The "American Manifesto" (Update)

As he is committing his memoirs of the Korean War to paper, we have been sorely missing the regular contributions of Dr Sam C. Holliday, director of the Armiger Cromwell Center.

Important as history may be, there's hardly denying we live in momentous times at present. In that realization Dr Holliday has interrupted his train of thought on the hotter episodes of the Cold War to share with us his analysis of the transition the world is currently passing through.

In "American Manifesto" he's following the ideals of the Classical Liberal school in the tradition of John Locke, and describes how those ideals were finally condensed and made manifest in the American Declaration of Independence and in the US Constitution.

Although the roots of the paradigm shift in a radically opposite direction were laid much earlier, it first made its proper influence felt on the North American continent after World War II, when Postmodern thought caused a social upheavel unparalled in history to the extent in which it broke loose from the roots of Western civilization.

As the forces of the counter cultural revolution are now breaking through to the highest corridors of power, the question what can be done to limit the damage has become an urgent one. How can we restore and maintain the values which have kept modern Western civilization prosperous for over three centuries?

Enjoy Dr Holliday's proposal for an American Manifesto. Earlier articles and essays posted on Politeia are available on the Articles file of the Armiger Cromwell Center.


American Manifesto

Those who founded the United States of America wanted to establish a new form of governance. They did not want to repeat the errors they saw in Europe, and throughout history. They opposed laws based on the “Divine Right of Kings.” They were against a democracy of unrestrained conflict, factionalism, mob rule, demagoguery, and the tyranny of popular majorities.

America has changed much since 1776. The change was slow and evolutionary until the start of the 20th century; it has been very rapid since 1942. The principles and ideals of the founders have been diminished. Is this progress or decline? The current debate is over how, and how fast, we should move toward a new and different Utopia. Yet shouldn’t the debate be over how to retain the principles and ideals of our Founders Fathers as we adjust to new realities?

- Caption: "Patriotism" (2006) by Megan Brigham - white charcoal 18x18", NFS - 

The Vision of Our Founding Fathers
What was the vision of our founders? They wanted to establish in America the foundations of a new structure and way of governance. They accepted the fact that people have many different views of right and wrong, good and bad. They wanted citizens to be able to exploit their God given (inalienable rights) talents, energies and resources to whatever extent they desired. They wanted constraints (negative rights) on government and rejected the idea of positive rights given to the people by government. They wanted checks and balances on all governmental structures. They wanted a weak Presidency and an even weaker Supreme Court. They wanted free men to establish, without external influence, a nation of free citizens who could enjoy the benefits of their successes but who would pay from their failures. They rejected the idea of equality of outcomes.

The founders did not want power in the hands of those who would exploit the weakness of human nature that tends to want security more than opportunity, comfort more than success, handouts more than self satisfaction. They did not want career politicians in positions of authority. They wanted policy determined by those willing to sacrifice wealth, life and honor to advance national interests, rather than those who gave priority to personal and factional interests. They finally reached a compromise on suffrage; they limited it to free adult male citizens who were property owners.

Then they recorded their vision in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. This vision has shaped who got what, when, how, and at what cost through much of our history. However, interpretations of these documents have greatly eroded the vision of the Founding Fathers—some consider this “progress”, but others consider it decline.

Why America is Different
America is a nation of immigrants. In common, those who became Americans, came to an unknown country in order to have a better future for themselves and their children. With freedom all could use their ability, ambition and energy to succeed or to fail. Unique American values and attitudes were thus built by the initiative of individuals, not by collective efforts determined by government. The building stages of America came from the character of individuals, not any tribal, ethnic or religious identification. Although America was not perfect during its building stages, freedom plus citizens with a sense of fairness and a willingness to accept responsibility, produced success. No elite corrected the imperfections.

The remarkable growth of America from 1776 until 1942 was the result of the efforts of individuals with diverse backgrounds facing dangers, challenges and demands of the new and the unknown; they built an American nation with a common identity and the bonds of kinship.

However, since 1942 there have been a noticeable change, which foreshadows the decline of America. This change is illustrated by a softening of both customs and laws, less reliance on the inner compass of individuals, the replacement of a sense of duty with self gratification, an unwillingness to accept responsibility, greater factionalism, and the seeking of governmental benefits and rewards.

The Renewal of America in Keeping with the Vision of Our Founders
Instead of using the old words of politics, which have much baggage, today a new American movement needs to be defined in terms of where our country is in the cycle of rising and falling. This would define the core convictions to insure a better future.

All groups--those who have a common identity and consider themselves "we"--are living organisms. Americans can be defined as an assembly of citizens that form an organism with a collective biography. Our country—like all groups—is subject to Darwinian like forces of survival. The distinguishing characteristic of all groups is a common identity--a sense of kinship. Survival, and the best possible future, depends on retaining that which caused the group to rise, and to avoid whatever might cause a decline.

The values and attitudes of the founders were the outcome of economic and administrative rationalization and differentiation that evolved after 1500. The four core convictions of the Founding Fathers were:

• Belief to provide individuals with an inner compass to control behavior, to be creative, to enjoy freedom, to have self-esteem and to be responsible for their actions. Belief prevents the individual from being only a subject of a state or nation.

• National identity to provide a sense of kinship (a nation) and a unique intellectual, creative, technological, and artistic culture.

• Patriotism to insure unity within a polity (a state) and success in achieving common goals.

• The scientific method to establish an objective way to uncover falsehoods and thus provides a means for reaching agreement.

How Things Changed
In 1776, and still in 1942, most Americans revered the four core convictions and understood that they must be kept vibrant and in equilibrium. Therefore, they can be considered the core convictions of America. However, whenever one of the four dominates the others, power shifts from citizens to an elite claiming expertise. Today American Traditionalists want to preserve balance among these four convictions, while Progressives want power to shift from citizens to a governmental elite.

Today we have a Presidency built on a cult of personality, which seeks to transform our country and change the world. No longer is the President seen as an administrator to defend the country, enforce the law, and uphold the Constitution as originally written.

Today the Supreme Court has unchallenged authority over everything, i.e. power that in the past was called “The Divine Right of Kings.” Today an elite controls our country.

We would not want to return to 1942 or 1776, even if we could. We must seek the best possible future and hold on to all true improvements. This is the aim of Traditionalists. They want to continue the evolution that began in 1500.

However, Progressives want a paradigm shift in Western Culture; they want to redefine the four convictions.

The Traditionalists do not want to "throw out the baby with the bath water". They want to prevent instability and chaos. Traditionalists seek stability through the four core convictions of Americans.

Conclusions
It is time for the American Manifesto, as presented here. Since human beings do not like to change their institutions, or re-think their philosophies, will this American Manifesto be of any practical use? It can be, but not alone. In order to reap any practical benefits more is required. The American Manifesto only states an ideal, and a path.

The next step is debate on and modification of this manifesto. Then most American citizens must share a common identity based on the principles and ideals in this manifesto. In achieving this it might be necessary to make citizenship a privilege to be earned or lost--rather than a right of birth. In that case, one aspect of earning citizenship should be acceptance of the four core convictions of America.

Finally, there must be political action—by a political party that advocates a consistent conservative philosophy.

The purpose of the American Manifesto is to present an ideal and a path to that ideal. Considerable effort by others will be required before there is a new reality in the United States of America which keeps each of the four core convictions vibrant and all of them in equilibrium.

Nations have passed away and left no traces,
And history gives the naked cause of it—
One single, simple reason in all cases;
They fell because their people were not fit.

--Kipling in ‘Land and Sea Tales’

What can be done in time of rapid change?
Some ignore the change with renunciation or flight.
Some seek only self and factional rewards in the change.
Some destroy, so something better can be built.
Some build so the future will be stable and bright.

--Sam Holliday (2009)

Copyright © 2008 Armiger Cromwell Center, Atlanta, GA 30319-1322. 404-201-7374. Permission is granted to forward this article by e-mail to friends or colleagues on a fair use basis. For reprint permission, contact Armiger Cromwell Center at armigercc@comcast.net

An online printable version of "American Manifesto", by Dr Sam Holliday

- Filed on Articles in "The Armiger Cromwell Center" -

The War on Reality: the Return of the Evil Empire

If reason makes no sense to your argument as reality clearly shows otherwise, attack reason as pernicious and superficial, and persuade the world that reality doesn't exist.

Communism was one of the main subjectivist ideologies that had their roots in the war on existence which was covertly pushed by the anti-modern philosophers of eighteenth century Germany. The battle was over the nature of thought itself. It grew out of fear for the 'cold' rationality of the Enlightenment, the liberty it propagated for peoples and individuals, and the Luddite angst over science and technology as expressed by Rousseau.

How to get the popular liberty genie, released by the Enlightenment, back into the bottle? For such a feat to be accomplished nothing less than the perception of reality needed to be altered, while the living conditions had to seen to be improving extensively. The followers have been working at it to this day.

The atheist branch went so far as to envision turning the physical world itself into the Paradise of Heaven. As a result the politics growing out of these philosophies use as their working material - not the realities of this world - but rather as it ought to be, at least from their point of view.

After the radicalism of Rousseau and the pious mind-games of Kant, the Hegelians divided into a Right and a Left faction. The Right had their base in Prussian Nationalism, which later morphed via Nietzsche into National Socialism; the Left produced Carl Marx, and the rest as they say, is history. After the Right was defeated in World War II all main arteries united together in Postmodernism. The philosopher Heidegger acted as the bridge over which Right and Left subjectivists unite.

As truth has the nasty habit of reasserting itself constantly, indeed oozes through every crack in the manufactured world of make-believe, the false perception needs to be actively inculcated on people's souls on a perpetual basis. Apart of manipulation of reality, ingraining is helped along by the use of physical coercion. This was justified by Rousseau's delusion, in which submission to the collective's 'common will' is seen as the highest ethical standard. Kant, Marx and Corporal Hitler agreed.

The main tool of Communism has always been the mind-games played on the masses as a means of control. The Nazis excelled in this as well. Leonard Peikoff in The Ominous Parallels makes the case that the Nazi concentration camps were actually a gigantic controlled experiment in mind-control. The Communist gulags and mental hospitals in which enemies of the collective were interned, are similar laboratories of evil.

It was one of the victims of those Siberian camps who died only last week, Alexander Solzhesitsyn, who worded so well how the war on reality works. “Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence. Any man who has once proclaimed violence as his method is inevitably forced to take the lie as his principle.”

The last part in fact works the other way around: any man who has once accepted the lie as his core philosophy is inevitably forced to take violence as his method of maintaining it.

Today's Russian oligarchy have their roots in the Soviet version of the Gestapo: the KGB. Whatever the case, it is hardly surprising that men who were from early childhood severely indoctrinated with the pernicious Soviet ideology, in midlife suddenly turn round and become the champions of liberty; their brains are just not wired this way. Such an expectation is as naive as it is hazardous; yet the world nursed this illusion since 1989. Georgian President Saakashvili, himself well versed in the intricacies of the Soviet war on reality, in a interview said it like this: "They use lies as an instrument of communication."

Younger people, born before the implosion of Communist collective might well study the brilliant work by George Orwell, 1984 which describes to perfection how the manipulation of reality works in such totalitarian systems that are built on its denial. The New Speak vocabulary drives the world of Ingsoc's smoke and mirrors.

The finger prints of the Soviet Pavlov reactions are all over the Georgian crisis. Just one of those knee-jerks is the Russian attitude towards the press, the messengers of reality (at least, until they were assaulted themselves by the war-on-reality vampire; since then they have become its tools).

It may take some time for the penny to drop, but for the Postmodern transnational progressives the re-emergence of the Evil Empire is good news. After all, Communism was only a means to an end: the state would wither away to bring about a global, multicultural collective. This is precisely what the KGB demoralized tranzies, currently in power, want to establish.

With the tragic events of last week, in which the fledging democracy of Georgia was sacrificed on the altar of debilitated tranzy diplomacy, the phantom of a global dystopia has come one step closer.

After sitting on the fence for a day or so the Left and the mainstream media have made up their minds. This wasn't a hard one (see Socialist Causes Explained): the Russian Sorelian myth in the making, that Georgia provoked the attack by an all out assault on Tskhinvali is swallowed hook, line and sinker; besides thus being the aggressor, Georgians are also primitive flag-waiving 'Nationalists', Christians (too bad Muslims aren't in charge in Ossetia), but their greatest sin of all, is that they are uninhibited pro Americans and proud of it.

When will the relativized stooges, the useful idiots, get their heads around the fact that America - far from being the enemy - is the sole guarantor against the global dystopia? The Evil Empire never was about ideology. It was always about power for power's sake. Communism was but a means to an end; geopolitical Darwinism will do as well, as it did before the onset of ideology.

Update:

"The People's Tools," Communist Revisionism for Dummies

Update:

A post by Paul Goble, director of research and publications at the Azerbaijan Diplomatic Academy on "Window on Eurasia" is instructive:

"Russian television, the most influential media channel in that country, has so distorted what is taking place in Georgia in the course of its “construction” of reality there that Russians who want to know what is really happening have been forced to turn to the Internet or, as during the Cold War, to Western broadcasters such as Radio Liberty.

In an analysis which was posted on Fontanka.ru today, media critic Sergey Ilchenko observes that “facts, especially in our days, do not exist on the television screen ‘in a pure form,’ separate from interpretation and commentary” as Russian TV’s approach to Georgia has clearly demonstrated over the last five days (www.fontanka.ru/2008/08/12/033/).

Catastrophes and conflicts, he points out, are “constructed” by television whose editors and reporters “ever more frequently appear in the role of directors of reality,” as the movie “Wagging the Dog” and Russian coverage of the war in Georgia show to the satisfaction of anyone who cares to pay attention. (...) >>>

- Filed on Articles in "Freedom isn't Free" -

The Dialectics: the Strategy Against the West

On the Articles pages information and links are compiled per subject in files or dossiers. One such file way overdue is on the various dialectics and the phenomenon of petty political correctness.

Much has been said and written on the subjects, but the true purpose and origins are seldom reduced their roots. This file seeks to remedy that hiatus. The following text will be transcribed to the Articles section as an introduction to the subject.

In reaction to ultra rational positions taken by the later thinkers of the Enlightenment, a brand of 18th century German intellectuals sought to save the old order by undertaking a cultural movement countering the rationalist influences. These reactionaries are known as the German Idealists, the Romanticists, the Counter-Enlightenment movement, or the anti-modernists.

In the effort, anti-modernist philosophers Kant (1724-1804) and Hegel (1770-1831) sought to square Judeo-Christian cosmology with reason.

Kant saw philosophy as a grey area between science and religion and made it the battleground in the war on reason. His rescue effort resulted in the corruption of all three fields. Philosophy - in Aristotelian and Thomist hands a precision instrument for the exploration of reality - has never recovered from Kant's speculative theories about the nature of thought.

Kant devised a dialectical mechanism which was later further developed by Hegel to reflect contradictions: the dialectic of contradictory elements, also known as 'new reason,' making them part of reality. Thereby he inflicted on the world the self-perpetuating mechanism for progress through strife and conflict. A practical application we see around us every day is the adversarial approach to communication, common to the journalists, lawyers and politicians.

Hegel skewed Kant's proposition by replacing God with the State. Later followers posited further variations on such themes, creating in effect secular pseudo religions. This is the origin of mystical nationalism and of malignant racial and cultural theories, including Postmodern multiculturalism.

Hegel's followers divided into Right, and Left (or Young) Hegelians. Young Hegelian Karl Marx (1818-1883) further developed the dialectic, devising yet another skewed version (dialectical materialism) of Hegel's skewed version.

Marx' paranoid vision of society has divided the world into two species of humans: the oppressors and the oppressed, resulting in a perpetual struggle of minority groups against the 'power structure.' The latter should not be understood as simply 'those in power', but rather 'those in power, other than us'.

Contemporary postmodernism in whom Right and Left Hegelians have re-united (yes! their are quite a few closeted Nazis there), harnessed political correctness to today's version of Marx' class struggle. Rousseau's vista of a noble, primordial world destroyed by the logic of man's egoism and drive for civilization, might well have sired the epidemic of Western self-loathing. But it is now part and parcel of the postmodern dialectic: political correctness, a mechanism for self-control along the lines of direct action or positive discrimination with the aim of establishing redistribution of power and rights.

This dossier aims to compile examples of the practical applications of the postmodern dialectic. These often takes the shape of contemporary multicultural and social ideas concerning minority groups.

The overt, narrow objective is the liberation of the minority in question (women's lib, black power, gay rights, etc.) with the view of shifting power and rights from the 'white males power structure' to minority victim groups (everyone else). In the Pragmatist expediency this moral aim justifies any means, but methods of self-control through moral, social pressure are very popular today.

The ultimate aim however goes far beyond the narrow collective group interest: the deconstruction from within, of Western culture as it developed over the course of three millennia.

The next step on that path was set when the Left recently abandoned the patronage of the traditional historically oppressed groups in favour of their enemy, Islamism: its potentially deconstructive powers are simply too promising to pass up. The fact they have made the shift without any visible signs of cognitive dissonance says much about the ruthlessness of the underlying ideology. Next stop: 'borders are immoral.'

Dossier:

Pajamas: "Saving the Males From the NY Times," by Bernard Chapin

Members of the mainstream media not only cherish alternative lifestyles; they also wish to purge everything from our culture that prevents their realization. This was evident on Father’s Day when the New York Times Magazine commemorated the holiday by placing the misandric query, “Will Dad Ever Do His Share?,” on its cover. Inside is a lengthy expose by Lisa Belkin on this subject entitled “When Mom and Dad Share It All.” Those familiar with the contents of the Gray Lady will be unmoved by yet another attempt to denigrate fathers. After all, fulfilling the needs of politically correct oppression merchants practically has become the paper’s central purpose. (...) >>>

- Filed on Articles in "The Dialectics" -