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Thursday, October 25, 2012

The Isms, Fatalism and Failure


  
7/18/07

We are besotted with isms of one flavor or another and have been taught, at an early age, to sort them out as to their political value. History should be a useful guide and defining the array of such human political programs and would offer us a ranking system whereby the relative merits and attributes of any ism might be evaluated. It does not. History is but the suborned mindless instrument of the political redactionist. We can find many thousands of definitive writings and preachings on any given ism that can be used to support of condemn a particular choice. We can identify at least a million papers, reports, books, sketches, speeches and such about, for example, communism, that shows, clearly, that this ism is either very good or very bad depending on who wrote the piece and what their political aim was at the time. The same trial goes on for capitalism.
So, how are we to decide on the particular isms are to be enjoyed and which are to be discarded? Clearly, as history has shown us by negative examples, the metrics of murder, war, revolution, inflation, economic collapse and such adverse sociological attributes cannot lead us to the preferred ism. History deftly ignores the palpable defects if properly written and circulated. There is no way to arrive at a firm conclusion on any ism and incessant failure in a wide variety of variables is not a political viable mechanism to teach people which pathway to take.
Of the isms that would, in any other endeavor such as science, bookkeeping, architecture or bridge building, be flung on the nearest dung cart and hauled off to the moldy archives of history tribalism, Marxism [and its various variants] and racism might be at the top of the list. History is ballooned to overflowing with depressing examples of how these isms work to defeat a successful society.
There is no way that anything good can be said about tribalism given the detailed histories of the calamitous outcomes of tribal wars and conflicts. The vendetta process extends back into time beyond reason and memory and becomes the prime teaching of children within a given tribe. The machete-mediated downsizing of whole African tribes for reasons lost in obscurity persists today with a few examples being the Tootsies and Hutus of Rwanda[1], the Sunni-Shia conflicts now entering its fourteenth consecutive bloody century and more complicated by Sharia, the all-encompassing and elastic system of religious laws[2]. A reading of the Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T. E. Lawrence[3] shows that the tribal conflict is complicated by the usual cooperation with enemies of Islam and other anti-nationalist notions mediated by mercenary pay and opportunistic looting in case of a success in battle. All this tribalism is ruthlessly compounded by a religious schism between the Sunni and Shia divisions of Islam thus raising the number of problems to the square of the number of social inputs or 2 x 2 =4. Only one of these societal factors is sufficient to destroy the Arab [or any other] society. No society that suffered from both tribalism and religious divides ever evolved from the savage state without the presence of a colonial power, an imperial power and direct military occupation by a strong external army. The most important factor is tribalism is the extermination of the opposing tribe or tribes.
Marxism [or Bolshevism--pick your sordid flavor here from Lenin, Mao, Stalin, Che, Fidel, Allende, Ho, Pol Pot, etc…], remains the highly touted ‘solution’ to capitalism with the antisocial practice of profiteering filtered out as the primary evil of economic societies. That should bring success it is argued The history of Marxism is, oppositely in common observation, smothered with failure, murder and a body count of a mere 100,000,000 and more since 1917. Failure aside, the quest for wealth and power by those who cannot obtain it seems to continually reinvent more reasons to set aside capitalism and return to the equality. The problem with Marxism is that those who make decisions in commerce are usually political hacks, losers, incompetents and criminals and the notion that ‘the workers’ know hot to run a business efficiently is clearly routed. We saw this in Italy in 1919 when the workers took over companies and could not make them function efficiently.[4] Failure aside, the attraction of Marxism is apparently based on the proffered false promise that there will be ‘land reform’ or ‘equality’ or ‘prosperity’ for those who will fight [and mostly die] in the struggle against the capitalists. It is indeed remarkable that after dozens of Marxist governments have collapsed, mostly by inflation and economic decay, the remaining ones [North Korea, Cuba] seem to be touted as sterling examples of some limited aspect of society, as the medical system in Cuba that most other societies have mastered for decades or centuries. As an alternative to capitalism, the American left have no other option but to support Marxism in one or more of its phony variants. Controlled by radical leftists, the American Democratic Party chooses to attack capitalism in every place however small. They are wedged in an ideological sarcophagus; they cannot just abdicate and join in with business and commerce—there are no votes for them there with the tax disease that they openly suggest. They are locked in the past with their miserable social histories.
Liberalism, a Marxist offspring with alleged good intentions but pedestrian results, has no successful consequences unless you count jobs and wealth created entirely from the tax base. Without taxes upon those who are adept in creating jobs and wealth, liberalism becomes mere socialism with the temptation to strictly enforce wealth and property rules and destroy entrepreneurism and success. Politics is the process of decision making in groups and is dependent on power to implement and enforce the decisions. There are no known cases where an increase in taxes was not advocated by the left in America. There is an endless list of leftist social programs and penalties on business in the west. A brief inspection of The Great Society[5]War on Poverty[6], shows a distinct lack of success with only the tax base supplying to daily essential needs of the poor, mostly residing in inner cities. The central political notion here is that the left buy votes with taxpayer dollars so they can vote for and implement higher taxes to buy even more votes and so on and so forth. The proof of this resides in the fact that reducing welfare monies leads to social unrest, no effective change in unemployment or crime and riots.
Socialism appeared to be a viable middle case between capitalism and other social forms of government until the fractional national gross domestic product increases beyond 50% by government spending, as we saw in France with the Sarkozy elections. Government can only grow so large [ hence inefficient] when educated people realize this effect and vote against it. The biggest governmental joke of all time was Moscow Central Planning, the bunch who sought to tell farmers when and where to plant potatoes and when to harvest them without asking. The only socialist states that really prosper [for all citizens] are those with small populations, abundant natural resources and tourism. The People’s Republic of China is now a case of wild capitalism based entirely on mercantilism [another ism!] with a shadow government of discredited Marxists who follow the money trail and admire the growth of the economy and success although with suspicion. Still, the Chinese have a billion poor people. India has half a billion poor. Both these examples, together having about half of the world’s population, are interesting examples of capitalism’s powerful ability to generate jobs, prosperity and success in countries where authoritarianism was [or still is] the predominant form of government. All this argues for capitalism as a form of human cooperation in manufacturing and distribution of goods and services and appears to be independent of political ideology.
So, what has history shown us and, more importantly, how does the success of capitalism demonstrate that it must be the first choice for government and society? Exactly nothing. History is not even an issue in contemporary leftist politics in their rabid quest for wealth by taxation and confiscation. It matters not whether capitalism in success or not because the far left cannot participate and would rather see war, pestilence, poverty and such as precepts to revolution and correction of the effects of capitalism.
So, what have tribalism and religious schisms show us in terms of government and society and prosperity? Exactly nothing. Tribalism is more important than prosperity as shown distinctly among the last 150 or so Marxist government in Africa, the Arab Kingdoms of the Middle East and elsewhere. Starvation, murder, poverty, ignorance and sloth are more important than prosperity when Marxism, Tribalism or other factors are present. It should be apparent that the orangutans in the cage at the National Zoo in Washington, DC could [and probably did] invent tribalism, Marxism and other schisms.[7]
For the third world, it is more important to die supporting some ideology than to live in peace and affluence. Thus, the political pump of destruction is self priming and the outcomes are highly predictable. Tribalism and Marxism, inter alia, will destroy a society.
rycK


[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_Genocide At least 500,000 Tutsis and thousands of moderate Hutus died in the genocide.
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharia “Sharia deals with all aspects of day-to-day life, including politics, economics, banking, business law, contract law, family, sexuality, hygiene, and social issues.”
"There is no strictly codified set of laws pertaining to sharia. Sharia is more like a system of devising laws, based on the Qur'an (holy book of Islam), hadith (sayings of Muhammad), and centuries of debate, interpretation and precedent.”
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Pillars_of_Wisdom “Some Englishmen, of whom Kitchener was chief, believed that a rebellion of Arabs against Turks would enable England, while fighting Germany, simultaneously to defeat Turkey.
"Their knowledge of the nature and power and country of the Arabic-speaking peoples made them think that the issue of such a rebellion would be happy: and indicated its character and method. So they allowed it to begin...” – Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Introduction
[4] MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY. With a Foreword By Richard Washburn Child. With Specially Authorized Additions, Up to 1939 by Mussolini, Benito 1939.
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Society “Two main goals of the Great Society social reforms were the elimination of poverty and racial injustice.” “The poverty programs were heavily criticized by conservatives like Charles Murray, who denounced them in his 1984 book Losing Ground as being ineffective and creating an underclass of lazy citizens.”
[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Poverty “As a part of the Great Society, Johnson's view of a federally directed application of resources to expand the government's role in social welfare programs from education to healthcare was a continuation of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal and Four Freedoms speech from the 1930s and 1940s.” WOP was a failure and all it did was to hike taxes and create a welfare-dependent society of voters in major cities.
[7] http://www.jimandellen.org/gmuhome/orangutan.html

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