Abstract of the largest study on Near Death Experiences conducted to date:

The results of a four-year international study of 2060 cardiac arrest cases across 15 hospitals concludes the following. The themes relating to the experience of death appear far broader than what has been understood so far, or what has been described as so called near-death experiences. In some cases of cardiac arrest, memories of visual awareness compatible with so called out-of-body experiences may correspond with actual events…

Dr Parnia commenting on a NDE that was validated and timed using auditory stimuli during cardiac arrest.:

This is significant, since it has often been assumed that experiences in relation to death are likely hallucinations or illusions, occurring either before the heart stops or after the heart has been successfully restarted, but not an experience corresponding with ‘real’ events when the heart isn’t beating. In this case, consciousness and awareness appeared to occur during a three-minute period when there was no heartbeat. This is paradoxical, since the brain typically ceases functioning within 20-30 seconds of the heart stopping and doesn’t resume again until the heart has been restarted. Furthermore, the detailed recollections of visual awareness in this case were consistent with verified events.

Perhaps I’ll make a post at some point outlining the mountain of evidence in favor of ‘non-physical’ intelligence etc. (terms are difficult here as what they are or how they operate remains unknown i.e. soul, spirit etc.).

I truly underestimated the blind spots within the existing scientific paradigm. By and large anomalous data that exists to far outside of the existing scientific paradigm is simply ignored.

‘Materialism’ was scientifically invalided over a century ago but more or less continues to exist as the default perspective underlying most working science (but by no mean all).

Experiments employing evolutionary game-theory set out to determine the probability that natural selection would produce humans that perceived objective reality.

The result came back as 0. These finding have since been mathematically verified.

It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true…And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.

The century had arrived that would enthrone matter and Thomas Hobbes was its apologist. In his Leviathan he wrote: 'That which is not body is no part of the universe, and because the universe is all, that which is no part of it is nothing, and consequently nowhere.' Hobbes's proclamation admits no compromise, and it charms people still. Of course Hobbes had not the least idea what matter was - he knew far less of it than theologians thought they knew of angels. His assertion was simply the incantation of a new creed. For over two centuries Hobbes's creed was science's.

Then, shortly after 1900, a revolution was ignited by Planck and Einstein that would banish substance, 'that unintelligible heart of materialism.’ Science had reduced matter to atoms,

which at first seemed as substantial as so many little stones. Then atoms were reduced to particles - and nature sprained her surprise. Einstein showed that matter and energy were essentially the same thing, and that the one could be changed into the other - thus the atomic bomb. Although we acknowledged energy in our simple days, it was regarded not as substantial in any sense, but as the motion of substantial particles. Yet if matter can be converted into energy, obviously the notion of substance is almost exhausted. Substance, body, was by definition and our primitive understanding an ultimate that could certainly not be reduced to anything so tenuous as energy, which was after all not a thing, but the property of a thing.

If any feeble life remained to substance, de Broglie delivered its death blow. In 1924, equations showed that a material particle could behave as a wave. That imaginative leap, verified experimentally three years later, won de Broglie the Nobel Prize in 1929. His formulations were further developed into wave mechanics by Schrodinger, Dirac, Heisenberg, and others. But when particles revealed their wave nature the game was over and substance was exposed as an illusion having no more fundamental tangibility than Ruth's spectral form.

The external world of physics has thus become a world of shadows, 'Sir Arthur Eddington said, 'In removing our illusions we have removed substance, for indeed we have seen that substance is one of the greatest of our illusions.

. . 'Some may feel they were robbed of the idea of substance by a sleight; that although matter waves are impalpable, they are nevertheless in some sense objective physical entities that still suggest something of substance, however ghostly.’ There was no sleight. Atomic particles are waves in a multidimensional space having nothing to do with the space we perceive. These waves are described as waves of probability with no material existence whatsoever. Schrodinger wrote that they are “completely immaterial waves; as immaterial as waves of nationalism, depression, or "streaking'" that sweep over a country.' And Planck simply called them waves of knowledge.

After considering the evidence, von Neumann, one of the greatest of modern mathematicians, concluded that the concept of objective reality had evaporated. That leaves only subjective reality, or something beyond description. When the physical view of the universe became completely non-material with modern physics, it encountered something that has always been considered the quintessence of immateriality: consciousness, mind. Perhaps we should have expected such a denouement when we found the physical world was built of incorporeal waves of knowledge or probability. A wave of knowledge, after all, requires a knower. Karl Marbe, a mathematician and philosopher, discovered many years ago that probability arose from the mind. Now what had been the purview of philosophers became a vital issue for physicists as well. 'It may be useful to give the reason for the increased interest of the contemporary physicist in problems of [philosophy],' wrote Eugene Wigner, Nobel laureate. 'The Reason is in a nutshell, that physicists have found it impossible to give a satisfactory description of atomic phenomena without reference to consciousness.'

That is not some semantic twaddle that a positivist can reduce to gibberish. Wigner was stating a fact of physics. 'It is not a long step,' said Einstein, 'from thinking of matter as an electron ghost to thinking of it as the objectified image of thought.' Sir James Jeans agreed: 'The concepts which now prove to be fundamental to our understanding of nature ...seem to my mind to be structures of pure thought, incapable of realization in any sense which would be described as material. Elsewhere Jeans concluded that in brief, idealism has always maintained that as the beginning of the road by which we explore nature is mental, the chances are that the end also will be mental.

To this present-day science adds that, at the farthest point she has so far reached, much, and possibly all, that wasn't material has disappeared, and nothing new has come in that is not mental. Eddington, in a now famous passage, stated it even more badly. Realizing that the physical world is entirely abstract and without actuality apart from its linkage to consciousness, we restore consciousness to the fundamental position instead of representing it as an inessential complication … ‘To put the conclusion crudely - the stuff of the world is mind stuff’...

The mind-stuff is not spread in space and time; these are part of the cyclic scheme ultimately derived out of it. In recent years Wigner observed that 'it will remain remarkable, in whatever way our future concepts may develop, that the very study of the external world led to the conclusion that the content of consciousness is an ultimate reality.' Von Weizsacker phrased it more poetically: 'Man tries to penetrate the factual truth of nature, but in her last unfathomable riches suddenly, as in a mirror, he meets himself.' St. Frances anticipated him: 'What we are looking for is what is looking.’ …Nineteenth-century surgeons often bragged that they had never discovered a soul in all the bodies they dissected. Twentieth-century physicists, in dissecting the universe, however, have failed to find a body.

-J. Finley Hurley

…Looking back to the different sets of concepts that have been formed in the past or may possibly be formed in the future in the attempt to find our way through the world by means of science, we see that they appear to be ordered by the increasing part played by the subjective element in the set. Classical physics can be considered as that idealization in which we speak about the world as entirely separated from ourselves.

…Quantum theory does not allow a completely objective description of nature.

…When we represent a group of connections by a closed and coherent set of concepts, axioms, definitions and laws which in turn is represented by a mathematical scheme we have in fact isolated and idealized this group of connections with the purpose of clarification. But even if complete clarity has been achieved in this way, it is not known how accurately the set of concepts describes reality…

…the physicists have gradually become accustomed to considering the electronic orbits, etc., not as reality but rather as a kind of `potentia.'...it is a language that produces pictures in our mind, but together with them the notion that the pictures have only a vague connection with reality, that they represent only a tendency toward reality…

…the scientific concepts are idealizations; they are derived from experience obtained by refined experimental tools, and are precisely defined through axioms and definitions. Only through these precise definitions is it possible to connect the concepts with a mathematical scheme and to derive mathematically the infinite variety of possible phenomena in this field. But through this process of idealization and precise definition the immediate connection with reality is lost…

…It may be useful in this connection to remember that even in the most precise part of science, in mathematics, we cannot avoid using concepts that involve contradictions…

The skepticism against precise scientific concepts does not mean that there should be a definite limitation for the application of rational thinking. On the contrary, one may say that the human ability to understand may be in a certain sense unlimited. But the existing scientific concepts cover always only a very limited part of reality, and the other part that has not yet been understood is infinite. Whenever we proceed from the known into the unknown we may hope to understand, but we may have to learn at the same time a new meaning of the word `understanding.'

-Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy

To understand a thing is a bridge and possibility of returning to the path. But to explain a matter is arbitrary and sometimes even murder.

Have you counted the murderers among the scholars?

...What you speak is, the intoxication is, the undignified, sick paltry dailiness is. It runs in all the streets, lives in all the houses, and rules the day of all humanity. Even the eternal stars are commonplace. It is the great mistress and the one essence of God. One laughs about it, and laughter, too, is. Do you believe, man of this time, that laughter is lower than worship? Where is your measure, false measurer?’ (The Red Book)

Have you ever noticed that every wikipedia article on any controversial topic always stresses the negative or null hypothesis without detailing supporting evidence?

An organized group of materialists–’guerrilla skeptics’--has maintained an ongoing information operation that actively edits all wikipedia pages in accordance with their conception of reality.

Not only are two hundred men and women put to death annually, on the average, in this country by mobs, but these lives are taken with the greatest publicity. In many instances the leading citizens aid and abet by their presence when they do not participate, and the leading journals inflame the public mind to the lynching point with scare-head articles and offers of rewards. Whenever a burning is advertised to take place, the railroads run excursions, photographs are taken, and the same jubilee is indulged in that characterized the public hangings of one hundred years ago. There is, however, this difference: in those old days the multitude that stood by was permitted only to guy or jeer.

The nineteenth century lynching mob cuts off ears, toes, and fingers, strips off flesh, and distributes portions of the body as souvenirs among the crowd. If the leaders of the mob are so minded, coal-oil is poured over the body and the victim is then roasted to death. This has been done in Texarkana and Paris, Tex., in Bardswell, Ky., and in Newman, Ga. In Paris the officers of the law delivered the prisoner to the mob. The mayor gave the school children a holiday and the railroads ran excursion trains so that the people might see a human being burned to death. In Texarkana, the year before, men and boys amused themselves by cutting off strips of flesh and thrusting knives into their helpless victim. At Newman, Ga., of the present year, the mob tried every conceivable torture to compel the victim to cry out and confess, before they set fire to the faggots that burned him. But their trouble was all in vain–he never uttered a cry, and they could not make him confess.

Ida B. Wells-Barnett, “Lynch Law in America” (1900)

https://www.americanyawp.com/reader/18-industrial-america/ida-b-wells-barnett-lynch-law-in-america-1900/

Women control the direction of society. When they let go of all propriety and decency and become sexually active and "outgoing" like men, then you can with a large degree of confidence say that the time is near for that part of civilization to fall. Because men are perpetually sexually active. And that is a fact. But when women lose their inhibitions and become just like their male counterparts, then all bets are off.

The excess indulgence in sex only harms the individual, it doesn't empower. Just gives a feeling of empowerment. Women hold the key to sex. And when women take the key and keep the door of exclusivity wide open, she harms herself by commodifying herself. She has thus made herself the very object of disdain. By sleeping with random men who couldn't care less about the individual that they have sex with, they will find that they have greatly lost their worth and value by making themselves easily accessible.

Women should choose wisely, as to who will the individuals be, that they associate with. Or at great cost to themselves realize that they were paying all that price for ashes and the wind. And I shouldn't have to quote, the well known saying, but I will anyway: "The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world". That is not just a saying. It carries immense weight and meaning. Whether you argue that it is the rampant growth of feminism that played a role in the accelerated growth via education and encouragement of women to join the workforce, to become valuable contributors to society, or not, it is an undeniable fact that women/mothers are not being in the home, has led to the indoctrination and the consequent neglect of children. Previously, the theory or rather, the conspiracy, that women not being present in the home would lead to children being taught all kinds of stuff at school was just a theory or conspiracy. But that is not the case anymore. There are groups with really clandestine, selfish agendas that seek to wreck all that we hold precious. You should realize that all the talks of global warming and climate change and political divisiveness and various commonly accepted differences between the sexes are being weaponized to divide men (or rather, men and women) against each other and children against their parents. The same tactic that the British used against the people of India. Tried and tested and has been found to work rather effectively.

What the world needs are individuals that protect and cherish, first of all, each other, the key to which lies in understanding of the differences between each other and playing to our strengths and differences. Feminine power lies in complete understanding of the fact that men, for all the strength and power they have in the world, cannot, to save their lives, give birth to a human being. That alone is immeasurable power. Power that vastly trumps that of any 0.001% man. Once you truly realize that you are truly irreplaceable in the capacity to be mothers, you will understand that there is no need to fight. That power already resides in your hands. That power implies, the power to train and educate, and greatly influence their children, being the next generation, and second, the world itself.

Women of the world unite! For your battle isn't one in the first place. Be great mothers. For in that, alone you are without equal. Unequal power and influence over the next generation. That means living lives that are worthy of praise and high regard. Leading lives of dignity and respect. Hold yourselves to high standards.

The sole purpose of this movement is thus transitory in that, it is but to concretize the knowledge of the fact that there is a section of society - 50% of it, that holds itself to high standards as the other half and achieves great results in transforming society for the better, to take it to greater heights and leaving an indelible mark upon the pages of history.

9/11 was not done by a plane or bombs it was most definitely beyblades

Prove me wrong

A few words before my original storyboard idea…… i’m probably already sharing too much information as is, but I’m a guitar player. Fade To Black release in 1984 was the main catalyst to my playing. (coincidentally I was born in September of the same year.)

Even though though Metallica lost their light and shining armor before my arrival on this planet, it was still very unsettling.

I remember seeing James is re-action on some interview footage and not only saying a lot of pain and sadness, but look like to be a lot of confusion and disorientation. and I understand that PTSD has long lasting effects, but this look different. it looked like a man who knew he was being lied to.

call it clairvoyance or just a hunch, But I think James was right about not seeing him under the bus. And suspiciously by contrast, how cool, calm and collected Lars has been….. but I digress

Now for the storyline idea……

Cliff was a LOKI variant and the black ice bus accident was obviously manufactured. Cliff was zapped out of this timeline before any harm could be done.

Guy Debord's first film.

[Film, English Dubbed] (https://vimeo.com/58909937)

Transcript

Voice 1: This neighborhood was designed for the wretched dignity of the petty bourgeoisie, for respectable occupations and intellectual tourism. The sedentary population of the upper floors was sheltered from the influences of the street. The neighborhood itself has remained the same. It was the external setting of our story, where a few people put into practice a systematic questioning of all the works and diversions of a society, a total critique of its notion of happiness.

These people also scorned “subjective profundity.” The only thing that interested them was a satisfactory concrete expression of their own lives.

Voice 2: Human beings are not fully conscious of their real lives. Groping in the dark, overwhelmed by the consequences of their acts, at every moment groups and individuals find themselves faced with outcomes they had not intended.

Voice 1: They said that oblivion was their ruling passion. They wanted to reinvent everything each day; to become the masters and possessors of their own lives.

Just as we do not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, we cannot judge such a period of transformation by its own consciousness. On the contrary, this consciousness must be understood as reflecting the contradictions of material life, the conflict between social conditions and the forces of social production.

Advances in the harnessing of nature were not yet matched by a corresponding liberation of everyday life. Youth passed away among the various controls of resignation.

Our camera has captured for you a few glimpses of an ephemeral microsociety.

Knowledge of empirical facts remains abstract and superficial as long as it is not concretized by being related to the whole situation. This is the only method that enables us to supersede partial and abstract problems and get to their concrete essence, and thus implicitly to their meaning.

This group lived on the margins of the economy. It tended toward a role of pure consumption, particularly the free consumption of its own time. It thus found itself directly involved in qualitative divergences from ordinary life, but deprived of any means to influence those divergences.

The group ranged over a very small area. The same times brought them back to the same places. No one wanted to go to bed early. Discussions continued on the meaning of it all. . . .

Voice 2: “Our life is a journey, in winter and night. We seek our passage . . .”

Voice 1: The literature they had abandoned nevertheless exerted a delaying influence, expressed in some affective formulations.

Voice 2: There was the fatigue and the cold of morning in this much-traversed labyrinth, like an enigma that we had to resolve. It was a trompe-l’oeil reality through which we had to discover the potential richness of what was really there.

On the bank of the river evening began again; and the caresses; and the importance of a world without importance. Just as the eyes have a blurred vision of many things and can clearly see only one, so the will can strive only imperfectly toward diverse objects and can completely love only one at a time.

Voice 3: No one counted on the future. It would never be possible to be together later, or anywhere else. There would never be a greater freedom.

Voice 1: The refusal of time and of growing old automatically limited encounters in this narrow and contingent zone, where what was lacking was felt as irreparable. The extreme precariousness of their methods for getting by without working was at the root of this impatience which made excesses necessary and breaks irrevocable.

Voice 2: We can never really challenge any form of social organization without challenging all of that organization’s forms of language.

Voice 1: When freedom is practiced in a closed circle, it fades into a dream, becomes a mere image of itself. The ambiance of play is by nature unstable. At any moment “ordinary life” may prevail once again. The geographical limitation of play is even more striking than its temporal limitation. Every game takes place within the boundaries of its own spatial domain.

Outside the neighborhood, beyond its fleeting and continually threatened changelessness, stretched a half-known city where people met only by chance, losing their way forever.

The girls who found their way there, because they were legally under the control of their family until the age of eighteen, were often recaptured by the defenders of that detestable institution. They were generally locked up under the custody of those creatures who among all the bad products of a bad society present the most ugly and repugnant appearance: nuns.

What makes most documentaries so easy to understand is the arbitrary limitation of their subject matter. They confine themselves to depicting fragmented social functions and their isolated products. In contrast, imagine the full complexity of a moment that is not resolved into a work, a moment whose development contains interrelated facts and values and whose meaning is not yet apparent. This confused totality could be the subject matter of such a documentary.

Voice 2: The era had attained a level of knowledge and technologies that made possible, and increasingly necessary, a direct construction of all the aspects of a mentally and materially liberated way of life. The appearance of these superior means of action, though they remained unused because of the delays in the project of abolishing the commodity economy, had already revealed the obsolescence of all aesthetic activity, whose ambitions and powers had both dwindled away. The decay of art and of all the old codes of conduct had formed our sociological background. The ruling class’s monopoly on the instruments we needed in order to implement the collective art of our time had left us completely outside the official cultural production, which was devoted to illustrating and repeating the past. An art film on this generation can only be a film about its lack of real creations.

Others unthinkingly followed the paths learned once and for all, to their work and their home, to their predictable future. For them duty had already become a habit, and habit a duty. They did not see the deficiency of their city. They thought the deficiency of their life was natural. We wanted to break out of this conditioning, in search of different uses of the urban landscape, in search of new passions. The atmosphere of a few places gave us intimations of the future powers of an architecture that it would be necessary to create in order to provide the setting for less mediocre games. We could expect nothing of anything that we ourselves had not altered. The urban environment proclaimed the orders and tastes of the ruling society just as violently as the newspapers. Man unifies the world, but man has extended himself everywhere. People can see nothing around them that is not their own image; everything speaks to them of themselves. Their very landscape is animated. Obstacles were everywhere. And they were all interrelated, maintaining a unified reign of poverty. Since everything was connected, it was necessary to change everything through a unitary struggle, or nothing. It was necessary to link up with the masses, but sleep was all around us.

Voice 3: The dictatorship of the proletariat is a relentless struggle, bloody and bloodless, violent and peaceful, military and economic, educative and administrative, against the forces and traditions of the old society.

Voice 1: But in this country it is once again the men of order who have rebelled and reinforced their power. They have been allowed to aggravate the grotesqueness of the ruling conditions according to their will, embellishing their system with the funereal ceremonies of the past.

Voice 2: Years, like a single instant prolonged to this moment, come to an end.

Voice 1: What was directly lived reappears frozen in the distance, engraved in the tastes and illusions of an era and carried off with it.

Voice 2: The appearance of events that we have not created, of events that others have in fact created against us, now obliges us to be aware of the passage of time and its results, to assess the transformation of our own desires into events. What differentiates the past from the present is precisely its out-of-reach objectivity. There is no more should-be; being has been consumed to the point of ceasing to exist. The details are already lost in the dust of time. Who was afraid of life, afraid of the night, afraid of being taken, afraid of being kept?

Voice 3: What should be abolished continues, and we continue to wear away with it. We are engulfed. Separated from each other. The years pass and we haven’t changed anything.

Voice 2: Once again, morning in the same streets. Once again the fatigue of so many similarly passed nights. It is a walk that has lasted a long time.

Voice 1: Really hard to drink more.

Voice 2: Of course one might make a film about it. But even if such a film succeeded in being as fundamentally incoherent and unsatisfying as the reality it dealt with, it could never be more than a re-creation — as impoverished and false as this botched tracking shot.

Voice 3: There are now people who pride themselves on being authors of films, as others were authors of novels. They are even more backward than the novelists because they are unaware of the decomposition and exhaustion of individual expression in our time, unaware that the arts of passivity are over and done. They are sometimes praised for their sincerity since they dramatize with more personal depth the conventions of which their life consists. There is talk about “liberating the cinema.” But what does it matter to us if one more art is liberated to the point that Tom, Dick or Harry can use it to complacently express their servile sentiments? The only interesting venture is the liberation of everyday life, not only in a historical perspective, but for us, right now. This project implies the withering away of all the alienated forms of communication. The cinema, too, must be destroyed.

Voice 2: In the final analysis, stars are not created by their talent or lack of talent, or even by the film industry or advertising. They are created by the need we have for them. A pathetic need, arising out of a dismal and anonymous life that would like to enlarge itself to the dimensions of cinematic life. The imaginary life on the screen is the product of this real need. The star is the projection of this need.

The advertisements during intermissions are the truest reflection of an intermission from life.

To really describe this era it would no doubt be necessary to show many other things. But what would be the point?

The point is to understand what has been done and all that remains to be done, not to add more ruins to the old world of spectacles and memories.

tiktok we all have or had it if you have used it you know that is literally brain rot but is something much worse through the last 4 to 6 years we have become more divided the left and the right, i think this a Chinas plan for world domination and they are absolutely trying to divide USA because USA is the strongest when they are united e.x. Pearl Harbor or 911 they got attacked and did 10 fold back but now days i don't think people on the left would fight alongside the right and this is is why so much political radicalism is pushed on tiktok and on Chinese tiktok unite is pushed unite is key so we need to stop this hate unite against a comman enemy and i know tencent you are watching this and that you problaby is gonna take this down but if you do you are makeing my point everyone who is reading this warn your freands s warn your famaily

The ‘Political Instability Task Force’ analyzed the data from every political instability in the world between 1955-2003; from this data they developed a statistical model that related country characteristics to the probability of a civil war starting…the model is capable of predicting instability onsets with 80% accuracy. What came as a surprise was that, even though the researchers tested about 30 various indicators, the model needed to know only 3-4 characteristics to achieve this accuracy…The first and most important, was the ‘regime type’...autocracy-democracy spectrum, ranging from -10 to 10…partial democracies were further divided into those with factionalism. Defined as, sharply polarized and uncompromising competition between blocs pursuing parochial interests at the national level…often accompanied by confrontational mass mobilization…intimidation or manipulation of electoral competition.

Partial democracies with factionalism were exceptionally unstable political regimes and were the most likely to descend into civil wars…Other factors that increased the probability of civil war included high infant mortality (the US has the highest infant mortality rate in the 1st world, 3x higher than the average), armed conflict in bordering states (3.2k mass shootings since 2018), state led repression against a minority group (33% of all American black men will go to jail in their lifetime) and widespread social media use. Social media algorithms serve as accelerants for violence by promoting a sense of perpetual crisis, a felling of growing despair, and the perception that moderates have failed.

Our analysis of the one hundred cases in CrisisDB on which we have gathered data…In nearly 2/3rds of the cases, the crisis resulted in massive downward mobility from the ranks of the elites to the ranks of the commoners…In 1/6th of the cases, elite groups were targeted for extermination. The probability of ruler assassination was 40%...75% ended in revolutions or civil war or both, and in 1/5th recurrent civil wars dragged on for a century or longer. 60% led to the death of the state–it was conquered by another or simply disintegrated into fragments.

What is little appreciated is that although democratic institutions are the best (or least bad) way of governing societies, democracies are particularly vulnerable to being subverted by plutocrats…

The American Republic has gone through two revolutionary situations. In the 1850s it was resolved by a social revolution, the American Civil War, which replaced the antebellum reuling elites with the new corporate ruling class. The 2nd peaked during the 1920s and was resolved by the adoption of the reforms of the Progressive and New Deal periods. Today, we are in a 3rd revolutionary situation and the structural analysis seems to be quite pessimistic…As we examine one case of state breakdown after another, we invariably see that in each case, the overwhelming majority of pre-crisis elites–whether they belonged to the antebellum slavocracy, the nobility of the French ancient regime, or the Russian intelligentsia circa 1900–were clueless about the catastrophe that was about to engulf them. They shook the foundations of the state and then were surprised when the state crumbled.

Full Book:

https://library.lol/main/E35FA981EA502BD8C5C032782FE11559

Articles:

‘Is the US Entering it’s End Times? Other Fallen Societies May Suggest So’

https://www.iflscience.com/is-the-us-entering-its-end-times-other-fallen-societies-may-suggest-so-70766

‘Elite Over Production and Foreign Policy’

https://nationalinterest.org/feature/elite-overproduction-and-foreign-policy-206726

Podcast:

‘Why Societies Fall Apart and Why the US May Be Next’

https://josephnoelwalker.com/149-peter-turchin/

To know the things that are not, and cannot be, but have been imagined and believed, is the most curious chapter in the annals of man.

--William Godwin, 'The Lives of the Necromancers' (1834)

It came burning hot into my mind, whatever he said and however he flattered, when he got me home to his house, he would sell me for a slave.

--John Bunyan

The Origins of American Government

The American government was not designed or intended to be a democracy. Democracy comes from the Greek transliteration, ‘δημοκρατία,’ meaning 'people and power.' Representative democracy did not exist even as a concept in ancient Greece. Early eligible American voters were white men who owned a significant amount of property. You have to commit violence against the English language to call this system a democracy. The American government was intended to be an oligarchy or more accurately, a plutocracy.

While American society has evolved significantly since its conception, the US government has remained relatively stable, changing only in form not kind. These formalisms were often institutional and gradual, existing more in words and imagination than actual practice. The ‘rules of the game’ were never completely uprooted but applied as they existed to a wider distribution of the population. This increasing equity has not corresponded with an increase in popular influence over US government policy. A ten year study ( Gilens & Page, Cambridge University Press, 2014) analyzing the data from every public policy decision from 1981 to 2002 (1,779) found that the average American voters influence on government policy was “non-significant” reaching a “near-zero level.” The authors note that

The chief predictions of pure theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy can be decisively rejected. Not only do ordinary citizens not have uniquely substantial power over policy decisions; they have little or no independent influence on policy at all… When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant, impact upon public policy…Despite the seemingly strong empirical support in previous studies for theories of majoritarian democracy, our analyses suggest that majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts….and the average American voter has no effect on the American government whatsoever.

While this system has remained relatively stable over time, the myths used to describe it, however, have become increasingly elaborate. Chief Justice Marshall, expresses the prevailing mythology clearly in his majority opinion in the case McCulloch v. Maryland:

The government proceeds directly from the people...[they] were at perfect liberty to accept or reject it; and their act was final. . . . The government of the Union...is emphatically and truly a government of the people. In form and in substance it emanates from them. Its powers are granted by them, and are to be exercised directly on them, and for their benefit…It is the government of all; its powers are delegated by all; it represents all, and acts for all

The Founding Fathers of American government, however, obliterate these dogmas. “The first object of government,” the principle authour of the constitution, James Maddison writes, is the protection of the “faculties [in] men, from which the rights of property originate.” “Factions…share the same opinions, passions, and interests,” and is a euphemism for social class. “The most common and durable source of factions,” Maddison continues in Federalist no. 10, are the “various and unequal distributions of property.”

Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society. Those who are creditors, and those who are debtors, fall under a like discrimination. A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views. The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operation of government.

…a republic [is] the delegation of the government to a small number of citizens…whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country. …the public voice, pronounced by the representative of the people, will be more consonant to the public good than if pronounced by the people themselves, convened for the purpose…[making it more difficult if] a common motive exists, for all who feel it to discover their own strength and to act in unison with each other. …[such as in] the abolition of debts, for an equal distribution of property, or for any other improper or wicked project, will be less apt to pervade the whole body of the Union than a particular member of it…

The debates at the Constitutional Convention were secret because they were in effect, a coup d'état of the existing American government (‘Articles of Confederation’). The purpose of the Constitutional Convention, Alexander Hamilton exclaimed, was "to take into consideration the Trade and Commerce of the United States." Exact transcripts were not recorded but summary notes of the proceedings survived. “There will be debtors and creditors, and an unequal possession of property. There will be particularly the distinction of rich and poor,” Maddison stated at the time, noting that “this indeed is the ground-work of aristocracy…”:

In framing a system which we wish to last for ages, we should not lose sight of the changes which ages will produce. An increase of population will of necessity increase the proportion of those who will labor under all the hardships of life, and secretly sigh for a more equal distribution of its blessings. These may in time outnumber those who are placed above the feelings of indigence. According to the equal laws of suffrage, the power will slide into the hands of the former. No agrarian attempts have yet been made in this Country, but symptoms of a leveling spirit, as we have understood them, have sufficiently appeared in certain quarters to give notice of the future danger. How is this danger to be guarded against, on republican principles?

“Those who own the country,” the first Supreme Court Justice of the US, John Jay, states matter of factly, “ought to govern it.” The original founders were mostly lawyers who lived in coastal towns. Of the original framers, their economic resources were generally: owning government debt (public securities), land speculation, credit, mercantile, manufacturing, shipping, slave holding. Not one member in attendance at the Constitutional Convention represented the ‘immediate and personal economic interests of the small farmer or mechanic classes.’ The vast majority–5/6ths–were directly and personally invested in the outcome of the proceedings and more or less benefitted from the subsequent adoption of the new constitution.

Alexis de Tocqueville, a French ambassador to the US, who traveled to America in the mid-1800s intending to study its prison system, became instead inexplicably transfixed with the entirety of US society. Democracy in America (1835) was quickly recognized as a master analysis and is still considered the most authoritative account ever pinned of the early American governmental system. Tocqueville writes:

Our contemporaries are constantly excited by two conflicting passions; they want to be led, and they wish to remain free...They devise a sole, tutelary, and all-powerful form of government, but elected by the people. They combine the principle of centralization and that of popular sovereignty; this gives them a respite; they console themselves [with the] reflection that they have chosen their own guardians.

It is in vain to summon a people, which has been rendered so dependent on the central power, to choose from time to time the representatives of that power; this rare and brief exercise of their free choice, however important it may be, will not prevent them from gradually losing the faculties of thinking, feeling, and acting for themselves, and thus gradually falling below the level of humanity.

The democratic nations which have introduced freedom into their political constitution, at the very time when they were augmenting the despotism of their administrative constitution, have been led into strange paradoxes. ...It is, indeed, difficult to conceive how men who have entirely given up the habit of self-government should succeed in making a proper choice of those by whom they are to be governed…

The Dean of American journalism, Walter Lippmann, notes that Thomas Jefferson first popularized the myths and stereotypes which came to crystalize American historical memory. “The Federalist argued for union, not for democracy, and even the word republic had an unpleasant sound to George Washington when he had been for more than two years a republican president,” Lippmann writes:

The constitution was a candid attempt to limit the sphere of popular rule; the only democratic organ it was intended the government should possess was the House, based on a suffrage highly limited by property qualifications. …Jefferson referred to his election as ‘the great revolution of 1800,’ but more than anything else it was a revolution in the mind.

No great policy was altered, but a new tradition was established.

For it was Jefferson who first taught the American people to regard the Constitution as an instrument of democracy, and he stereotyped the images, the ideas, and even many of the phrases, in which Americans ever since have described politics to each other.

...Partly by actual amendment, partly by practice, as in the case of the electoral college, but chiefly by looking at it through another set of stereotypes, the façade was no longer permitted to look oligarchic.

The American people came to believe that their constitution was a democratic instrument, and treated it as such. They owe that fiction to the victory of Jefferson, and a great conservative fiction it has been. It is a fair guess that if everyone had always regarded the Constitution as did the author of it, the Constitution would have been violently overthrown, because loyalty to the Constitution and loyalty to democracy would have seemed incompatible. Jefferson resolved that paradox by teaching the American people to read the Constitution as an expression of democracy.

The Origin of Propaganda

The word propaganda first entered the world in 1622 when the Catholic Church created the ‘Propaganda Fide’ or the ‘Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith.’ Conceived as a technique for organizing missionary work, by 1627 it was institutionalized in the Church’s college to increase the efficiency of indoctrination (renamed in 1967 the ‘Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples’). Propaganda from this epoch was an art form resembling classical rhetoric and was first anticipated and conceived as the ‘Art of War’ around 221 B.C.E. ‘The greatest victory,’ Sun Tzu writes, ‘is that which requires no battle.’ While the genealogy of persuasion techniques in the ancient and early modern world are interesting historical antidotes, they offer nothing in the way of understanding modern propaganda which was originally created in England and America, taking definitive form around 1920.

Archaic persuasion techniques, such as rhetoric, share about as much in common with modern propaganda as an atom bomb does with a sword. Propaganda is an inevitable byproduct of a technological society, evolving in tandem with and parallel to its development. Propaganda is a technical solution to a technical problem, namely integrating the masses into a rapidly changing, artificial world. For tens of millions of years, humans lived in small groups (no larger than 60-70 people), adapting to an environment which only changed very gradually. A natural equilibrium emerged between people and the environment, as anthropologist documented while observing aboriginal tribes.

This equilibrium was disrupted and eventually destroyed as the environment began to evolve at increasingly rapid rates, far outpacing human evolution. Between 1900 and 1970, the speed of travel increased by a factor of 1,000 and the speed of communication by a factor greater than 10 million. While the human brain has not evolved since before the invention of modern agriculture. “No longer are we surrounded by fields, trees, and rivers, but by signs, signals, billboards, screens, labels, and trademarks,” Ellul writes, “this is our universe.” A primary function of propaganda is to make adaption and integration into this universe more efficient, less painful, absurd, conscious.

Modern propaganda refers to the verbal translation of events through the mass media: experiences are translated into words, words into images. Newspapers, magazines, television, radio, billboards, and social media broadcast and circulate them infinitely. Everyday life is translated into images and image is now everything. The transitional shift in values from being into having and from having into appearing has been the defining characteristic of the modern age. Everyday life experiences come to feel increasingly fake while the digital images become more and more realistic.

The modern technological age is propagandas point of departure and its supreme law is concern with effectiveness. Far from intricate today, propaganda is pragmatic and it typically targets the human subconscious. As a default, propaganda is only concerned with masses not individuals, with averages not outliers. Propaganda addresses itself simultaneously to the individual and the mass. Individuals in a group tend to feel more certain while becoming increasingly suggestible; measured while acting impulsively. The mass media situations man exactly in this scenario, alone in the mass. “The aim of modem propaganda is no longer to modify ideas,” Ellul writes, “but to provoke action.”

It is no longer to change adherence to a doctrine, but to make the individual cling irrationally to a process of action. It is no longer to lead to a choice, but to loosen the reflexes. It is no longer to transform an opinion, but to arouse an active and mythical belief.

Propaganda conditions man to the rhythm of a totalitarian society. It is not a collection of images but a social relation between people, mediated by images. Propaganda, like social media, reunites us but only in our separateness.

The Origins of Modern Propaganda

By the late 1910s, propaganda had become a “self-conscience art and a regular organ of popular government.” Britain pioneered the field with the creation of the Ministry of Information, which sought “to direct the thoughts of much of the world.” Its central purpose was to persuade the American government to enter WWI. Woodrow Wilson had campaigned on staying out of the war and a majority of Americans were in favor of remaining neutral. In response to the anti-war sentiment, President Wilson created the Committee on Public Information (CPI or Creel Commission) to “fight for the minds of men, for the conquest of their convictions” by “spreading the gospel of Americanism to every corner of the globe.” The Institute for Propaganda Analysis notes:

The CPI blended advertising techniques with a sophisticated understanding of human psychology and its efforts represented the first time that a modern government disseminated propaganda on such a large scale. It is fascinating that this phenomenon, often linked with totalitarian regimes, emerged in a democratic state

Under the direction of George Creel, the CPI was instructed to “sell the war to America.” Liberal intellectuals were enlisted from the business, media, academic, entertainment and art industries. Will Irwin, an ex-CPI member, would later confess, “We never told the whole truth–not by any manner of means” and cited an intelligence officer as stating “you can’t tell them the truth.” The US war time environment was frighteningly similar to a totalitarian state. “With the aid of Roosevelt,” Randolph Bourne wrote during the war, “the murmurs became a monotonous chant.” According to Creel, 20,000 different newspapers were publishing CPI propaganda every day. The CPI organized 75,000 Four Minute Men (public speakers who could be ready in 4 minutes notice) who gave 755,190 speeches to over 300 million people. Weekly magazines and journals were given to over 600,000 teachers and 200,000 slides were created for detailed lectures. 1,438 different designs were produced for posters, window cards, newspaper advertisements, cartoons, seals, and buttons.

Congressional attempts to suppress Creel’s book How We Advertised America (1920) failed. “In all things, from first to last, without halt or change,” Creel wrote, “it was a plain publicity proposition, a vast enterprise in salesmanship, the world’s greatest adventure in advertising.” The CPI’s success established the “standard marketing strategies for all future wars” by selling the war as one that would “make the world safe for democracy."Congress would end the CPI’s funding on November 12, 1918. Two years later, however, the director of the CPI’s Foreign Division stated that propaganda had continued unabated in the postwar world.

The history of propaganda in the war would scarcely be worthy of consideration here, but for one fact– it did not stop with the armistice. No indeed! The methods invented and tried out in the war were too valuable for the uses of governments, factions, and special interests.

The CPI’s success inspired leading ‘democratic’ theorists like Walter Lippmann, Edward Bernays, and Harold Lasswell. Lippmann’s bombshell, Public Opinion (1922) and its sequel The Phantom Public (1927) developed a highly detailed theory which he called the “manufacture of consent.” The term propaganda entered the Encyclopedia Britannica the same year that Lippmann published Public Opinion. Regarded as the Dean of US Journalism, he practically invented the serious newspaper column while writing for the New Republic. “Millions of readers,” Lippmann’s biographer Ronald Steele explains, were “relying on him to explain and interpret the great issues of the day.” Lippmann believed that the chief goal of news was not objective reporting but to “signalize an event.” Behind the scenes he worked with the CIA writing propaganda leaflets, interrogating prisoners, and coordinating government intelligence. Lippmann worked with every American president from Woodrow Wilson to Richard Nixon and is commonly regarded as “the most influential commentator of the 20th century.” In Public Opinion, he explains that American democracy had reached a new paradigm.

That the manufacture of consent is capable of great refinements no one, I think, denies. …the opportunities for manipulation open to anyone who understands the process are plain enough. The creation of consent is not a new art. It is a very old one which was supposed to have died out with the appearance of democracy. But it has not died out. It has, in fact, improved enormously in technique, because it is now based on analysis rather than on rule of thumb. …As a result of psychological research, coupled with the modern means of communication, the practice of democracy has turned a corner. A revolution is taking place, infinitely more significant than any shifting of economic power. Within the life of the generation now in control of affairs, persuasion has become a self-conscious art and a regular organ of popular government. None of us begins to understand the consequences, but it is no daring prophecy to say that the knowledge of how to create consent will alter every political calculation and modify every political premise. Under the impact of propaganda, not necessarily in the sinister meaning of the word alone, the old constants of our thinking have become variables. It is no longer possible, for example, to believe in the original dogma of democracy…

This is a natural development because “the common interests very largely elude public opinion entirely, and can be managed only by a specialized class.” Lippmann expounded on these ideas in the Phantom Public arguing that “the public must be put in its place” so that “responsible men” can “live free of the trampling and roar of a bewildered herd.” These “ignorant and meddlesome outsiders” do have a “function.” They are to be “spectators, not participants.” According to Lippmann, the public’s highest ideal is to align with a member of the business class during a symbolic election. Taking the phenomenon a step further, Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays (ex-CPI member) turned Lippmann’s theories into practical step-by-step manuals –Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923), Propaganda (1928), Public Relations (1952), and Engineering Consent (1969). Bernays writes:

It was, of course, the astounding success of propaganda during the war that opened the eyes of the intelligent few in all departments of life to the possibilities of regimenting the public mind. The American government and numerous patriotic agencies developed a technique which, to most persons accustomed to bidding for public acceptance, was new. They not only appealed to the individual by means of every approach—visual, graphic, and auditory—to support the national endeavor, but they also secured the cooperation of the key men in every group —persons whose mere word carried authority to hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands of followers.

They thus automatically gained the support of fraternal, religious, commercial, patriotic, social and local groups whose members took their opinions from their accustomed leaders and spokesmen, or from the periodical publications which they were accustomed to read and believe. At the same time, the manipulators of patriotic opinion made use of the mental clichés and the emotional habits of the public to produce mass reactions against the alleged atrocities, the terror and the tyranny of the enemy. It was only natural, after the war ended, that intelligent persons should ask themselves whether it was not possible to apply a similar technique to the problems of peace.

Some of Bernays’ more notable clients included: Proctor and Gamble, CBS, the American Tobacco Company, General Electric, Dodge Motors, the Public Health Service along with every American president from Woodrow Wilson to Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Corporations turned to Bernays and others to fight the “hazard facing industrialists” which is “the newly realized political power of the masses.” Propaganda “in its sum total,” Bernays wrote at the time, “is regimenting the public mind, every bit as much as an army regiments the body of its soldiers.” In his study published by the Annals of the American Academy of Political Science (March 1947) Bernays refers to the “engineering of consent” as the “very essence of democracy.” The term propaganda acquired negative connotations during WWII and was replaced with “public relations” and “communications.” Accordingly, Bernays is often regarded as the “Father of Public Relations” (some historians give the title to Ivy Lee) and Life magazine has listed him among the 100 most influential people of the 20th Century.

The term propaganda entered the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences in 1933, when Harold Lasswell explained that elites must abandon “democratic dogmatisms about men being the best judges of their own interests.” The “ignorance and superstition” of “the masses,” Lasswell explains, led to “the development of a whole new technique of control, largely through propaganda.” In his dissertation, Propaganda Technique in WWI (1927), he outlines strategies which have become standard operating procedure in modern geopolitical strategy.

So great are the psychological resistances to war in modern nations that every war must appear to be a war of defense against a menacing, murderous aggressor. There must be no ambiguity about who the public is to hate. …A handy rule for arousing hate is if at first they do not enrage, use an atrocity. …When the public believes that the enemy began the War and blocks a permanent, profitable and godly peace, the propagandist has achieved his purpose. …No doubt that, in the future, the propagandist may count upon a battalion of honest professors to rewrite history, to serve the exigencies of the moment.

Laswell went on to help found the fields of political science and communications. He invented the famous communication theory: who says what to whom with what effect in which medium. For further reading see Lasswell’s annotated bibliography Propaganda and Promotional Activities (1935) which sources thousands of books and studies on early American propaganda.

Hitler and Nazi Propaganda

Contrary to modern characterizations, German propaganda was crude and unscientific throughout WWI. In 1922, Walter Lippmann wrote that the CPI tactic of “constant repetition” “impressed the neutrals and Germany itself.” Harold Lasswell’s extensive study of WWI propaganda (1927) concluded that Germany’s propaganda had been completely ineffective. Writing in Mein Kampf (1925), Adolf Hitler agreed:

It was not until the War that it became evident what immense results could be obtained by a correct application of propaganda. …Did we have anything you could call propaganda? I regret that I must answer in the negative. …The form was inadequate, the substance was psychologically wrong: a careful examination of German war propaganda can lead to no other diagnosis. …By contrast, the war propaganda of the English and Americans was psychologically sound. …I myself, learned enormously from this enemy propaganda. …The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous…

Hitler came to power 8 years later using little more than a microphone and a radio. Nazi propaganda was primarily based on Sigmund Freud’s theory of repression and libido. Hannah Arendt discusses the guiding viewpoint of the Nazi party in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1948):

From the viewpoint of an organization which functions according the principle that whoever is not included is excluded, whoever is not with me is against me, the world at large loses all the nuances, differentiations, and pluralistic aspects which had in any event become confusing and unbearable to the masses who had lost their place and their orientation in it.

Edward Bernays autobiography, Biography of an Idea (1965) details a shocking claim that's been completely ignored by historians.

Karl von Weigand…just returned from Germany, [and he] was telling us about Goebbels and his propaganda plans to consolidate Nazi power. Goebbels had shown Weigand his propaganda library, the best Weigand had ever seen. Goebbels, said Weigand, was using my book Crystallizing Public Opinion as a basis for his destructive campaign against the Jews of Germany…

In 1939, a German research center was established to conduct opinion surveys–which used Harold Lasswell’s famous communication technique–to determine who said what to whom with what effect in which medium, inside Hitler’s Germany. These operations laid the foundation for the murder of roughly 90,000 people over the months that followed, mostly Jewish women and children. "This will always remain one of the best jokes of democracy," Joseph Goebbels writes, "that it gave its deadly enemies the means by which it was destroyed."

At the Nuremberg War Crime Trials on April 18, 1946 the founder of the Nazi Gestapo, Hermann Goering, explained the essence of war propaganda:

Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. …Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

Charged with “crimes against humanity,” Goering avoided execution by committing suicide in his cell. In post-war America, however, many government propagandists went on to enjoy prestigious careers. The overseas director of the US Office of War Information (OWI), Edward Barret, wrote in 1953 that:

Among OWI alumni are the publishers of Time, Look, Fortune, and several dailies; the editors of such magazines as Holiday, Coronet, Parade, and the Saturday Review, editors of the Denver Post, New Orleans Times-Picayune, and others; the heads of the Viking Press, Harper & Brothers, and Farrar, Straus and Young; two Hollywood Oscar winners; a two-time Pulitzer prizewinner; the board chairman of CBS and a dozen key network executives; President Eisenhower’s chief speech writer; the editor of Reader’s Digest international editions; at least six partners of large advertising agencies; and a dozen noted social scientists.

Propaganda continued unabated in the post war world. Ronald Regan created ‘Operation Truth’ an initiative that would have made Orwell proud. In 2004 alone, the Bush Administration sent over 80 million on public relations. Bertrand Russell once wrote, "after ages during which the earth produced harmless trilobites and butterflies, evolution progressed to the point at which it has generated Neros, Genghis Khans, and Hitlers. This, however, I believe is a passing nightmare; in time the earth will become again incapable of supporting life, and peace will return."

https://rintintin.colorado.edu/~vancecd/phil308/Singer2.pdf

Pdf/EPUB/ADW3 links to full text in comments

Peter Turchin, one of the most interesting social scientists of our age, has infused the study of history with approaches and insights from other fields for more than a quarter century. End Times is the culmination of his work to understand what causes political communities to cohere and what causes them to fall apart, as applied to the current turmoil within the United States.

Back in 2010, when Nature magazine asked leading scientists to provide a ten-year forecast, Turchin used his models to predict that America was in a spiral of social disintegration that would lead to a breakdown in the political order circa 2020. The years since have proved his prediction more and more accurate, and End Times reveals why.

The lessons of world history are clear, Turchin argues: When the equilibrium between ruling elites and the majority tips too far in favor of elites, political instability is all but inevitable. As income inequality surges and prosperity flows disproportionately into the hands of the elites, the common people suffer, and society-wide efforts to become an elite grow ever more frenzied. He calls this process the wealth pump; it’s a world of the damned and the saved. And since the number of such positions remains relatively fixed, the overproduction of elites inevitably leads to frustrated elite aspirants, who harness popular resentment to turn against the established order. Turchin’s models show that when this state has been reached, societies become locked in a death spiral it's very hard to exit.

In America, the wealth pump has been operating full blast for two generations. As cliodynamics shows us, our current cycle of elite overproduction and popular immiseration is far along the path to violent political rupture. That is only one possible end time, and the choice is up to us, but the hour grows late.

Just take the total deaths from the previous five years and average them. Then substract them from the total number in the year of interest.

US total deaths:

• 2015: 2,712,630

• 2016: 2,744,248

• 2017: 2,813,503

• 2018: 2,839,205

• 2019: 2,854,838

• 2020: 3,338,000

2015 to 2019=(13,964,424)/5

=2,792,884.8

(3,338,000)-(2,792,884.8)

=545,116

It was always much more likely that the number of deaths was being under counted, rather than the reverse.

If one party is at war with another, and the other party does not realize it is at war, the party who knows it is at war usually wins.

-- Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui , 'Unrestricted Warfare'

https://irp-cdn.multiscreensite.com/26db15ee/files/uploaded/5GW%20Section1.pdf

http://library.lol/main/5EF05795BCE53A2895C79D4AFA6EF8C0

Excellent and very convincing book.

Ouch. Well if this doesn't damn near completely describe an area of enlarged focus in my private life the last few months.

Here, then, is this man for whom the future is once again a hazardous mystery to which there is no key. He falls back on the magician, on the political prophet, on the miracle-working wise man, on the one who unveils the future and offers assurances. He transforms the physician or the scientist into a sorcerer. He looks for some Promethean or some Mephistophelian intervention which will provide the final breakthrough and the security of a sure future. The success of Pante (a science fiction monthly), and publications of that type, of horoscopes, of fortunetellers, of sects, the growth of the irrational in politics and the increase in intellectual incoherence–all these are sure signs of the absence of hope. Efforts to plumb the world’s and my own future are completely drained dry in a “thus it was written.” The attempt to lay hold of the unseen powers, to appease them, to seduce them and use them is a magician’s springtime and the prelude to a summer of drought and sterility. Nothing can render a person more sterile and ineffectual than this return to magic.

Let it not be said that this merely incidental behavior, surface or peripheral sentiment, or that it is confined to ‘popular’ uncultivated circles. Quite the contrary. It is the recourse to magic which is central, and it is the rational conduct and the professional restraint which are peripheral and superficial. It is in his attempt to recreate the sacred and in his looking for a miracle that modern man is fully identified.

This comes equally to light among the sophisticated intellectuals. The whole team of the periodical Tel Quel, for example, is specifically characterized by its Magianism. Spellbinding art, pop music, Michel Butor or Alain Robbe-Grillet, the Underground, all these represent in reality a search for, or a step toward, the magical and the indecipherable.

Now if “at the beginning of things” magic could have been the agent of action, of mastery over the world, and of the affirmation of the individual over against the group, in our day it is a regression. For this is not a ‘new magic,’ but the old one. Faced with a formidable technological system and with relentless structures, man takes refuge in the ancestral activities of magic and the occult, of nighttime and dreams. He is afraid of what he has done and thinks to find a remedy in a return to the original springs, but what was spring three hundred thousand years ago is now a mirage of water which leads one astray into ever greater sterility. Today nothing is more reactionary than the Living Theater, the Underground cinema, pop music, and Scandinavian eroticism. These are, to be sure, understandable reactions, but they are debilitating and falsifying at the very height of the hardest struggle man has ever faced.

The magician is, above all else, the one who is able to disclose the future and eventually to change it. Nowadays we no longer have haruspices. Our century, which to be sure, still uses tarot cards and coffee grounds, would no longer be happy, on the whole , with what is openly called superstition. To all appearances it has become scientific, and it brags about being rational. Fortune-telling is practiced only in secrecy and shame. Even today’ fortunetellers have taken a rational turn. Never has the future been so scrutinized, but now we do it in the scientific manner. Forecast, projections, possibilities, prospects–these enterprises abound, and of course they bear the stamp of a certain rigor and rationality.

Some of the methods are quite consistent, but it has to be noted at the same time that the imagination plays an ever increasing role in such endeavors. The procedures, as a matter of fact, are more and more rational, but the object on which they are brought to bear is not. That is to say, it was soon noted that it is impossible truly to predict, for the reason that such a prediction would imply a selection from among certain privileged facts and hypotheses. So a choice had to be made between two procedures. One would either be content with the construction of models, abstract structures having little to do with concrete reality except to represent it conceptually. These models can then be made to operate in such a way that one can foresee their evolution. But this is an abstraction of the real, comparable to the image the magicians might have used to represent the future.

The second procedure is that of simulations and scenarios. If abstraction was the decisive factor in the first, the imagination is decisive in the second. It involves the invention of a series of coincidences, so that if such-and-such happens, the logical sequence can be seen. Thus one starts out with imaginary factors (not entirely, to be sure) and one treats these scientifically. Ultimately, if one managed to simulate all the imaginable concrete situations, each time adding this or that factor and making the corresponding changes in the other factors, one would have embraced the whole of the real. In these operations the frontier with science fiction is impossible to distinguish. …The throwback toward the irrational, the absurd modes of behavior, dependence on the imaginary–these are acts of man without hope who is trying to unwind a rational thread which he is holding by one end…

It is at that very point that man finds himself more ill equipped than ever. He has now become aware that he cannot construct the future his way, and on the other hand, he no longer believes in any outside forces or person…Man is unable to make his history, and he knows that now there is no other person who is making it either, only blind mechanisms, obscure powers, inexplicable interactions. It is an indiscernible, inscrutable future into which he is advancing step by step into the night, just as in the heroic ages, only this time he is doing it in crowds, en masse, by the billions, and by an accelerated process which leaves him no time for scrutinizing this absence. In this situation without hope, how could he fail to have recourse to the magician?”

Ellul, ‘Abandonment in a Time of Hope’

I first came across this book while working at a local shoe store one summer in college. The owner had immigrated to America after surviving the holocaust. His entire family was murdered.

After noticing me looking at it on his self, he gave it to me.

He was a kind and soft-spoken man. Being young and naïve with no understanding of history, the questions I asked him were vastly inappropriate and very American. He answered every one, mater of fact. His tone never waivered. His demeanor never changed. 'I left God in the camps,' he once said to me, as if recalling the score of last nights baseball game.

excerpt: ‘Ford and Hitler,’ chapter 3 of ‘Who Financed Hitler: The Secret Funding of Hitler’s Rise to Power, 1919–1933’

The full book.

http://library.lol/main/6745B653C1A1A758F4B1424452464D34

In 1915 Henry Ford chartered a ship at his own expense and sailed to Europe with a group of supporters in an effort to end World War I by negotiating a compromise peace. On board the ship, Ford told the well-known pacifist Madame Rozika Schwimmer: "I know who started this war-the German Jewish bankers." Ford later said to the Florence, Alabama, correspondent of the New York Times, "It was the Jews themselves who convinced me of the direct relationship between the international Jew and war. In fact they went out of their way to convince me. On the peace ship were two very prominent Jews. We had not been at sea 200 miles before they began telling me of the power of the Jewish race, of how they controlled the world through their control of gold, and that the Jew and no one but the Jew could end the war.

I was reluctant to believe it but they went into detail to convince me of the means by which the Jews controlled the war, how they had the money, how they had cornered all the basic materials needed to fight the war and all that. and they talked so long and so well that they convinced me. " Slapping the pocket of his coat, Ford told Madame Schwimmer, "I have the evidence here-facts! I can't give them out yet because I haven't got them all. I'll have them soon !" Needless to say,his peace mission failed, and left him somewhat bitter. Years later, Ford reflected on his fruitless efforts: "The whole world laughed at my Peace Expedition, I know, "4 but Ford was far from discouraged, and the world and Hitler were soon to be deluged with evidence of Ford's anti-Semitic feelings.

At the end of 1918, Ford bought a typical country newspaper called the Dearborn Independent. When Ford announced his publishing plans, he justified his actions by saying: "I am very much interested in the future not only of my own country, but of the whole world, and I have definite ideas and ideals that I believe are practical for the good of all and I intend giving them to the public without having them garbled, distorted or misrepresented."

He must have had something serious in mind since he said that, if need be, he was willing to spend $10million to finance the publication. The Independent was not to be a medium for publicizing the Ford company; in fact, the editors were told specifically to avoid any mention of Ford's industrial enterprise. Unlike most newspapers, it had no advertisements. Ford didn't want any commercial influence interfering with his editorial program. Initially, the basic tone of the Independent was anti profiteer, anti monopoly, and anti reactionary; on the positive side, it supported Wilsonian ideals of postwar reconstruction at home.

Ford had apparently been planning an attack on the Jews for some time, but he kept his plans to himself, although a few of his assistants and close associates had picked up hints. Ford's first editor of the Dearborn Independent, Edwin Pipp, said that Ford "was bringing up the Jews frequently, almost continually in conversation, blaming them for almost everything. . . . At first he talked only about 'the big fellows’ and said he had nothing against Jews in ordinary walks of life. Later he stated: 'They are all pretty much alike.' ... We had not published the paper more than six months before [Ford] commenced to talk persistently about a series of articles attacking the Jewish people. He said that he believed that they were in a conspiracy to bring on war for profits."

A year after Ford had purchased the Independent, he was questioned about his experiences on the peace ship by one of his company's executives. "What did you get out of that trip, Mr. Ford What did you learn?" the man asked. "I know who makes wars," Ford responded. "The international Jewish bankers arrange them so they can make money out of it. I know it's true because a Jew on the peace ship told me." Ford said that this Jew had told him that it was impossible to get peace his way. However good his intentions, no argosy such as the peace ship could accomplish anything unless he saw the right people, and the "right people" were certain Jews in France and England. "That man knew what he was talking about-[and] gave me the whole story," Ford said. "We're going to tell the whole story one of these days and show them up!"

Suddenly on May 22, 1920, the Independent lashed forth with a violent attack on the Jews. The boldface headline on the front page was a blunt and concise summation of the editorial's thesis: "The International Jew: The World's Problem." The first paragraph began: "There is a race, a part of humanity which has never yet been received as a welcome part."

This people, the article continued, has ever been fouling the earth and plotting to dominate it. In order to eventually rule the Gentiles, the Jews have long been conspiring to form an "international super-capitalist government." This racial problem, the Independent said, was the "prime" question confronting all society. The following ninety-one articles covered a wide field of topics related to the international Jew. Ranging from Jews in a world government to Jews in American finance, in Communism, theater, movies, baseball, bootlegging, and song writing, the articles had slanderous titles, such as "The Jewish Associates of Benedict Arnold," "The Gentle Art of Changing Jewish Names," "What Jews Attempted When They Had Power," "The All-Jewish Mark on Red Russia," and "Taft Once Tried to Resist the Jews-and Failed." In subsequent articles, Ford frequently accused the Jews of causing a decline in American culture, values, products, entertainment, and, even worse, of being the instigators of World War I.

Serious charges were leveled against several well-known Jews. Bernard M. Baruch was called the "pro-consul of Judah in America," a "Jew of Super-Power," and "the most powerful man" during World War I. When asked by news reporters to comment on these charges, Baruch replied, tongue-in-cheek, "Now boys, you wouldn't expect me to deny them would yoU?"

But most Jews reacted without the humor of Baruch. Petty riots took place in Pittsburgh and Toledo, and in Cincinnati, vigorous protests by Jewish citizens influenced the city council to establish a press censorship. Street sales of the Independent were so reduced by opposition that Fordhad to obtain an injunction. In some of the larger cities, members of the Jewish community and their friends threatened or assaulted the newspaper's salesmen.

In 1921 the theatrical producer Morris Gest filed a $5 million libel suit against Ford, but soon dropped it. Some public libraries barred the Independent from their collections and a resolution of protest was introduced in Congress. Representatives of almost all national Jewish organizations and religious bodies issued a common declaration denouncing the Ford campaign.

One hundred and nineteen prominent Christians, including Woodrow Wilson, called upon Ford to stop his "vicious propaganda." President Harding, after an appeal by Louis Marshall, president of the American Jewish Committee, privately asked Ford-through his friend Judson C. Welliver-to halt the attacks. William Fox, president of Fox Film Corporation, threatened to show choice footage of Model T accidents in his newsreels, if the industrialist persisted in attacking the character of Jewish film executives and their motion pictures.

When the Jews of Hartford were preparing for a 400 car parade in honor of Dr. Chaim Weizmann and Albert Einstein, they drew nationwide publicity by ordering "Positively no Ford machines permitted in line." Soon most Jewish firms and individual Jews boycotted Ford products," and Gentile firms who did business with Jewish concerns and were dependent on their good will followed suit to please their best customers. The drop in orders for cars was most severe in the eastern metropolitan centers of the country, and, within a few months Ford competitors began to gain the edge. Officials high in the company later agreed that during the run of the anti-Semitic articles the company lost business which was never regained.t" but nevertheless, because of the large postwar market, the boycott was not strong enough to cripple the Ford industry.

In 1921, Ford and his friend (and fellow anti-Semite) Thomas Edison were on their way to inspect the Muscle Shoals power plant when an Alabama reporter got through the crowd to ask Ford how long his anti-Semitic articles would continue. Ford replied that his "course of instruction on the Jews would last five years." Despite all of the attempts to silence Ford's Campaign, his racist ideas spread quickly throughout the world.

Within a year and a half Ford had turned the Independent into a notorious, mass circulated, anti-Semitic propaganda sheet. From 1919 to 1927 the Independent's nationwide circulation exceeded a quarter of a million, and from 1923 to 1927 it reached the half-million mark. Reprints of the articles which appeared in the Independent were published in a four-volume set (1920-1922) that gained a considerable circulation in the United States. Entitled The International Jew, this compilation was distributed widely and translated into sixteen different languages, including Arabic."

It was published in Barcelona., Porto Alegre, Brazil, and Leipzig. In 1932, the Brazilians asked Ford whether they might buy the translation rights. E. G. Liebold, one of Ford's private secretaries, assured them that permission to publish was unnecessary, "since the book has not been copyrighted in this country. "13 Correctly assuming that Liebold had given them the green light, the Brazilians printed 5,000 copies of the book from the German translation and displayed Ford's name prominently on the front cover. Spanish translations appeared throughout Latin America; the 1936 and 1937 editions of this translation went a bit further than most editions by using the manufacturer's photograph as a frontispiece. From France to Russia, anti-Seminc and nationalist groups eagerly bought up the publications of the famous American.

Prominent Jewish attorney, after completing a world tour in the mid-1920s, stated that he had seen the brochures in the "most remote corners of the earth." He maintained that, "but for the authority of the Ford name, they would have never seen the light of day and would have been quite harmless if they had. With that magic name they spread like wildfire and became the Bible of every anti-Semite.”

If The International Jew was the Bible, then to the Nazis Henry Ford must have seemed a god. His anti-Semitic publications led many Germans to become Nazis. Baldur von Schirach, leader of the Hitler Youth movement, stated at the postwar Nuremberg War Crimes Trials that he had become an anti-Semite at the age of seventeen after reading The Eternal Jew (title of The International Jew translated for the German editions). "You have no idea what a great influence this book had on the thinking of German youth," von Schirach said. "The younger generation looked with envy to the symbols of success and prosperity like Henry Ford, and if he said the Jews were to blame, why naturally we believed him. "

One of Hitler's lieutenants, Christian Weber, boasted that Ford would be "received like a King" if he ever came to Munich. Hitler's admiration for the auto magnate, the New York Times reported, was made obvious by the large picture of Henry Fordon the wall beside Hitler's desk in the Brown House.

In an adjoining room there was a large table covered with books, most of which were copies of the German translation of The International Jew. When news of the Jewish boycotts reached the Nazis, Hitler declared that "the struggle of international Jewish finance against Ford has only strengthened the sympathies of the National Socialist Party for Ford and has given the broadest circulation to his book, The International Jew."

And in 1923, when Hitler learned that Ford might run for President, he said, according to the Chicago Tribune, "I wish that I could send some of my shock troops to Chicago and other big American cities to help in the elections. . .. We look to Heinrich Ford as the leader of the growing Fascist movement in America.... We have just had his anti-Jewish articles translated and published.

The book is being circulated to millions throughout Germany." Theodore Fritsch, editor of the Leipziganti-Semitic publishing house, Der Hammer, printed six editions of The International Jew between 1920 and 1922; by late 1933 Fritsch had published twenty-nine editions, each of which carried Ford's name on the title page and lauded Ford in the preface for the "great service" that he had done America and the world by attacking the Iews." After 1933, it became a stock item of Nazi propaganda; every schoolchild in Germany came into contact with it many times during his education.

The manager of the Ford Company in Germany in the mid-1930s, Edmund C. Heine (an American citizen), explained that The International Jew had the backing of the German government and was an important factor in educating the nation "to understand the Jewish problem as it should be understood." Heine further pointed out that Fritsch, who insisted that "it is Henry Ford's book about World Judaisrn which hits the Jews most severely," would not give up his "publication rights."

When a New York Times correspondent asked Ernest Liebold, Ford's secretary, to comment on the report about the influence of Ford on the Nazi Party, Uebold refused to affirm or deny these reports but he did express "surprise" that The International Jew had become so popular in Nazi circles. There is no need for surprise, however. Not only did Hitler specifically praise Henry Ford in Mein Kampf, but many of Hitler's ideas were also a direct reflection of Ford's racist philosophy. There is a great similarity between The International Jew and Hitler's Mein Kampf, and some passages are so identical that it has been said Hitler copied directly from Ford's publication.

Hitler also read Ford's autobiography, My Life and Work, which was published in 1922 and was a best seller in Germany, as well as Ford's book entitled Today and Tomorrow.22 There can be no doubt as to the influence of Henry Ford's ideas on Hitler. Not only do Hitler's writings and practices reflect The International Jew, but one of his closest associates, Dietrich Eckart, specifically mentioned the Protocols and The International Jew as sources of inspiration for the Nazi leader. Unlike the traditional religious and social anti-Semitism which had flared up at various times since the Middle Ages, Mein Kampf presented a theory of racial anti-Semitism.

The distinguished group of historians, including Sidney B. Fay, William Langer, and John Chamberlain, who edited the American edition of Mein Kampf, claimed that the use of racial anti-Semitism as the integral part of a political program was Hitler's "Copernican discovery." However, this harsh new philosophy was first propagated to the general public, not by Adolf Hitler, but by Henry Ford.

We do not first see and then define. We define first and then see.

                 -Walter Lippmann

Sighting are vastly more diverse than what’s reported in either the True Believer Account of the phenomena or its antithesis, the null hypothesis.

Shields in the sky...

      –Livy, Roman Historian  

Flaming wheel...

      -England 1394

If we want to cherry pick ‘flying shields’ mentioned throughout history as evidence we must also include their accounts of dragons and so with all the rest. Both sides routinely ignore inconvenient data and neither is immune to offering absurd explanations, such as the ‘explanation’ given to explain why Jimmy Carter and a group of his close friends all saw what they considered UFOs a decade or so before he became president.

I have seen among the Gussii, lights moving near my camp at nigh, lights that died down and flared up again exactly as the witchcraft myth alleges. Gusii say that witches produce this effect by raising and lowering the lids of covered fire-pots which they carry with them.’

      –British Anthropologists

April 19, 1897

Two Texas residents see lights moving in their neighbors yard and proceed to investigate..

They discover 4 men w/ a landed airship who ask for several buckets of water. The neighbors oblige and are told that the airship with its propellers and wings is one of several secret technologies. After this brief exchange the men reboarded, the neighbors recalled, and the ship flapped away.

All the sightings of UFOs from the 1890s trace almost perfectly with popular conceptions and desires within the popular imagination of the time.

Strangely enough, during this time, no known invention existed with the ability to fly safely, reliably, or for prolonged periods of time. In 1898, the best known airplane could travel 13 miles per hour covering a maximum distance of 1 mile.

The fact that gravity would soon be transcended, existed widely within the collective imagination. Faith in the progress of technology had reached a fevered pitch and this religious zeal was frequently expressed in the form of flying ships as the novels of HG Wells vividly illustrate. Carl Jung famously claimed it was an illusion that man would ever be able to fly as the machines were ‘heavier than air.’

The overwhelming majority of the first attempts to fly employed boat propellers and flapping wings. The sighting abruptly ended in 1897 and ‘UFO’ sightings of all kinds died out until reports emerged of UFOs over Britain between 1909-1912, the years preceding WWI.

Similarly, as the 1930s drew to a close, Scandinavians began reporting UFOs which seemed to freefall straight down from great hights during thunderstorms. Experienced later by those unlucky enough to be on the other end of dive bombers a decade or so later.

As WWII engulfed the world, the previous UFO recollections were replaced by ‘ghost rockets’ reported by over 2,000 people who explained that they moved ‘faster than any known technology’ and didn’t have wings.

By the time the war concluded, every antagonist in the world had countless reports from pilots seeing ‘balls of light,’ ‘not of this world’ which followed their airplanes.

Belief in the existence of alien life had became so widespread that when a NY journalist wrote a satire in 1835 explaining that ‘bat winged humanoid beavers’ had been spotted living in huts on the Moon, the discovery of life was widely celebrated for nearly a month as the scientific discovery of the century. The enthusiasm only subsided after the author announced it was a hoax.

‘Oswald Spengler noted over a century ago that the idea of infinite space is absolutely fundamental to the Western conception of reality; while the ancient Greeks believed that ‘infinite’ was the opposite of existence. No word for ‘space’ existed in Greek.

Sci-Fi reminiscent of the mostly defunct tabloids of the 1990s (‘Bat Girl Lives!’ etc.) had become wildly popular by 1939: ufos, abductions, secret underground military bases. Of particular note is the ‘flying disk’ shape of alien space crafts which played a prominent role in the pulp fiction of its day.

When the associate editor of ‘Amazing Stories’ received a letter in 1943 detailing the discovery of an unknown language, offered as definitive proof that the legend of Atlantis was real, he read the first page and threw it in the trash. Shocked and seeing only dollar signs, the executive editor retrieved the letter and published it in the next edition.

In response to the issue, the magazine received a barely readable manifesto entitled, ‘A Warning to Future Man.’ The authour, a welder by trade, explained how he started hearing voices while working. These physic and telepathic communications informed him of the ‘underground tunnels built beneath Earth’s surface’ created by ‘Lemurians,’ an ancestor race who, plagued by the Sun’s radiation, retreated underground eventually taking off from the planet.

Being ambiguous creatures, the Lemurians left all their technology to ‘malignant dwarfs’ known as ‘deros’ or ‘detrimental robots in Mantong’ who employed telepathy machines and automated castration to torture humans. The manifestos authour, thankfully, had connected telepathically with their nemesis, the ‘teros’ or ‘integrative robots.’ They favored him because one of the teros was a lover of his.

The executive editor of ‘Amazing Stories’ then rewrote the 10,000 word document into a novella which he published in March 1945. Over the next four months, sales of the publication doubled with 250,000 people buying the rag every four weeks.

Almost immediately thousands upon thousands of letters began flooding the magazines office describing their personal experiences with the ‘deros.’

‘All over America, from the Civil War to the conclusion of WWII, Christian theology and Biblical narratives were replaced by images inline with the age of science and its ever expanding faith in technological Utopia.’

U·to·pi·a

noun

From the Greek word ‘ou-topos’ meaning 'no place' or 'nowhere'.

A sample of reasonable perspectives on the continuing insanity of the current UFO narrative:

From the standpoint of science, there’s still no good evidence [that extraterrestrials are visiting the Earth], only an 'argument from authority.' ... Grusch "says they’re here. But either he can’t prove it, or he won’t. Until he does, we should consider his stories to be just that: stories.

[The idea that China may have] surpassed us in technology is scary…What seems more believable? That the Chinese have surpassed us…or that aliens are visiting us?

Rather than presaging some new era of extraterrestrial disclosures, it is vastly more likely that the Grusch leak has an earthly explanation. For example, it may have been precipitated by a desire to distract from actual, man-made classified projects. In the 1950s and ’60s, the Air Force and the CIA often intentionally called sightings of highly secret U-2 spy planes “UFOs” to hide the true nature of the aircraft, as the craft’s original silver paint reflected sunlight and gave them an otherworldly appearance. Roughly half of all UFO reports were attributable to the U-2 and SR-71 Blackbird spy-plane project, according to a CIA official who worked on the project.

the actual evidence for UFOs is meager, even pathetic. The videos are so grainy. The pics so pitiful. If the whole world is carrying smartphone cameras – and we are – surely we should be seeing trillion-pixel snaps of flying saucers by now? Yet we are not; and yet the US establishment is behaving like we are: their comments are so extraordinary, their behavior so agitated, it is clear that something is up. Ergo: whether you ‘believe in UFOs’ or not, the Outbreak of Strangeness around DC needs to be explained.

It's not that people aren't seeing shit in the sky. They have been since the dawn of time. They had a picture of the world and a map of the universe which they knew to be real. Everything which came along was then defined according to the world they had created in their heads, regardless of how it actually existed objectively.

The likely end of organized life on Earth in the near future has prompted a disinformation campaign which

a.) promises a miracle (reverse engineered alien technology);

b.) and unconsciously invokes relief in thoughts of being able to escape our dying planet; to become like these alien geniuses who have mastered the universe through their technology;

c.) distraction and/or prevention of concreate action directed towards making the changes that would and could prevent the 6th mass extinction, currently underway (most scientist now agree that nearly all the previous were caused by climate change) but would profoundly disrupt and forever alter the current status quo.

https://old.reddit.com/r/theoryofpropaganda/comments/147l504/on_ufos_and_what_the_recent_disclosures_might/

https://old.reddit.com/r/theoryofpropaganda/comments/14qkkqp/taking_a_2nd_look_at_the_ufo_narrative/

https://old.reddit.com/r/theoryofpropaganda/comments/13x26oz/not_a_single_scientific_peerreviewed_paper/

All mainstream media loves the guy, even when they hate him. Every single news executive would tell you in private they hope he stays forever. There was a small but not impossible chance that if the media spectacle stopped discussing him, his support would have dropped a few % points.

The US political elite--Democrats (center-right) and Republicans (fanatical right) are both actively opposed to him.

The Democrats 'strategy' looks more and more as if it was chosen using a Ouija board.

The Republicans, on the other hand, oppose him for one simple reason: its impossible to inherent from someone whos still around.

Seizing Trump’s big lie might appear to be a gesture of support. In fact it expresses a wish for his political death. Transforming the myth from one about Trump to one about the nation will be easier when he is out of the way...When Republican gamers do not exhibit enough of that, Republican breakers call them “RINOs”: Republicans in name only. This term once suggested a lack of ideological commitment. It now means an unwillingness to throw away an election. Yet what does it mean to be a candidate for office and denounce voting? If you claim that the other side has cheated, and your supporters believe you, they will expect you to cheat yourself...To claim that the other side stole an election is to promise to steal one yourself. It is also to claim that the other side deserves to be punished...The lie outlasts the liar. The idea that Germany lost the First World War in 1918 because of a Jewish “stab in the back” was 15 years old when Hitler came to power. How will Trump’s myth of victimhood function in American life 15 years from now?

History and democracy entered the world simultaneously. And freedom has always been a contest between remembering and forgetting. All usurpers seek familiarity, normality, in the hopes of making one forget 'that they have only just arrived.'

That ideology didn't exist prior to the 19th century is mostly unknown. The standard practice in the original analysis of ideology was to use the word as a synonym for myth (see any of Harold Laswell's early studies for an example). Generally speaking, a myth is an image inducing belief.

The aim of modem propaganda is no longer to modify ideas, but to provoke action. It is no longer to change adherence to a doctrine, but to make the individual cling irrationally to a process of action. It is no longer to lead to a choice, but to loosen the reflexes. It is no longer to transform an opinion, but to arouse an active and mythical belief.

On the other hand, the propagandist tries to create myths by which man will live, which respond to his sense of the sacred. By "myth” we mean an all-encompassing, activating image: a sort of vision of desirable objectives that have lost their material, practical character and have become strongly colored, overwhelming, all-encompassing, and which displace from the conscious all that is not related to it.

Such an image pushes man to action precisely because it includes all that he feels is good, just, and true. Without giving a metaphysical analysis of the myth, we will mention the great myths that have been created by various propagandas: the myth of race, of the proletariat, of the Fuhrer, of Communist society, of productivity. Eventually the myth takes possession of a man’s mind so completely that his life is consecrated to it. But that effect can be created only by slow patient work by all the methods of propaganda, not by any immediate propaganda operation. Only when conditioned reflexes have been created in a man and he lives in a collective myth can he be readily mobilized. Although the two methods of myth and conditioned reflex can be used in combination, each has separate advantages. The United States prefers to utilize the myth; the Soviet Union has for a long time preferred the reflex.

The myth expresses the deep inclinations of a society. Without it, the masses would not cling to a certain civilization or its process of development and crisis. It is a vigorous impulse, strongly colored, irrational, and charged with all of man’s power to believe. It contains a religious element.

In our society the two great fundamental myths on which all other myths rest are Science and History. And based on them are the collective myths that are mans principal orientations: the myth of Work, the myth of Happiness, the myth of the Nation, the myth of Youth, the myth of the Hero. Propaganda is forced to build on these presuppositions and to express these myths, for without them nobody would listen to it. And in so building it must always go in the same direction as society; it can only reinforce society.

It is remarkable how the various presuppositions and aspects of myths complement each other, support each other, mutually defend each other: If the propagandist attacks the network at one point, all myths react to the attack. Propaganda must be based on current beliefs and symbols to reach man and win him over.

Thus, propaganda will turn a normal feeling of patriotism into a raging nationalism. It not only reflects myths and presuppositions, it hardens them, sharpens them, invests them with the power of shock and action

Finally, the last condition for the development of propaganda is the prevalence of strong myths and ideologies in a society. At this point a few words are needed on the term ideology. To begin with, we subscribe to Raymond Aron’s statement that an ideology is any set of ideas accepted by individuals or peoples, without attention to their origin or value. But one must perhaps add, with Q. Wright, (1) an element of valuation (cherished ideas), (2) an element of actuality (ideas relating to the present), and (3) an element of belief (believed, rather than proved, ideas).

Ideology differs from myth in three important respects: first, the myth is imbedded much more deeply in the soul, sinks its roots farther down, is more permanent, and provides man with a fundamental image of his condition and the world at large. Second, the myth is much less “doctrinaire”; an ideology (which is not a doctrine because it is believed and not proved) is first of all a set of ideas, which, even when they are irrational, are still ideas. The myth is more intellectually diffuse; it is part emotionalism, part affective response, part a sacred feeling, and more important. Third, the myth has stronger powers of activation, whereas ideology is more passive (one can believe in an ideology and yet remain on the sidelines). The myth does not leave man passive; it drives him to action.

…the fundamental myths of our society are the myths of Work, Progress, Happiness; the fundamental ideologies are Nationalism, Democracy, Socialism. Communism shares in both elements. It is an ideology in that it is a basic doctrine, and a myth in that it has an explanation for all questions and an image of a future world in which all contradictions will be resolved.

Myths have existed in all societies, but there have not always been ideologies. The nineteenth century was a great breeding ground of ideology, and propaganda needed an ideological setting to develop. Ideology in the service of propaganda is very flexible and fluid. Propaganda in support of the French Revolution, or of United States life in the twenties, or of Soviet life in the forties, can all be traced back to the ideology of democracy. These three entirely different types and concepts of propaganda all refer to the same ideology. One must not think, for this reason, that ideology determines a given propaganda merely because it provides the themes and contents. Ideology serves propaganda as a peg, a pretext. Propaganda seizes what springs up spontaneously and gives it a new form, a structure, an effective channel, and can eventually transform ideology into myth.

Most studies on propaganda merely examine how the propagandist can use this or that trait or tendency of a man to influence him. But it seems to us that a prior question needs to be examined: Why does a man involuntarily provoke the propaganda operation? Without going into the theory of the “mass man” or the “organization man,” which is unproven and debatable, let us recall some frequently analyzed traits of the man who lives in the Western world and is plunged into its overcrowded population; let us accept as a premise that he is more susceptible to suggestion, more credulous, more easily excited.

Above all he is a victim of emptiness—he is a man devoid of meaning. He is very busy, but he is emotionally empty, open to all entreaties and in search of only one thing—something to fill his inner void. To fill this void he goes to the movies—only a very temporary remedy. He seeks some deeper and more fulfilling attraction. He is available, and ready to listen to propaganda. He is the lonely man (The Lonely Crowd), and the larger the crowd in which he lives, the more isolated he is. Despite the pleasure he might derive from his solitude, he suffers deeply from it.

He feels the most violent need to be re-integrated into a community, to have a setting, to experience ideological and affective communication. That loneliness inside the crowd is perhaps the most terrible ordeal of modem man; that loneliness in which he can share nothing, talk to nobody, and expect nothing from anybody, leads to severe personality disturbances. For it, propaganda, encompassing Human Relations, is an incomparable remedy. It corresponds to the need to share, to be a member of a community, to lose oneself in a group, to embrace a collective ideology that will end loneliness.

Propaganda is the true remedy for loneliness. It also corresponds to deep and constant needs, more developed today, perhaps, than ever before: the need to believe and obey, to create and hear fables, to communicate in the language of myths. It also responds to man’s intellectual sloth and desire for security— intrinsic characteristics of the real man as distinguished from the theoretical man of the Existentialists. All this turns man against information, which cannot satisfy any of these needs, and leads him to crave propaganda, which can satisfy them.

The cult of the hero is the absolutely necessary complement of the classification of society. We see the automatic creation of this cult in connection with champion athletes, movie stars, and even such abstractions as Davy Crockett in the United States and Canada in 1955. This exaltation of the hero proves that one lives in a mass society. The individual who is prevented by circumstances from becoming a real person, who can no longer express himself through personal thought or action, who finds his aspirations frustrated, projects onto the hero all he would wish to be.

He lives vicariously and experiences the athletic or amorous or military exploits of the god with whom he lives in spiritual symbiosis. The well-known mechanism of identifying with movie stars is almost impossible to avoid for the member of modem society who comes to admire himself in the person of the hero. There he reveals the powers of which he unconsciously dreams, projects his desires, identifies himself with this success and that adventure. The hero becomes model and father, power and mythical realization of all that the individual cannot be

The propagandee…lives vicariously, through an intermediary. He feels, thinks, and acts through the hero. He is under the guardianship and protection of his living god; he accepts being a child; he ceases to defend his own interests, for he knows his hero loves him and everything his hero decides is for the propagandees own good; he thus compensates for the rigor of the sacrifices imposed on him. For this reason every regime that demands a certain amount of heroism must develop this propaganda of projection onto the hero (leader).

In this connection one can really speak of alienation, and of regression to an infantile state caused by propaganda. Young is of the opinion that the propagandee no longer develops intellectually, but becomes arrested in an infantile neurotic pattern; regression sets in when the individual is submerged in mass psychology. This is confirmed by Stoetzel, who says that propaganda destroys all individuality, is capable of creating only a collective personality, and that it is an obstacle to the free development of the personality.

Such extensive alienation is by no means exceptional. The reader may think we have described an extreme, almost pathological case. Unfortunately, he is a common type, even in his acute state.

Everywhere we find men who pronounce as highly personal truths what they have read in the papers only an hour before, and whose beliefs are merely the result of a powerful propaganda. Everywhere we find people who have blind confidence in a political party, a general, a movie star, a country, or a cause, and who will not tolerate the slightest challenge to that god.

Everywhere we meet people who, because they are filled with the consciousness of Higher Interests they must serve unto death, are no longer capable of making the simplest moral or intellectual distinctions or of engaging in the most elementary reasoning. Yet all this is acquired without effort, experience, reflection, or criticism—by the destructive shock effect of well-made propaganda. We meet this alienated man at every turn, and are possibly already one ourselves.

[The Book] (https://ratical.org/ratville/AoS/Propaganda-JE-Vintage1973.pdf)

George Orwell's original preface to Animal Farm has remained remarkably relevant despite being almost completely unknown. Titled ‘The Freedom of the Press,' (1945) Orwell noted how the book in question had been rejected by three publishers and the universal opinion at the time was that it should be suppressed.

The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of…things being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact…

The British press is extremely centralized, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question.

It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’...Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.…

In one of the purest expressions of irony ever offered, the preface was officially censored until 1972. I have personally looked in ever publication of the book I have ever come across (15+), never finding even one which contained its original preface–though I have been told that a few eventually made their way into print.

We should probably be unsurprised to find that Animal Farm remains one of the most misunderstood and misappropriated literary works in recent memory. The central thesis of the book was that the Russian Revolution had abandoned the working class by the time the Bolsheviks acquired power. And that the Soviet Union and the capitalist West were indistinguishable from one another (‘The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which’).

On Freedom of Speech

The issue involved here is quite a simple one: Is every opinion, however unpopular — however foolish, even — entitled to a hearing? Put it in that form and nearly any English intellectual will feel that he ought to say ‘Yes’. But give it a concrete shape, and ask, ‘How about an attack on Stalin? Is that entitled to a hearing?’, and the answer more often than not will be ‘No’. Now, when one demands liberty of speech and of the press, one is not demanding absolute liberty. There always must be, or at any rate there always will be, some degree of censorship, so long as organized societies endure. But freedom, as Rosa Luxembourg said, is ‘freedom for the other fellow’.

…it is chiefly, the literary and scientific intelligentsia, the very people who ought to be the guardians of liberty, who are beginning to despise it, in theory as well as in practice.

One of the peculiar phenomena of our time is the renegade Liberal. Over and above the familiar Marxist claim that ‘bourgeois liberty’ is an illusion, there is now a widespread tendency to argue that one can only defend democracy by totalitarian methods. …In other words, defending democracy involves destroying all independence of thought.

…These people don’t see that if you encourage totalitarian methods, the time may come when they will be used against you instead of for you. Make a habit of imprisoning Fascists without trial, and perhaps the process won’t stop at Fascists. …Tolerance and decency are deeply rooted in England, but they are not indestructible, and they have to be kept alive partly by conscious effort. The result of preaching totalitarian doctrines is to weaken the instinct by means of which free peoples know what is or is not dangerous.

I am well acquainted with all the arguments against freedom of thought and speech — the arguments which claim that it cannot exist, and the arguments which claim that it ought not to. I answer simply that they don’t convince me and that our civilization over a period of four hundred years has been founded on the opposite notice. …If I had to choose a text to justify myself, I should choose the line from Milton:

By the known rules of ancient liberty.

I know that the English intelligentsia have plenty of reason for their timidity and dishonesty, indeed I know by heart the arguments by which they justify themselves. But at least let us have no more nonsense about defending liberty against Fascism. If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. The common people still vaguely subscribe to that doctrine and act on it. In our country, it is the liberals who fear liberty and the intellectuals who want to do dirt on the intellect: it is to draw attention to that fact that I have written this preface.

On Totalitarianism

Totalitarianism has abolished freedom of thought to an extent unheard of in any previous age. And it is important to realize that its control of thought is not only negative, but positive. It not only forbids you to express — even to think — certain thoughts, but it dictates what you shall think, it creates an ideology for you, it tries to govern your emotional life as well as setting up a code of conduct. And as far as possible it isolates you from the outside world, it shuts you up in an artificial universe in which you have no standards of comparison. The totalitarian state tries, at any rate, to control the thoughts and emotions of its subjects at least as completely as it controls their actions..

There are several vital differences between totalitarianism and all the orthodoxies of the past, either in Europe or in the East. The most important is that the orthodoxies of the past did not change, or at least did not change rapidly. In medieval Europe the Church dictated what you should believe, but at least it allowed you to retain the same beliefs from birth to death. It did not tell you to believe one thing on Monday and another on Tuesday. And the same is more or less true of any orthodox Christian, Hindu, Buddhist or Muslim today. In a sense his thoughts are circumscribed, but he passed his whole life within the same framework of thought. His emotions are not tampered with.

By 1937 or thereabouts it was not possible to be in doubt about the nature of the Fascist régimes. But the lords of property had decided that Fascism was on their side and they were willing to swallow the most stinking evils so long as their property remained secure.

‘Realism’ (it used to be called dishonesty) is part of the general political atmosphere of our time.

it is a pamphleteer's duty to attack the Right, but not to flatter the Left. It is partly because the Left have been too easily satisfied with themselves that they are where they are now.

On What Should be Done with Hitler and Mussolini after their Surrender

Well, if it were left to me, my verdict on both Hitler and Mussolini would be: not death, unless it is inflicted in some hurried unspectacular way. If the Germans and Italians feel like giving them a summary court-martial and then a firing-squad, let them do it. Or better still, let the pair of them escape with a suitcaseful of bearer securities and settle down as the accredited bores of some Swiss pension. But no martyrizing, no St Helena business. And, above all, no solemn hypocritical ‘trial of war criminals’, with all the slow cruel pageantry of the law, which after a lapse of time has so strange a way of focusing a romantic light on the accused and turning a scoundrel into a hero.

On Mass Schizophrenia or Double Think

Many recent statements in the press have declared that it is almost, if not quite, impossible for us to mine as much coal as we need for home and export purposes, because of the impossibility of inducing a sufficient number of miners to remain in the pits. One set of figures which I saw last week estimated the annual ‘wastage’ of mine workers at 60,000 and the annual intake of new workers at 10,000. Simultaneously with this — and sometimes in the same column of the same paper — there have been statements that it would be undesirable to make use of Poles or Germans because this might lead to unemployment in the coal industry. The two utterances do not always come from the same sources, but there must certainly be many people who are capable of holding these totally contradictory ideas in their heads at a single moment.

This is merely one example of a habit of mind which is extremely widespread, and perhaps always has been. Bernard Shaw, in the preface to Androcles and the Lion, cites as another example the first chapter of the Gospel of Matthew, which starts off by establishing the descent of Joseph, father of Jesus, from Abraham. In the first verse, Jesus is described as ‘the son of David, the son of Abraham’, and the genealogy is then followed up through fifteen verses: then, in the next verse, it is explained that as a matter of fact Jesus was not descended from Abraham, since he was not the son of Joseph. This, says Shaw, presents no difficulty to a religious believer

Medically, I believe, this manner thinking is called schizophrenia: at any rate, it is the power of holding simultaneously two beliefs which cancel out. Closely allied to it is the power of igniting facts which are obvious and unalterable, and which will have to be faced sooner or later. It is especially in our political thinking that these vices flourish. Let me take a few sample of subjects out of the hat. They have no organic connection with each other: they are merely cased, taken almost at random, of plain, unmistakable facts being shirked by people who in another part of their mind are aware to those facts.

Hong Kong. For years before the war everyone with knowledge of Far Eastern conditions knew that our position in Hong Kong was untenable and that we should lose it as soon as a major war started. This knowledge, however, was intolerable, and government after government continued to cling to Hong Kong instead of giving it back to the Chinese. Fresh troops were even pushed into it, with the certainty that they would be uselessly taken prisoner, a few weeks before the Japanese attack began. The war came, and Hong Kong promptly fell — as everyone had known all along that it would do.

Conscription. For years before the war, nearly all enlightened people were in favor of standing up to Germany: the majority of them were also against having enough armaments to make such a stand effective. I know very well the arguments that are put forward in defense of this attitude; some of them are justified, but in the main they are simply forensic excuses. As late as 1939, the Labor Party voted against conscription, a step which probably played its part in bringing about the Russo-German Pact and certainly had a disastrous effect on morale in France. Then came 1940 and we nearly perished for lack of a large, efficient army, which we could only have had if we had introduced conscription at least three years earlier.

The Birthrate. Twenty or twenty-five years ago, contraception and enlightenment were held to be almost synonymous. To this day, the majority of people argue — the argument is variously expressed, but always boils down to more or less the same thing — that large families are impossible for economic reasons. At the same time, it is widely known that the birthrate is highest among the low-standard nations, and, in our population, highest among the worst-paid groups. It is also argued that a smaller population would mean less unemployment and more comfort for everybody, while on the other hand it is well established that a dwindling and ageing population is faced with calamitous and perhaps insoluble economic problems. Necessarily the figures are uncertain, but it is quite possible that in only seventy years our population will amount to about eleven millions, over half of whom will be Old Age Pensioners. Since, for complex reasons, most people don't want large families, the frightening facts can exist some where or other in their consciousness, simultaneously known and not known.

United Nations In order to have any efficacy whatever, a world organization must be able to override big states as well as small ones. It must have power to inspect and limit armaments, which means that its officials must have access to every square inch of every country. It must also have at its disposal an armed force bigger than any other armed force and responsible only to the organization itself. The two or three great states that really matter have never even pretended to agree to any of these conditions, and they have so arranged the constitution of U.N.O. that their own actions cannot even be discussed. In other words, U.N.O.'s usefulness as an instrument of world peace is nil. This was just as obvious before it began functioning as it is now. Yet only a few months ago millions of well-informed people believed that it was going to be a success.

There is no use in multiplying examples. The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.

When one looks at the all-prevailing schizophrenia of democratic societies, the lies that have to be told for vote-catching purposes, the silence about major issues, the distortions of the press, it is tempting to believe that in totalitarian countries there is less humbug, more facing of the facts. There, at least, the ruling groups are not dependent on popular favor and can utter the truth crudely and brutally. Goering could say ‘Guns before butter’, while his democratic opposite numbers had to wrap the same sentiment up in hundreds of hypocritical words.3

Actually, however, the avoidance of reality is much the same everywhere, and has much the same consequences. The Russian people were taught for years that they were better off than everybody else, and propaganda posters showed Russian families sitting down to abundant meal while the proletariat of other countries starved in the gutter. Meanwhile the workers in the western countries were so much better off than those of the U.S.S.R. that non-contact between Soviet citizens and outsiders had to be a guiding principle of policy. Then, as a result of the war, millions of ordinary Russians penetrated far into Europe, and when they return home the original avoidance of reality will inevitably be paid for in frictions of various kinds. The Germans and the Japanese lost the war quite largely because their rulers were unable to see facts which were plain to any dispassionate eye.

To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle. One thing that helps toward it is to keep a diary, or, at any rate, to keep some kind of record of one's opinions about important events. Otherwise, when some particularly absurd belief is exploded by events, one may simply forget that one ever held it. Political predictions are usually wrong. But even when one makes a correct one, to discover why one was right can be very illuminating.

In general, one is only right when either wish or fear coincides with reality. If one recognizes this, one cannot, of course, get rid of one's subjective feelings, but one can to some extent insulate them from one's thinking and make predictions cold-bloodedly, by the book of arithmetic. In private life most people are fairly realistic. When one is making out one's weekly budget, two and two invariably make four. Politics, on the other hand, is a sort of sub-atomic or non-Euclidean word where it is quite easy for the part to be greater than the whole or for two objects to be in the same place simultaneously. Hence the contradictions and absurdities I have chronicled above, all finally traceable to a secret belief that one's political opinions, unlike the weekly budget, will not have to be tested against solid reality.

On Historical Accuracy

When Sir Walter Raleigh was imprisoned in the Tower of London, he occupied himself with writing a history of the world. He had finished the first volume and was at work on the second when there was a scuffle between some workmen beneath the window of his cell, and one of the men was killed. In spite of diligent enquiries, and in spite of the fact that he had actually seen the thing happen, Sir Walter was never able to discover what the quarrel was about; whereupon, so it is said — and if the story is not true it certainly ought to be — he burned what he had written and abandoned his project.

This story has come into my head I do not know how many times during the past ten years, but always with the reflection that Raleigh was probably wrong. Allowing for all the difficulties of research at that date, and the special difficulty of conducting research in prison, he could probably have produced a world history which had some resemblance to the real course of events. Up to a fairly recent date, the major events recorded in the history books probably happened. It is probably true that the battle of Hastings was fought in 1066, that Columbus discovered America, that Henry VIII had six wives, and so on.

A certain degree of truthfulness was possible so long as it was admitted that a fact may be true even if you don't like it. Even as late as the last war it was possible for the Encyclopedia Britannica, for instance, to compile its articles on the various campaigns partly from German sources. Some of the facts — the casualty figures, for instance — were regarded as neutral and in substance accepted by everybody. No such thing would be possible now. A Nazi and a non-Nazi version of the present war would have no resemblance to one another, and which of them finally gets into the history books will be decided not by evidential methods but on the battlefield.

During the Spanish civil war I found myself feeling very strongly that a true history of this war never would or could be written. Accurate figures, objective accounts of what was happening, simply did not exist. And if I felt that even in 1937, when the Spanish Government was still in being, and the lies which the various Republican factions were telling about each other and about the enemy were relatively small ones, how does the case stand now? Even if Franco is overthrown, what kind of records will the future historian have to go upon? And if Franco or anyone at all resembling him remains in power, the history of the war will consist quite largely of ‘facts’ which millions of people now living know to be lies. One of these ‘facts’, for instance, is that there was a considerable Russian army in Spain. There exists the most abundant evidence that there was no such army. Yet if Franco remains in power, and if Fascism in general survives, that Russian army will go into the history books and future school children will believe in it. So for practical purposes the lie will have become truth.

This kind of thing is happening all the time. Out of the millions of instances which must be available, I will choose one which happens to be verifiable. During part of 1941 and 1942, when the Luftwaffe was busy in Russia, the German radio regaled its home audiences with stories of devastating air raids on London.

Now, we are aware that those raids did not happen. But what use would our knowledge be if the Germans conquered Britain? For the purposes of a future historian, did those raids happen, or didn't they? The answer is: If Hitler survives, they happened, and if he falls they didn't happen. So with innumerable other events of the past ten or twenty years. Is the Protocols of the Elders of Zion a genuine document? Did Trotsky plot with the Nazis? How many German aeroplanes were shot down in the Battle of Britain? Does Europe welcome the New Order? In no case do you get one answer which is universally accepted because it is true: in each case you get a number of totally incompatible answers, one of which is finally adopted as the result of a physical struggle. History is written by the winners. In the last analysis our only claim to victory is that if we win the war we shall tell fewer lies about it than our adversaries.

The really frightening thing about totalitarianism is not that it commits ‘atrocities’ but that it attacks the concept of objective truth; it claims to control the past as well as the future. In spite of all the lying and self-righteousness that war encourages, I do not honestly think it can be said that that habit of mind is growing in Britain. Taking one thing with another, I should say that the press is slightly freer than it was before the war.

I know out of my own experience that you can print things now which you couldn't print ten years ago. War resisters have probably been less maltreated in this war than in the last one, and the expression of unpopular opinion in public is certainly safer. There is some hope, therefore, that the liberal habit of mind, which thinks of truth as something outside yourself, something to be discovered, and not as something you can make up as you go along, will survive. But I still don't envy the future historian's job. Is it not a strange commentary on our time that even the casualties in the present war cannot be estimated within several millions?

On the Novelty of the Era

Looking through Chesterton's Introduction to Hard Times in the Everyman Edition (incidentally, Chesterton's Introductions to Dickens are about the best thing he ever wrote) , I note the typically sweeping statement: ‘There are no new ideas.’ Chesterton is here claiming that the ideas which animated the French Revolution were not new ones but simply a revival of doctrines which had flourished earlier and then had been abandoned. But the claim that ‘there is nothing new under the sun’ is one of the stock arguments of intelligent reactionaries. Catholic apologists, in particular, use it almost automatically. Everything that you can say or think has been said or thought before. Every political theory from Liberalism to Trotskyism can be shown to be a development of some heresy in the early Church. Every system of philosophy springs ultimately from the Greeks. Every scientific theory (if we are to believe the popular Catholic press) was anticipated by Roger Bacon and others in the thirteenth century. Some Hindu thinkers go even further and claim that not merely the scientific theories, but the products of applied science as well, aeroplanes, radio and the whole bag of tricks, were known to the ancient Hindus, who afterward dropped them as being unworthy of their attention.

It is not very difficult to see that this idea is rooted in the fear of progress. If there is nothing new under the sun, if the past in some shape or another always returns, then the future when it comes will be something familiar. At any rate what will never come — since it has never come before — is that hated, dreaded thing, a world of free and equal human beings. Particularly comforting to reactionary thinkers is the idea of a cyclical universe, in which the same chain of events happens over and over again. In such a universe every seeming advance towards democracy simply means that the coming age of tyranny and privilege is a little bit nearer. This belief, obviously superstitious though it is, is widely held nowadays, and is common among Fascists and near-Fascists.

In fact, there are new ideas. The idea that an advanced civilization need not rest on slavery is a relatively new idea, for instance; it is a good deal younger than the Christian religion. But even if Chesterton's dictum were true, it would only be true in the sense that a statue is contained in every block of stone. Ideas may not change, but emphasis shifts constantly. It could be claimed, for example, that the most important part of Marx's theory is contained in the saying: ‘Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.’ But before Marx developed it, what force had that saying had? Who had paid any attention to it? Who had inferred from it — what it certainly implies — that laws, religions and moral codes are all a superstructure built over existing property relations? It was Christ, according to the Gospel, who uttered the text, but it was Marx who brought it to life. And ever since he did so the motives of politicians, priests, judges, moralists and millionaires have been under the deepest suspicion — which, of course, is why they hate him so much.

On Progress or Modern Myths

Reading recently a batch of rather shallowly optimistic ‘progressive’ books, I was struck by the automatic way in which people go on repeating certain phrases which were fashionable before 1914. Two great favorites are ‘the abolition of distance’ and ‘the disappearance of frontiers’. I do not know how often I have met with the statements that ‘the aeroplane and the radio have abolished distance’ and ‘all parts of the world are now interdependent’.

Actually, the effect of modern inventions has been to increase nationalism, to make travel enormously more difficult, to cut down the means of communication between one country and another, and to make the various parts of the world less, not more dependent on one another for food and manufactured goods. This is not the result of the war. The same tendencies had been at work ever since 1918, though they were intensified after the World Depression.

Take simply the instance of travel. In the nineteenth century some parts of the world were unexplored, but there was almost no restriction on travel. Up to 1914 you did not need a passport for any country except Russia. The European emigrant, if he could scrape together a few pounds for the passage, simply set sail for America or Australia, and when he got there no questions were asked. In the eighteenth century it had been quite normal and safe to travel in a country with which your own country was at war.

In our own time, however, travel has been becoming steadily more difficult. It is worth listing the parts of the world which were already inaccessible before the war started. First of all, the whole of central Asia. Except perhaps for a very few tried Communists, no foreigner has entered Soviet Asia for many years past. Tibet, thanks to Anglo-Russian jealousy, has been a closed country since about 1912. Sinkiang, theoretically part of China, was equally un-get-atable. Then the whole of the Japanese Empire, except Japan itself, was practically barred to foreigners. Even India has been none too accessible since 1918. Passports were often refused even to British subjects — sometimes even to Indians!

Even in Europe the limits of travel were constantly narrowing. Except for a short visit it was very difficult to enter Britain, as many a wretched anti-Fascist refugee discovered. Visas for the U.S.S.R. were issued very grudgingly from about 1935 onwards. All the Fascist countries were barred to anyone with a known anti-Fascist record. Various areas could only be crossed if you undertook not to get out of the train. And along all the frontiers were barbed wire, machine-guns and prowling sentries, frequently wearing gas-masks.

As to migration, it had practically dried up since the nineteen-twenties. All the countries of the New World did their best to keep the immigrant out unless he brought considerable sums of money with him. Japanese and Chinese immigration into the Americas had been completely stopped. Europe's Jews had to stay and be slaughtered because there was nowhere for them to go, whereas in the case of the Czarist pogroms forty years earlier they had been able to flee in all directions. How, in the face of all this, anyone can say that modern methods of travel promote intercommunication between different countries defeats me.

Intellectual contacts have also been diminishing for a long time past. It is nonsense to say that the radio puts people in touch with foreign countries. If anything, it does the opposite. No ordinary person ever listens in to a foreign radio; but if in any country large numbers of people show signs of doing so, the government prevents it either by ferocious penalties, or by confiscating short-wave sets, or by setting up jamming stations. The result is that each national radio is a sort of totalitarian world of its own, braying propaganda night and day to people who can listen to nothing else. Meanwhile, literature grows less and less international.

Most totalitarian countries bar foreign newspapers and let in only a small number of foreign books, which they subject to careful censorship and sometimes issue in garbled versions. Letters going from one country to another are habitually tampered with on the way. And in many countries, over the past dozen years, history books have been rewritten in far more nationalistic terms than before, so that children may grow up with as false a picture as possible of the world outside.

The trend towards economic self-sufficiency (‘autarchy’) which has been going on since about 1930 and has been intensified by the war, may or may not be reversible. The industrialization of countries like India and South America increases their purchasing power and therefore ought, in theory, to help world trade. But what is not grasped by those who say cheerfully that ‘all parts of the world are interdependent’ is that they don't any longer have to be interdependent. In an age when wool can be made out of milk and rubber out of oil, when wheat can be grown almost on the Arctic Circle, when atebrin will do instead of quinine and vitamin C tablets are a tolerable substitute for fruit, imports don't matter very greatly. Any big area can seal itself off much more completely than in the days when Napoleon's Grand Army, in spite of the embargo, marched to Moscow wearing British overcoats. So long as the world tendency is towards nationalism and totalitarianism, scientific progress simply helps it along.

On Realism

The modem cult of ‘realism’ is generally held to have started with Bismarck. That imbecile speech was considered magnificently ‘realistic’ then, and so it would be now. Yet what Wympffen said, though he was only trying to bargain for terms, was perfectly true. If the Germans had behaved with ordinary generosity (i.e. by the standards of the time) it might have been impossible to whip up the revanchist spirit in France. What would Bismarck have said if he had been told that harsh terms now would mean a terrible defeat forty-eight years later? There is not much doubt of the answer: he would have said that the terms ought to have been harsher still. Such is ‘realism’ — and on the same principle, when the medicine makes the patient sick, the doctor responds by doubling the dose.

On American Racism

I was talking the other day to a young American soldier, who told me — as quite a number of others have done — that anti-British feeling is completely general in the American army. He had only recently landed in this country, and as he came off the boat he asked the Military Policeman on the dock, ‘How's England?’

‘The girls here walk out with niggers,’ answered the M.P. ‘They call them American Indians.’

That was the salient fact about England, from the M.P.'s point of view. At the same time my friend told me that anti-British feeling is not violent and there is no very clearly-defined cause of complaint. A good deal of it is probably a rationalization of the discomfort most people feel at being away from home. But the whole subject of anti-British feeling in the United States badly needs investigation. Like antisemitism, it is given a whole series of contradictory explanations, and again like anti-semitism, it is probably a psychological substitute for something else. What else is the question that needs investigating.

On Dating Profiles

Meanwhile, there is one department of Anglo-American relations that seems to be going well. It was announced some months ago that no less than 20,000 English girls had already married American soldiers and sailors, and the number will have increased since. Some of these girls are being educated for their life in a new country at the ‘Schools for Brides of U.S. Servicemen’ organized by the American Red Cross. Here they are taught practical details about American manners, customs and traditions — and also, perhaps, cured of the widespread illusion that every American owns a motor car and every American house contains a bathroom, a refrigerator and an electric washing-machine.

The May number of the Matrimonial Post and Fashionable Marriage Advertiser contains advertisements from 191 men seeking brides and over 200 women seeking husbands. Advertisements of this type have been running in a whole series of magazines since the sixties or earlier, and they are nearly always very much alike. For example:

Bachelor, age 25, height 6 ft 1 in., slim, fond of horticulture, animals, children, cinema, etc., would like to meet lady, age 27 to 35, with love of flowers, nature, children, must be tall, medium build, Church of England.

The thing that is and always has been striking in these advertisements is that nearly all the applicants are remarkably eligible.

What these things really demonstrate is the atrocious loneliness of people living in big towns. People meet for work and then scatter to widely separated homes. Anywhere in inner London it is probably exceptional to know even the names of the people who live next door.

Years ago I lodged for a while in the Portobello Road. This is hardly a fashionable quarter, but the landlady had been lady's maid to some woman of title and had a good opinion of herself. One day something went wrong with the front door and my landlady, her husband and myself were all locked out of the house. It was evident that we should have to get in by an upper window, and as there was a jobbing builder next door I suggested borrowing a ladder from him. My landlady looked somewhat uncomfortable.

‘I wouldn't like to do that,’ she said finally. ‘You see we don't know him. We've been here fourteen years, and we've always taken care not to know the people on either side of us. It wouldn't do, not in a neighborhood like this. If you once begin talking to them they get familiar, you see.’

So we had to borrow a ladder from a relative of her husband's, and carry it nearly a mile with great labor and discomfort.

On Honest Analysis and the Aiding of the Enemy

In America even the pretense that hack reviewers read the books they are paid to criticize has been partially abandoned. Publishers, or some publishers, send out with review copies a short synopsis telling the reviewer what to say. Once, in the case of a novel of my own, they misspelt the name of one of the characters. The same misspelling turned up in review after review. The so-called critics had not even glanced into the book — which, nevertheless, most of them were boosting to the skies.

A phrase much used in political circles in this country is ‘playing into the hands of’. It is a sort of charm or incantation to silence uncomfortable truths. When you are told that by saying this, that or the other you are ‘playing into the hands of some sinister enemy, you know that it is your duty to shut up immediately.

For example, if you say anything damaging about British imperialism, you are playing into the hands of Dr Goebbels. If you criticize Stalin you are playing into the hands of the Tablet and the Daily Telegraph. If you criticize Chiang Kai-Shek you are playing into the hands of Wang Ching-Wei — and so on, indefinitely.

Objectively this charge is often true. It is always difficult to attack one party to a dispute without temporarily helping the other. Some of Gandhi's remarks have been very useful to the Japanese. The extreme Tories will seize on anything anti-Russian, and don't necessarily mind if it comes from Trotskyist instead of right-wing sources. The American imperialists, advancing to the attack behind a smoke-screen of novelists, are always on the look-out for any disreputable detail about the British Empire. And if you write anything truthful about the London slums, you are liable to hear it repeated on the Nazi radio a week later. But what, then, are you expected to do? Pretend there are no slums?

Everyone who has ever had anything to do with publicity or propaganda can think of occasions when he was urged to tell lies about some vitally important matter, because to tell the truth would give ammunition to the enemy.

The most common and widely purchased collection of Orwell’s essays contains a stunningly poor selection in my opinion. I would have chosen the following:

• Notes on Nationalism
• A Hanging
• Literature and Totalitarianism
• Writers and Leviathan
• You and the Atomic Bomb
• Who are the War Criminals?
• In Front of Your Nose
• Future of a Ruined Germany
• Politics and the English Language
• What is Fascism
• Looking Back on the Spanish War
• Why I Write

First Draft of Part 1:

The word propaganda first entered the world in 1622 when the Catholic Church created the ‘Propaganda Fide’ or the ‘Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith.’ Conceived as a technique for organizing missionary work, by 1627 it was institutionalized in the Church’s college to increase the efficiency of indoctrination (renamed in 1967 the ‘Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples’). Propaganda from this epoch was an art form resembling classical rhetoric and was first anticipated and conceived as the ‘Art of War’ around 221 B.C.E. ‘The greatest victory,’ Sun Tzu writes, ‘is that which requires no battle.’ While the genealogy of persuasion techniques in the ancient and early modern world are interesting historical antidotes, they offer nothing in the way of understanding modern propaganda which was originally created in England and America, taking definitive form around 1920 (see the middle section of this subs wiki for a more detailed account).

Archaic persuasion techniques, such as rhetoric, share about as much in common with modern propaganda as an atom bomb does with a sword. Propaganda is an inevitable byproduct of a technological society, evolving in tandem with and parallel to its development. Propaganda is a technical solution to a technical problem, namely integrating the masses into a rapidly changing, artificial world. For tens of millions of years, humans lived in small groups (no larger than 60-70 people), adapting to an environment which only changed very gradually. A natural equilibrium emerged between people and the environment, as anthropologist documented while observing aboriginal tribes.

This equilibrium was disrupted and eventually destroyed as the environment began to evolve at increasingly rapid rates, far outpacing human evolution. Between 1900 and 1970, the speed of travel increased by a factor of 1,000 and the speed of communication by a factor greater than 10 million. But the human brain has not evolved since before the invention of modern agriculture. We have hunter-gather brains residing in a space age environment. “No longer are we surrounded by fields, trees, and rivers, but by signs, signals, billboards, screens, labels, and trademarks,” Ellul writes, “this is our universe.” A primary function of propaganda is to make adaption and integration into this universe seem less painful, less absurd, less noticed, in less time.

Just as the atom bomb resulted from technological refinements and advances in physics, modern propaganda emerged with mass communication technology and was formulated on data from psychology, sociology, and the social sciences generally. The nature of technology is disruption. Technology restructures the world along technical lines outside of human choice, desire, or intent. All the various social orders, traditions, and values which existed were either integrated or destroyed in the face of technical refinement. Monarchy was overthrown, aristocracies crumbled into dust.

I fear neither a fact nor a person, but only the possibility of losing the war. In times of crisis fear of persons is a most dangerous thing and there is but one sin, as Nietzsche put it; namely, that of cowardice.

		–Joseph Goebbels, diary entry (January 21, 1942)

Memory can be a strange beast. After a friend brought to my attention an analysis by Carl Jung of Nietzsche, prophets, and the unconscious, I began to think about the seemingly endless number of Nietzsche interpretations. Bertrand Russell’s ‘A History of Western Philosophy' came to mind. I had read his brief analysis of Nietzsche 10-15 years prior, probably while I was reading ‘Twilight of the Idols’ and the ‘Anti-Christ’ for the first time (while much of Nietzsche may be questioned; that he created better book titles than everyone whos ever lived is certain).

In the decade plus, I had somehow completely lost Russell’s actual line of inquiry, remembering an invention from my mind. I remembered it being only a few paragraphs, 1-2 pages at most; and the argument was that Nietzsche was angry, over emotional. What Russell may have lacked in creation, he more than made up for in synthesis, summary, observation, and advice–in regards both the history of ideas and the age he lived.

XXV: Nietzsche

NIETZSCHE (1844-1900) regarded himself, rightly, as the successor of Schopenhauer, to whom, however, he is superior in many ways, particularly in the consistency and coherence of his doctrine. Schopenhauer's oriental ethic of renunciation seems out of harmony with his metaphysic of the omnipotence of will; in Nietzsche, the will has ethical as well as metaphysical primacy. Nietzsche, though a professor, was a literary rather than an academic philosopher. He invented no new technical theories in ontology or epistemology; his importance is primarily in ethics, and secondarily as an acute historical critic. I shall confine myself almost entirely to his ethics and his criticism of religion, since it was this aspect of his writing that made him influential.

His life was simple. His father was a Protestant pastor, and his upbringing was very pious. He was brilliant at the university as a classicist and student of philology, so much so that in 1869, before he had taken his degree, he was offered a professorship of philology at Basel, which he accepted. His health was never good, and after periods of sick leave he was obliged to retire finally in 1879. After this, he lived in health resorts in Switzerland; in 1888 he became insane, and remained so until his death. He had a passionate admiration for Wagner, but quarreled with him, nominally over Parsifal, which he thought too Christian and too full of renunciation. After the quarrel he criticized Wagner savagely, and even went so far as to accuse him of being a Jew.

His general outlook, however, remained very similar to that of Wagner in the Ring; Nietzsche's superman is very like Siegfried, except that he knows Greek. This may seem odd, but that is not my fault. Nietzsche was not consciously a romantic; indeed he often severely criticizes the romantics. Consciously his outlook was Hellenic, but -760- with the Orphic component omitted. He admired the pre-Socratics, except Pythagoras. He has a close affinity to Heraclitus. Aristotle's magnanimous man is very like what Nietzsche calls the "noble man," but in the main he regards the Greek philosophers from Socrates onwards as inferior to their predecessors. He cannot forgive Socrates for his humble origin; he calls him a "roturier," and accuses him of corrupting the noble Athenian youth with a democratic moral bias.

Plato, especially, is condemned on account of his taste for edification. Nietzsche, however, obviously does not quite like condemning him, and suggests, to excuse him, that perhaps he was insincere, and only preached virtue as a means of keeping the lower classes in order. He speaks of him on one occasion as "a great Cagliostro." He likes Democritus and Epicurus, but his affection for the latter seems somewhat illogical, unless it is interpreted as really an admiration for Lucretius. As might be expected, he has a low opinion of Kant, whom he calls "a moral fanatic à la Rousseau."

In spite of Nietzsche's criticism of the romantics, his outlook owes much to them; it is that of aristocratic anarchism, like Byron's, and one is not surprised to find him admiring Byron. He attempts to combine two sets of values which are not easily harmonized: on the one hand he likes ruthlessness, war, and aristocratic pride; on the other hand, he loves philosophy and literature and the arts, especially music. Historically, these values coexisted in the Renaissance; Pope Julius II, fighting for Bologna and employing Michelangelo, might be taken as the sort of man whom Nietzsche would wish to see in control of governments.

It is natural to compare Nietzsche with Machiavelli, in spite of important differences between the two men. As for the differences: Machiavelli was a man of affairs, whose opinions had been formed by close contact with public business, and were in harmony with his age; he was not pedantic or systematic, and his philosophy of politics scarcely forms a coherent whole; Nietzsche, on the contrary, was a professor, an essentially bookish man, and a philosopher in conscious opposition to what appeared to be the dominant political and ethical trends of his time. The similarities, however, go deeper. Nietzsche's political philosophy is analogous to that of The Prince (not The Discourses), though it is worked out and applied over a wider field.

Both Nietzsche and Machiavelli have an ethic which aims at power and is deliberately anti-Christian, though Nietzsche is more frank in this respect. What Caesar Borgia was to Machiavelli, Napoleon was to Nietzsche: a great man defeated by petty opponents.

Nietzsche's criticism of religions and philosophies is dominated entirely by ethical motives. He admires certain qualities which he believes (perhaps rightly) to be only possible for an aristocratic minority; the majority, in his opinion, should be only means to the excellence of the few, and should not be regarded as having any independent claim to happiness or well-being. He alludes habitually to ordinary human beings as the "bungled and botched," and sees no objection to their suffering if it is necessary for the production of a great man. Thus the whole importance of the period from 1789 to 1815 is summed up in Napoleon:

"The Revolution made Napoleon possible: that is its justification. We ought to desire the anarchical collapse of the whole of our civilization if such a reward were to be its result. Napoleon made nationalism possible: that is the latter's excuse."

Almost all of the higher hopes of this century, he says, are due to Napoleon. He is fond of expressing himself paradoxically and with a view to shocking conventional readers. He does this by employing the words "good" and "evil" with their ordinary connotations, and then saying that he prefers "evil" to "good." His book, Beyond Good and Evil, really aims at changing the reader's opinion as to what is good and what is evil, but professes, except at moments, to be praising what is "evil" and decrying what is "good." He says, for instance, that it is a mistake to regard it as a duty to aim at the victory of good and the annihilation of evil; this view is English, and typical of "that blockhead, John Stuart Mill," a man for whom he has a specially virulent contempt.

Of him he says: "I abhor the man's vulgarity when he says 'What is right for one man is right for another'; 'Do not to others that which you would not that they should do unto you.' Such principles would fain establish the whole of human traffic upon mutual services, so that every action would appear to be a cash payment for something done to us. The hypothesis here is ignoble to the last degree: it is taken for granted that there is some sort of equivalence in value between my actions and thine."

True virtue, as opposed to the conventional sort, is not for all, but should remain the characteristic of an aristocratic minority. It is not profitable or prudent; it isolates its possessor from other men; it is hostile to order, and does harm to inferiors. It is necessary for higher men to make war upon the masses, and resist the democratic tendencies of the age, for in all directions mediocre people are joining hands to make themselves masters.

"Everything that pampers, that softens, and that brings the 'people' or 'woman' to the front, operates in favor of universal suffrage--that is to say, the dominion of 'inferior' men."

The seducer was Rousseau, who made woman interesting; then came Harriet Beecher Stowe and the slaves; then the Socialists with their championship of workmen and the poor. All these are to be combated. Nietzsche's ethic is not one of self-indulgence in any ordinary sense; he believes in Spartan discipline and the capacity to endure as well as inflict pain for important ends. He admires strength of will above all things.

"I test the power of a will," he says, "according to the amount of resistance it can offer and the amount of pain and torture it can endure and know how to turn to its own advantage; I do not point to the evil and pain of existence with the finger of reproach, but rather entertain the hope that life may one day become more evil and more full of suffering than it has ever been."

He regards compassion as a weakness to be combated. "The object is to attain that enormous energy of greatness which can model the man of the future by means of discipline and also by means of the annihilation of millions of the bungled and botched, and which can yet avoid going to ruin at the sight of the suffering created thereby, the like of which has never been seen before." He prophesied with a certain glee, an era of great wars; one wonders whether he would have been happy if he had lived to see the fulfillment of his prophecy.

He is not, however, a worshiper of the State; far from it. He is a passionate individualist, a believer in the hero. The misery of a whole nation, he says, is of less importance than the suffering of a great individual: "The misfortunes of all these small folk do not together constitute a sum-total, except in the feelings of mighty men."

Nietzsche is not a nationalist, and shows no excessive admiration for Germany. He wants an international ruling race, who are to be the lords of the earth: "a new vast aristocracy based upon the most severe self-discipline, in which the will of philosophical men of power and artist-tyrants will be stamped upon thousands of years." He is also not definitely anti-Semitic, though he thinks Germany contains as many Jews as it can assimilate, and ought not to permit any further influx of Jews.

He dislikes the New Testament, but not the Old, of which he speaks in terms of the highest admiration. In justice to Nietzsche it must be emphasized that many modern developments which have a certain connection with his general ethical outlook are contrary to his clearly expressed opinions. Two applications of his ethic deserve notice: first, his contempt for women; second, his bitter critique of Christianity.

He is never tired of inveighing against women. In his pseudo prophetic book, Thus Spake Zarathustra, he says that women are not, as yet, capable of friendship; they are still cats, or birds, or at best cows.

"Man shall be trained for war and woman for the recreation of the warrior. All else is folly."

The recreation of the warrior is to be of a peculiar sort if one may trust his most emphatic aphorism on this subject: "Thou goest to woman? Do not forget thy whip."

He is not always quite so fierce, though always equally contemptuous. In the Will to Power he says: "We take pleasure in woman as in a perhaps daintier, more delicate, and more ethereal kind of creature. What a treat it is to meet creatures who have only dancing and nonsense and finery in their minds! They have always been the delight of every tense and profound male soul."

However, even these graces are only to be found in women so long as they are kept in order by manly men; as soon as they achieve any independence they become intolerable. "Woman has so much cause for shame; in woman there is so much pedantry, superficiality, school-master-liness, petty presumption, unbridled-ness, and indiscretion concealed . . . which has really been best restrained and dominated hitherto by the fear of man."

So he says in Beyond Good and Evil, where he adds that we should think of women as property, as Orientals do. The whole of his abuse of women is offered as self-evident truth; it is not backed up by evidence from history or from his own experience, which, so far as women were concerned, was almost confined to his sister.

Nietzsche's objection to Christianity is that it caused acceptance of what he calls "slave morality." It is curious to observe the contrast between his arguments and those of the French philosophes who preceded the Revolution. They argued that Christian dogmas are untrue; that Christianity teaches submission to what is deemed to be the will of God, whereas self-respecting human beings should not bow before any higher Power; and that the Christian Churches have become the allies of tyrants, and are helping the enemies of democracy to deny liberty and continue to grind the faces of the poor.

Nietzsche is not interested in the metaphysical truth of either Christianity or any other religion; being convinced that no religion is really true, he judges all religions entirely by their social effects. He agrees with the philosophes in objecting to submission to the supposed will of God, but he would substitute for it the will of earthly "artist-tyrants."

Submission is right, except for these supermen, but not submission to the Christian God. As for the Christian Churches' being allies of tyrants and enemies of democracy, that, he says, is the very reverse of the truth.

The French Revolution and Socialism are, according to him, essentially identical in spirit with Christianity; to all alike he is opposed, and for the same reason: that he will not treat all men as equal in any respect whatever.

Buddhism and Christianity, he says, are both "nihilistic" religions, in the sense that they deny any ultimate difference of value between one man and another, but Buddhism is much the less objectionable of the two. Christianity is degenerative, full of decaying and excremental elements; its driving force is the revolt of the bungled and botched. This revolt was begun by the Jews, and brought into Christianity by "holy epileptics" like Saint Paul, who had no honesty.

"The New Testament is the gospel of a completely ignoble species of man."

Christianity is the most fatal and seductive lie that ever existed. No man of note has ever resembled the Christian ideal; consider for instance the heroes of Plutarch's Lives. Christianity is to be condemned for denying the value of "pride, pathos of distance, great responsibility, exuberant spirits, splendid animalism, the instincts of war and of conquest, the deification of passion, revenge, anger, voluptuousness, adventure, knowledge."

All these things are good, and all are said by Christianity to be bad--so Nietzsche contends. Christianity, he argues, aims at taming the heart in man, but this is a mistake. A wild beast has a certain splendor, which it loses when it is tamed. The criminals with whom Dostoevsky associated were better than he was, because they were more self-respecting.

Nietzsche is nauseated by repentance and redemption, which he calls a folie circulaire. It is difficult for us to free ourselves from this way of thinking about human behavior: "we are heirs to the conscience vivisection and self-crucifixion of two thousand years."

There is a very eloquent passage about Pascal, which deserves quotation, because it shows Nietzsche's objections to Christianity at their best: "What is it that we combat in Christianity? That it aims at destroying the strong, at breaking their spirit, at exploiting their moments of weariness and debility, at converting their proud assurance into anxiety and conscience-trouble; that it knows how to poison the noblest instincts and to infect them with disease, until their strength, their will to power, turns inwards, against themselves--until the strong perish through their excessive self-contempt and self-immolation: that gruesome way of perishing, of which Pascal is the most famous example."

In place of the Christian saint, Nietzsche wishes to see what he calls the "noble" man, by no means as a universal type, but as a governing aristocrat. The "noble" man will be capable of cruelty, and, on occasion, of what is vulgarly regarded as crime; he will recognize duties only to equals. He will protect artists and poets and all who happen to be masters of some skill, but he will do so as himself a member of a higher order than those who only know how to do something.

From the example of warriors he will learn to associate death with the interests for which he is fighting; to sacrifice numbers, and take his cause sufficiently seriously not to spare men; to practice inexorable discipline; and to allow himself violence and cunning in war. He will recognize the part played by cruelty in aristocratic excellence: "almost everything that we call 'higher culture' is based upon the spiritualizing and intensifying of cruelty." The "noble" man is essentially the incarnate will to power.

What are we to think of Nietzsche's doctrines? How far are they true? Are they in any degree useful? Is there in them anything objective, or are they the mere power-phantasies of an invalid?

It is undeniable that Nietzsche has had a great influence, not among technical philosophers, but among people of literary and artistic culture. It must also be conceded that his prophecies as to the future, have, so far, proved more nearly right than those of liberals or Socialists. If he is a mere symptom of disease, the disease must be very wide-spread in the modern world.

Nevertheless there is a great deal in him that must be dismissed as merely megalomaniac. Speaking of Spinoza he says: "How much of personal timidity and vulnerability does this masquerade of a sickly recluse betray!"

Exactly the same may be said of him, with the less reluctance since he has not hesitated to say it of Spinoza. It is obvious that in his day-dreams he is a warrior, not a professor; all the men he admires were military. His opinion of women, like every man's, is an objectification of his own emotion towards them, which is obviously one of fear. "Forget not thy whip"--but nine women out of ten would get the whip away from him, and he knew it, so he kept away from women, and soothed his wounded vanity with unkind remarks.

He condemns Christian love because he thinks it is an outcome of fear: I am afraid my neighbor may injure me, and so I assure him that I love him. If I were stronger and bolder, I should openly display the contempt for him which of course I feel.

It does not occur to Nietzsche as possible that a man should genuinely feel universal love, obviously because he himself feels almost universal hatred and fear, which he would fain disguise as lordly indifference.

His "noble" man --who is himself in day-dreams--is a being wholly devoid of sympathy, ruthless, cunning, cruel, concerned only with his own power. King Lear, on the verge of madness, says: ‘I will do such things-What they are yet I know not--but they shall be The terror of the earth.’

This is Nietzsche's philosophy in a nutshell. It never occurred to Nietzsche that the lust for power, with which he endows his superman, is itself an outcome of fear. Those who do not fear their neighbors see no necessity to tyrannize over them. Men who have conquered fear have not the frantic quality of Nietzsche's "artist-tyrant" Neros, who try to enjoy music and massacre while their hearts are filled with dread of the inevitable palace revolution.

I will not deny that, partly as a result of his teaching, the real world has become very like his nightmare, but that does not make it any the less horrible. It must be admitted that there is a certain type of Christian ethic to which Nietzsche's strictures can be justly applied.

Pascal and Dostoevsky--his own illustrations--have both something abject in their virtue. Pascal sacrificed his magnificent mathematical intellect to his God, thereby attributing to Him a barbarity which was a cosmic enlargement of Pascal's morbid mental tortures.

Dostoevsky would have nothing to do with "proper pride"; he would sin in order to repent and to enjoy the luxury of confession. I will not argue the question how far such aberrations can justly be charged against Christianity, but I will admit that I agree with Nietzsche in thinking Dostoevsky's prostration contemptible.

A certain uprightness and pride and even self-assertion of a sort, I should agree, are elements in the best character; no virtue which has its roots in fear is much to be admired. There are two sorts of saints: the saint by nature, and the saint from fear. The saint by nature has a spontaneous love of mankind; he does good because to do so gives him happiness. The saint from fear, on the other hand, like the man who only abstains from theft because of the police, would be wicked if he were not restrained by the thought of hell-fire or of his neighbors' vengeance.

Nietzsche can only imagine the second sort of saint; he is so full of fear and hatred that spontaneous love of mankind seems to him impossible. He has never conceived of the man who, with all the fearlessness and stubborn pride of the superman, nevertheless does not inflict pain because he has no wish to do so. Does any one suppose that Lincoln acted as he did from fear of hell?

Yet to Nietzsche Lincoln is abject, Napoleon magnificent. It remains to consider the main ethical problem raised by Nietzsche, namely: should our ethic be aristocratic, or should it, in some sense, treat all men alike? This is a question which, as I have just stated it, has no very clear meaning, and obviously, the first step is to try to make the issue more definite.

We must in the first place try to distinguish an aristocratic ethic from an aristocratic political theory. A believer in Bentham's principle of the greatest happiness of the greatest number has a democratic ethic, but he may think that the general happiness is best promoted by an aristocratic form of government. This is not Nietzsche's position. He holds that the happiness of common people is no part of the good per se. All that is good or bad in itself exists only in the superior few; what happens to the rest is of no account.

The next question is: How are the superior few defined? In practice, they have usually been a conquering race or a hereditary aristocracy--and aristocracies have usually been, at least in theory, descendants of conquering races. I think Nietzsche would accept this definition. "No morality is possible without good birth," he tells us.

He says that the noble caste is always at first barbarian, but that every elevation of Man is due to aristocratic society. It is not clear whether Nietzsche regards the superiority of the aristocrat as congenital or as due to education and environment. If the latter, it is difficult to defend the exclusion of others from advantages for which, ex hypothesi, they are equally qualified.

I shall therefore assume that he regards conquering aristocracies and their descendants as biologically superior to their subjects, as men are superior to domestic animals, though in a lesser degree. What shall we mean by "biologically superior"? We shall mean when interpreting Nietzsche, that individuals of the superior race and their descendants are more likely to be "noble" in Nietzsche's sense: they will have more strength of will, more courage, more impulse towards power, less sympathy, less fear, and less gentleness.

We can now state Nietzsche's ethic. I think what follows is a fair analysis of it: Victors in war, and their descendants, are usually biologically superior to the vanquished. It is therefore desirable that they should hold all the power, and should manage affairs exclusively in their own interests.

There is here still the word "desirable" to be considered. What is "desirable" in Nietzsche's philosophy? From the outsider's point of view, what Nietzsche calls "desirable" is what Nietzsche desires. With this interpretation, Nietzsche's doctrine might be stated more simply and honestly in the one sentence:

"I wish I had lived in the Athens of Pericles or the Florence of the Medici."

But this is not a philosophy; it is a biographical fact about a certain individual. The word "desirable" is not synonymous with "desired by me"; it has some claim, however shadowy, to legislative universality. A theist may say that what is desirable is what God desires, but Nietzsche cannot say this.

He could say that he knows what is good by an ethical intuition, but he will not say this, because it sounds too Kantian. What he can say, as an expansion of the word "desirable," is this:

"If men will read my works, a certain percentage of them will come to share my desires as regards the organization of society; these men, inspired by the energy and determination which my philosophy will give them, can preserve and restore aristocracy, with themselves as aristocrats or (like me) sycophants of aristocracy. In this way they will achieve a fuller life than they can have as servants of the people."

There is another element in Nietzsche, which is closely akin to the objection urged by "rugged individualists" against trade-unions. In a fight of all against all, the victor is likely to possess certain qualities which Nietzsche admires, such as courage, resourcefulness, and strength of will. But if the men who do not possess these aristocratic qualities (who are the vast majority) band themselves together, they may win in spite of their individual inferiority.

In this fight of the collective canaille against the aristocrats, Christianity is the ideological front, as the French Revolution was the fighting front. We ought therefore to oppose every kind of union among the individually feeble, for fear lest their combined power should outweigh that of the individually strong; on the other hand, we ought to promote union among the tough and virile elements of the population.

The first step towards the creation of such a union is the preaching of Nietzsche's philosophy. It will be seen that it is not easy to preserve the distinction between ethics and politics. Suppose we wish--as I certainly do--to find arguments against Nietzsche's ethics and politics, what arguments can we find?

There are weighty practical arguments, showing that the attempt to secure his ends will in fact secure something quite different. Aristocracies of birth are nowadays discredited; the only practicable form of aristocracy is an organization like the Fascist or the Nazi party. Such an organization rouses opposition, and is likely to be defeated in war; but if it is not defeated it must, before long, become nothing but a police State, where the rulers live in terror of assassination, and the heroes are in concentration camps.

In such a community, faith and honor are sapped by delation, and the would-be aristocracy of supermen degenerates into a clique of trembling poltroons. These, however, are arguments for our time; they would not have held good in past ages, when aristocracy was unquestioned.

The Egyptian government was conducted on Nietzschean principles for several millennia. The governments of almost all large States were aristocratic until the American and the French Revolutions. We have therefore to ask ourselves whether there is any good reason for preferring democracy to a form of government which has had such a long and successful history-or rather, since we are concerned with philosophy, not politics, whether there are objective grounds for rejecting the ethic by which Nietzsche supports aristocracy.

The ethical, as opposed to the political question is one as to sympathy. Sympathy, in the sense of being made unhappy by the sufferings of others, is to some extent natural to human beings; young children are troubled when they hear other children crying. But the development of this feeling is very different in different people. Some find pleasure in the infliction of torture; others, like Buddha, feel that they cannot be completely happy so long as any living thing is suffering.

Most people divide mankind emotionally into friends and enemies, feeling sympathy for the former, but not for the latter. An ethic such as that of Christianity or Buddhism has its emotional basis in universal sympathy; Nietzsche's, in a complete absence of sympathy. (He frequently preaches against sympathy, and in this respect one feels that he has no difficulty in obeying his own precepts.) The question is: If Buddha and Nietzsche were confronted, could either produce any argument that ought to appeal to the impartial listener?

I am not thinking of political arguments. We can imagine them appearing before the Almighty, as in the first chapter of the Book of Job, and offering advice as to the sort of world He should create. What could either say? Buddha would open the argument by speaking of the lepers, outcast and miserable; the poor, toiling with aching limbs and barely kept alive by scanty nourishment; the wounded in battle, dying in slow agony; the orphans, ill treated by cruel guardians; and even the most successful haunted by the thought of failure and death. From all this load of sorrow, he would say, a way of salvation must be found, and salvation can only come through love.

Nietzsche, whom only Omnipotence could restrain from interrupting, would burst out when his turn came:

"Good heavens, man, you must learn to be of tougher fiber. Why go about sniveling because trivial people suffer? Or, for that matter, because great men suffer? Trivial people suffer trivially, great men suffer greatly, and great sufferings are not to be regretted, because they are noble. Your ideal is a purely negative one, absence of suffering, which can be completely secured by nonexistence. I, on the other hand, have positive ideals: I admire Alcibiades, and the Emperor Frederick II, and Napoleon. For the sake of such men, any misery is worth while. I appeal to You, Lord, as the greatest of creative artists, do not let Your artistic impulses be curbed by the degenerate fear-ridden maunderings of this wretched psychopath."

Buddha, who in the courts of Heaven has learnt all history since his death, and has mastered science with delight in the knowledge and sorrow at the use to which men have put it, replies with calm urbanity:

"You are mistaken, Professor Nietzsche, in thinking my ideal a purely negative one. True, it includes a negative element, the absence of suffering; but it has in addition quite as much that is positive as is to be found in your doctrine. Though I have no special admiration for Alcibiades and Napoleon, I, too, have my heroes: my successor Jesus, because he told men to love their enemies; the men who discovered how to master the forces of nature and secure food with less labor; the medical men who have shown how to diminish disease; the poets and artists and musicians who have caught glimpses of the Divine beatitude. Love and knowledge and delight in beauty are not negations; they are enough to fill the lives of the greatest men that have ever lived."

"All the same," Nietzsche replies, "your world would be insipid. You should study Heraclitus, whose works survive complete in the celestial library. Your love is compassion, which is elicited by pain; your truth, if you are honest, is unpleasant, and only to be known through suffering; and as to beauty, what is more beautiful than the tiger, who owes his splendor to his fierceness? No, if the Lord should decide for your world, I fear we should all die of boredom."

"You might," Buddha replies, "because you love pain, and your love of life is a sham. But those who really love life would be happy as no one can be happy in the world as it is."

For my part, I agree with Buddha as I have imagined him. But I do not know how to prove that he is right by any argument such as can be used in a mathematical or a scientific question. I dislike Nietzsche because he likes the contemplation of pain, because he erects conceit into a duty, because the men whom he most admires are conquerors, whose glory is cleverness in causing men to die. But I think the ultimate argument against his philosophy, as against any unpleasant but internally self-consistent ethic, lies not in an appeal to facts, but in an appeal to the emotions.

Nietzsche despises universal love; I feel it the motive power to all that I desire as regards the world. His followers have had their innings, but we may hope that it is coming rapidly to an end.