Post below lifted from Whats that Smell. See the original for links
Particularly here in Great Britain:
How many citizens who were robbed knew that the police didn't even bother to look for the criminals, didn't even set a case in motion, so as not to spoil their record of completed cases - why should they sweat to catch a thief if he would be given only six months, and then be given three months off for good behaviour? And anyway, it wasn't certain the bandits would even be tried when caught.
Finally, sentences were bound to be reduced, and of course for habitual criminals especially. Watch out there now, witness in the courtroom! They will all be back soon, and it'll be a knife in the back for anyone who gave testimony!
Therefore, if you see someone crawling through a window [...] shut your eyes! Walk by! You didn't see anything!
Three guesses as to who wrote that.
Peter Hitchens? No.
Melanie Phillips? No.
Theodore Dalrymple? No.
It was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn describing the state of Soviet criminal law under Stalin in The Gulag Archipelago: 1918-1956. It is what happens in a society when they accept the Marxist idea that crime (of the non-political type) is borne out of economic hardship rather than having a cost-benefit and moral implication. When I read that part of his book, I became more and more convinced, not that I needed it, that the West may have won the military conflict, but the Communists won the ideological conflict. Particularly here in the UK.
As time goes by, and more and more records are declassified, it is becoming more and more apparent that Joe McCarthy was mistaken about the amount of Soviet infiltration of American institutions: He underestimated it. There was something like over 400 Soviet agents and fellow travellers in the State Department, alone, where he had estimated 200.
Now, imagine the amount of Soviet infiltration into institutions in a country that was not actively looking for Soviet infiltrators. And what you get is modern-day Britain.
My wife is doing some research for her Fine Arts degree on Abstract Expressionism. Her research is leading her down toward the direction in which madness lays...She has discovered the physical, academic, and institutional links between modern art, the Institute for Social Research (aka the Frankfurt School), Antonio Gramsci, the Ford Foundation, and loads of other links in the Communist/Socialist movements of the 20th Century. She had no idea the full extent of the forces working to undo Western Civilisation, with that end being part of their stated goals.
And it is becoming more and more apparent, the more one looks at what these people and their fellow travellers actually stated what they would do, and what has come about in the West over the last 50 years, that there just might be a link between the collapse of the Church, the state of higher education, the intellectual dishonesty of the mass media, and the intentions of the Communists.
Unfortunately (?), there is no central COMINTERN to control the direction of the growing disorder in the West. And now that the Pandora's Box has been opened, one wonders whether these forces that were unleashed beginning from the 1920s (or even before), will ever be stopped. I do believe we live in "interesting times" as the Chinese curse goes. There is more Solzhenitsyn to come...My copy of The Gulag Archipelago now has several dog-eared pages to indicate more gems like the one above.
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ELSEWHERE
Don Surber has a crushing reply to a wind-power freak. Read to the end of his post.
New York's replacement for Governor Spizer seems to be a similar sort of scum. See here. He is a black, however, so perhaps I should be a good Leftist and not judge him by white standards.
Skype passwords are not secure. And that affects Yahoo email addresses too. I'm glad I no longer use one of those.
A reminder here of the corruption Hillary was involved with during the Presidency of her unzippered husband.
I note that Taranto today is referring to Obama as a Rorschach inkblot. I believe I may have been one of the first to do that -- on Dec. 14, 2006. I was quoting John Podhorez on Dec 12, 2006, however, so I was not absolutely first. I have also been referring to Obama as the "empty vessel" since July 21, 2007, which is now a common usage. There too, however, I was not the first.
Bash Habash: "The homicidal career of George Habash, who died on January 26, documents that the hateful seed of Arab extremism sometimes takes root in non-Islamic soil. Islamism's apologists always evinced glee in pointing out that Habash, founder of the terrorist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, was of Christian origin. But to call him a "Palestinian Christian," as so many have, is too much: He was an old-fashioned idolator of the state on familiar Leninist lines. Habash will be remembered for masterminding a series of hijackings, the murder of 47 travelers in the bombing of a Swissair flight, and the murder of 27 people at an Israeli airport. He utterly rejected Israel's right to exist and denounced all efforts at reaching a two-state solution. That Mahmoud Abbas ordered three days of mourning for this apostle of murder suggests that the hateful spirit of Habash's life outlives the man."
Tax Competition May Force Maryland to Reconsider High-Tech Tax: "Greedy politicians in Maryland are between a rock and a hard place. They want to confiscate $200 million from the state's computer industry, but they increasingly recognize that the geese with the golden eggs may fly across the border: Under a bill passed in November, such tech services as Web design, computer repair and programming would all get hit with a 6% tax statewide. If the tax isn't repealed before it takes effect in July, it would be one of the most burdensome regimes in the nation on the growing industry. ... Wait until they see what happens to revenue when business begins to leave the state. Many Maryland companies and small businesses say they could be forced to relocate if the tax isn't repealed. And nearby states are courting potential departees"
For more postings from me, see OBAMA WATCH, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN.
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here or here or here
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"Why should the German be interested in the liberation of the Jew, if the Jew is not interested in the liberation of the German?... We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time... In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.... Indeed, in North America, the practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world has achieved as its unambiguous and normal expression that the preaching of the Gospel itself and the Christian ministry have become articles of trade... Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist". Who said that? Hitler? No. It was Karl Marx. See also here and here and here.
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
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1 comment:
"My wife is doing some research for her Fine Arts degree on Abstract Expressionism. Her research is leading her down toward the direction in which madness lays...She has discovered the physical, academic, and institutional links between modern art, the Institute for Social Research (aka the Frankfurt School), Antonio Gramsci, the Ford Foundation, and loads of other links in the Communist/Socialist movements of the 20th Century. She had no idea the full extent of the forces working to undo Western Civilisation, with that end being part of their stated goals."
Alas, twas the century of MANIFESTO-based art output, and theory-based art. They really thought they could change the world with weird paintings.
Tom Wolfe has a thin book called 'The Painted Word' the skewers Modernism in Twain-like fashion. One art CRITIC, Clement Greenberg was essentially the only "artist" of the last century, with the guys who literally scribbled away, signing their name to canvases really just being his assistants, for his written word was godlike in its influence.
Their tactic to undermine classic talent-based art was based on the theory that Van Gogh's work, along with other Impressionists, was spurned by everybody except art critics, which is a BLATANT LIE. In Van Gogh's case (pronounced to rhyme with "cough" in NYC art word circles or you get snubbed by Art World people!), he died in a rural town literally surrounded by peasants. Since Vincent's brother Theo died soon after Vincent, in Paris, a rural bartender ended up owning all of Van Gogh's work. His wife burned all the nude sketch studies as kindling since they were "indecent" and the bartender gave most of the paintings away as bar prizes, which many of the poor peasants had no appreciation of and some literally nailed over leaky holes in their attics! Several months later, Paris art collectors started showing up, since Theo (and art dealer in classic academic art) had helped get a few of Vincent's works into group Impressionism shows, the massive value of his work was a shock to the locals, so the bartender tried buying them back, but overall, most of his paintings (with patched up nail holes) were recovered.
Next, although it was destroyed, Duchamp sent a urinal to an art competition, and it was thrown in the trash. Art critics jumped on this as the latest thing, since he had pictures of it, and since Impressionism had mostly run its course, and not enough truly original and talented impressionist painters could be found to supply the art to the nouveau rich of the Industrial Revolution, so art galleries and critics started PURPOSEFULLY promoting work that the public would find utterly unappealing (unlike Impressionism was very much appealing to ladder-climbing urban people). Thus they added an 'Emperor's New Clothes' effect, in which skeptics were scoffed at for not being able to "appreciate" Fine Art, and they to this day adopted an attitude of High Seriousness, despite Pop Art's short-lived rebellion.
Finally, they had a bunch of reproductions of Duchamp's urinal made up, and a bunch of scribbles on canvas, or even a blank canvas, and hung them up right next to Van Gogh and Rembrandt, with the same serious "wall cards" explaining to the public (or gallery buyers) what the "meaning" of each work was.
Thus, it was a case of demand outstripping supply. This created the necessarily of trashing the whole idea of traditional or actually (instead of "abstractly") expressive art, meaning art of the Western tradition. Another trick was to turn to non-art religious icons of ancient cultures and call those crude sculptural objects "art" to add value to modern crude sculptural objects.
One indication of how small and inbred the Art World is is to look at the advertisements for new gallery openings in any glossy art magazine. There are about 700 galleries in NYC, about two dozen of them being Big Money profitable. But note that they never show pictures of the artwork, just the NAMES of the artists. Why? Since it's an insider's world. All the academics and critics already know who each artist is, especially since they were the ones to arbitrarily pick favorites among the hoards of talentless "artists" that Art Schools produce each year. Besides, it's now the artist's signature that anoints an object as worth $100K, not the object itself, the very same as a hundred years ago when Duchamp merely signed a urinal.
I have a funny story about this. I was buying a computer-controlled cutting machine about a decade ago, and on the way home from one company's demo of how accurate they could cut diamond-shaped holes in a piece of plexiglass, I had this sample with me as I swung by the Armory art show, the "biggie" of the art world, and was sternly told that NO ART could be brought by attendees into the convention floor. I had no luck in explaining that my foot wide piece of plexiglass with random holes cut in it WASN'T ART, but was an industrial sample, so I had to check it along with my coat! They were really quite angry about it, actually, and nearly denied me access at all.
"When I was young, like all the young, art, great art, was my religion; but with the years, I came to see that art, as it was understood until 1800; was henceforth finished, on its last legs, doomed, and that so-called artistic activity with all its abundance is only the manyformed manifestation of its agony. Men are detached from and more and more disinterested in painting, sculpture and poetry; appearances to the contrary, men today have put their hearts into everything else; the machine, scientific discoveries, wealth, the domination of natural forces and immense territories. We no longer feel art as a vital need, as a spiritual necessity, as was the case in centuries past. / Many of us continue to be artists and to be occupied with art for reasons which have little in common with true art, but rather through a spirit of imitation, through nostalgia for tradition, through mere inertia, through love of ostentation, of prodigality, of intellectual curiosity, through fashion or through calculation. They live still through force of habit and snobbery in a recent past, but the great majority in all places no longer have any sincere passion for art, which they consider at most as a diversion, a hobby and a decoration. Little by little, new generations with a predilection for mechanics and sports, more sincere, more cynical and brutal, will leave art to the museums and libraries as an incomprehensible and useless relic of the past. / From the moment that art is no longer the sustenance that nourishes the best, the artist may exteriorize his talent in all sorts of experiments with new formulas, in endless caprices and fancy, in all the expedients of intellectual charlatanism. In the arts, people no longer seek consolation, nor exaltation. But the refined, the rich, the indolent, distillers of quintessence seek the new, the unusual, the original, the extravagant, the shocking. And I, since cubism and beyond, I have satisfied these gentlemen and these critics with all the various whims which have entered my head, and the less they understood them, the more they admired. By amusing myself at these games, at all these tomfoolery's, at all these brain-busters, riddles and arabesques, I became famous quite rapidly. And celebrity means for a painter: sales increment, money, wealth. / Today, as you know, I am famous and very rich. But when completely alone with myself, I haven't the nerve to consider myself an artist in the great and ancient sense of the word. There have been great painters like Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt and Goya. I am only a public entertainer who has understood his time. This is a bitter confession, mine, more painful indeed than it may seem, but it has the merit of being sincere." - Pablo Picasso (In ORIGIN 12 1964)
NikFromNYC
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