Perennis

Napoleon, the Pope, and the CSA (Part II)

2011-12-14T20:50:00.009-06:00

Europe's Plan to Save the South

Emperor Louis Napoleon III

Not to be confused with Napoleon Bonaparte, his uncle, Louis Napoleon or His Imperial Majesty Emperor Napoleon III lived from 1808-1873 and reigned in France from 1848 until 1870. He was married to Eugenie de Montijo, known as Empress Consort Eugenie (1826-1920). Napoleon III reigned in France during a perilous time of intrigue, scheming politics, and shifting alliances, as the forces of unification and centralization stalked most regions of Europe. He was destined to cast a large shadow over events during the American Civil War or War Between the States (WBTS).

Empress Consort Eugenie

By 1861, Napoleon III was drawn into a conflict in the New World by the long-standing turmoil in Mexico, which resulted in a default on loan payments that broke the Treaty of Soledad by the liberal Mexican government on debt owed to France, Spain, and England. To redress the situation, in late 1861, France led an expeditionary force into Mexico along with troops from England, Spain, and Austria. Within a short time, however, most of the other European forces went home, and France was left to move alone against the Mexican Army, supported by its sometime President Benito Juarez. The political and social situation in Mexico at the time was fractured, and Juarez represented the most prominent faction within a number of relatively small political groups. The northern states of Mexico, led by Santiago Vidaurri, were independent of the central government and soon allied themselves with the newly formed Confederate States of America (CSA). Meanwhile, various other groups, the Catholic Church, businessmen, and industrialists, mostly opposed Juarez.

By today's standards, Juarez would be termed a liberal or perhaps a left-wing populist strongman. He was supported by the new Lincoln administration in Washington, which held similar views to his, but Lincoln could not aid Juarez due to his own burgeoning crisis, the WBTS. Juarez represented those government interests who had welched on their debt payments due to careless spending. After a period of armed conflict, Mexican General Comonfort finally surrendered to French Commander Elie Forey in the spring of 1863, and Juarez went into exile at Chihuahua City in the far northwest of Mexico.

Far from being the end of the story, this was only the beginning of a plan by His Majesty Napoleon III to aid the CSA. Neutralizing the floundering and incompetent government of the Juarez regime was just the first step in a complicated diplomatic and military action carried out by several European Powers designed to save Christian agrarianism in North America.

Pope Pius IX

The Pope's Blessing

Anyone who has studied the WBTS knows that establishment historians and other government apparatchiks have long insisted that the CSA was isolated from Europe and had no significant allies there. This alleged isolation was based on the supposed stigma attached to the South’s employment of the institution of slavery. This was not the case at all. But formal recognition of the CSA by European nations and the question of whether the CSA had European allies are two separate issues. The Mexican states bordering Texas to the south--namely Nuevo Leon y Coahuila as well as Tamaulipas--were early allies of the CSA and strong trading partners forming a large conduit for Southern cotton to Europe. This same alliance also served as a market for textiles and other goods produced in Monterrey and sold to the CSA.

The question of the CSA’s European allies is a more complicated issue. Understanding it requires a nuanced approach, an understanding of several theaters of operation at once, a perspective that has apparently eluded establishment scholars, who have ignored this arena either because it didn’t fit their hackneyed “slavery” template or because they have sought to obfuscate the subject.

As mentioned in part 1, the impulse towards consolidation and centralization, sometimes called unification or consolidationism, was an epidemic in Europe. In the early nineteenth century, the Italian peninsula was a diverse, pluralistic collection of states, duchies, and kingdoms. Through a series of wars, uprisings, and revolutions, though, this marvelous assemblage of distinct cultures was crushed into an increasingly homogenous society that sought to stamp out individual identities in favor of the national physiography called Italy.

One man who was at the center of the battle to retain the character of the Italian peninsula and opposed unification in the rest of Europe was Pope Pius IX (1792-1878). Arguably the greatest pope of the nineteenth century (possibly the modern era), he fought both spiritually and at times physically in the cause for ethnic diversity. A great theologian, writer, and pastor, he was the longest serving elected pope in the history of the Catholic Church. He also favored President Jefferson Davis over the rump president Abraham Lincoln. Not only did Pope Pius IX receive diplomats from the CSA, he corresponded with President Davis and worked behind the scenes with European heads of state to support the Southern cause. Many of these proceedings could be found scattered in various references. But recently, a new book, La Corona Ecumenica--Pio IX y la Confederacion Americana, 1861-1865, detailing the relationship of the pope with the South has been published in Spain by author Raphael Waldburg-Zeil.

Why would this famous pope side with the Confederate States? Gary Potter, writing in Catholicism , provides some of the answers. He writes, “We shall be helped in this by a remarkable essay, Religion and the Old South, written nearly seventy years ago by Allen Tate, poet, essayist, Southerner, and convert to the Faith.” The Old South, Tate shows, had the only truly European civilization ever known in America. That is, in the sense that it was a civilization rooted in its own, unique soil and produced men who measured their success in life according to non-material standards, perhaps the chief of them being honor. It was an agricultural civilization and a hierarchical one. That, in itself, was enough to make Pius and most ordinary Catholics of the day sympathetic to the South. Certainly the Catholic Bishops of the South were sympathetic. There is no record of any of them failing to support the Confederacy. One of them, Bishop Patrick Lynch of Charleston, South Carolina, became President Davis’ envoy to Pope Pius IX.”

In other words, the pope recognized the distinctive difference between the North and the South was one of culture and attitude. The Weltanschauung (comprehensive worldview) in the South was a cultural expression of the perennial wisdom where the deep recurring themes of the seasons, religion, and the land formed a worldview in conflict with that of the materialistic Yankee north.

Allied with the pope through reasons of compatibility were Emperor Louis Napoleon and his wife, Empress Eugenie, an intelligent and skilled woman with an active interest in foreign policy. She would be one of the emperor's best advisers and would make up in boldness what his Majesty lacked in pluck.

Eugenie was born in Granada, Spain, to Don Portocarrero and María Kirkpatrick Grevigné. She was educated in Paris and would marry Louis Napoleon in 1853. It is through Eugenie's family that a crucial Jacobite influence emerged (the Jacobite connection is referred to in part 1). Empress Eugenie's grandfather was William Kirkpatrick of Conheath, a Scottish nobleman whose family had supported English King Charles I and was awarded a title and other honors by the Jacobite patriarch James II. Her oldest sister was María Francisca. Maria married Jacob Fitz-James Stewart y Ventimiglia, the 8th Duke of Berwick, a part of the Stewart lineage.

Anyone who has looked into the history of the South knows that there was a strong Jacobite sentiment in the southern states. Many of the “mountain Celts” in the South favored the Stewart cause or were in some degree loyal to the Stewart monarchy, even to this day. Other European immigrants had affection for the Jacobites as well as the Hapsburgs. These attachments were known in the royalist circles of Europe exposing to them a vein of potential allies.

France Ascending

Michel Chevalier

Michel Chevalier (1806-1879) was a well-known figure in the French government holding several advisory posts. In a remarkable vegrandis libri translated by W. Henry Hurlbut and published in 1863 entitled France, Mexico, and the Confederate States, Chevalier yields some extraordinary insights about the policies of Emperor Napoleon. In September 1863, the New York Times characterized Chevalier's book this way: “There is little doubt, at all events, that it foreshadows Louis Napoleon's purposes, hopes and desires. Even without inspiration, however, its great ability and plausibility render it of high value and interest.” Subsequent writings by Chevalier would affirm that his ideas were indeed advising the Tuileries (the French White House).

A plan unfolded in Europe to aid the Confederate States by launching an expedition to Mexico. Chevalier confirms this (page 7 of his book): “It is (our) interests which compel France to sympathize with the Confederate States which have led our banners up to the walls of Mexico. The recognition of the Southern States will be the consequences of our intervention . . . which will consecrate the final separation and secession of those states from the American Union.” Beginning with the ouster of Juarez and stabilization of the political situation in Mexico, the French military would bring order to a society that had seen decades of chaos. The next part of the French plan might well be attributed to Empress Eugenie.

At the outset of the WTBS, Europe looked very different than it does today. For instance, there was no Germany as we know it. There was, however, a common Germanic language shared by many small and medium-sized states in Central Europe, the most important being Prussia, Bavaria, and Austria. The latter two were more or less allied with France, and the former installed Otto von Bismarck, an admirer of President Lincoln, as their leader. But Germany, as a country, did not exist.

As described in part 1, the situation in Europe was a powder keg of shifting alliances, a time of intrigue and revolution. Within this situation, the interests of the French, Austrians, and Pope Pius IX coalesced around a policy that would stabilize Mexico politically and bring new administrative skills to the government. Once this aim was accomplished, it would ensure a legitimate base of operations in the Gulf of Mexico for the French to openly supply the CSA.

It would take the French and their allies, not England’s actions and policies, to accomplish this plan. About the English, Chevalier said: “The commerce of England profits by the misfortunes of American commerce; she looks with satisfaction on the exhaustion alike of [the] South and of the North. She supplies both parties with arms, and while the southern export of cotton is suspended, she is increasing the cotton culture of India. England, then, will never take the initiative in recognizing the Confederate States . . .” In short, England was content to sell weapons to both sides and cynically watch them kill one another.

Family Ties

The idea that Europeans would hesitate to help the CSA over the slavery issue was ridiculous according to Chevalier: “The northern idea of abolition of slavery, by making the negro food for powder [to be used as cannon fodder] or by exiling him from his home (exporting him) to die of hunger is now thoroughly understood in Europe. Our notions of philanthropy and our moral sense alike revolt from these ferocious exaggerations of the love of liberty. Honest and intelligent men are no longer to be duped by these coarse devices, and Mr. Lincoln's abolition cry finds no echo.”

Casting the humanitarian pretensions of anti-slavery fanatics into the cocked-hat from whence they came, the European coalition moved forward with their plan. They prevailed on the beautiful Sophia, Princess of Bavaria, who was influential at the Austrian court. Empress Eugenie may have initiated the proposal that Sophia's son should rule as the Emperor of Mexico with the help of France.

Princess Sophia of Bavaria

After a period of consideration, the stake holders came to an agreement and the son of Princess Sophia, Maximilian, the younger brother of Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria, would be offered the throne of Mexico. In 1863, Maximilian and his young wife Carlota, and daughter of King Leopold of Belgium, a Protestant, agreed to go to Mexico and govern. Maximilian was from a new generation of monarchs who were forward thinking and interested in reform. This upstart group of royalty believed in the concept of democratic legitimacy, and he only agreed to rule in Mexico after a vote had been taken to confirm him. Somewhat like President John Kennedy and his wife Jacqueline, the couple were young, beautiful, idealistic, and full of life. They tried their best to perform their roles to reform Mexico, but Maximilian's story would be all too similar to that of JFK’s.

Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria

The plan was now in motion. Monsieur Chevalier speaking in the New York Times, June 30, 1863, sized up the situation in Mexico this way, “Mexico is to be permanently occupied . . . a civil service in every department is to be immediately organized in that country . . . I am persuaded, from various indications, that a permanent occupation is, and was from the first, intended.”

The next phase was establishing Maximilian and then French and Austrian military bases. The Europeans had no respect for the brutal Lincoln administration or the New England power structure that had installed him in office. Chevalier writes (p. 12): “Today the Americans of the north are completely foreign to the family of nations . . . They understand nothing but the narrowest and most mechanical mercantilism . . . and they long to annihilate the Confederate states in order that the South, by its intelligence, its enterprise, and the talents of its statesmen, may not throw down the ramparts they (the north) have built up against Europe . . ” To my knowledge no one in Europe disputed Chevalier's characterization of the Yankees.

The military and diplomatic plans were also being negotiated through envoys and other representatives of the Jefferson Davis administration in Richmond, Virginia. There was fierce activity by the Confederate State Department to quickly put together a stronger military agreement. France would build warships and provide materiel, but troops were out of the question until supply lines could be strengthened, land bases established, and a diplomatic cover rendered that would satisfy a nervous European public.

Carlota & Maximillian of Mexico

Chevalier continues on page 16: “Recognized by France, the strength of those states (the South) is quintupled at once . . . For other states (countries) are waiting to follow the example of France . . . [other] powers, hitherto kept aloof by the phantom of slavery, will follow France . . . ” Once France justified diplomatic and military ties, then the die would be irrevocably cast. The move would be enough to sway public opinion across Christendom against the common enemy, Abraham Lincoln, and the clique that controlled Washington. The most likely candidates to join the coalition with France would be Austria, Bavaria, and Brazil for starters. Outside Bismarck and the Prussians and the friendless goat of the Crimean War, Czar Alexander II of Russia, Lincoln's northern alliance had few friends.

These facts were well known to the Europeans who calculated that with the leadership of Napoleon III and his military, allied with the ground forces of the CSA, short work could be made of Lincoln. At the end of Chevalier's comments, he raised a military specter: “The navy of France is an argument which, in case of necessity, would support diplomatic action.” Here the meaning is obvious. Under the correct diplomatic cover, the French fleet would come in and smash the Yankee blockade and restore international trade and order. This would be the end of Lincoln's northern alliance.

Falling Curtain

President Jeffereson Davis

Although France and her associates spent blood and treasure on this project, the curtain was going down before the plan could come to fruition. The war spun out of control for the CSA, and defeat brought an end to its hope. Urgency was likely the source of the severe brutality by Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan toward the end of the war, when these generals used human resources like dried pine needles on a fire to defeat the South. Union soldiers recklessly charged at the dwindling Confederate forces, who slaughtered them by the thousands. But in the end, Northern numbers ruthlessly overcame Southern valor. Lincoln knew that Europe was about to enter our war, so his tactics, as implemented by General U.S. Grant, devolved into savagery. The clock had run out for the South.

Despised by many in Europe, Lincoln's government gained no new foreign alliances during the war, keeping only those already established by previous administrations. In addition, it had no assurances of military aid from abroad in case the United States had a future war with a European power. Yet the oldest families of Europe who had defended Western Civilization and Christendom for over 1000 years had extended a hand to save the Confederate States.

Had the South withstood the attacking Northerners and secured secession, it could have introduced new agricultural and labor techniques. Then with the help of France and the guidance of countries that had already terminated bondage; slavery would have peacefully ended. The South and the area along the Gulf of Mexico would have developed in a much different way.

Within a year of the end of the WBTS, Bismarck's Prussia would attack Bavaria and Austria, igniting the Austro-Prussian War. The United States would renew its support for Juarez, and soon the French were forced to pull out of Mexico in anticipation of a war with Prussia, which erupted in 1870. The idealistic Maximilian, instead of fleeing or abdicating, loyally remained with his adopted people and was defeated and brutally executed by Juarez: a sacrifice at the altar of liberalism that has plunged Mexico into turmoil up to the present time.

After the war, Pope Pius IX would continue to comfort the deposed President Davis and his family, supporting him even through his personal trials and imprisonment. The French people who helped give birth to the United States tried to save the old republic and recoiled at the attempt by the North to use the humanitarian pretensions of abolitionism to cover naked aggression and genocide.

The perennial wisdom of Christendom was delivered a grave but not a fatal blow. After the War it would be subducted, sliding beneath the veneer of modern culture , only to rise again and again.

Napoleon, the Pope, and the CSA

2011-09-27T12:19:00.007-05:00

Part I

Charles Edward Stewart

Europe continues to shape attitudes here in the United States. European philosophy underpins American culture despite attempts to shift the emphasis to other regions. In 1860 the influence of Europe on events in the USA was even more profound than today. Trade is always referred to as the most important issue in America’s trans-Atlantic relationship. However, in my opinion it is political ideas, culture and philosophy that are paramount.

Some say that the birth of the United States is the realization of Christendom in government fulfilling the work of James IV & I. Infused with the high Medieval ideals of decentralization stemming from the study of the Trinity; the Articles of Confederation and then the Constitution attempted to reconcile theories that issued from the pre-Hanoverian English monarchy with the realities of the New World. The legacy of the Stewart Kings was still strong and Christian agrarianism would be given another chance to thrive.

Had James II & VII not been illegally driven from office and the Stewart lineage continued to reign perhaps the American Revolution might not have happened. But with the advent of Continental politics in the form of William III (of Orange 1650-1702) and the conniving of a Parliament consumed with envy and regicide the abuse of the Colonies in the 18th century was destined and the American Revolution inevitable.

When in 1745 Charles Edward Stewart (Bonnie Prince Charles, 1720-1788), grandson of James II, landed in Scotland as Prince Regent of England, Scotland, Ireland, and North America he raised an army to free England from the grip of the Hanoverian pretenders and their incestuous brethrens in Parliament. Bathed in glory he and his followers bravely fought against all odds but in the end were defeated. The Jacobite cause and the pluralism and decentralization for which it stood left the British Isles and the fight continued elsewhere.

It has been suggested that the Bonnie Prince could have been the King of America. Certainly there was enough Jacobite sympathy in the Colonies to make it a possibility. Without doubt the lessons from the Stewart monarchs; the scholarship of James I, the murder of Charles I at the hands of Parliament, the unconscionable treatment of James II, and the brave dedication of Charles Edward was on every thinking person’s mind.

These events which occurred in the recent past for the Colonists were the artifacts of European politics that shaped the writing of the Declaration of Independence as much as anything else. The Colonists knew that there were centralizing forces at work in the halls of Europe. The power mad moral relativists in Parliament, their financiers, and the lugubrious Hanoverian monarchs were dangerous and antithetical to political freedom. This reality was not lost on the American Patriots.

As the citizens of the new United States set about to establish a model of high Middle-Ages decentralization that was designed to stifle the development of a strong central government; many Europeans were busy going the other direction. Through revolts, wars, revolutions, blood, and terrorism one nation after another would follow Britannia into the inferno of consolidation and centralization.

In a series of revolts, revolutions, wars, and other bloody carnage France was squeezed into a nation that looked something like it does today. For decades wars spread destruction across Europe and as France pushed its borders from the Atlantic to Moscow only to see it contract in a succession of gory spasms.

Under the banner of nationalism, fraternity, egality, socialism, progress, and atheism the French experience was copied and pasted onto the Italian peninsula, Greece, and the Germanic states. The 1800’s were packed with conflict as one would-be dictator, chancellor, or proletarian hero attempted to seize as much power as possible with the tools of the bourgeoning modern age.

The common ground for this activity was the creation of a strong central government. Mechanization and transportation followed the new religion of modern materialism leading otherwise sane people to dream of bigger and grander conquests.

The USA was not immune to these impulses. Perhaps the territorial designs and war with Mexico (1846-48) was a harbinger of things to come. Yet that seemed more like a classic land-grab than a centralizing power-grab.

But there was restlessness in the Northern states. The growing Northeastern materialist establishment began to cast their eyes on the government in Washington. The antiquated relic of Jacobite idealism would not bend to their wishes and impress the will of the few upon the whole country. Supported in the South the power balance and decentralized structure of the Constitution promised integrity for the individual while it bridled government control. The North chaffed under the Constitution. This out of kilter situation was doomed.

Benjamin Disraeli

With a close eye on Europe, adoration for the French Revolution, and the acceptance of Karl Marx into the pantheon of intellectuals the establishment in the North was aware which way the wind was blowing. In the 1800’s the heroes of modern Europe were centralizers, colonizers, and empire builders; led by strongmen like Benjamin Disraeli, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Bismarck. These trends were known to the Yankee powerbrokers who did not want to be left behind.

The only thing that stood in their way was the South. From the swamps of Florida to the Ozarks of Missouri the vast geography harbored “archaic” notions of governance. In the same way that Prussia coveted Bavaria and Austria the Yankees craved the South and its wealth. They need only to provoke the Southern people enough, war would break out, and conquest would belong to the North. No one in the world would come to the aid of the quaint rustics in the South and within days or weeks a new central government would reign from Washington.

This was the thinking in 1860. The North would outsmart the planet, blame the coming war on slavery, smash the South, and get away with murder. The Europeans would sit on the sidelines not smart enough to see past the pretext casus belli: slavery. Or would they?

End of Part I

Portrait traditionally depicting Prince Charles Edward by Maurice de la Tour (1704-1788)

Read Part II here

Divine Rights

2011-06-23T11:18:00.008-05:00

King James IV & I

June 2011 is the 445th birthday of the Stuart King James I

I became interested in King James IV & I (1566-1625) of Scotland and England (often called simply James I) on the subject of what is termed “The Divine Right of Kings”. The Royal Family of Stuarts including Charles I, Charles II, and James II whom James I was a progenitor have been characterized at times through the lens of the “Divine Right” doctrine. It seemed to have been a big mistake for which the Stuarts would all pay a price. Being consigned to the dustbin of history would be their fate for the crime of employing Biblical principles in the craft of governance.

James I wrote two books on the subject of Divine Right. One is The True Law of Free Monarchies and a second work Basilikon Doran about the state-craft of Divine Right governing. Spending some time in a library reading old history books and periodical articles about the subject of James I a speech he gave to Parliament in 1610 seemed to sum up the material in his books. For the purposes of this short essay I concentrated on the text of that speech.

Then I looked up some of the commentary that has been written about King James’ writing. I thought I had fallen into a familiar “black hole” of sorts. All manner, shapes, and sizes of the professional Left, neo-Marxists, and liberals have at one time or another taken a swipe at discrediting this doctrine.

The “Divine Right Doctrine” is held up as the ultimate in arrogance and coercion. It’s implementation is seen by some as the foundation for the beheading of Charles I, the Revolution of 1688, colonialism, the oppression of women, and various and sundry other ills of Western Civilization.

It is evidence of an uncompromising theocratic anachronism that must be banished from civilized discourse. From early “feminists” like Mary Wollstonecraft, Divine Right was twisted into a political diatribe against men. Marxists see it as “romantic reactionary” foolishness. Even after some 400 years this political philosophy continues to be a whipping boy.

In fact for a moment I thought I was researching the American Civil War as it has been pulled, plowed, mixed, sautéed, shredded, sliced, and diced by a similar cast of characters. Rewriting history is a favorite pastime of the Left.

My curiosity in these areas is spurred on as much by examining the nature and source of the revisions as the original study. So the issue of the Divine Right theory became even more interesting to me. Smelling the foul odor of agenda driven history rewriting I pushed forward. Destroying the reputation of King James the father of the Bible translation bearing his name seemed a neat fit for Leftist bent on trashing the Judeo-Christian tradition.

King James II & VII

If that were the goal then a nice play could be made. Killing several birds with one stone Cromwellians, Roundheads, and later Marxist and other atheist in the United Kingdom could dismiss James I and the Bible as reckless theocratic relics. As a bonus the universal enemies of Christendom could smear the entire Jacobite lineage of James II & VII (1633-1701) who would unflinchingly carry the Cross through history into the battle against materialism.

1610, The Speech to Parliament

There exists, I am sure more than one historic versions of the speech. Due to transcription, copying, and other clerical factors these things can be expected. But it did not take me too long to understand that generations of detractors have added, subtracted, and taken liberties with versions, quotes, and paraphrases regarding this speech.

I know that the Divine Right doctrine is not necessarily an article of faith with contemporary Jacobites. Nor is it resident to the 17th century England and Scotland. However the fact that James I wrote the books and delivered the speech has makes him a lightning rod for the critics of the doctrine and has served as fodder to sully the Jacobite cause.

Looking about on the Internet I found a reasonably reliable copy of the speech which is posted below. In between are a few comments I have formulated about the speech, trying, as best I can, to avoid the twin poisons of materialism and modernism so prevalent in our thinking these days. My intention is not to offer a line by line deconstruction but rather a brief abstract of opinion filtered through my studies of the perennial wisdom and all along trying to make it relevant today.

Recall that James I did not really have standing armies. Nor did he have a treasury, staff or bureaucracy that we would recognize today. He had to rely on tradition, persuasion, and the force of his arguments to reign as King.

This is a masterwork of the High Medieval thinking that informs it. It is poetic, tightly constructed, and lawyerly all in the same moment. I have read it over numerous times and find more to it with each reading.

I believe the first 10 words gives this work away. King James puts away an inconvenient reality first before the audience has developed a focus. As this was a speech it would be remembered for the body of the speech more than the introduction.

“The State of MONARACHIE is the supremest thing upon earth…” In my opinion James admits that there is an institution of “MONARCHIE” (monarchy) that is separate from the person of the monarch. This is the first fact in the speech. Regardless, his previous sentiments on the matter in this context he has quickly bifurcated his argument. It is the highest thing but still bound to the “earth”. This sets up two distinct realms of being.

In medieval terms this may be the “mansion” upon the plane of earth that the king might dwell in. It is the institution or office of the king but not the King himself. Here James did not say he created it nor did he say he installed himself in the mansion yet he does admit he has limits; grudgingly limiting his authority while making a difficult but honest assessment.

This is the reality. He has received the burden of governing from God. James is not the God of Creation nor is he the architect of the institution. He is a servant of it and must rule from the tenuous position of an ideal. From that point forward he is making a political case to his subjects, using (at times) bluster and puff that he is King and they should be grateful for that.

It is a deft but hard hitting reminder to his audience that the system of monarchy is scriptural, it is domestic, and it is organic. He will tell them that this is a civilized and productive system. It is a system of Law and precedent.

He is also informing his subjects that more than anything else he, the King, is accountable to God for his actions. Literally, as President Harry Truman so famously said, “The buck stops here.” James states, “…God saith to Kings, Vos Dij estis (you are gods), he immediately thereafter concludes, But ye shall die like men.” And how that death might occur is not elucidated but implied in the text. Then the King goes on to explain that, “…the wind beats sorest upon the highest mountains.” This is a revealing admonition, in my opinion. Saying, it is I not you (the Parliament) that must ultimately take the heat.

James concludes with an eloquent and succinct reiteration of his position. First he conflates the definitions of God and god on earth, “…That as to dispute what God may do is Blasphemie…it is sedition to dispute what the King may do in the height of his power.” Then he goes on to shade the meaning back the other way promising continuity with the Law presumably the Law of God as guided by the King’s hand, “…but I shall ever be willing to make the reason appear of all my doings, and rule my actions according to my Laws.”

He may be applying a political sliding scale of Divine relevance to his position and policies. He is after all a political creature as well as King. He must persuade, coerce, and bluff all at the same time. But that cannot be considered a criticism in the world of politics. This is the way public policy gets done. He is showing that he knows how to be a leader not just a ruler.

The criticisms of governing policy mentioned earlier are evolved from a gross, conscious, and purposeful misreading of the King’s words. Those who have an axe to grind with the monarchy or Scripture have twisted a reasoned and pragmatic lecture about principle into a harsh arrogant authoritarian rant. This masterpiece of political philosophy has been reshaped into a weapon of mass destruction against Christendom, tradition, and principle.

The Text of the Speech

James VI & I on the Divine Right of Kings

A SPEACH TO THE LORDS AND COMMONS OF THE PARLIAMENT AT WHITE-HALL, ON WEDNESDAY THE XXI. OF MARCH. ANNO 1609 [1610 new style].

The State of MONARCHIE is the supremest thing vpon earth: For Kings are not onely GODS Lieutenants vpon earth, and sit vpon GODS throne, but euen by GOD himselfe they are called Gods. There bee three principall similitudes that illustrate the state of MONARCHIE: One taken out of the word of GOD; and the two other out of the grounds of Policie and Philosophie. In the Scriptures Kings are called Gods, and so their power after a certaine relation compared to the Diuine power. Kings are also compared to Fathers of families: for a King is trewly Parens patriæ, the politique father of his people. And lastly, Kings are compared to the head of this Microcosme of the body of man.

Kings are iustly called Gods, for that they exercise a manner or resemblance of Diuine power vpon earth: For if you wil consider the Attributes to God, you shall see how they agree in the person of a King. God hath power to create, or destroy, make, or vnmake at his pleasure, to giue life, or send death, to iudge all, and to bee iudged nor accomptable to none: To raise low things, and to make high things low at his pleasure, and to God are both soule and body due. And the like power haue Kings: they make and vnmake their subiects: they haue power of raising, and casting downe: of life, and of death: Iudges ouer all their subiects, and in all causes, and yet accomptable to none but God onely. They haue power to exalt low things, and abase high things, and make of their subiects like men at the Chesse; A pawne to take a Bishop or a Knight, and to cry vp, or downe any of their subiects, as they do their money. And to the King is due both the affection of the soule, and the seruice of the body of his subiects: And therefore that reuerend Bishop here amongst you, though I heare that by diuers he was mistaken or not wel vnderstood, yet did he preach both learnedly and trewly annent this point concerning the power of a King: For what he spake of a Kings power in Abstracto, is most trew in Diuinitie: For to Emperors, or Kings that are Monarches, their Subiects bodies & goods are due for their defence and maintenance. But if I had bene in his place, I would only haue added two words, which would haue cleared all: For after I had told as a Diuine, what was due by the Subiects to their Kings in generall, I would then haue concluded as an Englishman, shewing this people, That as in generall all Subiects were bound to relieue their King; So to exhort them, that as wee liued in a setled state of a Kingdome which was gouerned by his owne fundamentall Lawes and Orders, that according thereunto, they were now (being assembled for this purpose in Parliament) to consider how to helpe such a King as now they had; And that according to the ancient forme, and order established in this Kingdome: putting so, a difference betweene the generall power of a King in Diuinity, and the setled and established State of this Crowne, and Kingdome. And I am sure that the Bishop meant to haue done the same, if hee had not bene straited by time, which in respect of the greatnesse of the presence preaching before me, and such an Auditory, he durst not presume vpon.

As for the Father of a familie, they had of olde vnder the Law of Nature Patriam potestatem [fatherly power], which was Potestatem vitæ & necis [the power of life and death], ouer their children or familie, (I meane such Fathers of families as were the lineall heires of those families whereof Kings did originally come:) For Kings had their first originall from them, who planted and spread themselues in Colonies through the world. Now a Father may dispose of his Inheritance to his children, at his pleasure: yea, euen disinherite the eldest vpon iust occasions, and preferre the youngest, according to his liking; make them beggers, or rich at his pleasure; restraine, or banish out of his presence, as hee findes them giue cause of offence, or restore them in fauour againe with the penitent sinner: So may the King deale with his Subiects.

And lastly, as for the head of the naturall body, the head hath the power of directing all the members of the body to that vse which the iudgement in the head thinkes most conuenient. It may apply sharpe cures, or cut off corrupt members, let blood in what proportion it thinkes fit, and as the body may spare, but yet is all this power ordeined by God Ad ædificationem, non ad destructionem [to edification not to destruction]. For although God haue power aswell of destruction, as of creation or maintenance; yet will it not agree with the wisedome of God, to exercise his power in the destruction of nature, and ouerturning the whole frame of things, since his creatures were made, that his glory might thereby be the better expressed: So were hee a foolish father that would disinherite or destroy his children without a cause, or leaue off the carefull education of them; And it were an idle head that would in place of phisicke so poyson or phlebotomize the body as might breede a dangerous distemper or destruction thereof.

But now in these our times we are to distinguish betweene the state of Kings in their first originall, and betweene the state of setled Kings and Monarches, that doe at this time gouerne in ciuill Kingdomes: For euen as God, during the time of the olde Testament, spake by Oracles, and wrought by Miracles; yet how soone it pleased him to setle a Church which was bought, and redeemed by the blood of his onely Sonne Christ, then was there a cessation of both; Hee euer after gouerning his people and Church within the limits of his reueiled will. So in the first originall of Kings, whereof some had their beginning by Conquest, and some by election of the people, their wills at that time serued for Law; Yet how soone Kingdomes began to be setled in ciuilitie and policie, then did Kings set downe their minds by Lawes, which are properly made by the King onely; but at the rogation of the people, the Kings grant being obteined thereunto. And so the King became to be Lex loquens [speaking law], after a sort, binding himselfe by a double oath to the obseruation of the fundamentall Lawes of his kingdome: Tacitly, as by being a King, and so bound to protect aswell the people, as the Lawes of his Kingdome; And Expresly, by his oath at his Coronation: So as euery iust King in a setled Kingdome is bound to obserue that paction made to his people by his Lawes, in framing his gouernment agreeable thereunto, according to that paction which God made with Noe [i.e. Noah] after the deluge, Hereafter Seed-time, and Haruest, Cold and Heate, Summer and Winter, and Day and Night shall not cease, so long as the earth remaines. And therefore a King gouerning in a setled Kingdome, leaues to be a King, and degenerates into a Tyrant, assoone as he leaues off to rule according to his Lawes. In which case the Kings conscience may speake vnto him, as the poore widow said to Philip of Macedon; Either gouerne according to your Law, Aut ne Rex sis. And though no Christian man ought to allow any rebellion of people against their Prince, yet doeth God neuer leaue Kings vnpunished when they transgresse these limits: For in that same Psalme where God saith to Kings, Vos Dij estis [you are gods], hee immediatly thereafter concludes, But ye shall die like men. The higher wee are placed, the greater shall our fall be. Vt casus sic dolor : the taller the trees be, the more in danger of the winde; and the tempest beats sorest vpon the highest mountaines. Therefore all Kings that are not tyrants, or periured, will be glad to bound themselues within the limits of their Lawes; and they that perswade them the contrary, are vipers, and pests, both against them and the Commonwealth. For it is a great difference betweene a Kings gouernment in a setled State, and what Kings in their originall power might doe in Indiuiduo vago [an undefined individual]. As for my part, I thanke God, I haue euer giuen good proofe, that I neuer had intention to the contrary: And I am sure to goe to my graue with that reputation and comfort, that neuer King was in all his time more carefull to haue his Lawes duely obserued, and himselfe to gouerne thereafter, then I.

I conclude then this point touching the power of Kings, with this Axiome of Diuinitie, That as to dispute what God may doe, is Blasphemie; but quid vult Deus [what God wants], that Diuines may lawfully, and doe ordinarily dispute and discusse; for to dispute A Posse ad Esse [from "may be" to "is"]is both against Logicke and Diuinitie: So is it sedition in Subiects, to dispute what a King may do in the height of his power: But iust Kings wil euer be willing to declare what they wil do, if they wil not incurre the curse of God. I wil not be content that my power be disputed vpon: but I shall euer be willing to make the reason appeare of all my doings, and rule my actions according to my Lawes.

The Art Business

2011-03-10T15:43:00.002-06:00

Rough Weather for Art Festivals

I was watching an art auction show on cable and one important point the host made was that, “…the fine art business is at its perigee”. The thought that we are in an extreme end of a cycle had not occurred to me. Although it is difficult to generalize about any country as big as the USA, as I have considered this point it seems clear to me that it is substantially true.

Recently we have worked a number of first rate art festivals with artists from all over the country. The design quality and craftsmanship was typically above average. The level of purchasing was moderate, enthusiasm was low; “no buzz” was a frequently heard comment among the artists as we discussed the ongoing business situation.

My wife and I have been making a living in the art business for over thirty years. Sometimes up and sometimes down we have been able to hold our own and prosper a bit through several recessions and economic downturns.

In times when business was slow it might require working more shows or selling more wholesale, turning out more pieces for sale to cover the slack but the shortfall could be made up by a little extra hard work. Noting that the business of art is always very labor and time intensive the increased demand on the artist might be difficult but it was possible to work through a slow business time.

There is not a large population of full time working artists. There are no health care perks, no cushy pension plan, no company car, no paid holidays. Days are filled with bookkeeping, scheduling, housework, ordering materials, designing, studio work, travel, and selling at art shows; time off is scarce.

Yet without the mention of “art” the story for the working artist is little different from any cottage industry, mom & pop shop, or micro-business. All these forms of commerce require extreme dedication and fierce independence. This is not the life for those who require a secure livelihood.

The model inherent to this form of business may seem untenable or even foolish to some but for centuries this was the foundation for the culture of commerce. At the bedrock of society were small free-holders slugging it out for a piece of the economy and a modest lifestyle.

More and more cottage industry is being replaced by franchising on the one hand and imports on the other. Many contemporary small businesses are in fact just appendages of massive corporations who sell small outlets to individuals as franchises.

Yet that is not so insidious as how our society has come to accept the migration of cottage industry to foreign countries. If we view artistic output as a function of the cheapest labor available to produce goods then the American artist will go the way of other sectors of the economy; slowly vanishing to points abroad.

With the advent of e-mail picture files an importer need only attend a few art festivals; take pictures of the best ceramics, graphics, textile, or metalwork. Then he can send it to the appropriate location in China or other poor countries and have the “copies” knocked off by skillful peasants or small factories at a fraction of the cost in the USA. This completely bypasses the need for a design department and cuts labor to a minimum.

I have been in major department stores, big-box retailers, and boutiques only to see copies or near copies of merchandise sold by American artist on display for sale: cheap. Fabric designs and other graphics ripped off and even oil, acrylic, and watercolor paintings mass produced in factories and sold inexpensively.

This is only one aspect of the current perigee in the art business. Of course the larger economic picture plays a role in the situation. During the big growth years of the Bush administration the arts prospered despite the fact the globalist trade policies were being seeded by everyone from the Business Roundtable to labor unions. These policies would open the flood gates of foreign hand-goods that now slam the art business.

The present administration in the White House is little better. Concerned with big picture, macro-economic, massive program approaches to even the smallest problem the working artist is lost in the shuffle. Caught in a hurricane of policies and an emphasis on ideology the central government now seems destined to change society without much perspective on what it might look like in the end.

Meantime, the artist must attempt to please the customer with creative and interesting work in an ever more hostile business environment. An attitude of anxiety is replacing enthusiasm in the buying public. It forms a barrier between the artist and their customers. Some of this is a result of economics but I think it is also driven by apprehension about the future.

Artists new to the business end of the field have not ever seen any other world and think that this is the way it has always been. I applaud those who choose to fight this slump out and try to make it despite the climate.

My personal hope is that the cable TV salesman was right. This is the perigee of a cycle; that the art business will ultimately swing back upwards.

But I am reminded that a booming art market in turn of the twentieth century “Silver Age” Russia was crushed for 70 years by revolution and government policy. The art market in other countries has seen similar blackouts.

Here in the USA despite its problems the arts have thrived on a lively free enterprise economy. If that is somehow throttled by globalist machinations or ideological pretensions then we who form the core of the working artist culture as well as those who want to enter this arena will be in for and extended period in this perigee cycle.

For more about Art on Perennis: Click Here

Yankee Twist

2011-02-04T10:29:00.002-06:00

Donald Gilmore

Historian Donald Gilmore reviews Mark Geiger's Civil War book.

Mark Geiger's new book, Financial Fraud and Guerrilla Violence in Missouri's Civil War, 1861-1865, Yale University Press, 2010, is the typical Northern-oriented history of the Civil War, with all the usual trappings, like anachronistic references to "Bushwhackers," i.e., guerrillas, and "Border Ruffians," i.e., Missouri elites, loaded words steeped in more-than-century-old propaganda--telltale inclusions that show the writer's bias.

But Geiger's book is original in many respects and opens up a new and different chapter in the history of the Border War. Unfortunately, from the beginning, with his title mentioning "financial fraud" and "guerrilla violence," you know where he's headed. There is no inference in the title that the "fraud" might be one precipitated on the Missourians by their powerful, ruthless Northern foes or that “fraud” has a different meaning for a state at war than it does for one at peace or that the "guerrilla violence" was fomented by vicious attacks across the border into Missouri by Kansas guerrillas, James Montgomery and Charles Jennison, as early as 1858 and was continued till 1862 by the same men under the command of Jayhawker General James Lane. Geiger’s title is meant to signal to conventional historians whose side he is on, thus avoiding any possibility of alienating his leftist brethren in academia.

What Geiger inadvertently (perhaps unknowingly) describes in his book is an economic "total war" that coincided with the total war military operations of the Union Army when it invaded Missouri in 1861 and overthrew its elected government, driving it out of the state into Arkansas and Texas. "Total War" describes an army’s attempt to kill its enemies and destroy their resources totally: money, homes, farms, banks, economy—everything. That's why western Missouri was called the "burnt district" after the Civil War. The Yankees succeeded in this military-financial holocaust.

In 1861, the Union Army invaded Missouri, and Gov. Claiborne Jackson was forced to rapidly mobilize Missouri's banks to support the Missouri State Guard in its defense of the state. Attacked by a large Federal army commanded by Gen. Nathaniel Lyon, the Missourians, with their backs to the wall, had to act quickly. Through a network of bankers, planters, and their wealthy extended families, Jackson began a frantic and desperate attempt to centralize the money in the Missouri banks before the Yankees confiscated their holdings. Opposing Jackson were Lincoln, Union General Lyon; Frank Blair, Jr., a close friend of Lincoln's; and General John Frémont, one of the main architects of total war in Missouri. The Union Army eventually overwhelmed Jackson, but he fought back defiantly and tenaciously with the Missouri State Guard.

Frémont, Lyon, and the U.S. Army in Missouri systematically seized all the money in the Missouri banks, divesting pro-Southerners of much of their financial resources. After Lyon’s death at the Battle of Wilson’s Creek in 1861, the Union Army, in military operations in Western Missouri under James Lane, seized many of the planters’ monies, homes, farms, businesses--even their clothes--all the means they had to sustain themselves. When Frémont “freed” Missouri’s valuable slave assets illegally in 1861; Lincoln forced him to rescind the order, fearing they had gone too far threatening a general uprising. By this time, Lyon and Frémont had seized control of most of the monies in the St. Louis, Chillicothe, Osceola, and St. Genevieve banks, and made an aborted attempt on the Lexington bank, but were thwarted by Gen. Sterling Price.

Gov. Jackson, now desperate for money to help him fend off the invading Union Army, had the remaining Missouri banks send him their monies and create promissory notes and bonds to cover the loans, signed by most of the leading pro-Southern planters residing in the Little Dixie area along the Missouri River and elsewhere. This enabled Jackson, without adequate financial support from the Confederacy, to finance his defense of Missouri against the Yankee onslaughts. Obviously, extreme situations demand drastic measures. Meanwhile, systematically and with armed force, the Union Army seized the remaining Pro-Southern banks and the monies in them, especially focusing on the gold and silver. The army also removed virtually all Pro-Southern bankers and their officers from their positions at these banks, replacing them with their own people, who hereafter called all the shots, and they weren’t to be Southern ones. The judges, courts, even Missouri’s Supreme Court were “Unionized” also. So they had the pro-Southern Missourians where they wanted them.

Now it was time for the Yankees to exact total revenge on Southern partisans, bringing them to their knees by calling in their promissory notes for prompt payments. If the payments were not made, as they certainly could not be in most cases, the Army’s bank agents could seize the planter’s collateral (a word Geiger seldom uses), i.e., their farms (plantations), which the Federal lawyers, bankers, and judges did, forcing 500,000 acres of the best, fertile land in Missouri to go on the auction block, bankrupting the elite planters--“Border Ruffians” in Geiger’s parlance--class of Missourians. It was a catastrophic, economic "Total War" that ruined this class forever. As Geiger admits, most of these men and their families left Missouri, had to after the war, going West and even to South America, Central America, and Mexico to live in colonies of ex-Southerners.

So Geiger's work is just one more Yankee history with that old, predictable Yankee twist. More like reassuring “comic book” history these books never see historic events from the Southerners' desperate side. The authors always start from the premise that the Southerners are scoundrels and frauds and their actions despicable and immoral. Geiger, moreover, pictures the guerrillas, the sons of the Southern planters and bankers, as devious, violent "Bushwhackers," the latter word loaded with negative affective connotations that present these valiant fighters in an unfavorable light. That's why Geiger's cover photo reveals guerrillas (no bushes in sight, no brave defenders either!) murdering Kansans at Lawrence. Geiger never refers to the mountain of reasons the Missourians had for their vengeful sacking of the town; in fact, the image of the sacking of that town was irrelevant to his study.

In Geiger's book, Gov. Jackson and his colleagues are frauds; the guerrillas are murderers--the usual, slanted, unfair, and incomplete Yankee interpretation. It's a shame Geiger couldn't have broadened his perspective in his generally excellent book to take in the plight of Missourians during the Civil War and examine the economic and military situation from both a Yankee and Southern viewpoint. Geiger admits, “legality is a matter of perspective in a time of Civil War.” Regrettably, he fails to follow up on this insight. Instead, Geiger’s analysis and explanation of Lincoln’s and the Union Army’s Total War on Missouri’s beleaguered banks and planters is simplistic.

Mr. Gilmore is a military historian, novelist, and lecturer.

Buy Donald Gilmore’s book: Civil War on the Missouri Kansas Border

Read a review of Donald Gilmore’s novel: Riding Vengeance with the James Gang

Gilmore essay about politics: Can the United States Sustain Itself

Christian Revolt

2010-12-21T21:39:00.003-06:00

Cristero War

Cristero Prepare for Battle

1 January 2011 is the 84th anniversary for the beginning of the Cristero War. Today this war is either a dim memory or unknown to most Americans but it is a crucial development in the history of our Mexican compatriots. Nearly 90,000 people were killed in this war that the dominant media does not want you to know about.

The Cristero War (sometimes known as the Cristiada in Mexico) lasted from 1926 to 1929, during which Christians fought against the policies of religious persecution enforced by the liberal Mexican government. These policies of religious persecution, stemmed from the anti-Christian 1917 Mexican Constitution. Confiscation of Church property, closing Christian schools, even preventing religious education in churches and requiring all religious activity be overseen by the government were features of the Constitution passed by Marxists who came to control the Mexican government. Citizen soldiers for Christ took the name “Cristeros”.

Beginnings
The roots of the conflict harkens back to familiar players in the American Civil War. The centralist policy of Benito Juarez (1806-1872) and other "progressive" schemes have earned Juarez the nickname “the Mexican Lincoln”. In similar fashion Juarez as Lincoln had advisiors swayed by the ideas of materialist philosopher Karl Marx (1818-1883) that were sweeping the elitist salons from London and Boston to Mexico City.

Juarez the famous Mexican President was himself a well known enemy of Christians. In 1861 he and his political party reneged on their foreign debt and precipitated a war with their European creditors. President Lincoln came to his aid sending money and arms using Union General Phil Sheridan as a military liaison officer of sorts to the Juarez government.

Juarez acknowledged Lincoln’s help and jailed the Confederate States envoy in Mexico. He also did his best to stop any aid from getting to Texas. Juarez and his government despised the Texans who he believed had “stolen” Mexican territory and who harbored numerous Christian groups that were perceived to be enemies by the liberals in Mexico.

North of the border as the War Between the States wound down Confederate soldiers commanded by Missouri General J. O. Shelby joined the fight against Juarez. His “Iron Bridge” was welcomed by the Mexican people who were trying to throw off the oppressive anti-Christian government of Benito Juarez. The Confederates fought the Juaristas continuing the battle against those who sought to centralize government and diminish the Judeo-Christian worldview.

Like Lincoln and his centralist allies; Juarez prevailed. In doing so he planted the seeds of the Cristero War nearly 60 years later which would try to fulfill the dream of “wiping religion from the landscape of Mexico”. The subsequent Constitution of 1917 was an effort to oppress Christianity out of existence.

After 1917, Mexico was led by anti-Catholic centralists, leftists, Marxists and other liberals who tried to evoke the anticlerical spirit of President Benito Juárez from the previous century. The liberal dictators were arrogant intellectual elites who considered Christians to be superstitious cowardly peasants easily crushed by sophisticated government forces, believing the campaign against them would resemble a “hunt” like killing game animals.

The War
Opposition to the anti-Christian policies began with the formations of various national organizations and then progressed to a decision by the bishops of Mexico to suspend all public worship and to begin a peaceful economic boycott of the government. However, the resistance which until this time had been non-violent became much stronger after the August 1926 siege of the Church of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Guadalajara which left many dead including the parish priest and his vicar. This would be followed by several armed uprisings throughout Mexico.

Cristero Flag

Supported by a liberal press the atheist President Plutarco Elías Calles (1877-1945) escalated a policy of overt government oppression; the smoldering Cristero War officially began on 1 January 1927 with the manifesto “A la Nación” (To the Nation). This document declared that the time of battle had begun and a rebellion exploded in the State of Jalisco. The Cristeros began capturing various towns and villages while shouting: ¡Viva Cristo Rey! ¡Viva la Virgen de Guadalupe! (“Long live Christ the King! Long live the Virgin of Guadalupe”). “Viva Cristo Rey” is still a cry of resistance in Mexico.

The war raged as one untrained citizen military unit after another fought valiantly against the well equipped Mexican Army. The Christian forces defeated the Army in numerous set battles and controlled vast regions of western Mexico.

Facing defeat in the field the liberal government began a brutal policy of terrorism against the civilian population to no avail. Christian women formed all female support units and it is estimated that 10,000 volunteered. By 1929 the Cristero forces numbered nearly 50,000 armed men.

Mexican Liberals Lynched Christians

The war finally burned itself out. Even though the Mexican government never surrendered their agenda of cultural genocide against Christians was defeated.

With the assistance of the United States, a peace agreement was established on 21 June 1929 that allowed worship to resume in Mexico, permitted religious education in the churches and allowed clergy to petition for legal reform. Also the Catholic Church regained its property rights.

At its end, almost 90,000 people were killed during the war. As of 2010, anti-religious provisions of the Mexican Constitution remain although they are no longer enforced. Marxism is still very strong in
Mexico and several of the so-called “liberal” political parties are fronts for revolutionary communism.

Shared Heritage
Today thousands of Mexicans participate in the “Cristero Cabalagata” a horseback pilgrimage to commemorate the war with the Marxist government in Mexico City. The event grows larger each year. At Cubilete Mountian in the State of Guanajuato men and women climb to the top assembling at the base of the huge Statue of Cristo Rey. This is a ceremony to honor their ancestors who fought and died in the name of Faith and as a symbolic act to remind the Mexican government that the people will not be oppressed.

Millions of Mexicans are conservative Christians. Some know of our shared history but like most Americans they have been kept in the dark by leftists who control the media and the schools. We need to seek out those who have the same opinions we do and pay homage to their heritage and their struggle.

Cristero War Photo Gallery:
(Click Here)

Modern Oppression

2010-12-07T19:40:00.008-06:00

Coptic Flag

Continued Oppression of Coptic Christians

While we prepare for another Christmas season many of us are preoccupied with the economy, the looming Obamacare disaster, and other political issues mixed in with thoughts about the wellbeing of our friends and family. Anxiety concerning the future is palpable in nearly every conversation I hear. Yet with the combination of anxious emotions running through society what we are experiencing is slight in comparison with what is happening to Egyptian Christians.

Often called Coptic Christians they are part of one of the most ancient Christian groups on earth; tracing their spiritual linage directly to the Apostle Mark. The Coptic Church rivaled Rome as an influential center of Christian thinking until their spiritual capital of Alexandria was overrun by Islamic forces in the 7th century under Muslim commander Amr ibn Al-Asi.

Since then relations between Christians and Islam have been spotty. Islamic rule is all encompassing and in recent times particularly oppressive. Located in the western Nile delta Alexandria was one of the jewels in the Mediterranean trade. A great seaport and export center Alexandria’s wealth nurtured scholars and artists as well as a thriving and respected Christian diaspora.

But that was then. Today Coptic Christians are being brutally attacked on a daily basis. They form one of the largest Christian minorities in the Middle East and with 10 to 15 million members in Egypt they are a force to be reckoned with although outnumbered by about 70 million Egyptian Muslims.

Recent reports paint a grim picture, “Egyptian state security forces opened fire on November 24, 2010 on Christian Copts, killing four, wounding 78, detaining hundreds and charging 170 with grievous charges – ‘enough to keep them behind bars for 10-15 years’ says Coptic political analyst Magdy Khalil”. The report goes on, “Working at the construction site of their new church in Talbiya, Omraniya, an area south of Cairo densely populated by poor Christians, the congregation was surprised at dawn by nearly 5000 security forces, opening fire on them with live ammunition, rubber bullets and tear gas.”

A resident clergyman defended the young people who were arrested saying,” Father Mina Zarif of Mar Mina Church, criticized the media for portraying the Coptic youths as if they were registered criminals, making Molotov cocktails. ‘I doubt if any of those peaceful people know what a Molotov cocktail looks like,’ he said, ’let alone make one’. He added that what happened is a crime but the real perpetrators were not the protesting Copts.”

According to another story by reporter Mary Abdelmassih, “Christians worldwide were shocked and enraged at the use of live ammunition by Egyptian state security forces against unarmed Coptic protesters, causing the death of three Coptic young men. A four-year old child suffocated from tear gas thrown inside the chapel. Various groups inside and outside of Egypt have condemned the use of excessive violence by security forces and the use of live ammunition against Coptic demonstrators.”

“Wagih Yacoub, a human rights activists, complained about the treatment of the wounded. ‘They were shackled to their hospital beds and then sent to detention camps.’ The same view is held by Magdy Khalil, who believes that the State dealings with the Egyptian Copts has evolved from discrimination to persecution to participation…directly or indirectly…in most of the crimes against them; to the stage of practicing 'State Terrorism' against a peaceful minority seeking to exercise their natural rights in prayer and worship (editor’s emphasis)."

The reports go on, “Witnesses describe how enraged the Copts became upon seeing Security forces bulldozing their equipment and wetting their cement sacks. ‘State security stole the church pews and the donation boxes’, said Father Mina Zarif.”

For more than ten years the Copts tried to obtain a license to build the Talbiya church. Unlike Muslim citizens, who only need a municipal license to build mosques, the Copts require a Presidential decree for a church, based on the 1856 Ottoman Hamayoni Decree, in addition to ten humiliating conditions laid down by the Ezaby Pasha Decree of 1934.

Does Obama Support Oppression?
If the reality of state sponsored persecution against Christians during the Christmas season is not sobering enough the reaction of the U S State Department and the Obama Administration is worse. President Obama issued no denunciation of the Egyptian government for the slaughter of innocent unarmed Christians. The matter like all similar issues with the Copts was referred to the U S Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF).

Although minority religious groups like the Copts have little legal standing in this country they rely on this marginally effective bureaucracy which is now in the clutches of leftist in the Administration. In an excellent article Lackadaisical About Liberty ,Washington Times writer Robert Schwarzwalder a former member of this Commission reveals the orientation of the Obama Administration.

Mr. Schwarzwalder writes, “…President Obama's recent announcement that he is appointing Suzan Johnson Cook to be chairman of USCIRF is so troubling. Although I'm sure she is a nice person, "Dr. Sujay," as she styles herself (she has a doctorate in ministry from the nation's most liberal Protestant theological institution, New York's Union Seminary), has no background - none - in religious liberty, diplomacy or foreign policy. She serves as a pastor and motivational speaker; I'm not sure how this latter skill will help her deal with the hard-hearted pols of Beijing or northern India.

The president also appointed William J. Shaw, immediate past president of the National Baptist Convention, USA and pastor of White Rock Baptist Church in Philadelphia, to USCIRF's board. Mr. Shaw has been involved in many fine charitable activities, but, like Ms. Cook, has no background in religious liberty. From their official biographies, it would seem that neither Mr. Johnson nor Ms. Shaw has ever been outside the borders of the United States.”

In short these appointments are modernists and moral relativists who favor nebulous multi-culturalism instead of real religions pluralism. They exist in a bubble created by a narcissistic State Department as a convenient policy tool.

The fact is that the Obama Administration’s proposed 2011 budget requires most US aid to go to NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations) officially recognized by the Egyptian government, and sets aside a $50 million “endowment” to be distributed out by the Egyptian President’s office.

“These two particular developments — requiring US to support only groups registered with the Egyptian government (aka Islamic groups) and establishing an ‘endowment’ — are unmistakable signs that the Obama administration does not consider political reform in Egypt a priority,” said Shadi Hamid, deputy director of the Brookings Institution’s Doha Center.

He continues, “The Egyptian government is doing everything it can to erase independent NGOs from the political map and the US seems to be legitimizing this move, sending the message that no matter how far you go in attacking civil society, we're not going to step up and do anything about it.”

The Egyptian central government like the US central government is interested in consolidation of power. In Egypt’s case this is done in the name of Islam while here it is done in the name of secular socialism. The effect is the same.

Many in the Christian South have a long cultural memory. They know that what was lost at Appomattox was more than the Cross of St. Andrew. Events in Egypt with the continuing oppression of Coptic Christians could be a view of the future for Americans. It is also a window to the past for those paying close attention.

Swamp Clown

2010-10-28T19:20:00.002-05:00

Swamp Clown, oil pastel on found wood, 9" x 4".

DS Reif--2009

Scanned Image

Cultural Reconstruction

2010-08-29T17:44:00.004-05:00

It often astonishes me that there is anything left of southern culture at all after 40 plus years of cultural reconstruction. Yet there is resilience across the American South that defies the media and is confounding to the elites.

Music is a well know bastion of southern culture regardless constant attempts to degrade and dilute it. Religion is also a strong part of sectional identity and its permutations are a regular target of leftist demagogues who would reconstruct it.

The visual arts are likewise a part of the cultural reconstruction picture but have never been given much attention outside the rarified world of galleries which actually specialize in “regional art”. Nonetheless, there are a few artists who consciously or not continue to realize a tradition.

Alabama painter Troy Crisswell is a well known fixture in art fairs across the South. Like his Yellowhammer counterpart, Brian McGuffy, who we discussed earlier, Crisswell trends towards a contemporary vision of symbolism.

As McGuffy is more overt in this interpretation of the visual space Crisswell has a lighter touch with his allegorical references. He generally dips into internal spaces with a keen eye for story telling while displaying a scholastic interest in technique.

The self-taught McGuffy has an exuberance fantasy life that is richly spelled out on his canvasses. Crisswell relies more on technique and long experience on the road working art fairs to bracket his subject matter into distinct categories while keeping the body of work in the that odd unlabelable space between surrealism, symbolism, and the hyper-real.

I see a direct connection with Crisswell’s work and that of the 20th century southern painter Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975). Partly by design and partly by fate Benton was an extremely controversial artist. He too inhabited a number of artistic provinces and was difficult to pigeonhole. Although quite good at it he rejected modernism in favor of his own form of what might be termed visual allegory. Like other symbolists his work can be interpreted on several levels but unlike the stuffy and cold Andrew Wyeth; Benton is warmer and more accessible.

In J. Richard Gruber’s book Thomas Hart Benton and the American South, we can see that Benton made a conscious decision to use the backdrop of southern culture and the story telling tradition of his region to inform his work. Born in Neosho, Missouri the place where the Missouri Legislature met in 1861 to pass its “Ordinance of Secession” and leave the Union, it is little wonder that Benton sought to exalt his home state and the South that had been so vilified.

I believe Benton knew that his work would infuriate the modernist “art world” but did it any way. His masculine southern style, Biblical references, and overt heterosexuality were in his day a signal to the art establishment that he was not an atheist; being an atheist was a prerequisite for success in the 20th century*. He was a rebel and his strong approach permeates much of the American art world but few art professionals will admit it. Even today in his home state the mere mention of Benton as a “southern artist” drives the professional left into a paroxysm of denial.

Crisswell is not Benton. Yet the gestalt of his work includes the Benton legacy. In one of Crisswell’s best pieces, “Falling Man” (not illustrated) the Benton storytelling, Biblical allusions, and sinewy stylizing come together. It is not the only place this is seen. The figures in his recent works echo Benton and Crisswell's compositions confound us with a sophisticated symbolist undercurrent.

In 2006 for the online journal The Fireeater I wrote about a budding “southern restoration” in the visual art that resists reconstruction. Support for the arts in the South is relatively strong. The meteoric ascent of abstractionist Michael Banks is evidence of this. It is support of the individual artist that will encourage more work to be done.

To be sure realism, landscape, portraiture, and related technical pursuits are important. But it is the critical support for the symbolist, the outsider, the surrealist, and the abstractionist that will propel the southern art culture into its own.

In the Fireeater I wrote, “Because we are dominated by a materialist culture of scientific secularism any art that emphasizes individualistic struggle, religion, redemption, or tradition will be officially suppressed. Without help only the acts of individual artists and the people who buy their work will preserve the embryo of restoration until such time when we have institutions strong enough to guard the fruits of this cause.” I stand by that statement.
D S Reif

All paintings by Troy Crisswell

*To learn more about the assault on Christian thinking in the mid-20th century through the conversion of Martin Lings to Islam (click here)

Singapore in the Southwest

2010-08-08T12:49:00.004-05:00

An Economic Singapore in our Southwest? Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas forming their own country and unleashing Christian Values, Constitutional principles and free enterprise as a force for good in the world. Writer Robert Painter thinks it might be a positive thing. Bob works as an energy efficiency expert but is a person that has toiled his entire life trying to understand how things operate and why human behavior seems not to have changed in all the years it has been on the earth. He works to make people think about things in a different ways. This is a very hopeful essay by a man who (with his wife) spends his free time rescuing dogs. DSR

Bob Painter and Sadie

I don't listen to Limbaugh on a regular basis, but sometimes he is on in the middle of the night when I wake up so I turn to a late rebroadcast of him. Recently a guy from St. Louis called in and said that this country is done! He wanted to move to another country and or a place where a state had seceded from the union. He said he would move to a state that seceded. (I would too). Limbaugh, give the usual vote Republican (conservative in his mind) speech but he didn't discount the guy as a kook, which he typically does.

I think there is a growing group who has watched this country decline with the globalist Bush family and their buddies; one of which is President Obama who is part of that group. I heard in 2008 that 14% of Americans were planning to leave the country. Later (2009), I heard that the number is up to 20%. Now I don't know the mechanics or exact findings of the poll, but I think this is an accurate statement.

I think this is a profound testimony to the unreported attitudes of the American people. I also surfed on to a news cast that was reporting this same topic and they said Americans were retiring to other countries based on their fears and dissatisfaction with the current situations in America. The fact that the controlled media would even report his means it is much larger and significant trend. If this attitude is true and people want a new country to live in then a state (or states) could create an economic boom with this sort of decision.

I have been watching the immigration of Californians to the rest of the country. I don't have a data source that is accurate but in just inquiring, I suppose there are thousands of them moving to Missouri. One report said that California loses over two million people a year that move to other states; to get away from the liberals? Missouri land and property values have been comparatively low nationally so this is a destination. A California man came to Cooper County and bought a large farm for twice the going land value driving up prices across the region yet it was worth it to the former Californian just to get out of there.

Arizona was a retirement destination but it could be a lot more if it would say to Uncle Sam “We will enforce our own borders, thank you, and we don’t need you for anything else, so good bye”. Think of it: if a state with all the amenities of being America less the regulations, oppressive courts, lower taxes, less welfare, a more regional government that represent the values of the people; wouldn’t that be a great place to move your business and people would flock there. (Read More)

Local governments are more responsive to the people. Arizona is just trying to protect its citizens and the central government won’t let them. A new country would be rid of the Feds and free again. If Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico went out to form a new country, it would be a huge economic boom for them; the new Singapore in the Southwest.

In my opinion this would be a great thing and is the best solution for this country. I think a peaceful pull out of states might not lead to the tyranny of Lincoln. The Feds won’t do something dumb like in 1860. They will have to hire mercenaries to combat a popular move like the formation of new and prosperous countries.

Now the north east would stay in their old corrupt condition, just like the liberal fools they have been for years. But without the rest of the country to pay for all their programs (Romney health care?) they would be desperate or they would have to reform.

I pray every day that this country will wake up and the good people will pull out of the brainwashing and lies of the Feds. I think it is working, Americans are thinking?

If there is another economic crash in the next 12 months pitting the socialists against the rest of us, it could be the catalyst for a break up? Regions could go their own way toward prosperity.

I think the new world order crowd has under estimated us again and I hope that is true. Secession gives thinking people an option. This may be the beginning of something, let’s hope, there is no hope with Washington with its current system and attitude.
Bob Painter

Race is a Hoax

2010-07-22T12:07:00.003-05:00

Carville's World

The term “race” as it relates to human groups is a hoax and a lucrative left-wing scam. There is no reality to the allegations that the color of skin determines behavior or intelligence.

It is another example of 19th century science gone amuck. The belief by otherwise sane people that we can predetermine what is in someone’s mind by skin color is a fatuous lie perpetrated by a liberal establishment.

Sitting above my desk is a very thick volume called Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible. It is a study of every word in the Bible. In reference to a group of people the word race is not mentioned: not once. It mentions race four times but never as a substitute for tribe or group of humans.

The dictionary says race is a term for broad categories of humans along the lines of physical attributes such as, hair color, skin color, eye color, the shape of the body, the size of the head, or various combinations of all the above. Perhaps this could include categories of inheritable characteristics but that level of specificity is indeed thorny at best.

Different ethnic groups have over time tried to pinpoint physical features as a relation to group identification. This is a sort of taxonomical hocus-pocus that people seem to enjoy engaging in for political reasons.

Credibility for this sort of activity is no more than nebulous if one is looking for actual empirical markers to find subsets in the human species. At best simplistic notions that garner popular approval based on this physical trait or the other are little more than persistent legends.

The predominantly liberal big-government science establishment shows duplicity on the “race” issue. These days the practitioners of science disagree about what constitutes “race”. Yet at one time they were not so circumspect. To be sure it was science that evolved the contemporary view of “race” as an add-on to the theory of evolution: old ideas are hard to kill.

Now with the technology of genetics and DNA and all the paraphernalia and money that attends the various cults of science the determination as to whether or not certain sub-sets of people actually are sub-species of Homo sapiens remains a mystery. No evidence seems to support the notion of “race” but the boys in the white coats soldier on in this pursuit none-the-less.

The old classifications of Mongoloid, Negroid, and Caucasoid as the “races of mankind” seem sort of stupid if you think about it too long. Could we say that three horses in the pasture one black, one white, and one spotted are different “races” of horses?

Like politics “race” is a construction. Genetic definitions are poorly understood or non-existent when it comes to “race”. In an odd coalition of anthropology, archeology, genetics and some other additives to the intellectual witches brew a consensus is sometimes arrived at by conflating genetics and ethnography.

But this only opens another Pandora’s Box of creepy unintended consequences running around the world making an already tenuous situation even more squalid. It opens the door that equates “race” and ethnicity.

I once owned an old picture book for children from the early 20th century. It told the story of the nations. In each chapter it had a picture depicting a characteristically costumed person with dress appropriate to their nation. Each drawing was complete with a caption something like, “A person of the Irish race”, “A person of the Dutch race”, “A person of the Chinese race”, “A person of the Siamese race”, “A person of the Zulu race”, and on and on. This was a description of the crackpot world of evolution science combined with political and ethnic stereotypes.

Today we combine science, Marxism, demagoguery, and lots of money to determine “race”. With the coveted title of “victim” associated with “race” the political operatives and their lawyers stay up late into the night inventing more and more cunning devices to inject “race” into the body politic.

Recently I have seen the term “Mexican race” associated with the liberal agenda of open borders. How about the “Puerto Rican race”? Yes, I’ve heard that from civil-rights activists. Then there is the ever popular “Asian race” so why not the “female race” or the “homosexual race”? There is really no end to this creepy virus once it has escaped its box.

In the world of left-wing political theorists like James Carville we divide groups up into smaller and more manageable political subsets and then turn them against one another. Is it little wonder that “race” is so much in vogue? (read more)

If you uphold the theory of “race” you are by definition a “racist”, that is, someone who takes action or is motivated by “race”. Using color differences as a political tool and calling it something else is the everyday grist of many politicians but these days we see it used by the Left most efficiently.

Convoluting the definition of human subgroups is an effective strategy. But using that strategy is the disgusting refuge of the cynical, the socialists, and the theomachist. Played over and over again on TV and in the dominant media this program of ethnic hatred reminds me of recent history in Rwanda and other African countries. A tactic that is designed to put ethnic minorities in power includes the uniting of various tribes and then hacking as many of the opposition to death as possible: the prototype of “race” based politics.

Yet even this awful reality has some historic credibility. Here in America most of the hatred is manufactured. Oh well, perception is reality in the world of the dominant media, George Soros, and David Axelrod. The BIG LIE of "race" is here to stay so long as central government money is there to fuel it.

Illustration: “Carville’s World”, pen and ink drawing, 2009

The Symbolist as Messenger

2010-07-01T20:55:00.003-05:00

Some art “experts” say Symbolist art as a cultural phenomena is “…a 19th-century movement in which art became infused with exaggerated sensitivity and a spooky mysticism”; I think it is older than that and it is only exaggerated and spooky to those who fear mystery. I believe it to be at the heart of the Perennial Wisdom. Using the edges of knowledge to communicate the ineffable, the symbolist sensibility transcends both language and mathematics.
Even art historians will admit it is a continuation or extrapolation of Romanticism, Orientalism, and Impressionism; yet this grudging admission begs the point. To pigeon-hole artistic symbolism into a transient fad falls into another trap the materialists have set for the arts. Featured artist Brian McGuffey belies the transient argument.

Most historians would put European artists John Henry Fuseli, Caspar David Friedrich, Gustave Moreau, Puvis de Chavannes, Odilon Redon, Franz von Stuck, Edvard Munch, Edward Burne-Jones and Gauguin into the Symbolist school. American artists such as John La Farge, William Rimmer, Albert Pinkham Ryder, Thomas Hart Benton and in the decorative arts Louis Comfort Tiffany could be placed in this category.

Lest we forget many writers and poets can be called symbolists. Certainly Southern writers like Edgar Allan Poe, Sidney Lanier, and Flannery O’Connor are part of this genre and some say poet Luna Corvus could be included here.

In her book on the subject Dr. Diane Chalmers Johnson calls American symbolist painters “poets in paint”; a fitting observation. I think it is appropriate to combine poetry and the graphic arts here.

Symbolist art has been criticized for being “too vague” and “without measurable definition”. Yet those critiques are more a description of the academic mind’s inability to grasp a dimension outside the realm of the senses.

This art form is not interested in simply recording facts. That is better left to the camera, the Realist, and mere scientists. Instead the Symbolist is more interested in recording what is not seen or measured. This is the antithesis of positivism. (read more)

Here you will find the intersection of the acknowledged dream world and the dream world of ordinary reality. In many ways the Bible is a Symbolist document. This is driven home in the Book of Revelations. Weaving the spiritual, the transcendent, politics, memory, and history into a single work is the essence of the great religious books.

The interpretation of Symbolist art depends on the culture it is embedded in. Because it unlocks the world of the unconscious mind it is inherently dangerous to the totalitarian worldview. It is the language of free will making it conspicuously Judeo-Christian as a thought-form.

As we find it we will attempt to bring you some contemporary Symbolist art currently being executed.

Brian McGuffey is an Alabama artist whose work is seen at art festivals and at the Square Room Gallery in Seattle, WA. http://www.squareroom.us/ His work is featured here.

All paintings by Brian McGuffey

Can the United States Sustain Itself?

2010-06-09T12:23:00.005-05:00

Mr. Donald Gilmore is a well known historian and novelist who wrote the groundbreaking book The Civil War on the Missouri/Kansas Border and other works. His books have shed new light on the American venue from the point of view of a Missouri Partisan. As a response and corollary to the recent writings of Mr. Thomas Moore of the Southern National Congress, Gilmore seeks to clarify the situation which the United States finds itself in. dsr

Donald Gilmore

Sometimes present, specific problems can indicate fundamental flaws in our society at large. Take for instance the present oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, which seems to befuddle our government and business community. We don’t seem at this time to be knowledgeable enough and sophisticated enough to solve this single national problem.

We have oil spilling into the water spoiling a billion dollar tourist industry, ruining the coastal ecology of the American Gulf South, and ravaging a second-to-none fishing industry. And for over forty days, the President of the United States dithered. Finally, his only response was to say in vulgar fashion that he would “kick some butts,” once individuals living along the coast area told him the precise “butts” to kick and why. Now, isn’t that a miserable response for a leader of a great nation to admit to, that he doesn’t know what to do, with all the best minds available to him, that he would just turn to those beset by this horrendous problem for an answer. That’s not even a grade-school-level solution.

Obama even designated a U.S. Navy admiral to oversee the problem, only to be told by the admiral that the people who created the mess, BP, were the only ones capable of fixing it. Isn’t that sort of like assigning the fox to resolve problems of predatory foxes in the hen house? Is anyone awake in Washington? Hello!

It should have been obvious from the start that some of the best minds, engineering and scientific, on our planet should have been consulted for the best advice as to the procedures to be followed to resolve this catastrophe. But left to its own devices, BP began spilling millions of gallons of dispersants on the oils slicks, informing us that that would alleviate the problem.

What happened, which has not been properly reported by the way, is that the dispersant did just what its description promised it would do: it “broke up and scattered in different directions” the oil. What was the result of this scattering? Within days, three different universities discovered huge lenses or layers of oil at various depths, to very deep, in the Gulf of Mexico. When BP was informed by the news media of this discovery, their answer was: “Our information tells us that this is not so.” Apparently, BP is not scientifically oriented in its correction of the oil problem or they would have acknowledged a scientifically discovered fact. And the men in Washington were asleep also.

What was the effect of this dispersion? On public TV tonight, June 8, the son of Jacques Cousteau, like his father an oceanographer and ecologist, raged at the ignorance of BP’s tactic of employing the dispersants, considering they had absolutely no knowledge of what the impact of using this dispersant would be. Now, with the oil dispersed, floating at various levels in the ocean, it cannot be skimmed off into barges, cannot be retrieved in any practical way, and as Cousteau maintained, will now travel all over the world under the surf causing incalculable damage to the ocean and the denizens therein—everywhere, the entire watery world!

So the point of this little essay so far is that our government and our leaders are becoming incapable of meeting the demands of a very large nation with a multiplicity of concerns. All our present President was able to do in the face of this tragedy was first, to remain silent for over forty days, and then, when activated by criticism from enemies and friends, to point fingers and give pretty speeches, which obviously have had no affect on the problem at any level.

Our country, like many nations and empires of the past is approaching a size and complexity where it appears to be unable to cope with the military, political, economic, and business structures of which it is composed. What we should increasingly realize is that great nations and empires are transient and have a limited longevity, like the Assyrian empire, the Macedonian empire, the Roman Empire, Louis XIV, the British Empire, the Russian Communist empire, and Hitler’s short-lived national socialist demi-empire.

Obviously, all of the above no longer exist, with only our present American and Chinese nations remaining, large, still intact, and ambitious to emulate them. Nearly all of the empires mentioned collapsed because of inadequate infrastructures and public debt caused by their overweening national ambitions. All these grand systems became so unwieldy and dysfunctional that they collapsed of their own weight, like our nation shall.

Excessive, burgeoning, weighty government spending for various supposed entitlements (i.e., bribes) will sink this ship of state like all those other grand states. The Roman Empire lasted almost 800 years before its practice of using foreign officers and men in its armies instead of its own people, spending beyond its ability to sustain itself, and allowing its public morality to rot destroyed it. The United States will never last half as long.

Just as Russia dissolved through the predictable failure of a Marxist economy, we will collapse through a similar socialist economic agenda that cannot be supported with the present system of taxation and public expectations. Like Hitler’s empire, bolstered by a propaganda network second to none, we have propped up our governments with a liberal media that is every bit as virulent and effective as Joseph Goebbels’ Nazi communication media.

But the seeds of the destruction of this American empire are already sown. The mainstay of the liberal media, the conventional TV networks, have been pre-empted by the new cable TV networks; the newspaper industry is crumbling as I write; and the growing independence of the Internet is undercutting and enervating the flow of traditional liberal propaganda. The United States as we have known it will likely become only a memory, perhaps as early as forty year from today, all the result of a socialist program in this country that became too ambitious, too costly, too centered on too few people, and this will lead ultimately to the social and economic disintegration of this nation.

When this occurs, will the United States, like Russia, recognize it has had its day, concluded its long, socialist adventure, and now must let the various broken pieces of a nation too large to control and function go their own way? Or will this nation, like it did during the Civil War, begin a monstrous blood bath using the federal forces at its disposal. Whose wisdom will guide us; George Soros and Karl Marx or Washington, Jefferson and Calhoun? These are questions we need to contemplate.
Donald Gilmore

Books of interest by Mr. Gilmore:

The Civil War on the Missouri Kansas Border

Riding Vengeance with the James Gang

Cards for BP

2010-06-03T15:15:00.002-05:00

Most likely an artifact of very early Judeo-Christian thinking what we now call “playing cards” form the visible tip of a comprehensive teaching that is little understood to the modern mind. Many of us are drawn to mysteries and the enigma contained in the cards continues to confound and delight people across the ages.

Known as cartomancy the ancient study of signs embodied in the “little book” symbolically handed to mankind by the Archangel Raphael in the Book of Revelations the cards yield uncanny results to those who respect them. As I have done before in these pages I have laid a card spread to examine the influence powerful events have had on the field of variables that comprise our reality.

After a thorough mixing of the cards and other appropriate observance I asked what can we know about the oil spill at the BP well in the Gulf of Mexico? Then I dealt the cards.

At about 2:00 CDT, June 2, 2010 the three cards that I drew were (in order) the Nine of Hearts (9h), the Jack of Diamonds (jd), and finally the Nine of Spades (9s). This is known as a “three card spread” or sometimes a “past, present, and future spread”. Of the latter I do not take the description completely literal although it has some application in the interpretation.

The “three card spread” does not yield great detail. It is a snapshot of what the situation is manifesting right now. But it does indicate broad archetypical knowledge about the subject.

In a brief analysis here’s what the cards say. The 9h points toward a broken relationship, even a dashed love affair, perhaps a breech of trust, a desire for change or wish. The jd traditionally describes a type of person. A young glamorous man usually, maybe part of the aristocracy (I’m feeling the British Royal Family in the background) but someone with gallant attributes (maybe Tony Hayward). Yet on the other hand it also indicates an irresponsible dabbler who is not good with money, a “playboy” of sorts. The final card is the 9s.

The 9s is rarely a good card. Sometime equated with the “Tower Card” in the tarot deck it is generally associated with loss, disappointment, and even destruction. However, as with all spades it can be interpreted as a necessary change brought on through past actions.

One hates to push too much interpretation on a 3 card spread and as with all prophetic systems the time-line is uncertain but there seem to be some obvious (to me at least) areas of interest. The 9-J-9 symmetry looks like a strong decisive statement. The shift from heart to diamond to spade is unnerving as is the corollary; Haniel to Zadkiel to Camael (love-hope-loss) is a classic slide in the wrong direction.

If we have had an affair with the riches of the British aristocracy and their interest in the oil industry and have wished for prosperity; then we have just had a reality check. The promise (or hope) we see in the present must be tempered with the fact that fancy new technology might “feel” good and the personnel from BP (and the hidden hand of the Royal family) may seem comforting but we shouldn’t put our faith in it. Because of the Jack connection I may be seeing a reflection of BP and not the oil industry in general. The outcome is not only uncertain but condemned to be tainted with the baggage from the past. There are consequences here that will not benefit the majority. Being prepared for disappointment with the future is in order.

Stealing History

2010-04-13T13:14:00.021-05:00

Gov McDonnell steps into a consequential dung heap

When I was in college I took a year of (what was then called) Afro-American history. The teacher was a very good young black instructor by the name of Dr. Franklin.

The second semester of the course was nearly all devoted to the American Civil War. I recall one of the first things Dr. Franklin said was something like, “You white kids have been told that the Civil War was fought in order to end slavery. You black kids have been told that Lincoln started the Civil War to free the slaves. I’m going to show you that none of that is the truth.” That was my first clue that something was wrong with the way we understand our history.

Some time later a friend of mine who had attended Harvard was discussing Illinois politics with me. He said that underlying all the crookedness Illinois had a proud history; after all he said, “It is the land of Lincoln and Lincoln was the first liberal.” This was an epiphany for me some 30 years ago.

The fairy-tale we call the story of the Civil War is a pernicious falsehood on which political operatives have built a foundation of propaganda: one lie stacked upon another. The story that Lincoln and his henchman were concerned with the well being of black folks was for me totally exploded by Dr. Franklin many years ago. In fact subsequent studies have proven my history teacher correct. Yet there are those who will soon use tax money to undo this truth.

This tawdry little folk-tale about the Civil War or War Between the States (WBTS) that is repeated by the central government, leftists, and others is back in the news. When Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell had the audacity to eliminate the mention of slavery in his statement about Confederate Heritage Month the Left went ballistic and the Governor quickly retreated.

The fact that there is a hard-wired connection between today’s Left and the WBTS is the unwritten sub-text to the headlines. The statement that “Lincoln was the first liberal” is more than a cliché. Old Abe was the first big government centralist and that drew many admirers including Karl Marx who was writing columns for New York newspapers cheering the Union cause while the War was raging in the field.

In the last decade or so the leftist rewriting of the War has been challenged by numerous authors. Among them are Thomas Woods, Charles Adams, Thomas DiLorenzo, Edward Renehan, Donald Gilmore, and the Kennedy/Benson team that gave us Red Republicans and Lincoln’s Marxists. Unfortunately all their work to uncover the truth about the War is about to be washed away by the central government through the Department of Interior (DOI).

Under the guise of the Sesquicentennial Celebration of the Civil War we will soon be treated to the mother of all centralist propaganda efforts directed by the DOI and the National Parks Service which has concocted a massive re-writing of history using taxpayer money. The “Master Narrative” they have cooked up for us is supposed to once and for all establish the story that “slavery” was the only reason for the War.

Unknowingly Governor McDonnell had walked into the plot and was caught in a cross-fire of DOI hacks, Obama administration officials, DuBois activists, and other leftists who are the main impresarios in this Stalinist scheme. McDonnell and others have been muzzled for not showing adequate deference to the leftist line.

A little known book, Troubled Commemoration: The American Civil War Centennial, 1961-1965 (2007) by the left-wing British writer, Robert J. Cook, is a blueprint of sorts for this brave new world interpretation of our history. Working with the once venerable Southern History Association which is now in the orbit of the apparent Marx-Leninism of the Southern Labor Studies Association, Mr. Cook has written a book about the failures of the Civil War Centennial celebration; 50 years ago.

The book is a convoluted race-baiting screed that could have been written by Marxist authors Martin Duberman and Howard Zinn who Cook quotes and often mimics. Ultimately he will pin the blame on the failure of the Centennial celebration on anti-communist in the South and rise of the Civil Rights movement.

Regarding the latter we need to recall the deep roots that the Civil Rights movement had in Marxism (as in W. E. B. DuBois, Hughes, and others). Recently NAACP officials crowed that Dr. Martin King was a “revolutionary socialist”. Pitting blacks against whites is a reliable leftist scam to wedge into political power. Proponents of Mr. Cook’s work are doubtlessly aware of this tactic.

The book was written with the coming Sesquicentennial in mind. It is a convenient foil for promoters of the leftist cause to use in their zeal for turning the Civil War into the Great Civil Rights War.

Re-visiting the Civil War battlefield is futile. Too much ink has replaced the blood. It is controlling historical memory that is at issue. If the past can be rewritten to conform to the present then presuppositions can be synthesized out of thin air.

In other words by misrepresenting history a story can be created that explains the present in a predetermined manner. Absolutely false statements about the past will make the Marxist theory of history appear correct. One lie in turn justifies another and the Left is vindicated through the use of American blood shed in a battle over the Constitution not Das Kapital.

McDonnell is not the only one who has stepped into this dung heap unaware that his actions have caused an unseen but consequential mess. But the outcry about his actions by the Left is evidence of what they are thinking and planning.

Even today the WBTS exposes a terrible fissure in the American consciousness. The traditional conservative sees the War as a Tenth Amendment fight, while the liberal and leftist see it as an opportunity to promote and enforce central government power.

Governor McDonnell’s predicament is a prelude to the coming “festival of history rewriting” that is scheduled for next year. A celebration that will infuse neo-Marxist liberalism into the Union cause pitting the Yankee soldier against sterotypical Southern slaver-traders while squandering billions in tax money. Many people will not see it coming, some will ignore it, others will not believe that there are those in our government who are that calculating and cunning, but if not for one brave black history teacher I would be one of them.

We Put Up A Cross

2010-04-03T14:09:00.005-05:00

Although allegory (1) is a universal part of our life it is continuously overlooked. There are “signs” everywhere. In people’s behavior, on the airwaves, even across the skies the future is being written as we speak. Usually not in single words but in strings of symbols woven together into great tapestries of allegory etched on our daily lives.

As Christians go I am not high on the piety scale. But I have held on to a belief and faith that has come to me through long years of independent study, self examination, and struggle rather than family heritage. I was raised in the company of atheists and agnostics who might have had other decent attributes but faith was not one of them.

My early days were filled with self-doubt combined with thrashing about trying to find a rock to hang onto in the stormy seas of life. I was stubbornly determined to find answers: to disassemble culture and see how everything works. But when push gets to shove here in the rocky earth of the Ozarks it was the simple acts of faith displayed by others which got them through the most awful tragedies finally convinced me that over analyzing God’s plan was fruitless.

Before my eldest cousin died a few years ago I had the pleasure of sharing a little time with him. He had spent his life with family and raising prize work horses to sell to Amish and Mennonite farmers who paid top dollar for his animals.

My diminutive 80+ year old cousin George asked me if I went to church. I said, “Not too much”. He then asked me, “Well, do you believe in Jesus Christ with all your heart?” Surprising myself I replied, “Yes I do.” George’s eyes twinkled a bit and he replied in his brief but definitive style, “That’s the main thing.” I will never forget it.

Our Western culture is in deep trouble today. The signs of that are everywhere. I need not elucidate the problems because my readers already know this. Events form a great allegorical story of decline that can be seen in the headlines.

Religious leaders like Pope Benedict XVI are being vilified by the dominant media and this heralds a new crescendo of hubris by the materialist elites. Except for pliable left-wing toadies Protestant leaders are marginalized and told by the chattering heads to speak only of “peace” and “reconciliation” and “multi-culturalism” and “collectivism”or they will be attacked as well.

Father Gabriele Amorth the Vatican’s chief exorcist has gone public with his analysis that Satanic forces are acting within Christendom while other demons are attacking the Judeo-Christian world from the dominant materialist culture. Allegory abounds; there are signs and symbols everywhere.

Recently in a Washington DC newspaper, columnist Jeffrey Kuhner wrote an Op-Ed piece called “Christophobia” which outlines the political dimension to this situation. In allegory the symbols do their work as they cascade down through our culture; old mythologies are challenged while new ones struggle for supremacy. Politics, allegory, and culture, become more closely aligned in times of stress.

I have never been much for overt symbols of faith and piety. Yet when confronted with the violence of the materialist left I am moved to public action. My wife and I decided the first thing we could do is display a Cross.

Yes, the simple act of putting up a Cross in our front yard. I had an old stand cemented in the ground that held a birdfeeder and stood about 6 feet tall. To that I welded a standard with an ornate Cross complete with fleur-de-lis finials so that the whole installation stands about 10 feet tall. Very visible to our busy road and neighbors it is located unmistakably in the face of the dominant materialists.

It is a simple act that anyone can do. In the window, on your vehicle, in your yard, on the roof, anywhere is good. Show the Cross just as you would show the Flag; allegories of goodness, faith, and opposition.

(1) a story or description that symbolizes a deeper meaning.

More Than Genesis

2010-03-11T16:17:00.002-06:00

Seven Heavens

Religion should be an alternative to materialism. If the Bible is a refutation of the materialist paradigm then Genesis is the penultimate confluence of forces. Without a beginning of thought there is no thinking for humans at all.

The misrepresentation of Genesis as merely a “creation story” is a farce repeated by not only people who should know better but by people whose business it is to create confusion. While many well intentioned individuals find themselves parroting throw away talking points others with evil intent are busy writing those lines.

As the wholesale attack on the Judeo-Christian worldview rages forth it is time to admit that the attempts by many good people to squeeze spiritual thought into the box of rational materialism is now past. Although the attempt to fend off Marxism in the last 150 years or so through the use of “apologetics” and other techniques was gainful for a time it is being over-run.

Although spinning religious thought into a positivistic framework with “creationism” may be a successful instrument to gain government grants in the future it misses the point. Of course, the lessons of Genesis can be retooled linguistically to show their veracity. However, the attempt to “prove” Truth through positivistic means only serves to re-enforce the arguments of materialism rather than attenuate them.For instance, can blasphemy be used to prove God's love?

At this time it is not my intention to elucidate Genesis. I will point out that what we have in the the first book of the Old Testament is both mystery and mysticism; that is a natural fact. Noting that the author of this book is inscribing a legal document not a scientific treatise or a work of opinion. Yet it militates against the modern scholar to envision mysticism as a legal work.

There is a unbreakable partnership between Hebrew tradition and Christianity. Beyond picking out a word or two from a Concordance to ascertain its Hebrew meaning there is a bridge of thinking that must be crossed. However, just as the Haskalah movement has corrupted Hebrew thought with materialism so in turn has rational materialism eviscerated Christian thought.

With a careful reading of even the first few chapters of Genesis a person could spend a life of meditative contemplation understanding the universe without even one more sentence of writing from another source so long as the person had the rudimentary powers of observation. As a part of the perennial wisdom it was designed this way.

Yet with just a fractional knowledge of Hebrew tradition one would understand in Gen 2:1 “Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them” (note the plural form of heaven and the use of the word host) there are seven heavens, seven expansions of the firmament, seven “dimensions” if you like, to the comprehensive Creation of God. This example of the unknowable mystery of Biblical writing has been papered over by rationalist ommissions, arguments, and obfuscations. For the record the names of those places are; Vilon, Rakia, Shehakim, Ma'on, Makhon, and Arovot.

When Meister Eckert was alive there were stirrings of faith and scholarship that went beyond denominational authority. The Cabala and other Christians stood shoulder to shoulder in the pursuit of understanding God's reflection. In this world of imperfection the work may have been fraught with tribulations but the work florished.

Today rational apologetics are not enough to save Christendom from its enemies. Being defined by materialism Christians are succumbing to the methodology of their adversaries. Although the contributions of Rushdoony and others are numerous their shortsighted definition of “mystical” is not helpful. Within the Vatican those who have promoted rationalism have done a similar disservice.

If we are without allies in this world then we must look to the other worlds of Creation for help. There is more power in one Archangel than all the nuclear weapons on earth. The sword of Michael gleams with justice while the Mercy of Zadkiel tempers our actions. It may be God's will that guides every angelic movement but our prayers must first reach His ears and convince Him of our cause. No materialist can ever understand these words.

The Politics of Angels

2010-01-06T19:49:00.007-06:00

"Seven Angels"

Early Christians were well aware of the Angels that formed a major role in their spiritual as well as their temporal world. Angels were not just a theory or metaphor of faith. The Christians in the first millennium after the arrival of our Savior knew that Angels were real palpable beings who governed at the command of God.

Angels were not viewed solely as good natured guardians and radiant females with golden wings that protected children. The Angels of the Hebrew tradition and in the Old Testament were also warriors who defended Creation from evil with brutal force if commanded.

Not only were Angels Biblical but they formed the background that arose from the ancient Hebrew worldview. The world of Eden, the great king Melchizedec, and the earliest descendants of Adam and Eve resonated with the presence of Angels.

Yet today Angels are relegated to a backseat in the world of Christians. Often they are depicted as “new age” fairies looking like the cover art from a “romance” novel. At other times Angels are little more than chubby cherubs decorating a greeting card. Instead of a source of power for the faithful to defend us from our enemies, Angels have become a caricature. What happened?

Some Background

In a series of Church synods (meetings) between 743-745 AD the politically minded Pope Zachary was trying to finesse some thorny diplomatic issues. The Frankish and Germanic interest in the Church required power-sharing while in the East he had grave problems with Constantine V (son of Leo III) of Byzantium. In an attempt to placate the iconoclastic (image destroying) Constantine and keep peace in the burgeoning north Pope Zachary “downgraded” the role of several Archangels to sainthood at the behest of the Constantine faction.

Zachary’s actions briefly satisfied the desecrations of Constantine but gravely damaged the spiritual power of Christendom. At nearly the same time militant Islam was busy with the destruction of Christian North Africa and the invasion of Spain. Pope Zachary’s spiritual shortsightedness helped fuel the Islamic invasion which continues today.

Although the actions the Pope took were on the local synod level and did not rise to the official level of a General Council; the issue smoldered. Somewhat clarified by the next General Council (Second Nicaea, 787 AD) that conditionally supported the veneration of various religious images; the damage was done. Due to the volatility around those who supported the Angels with their use as a tool to acquire strength through devotion and the violent iconoclasts like Constantine V the matter was swept under the rug.

Angelic Politics

The policies of iconoclasts in the Catholic Church were nearly identical to the beliefs of Islam who completely forbade the use of Angelic images. So this controversy became a net gain for Islam which was able to get the Catholics to turn their backs on one of their most important allies; the Corps of Archangels.

As is sometimes the case Protestants fell in line and repeated the mistakes of their Catholic forerunners. Not understanding that there is a politics to Angels, Christians have allowed one of their most powerful assets to lie dormant while the enemies of Christendom celebrate one victory after another.

Even though the spelling and pronunciation has change over many millennia, The Seven Ruling Archangels; Raphael, Uriel, Michael, Gabriel, Zaphiel, Haniel, and Zadkiel: are eternal. They are a profound presence in our life whether we are aware of it or not.

Existing at the edge of consciousness these spiritual beings are the messengers, guardians, and soldiers for God. Angels guard the Gates of Eden; they visited Noah, came to Abraham then annihilated Sodom and Gomorrah, protected Mary, and provided innumerable un-named acts. All seven Archangels visit us in the Book of Revelations and absolutely declared their inherent dominion in prophecy.

Yet we want to turn them into pudgy little cherubs? Do we want to allow them to be controlled by pagans and Muslims? The answer for me is NO. I say they are our allies and the conduits to God.

With militant Islam on one horizon and militant materialism on the other horizon the only way we have to look is straight up. Without the alliance of God and his warrior Archangels we are naked and powerless in these “raven days” of our civilization.

D. S. Reif

"Seven Angels" Pencil drawing on paper.

Lincolnism

2009-12-20T14:20:00.010-06:00

"Hats off to Abe"

The recent Healthcare debate has its roots in American history and the legacy of President Abraham Lincoln. Simply put the political philosophy of Abraham Lincoln is that the central government is the final authority regarding policy for everyone in the country. At the end of the day, the various States, therefore, are subordinate to the control of the central government (centralism). All policy disputes will ultimately be settled by the central government. Centralism is the end of federalism.

The political software of the United States is Lincolnism. Both parties are ruled by the principles that evolved from the outcome of the American Civil War. The doctrines of Mr. Lincoln increasingly became the only framework in which policy is discussed.

The apparent victory for the centralist policies of emerging republics like the United States became the model for popular centralism worldwide. Lincolnism became the underlying method for, among others: Bismarck, Lenin, and Mao.

Lincoln's centralism was greatly admired by Karl Marx. Mr. Marx had been advocating similar policies as a way of promoting national and international socialism. In fact, the ideas of Marx and Lincoln regarding the subject of centralism are remarkably similar.

The reality that there was a broad cross-pollination of ideas between American centralists and Marxists before during and after the War Between the States has been thoroughly examined by Kennedy and Benson. The centralist influences of Lincoln’s policy are well documented by Thomas DiLorenzo and others. Despite the throttling efforts of the predominately leftist Establishment to stifle the understanding of Lincoln’s centralism; the truth has slowly come out.

Although it is true that Lincoln was technically not a Marxist it is similarly true that Marx believed in Lincolnism. With Lincoln being a politician and Marx being the prototypical community organizer these two nineteenth century centralists have combined to not only shape the profile of both American political parties but nearly all the political debate worldwide.

That President Obama has embraced Lincoln as the icon of his administration is not news. Nearly every President since Lincoln has paid homage to him. So is it little wonder that in order to “fix” the health care industry Mr. Obama has sought an answer using the central government: an artifact of Lincolnism.

Obama’s beliefs seem normal, however, what is really curious is that the alleged political opposition to Obama’s policies are similarly rooted in the very Lincolnism that they are contesting. Recalling that the Republican Party claims Lincoln as their founder it seems peculiar that they are resisting Obama who comes out of the same tradition; so to speak.

From Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele to Rush Limbaugh and from Senator Olympia Snowe to Sean Hannity; across the upper tier of Republican advocates there is nothing but loyalty to the legacy of the Lincoln model. At the same time both Parties and nearly everyone who speaks for them show contempt for those who legitimately opposed Lincoln, that is; the agenda of Constitutional federalism formulated by Davis, Calhoun, Jefferson, and others.

Routinely tarred with the epithet of “Southern” there is a stirring of influence by thinkers (some noted above) that advocate a reappraisal of Lincolnism and its consequences. With the government’s intellectual tank on empty and the trajectory of the national interest heading for bankruptcy or worse the ears of the populace are hungry for viable alternatives. Yet popular critics of the administration seem unable to come to grips with Lincoln and his continuing influence.

Riding Vengeance

2009-12-14T10:20:00.012-06:00

Riding Vengeance with the James Gang, Donald Gilmore, 2009, Pelican Publishing, Gretna, LA, 367 pages, historical novel, hardbound, $23.00

Previously most books about the James boys invoke either a re-fighting of the War Between the States or a morality lesson about the Missouri outlaws. This book does neither. It is a historical novel that views the main characters in the milieu they lived in from their own point of view. It is exciting and genuine straying little from the extraordinary record of events.
Donald Gilmore’s frontier history book, The Civil War on the Missouri/Kansas Border, gives him splendid credentials to write this novel. That book is full of research and detail and to the chagrin of the History Establishment challenges the existing left-wing pretensions that attempt to define the South, Missouri, and the War.
In a sense the James Gang book picks up where the other book leaves off. It not only recalls the War but follows real flesh and blood people as they attempt to sort their lives out in a world gone mad. Certainly the Yankee invasion and attempts to smash the people of Missouri is now beyond our comprehension. The genocidal policies of the Lincoln administration had real consequences regardless of how they have been swept under the Establishment rug. Those consequences are the ground this book inhabits.

The novel is organized in a chronology beginning in November 1861 and ending in November 1876. Journal style it examines selected significant days and threads them together as a historical narrative. The James boys and the Youngers were all Confederate soldiers and strong Southern partisans as was most of their state.
We are exposed in the beginning to scenes of the invasion and war. Union soldiers murdering, looting, torturing civilians, and killing their pets in an arrogant orgy of oppression. The cost of a U.S. Armed Services choosing to back the wrong side and put their forces behind the Lincoln cabal was a disaster for the military’s long term standing. Those chickens are coming home to roost in our time. Let us pray that it does not happen again. But Gilmore, a military historian by trade, shows great courage by exploring this part of the story.

But it is not at all a Yankee bashing screed: far from it. It is a tapestry of daily life, extraordinary times, cultural crosscurrents, and violence woven together with fact, lore, and dialog. At first blush I though it was going to be something like the Akira Kurosawa movie The Seven Samurais. But as a novel it started to feel more like the time bending of Gore Vidal without the posturing or maybe James Elroy without the garlic and cops.

Gilmore knows his characters like Elroy knows the mob. There are parts of this book where Gilmore is so deeply into the heads of these characters that it is almost spooky. I’ve done a great deal of research in this area and know the psychic landscape well but not as well as Gilmore.

After the James gang executed the would-be Pinkerton assassin, John Whicher, Frank James was left to ruminate about the world situation and pondered Whicher’s fate. On page 181 he says to himself, “(Whicher) had been woefully misguided by wishful thinking and fatal misconceptions. (but)…life was complex and had hidden dimensions that a man of the world needed to recognize. The man on the street believed simply in lofty concepts of democracy and the rule of law. That suited ordinary workin’ folks…it described the world that history books talked about. But there is a harder reality, a parallel world, difficult to fathom, ruled by influential families, big money, business, politicians, their armies, and an elaborate network of hangers-on like Pinkerton. It was a cruel, manipulative world, its intentions largely obscured from most people, shrouded in propaganda, lies, deception, intrigue, scheming over money, and sometimes murder, when it was expedient.”

This is likely how they thought. Frank and Jesse as well as the Younger were educated men who were well read in their day. It is their understanding of the world as it was (and is) that fascinates us and brings us back to their story which the author brightly illuminates.

Gilmore gives lengthy coverage of the debacle at the Northfield, Minnesota bank robbery. The ironies and omens leading up to the action on the bank reaped their fortunes in the failure of the mission. Yet the story of the escape is riveting and page turning. The Youngers are captured with others in the gang but somehow Frank and Jesse despite injuries and being shot up elude the biggest manhunt in U.S. history and evade the Minnesota forces. The men cover hundreds of miles of hostile territory on foot, horseback, bareback on stolen farm animals; use their wits, guns, and charm to get food and get away. The narrative is breathtaking and is true to the conditions of the time.

Gilmore’s ethical balance is painted in unrelenting colors. Condon or not these were all tough men who were endowed with a sinewy strength and courage that was ruled by their past and destiny. They were real outlaws in the most exalted sense of the term. Not good guys or gooey TV bad men; the James gang were men of their time shaped by a terrible traitorous war. They were “real” outlaws not the Dr. Science climate crooks, currency traders, terrorists, or government big shots that pass for outlaws today.

The book is a good history novel with lots of treats for James gang fans, western history lovers, and Civil War buffs. Maybe a little too heavy on characters for my taste, this can be confusing at times but that said I think the book will satisfy anyone who is interested in this genre.

Buy the book: Riding Vengeance with the James Gang

Bedeviled

2009-12-03T12:09:00.020-06:00

Bedeviled

The Obamacrats have changed the orientation of the Democrat Party from Jefferson and Jackson to the Chicago leftist establishment. More ominous is they have moved the geographic center of gravity of the Party from America to fin-de-siecle Russia with its decadent mixture of the occult and Bolshevism.

It is no secret that the current administration is an ideological stepchild of the Chicago Marxist labor movement that gave rise to the premier community organizer Saul Alinsky. We have spoken before about the theomachist proclivities of Mr. Alinsky and those who have come after him.

Mr. Alinsky penned a few notable lines not the least of which was his dedication to his most famous book Rules for Radicals in which he revealed his enthusiasm for Lucifer, i.e., Satan or the Devil. Referring to Lucifer as the “first revolutionary” Alinsky was of course signaling his intentions to a wide audience of the anti-Christian intelligentsia including the establishment surrounding the University of Chicago.

That is not news to anyone who has followed this Marxist philosopher. What is not so well known is that his comments were also a deferential reference to nouveau revolutionaries in pre-Soviet Russia. This period of intrigue and revolution is very sacred to the hard left elitists in the Democrat National Committee (DNC). The era was romanticized in the 1981 movie Reds starring Warren Beatty, Diane Keaton, and Jack Nicholson; a classic to socialists.

The elevation of the Devil to political icon is a relatively new contribution to the politics of Western civilization. Author Kristi Groberg has done some interesting research in this area and we can thank Marxist thinkers in “Silver Age” (1890-1915) Russia for this new development*. They reasoned that by allying themselves with the image of Satan they could co-opt the power of the Devil to advance their anti-Christian agenda while surrounding themselves with the mantle of rebellion against the Orthodox Church and the Czar. Casting themselves as the ultimate outsiders these socialists relished their iconoclastic image.

Satanist author and playwright Valery Briusov (1873-1924) and others were in the orbit of influential cultural impresario Georgy Chulkov; all friends of socialism. These activists advocated using their “art” as a weapon against the up-tight bourgeois sexual and religious establishment of pre-revolutionary Russia.

Impressed by Chulkov’s manipulation of symbols for political purposes propagandist writer Anatoly Lunacharsky promoted mythic image making and drew inspiration from Briusov. Seeing that powerful religious images could be used to promote “the Revolution” in the salons of the elites Lunacharsky initially welcomed Satanists and other practitioners of the Black Arts as allies to fight the enemies of the socialist state but would eventually betray them when they became too powerful. In the end proving that socialists are more unscrupulous than Devil worshippers.

Fifty years later in the writings of the Marxist labor movement of Chicago these themes resurfaced. Tampering with the underworld and allying oneself with the image of Lucifer is a dangerous proposition. Mr. Alinsky may have thought he was being a smart-ass when he penned his sophomoric remarks. Or maybe his motives were more sinister. Nonetheless, it is evident that he was using a very calculated historic reference when he dedicated his work to Satan.

I wonder if the Chicago left-wing establishment now in control of Washington knows what sort of baggage they have picked up: or do they even care?

* Much more research on this subject: http://academic.reed.edu/russian/courses/408syllabus.doc

Myth Maker

2009-10-14T20:21:00.007-05:00

The term “myth” has over the years been enmeshed in a modern struggle that seeks to diminish the Past. We covered that a few months ago in the essay about modernism. Yet there are those who understand the importance of both myth and the past. One person who knows the significance of myth is Josh Foreman who has the courage to tackle the issue of the Bible as myth. This is a very big undertaking which is not for the faint hearted. So I have written a little introduction to the subject of myth and I have also linked Perennis to his website.

During the period when I was doing research in The Institute for Perennial Studies, I think I must have read most of what Joseph Campbell (1904-1987) wrote. For many years I was smitten with his thinking. The impressive breadth of his work and the volume of his research were spectacular. The “Masks of God” series was wildly popular for books of this genre. If memory serves me Public Broadcasting even made series of shows about it. As a result he became something of an expert in myths.
I am indebted to Mr. Campbell in the following way; he opened up a broad vista of comparative religion and attempted to make the subject readable: in the tradition of Will Durant. The attribute of popularization is rare in the world of philosophy and scholarship.
In so doing he did remind us about the role of myth in the culture of Man. In his mind “myth” had its true meaning as overarching story or cultural guidepost rather the comic book understanding of “myth” as being synonymous with hoax. Although I still consider his book The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology a very good reference work I have moved beyond Campbell as a thinker.
Maybe technician* might be a better term than thinker when referring to Campbell. I have come to put him in the same category as Sigmund Freud, Karl Jung, Stanislav Grof, Lewis Mumford, and others who seemed to coolly stand off on the sidelines and observe history with a detachment worthy of an astronomer.
But it is really Campbell and Jung who perfected condescension and best fit the category of “cultural astronomer” in my estimation because they dealt with the spirit of Man in his most vulnerable arena and did so using the most detached terms. The unconscious mind and the life it informs are the stuff of our soul and the touchstone of God. In other words they were intentionally messing with the fabric of reality.
I have come to believe that more than anything Jung was a voyeur and a dabbler. He was a product of his times which meant in order to gain acceptance he could look at the spirit, he could try to measure the spirit, he could surgically dissect the spirit, he could comment on the spirit, but he could not actually express the spirit as part of his own personal location. Jung and his associates wanted to be “scientists of the spirit” so to speak.
For the most part the same can be said of Campbell except I think he was of greater utility to the materialist agenda. He was certainly raised up by the likes of former press secretary to Lyndon Baines Johnson and TV personality Bill Moyers who is a front-man for liberal materialism. This is because at the end of the day Campbell was a modernist who saw himself as one of the ushers that would give us an entrance to the latest version of “the new dawn”. Campbell would provide Moyers and his ilk as well as such cultural luminaries as Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and many others a blueprint to destroy the past.

On page 520 the Masks of God: Occidental Mythology tells us everything Joseph Campbell said with his many books in a handful of sentences. “And here we touch upon a crucial problem of the religions of our time; for the clergies, generally still are preaching themes from the first to forth millenniums B.C. No one of adult mind today would turn to the Book of Genesis to learn of the origins of the earth, the plants, the beasts, and man. There was no flood, no tower of Babel, no first couple in paradise, and between the first known appearance of men on earth and the first buildings of cities, not on generation (Adam to Cain) but a good two million must have come into this world and passed along. Today we turn to science for our imagery of the past and of the structure of the world, and what the spinning demons of the atom and the galaxies of the telescope’s eye reveal is a wonder that makes the babel (Campbell’s word, un-capitalized-ed) of the Bible seem a toyland dream of the dear childhood of our brain.”

I don’t know how a man could be more patronizing. But then again the materialist is empowered with the righteousness of the falsifiable “truth” gleaned from the fruits of one government funded program after another.
Independent scholar Josh Foreman has written a comprehensive essay entitled “The Bible as Myth”. Mr. Foreman has a very good understanding of the meaning of “myth” and its relationship to the Western weltanschauung. He is proof that Joseph Campbell is not the only person who can write intelligently about the subject of myths and can do so without patronizing a couple billion Christians. But he also has a contemporary spin on the subject that is not that far from Pastor Harris’ view of a Christ-vision as the center of a mystical Church. Here is an excerpt from Foreman’s essay and the link to the entire piece follows.

“Personally, I want to believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus as that mechanism. (If such a mechanism is needed.) And my philosophy does not exclude the possibility at all. I don’t need some sanitized, rationalized, humanistic or neutered version of the Christian myth that Thomas Jefferson and the Jesus Seminar offer to make it palatable to me.
These guys have boxed their version of God in just as much as the orthodox doctrine box-builders. But as my focus has shifted from a rules-based faith, (We are bad, God had to sacrifice to compensate, because, you know, those are the RULES!) to a character-based faith, (God is Just and omni-all-that-good-stuff) I’m losing my need to believe the particulars of our myth. The particulars that come from a written tradition that grows rules-based doctrine. Which is not the same thing at all as rejecting the particulars. To do so would be to betray what I think has been God’s greatest revelation to me: the completely humiliating realization that I Know nothing. So I don’t feel like I’m losing any faith at all. I feel like I’m shifting it. Off of my former ideas about what the Bible must be and how historically accurate it is, and onto a perfect God, where it really belongs.
Sure, this is a God of my own understanding. But I don’t see how that’s different than the God of other people’s or institution’s collective understanding. When it comes to particular events in the Christian myth, since I don’t have any controverting evidence, my inclination is to believe them in faith. This myth has been the single most powerful organizer and interpreter of my life, and I feel really, really good about the results. So I feel no need to take a skeptical approach to the specifics of it. I don’t default to the negative-until-proven state that Biblical skeptics do.”

Read the complete essay at:
"The Bible as Myth"

*I considered the word “propagandist” to replace technician; however, that word sometimes implies a connection to the old Soviet Union which is misleading in the context of this essay. However, such a connection probably could be found if one traced a path through philosophical materialism rather than political materialism.

David S. Reif

God Haters

2009-09-17T14:01:00.040-05:00

Alinsky & Popper

Revised (07-02-10)

A theomachist is one who works against God; hates God in fact. Theomachism is the political belief and practice of hating or destroying God.

Unlike atheists who merely deny the existence of God, perhaps the most disgusting set of ideas known to the world is the active hatred of God. Not new to history it has become a major part of the ideological landscape in the last century with the rise of materialism and positivist science. Those who practice this detestable belief do so under the cover of other political ideals which are compatible with their belief. It is rarely out in the open but is processed through code words and often high minded ideals. Yet the practice of theomachism is cleverly inserted into the philosophical framework of both academic and everyday life so it is nearly invisible to the unwary.

Not limited to any one religion or sectarian structure theomachism is an equal opportunity hater. Although Christianity is a logical target these days it is the Judeo-Christian worldview which is favored by the theomachist in the West. However, Hindus, Druids, Native American and other theistic beliefs are susceptible to the hatred of the theomachist.

I have chronicled the advance of materialism and positivism with my essay about Nicola Tesla. In it we see that a reaction had been building in the West against the influence of Judeo-Christian thinking by a new breed of intellectuals, merchants, and the political class. In "Tesla’s Legacy" I wrote: “The bureaucratic institutions that developed from this rich soup of money, influence, and intellectual horsepower would fill the growing vacuum of authority left in the wake of declining Christian and other religious thought. The materialists of the time were not dummies. Many could see that their moment had come both to continue their studies and to enrich themselves by creating a new order of control and dependency to replace the old ideas of faith and self sufficiency.
Thus the stage was set and one secular prince after another would plunge the planet into the black night of World Wars. The ensuing century of carnage, holocaust, and human deprivation paralleled the rise of positivist science.”

And indeed two World Wars nearly exhausted the West and destroyed the philosophical credibility that came with the rise of materialism. But those in power after the last war were left with a mess. As it was the materialist worldview combined with the amorality of Marxism that caused the destruction of Europe and the erosion of America; blame had to be shifted somewhere else. That somewhere was religion which is now universally charged with every failing in society.

True Hate Speech
There is not enough time to give this subject the ink it deserves. There is material for multiple books yet it is doubtful that a publisher could be found to promote such an effort. Yet it is the unbridled hatred of God that underlies many of the headlines we see today.

I don’t know what the mechanism is that causes an atheist to become a violent hater of God but the two beliefs seem to be closely related. Perhaps frustration breeds aggression for the atheist as he tries to justify his convictions. I will briefly examine two of theomachism’s chief proponents who have cast their shadow over the twentieth and twentieth-first century. The first is a very obvious one who has been given some exposure lately. An icon of the contemporary Left his books form the textbooks on how to destroy the Judeo-Christian society.

In the 1960’s caught in the deadly ideological crosscurrents of the time I read the book Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky (1909-1972).At the time my 19 year old brain was only vaguely aware that Mr. Alinsky was neo-Marxist believing that he was a “radical” which at the time was thought to mean something other than Marxism. I did not know, for instance, that Alinsky (like Mikhail Gorbachev) was thoroughly informed by Antonio Gransci (1891-1937) the most destructive ideologue known.

Gramsci believed that both free enterprise and capitalism grew out of the Western Judeo-Christian worldview that recognized free will as the basis for culture. He reasoned that in order to destroy capitalism and bring on the communist utopia, the institutions of the West must be toppled from within. Infiltrating, corrupting, and eroding Western traditions was his method using tactics that had no boundaries in ethics because atheist socialism/communism recognizes no ethical values except those that further the “Revolution”. Regardless how vulgar and corrupting, Gramsci envisioned his “long march through the institutions” as the Trojan Horse that would embed itself into Western culture and eventually topple it.

Alinsky came along and wrote the code for this program. This Chicago native is a cult hero to many Leftists. In his books he gives detailed plans and rules for those who want to wreck America and bring about a socialist revolution and ultimately utopia freeing society from the boredom, hypocrisy, and toil of liberty. He dodged questions about what school of communism he owed allegiance to but he did adhere to Lenin’s Six Rules for a Communist Organizer: "lie, lie, lie, deny, deny, deny."

Mr. Alinsky dedicated his most famous book Rules For Radicals to Lucifer (Satan). He noted that Lucifer was the “first revolutionary” as I recall. This is from the story he references (KJV) REV 12:7-9 “Now war arose in heaven, Michael and his angels fighting against the dragon; and the dragon and his angels fought, but they were defeated and there was no longer any place for them in heaven. And the great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world - he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him.”

Although Alinsky was an unctuous fool smitten by University of Chicago elites he was clever enough to know that his reference to Lucifer would gain him some points. Knowing that Lucifer represented Babylon also helped him because that was a code to other theomachist that working against God was his ultimate goal and installing the tyranny represented by the metaphor of Babylon sealed his political intentions.

Alinsky and his acolytes are theomachists. It is plain from his writings and his intentions. Those who follow Mr. Alinsky may be naïve but that is the unfortunate lot of the “useful idiot”. Not only is he an atheist and neo-Marxist but he is a devotee of Gramsci. Little more needs to be said to describe him.

Yet there is a sort of perverse integrity with Alinsky. He certainly does not make any excuses for his ideas, plans, or behavior. He is quite open about it.

Occulted Evil
Much more subtle and dangerous is one of the other famous theomachists whose work directly influences the headlines. As Alinsky informs organizations like ACORN even larger groups are under the spell of a Svengali from Europe. This man is known best in intellectual circles but has recently been embraced by the famous currency trader and political gadfly George Soros who believes he is a “messiah” of sorts. Mr. Soros is the founder of the Open Society Foundation named for a famous book by our next person of interest.

The philosopher Karl Popper (1902-1994) was born in Austria and like Marx and Alinsky began life as a Jew and like his fellow atheists quickly abandoned his faith when it became an impediment to his career. As a thinker he came to power after WW II when British socialists were looking for an mouthpiece to explain to the world why they should still inhabit the seats of power in the halls of academia when their socialist/Marxist ideology (ideology: the software that operates society) had nearly destroyed the West.

The Royal Academy elevated Mr. Popper to prominence because he had devised a way to “reform” positivist science and materialism while at the same time rejecting Marxism. This was quite a feat of convoluted intellectual gymnastics.

I don’t have time to refute Popper’s every utterance but thankfully he did not really say much of anything noteworthy or new. He did sort of rephrase the “scientific methodology” by refining a Kantian concept. This was Popper’s famous “falsification” doctrine. Although a close runner up would be his ability to overlook the justification of money and power as a substitute for discovery. But then again Popper knew where his bread was buttered.

In short Popper said that scientific truth must always be “falsifiable” or that as a theory is proposed it can be tested until it can be improved or “falsified”. In other words all knowledge is a work-in-progress; nothing is absolute. The way this works out in practice is: you can stack one lie on top of another and when a lie is undermined and about to be discovered then you simply stack another lie on top of the pile; on and on ad infinitum.

As for Judeo-Christian thought one can quickly see that God and his works are not “falsifiable”, therefore, they are invalid to human knowledge. Only “falsifiable” propositions trend towards truth. In a nutshell: everything is relative.

Popper lived in the bubble of insulation that cushions all fatuous sophists from the real world. Safely ensconced in the British Royal Society and watered thoroughly from the trough of government funding he was able to write and write and write until his ideas seemed to have gravity.

But what his work really did was advance a theomachist agenda to further diminish the Judeo-Christian worldview in favor of a tyranny based on “multi-cultural diversity” whatever that is. Popper rebuked Marx by saying he and his works were basically dealing with historicism (a faith of sorts) and not true science so in a deft stroke of silliness Popper put Marxism and Judeo-Christianity on the same footing as “un-falsifiable” doctrine.

Popper with Alinsky has unleashed a two pronged attack on traditional culture. Alinsky represents atheist Marxism and Popper represents atheist big science. Many of our leaders today espouse one or both ideologies melding them together in a witch’s brew of hate based ideas. Yet you will find nothing about the hatred of God in this administration’s “Hate Speech Laws”.

The War on Free Will
Theomachism was rampant in the Soviet Union and remains the official but rarely articulated policy of Red China. There are those in America and Western Europe who are actively engaged in destroying every vestige of religion in public and private life. They have a legion of followers and a larger horde of useful-idiots. Because their goals are so profane, disgusting, and vile they will rarely show their true colors but the keen observer will have no trouble seeing them if they look closely.

It is possible that the appeal of such beliefs as materialism, positivism, and Science are strongest among people who have over developed reptilian brains. These ideas stress only the senses. Their adherents are concerned with issues that can be measured and directly perceived. They seem obsessed by bodily functions; water, food, stimulation of the senses, and sexual gratification. They have no capacity to understand the vast world that lies beyond the senses, therefore, to them goodness, love, and God have no existence. Ideas that they do not understand are seen as a threat and like the lizard they can only react and destroy the threat.

Marx, Popper, Alinsky, Gramsci, and the rest of this genre are celebrated for their Machiavellian tendencies. They live in a primordial rain forest of ideas where one giant lizard eats another in a perpetual death dance of “falsification”. This is the society they envision for us.

David S. Reif

Bad Cards for Mr. Obama

2009-08-25T20:11:00.011-05:00

As part of a pastime I recently (8/20/09) pulled a three card spread for a glimpse at President Obama’s situation as seen from the perspective of cartomancy. The three card spread is not meant as an in depth analysis it is basically a snapshot or general overview of past, present, and future influences. There is no way to sugar coat the results. These are not good cards for the President.
After a thorough mixing of the cards the first card dealt is the President’s personal card (significator) and it was the Jack of Spades (Knave of Swords) which is placed in the center. To his right I laid a King of Spades (King of Swords) and to his left I pulled the Queen of Clubs (Queen of Wands).
To begin with this is a very dark spread with no red cards showing. Spades are ruled by Mars and Clubs are ruled by Saturn. The Jack is under Jupiter and the King is under Saturn. A bright spot is the Venus aspect of the Queen although that does not show through much due to the heavy Saturn influence. There is a lot of opportunity here even room for explosive growth but it could mean overconfidence and unfortunately; punishment if goals are not met.
Although not the worst Jack I could have dealt; the Jack of Spades (JoS) is not a very strong card. He is a dilettante; a weak and frivolous character prone to deceit. He is enthusiastic but loses interest in a relatively short time.

On his right and looking at him is the King of Spades (KoS) a powerful and demanding patron and protector father-figure that is logical and driven; my guess this is a projection into the present of George Soros. Returning his gaze the JoS must be vigilant.

At his left the Queen of Clubs (QoC) is a dominant ally and demanding female figure which might be the President’s grandmother but is probably his wife, Michelle. The QoC is charming and sociable but will manipulate her way into power. She loves the spotlight and loves luxury but can also be treacherous and untrustworthy; nothing to look forward to.
Shot through with deception, ponderous hidden power, lies, treachery, and court intrigue the JoS is no match for his entourage. He can be a fighter but will ultimately succumb to forces outside his control. The KoS overshadows him and the QoC will manipulate and possibly overthrow him.
The numeric value of this spread is the number “nine”. Not much help here either. Even though 9’s are natural leaders and can be very caring or empathic they tend to bury their own emotions. They feel abandon by one or both of their parents and allow their past to rule their lives, color their attitude, and retard decision making faculties.

As a personal observation; I would not want to live in this man’s house.

David S. Reif

J. C. Watts for President

2009-08-12T20:24:00.015-05:00

Booker T. Washington, the great scholar and statesman born in Virginia, cradle of the American Constitution, suffered from the trials of fortune to become a beacon of leadership. His star cast its light for not only the post-Civil War black population but also the white people who were themselves struggling to overcome the trials of occupation, Reconstruction, and requisition. He sought to bring the various ethnic groups together and rebuild the South and in extension the nation which longed to be whole again.
Dispised by Marxists like W. E. B. Dubois and vilified to this day by leftists Washington is the model and lighthouse of sanity to all Americans of sound mind who seek to continue the traditions of this great culture. J. C. Watts is cast in the same mould as Washington. He is a thoughtful man who is no stranger to action. Like Washington Watts is a unifier and a visionary retaining his identity as a Black man and Christian in an age of materialism, regardless the challenges his adult life brought him.
Now that the people of the United States have broken down an ethnic barrier and elected Barack Hussein Obama as the first Afro-Arab-American President (1) perhaps it is time to look for a more conventional American as the next President. Of course Mr. Obama is an African-American but he is Afro-Arab recalling that some 48% of the African continent is Islamic (462 million people) and about a dozen African countries have ethnic Arab majorities and many more with sizable Arab minority population; Kenya for instance.
Mr. Obama senior, the President’s father, characterized himself as an Arab; rightly so. However, the history of Arab Africa is fraught with conquest, dictatorship, Marxism, the Arab slave trade, ethnic cleansing, and Baathism. None of those traditions seem compatible with American politics or institutions. So Mr. Obama is a good example of black Afro-Arab ancestry but is in no way representative of the American Black population which is overwhelmingly Christian. In fact, except to father children and attend an elite university Mr. Obama sr spent little time in the United States preferring to return to Kenya to pursue a career in politics.
The reality that President Obama is an Afro-Arab does not diminish his historic role in American history. It only underscores the tolerance and openness of the majority population of the United States. Unfortunately, our President has a very thin resume when it comes to the American experience.
Attending expensive private schools both here and abroad, spending time traveling to Islamic countries, hobnobbing with the Brahmans at Harvard, cavorting with the Lexus liberals at the University of Chicago, and working for the Richie Daley political machine hardly makes President Obama an expert on what most Americans of any color call real life. Like his good friend Professor Gates of Harvard the President is also an ideological descendant of Dubois; not really a mainstream thinker in our history.
Compare that to the life and origins of J. C. Watts: Julius “J C” Watts of Oklahoma. Mr. Watts was born on November 18, 1957 in Eufaula, Oklahoma on the banks of the Canadian River in McIntosh County deep in the heart of the old Indian Territory. He distinguished himself at the University of Oklahoma graduating with a degree in journalism as well as being a celebrated athelete. He is a Babtist minister and ran for public office and became the Congressman from the 4th Congressional District. He served in many capacities in the Congress all with very high marks then steped down to become a successful businessman(2).
Noting just in that brief biography he has much more experience in the American venue than does the current President. Yet there is another very important distinction. J. C. Watts is not a socialist, neo-Marxist, or Marxist. Does not revere or cowtow to the memory of communists like the Harvard educated DuBois or any of the other self appointed “Black leadership” that does. Like other traditional Christians Mr. Watts has always been an opponant of Marxism and materialism in all forms.
Instead Mr. Watts is cast from a deeply American mould. He understands the ups and downs of culture as it morphs from one form to another. Yet he is anchored in the rich tradition that has percolated up from the ruins of the South steeped in suffering and unbowed by the extremes of circumstances. The light that illuminates Mr. Watts is the brilliance of Booker T. Washington and the culture that informed him.
Mr. Watts commands genuine respect from all who have been associated with him because his integrity has come from his life experience. He is not the made-up concoction of foreign gadfly billionairs and left wing spin machines. He is the real thing; muscle, blood, and brains all tested in reality not focus groups.
Watts is African-American but he is not interested in the DuBois faction of leftists who actively promoted Pan-African Marxism an activity that made DuBois’ birthday a celebrated Marxist holiday (3). To the contrary Mr. Watts would rather celebrate Christmas and the 4th of July.
The chasm between the various people of color in our country is in large measure manufactured to profit the contemporary Democrat party. If we are to bring an end to this terrible system we need a leader who is able to stand above the rhetoric while keeping his feet firmly planted in American history and its multi-ethnic makeup. Someone who knows government, is authentically grounded in our heritage, understands the language of business, and has the moral character to reach across all the artificial fissures and bring people into a confederation of liberty and equality.
Mr. Watts is a legitimate Christian not a disciple of Francis Bellemy’s “Christian socialism” the precursor to “Black Liberation Theology”. He is a man created in the blast furnace of American Culture which spawns tough minded steet wise independent thinkers instead of canned Ivy League pousers. Mr. Watts represents a Black America that is tough and agile and smart and can fend for themselves when necessary; traits of the best Americans.
Some people in Oklahoma would like to see him in the Governor’s mansion and Watts would make a good leader and the people of his state would be proud to have him. But he needs to play on a bigger stage so the true character of this man can light our way in this turbulent time. J. C. Watts needs to be the next President of the United States of America.

David S. Reif

Haunting the Ozarks

2009-07-19T09:43:00.013-05:00

Among the other things the Ozark Mountains of Missouri are famous for is a haunted atmosphere that pervades the hills, hollers, and crags. I have heard tales about ghosts, spirits, and haints told by average people in the most matter-of-fact ways.

Spirits or ghost are sometimes called “haints” as in “…haint really people and haint really ghosts”; in other words something else, something beyond description. I’ve also heard an even more macabre definition, “…haint alive and haint dead” something truly unfathomable for the modern rational mind.
The really odd thing about haints is that I have heard people talk about these entities that were seen in the woods. No, no, not in a haunted mansion, shed, or house not an old insane asylum or prison but in the woods.

For sure the Ozarks are a strange place anyway. “Stretching from St. Louis, MO to McAlester, OK and about 150 miles or so either side of that line is area of hills, ridges, small mountains, and general rough country”, that was a very old description I read in a copy of a journal entry from the 19th century and still good today. It is a sort of an odd kidney shaped region mirroring an ancient Balkan kingdom like Transylvania.

A cartographer in the 1950’s actually made a map of the Ozark region. It depicted the Ozark-Ouachita plateau as one contiguous region just the way people have seen it for centuries rather than the reductionist segmented, St. Francis Mt., Salem Uplift, Boston Mt., Ouachita, Mt., Osage Highlands, blah, blah conglomerate that one sees on Internet search engines.

Yet it is the Missouri Ozarks and just the northernmost part of the Arkansas Ozarks that the tales of spooks and haints really abound. For many years I pondered, “Why would that be?” What is so different about our Missouri Ozarks that makes them so haunted and foreboding?

In my reading I have not seen any spooky references to the Ozarks by American Indian accounts. No tribe really “owned” the Ozarks but several drifted through staying awhile and moving on with the seasons; something like tourists today. Some reports even spoke of the Ozarks as a spiritual place full of springs and streams inhabited generally by positive energy.

Indeed the Ozarks are full of magical places. I think there are more caves and springs and other portals to the underground in the Ozarks than anywhere else in North America. Because of the mysterious geology with soft limestone and spongy sandstone rubbing against some of the hardest god awful flint rock and cherts imaginable one is confronted with an installed conundrum. This makes the Ozarks in many places seem dry and craggy while a stone’s throw away is a lush spring with ephemeral plants that appear and disappear in the blink of an eye; God’s magic abounds everywhere.

But what about the ghostly haints; the strange sensations that one encounters while deep in the Ozark woods. The rustling, the weeds parting in front of you and then in the flash of a perception you “see” a Gila monster or a scaly anteater for the fraction of a second; but it’s not really there, or was it? More than once I have been left puzzled and shaken by the encounter with the impossible.

Then there is the energy. Energy is such an overused term. Good energy, bad energy, green energy, positive, negative, on and on the adjectives go in a dizzying confusion. But there is something that seeps out of the cracked, crunched, fissured, sink-hole filled landscape; call it energy if you like. One can almost smell it, almost see it but it is just at the edge of the senses so the brain can just barely touch this mysterious stuff oozing out of the earth.

Please don’t scoff gentle reader at the rambling of this writer. Just south of Joplin, Missouri is the famous “Ozark spook lights”. Sometimes globs, or bands, or shafts of light bubble up from the ground a phenomenon that has been seen by thousands over the years. No less than the US military has conducted “hush-hush” experiments in the area concluding that the whole thing was “anomalous”. Yet at times the frequency of the Ozark energy seems to slow down beneath the speed of light and manifest as bright balls or globs that are perceivable to the human eye. That’s what I think.

Some feel that the mystical properties of the Ozarks can be exploited for the good of Mankind and harnessed to cure the sick; clinics abound in the hills and hollers. With all the spiritual new age theorizing about spectrums of healing and “good vibrations” there is still the old tales about haints and oddly dressed people trudging through the woods, weeds, and fields of the Missouri Ozarks. What about them?

Beyond the spectrum suite of psychic healing is a cold reality buried in shallow graves and pits all across our Ozarks. No less tortured than the hills and castles of Transylvania is an occulted history concealed there in the leafy thatch and pungent musk of the rocky ground.

In the music and video of the song Caney Mountain by the indie southern-rock group Ha Ha Tonka there is a gut level understanding of the spirit haints and the haunting of people and their history here in the Ozarks. These are gifted musicians who have tuned into something that is beyond the senses painting a picture of the invisible.

In their new offering they use the deep spooky tortured abstractions gleaned from the earth around their Ozark home to paint another moody masterpiece titled, Novel Sounds from the Nouveau South. I’m not sure that they have a cognitive sense of what took place here. I don’t know if they have experienced the haints in the woods or know the dark history of the Ozarks but they sure do feel it.

Around 1860 Missouri became a killing field. First came waves of invaders from New England, based in Kansas the Jayhawkers murdered their way into Missouri. Then from Hessia, Westphalia, and Prussia came the 48er’s; Marxist murderers and thugs kicked out of Europe after the failed Revolution of 1848. After them came outsiders and pillagers and rapists and plunders and murderous demons from wherever they could be mustered to subdue the proud people along the Kansas border, in the Ozarks, and throughout the rest of the state. Historian Donald Gilmore does a good job describing it in his book Civil War on the Missouri-Kansas Border.

It took about 15 years to finish the war and then mop up all those who refused to surrender. There was little of no law; military or otherwise. The killing was relentless and for the most part unbridled. The actual toll in lives lost will never be known. The carnage is examined in Canadian author Michael Fellman’s book, Inside War as he takes a stab at it from a Northern perspective while Don Gilmore tries to set the record straight as does Paul Petersen with his work about Quantrill.

Another book, The Burning by Richard Sunderwirth is a personal homespun look at evil and the state sponsored terrorism that occurred at Osceola, Missouri. The murder of civilians by invading troops from the North is unfathomable, uncountable, simply beyond understanding: I know I’ve tried.

Once the sun has set on a day it is history and fodder for debate. It can be then twisted and turned to suit the victors and the establishment. But the truth is still there in the hearts of the descendants and tangled up in the myriad energies of time and space. When scholars argue over “facts” it falls to the poet to find truth through intuition or far-sight or vision or whatever that faculty might be called that “sees” what is unseen.

So here in the Ozarks of Missouri and its immediate environs where the deadly death dance of unbridled warfare stepped to the fiddle of the Devil and his blue demons only the haints those ragged ghosts lurking in the woods and God know the truth. The haints cannot speak in the tongue of modern man so it is through the fog of time that they come forward and leave their impressions on the minds of those sensitive enough to feel the cries from the mortally wounded, tortured, and murdered.

I believe the haunting of the Ozarks is man-made. The gentle spirits that inhabit the springs and the bluffs and caves have been disturbed by the brutality of power and politics. Displaced by the forces of modernism and its material cousins the plight of those kindly nymphs and fairies is told by Edgar Allen Poe in “Sonnet-to Science”; although not about the Ozarks the poem is about the same subject.

These sensations we feel are imperfectly read by our meager facilities so their expression is in symbols and metaphor. Fleeting glimpses of another reality and time that have the power to move, influence, and cajole the sensitive and stir them to express themselves in a unique way.

Taking cues from the dead and angels that speak for them people try to convey a glimpse describing it as a ghost or haint or whatever fills out this vague impression one might feel. In the quiet nights deep in the forest or on the rock-strewn savanna the whispers in the wind and the rustle of things unknown evoke a haunting that cannot be silenced. -David S. Reif

CreditsCover illustration; photograph, A. Ann Reif, 2003

1406 Moonlanding Drive Part II

2009-06-15T19:23:00.007-05:00

Introduction

I already posted Part I of 1406 Moonlanding Drive which can be read at: Moon Landing One. The following is the second part of this comprehensive work. In 1991 with the help of Institute for Perennial Studies co-founder, Carl Klemaier, we wrote an essay that attempted to explain some of the lessons we had learned about modernism using concrete examples drawn from society. The result was the following piece which is a combination of taped conversations sewn together with commentary.
In Part I we tried to provide some context by using a brief look at the “planned obsolescence” of post WW-II America as an introduction to a broader look at cultural history. Exploring the hype associated with the products that filled out the modernist’s pantheon we set the stage for and expanded critique of a weltanschauung that has given us the junk-pile as metaphor for the modern world.
By including political history in Part II we use the perennialist view to analyze liberal and conservative showing their complicity and cooperation. Interestingly we threw down a challenge to contemporary conservatives of 1991 to live up to their historical rhetoric and today we see that up to now they have failed. We also pointed out the role of environmentalism in politics and cautioned that it could be co-opted by neo-Marxism; foreshadowing the Green Party and its spin-offs. In fact the failure of the conservative movement to acknowledge the “deep conservatism” manifested by a significant segment of the so-called “60’s revolution” is exactly why the Republican Party is in turmoil today; namely the inability to pick through media driven accounts of the sexual libertine exploits by some and the underlying spiritual longings of the majority.
One can draw a close parallel between the rebellious conservatism of the 1960’s spawned by Barry Goldwater and the Ron Paul faction of the Republican Party. Furthermore, the rejection of the Paul bloc today is a continuation of policy by statists within the Republican Party to preserve scientific secular modernism as the official view of the Party. Yet both Parties cling to the National Security Act of 1947 as their unofficial manifesto which absolves government from responsibility in the name of self preservation for the State; a masterpiece of secular scholarship.
As the feast of consumerism draws to an end in America fueled by the spoils of WW II squandered on the national security state, a sort of hangover of self loathing has set in. While economic elites bail out and set sail for the Orient the average citizen of the United States is left to clean up the revelry as best we can. With Asian materialism on one horizon and Islam on the other, America must find a way to survive. Although perennialism is not necessarily limited to any particular religion it is the Christian perennialist like the so-called Southern Agrarians and others,
http://dsreif.blogspot.com/2008/12/southern-agrarians-or-southern.html, that needs to be studied to find answers to this dangerous predicament. -DSR-

1406 Moonlanding Drive Part II
A Meditation on the Decline of Materialism
Carl Klemaier and David S. Reif (June 1991)

“Progress is our most important product”. General Electric Slogan
“Better Living through chemistry.” Dow Chemical Company Slogan

Carl Klemaier: “The story of modernism is an expression of these slogans. As I grew up in the 1950’s these slogans became as familiar to me as the prayers I was learning in Catholic school. And like prayers, those slogans became the cornerstone of my hope in a better world, both here and hereafter. In this world progress would bring the worldly equivalent to heaven—heaven on earth. Anything newer and faster, brighter and shinier, like aluminum, brought us closer to the heaven at the end of history, just as each bead of the rosary brought us closer to the heaven at the end of life. And just as the priest mediated between God and I, so did the scientist, ‘Dr. Science’, would carry out the earthly ceremonies of progress.”

Underlying Dr. Science was a secular ideology based on a belief that humans need not have limits and by using the right method, the scientific method, the world could be transformed. This came to mean that whatever scientists could do, usually for the military, the corporations, or the State, they should do.
This secular ideology, termed, ‘modernism’, was the result of a 200 year erosion of traditional values caused by the rise of the cult of positivism and the industrial revolution. These two factors caused extreme change in Europe. It was a time of fortunes being made by the new rich, and old institutions being eclipsed, and rural populations being uprooted as they struggled in the overpopulated industrial cities.
The new religion of science as described by French philosopher Auguste Comte (3), having obtained a foothold, now began to evolve a bureaucracy funded by those who benefited from the changing world. Lewis Mumford, in his book, The Myth of the Machine, puts it this way: “the new scientific philosophy took over…As mechanical power increased and as scientific theory itself, through further experimental verification, became more adequate, the new method enlarged its domain…Those who created the mechanical world picture foresaw many actual inventions and discoveries, and were passionately eager to bring them about; but they could not even speculatively, anticipate the dismaying social outcomes of their efforts.”

CK: “As the 1960’s began with Kennedy’s optimism, the space program, and the Peace Corps, the promises seemed justified. In the intellectual circles there was even a debate that the need for ideology (fundamental assumptions about what life is about) had come to an end. Those who believed this felt that as a society the United States had, or was well on its way to achieving, the society at the end of history. Republicans and Democrats really had nothing to argue about, given the affluence of post WW II society.”
“But as nuclear weapons multiplied, and assassinations erupted, and Vietnam became fouled by napalm burning the flesh of children, a growing sense began to emerge that something was fundamentally wrong. I began to doubt the presuppositions with which I was raised.”

A critique began to surface, issuing forth from the anti-war/counterculture movement. While at the time, opponents labeled them “leftists” because they were questioning, sometimes aggressively, the political, economic, educational and social foundations of the country. In reality, however, at their root these movements were perennialist (deeply conservative) in their motivation.
Michael Novak, writing in 1968, hinted at this radical conservatism when discussing young people. “One would have thought, a few years ago, that the age of ideology was at an end. But now young people have discovered that pragmatism, too, has the characteristics and effects of an ideology. They have observed in particular, its low resistance to a new toughened strain of tyranny. Technological progress, they recognize, demands stability and unity over periods of time log enough to bring plans and projections to fulfillment; it depends upon control over natural resources, industrial facilities, future human desires, and conditions. Any government dedicated to the use of advanced technology finds it in the national interest to produce and enforce stability on a worldwide scale…”(4) The political movements of the 1960’s saw militant corporate capitalism, Communism, and fascism as bureaucratic tyranny set upon world domination. The Cold War was a battle not between ideologies, but between materialistic worldviews set on dominating people and manipulating nature.
The “deep conservative” movement was an expression of a profound alienation created by a change of emphasis from a healthy individualism to the grandiose egotism of the post-WWII super-power state. The “self” became a prison of loneliness. Michael Novak comments on the worldview that led to this impasse. He continues, “The radicals recognized that the rugged individualism of Ayn Rand, the inner directed personality imagined by David Riesman, and the natural, atomic individual imagined by John Stuart Mill and the English empirical tradition are now viable models of human behavior.” Unfortunately, this model was full of unintended consequences not the least of which was individual feasting on the spoils from the recent World War.
The perennialist movement was interested in interconnection and “whole systems” more than atomistic individualism; a conservatism rooted in the deep past of Pythagoras and Siddhartha Gautama rather than new comers like Hobbes and Rand. The hippies were interested in communes but not Communism. They were interested in connections of people to the land, as naïve as that might have seemed. As a line in the song “Woodstock” states’ “I want to get back to the land and set my soul free”. Longing for meaning in a consumer driven, junk product world was the underlying message here.
This “deep conservative” emphasis on the interconnection between community, family, people, land, God, and values cuts across contemporary ideological lines in such a way as to nearly rend them completely. In the 1980’s, the family and spiritual issues of the Republican Right come from the same piece as cloth of the ecological and “mother earth” agenda. They both stress the connection of ideology and non-measurable, intangible values based in spiritual wisdom…and area inaccessible to positivist science and technology. Unfortunately, this potential cross-pollination has already been recognized as a battleground by the avant-garde of the Left in the disguise of the so-called “greens” lurking on the fringe of European politics. Whether the Republican Right is up to the challenge is an open question.
Regarding the notion of interconnection philosopher, David Fideler, states it best when he comments on interconnection in a classical sense. “Pythagoras correctly observed that all things are linked together proportionately, by justice, harmony----call it what you will. By cultivating an awareness of harmonic forming principles and working within the bounds set by necessity, Mankind possesses the potential to become a sacred steward of the earth and a co-creator with nature; but the inevitable corollary is that humanity also has every power to create and inhabit a hell of its own making. The simple fact remains that the scales of justice are inexorable---it is a principle of nature, and not merely of human morals, that each should receive his due. If we poison our rivers, we poison ourselves; if we act in stupidity, it is only appropriate that we suffer the consequences. If there is a moral to the story, it is simply that individuals and societies are far less likely to run into trouble should they posses an awareness of these principles and relationships. And if one would like to cultivate the innate human ability to see things as they are, in whole-part relations, there is scarcely a better guide than the Pythagorean sciences.”(5) In other words “the wisdom of the ages”.
Today conservatism is supposed to be on the rise and liberalism is a dirty word. In reality, there is little difference. Pragmatic secularism or modernism, carried out by scientific, corporate, and State bureaucracies are still telling us that progress is ‘new and shiny products’ that are in reality designed to turn into junk, developed by chemists and computer programmers working for the same entities. Liberals and conservatives are locked into a positivist paradigm. They are equal in their wholehearted support of the unexamined concept of Progress.
Modernism, then, becomes a wholesale assault on the old worldview of interconnection between Man, God, and values; the ultimate in whole systems. The desire to “conserve” what is old and longing for “renewal” through the perennial wisdom become the targets of technology and positivist science. Given this situation the question arises: Can the various peoples of the world hold onto their traditions and the worldviews that underlie them in the face of the secular modernist attack carried on in the name of progress?
The assault on tradition is obviously an expression of great arrogance. Drawings from the Bible and other timeless books true conservatives have questioned human pride. This includes the creation of vast schemes that call for comprehensive planning which are favored by leftists but have also tantalized conservatives who have come under the spell of the modern age.
Russell Kirk, in his classic study of American conservatism, The Conservative Mind, lists six fundamentals of conservatism. 1. Belief in a transcendent order or body of natural law which rules society as well as conscience. 2. Affection for the variety and mystery of human existence…a sense that life is worth living. 3. A conviction that civilized society requires orders and classes against the notion of classless society. 4. The belief that freedom and property are closely linked…Economic leveling is not economic progress. 5. The belief that custom and convention are checks upon man’s anarchic impulse and upon the innovators’ lust for power; a distrust of sophists and economists who would reconstruct society upon abstract designs. 6. The recognition that change may be a devouring conflagration, rather than a torch of progress.
Yet, this no longer acts as a model for conservatism. It is nearly its antithesis in the light of recent history. The “devouring conflagration” of innovation from aluminum tumblers and “trailer houses” that are designed to crumble, through junk bonds and the Pentagon’s “Star-War” schemes are now the banner of both conservative and liberal.
Saving tradition may not be bringing back high button shoes, whalebone corsets, and rigid religious orthodoxy. However, it does mean reviving a traditional worldview that emphasizes whole systems to operate culture and individual freedom to operate society; a true pluralism where nations instead of ideologies rule people.
Breaking with the recent past of technological “progress” and industrialized productivity may cause panic in the faint hearted. Yet continuing the dizzying ascent to scientific heaven, with only second-hand military technology, medical experimentation, and 19th century resource exploitation as the foundations of modernism to guide us, seems far more frightening than a re-examination of a perennial wisdom to see us through a transition to sanity.
The hype driven economics and philosophy that moves our worldview are based on a Western idealism gone mad. Morris Berman states it well when he writes, “Scientific consciousness is alienated consciousness: there is no ecstatic merge with nature, but rather total separation from it. Subject and object are always seen in opposition to each other. I am not my experiences, and thus not really a part of the world around me. The logical end point of this worldview is a feeling of total reification everything is an object, alien, not-me; and I am ultimately an object too, an alienated ‘thing’ in a world of other equally meaningless things. This world is not of my own making; the cosmos cares nothing for me; and I do not really feel a sense of belonging to it. What I feel, in fact, is a sickness in the soul.”
“Translated into everyday life, what does this disenchantment mean? It means that the modern landscape has become a scenario of ‘mass administration and blatant violence’, a state of affairs now clearly perceived by the man in the street. The alienation and futility that characterized the perceptions of a handful of intellectuals at the beginning of the century have come to characterize the consciousness of the common man at its end. Jobs are stupefying, relationships vapid and transient, the arena of politics absurd. In the vacuum created by the collapse of traditional values, we have hysterical evangelical revivals, mass conversions to the Church of Reverend Moon, and a general retreat into the oblivion provided by drugs, television, and tranquilizers. We also have a desperate search for therapy, by now a national obsession, as millions of Americans try to reconstruct their lives amidst a pervasive feeling of anomie and cultural disintegration. An age in which depression is a norm is a grim one indeed.” (6)
Few can argue with this position. The linkage between scientific pragmatism and politics is manifested in its by-products. We see the outcome in Big Science bureaucracies; consumer junk piling up on landfills; and moldering “trailer houses”, cars, and refrigerators decaying in the countryside. These combine with the larger issues of toxic waste, plutocracy, weapons of mass destruction, ecological degradation, and an alienated culture which produces dependent poorly adjusted people.
Given this, then the mobile home, with its grid coordinate address on a street named after a technological accomplishment, decaying after its short lifetime of use becomes a metaphor for much of our lives---lives which make us begin to wonder what happened to the future we long to remember.

3) Auguste Comte—(1798-1857), French philosopher who founded positivism and believed that the final stag in the evolution of human thought was when science discovered “positive truth” through observation. He believed in the “religion of science” with himself and other scientists as the priesthood for this cult.

4) The End of Ideology Debate, ed. Chaiml Waxman, (Simon and Schuster 1968), pp. 389-397.

5) Pythagorean Sourcebook and Library, ed. David Fideler, (Phanes Press 1987), p. 45.

6) The Re-Enchantment of the World, Morris Berman, (Bantam Press1984, p.3.

1406 Moonlanding Drive (Part I)

2009-06-07T18:23:00.015-05:00

Introduction

The effects of modern materialism have been more than evident but only lightly scrutinized for several decades now. An out of control science bureaucracy linked with out of control government both being lead by destructive secular motives was the sad impulses driving the dark and murderous twentieth century. This subject was discussed in the essay Tesla’s Legacy: http://dsreif.blogspot.com/2009_03_01_archive.html , however, I thought it important to look at the precursors to that piece.
In 1991 with the help of Institute for Perennial Studies co-founder, Carl Klemaier, we wrote an essay that attempted to explain some of the lessons we had learned about modernism using concrete examples drawn from society. The result was the following piece which is a combination of taped conversations sewn together with commentary. Almost no one was working in this area so what we were doing was verboten within our materialist culture in those days. Attempts to publish this and other similar essays were met with comments like “too daunting” and “the results of negative speculations”. These attitudes are changed somewhat as the veil is lifting on the agenda of global materialism and secular tyranny that is now making its way into the popular consciousness.

As "planned obsolescence" and other modernist catechisms have played out the views we expressed are more evident today. Linking the National Security State with culture was not considered then but today that statist plan has borne bitter fruit as it has poisoned a society from within.
What follows is part one of a two part project. It was written before it could be digitally stored so I am transcribing it from paper text into a word processor format as time allows.

1406 Moonlanding Drive (Part I)
A Meditation on the Decline of Materialism
by Carl Klemaier and David S. Reif (June 1991)

“The Science of today is the technology of tomorrow” Edward Teller

David S. Reif: “When I was young I remember the first time I knew what aluminum felt like. It was dull, gray, and light weight. School science books and magazines (c. 1960) that I read all proclaimed that this was the metal of the future to replace everything from wood to steel. It was to be a veritable revolution in the way we were going to live.”
“The marvelous light weight stuff was omnipresent in the days of the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. You cooked with it. Your knife and fork could be made of it. There were those crazy anodized tumblers in bright candy-colors: some were a sort of purple, others blue, gold, and green: strange colors like Christmas ornaments. It seemed everyone had them. They were awful! They sweated; ice melted fast; and when you got your teeth against them you got a kind of funny ‘shock’ or something unnerving like that. And the creepiest attribute: you could taste them.”
“Some people had dishes made of it. Many had serving pieces made from the stuff. Mass produced lazy-Susans, trays, and bowls with elaborate Victorian designs “etched” into them that I suppose were to make us think of “depression glass” patterns or other classic designs. They were ubiquitous and hideous. Cold food got warm in them and hot food got tepid. They had a funny “scum” on them all the time and they ‘tasted’.”
“We were told by the Dr. Science of the time that aluminum was inert, wouldn’t rust or tarnish, was safe as ceramic to eat off of, and of course---tasteless. I knew better, even then. I liked the colored tumblers but only to look at. Most people got rid of the awful stuff as soon as they had enough money to replace it or the person who had given it to them went to their final rest and the offending tray didn’t have to be trotted out every time they came over for dinner.”

Aluminum was supposed to be the “miracle metal” of the modern world. Although it was first extracted by electrolysis in 1866 by Charles Hall, it was not until the 1920’s and ‘30’s that aluminum was hailed as a technological panacea. Lightweight, cheap, and plentiful, it seemed the perfect metal to carry out the dream of the modernist architect and planner.
World War II was a great booster for the fortunes of aluminum as well as other “modern” materials. The ordnance, airplane, and electronics industries demanded new designs to keep up in the deadly game of killing. Non-ferrous metals, plastics, and precision castings were developed in earnest by all sides of the conflict, accelerating the process started in WWI which mechanized warfare. Now war was industrialized.
In that process, new materials and methods were devised for the lethal business of warfare. “Big Science” and high tech are particularly suited for this type of production because of the reductionist component that tends to turn a blind eye to the human costs involved concentrating instead on technological priorities. But with the end of the war, a market had to be devised for all the deadly processes invented for killing. These methods now had to be adapted to a peace time economy.
Of course, this is where advertising comes in to move the modernist(1) agenda along. Huge sums had been invested into the war making process and great effort had been expended developing a new world of products and materials. Now they had to be packaged and moved through the civilian economy. The “old” had to go and make way for the “new”.

DSR: “New and shiny; that pretty much sums it up. Whatever is new and essentially unused is the best. Whatever is old is, well, old and close to being obsolete or at least on its way to the trash heap. “New” the universal buzz-word of modernism would become ever-present. ‘Modern’, ‘Space-Age’, and ‘High Tech’ are essentially labels for the same thing. The marketing people are just doing their job: creating demand…and by using various “tags” they can repackage the message of the post-WWII era over and over using the formula devised earlier in the twentieth century. That new is better than old and if we want to keep up and not be left out of the action we, “…need to get with the program” a popular expression from the 1970’s."
"The era of the Cold War had begun ushering in a new and deadlier round of weapons research and development, inevitably spawning new product spin-offs to astound and amaze the world. In effect government spending on weapons and space drove the economy and eventually the culture.”
“The photograph “1406 Moonlanding Drive” is a detail of a mobile home or as we say in the Ozarks a ‘trailer-house’. It looks like an early 1970’s model of the American Dream, the single family dwelling. When it was built it was really new and shiny on the sales lot where it was displayed. Bright colored pennants merrily flapping in the breeze and a big sign announcing what a bargain this little baby was greeted potential customers.”
“It was the latest in aluminum and baked enamel steel construction with all paneled and plastic interior, ventilator windows set in aluminum E-Z care no paint frames, and put together with the latest tech-screw fasteners. It was, in short, a marvel of modern technology. Cheap affordable housing for the newly wed, the retired, and the low income customer; it was built to withstand the elements, resist the ravages of time, and hold its value for the lucky new owner of this fine example of American technical know-how.”
“In the era of the Gemini Project, the Moonwalk and push-button warfare, this edifice stood as a shiny new example of how military research and all that space program technology could be brought down to earth and harnessed for the use of the ordinary citizen.”

It is now about 20 years later. The dream home has seen some history. Viet Nam has collapsed. Nixon is driven from office. The flower-children are gone. The standing of the United States in the world is now openly debated. The single-bread-winner-family is starting to look like a quaint story about better days.
The price of aluminum has skyrocketed and almost everywhere there are people walking along the roadsides of our country collecting beer cans, storm window sashes, wire, and other flotsam to “recycle” for the good of the environment. Or are these people really trying to subsist by picking up the scattered garbage of others and take it to the scrap yard for cash.
Either way it all revolves around the “miracle metal” aluminum; making it from ore is many times more expensive that beer can aluminum. It takes an enormous amount of electricity to convert bauxite (aluminum ore) into metal. There are waste products from smelting that are not easily gotten rid of and there is pollution. The electricity comes from generating plants fired with coal which is said to pollute the atmosphere. Or it comes from oil and gas fired generators or nuclear power plants. Oil and gas needed for transportation are used to electrolyze bauxite into aluminum. Atomic power plants are heavily subsidized by tax dollars but none of these costs are factored into the price of the “miracle metal”.
Sometimes electricity to extract aluminum comes from hydropower plants which have been built to fuel the needs of the industry. They dam our rivers, flooding cropland and displace farmers so they can join the urban work force and become potential customers for mobile homes.
In the not too distant past, homes and commercial buildings were built by craftsmen to last and last. The structures had a spiritual quality because they were constructed with time honored methods in geometric arrays whose origins were functional, aesthetic, and spiritual, recalling Pythagorean principles or the mystical relations that exist in the archway, the perfect circle, or the ratios of a rectangle. Materials were durable and earthy. Stone, brick, hewn beams, and wrought iron came together under the hands of skilled people to bring forth beauty and function: form following essence.
Structures lasted hundreds of years and were populated and re-populated by on family after another. When there was need of temporary buildings, the “trailer-houses” of the past were made with materials that were abundant and easily available, and could be repaired readily. The American Indians had thousands of such dwellings” lodges, tepees, wikiups, hogans, and other temporary homes that were made from natural materials that did little to harm the earth.
Even if people needed to live in these structures for extended periods, they could be repaired as needed with common materials. Their design was in tune with tradition and spiritual sensibilities of time and place.
Dr. Science tells us to wait, things will get better. There will be new building materials that will last forever. Plastics in every color of the rainbow and metals that never rust or tarnish. Homes of the future, clothes, and other possessions will be beautiful and hold their value indefinitely; tools and utensils will never wear out.
The people on Moonlanding Drive have heard all about progress before. But today things are broken, the doorknob will no longer work; the precision casting in its interior no longer accepts the aluminum key to fit it. The baked enamel steel siding is dirty beyond cleaning; it is peeling in places and rust has invaded the cracks. The high-tech fasteners are corroding, coming loose, and no longer hold properly; the roof is leaking. Repair is difficult for people without space-age technology; aluminum is hard to weld requiring specialized equipment. Fasteners once tightened are not meant to be replaced; precision castings are not designed to be fixed.
Try to tell the people on Moonlanding Drive that the promises of a worldview based on positivist(2) science and modernism will work. They may listen and hope and without an alternative, they will try to believe, but it is getting harder. For many “shiny and new” is a cynical memory. No more credible than the latest hype on the TV for a flimsy Veg-a-Matic or shiny and new faux-pearl jewelry that is worthless before it arrives in the mail.

Footnotes:
1) Modernist-Someone who adheres to the creed of modernism which is an uncritical belief in “progress”. A view that believes whatever is “new” is intrinsically superior to what it replaces.

2) Positivist-One who believes in positivism; a belief in those things that have a quantity, believing only in things that can be measured. It is the basis for “science”.

In the next installment Carl Klemaier and I discuss more of the issues concerning people living on Moonlanding Drive. It can be read at: Moon Landing Two

Illustration: Black and white photograph entitled, “1406 Moonlanding Drive”, 1990, by the author, taken with Nikon N-2000 35mm camera using Kodak Plus-X film.

Pastor Harris

2009-04-12T19:19:00.016-05:00

On this Easter 2009 it is well to look at the legacy of Jesus the Christ who has risen on this day. Since that date over 2000 years ago a parade of ideas, books, and art has issued forth from the words of Christ. His teaching and those of the Jewish fathers before Him have formed the worldview or in contemporary terms the software that operates the Western world and indeed defines the West as a cultural entity.

As we have discussed on Perennis that this proposition, this great idea that runs our culture is under a purposeful attack. The soul of the Western world was ripped apart in the twentieth century, perhaps the darkest age to ever visit itself on Mankind. Mirroring the rise of materialism so has the decline of the West come upon us. This process was outlined on Perennis last time:
http://dsreif.blogspot.com/2009/03/teslas-legacy.html

In tandem with the rise of materialism is the decline in influence of the Christian worldview. There is no shortage of opinions about this matter, it is in fact “pundit-chow” for the cynics in the chattering class. Nevertheless, I have found a source for a more immediate and heartfelt observation regarding this phenomena.

The following two poems are by Pastor Kenneth Harris. He is discussing the role of the institutions of Christendom the primary one being the churches spawned by the teachings of Jesus. These are melancholy sermons. On the one hand he is showing his love for religion because he cares enough to fight for it yet and on the other he is trying to awaken the institutions which are the vehicle of the Teaching.

Pastor Harris is a black man who was born in Louisiana, raised by a minister and his wife in small churches up and down the Mississippi valley, experienced the world at its rawest level, pastored in the very worst sections of the inner city, is afflicted with diabetes, and presently lives in a V.A. critical care facility in California.

For a time he was a prominent Black Muslim but escaped to return to his Christian roots. One day several years ago I asked him about leaving the Nation of Islam. He told me that he could take the racism, “back then I hated white people”, but he could not stand the constant barrage of anti-Christian rhetoric. When he left he said, “…they ran me out of town”. On the run from the Black Muslims, out of work, in a strange town, he was given a chef job by a white Christian family. “I will never forget that” he told me. Such is the power of Christ as He continues to work real miracles in the world we live in.

Harris can be considered a true Christian mystic. Seeking union with God he does not abandon the material world nor does he want to be dissolved into a vast nothingness as a Theravada Buddhist aspires to in classic Eastern mystic tradition. His mysticism is rooted in Scripture and experience and suffering. His poems are an admonishment to not a condemnation of the Church he has pledged his life to.

Religion: The Image of Christianity

Christianity is to Religion as the sun is to the moon
or a glistening pond that attracts the beautiful
migrating loon.

Christianity is to Religion like an invisible breeze,
that moves the wind chime in a myriad of melodies.

Christianity is to Religion as music is to dance,
capturing the singularization of the universe
in a graceful prance.

Christianity vs. Churchianity: Cloning Christianity
(the evil of Chruchianity)
Part I
Christianity is not a religion,
those who believe that are far off course,
like the analogy of the cart,
placed in front of the preverbal horse.

This is the reason the world’s religions
are ruled by the Dark Force,
through the transference of Divine power
into a carnal source.
But the height of this insanity,
is to think you can replace Christ,
with “Churchianity”,
for all the aggression against humanity
was carried out by the church not Christianity.

Part II
Lets examine the temptation of Christ,
Satan’s attempt to reduce Christianity to a vice,
had he succeeded there would be no eternal life.

Follow me as the spirit gives insight in Revelations 11:4
there’s two trees of light
like the sun and moon they are both bright
But the moon is an illusion,
it simply reflect solar fusion;
like the moon Religion has no light.

So no matter your personal decision
to chose Catholic or Protestant religion,
you will find what the Faiths are seeking;
In the mystery of Christ’s teaching.

Illustration: Meister Eckhart; woodcut, c. 1400 A.D.

Tesla's Legacy

2009-03-24T17:54:00.013-05:00

Nicola Tesla is a pivotal figure in the history of science. Tesla conceived of nuclear weapons, particle beams, and ballistic missiles years before they existed. He is known for practical inventions and bizarre experiments. Today some people have made him into a "science mystic" of sorts giving him a cult-like following even naming an electric car after him. When I wrote this he had not achieve that notoriety. However, I wanted to put this essay back in play as it seems to me that it is as relevant today as it was 10 years ago.

This piece is essentially a perennialist analysis of the twentieth century as seen through the life of pioneering electrical engineer, inventor, and media icon Nicola Tesla (1856-1943). As a cultural history it visits the last century: a dark age of mass murder and destruction brought on by the rise of materialism.

The original essay published under the title “The Last Wizard” appeared in the European journal of the Proustist Society, Global Times, in the July/August issue of 1998. Then an expanded version was published on the website The Fireeater in September 2005. The first edition is in a print magazine which is difficult to come by and the second is archived.

The one that appears here contains some new material as well as new artwork.

Tesla's Legacy

A slender man with dark handsome features stood atop a mountain in Colorado and witnessed the fruits of his labors play out against the cold Rocky Mountain sky. As bolts of man-made lightening slashed the darkness, echoes of thunder cascaded back and forth between the peaks. The deafening sounds were heard fifteen miles away at Colorado Springs. Flash after flash of unfocused electron energy spewed forth from a 200 foot tower that stood atop a primitive high-potential electric generating station. Streamers of electricity over 100 feet long turned the blackness into blue phosphorescence as bolt after bolt arced skyward. The man seized by the enormity of the event was frozen with excitement. He was the only person on the planet to comprehend the principles of this work. In the flashes of energy he stood on the brink an age that would dwarf all history for the horrors it would bring to humanity.

Was this a description of a new science fiction movie? The latest piece of fantasy churned out on the Internet? An advertisement for a rerun of the "X-Files"? Not at all; the equipment used to generate this incredible scene is today considered antiquated. The man was not the product of M.I.T. or some other government particle physics research team. Nor was he the slick result of a billion dollar science bureaucracy.

The man was Nikola Tesla. The event sometimes called "Tesla's lightening experiments" happened in July of 1899 over one hundred years ago. The centennial of his great work came and went and there weren’t any global ceremonies or re-enactments of this accomplishment. To my knowledge that feat along with several other tricks that he alone mastered has never been reproduced.

Creative Fits
Tesla was born in the village of Smiljan in rural Croatia at midnight on 10July 1856. Part of the Serbian minority this deeply religious family was headed by his father a Serbian Orthodox priest. From an early age he built machines and small inventions. He was curious, a fast study in most things, obviously intelligent, a quick wit, and had a nearly photographic memory. Yet one trait stood out. He had a peculiar ability to envision the plans for a complicated invention in his minds eye, draw the plans, and if the parts were available; make the thing work. Another less desirable quirk was a habit of compulsively calculating in his head the cubic volume of all the bowls and serving pieces on the dinner table and periodically announcing his findings.

Although he attended local schools getting what might today be a high school education with the addition of a year or so of technical training, this largely self-taught man had always been a dreamer and visionary. The gift of vision was to benefit and plague him throughout his life. As a young man he thought of a machine that would hover in a stationary fashion above the earth. People could board this device and then allow the planet to move underneath them in a natural rotation traveling great distances effortlessly. Unfortunately, at the time the technology was not available to accomplish his plans: a situation that remains today. However, the scope of this kind of thinking would color his relations with business and fire the imaginations of the public.

His senses and emotions were always hair-trigger acute. He claimed to have extraordinary sight and hearing and was even credited with what might be called para-normal abilities at times. Yet this heightened acuity often left him edgy, restless, and frustrated.

In his mid-twenties he had what might be characterized as a "nervous breakdown" of sorts where he claimed to hear faint noises at great distances, became extremely nervous, and sometimes his heart would inexplicably race to over 200 beats per minute. During one of these "fits" something remarkable happened. He had another of his visions except this time it was for the basic principles of alternating-current electricity (AC) and the machines needed to supply it, support it, and utilize it. This invention has shaped nearly every aspect of our life today.

During a period of several months the visions and drawings continued as a shower of ideas flooded his life. Not only inventions but theoretical work issued forth from the busy pen of Nikola. Design problems that had plagued him for years were resolved in this period of activity. Obstacles of science and technology seemed to succumb to an almost paranormal flood of inspiration. These peculiar states of creativity would visit him throughout his life.

Tesla, however, was no mystic. It is problematic whether or not he was spiritual at all. Some say as his life went on he became an agnostic or atheist. Certainly his belief in the proposition that all phenomena could be explained by science and utilized by technology flew in the face of religious thought.

His father had been a priest and at one time Nikola was being groomed to follow his footsteps. This prospect was loathsome to Tesla and it seemed he did whatever he could to avoid the priesthood and pursue a completely materialistic path.

Of course he was not alone in his beliefs. The era he was born into was an age of growing doubt with spirituality and the worldview it had spawned. The old spritual order was faltering under the weight of bureaucracy, patronage, and the bickering of its elites. Powerful secular republics like France and the United States were waxing on the horizon. A new profane order of wealthy mercantile interests and global exploitation had created a voracious appetite for technology that would concentrate riches. A "new scientist" was emerging to satisfy that craving and Tesla was right on the cusp of an era. The old image of scientist as natural historian studying nature for the good of Man was fading like a tintype image in the Sun.

The Modern Dawn
Although materialist thinking has been around for a long time the arrival of its present incarnation was cooked up a generation or so earlier. A new paradigm arising out of Cartesian dualism and the Religion of Humanity founded by Auguste Compte was gaining the ascendancy.

Rene Descartes' (1596-1650) famous dictum, "I think therefore I am" became the bumper sticker slogan of a whole school of philosophers. It enabled a disconnect in Western thought to go wild and the mind/body split ensued establishing the supremacy of the intellect over the heart in European thought. Although many truly brilliant people including the Italian jurist Giovanni Vico (1668-1744) totally exploded Descartes’ work it had a nice commercial ring and it implications neatly fit into the domination theories of the new elites. Descartes, the "father of modern philosophy", was one of their darlings.

Following Descartes came another French philosopher, Auguste Compte (1798-1857) whose name is not nearly as well known today yet his thinking more than any other has shaped the modern world with his new wrinkle on materialism. The founder of the school of "positivism" Compte believed that the only things that existed in the universe were those things that could be measured. In other words, any thing that is without quantity does not exist and is unimportant. Furthermore, he believed that in the future scientists would usher in the final stage of human evolution by finding "positive" truth through observation. This cult would then establish a religion and Priesthood of Science that would supersede all other religions and dominate the world for the good of humanity.

With the power of an expanding industrial elite bringing huge sums of money into the picture and a growing vacuum of leadership from the decaying Hapsburg order the scene was set for positivists like Tesla. His ability to intuit the mechanical workings of the natural world and then abstract principles that could be applied to a wide spectrum of problems seem tailored to the agenda of the new secular order. Going to the United States appeared to be a logical move where his talent would be welcomed with status, money, and power. At first his plan would work for him but there were problems down the road.

For a time his genius was hailed and breakthrough after breakthrough in electrical engineering made his presence welcome with the industrialists of the time. Taming the vast potential of electromagnetic forces seemed in the public mind to be god-like and his fame grew. He worked tirelessly on problems of power transmission and distribution so as to make electricity more available. Keeping centrally generated power in the hands of business interests while making household electricity widely available was one of his priorities as was the use of radio signal to transmit instructions to machines and ultimately broadcast the human voice. These projects consumed much of his time as he went from tycoon to tycoon pitching his ideas and getting money to develop them.

Without doubt the "lightening experiments" were of this sort. Collecting money from John Jacob Astor and other robber barons of the time Tesla was attempting to transmit electrical energy directly through the atmosphere without the use of wires. His success was mighty. High potential electric power filled the air in Colorado on those fateful nights. When he had his generators turned on it is said that at a distance of more than a mile away local residents could pull a six inch arc of blue flame electricity from a barb wire fence or any other piece of metal.

News of his extraordinary experiments mixed with his own fanciful pronouncements flashed across newspaper pages. Yet as much as his wizardry astonished the press and inspired the public many of his projects were too extravagant for his backers. The “lightening" experiments fell in this category. To compound the problem he was as bad at managing money as he was with interpersonal relations. He had a reputation as a temperamental and haughty genius with a penchant for meddling in the affairs of supervisors often attempting to micro-manage projects based on his ideas and plans.

In 1884 Nikola abandoned Thomas Edison's laboratory in a pique of anger mostly because he could not work under the direction of anyone except himself. A few years later he had evidently invented radio transmission before Marconi. But due to inattention to documentation and plain disdain for people's opinion he somehow allowed Marconi to get the credit. A bitter legal battle followed lasting the rest of his life for the recognition he deserved from the invention of wireless communication. It was not until after his death that the dispute was resolved. Edison would brand Tesla "...a poet of science" with ideas "...magnificent but utterly impractical". As that flawed notoriety grew it would become a kiss of death for his business ambitions.

Using radio waves and other inventions he built robots and even remote controlled submarines before the Spanish-American War. These developments caught the attention of the U.S. War Department and the British Admiralty. The application of advancements in physics and chemistry had become a top priority with the military of the Great Powers. Reports of his inventions and Tesla's proclamations in the press caught their attention.

His work in the arena of mechanical resonance spawned the idea of crumbling matter with energy. He bragged that if he could engineer a simple sequence of vibrations on various points of the earth and could set in motion as resonance that would "destroy the world". He talked about flying machines carrying bombs and projectiles operated by remote radio control that would obliterate an enemy a continent away. He foresaw the arrival of energy weapons and predicted that in the future the world would be cleansed by a titanic "war of science" foreshadowing the dark age of carnage that would be known as the Twentieth Century.

The military and the emerging industrial elites needed a vision of how they could accomplish their own dreams of domination and control. The growing new secular order in the institutions would do their best to erase the past and its importance from the textbooks and establish the modernist intellectual hegemony. Politicians surfing a wave of money would abandon principle and embrace relativism. But it would take shot and powder to actually install secular materialism and science as the new weltanschauung (worldview). A lasting alliance between industry and the military would soon be forged and the new scientist was the bridge. The prophecies of Auguste Compte whose speculations about the supremacy of science was now close to becoming a reality.

The bureaucratic institutions that developed from this rich soup of money, influence, and intellectual horsepower would fill the growing vacuum of authority left in the wake of declining Christian and other religious thought. The materialists of the time were not dummies. Many could see that their moment had come both to continue their studies and to enrich themselves by creating a new order of control and dependency to replace the old ideas of faith and self sufficiency.

Thus the stage was set and one secular prince of after another would plunge the planet into the black night of World Wars. The ensuing century of carnage, holocaust, and human deprivation paralleled the rise of positivist science. Nobel’s high explosives begat the machine gun, airplanes enabled aerial bombardments, electrolytic chemistry gave us poison gas, Einstein’s clever scribbling became the Atomic Bomb, and as each scientific breakthrough fostered another weapon system the fortunes of the “new scientist” continued to blossom under the dark skies of modernism.

The Last Wizard
Not trained at a prestigious university, not being born in one of the Great Power countries, and unsupported by a tweedy network of colleagues; Tesla had problems. As the twentieth century unfolded professional images continued to morph and a new and improved model of the scientist gained favor. At first men like Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Max Plank, Enrico Fermi, and Leo Szilard came to power in government and university sponsored research. Many were disciples of Ernst Mach the hard core ideologue of materialism whose simplistic views on phenomenology appealed to these people. Then men such as Robert Oppenheimer and Edward “Fritz” Teller of nuclear weapons fame came along who would finally eclipse them all. These were organization men who understood the clubby world of international conferences, professional journals, national alliances, and most of all grant money. These improved scientists could be integrated more easily than renegade wizards like Tesla.

The victor and the vanquished in the great wars of the twentieth century shared one thing in common. They worshipped the scientist for the cornucopia of technology that he delivered to his benefactors. Capitalist, communist, or Nazi all agreed that the way to power was through the temple of positivism. No other single ideology so profoundly shaped a time than this materialistic system. It could both produce and destroy with comparable effectiveness. Trussing “big science” up in bureaucracy and slathering its practitioner’s with money would ensure a steady flow of ideas and goods. In the new reality of administrative charts and state power the pliable genius would become a seamless part of the establishment power structure.

The populace would stand in awe as one “miracle” after another rolled off the assembly lines of technology. Supplying food and entertainment while dangling new weapons of control over the common man’s head the secular princes could manage the unruly with credible threats of annihilation while basking in the sallow glow of power.

Nikola Tesla the man who called his body a "meat machine" may have been just the kind of disconnected genius to utter the spell that would send generations of physicists to court planetary extinction through thermo-nuclear holocaust. But he wasn't alone. From his grandiose speculations inspiration was stimulated in others whose intentions were not nearly as ambiguous as Tesla's.

Branding him as evil misses the point. Although the Jeckle and Hyde dichotomy in science is well known, its negative embodiment is probably not at its zenith with Tesla. Even though Einstein might later be caricatured as the bureaucrat of theory, in the nuclear age it was Oppenheimer who would ply the river Styx and surely it would be Teller who sought to inhabit the dark throne; not Tesla.

Yet the implications that issued forth from Tesla’s words and actions militated strongly towards the camp of Ernst Mach whose ultra-materialism and outright disdain for religion left little room for difficult concepts like ethics, morality, and the law. Soon this omission allowed an amorality to grow that enabled an era of unprecedented industrialized murder to bloom.

When the physical abominations caused by the apparatus of ruin were not enough; weapons of mass cultural destruction would become legitimate. Using government policy, the Media, and the courts social scientists from the Frankfurt School like Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm, Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse attack the entire belief structure of traditional society. Like a virus in a computer the program these positivistists created known as “political correctness” continues to grind forward and the mind control that it enabled would become an epidemic. By the dawn of the twentieth-first century literally nothing was sacred.

Insulated from history and moral critique the devastation wrought by materialism-gone-wild is overlooked by most of its devotees. While indulging their nebulous “creative urges”, engaging in the work of "invention", and the exploiting of phenomena; today's scientist/priest seeks to master nature and deliver its bounty to those who might preside over the domain of Earth. Apart from that the modern scientist pleads absolution from responsibility in the name of the unexamined concept of “discovery”.

When examining the products of Tesla’s unrestrained genius and self promotion a judgment must take into account his lack of understanding about the venue that he stumbled into. But those who came along in the wake of him knew exactly what they were doing. Claiming forgiveness on the grounds they are innocent from understanding the consequences of their actions is ludicrous. Something akin to a thief claiming he didn’t know that the things he stole were valuable. Even the Soviet-materialist philosopher Evald Ilyenkov in his essay “The Metaphysics of Positivism” understood that scientists are inherently irresponsible.

Tesla was genius and stumblebum at the same time. His nineteenth century rural Eastern European personality had not caught up to the bourgeoning secular world he found himself in. He could envision the mechanisms of electro-motive forces and make them manifest but cared little for anything except what fame and fortune it might bring him. Not knowing that the exaltation of creativity was also the worship of one’s personal ego never occurred to him or any of his colleagues to this day. Caught in between two worlds he prophesized the trappings of a new material age without understanding the society it implied thereby helping to install a program which doomed it to tragedy.

As the failures of modern materialist technological society mound up a sad legacy surrounds us. Massive engineering failures, mega-systems management blunders, atmospheric anomalies, overcrowding, iatrogenic disease, traffic, fuel cost gyrations, the evaporation of privacy, and a world of other problems have been handed us since the first light of positivism dazzled the world. It is a long road from the heady days when man-made lightening ripped the skies over the Colorado Rockies

.

David S. Reif

artwork: 5x8 oil pastel on paper by author entitled: Tesla's Legacy, 2009

"One of the Trees in the Garden"

2009-01-06T20:06:00.006-06:00

This watercolor was used in an exhibit in 1989 to illustrate the nature of the work done within the Institute for Perennial Studies. Entitled "One of the Trees in the Garden" an allusion to Genesis and the various trees in Eden. There were names written on the branches of different authors, prophets, and religious figures we were studying; the trunk was scripted with 'The Perennial Wisdom'.

What is evident today is the alchemical nature of the graphic although that may not have been consciously intentional at the time. It is highly mystical but not in the Eastern sense of a struggle towards "oneness". The feeling is instead a pluralistic mood that displaced truth into an organic collage of understanding that is a product of the human mind instead of a divine revelation.

Noting that all the ends terminated in buds rather than flowers it is up to the viewer to determine whether there is some conclusion to each terminus or not. Nothing has been decided in this milieu.

However, in toto it is far from nihilistic or even uncertain. The force of the proposition draws one into inquiry instead of conclusion. Yet there is a definite point of view which is non-material. The whole picture floats in a cosmic location with sun and moon setting the stage in a universe filled with knowledge. The roots caressing both direct and indirect light feeding off of both but not relying on any earthly attachment.

This is a world beyond materialism which is the home of wisdom. Although data can be found by measuring; ultimately data is ephemeral. Here wisdom is obtainable but not by direct sensory means. It is a world of symbol and metaphor which exists in an eternal place beyond the reach of data and material facts.

Modern Superstitions

2008-12-29T22:08:00.014-06:00

If you want to understand why the Islamic world smells blood in the water when it views Christendom and watches the decline of the West then we need to understand why some western philosophers who understood Christianity left it and joined Islam. One of the major twentieth century perennialists was Martin Lings (photo left). Although he wrote several books the only one I really studied was his 1965 book Ancient Beliefs and Modern Superstitions, Perennial Books, London; which was on our reading list.

There are a couple things about twentieth century perennialism that are important to understand when we consider the perennialism of the Southern Agrarians and their revolutionary contribution which returned the West to its rightful place in this field of ideas. One issue to bear in mind is that a few perennialists have wandered off into the syrupy world of universalism. Another is that some famous perennialist like Rene Guenon and Martin Lings converted to Islam.

Some could say I am being redundant. Islam is universalism after all. But there is some shades of difference that will be fleshed out at a later date. Nonetheless, it is interesting to consider why truly great thinkers abandon Christianity for Islam.

Let us consider Mr. Lings' background a bit. Martin Lings (1909-2005); Lings was born in Lancashire, England, in 1909 and received both his BA (1932) and his MA (1937) from Oxford University in English literature was a leading member of the “Traditionalist” or “Perennialist” school and an acclaimed author, editor, translator, scholar, Arabist, and poet whose work centers on the relationship between God and man through religious doctrine, scripture, symbolism, literature, and art. He was an accomplished metaphysician and essayist who often turned to a number of the world’s great spiritual traditions for examples, though he is probably best known for his writings on Islam and its esoteric tradition, Sufism. (World Wisdom biography).

In 1935 Lings discovered the writings of Rene Guenon, the French philosopher (1886-1951) and went to Cairo to study with Guenon. Lings lived in Cairo until Guenon died in 1951 and shortly thereafter Lings and his wife were kicked out of Egypt by some of his fellow adherents of Islam during a wave of Jihadism in the early 1950’s. He returned to England where he lived the life of an academic. He wrote several books while working at the British Museum. He died in 2005.

I did not read Lings for his Arabic scholarship but for his critique of modernism. However, a passage in his book Ancient Beliefs and Modern Superstitions on pp 64-65 gives the attentive reader a good synopsis of what profoundly disturbed Lings about Christendom.

Recalling that in the period of the early twentieth century in Europe prior to the rise of Hitler Christianity was being laughed out of the marketplace of ideas by the dominant materialist ideology. Many sensitive Christian thinkers were scoffed at by scientists, Marxists, and others who were in the process of overthrowing Christian thought in the universities. Of course Hitler and his one-time friend and fellow Christian hater Stalin did their best to finish the job.

On p 43 Mr. Lings writes about the “barely luke-warm semi-agnostic religion which characterizes most of those ‘leaders of thought’ in the modern West who have any religion at all…” he continues on p 64:
It is often said that what has happened (to the West) was a reaction and that religion is to blame, but this argues a very narrow view of history. The flat ‘horizontal’ outlook which later came to be known as humanism was already rife in the pre-Christian West and is stamped on almost all north Mediterranean art of two thousand years or more. The modern civilization is not merely the death-agony of the Greco-Roman civilization which, having been cut short by Christianity was ‘reborn’ at the Renaissance. Since then the Western world has re-manifested, ‘with a vengeance’ if one likes to put it that way, its tendency to be distracted from the great truths of the Universe by what it calls ‘reality’, that is two-dimensional facts, mainly of the material order.

The circle is a vicious one, since ‘freedom’, that is, certain fully achieved degree of distraction, confers on the mind an agility which it did not possess in the past, and this agility opens up possibilities of still further distraction. The ever-increasing facility of travel in the modern world is as an outward image of the ever-increasing glibness and superficiality of the movements of the mind. Despite all the finery of words, what is called ‘enriching one’s cultural perspective’ or ‘broadening one’s outlook’ or ‘enlarging one’s intellectual horizon’ bears no relation to that magnanimity…If a plastic substance be continually pulled this way and that so as to increase its length and breadth, its third dimension will be reduced to a minimum. The ‘broad mind’ of the humanist is simply a narrow mind that has been flattened out.

But is it not possible to increase the psychic substance as a whole? The answer to this question is already implied in the image of a tree, for a tree cannot be made to grow by pulling at its branches, and so it is with the soul, whose substance can only receive increase from its root in the Spirit; and if the due performance of rites gives the root of the tree what nourishment it requires, the growth is not only still further encouraged but also made more perfect by the art of pruning, that is, by the abstentions and sacrifices which religion enjoins or recommends.

Not only is this a slap at liberal materialism but it also exposes the bleeding wound of the West that Islam seeks to exploit in its quest to conquer all of Christendom. The gash across the face of Western Civilization that Lings characterizes as humanism, is the same wound that the Agrarians call industrialism, and I call modernism. It is, unfortunately, all the same dreadful lesion.

Modernizing Jesus

2008-12-25T21:24:00.011-06:00

On Christmas Day it seemed fitting to include a reading about Jesus Christ. Although Henry J. Cadbury’s book, The Peril of Modernizing Jesus, (Macmillan, 1937); was not on the Institute for Perennial Studies reading list the analysis that appeared in this book was often discussed in one way or another.

Cadbury was a Harvard scholar on religion in the twentieth century. Prior to the Quakers being taken over by the radical Left they produced a number of quality religious thinkers; Cadbury is one of them. He may not be regarded as a perennialist but in the pages of this book he does at least sound like one at times. The book wanders around trying to make a point and at times comes to it but this selection from page 42 is illustrative of Cadbury at his best.

Looking into the dense forest of modernism now enveloping his world in New England and its Harvard fiefdom somehow Cadbury was able to see a glimpse of the truth. To me this is the remarkable nature of the perennial wisdom. Even in the gathering gloom of the twentieth century a piercing light was able to burst forward and illuminate a benighted Harvard scholar.

Chapter II

The Cause and Cure of Modernism
The tendency to modernize Jesus is not a new phenomenon in Christianity. It has always existed. The history of the study of the life of Christ, such as Schweitzer made for the last century and a half, is largely a study of this reading into Jesus the thought patterns of the age or group. In our own time different groups tend to make him in their own different images. If we were able to predict the mental atmosphere of a future generation we should be able to predict as clearly their understanding of Jesus.

The tendency is inevitable, and probably not entirely curable. To attempt to offset it is surely a reasonable ambition. The means for doing so are fairly obvious. First, the realization of our own prejudices and presuppositions. We may try to look at ourselves objectively, to realize that we, like other generations or other groups, take our own mentality for granted and quietly read it into alien figures of the past, largely because we do not make the mental exertion of trying to understand them as they were. In the case of Jesus we are anxious…to secure his authority for our own point of view.

Somehow truth seems to seep through the paralysis of propaganda no matter how densely it is slathered across our consciousness. Cadbury had doubts. Not about Jesus but about how the modernists of his day were perpetuating a pliable Jesus (including later Quakers).

Today a few more people are questioning, “our own prejudices and presuppositions” including positivism, materialism, and science. Something Cadbury could only point to as he gazed into the surrounding fog. He may not have had the courage to expose the deception but he did have the courage to take a swing at one of the biggest modernizer of the time; Albert Schweitzer.

From Jack Miles, Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God, (Knopf, 2001) is the following comment that elucidates Cadbury’s criticism.

“Schweitzer believed that the historical Jesus not only could be but essentially had been recovered. When he wrote “There is nothing more negative than the result of research into the life of Jesus,” he did not mean to express any doubt that the quest for the historical Jesus had succeeded but only unflinching realism regarding the religious relevance of its success.”

This is the process of reading ones own reality into the reality of God. It is nearly the ultimately in presentism a virulent form of modernism. So, yes, indeed Cadbury did a service, unfortunately, one that was almost entirely lost on Harvard and much of America to this date. However, on this Christmas Day we can rejoice that the truth will inevitably reveal itself as people of good will join the crusade.

Modernism

2008-12-18T19:46:00.012-06:00

The antithesis of the Perennial Philosophy (philosophia perennis) is Modernism. In order to build a framework for further discussion I am posting an essay I wrote entitled "What is Modernism?". It first appeared as a letter to the editor in an Eselen Institute publication c.1996 although I do not have a copy of that version. A somewhat expanded rewrite was then published in Denmark in the English language edition of Global Times, the journal of the Proutist Society, January of 1998. The Global Times rendition is what appears below. Portions of it were published in the 2004 essay, "Three Pillars of Yankee Rule", which appeared in the online journal The Beacon.

A major part of the critique developed within the Institute for Perennial Studies was a decidedly downbeat view of the potent political philosophy; modernism. Unlike the tepid academic term “modernity” which is nearly devoid of content modernism is a cancerous doctrine that has swept through almost every culture particularly since the American Civil War.

There will be further discussion of this topic. In my opinion the negative aspects of modernism outweigh the positive contributions it has made, however, the pervasive nature of its reach and the influence of its adherents makes criticism rare.

WHAT IS MODERNISM?

Without a doubt the most powerful political and social ideology of the past century is something few people have considered. A cluster of dogma has sprung up around the philosophy of positivism, the belief that nothing exists except that which can be measured. From this starting point we have witnessed the rise of positivist science, philosophical reductionism, consumerism and a cultural appendage; modernism.

As the director of The Institute for Perennial Studies in the late 1980’s I found that we spent a lot of time researching and critiquing modernist systems as well as examining alternatives. If we learned anything from the experience it is that the negative effects of modernism are ubiquitous. As a belief system it infects all of our thinking.

Allow me to share some of our findings regarding modernism and its attendant systems; positivism, an aggressive new materialism, and consumerism. The first and most noticeable trait of any modernist system is its claim to be "new". Newness is unique to this belief system and is characterized by a cult like following of pundits and pollsters who are always trying to divine the latest trends and impulses for the purpose of forecasting. Newness is celebrated as a sacrament and is its own proof of superiority. The act of being "first" has become an obsession. Post-modernism, advanced modernism, progress, etc., have all laid claim to the mantle "new" at one time or another.

Modernism consistently defines its enemies as "undemocratic". Whether it is Kropotkin and Lenin espousing various forms of scientific socialism as an escape from the Old (elitist) Order, the Northeastern establishment promoting corporate liberalism ("free trade") in the new cyberspace of Wall Street, or Coca-Cola selling the universal soft drink to the "new global marketplace", the underlying argument is always the same. We have the wave of the future at our disposal and if you don't get on the bandwagon you are resisting "democratic inevitability".

Permutations of modernism are always heralded by a shower of statistics and other mathematical gadgets. Proving that the tide is running in a certain direction with various empirical methods is an absolute necessity for the modernist. Reliance on the measurability of social trends is the foundation of political science and public relations.

Modernism eventually fall victim to its own poison. The idea that modernism is itself new is a fallacy. History is filled with secular prophets declaring a "new dawn" or a "new era". Not only in the Christian Bible but in the scriptures of all spiritual traditions there are admonitions against people relying too heavily on their own creations. Babylon fell while lusting after temporal rewards. Jesus reminded us that he was “the beginning and the end” saying that time as well as Creation is the domain of God and “newness” is that suspicious property of Man.

The Prajna Paramitas warn the Buddhist not to trust the material world of ever changing “aggregates”. The Sacred writings of antiquity are replete with similar caveats against newness turning instead to the eternal world within. Allied as it is with the materialist pantheon of science and positivism the present incarnation of modernism is particularly dangerous and pervasive but little changed from past manifestations.

In our research we came to the conclusion that modernism was not the leading edge of an evolutionary continuum rather it is a veneer. In the case of its present likeness the veneer is uniquely corrosive and seeks to dissolve, absorb, or ultimately erase everything that has come before it. Natural resources, indigenous cultures, traditional values, and even history itself is a target for the modernist. Yet, the real sadness is that society has bought into a fad and in the last analysis "new" is predictably ephemeral.

The Herald of Perennialism (1987)

2008-12-17T21:58:00.007-06:00

The following is a statement that we generated as a result of the work at the Institute for Perennial Studies back in 1987. It was released as a broadside or poster on parchment style paper with graphic illustrations and was quite a handsome frame-able document. Unfortunately, only a few copies have survived so far as I know. There may be more floating about somewhere.

This critique holds up pretty well and was the catalyst for any number of people and groups who incorporated elements of the perennialist proposal into their thinking.

It was not the only piece we published but it did encapsulate some of the broad ideas. I will flesh out more of the raw thinking on this issue and demonstrate how the critique was used by me to analyze cultural data as I was able to refine the process.

THE HERALD OF PERENNIALISM

We seek the re-evaluation of culture based on a perennial wisdom which emphasizes harmony and integration with nature and views humanity as a spiritual entity within Creation. This perennial wisdom was the axis of human culture for all but the last 250 years when a positivist model stressing Cartesian dualism began to gain ascendancy by exaggerating the separation of people from nature through the powers of abstraction. This new program led the way to extreme industrialism and the redistribution of wealth towards an urban elite and the bureaucrats that serve them and away from the traditional rural culture that was close to the land. The result of the potent but shortsighted worldview that evolved from this change has been to glorify complex organization, to disconnect people from the regenerative power of nature, to stifle a more productive style of learning based on renewal, and to dislocate human needs in favor of technological priorities. Consequently in a mere two and a half centuries this program that exaggerates abstraction, and promotes exploitation and expedience at the expense of serving the requirements of balance has brought to humanity the modern era of holocaust, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, ecological degradation, and an alienated culture which produces dependent, poorly adjusted people.

In light of our present situation we feel that a reappraisal of a perennial wisdom is necessary. This can be done by defining the elements of philosophy of perennialism. In the process of doing this we hope to create a dialogue among interested people which will lend to the creation of a vocabulary and paradigm capable of communicating knowledge about the deep relationship between God, people, and values. We feel that this work will activate a positive consensus towards a more productive use of human institutions. Having done this we believe that perennialism could be implemented by a wide spectrum of individuals and groups leading to a new and healthier culture. This in turn can facilitate the growth of o global kinship based on a deeper wisdom.

copyright: 1987 D. Reif, C. Klemaier

Perennis Continues

2008-12-16T20:37:00.001-06:00

In the 1980's a small group of independent scholars started a study group called the Institute for Perennial Studies. Grounding our work in the philosophia perennis we would apply those principles to our task; hence the name. We published the journal Perennis for a couple years before the core of the study group went in separate directions and we cease to publish.

The Institute for Perennial Studies had a question as its mission statement. The question was, "After thousands of years of sustained human habitation what factors have brought us to the place where mass annihilation was possible?" This question seemed so fundamental, so obvious, so natural to ask. Yet virtually no one was asking this question.

I know now that the reason no one was asking this question was because, well, why would anyone ask such a thing. The United States was soaring, Europe was rebuilt and shaking off the effects of WW II, and the "Third World" was under control. The future seemed bright for most people so why would anyone ask a dumb question like the one we posed.

Since then I have taken what we learned in our studies back in the 1980's and attempted to apply them to the real world. I put our critique up against the best contemporary thinking testing our findings to see if they held up under the rigors of time.

As my schedule allows I will post vignettes of what I have learned from 20 years of observations that have arisen from the original insights given to us through our studies of the effects of modernism and its allied beliefs and how this cluster of ideas impacts culture.