Home Economics, Part 1

                          By F. Roger Devlin

      

1. Two conflicting conceptions of feminine dignity

One of the hallmarks of Western civilization is the unusually high status it has accorded women. That has often been attributed to the influence of Christianity, which prizes certain typically feminine virtues (mercy, humility) more than pagan society had. But Tacitus had already noted the respect paid to women’s opinions as being typical of the pagan Germanic tribes of his time. Some believe the regard paid to women to be a reflection of conditions in ancient Northern Europe, where the nuclear rather than the extended family was the more important economic unit. But however it may have originated, women’s position in our civilization has recently been eroded by economic developments and by the feminist movement. The present essay aims to explain how this has happened and argue the need to reverse the process.

Much confusion exists regarding the feminist attack upon women’s status, because the feminist movement has always presented itself to outsiders — usually with success — as an effort to improve that status. Feminists, as we all know, assert that women are rightfully the “equals” of men and deserve a “level playing field” on which to compete with them. In our time, it is a rare person whose notions about women’s claims remain wholly uninfluenced by these slogans; that is true even of many who think of themselves as opponents of feminism. For example, certain would-be defenders of Western civilization believe Islam presents a danger to us principally because it does not accept “equality of the sexes.” Indeed, they sometimes make it sound as though they would have no objection to Islam if only Muslim girls were free to wear miniskirts, join the Army, and divorce their husbands. Or again, many in the growing father’s movement describe their goal as implementing “true” equality rather than recovering their traditional role as family heads. I have even known conservatives to earnestly assure young audiences that the idea of sexual equality comes to us from Christianity — a crueler slander upon the Faith than Voltaire or Nietzsche ever imagined. The extreme case of such confusion can be found in “mainstream” conservatives such as William Kristol, who claims to oppose feminism on the grounds that its more exotic manifestations “threaten women’s recent gains”: in other words, the problem with feminism is that it endangers feminism. It is difficult to combat a movement whose fundamental premises one accepts.

In fact, the high standing of women in our civilization not only long predates feminist ideology but is logically incompatible with it. To understand why, one needs to keep two points in mind: 1) women’s traditional status was linked to behavioral expectations — fulfilling the duties of their station; and 2) it assumed qualitative differences and complementarity (rather than “fair” competition) between the sexes.

As to the first point: strictly speaking, it was never women as such who enjoyed high status but rather the social roles proper to them — those of wife and mother, chiefly. Being born female (or male) is merely a natural fact of no intrinsic moral significance, but the filling of a social role involves effort and often sacrifice. Accordingly, the respect paid to women was not an unconditional birthright; it was reserved for women who fulfilled their feminine obligations.

Among those obligations, marital fidelity was of supreme importance: so much so that in our language general terms such as virtue and morality have often been used to refer specifically to sexual fidelity in women. That is owing not to irrational prudery, as the apostles of sexual liberation imagined, but to the recognition that all which is necessary to destroy a race and civilization is for its women to refuse to be faithful wives and mothers.

The Western tradition also includes a strong presumption that women wish to fulfill their role; in other words, women are assumed to be “virtuous” until proven otherwise. In certain eras it was dangerous even to suggest that a lady might not be a paragon of sexual self-restraint if one did not have very strong proofs: an aspersion upon a woman’s honor was grounds for a duel. Of course, that does not make much sense when women have no honor; and today, the proponents of equality and liberation openly repudiate the very idea as an “oppressive social construct.” But to be frank, I suspect honor never was actually the primary determinant of women’s behavior. Good example (especially from their mothers), habit, lack of opportunity, religious instruction, and, in the last instance, the prospect of social disgrace and financial ruin were probably always more effective with them.

Men, however, have often been encouraged to believe that women are naturally monogamous, unmotivated by anything so base as sexual attraction, and only seek “good husbands” whom they disinterestedly marry out of love. This pleasing and edifying view of womanhood is the basis of the West’s cultural forms surrounding relations between the sexes: gallantry, chivalry, courtship, and companionate marriage. These are what place love, in Edmund Burke’s phrase, “if not among the virtues, among the ornaments of life.”

There are also certain more practical, if less delicate, considerations involved: viz., if a husband trusts his wife, he can skip rushing home from the office unannounced to make sure she is not in bed with the gardener. That leaves him free to devote his full attention to his own role as breadwinner for children he is sure are his own.

The socially beneficial effects of the chivalrous view of womanhood are quite independent of its accuracy. There is not necessarily any pre-established harmony between what is true and what it is useful for men to believe. A man may be better off not knowing the whole truth about women — even, or perhaps especially, his wife. But most women cooperated enthusiastically in promoting the chivalrous view, even if they were not taken in by it themselves. That is partly because they have been shrewd enough to perceive the advantages of maintaining a high reputation with men and partly because they are naturally more reticent than men about their sexual urges (“modest”).

But whether based upon knowledge or pleasing illusion, the regard in which our civilization has held women depends utterly upon their practice of monogamy, and makes no sense apart from it. As long as cases of female adultery were few enough, they could be passed off to men as freaks of nature, akin to two-headed babies. When, on the other hand, wives in their millions act upon the feminist plan of “liberation,” walk out on their husbands, separate them from their children, bankrupt them in divorce court, and shack up with other men, that system breaks down. That is where we are today.

To my mind, the most remarkable feature of the revolution we have undergone is the time lag between the changes in women’s behavior and changes in men’s attitude toward them. Men often strain to blame their own sex for what has gone wrong, though the natural disadvantage of the male’s position makes his primary responsibility unlikely on a priori grounds: since women have greater control over the mating process, they are inherently likelier than men to be at the root of any fundamental breakdown in family formation and stability.

It seems that many men have an emotional need to believe in the inherent virtue or innocence of women, a bit of sentimentality akin to the Romantics’ cult of childhood. Even today, under a burgeoning feminist police-state, male commentators not infrequently berate their own sex for an allegedly insufficient appreciation of the lofty claims of womanhood. The kindest thing one might say of such men is that they are condemning themselves to irrelevance. A somewhat less kind judgment might be that they are collaborators.

The chivalrous view of women is helpful for keeping in check the naturally wayward desires of young husbands in a substantially monogamous society; it is useless or positively harmful in a society being run by spoiled and tyrannical females who have “liberated” themselves from domestic obligations. As usual, conservatives are busy calling for the barn door to be shut long after the horse has run off. Our task today is not to “safeguard” or “protect” marriage but to rebuild it almost from scratch. The strategy for doing so will necessarily be different from the strategy for defending it when it was merely under threat.

2. Feminism as Male-Role-Envy

Let us now turn to our second point about women’s traditional status: namely, that it implied sexual complementarity and cooperation. This means that their status cannot be maintained once complementarity is displaced by a normative ideal of sexual equivalence and competition. The feminist movement has, of course, effected precisely such a displacement, thereby undermining the respect for women they claim to promote. I will now try to explain how that happened.

First, a caveat: most critical discussions of feminism concentrate on refuting its doctrines, such as the ascription of feminine traits to upbringing rather than nature. My approach will be different. While such formal refutation of doctrines is not valueless, it seems to me to mistake the fundamental character of feminism. The feminist movement consists essentially not of ideas at all but of attitudes, or even mere emotions. Feminist “theory,” as it is grandiloquently called, is simply whatever the women in the movement come up with in post facto justification of their attitudes and emotions. A heavy focus on feminist doctrine seems to me symptomatic of the rationalist fallacy: the assumption that people are motivated primarily by beliefs. If they were, the best way to combat an armed doctrine would indeed be to demonstrate that its beliefs are false. But in the case of feminism, even more than Marxism and other political ideologies, it is rather the beliefs that are motivated by various personal and nonrational needs. I propose, therefore, that feminism may be better understood through a consideration of the feminist herself.

A feminist in the strict and proper sense may be defined as a woman who envies the male role.

By the male role I mean, in the first place, providing, protecting, and guiding rather than nurturing and assisting. This in turn involves relative independence, action, and competition in the larger impersonal society outside the family, the use of language for communication and analysis (rather than expressiveness or emotional manipulation), and deliberate behavior aiming at objective achievement (rather than the attainment of pleasant subjective states) and guided by practical reasoning (rather than emotional impulse).

Both feminist and nonfeminist women sense that these characteristically male attributes have a natural primacy over their own. I prefer to speak of “primacy” rather than superiority in this context since both sets of traits are necessary to propagate the race. One sign of male primacy is that envy of the female role by men is virtually nonexistent — even, so far as I know, among homosexuals.

Normal women are attracted to male traits and wish to partner with a man who possesses them. Healthy societies are marked by a cooperative reciprocity between the sexes, but an unequal one in the sense that it involves male leadership of the female, somewhat as in ballroom dancing.

The feminists’ response to the primacy of male traits, on the other hand, is a feeling of inadequacy in regard to men — a feeling ill-disguised by defensive assertions of her “equality.” She desires to possess masculinity directly, in her own person, rather than partnering with a man. That is what leads her into the spiritual cul de sac of envy.

And perhaps even more than she envies the male role itself, the feminist covets the external rewards attached to its successful performance: social status, recognition, power, wealth, and the chance to control wealth directly (rather than be supported). She tends not to give much thought to the great mass of men who struggle to fulfill the demands of their role without ever attaining the rewards of superior performance.

Let us consider next what envy is. First, it involves a painful awareness of something good or desirable in another person. This much it has in common with emulation. The emulator, however, is primarily concerned with self-improvement. Envy has a fundamentally negative character; it wants to bring the other down rather than raise itself up. The envier usually does not admit that explicitly but rather claims to have been cheated, whether by the envied party or by the surrounding society: he disguises his envy as a zeal for justice. Often he claims to want to compete on a level playing field, but maintains that competition has been “fixed.”

Envy, however, is distinct from the sense of justice in being fundamentally unappeasable. The righteously indignant person genuinely wants to come to a settlement. By contrast, if the envied party grants what the envier demands, it merely further demonstrates his superiority and provokes more envy. One reason the feminists have gotten as far as they have is that many men are untroubled by envy themselves. These men cannot understand the psychology behind feminism. Sincerely caring about women and wishing to promote their welfare, they waste effort on futile attempts to reason or compromise. They imagine that limited concessions might persuade feminists that men are not really so bad after all.

But it is a metaphysical impossibility to “grant” what a feminist envies: the successful performance of the male role including risks overcome, obstacles surmounted, and objectively verifiable achievements. What the appeasers actually do is grant women some of the external appearances and rewards of such achievement. That is the meaning of corporate hiring and promotional preferences. But a little reflection will reveal why such concessions can never satisfy the feminist. She is humiliated precisely by the awareness that her advancement is an unearned act of charity on the part of the hated “patriarchy.” It would be difficult to imagine, in fact, a more efficient means of stoking her frustration and resentment. (The situation with racial preferences, incidentally, is precisely analogous: thus, one book on Black beneficiaries of “affirmative action” is aptly titled The Rage of a Privileged Class.)

Indeed, concessions are perceived as signs of weakness, and whet the appetite for more concessions, a cycle that could only end with the complete self-destruction of the envied party. In other words, feminists’ claim to be motivated by love of justice or fairness is flapdoodle. Feminism is a species not of righteous indignation but of hatred.

In practice, since the feminist can never be the equal of men at the male role, she concentrates her efforts upon sabotaging that role. In other words, because she cannot level up, she contents herself as best she can with leveling down. So the practical consequence of feminist political power is to make it impossible for men to “do their thing” (fulfill their role). For example, women may not be able to have careers as glamorous and successful as they imagined, but one accusation of “harassment” is all it takes to destroy the career of a man whose accomplishments she could never equal. And there is no question that many women get a sadistic pleasure from wielding such power. I myself once heard a woman boast of getting three different men fired.

A whole legal industry has mushroomed within a single generation based upon newly invented crimes and torts of which only men can be guilty and only women can be victims. Obviously, the Western tradition of high regard for women is not going to survive the spread of such behavior indefinitely. Women who wonder why men do not seem to “respect” them any more might seek the answer in the mirror.

Envy of the male role has devastating consequences for women’s performance of their own proper role as well. Although it may be a secondary or supporting one in relation to men, it is indispensable for the survival of the race: the woman bears, nurtures, and to a great extent educates the rising generation. The feminist either refuses to fulfill her natural role or at best does so resentfully, sullenly, and poorly. For that reason, feminism should not be treated merely as a personal folly on the part of some misguided or spoiled women — it is a mortal threat to any society in which it truly takes hold. Enemies of heterosexual cooperation and procreation are enemies of the human race.

Source: http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/

The Family Way

                          By F. Roger Devlin

                  

Allan C. Carlson
Third Ways:
How Bulgarian Greens, Swedish Housewives, and Beer-Swilling Englishmen Created Family-Centered Economies – And Why They Disappeared
Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books, 2007

Economic science is so imposing an edifice viewed from outside—with its technical paraphernalia, its libraries full of books and journals, its endowed professorships and international conferences, its specialties and subspecialties—that the layman might be hesitant to take up the experts’ time with questions about so petty a matter as the family. As Allan Carlson tells it (pp. 35–38), however, such deference to the economist’s professional expertise would be misplaced: the natural family has remained a stumbling block to economic science as well as policymakers for more than two hundred years.

Adam Smith and David Ricardo expressed cautious optimism that an unhindered market in labor would provide the ordinary working man a large enough wage to marry and raise a few children; but neither claimed to have demonstrated the necessity of this. Radicals such as Marx and Engels soon challenged the idea, maintaining that capitalism transformed labor into an ordinary commodity which women and even children could sell to capitalists at a fraction of the cost for adult men. The traditional autonomy and solidarity of the family would thereby fall prey to industrial efficiency and the Faustian quest for profits. Later liberal economists such as J. S. Mill and Alfred Marshall came to agree with the Marxists that the capitalist market economy makes no natural accommodation to the family.

The Marxists also appear to be correct that the loss of family autonomy through wage competition is a development specific to capitalism. Alexander Chayanov, subject of one of Carlson’s chapters, studied the preindustrial economy of peasant families and protested that the imposition of concepts like wages and capital on agrarian production was arbitrary and procrustean. The peasant family produced for use rather than profit; their work pattern was determined not by supply and demand but by natural biological rhythms: the recurrence of the seasons, sowing and reaping; the human life-cycle of birth, procreation, and death. The analytic scheme of modern economics, which presupposes a fundamental distinction between capital and labor, is therefore of no help in elucidating what goes on in peasant households (pp. 72–73).

The “Third Ways” described in the present book were programs designed to protect the natural family—peasant or otherwise—from the solvent of market competition. It consists of seven chapters of about twenty or thirty pages, each devoted to one “third way.” They include programs to restore full-scale family farming, others just to promote home ownership and a modest degree of household production, and others still merely to guarantee a family-supporting wage to fathers.

It might at first sight seem paradoxical that families could ever be economically worse off having a second income instead of just one. But this is a classic example of what logicians call the fallacy of composition. It works like this. When an exciting play occurs in a baseball game, all the fans jump to their feet to get a better view. Do they actually get a better view? On average, no. If only one fan were to rise, he would get a better view; but when all rise, the overall view is no better than before. Analogously, an individual woman entering the workforce undoubtedly improves her own material situation; but if the great mass of women enters the workforce, the overall effect is merely to glut the market for labor, driving down wages for everyone. As early as 1825, an editorial in a British newspaper declared:

The labouring men of this country should return to the good old plan of subsisting their wives and children on the wages of their own labour, and they should demand wages high enough for this purpose. By doing this, the capitalist will be obliged to give the same wages to men alone which they now give to men, women, and children. [Labourers must] prevent their wives and children from competing with them in the market and beating down the price of labour. (p. 38)

No “law of economics” prevents such insulation of women and children from the labor market. All societies treat certain things they especially value as extra commerciam—outside the scope of market exchange. There need be no market for beef, for example, in a country where cows are considered sacred. Or again, as long as a market in slaves existed they were subject to the same law of supply and demand as any other commodity; but this market could be abolished, and was. Similarly, there need be no market for women’s labor in a country which values home life and family solidarity more than maximal industrial efficiency. Except under rare conditions involving extreme destitution—e.g., where women’s or children’s wage work might be necessary to allow everyone in a family to eat adequately—any society can enjoy as much family autonomy as it is willing to pay for in such efficiency. Proponents of family-centered “third ways” believe such a tradeoff worthwhile; some may disagree, but there is no economic absurdity involved in the idea.

If you are even familiar with the term “family wage” today, you are showing your age. Yet this ideal, writes Carlson, “dominated labor goals throughout the North Atlantic region from the mid-nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries and had measurable effects on wages and the labor market.” While industrialists almost without exception advocated the “right” of poor women to work (and drive down men’s wages), working class husbands felt differently. They fought for and won wages that permitted their women to remain at home with the children. In Britain between 1842 and 1914, for example, “substantial gains in material standards were achieved by the working class, accompanied by the movement of women from wage-earning to domestic pursuits.” Similarly, in Belgium there was “a thorough transformation in the family life of workers between 1853 and 1891, based on a withdrawal of married women from the labor market and a dramatic rise in the real incomes of men” (p. 44). Keep this in mind the next time you hear a feminist complacently assert the “impossibility” of returning to the days when a woman’s place was in the home.

In America the family wage ideal rested on legal barriers, direct discrimination (gasp!) against categories of female workers, marriage bans, and labor laws requiring the special treatment of women, discouraging their employment. The system was strong enough to survive the New Deal, but was dealt a body blow by the entry of the United States into World War II and the consequent mobilization of women for industry. The National War Production Board recommended “a single evaluation line for all jobs in a plant regardless whether performed by men or women.” Only 13 percent of US firms had followed such a policy in 1939, but by 1947, 57 percent did (pp. 45–46).

Carlson provides a graph of the erosion of the family wage system in America since 1951. Let the Family Wage Ratio be defined as the median income of dual earning couples divided by the median income of stay-at-home-wife couples. Under a family wage regime, this figure will approach 1.0; under the feminist gender-equivalence regime, the figure tends toward 2.0. In 1960, the figure was 1.25; it rose slowly in the 60s and 70s, and was still 1.42 as recently as 1982; then the rise accelerated, reaching 1.82 in 2003, the most recent date for which the book provides figures (pp. 47–48).

“Equal pay for equal work” is a masterful piece of political rhetoric with a sort of “2+2=4” ring to it. Carlson catalogues for us a few of the realities this deceptive slogan has served to conceal. First of all, family households with only a single male wage earner have experienced a decline in real income: between 1973 and 1993 alone, this decline amounted to 13.6 percent. Next, single-income families have been put at a mounting competitive disadvantage relative to two-income families in the acquisition of consumer goods. There has also been a sizeable increase in the number of men earning less than a “poverty line” wage, and similar growth in the number of children living in female-headed households. Married women are increasingly faced with a stark choice: leave their young children during the day to try to earn income, or stay with them and fall into poverty. Either way, the children lose (pp. 50–51).

For the first time in history, notes our author, the family is becoming completely industrialized. Gardening, food preparation, home repairs, child care, and other residual forms of home production are being abandoned by busy couples in favor of market-provided services; in other words, the home has no economy of its own, but has become at best a kind of consumer’s cooperative (pp. 51–52). With the economic rationale for marriage thus eroded, divorce, transitory cohabitation, bastardy, abortion, and loneliness all increase. We have come a long way, baby.

Sweden is often held up as the best model of a country pursuing a “third way” between capitalism and socialism. Carlson devotes a chapter to the evolution of Swedish family policy in the past century and the ideological debates surrounding it; rumor has it that its original title was “Desperate Swedish Socialist Housewives.” However that may be, this chapter makes especially clear the difficulty of arranging family policy prescriptions neatly on a conventional left-right ideological spectrum. As early as 1866, delegates to the First Socialist International “approved a resolution calling for bans on the employment of women. The measure’s sponsors reasoned that working women pressed down overall wage levels and displaced men; in their view, working women were the equivalent of strikebreakers” (p. 113). Sweden’s Social Democratic Party adopted this view, and for many years it remained normative for Swedish “progressives.”

The author draws our attention, for instance, to Ellen Karolina Sofia Key: socialist, feminist, eugenics advocate, disciple of Darwin and Nietzsche. None of these commitments prevented her from laying heavy emphasis on the maternal role and its importance to individual women, their children, and the society of the future. Woman was “most free,” she wrote, “in the physical and psychic exercise of the function of maternity.” The mother was an “artist in education” who understood “the enormous significance of the first years.” What she most requires to fulfill this role properly is time, time, and again time.” She believed the State should place as high a priority upon proper mothering as upon military service. For many years a popular women’s magazine, Morning Breeze, propagated Key’s ideal of the socialist housewife, carrying illustrations of athletic-looking Nietzschean Übermütter surrounded by swarms of healthy children (pp. 114–17).

Gunnar and Alva Myrdals’ pernicious influence on Swedish social politicy commenced in the 1930s, but was effectively resisted for longer than many realize. “Astonishingly,” writes Carlson, “as late as 1964 the labor-force participation rate for Swedish women remained steady at 30 percent; a mere 3 percent of Swedish preschool children were in public daycare centers” (p. 128).

The socialist housewives began referring to homemaking as “domestic science” and portrayed themselves as efficient laborers whose work station just happened to be the home. They demanded and got several years of mandatory education in home economics and child care for all Swedish girls. Government agencies sponsored quantitative studies which revealed, inter alia, that the average working-class housewife had at her disposal 2.8 frying pans and 1.6 teapots. The modern Swedish household was obviously a highly scientific place (pp. 122–24).

By the 1960s, however, Alva Myrdal and her stridently anti-familial feminism were again on the march. Individual rather than familial taxation became a central issue in Swedish politics. As passage of the measure approached, a “Campaign for the Family” was launched. Fifty thousand letters of protest poured into the Prime Minister’s office; thousands of women marched on the Riksdag in (as one Swedish newspaper put it) “history’s first housewife demonstration.”

It was to no avail. In 1970, individual taxation went into effect; overnight, a housewife became an expensive luxury (pp. 129–31). Carlson writes: “Correctly labeled the era of Red Sweden, the first Olaf Palme government committed a kind of feminist genocide, intentionally eliminating a whole class of women through coerced ‘reeducation’ and forced labor” (p. 179).

The family wage is by nature a compromise with industrial capitalism; it turns one member of the family over to the labor market in exchange for keeping the rest insulated from it. Distributism, the economic platform advocated by Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton, went farther by seeking to counteract some of the inherent tendencies of capitalism directly.

The distributists believed property “so important that every family should have some.” But capitalism, they asserted, naturally brought about the consolidation of property in a few hands. The State, therefore, should openly favor smallholders, cooperatives, and family businesses over large corporations and monopolies. They advocated progressive taxation and legal restrictions on large enterprises. In his chapter on the distributist movement, Carlson is in the odd position of having to defend Chesterton in particular from some of his greatest admirers, too quick to dismiss this aspect of his work as incoherent, vacuous or futile. Such is the usual price of political failure (pp. 1–34).

For a similar economic program that made real headway, Carlson turns our attention to the peasant parties which swept to power in the new democracies of Eastern Europe after the Great War. Their fundamental principle was that land should belong to those who till it. This required extensive land redistribution from the old nobility to peasant families, sometimes without compensation. In Czechoslovakia, 4.5 million acres were distributed to peasant families by 1931; in Poland the figure was 6.25 million acres by 1937.

The peasant parties also favored progressive taxation, free trade, republicanism, decentralized governance, agricultural cooperatives, pacifism, educational reform, mandatory public service for youth, rural life, and limited industrialization (the processing of agricultural and forest products, for instance, being preferable to machine gun or mustard gas production). The peasant parties also uniformly opposed communism. A “Green International,” formally called the International Agrarian Bureau, took form in 1923 to coordinate political action across international boundaries. One specific project aimed at creating a Danubian free trade zone in Central and Eastern Europe (pp. 90–101).

A fluke of history allowed agrarian ideas to influence policy even in the Soviet Union for a time. In 1921 Lenin announced the New Economic Policy, a tactical retreat on the economic front aimed at allowing the Bolsheviks to tighten their political grip on Russia. For most of the 1920s, collectivization of peasant land-holdings was shelved and private industry on a modest scale was permitted. The agrarian economist Alexander Chayanov openly directed an agrarian think tank in Moscow from 1919 until 1930, and even became Deputy Minister of Agriculture for a time (pp. 69–70).

Despite their promising beginnings, all these agrarian programs succumbed to more ruthless enemies of various sorts. Peasant rule was violently overthrown in Bulgaria in 1923; then in Poland in 1926. The new Yugoslav government gradually squelched it in Croatia during the twenties, and in Romania it lost out to royalist militarism by 1930. Stalin had Chayanov arrested and sent to the Gulag that same year. A number of peasant leaders ended by being assassinated. In Czechoslovakia, however, peasant rule continued all the way up to the Nazi occupation (pp. 81, 101–106).

Anyone familiar with the “Christian Democratic” parties of contemporary Europe will be suspicious of their inclusion in a volume devoted to “third way” politics. Carlson recognizes this; he explains that in the course of the 1950s these parties either faded from the scene (as in France) or

consolidated their hold on power at the price of their vision. By the early 1960s, they were increasingly pragmatic and bureaucratic, self-satisfied defenders of the status quo. Ambitious office seekers rather than Christian idealists came to dominate the parties. [They] became simply mass parties of the right-of-center. (p. 169)

If you want to understand what is wrong with the Old Continent today, study the Christian Democrats of Germany or Italy.

Yet Christian Democracy has distinguished roots extending back into the nineteenth century. Its progenitors were believers who abhorred the anti-Christian aspects of the French Revolution but had no particular concern for the preservation of monarchy, feudal titles, or great private fortunes. They rejected liberal individualism and laid emphasis on the family as a natural institution which the State was bound to protect and defend.

Many sought to unify Christians of various denominations politically in order to counteract the secularizing tendency of the modern world. Abraham Kuyper, for example, was a Protestant clergyman who helped found the Antirevolutionary Party of the Netherlands; he saw Catholics as natural allies in the struggle against Christendom’s enemies. Kuyper’s influence on American Evangelicals has been extensive, but remains little known outside Evangelical circles.

German Catholics were also among the early founders of Christian Democracy. Bishop Ketteler of Mainz helped organize “The Catholic Federation of Germany” in 1848, which was later renamed the Center Party and opened to Protestants. “During the 1860s,” writes Carlson, “Ketteler denounced ‘capitalist absolutism,’ called for the creation of Christian labor associations to protect workers, and urged political reforms that would increase wages, shorten the working day, and prohibit the labor of children and mothers in factories” (p. 157). He was also a principal opponent of Bismarck’s so-called Kulturkampf of the 1870s. This campaign succeeded in abolishing church weddings and forbidding the discussion of political matters from the pulpit. Until he met opposition, Bismarck also attempted to give the State a large degree of control over clerical affairs.

Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum had great influence on Catholic Christian Democratic thinkers (as well as on the Distributists). Although often misunderstood as merely a rejection of socialism, the document “implicitly declared over 80 percent of Europe’s land—circa 1891—to be held unjustly. In effect, [it was] a call for peaceful agrarian revolution” (pp. 6–7). The document became a part of the Catholic Center Party’s platform (p. 158).

Hitler abolished the Center Party in 1933; Mussolini had already outlawed its Italian Christian Democratic counterpart in 1925. During the years it was forced out of public life, the Christian Democratic tradition was carried on at a philosophical level by a number of French Catholics: Emmanuel Mounier, his student Gilbert Dru (murdered by the Gestapo), Etienne Gilson, Etienne Borne, and Jacques Maritain. To the liberal individualism which spoke of the self as a locus of desires they opposed “personalism,” which stressed moral choice and the development of the personality through participation in social bodies such as the family and local community. They held that women should enjoy equal civil, legal, and political rights, but believed this compatible with the family wage ideal and traditional sex roles (pp. 162–64).

Christian Democratic parties had a decisive influence on the politics of the immediate postwar period, coming to power in West Germany and Italy while taking part in governing coalitions in France and the Netherlands. The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights has been described as “largely identical” with the worldview of Christian Democracy, and the original European Economic Community was also their work (pp. 166–67).

The most important economic thinker associated with the original Christian Democratic movement was Wilhelm Röpke. Although he was the mind behind the West German Wirtschaftswunder of the 1950s (through his influence on Economic Minister Ludwig Erhard), Röpke was the first to criticize the “cult of productivity” as a “disorder of spiritual perception.” Insisting that “people do not live by cheap vacuum cleaners alone,” he sought “to adapt economic policy to man, not man to economic policy” (pp. 164–66).

While defending private property and free markets, Röpke insisted that a successful market economy required a moral framework—one which was not itself a product of market relations, but of “family, church, genuine communities, and tradition.” Like the Distributists, he favored regulatory measures to prevent monopolies and encourage home ownership, small shops, and family farms.

* * *

None of the third ways Allan Carlson describes proved a complete success; but none was without positive effects, and often more than commonly realized. More importantly, the problems to which third way advocates responded are with us still: the collapse of Communism does not imply that the West has succeeded in reconciling the family’s needs with the demands of a competitive industrial economy.

I shall give Dr. Carlson the final word. In a recent interview he spoke of his own ideal as a “Family Way” economy which:

. . . would treat the family grounded in marriage, not the individual, as its fundamental unit. Real property would be so treasured that every household would have some. Where outside employment was necessary, it would favor the payment of a “family wage” to the head-of-household so that the other parent—normally the mother—might devote herself to children and home production. It would give strong legal and financial protections to family-held businesses. This economy would favor small farms and independent shops. It would favor home offices for doctors, lawyers, accountants, and other professionals. It would encourage families to create home businesses, to garden, to engage in modest animal husbandry, and to homeschool their children. And it would frown on advertising that relied on the vices of lust, sloth, greed, gluttony, envy, and pride.

TOQ Online, May 1, 2009

The Rivkin Project: How Globalism Uses Multiculturalism to Subvert Sovereign Nations, Part 3

                           By Kerry Bolton

    

Part 3 of 3

The Role of Multiculturalism in the Globalist Agenda

Many nefarious aims have been imposed under the banner of multiculturalism and slogans such as “equality” and “human rights.” As “democracy” has been used to justify the bombing states throughout recent history, these slogans often serve as rhetoric to beguile the well-intentioned while hiding the aims of those motivated by little if anything other than power and greed.

One might think of the manner by which the issue of the Uitlanders was agitated to justify the Anglo-Boer wars for the purpose of procuring the mineral wealth of South Africa for the benefit of Cecil Rhodes, Alfred Beit, et al.

A similar issue was revived in our own time, under the name of “fighting apartheid,” and while the world was jubilant at the assumption to power of the ANC, the reality has been that the Africans have not benefited materially one iota, but the parastatals or state owned enterprises are being privatized so that they can be sold off to global capitalism. When the patriarch of South African capitalism, Harry Oppenheimer, whose family was a traditional foe of the Afrikaners, died in 2000,Nelson Mandela eulogized him thus:  “His contribution to building partnership between big business and the new democratic government in that first period of democratic rule can never be appreciated too much.”[1]

The “democracy” Oppenheimer and other plutocrats in tandem with the ANC created in South Africa is the freedom for global capital to exploit the country. Mandela stated the result of this “long march to freedom” in 1996: “Privatization is the fundamental policy of the ANC and will remain so.”[2] In commenting on the privatization of the Johannesburg municipal water supply, which is now under the French corporation Suez Lyonnaise Eaux, the ANC issued a statements declaring that: “Eskom is one of a host of government owned ‘parastatals’ created during the apartheid era which the democratically elected government has set out to privatise in a bid to raise money.”[3] It is the same outcome for South Africa that was achieved by the “liberation” of Kosovan minerals in the name of “democracy” and in the name of the rights of Muslims under Serb rule, while other Muslims under their own rule are bombed into submission by the USA and its allies.

The Aims of Global Capitalism

The nature of the globalist dialectic has been explained particularly cogently by Noam Chomsky:

See, capitalism is not fundamentally racist — it can exploit racism for its purposes, but racism isn’t built into it. Capitalism basically wants people to be interchangeable cogs, and differences among them, such as on the basis of race, usually are not functional. I mean, they may be functional for a period, like if you want a super exploited workforce or something, but those situations are kind of anomalous. Over the long term, you can expect capitalism to be anti-racist — just because it’s anti-human. And race is in fact a human characteristic — there’s no reason why it should be a negative characteristic, but it is a human characteristic. So therefore identifications based on race interfere with the basic ideal that people should be available just as consumers and producers, interchangeable cogs who will purchase all the junk that’s produced — that’s their ultimate function, and any other properties they might have are kind of irrelevant, and usually a nuisance.[4]

The Chomsky statement cogently expresses the situation in its entirety.

France as a Social Laboratory for Globalization

The Rivkin offensive is the latest in a long line of programs for undermining French identity. France is a paradox, combining the cosmopolitan values of the bourgeois Revolution of 1789 with a stubborn traditionalism and nationalism, which the globalists term “xenophobia.” It is manifested even in small ways such as the legal obligation of French public servants and politicians to speak only French to the foreign media, regardless of their knowledge of any other language; or the widespread resistance in France to McDonalds and Disney World.

France, like much of the rest of the world, however, is fighting a losing cultural battle against globalization. Jeff Steiner’s column “Americans in France,” refers to the manner by which the French at one time resisted the opening of the American fast food franchise as “part of an American cultural invasion.” Steiner writes:

. . . That seems to be past as McDonalds has so become a part of French culture that it’s not seen as an American import any longer, but wholly French. In short, McDonalds has grown on the French just like in so many other countries.

I’ve been to a few McDonalds in France and, except for one in Strasbourg that looks from the outside to be built in the traditional Alsatian style, all McDonalds in France that I have seen look no different than their American counterparts.

Yes, there are those that still curse McDo (They are now a very small group and mostly ignored) as the symbol of the Americanization of France and who also see it as France losing its uniqueness in terms of cuisine. The menu in a French McDonalds is almost an exact copy of what you would find in any McDonalds in the United States. It struck me as a bit odd that I could order as I would in the United States, that is in English, with the odd French preposition thrown in.

If truth were told, the French who eat at McDonalds are just as much at home there as any American could be.[5]

This seemingly trivial example is actually of immense importance in showing just how a culture as strong as that of France — until recently an immensely proud nation — can succumb, especially under the impress of marketing towards youngsters. It is a case study par excellence of the standardization that American corporate culture entails. It is what the globalist elite desires on a world scale, right down to what one eats.

It is notable that the vanguard of resistance to McDonalds came from farmers, a traditionalist segment of Europe’s population that is becoming increasingly anomalous and under the globalist regime will become an extinct species as agriculture gives way to agribusiness.

Given France’s status in Europe and its historical tendency to maintain its sovereignty in the face of US interests — even quite recently with its opposition to the war against Iraq — France remains one globalism’s few stumbling blocks in Europe. An added concern is that the French will take their stubborn “xenophobia” to the polls and elect a stridently anti-globalist party, as reflected in the electoral ups and downs of the Front National, which opposes both globalization and privatization.

This is a major reason for Rivkin’s far-reaching subversive and interventionist program to assimilate Muslims into French society, which would fundamentally transform French consciousness to be more thoroughly cosmopolitan. The intention is clear enough in the Rivkin embassy documents where it is stated that the Embassy will monitor the effects of the “outreach” program on the “decrease in popular support for xenophobic political parties and platforms.”

Contra the “xenophobia” of France, R. J. Barnet and R. E. Müller’s study of the global corporation, Global Reach,[6] based on interviews with corporate executives, shows that the French business elite has long been seeking to undermine the foundations of French tradition. Jacques Maisonrouge, president of the IBM World Trade Corporation “likes to point out that ‘Down with borders,’ a revolutionary student slogan of the 1968 Paris university uprising – in which some of his children were involved – is also a welcome slogan at IBM.”[7] Maisonrouge stated that the “World Managers” (as Barnett and Muller call the corporate executives) believe they are making the world “smaller and more homogeneous.”[8] Maisonrouge approvingly described the global corporate executive as “the detribalized, international career men.”[9] It is this “detribalization” that is the basis of a “world consumer culture” required to more efficiently create a world economy.

Paris is already a cosmopolitan center and therefore ideal as a prototype for the “global city” of the future. In the 1970s Howard Perlmutter and Hasan Ozekhan of the Wharton School of Finance Worldwide Institutions Program prepared a plan for a “global city.” Paris was chosen for the purpose. Prof. Perlmutter was a consultant to global corporations. His plan was commissioned by the French Government planning agency. Perlmutter predicted that cities would become “global cities” during the 1980s.

For Paris, this required “becoming less French” and undergoing “denationalization.” This, he said, requires a “psycho-cultural change of image with respect to the traditional impression of ‘xenophobia’ that the French seem to exude.” The parallels with the current Rivkin program are apparent. Perlmutter suggested that the best way of ridding France of its nationalism was to introduce multiculturalism. He advocated “the globalization of cultural events” such as international rock festivals, as an antidote to “overly national and sometimes nationalistic culture.”[10]

Undermining France’s “overly national and sometimes nationalistic culture” is the reason Rivkin sought to foster stronger connections between Hollywood and the French culture industry.[11] Rivkin knows the value of entertainment in transforming attitudes, especially among the young. After working as a corporate finance analyst at Salomon Brothers, Rivkin joined The Jim Henson Company in 1988 as director of strategic planning. Two years later, he was made vice president of the company.

The Jim Henson Company produces Sesame Street, whose cute little muppets push a well-calculated globalist agenda to toddlers. Lawrence Balter, professor of applied psychology at New York University, wrote that Sesame Street“introduced children to a broad range of ideas, information, and experiences about diverse topics such as death, cultural pride, race relations, people with disabilities, marriage, pregnancy, and even space exploration.” The series was the first to employ educational researchers, with the formation of a Research Department.[12] Sesame Street has received funding from the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, and the US Office of Education. Of passing interest is that the Carnegie Corporation and the Ford Foundation are also patrons of the Pacific Council on International Policy.

Creating the World Consumer

As Chomsky has pointed out, global capitalism sees humanity in terms of interchangeable cogs in the production and consumption cycle. The summit of corporate human evolution is transformation into “detribalized, international career men.” According to financial journalist G. Pascal Zachary, these rootless cosmopolitans constitute an “informal global aristocracy” recruited all over the world by corporations, depending totally on their companies and “little upon the larger public,” a new class unhindered by national, cultural, or ethnic bonds.[13]

Barnett and Muller quoted Pfizer’s John J. Powers as stating that global corporations are “agents for change, socially, economically and culturally.”[14] They stated that global executives see “irrational nationalism” as inhibiting “the free flow of finance capital, technology, and goods on a global scale.” A crucial aspect of nationalism is “differences in psychological and cultural attitudes, that complicate the task of homogenizing the earth into an integrated unit. . . . Cultural nationalism is also a serious problem because it threatens the concept of the Global Shopping Center.”[15]

This “cultural nationalism” is described by Rivkin and all other partisans of globalism as “xenophobia,” unless that “xenophobia” can be marshaled in the service of a military adventure when bribes, embargoes and threats don’t bring a reticent state into line, as in the cases of Serbia, Iraq, and perhaps soon, Libya. Then the American globalist elite and their allies become “patriots.”

Barnet and Muller cite A. W. Clausen when he headed the Bank of America, as stating that national, cultural, and racial differences create “marketing problems,” lamenting that there is “no such thing as a uniform, global market.”[16] Harry Heltzer, Chief Executive Officer of 3M stated that global corporations are a “powerful voice for world peace because their allegiance is not to any nation, tongue, race, or creed but to one of the finer aspirations of mankind, that the people of the world may be united in common economic purpose.”[17]

These “finer aspirations of mankind,” known in other quarters as greed, avarice, and Mammon-worship, have despoiled the earth, caused global economic imbalance, and operate on usury that was in better times regarded as a sin. These “finer aspirations,” by corporate reckoning, have caused more wars than any “xenophobic” dictator, usually in the name of “world peace,” and “democracy.”

The Rivkin doctrine for France — which according to the leaked document, must be carried out in a subtle manner — is a far-reaching subversive program to transform especially the young into global clones devoid of cultural identity, while proceeding, in the manner of Orwellian “doublethink,” under the name of “multiculturalism.”

Notes

1. “Mandela honours ‘monumental’ Oppenheimer”, The Star, South Africa, August 21, 2000, http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=13&art_id=ct20000821001004683O150279(accessed September 27, 2009).

2. Lynda Loxton, “Mandela: We are going to privatise,” The Saturday Star, May 25, 1996, p.1.

3. ANC daily news briefing, June 27, 2001. See also “Eskom,” ANC Daily News Briefing, June 20, 2001, 70.84.171.10/~etools/newsbrief/2001/news0621.txt

4. Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky (New York: The New York Press, 2002), pp. 88–89.

5. J. Steiner, “American in France: Culture: McDonalds in France, http://www.americansinfrance.net/culture/mcdonalds_in_france.cfm

6. R. J. Barnet and R. E. Müller, Global Reach: The Power of the Multinational Corporations (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974).

7. Global Reach, p. 19. For an update on Maisonrouge see: IBM, http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/builders/builders_maisonrouge.html

8. Global Reach, , p. 62.

9. Global Reach, ibid.

10. Global Reach, pp. 113–14.

11. “2010 France Country Dialogue,” PCIP, op. cit.

12. L. Balter, Parenthood in America: An Encyclopaedia, Vol. 1 (ABC-CLIO, 2000), p. 556.

13. G. Pascal Zachary, The Global Me (New South Wales: Allen & Unwin, 2000).

14. Global Reach, p. 31.

15. Global Reach, p. 58.

16. Global Reach, ibid.

17. Global Reach, p. 106.

The Rivkin Project: How Globalism Uses Multiculturalism to Subvert Sovereign Nations, Part 2

                            By Kerry Bolton

   

Part 2 of 3

The Rivkin Project for Subverting French Youth

In 2010 when US ambassador Charles Rivkin invited a delegation of fellow Pacific Council on International Policy members to France, he had outlined a program for the Americanization of France that primarily involved the use of the Muslim minorities and the indoctrination of French youth with corporate globalist ideals. The slogan invoked was the common commitment of France and America historically to “equality.”

Wikileaks released the “confidential” program. It is entitled “Minority Engagement Strategy.”[1] Here Rivkin outlines a program that is a flagrant interference in the domestic affairs of a sovereign nation and, more profoundly, seeks to change the attitudes of generations of Muslim and French youth so that they merge into a new globalist synthesis; or what might be called a new humanity: Homo economicus, or what the financial analyst G. Pascal Zachary calls “The Global Me,”[2] to achieve what Rivkin describes as the USA’s “national interest.”

Rivkin begins by stating that his embassy has created a “Minority Engagement Strategy” that is directed primarily at Muslims in France. Rivikin states as part of the program: “We will also integrate the efforts of various Embassy sections, target influential leaders among our primary audiences, and evaluate both tangible and intangible indicators of the success of our strategy.”[3]

Rivkin is confident that France’s history of ideological liberalism “will serve us well as we implement the strategy outlined here . . . in which we press France . . .” Note the phrase: “press France.” America’s global agenda is linked by Rivkin to his blueprint for transforming France into “a  thriving, inclusive French polity [which] will help advance our interests in expanding democracy and increasing stability worldwide.” The program will focus on the “elites” of the French and the Muslim communities, but will also involve a massive propaganda campaign directed at the “general population,” with a focus on youth.

At high levels US officials will place French officials on the defensive. The program also includes redefining French history in the school curricula to give attention to the role of non-French minorities in French history. It means that the Pepsi/MTV generation of Americans will be formulating new definitions of French culture and writing new pages of French history to accord with globalist agendas. Towards this end: “. . . we will continue and intensify our work with French museums and educators to reform the history curriculum taught in French schools.”

“Tactic Number Three” is entitled: “Launch Aggressive Youth Outreach.” As in other states targeted by the US State Department and their allies at the Soros network, Freedom House, Movement.org, National Endowment for Democracy, Solidarity Center,[4] and so forth; disaffected youth are the focus for change. Leading the charge on this effort, the Ambassador’s inter-agency Youth Outreach Initiative aims to “engender a positive dynamic among French youth that leads to greater support for US objectives and values.” Can the intentions be stated any plainer? It is Americanization culturally and politically.

It is here that we can most easily get past the cant and clearly see what is behind the strategy: to form a generation “that leads to greater support for US objectives and values.” These “US objectives and values” will be sold to the French as French values on the basis of the bourgeois ideals of 1789 which continue to encumber French ideology on both Left and Right. They will be taught to think that they are upholding French traditions, rather than acting as agents of change according to “American values”: the values of the global village and the global shopping mall. A far-reaching program incorporating a variety of indoctrination methods is outlined:

To achieve these aims, we will build on the expansive Public Diplomacy programs already in place at post, and develop creative, additional means to influence the youth of France, employing new media, corporate partnerships, nationwide competitions, targeted outreach events, especially invited US guests.[5]

The program directed at youth in France is similar to that directed at the youth that formed the vanguard of the “velvet revolutions” from Eastern Europe to North Africa. Potential leaders are going to be taken up by the US State Department in France and cultivated to play a part in the future France of American design:

We will also develop new tools to identify, learn from, and influence future French leaders.

As we expand training and exchange opportunities for the youth of France, we will continue to make absolutely certain that the exchanges we support are inclusive.

We will build on existing youth networks in France, and create new ones in cyberspace, connecting France’s future leaders to each other in a forum whose values we help to shape — values of inclusion, mutual respect, and open dialogue.[6]

Here Rivkin is advocated something beyond influencing Muslims in France. He is stating that a significant part of the program will be directed towards cultivating French youth, the potential leaders, in American ideals, under the façade of French ideals. The US State Department and their corporate allies and allied NGOs intend to “shape their values.” The globalist program for France is stated clearly enough to be the re-education of French youth. One would think that this is the most important role of the French Government, the Catholic Church and the family; the latter two in particular. American bureaucrats and their inane sidekicks recruited from professions are to formulate new “French values.”

As in the states that are chosen for “velvet revolutions” part of the strategy includes demarcating the political confines. As Hillary Clinton recently stated in regard to the type of state the US Establishment expects to emerge after Qadaffi, the new Libya should be an inclusive democracy, open to all opinions, as long as those opinions include a commitment to “equality” and “democracy”; in other words, there must be a new dispensation of freedom in Libya, so long as that freedom does not extend beyond America’s definition of it. And if someone oversteps the lines of acceptable democracy, American bombers are on standby. In the context of France, however, it is clear that the demarcation of French politics according to globalist dictates cannot include any elements of so-ccalled “xenophobia” (sic), which in today’s context would include a return to the grand politics of the De Gaulle era. Hence, “Tactic 5” states:

Fifth, we will continue our project of sharing best practices with young leaders in all fields, including young political leaders of all moderate parties so that they have the toolkits and mentoring to move ahead. We will create or support training and exchange programs that teach the enduring value of broad inclusion to schools, civil society groups, bloggers, political advisors, and local politicians.[7]

Rivkin is outlining a program to train France’s future political and civic leaders. While the programs of US Government-backed NGOs, such as the National Endowment for Democracy — ostensibly designed to develop entire programs and strategies for political parties in “emerging democracies,” such as the states of the ex-Soviet bloc — can be rationalized by way of a lack of a heritage of liberal-democratic party politics, the same rationale can hardly be used to justify America’s interference in France’s party politics.

Towards this end Rivkin states that the 1,000 American English language teachers employed at French schools will be provided with the propaganda materials necessary to inculcate the desired ideals into their French pupils: “We will also provide tools for teaching tolerance to the network of over 1,000 American university students who teach English in French schools every year.”

The wide-ranging program will be co-ordinated by the “Minority Working Group” in “tandem” with the “Youth Outreach Initiative.” One of the problems monitored by the Group will be the “decrease in popular support for xenophobic political parties and platforms.” This is to ensure that the program is working as it should to block the success of any “extreme” or “xenophobic” party that might challenge globalization.

Rivkin clarifies the subversive nature of the program when stating: “While we could never claim credit for these positive developments, we will focus our efforts in carrying out activities, described above, that prod, urge, and stimulate movement in the right direction.”

What would the reaction be if the French Government through its Embassy in Washington undertook a program to radically change the USA in accordance with “French national interests,” inculcating through an “aggressive outreach program” focusing on youth, “French ideals” under the guise of “American ideals on human rights.” What would be the response of the US Administration if it was found that the French Government were trying to influence the attitudes also of Afro-Americans, American-Indians, and Latinos? What would be the official US reaction if it was found that French language educators in American schools and colleges were trying to inculcate American pupils with ideas in the service of French interests?

The hypothetical reaction can be deduced from the US response to the “Soviet conspiracy” when Senate and Congressional committees were set up to investigate anyone even vaguely associated with the USSR. So what’s different? The USA perpetrates a subversive strategy in the interests of it globalist cooperate elite, instead of in the interests of the USSR or communism. It is not as though the USA has had much of a cultural heritage that it can present itself to any European nation, let alone France, as the paragon of good taste and artistic refinement upon which a national identity can be constructed. It this matter, it is a case of deconstruction.

Notes

1. C. Rivkin, “Minority Engagement Report,” US Embassy, Paris, http://www.wikileaks.fi/cable/2010/01/10PARIS58.html

2. G. Pascal Zachary, The Global Me: Why Nations will succeed or Fail in the Next Generation (New South Wales, Australia: Allen and Unwin, 2000).

3. Rivkin.

4. K. R. Bolton, “The Globalist Web of Subversion,”Foreign Policy Journal, February 7, 2011, http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2011/02/07/the-globalist-web-of-subversion/

5. Rivkin.

6. Rivkin.

7. Rivkin.

The Rivkin Project: How Globalism Uses Multiculturalism to Subvert Sovereign Nations, Part 1

                           By Kerry Bolton

   

Charles Rivkin

Part 1 of 3

During October 19–22, 2010, Charles Rivkin, US Ambassador to France, invited a 29-member delegation from the Pacific Council on International Policy (PCIP) to a conference in France, the main purpose of which was to discuss Arab and Islamic relations in the country.[1] The meeting was part of a far-reaching subversive agenda to transform that entire character of France and in particular the consciousness of French youth, which includes the use of France’s Muslim youth in a typically manipulative globalist strategy behind the usual façade of “human rights” and “equality.”

Globalist Delegation at US Embassy

The PCIP report states of the conference:

. . . The delegation further focused on three key themes. First, the group examined Franco-Muslim issues in France through exchanges with Dr. Bassma Kodmani, Director of the Arab Reform Institute, and Ms. Rachida Dati, the first female French cabinet member of North African origin and current Mayor of the 7th Arrondissement in Paris. A trip to the Grand Mosque of Paris and a meeting with the Director of Theology and the Rector there provided additional insight. Second, meetings with Mr. Jean-Noel Poirier, the Vice President of External Affairs at AREVA (a highly innovative French energy company), and with Mr. Brice Lalonde, climate negotiator and former Minister of the Environment, highlighted energy and nuclear policy issues and the differences between U.S. and French policies in these arenas. And finally, the delegation explored the connections between media and culture in California (Hollywood) and France in meetings at the Louvre, the Musee D’Orsay, and at FRANCE 24 — the Paris-based international news and current affairs channel.[2]

The over-riding concern seems to have been on matters of a multicultural dimension, including not only Arab and Islamic relations in France, but perhaps more importantly in the long term, a discussion on the impact of Hollywood “culture” on the French.

The USA has long played a duplicitous game of “fighting terrorism” of an “Islamic” nature as one of the primary elements of its post-Cold War stratagem of manufactured permanent crises, while using “radical Islam” for it own purposes, the well-known examples being: (1) Supporting Bin Ladin in the war against Russia in Afghanistan, (2) backing Saddam Hussein in the war against Iran, (3) supporting the Kosovo Liberation Army in ousting Serbian sovereignty over mineral rich Kosovo, the KLA having been miraculously transformed from being listed by the US State Department as a “terrorist organization,” to becoming “freedom fighters.”

When US globalists pose as friends of Muslims, the latter should sup with the Great Shaitan with an exceedingly long spoon.

What is the Pacific Council on International Policy?

The PCIP of which Rivkin is a member was founded in 1995 as a regional appendage of the omnipresent globalist think tank, the Council on Foreign Reactions (CFR),[3] is headquartered in Los Angeles, but “with members and activities throughout the West Coast of the United States and internationally.” Corporate funding comes from, among others:

Carnegie Corporation of New York
Chicago Council on Foreign Relations
City National Bank
The Ford Foundation
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
The William & Flora Hewlett Foundation
Rockefeller Brothers Fund
The Rockefeller Foundation
United States Institute of Peace[4]

The PCIP is therefore yet another big player in the globalist network comprising hundreds of usually interconnected organizations, lobbies, “civil society” groups, NGOs, and think tanks, associated with banks and other corporations. As usual, there is a conspicuous presence by Rockefeller interests.

Why France?

France has long been a thorn in the side of US globalism because of its stubborn adherence to French interests around the world, rather than those of the manufactured “world community,” although the Sarkozy regime is an exception. However, France is one of the few states left in Western Europe with a strong national consciousness. The best way of destroying any such feeling — which translates too often into policy — is to weaken the concepts of nationhood and nationality by means of promoting “multiculturalism.”

Was it only coincidence that the 1968 student revolt, sparked by the most puerile of reasons, occurred at a time both when the CIA was very active in funding student groups around the world, and when President De Gaulle was giving the USA maximum trouble in terms of foreign policy? De Gaulle did little to play along with American’s post-war plans. He withdrew France form NATO command, during in World War II was distrusted by the USA.[5]

Of particular concern would have been De Gaulle’s advocacy of a united Europe to counteract US hegemony.[6] In 1959 he stated at Strasbourg: “Yes, it is Europe, from the Atlantic to the Urals, it is the whole of Europe, that will decide the destiny of the world.” The expression implied co-operation between a future Europe and the USSR. In 1967 he declared an arms embargo on Israel and cultivated the Arab world. This is the type of legacy that globalists fear.

With the buffoonery of Sarkozy, and mounting tension with disaffected Muslim youth, a backlash could see an intransigently anti-globalist, “xenophobic” regime come to power. In today’s context, what better way now to subvert French nationalism and any potential to revive as an anti-globalist force, than to use its large, unassimilated Islamic component, just as the Bolshevik revolution was undertaken to a significant extent by the disaffected minorities of the Russian Empire?

Of interest also is the concern this delegation had for the influence of Hollywood on French culture. This might seem at first glance to be an odd concern. However, Hollywood, as the economic symbol of globalist cultural excrescence, is an important factor in globalization, in what amounts to a world culture-war. Ultimately the goal of globalism is not to promote the survival of ethnic cultures and identities, but rather to submerge them into one big melting pot of global consumerism, to uproot every individual from an identity and heritage and replace that with the global shopping mall, and the “global village.” Therefore multiculturalism should be viewed as the antithesis of what it is understood as being.

So far from the global corporates wanting to promote so-called multiculturalism in terms of assuring the existence of a multiplicity of cultures, as the term implies; it is to the contrary part of a dialectical process whereby a under the facade of ideals, peoples of vastly different heritage are moved across the world like pawns on a chess board, the aim being to break down culturally specific nations. It is an example of Orwellian “doublethink.”[7]

It is notable that the instigators of the “velvet revolutions” now sweeping North Africa and reaching into Iran are largely “secularized” youths without strong traditionalist roots. Similarly, the best way to solve France’s ethnic conflicts and to assure that France does not re-emerge again to confront US/globalist interests, is to dialectically create a new cultural synthesis where there is neither a French culture nor an Islamic culture, but under the banner of “human rights” and “equality,” a globalist youth-based culture nurtured by Hollywood, MTV, cyberspace, MacDonald’s and Pepsi.

That this is more than hypothesis is indicated by the manner by which the secular youth revolts now taking place in North Africa have been spawned by an alliance of corporate interests, sponsored by the US State department and sundry NGOs such as Freedom House.[8] The North African “revolutionaries” toppling regimes are just the type of “Muslim” that the globalists prefer; imbued with the cyber-consumer mentality.

So what are Rivkin and the US State Department up to in France, that they should be so interested in the place of Hollywood and of Muslims in the country?

Notes

1. “2010 France Country Dialogue,” PCIP,  http://www.pacificcouncil.org/page.aspx?pid=583

2. “2010 France Country Dialogue,” ibid.

3. “Founded in 1995 in partnership with the Council on Foreign Relations,” PCIP, Governance, http://www.pacificcouncil.org/page.aspx?pid=373

4. Corporate and Foundation funding: http://www.pacificcouncil.org/page.aspx?pid=513

5. S. Berthon, Allies At War (London: Collins, 2001), p. 21.

6. A. Crawley, De Gaulle (London: The Literary Guild, 1969), p. 439.

7. “The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them . . .” George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four(London: Martin Secker and Warburg, 1949), Part 1, Ch. 3, p. 32.

8. K. R. Bolton, “Twitters of the World Unite! The Digital New-New Left as Controlled Opposition,” Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4. Tony Cartalucci, “Google’s Revolution Factory – Alliance of Youth Movements: Color Revolution 2.0,” Global Research, February 23, 2011, http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=23283

Why We Need Protectionism

                           By Aedon Cassiel

       

It’s rather funny that the very people who go on about value being subjective act as if a “more productive” economy is objectively more valuable than all possible alternatives. If people subjectively prefer a more stable job market to one that produces more net total stuff, then why shouldn’t the proponents of the “subjective theory of value” see that as a viable reason to endorse protectionism? Even if protectionism does reduce the national GDP, one can still reasonably ask of what human beings need more: the stability of being better able to predict the future, or the dignity of having a job? Or a larger total quantity of mass-produced trinkets, while people drift from dead-end job to dead-end job?

Austrolibertarians tell us that there is no objective way to rank the utility of getting things desired now versus getting them in the future, and explain that interest exists to coordinate the differences in preferences for now versus later that exist between various individuals. They will then refrain – for good reason – from saying that investing is “objectively” better than consuming. Investments only exist, after all, so that they can eventually be consumed. So the Austrolibertarian, as an economist, can’t pass any judgement on whether a given person’s decision to save or spend was “right” or “wrong.”

But then they betray all of these principles. Even though – according to them – things like immigration and free trade have short-term costs combined with long-term benefits, they claim that it is objectively true that these policies are good and should be supported.

But this implies that there is an objective answer as to how one ought to weigh costs incurred “now” versus payoffs and returns received “later” – even granting their assumptions about the costs and benefits. What if I simply prefer knowing that I can train my children to work in the same industry in which I spent my life, giving me the ability to relax and trust that they and I will both have a secure future, to speeding up the process of competition and throwing myself and them into an unstable, constantly-changing job market, no matter how much that would raise the GDP for my grandchildrens’ generation?

As Sacco and Vanzetti Vandal’s A Call for Economic Nationalism notes, “Fifty years ago, permanent employment with the promise of a pension upon retirement was the standard in America. Now, temporary contracts that employ workers for either a few months or a few years have become the standard . . . globalization has destroyed permanent work.” This change, in and of itself, has an extremely significant effect on the human quality of life – and it simply isn’t captured by material measurements of the economy’s performance. It’s perfectly fine to debate whether taking on this kind of change in the national way of life is worth a given amount of “stuff.”

Models that reduce human beings to economic units tend to miss this point: a person relocating for work is very, very much unlike shipping a product to someone who wants it somewhere else. Goods don’t have preferences about where they live, but for human beings, these preferences are among the most significant in all of our lives. Moving can break down communities. It can take people away from communities they value and of which they want to be a part. It can significantly reduce a person’s chances of finding the kind of partner with which they would actually want to live their lives.

Ecologist Garrett Hardin (who coined the term “tragedy of the commons” in 1968) famously argued against unchecked mass immigration on Left-wing environmentalist grounds in his article on Lifeboat Ethics. Colin Hines, who worked with Greenpeace for ten years, is now making similar arguments about protectionism in the book Progressive Protectionism.

So now, of course, the mainstream Trump-hating Left will side with Forbes Magazine in opposing tariffs. But the desire to preserve local traditions and recognize that human dignity, security, and the protection of ways of life that people actually want to live can conflict with the desire to simply maximize the net total production of things. It has as much presence within the authentic Left as it does on the Right. Identity politics has simply corrupted whatever remains of any “authentic Left” worth talking about.

So how long do the “costs” of free trade last, and how long do the “benefits” take to materialize, anyway? A 2016 study on the “China Shock” found that:

These impacts are most visible in the local labor markets in which the industries exposed to foreign competition are concentrated. Adjustment in local labor markets is remarkably slow, with wages and labor-force participation rates remaining depressed and unemployment rates remaining elevated for at least a full decade after the China trade shock commences. Exposed workers experience greater job churning and reduced lifetime income. (emphasis mine)

The authors have several more important studies collected at The China Trade Shock. Another one, ”When Work Disappears: Manufacturing Decline and the Falling Marriage-Market Value of Young Men,” notes that trade shocks have directly contributed to “premature mortality among young males” while increasing the number of “mothers who are unwed and share of children living in below-poverty, single-headed households.” Again, stripping men of the dignity of work has social costs that go far beyond what can strictly be measured in GDP; it destroys communities, and it destroys relationships.

As Nick Fuentes rightly pointed out on Twitter recently, “The most vocal advocates for free trade always conveniently work in industries least effected by free trade. Harvard economists, CNN pundits, Cato institute interns – these people aren’t exactly feeling the pain from offshoring the way our machinists are . . .” Very few of these people run the risk of becoming deadbeat fathers who simply can’t find work dignified enough to support a marriage or children. But any real “conservatism” worth the name should at the very least put preserving families above maximizing GDP.

 

It makes perfect sense, then, why it is that, once we crunch the numbers, we see that living in areas affected by trade shocks very significantlypredicted voting for Trump. Doesn’t this put the contempt with which Trump voters are seen in the mainstream media in a new light? The glee with which these people will dox and try to destroy the livelihood of members of the Dissident Right is just one illustration of the fact that they really don’t give a damn if white people are left to starve to death, jobless, and without a role to play in modern society. They complain; their concerns are ignored. They vote for someone who actually wants to do something about it, and the issues are obfuscated, while they themselves are treated with nothing but yet more spite and scorn. The crux of the “disagreement” here is that they really just do not care about the complete destruction of your livelihood if it means they can buy – mostly meaningless – stuff a little bit more cheaply.

Robert Stark Interviews Greg Johnson on Populism, Elitism, & Economics

                           By Greg Johnson

            

Frans Francken the Younger (Antwerp 1581-1642), Death and the Miser

Editor’s Note:

The following text is the transcript by V. S. of a May 2013 conversation with Robert Stark. 

Robert Stark: Hello, everyone! This is The Stark Truth with Robert Stark. I’m joined here with Greg Johnson. Hey, Greg! It’s nice having you on. 

Greg Johnson: Thanks for having me on, Robert.

RS: So, what we’re going to be discussing is the issue of economics and how it relates to class struggle and class warfare. Whatever term you want to use to describe our political and ideological circle, there are these two conflicting views and concerns about economics and class that have to be addressed.

One of them is that there’s this fear — and you really see this fear among the Tea Party crowd and it exists within our ideological circle but also it exists among mainline conservatives — of a growing underclass. They have this fear of socialism and the underclass demanding wealth redistribution from the middle class, and this fear has been exploited by a parasitic elite, by the plutocracy, to get the middle class to align itself with the plutocracy. That’s basically why you’ve seen the middle class aligning itself with the Republicans.

Greg, you’re also familiar with the sort of Rothbard meme, which is the foundation of paleo-libertarianism.

GJ: Yeah, that’s right. As I understand it, the paleo-libertarian approach really was created as a reaction to David Duke’s emergence as a national political figure. Based on his performance, it was decided there was a great deal of potential for racially-aware, White-interest ethnic politics, and so Rothbard and Lew Rockwell and others associated with him tried to fuse libertarianism — classical liberalism — with certain populist Right-wing elements. I think the best synthesis of that was those Ron Paul newsletters that Ron Paul claims he never read, where he’s addressing concerns about things like Affirmative Action. It’s an attempt to co-opt racial anxiety and channel it into a race-blind, race-neutral free market ideology.

RS: And the thing is it is a legitimate concern about a growing underclass making more economic demands, but the problem is we have so much wealth and power concentrated in the plutocracy. That’s actually a far bigger threat, because, even though the underclass is growing in numbers, wealth basically translates into power, and power triumphs over the number of people in regard to political power.

Greg, one of the things you proposed in one of your articles – I forget what it was called, but it was something about the failure of conservatives or why the GOP must perish, it was one of those articles – an income cap at one million a year, because that’s really the problem. Having so much money concentrated in the hands of a few is what has led to the corruption of our political system.

GJ: Yeah, I would agree with that. There are two problems. There is a problem of a growing underclass of net tax-consumers, parasites if you will, and of course immigration from low IQ countries is contributing to that dramatically. But even Asian immigrants are actually a big problem because they bring their elderly relatives over, and they’re very, very savvy about getting people enrolled in all kinds of public benefits programs. So, it’s not even the low IQ people who are a problem. It’s the high IQ people who are cynical and manipulate the system, and so we really do have a serious problem, and there’s no question that you cannot have a functioning Western, First World society if you have too many people who are basically unwilling or incapable of producing enough value to sustain that kind of lifestyle. If you give these people the vote, and you give these people social welfare programs, they will take more than they contribute until basically they ruin the system.

So, that is a definite problem, but by the same token I think the overclass, if you want to put it that way, is equally problematic, and it’s the overclass who are bringing in the underclass and afflicting the middle class with this immigration. The overclass, the super rich, really are benefiting tremendously by exporting American jobs overseas and importing coolie labor into America to undercut the gains of the labor movement, basically.

I used to be a kind of conservative, a kind of patriot; I was something of a libertarian, so I looked upon American history as something that was glorious and wonderful, but I have come around to thinking that really the only glorious chapter in American history is the history of the labor movement and the populist movement and what they did to try to rein in the kind of predatory capitalism that we had in this country and give working people the breaks they needed to produce the extremely large and powerful and prosperous American middle class, which the plutocracy is now dismantling again by outsourcing jobs or shipping jobs overseas and by bringing in low IQ, low tech stoop labor from the Third World.

So, we do need to address the problem of the overclass, and I think that in those terms libertarianism is a completely worthless ideology. It’s completely worthless, because basically their only objection to Goldman-Sachs or Time-Warner or any of the big companies and the agendas that they push would be if the checks didn’t clear. If certain people want to buy up huge chunks of the economy and pump filth and depravity and propaganda into people’s homes, well, if the checks cleared then libertarians have no problems that, and I just think that’s a form of self-induced stupidity, politically speaking.

What you need to look to is a non-free market, Right-wing critique of contemporary society, and there are a lot of resources for that. There’s a whole tradition of Third Way economic thinking, including classical republicanism, populism, social credit, distributism, and the like that can mount a critique of the kinds of plutocratic system that we have today. So, I think one of the most important things for the agenda of the North American New Right is the complete destruction or a deconstruction of the free market orthodoxy that reigns in Right-wing circles. I think market economics is bad science. Well, what it is really is classical liberal politics presenting itself as science.

RS: Yeah, the thing is the capitalist, free market propaganda is so ingrained in the American Right. On the one hand, you get these libertarians — and the Tea Party movement is basically run by the Koch brothers — so they’re very apologetic for the plutocracy. But then you get these people who are kind of pseudo-populist or paleo-conservative types like the Alex Jones crowd. If you listen to Alex Jones and those people, they do have a visceral hatred for these globalist elites beyond what you get among the Tea Party types, but they still have this capitalist, conservative orthodoxy where they have the sphere of government and socialism that they would be opposed to any kind of tax increases on the ultra-wealthy.

If you look at the issue of campaign finance reform. Campaign finance reform is meaningless. Canada has fairly strict campaign finance reform, but their politicians are just as corrupt and reprehensible as ours. But really the way you have to deal with the concentration of power in the hands of a few is to limit their wealth.

One solution that’s been put out — I think it was in my interview I did with James Bowery — is there needs to be an asset tax. Instead of an income tax where you tax income there needs to be an asset tax on corporations and banks. That’s probably the best way to start and then there’s your idea of putting a cap on income at $1 million a year, but you would make an exception for people who invent stuff.

GJ: Yeah, I think that would be a legitimate kind of exception, and I chose that figure just arbitrarily, basically to get the idea circulating out there that part of the problem could be solved simply by capping incomes. There are a lot of people who would up stakes and leave America if we capped their incomes, and my attitude towards people like that is: let them go. Good riddance! We don’t want people like that. If a person just can’t make ends meet on a million dollars a year, then I hope they do what Denise Rich did, which is up stakes, renounce her citizenship, and leave.

We would eliminate I’d say 70 or 80% of the 500 top wealthiest people in the country, who would simply up stakes and leave because they have no connection to the United States anyway. It doesn’t matter to them one bit, and the reason I believe that is because their policies indicate that this country doesn’t matter to them one bit. They’re enriching themselves by dismantling the American economy and the American way of life by corrupting the American system of government. Good riddance to them. I’d like to see them all go.

I think the only thing I would regret is if we didn’t make the people who have profited from dismantling the country give back a lot of their gains before they leave. I think that they definitely should have their gains expropriated, and they should be able to leave with whatever legitimate wealth that they have accumulated.

I think that populism in a broad sense is a really legitimate outlook. But if you’re a real populist then what you would want is a society that basically is a classical republican model. What do I mean by that? It’s a society where the common good of the people is the law. It’s the highest law. It’s the aim of politics. If you look at the classical republican tradition really starting with Aristotle’s Politics, there’s a strong argument there for maintaining the middle class. Meaning a large number of people who are independent enough intellectually and especially economically to participate in politics. If you have a large enough middle class, that is the bulwark against the tyranny of the elites, and so the only way that you can really have a society that’s free and a society that’s just – meaning a society that looks out for the interests of the whole – is to maintain a balance against the tyranny of the elites. The elites are richer and smarter than the average, and unless there is some kind of balance or check against their power they will basically turn the system into some kind of oligarchy or plutocracy. The only way to stop that is to have the many, the majority, to be propertied, independent, and leisured enough to participate in politics to counter-balance that, and that is the argument for middle class society.

If you look at the populist tradition in America — you look at somebody like Thomas Jefferson, you look at the 19th century — the great concern of populists was to prevent the middle class from being disenfranchised, disempowered by losing their property and their independence, and the main mechanism by which independent farmers and business people lose their property and become more dependent on the wealthy is basically foreclosure. It’s borrowing at interest and losing their property through foreclosure. That is the main cause of downward mobility for middle class people, and that brings us to a critique of interest-bearing banking and things like that. I think that is absolutely crucial element in a populist, Right-wing critique of capitalism.

RS: I’d like to get into detail about those two issues — the issue of foreclosure and the issue of banking — but what I want to say is the first step in educating people in metapolitics is we have to kind of wean the middle class off of capitalism. The core reason these middle-class conservatives are capitalists is because they have this fear that any kind of redistribution of wealth at the top is a sort of slippery slope to full-blown socialism, and they’re afraid that their money will be confiscated and given to the underclass. So, I think the very first step is to educate those people and to address their fears and concerns which are causing them to be exploited by the elites.

GJ: Yeah, I would agree with that. I am very critical of just pure redistributionism as a political strategy. The idea that you’re going to have as a regular day-to-day function in government taking money from productive people and giving it to people who aren’t productive is a very bad thing. There’s no question about it.

I would, however, be in favor of certain quick and massive redistributions of wealth from people who have gotten it through dismantling the American economy. I don’t know if I’d just give it away to anybody who wants it or anybody who’s needy, but I think it would be a very appropriate thing to basically take away ill-gotten gains and use that to fund some kind of government programs.

But the most appropriate thing to do with expropriating ill-gotten wealth of the plutocracy would be to use it to capitalize new American manufacturing industries. I think that would be a very, very useful thing, and so instead of just handing it to people you would use it strategically to recapitalize and reindustrialize America. I think that would be a good thing.

RS: So, this is basically the key of what you were getting at. Redistribution of wealth in itself isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It just has to be done the right way. The wealth has to be taken from the people who are basically engaged in destructive behavior and redistributed to people who have potential to be productive.

We reject egalitarianism, but just because we reject egalitarianism doesn’t mean . . . I mean, the real problem with capitalism is that capitalism doesn’t necessarily reward the very best behavior. The people who thrive the most in a capitalistic system are those with sociopathic tendencies.

GJ: I would agree with that, and you’re exactly right. The most important thing that we just have to get out there is that we are not egalitarians. We do not think that the bedrock, default moral prejudice should be for equality across the board. That’s simply not true. People are not equal, and they should not be made to be equal.

However, I think that a broad middle class is different from numerical equality. Radical egalitarians cannot help but have the people of lowest quality and least potential be the moral benchmarks. I’ve heard liberals gushing and drooling about how “the measure of a society is how it treats the most needy and vulnerable,” and I just think if that’s really true then you have basically set your moral compass in a way that will lead to the destruction of the strong, the productive, the creative, and so forth, and I think that’s a terrible idea.

I think that really the criterion for justice in a society is not how it treats the least talented and least productive but rather how it pursues the common good, and I think that reorients politics tremendously, because if you think in terms of how to pursue the common good one of the things that we do know is that a society where people who are creative and virtuous, if those people are rewarded for that, they will be productive, they create wealth, they create inventions, they create an atmosphere of social trust, which I think is enormously important, and that kind of society where you reward real excellence measured in terms of creating real things of value and also moral excellence, character, I think that kind of society is good for everybody.

Therefore, a kind of elitism is appropriate, and it’s actually best for the people as a whole. So, I’m a populist in the moral sense, but I think if you actually look in causal terms, if you look at what is actually conducive to the good of the whole, then what you have to be is resolutely, inflexibly an elitist. You have to be an elitist on principle. You have to reward people for excellence, and you can’t put your thumb on the scale, and you can’t reward people for mediocrity or need. I think that even the needy and mediocre actually benefit from a truly aristocratic, elitist society. Of course, the way to prevent that kind of elitism turning into the selfish rule of elites like we have today is to have a large and empowered middle class that’s politically capable of preventing that from happening.

But the other thing you need to ensure is the circulation of the elites. What do I mean by that? I just mean that if you have a real elitist system you’re going to be having things like public education where you give people access to excellent education as just a baseline condition of citizenship and you resolutely promote the best people from all classes of society, and you do not have this kind of elite that we have in America today which is increasingly hereditary, where you have wealthy people sending their kids to exclusive schools, getting them into Ivy League universities, and you get this self-perpetuating, somewhat impervious elite. I think that if you have an elite that’s genuinely elitist you’re going to be constantly pulling in people from all different ranks of society based on their worth, and you’re also going to have mechanisms whereby the mediocre children of the wealthy and powerful are allowed to descend to a lifestyle and amount of power that are appropriate to them.

I think that a system like we have in America, where you have manifestly mediocre people like Albert Gore, Jr. or George W. Bush aspiring to become president or actually becoming president, is a bad system. I am sure that there are 10,000 Iowa farm boys or 10,000 people from Appalachia in the coal region or 10,000 people from any part of the country from humble backgrounds who are probably smarter and better than a lot of the people who are going to Harvard and circulating from government to board rooms in the current corrupt system. So, if you’re really an elitist, you’re going to have an elite that circulates a lot. People will rise from all areas of society because of their genuine merit, and people who are descended from the best people but are not as good as their parents are not going to enjoy the same level of power and influence and wealth that their parents have. I think that’s a very just system.

RS: The thing about implementing it is that’s basically how it’s always been throughout history even going back to the European aristocracies. Wealth and power was usually passed down from one generation to another. I think this idea that anyone can become successfully, which is what people call the American Dream, it’s happened in some situations, but I think it’s really a fantasy. It’s never really been the case, but if you want that to be the case the question is how do you implement that.

GJ: Right. I think that upward mobility is a very nice thing. You do not want a society where you’ve got sort of fossilized, impervious castes. I think that is an injustice, and it makes a society weaker, because there are people of genuine greatness who come from humble backgrounds, and if they can rise to positions where they can give more to the world then the world is enriched because of that. So, I think that’s very important. I think that upward mobility is an important thing, and I am all for that.

I think that one has to enshrine that, and one of the ways to do that is to have an elitist system, a meritocracy, if you will. Lots of libertarians love to talk about meritocracy, but honestly what they’re really talking about is plutocracy, because merit is really measured in their eyes in terms of wealth when you get right down to it. I think that if you had a genuine meritocracy, genuine ability for people to rise and fall according to their merits that that is actually the best kind of system for the people as a whole.

So, again, I’m a populist in terms of my overall moral foundational outlook and in terms of what I think the proper goal of society is, but I’m an elitist because I believe that having a real meritocracy is the best way of assuring that the common good is taken care of.

RS: The other thing about the economic system is that the economic system is set up to keep down political dissidents. If you want to rise up in a big corporation or a financial institution, you do have to be basically apolitical or you have to adopt the political ideology of the ruling class. Basically, if you’re a political dissident it does limit your economic opportunities. If you look at the top 1% I can’t think of a single person with dissident views.

GJ: Right. I would agree with that, and that’s, again, really the populist principle.

Let’s define middle class, too. By middle class I don’t just mean middle income people, because there are lots of middle and upper income people who are not middle class in the sense that I mean. By middle class I mean economically independent. In some sense self-employed as a small businessman or a large businessman, farmer, things like that. If you are self-employed as opposed to employed by another person you have greater freedom of thought and action in the political realm, and there’s just no question about that. There are a lot of people with middle and high incomes who still work for other people, and they have very, very little real freedom of thought, and I think that’s very bad.

We have to define what dissident ideas are too, because . . . Was it Charles Koch, one of the Koch brothers, I think the senior one? I think he’s the fifth or sixth richest man in the world.

RS: Yeah, Kevin MacDonald wrote an article about the Koch brothers buying up the LA Times.

GJ: Right.

RS: He’s not a huge fan of him, but I think he’s a little less cynical about them than we are. They haven’t taken an official stand on an issue like immigration, but if I had to guess they’re probably for open borders. But their main political issues are basically less taxes on the wealthy, less regulations on business, and less environmental regulation. I think for some people who are focused solely on ethnicity they may look the other way, but those issues by themselves are reprehensible positions to take and they definitely should be viewed as despicable individuals.

GJ: Oh, I would agree with that. Libertarians are open borders enthusiasts. The Koch brothers are libertarians. They are the main bank rollers of libertarianism in the United States in the 20th and 21st centuries, and it is just astonishing how much money they have put over the years into these various libertarian organizations.

Years and years ago when I was on the sort of fringes of libertarianism people would talk about “the Kochtopus,” all the different arms of the Koch machine. They’ve been investing millions and millions of dollars into promoting libertarian ideas for decades now, and they are a wonderful example of metapolitics. If the North American New Right had people with anything like the money of the Koch brothers, or one thousandth of the money that the Koch brothers have, we could still do so much to promote better ideas. They have created think tanks, they have endowed professorships at universities, they have wormed their way into various institutions, and they are very, very successful at promoting their version of extremely bad ideas, their Right-wing, classical liberal version of bad ideas.

And yes, I am 100% on the side of the progressives when it comes to things like environmental regulation, for instance, so I think the Koch brothers are pretty bad. I think they’re worse than your average Republican in many ways, because they are very, very ideologically purist. They’re purists. They’re ideologues. They’re not these compromising and corrupt Republican politicians. In some ways, I would prefer a corrupt politician who has bad ideas, but betrays his bad ideas all the time, to somebody who is incorruptibly wrong and has a personal fortune of $34 billion to back it up and is willing to actually write checks. That is a very dangerous person.

George Soros is a bad guy in a different way, but the Koch brothers are bad as well.

RS: I think it was Chesterton who said this, but this goes back to your definition of the middle class: “The problem with capitalism is that there’s too few capitalists.”

GJ: Exactly. I think that’s really well put. What we stand for is private property and free enterprise broadly distributed, and that is the key issue. You can pretty much deduce everything from the necessity of maintaining the broad distribution of free enterprise and private property. You can deduce regulations on the amount of wealth people can have. You can deduce things like protectionism. You can deduce getting rid of interest-bearing currency and getting rid of the banking system. You can pretty much arrive at social credit. If you just ask yourself what is necessary to maintain a private property, private enterprise society with a huge prosperous powerful middle class. The whole range of third way economic things follows, and they are all very consistent with one another. Distributism and social credit, all of these things can be fit together, because they’re all working towards the same end, and they share a lot of the same basic premises.

I think that Chesterton is very, very good on that sort of issue.

RS: So, earlier on you touched on the foreclosure crisis. I’d like to get into that issue more in detail.

GJ: Well, foreclosure just happens when you pledge your property for security on a loan. We’ve gotten into this system where the primary asset that most middle class people can aspire to have is a home, and there’s this built-in idea that it’s this wonderful thing if home prices are going up 10% a year, which I think is catastrophic. If orange juice went up 10% a year or cars or clothes went up 10% a year people would be screaming bloody murder. College educations are going up 10% a year, and people are screaming bloody murder about that, but somehow we’ve got this idea that it’s wonderful if home prices keep going up, and, of course, the reason that some people think that is because they have a home, and they want to sell it, whereas most people don’t have orange juice or college educations to sell.

RS: Yeah, that’s why the home prices are going up. I think part of it is just supply and demand. In California, we have a rapidly growing population due to immigration, but the housing supply is not growing to keep up with that.

But the other side of the reason why housing prices are going up is because of the banking system.

GJ: Well, right. Exactly. There’s a lot of speculation going on, and frankly if you have things like deductibility of mortgage interests . . . Mortgage interest deductibility is a giant redistribution mechanism to the banks. Let’s just face it. House prices are higher because of mortgage interest deductibility and, of course, banks benefit from that tremendously. Of course, middle class people want to hold on to that because they think they benefit from it, and as individuals they do, but the system as a whole doesn’t benefit from things like that. I think it just creates high prices.

What I would do with housing is simply have interest-free loans that are underwritten by the government or private enterprises that just have a fee. A fee for writing the loan and administering it. You pay that maybe once, right? It’s not calculated as a growing, compounded interest payment on the amount that you borrow. It’s simply a fee, and it would allow people to get started in life, buy homes and things like that.

I would actually limit the number of houses and housing units that individuals can own.

RS: You know, Steve Sailer had an article about that. He said that in places like Los Angeles or I’m sure the Bay Area part of the reason why there’s a growing gap between the rich and the poor is because of real estate. You have some people who are monopolizing large amounts of the best real estate or who own several homes. So, you’re right. There does have to be a cap on how much real estate one person should own.

GJ: Yeah, why not have one house and a vacation house or something like that and have a limit? Basically, what that would mean is you would have people who have lots of capital not going around and buying homes and flipping them and contributing to these bubble-speculative mentalities in real estate, which of course we should have learned how disastrous that was, but now people are all excited, “Maybe the bubble is coming back!” We don’t want the damn real estate bubble to come back! In fact, I would like to see housing prices deflate a great deal.

And let’s face it, when I was living in Berkeley in 2003 I saw a two-bedroom bungalow up for sale for $1 million. That’s absurd! The fact of the matter is that most of the people living in Berkeley never paid those kinds of rates for their houses, and so you had a town where the vast majority of the people living there could never afford to live there if they had to purchase their homes at the going market prices. Now, they’re all delirious because they think they’re going to retire and sell that house at $1 million or $2 million or whatever, and they’ll have lots of money to play with, but what will happen eventually is that Berkeley will be nothing but a town full of rich pretend hippies. I’ve seen this happening in San Francisco. You go to the Haight-Ashbury district, and it’s a pretty disgusting place really. There are bums all over the streets and mangy dogs and panhandlers and drunks and druggies, and then scurrying between them are people who want to hang out in the Bohemian district who bought a three-bedroom flat a couple blocks off Haight Street for $1 million.

RS: Yeah, it’s basically what James O’Meara talks about in his Gilmore Girls series.

GJ: Exactly! Exactly. You’ve got this situation where you’ve got certain communities that are basically just becoming hollowed out simulacra of communities where rich people go to pretend that they’re New England villagers in Martha’s Vineyard or hippies in Haight-Ashbury, things like that. It’s basically the equivalent of when Marie Antoinette pretended like she was a milkmaid in the gardens of Versailles. It’s a completely debased, hollowed out, globalized, false simulacrum of communities. And meanwhile real people who work in these towns, who teach school, who are the postmen, who are small business owners, clerks, hairdressers, you know, the people who actually work in the town can’t afford to live there. They have to recruit 60 miles. Ridiculous situations. Towns like Aspen where people commute 60 miles to work there, and then they go back to a trailer that they live in, which is massively overpriced because it’s 60 miles from Aspen.

It’s a ridiculous situation. It’s unjust, it’s artificial, and it’s driven largely by all this easy money flowing into housing. People say, “Oh, our interest rates are low!” Whenever I hear that I panic. I want to reach for my revolver. Low interest is one of the worst . . . If we’re going to have interest, I’d rather have high interest than low interest. Why? Because low interest is the crack that powers these stupid, destructive, speculative economic bubbles. So, if you’re going to have interest I’d rather have it high than low. There are countries that have enjoyed sustained, slow economic growth and prosperity with high interest. It’s a totally doable system, but America, I think, is too addicted to fast growth and Ponzi economics all fueled by low interest, and I think that’s one of our great economic follies, and it’s creeping back. People want to have the stock markets going higher and higher. Housing prices are up.

I feel like I’m back in 2007 and 2008. That wasn’t so long ago, but people don’t seem to have learned anything.

RS: I’d like to talk a little bit more about political strategies. I think there are two political strategies. We’ve talked about the conservative middle class. There’s the underclass and then there’s also people who are on the Left. One thing is conservatives are really obsessed with selling capitalism to the underclass and to poor minorities. I think the key is I see a trend where you have an alliance . . . The underclass is basically being exploited politically by the elite, so I think it’s important actually to encourage the underclass to really turn against the elite like you’ve seen in places like Venezuela.

GJ: Well, yeah, I would like to see that happen. My attitude about the underclass is basically that we should try to reduce it in size, and the best way to reduce it in size is, first of all, let’s send all of the recently arrived underclass members home and get rid of incentives for idleness and parasitism.

Let’s just say I’m running America as it is today, America the multicultural society afflicted with the millions and millions of non-Whites that we have. I would actually much rather just pay welfare to anybody with an IQ of 85 or under for the rest of their lives, because I think one of the worst things we do in America is actually put these people in jobs where they pretend to work. They pretend to work, and they gum up the economy.

I used to live in Atlanta. Atlanta, I think, was 60% Black, and the city government was like 96% Black, and the people in that city government consisted of large numbers of useless eaters who basically went to their offices and pretended to work. Anybody who actually had to deal with the city government or the county government getting their business going or buying and selling property, doing anything that was economically necessary, had to go through this bureaucracy that was full of morons who are just loafing, chatting on their cell phones, letting the office phone ring or go to voice mail, then the mail box was always full. Your heart would sink through the floor when you would hear a Black woman’s voice wishing you a “blessed day,” because you would just know that there was absolutely no hope. People who lived and did business outside Atlanta in some of the further ex-urban counties that were predominately White would go into the city hall, and people would just rush them through. They’d be really helpful. None of this passive aggressive stuff, none of the laziness, none of the craziness that the people in Atlanta have to deal with.

So, my attitude about the underclass really would be: why not just put them on welfare for the rest of their lives, get them out of jobs that they can only pretend to do, and if they’re of child-bearing age give them incentives to be sterilized? I think that if you would just do that we would actually be a richer society than we are today, a richer and more efficient society than we are today.

So, my attitude about the underclass is that it should be reduced and the best way to reduce it, ultimately, is to have a kind of gentle, slow-functioning eugenic program in place. What we should have is a safety net – I believe in that kind of social welfare – but you do not want to have these communities which generation after generation are basically lounging around in the social safety net like it’s a permanent hammock. That’s not the way to do things.

Practically every time you hear idiots talking about moral uplift programs, economic uplift programs, minority uplift programs, it’s always wealthy White liberals like the people who live in the Marina District in San Francisco trying to ally themselves with mestizo day-laborers and Blacks, and who ends up getting screwed? It’s the middle class. They’re the ones who always foot the bills for these things. So, I do see middle class people as right in their fear of any kind of discussion of these kinds of egalitarian schemes: redistribution, minority uplift, and things like that.

RS: California is run by a coalition of basically three groups: the very wealthy, the public employee unions, and the underclass, and they run the California Democratic Party. So, the key is to break up the alliance between the very poor and the very rich. The underclass just basically despises the rich.

GJ: Yeah, they despise the rich, but the fact of the matter is that they generally do not have leaders who will lead them to confront the rich. I remember when I lived in Atlanta there was this Negro minister and businessman, the Reverend Hosea Williams, and Hosea Williams was just one of these vaguely ridiculous, Southern Black, poverty pimp, Civil Rights politicians. But Hosea Williams was a cut above a lot of the others, and one of the things he said about himself was that he actually believed in the interests of Blacks, whereas he believed that people like Coretta Scott King and Jesse Jackson and people like that had basically sold out to the ultra-rich and to the Jews. He actually referred to himself as a “nigger’s nigger” whereas he said that Coretta Scott King was a “Jew’s nigger.” Now, that’s pretty salty language, but that’s the way a lot of minorities see things. But there are very, very few of them that will actually stand up and occupy a leadership role within their community that could galvanize them against the plutocracy.

Instead, anybody who looks like they have the potential to rise in their community is co-opted very quickly. Look at Barack Obama. There were people who spotted him as an up-and-coming potential person and mentored him, and basically a lot of them were Jews. A lot of them were Left-wing Jews who looked at Obama, saw this up-and-coming Black, and they stepped in and played this mentoring role. They are constantly looking for talent in different communities that they can mentor and harmonize with their interests, and that’s the way that the plutocracy works.

RS: Yeah, you saw that with Cesar Chavez, who was against the big corporate agriculture, and now the so-called “Chicano” movement is aligned with corporate agriculture.

GJ: Oh yeah, of course. They’re keeping corporate agriculture rich by being so poor, right? Exactly.

RS: I would say those corporate farms should be shut down and sold to people who want to start up small family farms.

GJ: I wouldn’t even say sell them. I’d just say homestead them out like we did in the past.

RS: Yeah. I don’t mean sell them and give them the revenue. You could sell them and the revenue could go back to the public and be invested.

As you know, I do a TV show up in the Central Valley and I drive through that area. That agriculture industry generates billions or even trillions of dollars. That whole area is one of the poorest areas in the whole country.

GJ: Almost definitely. It’s horrific. A generation or two ago it was a prosperous area. It was kind of boring. San Franciscans would make jokes about Fresno being kind of dull. But the fact of the matter is that there was a large White middle class in that area, and the White middle class is gone in a lot of these towns; property values are very, very low because of the massive number of mestizos who live there now; crime and corruption is terrible; poverty is terrible. It really is becoming a kind of Third World plantation economy, and that is one of the things you have to guard against.

Again, small farms with independent farmers = a prosperous, middle class society. But what you get with the concentration of property is you get the über-rich plantation, which is worked by landless peasants.

RS: I know a lot of people who call themselves neo-Confederates, but that’s one of the reasons I’m not a big fan of the Confederacy because it was a feudalist system like that.

GJ: Calling it feudal is an underserved compliment, because on feudal estates the lords actually had obligations to their tenants. They were not chattel slaves. Even serfs in Russia had more rights than chattel slaves. What it was — and this is the truth with America and Anglo-American capitalism as a whole — is nothing but a cut-throat, inhuman form of capitalism where the people who got really, really rich from it cashed in all of their blood money and bought houses that looked like the estates of the European aristocrats, but it was only aristocratic on the surface because there was none of the morality that goes along with genuine feudal aristocratic society. It was just the manners and the accoutrements. It was the furniture, it was the airs that these people put on, but they had absolutely no mutual feudal moral obligations.

Slavery is just capitalism at its worst, and that’s why I can’t really pine for the South either. If I lived in the South, frankly I would have been a White populist revolutionary who would be burning down the big houses.

RS: Yeah, I heard a video of Tom Metzger speaking to a group of Black Nationalists and he said that if he was alive back then he would have been pointing a cannon at the plantation owners.

GJ: I’ve always liked Tom Metzger. I hadn’t heard that one, but he’s a man after my own heart. One of the best things Tom Metzger ever said, which I thought was really, really funny but profound, was basically directed at the kind of White Nationalist types who think, “Well, we should just surrender some of our territory to the invaders.” And Tom Metzger said, “I support the idea of reuniting Baja California with Alta California. We need to reunite Baja California and drive out all the Mexicans.” I thought, “Yeah!” OK, it’s not a serious proposal, but he’s making a point. The mestizo nationalists are talking about basically driving White people out of power and just physically out of large parts of this country and taking it over, and what’s the most radical position in opposition to that? “Well, we’ll just cede some of this territory to you.” It’s appalling. That’s the most radical position, whereas a really radical position would be instead of having this idea that “what’s yours is yours and what’s ours is negotiable . . .”

RS: Yeah, and you have a lot of those Northwest migration people who talk about a country in the Northwest. I think California is one of the most remarkable places in the world, and they’re telling people to just leave California and abandon it.

GJ: Yeah, and I think that’s really too bad. California is really worth fighting for. That’s why I love California. It’s just too nice to give up.

But yeah, instead of having this attitude that “what’s theirs is theirs and what’s ours is negotiable,” we need to have the exact opposite attitude towards the Mexicans. It’s like, “Folks, we’re going to keep this country of ours, and if you’re really quiet and good and all go home, we won’t take a few slices out of Mexico for our growing population.” That would be really radical. That would go beyond even the position that I think I would legitimately defend. But it makes it clear just how defensive a posture White Americans are in when even the most radical ones are just basically saying to the aliens, “OK, let’s just make a deal: you can take part of our country from us.”

I like Metzger because he has a fighting spirit, and when he made that proposal that really, really shows how defensive we are, and it’s a position of weakness that we have cast ourselves into and that we are arguing from. We have to psychologically emancipate ourselves from that position of weakness, or we are going to be weak, and we’re going to lose everything.

RS: We kind of went off on a little bit of a tangent, and that’s OK, but I think before we wrap it up let’s get to the topic of social credit.

You have that article “Money for Nothing” and you can talk a little bit about that and your correspondence with Dick Eastman, who’s a big advocate of social credit.

GJ: Well, thanks for mentioning that. There are a few articles that I’ve written on economic topics that I really want to recommend to people who haven’t read those articles, because I’m rather proud of them. These are all at the Counter-Currents website: counter (hyphen) currents.com.

One is called “The End of Globalization,” which simply makes the point that if you’re serious about opposing globalization then the natural boundary where globalization stops is the nation and therefore nationalism is the only really viable alternative to globalization.

Another article I wrote is “Some Thoughts on Debt Repudiation,” which I think has to be a feature of setting up any new system.

RS: About a third of our debt is to China, but most of it is actually to private bankers.

GJ: Yeah, and I think they can go without a new pair of shoes. My attitude is we’ll just say to the Chinese, “Look, we’re not going to pay you this, but all the capitalists who built companies, built factories in your country? You can keep those for domestic production.”

RS: Yeah, let the Chinese confiscate the property of the Western factories in their country.

GJ: Exactly. And we’ll just build new factories in our country for domestic production, and they can produce their cheap crap with lead paint for domestic consumption over there. I think that would be great.

So, the debt repudiation piece is another one, and the third one I want to recommend is called “Money for Nothing,” and that’s basically my attempt, in as naïve a tone as possible, to lay out the best ideas in the whole social credit theory that’s associated with Clifford Hugh Douglas, Alfred Richard Orage, and Ezra Pound. I really recommend that, and I was just really flattered, just profoundly flattered, when Dick Eastman, who knows a hell of a lot more about social credit than I do, sent me a long email where he basically cut and pasted my entire article and went through it and commented on it line by line. I really benefited from that, and I feel like, “Yeah, my take on this was substantially correct,” and I had the testimony of a guy who knows a lot more about social credit than I do. So, anyway, I do recommend that piece. It’s a starting point.

I really do want to write more about this in the future, but I’m just so thinly spread. I’ve got so many different projects. I might just take a month in the Fall, maybe the month of October, and just sit down and grind out several more social credit pieces, because I’ve always been pretty good at explaining difficult ideas. I use to teach Heidegger, and I used to teach Kant. You know, if I can teach Heidegger, and I can teach Kant to undergraduates, then I can teach social credit to the world at large. There are certain ideas at the core of social credit that are actually kind of difficult, and I think that I’ve found ways of making them easy for me to understand and I think easy for the rest of the world.

But yeah, so I don’t want to go into that so much right now. I’ll just issue that sort of promissory note that there’s more to come at Counter-Currents on social credit, and if there are social credit writers who are comfortable associating with people like me at Counter-Currents and want to write for us and review books or try to popularize some of these ideas I would be really, really eager to hear from you. So, if you’re out there contact me. I want to hear more from the social credit people.

RS: Alright, Greg. Thanks for being on The Stark Truth.

GJ: Well, thank you, Robert. I really, really enjoyed this, and so I look forward to our next conversation.