Open Conspiracy - Good or Evil?
I started this thread at the suggestion of @Athena but I hope others will find it interesting too.
The term “conspiracy” seems to denote an agreement to commit an act that is either morally reprehensible or criminal. However, if we look at how it has been used historically, this doesn’t seem to have always been the case. For example:
1. Conspiracy of the Equals, an organization founded by the French revolutionary Babeuf who wanted to introduce “pure democracy” and “egalitarian communism”, and which Marx and Engels regarded as the first communist party.
2. Lenin’s Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (later Communist Party) called itself “conspiratorial” even after the revolution (Conspirator: Lenin in Exile by Helen Rappaport).
3. The book The Open Conspiracy by H G Wells.
Wells’ Open Conspiracy is of particular interest for several reasons:
He seems to start from the premise that man is a “malicious and destructive animal”.
According to Wells, this necessitates a “conspiracy against established things” that would have to enroll supporters from all quarters, socialists and fascists alike, and it would have to go on in the daylight.
In fact, he seems to suggest that the whole world is already engaged in a sort of “open conspiracy” to reshape the world through world government, abolition of the nation-state, population control and redistribution, and similar far-reaching policies.
Wells was also a popular author of science fiction novels and it is easy to dismiss him as a fantasist. However, for some reason, science fiction seems to stimulate thought, and fiction writers have been known to influence scientists, scholars and intellectuals of all sorts, as in the case of Jules Verne who enjoyed something like a cult after his death.
Wells himself was highly influential among progressive intellectuals and politicians in England and America. His work The Rights of Men laid the ground work for the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the UN itself has been described as a form of world government in the making.
The term “conspiracy” seems to denote an agreement to commit an act that is either morally reprehensible or criminal. However, if we look at how it has been used historically, this doesn’t seem to have always been the case. For example:
1. Conspiracy of the Equals, an organization founded by the French revolutionary Babeuf who wanted to introduce “pure democracy” and “egalitarian communism”, and which Marx and Engels regarded as the first communist party.
2. Lenin’s Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (later Communist Party) called itself “conspiratorial” even after the revolution (Conspirator: Lenin in Exile by Helen Rappaport).
3. The book The Open Conspiracy by H G Wells.
Wells’ Open Conspiracy is of particular interest for several reasons:
He seems to start from the premise that man is a “malicious and destructive animal”.
According to Wells, this necessitates a “conspiracy against established things” that would have to enroll supporters from all quarters, socialists and fascists alike, and it would have to go on in the daylight.
In fact, he seems to suggest that the whole world is already engaged in a sort of “open conspiracy” to reshape the world through world government, abolition of the nation-state, population control and redistribution, and similar far-reaching policies.
Wells was also a popular author of science fiction novels and it is easy to dismiss him as a fantasist. However, for some reason, science fiction seems to stimulate thought, and fiction writers have been known to influence scientists, scholars and intellectuals of all sorts, as in the case of Jules Verne who enjoyed something like a cult after his death.
Wells himself was highly influential among progressive intellectuals and politicians in England and America. His work The Rights of Men laid the ground work for the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the UN itself has been described as a form of world government in the making.
Comments (151)
Obviously, this sounds very much like the State in Marx and Engels’ communist society that supposedly will take care of all administrative matters, allowing the citizen “to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner …” (The German Ideology).
But Wells was not a Marxist. He was a Fabian Socialist and leader of the London Fabian Society. So, could it be that Fabian Socialism has achieved through intellectual and cultural work what Marxism failed through more revolutionary means?
Incidentally, Fabian Socialism is a system that aims to implement socialism or communism by a method called “permeation” that propagates socialist ideas without openly identifying them as such.
The Fabian Society describes itself as having “been at the forefront of developing political ideas and public policy on the left for almost 140 years” and derives its name from the Roman general Quintus Fabius, known for his delaying tactics in the war against the Carthaginians.
Fabianism | socialist movement | Britannica
Fabians – Our History
Shaw and Fabianism - marxists.org
The Two Souls of Socialism - marxists.org
Edit:
Fabian methods. Fabianism’s reputation of “conspiracy” comes from the methods Fabians employed to propagate their ideology, especially what they termed “permeation”. Fabian co-founder and leader G. D. H. Cole explained that although a political organization, the Fabian Society was organized for thought and discussion and not for electoral action which it left to other organizations such as political parties while encouraging its members to infiltrate and operate from within those organizations:
“The Fabian Society has become famous throughout the world as a planner of Socialist policies and an inspirer of Socialist ideas”[…]”The person whom the Fabian Society wishes most to convert is the man or woman who is in the best position for influencing others”[…]”The Fabian Society regards each individual in its relatively tiny membership as a stone thrown into a pool, spreading rings of influence all around him”
The Fabian Society, past and present
Fabian objectives. The Fabians’ political philosophy was identical with Wells’ Open Conspiracy. Their primary objective was to establish a world government on communist lines. They set up a Fabian Research Department to do research, write reports and suggest policies on international government. They founded organizations to promote the idea, and were involved in the establishment of, the League of Nations and its successor, the United Nations.
H G Wells, The Idea of a League of Nations
Celebrating H G Wells’s role in the creation of the UN Declaration of Human Rights
Fabian influence. Why was this “Open Conspiracy” or “Fabian Conspiracy” so influential? The Fabian founders were well-off Liberals (members of the British Liberal Party) with close links to industrial interests, such as owners of railway/railroad companies, steel plants and chocolate manufacturers. G B Shaw who was a highly influential Fabian leader, wrote “Socialism for Millionaires” in which he advised wealthy personalities of the day to use their wealth for social causes. Carnegie and Rockefeller were among those “converted”. For example, the Fabians’ London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) which was established to promote socialism, had more than 30% of its expenses covered by Rockefeller foundations while also receiving funding from the British Chamber of Commerce, bankers, financiers and other sources.
Rockefeller funding led to the LSE being dubbed "Rockefeller's baby".
LSE - Rockefeller's baby? lse.ac.uk
A History of the London School of Economics and Political Science, by LSE Director R. Dahrendorf.
LSE history - from the Fabian Society Archives at LSE
Criticism of Fabianism. Fabianism has received some strong criticism both from the right and the left. Criticism from the left revolves on the charge that Fabians are not true socialists but represent their own vested interests and the interests of their allies from the corporate community.
Leon Trotsky described the Fabians as a “tool of the ruling class”: “By this we do not at all mean that the Fabians, the ILPers and the Liberal defectors exert no influence on the working class. On the contrary, their influence is very great but it is not fixed. The reformists who are fighting against a proletarian class consciousness are, in the final reckoning, a tool of the ruling class”
Writings on Britain, Where is Britain Going?, The Fabian “Theory” of Socialism, Volume 2, 1974, p. 48
Criticism from the right focuses on the Fabian strategy of implementing totalitarian communism under the guise of democratic socialism.
Another key element that both criticisms have in common is the Fabians' close links to powerful financial and industrial groups.
A detailed account of the Anglo-American industrial and banking groups that shared the Fabians’ aims is given in The Anglo-American Establishment by C Quigley
N.B. In order to properly evaluate the Fabians’ worldwide influence it may be helpful to start with Quigley and then read R. Martin’s Fabian Freeway: High Road to Socialism in the USA
Harry W Laidler, an influential American Fabian, also gives a useful account of the links between the London Fabians and the socialist movement in the USA in his History of Socialism
The latest critical study of Fabianism and the industrial groups (Milner Group) described by Quigley is The Milner-Fabian Conspiracy by Ioan Ratiu.
A very good critique of Socialism in general is Socialism: The Failed Idea That Never Dies by Kristian Niemietz.
By the way, The League for Industrial Democracy (LID) which the London Fabians described as their “provincial society” in their publications was one of the many conduits through which Fabians influenced political movements in the USA.
The New York-based LID was named after the Fabian book Industrial Democracy that was also translated into Russian by Lenin and used to promote Bolshevism as a “democratic” project.
Good observation. We tend to say something is a conspiracy if the agenda or the objectives aren't publicly declared about some action or policy.
Quoting Apollodorus
Hmm. So is globalization an agenda of the Fabian society? I think not (yet I don't know, so that's why the question).
Well, globalization is the agenda of many different groups. The Fabians were just one of them. There were, for example Anglo-American industrial interests (The Anglo-American Establishment by C. Quigley)
But the Fabians were among the first political movements to promote the idea of world government as can be seen from H G Wells and other Fabians. Of course, you can also go back to Marx and Engels. The main difference is that the Fabians pursued their agenda by "non-revolutionary" means even though the agenda was revolutionary in its objective.
I would say that this is something close to every social democratic movement that has been in power in Western Europe. All of them don't directly link to the Fabian society.
Correct. Also, is it still a "conspiracy" if it involves the whole world? Wells seems to think so. Maybe his ambiguity was deliberate. In any case, he did advocate a new world order initiated by an elite group and he wanted the Fabian society to be that group.
Maybe not all of them. However, the Fabians did reestablish the Socialist International after WWII which they controlled together with the Labour Party that was in charge of government in the British Empire. The SI was reestablished in London and was funded by the Labour Party (itself founded by the Fabians) so it was able to exert influence on all member parties.
Then you start to be more of a tin-foil hat conspiracist.
You see, "the whole world" has in itself other actors than the US and the West as Putin's Russia, China controlled by the CCP, India, Saudi-Arabia, Pakistan, North Korea, Latin American countries etc. That these hold a same agenda sounds extremely dubious. The conspiracists simply forgets them or disregards them as independent actors with minimal knowledge of them. So one has to be careful.
Actually, "the whole world" wasn't my phrase. It's what Wells says in the book. Personally, I tend to think the Fabian influence was more on England and America - and maybe other former parts of the British Empire like Australia which also had a Fabian Society.
I think this is quite small compared to what lengths the Soviet Union went to finance and control Communist parties all over the World. UK Labour Party is quite puny in it's influence compared to that.
And of course when you think about the various Social Democrat leaders in Europe, Miterrand, Blair, etc. they differed in many ways both with their domestic and foreign policies.
This I accept. The strong bonds are quite apparent here. Outside of that realm there come many differences and obstacles more than the language barrier.
For Fabian influence outside Europe see
J. M. Sneyder, “The Fabianization of the British Empire: Postwar Colonial Community Development in Kenia and Uganda, 1948 – 1956”, Britain and the World: Historical Journal of The British Scholar Society, March 2020, vol. 13, No 1, pp. 69-89
Fabianism and Culture - cambridge.org
The Influence of Fabian Society on English Social Literature
Fabian Society JOMO KENYATA
And of course there might be influences and exchanges of ideas with international relations. But then, I guess,for example the work within EU by various political party factions might be on a different level now to earlier exchanges between various social democratic parties.
That's how it started. But close links with Europe's socialist parties were forged during WWII when socialist leaders fled to London and were carried on after the reestablishment of the International.
The Labour Party, Denis Healey and the International Socialist Movement
The think tank Policy Exchange was founded in 1999 by UK Prime Minister and Fabian Society member Tony Blair, another leading Fabian Peter Mandelson, Germany's Social Democratic Chancellor Gerhard Schroder and US Democratic President Bill Clinton.
Among many other organizations promoting globalism Tony Blair also founded The Tony Blair Institute For Global Change.
By the way, the entire leadership of the British Labour Party consists of Fabian Society members and Fabians have founded and hold key positions in many influential educational institutions, think tanks, and government advisory bodies such as the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), Imperial College London, Royal Economic Society (RES), National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) and many others. As stated on the Fabian Society website, there are also hundreds of Fabians politicians.
Of course, it depends on which side of the battlelines you are whether this appears to be an act that is both morally reprehensible and criminal. This is not to say that all who call themselves Christian are guilty by association, but the Religious Right will not rest until they help usher in Armageddon.
Well, I suppose you could describe Christianity as a conspiracy against ignorance and evil but there is nothing wrong with that. As the OP says, conspiracies aren't always bad.
All political movements and even some religious ones aim to acquire power for themselves and they can only do so by denying power to others. But Christianity didn't come to power by force of arms but through persuasion.
As explained by St Augustine in The City of God, Graeco-Roman religion was already moving in the direction of monotheism and many leading thinkers, including Hellenistic philosophers found Christianity attractive. Conversely, many early Church leaders found Platonism attractive. Many had started off as Platonic philosophers and continued to hold Platonism in high regard. Augustine himself says that he was inspired by the writings of Plotinus to look for a higher truth (Confessions).
Louis Auguste Blanqui, the leader of one of the political factions during the Paris Commune and arguably their better half, openly advanced a conspiratorial praxis, which he justified by the necessity of remaining outside of the apparently omnipresent gaze of the Sûreté. Despite this, communards of both factions, even, perhaps, particularly his own, did, to varying degrees, become committed to the open form of direct democracy which the Commune has been lauded because of, of which Peter Watkins's La Commune, an excellent film, I might add, is exemplary.
Blanqui's assumption that the revolution can only be carried by a conspiratorial sect was later taken up by Vladimir Lenin in his rejection of revolutionary spontaneity in the foundational theses of what has come to be called "Leninism", What Is to Be Done? and The State and Revolution. The assumption that an effective revolution can only be carried out by a cadre of "professional revolutionaries" in the form of a revolutionary vanguard directly led to co-option of the February Revolution by the Bolsheviks during the October Revolution.
Be they either Communist or Anarchist, I would sooner die as a quote unquote "White" than I would wait to discover what form of totalitarianism such revolutionary chauvinism takes. Though I do understand that you are merely posing a question as to whether or not we ought to consider "conspiracy" as being negative from a kind of philosophical skepticism that cultivates keeping an "open mind", I would like to take this opportunity to state, in no unclear or uncertain terms, that the characterization of political conspiracy as being somehow nefarious is not only to the point, but also ought to be just simply evident to anyone with even fairly limited understanding of the October Revolution. The February Revolution was a spontaneous revolution. Were it not to have been co-opted by the Bolsheviks, it is quite likely that people would have a dramatically different relationship to Socialism today.
Was it the ignorance of those whose souls Christians tried to save through torture and death or the ignorance of Christians? Was it the ignorance of those who were the victims of psychological torture of those who were told what to believe on penalty of an eternity in Hell or the ignorance of Christians? Is it the ignorance of those who strive for peace or the ignorance of Christians plotting Armageddon?
Quoting Apollodorus
Again, you demonstrate your ignorance of Christian history. Through the actions of the Church Fathers and their suppression and persecution of those disagreed with them they established an official Catholic Church. Note the definition of 'catholic'. They later gained political power when the Roman Emperor Constantine purportedly converted to Christianity. It remains an open question whether he did this merely as a political expedient.
Quoting Apollodorus
Augustine was hardly an impartial observer. He was, after all, a Church Father and invented 'original sin'. An idea that still tortures the spirit to this day.
The decision, on the part of the Left-Communists, to support the Bolsheviks had drastic consequences for both them and in the general course of human history. It was a mistake that would later lead their defecting during the Russian Civil War and persecution under the Marxist-Leninist regime of Josef Stalin, one that, though I generally have an aversion to speaking for anyone other than myself, we readily acknowledge. Our refusal to participate within any revolutionary project where any party, with any rationalization or justification whatsoever, considers for whatever class they offer the pretense of being capable of liberating as their political subjects is well-founded and more than reflective of our commitment to a Socialist project only in so far that it is necessarily anti-authoritarian.
It seems doubtful to me that you would be aware of the general sentiment or political praxis of the libertarian Left, and, so, I should hope that you don't take my elaboration upon this as a form of censure. What your query calls to light is the fundamental flaw within every form of Leninism and raison d'être for the failures of both the French Revolution and the so-called "Russian Revolution".
There is a very limited partial necessity for political organizations engaged in illegal activities, assuming that they are justified in doing so, to be somewhat clandestine. If we are to suggest that there somehow exists something like a general project for the common liberation of all of humanity as per the historical meta-narrative of quote unquote "civilized" progress, of this, I will say, there are certain elements of serendipity. In terms of the world becoming a better place to live, however it is that you should like to interpret that, often times that "The Lord works in mysterious ways" can be meaningfully invoked as a kind of socio-political allegory. Being said, even within Liberal democracy, it is nothing but self-evident that clandestine politics have overall been fairly damaging. One only need to point to the Intelligence community, particularly in the United States, United Kingdom, or Germany, as evidence of this. Rudyard Kipling described the form of diplomatic espionage that resulted in the war in Afghanistan between the British and Russian Empire as "The Great Game". Of it, he said, "When everyone is dead, the Great Game is finished. Not before."
As well-meaning as anyone could be in their invocation of the real-life Jedi Order in a defense of clandestine politics, the utilization of things like secret police within totalitarian regimes ought to illicit a forthright rejection of any political party that must rely upon secrecy. Your example of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, though I am willing to give you more of the benefit of the doubt in the general course of this thread, is paradoxically exemplary of what Karl Popper called the "Open Society", the very antithesis to any conspiratorial political sect.
Not to mention the ongoing conspiracy of Christianity in its sexual abuse of children - committed by clergy and covered up by clergy at the highest levels for generations. Like Marxism, Christianity has pretended to care for the weak and suffering, but energetically commits atrocities on the very group it proports to protect.
Oh my, that is back to the thread this one sprang from. Empirical scientists being no better than the church of old. These discussions can make a person's head swim. Especially when trying to decide if a subject should break off into a new thread or not because everything is connected. :roll:
Perhaps we need new categories of thought? How can we be sure of what we know? Around 1830 Tocqueville wrote of how Christian democracies would become despots and this is not a good thing but seems an accurate explanation of what is happening. Are we unquestionably sure one economic system is better than another and would this be true for all people in the whole world? Is there ignorance hiding in what we believe is true? Do we have terminology that includes a healthy element of doubt?
Was/is democracy a conspiracy? I can imagine fundamentalist Muslims and Chinese leaders arguing it is. Are some economic systems compatible with democracy and others not?
Are we boldly making political and economic decisions in a state of ignorance and do we need informed people to form a conspiracy and straighten out this mess?
I have certainly heard this expressed by fundamentalist Muslims. Democracy is how the evil West spreads its 'poisonous ideas' of equality for women and secularism.
I think most people would agree with that. As shown by Rappaport and other historians, Lenin did like to see himself as a conspirator and the whole Soviet leadership was rather fond of that description. I suppose over time it became like a sort of "badge of honor". And I certainly agree with the view that the Bolshevik "revolution" was really more like a coup than a revolution, in view of the fact that it was carried out by a handful of Marxist ideologists with the help of radicalized workers and some elements of the military that had been exposed to revolutionary propaganda.
The rural population, that formed the vast majority of the country, was not involved.
And, of course, Lenin used the statements of Marx and Engels - like the May 1850 Address to the Communist League - to justify his own belief in power being seized by a conspiratorial clique:
“If the forces of democracy take decisive, terroristic action against the reaction from the very beginning, the reactionary influence in the election will already have been destroyed […] To be able forcefully and threateningly to oppose this party [the democrats], whose betrayal of the workers will begin with the very first hour of victory, the workers must be armed and organized. The whole proletariat must be armed at once with muskets, rifles, cannon and ammunition”
Marx & Engels, Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League, May 1850
and
“A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists”
F Engels, “On Authority”, Almanaco Republicano, 1874
This was also what enabled the Bolsheviks to justify their reign of state terror in the wake of the revolution or coup.
Perfectly reasonable question. The Fabians of course, were fanatical believers in efficiency and aimed to build a society in which everything would be controlled and decided by a body of administrative "experts". Fabian ideologists who were also leaders of the Labour Party believed that the state should think for the whole of society and the Fabian Society saw itself as the "brain-workers" of socialism and of mankind in general.
In their view, the Fabians were joined and reinforced by Anglo-American industrialists and bankers, who, like the Fabians, believed that power should be taken from the hands of politicians and entrusted to an administrative elite consisting of themselves and their Fabian collaborators.
Who these industrialists and bankers were is explained in detail in The Anglo-American Establishment by C. Quigley
Pretending we "Do it for the children".
Externalizing costs onto the Earth.
Generally just taking the easy way.
The "I deserve this (a break, a treat, whatever)" mantra.
The whole "Up Up With People!" [It happened just this morning I was walking down the street
The milkman and the postman and policeman I did meet.
There in ev'ry window and ev'ry single door
I recognized people I'd never noticed before.
Up! Up with people!
You meet 'em wherever you go
Up! Up with People!
They're the best kind of folks we know.
If more people were for people
All people ev'rywhere
There'd be a lot less people to worry about
And a lot more people who care.]
What's really bad is pretending "I am forgiven. Someone died for my sins. I can burn the less fortunate."
In short, we're a bunch of kids cut loose unsupervised in a mall. The open conspiracy is that that is somehow okay to run wild and consume and destroy.
I am glad that you agree, but think that you have only been so fair to Marx and Engels, whose opinions and statements often changed and varied.
The phrase, "the dictatorship of the proletariat", comes from "The Civil War in France", written by Marx, which is largely a celebration of the Paris Commune. He uses the phrase to describe that the communards had largely dismantled the repressive apparatus of the French state, while keeping a minimal set of aspects of it operational so as to defend the commune. Lenin nearly completely expropriated this in his defense of a transitional and fairly autocratic state that was to guide the revolution from Socialism to Communism in The State and Revolution. Josef Stalin, later, interpreted that as a sanction for dictatorship, which he explicitly defended, I think, in Foundations of Leninism, though can't quite remember the particular Marxist-Leninist text. I am fairly certain that it is one of the foundational Marxist-Leninist texts.
Marx had chosen an incendiary phrase in a polemic that Lenin had interpreted in his creation of a political philosophy that, in my opinion, departed from what had come to be Marxism, which Josef Stalin later took as a justification for his regime. Though there are causal chains on the links of historical events, there isn't quite the through line between Marx and Stalin that some people propose, as Marx had originally used the phrase to describe something wholly other, perhaps only so justifiable in itself, than what either Lenin or Stalin did.
Am I the only person who suspects for the Fabians to be entryists within the Labour Party and that their defense of Eugenics is just a cryptic form of social murder, as Eugenics necessarily just simply is, orchestrated by the likes of certain sets of factions within, primarily, as it concerns Intelligence in the U.K., MI6, as well as a few relatively obscure intellectuals within the Conservative and Unionist Party? Obviously, this is a conspiracy that I have hatched, but I do often wonder as to whether or not there are grains of truth to it.
I do agree with that statement. I certainly believe that mankind has a lot of growing up to do. And the current consumer-oriented culture that cares little about the future and even less about our spiritual well-being can only serve to exacerbate the situation and turn us all into obedient subjects of an all-controlling nanny state while we happily relinquish whatever power we have left.
And Fabians, of course, are among the first to applaud the advances of the nanny state. For example, the British Labour Party politician Margaret Hodge has defended policies she acknowledged had been labelled as "nanny state", saying at a speech to the Institute for Public Policy Research that "some may call it the nanny state but I call it a force for good".
Christians by and large have forgotten the broken promise. They now believe that they are already saved because they believe. The importance of Paul's spiritual body is that it would be free of the sins, but those who think themselves "saved" are no different from anyone else, often hiding their transgressions against God and men behind their show of piety. Yet they conspire to create a Christian theocracy to overturn secular governments. And like their Muslim counterparts they believe they are doing the will of God.
It's an open conspiracy and everyone, everyone (me included) is in on it. Even those who would pretend to be the adults in the room.
I wouldn't call Fabians "entryists into the Labour Party" as they co-founded it and have been sitting on its national executive from the start. Hundreds of Labour members of Parliament are Fabians. Without the Fabians there would be no Labour Party.
That's why Jeremy Corbyn and the far-left unions failed. They tried to take over the party after Tony Blair and Gordon Brown but the Fabians reasserted their control with Keir Starmer and his new team of Fabians.
However, you are right about the Fabians' Eugenicist tendencies. G B Shaw wrote "what we are confronted with now is a growing perception that if we desire a certain type of civilization and culture we must exterminate the sort of people who do not fit into it" - Preface, On The Rocks, 1933.
Perhaps, just the campaign of ostensively ethical Eugenics on their part? I can't rationalize how what is just simply ultimately a Social Darwinist strategem has become fairly popular among liberal utopian Socialists. They, now, seem to endorse a form of Eugenics advanced by the sets of society of which Julian Huxley, Aldous Huxley's brother and partial inspiration for A Brave New World, was a part of. If you watch Homo Sapiens 1900, though obviously a critical documentary, it does seem fairly clear that the racialist and classist tendencies were part and parcel to Francis Galton's theories, the history of Eugenics is inextricably tied to totalitarianism within the former Soviet Union, China, and Nazi Germany, and that whatever ostensive collective good it was that Julian Huxley endorsed ought not to justify what does ultimate as a form of social murder necessarily, as it'd seem to be commonly understood by that Aldous Huxley's allegory is taught in most high schools. I don't understand why the Labour Party has not absolved themselves of such notions, aside from my rather spurious claim that it has something to do with British Intelligence.
Interesting, but I assume Jeremy Corbyn surely wasn't a Fabian (or am I wrong?). The way how Blair was against Corbyn and predicted a disaster (which the elections were, so Tony was right), I assume that there is an opposition to the old-school Fabians in the Labour party.
Now the leader Keir Starmer is for a foreigner like me a total unknown.
I really don't know much about the role of British intelligence in this. I suppose I will have to look into it. But social engineering has long been part of the Fabian agenda. Wells himself speaks of "controlling and redistributing" the world's population in his book. As I said, his plans were really very far-reaching in many respects. I can understand why some people agree with the idea of a nanny state, but I for one wouldn't like to be social engineered just because the Fabian state wants so.
Again, that's just a conspiracy that I harbor, but I just can't understand why a political organization like the Labour Party would continue to, at least, tacitly, support a biopolitical campaign that has been largely discredited and has had very clear dire consequences throughout human history.
I feel kind of the same way about black liberation and the Nation of Islam, though, would obviously substitute the Central Intelligence Agency for MI6. Within any left-wing or radical circles, though, chalking up any misguided ideas to having something to do with Intelligence is kind of a problem in its own right, and, so, am willing to admit that I am exclusively engaged in speculation.
To use the National of Islam as an example, though it would be unfair to blanketly characterize the organization as such, there are currents of a somewhat fanatical black separatism within it, proclivities towards black supremacism, strains of anti-Semitism, quasi-fundamentalist mystic Islamism, and an often all too reckless form of revolutionary orthodoxy. When you consider the life of Malcom X, it can seem as if he had been conscripted within the organization before becoming ardently devoted to it before having effectively renounced it. With some of the political history of the black liberation movement often lacking in any definite explanation, it does seem to be all too fortuitous for nearly every publicity crisis that the movement has to be traced back to the same organization, especially when its most notable member was responsible for, perhaps, the most divisive split within the anti-racist protest movement, which, upon leaving, he later attempted to rectify.
I'm not suggesting that the Nation of Islam is or was just simply a CIA front; I'm just suggesting that it could be possible for the organization to have been, to some degree, infiltrated, and, to some degree, utilized in dividing the various set of political factions to have come out of the Civil Rights Movement. If you take kind of long look into its somewhat esoteric history, there are a number of things about it that seem to be kind of odd.
I am also willing to posit that something similar could be happening with Eugenics and the Labour Party.
Being said, the truth is often stranger than fiction and people often come to rather odd social, political, or spiritual reasons wholly on their own and, as before, I would warn against forthrightly levelling accusations of entryism or espionage, as it can often be rather destructive. In the beaten way of self-critique, I have become isolated from the Anarchist movement as a Pacifist because of the Black Panther Party, and, so, do have a vested interest in criticizing the Nation of Islam, and, so, can't quite tell, myself, as to what is a well-founded suspicion and what is just simply a paranoid and persecutory complex.
An aside: As that the raison d'être for that people who are classified or identify as "punks" hate people who are classify or identify as "hippies", aside from that most Anarchists do tend to preclude strict nonviolence, is often cited as being because of the "diversity of tactics", effectively as it was adopted by the Black Panther Party, who, if you didn't know, does have an Anarchist faction, thereily leaving me with an odd kind of "white savior complex", as I am effectively trying to figure out how to convince the Black Panthers to let me back into the Anarchist movement, which, to me, seems rather unlikely, as, when the hippies tried to engage the Black Panthers within psychological encounters back in the late 1960s, it kind of resulted in a total breakdown of the social order. Experimental psychology may have just not been the way forward, but, as I'd basically be asking them to either revoke or reform their interpretation of "self-defense", effectively the foundational concept to their general ethos, it seems rather unlikely that I would be capable of convincing them of this favor, especially since I do happen to, at least, appear as person whom most people would assume is "white".
Starmer was a total unknown to most people except to the Fabians. A barrister/lawyer to anyone who had heard of him if at all. I think he was running a Trotskyist magazine for a while.
Yes, there is an opposition within Labour as I said. The left-wing unions and the right-wing Fabians. It's always been that way. The deal that was done from the start was for the unions to provide members and funds and for the Fabians to make policy, write policy papers and manifestos, carry out research, run elections, and generally do the brain work for the party.
Corbyn's far-left unionist gang tried to rebel and take over but they failed. Of course Labour has always been more successful with Fabians in charge but last time around, under Blair and Brown it got kicked out by the voters and the Tories have been in power ever since - from 2010. That's a long time in politics and as things stand right now it doesn't look good for Labour. The Tories would need to make some really big blunder to lose to Labour.
The other problem Labour has is that it is seen as a party for minorities ever since it abandoned the British working class in favor of ideology-driven far-left policies and militant Islam.
I'm not so sure that I foresee the danger of "militant Islam" within the Labour Party, who seems so inclined to be of a generally agreeable ethos in that regard, similar to that of Adam Curtis. They're not quite like the International Socialist Organization who offered a "critical, but unconditional support", whatever that means, for Hamas during the Israeli bombardment of Gaza.
Well, I was talking about Labour's image with voters. Corbyn didn't do his party a service by apparently endorsing extremist Islamic organizations as well as far-left groups like the Irish Republican Army (IRA) while at the same time also having an "anti-Semitic" problem. When you start playing off one ethnic group against another for political gain it doesn't take long before people start to wonder what your game is. That's why Corbyn never stood a chance as a leader and Labour never stood a chance with him in charge of the party. Add to that the Fabians' opposition to him and you'll start seeing the problem.
Oh, you're most welcome. Do take your time. It's all very interesting stuff I think and I doubt you will regret it in the end. Reading does tend to open one's horizons especially when it comes to new topics of this kind.
While Martin McGuinness was a former leader of the Provisional Irish Republican Army, he later became Sinn Féin's chief negotiator in the peace process. Engaging in dialogue is not the same thing as fostering political terrorism.
I agree. However, the republican movement had a political wing represented by Sinn Féin and a paramilitary group represented by the IRA and its various offshoots like the Provisional IRA (PIRA).
Corbyn's alleged links to the IRA were reported in the press:
Revealed-Jeremy-Corbyn-and-John-McDonnells-close-IRA-links
This contributed to Labour and especially Corbyn having a negative image with voters.
From the mother thread.
:grin: I have been pondering thoughts all night. First for the word "conspiracy". It originates from Latin meaning to breathe together, which becomes agreement and later a secret plot.
Sorry I am a very slow reader and feel a need to respond before I have completed the reading.
What possible ideas could the Fabians have that are more radical than Christianity? > especially the Anababitist and the Munster rebellion come to mind.
The people who started this rebellion did so with pamphlets
It appears a big conflict with Catholicism is a hierarchy of authority and aristocratic social organization versus equality in every way.
But Anabaptism was not a single movement because in the region there were peasant wars and an attempt to establish a theocracy and evenly distribute wealth. Which makes me think back to Athens and the rise of democracy. At least since Athens, the poor have rebelled and demanded a stronger say in government and fairer distribution of wealth. So what is new about Fabianism?
It would be the negative meaning of conspiracy to think thoughts of social and economic change can be secretly embedded in a society. Are these ideas different from Christianity or democracy coming from Athens? The notion of democracy is we can discuss these things, and come to agreement about the best way to organize ourselves. It is a social order that works pretty well, with problems developing when a group of people are excluded from governing power, except economically. That economic factor is so troublesome. Athens protected private property because doing so improved their ability to meet human needs than communal living did. There is a stronger motivation factor when we have private property instead of communal property.
That is certainly true! But what makes those in power willing to listen and share power? The Steampunk movement is the result of disappointment about industrialization leaving so many in desperate poverty. We are struggling to overcome this problem and I think we have made great progress, but I am not sure the democratic party is managing the economic problem well at this moment in time. Good intentions are no guarantee of good results. But we can not maintain the status quo either because we must adjust to changes. And so it is throughout human history. What makes those in power willing to listen and share power?
How many of those leaders experienced terrible poverty as children? H. G. Wells is one of them who was malnourished and suffered a lot because of poverty and stupid laws that enforced suffering on others, such as his mother having to work as a domestic to support her family when her husband was disabled, and her employer having the power to prevent her from living with her children and husband while she was employed.
Correct. I've slightly edited the OP (2nd post, actually) to clarify how Fabianism has come to be associated with "conspiracy". The Fabians were attacked from the start by other socialists, from leading ideologists like Engels to common folk, for being disingenuous and self-interested or "unprincipled spiders" as some called them.
And yes, property is a powerful motivating factor in all political movements. Leading Fabians, although members of the Liberal Party, were often Marxists and some still are. However, they realized early on that abolition of private property as advocated by strict Marxists wasn't too attractive a proposition to the common people. Farmers and other land owners were definitely against the idea and ever factory workers wanted higher wages in the hope to one day own their own property.
So, the Fabians who were highly intelligent and educated people, were forced to modify their political program in order to accommodate the interests of the majority and win the support of bankers and industrialists whose aim was to water down the more revolutionary currents of socialism. This is why they dubbed socialism "a business proposition" and were viewed by other socialists with suspicion and disdain. But the Fabians' intellectual work, their influence on education, and the support they enjoyed from economic interests enabled them to outmaneuver other socialists and impose their own agenda.
The internal situation within the British Labour Party, where right-wing Fabians are at loggerheads with left-wing unionists, is a microcosm of the wider tensions and conflicts between Fabianism and other socialist currents throughout the world.
But, as I said, there is quite a bit to explore and assimilate. So, do take your time. There is no rush.
Wells, yes. But he was not a founder of the Fabian Society, he joined much later.
Beatrice Webb was the daughter of railroad magnate Richard Potter, chairman of the Great Western and Grand Trunk Railways of England and Canada. It was people like Potter who helped finance the Fabians' London School of Political Science and Economics (LSE) and other Fabian initiatives that cost millions to fund.
Well, it can't be ruled out. Eugenics did form a big element in Fabian ideology. In those days a lot of people were into Darwinism and Eugenics and the Fabians were no different. Certainly Wells advocated population control and redistribution and this involves some elements of Eugenics. So, hypothetically speaking, Labour could be motivated by Eugenics in its current policies? But I'm not an expert on it, and I haven't looked into that.
I was talking about the way Fabianism came to exert a lot of influence on politics, education and culture. But if you have any sources on Labour's links with Eugenics, do let us know, by all means.
It is important to understand that the Fabians were middle class. There were exceptions, but it would be factually wrong to see the Fabians as poor and destitute working-class people. At origin, they were members of the Liberal Party, the party of new money (as opposed to the Tories who were the party of old money). That was precisely why they founded the Labour Party with the help of the unions, because poor working-class people didn't trust them and the middle-class Fabians didn't stand a chance of influencing the labor movement without an ostensibly "working-men party" like Labour.
Fabian leaders like the Webbs (who were the true leaders, not Wells) held dinner parties at home with the rich and powerful of the day as related by Beatrice Webb in her diary and memoirs. They had a dining club called "The Coefficients" ( I think Quigley mentions that as well) where they met and discussed their plans with bankers, gold and diamond producers, and powerful politicians with whom they coordinated their activities, like Lord Haldane, Edward Grey, Lord Milner and many others.
Incidentally, the term "champagne socialist" was applied to Fabians like Ramsay McDonald, the first Labour Prime Minister, who had married into money and, like other Fabians, was regarded as a traitor to working-class interests.
As I said, the tension between the Labour right wing revolving around the Fabian Society and the left wing revolving around unions is still there and for very good historical and ideological reasons that need to be understood.
Quoting Wikipedia
He was strongly influenced by Walt Whitman and the Hindu Bhagavad Gita. He clearly saw in these a sense of purpose and devoted himself to that.
Corbyn supports united Ireland, which, though the only part in Northern Ireland to do so completely is Sinn Féin, is dissimilar from supporting terrorist attacks on the part of the IRA. He has said that he has maintained links with members of Sinn Féin in order to bring a resolution to the conflict, which, though I do expect for him to be the kind of left-wing politician to occasionally give the Provisional IRA more of the benefit of the doubt than they truly deserve, I do happen to believe. Meeting with affiliates of the IRA so as to bring about the Good Friday Agreement is not the same thing as meeting them in a tacit support of their actions. He did invite Gerry Adams to promote his autobiography following the Birmingham hotel bombing, which may have been ill-timed, but Adams doesn't seem to have had anything to do with bombing, aside from that he has been instrumental within the peace process. While Sinn Féin and the various organizations that have adopted the moniker, the IRA, particularly the Provisional Irish Republican Army, are not the same organizations, what I don't doubt is that there are any number of connections between them. For a Labour politician to meet with members of Sinn Féin so as to facilitate the peace process, even if they support a united Ireland, which I do as well, is not akin to condoning terrorism and actually quite to the contrary. This notion that Conservative politicians had the in the United Kingdom that The Troubles could have been brought to an end without engaging in dialogue with members of Sinn Féin, if not particularly those connected to the IRA or even members of the IRA, themselves, is entirely absurd, if not offhandedly immature. Confliction resolution necessitates that people are willing to talk to each other. Any person is taught this after having gotten into their first fight.
That seems like an important statement. Which generation enjoyed that new money and what changed that made that new wealthy posible?
"gold and diamond producers"? That comes from Africa. Exploration and trade were behind the new economic opportunity, and that is a totally different economy than farms, serfs, and slaves. The new economy involves wars of conquest and leads to the first and second world wars. Wars are costly and demand manpower. The colonial economy didn't survive the world wars but industry was able to pick the labor and continue creating new wealth. Mass production requires mass markets and now a growing middle class becomes more important to economic growth. This is a lot of rethinking social and economic matters.
Quoting Apollodorus
I am going to have to work on figuring that out. Can you say more about it? What are the important power centers of both? I have always ignored left and right talk so I really do not have the necessary concepts.
While the sentiment you have expressed seems fairly amicable, I fail to take your meaning. I was making a clarification about Corbyn's alleged IRA contacts. He hadn't established contacts with whomever it was in either Sinn Féin or the Provisional Irish Republican Army so as to bolster support for acts of terrorism; to the contrary, he had done so in order to facilitate the peace process. I am both a Pacifist and somewhat sympathetic to the plight of those who live in Northern Ireland and, therefore, care that the peace process is effective. As, though I assume for Apollodorus's take on such matters to merely be reflective of the political ecology of the United Kingdom, and, therefore, mistaken, I think that the characterization of politicians who have facilitated dialogue with any number of parties to bring about the Good Friday Agreement as having made a tacit sanction of political terrorism to disrupt the peace process, I felt a need to make a clarification.
I don't understand what this has to do with the Democratic Party.
Despite your clearly confused interpretation of Jeremy Corbyn's relationship to the Provisional Irish Republican Army, which the citation of The Telegraph and The Daily Mail as reputable sources of information upon such matters is evidence of, I am beginning to suspect that this thread is about something other than what I originally thought that it was, and, so, apologize for my wanton diatribes by that account.
Of the Yippies, there were a series of debates between Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, who coined the term, "Yuppie", to describe young urban professionals. Rubin suspected that, upon figuring out how to get most of the young population to consider them favorably, they ought to just make enough money to take over the world so that someone else didn't do so in their stead. Though Rubin is kind of the classical example of a sell-out and I do feel so inclined to agree with Hoffman, I do think that he had a certain point to make. Were the music industry, for instance, to have been taken over by the likes of the Yippies, I think that you would a considerable improvement within Pop Culture and even just the social ecology of, at least, American society today.
There's also that I'm of such an inclination to think that there's just nothing wrong with being kind of a libertine. If this or that "champagne socialist" wants to live it up, what's it to me?
As an independent musician, I've noticed a kind of poverty of Do-It-Yourself sentiment in that, without there being anyone who runs a decent establishment, there is no place for artists like me to play. In so far that a person is not abusive with their wealth, I don't have any qualms with them having it. In so far that they use it cultivate a culture that is to the general benefit of humanity, I don't see why people, in good faith, can't accept and take this well and agree that their doing so is, perhaps, somewhat requisite for the world to become a better place to live. I don't harbor any illusions of philanthropy, though.
I think the confusion is yours, not mine. I don't care about Corbyn in the least. I was simply saying how he was portrayed in the press and why he acquired a negative image among voters which exacerbated the problems Labour already had, as explained above. Nothing more and nothing less.
The same applies to McDonald. His description as a "champagne socialist" was merely an illustration of how Fabians were seen by other socialists. Fabian authors admit that Fabians weren't highly regarded by working-class people. They were middle-class intellectuals with whom working-class people couldn't easily connect or identify. That's why Fabians preferred to quietly sit on the Labour executive committee and draft policy papers whilst working-class members like McDonald and Keir Hardie were used as a front or bait, if you prefer.
Well, you need to know a bit about how the British Empire worked. The Tories were the party of "old money", i.e., upper-class, landed aristocracy. The Liberals were "new money", i.e., middle-class bankers and industrialists who made their fortune from investments in the colonial possessions especially in Africa where gold, diamonds, and other natural resources were being discovered and developed. The Fabians being middle-class Liberals, they had close connections to the Liberal bankers and industrialists described by Quigley in The Anglo-American Establishment. After all, they were members of the same party and they knew each other.
Regarding Labour, it is sufficient to know for now that it was founded by the Fabian Society and trade unions who had different interests but entered into an alliance of convenience with one another for political expediency. So, basically, the Labour right wing is led by the Fabian Society and other Fabian groups mainly based in London, whereas the Labour left wing is led by unions like Unite which are often headed by people from further north, e.g. Liverpool, Manchester, etc. For example, Unite boss Len McCluskey, Jeremy Corbyn's ally, and opponent of the Fabian right, who is a Marxist from Liverpool.
Perhaps, I have misunderstood you, but you do seem to have found fault with Corbyn because of how he was portrayed in the press, which I don't think is fair. To me, it seems like it would have been a lot more important for a person to facilitate the Good Friday Agreement than it would for them to win an election. Granted, I should probably just take your word for that you were giving a mere analysis of his depiction in the press as you have explicitly stated.
Though now willing to take your word for that you were giving a mere analysis of how Corbyn was portrayed in the press. I do think that doing something like facilitating the Good Friday Agreement is kind of more important than winning an election.
Edit: Oh, it posted the first one. Well, whatever.
I don't think it would be bad if you did. I was just making a general point about Labour and about the fact that it hasn't really recovered after Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.
Another issue Labour had was the way it handled the banking crisis in 2008, selling off the country's gold reserves at rock-bottom prices and making rich gold speculators and traders even richer in the process, etc. Brown who had been regarded as an expert on economics, was seen to have failed miserably.
Perhaps Labour was treated unfairly by the press on this point as well, but that's how the cookie crumbles. What matters at the end of the day is that Labour lost the trust of the voters and it's still struggling to catch up. And internal frictions aren't helping either.
I don't know. I think you may be too concerned with electoral politics. On some level, if no one is in office, what can be done? By the same token, however, I think that we ought to consider just what we elect politicians for.
Engaging in dialogue so as to bring a resolution to a conflict is precisely the sort of thing that I not only entrust a public official to do, but also respect. If we are to do without the difficult tasks that some characterize as being contentious in kind of a condescending appeal to a somewhat illusory mass audience in the name of winning an election, why is it that we should even vote in an election? I also wonder as to whether such a middle of the road strategy is even effective. I think that there's a strong argument to make for that voter apathy exists because of that politicians via some form of pragmatism or another, often concede too much.
As far as political candidates go, I think that Corbyn was a good choice and don't think it was a mistake on the part of the Labour Party to choose him as a candidate. I don't live there, but I'd guess that his loss had more to do with kind of a spurious meta-narrative concerning Neo-Liberalism and the United Kingdom's longstanding alliance with the United States, one that is often never explicitly addressed, as it relates to the British exit from the European Union than it does with anything that The Daily Mail or The Telegraph has to say about Corbyn's alleged sanction of political terrorism.
Well, that's what seems to be less and less clear. Personally, I tend to think we're being taken for a ride.
I don't mean to be cynical but political life is becoming so complex and there are so many and multiplying competing interest groups that it is nearly impossible to achieve anything of value except short-term, cosmetic "results" that are promptly undone or cancelled the minute the opposition comes to power.
I think that you are grossly mistaken. It is just this kind of cynicism that de facto makes me an Anarchist and not a Liberal.
I am an Anarcho-Pacifist. Though not a single-issue voter, I do tend to put a person's general attitude towards human rights first, their likelihood of involving the nation of which I am a citizen in a war second, and the rest to follow. Were I to live in Israel, for instance, were I think that this or that Israeli politician, let's say a fairly conservative member of Yesh Atid, to be more likely to bring an effective and lasting resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, I would certainly consider voting for them over this or that Labor Zionist. The Left is operating under the assumption that such people do not exist, which is just simply false. There are people, from all walks of life, who are willing to engage in the difficult tasks, such as what has come to be referred to as "dialogue", that are requisite to make the world that we live in the kind of place where such conflicts do not occur. Such tasks ought to be considered as noble. All too often, however, within partisan politics or this or that adherence to this or that ideology, people lose sight of the purpose of Politics in general, namely to do things like facilitate conflict resolution. We fail to value what is truly important and, because of this, it becomes all too easy to rely upon an odd kind of pragmatic cynicism that, as a generalized pathology, becomes as if it were true via a form of self-fulfilling prophecy. If people are ever to elect politicians who are worthy of respect, then they will have to be willing to respect that which is ethical and that which is pertinent.
I think most people are. Unfortunately, politicians seem strangely unable to deliver. So, why waste billions on elections and politicians instead of eradicating poverty?
Wouldn't it be better to get rid of political parties and have governments run by philosopher-kings as suggested by Plato?
I never been one to accept Plato's rejection of the Athenian democracy, despite what was untenable of it, and hypothetical noocracy. Philosophers, for what they have going for them, often don't have all too great of political ideas or make for great politicians. I will avoid citing the most obvious one and point to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's notion of absolute idealism culminating in the Prussian state as evidence of this.
I am, perhaps, more pessimistic than you are. I think that it is quite common for people, particularly those engaged in politics, to dismiss all kinds of ideas as being somehow "idealistic" or to justify any number of concessions, however anyone would like to interpret that, as necessitated because of some form of pragmatism.
Were Liberal democracy to genuinely be what people who care about liberty, equality, and all that could believe that it is, I would see no reason to be an Anarchist.
Agree. And if we think democracy is a hard thing to get right - how about philosopher-kings? How on earth would the quality of this be determined and how would we avoid getting a well-read 'Putin' rather than a Socrates? It seems to me that what is true for Presidents might be true for philosopher-kings - the kinds of people who want to be one should be instantly dismissed from the list of contenders. And the kinds of people who might be great, would never accept the position.
Might be true but not necessarily so. Not if the philosopher-kings are specially raised and trained for that particular purpose. All that needs to be done is for the people to decide what qualities, abilities, and virtues the philosopher-kings should possess and for them to be educated and trained accordingly. There would be no need for elections, corruption and aberrant political ideologies would be eradicated, and many billions would be saved and distributed among those who need it most or otherwise used for the public good. And @thewonder would finally be released from the burden of being an Anarchist
I hear you but right there is the crux to all our problems.
Correct. And that's why I'm beginning to think that we haven't progressed much since Plato.
As I said, spending more and more billions on elections and politicians does not appear to provide us with better politicians, better elections or better democracy. On the contrary, it seems to me that this only serves to increase the undemocratic influence and power of self-interested oligarchic circles. The "Open Conspiracy", "Fabian Conspiracy" or whatever we choose to call it, seems to have driven us in the same direction. As shown by Orwell's 1984 this was quite predictable and we can't really feign surprise.
I don't know, I feel kind of like training philosopher kings would be sort of like training artistic savants within Classical music. The entire intellectual edification would revolve around far too few of people. If you really wanted to predicate governance by Philosophy, it would have to be the case that everyone could become a philosopher. Within a political context, that seems kind of like some form of participatory democracy. Only an Anarchist commune can free me of the burden of being an Anarchist. It's a paradox of apotheotical disenchantment.
I didn't mean that there must be an exclusive elite group. But we're talking about quality, not quantity. Obviously, candidates would have to be selected according to certain criteria and this would necessarily limit the number of those selected. However, any citizen with the right aptitude can apply for selection and if successful be included in the general pool of philosophers from among whom one would become the leader and others his advisers. I can see no reason why this shouldn't be applied at least on a trial basis. At the very least, the experiment could start with a village or town and if successful reproduced at regional and national level. I don't see how it could be any worse that what we've got now and with a bit of luck it might turn out to be better. Just think of the many billions that could be saved on elections and politicians. I think it would greatly contribute to eradicating poverty and other societal problems. And, who knows, philosopher kings might even serve as a model and inspiration for the rest of the population and this would help combating antisocial behavior, crime and anti-culture.
Yes. There will be seat-sales, when Armageddon strikes. Security, police presence. Searches by the entrance for concealed weapons. Celebrity seats, red carpet. Before you enter the auditorium, where Armageddon is to be held, ushers will check your invitation to your seat assignment. They will point you in the right direction, and tear your ticket in half. Maybe stamp your hand, so you can go to cash bar and the washroom during the show.
I would like to watch Armageddon from Caesar's seat in the Colosseum. First act: Christians vs. Lions. That is, an exhibition ball game of Tampa Bay Christians, vs Kansas City Lions. Second act: Marxists-Leninists vs Menshevik forces. Third act: all of humanity against human stupidity.
As I understand it, they have all been reserved by the elect. Not even standing room for the likes of me.
When I got involved with a group of grandparents fighting for grandparents' rights, I was horrified by the fighting for control that almost destroyed our united effort, and I notice in the reading that there were divisions in the socialist movement for the same reason. We are highly motivated when we feel important to the movement, and like churches break up into different sects, political activist groups seem to do the same thing. Strong leaders need followers, they tend to compete against each other.
For sure owning one's own property is desirable. There are some benefits to renting, but I rather have control over property choices and who can live in my home, than feel like I am still living with my parents because the owners and managers have all the rights, not the renters. Not to neglect, when we own we build equity and when we rent, not only do we not have equity but the cost of renting goes up and up, preventing renters from getting economically ahead and preparing for retirement. Those are important differences.
"This is why they dubbed socialism "a business proposition"" I really like your explanation of that and I must ponder it. It makes perfect sense to me to work with economic interests instead of against them.
And it seems to me, some of the important Fabians were educators, not industrialists. That might be important to their take on things? Education is essential to liberty and I think liberty is very important. It goes with owning land and having property rights, versus renting and living under rules made without us having a say in them.
I think I favor the democratic model for industry. I like the idea of worker-owned industry but there must be strong leadership as in a republic, not the inefficiency of democracy that lacks strong leadership. Thank you for making the issue comprehensible.
You are quite right about private property and for very good reasons which we can address later. Suffice it to say for now that the vast majority of people were and still are against the abolition of private property and this induced the Fabians to distance themselves, at least in public, from more radical forms of socialism.
The danger of activist movements is that they involve many different people with different outlooks, interests and agendas and this can make those movements vulnerable to infiltration and manipulation by other interests.
The Fabians' involvement with corporate interests did make sense for several reasons, the principal one being that their projects required the kind of moneys that the Fabians simply did not have. The downside to that is that Fabian projects being increasingly larger and more costly, Fabianism over time became totally dependent on corporate donors and ended up representing the interests of the corporate community over those of the general public. This would be one key point to keep in mind.
The London School of Economics (LSE) is a case in point. Originally owned and controlled by the Fabians, control soon passed from the Fabians to the corporations whose directors currently sit on its board and decide policy.
I think education was where this discussion originally started. I communicate with university students and professors on an almost daily basis. When I mention Fabianism and its influence there is first perplexed silence but after consulting the sources they all end up thanking me for bringing it to their attention.
It would have been impossible to clarify this point in a few sentences. Education was absolutely central to the Fabian project. There is an excellent study by Fabian Society archivist Patricia Pugh, Educate, Agitate, Organize: 100 Years of Fabian Socialism, which makes this point more than clear. I will post a link if I find one, but here is a review of it Review: [Untitled] on JSTOR
The LSE was founded in 1895 and was the first big project started by the Fabians. It later merged with and took over the University of London. But the Fabians were taking over the entire education system. They initiated education reform in the whole of England. Shaw in his paper “Educational Reform” (1889) wrote that the aim was “control over the whole education system, from the elementary school to the University and over all educational endowments”.
The word “endowments” itself speaks volumes. The Fabians had the backing of leading bankers and industrialists and were given free hand by the King to do virtually as they pleased in the name of “enlightenment” and “progress”. They took control of the London School Board, the London County Council, university societies, students’ unions, top institutions like Imperial College and Royal Economic Society, foundations, endowments, and pretty much everything that had to do with education.
Beatrice Webb wrote in her diary that the LSE was “stealthily establishing itself as the English school of economics and political science” and concluded that thanks to the activities of the Fabian Society, the LSE, the London County Council Progressives (allies of the Fabians) and the influence of Fabian books, “no young man or woman who wanted to study or work in public affairs could fail to come under Fabian influence”.
In a nutshell, this was the Fabian plan or “conspiracy”: to systematically, and in their own words “stealthily”, take over education and, through education, also culture, politics and governance. And, as explained by R. Martin, they replicated this in America and throughout the British Empire. In other words, these are the practical details to Wells' more general outlines.
If people want to know why the education system in England and America is the way it is, Fabian and corporate influence or control is a big part of the answer.
In any case, it is clear that Fabianism is not a democratic enterprise. The people have absolutely no say in it. If we want to change culture we need to change education. But we can't do that when education is in someone else's hands.
I'll say what someone once quoted from the film, Heathers, to you, which is that "it's all about the inherent inequality to a game of croquet."
To go back to the Classical music metaphor, within an orchestra, you have a person who plays the first violin and someone who plays an accompanying viola part. I would imagine that a person who plays the viola, at some point or another, is likely to wonder as to how much they really contribute to the orchestra as a whole, whether or not nearly every orchestral piece ought to showcase virtuosic violin playing, and if it's really fair for the orchestra to be designed in such a manner that does.
If we are to give such a preference for intellectual savants, which we already have done, I would imagine that similar sentiment would arise.
I don't play Classical music, but do play Experimental Rock and Roll. I have theorized that the standard Rock and Roll line-up, consisting of four members, one lead guitar player, one rhythm guitar player, one bassist, and one drummer, doesn't fully encompass what a Rock and Roll band could be capable of. What I think is that there should be something like a first guitar, second guitar, a lead singer and synthesiziser play, a bassist, and a drummer. Given this set-up, where the first guitarist obviously plays a Gibson Les Paul through a Marshall half-stack and Marshall head-stock, the second guitar player plays a silver Gibson hollowbody through a Fender Twin Reverb and a Tone Master headstock, the lead singer and synthesizer player somehow convinces Moog to create a digital synthesizer for them that is designed to reproduce the sounds of the original analog Moog, the bassist plays a Fender Jazz Bass through whatever equipment they so desire, and the drummer has a similar set-up to that of Steve Shelley of Sonic Youth, it would seem to be the case that most of the songs would probably be written by either the first or second guitarist or lead singer. It would also seem to be the case that the band would be led by one of those three people. What, were I to be in such a band, I would find to be kind of vexing were that the bassist, within a song that they didn't write, to believe for themselves to be the person who should lead the band. The reason that a person play the bass is so that they don't have to take the spotlight on stage, mill about in this or that corner of the venue after the fact, look standoffish and cool and be capable of finding partners by virtue of being in an Experimental Rock and Roll band.
I am not an idiot. Even though I, too, agree that "the abolition of any form of either evident or implicit hierarchy" is the only agreeable definition of Anarchism, I understand that, within any given social situation, there are people who will take on some form of leadership role and everyone else.
What you are proposing, however, is just a society akin to what academia is already like. Though I see enough within the cultivation of the life of the mind to participate within it, I am willing to admit that there is a certain degree of wealth and class that comes with academia and, though it can result in the creation of great works, it is already kind of absurd for Philosophy to be like Classical music. To make a comparison within the arts, I think that it should be more like Abstract Expressionism or Free Jazz. If it is not the case that just about anyone can learn to become a philosopher king, then, there will be created certain classes and society will not differ too much from what already exists today.
I would also like to note that my theoretical genres for such a band are Baroque Shoegaze, Postmodern Punk, and Dream Rock, but kind of think that it'd just be cooler if all that it said on bandcamp, and, as bandcamp will save the independent music industry, there is only bandcamp, was "experimental rock and roll".
Well, I kind of like that type of music myself although I prefer to exchange ideas to listening to music and for some reason people tend to keep asking me questions.
As for the creation of certain classes, I don't think that would be a major problem as classes tend to emerge naturally in more complex societies anyway. More important would be what classes do and what they contribute to society. Plus, you can't tell that a system will be worse than the existing one until you try it out.
I'm not trying to press you for anything or anything. I just thought that you created an interesting thread that, admittedly, offered me a forum to go on about all sorts of things that I just have kind of a vested interest in going on about.
What I am saying of your idea for philosopher kings, however, is that it just seems like it'd be as a society similar to that of academia today. Though I do view academia somewhat favorably, I think that there are implicit inequalities within it, which, if we are to imagine an ideal political scenario, we could just as soon do without. I also kind of think that academics would probably just kind of create a slightly better version of the Liberal democracy that exists already. It'd be an improvement, but, if we're going to imagine the best of all possible worlds, why not imagine an effective participatory democracy wherein everyone can be as a philosopher?
To continue with the music metaphor, though I would prefer that people just take the older guys in the band up on whatever wisdom, if you will, and common sense that they're trying to dish out, why recreate a situation where only really those dudes have all too good of an idea as to just what it is that is going on? It's like how it'd only be cool for a person to discover the band, The Hunches, as a teenager. Society being as such, has certain circumstantial advantages for some which are ultimately unfair. What people generally dislike about the music community, even the parties involved, is a tendency for people to be overly critical, judgmental, and form cliques. I'd bet that you can somehow trace this back to the social ecology of Classical music. When we're going to imagine an ideal music industry, why recreate the very inherent flaws which resulted in what people generally dislike about it?
What I'm suggesting is that the training of philosopher kings is kind of nepotistic and almost vaguely aristocratic. I'm not trying to level too much of a dig at you, but I am of the opinion that it just wouldn't be all too great of an idea. When nepotism and aristocratic excess eventually led to what people dislike about the form of Liberalism that we have today, what would be the point of recreating the circumstances from which they were born?
I think that that's kind of a glib way to put that, typical of the very hipsters I am trying to critique.
What I'm suggesting about your idea of philosopher kings is that it is something like what the aristocracy already thought. As I assume for you to be a left-wing Liberal and not some sort of cryptic monarchist, what I'm trying to explain is that to put it into effect in the ideal sense that you are proposing could only result in a better form of the Liberalism that we already have today. What's the point of just recreating the circumstances for the very inefficiencies and inequalities that already exist? Were you to set up such a society now, thirty years later you'd have two political camps, one in favor of something like Neo-Liberalism, and one in favor of something like the Nordic Model. I'm not pressing you for information, but am merely asking a rhetorical question when I say, "What would be the point?"
That's exactly what I was saying. As the classes already exist, there would be no point recreating them It's enough to replace their old members with new improved ones. I doubt that Stalinism would be a solution seeing that it has failed everywhere. So, putting philosophers in charge wouldn't be a bad idea.
"Communism is a red herring."
Within academia, there are all kinds of petty intellectual squabbles, neuroses, chauvinist disputes, sectarian ideological camps, Mentalist prejudices, somewhat arbitrary formal credential requirements, and pomp and circumstance that people, usually intellectuals who are keen on such things, bemoan, and rightfully so. The Western intelligensia hazards a certain malaise, despite what is tenable of it. When the source of this malaise are the various forms of class that both become created or have been inherited because of either social or material capital, why should we recreate the circumstances which brought them about? What I am not saying is that society has no need for specialists or that there haven't been great thinkers whom we ought to laud for their life's work. What I am saying is that what the aristocracy in the Nineteenth Century generally thought was something along the lines of that society should be ruled by philosopher kings and that this very same aristocracy set in motion the course of events which have resulted in the form of Liberalism that exists today. In a way, that kind of a lot of politicians have taken Plato at his word for that the Athenian democracy would eventually culminate in tyranny has created all kinds of plights throughout the general course of human history. In the field of Nuclear Engineering, I can understand how it comes to be that much of what goes on revolves around the theories of only a few specialists. When it comes to the organization of human society, however, there only being a few intellectuals whom are let to cultivate an intelligensia will necessarily result in the formation of an intellectual class, with what limited good and all of the general bane that comes with it.
I think you misunderstood what you were saying.
What I was saying was something else. I said philosopher kings not aristocracy. Obviously you couldn't have presidents because there will be nothing to preside over hence the designation of "king". However that would be just a title because they will be elected by the people. Better than Stalin and Mao Zedong who weren't elected and appointed themselves. Plus they were murderers not philosophers. IMO that proves my point.
The aristocracy had adopted this kind of millenarian, technocratic, Neo-Classical, Aristotlean, substitution of the Liberal democratic project à la constitutional monarchy that effectively relied upon the only so well meaning invocation of the aforementioned "philosopher kings". As intuitive as it could be for anyone to think that people who believe in the cultivation of wisdom ought to be the sort of people to guide the general organization of society, what this philosophical interloping within the Liberal democratic project was is precisely what produced the various forms of class that exist today.
I have quoted the film, Clue, before and I will quote it again, "Communism is a red herring." Neither you nor I live in the Russian Federation or China and, regardless as to what historical lessons there are to learn from the humanitarian catastrophes that occurred there, the abuse of power on the part of either Josef Stalin or Mao Zedong, neither of which you have provided any support for that I am somehow defending, is just simply completely irrelevant within this discussion.
What I am suggesting is that electing philosophical kings wouldn't be terribly different from the only so functional form of representative democracy that already exists today. I have also pointed out that doing so would fail to eliminate one of the fundamental flaws with the general culture of the intellect, being the creation of various classes. What I have posited is that, rather than only having a few intellectual savants to rely on for spiritual guidance, if you will, that it ought to be the case that just about everyone ought to be able to become a philosopher. What I suspect there is to draw from this supposition of mine is that it would just simply be some form of participatory democracy or another. I, further, theorize that Anarchism, as per my interpretation of it, is a kind of Liberal apotheosis and have highlighted a certain paradox to my general political inclinations, being that I don't tend to get on very well with Anarchists, but see its full reification as the culmination of all that is veritable of civilization as a whole.
If it wouldn't be terribly different then why object to it?
As I said, it is imperative to understand yourself. There is no point understanding others or believing that you understand them if you don't understand yourself in the first place. That's why it has been said "Know thyself".
You seem to be objecting to the designation of "king" on psychological grounds. But that is your issue that only you can resolve.
It doesn't matter what we call philosopher kings. You can call them "wise rulers" if you prefer or use the Greek word that most people wouldn't understand and wouldn't associate with "aristocracy".
But I bet you would object to that too, and that suggests to me that your reasons are psychological not logical. In order to look at things in a philosophical light we must begin by pulling our heads out of the psychological, cultural and political garbage and analyze reality objectively, not put some psychotic or neurotic spin on it.
Why should we be ruled by a conspiracy of Fabians and oligarchs? Both politics and business are about power and self-interest. In contrast, philosophy is about wisdom or common sense. Therefore, governance should be based on philosophy, not on politics or business.
I never speak of the Democratic Party. I speak of the democratic process and my ideas of that come from the ancient Greeks. I am also in favor of sports events and the winners of the game get things their way until next year when the games are played again.
I think the big mistake communist made is to eliminate the business people. Philosophy just is not the subject to study for a good economy and if the economy isn't good, nothing will be good. We might want to care more about logic and worry less about being "nice".
Well, philosophy does include logic. Plus, a philosopher king or whatever we choose to call a ruler would have economic advisers, exactly as existing heads of state do.
I think there is a big difference between having a sound economy and having a country controlled by vested business interests.
But I do agree that communism shot itself in the foot by eliminating the business class. Communist China learned from Russia's mistakes and introduced some capitalist methods but under the strict control of the Communist Party.
Why would their plan have any resistance?
Quoting Apollodorus
Really if the decisions are not made through the democratic process, how are they made? :lol: I have tried to get people interested in education for many years. If Fabians found enough interested people to be effective, more power to them. Did they perhaps have an exclusive society that prevented people from getting involved?
They didn't have a society preventing people from getting involved. They had one getting people involved without the people realizing what the ultimate objective was. Exactly as in communism. People got involved in the hope of building a better society but came to regret it.
History is full of examples of people getting involved in certain causes and then regretting doing so. Socialism, Fascism, Nazism, they all operate on the same basis.
People got involved in voting for Trump only to regret it afterward. That happens all the time. Politicians are good at manipulating public opinion. That's what they do for a living. You've got to do that because otherwise you don't get elected.
Hitler was elected democratically. Does that mean that Hitlerism was good? The point is not how you get to power but what you do with that power once you get it.
I seriously doubt that past economic advisers were capable of giving good advise because they just were not thinking of the greater economy.
Even in Theodore Roosevelt's day, Europe was full of people with royal titles and that social order is nothing like the social order that evolves through exploring the world and trading. In the past, people were locked into their birth position, but with exploring and trading and then industrialization, we get the new rich and a huge shift in power.
Philosophy is not economics and our high-tech society that can feed everyone is not the result of philosophy. Where is the meeting ground between philosophy and economics? A focus on being compassionate is not going to achieve what we have achieved. On the other hand, I also fault economists who ignore our finite reality and create notions of economics that are not well-founded in reality. Our planet will not sustain the US standard of living around the world and I think we are behaving totally insanely!
That's exactly my point. Economics isn't an exact science. It can be interpreted and applied in many different ways. So, ultimately, what matters is what you aim to achieve, a truly just society or promote certain business interests that paid for your election campaign?
I'm just saying that Plato put forth that idea in opposition to the direct Athenian democracy and that it was, later, used to disrupt the Liberal democratic project. In some ideal sense, perhaps? I just think that, if we're going to establish a rule by the wise, it ought to be the case that everyone can come to be considered so.
Have you sat on committees that were developing policy or gotten involved with political activist work? When you think something needs to change, how do you go about getting that change? If you are not a good leader capable of uniting followers, you will not succeed and if our leaders do not succeed, we do not succeed.
Why did anyone regret the efforts of the Fabian Society? I am pushing the point because you are right about some movements going sour. Perhaps understanding why this happens could lead to avoiding the problem and succeeding instead of failing?
Well, try to apply that logic to other areas. Nobody should have a university degree unless everyone can have a university degree. Nobody should be a talented singer or artist unless everyone can be a talented singer or artist, etc., etc.
People are different and we choose those that are best suited for a particular purpose. Otherwise abolish elections, exams, etc., etc.
The miracle of democracy is the group mind/consciousness. I wish I were a faster reader so I could read Apollodorus links to the books before saying anything. From the little I know now, the effort of the Fabian society is exactly what is needed but Apollodorus has said things went sour. On the other hand, I don't care who makes up the ruling group, it will never achieve the miracle of a democracy with full participation. I do not mean direct democracy, because that would never work for large populations, but a republic that empowers everyone.
Yes, I have and I know exactly what it is like. It's a never-ending struggle that most of the time leads either to no results or to the wrong results. That's why Karl Marx gave up on politics and took up economics.
I doubt very much that people regret the efforts of the Fabian Society when the vast majority of people haven't even heard of its existence except perhaps small political circles like within the British Labour Party.
At the end of the day, if people are happy with the education and culture we have at the moment, then there is nothing to worry about. But if not, then something needs to be done. And to do something we need to know who the key players are in education, culture, politics, etc.
That is not how I understanding economics. We can measure everything, and with the right measurements, we can predict the future.
Let me explain myself. I knew a geologist who after years of working in the field became a professor, and he wrote books. It was an academic publisher who published his books and they were used in colleges. The publisher did not market the book in book stores such as Barnes and Noble, so I attempted to persuade economic professors to look at the book and they refused. They had no understanding of what finite reality has to do with economics, not even oil! Their heads were up in the clouds somewhere with economic theories. Like hello, the gold rush led to boom towns, and the boom towns became ghost towns, and that is a complete failure of economic planning. Oil-rich nations tend to be one resource economies and when the oil is gone, they are back to riding camels. They know this and are investing much of their wealth in military power, and they will not sink into poverty passively.
The US would be so screwed if it had not been for fracking ending our dependency on foreign oil. Isreal could not take more and more land from Palestinians without the protection of a large nation and its military build-up. The US needs to secure its access to oil and chose to do so militarily and that makes Israel essential to the US, the economic fallout of all this is huge and I highly doubt there is one economic professor explaining it. Now, what are the philosopher-kings going to do with this information? Which philosophy course explains these concerns are vital to keeping people fed?
I really need to move on to my mundane life, and I hate doing that in the middle of a really hot debate.
You said
Quoting Apollodorus
Why did they regret it?
But when it comes to education you said
Quoting Apollodorus
:brow: Trump and his thugs are the same as Hilter and his thugs, and is the result of replacing the US replacing its liberal education with the German model of education for technology. For a good 30 years, I have been trying to make people aware of this change in education and it is futile because people are clueless about what culture has to do with being a democracy, and they are convinced education for technology is essential to our wealth. When Eisenhower put that into place, he warned of the dangers and no one pays attention to the warning, nor do they accept the science of global warming, nor do they know what have is temporary and will come to a terrible end unless there are a few miracles.
This is from the Investopedia Guide to Economics:
"Economics is generally regarded as a social science, although some critics of the field argue that economics falls short of the definition of a science for a number of reasons, including a lack of testable hypotheses, lack of consensus, and inherent political overtones."
So, first of all, critics point out that economics isn't a science and even less an exact one.
Secondly, even if it was an exact science, it is still interpreted and applied differently by different political factions. Otherwise, all governing political parties would have an identical economic program. But they don't. Different parties stress different sectors of the economy or employ different methods to pursue their policies.
In Soviet Russia there was an overproduction of bricks for the building industry but there was a shortage of shoes, etc. How do we explain that, in a political system following the economics of Marx who was supposed to be an economic genius?
When the British Labour Party came to power in 1945 it introduced nationalization and other Marxist policies, it got billions in loans from America on top of Marshall Plan aid, etc. And it still failed so miserably that it got kicked out after just five years. Its reputation in the field of economics has never recovered since.
As for philosophy, Pythagoras, Plato and other famous Greek philosophers all believed that it should have a practical application in public life. Roman emperors often agreed and tried to style themselves philosophers. If we deny this, then what good is philosophy?
For example, in the Russian Revolution people got involved in overthrowing the imperial system. But what they got was a new emperor called Stalin who murdered or starved to death millions of innocent people.
What I'm saying is that people can get involved politically without knowing what the end result will be.
If we look at it from that perspective, then nothing can be done, there is no hope, and no point discussing anything.
Personally, I think we can learn from the Fabians. Take their slogan "Educate, Agitate, Organize", and start educating, organizing, and mobilizing the people. But we can't do that if we can't agree what to educate them about or what we want to achieve.
I think that you misunderstand.
Cultivating wisdom as such would result in the cultivation of cults of personality and the formation of intellectual classes. Those two things already pose certain predicaments for me. Why, when the fundamental qualms that I have with society already are not resolved, should I go for another way of organizing it?
If we are to take you and Plato at his and your word, in good faith, and interpret you well, within a political context, it would seem that the training of philosopher kings would result in a syncretic form of representative and participatory democracy. In the ideal sense, these "philosopher kings" are just open-minded Liberals and Anarchist political philosophers. Why even adopt such a moniker?
To resolve those qualms. But you don't have to. You can always join the Communist Party or the Taliban. Or just leave it.
I don't see how my assumption that there ought to be a somewhat equitable access to education is somehow indicative of that I advance some form of extreme egalitarianism.
It's been over one-hundred years since the era of industrialization. I'm still just some down and out Catholic school kid from a working class neighborhood who never can seem to get past kind of a lot of wealthy and abusive middle-aged men. As much as I don't harbor any animosity towards people with wealth or the lucky few who are let to become successful within academia, classism just isn't charming and mentalism really is a form of prejudice.
They don't like anyone with a fair amount of intelligence and common sense. They never have and never will. They're right not to. What often happens is that people like me get everyone else to understand that they're just kind of using them, as, if we don't, we will be marginalized and isolated from society. On some level, they're right to claim that we're just trying to remove them from their positions of authority. Clearly, we have good reason to. They could always just give up on their boarding school habits, though. There came a time in my life where I thought that I should consider as to why it is that Jason Pierce has developed the band, Spiritualized, and let go of what I thought about Spacemen 3. It takes half of them until around sixty-five to gain even the semblance of maturity, though.
This is just a personal gripe and nothing to anyone here, really. I can appreciate Classical music. I'm glad that there's a world outside of it, too, though.
A joke that I have added to this comment:
I grew up in an actual split-level house next to an actual sewer in an actual post-industrial working class neighborhood with a proverbial "other side of town" across the bridge and over the rain tracks that also happens to be kind of a mob retirement community and went to an actual Catholic school where there were actual informally organized boxing matches in the parking lot where we had our recess. It's a good thing that I am a Pacifist and don't have any friends because we otherwise probably would have started the American equivalent of the Provisional Irish Republican Army by now.
A closing remark:
As much as I, too, am a great fan of his work, I do kind of lament that the creative oeuvre of Wes Anderson has had the effect of, again, convincing the global populace that what isn't really, but people generally term "racketeering" is fun. I just want to be let to like Bottle Rocket again. Alas, though, I should stop going on like this, and, so, will give the original poster their thread back.
Well, okay, I apologize for venting.
I don't see how either genuine representative or participatory democracy are akin to either of those things, but, whatever.
If someone doesn't see something it doesn't mean it's impossible or it isn't true. But I think "whatever" is probably the word.
I think a major point that has been missed here is the ultimate objective of Fabianism. When I ask people what current political system they think Fabianism most resembles, they tend to say “America” or “England”. This immediately tells me that they have failed to process and assimilate what Fabianism is about, because the answer is China (though it used to be the Soviet Union).
Shocking as this may sound, this is the reality of Fabianism if we carefully read Fabian documents. As I said before, the original Fabians were radical members of the British Liberal Party and that means Marxists.
G B Shaw openly (and proudly) admitted that he discovered his political career by reading Marx. Now, at that time “Marxist” or “socialist” was a dirty word in polite society. There was no way middle-class Liberals could have promoted Marxism openly. So, these “Liberal” Marxists decided to slightly modify Marxism to make it palatable to wider sections of society. So they used more indirect and suggestive language that still preserved the Marxist essence of Fabianism.
“The object of the Fabian Society is to persuade the English people to make their political constitution thoroughly democratic and so to socialize their industries as to make the livelihood of the people entirely independent of private Capitalism” - Fabian Tract No. 70, 3
The original agenda of the Labour Party which the Fabians founded in 1900 was to enforce socialism through nationalization, state control and abolition of private property.
Common ownership of the means of production, state administration and control of all industries and services (1918 Constitution).
Land nationalisation (1918 Manifesto, Labour and New social order, etc.).
That was exactly what the Fabians and Labour tried to enforce when they came to power in 1945 but failed to win support for all the Marxist policies they would have liked to implement.
But there is much more to it. Leading Fabians like H. G. Wells and G. B. Shaw were great admirers of totalitarian regimes such as Communist Russia to which they maintained close links.
The Webbs knew Lenin personally from before the 1917 Revolution (remember they were in contact with Marxist revolutionaries through the Socialist International and other organizations) and had a portrait of Lenin at their private home. They made several trips to Russia as did Shaw and wrote “Soviet Communism: A New Civilization” in praise of the regime which they believed should be copied by England and the whole world.
The Fabians regarded Bolshevism as “applied Fabianism”. They called the Soviet Union “Union of Fabian Republics”. Lenin was “the greatest statesman of Europe”. Stalin was a “good man” and a “good Fabian”, etc., etc.
So, basically, as many historians have pointed out, the Fabians were promoting Communism under the guise of “democratic socialism”. This is exactly what earned them the label of “Fabian Conspiracy” in addition to their well-documented policy of stealth.
IMO pretending to promote a democratic system when in fact you are promoting a totalitarian one is not only disingenuous but also undemocratic - by definition.
That is as smart as all the different religious leaders taking their flock in a different direction, and basing their understanding of life on a fiction. How in the world did we come to an agreement that that is economics?
Quoting Apollodorus
:lol: Yeap and might there be something wrong with that? How about, something a whole lot wrong with that? It isn't just about politics inside a nation, but politics and the whole world! They all need to get their heads out of the cloud and ground economics in reality.
Quoting Apollodorus
Obviously, that thinking was not grounded in necessary facts. Not only is it necessary to know the number of shoes needed but also do we have resources for making shoes? Where do the resources from come?
Quoting Apollodorus
Wow, what a great observation that is. And how well was scientific thinking developed in the day of Plato and Rome? Rome's economic problems were directly related to its supply of gold, and it is a great example of what is wrong with having an economy dependent on oil, and not figuring that into economic thinking. Religion and philosophy are great for talking about who to treat each other. It is not science and economic thinking should not be modeled on philosophy without reality.
That is one reason we should pay attention to history. Our education for a technological society may be smart but it sure isn't wise. We can forgive people in the past for their ignorance because they didn't have history to learn from and the ability to educate everyone and keep people informed, but we do not have a good excuse for our ignorance.
Perfect, I agree with that 100% and one of the stupidest things in all time is our use of TV for advertising and appealing to our lowest instincts to attract people who watch the advertising, instead of using it to educate the masses and keep them updated. The other really stupid thing is letting industry make education decisions instead of the educators and our failure to prepare these educators to prepare the young for democracy as they once were when used education to mobilize for war.
We need a Fabian society to correct these grievous errors.
I need to see the quotes with the replies, otherwise, it is like walking into the middle of a conversation and not knowing what people are talking about.
Equitable education is essential to democracy. What we have been doing, giving some children excellent education while other children live in life-threatening neighborhoods, with very poorly funded schools, is insane. Science is just beginning to point out that inequity sets our young on very different paths. We are still very primitive and we may self-destruct before making adequate changes but science might make a difference. The chances of that happening increase if we start using TV to educate the people and create a better world.
You write of the old world order that is ordered by family. In the old world order children are dependent on their families for any advantages they may have, and if they are raised by poorly educated parents doing manual labor for very low wages, they will not have advantages. Importantly among the advantages is social ties and cultural differences.
The new world order is about merit. That means anyone with the necessary education has an opportunity to rise up and achieve the highest levels. Now we know that is an ideal but not exactly the whole story. The human factor has not gone away and that is a good thing. But there are people who believe we all be better off when everything is run by computers. I really don't think we want to go that far in overriding the human factor. In the New World Order, people are dependent on the state, not the family, and that may not be a good thing?
I believe you not only are you no topic, but you raise our awareness of the complexity of it all. The upper class, middle class, and low class have different values, and just how much should government and education shape the child's values? The US "Americanized" the immigrants' children and many of those children walked away from their families and never looked back. The children went on to achieve the American dream, especially if they fought in WWII and took advantage of the GI Bill and got in on the new technologies when there was very little competition for those higher-level jobs. Back in the day, not only was the education free to GIs but their education almost guaranteed upward economic mobility. That was not that long ago and it dramatically changed our lives and expectations. We have a lot of soul searching to do and questions to ask.
Where do you stand on all of that? I thought we agreed private property is a good thing? However, workers need affordable housing and that requires government to step in because privately there is no affordable, decent housing for low paid workers. Because of population growth land needs to be set aside for low income housing and it needs to be spread about the incorporated area.
All economies depend on low income workers and these workers need to depend on government subsidies as a social thank you for their important social and economiic contribution. And every child must be assured a safe neighborhood and good education.
However? I am not sure government should provide child care and all adults should be forced to work for economic reasons? I think the traditional values and traditional women are essential to a civil society. I am more in favor of supporting individualism than destroying it.
One of my favorite books is Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, maybe he was writing in response to Fabians? George Orwell's 1984 is also a warning against totarianism. We speak of democracy and say too little of liberty. I do not want to live in a country without liberty and that means people will make choices that lead to poverty and I will point out that means a lot of women getting paid very poorly for caring for others because that is meaningful and essential work and that work is not about honest profit. In such circumstances that is where government needs to subsidize the worker. And I would leave the homeless in camps that are provided for everyone's safety. Taking all challenges out of life is not doing anyone a favor. Moving from a camp to a home should require making a social contribution.
Hum, :chin: we could talk about what is a honest profit and what is the ugliness that we see in capitalism.
:lol: What choice do youth have? They do not know enough about life to make well informed decisions.
For give me, this thread seems to be making me aware of how different my thinking is! :chin: I so remember rushing out into life eager to get my peice of the pie, and to my horror finding my life was totally different than what I expected and realizing how much I did not know! Now as an old woman I find no one wants to hear what I have to say nor the lessons I have learned. They all want to rush out there and discover life for themselves.
My point is, along with all the other changes in life is the growing populations of long lived people. This means a totally different consciousness than in the past. When things changed slowly and there were no scientist or professional experts, we listened to our elders and valued their experience.
Then education for technology told the children old people are old and out dated and technology was creating a whole new world, elementating any reason to turn to the elders. Our technological world, with merit hiring, has destroyed family values and family order. Like lemmings we are all rushing over a cliff and this is really stupid because we have more information that ever before and the scientific method of determining truth, and we are not developing a culture of independent thinkers and long lived people. We are looking for a leader and don't know the cliff is infront of us. Our expectations have gone wild and our sense of responsibility has crashed.
Yes, we did agree that private property is a good thing.
Once we have understood that the ultimate aim of Fabianism is to impose communism, we can see how the abolition of private property is an unacceptable feature of totalitarianism.
In order to eradicate economic injustice, utopian socialists before Marx suggested solutions such as the abolition of private property. These solutions were often linked to other extreme measures like the abolition of marriage and the abolition of religion. The original Fabians were far-left, extreme radicals of all sorts from Marxists to Anarchists.
Marx and Engels copied most of their ideas from the utopian socialists but coached them in language that sounded “scientific” to make those utopian ideas more palatable to prospective followers. The abolition of private property was no different.
In 1845, Marx and Engels had written in The German Ideology that in Communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, “society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner …”
Marx and Engels failed to find a publisher for their book and it is not difficult to see why. Their idyllic picture of communist society may seem enchanting, but only so long as no questions are asked. It may well be possible in a communist society for all citizens to engage in various spheres of activity, but who would decide what activities should be pursued by millions of citizens at any given time and place and how? What if some preferred to engage in a different type of work or chose not to work at all?
Only three years later, in the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels totally reversed the above utopian description of the future society by suggesting not only that all citizens would be “equally liable to work” but that they would be organized in “industrial armies, especially for agriculture”.
Apparently, citizens could now no longer do as they pleased. Their “freedom” consisted in joining the army of workers and perform work as directed by the state which was the new owner of land and means of production. This new description implies that, far from being “free”, all citizens will be turned into the state’s servants or instruments of production. As later happened in Soviet Russia and Maoist China and as Britain's Fabian Socialist Labour Party attempted to enforce in 1945.
Marx and Engels’ insistence on armies of workers engaged in large-scale industrial production is also the key to understanding the true meaning of other Marxist concepts such as “abolition of private property” and “common ownership”.
The Communist Manifesto, although calling for the abolition of private property, does not explain what this means in practice. Its hidden meaning only comes to light by (1) taking the authors’ statements to their logical conclusion and (2) seeing how they were applied in Marxist societies.
The Manifesto states very clearly that communism was to abolish property in land and all rights of inheritance. This means that land and houses would become property of the state along with all means of production (raw materials, tools, machinery and factories), transport and communication. This would leave the citizens of communist society with nothing but personal belongings such as clothing and household items.
In terms of housing, the only option would be state-owned accommodation. Marx and Engels believed that, for communist society to be sustainable, workers had to produce as much as possible as efficiently as possible. This required a workforce that was highly disciplined and organized like an army, which was also the Fabian idea. And as armies are housed in barracks provided by the state, so too, industrial armies would be housed in barracks-style, state-owned housing estates. Indeed, dormitories and accommodation blocks with communal kitchens – and little privacy – became a standard feature of urban planning in the wake of the Communist takeover in Russia.
Obviously, this system of state-owned housing also severely restricted freedom of movement, which once again shows why communism - and Fabian Socialism leading to Communism - is a totalitarian system that is unacceptable to lovers of freedom and democracy.
This is why Fabian Socialist parties like the British Labour Party attempt to publicly distance themselves from controversial Marxist policies like abolition of property while covertly aiming to eventually establish a communist system. And this also applies in various degrees to other "democratic" or "social democratic" parties - like the US Democratic Party - that have close links to Britain's Fabian Society and Labour Party.
It is very interesting that Fabians were so indoctrinated or brainwashed that from the thousands of Fabian Society members very few ever rebelled against Fabianism although a few did rebel against the Society itself. These included Huxley, Orwell and Wells. But even then many of them continued to cooperate with the Society in many ways. Perhaps, knowing the extent of Fabian influence, they felt powerless to resist Fabianism? I think this in itself would make a fascinating topic and instructive study in the psychology of cult-like political movements.
Anyway, the Fabians had a highly sophisticated propaganda machine comprising a propaganda bureau linked to literary societies, book clubs and similar organizations through which they churned out hundreds and later thousands of items of imaginative literature of all sorts from novels to science fiction through which they promoted Fabian ideas.
Bernard Shaw was the main propagandist of the Fabian Society and wrote many pamphlets that were translated in various languages as well as being a highly influential playwright. In 1925 he said that the world had been “thoroughly Fabianized”.
In fact, we learn a lot about the Fabians from Shaw. While the Webbs and other Fabians were English and therefore much more reserved and guarded in the language they used, Shaw was Irish and his more candid or careless statements were all over the papers as well as in his own writings. So Shaw is a good source for Fabian ideology and policy although other leaders like the Webbs were the actual ideological leaders.
The youth are totally dependent on guidance and direction from the older ones. That's why education is so important. We have no control over the education system. But this doesn't mean that we are completely powerless. We can still make use of modern communication technology to raise public awareness of things that are not right in society and of the need to do something about it, in other words, educate, organize and mobilize the public exactly like the Fabians have done it and many others do it even now. Start with family, colleagues, neighbors and friends and inform the people.
Ah, I love this, sometimes we need to keep communicating to actually understand each other's meanings.
I can appreciate that as I struggle to communicate with words that get people's attention and cause them to think. But we can also see that a terrible failure of ignorance. I think when we are planning for humans we need to have a scientific understanding of human nature and our limits. But the Greeks made it clear that a polis that is too large is not a polis at all. We are limited in the number of people we can know, and how we feel towards those we know, is different from how we feel about people we do not know. Our morality is based on these feelings. We will never be as moral with "those people" as we are moral with one of "us". This is very much an Israeli problem as they imagine themselves to be very different from "those" people and do to "them" what they never would do to their own.
I would credit the Prussians for this breakdown of traditional social/economic organization. It goes with modernizing the military force and putting people in their positions based on their merit, instead of inherited social position. As I said earlier, exploration and trading totally changed the social/economic and political order, and religion is inadequate for modern needs because it is based on God's will and inheritance, not merit. These are old world order issues versus the New World Order and we might not be able to think them through without understanding the huge change brought on by exploration and trade, then technology and industry, shifting populations from the country to the city. The Bible was not written for city dwellers.
:wink: Capitalism is not about working for a living. It is about owning for a living. For years I have wondered why we prepare our young to be workers instead of owners? Oh boy, now we have something to talk about! In the US and some European countries, we want everyone to accept capitalism but we do not prepare our young to be capitalist. We have zero understanding of economics and banking and yet have the power of the vote, but we can not discuss the really important matters. When was the last time we voted on land use issues or banking policy? And yet we are supposed to be self-governing. This looks really insane to me. Perhaps reading Bible stories would improve my ability to be self-governing?
You explained all that very well! And we can go back to Sparta and Athens to understand the issues.
Correct. The fundamental issues have never changed. What has changed is the political systems claiming to address them. And even these are essentially the same. The Greeks already identified several forms of governance such as monarchy, democracy and tyranny. Some philosophers believed that monarchy was the ideal but they qualified it by insisting that the rulers should be philosophical or wise kings. Whichever system we may settle for, what is certain is that communism is a fraudulent system that promises "freedom" but ends in tyranny and economic ruin. And this is why Fabianism must be opposed if we want to avoid the fate of China.
Quoting Athena
Knowledge is power. Real power begins with knowledge, with an awareness of the situation we are in, of where we are, how we got here, where we want to go, and how we get there.
There is a great parable from the Bible about the enemy who sowed tares or weeds among the wheat while the farmer slept. Ignorance is a form of sleep that prevents us from identifying the enemy, seeing through his plans and taking steps to stop him. People need to wake up and stay wide awake, aware and alert at all times and encourage others to do the same.
Greek philosophy is about spiritual awakening. But this must go hand in hand with social and political awakening. While we aspire to personal enlightenment or salvation, we can not ignore the world around us. To do so would mean to go against the most fundamental principles of philosophy. The Greeks were practical people. Their gaze was fixed on the stars but their feet were firmly on the earth. Theirs was not an arm-chair philosophy but a philosophy of active practice.
I see what you're saying about the Fabians, but previously just said "whatever" because of that we had gotten off-topic and just didn't feel like going on anymore. I don't really know anything about the Fabians, myself, though.
I don't know. It's all good, I guess.
Well, I think you did mention that you are an Anarchist. So, for example, how would you reconcile Anarchism with the Fabian policy of state control?
I haven't advocated Fabiainism. I have just said that I don't know anything about it.
I know. I was just wondering how an Anarchist would evaluate Fabianism (based on the data provided here).
Probably not terribly favorably, but I only have your analysis to go on.
As I said, the analysis provided here isn’t “my analysis”, it is an analysis found in all critical authors and it is consistent with the Fabians’ own writings, policy papers and other documents.
I know a few Fabians personally so maybe we can invite a few Fabians to join the discussion. But in the meantime, let’s take a look at the Fabian view of this so-called “Fabian conspiracy”.
These are some key points made in the Fabian paper Fabian Review, where Vanesha Singh, assistant editor of the Fabian Society, says:
(1) “As an overview, most Fabian conspiracies have right-wing undertones. They tend to be backed by very few facts and are fuelled, instead, by a staunch opposition to socialism”.
(2) “Websites also lay out, in immense detail, how the Fabian Society influences multinational corporations, or how it represents the financial interests of global institutions such as the United Nations”.
(3) “The theorists extrapolate from information found on the society’s own website: that we once had 200 members sitting in the House of Commons, is turned into evidence that we “write Labour’s policy statements, manifestos and party programmes”, for instance. Facts can be manipulated to suit warped versions of the truth …”.
– V. Singh, “Crying Wolf”, 23 Sep 2018, Fabian Review, Autumn 2018
Great. So, let’s just very briefly analyze this, without going into endless discussions. You can let me know what you think.
(1) “As an overview, most Fabian conspiracies have right-wing undertones. They tend to be backed by very few facts and are fuelled, instead, by a staunch opposition to socialism.”
First, the author ignores the fact that the Fabians have many critics on the left, and have had since Engels and many other. By introducing the phrase "right-wing undertones", she attempt to deflect attention from this fact and deliberately misrepresents criticism of Fabianism as an exclusively "right-wing" phenomenon, which is simply not true.
Second, what kind of statement is this? Is the author suggesting that if an accusation has “right-wing undertones” and is “fueled by opposition to socialism” then that renders it null and void? If yes, then this suggestion is another diversionary tactic meant to undermine the validity and legitimacy of criticism of Fabianism.
As for “very few facts”, she is actually contradicting herself, because a few lines down she says:
(2) “Websites also lay out, in immense detail, how the Fabian Society influences multinational corporations, or how it represents the financial interests of global institutions such as the United Nations.”
For sure, “immense detail” (her own phrase) is a bit more than “very few facts”. Quite the opposite of "very few facts" actually. In my view, the detail is overwhelming as you can gather from what we’ve seen here.
But she scores another own goal straight after the first one:
(3) “The theorists extrapolate from information found on the society’s own website: that we once had 200 members sitting in the House of Commons, is turned into evidence that we “write Labour’s policy statements, manifestos and party programmes”, for instance. Facts can be manipulated to suit warped versions of the truth …”.
She admits that her own Fabian Society (which has a membership of about 7,000) has hundreds of members sitting in the House of Commons (the lower house of the UK Parliament). Actually, not “once”, but NOW, because the same website says that the Fabian Society has “hundreds of politicians in Westminster, local government and the devolved (regional) administrations”.
How can you have hundreds of Fabians developing and implementing public policy at local, regional and national level and at the same time claim that Fabian influence is “conspiracy theory”?
On 3 April 2020 the Fabian Society publicly congratulated Fabian Society members Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner for being elected leader and deputy leader, respectively, of the British Labour Party.
Please read this carefully:
"The Fabian Society is delighted to congratulate Keir Starmer on his election as leader of the Labour party. Keir is a member of the Fabian Society’s executive committee and joins the long line of Labour leaders who have been prominent Fabians.
Congratulations also to Angela Rayner on her election as deputy leader. Angela is also an active member of the Fabian Society. Both Keir and Angela have frequently written for the Fabian Society and addressed our conferences and events.
Andrew Harrop, general secretary of the Fabian Society said:
“The Fabian Society is delighted to congratulate Keir and Angela on their election as leader and deputy leader of the Labour party. We are incredibly proud to see two of our most talented Fabian Society members take charge of the British opposition.
“Both Keir and Angela exemplify the best of Fabian values in the way they combine such passion for social justice with a hard-headed practicality. The Labour party and the country will be well served by two inspiring Fabians leading the British left.”
Congratulations to Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner | Fabian Society
Of course there are many more Fabians in the Labour Party leadership as well as rank-and-file than Starmer and Rayner. But there is no need to enumerate them all because Fabian Society general secretary Harrop himself tells us that two Fabians, Starmer and Rainer, have “taken charge of the British opposition”. Which they have, they are the official leaders!
So, Starmer, who is a member of the Fabian Society executive committee, is the Leader of the Labour Party, i.e. of the British opposition.
The same Fabian website also expressly states that Starmer and Rayner “join the long line of Labour leaders who have been prominent Fabians.”
Why is the Fabian Society, a private organization unaccountable to the British public, in charge of the British opposition?
And how is stating facts published by the Fabian Society itself, “extrapolation”? Nobody denies that there are some crazy theories out there. But there is no need of any theories. The facts admitted by the Fabians themselves are more than enough to show that something isn’t right there.
People are actually trying to get back control of the Labour Party from the Fabians but aside from brief exceptions like Corbyn and McCluskey it’s just not possible.
I've always considered for the Fabians to be well-meaning Socialists who have occasionally made mistakes in terms of public policy, such as their support of Eugenics, because of their Victorian elite mentality, of which a parallel could be drawn towards Andrew Carnegie's The Gospel of Wealth. Though they have changed over the years, I doubt that my assessment of them would differ too much today. Someone somewhere down the line came up with the phrase "the open conspiracy", which, I think, you have become somewhat fixated upon. It doesn't seem to be the case that there is a form of conspiratorial control over the Labour movement on the part of the Fabians. They just became somewhat popular in it. As I have already defended him in this thread, I would be moreso inclined to support someone like Jeremy Corbyn. I don't live in the United Kingdom, though.
Lyndon B. Johnson coined the "Great Society" to describe the Democratic Party's efforts to eliminate poverty and racial injustice in the 1960s. Even though I disagree with Johnson's foreign policy and do not think that their domestic policies were effective, it would be absurd for me to claim that the "Great Society" was some form of progressive industrialist conspiracy.
As it concerns actual political conspiracies, I have already issued a lengthy response revoking them.
Well, the point I'm making is that the Fabian Society is a private member organization. When people vote for Labour, the vast majority are not aware of the fact that Labour is controlled by the Fabian Society.
In my view, control of a major political party by a private organization doesn't sound very democratic, no matter what party or what organization that is.
Plus, when Labour is in office, the government is run by Fabian executive members sitting on the Labour leadership team.
Why should a private organization that is unaccountable to the electorate run the country from behind the scenes? It doesn't make any sense to me.
If the public were informed that the country is now run by the Fabian Society, it would be a different matter, but it isn't and that is deceptive and disingenuous.
I agree with your opposition to the Fabians to some extent, but, as I just don't live in the United Kingdom, I don't understand why you think you ought to convince me to do something about this. I am not a citizen of the U.K. and, therefore, not a member of the Labour Party. You should be having this conversation from a table outside of a pub somewhere in London handing out pamphlets for whoever the opposition to the Fabians are within the Labour Party. I can do nothing to help you from where I stand in the United States and, as I am an Anarcho-Pacifist, would do very little to, as I would probably merely vote for the Labour Party and not be an active member of it, were I to live in the United Kingdom.
I never asked you to do anything about it. I simply asked you for your honest opinion. But if you think that a private organization that people don't know anything about and that is unaccountable to voters should run the country, then everything is clear. Thank you for your comment.
I have not said that. I have said that I would be more inclined to support someone like Jeremy Corbyn, whom I previously defended against statements that you had made in this very thread.
I think that you think that what people say on The Philosophy Forum has more of an effect in the so-called "real world", as if the internet was somehow not a part of reality, than it actually does. Though anything that anyone says anywhere online can have effects, perhaps, within specific contexts and specific situations, The Philosophy Forum particularly so, generally what is stated here is fairly marginal.
Take your thread on your proposed plan for peace in Western Asia, for instance. If you want to bring peace to the region, what you should do is to look into what kinds of work human rights and nongovernmental organizations are already doing and volunteer. Attempting to start such a grandiose movement of "philosopher kings" on The Philosophy Forum is, at best, rather fanciful.
If you just want to chat it up about the Labour Party here, I would just hope that someone else comments in this thread or another one of yours, as, as I have a fairly limited knowledge of the internal politics of it, I just don't have very much to say.
@StreetlightX probably knows some of the intellectuals whom I have been trying to put aside a certain dispute with. I have taken it upon myself to explain my situation so as to facilitate that happening. You seem to have taken my doing this for that The Philosophy Forum can somehow generate extraordinary historical events and sweeping changes in public policy.
lol Not at all. It's just a discussion suggested by @Athena which you volunteered to join if you care to recall. I don't really care about this or any other discussion on this forum to be honest. You are reading far too much into it. And you don't have to participate if you don't want to which is probably just as well.
My mistake, then. I am just saying that I don't know enough about the Labour Party to make good conversation about it. I also don't happen to live in the U.K..
For some reason, though, you seem to have taken that acknowledgment of mine as a tacit support for the Fabians, among others, which is not the case. You have forgotten that within this very thread I made a number of posts defending Jeremy Corbyn.
Anyways, feel free to carry on. Like I said, I just don't know anything about the internal politics of the Labour Party.
Who thinks about business and economic matters? What does it mean to think about either? As I understand governing, it is what makes sure everything works together. It must not favor one thing over another but keep things balanced. Some industries can make huge profits and others can not. Only if an industry is very profitable can it pay high wages, and economies are mostly supported by low labor cost, and here government can balance the low labor cost with subsidies. There are economic and social benefits to assuring all workers have a decent standard of living. Someone must care for children and perhaps we should pay that person? I don't think we want to pay a woman who keeps having children so she can live on welfare, so there needs to be a disincentive for not doing that unless a low population rate means there is a need for more people. Then we might want to pay mothers more to encourage their reproduction.
History has not had a lot of highly influential women, but for me, the focus needs to be on the children and the elderly. That means there must be a good economy that can support a high standard of living. But money alone is not the only thing that needs to concern us. Morals also are important, and an industry that is all about manipulating us to buy things may not be considered moral? Businesses should be ethical and society must have shared morals and principles, and that won't be without education transmitting a culture for that. Fabianism is attractive because it considers fairness in wages and education.
Correct. The welfare system especially in Fabian-dominated societies like England has encouraged the emergence of thousands of families living on state support for generations. (I'm not talking about people who might occasionally find themselves out work, but about professional scroungers.)
At the same time, the Fabian insistence on women joining the workforce has reduced the number of women willing to devote their lives to raising children.
Fabian influence has also drastically reduced the number of married couples. Marx in his Communist Manifesto boasted about communism aiming to abolish the family. G B Shaw and other Fabian leaders were outspoken opponents of the family. The Fabian-Labour regime of 1997-2010 deliberately neglected the family and its importance in the development and progress of children so as to not appear "discriminatory or judgmental" toward unmarried and single parents. Under Fabian rule in 2009 married couples in England became a minority for the first time in history.
Interestingly, in the past, the head of the family (the man) used to earn enough to support himself and his family. Nowadays both partners often need to work to earn enough and very few can afford to buy a house.
This has contributed to a stagnation or fall in the general population and to the need for entire industries to import employees from abroad. Hence the Fabian and Labour policy of encouraging mass immigration.
Mass immigration in turn has led to a shortage of housing (= higher house prices and rent) and to stagnant wages that aren't keeping up with the rising living costs.
Fabian control of the education system has not led to higher standards of education, but to the opposite. Universities like the Fabians' LSE often have more foreign students than British.
In 2009, at the height of Fabian-Labour rule, independent opinion polls found that many young people were unemployable, lacking skills from reading and writing to punctuality, presentation and communication.
This again has further increased the need for importing "skilled workers" from other countries, etc. and has created an economy dependent on migrant workers who are gradually replacing the local working class.
The question that arises is, How does the British working class benefit from being replaced with others?
So, Fabianism may look "attractive" on the face of it but it comes with many problems of its own.
This is why people in general have decided that they want some Fabian policies such as national health service but not Fabianism, and this is what the ruling Tories (Conservatives) are now trying to offer, and have been since 2010.
Ultimately, the question is not whether Fabianism has anything attractive to offer but whether, on balance, Fabianism's good points outweigh its bad points. Closer analysis suggests that the opposite is the case.
Personally, I wouldn't want to live in Communist China just for the sake of public health service and unemployment benefits. And I definitely don't fancy being replaced. But this is just my view.
There was a time when we all depended on our tribe. We shared the earth's resources in common and defended our territory just as dog packs and chimpanzees do. We evolved a family order with divided responsibility. Industrialization has disrupted that order. Iran soundly rejected that disruption of family order and celebrated religious leadership and a returned to traditional morality. So does our Christian right, sort of? They reject welfare while bemoaning the end of traditional values, and demanding women have equal rights. A woman with children does not have equal rights, because she does not have equal freedom to pursue her career and have family too.
When men say what you have said, it is pretty obvious that is a man speaking. Where is the father who supports his family and teaches his son how to be a man and a useful part of the community? How many children have you raised without depending on someone to support the family or care for the children?
England and the US prepared their young for citizenship. England rejected education for technology because it was protecting its classes and technology increases equality. We have all embraced education for technology, which is preparing the young to be products for industry and destroying family values. We now speak of freedoms but not our duties. People are physically becoming adults but they are not maturing. Having that wonderful career is about culture and preparation for life that education, is totally failing to do, in our technological societies with unknown values. So now we have divided and are no longer united, and the poor have no idea how to think middle-class lives, nor is the middle-class consciousness the of the at the of poverty. Children in poverty with overwhelmed mothers learn to want nothing because their mothers can not cope with their needs and wants. And this we are spreading around the world. We have left culture up to media commercialism. Our amorality is erupting into anarchy, as we find fault with everything and everyone and look forward to the day computers take over and we are all consumed by the Borg.
I agree. That's exactly why I've said many times before that the emergence of a political right and left hasn't brought anything good and society should return to a no-party system where governance is done by consensus instead of having alternate rule by one party or another. Hence my suggestion that governments should be run by impartial or partyless "philosopher kings" or wise rulers as proposed by Plato.
And yes, the problem is powerful countries exploiting the resources of the weak ones. China is a good example. It exploits Tibet - while also suppressing its people - and is expanding its influence and power in the Pacific, Africa, the Middle East and even Europe.
Yet no one says anything about China. Mainstream discussion seems to always revolve around Europe's colonial past.
Quoting Athena
Sure. But the same applies to a man who has to bring up children without their mother.
I think “equal rights” can be deceptive and is often used to deceive people. The ruled are not in the same position as the rulers. Individuals are different from each other. We all have different aptitudes and skills, different levels of intelligence or physical strength, etc.
If we take “equality” to its logical conclusion, then women should stop having children and become men. Is this what society should strive to achieve?
I never said there should be no welfare. I only pointed out that some families live on state benefits for generations, even those that do have a man or father in the house. I was referring to people who are deliberately abusing the system out of their own choice, not because circumstances force them.
You are I do not understand poverty the same. I once thought poverty was a meaningful experience those of us born white and middle class could never have. Then during the 1970 recession caused by OPEC embargoing, my family experienced serious poverty for so long I forgot how to think middle class.
We used to think the people who went through the depression and starting hording, where funny. During the recession I became afraid of that when I used what we had there would be no more, and I bgan hording. I was proud of my ability to endure hunger and cold, and didn't weigh enough to sell plasma, so I used heavy clothing and risked going to shock to sell plasma. I rished my life in other ways, because that is what I had to do to survive and I developed black humor, where death is something to laugh about. I learned poverty is mentally, physically and spiritually devastating. I do not believe people willingly live like that, but when that is all they know. That is all they know.
Do not judge a man until you walk a mile in his boots.
Quoting Athena
I think there is a big difference between communism and what Plato or the US Founding Fathers had in mind. Plato proposed rule by good and wise governors precisely to combat tyranny. America had been a British Crown Colony, so rule by one party either under a king or president wasn’t such an unusual prospect. As long as democracy is secured, it doesn’t really matter.
By contrast, communism advocates abolition of private property, total state control, and dictatorship.
Marx and Engels believed that between capitalist and communist society lay the period of revolutionary transformation of the one into the other and that to this corresponded a political transition period in which the state could be nothing but the “revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat” (Critique of the Gotha Programme, 1875, MECW, vol. 24., p. 95).
Engels wrote: “Do you want to know what this dictatorship looks like? Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat” (“Introduction”, 18 Mar. 1891, The Civil War In France, 1871, MEW, Band 22, s. 199).
In the Paris Commune of 1871, armed revolutionaries, some of whom were members of Marx and Engels’ International, had seized the French capital and imposed a reign of terror in which many citizens were summarily executed – including the Archbishop of Paris who had been taken hostage – and much of the city was burned to the ground. Marx and Engels at the time celebrated the Commune as “the most glorious deed of our party” and the “glorious harbinger of a new society” (Marx, Letter to Dr. Kugelmann, 12 Apr. 1871, MECW, vol. 44, p. 131; Marx, “Third Address to the General Council of the International”, 30 May 1871, MECW, vol. 22, p. 230).
The Communists murdered many millions of innocent people in Russia, China, Eastern Europe, and other places.
Quoting Athena
China has become different under Western influence. The biggest influence was probably Soviet Communism. After the economic collapse of the Soviet Union, China nearly went down the same road but decided to take a leaf from Lenin’s book and introduced some elements of capitalism under strict state control. This was followed by massive investments and credit from America and Europe and allowed China to become an empire again, but an atheist and national socialist one instead of traditional Chinese. This is already creating big problems for a lot of small countries and even a few big ones.
Quoting Athena
Well, if that’s the path humanity wants to go, then there isn’t much we can do about it. Personally, though, I don’t see anything fundamentally wrong with having men and women. A bit of tradition isn’t always bad. If animals can be male and female without problems I don’t see why humans should be different.
Quoting Athena
People tend to agree on some things and disagree on others. However, I think the discussion was trying to establish whether Communism in its Fabian form is a good thing and, in connection with that, what form of government we think would be the ideal one.
I believe we agreed on keeping private property. This would rule out communism. Anything else you think we agree on?
I am struggling to understand why anyone would think eliminating the industrial leaders would be a good thing. Marx wasn't even capable of supporting himself. Why would anyone think he could create a healthy economy for a whole nation? To be an industrial leader, first a person has to have a good idea, and the ability to promote that idea and get others to invest in it. Then create an organization that turns the idea into a reality and markets it to a population. At no point in the process does a person take a weapon and start killing people. What went so wrong that made people think a violent revolution is how to achieve anything of value?
Moa is a good example of a charismatic leader with no merit. He had the power to rule but not the ability. Science is essential to democracy. We once understood this but don't seem to understand that now because half of us followed a leader who ignores science, proving what happened in China can happen in the US. That is quite frightening to me. Only democracy is protected in the classroom is it protected and I think the US stopped doing that.
My comment about men becoming as women was a response to you saying I think both of us agree having both sexes and tolerance for gender differences is a good thing. Personally, I think the traditional family of a man who supports the family and a woman who stays home to care for the family has great value. However, within this traditional family structure, everyone needs to be supported for self-actualization and this would involve sharing responsibilities. :grin: Cooperative families making a cooperative nation.
I lost interest in communism when I read it "liberated women" with a propaganda campaign declaring full-time homemakers are not valuable citizens. In the US we shortened this to "just a housewife" and effectively destroyed the value of full-time homemakers.
When the communist destroyed the value of full-time homemakers women got jobs in order to be valued citizens and they began working like men. The state had to provide child care, because someone has to care for the children.
The flood of women into the workforce increased the size of a cheap source of labor and this increased the economy. However, the divorce rate soared and so did the abortion rate. Women were not fairing better, because, with both the responsibility of caring for children and having to work, they did not have the time and energy to get an education and advance a career. Not until my X walked out and I had to care for the children and support them too, did I appreciate the value of a full-time homemaker. It would have been wonderful to come home to a clean home, a cooked dinner, and have someone else resolve all the problems that come with having children, so I could just eat and relax. I realized if the only thing I had to do was focus on supporting the family, then I would have the time and energy to develop a career. In old books about family, it was stressed how the woman should manage things so her husband was free to what he needed to do to support the family. My point is, single mothers are not liberated, women unless they can pay someone to care for the children and the home and the relations that a full-time homemaker cares for. When women are forced to both care for the children and support them, they tend to fall into poverty, and this becomes a state burden. It becomes counterproductive.
That makes communism the worst possible thing for family values and a society that values humans. We are proving Capitalism can be just as destructive to family and human values.
I think Marx and Engels needed the voice of a woman who thought her role in society as a homemaker was extremely valuable. I think the men had an exaggerated sense of their own importance.
Quoting Wikipedia
:rage: Darn right much of women's labor is not monetarily compensated for. Caring for people freely because that is what a good woman does, is not a bad thing. Turning a woman into a commodity whose function is dependent on a monetary reward destroys our human values,
:chin: Perhaps that goes with thinking a violent revolution and killing industrial leaders is a good thing, because everyone is reduced to a commodity. No one's unique human value is respected.
I think you are making some very good points there. Marx was an authoritarian, domineering, and argumentative person from the start. He studied law and philosophy and tried to use philosophical arguments and legalistic language to impose his views on others. But that didn’t work out, he fell into disrepute at university and could never get an academic job. So, he turned to journalism but his revolutionary rhetoric got his paper (funded by wealthy bankers and industrialists) closed down. He then turned to revolutionary activities, used his father’s inheritance to fund insurrection in Belgium where many German factory workers lived, which failed, and he was on the run from the police ever after.
In 1847 Marx and Engels set up the Communist League in London to promote violent revolution among German workers living in England who had links to workers’ organizations in Germany and other European countries. Their plan was to infiltrate the socialist labor movement, join the Democrats to seize power from the Conservatives, and then overthrow the Democrats and install a Socialist regime run by the Communist League, i.e., by themselves.
The whole Marxist ideology was constructed for that particular purpose, to incite people to insurrection, whilst hiding the leadership’s true intentions of assuming power for themselves. They wrote the Communist Manifesto (1848) to promote their ideology. All the central concepts of Marxist political theory were formulated in ambiguous, suggestive, and misleading language.
Frederic L. Bender, “The Ambiguities of Marx’s concepts of ‘proletarian dictatorship’ and ‘transition to communism’”
People were not stupid. The English working classes completely ignored Marx and even among the German workers he had only a very small following. The Communist League never had more than a few hundred members. Engels in his 1890 Preface to the Communist Manifesto wrote:
“… “Working men of all countries, unite!” But few voices responded when we proclaimed these words to the world 42 years ago, on the eve of the first Paris Revolution [of 1848] in which the proletariat came out with the demands of its own.”
Manifesto of the Communist Party (marxists.org)
Of course “few responded”. Practically no one, because the German-language Manifesto (printed in London) was seized by the German police at the border, the French version remained unpublished at the time, and the English translation was published two years after the revolution!
So, Marx and Engels’ “revolution” is a myth, a fairy tale, and a hoax. It never happened, because nobody believed in it and very few had actually heard of it. Marx then turned to writing his economic theory and after about twenty years published the first volume of Capital (1867) but nobody bought that either. It was long after his death that Engels and other German socialists, with the help of the London Fabians and Russian Marxists, managed to spread the ideology of revolution to Russia where in October 1917 Lenin, Trotsky, and a few other Marxist ideologists seized power with the help of radicalized factory workers and some elements of the armed forces - all of whom were later liquidated by Stalin.
Essentially, this is what Marxist political theory can be reduced to, an ideological tool for seizing power. It has absolutely no viable political program or anything except total state control and dictatorship of the Communist Party (a self-appointed intellectual elite), not of the working classes who are simply reduced to servants of the state. Marxism comes to power through a mixture of deception and force of arms.
Engels’ definition of revolution was “the most authoritarian thing that exists; it is the act, whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon; and the victorious party must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionaries” - Engels, F., “On Authority”, 1874, MEW, Band. 18, s. 308.
Marx was also suffering from a skin disease that was causing frequent episodes of self-loathing and alienation and making him fly into a rage and behave like a tyrant even in his own home. You can almost hear his anger and frustration in some of his writings and this was reflected in the violent language that he was using to attack everyone that contradicted him.
“The nature and consequence of Karl Marx's skin disease” - National Library of Medicine
Quoting Athena
Correct. Mao was just a brainwashed farmer and a Soviet Russian puppet. He was worthless without Russian backing. After the death of Stalin, the Russians started a de-Stalinization program to make Russia’s Communist dictatorship slightly more moderate. Mao went in the opposite direction and turned more and more dictatorial and bloodthirsty.
Even before seizing power, Mao proclaimed that it was “necessary to bring about a reign of terror all over the country” – S. Schram, ed., Mao’s Road to Power: Revolutionary Writings 1912-1949.
Remember that the British Fabian leadership were admirers of Stalin and thought that the Soviet Union was a “Union of Fabian Republics”. The Fabians were for violent revolution in places like Russia and Africa that didn’t affect them, but in Europe and America they advocated communism by gradual steps and by stealth, and their main tool was education.
Wells who was a master Fabian tactician wrote in New Worlds for Old:
“Unless you can change men’s minds you cannot effect Socialism, and when you have made clear and universal certain broad understandings, Socialism becomes a mere matter of science and devices and applied intelligence. That is the constructive Socialist’s position. Logically, therefore, he declares the teacher master of the situation. Ultimately the Socialist movement is teaching, and the most important people in the world from the Socialist’s point of view are those who teach—I mean of course not simply those who teach in schools, but those who teach in pulpits, in books, in the press, in universities and lecture-theatres, in parliaments and councils, in discussions and associations and experiments of every sort, and, last in my list but most important of all, those mothers and motherly women who teach little children in their earliest years. Every one, too, who enunciates a new and valid idea, or works out a new contrivance, is a teacher in this sense.
And these Teachers collectively, perpetually renew the collective mind. In the measure that in each successive generation they apprehend Socialism and transmit its spirit, is Socialism nearer its goal.”
New Worlds for Old, by H. G. Wells (gutenberg.org)
And they do that through education, culture, politics, and pretty much every single movement or trend that they instigate, manipulate, and direct. This is the real danger of Fabianism: it advances communism and totalitarianism under the pretense of “progress” without anyone realizing it until it’s too late.
Quoting Athena
Correct. Humans have evolved into what they are now for a reason. Men and women have different roles but should be treated with equal respect. The Fabians started by claiming to change capitalism and, following their own logic of permanent revolution or permanent change, they have begun to change not only politics but also culture, society, the family, and, ultimately, man himself in accordance with their Darwinist and Eugenicist agenda of making man and woman in the image of Fabian sociopathic ideology. This is, literally, the deliberate and systematic destruction of humanity for the sake of some psychopathic dream.
Quoting Athena
Correct. Any system can be destructive without appropriate checks and balances. In capitalism the destructive forces are unchecked money interests. In communism it is unchecked political ideology.
What is interesting is that in answering the charge that socialism destroys the family and the home, Fabians like Wells use the argument of the Communist Manifesto which was that capitalism destroys the home anyway. As if that settled the matter. In fact, it only shifts the problem without solving it, and it really only exacerbates it.
New Worlds for Old, by H. G. Wells (gutenberg.org)
And, of course, communism never abolished poverty. Millions died of starvation under communist dictators like Stalin and Mao.
Soviet famine of 1932–33 – Wikipedia
Famine in Stalinist Russia – Images
The Soviet Union was propped up by US investments and loans from 1917 to the 1980s. In the early 1980s, Ronald Reagan found out and stopped all technical and financial assistance to Russia. Russia’s Communist regime collapsed soon after. This clearly exposes the mythology of the "superiority" of communist economics.
Ronald Reagan Won the Cold War | The Heritage Foundation
Quoting Athena
Yes, Marx and Engels certainly had an exaggerated sense of their own importance, especially in relation to women. Engels was a womanizer and Marx treated his wife as a servant. Marx got his housemaid Helene pregnant and he and Engels did their utmost to cover it up, Engels even pretending to be the father to protect Marx’s so-called “reputation”.
Helene Demuth – Wikipedia
Quoting Athena
Absolutely. Marx criticized capitalism for devaluing and dehumanizing people, but communism does exactly the same only worse. Man and woman in communist society only have a value to the extent they are of use to the state. Very few women made it to leading positions in Soviet Russia or Maoist China.
Communism only advocates the “liberation” of women and other groups until it comes to power. After that, it’s another story.
Quoting Athena
Yes, killing not just industrial leaders but everyone that has any degree of power, influence, or talent that can be inconvenient to the communist leadership. That’s why they built concentration camps long before the Nazis did.
Gulag – Wikipedia
From the early 1900s, leading international bankers and industrialists, together with their Fabian collaborators, had been planning to overthrow the Czars and make the Russian Empire into a Union of Fabian Republics run by Fabian Socialists that at the same time would serve as a big market for the bankers and industrialists who were funding the Fabians. This was what the Fabian leadership meant when it said that "Socialism is a business proposition".
The London Fabians maintained close contact with Lenin and other Russian revolutionaries through the Socialist International, the Rainbow Circle, and the Society of Friends of Russian Freedom. Wealthy Fabian Society members financed Lenin and his Russian Social Democratic Labour Party during their exile in London. The Fabian leadership, especially the Webbs through their writings like Industrial Democracy (which Lenin translated into Russian) also provided the ideology used by Lenin to win support for his revolution.
In 1917, the year of the Russian Revolution, Ford started mass-producing Fordson tractors. Because of the Civil War in Russia, it could only start selling them in 1920 after which it exported tens of thousands of Fordsons to the Soviets. After 1924 Ford licensed the production of tractors and trucks in Russia itself.
From then on, there was a steady transfer of US cash and technology to Russia into the 1980s. The groups involved were the Rockefellers (chief financers of Fabianism) and associates through banking and industrial corporations like Chase Manhattan, Citibank, Bank of America, Morgan Guaranty Trust, Manufacturers Hanover, and Ford Motor Company as well as organizations like the USSR State Committee for Science and Technology (SCST) and the US-USSR Trade and Economic Council (USTEC) which was headed by Rockefeller executives and associates.
David Rockefeller was the leader of the US financial assistance effort to Communist Russia. In the early 1970s he started to overtly finance Russia and China. In 1973 he opened a Chase Manhattan branch in Moscow and visited China to negotiate US-Chinese economic cooperation.
Rockefeller also started to promote a worldwide policy of East-West rapprochement through his close friend and collaborator and US Government adviser Henry Kissinger and through the Rockefeller-funded UN. Rockefeller’s activities saved Communist Russia and China from economic collapse.
Meantime, Ronald Reagan had been studying the Soviets for a long time and he knew that communist economy was not a functional system. When he came to power in 1981, he immediately ordered an investigation into how the Soviets financed themselves and this was when he found out that they were assisted by US finance and technology.
In May 1982 Reagan went public with his plan. Speaking at his alma mater, Eureka College, he predicted that “the march of freedom and democracy … will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people.”
He directed his top national security team to develop a plan to end the Cold War by winning it. The result was a series of top-secret national security decision directives.
In particular, Reagan adopted a policy of attacking a “strategic triad” of critical resources –financial credits, high technology and natural gas – essential to Soviet economic survival. Author-economist Roger Robinson said the directive was tantamount to “a secret declaration of economic war on the Soviet Union.”
When Reagan increased US military expenditure by 13%, the Soviets barely reacted because they simply could not afford to keep up.
The Soviets whose economy depended on oil exports also went through an oil crisis caused by a fall in oil production and prices.
The Soviets knew that they were finished and just gave up exactly as predicted by Reagan. After seventy years of communism or Fabianism, they were forced to reintroduce capitalism and feed themselves instead of relying on capitalist aid.
To get an idea of the situation, in 1970, the Soviet Union bought 2.16 million tons of grain. By 1985 this had risen to 44.2 million tons (a 20-fold increase). There were similar increases in meat imports and other products. Basically, the Soviet State had become incapable of feeding its own people.
D. Rockefeller, Memoirs
Fordson – Wikipedia
How Ronald Reagan Won the Cold War | The Heritage Foundation
Reagan’s Secret Directive NSDD-75 Federation of American Scientists (FAS)
Since you mentioned the 1970s oil crisis, I thought you might want to know how that came about.
Oil at the time was controlled by four major players: (1) the Rockefellers through Standard Oil (ESSO), Mobil, etc., (2) the Rothschilds through Shell and French-North African operations, (3) the Arabs trough the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC), and (4) the Russians’ State Planning Committee (Gosplan).
The energy crisis actually started in 1970 - 1971 when the US oil production had peaked which meant a fall in supply and a rise in prices.
In October 1973, the OAPEC which was controlled by Kuwait, Libya, and Saudi Arabia, announced an oil embargo on some Western countries including America. The embargo wasn’t particularly well-organized or effective. It was more symbolic. But OAPEC used its influence to increase world oil prices which put a huge strain on economies around the world and affected millions of people in America and other Western countries.
However, what was happening behind the scenes was that even before the embargo was imposed, major Western countries had reached an agreement with Arab oil producers to invest the surplus obtained from higher oil prices in Western economies via the banks controlled by the same people who controlled the West’s oil industries.
The Rockefellers played a key role in this, though they were by no means the only ones. Officials of the Rockefeller-controlled Arabian American Oil Co. (ARAMCO) actually encouraged the Arabs to raise their oil prices to justify the Rockefellers’ own price increase in the USA.
According to the Washington Post, ARAMCO (consisting of ESSO, Mobil, Standard of California and Texaco), not only encouraged the OAPEC to raise prices but also neglected to invest in the maintenance of Saudi oil wells in order to hamper production.
So, whilst millions of ordinary people were reduced to poverty and destitution, the Rockefelllers made billions and expanded their banking and petroleum empire throughout the Mid East as the Arabs and Iranians deposited their oil dollars in Rockefeller banks. By 1978, Iranian deposits with Chase alone exceeded USD 1 billion.
The Rockefellers’ Soviet partners (who were key military allies of the Arabs) also profited nicely by secretly buying Arab oil at discount prices and selling it at raised prices to the West as “Russian” oil.
Reagan did well to stop the Soviets. Unfortunately, he failed to stop the Rockefellers.
L. Rocks, The Energy Crisis
D. Rockefeller, Memoirs
J. Anderson, “Details of Aramco Papers Disclosed”, Washington Post, 01/28/1974
I think that is a typical problem today. People thinking the right information and the right argument is what leadership is about, getting angrier and angrier when no one accepts them as a leader. This comes with education for technology but is not the result of liberal education.
Isn't that in line with Hitler's road to power? Except Hitler appealed to the people by going throughout the country and finding out exactly what made people angry and then used that information to gain their support. It was not all, his idea imposed on others, but more skillful emotional manipulation.
And I think a recent leader was doing the same thing, only this time strongly opposing socialism, turning socialism into a strong playing card for the opposition.
Your explanation is interesting and I am impressed by what communism had to do with giving Hitler power. It is like the US push for socialism and the opposite party pushing against it. People are reacting against each other and excessively willing to follow leaders, like an emotional melee not really an intellectual movement. Hilter was against communism.
Oh my goodness your highlight of this reveals the tragedy of what happened. The American Revolution was a revolution of consciousness. Not exactly all of it was a revolution of consciousness because not everyone was literate. However, many of the leaders were literate in Greek and Roman classics and the philosophy of their time and they did create a new form of government built on an understanding of Athens and Rome.
That is sad and I don't think he was the only person with a personality/mental disorder that people have followed. Neitzche's superman is appealing to males, but really is that the thinking that is good for civilizations?
Oh dear, that is really sad but so typical. Looking back on my observations of life it seems few people learn to handle power well. Of course, I am thinking of what happens in families where the head of a household may be a tyrant because he does not know better or when the woman dominates she may be the tyrant especially in her role as mother. When we do not learn better, we do not do better. This is tragic when the person is in a strong national leadership role.
My bell went off- time for me to run. I hope to get back to you later.
Yes, liberalism is a strange thing. It’s supposed to generate liberty or freedom but more often than not the opposite seems to be the case.
Quoting Athena
Correct. Not everybody is a Hitler or a Stalin, but politics is about power and most of the time to acquire or hold on to power you may have to manipulate public opinion. Different leaders do it in different ways but it can’t be avoided. It’s just bad luck when the leader turns out to be the wrong one.
Quoting Athena
Yes, most people may want some socialist policies but they certainly don’t want socialism. And even fewer would want even that if they realized what it entails and where it leads to.
Quoting Athena
That’s right, communism or “Bolshevism” was a big problem in Germany. Germany had been invaded by Napoleon in the past and was occupied by the Allies after World War I. People knew that Russian Bolshevism was a murderous regime and were terrified. Communist Russia was a backward agricultural country that needed to incorporate Germany into its empire because it needed Germany’s strong industry and economy. Lenin and Trotsky had plans to invade Germany and so did Stalin. The German Right used that to its advantage but it’s hard to see what else it could have done in those circumstances.
Quoting Athena
Yes, the American Revolution may have had its own flaws, but the Stalinists and Maoists were bloodthirsty savages who were barely human. In Maoist China, people were tortured and killed just for sadistic fun and in many cases they were eaten. Banquets were organized in which people were shot in the head and their heart and liver eaten in a gesture of loyalty to the regime. The Soviets were bad enough but the Maoists were far worse. Cannibalism, in which “class enemies” were killed and eaten for fun, was a widespread problem in Maoist China.
Guangxi Massacre – Wikipedia
Quoting Athena
That’s why the Greeks and Romans believed in a sane mind in a sane body (“nous hygies en somati hygiei” or “mens sana in corpore sano”). You can never know what motivates someone until you find out. Personally, I have never understood what people found in Nietzsche and even less in Marx. Look at pictures of them and you instinctively know that something isn’t quite right.
This is what a German police report says about Marx:
“[Marx] leads the existence of a Bohemian intellectual. Washing, grooming and changing his linen are things he does rarely, and he is often drunk. He is frequently idle for days on end […] He has no fixed time for going to sleep or waking up. He often stays up all night and then lies down fully clothed on the sofa at midday, and sleeps till evening, untroubled by the whole world coming or going through [his room]. There is not one clean and solid piece of furniture. Everything is broken, tattered and torn, with half an inch of dust over everything and the greatest disorder everywhere ...”
https://www.intellectualtakeout.org/blog/karl-marx-was-pretty-bad-person/
This is confirmed by other witnesses including friends and collaborators.
Quoting Athena
Yes, ignorance is the root of all evil. People allow others to come to power without realizing what they are doing. The only antidote to this seems to be what Plato suggested: educate the masses and train leaders to be good and wise rulers. Whether this will ever be achieved is another story, but it seems that we need this now more than ever.
Quoting Athena
It definitely is fascinating. And there is more to it. The Soviets were building a pipeline from Siberia to Europe to sell gas to Germany and other countries. Reagan stopped General Electric from selling the technology to the Soviets and apparently, US intelligence in 1982 sabotaged the project. This is something that even the CIA is supposed to have no knowledge of. What we do know is that the Soviets were running their communist system with technology stolen from America and other capitalist countries. In 1983 the FBI found that one in every three Communist Bloc envoys was a spy. Reagan expelled many of them and other Western countries followed suit. Soviet Russia was not only an “Empire of Evil”, it also was a parasitic entity that was totally dependent on capitalist aid and on economic espionage, as well as on exploiting smaller communist countries, i.e., begging and stealing. Reagan deserves a lot of credit for taking it out. Unfortunately, a lot of people are ignorant of history. They think Reagan was a “bad guy” and Communist Russia was “cool”.
Third of Eastern Bloc Envoys Are Spies, Head of F.B.I. Says - New York Times
Quoting Athena
Well, the way I see it, philosophy teaches us how to think rationally and critically. It sharpens our power of observation and teaches us not to take a piece of information or knowledge at face value but always look at what is behind it. Even if we don’t find the ultimate truth, at least we’ll know more than before. If we follow that path we meet the right people and read the right books. A few good books can be worth more than ten university courses. This is because the education system teaches politically correct knowledge but life is not politically correct and this can result in a dangerous disconnect that puts us on the wrong course.
For Plato and other Ancient Greeks, philosophy was a practical discipline that included politics. Philosophers can’t ignore the real world and lock themselves up in an ivory tower. On the other thread we discussed the military-industrial complex. As I pointed out, the military industry is not an autonomous entity, it depends on resources like oil and steel and is often controlled by those who control the resources. If we look at who controls resources we will find who controls finance, the economy and politics. It isn’t rocket science.