Tag: oligarchy

Mob Rule or Oligarchy; Potato, Puhtatuh

photog 2 Comments Current Events , , , , ,

Going all the way back to Plato and Aristotle, Europeans have theorized and even attempted to set up the optimal form of government.  Aristotle divided all governments into one of three forms, each with its deviant version:

“The distinction between correct and deviant constitutions is combined with the observation that the government may consist of one person, a few, or a multitude. Hence, there are six possible constitutional forms (Politics III.7):

 

Form                     Correct                 Deviant

One Ruler             Kingship               Tyranny

Few Rulers           Aristocracy         Oligarchy

Many Rulers       Polity                     Democracy

I suppose we could make a case that our government has slipped from a polity into a democracy that Aristotle would consider a deviant form of government in which mob rule corrupts the correct governing of a state.  But many contend that we had long ago slipped into an oligarchy that is controlled by the combination of the managerial class inhabiting the federal bureaucracy and corporate boardrooms.

Be that as it may, the outward form of government is portrayed as a democratic republic or representative democracy.  But if an oligarchy has effectively captured permanent control over the federal government, then regardless of appearances, we are living under a regime that will not respond to our wishes or protests.

And this is not a surprising occurrence.  Every historical instance of democratic rule has eventually devolved into some form of tyranny.  Athens was overthrown by an oligarchy and Rome became essentially a military monarchy.  I guess it was inevitable that eventually a powerful faction would decide to impose its will on a state as rich and powerful as the United States of America.  The vast wealth was just too tempting.

But for us who remember the almost paradisical conditions that existed while the oligarchs had not yet consolidated their control over the levers of power it is problematic to know what to do going forward.  Many have just given up and now adopt whatever dictates and fashions the oligarchy and its servants dictate.  They do what is necessary to survive in the hive.  Some people call these individuals “bugmen.”  It’s a galling existence.  At any point it might be necessary to allow yourself to be denounced because of your sex or race.  You may even have to take a demotion in order to satisfy the diversity, equity and inclusion caprices of your employer.  But you’ll do it to keep the stock options you’ve been given and the connections you need to get your kids in a “good school.”

Of course, your children are also at the whim of the weirdos who run these good schools.  If things go poorly your son or daughter may end up as your daughter or son.  Which is another way of saying psychologically broken, sexually mutilated and permanently sterile.  And there is a very high probability that they’ll be taught to hate you and your ancestors for being the wrong color.

As you can see joining the hive is not without its sacrifices.  And perhaps in the long run is a dead end for all but the true aristocracy.  Then, the question is are there any alternatives?

Currently, the workaround most people resort to is moving to a Red State that resists the worst of the Left’s interference.  Ron DeSantis in Florida has of late become the champion of Red State resistance.  And consequently, hundreds of thousands of people have moved to Florida over the last couple of years from places like New York.

Another alternative is leaving for another country.  This is a much riskier proposition.  In most cases other countries are unsatisfactory to Americans because of economic and cultural concerns.  And in fact, few places provide even the freedoms we still seem to enjoy here.  Places like Hungary or the Czech Republic seem promising.  There are signs that they value freedom and traditional culture.  But it would still be making yourself a stranger in a strange land.

And finally, you can do nothing and hope that the country will somehow free itself from this subjugation we find ourselves living under.  There are no historical precedents for this.  But there are some circumstances that might provide some hope.  Poor management and incompetent leaders are contributing to a relative weakening of the United States with respect to the other larger powers in the world.  If America’s economic position should seriously deteriorate then it is very possible that the coalition that keeps the oligarchy in power could disintegrate and that would leave open the possibility that a different coalition could gain power and restore the freedoms that made the United States a desirable place to live.

Of course, this weakening could just as easily destabilize the country just as the military weakness of Rome destabilized that empire’s borders and allowed the Germanic tribes to overrun the western half of the empire.  Our ruling elites have flooded the country with tens of millions of refugees and by delegitimating their police forces they have reduced the big cities to free-fire zones, where chaos reigns supreme.  This environment may make it impossible to restore competent authority in large swaths of the country.  If that happens leaving these areas for safer locales or even different countries may not be a choice but necessity.

It’s pretty hard to know which choice to take.  Maybe the best advice is, keep your options open and wait for a tipping point to know which way to turn.  But one thing for sure, don’t depend too much on any government.  Have some good friends who have your back in an emergency.  You’ll need them.

So, we may be living through another laboratory experiment in the devolution of a democratic society.  Aristotle would not have recognized the trappings of our system as related to the Athenian experiment (although the Greek columns standing in front of our federal buildings would have looked familiar) but he would understand the transition from republic to oligarchy.  Maybe he would have blamed it on giving women the vote.  He mentioned that they shouldn’t be allowed to do that.  Apparently, he was ahead of our time.

Moral Superiority

photog Current Events , , , ,

From my youngest political memories, I was always made acutely aware of the differences between the way of life in the United States versus the rest of the world.  And not just comparing it to the Soviet Union or China or the banana republics in Latin America or the tribal societies of Africa and the Middle East or even the democracies in Europe.  Even Western Europe, even England lacked our freedom of speech, our right to bear arms.  We were the freest people on Earth.  We could say whatever the hell we wanted and the if the President himself didn’t like what we said, well he could go pound sand.

And the system we had held our leaders accountable.  Truman’s phrase, “The buck stops here,” signified that the President was held responsible for the actions of his administration and he was answerable to the American people.  Our leaders knew that the American people were proud of being the freest people on the face of the Earth and any leader who trampled on that freedom would be handed his walking papers at the next election.

And it went without saying that the Russian leaders; Brezhnev, Khrushchev and of course Stalin were lying, murderous thugs that Americans wouldn’t tolerate living under for a minute.  The idea that there could be a moral equivalence between these criminals and even your least favorite American president was absurd.  Our leaders were public servants and honorable men, even the ones from the opposing party.  They obeyed the law and respected the Constitution.

But what about today?  What if I compared Joe Biden with Vladimir Putin?  Would it still be night and day?  Let’s see.

Vladimir Putin is a former KGB colonel and a ruthless despot who would destroy anyone who tried to cross him.  I also think he is a Russian patriot who loves his country and people.  He also seems to be culturally, a traditionalist.  I would be afraid to live in his modern-day Russia.  The country lacks a fair justice system and governmental corruption is systemic.  But one thing that Russia lacks is a woke revolution.  No rainbow flags festoon the fronts of government buildings or schools.  No one talks about their pronouns.  You won’t find any men wearing dresses.  No doctors are sexually mutilating children.  So, in that one dimension, Putin’s Russia is morally superior to Biden’s America.

Now let’s look at Joe Biden.  He is a pathological liar.  He doesn’t just lie when he needs to.  He lies in the same way as everyone else breathes, that is, continuously.  He’s a chronic influence peddler whose “take” has grown to the point where it has reached the billion-dollar range.  And as far as honoring the rights of Americans, Biden’s Justice Department currently has scores of Americans illegally rotting in prison cells for the misdemeanor of trespassing in the Capitol Building on January 6th 2021.  Personally, he’s been accused of sexual assault on the streets of Washington D.C. during daylight hours.  He has a creepy habit of sidling up behind women and girls and holding them by the shoulders while sniffing their hair.  His family is made up of broken people with crack cocaine smoking bagman Hunter as the poster child for parental failure.  And as the COVID crisis proved Biden is more than willing to use an excuse to assume dictatorial control over the lives of Americans.

And even ignoring the men in charge, let’s look at the governments in Russia and the United States.  Russia is a corrupt oligarchic kleptocracy where those in charge use their positions to enrich themselves at the expense of the general population.  It’s obviously true.  And at this point how does that differ from the American oligarchs who run the banks and the financial mega-corporations that dictate the policies of the Federal Reserve so that they always make money even while we’re bankrupted by the swings of the economy?  And finally, unlike Russia, our elite has conjured up the woke revolution that brainwashes our children into hating their ancestors, their families and even their own bodies.  These monsters are reinforcing a cult that has as its endgame the end of normal human life on the planet in favor of sexually depraved, sterile zombies that want no progeny and no future beyond playing videogames and tweeting into empty space.

Putin is no saint.  He’s a megalomaniacal despot.  But as it turns out he is an improvement over what has happened to our country.  Anyone who claims that somehow the West has moral superiority over Russia or China or Iran will have a hard time convincing me.  And we have a long road to get back to where we were when we did.

No One Talks Collapsing Empires Better Than the ZMan

photog Current Events , , , ,

My favorite dissident has what I think is a fascinating discussion of what happens when an empire, e.g. the Soviet Union or the Romans starts to die.  He discusses the transition from central rule to oligarchs.  I think he makes some truly excellent points.  We may already be quite a ways along the process.  And he shows how differences in circumstances can lead to different outcomes.  A good read.

The Emptiest of Suits

photog Current Events , ,

I was casting about among the Roman emperors to try and find an equivalent for Biden.  But I couldn’t do it.  He has some of Caligula’s and Nero’s perversity but both of those psychopaths were much more honest.  While Tiberius was known to have a dissolute character, he was also a very able general.  No one could possibly accuse the Hero of Kabul of being that.  Even among the flotsam and jetsam of the fourth century I couldn’t find the right combination of greed, dishonesty, moral degeneracy and just downright stupidity needed to approximate Joe’s specialness.

So, I declared defeat and decided Joe was unique.  But there’s got to be a way of explaining how the formerly greatest nation on the face of the Earth is now headed by a lying, thieving, lecherous, imbecile.  One part of that is the fact that he was Obama’s vice president.  And that can be explained by saying that Obama is also a very dishonest man.  So, was part of Biden’s selection by Obama dependent on Joe’s willingness to share in the graft?  Probably so.  In that case I suppose it’s actually an advantage that he’s a moron.  After all, a smart crook is a lot more dangerous as a partner than a stupid one.  It wasn’t likely that Joe would bite the hand that fed him.  But how exactly does he get to be the President?

I think that the likeliest explanation is that it was an accident.  It was just the luck of the die.  Everything happened the way it did in an election year that the Democrats weren’t supposed to win.  And the pack of losers that Joe was up against were just so hopeless that his status as a former vice president meant they had to give it to him.  Of course, I think it’s assumed that the powers that be in the Democrat Party figured that since Joe is as bought and paid for as any man can be that even with his obvious deficiencies, they could still make his first term work for them.

But are things so far along the road toward banana republic that the people running the show don’t even have to pretend that the figurehead has a functional brain?  No one thinks that Biden writes his own speeches but he can’t even read his own speeches.  And the Biden administration has altogether dropped the pretense that this is a free country.  If parents complain about their school boards, the Attorney General of the United States publicly sets the FBI on them and declares them terrorists.  Think for a minute just how crazy that is.  What’s next, will snipers pick off the people chanting, “F*** Joe Biden” at a Virginia Tech football game?

So, what’s my point?  I guess I’m saying that we’ve crossed some kind of line.  Both sides are now aware that we’ve gone beyond what was an acceptable level of partisan arrogance.  This is now akin to what went on in Chicago when Al Capone owned the police and the mayor’s office.  Law enforcement corruption allows political enemies, even up to the President of the United States to be harassed and his cabinet members prosecuted for imaginary crimes.  Joe Biden was given the presidency as a payoff for his decades of service as a bought man.  He will mouth whatever they ask and he will do whatever they order him to do.

And the longer this goes on and the more extreme the behavior the more certain that it will require at some point, a complete break with representative government.  In order to ensure against an extreme reaction to the takeover it will be necessary to tighten control over everyone outside of the oligarchy to an extreme degree.  To do that will require something akin to the totalitarian methods that were seen in Soviet Russia or East Germany.  And in retrospect, we’re really not that far from that point now.

But let me get back to the original point of this post.  It’s the insult being added to the injury.  Making Joe Biden president is an insult that is hard to overstate.  It could be argued that if they had made an orangutan or a chimpanzee president it wouldn’t have been that much worse.  In fact, apes are relatively personable, at least if they’re behind unbreakable glass and can’t fling their feces at you.  And speaking of which, how much longer will Joe be trusted not to do that?

The Federal Government Has Become an Occupying Army

photog Current Events ,

Government is always an irritant.  Being told what to do and how to do it is irksome.  No one enjoys paying their taxes or obeying traffic regulations or filling out confusing and sometimes meaningless forms.  But we do it because the overall value of living in an ordered society outweighs the frustration of these petty irritants.  After all, without the law we would have much bigger problems than a traffic cop writing us a ticket for speeding.  We’d be fighting for our lives against some maniac who took offense at how we didn’t go fast enough on a highway.

But in the last year we have reached that threshold where the government we live under is actually a greater harm than the good it provides.  I don’t mean this in the sense that it would be better if tomorrow we lived in the state of nature.  If the post office and the police and the highway department and the local Walmart shut down operation and their former employees became gangs or roving marauders pillaging the town square, I think things would be even worse.  But what has happened is that organs of the state have stopped performing their agreed upon functions.  The police now let mobs attack US citizens at will on US soil and have no intention of stopping them.  The government no longer interferes when corporate entities discriminate against citizens based on things like their political beliefs or even the color of their skin.  The government health agencies have stopped providing accurate information about something as frightening as a biological weapon that a foreign power has unleashed against us.  Worse, they are mandating policies that disrupt almost every facet of our public and private lives and are doing so in an almost vindictive way that provides no health benefit.  The government intelligence agencies now regularly spy on US citizens and then collude with tech companies and the supposedly neutral press to target their political opponents.

Even the citizens who align with the party now in power, the Democrats, are finding it harder to justify the crazier and crazier outrages that have been going on.  Avowed progressives like Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald find themselves forced to make common cause with their cultural enemies at Fox News because they still value the concept of honest journalism, government accountability and the Bill of Rights.

The federal government has decided they don’t need us anymore.  They believe they have crossed some threshold beyond which we no longer have any say over what they do.  And it is becoming clear that they will try to make that a permanent situation.

Needless to say, this doesn’t sit well with millions of people.  What isn’t clear is how to remedy the situation.  The federal law enforcement and military have been making very clear statements that they are watching us carefully and will drag any dissenters away to prison if they think any organization is threatening their control over the population.  It will take leaders of the states to stand up to that kind of physical coercion.  And even that isn’t a sure thing.  It’s amazing how quickly the FBI has come to resemble the KGB or the Stasi.

So, what’s the point of this essay?  It’s to help some people reset their thinking.  The federal government is no longer the legitimate representative of the people of the United States.  It’s a criminal gang that has taken control of the territory where you live.  It is very powerful and well organized and dangerous.  But you have no moral obligation to honor it.  You may obey it out of fear or because you see an advantage to do so but don’t mistake that for patriotism.  You are in the same position that the French people were under the Nazi occupation.  Vichy could pretend to rule “Free France” but everyone knew he was just a cowardly collaborator.  You may have to obey but it is without consent.

And if the day comes when we regain our freedom there may be very dire consequences for the men who did this to us.  Remember who they are.

Morton Has a New Post – Never Again – Standing Up to The Oligarchy

photog Current Events ,

Max Morton is a good writer and has interesting things to say.  In his new article he looks back to the Nazi othering of the Jews and other enemies of the Reich and compares it to the Left’s use of BLM and Antifa to target normal White people as their “other.”

The piece is well written and demonstrates how setting up an internal enemy allows the powerful to divide and conquer and keep the gravy train moving along for the oligarchs.

He finishes off by saying that those who are obeying the oligarchs and attacking the Left’s enemies should come to their senses and join forces with us.  It’s a nice sentiment but I think the Left has its constituents and they are pretty bought in.

What it does tell me is that instead of counter-attacking the useful idiots the more useful strategy is attacking the oligarchs directly.  Go after their money.  That is their primary concern.  Destroy that and you destroy them.  The question is how.

 

 

05MAY2021 – American Greatness – Post of the Day – Oligarchy, and Remedies by Angelo Codevilla

photog Current Events, On-Line Article Reviews, Reviews , ,

This is a short post by Codevilla asserting that before we can act effectively against the usurpers in Washington, we must first acknowledge that the Republic as we knew it is already extinguished and replaced by the oligarchy that controls both the bureaucracy in Washington and the globalist corporations that work hand in glove with them.  But once we do acknowledge this reality, we can take effective action to organize like minded people to start effecting a different future for ourselves that doesn’t revolve around the oligarchic domain.

Codevilla points in the direction of the governors of red states beginning to nullify the dictates of the federal government where they overstep constitutional limits.  But he does not go into any detail as to how this will happen and what level of resistance the federal government will offer.  But I think we all are beginning to see that some extremely brave men will be needed to cross a kind of Rubicon at some point in the not-too-distant future.  If not, then the idea of escaping the oligarchy will be just a fantasy.

I find it is becoming increasingly easy to hear the same ideas being stated by different types of writers.  Codevilla is an academic.  But plenty of ordinary people and plenty of pundits are beginning to coalesce around the idea that a rejection of the regime in Washington is what is already happening.  The biggest question is when will a serious collision happen and who will win?