RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/05/america_s_jenga_tower_of_power.html

A majority of Americans believe that mail-in ballot fraud tainted the 2020 election, but most state and federal officials continue to pretend the results were aboveboard.  A majority of Americans wish to put an end to mass illegal immigration, but the Department of Homeland (in)Security continues to do nothing to protect our borders from foreign invasion.  A majority of Americans are worried about rising inflation, but the federal government continues to print and spend money and issue costly regulations.  A majority of Americans oppose widespread government surveillance programs that intrude upon their privacy, but elected officials continue to give the Intelligence Blob full access to Americans’ most sensitive records and communications, in total disregard for the Constitution’s protections against warrantless searches.  A majority of Americans distrust mainstream news sources, but prominent news organizations continue to push ideological propaganda at the expense of truthful and objective reporting.  

These are just a few of the many ways in which America’s most powerful institutions fail to faithfully represent or protect the American people.  As the disconnect between the governing and the governed continues to grow, the dishonest state of our Union will become undeniable: an insular cabal of financial, corporate, political, and bureaucratic “elites” hold 99% of the American people hostage.  When Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Mitch McConnell speak about protecting “democracy,” what they want to preserve is an outrageously unbalanced system in which a few control everything and most control nothing.  That’s a little like a Jenga tower of blocks, in which all the weight at the top sits perilously upon a couple of crooked supports.  Eventually, such an uneven structure will collapse.

Most of us already feel America’s Jenga tower wobbling.  The federal government feels it, too.  That’s why it spends so much time censoring Americans’ speech, spying on their conversations, and abusing the criminal “justice” system to batter perceived political enemies.  As with all budding totalitarian regimes that have risen in the past, the U.S. government has abandoned persuasive argument for intimidation and coercion.  It is an ugly factory that produces nothing but nagging regulations.  It is a second-rate club that protects D.C.’s privileged VIPs and shoves the rest of America behind a cheap velvet rope.  It is an ear-splitting bullhorn that endlessly screeches, “Do exactly what we say!”  And the more it nags and shoves and screeches, the more America’s Jenga tower wobbles.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/05/04/marx-still-reigns-supreme-but-why/

This week, with the global celebration of May Day and with the ongoing protests on the nation’s college campuses, it is worth remembering that the man who largely inspired both was a hateful, intellectually shallow misanthrope, remembered by history and admired by jesters and dupes largely because of his odiousness.

The First of May is celebrated by socialists around the world, not specifically because of Karl Marx but to honor the anarchists hanged for the Haymarket Affair in Chicago in 1886. Nevertheless, this “International Labor Day” has very much become a Marxist tradition, formerly commemorated with parades and ceremonies by the Soviet Bloc nations and still very much acclaimed by those who still revere Marx and his communist ideology.

Marx is likewise celebrated these days in the pro-Hamas camps on America’s college campuses. The ideology of struggle expressed by the protesters is very much in the Marxist tradition. Reams of Marxist literature have been collected at various abandoned/disbanded protest sites around the country, most notably on the UCLA campus. And, of course, Marxist organizations and agitators have been front and center throughout the demonstrations. As the inimitable Mike Gonzales has repeatedly stated, noting that Marxism is always at the forefront of these types of protests: “The issue is never the issue. The issue is the revolution.”

The question is why. Why is Karl Marx, of all people, so adored and admired by the world’s angry and disillusioned youth? He was but one of hundreds of thousands of 19th-century communists and but one of hundreds of leftist intellectuals and theorists of his era. Why him?

https://stephenrittenberg.substack.com/

Part I

Civilization vs. Barbarism

Scholars have illuminated the historical, political, economic, sociological and religious sources of antisemitism. Almost none were prepared for its raw eruption on October 7, 2023 in our post Holocaust world. It was generally believed that education, historical knowledge provided by Holocaust museums, and the miracle of Israel’s post WWII founding would foreclose forever (“never again”) murderous and organized Jew hatred. Milder forms of antisemitism were thought to be legally manageable by laws against hate crimes. However, human nature doesn’t change and something deep in the psyche motivates murderous Jew hatred. Our hypothesis is a simple one: the quest for pleasure, the ‘pleasure principle’ is mankind’s prime motivator. Sado-masochistic acts provide intense pleasure, especially in the form of rape combined with murder. The urge to destroy, to annihilate while discharging sexual drives is what motivates Jihadists. Hitler’s einsatzgruppen killers reappeared as Hamas’s slaughterers—this time, exhibitionistically recording snuff pornography for millions. Jews are ideal scapegoat targets of sadistic pleasure for all the reasons cited by scholars. Ultimately Moses’s 10 commandments brought unwelcome restrictions on pleasure and Jews are forever hated for doing so. Civilization brought it discontent. Hamas and Islamo Nazism are attacking Western civilization at its roots.

The clinical setting of psychoanalysis provides a powerful psychosexual lens for observing human nature- up close and personal. I have employed that closeup lens for 60+ years to help suffering patients, driven by a need to understand themselves, Every one of them has revealed the conflict novelists like Conrad and Solzhenitsyn describe between the forces of light and darkness, life and death.

“Outside the civil garden of every day of love/there crouches a wild passion to destroy and be destroyed..”—W.H. Auden.

For example: a charming, intelligent woman in her forties came for treatment. She felt chronically guilty for not contributing financially to her otherwise happy marriage. As a child her younger sister was a behavior problem who consumed her parents’ attention. My patient became the “good girl” who caused no problems and therefore got little parental interest. She worked hard to keep the family intact, did well at school and was regarded as a ‘perfect’ child. Yet at night, in the privacy of her room she made a list of people she hated and would brutally murder, her “kill list.” She reveled in ways of torturing these ‘enemies’, including her sister and her parents. Now as an adult, she lived a seemingly healthy normal life— but was riddled with guilt and unexpressed longings to pursue the life of an artist—a wish she experienced in early childhood that was mocked by her parents. As analysis unfolded and her aggressive drives could be acknowledged they found their outlook as she pursued her childhood ambition to be an artist and began to receive recognition for her work. Animating her work was the desire to triumph over her sister and prove her parents wrong for dismissing her artistic talents as a mere ‘hobby.’ She was able to feel and tolerate the desires to violently destroy those she loved, to realize what Solzhenitsyn realized.