politics – Becoming American

The First Step in Saving America

Saving America from socialism starts at home. When you board a plane the safety demonstration always tells you to put your own oxygen mask on first before helping others.

Stop trying to change the world. That doesn’t work. Start by changing yourself. Think about what you are doing, what are your contributions? What classes are you taking? What meetings are you attending? Which amendments are you practicing? Who are you teaching?

We lead by example and by taking our own steps we show others the way. A lot of people exclaim “we need to do something!” What they’re really saying is “you need to do something!” Otherwise they would already be doing it.

Politics is very divisive, particularly in this current environment. It would be very easy to fall down a rabbit hole of negativity and bashing those with opposing views. I think it is better to express our opinions openly and take the time to research what we are talking about. The more informed we are, the better we can give calm measured responses to those who question us.

You’re never going to get through to a person who is hardcore into their political position, but by being calm and logically stating your case, you might get through to a couple of people listening to your argument.

The better educated we each are, the better off our families, communities and country will be. The first step in saving America is by saving and improving yourself.

Stand Up

On the day that President Trump was sworn into office, a co-worker and I snuck out of a meeting to go to McDonalds. We went to McDonalds because we knew the local one had a TV and would most certainly be broadcasting the inauguration.

After President Trump and Vice President Pence had taken office, I stood up for the national anthem. I placed my hand over my heart with a deep respect for this country and what had just happened.

I was the only person in the restaurant to do that. My friend remarked to me that he thought it was really cool and respectful how much patriotism I showed to both to England and to the United States.

My friend knew how much I loved my home nation and how much I was looking forward to going back for a visit the next month. He also knew about my respect for this nation and that I am a proud gun owner and second amendment supporter.

I think it took him by surprise just how much I love both countries for similar reasons.

I was born in the UK. My ancestors are all English. I have family members who fought and died in both world wars. I am a huge fan of Sir Winston Churchill and I love everything that is and has ever been good about Great Britain.

By Equal measure I love the United States of America. I love everything that it stands for. I think that the American Constitution is the best document ever produced by mankind.

Anyone who’s read articles of mine in the past know I’ve been on a philosophical journey and that I’ve questioned everything about politics in this country. But not once have I ever disrespected the national anthem.

The sports players who have been taking a knee, or staying sat down in their locker rooms are a disgrace to themselves, their families, their fellow countrymen and the proud legacy of this great country.

You don’t have to agree with the politics of the day. You don’t have to like it. But you absolutely must be respectful of those who have fought and died for the freedoms that you enjoy.

President Trump is right to call out the players who have been taking a knee. The NFL will lose a lot of money over this. Sports is supposed to be about respect. It’s supposed to rise above the politics of the day and be a get away for a couple hours of fun.

Those who support taking a knee are a national embarrassment.

I’m sure plenty of sports fans will switch off the tv next week and find something else to do.

Stand up.

Forging my own path

From the time I first began paying attention to politics, my path has varied, as everyone’s has. As a teenager my thoughts were more liberal and indeed socialist in nature, as you would expect of anyone brought up in a socialist country. Almost as soon as I moved to the US, my thoughts became more conservative. My actual voting record to date is purely conservative and libertarian. I have yet to vote for a single liberal.

During the 2012 primaries, right after I became a citizen, I was excited about Ron Paul and his message of peace and prosperity. My thoughts became very libertarian in nature. After my bitter disappointment with the GOP convention that year I became almost anarchist in my thought process, and back toward libertarianism in 2013. Recently I find myself more conservative again, as I do not always agree on the libertarian mindset. I am anti drug, and anti gay marriage, but understand where the drug war has failed, and where government should stay out of peoples bedrooms. I am pro peace, but understand that a strong English speaking nation patrolling the high seas has maintained the very prosperity we have enjoyed over the last few centuries.

It’s interesting to think about all the people you encounter on a daily bases, those who you work with, a family you marry in to, people you meet at gatherings and conventions. Just about everyone I have ever met has had some impact on my life and my thought process. That is not to say that I am easily swayed, far from it, but I am a big thinker, and I like to run down several avenues before I draw my conclusions.

Essentially I have always been pro freedom, I hate the idea of being told what to do, by anybody or any entity. I hated school for that reason, but I love to learn.

I have been very lucky in the people I have met. My wife is the most important person I have met, and her father, who inspired me to read philosophical and mythological works by people such as Joseph Campbell and Friedrich Nietzsche. I have met trustees of the Township I work in, I have met influential people such as Libertarian girl, and YouTube celebrities such as Supadupaflygirl. I have met members of the world stunt association, members of the Wild West Society, independent movie directors, and many others from all walks of life.

The life that my wife and I have forged for ourselves is already so unique. We cast off the acceptable shackles of society and cast off into the great unknown.

As for politics, and indeed anything in life, you must speak up, you must say something, you must do something. Even if you might be wrong at first. We learn by making mistakes. I have gotten in so many arguments, even with good friends on this site, because of apposing viewpoints, but every time I learn something. I learn how to argue better, to argue smarter. I learn that the way I phrase things might be off. I learn to sharpen my viewpoints, to make more sense of them. It is better to be considered a fool for a moment, than to stay quiet and be a fool for your whole life.

As I continue to forge my path, I continue to learn, I continue to pay attention to the world around me, and to others who cross my path. My path is like no other. I came to a thick forest, and began hacking at the branches, learning as I went. Now, already my path is long, it has curves in it, and it is interesting. I continue to push on, deeper and deeper, discovering more and more of life’s treasures along the way.

The freedom movement in this country is growing, and I am growing with it. This week the Tea Party turned five years old, and last year saw the rise of the libertarian movement. Conservatives are growing smarter, are growing wiser, and even liberals are starting to question their leaders actions. The world is waking up, and people are starting to walk off the beaten track.

What is your path, and where are you taking it?

Homesick

Since my birthday on the 21st November, I have become quite homesick. I had a great day; I went out to eat with my wife, and then we went and watched the new James Bond movie. While watching Skyfall I got to see areas of London which I recognized, and I started to feel the pangs of feeling homesick and missing sites that I was familiar with. England might not be the freest country in the world, but it is certainly not a dictatorship. England has given the world many modern conveniences and freedoms. The Magna Carta was used heavily in the formation of the US constitution, and British scientists continue to push the world forward in human discoveries.

I was born and raised in a small city called Canterbury; a city made famous by its ancient cathedral and by Geoffrey Chaucer’s ‘the Canterbury Tales’. It is very much a tourist city, with education at its heart; it has three universities.

Canterbury (ⁱ/ˈkæntərˌbɜri/ or /ˈkæntərˌbɛri/)^[1] is a historic English cathedral city, which lies at the heart of the City of Canterbury, a district of Kent in South East England. It lies on the River Stour.

Originally a Brythonic settlement called *Durou̯ernon (composed of the ancient British roots *duro- “stronghold”, *u̯erno- “alder tree”), it was renamed Durovernum Cantiacorum by the Roman conquerors in the 1st century AD. After it became the chief Jutish settlement, it gained its English name Canterbury, itself derived from the Old English Cantwareburh (“Kent people’s stronghold”). After the Kingdom of Kent’s conversion to Christianity in 597, St Augustine founded an episcopal see in the city and became the first Archbishop of Canterbury, a position that now heads the Church of England and the worldwide Anglican Communion (though the modern-day Province of Canterbury covers the entire south of England). Thomas Becket’s murder at Canterbury Cathedral in 1170 led to the cathedral becoming a place of pilgrimage for Christians worldwide. This pilgrimage provided the theme for Geoffrey Chaucer’s 14th-century literary classic The Canterbury Tales. The literary heritage continued with the birth of the playwright Christopher Marlowe in the city in the 16th century.

Canterbury Cathedral is one of the most famous religious structures in the world.

Parts of the city have been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Many historical structures remain, including a city wall founded in Roman times and rebuilt in the 14th century, the ruins of St Augustine’s Abbey and a Norman castle, and perhaps the oldest school in England, The King’s School. Modern additions include the University of Kent, Canterbury Christ Church University, the University College for the Creative Arts, the Marlowe Theatre, and the St Lawrence Ground, home to Kent County Cricket Club. The city lies at the heart of the City of Canterbury, a local government district.

Canterbury is a popular tourist destination: consistently one of the most-visited cities in the United Kingdom,^[2] the city’s economy is heavily reliant upon tourism. There is also a substantial student population, brought about by the presence of three universities. Canterbury is, however, a relatively small city, when compared with other British cities.

I was born in Canterbury, and went to schools in the city growing up. I attended St Stevens Infant and Junior schools (protestant Christian schools) as a young boy, and attended Canterbury High school through my teenage years. My parent’s philosophy is to live and let live, and to be considerate of others. I was quite shy growing up, but I loved my home town and was very proud of my British heritage. My family goes back hundreds of years, and I am from English heritage as far back as records go. I recently found out through my uncle on my last visit that one of my great great great grand mother’s was Irish, and that her husband brought her back to England. As far as I am aware, my family has always lived in the south east of England.

My home country is very much steeped in tradition, and the ideals of being ‘proper’ are very prominent. English people for the most part live very structured lives, and when I met my wife, I very rebelliously found out that things didn’t have to be that way. In America you can be anything that you want to be. But now as I mature into adult life, I realize that structure is important. I see so many Americans working all hours of the day chasing their tails and not fully experiencing life itself. Sure they might have a big house and a fancy car, but they never have time to fully enjoy it. I look at the Universities and realize I could never go to them through the shear costs. Now that I am fast approaching my later twenties, and the talk of children continues to come up between my wife and I (both our younger sisters now have children) I wonder what kind of life they will be able to have in this country. The land of opportunity seems to be consuming itself, and has become more divided than ever. England has been through its share of ups and downs, and appears to be resilient to the tides of change. America I fear, will not be able to cope with the changes that it now faces.

I want to live in a free world, where anyone can be what they want to be. I do not want some over authoritarian government watching my every move and telling me what I can and cannot do.

I lived within Canterbury’s city limits until age 9 when my parents moved us to a small village called ‘Sturry’ which was right on the outskirts of the city. It was a short 4 mile hike to the center of Canterbury, but we had a house that overlooked a field, and it felt very rural. Sturry is where my mum’s family have lived for over a hundred years, and the village itself is steeped in history.

Human habitation in Sturry is thought to have started around 430,000 years ago, as dated flint implements – namely knives and arrow-tips – show. Other signs of early human activities include a collection of axes and pottery shards from the Bronze Age and more pottery from the Sturry Hill gravel-pits, and a burial-ground near Stonerocks Farm showed that there was an Iron Age settlement of Belgic Celts (who gave Canterbury its pre-Roman name of Durovemum) from the end of the 2nd Century BC. All this evidence indicates that human habitation of some kind existed on the north bank of the River Stour, on Sturry’s site, for hundreds and thousands of years. When the Romans arrived, they built Island Road (the A28) to connect Canterbury, the local tribal capital, with the ferry to the Isle of Thanet, with a branch to their fort at Reculver.

The most important era for Sturry, determining its future shape, size, function and name, was that part of the early 5th century when the beleaguered Romano-Britons brought in Frisians and Jutes as mercenaries to help them fight against invading Picts and Scots, and rewarded them with land. Some of them settled near Sturry: their cemetery was found at Hersden. Then in the mid 5 Century, Kent was re-organised into lathes, or districts. Sturry was the first; Stour-gau, meaning district or lathe on the Stour. The lathe was bounded by the Stour as far as Canterbury in the North by the sea, and farther south as distant as Wye.

The remains of a large village water mill lie near the parish church, and the High Street retains some charming historic buildings. The village virtually adjoins one of the smallest towns in England, Fordwich, where there are further interesting buildings, including the historic Town Hall. Fordwich itself is smaller in size than Sturry. A rare survival, a small granary, constructed with wooden weather-boards is located at Blaxland Farm and has nine staddle stones supporting it. A barn from Vale Farm, Calcott has been re-erected at the Museum of Kent Life, Sandling. A 16th Century manor house and oasthouse, built in 1583 and which belonged to St Augustine’s Abbey in Canterbury still stand in Sturry village beside the medieval tithe barn – although they have all been incorporated into the King School after they were sold by the widow of Lord Milner in 1925.

Since the 1960s a large number of satellite housing estates have been built on the north side of the village, mostly in former woodland, which have turned Sturry into one of the major dormitary villages for Canterbury. Nonetheless, the village is still overwhelmingly rural, with fields for arable farming and livestock grazing, and large amounts of coppice woodland. A number of market gardens can also be found in the countryside around the village. Large and deep quarries are still worked on the edge of the village, with the old workings flooded to provide recreational lakes used primarily for fishing.

During the Second World War, Sturry was one of the most badly bombed villages in England, the greater part of the High Street being destroyed by a parachute mine in 1941 during the Baedeker Blitz, killing 15 people of which 7 were children aged 12 and under.^[1] One of these was a little girl who had been to the bakers’ and whose body was recovered still clutching the bag of buns she had bought.^[2] The same aircraft dropped another bomb, but this landed amongst the allotments. In the book, Letters to Sturry, it is recorded that on Wednesday, 28 August 1940, there were eight separate air raid warnings and on ‘Battle of Britain Day’, 15 September 1940, a German Dornier bomber plane, (Aircraft 2651, 3rd Staffel, Kampfgeschwader 76), crash-landed in a field below Kemberland Wood near the Sarre Penne stream. Three of the five crew were killed and were firstly buried in Sturry Cemetery but then re-interred in the late 1960s into the German war cemetery at Cannock Chase.

Nonetheless a number of interesting buildings remain intact in Sturry, including St Nicholas parish church, which is predominantly Norman in style, with the oldest parts dating to about 1200. The Manor House, built in 1583, is now the junior school of The King’s School, Canterbury.

My grandmother survived the bombing of Sturry and her oldest brother has many stories to tell of German planes flying over head during the war. While England may be more progressive and socialist than in previous decades, it is still very much a capitalist society, and thrives off innovation and technologies. It should be no surprise then that I get very unnerved when I hear people supporting wars in the middle east, and check points at highways in the US. I find this to be fascism 101 and it is something which makes older generations shudder, especially my grandparents. My grandfather still remembers a V2 rocket flying alongside his fathers car while they were driving home one day, and pulling off onto the side of the road, waiting for the bomb to drop in the distance and explode.

I am feeling very homesick right now because I know that Britain will shake off the stupidity of socialism in good time, and will continue to educate its populace in the traditions of old, while teaching the importance of the sciences, math and good English. I fear that America in reaction to socialism from the left, will careen hard to the right and pick up the same failed philosophies of Adolf Hitler during the 1930’s in response to communism.

I don’t particularly consider myself a patriot of either nation, at least not in the traditional statist sense. I don’t blindly support the flag of either nation, but I am very proud of each nation’s history. I love my British heritage, and I love the constitution and values of my adopted nation.

I simply want to live in a free world, and self determine what is best for me. I want to make my own living, and not have others tell me what I can and cannot do. So long as we don’t go out of our way to hurt others, why should we be stopped from acting off our own accord?

I am beginning to care less and less about politics, it is simply a means to an end. The US is rife with corrupt politicians, and the only way to fix that is to learn about it, flush out the bad ones by replacing them, and find all the goodness that you can within yourself. Actions speak louder than words. It is not so much what you believe in that counts, it is the way that you treat others.

It is far more important to live well, educate yourself, and provide a good example than to simply point out others and call them stupid. We teach our kids by setting a good example, so why shouldn’t we live and talk to others in such a manner?

A home is created on values, and by gritting our teeth through the hard times. We must never forget our history, and we must always learn from the mistakes of the past. The world will be a much better place if we can learn to be happy and advance ourselves and enjoy life to the best degree possible, even if the rest of the world is falling apart. The world is built and rebuilt by those who look toward the future. It is up to each of us as individuals to make it a good one.

People are waking up

As I prepare to set off for a much needed camping trip with my little family consisting of myself, my wife and my dog, I leave safe in the knowledge that there are those out there continuing the fight for liberty and truth.

Finally, people are starting to wake up. They are starting to realize that everything is staged.

People are starting to realize that the path they are on will only lead to destruction.

The mainstream media is failing, and the false flag attacks by corrupt governments are failing also.

“Great military peoples have conquered their known world time and time again through the centuries, only to die out in the inevitable ashes of their fire. Well over two thousand years ago, the Chinese philosopher, Laotzu, concluded that:”Weapons often turn upon the wielder, An army’s harvest is a waste of thorns.”We may have to resort to arms in the future, as we have in the past. We may have to use them to prevent atomic war from being launched against us. But let us have the wisdom to realize that the use of force is a sign of weakness on a higher plane, and that a policy based primarily on recourse to arms will sooner or later fail.” — Charles Lindbergh, Of Flight and Life, 1948

America, you have become a nation of enablers and apologists for tyranny and mass murder. You condemn the Nazi and gulag guards of times past even as you celebrate your own mercenaries and torturers, even as you explain away, if not outright cheer, the unspeakable crimes committed by your sons and daughters. You don’t care who you kill, as long as your soldiers are paid, and your munitions, bomb and tank factories are humming.

Safely ensconced in academic luna parks, your leading intellectuals lean slightly right or left, but never enough to rock this blazing gunboat, lest they sour the cocktail parties or, god forbid, have their tenure revoked. Mouths stuffed with antipasti, they’re expert at sidestepping Israel’s prolific crimes, 9/11, Bin Laden’s faux death or the parasitic Federal Reserve, and as another joke election nears, they’re all gung ho about candidates who back illegal wars and banking frauds, since each is supposedly the lesser of two evils.

I did not watch the presidential debates Wednesday night, because I’ve already found out that the two aired contenders are liars. I know that the whole thing was staged, and that no real difficult questions were answered. The status quo was maintained, and apparently Romney won. But there are so few people paying attention to the idiot box we call the TV right now, that it will not swing the vote. This is a good thing. The grip of the corrupt empire is tightening, and more systems are slipping through its fingers.

If we do not wake up soon, we will perish. There are many evil forces at bay, that extend past communism/fascism and the left vs right paradigm.

The dark ages were dark because people barely survived, and paid too much in taxes to feudal lords who lived lavishly of the peoples sacrifice. Inventions were quashed and scientists were hung. The status quo was maintained and the people were silenced. Do not allow anyone to quiet your mind or your resolve.

As I go offline for the weekend, I pray that the world will not while I’m gone.

So while I’m out on my mini adventure, do yourself and the world a favor; don’t let it destroy itself. Stand out as an individual. Rub your eyes, and venture out into the world. You are capable of anything. Evil only triumphs when good men do nothing, and the evil doers are running scared!

Thoughts on the meaning of life

“life is without meaning, you bring the meaning to it” – Joseph Campbell

Well it’s been a hectic past couple of weeks. I wrote about the previous week in my last article, and this past week has been busy too, with end of quarter at work, and with a wedding on Saturday.

I got a chance to relax on Sunday and sit in the hot-tub at my in-laws house. While I was allowing the warm water to relax my muscles and the jets to massage the stress away, I was thinking about the past few weeks and about the future.

The reason I get into politics, is because I can see an erosion of freedom and responsibility in daily life. It is because of this that I argue my points across and try to make sense of it all.

When I take part in life, particularly when I take pictures of families at weddings, I’m not thinking about all the silly politics that goes on. I’m thinking of the meaning of life, and all the family and friends who are supporting the new couple. I’m thinking about how happy everyone is, and how to capture their smiles in the most natural way possible without them even realizing it.

I found out this morning that the father of the bride of one of our previous weddings, died on Saturday, around the same time that we were taking pictures of a newly wed couple and their families dancing and having fun. It is with bitter irony that you realize how fragile life is, and that while one family is singing and dancing, another is going through the terrible pain of loss.

This is the second time this year that a close relative of a newly wed couple has died shortly after us taking the last pictures of them. Its a haunting feeling to know that you took the last ever picture of them alive. The comforting aspect is that you know that you captured a memory of them for the family to treasure even long after they are gone.

With the birth of my second nephew, and the thoughts of starting a family of my own, I return to the political spectrum and wonder how much of a future there will be in the world without peace.

If the death of one person can upset so many people, how would a huge war make you feel? When you realize that many thousands of people die in conflict each year.

If we cannot balance a budget or restrict government growth, if we cannot stop the lobbyists and the corrupt politicians from sending our young men out to war, and continue to restrict growth through legislation. Then how much of a future will there be, not just for us, but for the world?

A friend sent me an email this morning of the space shuttle discovery. It shows the cockpit, and all the instruments. After many conversations with him about Star Trek and space travel, it seems as if we are going backwards as a civilization. Why are we not out there traveling the solar system? Why are we constantly bombing each other and starting wars? Why do we have a ‘war on drugs’? Why can’t we just leave each other alone, and only punish those who actually literally harm others?

Why do we feel the need to use the government as a way to redistribute wealth? Why do we feel the need to use the government to create benefit programs, when charities are perfectly capable of taking care of those in need?

Life has no meaning unless you bring meaning to it. When you are born, you are an empty vessel. It is up to your parents to teach you how to walk and talk. After that, it is up to you to continue the learning process. It is up to you to advance yourself. It is up to you not to hold yourself back. You must do what you feel is right. You must hold yourself to your own highest moral standards.

Life moves forward when you cherish it, and advance yourself through productive means. When you embrace knowledge and creativity, when you learn all that you can, and work toward your goals. You can and will achieve anything.

When you reject the old, the useless, the warn out policies of the past, and embrace new ideas built upon the learning of successes throughout the world, then you will have achieved a bright new future in which anything is possible.

I reject the two party system in politics because it is broken and it does not work. From an outside perspective, and can say they are almost identical.

I reject war because it is a racket. I am perfectly capable of defending myself.

I embrace the US constitution, because it is the most well written document to protect and embrace freedoms that the world has ever seen.

I embrace liberty and free markets because they allow the individual to create whatever he or she desires, and then sell that product to others to enhance their own lives.

I embrace value, true value, because if you value your life, the lives of others, the value of the inventions created by men of the mind.

I embrace new technologies. These new technologies were invented, and without them, we would still live in caves and would not have a civilization to begin with.

I embrace nature, because nature is abundant, and everything erupts forth from it.

I embrace respect. Because without it, fights ensue, and ideas get squashed. It is not the better idea that succeeds in battle, but the person with the largest hammer. Battles are necessary from time to time, but logic should always be supported by fact, and then brought forward as the successor.

Life has meaning when you bring meaning to it. What is the meaning of your life? What have you done today? What have you done to enhance and enrich your own life? And in turn, what have you done to enhance and enrich the lives of those around you?

Your hard work pays off when you keep going despite bumps in the road. Sometimes you have to stop and alter your course slightly, or even go off road, but if you stay on track you will get to your destination.

When was the last time you looked up at the stars? Can you imagine a better future?

What did you do to make your life happy today?

Are you living a happy life?

We live for our own happiness. If we are not happy, or able to find contentment, then our lives are wasted. You only get one shot at life. So make it a good one.

Why we fight

I have nothing to gain from these posts except a chance at a future.

There are periods in history where the individual must stand up and fight, or perish with the collective. We are currently living in such a time.

I do not relish the idea of pounding out an article each day. Well; not every day. There are days, as in recently that I’d rather just wake up, take a shower, make a pot of coffee, cook breakfast and take the dog for a walk, and not think about anything but the fresh morning smell and the sun rising.

The reason I study politics and philosophy is because politics affects my life whether I like it or not, and philosophy is the key to unlocking the potential to change the status quo and deal with life in general.

In a political sense, I do not fall into the left/right paradigm. It makes no sense to me, and I only take part in it when there is advancement to be gained toward liberty and economic freedom.

With the current presidential contenders from the democrats and republicans there is a dead heat. They are both as bad as each other. I don’t buy the idea that Barack Obama is an undercover Marxist Muslim here to drive the country back into the stone age. Equally I wouldn’t call Mitt Romney a great businessman, or our lord and savior. At best, these two clowns are puppets who will do whatever their financial backers tell them to. Almost all of those in power have been bought and paid for, and it does not matter if they are all Marxists in disguise or if they are fascists only interested in a quick buck. They are all bad, and they need to go.

I’m not interested in term limits, because there are good congressmen out there such as Ron Paul who have served well for over two decades. Term limits would only give the wrong-doers a tighter time frame to commit their evil acts.

Our problems are far deeper than ‘the economy’, ‘benefits’, ‘medicare/medicaid’ and all the other ‘issues’ that have been trumped up by the past administrations and played like a pied piper for all of us to debate about fruitlessly and endlessly.

The United States has the most advanced document that enshrines human freedom ever conceived by human intelligence. The protection of this document and the enforcement of it by its citizens is paramount to the survival of this country and to the world.

Before the US constitution there was the Magna Carta, a document which was signed in my very own home town of Canterbury, England. For me; freedom and the ability to say and do as you please runs deep.

If we do not restrict the power of government from both sides of the US political isle soon, we will lose the ability to do so entirely.

For my generation, it really is liberty or death. We are not much interested in all the other ‘issues’. On our current path; which is nearing hyperinflation; we know that the economy will fail. We can deal with that, we can rebuild that. But if we lose freedom now, we will never again see it in our lifetime. Economies boom and bust, but can be rebuilt. But can a country which has lost its moral compass return to freedom so quickly? I doubt it.

No one in my age group who I have spoken to seriously about politics is going to vote for Romney or Obama. They are all Ron Paul supporters. We will all be voting for Gary Johnson in this election period, in support of the same ideals. If you are serious about defending liberty, and providing a chance at a future for my generation, I suggest you do the same.

It does not matter if we win the election or not. Mitt Romney is not going to beat Barack Obama. Romney is too stiff, too out of touch, and his rejection of the young and grassroots movements has already cost him the election.

Can we survive another four years of Obama? That is uncertain. Can we afford not to make a difference in this election? No. We must make a difference. The more people vote libertarian, the bigger the message will be to Washington to change its ways. Who knows, we might even win.

Freedom is not won overnight. It takes many battles, many of which will be lost, but over time the message will spread and the war will be won. But it is up to the individuals to stand up and make a difference. And that is why we fight.

The Theory and Practice of Oligarchy

After writing Monday’s article, I started doing more research into oligarchies and the reasons behind our battles in society. I find that writing down ideas is a good way to find the truth; you begin to connect the dots, and one idea always leads to another. While writing, I did some research and came across this article, it is very long, and very interesting:

THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF OLIGARCHICAL COLLECTIVISM

by Emmanuel Goldstein

(The ‘Book within a Book’ from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four)

Chapter 1 – Ignorance is Strength
Chapter 2 – Freedom is Slavery
Chapter 3 – War is Peace

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The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism is not a book in it’s own right. It a book with a book from George Orwell’s Nineteen-Eghty-Four. Throught most of the Novel this “Book within a Book” is simply refered to as “Goldstein’s Book” — a reference to it’s supposed author, Emannuel Goldstein. Winston Smith aquires this book from O’Brien

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Chapter I
Ignorance is Strength

Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of the Neolithic Age, there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle, and the Low. They have been subdivided in many ways, they have borne countless different names, and their relative numbers, as well as their attitude towards one another, have varied from age to age: but the essential structure of society has never altered. Even after enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium, however far it is pushed one way or the other.

The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable. The aim of the High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High. The aim of the Low, when they have an aim — for it is an abiding characteristic of the Low that they are too much crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittently conscious of anything outside their daily lives — is to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal. Thus throughout history a struggle which is the same in its main outlines recurs over and over again. For long periods the High seem to be securely in power, but sooner or later there always comes a moment when they lose either their belief in themselves or their capacity to govern efficiently, or both. They are then overthrown by the Middle, who enlist the Low on their side by pretending to them that they are fighting for liberty and justice. As soon as they have reached their objective, the Middle thrust the Low back into their old position of servitude, and themselves become the High. Presently a new Middle group splits off from one of the other groups, or from both of them, and the struggle begins over again. Of the three groups, only the Low are never even temporarily successful in achieving their aims. It would be an exaggeration to say that throughout history there has been no progress of a material kind. Even today, in a period of decline, the average human being is physically better off than he was a few centuries ago. But no advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimetre nearer. From the point of view of the Low, no historic change has ever meant much more than a change in the name of their masters.

By the late nineteenth century the recurrence of this pattern had become obvious to many observers. There then rose schools of thinkers who interpreted history as a cyclical process and claimed to show that inequality was the unalterable law of human life. This doctrine, of course, had always had its adherents, but in the manner in which it was now put forward there was a significant change. In the past the need for a hierarchical form of society had been the doctrine specifically of the High. It had been preached by kings and aristocrats and by the priests, lawyers, and the like who were parasitical upon them, and it had generally been softened by promises of compensation in an imaginary world beyond the grave. The Middle, so long as it was struggling for power, had always made use of such terms as freedom, justice, and fraternity. Now, however, the concept of human brotherhood began to be assailed by people who were not yet in positions of command, but merely hoped to be so before long. In the past the Middle had made revolutions under the banner of equality, and then had established a fresh tyranny as soon as the old one was overthrown. The new Middle groups in effect proclaimed their tyranny beforehand. Socialism, a theory which appeared in the early nineteenth century and was the last link in a chain of thought stretching back to the slave rebellions of antiquity, was still deeply infected by the Utopianism of past ages. But in each variant of Socialism that appeared from about 1900 onwards the aim of establishing liberty and equality was more and more openly abandoned. The new movements which appeared in the middle years of the century, Ingsoc in Oceania, Neo-Bolshevism in Eurasia, Death-Worship, as it is commonly called, in Eastasia, had the conscious aim of perpetuating unfreedom and inequality. These new movements, of course, grew out of the old ones and tended to keep their names and pay lip-service to their ideology. But the purpose of all of them was to arrest progress and freeze history at a chosen moment. The familiar pendulum swing was to happen once more, and then stop. As usual, the High were to be turned out by the Middle, who would then become the High; but this time, by conscious strategy, the High would be able to maintain their position permanently.

The new doctrines arose partly because of the accumulation of historical knowledge, and the growth of the historical sense, which had hardly existed before the nineteenth century. The cyclical movement of history was now intelligible, or appeared to be so; and if it was intelligible, then it was alterable. But the principal, underlying cause was that, as early as the beginning of the twentieth century, human equality had become technically possible. It was still true that men were not equal in their native talents and that functions had to be specialized in ways that favoured some individuals against others; but there was no longer any real need for class distinctions or for large differences of wealth. In earlier ages, class distinctions had been not only inevitable but desirable. Inequality was the price of civilization. With the development of machine production, however, the case was altered. Even if it was still necessary for human beings to do different kinds of work, it was no longer necessary for them to live at different social or economic levels. Therefore, from the point of view of the new groups who were on the point of seizing power, human equality was no longer an ideal to be striven after, but a danger to be averted. In more primitive ages, when a just and peaceful society was in fact not possible, it had been fairly easy to believe it. The idea of an earthly paradise in which men should live together in a state of brotherhood, without laws and without brute labour, had haunted the human imagination for thousands of years. And this vision had had a certain hold even on the groups who actually profited by each historical change. The heirs of the French, English, and American revolutions had partly believed in their own phrases about the rights of man, freedom of speech, equality before the law, and the like, and have even allowed their conduct to be influenced by them to some extent. But by the fourth decade of the twentieth century all the main currents of political thought were authoritarian. The earthly paradise had been discredited at exactly the moment when it became realizable. Every new political theory, by whatever name it called itself, led back to hierarchy and regimentation. And in the general hardening of outlook that set in round about 1930, practices which had been long abandoned, in some cases for hundreds of years — imprisonment without trial, the use of war prisoners as slaves, public executions, torture to extract confessions, the use of hostages, and the deportation of whole populations-not only became common again, but were tolerated and even defended by people who considered themselves enlightened and progressive.

It was only after a decade of national wars, civil wars, revolutions, and counter-revolutions in all parts of the world that Ingsoc and its rivals emerged as fully worked-out political theories. But they had been foreshadowed by the various systems, generally called totalitarian, which had appeared earlier in the century, and the main outlines of the world which would emerge from the prevailing chaos had long been obvious. What kind of people would control this world had been equally obvious. The new aristocracy was made up for the most part of bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organizers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists, and professional politicians. These people, whose origins lay in the salaried middle class and the upper grades of the working class, had been shaped and brought together by the barren world of monopoly industry and centralized government. As compared with their opposite numbers in past ages, they were less avaricious, less tempted by luxury, hungrier for pure power, and, above all, more conscious of what they were doing and more intent on crushing opposition. This last difference was cardinal. By comparison with that existing today, all the tyrannies of the past were half-hearted and inefficient. The ruling groups were always infected to some extent by liberal ideas, and were content to leave loose ends everywhere, to regard only the overt act and to be uninterested in what their subjects were thinking. Even the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages was tolerant by modern standards. Part of the reason for this was that in the past no government had the power to keep its citizens under constant surveillance. The invention of print, however, made it easier to manipulate public opinion, and the film and the radio carried the process further. With the development of television, and the technical advance which made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an end. Every citizen, or at least every citizen important enough to be worth watching, could be kept for twenty-four hours a day under the eyes of the police and in the sound of official propaganda, with all other channels of communication closed. The possibility of enforcing not only complete obedience to the will of the State, but complete uniformity of opinion on all subjects, now existed for the first time.

After the revolutionary period of the fifties and sixties, society regrouped itself, as always, into High, Middle, and Low. But the new High group, unlike all its forerunners, did not act upon instinct but knew what was needed to safeguard its position. It had long been realized that the only secure basis for oligarchy is collectivism. Wealth and privilege are most easily defended when they are possessed jointly. The so-called ‘abolition of private property’ which took place in the middle years of the century meant, in effect, the concentration of property in far fewer hands than before: but with this difference, that the new owners were a group instead of a mass of individuals. Individually, no member of the Party owns anything, except petty personal belongings. Collectively, the Party owns everything in Oceania, because it controls everything, and disposes of the products as it thinks fit. In the years following the Revolution it was able to step into this commanding position almost unopposed, because the whole process was represented as an act of collectivization. It had always been assumed that if the capitalist class were expropriated, Socialism must follow: and unquestionably the capitalists had been expropriated. Factories, mines, land, houses, transport — everything had been taken away from them: and since these things were no longer private property, it followed that they must be public property. Ingsoc, which grew out of the earlier Socialist movement and inherited its phraseology, has in fact carried out the main item in the Socialist programme; with the result, foreseen and intended beforehand, that economic inequality has been made permanent.

But the problems of perpetuating a hierarchical society go deeper than this. There are only four ways in which a ruling group can fall from power. Either it is conquered from without, or it governs so inefficiently that the masses are stirred to revolt, or it allows a strong and discontented Middle group to come into being, or it loses its own self-confidence and willingness to govern. These causes do not operate singly, and as a rule all four of them are present in some degree. A ruling class which could guard against all of them would remain in power permanently. Ultimately the determining factor is the mental attitude of the ruling class itself.

After the middle of the present century, the first danger had in reality disappeared. Each of the three powers which now divide the world is in fact unconquerable, and could only become conquerable through slow demographic changes which a government with wide powers can easily avert. The second danger, also, is only a theoretical one. The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become aware that they are oppressed. The recurrent economic crises of past times were totally unnecessary and are not now permitted to happen, but other and equally large dislocations can and do happen without having political results, because there is no way in which discontent can become articulate. As for the problem of overproduction, which has been latent in our society since the development of machine technique, it is solved by the device of continuous warfare (see Chapter III), which is also useful in keying up public morale to the necessary pitch. From the point of view of our present rulers, therefore, the only genuine dangers are the splitting-off of a new group of able, underemployed, power-hungry people, and the growth of liberalism and scepticism in their own ranks. The problem, that is to say, is educational. It is a problem of continuously moulding the consciousness both of the directing group and of the larger executive group that lies immediately below it. The consciousness of the masses needs only to be influenced in a negative way.

Given this background, one could infer, if one did not know it already, the general structure of Oceanic society. At the apex of the pyramid comes Big Brother. Big Brother is infallible and all-powerful. Every success, every achievement, every victory, every scientific discovery, all knowledge, all wisdom, all happiness, all virtue, are held to issue directly from his leadership and inspiration. Nobody has ever seen Big Brother. He is a face on the hoardings, a voice on the telescreen. We may be reasonably sure that he will never die, and there is already considerable uncertainty as to when he was born. Big Brother is the guise in which the Party chooses to exhibit itself to the world. His function is to act as a focusing point for love, fear, and reverence, emotions which are more easily felt towards an individual than towards an organization. Below Big Brother comes the Inner Party. Its numbers limited to six millions, or something less than 2 per cent of the population of Oceania. Below the Inner Party comes the Outer Party, which, if the Inner Party is described as the brain of the State, may be justly likened to the hands. Below that come the dumb masses whom we habitually refer to as ‘the proles’, numbering perhaps 85 per cent of the population. In the terms of our earlier classification, the proles are the Low: for the slave population of the equatorial lands who pass constantly from conqueror to conqueror, are not a permanent or necessary part of the structure.

In principle, membership of these three groups is not hereditary. The child of Inner Party parents is in theory not born into the Inner Party. Admission to either branch of the Party is by examination, taken at the age of sixteen. Nor is there any racial discrimination, or any marked domination of one province by another. Jews, Negroes, South Americans of pure Indian blood are to be found in the highest ranks of the Party, and the administrators of any area are always drawn from the inhabitants of that area. In no part of Oceania do the inhabitants have the feeling that they are a colonial population ruled from a distant capital. Oceania has no capital, and its titular head is a person whose whereabouts nobody knows. Except that English is its chief lingua franca and Newspeak its official language, it is not centralized in any way. Its rulers are not held together by blood-ties but by adherence to a common doctrine. It is true that our society is stratified, and very rigidly stratified, on what at first sight appear to be hereditary lines. There is far less to- and-fro movement between the different groups than happened under capitalism or even in the pre-industrial age. Between the two branches of the Party there is a certain amount of interchange, but only so much as will ensure that weaklings are excluded from the Inner Party and that ambitious members of the Outer Party are made harmless by allowing them to rise. Proletarians, in practice, are not allowed to graduate into the Party. The most gifted among them, who might possibly become nuclei of discontent, are simply marked down by the Thought Police and eliminated. But this state of affairs is not necessarily permanent, nor is it a matter of principle. The Party is not a class in the old sense of the word. It does not aim at transmitting power to its own children, as such; and if there were no other way of keeping the ablest people at the top, it would be perfectly prepared to recruit an entire new generation from the ranks of the proletariat. In the crucial years, the fact that the Party was not a hereditary body did a great deal to neutralize opposition. The older kind of Socialist, who had been trained to fight against something called ‘class privilege’ assumed that what is not hereditary cannot be permanent. He did not see that the continuity of an oligarchy need not be physical, nor did he pause to reflect that hereditary aristocracies have always been shortlived, whereas adoptive organizations such as the Catholic Church have sometimes lasted for hundreds or thousands of years. The essence of oligarchical rule is not father-to-son inheritance, but the persistence of a certain world-view and a certain way of life, imposed by the dead upon the living. A ruling group is a ruling group so long as it can nominate its successors. The Party is not concerned with perpetuating its blood but with perpetuating itself. Who wields power is not important, provided that the hierarchical structure remains always the same.

All the beliefs, habits, tastes, emotions, mental attitudes that characterize our time are really designed to sustain the mystique of the Party and prevent the true nature of present-day society from being perceived. Physical rebellion, or any preliminary move towards rebellion, is at present not possible. From the proletarians nothing is to be feared. Left to themselves, they will continue from generation to generation and from century to century, working, breeding, and dying, not only without any impulse to rebel, but without the power of grasping that the world could be other than it is. They could only become dangerous if the advance of industrial technique made it necessary to educate them more highly; but, since military and commercial rivalry are no longer important, the level of popular education is actually declining. What opinions the masses hold, or do not hold, is looked on as a matter of indifference. They can be granted intellectual liberty because they have no intellect. In a Party member, on the other hand, not even the smallest deviation of opinion on the most unimportant subject can be tolerated.

Though Police A Party member lives from birth to death under the eye of the Thought Police. Even when he is alone he can never be sure that he is alone. Wherever he may be, asleep or awake, working or resting, in his bath or in bed, he can be inspected without warning and without knowing that he is being inspected. Nothing that he does is indifferent. His friendships, his relaxations, his behaviour towards his wife and children, the expression of his face when he is alone, the words he mutters in sleep, even the characteristic movements of his body, are all jealously scrutinized. Not only any actual misdemeanour, but any eccentricity, however small, any change of habits, any nervous mannerism that could possibly be the symptom of an inner struggle, is certain to be detected. He has no freedom of choice in any direction whatever. On the other hand his actions are not regulated by law or by any clearly formulated code of behaviour. In Oceania there is no law. Thoughts and actions which, when detected, mean certain death are not formally forbidden, and the endless purges, arrests, tortures, imprisonments, and vaporizations are not inflicted as punishment for crimes which have actually been committed, but are merely the wiping-out of persons who might perhaps commit a crime at some time in the future. A Party member is required to have not only the right opinions, but the right instincts. Many of the beliefs and attitudes demanded of him are never plainly stated, and could not be stated without laying bare the contradictions inherent in Ingsoc. If he is a person naturally orthodox (in Newspeak a goodthinker), he will in all circumstances know, without taking thought, what is the true belief or the desirable emotion. But in any case an elaborate mental training, undergone in childhood and grouping itself round the Newspeak words crimestop, blackwhite, and doublethink, makes him unwilling and unable to think too deeply on any subject whatever.

A Party member is expected to have no private emotions and no respites from enthusiasm. He is supposed to live in a continuous frenzy of hatred of foreign enemies and internal traitors, triumph over victories, and self-abasement before the power and wisdom of the Party. The discontents produced by his bare, unsatisfying life are deliberately turned outwards and dissipated by such devices as the Two Minutes Hate, and the speculations which might possibly induce a sceptical or rebellious attitude are killed in advance by his early acquired inner discipline. The first and simplest stage in the discipline, which can be taught even to young children, is called, in Newspeak, crimestop. Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity. But stupidity is not enough. On the contrary, orthodoxy in the full sense demands a control over one’s own mental processes as complete as that of a contortionist over his body. Oceanic society rests ultimately on the belief that Big Brother is omnipotent and that the Party is infallible. But since in reality Big Brother is not omnipotent and the party is not infallible, there is need for an unwearying, moment-to-moment flexibility in the treatment of facts. The keyword here is blackwhite. Like so many Newspeak words, this word has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary. This demands a continuous alteration of the past, made possible by the system of thought which really embraces all the rest, and which is known in Newspeak as doublethink.

The alteration of the past is necessary for two reasons, one of which is subsidiary and, so to speak, precautionary. The subsidiary reason is that the Party member, like the proletarian, tolerates present-day conditions partly because he has no standards of comparison. He must be cut off from the past, just as he must be cut off from foreign countries, because it is necessary for him to believe that he is better off than his ancestors and that the average level of material comfort is constantly rising. But by far the more important reason for the readjustment of the past is the need to safeguard the infallibility of the Party. It is not merely that speeches, statistics, and records of every kind must be constantly brought up to date in order to show that the predictions of the Party were in all cases right. It is also that no change in doctrine or in political alignment can ever be admitted. For to change one’s mind, or even one’s policy, is a confession of weakness. If, for example, Eurasia or Eastasia (whichever it may be) is the enemy today, then that country must always have been the enemy. And if the facts say otherwise then the facts must be altered. Thus history is continuously rewritten. This day- to-day falsification of the past, carried out by the Ministry of Truth, is as necessary to the stability of the regime as the work of repression and espionage carried out by the Ministry of Love.

The mutability of the past is the central tenet of Ingsoc. Past events, it is argued, have no objective existence, but survive only in written records and in human memories. The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon. And since the Party is in full control of all records and in equally full control of the minds of its members, it follows that the past is whatever the Party chooses to make it. It also follows that though the past is alterable, it never has been altered in any specific instance. For when it has been recreated in whatever shape is needed at the moment, then this new version is the past, and no different past can ever have existed. This holds good even when, as often happens, the same event has to be altered out of recognition several times in the course of a year. At all times the Party is in possession of absolute truth, and clearly the absolute can never have been different from what it is now. It will be seen that the control of the past depends above all on the training of memory. To make sure that all written records agree with the orthodoxy of the moment is merely a mechanical act. But it is also necessary to remember that events happened in the desired manner. And if it is necessary to rearrange one’s memories or to tamper with written records, then it is necessary to forget that one has done so. The trick of doing this can be learned like any other mental technique. It is learned by the majority of Party members, and certainly by all who are intelligent as well as orthodox. In Oldspeak it is called, quite frankly, ‘reality control’. In Newspeak it is called doublethink, though doublethink comprises much else as well.

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows that he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated. The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt. Doublethink lies at the very heart of Ingsoc, since the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies — all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth. Ultimately it is by means of doublethink that the Party has been able — and may, for all we know, continue to be able for thousands of years — to arrest the course of history.

All past oligarchies have fallen from power either because they ossified or because they grew soft. Either they became stupid and arrogant, failed to adjust themselves to changing circumstances, and were overthrown; or they became liberal and cowardly, made concessions when they should have used force, and once again were overthrown. They fell, that is to say, either through consciousness or through unconsciousness. It is the achievement of the Party to have produced a system of thought in which both conditions can exist simultaneously. And upon no other intellectual basis could the dominion of the Party be made permanent. If one is to rule, and to continue ruling, one must be able to dislocate the sense of reality. For the secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one’s own infallibility with the Power to learn from past mistakes.

It need hardly be said that the subtlest practitioners of doublethink are those who invented doublethink and know that it is a vast system of mental cheating. In our society, those who have the best knowledge of what is happening are also those who are furthest from seeing the world as it is. In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion; the more intelligent, the less sane. One clear illustration of this is the fact that war hysteria increases in intensity as one rises in the social scale. Those whose attitude towards the war is most nearly rational are the subject peoples of the disputed territories. To these people the war is simply a continuous calamity which sweeps to and fro over their bodies like a tidal wave. Which side is winning is a matter of complete indifference to them. They are aware that a change of overlordship means simply that they will be doing the same work as before for new masters who treat them in the same manner as the old ones. The slightly more favoured workers whom we call ‘the proles’ are only intermittently conscious of the war. When it is necessary they can be prodded into frenzies of fear and hatred, but when left to themselves they are capable of forgetting for long periods that the war is happening. It is in the ranks of the Party, and above all of the Inner Party, that the true war enthusiasm is found. World-conquest is believed in most firmly by those who know it to be impossible. This peculiar linking-together of opposites — knowledge with ignorance, cynicism with fanaticism-is one of the chief distinguishing marks of Oceanic society. The official ideology abounds with contradictions even when there is no practical reason for them. Thus, the Party rejects and vilifies every principle for which the Socialist movement originally stood, and it chooses to do this in the name of Socialism. It preaches a contempt for the working class unexampled for centuries past, and it dresses its members in a uniform which was at one time peculiar to manual workers and was adopted for that reason. It systematically undermines the solidarity of the family, and it calls its leader by a name which is a direct appeal to the sentiment of family loyalty. Even the names of the four Ministries by which we are governed exhibit a sort of impudence in their deliberate reversal of the facts. The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy; they are deliberate exercises in doublethink. For it is only by reconciling contradictions that power can be retained indefinitely. In no other way could the ancient cycle be broken. If human equality is to be for ever averted — if the High, as we have called them, are to keep their places permanently — then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity.

But there is one question which until this moment we have almost ignored. It is; why should human equality be averted? Supposing that the mechanics of the process have been rightly described, what is the motive for this huge, accurately planned effort to freeze history at a particular moment of time?

Here we reach the central secret. As we have seen. The mystique of the Party, and above all of the Inner Party, depends upon doublethink. But deeper than this lies the original motive, the never-questioned instinct that first led to the seizure of power and brought doublethink, the Thought Police, continuous warfare, and all the other necessary paraphernalia into existence afterwards. This motive really consists…

What is it we're shooting for? Chapter II
Freedom is Slavery

(Ommited from book)

Chapter III
War is Peace

The splitting up of the world into three great super-states was an event which could be and indeed was foreseen before the middle of the twentieth century. With the absorption of Europe by Russia and of the British Empire by the United States, two of the three existing powers, Eurasia and Oceania, were already effectively in being. The third, Eastasia, only emerged as a distinct unit after another decade of confused fighting. The frontiers between the three super-states are in some places arbitrary, and in others they fluctuate according to the fortunes of war, but in general they follow geographical lines. Eurasia comprises the whole of the northern part of the European and Asiatic land-mass, from Portugal to the Bering Strait. Oceania comprises the Americas, the Atlantic islands including the British Isles, Australasia, and the southern portion of Africa. Eastasia, smaller than the others and with a less definite western frontier, comprises China and the countries to the south of it, the Japanese islands and a large but fluctuating portion of Manchuria, Mongolia, and Tibet.

The Three Superstates

In one combination or another, these three super-states are permanently at war, and have been so for the past twenty-five years. War, however, is no longer the desperate, annihilating struggle that it was in the early decades of the twentieth century. It is a warfare of limited aims between combatants who are unable to destroy one another, have no material cause for fighting and are not divided by any genuine ideological difference. This is not to say that either the conduct of war, or the prevailing attitude towards it, has become less bloodthirsty or more chivalrous. On the contrary, war hysteria is continuous and universal in all countries, and such acts as raping, looting, the slaughter of children, the reduction of whole populations to slavery, and reprisals against prisoners which extend even to boiling and burying alive, are looked upon as normal, and, when they are committed by one’s own side and not by the enemy, meritorious. But in a physical sense war involves very small numbers of people, mostly highly-trained specialists, and causes comparatively few casualties. The fighting, when there is any, takes place on the vague frontiers whose whereabouts the average man can only guess at, or round the Floating Fortresses which guard strategic spots on the sea lanes. In the centres of civilization war means no more than a continuous shortage of consumption goods, and the occasional crash of a rocket bomb which may cause a few scores of deaths. War has in fact changed its character. More exactly, the reasons for which war is waged have changed in their order of importance. Motives which were already present to some small extent in the great wars of the early twentieth century have now become dominant and are consciously recognized and acted upon.

To understand the nature of the present war — for in spite of the regrouping which occurs every few years, it is always the same war — one must realize in the first place that it is impossible for it to be decisive. None of the three super-states could be definitively conquered even by the other two in combination. They are too evenly matched, and their natural defenses are too formidable. Eurasia is protected by its vast land spaces. Oceania by the width of the Atlantic and the Pacific, Eastasia by the fecundity and industriousness of its inhabitants. Secondly, there is no longer, in a material sense, anything to fight about. With the establishment of self-contained economies, in which production and consumption are geared to one another, the scramble for markets which was a main cause of previous wars has come to an end, while the competition for raw materials is no longer a matter of life and death. In any case each of the three super-states is so vast that it can obtain almost all the materials that it needs within its own boundaries. In so far as the war has a direct economic purpose, it is a war for labour power. Between the frontiers of the super- states, and not permanently in the possession of any of them, there lies a rough quadrilateral with its corners at Tangier, Brazzaville, Darwin, and Hong Kong, containing within it about a fifth of the population of the earth. It is for the possession of these thickly-populated regions, and of the northern ice-cap, that the three powers are constantly struggling. In practice no one power ever controls the whole of the disputed area. Portions of it are constantly changing hands, and it is the chance of seizing this or that fragment by a sudden stroke of treachery that dictates the endless changes of alignment.

All of the disputed territories contain valuable minerals, and some of them yield important vegetable products such as rubber which in colder climates it is necessary to synthesize by comparatively expensive methods. But above all they contain a bottomless reserve of cheap labour. Whichever power controls equatorial Africa, or the countries of the Middle East, or Southern India, or the Indonesian Archipelago, disposes also of the bodies of scores or hundreds of millions of ill-paid and hard-working coolies. The inhabitants of these areas, reduced more or less openly to the status of slaves, pass continually from conqueror to conqueror, and are expended like so much coal or oil in the race to turn out more armaments, to capture more territory, to control more labour power, to turn out more armaments, to capture more territory, and so on indefinitely. It should be noted that the fighting never really moves beyond the edges of the disputed areas. The frontiers of Eurasia flow back and forth between the basin of the Congo and the northern shore of the Mediterranean; the islands of the Indian Ocean and the Pacific are constantly being captured and recaptured by Oceania or by Eastasia; in Mongolia the dividing line between Eurasia and Eastasia is never stable; round the Pole all three powers lay claim to enormous territories which in fact are largely unihabited and unexplored: but the balance of power always remains roughly even, and the territory which forms the heartland of each super-state always remains inviolate. Moreover, the labour of the exploited peoples round the Equator is not really necessary to the world’s economy. They add nothing to the wealth of the world, since whatever they produce is used for purposes of war, and the object of waging a war is always to be in a better position in which to wage another war. By their labour the slave populations allow the tempo of continuous warfare to be speeded up. But if they did not exist, the structure of world society, and the process by which it maintains itself, would not be essentially different.

The primary aim of modern warfare (in accordance with the principles of doublethink, this aim is simultaneously recognized and not recognized by the directing brains of the Inner Party) is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living. Ever since the end of the nineteenth century, the problem of what to do with the surplus of consumption goods has been latent in industrial society. At present, when few human beings even have enough to eat, this problem is obviously not urgent, and it might not have become so, even if no artificial processes of destruction had been at work. The world of today is a bare, hungry, dilapidated place compared with the world that existed before 1914, and still more so if compared with the imaginary future to which the people of that period looked forward. In the early twentieth century, the vision of a future society unbelievably rich, leisured, orderly, and efficient — a glittering antiseptic world of glass and steel and snow-white concrete — was part of the consciousness of nearly every literate person. Science and technology were developing at a prodigious speed, and it seemed natural to assume that they would go on developing. This failed to happen, partly because of the impoverishment caused by a long series of wars and revolutions, partly because scientific and technical progress depended on the empirical habit of thought, which could not survive in a strictly regimented society. As a whole the world is more primitive today than it was fifty years ago. Certain backward areas have advanced, and various devices, always in some way connected with warfare and police espionage, have been developed, but experiment and invention have largely stopped, and the ravages of the atomic war of the nineteen- fifties have never been fully repaired. Nevertheless the dangers inherent in the machine are still there. From the moment when the machine first made its appearance it was clear to all thinking people that the need for human drudgery, and therefore to a great extent for human inequality, had disappeared. If the machine were used deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt, illiteracy, and disease could be eliminated within a few generations. And in fact, without being used for any such purpose, but by a sort of automatic process — by producing wealth which it was sometimes impossible not to distribute — the machine did raise the living standards of the average human being very greatly over a period of about fifty years at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries.

But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction — indeed, in some sense was the destruction — of a hierarchical society. In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motor-car or even an aeroplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared. If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction. It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance. To return to the agricultural past, as some thinkers about the beginning of the twentieth century dreamed of doing, was not a practicable solution. It conflicted with the tendency towards mechanization which had become quasi-instinctive throughout almost the whole world, and moreover, any country which remained industrially backward was helpless in a military sense and was bound to be dominated, directly or indirectly, by its more advanced rivals.

Nor was it a satisfactory solution to keep the masses in poverty by restricting the output of goods. This happened to a great extent during the final phase of capitalism, roughly between 1920 and 1940. The economy of many countries was allowed to stagnate, land went out of cultivation, capital equipment was not added to, great blocks of the population were prevented from working and kept half alive by State charity. But this, too, entailed military weakness, and since the privations it inflicted were obviously unnecessary, it made opposition inevitable. The problem was how to keep the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real wealth of the world. Goods must be produced, but they must not be distributed. And in practice the only way of achieving this was by continuous warfare.

What a Wonderful World The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. Even when weapons of war are not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of expending labour power without producing anything that can be consumed. A Floating Fortress, for example, has locked up in it the labour that would build several hundred cargo-ships. Ultimately it is scrapped as obsolete, never having brought any material benefit to anybody, and with further enormous labours another Floating Fortress is built. In principle the war effort is always so planned as to eat up any surplus that might exist after meeting the bare needs of the population. In practice the needs of the population are always underestimated, with the result that there is a chronic shortage of half the necessities of life; but this is looked on as an advantage. It is deliberate policy to keep even the favoured groups somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another. By the standards of the early twentieth century, even a member of the Inner Party lives an austere, laborious kind of life. Nevertheless, the few luxuries that he does enjoy his large, well-appointed flat, the better texture of his clothes, the better quality of his food and drink and tobacco, his two or three servants, his private motor-car or helicopter — set him in a different world from a member of the Outer Party, and the members of the Outer Party have a similar advantage in comparison with the submerged masses whom we call ‘the proles’. The social atmosphere is that of a besieged city, where the possession of a lump of horseflesh makes the difference between wealth and poverty. And at the same time the consciousness of being at war, and therefore in danger, makes the handing-over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival.

War, it will be seen, accomplishes the necessary destruction, but accomplishes it in a psychologically acceptable way. In principle it would be quite simple to waste the surplus labour of the world by building temples and pyramids, by digging holes and filling them up again, or even by producing vast quantities of goods and then setting fire to them. But this would provide only the economic and not the emotional basis for a hierarchical society. What is concerned here is not the morale of masses, whose attitude is unimportant so long as they are kept steadily at work, but the morale of the Party itself. Even the humblest Party member is expected to be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph. In other words it is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state of war. It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed is that a state of war should exist. The splitting of the intelligence which the Party requires of its members, and which is more easily achieved in an atmosphere of war, is now almost universal, but the higher up the ranks one goes, the more marked it becomes. It is precisely in the Inner Party that war hysteria and hatred of the enemy are strongest. In his capacity as an administrator, it is often necessary for a member of the Inner Party to know that this or that item of war news is untruthful, and he may often be aware that the entire war is spurious and is either not happening or is being waged for purposes quite other than the declared ones: but such knowledge is easily neutralized by the technique of doublethink. Meanwhile no Inner Party member wavers for an instant in his mystical belief that the war is real, and that it is bound to end victoriously, with Oceania the undisputed master of the entire world.

All members of the Inner Party believe in this coming conquest as an article of faith. It is to be achieved either by gradually acquiring more and more territory and so building up an overwhelming preponderance of power, or by the discovery of some new and unanswerable weapon. The search for new weapons continues unceasingly, and is one of the very few remaining activities in which the inventive or speculative type of mind can find any outlet. In Oceania at the present day, Science, in the old sense, has almost ceased to exist. In Newspeak there is no word for ‘Science’. The empirical method of thought, on which all the scientific achievements of the past were founded, is opposed to the most fundamental principles of Ingsoc. And even technological progress only happens when its products can in some way be used for the diminution of human liberty. In all the useful arts the world is either standing still or going backwards. The fields are cultivated with horse-ploughs while books are written by machinery. But in matters of vital importance — meaning, in effect, war and police espionage — the empirical approach is still encouraged, or at least tolerated. The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought. There are therefore two great problems which the Party is concerned to solve. One is how to discover, against his will, what another human being is thinking, and the other is how to kill several hundred million people in a few seconds without giving warning beforehand. In so far as scientific research still continues, this is its subject matter. The scientist of today is either a mixture of psychologist and inquisitor, studying with real ordinary minuteness the meaning of facial expressions, gestures, and tones of voice, and testing the truth-producing effects of drugs, shock therapy, hypnosis, and physical torture; or he is chemist, physicist, or biologist concerned only with such branches of his special subject as are relevant to the taking of life. In the vast laboratories of the Ministry of Peace, and in the experimental stations hidden in the Brazilian forests, or in the Australian desert, or on lost islands of the Antarctic, the teams of experts are indefatigably at work. Some are concerned simply with planning the logistics of future wars; others devise larger and larger rocket bombs, more and more powerful explosives, and more and more impenetrable armour- plating; others search for new and deadlier gases, or for soluble poisons capable of being produced in such quantities as to destroy the vegetation of whole continents, or for breeds of disease germs immunized against all possible antibodies; others strive to produce a vehicle that shall bore its way under the soil like a submarine under the water, or an aeroplane as independent of its base as a sailing-ship; others explore even remoter possibilities such as focusing the sun’s rays through lenses suspended thousands of kilometres away in space, or producing artificial earthquakes and tidal waves by tapping the heat at the earth’s centre.

But none of these projects ever comes anywhere near realization, and none of the three super-states ever gains a significant lead on the others. What is more remarkable is that all three powers already possess, in the atomic bomb, a weapon far more powerful than any that their present researches are likely to discover. Although the Party, according to its habit, claims the invention for itself, atomic bombs first appeared as early as the nineteen- forties, and were first used on a large scale about ten years later. At that time some hundreds of bombs were dropped on industrial centres, chiefly in European Russia, Western Europe, and North America. The effect was to convince the ruling groups of all countries that a few more atomic bombs would mean the end of organized society, and hence of their own power. Thereafter, although no formal agreement was ever made or hinted at, no more bombs were dropped. All three powers merely continue to produce atomic bombs and store them up against the decisive opportunity which they all believe will come sooner or later. And meanwhile the art of war has remained almost stationary for thirty or forty years. Helicopters are more used than they were formerly, bombing planes have been largely superseded by self-propelled projectiles, and the fragile movable battleship has given way to the almost unsinkable Floating Fortress; but otherwise there has been little development. The tank, the submarine, the torpedo, the machine gun, even the rifle and the hand grenade are still in use. And in spite of the endless slaughters reported in the Press and on the telescreens, the desperate battles of earlier wars, in which hundreds of thousands or even millions of men were often killed in a few weeks, have never been repeated.

None of the three super-states ever attempts any maneuver which involves the risk of serious defeat. When any large operation is undertaken, it is usually a surprise attack against an ally. The strategy that all three powers are following, or pretend to themselves that they are following, is the same. The plan is, by a combination of fighting, bargaining, and well-timed strokes of treachery, to acquire a ring of bases completely encircling one or other of the rival states, and then to sign a pact of friendship with that rival and remain on peaceful terms for so many years as to lull suspicion to sleep. During this time rockets loaded with atomic bombs can be assembled at all the strategic spots; finally they will all be fired simultaneously, with effects so devastating as to make retaliation impossible. It will then be time to sign a pact of friendship with the remaining world-power, in preparation for another attack. This scheme, it is hardly necessary to say, is a mere daydream, impossible of realization. Moreover, no fighting ever occurs except in the disputed areas round the Equator and the Pole: no invasion of enemy territory is ever undertaken. This explains the fact that in some places the frontiers between the superstates are arbitrary. Eurasia, for example, could easily conquer the British Isles, which are geographically part of Europe, or on the other hand it would be possible for Oceania to push its frontiers to the Rhine or even to the Vistula. But this would violate the principle, followed on all sides though never formulated, of cultural integrity. If Oceania were to conquer the areas that used once to be known as France and Germany, it would be necessary either to exterminate the inhabitants, a task of great physical difficulty, or to assimilate a population of about a hundred million people, who, so far as technical development goes, are roughly on the Oceanic level. The problem is the same for all three super-states. It is absolutely necessary to their structure that there should be no contact with foreigners, except, to a limited extent, with war prisoners and coloured slaves. Even the official ally of the moment is always regarded with the darkest suspicion. War prisoners apart, the average citizen of Oceania never sets eyes on a citizen of either Eurasia or Eastasia, and he is forbidden the knowledge of foreign languages. If he were allowed contact with foreigners he would discover that they are creatures similar to himself and that most of what he has been told about them is lies. The sealed world in which he lives would be broken, and the fear, hatred, and self-righteousness on which his morale depends might evaporate. It is therefore realized on all sides that however often Persia, or Egypt, or Java, or Ceylon may change hands, the main frontiers must never be crossed by anything except bombs.

What is it we're shooting for? Under this lies a fact never mentioned aloud, but tacitly understood and acted upon: namely, that the conditions of life in all three super-states are very much the same. In Oceania the prevailing philosophy is called Ingsoc, in Eurasia it is called Neo-Bolshevism, and in Eastasia it is called by a Chinese name usually translated as Death- Worship, but perhaps better rendered as Obliteration of the Self. The citizen of Oceania is not allowed to know anything of the tenets of the other two philosophies, but he is taught to execrate them as barbarous outrages upon morality and common sense. Actually the three philosophies are barely distinguishable, and the social systems which they support are not distinguishable at all. Everywhere there is the same pyramidal structure, the same worship of semi-divine leader, the same economy existing by and for continuous warfare. It follows that the three super-states not only cannot conquer one another, but would gain no advantage by doing so. On the contrary, so long as they remain in conflict they prop one another up, like three sheaves of corn. And, as usual, the ruling groups of all three powers are simultaneously aware and unaware of what they are doing. Their lives are dedicated to world conquest, but they also know that it is necessary that the war should continue everlastingly and without victory. Meanwhile the fact that there is no danger of conquest makes possible the denial of reality which is the special feature of Ingsoc and its rival systems of thought. Here it is necessary to repeat what has been said earlier, that by becoming continuous war has fundamentally changed its character.

In past ages, a war, almost by definition, was something that sooner or later came to an end, usually in unmistakable victory or defeat. In the past, also, war was one of the main instruments by which human societies were kept in touch with physical reality. All rulers in all ages have tried to impose a false view of the world upon their followers, but they could not afford to encourage any illusion that tended to impair military efficiency. So long as defeat meant the loss of independence, or some other result generally held to be undesirable, the precautions against defeat had to be serious. Physical facts could not be ignored. In philosophy, or religion, or ethics, or politics, two and two might make five, but when one was designing a gun or an aeroplane they had to make four. Inefficient nations were always conquered sooner or later, and the struggle for efficiency was inimical to illusions. Moreover, to be efficient it was necessary to be able to learn from the past, which meant having a fairly accurate idea of what had happened in the past. Newspapers and history books were, of course, always coloured and biased, but falsification of the kind that is practiced today would have been impossible. War was a sure safeguard of sanity, and so far as the ruling classes were concerned it was probably the most important of all safeguards. While wars could be won or lost, no ruling class could be completely irresponsible.

But when war becomes literally continuous, it also ceases to be dangerous. When war is continuous there is no such thing as military necessity. Technical progress can cease and the most palpable facts can be denied or disregarded. As we have seen, researches that could be called scientific are still carried out for the purposes of war, but they are essentially a kind of daydreaming, and their failure to show results is not important. Efficiency, even military efficiency, is no longer needed. Nothing is efficient in Oceania except the Thought Police. Since each of the three super-states is unconquerable, each is in effect a separate universe within which almost any perversion of thought can be safely practised. Reality only exerts its pressure through the needs of everyday life — the need to eat and drink, to get shelter and clothing, to avoid swallowing poison or stepping out of top-storey windows, and the like. Between life and death, and between physical pleasure and physical pain, there is still a distinction, but that is all. Cut off from contact with the outer world, and with the past, the citizen of Oceania is like a man in interstellar space, who has no way of knowing which direction is up and which is down. The rulers of such a state are absolute, as the Pharaohs or the Caesars could not be. They are obliged to prevent their followers from starving to death in numbers large enough to be inconvenient, and they are obliged to remain at the same low level of military technique as their rivals; but once that minimum is achieved, they can twist reality into whatever shape they choose.

The war, therefore, if we judge it by the standards of previous wars, is merely an imposture. It is like the battles between certain ruminant animals whose horns are set at such an angle that they are incapable of hurting one another. But though it is unreal it is not meaningless. It eats up the surplus of consumable goods, and it helps to preserve the special mental atmosphere that a hierarchical society needs. War, it will be seen, is now a purely internal affair. In the past, the ruling groups of all countries, although they might recognize their common interest and therefore limit the destructiveness of war, did fight against one another, and the victor always plundered the vanquished. In our own day they are not fighting against one another at all. The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact. The very word ‘war’, therefore, has become misleading. It would probably be accurate to say that by becoming continuous war has ceased to exist. The peculiar pressure that it exerted on human beings between the Neolithic Age and the early twentieth century has disappeared and been replaced by something quite different. The effect would be much the same if the three super-states, instead of fighting one another, should agree to live in perpetual peace, each inviolate within its own boundaries. For in that case each would still be a self-contained universe, freed for ever from the sobering influence of external danger. A peace that was truly permanent would be the same as a permanent war. This — although the vast majority of Party members understand it only in a shallower sense — is the inner meaning of the Party slogan: War is Peace.

Emmanuel Goldstein

The theories behind that article are important for what I will talk about in Friday’s post, and will help connect why I feel the way that I do in Monday’s post. I feel that we are pitted against one another so that we can easily be divided and conquered. Most people are asleep, and those who are awake usually end up chasing short straws trying to find the truth.

The left vs the right

I started writing this post a couple days ago, and it was originally a rant about Glenn Beck. It was more of a post to myself to get ideas and thoughts off my chest, and I wasn’t going to publish it. I like Glenn, but from time to time his actions perplex me. After I had typed the original content, I went back to it and re-edited it. I decided that with the added content, it was worth publishing. I usually just proof read my posts before I commit them, and then I set them to be published at 7:30pm each day. With this post I realized that there was a lot more to it. It’s not just about what Glenn does or doesn’t do. It’s about how we’re all played to become ‘left’, ‘right’, or simply become numb and ‘apathetic’ to the whole political process. Before anyone gets upset that I’m bashing Glenn, I’m not. I love Glenn because he is brave enough to ask the tough questions that no-one wants to ask, and he exposes the truth as he sees it. So thank you for that Glenn. You have opened up doors for many Americans, including myself. When I write I often try to see the subject from different view points to make it more balanced and to find the truth in it. This post is still a bit fractured, since there is so much I have to say, so take it as you will. Anyway, here is how I see things as far as the left and right spectrum of politics in America right now:

People like Glenn Beck talk about the 10% of people needed to lead us in a new direction. I believe there is more than 10%, but that they do not all talk to one another, they are divided, and they have their differences.

I cannot understand why Glenn will not get behind Ron Paul. Here is a candidate who is more like George Washington (Glenn loves Washington so much he wrote a book about him) than any candidate since the great man, and yet he will not support him. It is divisions like this as to why we’re not getting out of this mess any time soon. Glenn has helped to wake many people up, and yet he keeps himself closed off to so much. He is very quick to label others and shut down those who speak out against anything he says.

I think the reason Glenn does this is because of where he gets his information from. Glenn is a good hearted guy. I think when he finds certain information that he doesn’t like, he gets upset and labels it as evil. Personally, I take a more scientific approach. I usually take a step back and think about where the information is coming from, and why the source feels the way that they do. Now Glenn is very good at connecting the dots, but I feel that sometimes he allows his emotions to get in the way and allows things to become too one sided.

Why is he going on a comedy tour ‘unelectable 2’ during a presidential campaign year, when there is a George Washington who desperately needs his support? And why is Glenn trying to prepare us for doomsday when we have the capability right now to save ourselves from that?

I see that too many people allow themselves to be easily influenced by bias, they allow themselves to be pitted in a group of left vs right. And currently the new trend is to call everyone an ‘evil liberal’ or a ‘socialist’. While that’s all fine and dandy (and those who know me, know I hate socialism), they forget about fascism from the right. They forget about the crony capitalists, they forget all the evil on the right that liberals hate. I think most liberals have a good heart, and don’t want a big government. They’re probably just misguided into thinking that the government can provide so many things. A few social securities is not necessarily a bad thing, its how we go about them that’s important.

Why not have a social security for the elderly? But why not make it optional? Personally I’d rather do it myself, and that has a lot to do with my math and finance skills. If I were not good at these two subjects, I’d probably want to put it into someone else’s hands also.

The problem with big companies is when they get involved with big government. Special interests take over, and the little people get screwed.

Glenn wants us to turn everyone back to God. And he seems to play into the idea that the left are godless swine’s. Apparently the youth are stupid also and should be ignored, and on this point I do agree that many youth are misguided. But there are many who are fully in the fight for freedom, and many of them are not conservative. They are libertarian. They are more like the founding fathers than many conservatives I have met. Yes, many of the founding fathers believed in divine providence, but this is a secular nation. One where any religion can be practiced. Up until the 1950’s the pledge of allegiance did not have ‘under god’ in it. The whole Godly right and atheist left idea is designed to divide and conquer us.

I am not very religious, but I believe heavily in morality, and I like many of the teachings of Christianity and indeed many of the other popular religions.

The mainstream media has done a good job of labeling Ron Paul as a fruitcake and I find it deeply disturbing because combating the ‘left wing’ by going to the extreme right is a surefire way of losing liberty.

I see how easily good hearted conservatives often get thrown into the far right, and how good hearted liberals get thrown into the progressive crowd. I think most Americans want to maintain their independence, and all this infighting will get us no-where. Of course, there are some on the very far right that will say I’m collectivist for saying that. No, I’d rather agree to disagree with ‘the other side’, than allow the republic to fracture and allow our system of government to be completely taken over by oligarchy.

We get so wrapped up in our daily lives, that we don’t see the obvious problems in front of us. By the end of a long day we sit down and listen to the MSM (mainstream media) because it sounds so appealing. ‘Those darn liberals’ we say to ourselves as we watch Sean Hannity bash ‘the left’, and we say ‘those darn tea baggers’ as CNN bashes ‘the right wing nuts’. We don’t sit down long enough to realize that it is all a complete farce, that we are pitted against each other to serve the special interests of a select few.

It’s time to wake up America; you are being used! And yes, that includes conservatives too.

I am libertarian for a reason. I believe in freedom and liberty. I do not allow myself to fall into one side or the other because that has become the special interests strategy for dividing and conquering the country.

This country has no place pushing our might around in the world. Our strength comes from our willingness to trade and our innovations. Our products are created from our ingenuity and we are able to invent new ideas because we have the freedom to do so.

Long drawn out wars do not serve our republic, and calling liberals and libertarians ‘pacifists’ is a very fascist thing to say. Those who are talking about creating war in other nations might want to check their facts before they begin beating their war drums some more. If I get attacked, I’ll put the criminal on the ground. If my house gets broken into at night, I’ll shoot to kill, if our country gets attacked, we should use everything in our might to repel the attack. But: we have no place bullying other countries in the world into submission. That is imperial, that is empire, and that weakens our nation as we print fake money to pay for our soldiers to be blown to bloody bits.

Wake up and stop being a ‘useful idiot’, yes that includes conservatives. The only way forward, the only way upward, the only way to restore the republic and the constitution is to create unity through freedom and independence; find a common ground from there, it is our only hope. We can go back to our silly left vs right bickering later.

Do not fall into the trap.