Two non-fiction books that I am currently reading (teaching from the one) 1) Dinesh D'Souza's book America; Imagine a World Without It and 2) The Genesis of Science by James Hannam have been both enlightening and inspiring.
History has a way of illuminating the present and foretelling the future in ways that those who seek to rewrite history are well aware of and is a primary reason why they want to eradicate it. Consider the activists in America, Australia and the UK who even now are trying to rewrite our histories, all in the name of 'tolerance' and 'acceptance of the other' of course. Nonsense! They have learned from the radicals that history is a great indicator of future and present actions and they want as much ignorance and misinformation to reign as possible because the uninformed are so much easier to hoodwink.
The climate change hoax is a case in point where the catch-cry of "the science is settled" is such an anti-science claim but to the un-initiated sounds acceptable, even correct. The Transsexual revolution and 'gender fluidity' is another anti-science crusade being undertaken in the 'name of science' and because the 4th estate is so complicit in the PoMo cultural revolution, they either are unaware of the irony or are comfortable with hiding the truth from we, the 'deplorables'.
What struch me in Dinesh D'Souza's book was the passage of how the American 'dream' has been shifted from its original intent to something out of the playbook of cultural Marxism in a fairly short period of time. It has also been interesting to reacquaint myself with the fact that the distaste that the elites in society have towards 'capitalism' is not new, and has in fact been the default position towards business and entrepreneurship throughout history:
If one unique principle of the American founding was the idea that all men are created equal and endowed with unalienable rights, a second unique principle is the creation of a free market society with business as the national vocation and the innovator and entrepreneur as the embodiment of the American dream. Marx understood this. Writing in the mid-nineteenth century, he termed the United States"the most modern example of bourgeois society". Yet America's commercial emphasis may seem unfamiliar to many today, because progressives have been attempting to redirect the energy of the American people - especially young people - away form the commercial sector toward the government sector. When I first came to the States in the late 1970's, the tone had been set by John F Kennedy. Kennedy said to Americans: If you are young, if you are idealistic, then do what? Join the Peace Corps! Become a public servant. For JFK, there were nobler things to do with your life than to work for a profit making corporation. If you did that, you were a greedy, selfish guy. But if you became a bureaucrat, or went on a Peace Corp mission and lived in a hut in Africa, you were a morally wonderful person. We hear the same thing from Obama, who routinely tells people in his graduation speeches: don't go for the brass ring, the corner office, the big promotion. Presumably he want Americans to become community organisers or union bosses or go to work for the federal government. In the progressive lexicon, "business" is a term of derision and becoming a political activist or a federal bureaucrat is what the American dream is all about. [pp. 50,51]What is particularly ironic about all this is how Kennedy's father was one of Americas early 'robber Barons' and that in Australia today for the first time in history, the government sector are more highly enumerated than the private sector, an fiscal imbalance that cannot continue indefinitely for the simple reason that the money the government sector uses to pay its wages are generated via taxes paid by the private sector.
Governments do not generate money, they just spend it, and when they step into the business of running businesses they do it so badly that the economy collapses which is the lesson that should have been learned from history by the endless attempts at Socialism.
D'Souza goes on to explain the historical disdain towards business(free enterprise/capitalism) that seems to be a hallmark of our current administration in Australia (even though an alleged 'businessman' is at the helm; though bankers these days are more ideologues than they are entrepreneurs) as least and certainly within the main stream media worldwide:
The Founders(American constitutional) knew that , historically, in most cultures, business and trade were reviled. For nearly two millennia, across the world, the merchant and entrepreneur have been regarded as low-life sum. Confucius says, "The virtuous man knows what is noble. The low man knows what is profitable". In Japan, the social hierarchy placed the Imperial family and the lords at the top, the warriors or samurai below them, then the farmers and the artisans, and finally the merchants lowest of all. In the Indian caste system, the top rung is occupied by the priest, the next rung by the nobility, the next by the warriors, and down the list we go, until one step form the bottom, just above the hated untouchable, we find the merchant and trader. Historian Ibn Khaldun, one of the great Islamic thinkers of the middle ages, has an essay arguing that looting is a morally preferable way to trade to acquire wealth. Why? Because trade is based on exploitation of needs of others and is therefore base and shameful. Looting by contrast, is courageous and manly, since you have to defeat a rival in open combat and take his stuff. Even today in Europe, its better to have inherited money than earned money. Inherited money is seen as innocent, like manna dropped from heaven, while earned money is seen as the result of some sort of exploitation. The American Founders were well aware of this social hierarchy and they inverted it. In a sense they turned the whole totem pole upside down, so that in their new regime, the bottom-runged entrepreneur would come to the top. [pp. 51,52]And of course this reversal of the 'historical order' helped to create the freest, most dynamic and successful culture that the world has ever seen. Progressives have been worked for a number of decades now to subvert the system back to the way it has always been. Today you seldom see a movie where the businessman is a hero, au contriare they are almost always the villain. Sure there are and have always been crooked con-men but many business leaders of the past have been exemplars of philanthropy and generosity.
I am on a roll and before I exhaust my readers any more I will leave the thought of 'where are we headed?' with you. Are we going to return to the feudalism of the historical past with a few elites ruling over what we think, feel, say or do, or are we going to return to the freedoms given by the American Constitution? I vote for the latter.
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