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A Nasty Business

Richard Barnes

As a matter of historical fact the legal systems of all the nations that are heirs to the Western legal tradition have been rooted in certain beliefs or postulates [which] have presupposed the validity of those beliefs. Today those beliefs or postulates — such as the structural integrity of law, its ongoingness, its religious roots, its transcendent qualities — are rapidly disappearing ….

The law is becoming more fragmented, more subjective, geared more to expediency and less to morality, concerned more with immediate consequences and less with consistency or continuity.

Thus the historical soil of the Western legal tradition is being washed away in the twentieth century, and the tradition itself is threatened with collapse. — Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution, Harvard University Press (1983)

To destroy a people, you must first sever their roots. — Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Disrespecting, disregarding, dishonoring, distorting, or otherwise dismissing objective Truth in history, is a nasty business whose sequel is violence, tyranny, and death (cf, The Black Book of Communism, The Theme is Freedom, Earthly Powers, Robespierre, The Secret Six for historical proof; see 1984, Brave New World, The Hidden Strength, The Possessed, for philosophical reasoning behind the certainty of such a sequel).

In recent posts, we’ve documented very real consequences of godless philosophies and also the phenomenon of seeing the same atheistic ideologies foisted on and by our academics, our politics, our commerce, our medicine, and more as if we by some magic can escape the repercussions such beliefs have engendered throughout history on any people who have indulged in such foolishness.

This blog is entitled “The Pull of The Land” in agreement with Whittaker Chambers who said, “No land has a pull on a man as the land of his childhood.” That is certainly true for this writer. I yearn for a day, should the Lord grant it, in which I can once again see Venezuela a freer country and a happier people such as I remember in my childhood and youth. I also long to see this country — its 50 states and outlying territories — a freer and happier country such as I knew in yesteryear, a country which my own children and grandchildren can enjoy as I did.

But Chambers’ aphorism runs even beyond the land of one’s birth. I have been very fortunate in that I have been able to visit, and in some cases live in, lands on all sides of the globe. My heart holds a keen appreciation for such lands. However, eerily, should you offer me a free trip to only one of them, I’d be very hard pressed to choose between Spain and England. Why? Because they both are strongly linked to the place of my birth: an American mining camp in Venezuela. My forebears on my father’s side came to Massachussets from England, and from my mother’s side, to Venezuela from Spain.

The pull is very strong and as much as I’d like to see Singapore or Croatia or New Zealand or Iguazú or any other land once again, it is Spain or England I’d choose if my choices were limited to one or two.

The pull is very strong and as much as I’d like to see Singapore or Croatia or New Zealand or Iguazú or any other land once again, it is Spain or England I’d choose if my choices were limited to one or two.

It is that special love and appreciation which impels us to understand what has happened; to understand in order to be able to address the question, especially for the sake of our children and grandchildren.

We must return to Truth. Not my subjective truth or your subjective truth. Rather, the Objective Truth. 

And this is very difficult because we are all “men of our times” and our times are characterized by constant, endless propaganda which insists on living subjectively and questioning anyone or anything which claims to know the Truth. 

Regardless, we must press on as best we can, knowing that liberty cannot survive on subjectivity. It requires objective truth, which is the most powerful means we have at our disposal in order to push back on those who would transmogrify us into something we never agreed to or otherwise intended to be.

The late Professor Berman said that our legal systems “have been rooted in certain beliefs or postulates [which] have presupposed the validity of those beliefs.” 

As we see elites and mobs tear down statues of men we have historically admired, we must ask whether the presuppositions we formerly believed and acted upon were actually true. By their actions for two or three generations now the destroyers and their abetters in media, academia, entertainment, and more, have been forcefully asserting that all our presuppositions have been lies at best, evil at worst.

What is their basis for their insisting upon their infallibility? Are they speaking and writing truthfully?

A major hint that they speak lies is very easy to see: they work overtime to silence anyone who dares to challenge them on the basis of historical fact or Truth.

That should encourage us. It appears we still have a leg up on them.

But we will lose that advantage unless we get a firm grasp on Truth. 

In future posts, we hope to look at a few pivotal epochs or events in our history and seek to understand the deleterious effects the deliberate distortion of such episodes has had on the course of our history down to the present. 

Girona, Spain

English countryside

San Francisco in the 50s

San Francisco today

Caracas in the 50s

Caracas today

Converting The Catastrophe Of The Revolution

Richard Barnes

[The left-wing Republicans] managed to convert the catastrophe of the [French] Revolution into a stirring and soft-focused myth, largely by downplaying, editing out, or explaining away its most sanguinary ‘episodes’, like the Terror, as deviations from the noble idea, a process in which the great historians of the Republic, some of whom achieved high office, were thoroughly collusive, and which has obvious echoes of subsequent events in Russia, although there, historians tended to be shot” — Michael Burleigh, Earthly Powers, p. 339 [emphasis mine].

Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote, “To destroy a people, you must first destroy her roots.” This observation has multiple applications of which two are primary. 

One application is to a country, such as The United States, where for more than a century now, her media and academia have utterly distorted her colonial and early Republic history. The effect of this has been to rear generations who have been taught not only to not know, let alone understand, but to actually hate their country for her racist, repressive, and utterly corrupt colonial past and founding. In effect, there was nothing good in our past and to “progress” we must “burn it down”, cast it aside, and start over. These generations not only despise their fathers, they refuse to listen to anyone with the temerity to show them, even from primary sources, that they have been taught bunk.

Another application is to apply it to a country, such as Venezuela (and much of South America) where for more than two centuries, her media and academia have utterly distorted her colonial [Spanish] history and mythologized and glorified her recent history, inaugurated by the godlike Simón Bolívar, who “liberated” her and initiated the birth of true liberty and civilization. The effect of this has been to rear generations who have been taught to not only scorn, let alone understand, but to hate their colonial past and to believe that all civilization began in the modern era. These are generations who ignore what even Bolívar admitted as he neared death, that centuries of civilization had been wiped out by his revolutions.

Both applications are nefarious and will surely precipitate utter ruin unless arrested. In the first case, they lead to a refusal to defend one’s people and home; in the second, they inspire a false valuation of one’s recent history. In both cases, they result in a headlong rush into ruinous policies and actions.

And, in both cases, an insufferable arrogance is birthed and encouraged: Job would say to them, “No doubt but ye are the people, and wisdom shall die with you.”

Dishonest historians and media are nothing new. Solzhenitsyn told about American correspondents who visited Moscow and reported back to America how the Russian people were filled with unspeakable joy and gratitude for Soviet Communism, this in the face of millions dying from hunger and torture in the Gulag network of concentration camps and prisons. Not to mention the dishonest and debunked “reporting” by such as Walter Duranty who lied with a straight face about the forced famines in Soviet Ukraine. He “won” the Pulitzer prize for his grim fairy tales and to this day, that honor has yet to be denounced, let alone recalled, by The New York Times.

Examples can be easily multiplied.

Jesus said, “By their fruits ye shall know them.”

We do not need the media or historians to show us the very real, life-killing, tyrannical fruits of Communism and Socialism, by whatever names they may be called in any given era. Just a few observations here and there will suffice, assuming we are willing to see and listen. For example, we now have, in the United States, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of emigres who escaped the chains and gulags of Asian and Eastern European tyrannies. Many of them have been raising their voices and sounding the alarm, most acutely over the last three years. Sure, they are dismissed, ignored, or mocked by the bien-pensants who write from their ivory towers in commerce and academia and who despise the men and women who do the work and pay the taxes and actually love their country and her history.

But we ought not dismiss them, for in warning us, they reach back to the horrible truths of their past, and point to what our future will be if we do not change course, beginning with the very real, religious Foundation of liberty.

As for the “noble idea”, their pasts and our future are not “deviations” from it, but rather are intrinsic to it. 

For it is by no means a “noble idea”, but rather an ancient, demonic one, as is attested by millions of voices crying from their blood-soaked graves.

Although this study covers religion and politics from the French Revolution to the Great War, it demonstrates, once again, that there is nothing new under the sun

Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) warned the west, as he observed her unwillingness to defend her heritage, her love of materialism, ease, and pleasure, and her blindness to the same systems of philosophy and government that created the Soviet Gulag Archipelago, Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot’s Killing Fields, and more.

Postscript

Richard Barnes

After publishing The Unquiet Death of Cetin Mert, I came across several reports about American teachers’ in-your-face determination to indoctrinate their students in Communist ideology.

From Fox News: “Rebeca F. Rothstein [works at North Bethesda Middle School in Maryland] also posted about providing ‘Marxist literature’ to kids and said, ‘F— capitalism.’ She shared in one instance that she was ‘tired after a long day of indoctrinating students.'”

“‘I had to un-brainwash myself from capitalism in order to fall in love with socialism and communism,’ she said. ‘If everyone had the same amount of money, then money wouldn’t be worth anything.'” [Do parents truly want their children to learn economics from low-wattage bulbs like this specimen?]

“‘Capitalism must go,’ she said. In that same video she said, ‘revolutions involve violence.'”

“The school district ignored multiple requests for comment about her quote on violent revolutions and whether they support the rhetoric.”

An article in Townhall reported on an event organized by the Colorado AFL-CIO, the parent organization of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the nation’s second largest teacher’s union, where a Colorado teacher took the stage to call for a “forceful cultural revolution”, borrowing from that great humanitarian, Mao Zedong (formerly known as Mao Tse Tung). 

“Tim Hernandez is a teacher at Aurora West Preparatory Academy in the Aurora Public Schools District, according to its website. He announced in his speech at the Colorado AFL-CIO event that he advocates for Marxist-Leninism to be taught in schools, admitting that he teaches radical Communist doctrines in his classroom.”

As noted in my prior post, we must oppose this evil by affirming our love for Truth and for humanity. And those of us with school age children need to decide as to where, how, and by whom they are to be schooled.

And, no, I do not equate schooling with education.

Jesus said, “By their fruits ye shall know them.” The fruit of Communist ideology, by whatever name it might use to cloak itself, is death. Tens of millions of horrible deaths precipitated by the godless state. No amount of foolish, deceitful, and dangerous rhetoric can hide that fact.

Live not by lies.

George Meany, call your office.

George Meany (1894-1980) on Time’s cover in 1955

He was an old-time labor leader who genuinely understood and opposed Communist ideology. His introduction of Alexander Solzhenitsyn in June, 1975, was powerful and reverberates to this day.

The Unquiet Death of Cetin Mert

Richard Barnes

Earlier this year I wrote about Peter Fechter in The Unquiet Death of Peter Fechter. 

Mr. Fechter was 18 years old when he was shot and left to die, pleading for help which the Communist east refused to provide while forbidding the west to render assistance. His pleas went silent after 50 minutes.

Looking over that post in light of a recent re-reading of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s speeches to the AFL-CIO in 1975, I see that I was missing an insight: it is not sufficiently clear to be against Communism. Our need to speak truth requires more precision.

For example, consider one of the youngest to die along the wall, although in his case it was not technically along the wall, but in the Spree River. 

A little boy, on his fifth birthday, played with his new ball as his parents prepared to take him to the countryside for a picnic to celebrate with his friends.

The ball rolled down the embankment and fell into the river. The boy ran after it and lay down on his stomach stretching over the water seeking to retrieve the ball with a stick. He fell in the water and witnesses frantically sought help. However, none dared jump in the water, knowing they’d be shot, like Peter Fletcher. 

By some idiosyncrasy, the West Berlin side of the border went only to the river’s edge in that part of the city; the river itself was considered all East German territory.

West German guards and firemen came and sought permission to rescue. Permission was denied. Over an hour later, East German scuba divers arrived and fished the dead boy out of the water as hundreds of folks on the west side cried, “Murderers! Murderers!” 

That was not the end of it. Instead of immediately returning the boy’s body to his parents in the west, Communist East Germany kept the body for four full days. 

As a postscript, many years later, more information was learned from the Stasi files: East German guards had seen the boy falling into the water. They had watched with binoculars and took photos. But did nothing.

As one ponders such evil, the realization dawns that to say one is “anti-Communist” does not quite cut it. 

And here is where Solzhenitsyn’s insight is helpful: “Communism has managed to persuade all of us that these concepts [good and evil] are old-fashioned and laughable. But if we are to be deprived of the concepts of good and evil, what will be left? Nothing but the manipulation of one another. We will sink to the status of animals.”

I forget who said it, but after the fall of the Berlin Wall, “Communism” was said to have disappeared, except in the faculty lounges of American [and Western] universities. That was good for a chuckle. But no one chuckles now, as we see the product of those faculty lounges in generations of students and careerists who laugh at the concepts of right and wrong, good and evil. They do not acknowledge that there is a God Who will not be mocked and Whose law is the standard by which we and they will be judged one day.

Meanwhile, our own country sees our city streets and highways consumed with rage and hatred, manifesting themselves in murder and mayhem.

Solzhenitsyn would tell us to not make Communism “appear as though [it] were something original, fundamental”. To say one is “anti-Communist” is to make Communism one’s point of departure.

He went on to say that the primary, the eternal concept is humanity. I believe he would not quibble with me as I modify his assertion a bit: the eternal concept is Truth. And Truth recognizes the reality of humanity as made in the image of God. I know he would not quibble because elsewhere he urged us to “not live by lies”, but rather to live by and for Truth.

So, we can say, that to be “against Communism is to be for humanity”. To reject this inhuman Communist ideology is simply to be a human being. “It is a protest of our souls against those who would have us forget the concepts of good and evil.”

So as you see the detritus of Communism throughout the 20th Century and into our own; as you see it manifested on our own streets, by different names but the same godlessness and hatred and desire to destroy our own social order; as you confront folks who downplay the evil or who seek to finesse their arguments to in effect obfuscate the very real nefariousness of the lies being hurled at us; just remember: you are for humanity and therefore you are against them.

Cetin Mert (May 11, 1970 – May 11, 1975)

East German guards retrieving the boy’s body from the Spree River

East German guards remove the body of Peter Fechter who spent his last 50 minutes on earth pleading for help.

What Has Happened To Medicine?

Richard Barnes

My prior post, Cero, told about my getting very sick on the way to a Double A baseball game in Ciudad Bolivar (CB). Cero noticed I did not look well and told my father who then drove me ahead of the team to CB where our friends took us to their family doctor who determined my ailment and I was well by the end of the day.

For decades I had not thought of Cero or the event in which he played a prominent role. The recollections were prompted by the chapter, “The Crisis In Medicine” in Harold O.J. Brown’s The Sensate Culture.

“Once considered an art and a calling, medicine has become both industrialized and commercialized. In the United States, which often serves as a bellwether for all Western culture, medical care, surgery, psychiatry, and hospital care, are advertised like automobiles and cosmetics:

“‘The University of Chicago Hospitals — at the forefront of medicine’.

“‘The only Harvard-trained specialist in male sexuality in Northern Illinois….'”

As if that weren’t unseemly enough, medicine has also become thoroughly politicized, increasingly defined as a “right of all citizens and non-citizens in modern Western states.” And since it is a “right”, the state has taken over vast swathes of the medical-industrial complex, including encouraging the “right to die”, because, after all, it is very expensive to help people live longer than public well-being actuarial tables, is it not?

(About the “right to die”, Brown remarks pithily, “It is odd to define something that everyone must do as a right.”)

Medicine is at least as ancient as the first birth of a child. “Did Adam tie Cain’s umbilical chord…?” 

The close relation between medicine and religion persists to this very day, as attested by doctors who still repeat the old slogan, “I treat; God heals”.

Another close relation that has been revived in 20th and 21st Century America is that between medicine and the state.

This is nothing new. The world’s oldest law code, The Code of Hammurabi, reflects a unified culture, centered on the throne, with the monarch playing a semi-divine priestly role. And the physician was “trained, examined, and paid by the royal household. Those who did best in their examinations could become physicians to the royal household; those who did less well, treated the nobility and wealthy citizens, while the poorest candidates treated the common people.” Nothing new here as the president and both houses of congress have medical care and benefits which are unthinkable for the rest of us.

“Medical care was available to all classes without cost….” But this state-provided care came with something with which our modern society in increasingly afflicted, “the physician was a servant of the state and was expected … to keep the monarch informed about the affairs of his subjects.”

Are you not concerned about all the “checklists” doctors or practitioners go through whenever you happen to grace their clinics or offices? I know I am. Hammurabi seems not to be so far in the past.

The Hippocratic tradition, originating in the idealistic phase of Greek culture, “proved extremely durable, even through the sensate period of Roman Empire; it was developed and reinforced in both medieval Europe and the Muslim lands of the Near East. Only in the late sensate phase of our own culture has it begun to be seriously challenged.”

“The Hippocratic Oath taught physicians to consider their work a holy calling and to hold themselves accountable to God, to their professional colleagues, and particularly to their patients.”The patient was seen to be made in the image of the divine. Outside the Hippocratic tradition, “physicians frequently worked for the monarch or the state. They had no specific duty to their patients as individual human beings in the same way that a veterinarian has no specific duty to the dogs or horses he treats but rather to the owner who pays him. Hippocrates instructed his students and all who followed in his tradition concerning their duty to the patient first of all. Specifically, the new physician promised not to perform or counsel abortions and not to perform or counsel ‘assisted suicide’.”

Significantly, in the Hippocratic tradition, the physician works for the patient; in the Babylonian, totalitarian tradition, the physician works for the state.

In our increasing sensate culture the shift in medicine has been away from the patient and to the state, as it is the state who determines who gets paid and by how much. 

Medicine touches a broad and deep range of human existence and much of modern Western human existence is sensate to the core — materialistic, utilitarian, pragmatic, irreligious, and oriented to the temporal as opposed to the eternal. We therefore ought not be surprised at the cavalier attitude so prevalent in today’s medical-industrial complex. 

However, we do have a duty to push back and, wherever possible, to seek for and provide alternatives for ourselves and for our children. Alternatives such as direct primary care, health sharing groups, and surgery centers. We are not without hope.

Surgery centers along with Direct Primary Care and Health Sharing Groups are options available to those who seek to return to a less “state-centered” medical approach

Ciudad Bolivar circa 2000