← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Faust
Thread ID: 6777 | Posts: 12 | Started: 2003-05-19
2003-05-19 02:33 | User Profile
**Capitalism the Enemy
By Samuel Francis
By a margin of 63-56, the South Carolina House of Representatives voted on May 10 to pull down the Confederate battle flag that has fluttered above the state's capital dome since 1962 and to remove it to a "place of honor" on the capital grounds. The vote was a grand (or perhaps petty) finale to a controversy that has lurked below the surface of South Carolina's politics for much of the last decade and has now begun to haunt the politics of other Southern states and, indeed, the whole nation. Proponents of removing the Confederate flag argued that it is, in the immortal and typically stilted phrasing of a 1991 resolution of the NAACP, "an odious blight upon the universe," or, in the lesser eloquence of Sen. John McCain, "a symbol of racism and slavery." Supporters of the flag argued, generally, that it was not a symbol of racism and slavery, though they seemed to disagree on what it actually does symbolize -- state's rights, Southern independence, cultural tradition, or simply the martial virtues of honor, l oyalty, courage, and the willingness to sacrifice for a cause that most Americans associate with the Confederacy and its hapless warriors. Like all real symbols, the flag represents many different things, most of them intimately connected to each other in the enduring bond called "civilization." If the meaning of the symbols could be translated into simple and clear language, there would be no need for symbolism at all.
The absence of a simple and clear slogan that encapsulates the real meaning of the flag, as opposed to the simple, clear, and false slogan that encapsulated its meaning for its enemies, may tell us a good deal about why the defenders of the flag lost and its foes prevailed, and it is ever thus in the continuing conflict between the forces of civilization and tradition, on the one hand, and barbarism, on the other. At no time since the French Revolution have the forces of tradition been able to enlist simplicity and clearness on their side, and the emmense power that simplicity and clearness exert on the human mind is a major reason the enemies of tradition triumph. The power of tradition and its allies lies not their ability to justify themselves through logic but in their capacity to mobilize those who remain attached to tradition; in a declining civilization, or one challenged by the enemies of tradition, that capacity will dwindle as the power of the challenger grows. So it was in South Carolina, where, as in most of the South, the memory of its traditions has been dwindling for the last century, even as the power of its enemies -- simple, clear, and profoundly evil -- grew.
The NAACP and nitwits like John McCain are by no means the most dangerous enemies of Southern traditions. The NAACP has been crusading against the Confederate flag since 1991, but only this year was its crusade successful. It is impossible to account for this victory without considering the immense assistance the NAACP recieved from the Republican Party and the "capitalism" before which the party loves to postrate itself. If it's dangerous enemies you're looking for, those two will give you a fight to the death any day.
The unreliability of the Republicans on the flag has been manifest since at least the early 1990's (some would say since the 1860's), when South Carolina Republican Gov. David Beasley violated a campaign promise he had made in 1994 not to try and remove the flag from the capital dome. He soon gathered the support of Sen. Strom Thurmond, former Gov. Carroll Campbell, and the Christian Coalition. As it developed, a populist movement centered on defense of the flag stopped the Republican establishment. Gov. Beasley -- whom Christian Coalition leader Ralph Reed had boomed as a possible presidential candidate -- was promptly bounced from office in the following election, largely because of his treachery on the flag issue.
The Republican betrayal in the earlier flag controversy was grounded in a lust to gain black votes (which never materialized), but in the most recent battle, it was compounded by greed and fear, which the NAACP cleverly managed to incite. The campaign against the flag was joined to the NAACP's national boycott of the state until the flag was removed from the capital building, and since the boycott struck directly at the capitalist heart of the Republican Party (indeed, at capitalism itself), it was a far more effecacious tactic than simply threatening to vote against politicians who refused to remove the flag. By targeting the business elites who call the shots in the GOP (which has a majority in the South Carolina House) and the $14 billion tourist industry of the state, NAACP actually struck at the heart of the modern South. The role of Big Business in forcing the flag off the dome was clear at least as early as last year. In a report in the New York Times, Paula Harper Bethea, chairwoman of the South Caroina Chamber of Commerce, offered up most of the cliches put forward to justify removing the flag. "The shrinking world in which we live, the way technology has brought us together," Miss Bethea beamed, "has made us realize that we are not islands unto ourselves. If we are going to be part of the next millinneum, we have to remove that flag off our Statehouse dome and put it in a place of honor elsewhere." Of course, the reason the NAACP demanded its removal was that it claimed the flag is a symbol of racism and slavery, and if that were so, why on earth would anyone want to "put it in a place of honor elsewhere"? The statement made little sense, but what was driving it was not sensibility so much as the mere determination to make the controversy go away before it hurt business. Michelin Tire Company, which has constructed a new plant in South Carolina to replace the textile mills put out of business by free trade, was also particularly vocal about the need to move the flag off the dome," the Times reported.
In Alabama, the same dynamic was evident. Neal Wade, of a group called Economic Developement Partnership of Alabama, told the Times that the Confederate flag had to go because "Anything that causes division within the state makes it less attractive to a potential employer, particularly from overseas," and the Times itself commented that "the pressure is even greater to join the global economy, and foreign employers do not want the slightest hint of a divided work force or a reputation for backwardness."
Conservatives -- real conservatives, at least, not classical liberals or neoconservatives -- should not be surprised. Capitalism, an economic system driven only, according to its own theory, by the accumulation of profit, is at least as much the enemy of tradition as the NAACP or communism, and those on the "right" who make a fetish of capitalism generally understand this and applaud it. The hostility of capitalism toward tradition is clear enough in its reduction of all social issues to economic ones. Moreover, like communism, capitalism is based on an essential egalitarianism that refuses to distinguish between one consumer's dollar and another. The reductionism and egalitarianism inherent in capitalism explains its destructive impact on social institutions. On the issue of immigration, capitalism is notorious for demanding cheap labor to undercut the cost of native workers. But it is not only in America that it has done so.
The agribusiness proprietors of ancient Roman plantations imported slave labor for the same reason, with the result that by the end of the first century A.D., there were virtually no Romans, and not even many Italians, left in Italy and so it has been throughout history. In South Africa, the main reason for the rejection of Prime Minister Verwoord's project of grand apartheid, under which the black majority would acquire their own independent states, was that South African and global capitalists needed black labor to exploit and to drive down the wages of white workers. It was for this reason that the South African Communist Party in its early days actually supported apartheid or something like it, since the party was then largely composed of white working-class members. Today, of course, not only does global capitalism demand the importation of cheap labor through mass immigration but also, through free trade, manages to export its production facilities to whatever country contains cheaper labor. The capitalist Muhammad both goes to the mountain and has the mountain come to him.
Nor should it be surprising that the Republicans who control the House of Representatives in South Carolina bent in the direction of the capitalist wind, even at the risk of their own political careers and explicit previous commitments. House Majority Leader Richard Quinn actually burst into tears after voting to remove the flag. "My vote was very difficult," he whined to the press afterward. "It was the hardest vote I've ever cast." As Mrs. Francis Bell, state chairwoman of the Council of Conservative Citizens, remarked after the vote, "Many legislators lied." Caught between the cultural and political rock that wanted the flag to be kept waving ovver the capitol and the capitalist hard place that demanded it be pulled down, so that the state could be a part of the new millennium, be brought together by technology, join the global economy, and avoid the slightest hint of divided workforce or a reputation for backwardness, the Republicans chose modernity -- and the betrayal of their state's traditional identitity.
The spat over the Confederate flag in South Carolina may seem to most Americans a provencial imbroglio, but two facts combine to make it a matter of national significance. First, with the coming non-white majority in the United States because of mass immigration, there is every prospect that similar battles over other historic cultural symbols will take place. Indeed, some years ago in San Jose, California, the local city council authorized the construction of the Aztec god Quetzacoatl in the city's main square, instead of a statue to the American soldier who occupied San Jose for the United States during the Mexican War. There are a number of other instances of similar acts of dispossession against traditional symbols, though none so far has quite compared to the NAACP's perpetual war against the Confederacy.
Second, even with the emergence of a nonwhite majority and tis hatred of traditional American cultural symbols, it is the willingness of ostensably "conservative" forces, like the Republicans and capitalism (organized religion, in the form of mainstream churches, is yet another), to support the war agianst these symbols that makes the war important and dangerous. In the long run, of course, the war will not be confined to symbols, but will extend to the people who have historically composed American civilization.
The betryal of the Confederate flag by the Republicans and by the capitalism which so hypnotizes the GOP says plainly that neither institution can be counted on to defend either Southern traditions or national and civilizational ones. There are a few traditional Southerners who did not already know this, although most have supported the GOP since the 1960's in what was and alliance of convenience for both sides, and most conservatives of all kinds have allied with capitalism against this centuries more militant forms of egalitarianism. But the Republican infatuation with capitalism, and the disengagement of capitalism from every other social institution in pursuit of its own profits and in antagonism to any institution that presents an obstacle to profits, pitches the usefulness of these alliances into the garbage dump of history.
url: [url=http://web.archive.org/web/20010218022754/forum.samfrancis.net/Forum6/HTML/000011.html]http://web.archive.org/web/20010218022754/...TML/000011.html[/url]
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2003-05-19 20:04 | User Profile
Yep Francis nailed it.
2003-05-20 20:54 | User Profile
Second, even with the emergence of a nonwhite majority and it's hatred of traditional American cultural symbols, it is the willingness of ostensably "conservative" forces, like the Republicans and capitalism (organized religion, in the form of mainstream churches, is yet another), to support the war agianst these symbols that makes the war important and dangerous. In the long run, of course, the war will not be confined to symbols, but will extend to the people who have historically composed American civilization.
Well said, but I disagree that it is "capitalism" per se which supports a war against symbols and ultimately American civilization, but a perversion of capitalism, a neo-socialism which is funded by YOUR AND MY TAXES. Without the complicity of the Democrats and Republicans who fund everything from NPR to the Southern Poverty Law Center, to La Raza with our money, there would be no impetus behind this politically correct deconstruction of our history, values and culture.
2003-05-20 23:28 | User Profile
I wasn't aware that our tax money funded MTV and Hollywood, both of which have contributed far more to the subversion of Western culture than NPR and the National Endowment for the arts. Libertarians and many paleoconservatives have a strange myopia which leads them to attribute all evil in society to the public sector and all that is good to the private sector.
You took the words right of my mouth. What is with this obsession with taxes? Yeah if only we abolished taxes America would be a white paradise. How is abolishing taxes going to close our borders? The way I see it, capitalism is completely incompatible with ideas like White nationalism (which may be why jews are so good at it). Corporations are interested in only one thing: profits. Corporations are like politicians. But while politicians pander to get votes, corporations pander to get profits. For example, take two companies, like Coke and Pepsi. Let's say Coke says, "Ok, we're not going to target minorities anymore. There will only be white people in our ads, and all our ads will be in English." Well, Pepsi comes along and says "Great. If you don't target minorities, we will!" Now, in order to be competitive, Coke really has no other option but to follow Pepsi's lead. This is similar to what the Republicans and Democrats do. If one doesn't chase after a minorities, the other one will.
I also see a lot of corporations sponsoring minority programs, like scholarships. Also a lot of companies support affirmative action. And the entertainment industry is responsible for a lot of the crap that's out there, such as rap and anti-white films and tv shows. They don't care what kind of garbage they throw out there as long as it sells. And little by little, White culture in America is eroded.
Maybe the only way for capitalism to work is in an monoracial society.
2003-05-21 04:04 | User Profile
Another example of capitalism at work:
BudLight sign in a Houston bar
[img]http://home.swbell.net/feltontx/paises_sin_fronteras.jpg[/img]
Translation: "Countries without borders."
2003-05-21 04:34 | User Profile
Just the fact that Kurtwood Smith would join OD shows how far this site has come. Kurt, you were great in Robocop.
Kurt, those signs are all over L.A., so are billboards with the same crap. There are even a few of those neon signs in English, but 95% of that crap is in Espanol.
2003-05-21 05:51 | User Profile
Just the fact that Kurtwood Smith would join OD shows how far this site has come. Kurt, you were great in Robocop.
Thanks. Yes, I was...I mean he was great as Clarence, wasn't he.:lol: (Just for the record, I'm not him. I swear. Though my name really is Kurt)
Kurt, those signs are all over L.A., so are billboards with the same crap. There are even a few of those neon signs in English, but 95% of that crap is in Espanol.
Yeah, we have them in the Northeast too: NJ, NY, CT, MA all over. Even saw one in Georgia when I went to visit a friend.
2003-05-21 05:58 | User Profile
Just don't tell anyone I really am Race Bannon. That's why I chose Roger Bannister as my forum handle. Same initials.
Yeah, the advertising is amazing. It's not really tied to some type of coordinated attack, of course.
2003-05-22 21:27 | User Profile
The fact of the matter is, our financial elites tend to be among the most liberal individuals on social and cultural issues, their "conservatism" boils down to a shallow and self-serving "fiscal conservatism" that has little to offer the rightwing rank and file anyway.
This is true, but in many ways it is because of hostile workplace, anti-discriminiation laws, boycotts etc. that basically extort money out of corporations to liberal causes. I'm not saying that is the only reason, but it is a large factor. There was a time of course when most corporation heads (ford, edison etc.) were conservative.
More important still, a great deal of the foreign policy mess that the US has gotten entangled in (be it through costly currency baillouts or even more costly wars) is due to our defense of "global markets" on behalf of the international investor classes.
I don't think that any libertarians (or at least paleolibertarians) have illusions about the fact that Big Business played a destructive role in foreign policy. Rothbard's "Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy" is the most obvious example. I have never heard any paleo of any stripe endorse the Open Door policy, Dollar Diplomacy, or any other sort of pro-business foreign policy the U.S. has embarked on. is the most obvious example. The view is that truly free markets promote peace, but Government in collusion often acts bad to protect certain business interests, which is hardly the free market. You can argue that if you an unregulated market, that this sort of meddling is the inevitable conclusion of it, but to deny that most paleos have not come to terms with you assertion is simply untrue.
** Finally, a great deal of the pressure on behalf of open borders immigration comes from plutocrats and their WSJ neocon and libertarian apologists demanding cheap foreign labor.**
This is true, but if anything it is small businesses that you value so much more than big businesses (outside of silicon valley) that rely on foreign labor and particularly illegal immigration. That National Association of Small Business and Chamber of Commerce have all endorsed Amnesty proposals, guest worker plans and the like. On that note, labor unions are also pushing for more immigration to increase their memberships, as are most churches. I'm not saying that capitalism does not create certain interests that demand open borders, but I don't see what system wouldn't.
I wasn't aware that our tax money funded MTV and Hollywood, both of which have contributed far more to the subversion of Western culture than NPR and the National Endowment for the arts. Libertarians and many paleoconservatives have a strange myopia which leads them to attribute all evil in society to the public sector and all that is good to the private sector. In fact, because our problems are systemic in nature, both the private and public sectors are rotten to the core. It is not either sector per se which is to blame, but rather the common denominator of which elite has its hands on both. In a healthy society, both the private and public sector promote (or at the very least don't conflict with) the values of our culture. To argue that doing away with the public sector will solve all ills on the grounds that the current government is corrupt and subversive makes about as much sense as arguing that we must do away with private property because private property makes the Rupert Murdochs and Sumner Redstones of the world possible.
Hans Hoppe and Paul Gottfried have shown that Managerial states necessarily deteriorate into the multiculturalist mess they are in now.
One example of this would be the Social Security system that you see as necessary. It has had two effects. The first is to disintegrate the family and community by taking the responsibility of taking care of one's parents when they got old from the children to the government. Furthermore, and more importantly, it creates a constant need for young labor to pay the lavish pensions which is why all western governments need Third World immigration to keep their systems afloat. This much more than the demand for cheap labor, is the major cause of elite support of Third World immigration in Europe.
**Sam Francis is probably the only paleoconservative who seems to understand this (though he doesn't say it very often) while his colleagues pretend that giving carte blanche to plutocrats will solve all of our social ills. In this regard Fascist and National Socialist thinking is well ahead of "conservatism" of most stripes. **
I'd say that most no libertarian paleos seem to have quite an anti-capitalist stripe with the exclusion of maybe Joe Sobran and Paul Gottfried. Tom Fleming, Charlie Reese, Chilton Williamson, Joseph Scootchie, and Pat Buchanan have all been quite critical of capitalism, and I would guess all would rather take their economics from Belloc rather than Mises.
2003-05-24 18:59 | User Profile
There is more to the phenomenon of leftism among the plutocrats than just pressure from leftist groups. Another factor is that the elites feel alienated from "flyover country" and non-metropolitan Middle America in general, and some of this alienation translates into hostility. While this is most evident among Jewish elites, it is by no means restricted to them, their gentile counterparts have adopted the same cosmopolitan elite culture and fall squarely into the "blue" rather than the "red" portions of the political maps. Social and cultural conservatism, to say nothing of racialism or ethnic nationalism, are perceived as the culture of the "flyover country" THEM as opposed to the enlightened, cosmopolitan 'US' (from the financial elite's standpoint)
I don't know that this is always true. Granted their is a different culture among the rich than the poor or middle america, and maybe some hostility, but that does not mean that the Rich by their very existense feel threatened or wish to change the middle american culture. If you look at most of the damage done by Big Business, I would say it has been through their foundations. And regardless of what you think about the Fords, Rockerfellers, Carnegies etc., the agenda that they push is far different than their founders envisioned.
Since libertarians believe in free trade, how would a libertarian government (such as it would be) deal with the fact that other nations tend to favor trade protection, if not through tariffs, than through cryptic protectionist policies such as the vast Japanese import bureaucracy? More seriously still, what if substantial numbers of nations slotted for "free trade zones" decide to adopt various forms of socialism or "xenophobic" populism - there will doubtless be pressure from the private sector for "regime change" to create conditions favorable for international investment. In other words, if the rest of the world doesn't want "free markets," then free markets will be forced upon them. It is for this reason that the so-called neolibertarian (a term I coined) has emerged: one who favors the economics of libertarians at home while advocating neocon-style crusading abroad on behalf of the investor classes.
This can be done through traditional diplomacy and bilateral trade agreements. Granted some countries will not favor free trade, but if the government was sufficiently limited, then it wouldn't have the power to do those things even if it were pressured.
Businesses do not always demand such crusading. Carnegie, for example, was one of the strongest opponents of annexing the Phillipines.
I don't see why small businesses stand to benefit more from cheap foreign labor than big business. I agree that labor unions and churches (both Catholic and Evangelical) have been no help on the immigration issue either. I never claimed that business interests were the only pressure group pushing for open borders, merely that they were probably the most important and powerful one.
I am not denying that big business has, on balance, played a negative role in promoting immigration in the last 20 or so years. However, I think it is just as much indicative of the culture rather than the businesses. We always had Mexico as a potential source of cheap labor, but to the best of my knowledge, big business has only recently agitated for a less restrictive immigration policy.
As for big business vs. small business agitating for immigration, the vast majority of violations for hiring illegals has been by small businesses. I would guess this is because professions like construction and contracting are much more dependent on immigrant labor than other businesses. It may be that immigrants tend to own more small businesses though.
** That certainly is true in the American liberal-democratic implementation of the managerial state. I fail to see how this should be a general rule of managerial states in general. After all, Nazi Germany was a managerial state, had it won or survived the war I rather doubt it would become multicultural. To use a less controversial example, modern Japan is probably more bureaucratized and managerial than the US, but Japan has hardly embraced ethnic or cultural heterogeneity.**
Japan is not populated by white Christians, who as Gottfried shows are predisposed to the politics of guilt, at least in racial areas. That being said, Japan is already denegrated quite a bit in terms its acceptance of homosexuality, and it may just be a matter of time when it does the same in terms of ethnicity (see for example, [url=http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/News/Trifkovic/NewsST071502.html]JAPAN, THE NEXT TARGET FOR MULTICULTURALIZATION by Srdja Trifkovic[/url])
As for Nazi German (and I suppose you could add Fascist Italy in with them), one may have predicted that the American managerial state would not have ended up like it has now 60 years ago, but you never know. Furthermore, both of those countries were only to base their national pride in perpetual war. The closest example to a peaceful fascist state would be Franco's Spain, which transitioned quite well into a multicultural theraputic state.
** Paleos such as Fleming criticize some of the consequences of free markets (i.e. Walmart and MacDonaldization of the American landscape) but rarely if ever attack free markets in principle. Williamson has defended environmental regulation, while Reese and Buchanan have openly stated that they are not libertarians and don't consider "free markets" the be-all and end-all of conservatism. However, to my knowledge Francis is the only paleo writer who has come out in support of rightwing managerialism in Revolution from the Middle. Of course, he's not consistent here, because in other columns he tries to sound like a strict constructionist and pseudo-paleolibertarian.**
Francis's support of Managerialism seems to be based more strategically than in principle. (i.e. That cultural issues are much more important than economic ones, so if we want to win over Middle America, we must accept medicare, minimum wage, social security etc.) While I disagree with many of the paleos criticism of markets (though I agree about the MacDonaldization and support Environmental regulation), it seems to me that the majority of the problems you associate with capitalism could be cured by simply pursuing a protectionist trade policy. Why then is it necessary to accept the entire New Deal apparatus?
2003-05-31 02:34 | User Profile
the giooish multicult wants japan and china next. they are the only major areas they have not seriously denuded. they are driven to fubar cultures. they have never broke into japan. they have into china, but they have been backwatered to the degree they have no influence... until now in the age of the $...
i do hear the KJI is half-giooish however...
this brings up lots of scenarios.
japan isnt invading us. china, otoh...
KJI could be manipulable from their end to help with this...
i think that the zogists are going to ultimately try to influence china if we go belligerent in/with the far east (rightly or not) or if domestic considerations here require chinese help to... ahem... help straighten out.
like if the swarm over the border isnt enough. or too many whams dont play along.
buy gold and ammo.
2004-02-08 19:27 | User Profile
[QUOTE=AntiYuppie]It is for this reason that the so-called neolibertarian (a term I coined) has emerged: one who favors the economics of libertarians at home while advocating neocon-style crusading abroad on behalf of the investor classes.
This describes Joe Farrah and the editorial stance of WorldNetDeli to a T, though his rag's foreign policy motives stem mostly from dispensationalist doctrine, which has been shamelessly harnessed and exploited by the zionists/plutocrats/neocons.