It was while I was going over these stories that I realized for the first time just how important a part of the communist movement in America the teachers were. They touched practically every phase of Party work. They were not used only as teachers in Party education, where they gave their services free of charge, but in the summer they traveled and visited Party figures in other countries. Most of them were an idealistic, selfless lot who manned the front committees and were the backbone of the Party’s strength in the labor Party and later in the Progressive Party. Even in the inner Party apparatus they performed invaluable services.
Bella Dodd[i]
Brazil is falling to the communists. America is only a few steps behind. Here is the process: You capture the public schools. You capture the colleges. You indoctrinate and capture the elite. At the same time, you infiltrate the seminaries and corrupt the churches. You take over the tax-exempt foundations. You enter the intelligence community, the government, and the media. You get control of the money spigot. You make and break careers. You finance false fronts. You shape the larger culture. You conquer society itself. There is one thing you must be careful of, however. When your tyranny becomes effective, and society collapses under your destructive policies, and freedom evaporates, the masses will come after you with their guns (if they have any). Perhaps they will come after you with their bare hands. So, it is advisable that you misdirect the masses. You must get them to blame someone else for your crimes. Even more to the point, if you decide to devastate society with a biological attack, you must convince your victims that someone else was behind it. You must maintain your innocence to the end, even as you are taking over the world in plain view.
Ask yourself why nobody frets over communism’s advance to power in Brazil. How has this happened? Nobody sounds the alarm? NOBODY!? That Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was a friend of Fidel Castro, and a comrade in the communist movement, is well known. Yet nobody mentions this. And nobody finds it curious that Russian President Vladimir Putin supports Lula da Silva, and supports the “little rocket man” in North Korea, and is close friends with President Xi of the Chinese Communist Party, and supports the communist regimes Cuba and Nicaragua. President Putin has even given military support to the communist regime in Venezuela.[ii] Does Putin sound like a good Christian boy, or a communist who pretends to be a Christian? There is a red elephant in the room, and everyone fails to see it. What? Are you seeing elephants? Only anticommunist dinosaurs see communists “under the bed.” But I am not pointing under the bed. I am pointing to Mexico, Cuba, Venezuela, Colombia, Bolivia, Chile and now Brazil. These are places that can be seen from the moon! But then, our deluded pundits and politicos do not want to notice vast regions that are falling to communism – in the Western Hemisphere. So, it bears repeating: Brazil is falling to the communists. America is only a few steps behind.
Yes, the Kremlin has pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes, making us think that the communist bloc split apart decades ago and ceased to exist with the fall of the Soviet Union. The best alibi is when nobody thinks you exist. But even so, in communism’s war against humanity, somebody must be blamed for the bad things that are beginning to happen – the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, the food shortages, the energy shortages, the economic collapse, etc. The global movement that put Lula da Silva in power in Brazil, that put Joseph Biden in the White House, that unleashed COVID-19 on the world using Big Pharma as its cat’s paw – needs patsies aplenty, and scapegoats, and dupes, and false narratives galore.
The key to redirecting blame for all the bad that is coming is found in something called ideology – a thing that evolves over time as it disorients and misdirects. Ideology is a political formula that does not require much study. The masses are drawn to ideology because it is easy to understand. The manipulators of humanity see ideology as a weapon. As Mao Zedong once said, “Marxism-Leninism is better than a machine gun.” The bullets in this machine gun are lies. They are fired in a steady stream against those targeted for conquest. The first target is the anticommunist, the person who resists communism, who recognizes its formations and themes – who understands communist subterfuge and misdirection.
The relationship between communism and ideology is not easy to understand. Exoteric communism is a changing set of outward dogmas and causes, linked together beneath the surface by esoteric communist practice; that is to say, by what Lenin called “the scientific management of human affairs” in the Machiavellian sense. Therefore, Chinese communism emphasizes its Chinese characteristics even as Venezuelan communism is “Bolivarian.” The communist practitioner conforms to the “laws” of history – of time and place. If he must pretend to be a liberal or a nationalist or a Christian to advance the Revolution, then he pretends. But underneath, he remains what he is. Esoteric Marxism is about global conquest through the inversion of all symbols and existing principles, as modeled by Karl Marx. Marxism in this sense is not a dogma, said Lenin. It is a living and evolving system for destroying everything. Marx’s favorite quote, in this regard, was from Goethe’s Faust, where Mephistopheles says, “Everything that exists deserves to perish.” The full quote is,
I am the spirit that negates.
And rightly so, for all that comes to be
Deserves to perish wretchedly;
‘Twere better nothing would begin.
Thus everything found in your terms, sin,
Destruction, evil represent –
That is my proper element.
Here is the anti-metaphysics, the anti-religion, the anti-philosophy of esoteric communism. Under Lenin’s guidance and Stalin’s helmsmanship, the communists built up a global system of power aiming at the destruction of the Old Order – an order based on ancient principles carried forward from generation to generation, through religious traditions and philosophic explanations. Only a small number of thinkers have noticed the true face – the wicked esoteric face – of communism. It is only by understanding esoteric communism that a person sees the real meaning of exoteric communism (which consists of flexible ideologic themes which may or may not self-advertise as “communist”). Unlike the Western ideologue, who stupidly believes in his ideology, the esoteric Marxist does not believe his own ideology. In fact, as Robert Payne tells us in his biography of Marx, the Founding Father of Marxism laughed at those who believed in “that class shit.”[iii] In his malevolence, Marx had developed intellectual weapons for destroying mankind. As Lenin realized, these weapons could be improved upon.
Of course, Marx was not the first to fashion intellectual weapons. Such weapons have been continually fashioned throughout history. And they continue to be fashioned today. The general rule, in fashioning an ideology (i.e., a political weapon) is to envision your enemy. Ideology, therefore, always demonizes someone. For example, Nazi ideology demonizes the Jews while the communists (who call their ideology a “science”) demonize the bourgeoisie. Cultural Marxism (which is the latest and most refined version of Marxism’s exoteric iteration) demonizes white males. At the same time, on the right, conspiracy ideology demonizes a hidden cabal of actors who have allegedly controlled history since the dawn of time. Stalin, in his turn, more modestly spoke of a series of conspiracies involving Trotskyites, saboteurs, spies, and wreckers (around which Stalin built the narrative of his famous show trials).
To demonize is to generate hatred – an important feature of ideologies. Julien Benda, in his famous book La Trahison des Clercs, said that our age is the “age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds.” And the biggest hatred that now appears, ominously, is hatred of the West, especially in the form of anti-Americanism. This hatred has been fostered with such success, that many Westerners (especially Americans of white European extraction) hate themselves. Consider the example of Critical Race Theory, which says that all white people are racist. We should not be surprised to learn that Critical Race Theory is fashionable in American universities, and is even taught within the U.S. military. We know from the history of antisemitism the phenomenon of self-hating Jews (who have succumbed to their enemy’s propaganda). Now we have the phenomenon of self-hating Americans and Europeans. All of this is helpful to the communists, especially since their objective is to destroy Western civilization (which, as Mephistopheles said, “deserves to perish wretchedly”).
In the war of ideas, which is fought all around us, we are continuously attacked by those who would subdue us with their intellectual weapons. One of these weapons consists in the argument that we do indeed deserve to perish, as Mephistopheles said, “wretchedly.” Stalin famously boiled this down to a simple sentence: “If our enemies accuse us of crimes, then we blame them for the crimes.” In other words, communism teaches its acolytes to “blame the victim” of communism’s atrocities. That America is the chief intended victim should be obvious. Thus, we find the following themes continuously pounded home: the CIA killed Kennedy; America bombed and invaded Cambodia; Bush lied and people died; America is “destroying the planet,” etc. All of these slogans, spread far and wide by the communists and their dupes, are distortions of reality that blame the intended target for everything bad that has ever happened. The sad fact is, many Americans believe one or all of these ideologically-loaded slogans.
As an aside, a reader recently objected to my suggestion that all ideologies are inevitably untrue. He had probably looked up the dictionary definition of ideology, where it is described innocuously as “a system of ideas and ideals, especially one which forms the basis of economic or political theory and policy.” This definition is problematic because theory, policy and ideals are items too distinct to be subsumed under such a referent (which yet remains undefined by this supposed definition). These items can never be reconciled in a “system.” After studying hundreds of ideologues over a period of many years, Eric Voegelin realized that all ideologues were system-builders. But truth cannot be encapsulated in a “system.” In fact, all systems falsify the truth because life itself is a process of questing for the truth. It is a process by which we discover ideas and learn their meaning by direct experience. What a system pretends to be, inevitably, is a final and decisive answer of some kind – a shortcut that removes the very reason for living (i.e., discovery). Mortal man does not know the full truth. He therefore cannot devise a system of truth that is true. Here is an intellectual impertinence, a usurpation, an impersonation of God by man. Furthermore, could anything be more disastrous for a man than abandoning his quest for truth in favor of a formula that pretends to be the truth? This counterfeit would cheat a man of his very life; for Voegelin implies that once you have adopted an ideology you are no longer in life. By adopting an ideology, a human being becomes the stuffed thing of an intellectual taxidermist.[iv]
What about ideologies that claim to be “scientific”? Are they not searching for the truth? Here one must distinguish a real quest from a fraudulent one. When ideologists talk of class theory or race theory, or conspiracy theory, or global warming theory, they are lying. A theory is suggestive of a scientific approach, but ideologists have no real interest in science or methods leading to the truth. Remember that they must establish their system as truth, with all its answers. The word theory, therefore, coming out of their mouths, is the biggest lie of all. It is bluff pseudo-science. All incidents, all documents, etc., are taken out of context by these “theorists” who regularly misuse language to pile one fallacy upon another. Their objective is to persuade the reader that their “system” is the truth.
The most alluring ideology posing as “theory” – for most Americans – is “conspiracy theory.” Many patriots, who would save their country, are caught up in false notions of a history-spanning and all-encompassing conspiracy that regularly diverts their attention from flesh-and-blood enemies who are running circles around them. More than other ideologists, the ideologists who believe in THE ONE GRAND OMNIPOTENT CABAL, are always boxing with shadows. But when have they ever landed a blow? As ideology, conspiracy theory uses the wrong methodologies, mixing fact with metaphor – mistaking paranoia for a sensory organ. The research that is presented by conspiracy theorists knows nothing of the “falsifiability Principle,” expounded by Karl Popper in his book, The Logic of Scientific Discovery. Smugly using a figure of speech as the subject of their sentences, conspiracy theorists follow the same failed practice as President George W. Bush in his “War on Terror.” They would prosecute a “War on Conspiracy” with a similarly futile outcome.
The most striking example of bad methodology in a conspiracy ideologist can be found in Anthony Sutton’s book, America’s Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull and Bones. “Now in scientific methodology,” wrote Sutton, “a hypothesis can be proven. It cannot be disproven.”[v] In other words, Sutton refused to accept the falsifiability principle. Perhaps he unconsciously realized that his work would have crumbled into dust once his many omissions – factual and contextual – were brought to light. It was convenient then, that his “theory” could not be questioned but only affirmed. One ought to ask, then: what kind of theorist could Sutton’s have been? Here is why I have never taken Anthony Sutton’s work seriously.
Another kind of conspiracy “theory” attaches to the ideology of antisemitism – the crudest ideology of all (and sometimes referred to as “the stupid man’s Marxism”). For example, conspiracist antisemitism believes that Jewish black magicians rule the world through the masonic lodges and the banks. What happens, indeed, when you show an antisemite that his beloved conspiracy theory, based on The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, was plagiarized from Maurice Joly’s book, The Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu? Does the antisemite say, “Oops I goofed”? Does he do as Anthony Sutton did, and offer a perverted scientific methodology? Being simpler, the antisemite’s reaction is more earthy. Even if he is shown a copy of Joly’s book, he will say that the book itself is part of the larger deception. He will say to your face that you have been duped by the Jews. And if you persist in arguing against his hobby horse, you will eventually find yourself denounced as an agent of the Zionist conspiracy.[vi]
Those who have adopted an ideology usually seem sincere in their beliefs. But this sincerity is not at all innocent. “Ideologies, whether Positivist, or Marxist, or National Socialist, indulge in constructions that are not intellectually tenable,” wrote the political philosopher Eric Voegelin. “That raises the question of why people who otherwise are not quite stupid, and who have the secondary virtues of being quite honest in their daily affairs, indulge in intellectual dishonesty as soon as they touch science.”[vii]
Intellectual dishonesty in this case, noted Voegelin, arises from the ideologist’s “persistent state of alienation.” To better understand what alienation means in this context, it is worth remembering that psychiatrists were once called “alienists.” That is to say, alienation is the root cause of madness (provided the patient’s symptoms owe nothing to a disease of the brain). In ancient and medieval times alienation signified estrangement from God or the divine ground of being (i.e., ultimate reality). Secular modernity uses the word alienation differently, referring to estrangement from society. Thus, modernity has adopted a peculiar view; for if God is the ultimate reality, and if insanity is estrangement from God, then reconciling a crazy person to a Godless society must also be crazy. On the other hand, if God does not exist, and reality is “other people,” then we have assuredlly come closer to validating Jean-Paul Sartre’s idea that “Hell is other people.” For any fool can see that our socially mediated secular reality is turning into Hell.[viii]
We should not be afraid, at this late hour, to call things by their proper names. So here is the bottom line: The modern world is gradually going to hell as it goes insane, and ideology is a symptom of that insanity. We should not be surprised, therefore, that our institutions are weighed down, more and more, by more and more ideological baggage, making us crazier and crazier. All around us people are offering false narratives, fake news, and facts out of context. When Tucker Carlson presented supposed evidence that “the CIA” was behind John F. Kennedy’s assassination we ought to ask whether all three letters in CIA were directly or indirectly involved? Was the C on the grassy knoll, the I in the book depository building? Where, then, was A positioned? This is not serious, of course, and neither is blaming an entire organization, made up of thousands of patriotic individuals, for murdering the President of the United States. But the purpose is clear, even if Carlson cannot see it. To reproduce Soviet KGB themes on FOX NEWS, without realizing what you have done, is a kind of madness.
Naturally, the worst kind of insanity is what we are seeing in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, in threats of nuclear war, and in China’s threats to invade Taiwan. This is the blood-soaked kind of insanity which will reach the shores of America one day. But for the present, the dominant political insanity in America takes the form of an all-encompassing political clown show – with spectacular pratfalls involving senile or orange-haired Bozos, special counsels, impeachments, fake news, and action-packed politics-as-sports & entertainment. It is great fun until you realize that the joke is always on us.
And what, pray tell, is wrong with clowns? The late Brazilian philosopher, Olavo de Carvalho, once said, “Never trust uncultured people.” A clown, in this context, is an uncultured person who has risen – inexplicably – to high office. Olavo understood that uncultured people are bound to fall in line with the first silly thing that captivates their otherwise flagging attention. A political clown is the first to believe in a conspiracy theory or false narrative that eventually promises to bring him into alignment with his country’s enemies. The thing about political clowns is their readiness to side against you and even themselves at the drop of a hat. A clown’s allegiance is always up for grabs. He will vote a communist into the White House because she smiles sweetly, talks about God, and pretends to be a conservative.
What makes for a clown is a readiness to over-simplify, to avoid anything serious, to say what is true without knowing anything at all. How can a serious thought exist out of nothing? And what is between a clown’s ears? Very little to nothing. Clowns are incurious and uncultured folks who know very little history or philosophy, and therefore have no context for judging politics. Yet they are loaded to the gills with judgments and certainties. This is a problem that generally afflicts our political discourse today, on the right and left.
Ideology and Strategy
From the standpoint of global strategy, ideology has great importance; for an enemy sees your ideological stupidities better than you do, and he will play games based on these stupidities. Our friends and colleagues, sharing many of our preconceptions, add to the problem by joining with us in an intellectual phalanx of error, which Irving Janis called “groupthink.” Janis defined groupthink as “a deterioration of mental efficiency, reality testing, and moral judgment that results from in-group pressures.”[ix] Human beings tend to be stuck in their own respective echo chambers, constantly seeking reassurance, blotting out anyone who disagrees. Of course, when you are dealing with an enemy this sort of thing is very dangerous.
The Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union and its successor state have been studying America and Western Europe for the past century. They are well acquainted with our wishful thinking and our various misconceptions. In fact, they would like to foster as many misconceptions in us as they can; for good strategists make their own opportunities. Agents of influence, carrying out the instructions of Moscow Center, are meant to operate in the shadows; yet the most important shadows in which they operate are produced in minds beclouded by ignorance and ideology. In fact, Russian and Chinese agents of influence have used our own ideological preconceptions against us at every turn. For example, our economic conservatives and libertarians have always said that “communism does not work.” So the communists condescended to flatter them in the late 1980s, turning openly to capitalism. In this way the communists made inroads into the libertarian right. After 1991, when Russia pretended to become a Christian conservative country, paleoconservatives were romanced. Given the proprietary vanity which ideologists feel with regard to their ideas, who is so firm that he cannot be seduced? Ideological agreement can be a form of flattery, and flattery is an agent-recruiter’s most important tool.
This leads us to consider the great success that Communism Incognito has had, behind the scenes, in American and European politics since 1991. The grandiose deception strategy adopted by the communist bloc in 1960,[x] which was predicated on organizing a false liberalization in Russia as well as market-oriented reforms in both Russia and China, appeared absurdly ambitious and optimistic on its face. To properly grasp the strategy’s ingenuity, one must see its psychological depth. The communists had done well insofar as they knew their enemy. They knew that the West wanted to be fooled. Especially, the West wanted to believe that the threat of nuclear world war was a thing of the past. Thus, the communist and post-communist theater productions of 1989-94 were successful. Those who were paying attention could see the transparently sloppy stagecraft, especially in Czechoslovakia and Romania; yet, the whole thing came off easily; except that the communists had deceived themselves about the unpopularity of their own system. Here, they might have known their enemy but not themselves (for this is always the hardest thing of all). Where it came to the reactions of the West, the strategists in Moscow were masterful. Where it came to the reactions of Poles and Ukrainians and certain other peoples, they blundered badly. But that is a story for another time.
What made the deception work was in the strategist’s understanding of what the West wanted to believe ideologically, and, in fact, psychologically needed to believe. The collapse of the Soviet Union served to validate liberalism, market hedonism, and democratism. All doubts regarding these ideologies were instantly removed by the collapse of the Soviet Union. If the West had been blinded by its ideological assumptions before 1991, the West was blind and deaf and stupid ever afterward; for the West had won a great and painless victory. Heaven help anyone who came along to say otherwise.
The Advance of COmmunisM
In 1958 the American lawyer Robert Morris, who had worked as counsel to the Senate subcommittee on internal security, warned about the infiltration of the communists. “My friends tell me I take these things too seriously,” Morris wrote. “But what I see is an encirclement that has its goal my own five children.” Morris then said there was a connection between the advance of communism abroad and its advance within our country. “Whether it is the Congo, Laos or Berlin, these are mere stepping stones, in Khrushchev’s eye, to the real target, the United States. We are the only obstacle to his goal of world dominion. If we fail, our whole civilization is lost.”[xi]
Morris’s book, which chronicles his legal and intelligence battles against communism in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, is long forgotten now; yet it was a brilliant little history, full of shocking details and unpalatable truth-telling. Morris wrote, “The treachery, the credulity, the ineptitude and the complacency, seem so fantastic. And beholding them, it is no wonder we are losing.”[xii] Morris wrote those words in 1958. Indeed, what would he say now that Brazil is falling to Fidel’s friend, Lula? Of course, despite his many disappointments Morris was not inclined to give up. He said our inability to defeat communism had to do with human weakness, and that these weaknesses could be overcome. He wrote, “perhaps we can effect a stirring reversal.” So far, the most striking moves against communism have occurred in places like Poland, the Baltic States, Georgia and Ukraine. In fact, Ukraine is the only country in Europe that presently bans its Communist Party. (Hungary and Moldova had bans at one time.) In 2015 the Ukrainians legally prohibited communist symbols and barred the Communist Party from participating in elections. Of course, Moscow did not take this lying down.
With the war in Ukraine and the communist takeover in Brazil, we can see America’s peril with greater clarity. The government of the United States, under President Joseph Biden, supports the rise to power in Brazil of a convicted criminal, friend of Fidel Castro, and communist conspirator – Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. In fact, the U.S. Secretary of State has threatened the Brazilian military should it block Lula’s presidency. Here is a bit of that insanity we were discussing earlier; for President Bolsonaro, who is routinely vilified by American Democrats and leftists, is a pro-American politician. He is friendly to American values, while Lula da Silva hates the United States, being friendly to Cuba and China and Russia. In 2019 Bolsonaro offered the United States the possibility of having military bases on Brazilian soil to counter the Russian threat emerging out of Venezuela.[xiii] But this never materialized, and the Biden Administration’s concerns about Russian infiltration of the Western Hemisphere are not anywhere visible. In fact, the Biden Administration will do nothing to prevent Russian military units from deploying to Nicaragua (as announced last year).
We can only understand what is happening in terms of profound ideological changes that have taken place within the United States since the supposed end of the Cold War. Socialism is becoming acceptable in the United States for the first time. This would have been inconceivable fifty years ago. Consider how Washington reacted when a communist came to power in a South American country 53 years ago, when Chile elected Salvador Allende as their president. The CIA bunglingly pressured reluctant Chilean generals to overthrow Allende.[xiv] Now U.S. policy has swung to the opposite position – welcoming communists into power throughout Latin America, threatening those who might oppose communism with force of arms.
This is tragic for millions in Brazil who know their country will be looted by Lula and his communist gangster friends. Millions in Brazil are in the streets, protesting for their deliverance. But President Biden is one of those clowns discussed earlier, who does not know on what side his bread is buttered. – Or does he? At this late hour nobody should be naïve. A time of troubles is beginning for Brazil. The leading institutions of the country no longer belong to the Brazilian people.
In his farewell address, before leaving Brazil, President Bolsonaro said “violence will return to Brazil.” Then he predicted, amid mixed signals, what lies in store:
[They will] stop the economic wheel from spinning and there will be no money for public services. It won’t happen like the pandemic, when you received your full paycheck. With no economy there will be no resources. Everyone will suffer. But I am sure, it won’t take long. Brazil will come back to normal, to prosperity, to order and progress, to respect, love for our flag. Brazil won’t succumb.
Sadly, these hopeful words ring hollow in the wake of what is happening in Brazil. Hundreds are being arrested, including anticommunist journalists. I understand why Bolsonaro fled his country, since nobody wants to be tortured in a communist jail. But was not Bolsonaro like the captain of a ship? Was he not obliged, in some sense, to go down with that ship – to fight to the end? I cannot judge a man for saving his own life. But then, I think of the millions he left behind – the 1,700 Brazilian patriots arrested. The only hope Brazil had was in Bolsonaro. Now the Brazilian people will have to do what the Ukrainian people did; that is, distrust their leaders and mock them – to the point of settling on a comedian as president; for if one must have clowns, then have a real one. It is a choice that has proven satisfactory in Ukraine.
And what does the vile American press have to say about the Brazilian patriots? The vile American media slanders the Brazilian patriots as “right wing extremists.” Earlier in his farewell speech, Bolsonaro said that peace required guns and that peace required war preparations. But then, tearfully, he turned everything upside down, telling his followers, “Always seek peace, harmony – not just talk about it. How important this is, in this quick journey here on earth, to live in peace.” As a blubbering subtext, we can hear someone mumbling –
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a wimper.
Links and Notes
[i] Bella Dodd, School of Darkness (Kindle Edition), p. 263 at 46 percent. Dodd was a Communist Party lawyer who had worked for communist control of the leading teachers’ unions, which captured the education system in the state of New York by 1939. For further details the takeover of America’s schools in New York and New Jersey: Robert Morris, No Wonder We Are Losing (New York, The Bookmailer, 1958).
[ii] https://dialogo-americas.com/articles/russia-venezuela-military-partnership-a-threat-to-latin-america/#.Y8GWdHbMK3A
[iii] https://www.amazon.com/Marx-Biography-Robert-PAYNE/dp/B0006D7CAW/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1ZYTPFZRHV0QA&keywords=Marx+by+Robert+Payne&qid=1673635095&sprefix=marx+by+robert+payne%2Caps%2C109&sr=8-1
[iv] In France, during the eighteenth century, the term ideology was first used to describe the scientific study of ideas. But through common usage, during the turbulence of the French Revolution, it became what it is today; that is, a byword for various political belief systems. Napoleon Bonaparte was astute enough to realize that ideology represented something negative; for he used the word ideology as term of abuse, depicting his opponents as “ideologues.” The correctness of this usage was also recognized by Karl Marx, who knew exactly what he was doing when he concocted his own ideological system – disguised as philosophy (i.e., dialectical materialism). Unlike Marx, who said ideologies were mere byproducts of “material life conditions,” Eric Voegelin suggested that ideologies were the result of man’s spiritual estrangement from the “divine ground” of being. The key point is that ideologists do not begin with God and advance to an ordered understanding. They begin estranged from the “divine ground of being,” and invent their own truth – which is hardly propitious.
[v] Anthony C. Sutton, America’s Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull & Bones (Oregon: TrineDay LLC, 2002), p. 2.
[vi] Conspiracy theorists who believe I am an agent of the conspiracy, however, need to explain my relative poverty and underemployment over the past thirty years. If I am somehow supporting Doctor Evil and his crew, why didn’t they get me on Fox News? – or, at least, a better book deal!
[vii] Eric Voegelin, Autobiographical Reflections (USA: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), p. 45.
[ix] https://www.the-philosophy.com/sartre-hell-is-other-people https://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/glossary/groupthink#:~:text=According%20to%20psychologist%20Irving%20Janis,the%20group’s%20competence%20and%20morality.
[x] See KGB Major Anatoliy Golitsyn, New Lies for Old (New York: Dodd & Mead, 1984).
[xi] Morris, p. 213.
[xii] Ibid, p. 216.
[xiii] https://apnews.com/article/44fab22af15b45b2846778e9c922adeb
[xiv] The Chilean generals refused to do the CIA’s bidding, but overthrew Allende on their own initiative when he violated the Constitution by attempting to raise his own troops.
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235 responses to “Ideology, Subversion, and the Fall of Brazil: Not With a Bang”
I was doing some reading on the AI breakthroughs. Not solely on the chat bots, but on the technical side for logistics warfare. It appears that Xi is very privy to technical superiority, especially AI related tech. My feeling is that whoever gets the AI systems going first has instant exponential leverage over an opponent. That being said an AI tactical cloud going up in six months would send shivers down Xi’s spine. I would think he would do something soon, or at least try to counter it in some way. I also wonder if Xi already has something similar that we don’t know of yet.
I’m following the blog, just trying to stay abreast of current events.
So many things to keep track of, ralphee. Thanks for stopping by.
Reading these posts I feel like I just read a One flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest like script.
The essay was excellent, though.
Thank you.
Carla. I have definitely attracted some hateful trolls.
Jeff,
Switching topics away from the attention-demanding Petunia, do you have any idea what took place on Biden’s first trip to Russia in 1973. In the last blog, I pointed out how every article that had a link to the “1973 trip to Moscow” took you to his 2011 speech at a university in Moscow on the Whitehouse.gov website. This was true if you clicked on the Russian sources or American sources such as CNN. So, for some reason the 1973 stories about his trip have been scrubbed from the internet. Any ideas? Maybe I am making a mountain out of a molehill, but it’s very strange.
I found several articles that mentioned not only his 1973 trip, but also his 1979 trip.
I use http://search.brave.com for my search engine, or if you use brave as your browser make its search engine your default search engine. On this computer that doesn’t have brave browser, I was able to make the brave search engine the default search engine in firefox. I have found that I cannot trust the other search engines to find articles like these, not even duckduckgo.
I will check that out on Brave. Thank you.
All 1973 hyperlinks inside the 3 stories I found went to Whitehouse.gov to the 2011 speech at a Moscow university. It was spooky because one story was written by CNN and the other 2 were Russian publications.
Yes, there are Bukovsky archive documents on Biden’s trip to Russia, smuggled out of the USSR. I subscribe to scribd, where you can access the Bukovsky article and documents on the Biden trip to the USSR. According to the Soviet document, Biden told Soviet authorities, privately, that he had no problem with their human rights abuses but he had to publicly chastise Moscow for political reasons. So they should not be alarmed at anything he said against them in public. He did not really mean it.
Typical (Democrat) politician. 😕
I’m curious as to who this brilliant man was. I have some famous quotes about brilliant men too. Tesla was an electrical and power engineer.
“Power Engineers ARE NOT the holders of the latest and most sophisticated mathematics. That realm belongs to Theoretical Physicists and Mathematicians.” I am laughing out loud at you while I write this. Theoretical physicists have given us nothing except some billion $ experiments and bogus claims of gravity waves and relativity nonsense. Then some mythological photons and other magic dust particles. The greatest electrical engineers were self taught. They have given us everything modern life has and ” Theoretical Physicists and Mathematicians.” have given the world nothing.”
The man I asked had no interest in electronics, said it was easy. He worked on the solar panels for Star Wars defense system in the 80’s. Met with Bush Snr in the oval office about it.
Interesting Ralphee. I deleted the previous thread about Tesla. It is not topical for this site.
In the most recent Populist Roundtable episode you mentioned the following book which describes a meeting between Steve Bannon and Alexander Dugin. Can you say more about this meeting and whether you think Bannon’s influence was a significant factor in turning the conservative media towards Russia?
War for Eternity: The Return of Traditionalism and the Rise of the Populist Right (available on amazon)
by Benjamin R. Teitelbaum
Laura, to answer your question about the “War for Eternity.” I am going through Teitelbaum’s book now. There are many interesting things in it. Actually, very explosive things if you realize what is being said. Not everything should be taken at face value, of course, and needs to be sifted. According to Teitelbaum, Dugin and Bannon met in Rome little over four years ago (Nov. 2018). Bannon proposed some kind of an alliance, or cooperation. Why would this be thought possible? To simplify: Bannon has advertised himself as a follower of Traditionalist philosophers Guenon and Evola, just as Dugin has. Ironically, I do not believe either man is seriously following the philosophies of Gueonon and Evola. Their lip service to Traditionalism seems to be part of a game, or a dance, or something even less edifying that each side may be trying to do to the other. My impression is that Bannon made some kind of attempt to penetrate Dugin’s European network by befriending Dugin and some other folks. This looks a little like a spiderweb and interpreting people’s actions can be difficult. When I spoke to Bannon several months ago, during a commercial break on his show, he told me that “We have to end this war in Ukraine so we can ally with Russia.” This comment did not entirely surprise me, given the way the right was then turning. According to Teitelbaum, Bannon has been angling for an alliance with Russia for a long time. Of course, if I’m the Russians I do not trust this guy, Bannon, because he might be a Pentagon spy (i.e., as he is a former US Navy officer). If Bannon is working for U.S. intelligence, as a paranoid communist agent might suppose, he would not be particularly concerned about taking the money of a Chinese billionaire-defector, like Miles Guo (whose defection might not be what it seems). Of course, this is a tangle that should make your head hurt.
At least, it makes it spin.🫡
JEFF. NEED YOU AND EVERYBODY TO WATCH THIS SHORT (NINE MINUTE) VIDEO, AND TO GET YOU AND ANYONE ELSE’S RESPONSE:
Comedian Leaves Oxford Union SPEECHLESS
2,033,422 views Jan 13, 2023
Konstantin Kisin speaking at the Oxford Union for the motion “This House Believes Wokeness Has Gone Too Far”.
Excellent speech. Everyone needs to memorize his points and use them.
I think this speech misses a main element of Marxist ideologues, and which is that of replacing their ignroance and shallow clownness with threats in order to elicit respect. Clowns in power, like the little Zeke Zinnober of ETA Hoffmann, become vicious and cruel due to their lack of authority, as if they unconsciously knew they were ridiculous. Violence is all they have as a resort. This is the biggest problem with wokists. And this is fodder for Russia because rapists like communists will always lay in wait to attack someone at the first sign of identified “threat” behavior. The idiot is not only useful when he supports communists but also when he himself becomes dangerously schizophrenic. Stalin always built a consensus that way during his purges, picking one by one people clowns getting carried away with everyone agreeing at the table but also everyone a dupe because Stalin was a step ahead and had in mind everyone.
If threatening aloof imperial clownish behavior is what Russia and the world will perceive our new generation to be, it will be easy for them to call us Nazis. I am wondering if by invading Ukraine the goal was to provoke the west in a nuclear war. Obviously the bombing of civilians in Ukraine is that. Suffice to say that if you want to kill your pitbull in front of neighbors, the best way is to make it stupid and dangerous first.
Sutton’s statement on Page2 is logically incorrect;
“in scientific methodology a hypothesis can be proven. It cannot be disproven.”
Actually he seems to have got it backwards;
“So, a scientific hypothesis most definitely can be disproved. We can also validate an hypothesis, but it cannot be proved. Hypotheses can be well validated. They can even be considered as “laws” but they are never proved.”
from https://www.quora.com/Why-can-a-scientist-never-prove-or-disprove-a-hypothesis-but-can-only-test-it?share=1
Logically, the correct understanding in this context could be; “in scientific methodology an hypothesis CAN’T be proven. It CAN be DISproven.”
Therefore it would be up to an opponent to supply evidence or observations that disprove Sutton’s hypothesis that “America’s secret establishment” did the things he alleged.
Sutton however did correctly state “a negative proposition can never be proven” earlier on the same page.
You said “In other words, Sutton refused to accept the falsifiability principle.”
Irrespective of whether he really did or not, the onus would be on you Jeff to disprove his hypothesis, which I do hope you will try to do instead of just summarily dismissing his body of work so easily.
Crumbling into dust? Really?
g1: Yes, Sutton’s epistemology is backwards. A hypothesis (e.g., all swans are white) can never be proven. But it can be disproven if you can find a black swan. This is not the whole story regarding science or epistemology, of course. But Sutton has made a mistake; and you would like to rationalize this by suggesting that I cannot disprove a negative in Sutton’s case. Sorry to say, you are making another kind of mistake. You are admitting that Sutton’s conspiracy theory is not proven in any sense (i.e., that it is a negative). All you have to do is assert it’s truth, without any real proof, and I have to prove it is wrong. But again, this is entirely backwards. If there is nothing to disprove, I need not do anything of the kind.
So what was Sutton’s conspiracy theory? It was in line with certain assertions made by Robert Welch, which I have strong objections to. In his book “National Suicide: Military Aid to the Soviet Union,” Sutton concluded that the Vietnam War, the Korean War, and the Cold War were “not fought to restrain communism [but] … to generate multibillion-dollar armament contracts.” Then, in “Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution,” Sutton detailed Wall Street investment in the early Bolshevik regime, arguing that it was a plot to turn Russia into “a captive market and technical colony to be expolited by a few high-powered American financiers and corporations under their control.” He postuled the theory that the West’s economic power elite have a “long-range program of nurturing collectivism” and fostering “corporate socialism” in order to preserve their wealth.
This is merely a more scholarly version of the John Birch Society’s “conspiracy behind communism” theory, which has its roots in the Jewish-Masonic conspiracy theory. It is a cleaned up, post-holocaust, version of this same theory, with similar explanations as given by Karl Marx, for the idea that capitalism is an oppressive (or neo-imperialist) world system. In essence, Sutton has a great deal in common with Lenin’s thinking about “imperialism,” and later writers who alleged that capitalism amounts to an international form of neo-colonialism.
Strangely, Sutton’s conclusions mirror both Nazi and communist characterizations of the capitalist system. The reasons for this similitude needs to be explained. In fact, I do not think Sutton was a closet communist. I rather suspect a more right wing tendency.
Think of it this way: When an antisemite says there is a conspiracy of Jewish Cabalists, who rule the world through the banks and masonic lodges, he is giving the uneducated man’s version of Sutton’s theory. On the other side, Sutton’s theory offers a scholarly argument to support such opinions. Is this merely a coincidence? I cannot say, but it is something to think about.
Professor Virgil D. Medlin of Oklahoma City University reported finding numerous factual errors in Sutton’s “Wall Street” series. Sutton also included rumors and unsubstantiated claims in his books. Howard Dickman of the Manhattan Institute said that “Wall Street and FDR” was a “weak specimen of conspiracy history.” Professor S. Leiberstein initially praised Sutton’s work, but reversed himself after more careful consideration, noting that Sutton had cherry picked his facts, ignoring serious counter-evidence.
On close examination, Sutton does not give us any proof of his theses. In all that he presents there is no smoking gun. Of course, an absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. But, the absence of evidence is not something we need to take seriously.
If an elite conspiracy has been operating for over one hundred years, I submit that there would some credible direct evidence to offer. But in all my research, I have not seen this kind of proof. I have merely happened upon people who think they have evidence, only to find that they do not even understand what evidence is, or what their “facts” actually signify. The idea that there is a better explanation of the facts, and that there is a large body of evidence substantiating other explanations, is entirely missed. Conspiracy believers won’t even look at other material. Give them a conspiracy book and they are happy. Have them read a serious book showing a more plausible explanation for historical events and they will denounce the book as part of the coverup. I am sorry to say, this is not an honest approach.
When you learn more about the history of the “sealed train,” Lenin’s arrival at Finland Station, and the plans of the German government to end the war in the east (in 1917), you see a different picture than Sutton offers. With western businessmen rushing in to the new Soviet Russia, and incidents like the Lockhart Plot, you realize that things are not what they seem; that Sutton does not have the real story at all. Then came Lenin’s NEP, in which the Bolsheviks openly turned capitalist themselves. They engaged in Operation Trust to fool the Western capitalists, to promote further investment in Soviet Russia. Was this, also, a capitalist plot to colonize Russia? Here is where my credulity is stretched to the breaking point.
Basically, with Sutton as with many conspiracy theorists, there is very little to disprove because they are offering an interpretation without real substance. You will notice many half-baked people, furiously dumping mountains of poorly digested “fact” on me. They hope to overwhelm me with their “evidence.” They become more and more shrill as they go. They accuse me of covering up the faccts, of censoring them. I just do not want this discussion board taken over by their nonsensical interpretations; for they would blot me out of my own website. All over the Internet their ideas wash over the empty-headed public like a flood. Everyone is infected with this stuff. I get it from my friends all the time. We are immersed in this stuff as much as we are immersed in Marxism. In fact, this teaching about the evils of capitalism aligns with Marxism.
In the end, ten million “factual” misinterpretations do not, in sum, make one correct interpretation. Am I obligated to work through all this trash? No. I have been there, I have done that. You imagine I have dismissed Sutton’s body of work “easily.” Believe me, I wish I could get the months of wasted time back; for every time I condescend to check these things out, I come up with nothing. I did suspect there was nothing there, but not knowing I had to check into it. Always and ever, this elite capitalist conspiracy thing is a dead end. I say it until I am blue in the face. But you and other true believers like you, do not accept my many points (constantly offered). You are mentally stuck on this thing. I will never convince you that your unpoven, unvalidated convictions are UNTRUE. Somehow, I am still obligated to PROVE you are wrong. You believe without proof, which means YOU WANT TO BELIEVE IT.
If the onus is on me to “disprove” every odd fact that is dumped on me, I will never do anything in life but explain that your facts do not prove your theory. We shall go round and round, to what end? You will just get more upset with me, and I will lose my patience with you. Since most people who believe this sort of thing violently believe in it, every fact is going to appear as a proof to them. That they do not possess the larger knowledge, or the native judgment, to interpret facts corrrectly, or to suspend judgment, merely serves up an insult to you. I am not a full-time conspiracy debunker. I am trying to figure out what is really happening, and that means I am looking for the truth without getting lost in the conspiracy theory weeds. I am not looking to argue with hundreds of convinced conspiracy buffs, hurtling thousands of badly interpretted facts at me.
More than thirty years ago I spent three months in a research library going through conspiracy books, analyzing their “proofs.” One key book was called “The Shadows of Power.” I found three allegations there that would constitute proof. When I traced the footnotes of these three claims, one was a misstatement of an admission by two of Jacob Schiff’s children about the financing of the Bolshevik Revolution. Turns out, he did not finance the Bolshevik Revolution at all. The other two proofs came from German, and then Japanese, propaganda literature produced during WWII. They were simply anti-American claims with no citations.
So I gave conspiracy theory three months back then, and several days here and there researching claims. Nothing that would prove the conspiracy, that I have looked at, ever panned out. In the sense that you cannot prove a “negative,” these non-proofs need not be refuted; for that which is unlikely, and which has not been proved, need not be disproved. The assertions are, after careful anlaysis, a tissue of illusion. You have to believe in the conspiracy before you can see it. And once you have seen it, everything begins to look like proof.
Sort of like the archaeologist who said, “I never would have seen it if I hadn’t believed it.”
The clown is indeed aloof, and mostly aloof about his own ridiculous and suffering condition. Comedy has always been often been about laughing of other’s misfortunes. The clown laughs as if his misfortune is one to laugh at as if it was another’s. Liberal clowns on TV perfectly match this schizophrenia.
Fidel was sending degenerates to labour camps. Not only homosexuals, but also prostitutes and their customers. Today’s Cuba is spitting his legacy. They are lost.
The thing is, it was a political purge expedient of the days, not of today. This makes the eso-communists more flexible and strategic and thus less ideological than the Nazis who were exo-communists. Where it gets more dicey for the apprentice sorcerer is when his created monsters run amok. Paranoia rises as a system relies more on threat than actual knowledge and authority. What makes Russia control China that it knows the Chinese will not switch off somewhere on the Communist plan wifi and carry out a threat, One could surmise that the West did not create a split between China and Russia with détente, but actually saved Russia from a China on the border of a sort of schizophrenic breakdown!
Now unfortunately it is us in that position…
The gays of Cuba in the 50s are not the same gays of today’s Cuba. The same thing happened to Germany. Bismark anihilated the cultural support of each region and sought to unite Germany, and instead people resorted to ideology to find quick and dirty reorientstion. The homosexuals of the 50s in Cuba were Indians who participated in the culture, had knowledge of it and many were actual healers that competed with Castro’s “medical benefits” communist politics. Nowadays the homosexuals of Cuba are fully dependent on ideology, have completely lost their cultural ancestry and medicinal knowledge and they are sexual schizophrenics, while schizophrenia does not exist in “primitive” cultures. Let us not confuse homosexual with modern sexual schizophrenia rejecting reality and embracing ideology, a Peter Pan syndrome.
The fact that there are gays in a socialist society is alarming. Legalizing those elements is a road to counter revolution. GDR was the first socialist country to do this, the wall fell shortly after.
“My kind has influence on your country?”
Your kind is basically running our country. Temporarily, hopefully.
I think it was a psychologist who said science produces landfills and ideology produces human garbage. Ideology, in psychology, basically was prevalent according to him because it was not real ancestral knowledge earned for thousands of years by societies aiming at creating sense amongst and within people. Psychoanalysis to him was struggling with its own ideology against other methods and psychiatric discoveries more than it was actually doing genuine work of treating patients.
Bolsonaro indeed erred in complete vacuuous Bush-Trump type speech on peace etc. The salient issue is to reorganize people. People fail to comprehend too that in America that the Constitution as a document is only half of it. What really organize the nation was getting together to write a document and “dream” of a future nation. That activity, future seeing and looking, was the magic which made it happen. Had the Founders dwelt on the past prowess of previous philosophers or good kingdoms, they would have failed. Communists succeed despite their stupidity simply because they are forward looking, they appeal to the youth. Of course, they knowing that magical ingrdedient, they do not bother cynically with the “overhead” of devising a virtuous constitution and document. Communism is meant to never happen for that reason , and it is meant to keep destroying for that reason, because, if it were established, it would immediately die replaced by the next forward looking goon. The Lenin fight against the “counter-revolution” was the key. The whole Soviet deception is based on them being assured that we have stopped fighting a “counter-revolution” against British or modern french influence (sadly). We have stopped tarring and feathering Anglicans making prayers to King George, that is there the problem.
England should have never been our ally in WWiI, in a way, the crown, that is. The crown should have always been our eternal symbolic enemy in order to get back this “forward future oriented” brand appeal, especially amongst the youth. It is almost like the Soviets wanted it that way intuitively.
BRILLIANT speech by Konstantin Kisin before the Oxford Union!! Agree with LadyfromLibertyGarage… his eveery point is excellent, full-stop.
As always Jeff, your usual tour de force article. Thanks, as always.
Books,
in the manner
of submarines, that
book is undependable below that depth.
If
your search
for wisdom was
set to music, would the
music sound as intense as these men?
Any of you know what this is about:
https://web.archive.org/web/20191230163701/http://www.deagel.com/country/forecast.aspx?pag=1&sort=GDP&ord=DESC
It is somebody’s idea of a forecast, and it got a lot of attention because of its sensational nature. This site is predicting economic circumstances so bad in the U.S., that most people will leave the country. The methodology for gathering the data is not scientific and is not even shown. The economic and population projections are obviously part of a game of questionable taste.
It forecasts the U.S. losing 70% of its population. That’s a bit distressing.