy, and the history of democracies; and they were deliberately doing everything in their power to avoid for their own times, and to prevent for the future, the evils of a democracy.
Let's look at some of the things they said to support and clarify this purpose. On May 31, 1787, Edmund Randolph told his fellow members of the newly assembled Constitutional Con vention that the object for which the delegates had met was “to provide a cure for the evils under which the United States labored; that in tracing these evils to their origin every man had found it in the turbulence and trials of democracy....”
The delegates to the Convention were clearly in accord with this statement. At about the same time another delegate, Elbridge Gerry, said: “The evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy. The people do not want (that is, do not lack) virtue; but are the dupes of pretended patriots.” And on June 21, 1788, Alexander Hamilton made a speech in which he stated: "It had been observed that a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government. Experience had proved that no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity."
At another time Hamilton said: “We are a Republican Government. Real liberty is never found in despotism or in the extremes of Democracy.” And Samuel Adams warned: “Remember, Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself! There never was a democracy that ‘did not commit suicide.’”
James Madison, one of, the members of the Convention who was charged with drawing up our Constitution, wrote as follows: “...democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security, or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”
Madison and Hamilton and Jay and their compatriots of the Convention prepared and adopted a Constitution in which they nowhere even mentioned the word democracy, not because they were not familiar with such a form of government, but because they were. The word democracy had not occurred in the Declaration of Independence, and does not appear in the constitution of a single one of our fifty states-which constitutions are derived mainly from the thinking of the Founding Fathers of the Republic - for the same reason. They knew all about Democracies, and if they had wanted one for themselves and their posterity, they would have founded one. Look at all the elaborate system of checks and balances which they established; at the carefully worked-out protective clauses of the Constitution itself, and especially of the first ten amendments known as the Bill of Rights; at the effort, as Jefferson put it, to “bind men down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution,” and thus to solidify the rule not of men but of laws. All of these steps were taken, deliberately, to avoid and to prevent a Democracy, or any of the worst features of a Democracy, in the United States of America.
And so our republic was started on its way. And for well over a hundred years our politicians, statesmen, and people remembered that this was a republic, not a democracy, and knew what they meant when they made that distinction. Again, let's look briefly at some of the evidence.
Washington, in his first inaugural address, dedicated himself to “the preservation of the republican model of government.” Thomas Jefferson, our third president, was the founder of the Democratic Party; but in his first inaugural address, although he referred several times to the Republic or the republican form of government, he did not use the word “democracy” a single time. And John Marshall, who was Chief Justice of the Supreme Court from 1801 to 1835, said: “Between a balanced republic and a democracy, the difference is like that between order and chaos.”
Throughout all of the Nineteenth Century and the very early part of the Twentieth, while America as a republic was growing great and becoming the envy of the whole world, there were plenty of wise men, both in our country and outside of it, who pointed to the advantages of a republic, which we were enjoying, and warned against the horrors of a democracy, into which we might fall. Around the middle of that century, Herbert Spencer, the great English philosopher, wrote, in an article on The Americans: “The Republican form of government is the highest form of government; but because of this it requires the highest type of human nature -- a type nowhere at present existing.” And in truth we have not been a high enough type to preserve the republic we then had, which is exactly what he was prophesying.
Thomas Babington Macaulay said: “I have long been convinced that institutions purely democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty or civilization, or both.” And we certainly seem to be in a fair way today to fulfill his dire prophecy. Nor was Macaulay’s contention a mere personal opinion without intellectual roots and substance in the thought of his times. Nearly two centuries before, Dryden had already lamented that “no government had ever been, or ever can be, wherein timeservers and blockheads will not be uppermost.” And as a result, he had spoken of nations being “drawn to the dregs of a democracy.” While in 1795 Immanuel Kant had written: “Democracy is necessarily despotism.”
In 1850 Benjamin Disraeli, worried as was Herbert Spencer at what was already being foreshadowed in England, made a speech to the British House of Commons in which he said: “If you establish a democracy, you must in due time reap the fruits of a democracy. You will in due season have great impatience of public burdens, combined in due season with great increase of public expenditures You will in due season have wars entered into from passion and not from reason; and you will in due season submit to peace ignominiously sought and ignominiously obtained, which will diminish your authority and perhaps endanger your independence. You will in due season find your property is less valuable, and your freedom less complete.” Disraeli could have made that speech with even more appropriateness before a joint session of the American Congress in 1935. And in 1870 he had already come up with an epigram which is strikingly true for the United States today. “The world is weary,” he said, “of statesmen whom democracy has degraded into politicians.”
But even in Disraeli’s day there were similarly prophetic voices on this side of the Atlantic. In our own country James Russell Lowell showed that he recognized the danger of unlimited majority rule by writing:
“Democracy gives every man the right to be his own oppressor.”
W. H. Seward pointed out that “Democracies are prone to war, and war consumes them.” This is an observation certainly borne out during the past fifty years exactly to the extent that we have been becoming a democracy and fighting wars, with each trend as both a cause and an effect of the other one. And Ralph Waldo Emerson issued a most prophetic warning when he said: “Democracy becomes a government of bullies tempered by editors.” If Emerson could have looked ahead to the time when so many of the editors would themselves be a part of, or sympathetic to, the gang of bullies, as they are today, lie would have been even more disturbed. And in the 1880's Governor Seymour of New York said that the merit of our Constitution was, not that it promotes democracy, but checks it.
Across the Atlantic again, a little later, Oscar Wilde once contributed this epigram to the discussion: “Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people, by the people, for the people.” While on this side, and after the first World War had made the degenerative trend in our government so visible to any penetrating observer, H. L. Mencken wrote: “The most popular man under a democracy is not the most democratic man, but the most despotic man. The common folk delight in the exactions of such a man. They like him to boss them. Their natural gait is the goosestep.” While Ludwig Lewisohn observed: “Democracy, which began by liberating men politically, has developed a dangerous tendency to enslave him through the tyranny of majorities and the deadly power of their opinion.”
But it was a great Englishman, G. K. Chesterton, who put his finger on the basic reasoning behind all the continued and determined efforts of the Communists to convert our republic into a democracy. “You can never have a revolution,” he said, “in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution.”
And in 1931 the Duke of Northumberland, in his booklet, The History of World Revolution, stated: “The adoption of Democracy as a form of Government by all European nations is fatal to good Government, to liberty, to law and order, to respect for authority, and to religion, and must eventually produce a state of chaos from which a new world tyranny will arise.” While an even more recent analyst, Archibald E. Stevenson, summarized the situation as follows: “De Tocqueville once warned us,” he wrote, “that: ‘If ever the free institutions of America are destroyed, that event will arise from the unlimited tyranny of the majority.’ But a majority will never be permitted to exercise such ‘unlimited tyranny’ so long as we cling to the American ideals of republican liberty and turn a deaf ear to the siren voices now calling us to democracy. This is not a question relating to the form of government. That can always be changed by constitutional amendment. It is one affecting the underlying philosophy of our system -- a philosophy which brought new dignity to the individual, more safety for minorities and greater justice in the administration of government. We are in grave danger of dissipating this splendid heritage through mistaking it for democracy.”
And there have been plenty of other voices to warn us."
Robert Welch - September 17, 1961
Congressman Ron Paul's Resolution 443 Supports the Constitution - December 6, 2000
"Well, leave it to Ron Paul, Congressional Representative from Texas, and the most Constitutional of all Congressmen, to come forward in defense of the Electoral College. Here is the text of the House Concurrent Resolution he has JUST put forward to remind everyone that this is a REPUBLIC, NOT A DEMOCRACY, and to re-affirm our Constitutional Presidential electoral process. I whole-heartedly support this Res. and urge all of you to call your Congressmen now and get them to co-sponsor it, or at least support it. Way to go Rep. Paul!"
Stop the LIE~~We are a REPUBLIC not a Democracy: Support Res. 443
Training Manual
No. 20000-25
War Department
Washington, November 30, 1928
DEMOCRACY:
REPUBLIC:
A Republic is a form of government under a constitution which provides for the election of (1) an executive and (2) a legislative body, who working together in a representative capacity, have all the power of appointment, all power of legislation, all power to raise revenue and appropriate expenditures, and are required to create (3) a judiciary to pass upon the justice and legality of their governmental acts and to recognize (4) certain inherent individual rights. Take away any one or more of those four elements and you are drifting into autocracy. Add one or more to those four elements and you are drifting into democracy.
Superior to all others. : Autocracy declares the divine right of kings; its authority can not be questioned; its powers are arbitrarily or unjustly administered.
Democracy is the "direct" rule of the people and has been repeatedly tried without success.
Which one most closely resembles what our constitution says? A republic.
Which one most closely mirrors the Communist Manifesto? A democracy.
Our Constitutional fathers in their divine wisdom, knew the strength and weakness of both autocracy and democracy and with fixed principles definitely in mind, they defined a representative republican form of government. These leaders who were so far ahead of their time made a very clear and concise distinction between a republic and a democracy and they are recorded throughout the history of their time stating over and over and over so no one would get it wrong, that they had founded a republic.
James Madison Explains the Constitution to Thomas Jefferson
From Here: Republic To Democracy
Democracy and Mobocracy are synonyms for a form of government in which the majority (mob) rules, and which by definition, guarantees the absence of minority rights. In a true democracy the only law is that of the majority. Each level of government would have to have the people vote on every decision, no matter how trivial. The democratic form of governing is only functional when all the people in a region can be assembled for the purpose of deciding on the issues at hand, thus it can only function properly in very small applications, such as townships.
In a republic elections are held in order for the people to elect representatives and the people entrust their representatives to administer the functions of government in their behalf. This form of government can function in vast arenas and assures each person of representation. This is the form of government our founding fathers selected for this country.
While a republic practices a form of democracy via the elections of representatives and the representatives pass laws and amendments according to the rules of majority voting, the existence of representatives (Congressmen and Senators) and the establishment of our Constitution differentiate our Republic from a democracy.
The Constitution, and especially of the first ten amendments we call "The Bill of Rights"; were written to assure the rule of law and not of men, and as Jefferson put it, to "bind men down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution".
In other words; If you personally voted on the budget, the current tax codes, whether our military should bomb The Sudan, and how much money should go to Alabama for welfare, social services, child care, etc., which street in Yahoo County should be paved next, then you would be living in a democracy. Unfortunately it is not feasible for all 250,000,000 US citizens to gather and vote on every little issue, so in their infinite wisdom our founding fathers selected to establish a republican form of government...
In recent history, it seems that for some reason, the people and or the government have somehow decided that "Republic" is not politically desirable, so self appointed political scholars have "invented" the terms "direct democracy", "indirect democracy" and "representative democracy" with the direct democracy being a democracy as defined above and an indirect democracy or representative democracy being a "Republic".
WHY???, Neither our vocabulary nor our dictionary required these updates. A republic is a republic and a democracy is a democracy. For some reason, someone decided to take great strides to keep from using the historically and grammatically correct term for our republican form of government, so they seem to have just pulled "indirect", "direct", and "representative" democracy out of thin air. What gave them the right??? How long will it take to correct this blunder? Did the democrats in power at the time, just have a terrible dislike and inability to say "republic", so they decided to change our language and confuse the issue? If anyone out there knows and especially if you have any documentation, please advise the Webmaster because I would sincerely like to know the reason(s)...
The use of the term "Democracy" when related to The United States form of government offends me, especially when the term is used by our representatives, who are supposed to be educated and aware of our Constitution and the intentions and desires of our founding fathers. They, after all, take an oath to uphold the Constitution and the laws of this nation. Sometimes, I wonder if they have ever even read, much less understood, the document this nation was founded upon.
The following are definitions, notables, and quotes, many of which show just how little our founding fathers and other well known scholars and statesmen thought of the democratic form of government.
DEFINITIONS:
*** Comment: Between 1927 and 1952 our military apparently succumbed to left wing propaganda!!! ***
QUOTES:
NOTABLES:
The Most Important Notable!!!
SUMMATION:
The continuing degradation of our form of government from a republic to a democracy is just another example of the regressive tendencies invading this country. We must all attempt to correct these tendencies, before our Nation loses it’s greatness and it’s standing in the global community of the new millennium. We must strive to resurrect and maintain those wonderful ideals that our founding fathers so graciously and thoughtfully bestowed upon us...
"Some words can make a man's heart warm. Republic is one of them."
John Wayne - The Alamo
Text of Bush's victory speech
"After six days of voting, and 36 ballots, the House of Representatives elected Thomas Jefferson the third president of the United States. That election brought the first transfer of power from one party to another in our new democracy."
Text of Vice President Al Gore's concession speech
"Neither he nor I anticipated this long and difficult road. Certainly neither of us wanted it to happen. Yet it came, and now it has ended, resolved, as it must be resolved, through the honored institutions of our democracy."
"Now the U.S. Supreme Court has spoken. Let there be no doubt, while I strongly disagree with the court's decision, I accept it. I accept the finality of this outcome which will be ratified next Monday in the Electoral College. And tonight, for the sake of our unity of the people and the strength of our democracy, I offer my concession."
"And I say to our fellow members of the world community, let no one see this contest as a sign of American weakness. The strength of American democracy is shown most clearly through the difficulties it can overcome."
Ramadan Turkey, Wearing rags on your head and being home in time for Christmas. Allahmas.
Thus, liberalism and Marxism share a concern with the private, economic aspects of life and culture.Isn't an emphasis on the private and the social somewhat contradictory? Same goes for society and the economy.They both understand and analyze politics in terms of society and the economy.
We're reading upside down, of course, but still ... you can hear the Truth ringing throughout.
Even if it's just telltale "turn of phrase" thing.
(That's one reason it was important to link the Sources which produce such strange fruit.)
For clarity's sake:
--- ** "The Combined Effect of Proletariat and Banker will be Formidable"** -- (Belloc, 1924)
You wear slips? I'm crushed. I was certain you were a thong gal.
Oh well, have a great Thanksgiving!
| Republic... I like the sound of the word. Means people can live free, ... talk free Go or come, buy or sell, ... be drunk or sober, however they choose. Some words give you a feeling. Republic is one of those words that ... ... makes you tight in the throat. Same tightness a man gets when his baby takes his first step ... or his first baby shaves and makes his first sound like a man Some words can give you a feeling that ... ... make your heart warm. Republic is one of those words. |
"Well whadaya think, Jim?"
"... I hate to say anything good about that longwinded jack-a-napes but he does know the short way to start a war."
Did you know I come from Texas? A seven-dollar baby from Brook Army ('bout four miles from the Alamo, I hear). Probably one reason I practically know the album by heart.
| In the southern part of Texas Near the town of San Antone Stands a fortress all in ruins That the weeds have overgrown You may look in vain for crosses And you'll never see a one But sometimes between the setting and the rising of the sun You can hear a ghostly bugle As the men go marching by You can hear them as they answer to that roll call in the sky ... Let the old men tell the story Let the legend grow and grow of the 13 days of glory at the siege of Alamo |
Bear the tattered banners proudly while the eyes of Texas shine Let fort that was a mission Be an everlasting shrine Once they fought to give us freedom That is all we need to know of the 13 days of glory At the siege of Alamo. Every musket is ready Every man holds a sword And this small band of soldiers Standing tall in the eyes of the Lord |
Guess it seemed an odd analogy to use ... assuming we were intervening on behalf of folks we found simpatico in a Global Code of Conduct sort of fashion and -- along with a coalition of the usual suspects -- routing the Greater danger -- as far as Humans were concerned -- to the Planet ... as far as Humans were concerned.
A time to be reaping, A time to be sowing The green leaves of summer are calling me home It was good to be young then in the season of plenty when the catfish were jumping as high the sky A time to be laughing, A time to be living A time to be courting a girl of your own T'was so good to be young then, to be close to the earth and to stand by your wife at the moment of birth |
A time to be reaping, A time to be sowin' the green leaves of summer are calling me home It was good to be young then, with the sweet smell of apples and the owl in the pine tree, a wink in his eye A time just for planting, A time just for plowing A time just for living, A place for to die T'was so good to be young then, to be close to the earth Now the green leaves of summer are calling me home. |
|
I'm gonna tell you something, Flacka, and I want you to listen tight. May sound like I'm talking about me. But I'm not, I'm talking bout you. As a matter of fact, I'm talking about all people everywhere. When I come down here to Texas I was looking for something. I didn't know what. Seems like you add up my life and I spent it all stompin' other men or, in some cases, getting' stomped. Had me some money and had me some medals. But none of it seemed a lifetime worth the pain of the mother that bore me. It's like I was empty. Well, I'm not empty anymore. That's what's important. To feel useful in this old world. To hit a lick in against what's wrong or to say a word for what's right even though you get walloped for saying that word. Now I may sound like a Bible-beater yelling up a revival at a river-crossing camp meeting. But that don't change the truth none. There's right and there's wrong. You gotta do one or the other. You do the one and you're living. You do the other and you may be walking around but you're dead as a beaver hat. |
... It is no exaggeration to say we are moving toward a police state. In this atmosphere, we should take nothing for granted. We will not be protected, nor will the courts, the congress, or the many liberals who are gleefully jumping on the bandwagon of repression guarantee our rights. We have no choice but too make our voices be heard; it is time to stand and be counted on the side of justice and against the antediluvian forces that have much of our country in a stranglehold....
It is common for governments to reach for draconian law enforcement solutions in times of war or national crisis. It has happened often in the United States and elsewhere. We should learn from historical example: times of hysteria, of war, and of instability are not the times to rush to enact new laws that curtail our freedoms and grant more authority to the government and its intelligence and law enforcement agencies.
The US government has conceptualized the war against terrorism as a permanent war, a war without boundaries. Terrorism is frightening to all of us, but it's equally chilling to think that in the name of antiterrorism our government is willing to suspend constitutional freedoms permanently as well.
Moving Toward the Police State
(or Have We Arrived?)
Secret Military Tribunals, Mass Arrests and Disappearances, Wiretapping & Torture
(Michael Ratner, via Cipherwar)
There's really only the one Just War without boundaries or end (in time). That's the one where it's truly Good against Evil.
I still don't get the part where (if you're on the side of the Good) you have the option always of choosing evil, any evil ... even the lesser evil ... to Win. If all that's necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do Nothing, where does that put us when Good Men consciously act or are conditioned to do evil?
How do you spell Zeno's Paradox? I know I always get it wrong.
I think there's something to that math by which the hare always will lose if he must break his stride down to little bits of both the drag of evil and the aerodynamic of good whilst the turtle plods along propelled by pure, unbroken evil.
But it was a great Englishman, G. K. Chesterton, who put his finger on the basic reasoning behind all the continued and determined efforts of the Communists to convert our republic into a democracy. “You can never have a revolution,” he said, “in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution.”I loved this, of course.
As with much of the War on a Noun Series, we seem to have things back to front, top to bottom, upside down as usual.
It's like the War on Drugs which operates on the popular misconception that Demand drives the Supply of drugs when, in fact, the opposite is true.
Or the War on Poverty that sought to eradicate the poor and Unwanted by plying them with contraception and legal abortion.
Big Lies go down best as slogans ... with plenty of circular reasoning, bent logic, buzzwords and statistics galore giving the intellectuals the impression they're riding something other than the metal rails of a thrill ride in Utopia and actually are moving somewhere.
But then again if it's too personal I understand.
It just seems kind of weird that you would include Uncle Bill in your answer.
I'm just going to have to go see my friend Captain Morgan, he always knows the answers.
Sorry to come off as the recovering shallow politician that I am, but I swear the writer of that first thing came off to me as Professor Irwin Corey! Tennis shoes and all!!!
He keeps using that word. I don't think it means what he thinks it means.
His description of government enforcing the "neutrality" of society in a democracy is interesting. Neutrality, here, means a point of equilibrium for a system always under tension.
It's interesting to relate the "neutrality" of modern art with politics. Cubism is often described as presenting different views at the same time, and Mondrian, later, balanced primary colors and rectangular shapes to achieve nonrepresentational harmony. What then, I wonder, do the large, single band of color paintings by Rothko portend?
Given the fact most of us can no longer speak our minds, even, I think the tension's a done deal.
It's not the writer so much as his spilling the beans in some respects.
You don't mind if I drop a bit more clarity into the thread, do you?
The Transition Period According to Marx.... Between capitalist and Communist societies, he said, lies the period of revolutionary transformation of the one into the other and, corresponding to this, there is also a political transition period in which the State can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.Regardless of what various disciples of Marx may have added to or taken away from his system, they all agree on the necessity both of class struggle and of the dictatorship of the proletariat. As late as September 28, 1962, the Tenth Plenary Session of the Chinese Communist Central Committee emphasized in its communique that class struggle marks the period of proletarian revolution and proletarian dictatorship and will continue throughout the historial period of transition from capitalism to communism -- a transition that will last scores of years or even longer. [Follows with the Pre-Gramscian quaint notion of Marx that the proletariat actually would remained armed, revolt, tear down the bourgeoisie State and police and, as the new functionaries, would never think to constitute themselves a separate class of privileged bureaucrats. I think we also can exchange class struggle with that of sex, skin, intelligence, as well -- better to breed you, my dear.] Decades later -- in the current era of Communist compromises at least in practice if not in doctrine -- the transition is described in less brutal terms, and the main instrument of transisition is conceived as cooperation with all revolutionary, democratic and progressive elements in any given situation. [...] Welfare State as Transition to UtopiaThis dilution of the properly revolutionary element of the passage to socialism ... was made possible by the intervening evolution of the centralized Welfare State designed to take the wind out of the sails of the revolution.The question is: Does the Welfare State tame and organize the revolutionary idea, or does it merely serve the ultimate objectives of the revolution by adjusting people's attitudes to the post-revolutionary world? The fact is that the concept of the State (or the community) completing dominating and regulating the lives of its citizens, had been, by and large, accepted in the second half of the 20th century. Although there is still considerable discussion, largely theoretical and irrelevant, about what Lefebvre calls the "rhythm and modalities" of the transistion, the debate of the past several decades has been merely whether the State, the race, the ideological Empire or World Government will stage-manage the last accts of the passage to coalescing mankind. Whichever prevails, the tend has been unmistakable for a long time now: the mechanism is in place; small concrete decisions are made daily; only the theoretical measures are still discussed. As early as 1891, Chauncy Thomas outlined the general process in his utopian novel The Crystal Button. The community is described as living in the Year Of Peace 4872 (1372 years after 3,500 years spent under the calendar of Anno Domini). The novel's character refers to the end of the nineteenth century as almost a prehistoric date when certain signs already indicated the shape of things to come. The Professors tells Paul Prognosis, the Bostonian who dreams of the future.
Even in your day it was one of the signs of the times that small interests were beginning to be absorbed by corporations, and those by giant monopolies. By slow and peaceful steps, the same movement progressed until the government itself came into possession of such industries as were of peculiarly public interest, including all means of communication and transportation, and life and fire insurance; and the land question was settled in the same manner. Ever since Chauncey Thomas wrote these lines, the trends he detected have become immeasureably stronger. The Welfare State is an accepted fact; two ideological empires exist; and both the Welfare State and the ideological empries resemble each other increasingly in the techniques they utilize and even in some fundamental thinking. The world government is still only a distant image [c. 1967], but many highly regarded statesmen speak about it as a distinct possibility. (13) In his own way, Adolf Hitler also believed that larger units than states were emerging and that the transition needed the skill of political minds of his own cast. This is what he told Herman Rauschning: The conception of the nation has become meaningless. We have to get rid of this false conception and set in its place the conception of race. The New Order cannot be conceived in terms of the national boundaries of the peoples with an historic past, but in terms of race that transcend these boundaries ... Less nebulous and romantic, and still influenced by the concept of the Roman State, Mussolini wrote that people should be viewed qualitatively and, therefore, they may be represented in the will of a few or even one. In this respect, judgment belongs not to the individual but to the State, because the State is all citizens, and its formation is the formation of a consciousness of its individuals in the masses. [Mussolini's untrained mind, inspired as it was by only a few of the writings of prominent socialist doctrinaires, struggled with incompatible concepts such as "masses" and "individuals rights"] but the twentieth-century utopian leitmotiv is present:
"For the Fascist," writes Mussolini, "all is comprised in the State and nothing spiritual or human exists -- much less has any value -- outside the State ... The Fascist State -- the unification and synthesis of every value -- interprets, develops and potentiates the whole life of the people."
(13) --- When India suffered under the invasion by the Red Chinese in 1962, Indian politicians consulted Nehru regarding his intentions. He simply told them that by the year 2000, border conflicts would be a thing of the past since all countries would be provinces of a one-world organization. (14) --- Quoted in A. Bullock, Hitler, Harper & Row, New York, 1952, pp. 363-364.
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As linked from the "Hear No Evil" thread in The First Duty of Citizenship: Enthusiasm
Or, as the United Way likes to say: "we don't care how much you give, all we really want is 100% participation."
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