I’ll not write too much about this issue I’ve addressed before, but I’ll go further than before on one detail: the United States government is barely such a thing and perhaps it’s leading us into a fragmentation which might lead to multiple governments of some sort or a civil war or some periods of each. To be sure, the government in Washington has pieces of a government such as the Social Security Administration and the various management agencies for national parks and forests. It has a military which seems to be more corrupt in some ways than ever before, even in the 1950s and early 1960s when some of the top officers, including some on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, seemed nearly treasonous at times—see Operation Northwoods. See also Dualism: JFK and the Quite Speakable and Quite Historical which is a sort-of review of JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters by James W. Douglass. I state my objections to the overall understanding that Douglass has of these events—basically, he seems to see brutal fights for power and wealth in terms of some sort of struggle between Good and Bad; I do think there are evil men involved in these fights but sometimes those evil men might be on, say, the side of the American Republic (such as it is) and its citizens. Unfortunately, the various gangs in the United States, centered in Washington or New York (Wall St) or the major corporate headquarter buildings have recently combined, mostly after the fact, when one gang or another has carried out some major crime—the murders of public figures, the CIA-bombing of the plane over Lockerbie (the CIA was protecting its drug-smuggling operations which seem to play a major role in keeping the bankrupt American economy supplied with enough cash to sort-of remain on its feet), the bombing of the Federal building in Oklahoma City (for what purpose??), and—of course—9/11 which was, in a limited sense, the largest and most murderous bank robbery in history.
A lot of evil men have gained power or increased their power during the slide of the West into moral and cognitive disorder. A lot of heirs to fortunes they could never rebuild or even maintain have become pirates of a sort. I don’t see a well-organized army of evil men anywhere in particular but rather individual gangs of bankster-thugs, politician-thugs, spook-thugs, manufacturing-thugs, police-thugs, and so on. Men of low moral character drive out men of better moral character during periods such as the one the United States entered following World War II when it was the only powerful and wealthy country which retained all its wealth; the other countries of the West were subjugated to American order or voluntarily took on that early version of a New World Order pushed by the globalists at the Sullivan & Cromwell law-firm (especially the Dulles brothers) and at investment firms such as Brown Brothers & Harriman (the usual suspects plus the Walkers and Bushes and all in tight cahoots with the Rockefellers); they all wished to share in the power and wealth as the US began trying to establish hegemony even as other countries began to recover from the disasters of colonialistic exploitation or the Great European War, Parts I and II. We Americans fell into the greater sin of Antinomianism, a sin on display with the often openly expressed belief that we don’t have to honor our agreements or international law and can bomb freely because we are the morally upright; others have to be punished brutally for committing small-scale versions of our great sins and crimes—if they even really commit those acts.
It’s a mess and the current revelation that, for example, Republican-thugs might ally themselves with Democratic-thugs against members of their own party is hardly surprising in light of history. Nor is it surprising when Douglass reveals notes from J Edgar Hoover stating that the CIA had infiltrated the FBI and placed men loyal to the Dulles gang of thugs in key positions of the FBI.
The regions of centralized power in the West are disordered and we shouldn’t engage in literalistic fantasies of well-organized evil striking out into the region of light. Satan is MIA but there are plenty of men and women who are not only greedy and excessively ambitious but also desperate as their dreams of hegemony are endangered by various people and peoples who won’t let us win every game on the playground.
We also shouldn’t engage in literalistic fantasies that simple reforms will bring the United States or the entire West back to a state of moral and political and cultural order. It would be good to replace most of our ruling class criminals with good men or good women but the decayed state of Western Civilization would continue to encourage men with the “mentality of gangsters” to try to enter the centers of power (money-center banks and large private corporations) as they’ve done in the United States since its founding. (“Mentality of gangsters” is Lord Acton’s phrase used during his analyses of power and corruption.)
They’ve entered but not because they grew particularly powerful compared to what seemed to have been more competent grandfathers. Those grandfathers included the so-called Robber Barons, drug-smugglers, and slave-traders as well as the American Protestant missionaries become imperialists against the good of those they were “saving”. There was a lot of overlap of these groups and, it must be said, nearly all of those criminals came from the `blue-blood’ Calvinist families of the American states of the Northeast.
These criminals didn’t destroy the United States; they were merely parasites who were like termites chewing away at a decaying foundation which wasn’t even subject to inspections and maintenance. It was the `good guys’ such as Luther and Calvin, numerous popes and cardinals, Voltaire and Emerson, Lincoln and the Roosevelts and numerous British political reformers who cared not for the foundations or even drilled holes—or worse—in those foundations. Notice the lack of `modernist’ musicians and novelists and poets on the list. I’ll let the reader think about the common fates of the protagonists Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina though the first was the character of Gustave Flaubert, a nihilistic sort of existentialist and a great sinner, while the second was a character of Leo Tolstoy, an unbalanced but deeply spiritual man of doubtful Christian orthodoxy, by even the loose definitions of modern times.
I think that not only the work of scientists and engineers, but also those of musicians and writers of literary fiction and history, were constrained by rules which reflect deep respect for certain forms of honesty—largely in the sense of honoring empirical reality. Many others were not so constrained, including:
- many philosophers outside of those working in technical fields such as science, and certainly those philosophers masquerading as literary critics,
- most theologians,
- politicians and businessmen and most academic economists, and
- teachers and clergymen and those used-to-be important Americans—local journalists.
Most of the remaining order in the West is of a cultural sort, though there are few—if any—worthwhile novelists, believers or non-believers, among those published in the past two or three decades. Yet, historians have re-turned to narratives often as well-written and as engaging as the great novels. Musicians can produce music which is as disciplined as that of composers in the Classical or Romantic Eras and yet has a modern feel and draws upon more recent understandings of the possibilities of music.
On the whole, we’re in trouble. I could write with tongue only partly in cheek: we’re doomed. But there are enough good signs to lead me to believe we can rescue the West, bringing it back to health in only a couple generations or so, but we have to first find ourselves a new class of leaders: more knowledgeable and more respectful of empirical knowledge, more intelligent, less sociopathic, and more respectful of the traditions of the various peoples of the West.