Antifastan

I have lived in both a Catholic and a Buddhist monastery.  I have experienced first-hand a communal lifestyle in which one contributes according to one's abilities and talents, and receives according to one's needs.

Those communities produced products that were sold to the world at large and the revenues were put into the community treasury for use to benefit the community.  Every member had food and clothing, a cell (personal space), medical care as needed, and time off once a week for personal pursuits.

In exchange, the individual contributed labor, ideas and vigilance to the greater good of the community.  Each individual submitted to the will of the community and took an oath to follow the rules and goals of the community.

In both cases, the communal goals were loftier than the community itself, or any individual who comprised it.  The central goal in both cases was enlightenment and the entire community was committed to providing everything the individual needed to achieve that goal.  It is a deceptively simple system, but functional as proven by the fact that monasteries have existed for thousands of years.

My monastic experience taught me that communism (little 'c') is not an inherently bad system, and it can be manifested is many different flavors that are all equally beneficial to the individual.  However, I have never been able to conceive of a means to expand a system like this beyond a small, close-knit community with a single overarching goal.

It should be noted at this point that communism and socialism are not equivalent.  Communism supports the individual's journey, while socialism is focused solely on promoting the State at the individual's expense.

When we look at Antifastan, or the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) as they like to call it, we see none of the ideals or organization that are hallmarks of a successful alternative system.  Despite the rhetoric of wanting to establish a fair and equitable alternative to the greater society, they immediately set up walls to control "immigration," established a paramilitary police force, began demanding "taxes" from the local population, and issuing edicts that are effectively fiat laws.  In other words, they immediately became what they are supposedly fighting.  Their actions belie their words, which is typical of these kinds of movements.

Essentially, Antifastan is all about power - who has it, who wields it.  There is no higher ideal or goal that transcends the community.  There is no sense of justice or an equal playing field that protects access to opportunity for the community, just aggrandizement and fame for the self-appointed leaders and click-bait for their social media scoreboards.

The united States were founded on the ideals of The Enlightenment - that all people are fundamentally of equal value and deserve a System tha protects their basic bundle of congenital rights, so that they can pursue those things most important to their individual well-being.  In this sense, the US was conceived as the purest form of communism (little 'c'), much like a monastery on a grand scale.

The US was thusly founded on the concept that the community provides the infrastructure of fairness that allows the individual to achieve some higher ideal.  The primary difference between a monastery and the US system lies in the overarching ideal.  The monastery is a group of individuals seeking a common goal, while the US was supposed to allow the individual to select and pursue their own goal.  It's a subtle but significant difference.

What we witness in Antifastan is the community being forced to support one individual's or group's goals, without respect for any other member's needs and desires.  There is no declaration of common rights, just a sense that all must contribute to the leadership's selfish desires.

As someone watching from afar, I am reminded of the novel Lord of the Flies, with a generous dash of Animal Farm for flavor.  We see a group of children using force to gain and hold perceived power at all costs, while essentially declaring "some animals are more equal than others."

I would find myself supporting something like Antifastan if I saw a mature and sincere effort to demonstrate the advantages of an alternative system.  What I see, however, is the same corruption that has destroyed the original concept of the US.

In surveying history, the primary problem I see with all governments is that no one has yet devised a self-correcting system that inherently rejects corruption.  At some point, the Seven Deadly Sins find a way to derail the cogs of governance and redirect the ideals to serve one individual's or group's purposes.  Thomas Jefferson, who thought about this problem extensively, ultimately concluded that the singular ideal must be embedded in the culture, and that the culture must 'refresh the tree of liberty from time to time with the blood of tyrants and patriots.'

Here, we reach the crux of the current situation.  The corrupting forces realize that the culture is the key to success.  They are doing everything possible to destroy and obfuscate the cultural ideal so that the urge to reform is gone, and is supplanted by the corruption itself.  In other words, it all depends on what the definition of "enlightenment" is.  If Enlightenment is defined as achieving a state of pure Love and Morality, then the culture serves to clear the path to that ideal.  If the definition of Enlightenment is to satiate the base desires of the individual, then the culture will clear the path to that ideal.  In either case, the culture is the key to success, however it is defined.

Antifastan is nothing more than an expansion of the child's "all for me" ideal.  It is the expression of the base desires for attention and power.  It is the embodiment of 'some animals being more equal than others.'

Once upon a time, Western culture held up the mature adult with balanced mind, body and spirit as the ideal.  In the last 50 years, we have seen that ideal warp and devolve into eternal childhood - the utter rejection of responsibility for one's self and the goal of elevating one's self above the inner animal.

In another time, the "leaders" of Antifastan would have had their mothers grab them by the ear and march them home, where fathers would apply judicious corporal punishment.  Now, the social institutions are glorifying this childish display, further eroding the hard-fought advances in Western philosophy.

True communism, such as we see in monasteries, seeks to combine the total effort of the community into a solid and secure foundation from which the individual can achieve higher goals without the constant distrction of daily needs.

Antifastan is the glorification of daily needs over all other concerns.  It sacrifices the individual's journey towards enlightenment on the altar of physical gratification

Is this really what we want - to be technological animals satiating our base desires at the expense of all else?  Or are we seeking to build a level foundation that removes certain key variables that stand in the way of our evolution towards the Divine?

Far Afield And Back Again

Of late, I have been absorbing the thoughts and work of several esteemed researchers, among them Joseph P. Farrell, Peter Lavenda and the great Texan, Jim Marrs.  The thread these three men have in common are that the Nazi diaspora at the close of WWII and the assassination of JFK were seminal events in the current course of history.

I have to say that their arguments are compelling, their documentation unimpeachable and their speaking erudite and informative.  You can find extensive interviews with all three with a quick search of YouTube.  I won't link it all here as the volume is quite extensive, and the voyage of exploration is best steered by the individual.

I do, however, want to express some insights that I have had in listening, reading and pondering the work of these gentlemen.  Certainly, they echo things I have thought about since at least my university days, but they have refined and documented what I understood by intuition.

One of the main points that seems to resurface in the work of all three researchers is the fact that the Nazi ideology was not hatched in Germany.  Many of the things we generally revile were in fact originally American, and were only implemented openly and forcefully in the Nazi regime.

Concepts like racial purity were hatched out of Darwinism and had their first expressions in the US as the eugenics movement through people like Margaret Sanger.  Institutions like Planned Parenthood and Child Protective Services are the modern day descendants of the original.  Arianism was simply one branch on the evolutionary tree whose roots were in the Anglo-American sphere.

Fascism, as I have described elsewhere, is not the brainchild of Hitler or Mussolini.  In fact, fascism began in Imperial Rome, as was reborn in the American federal system.  The marriage of business and government, one of the defining aspects of fascism, can be seen in the 1800s American system, with philosophical roots in the federalism papers and even the Constitution.

Where most Americans go astray is that they believe six impossible things before breakfast.  They believe that they are champions of democracy throughout the world, yet they live in an elitist republic whose founders reviled democracy.

The novelty of the American system was that it allowed people to choose their elite, rather than have them imposed from the top down.  By its very nature, a representative government is an elitist organization.  The primary difference between that and what had come before was that the people were allowed to vote on who they wanted to be ruled by, rather than having it imposed on them by heredity or force.

Every aspect of the American system is designed to dilute the vox populi.  Electing an elite called Congress, with two chambers, one a more general populist assembly, and the other more elitist.  Even the Electoral College was put in place in order to prevent the direct selection of the president.  Rather it kept that task for land owners and insiders.

That Americans think they live in a democracy, and impose democracy at the point of a gun throughout the world, is one of the most amazing forms of mass delusion I have ever encountered.  The American people live, breathe and eat an elitist lifestyle, while at the same time thinking they have power and can rightfully impose that power on other people.  In fact, democracy has not existed for centuries, even millennia.

Stranger still is that democracy and communism are ideological cousins, yet I daresay the average redreck would bow up at the suggestion that his beloved military is bombing the world into communism through the use of fascism.  Yet, that is exactly what is happening.

Where people have gotten so befuddled is that they are not precise in their thinking or use of language.  It is not entirely their fault, as elites use the confusion to their advantage, but it behooves every individual to take responsibility for their own education and research.

The basic problem is that we tend to blend the lines between economic and political systems.  Economics concerns itself with how commerce is conducted, and politics focuses on how power is exercised.  They are two completely different concepts, though they are often wedded, in the same way that a man and a women are very different creatures, yet they join to create a single household.

Within the concepts of economics and politics, there are various ways of implementing them.  In economics, there is capitalism, communism and a great variety of other systems.  Within politics, there are ideas such as democracy, socialism and fascism.  The subgroups within each are only means by which we institute commerce and exercise power.

Interestingly, democracy hardly exists in the world, yet people are being bombed into oblivion on a daily basis in order to institute it.  On the other hand, communism exits nearly everywhere, and people are trying to eradicate it, thinking it is a natural enemy of democracy.  That no one seems able to separate these ideas is the cause of so much cognitive dissonance today.

Economic and political systems are not mutually exclusive.  They can be mixed and matched quite easily, as the system are only the way in which we do things.  That economics and politics go hand-in-hand is obvious.  No one can deny that wealth is power, but we gain wealth through economics, and exercise the power through politics.

Democracy no more implies capitalism, than communism excludes it.  In fact, anyone who has read Marx and Engels would know that his ideal political system is a natural outgrowth of the evolution of economic systems, and that inevitably, all economic systems are evolving towards communism.  However, communism on a mass scale has not yet existed on the face of the Earth.  The USSR and China are NOT communist states.  They are socialist states, which is a form of politics.  Socialist states can implement communism, or they can choose capitalism or fascism or any of a myriad of other economic systems.

In the same way, democracies can be capitalist or communist or use any of dozens of other economic systems.  In fact, at their root, democracy and communism would seem to be ideal partners.  Democracy spreads the exercise of power over an entire population, and communism espouses the concept of each person giving and receiving as they are able.

It is entirely possible for one village to be a communist democracy within itself, but conduct its outside affairs (commerce) on a capitalist basis.  None of this would cause the Universe to spin out of control.  It is simply the means by which certain ideas and activities are arranged and conducted.

It gets much more complex as these systems are hybridized over time and location.  An example of pure communism is monasteries of any stripe.  In any given monastery, the members contribute to the overall good according to their stregnths, and receive from the community according to their needs.  But, the monastery usually produces some product, which it trades with the outside world through some form of capitalism.  The difference being that profit from trade is distributed acorss the community as the need arises, rather than enriching certain individuals.

On an international scale, we see the US is a constitutional republic, which conducts its economic affairs as capitalists, while China is a socialist state that also conducts its economic affairs through capitalism.  The difference is how the wealth, and thus the power, is distributed and exercised within the confines of their communities.  Neither is purely one or the other, and both are evolving as they go along.  The US is becoming a fascist state with socialist tendencies, while China is becoming more democratic while espousing a communist ideal.

The US welfare system is a communist concept, while China's emerging middle class is a sure sign of capitalism.

None of these things is inherently evil.  Communism as an ideal makes perfect sense.  I am an expert in leather craft, so I contribute shoes and belts to the community.  My child is sick, so I consume extra health care from the community as my family needs it.

Capitalism allows me to enrich myself and my family on the quality of my leathercraft, to the exclusion of others.  If I want more or better health care for my child, I buy it because my personal wealth allows me to, to the exclusion of others.  However, I am free to choose to contribute part of my wealth to distribute better health care to those who can not afford it.

In either case, the basic impulse is neither good nor bad.  It is only how it is exercised, and by what means we propagate our ideal in the world that becomes good or evil.  If democracy and capitalism are so good, as many Americans believe, then why do they feel the need to force it on others at the point of a gun?  Why not let others see the benefits of our system and choose freely to implement it, in whole or in part, as they see fit?

Because organic systems are constantly in a state of flux, with new ideas coming into vogue, and old ones being modified to fit new circumstances, it is easy to see how people can become confused.  However, Americans must wake up to the fact that they are being manipulated to believe one thing, while violently supporting another.  Furthermore, they are being duped into seeing enemies where none exist, in order to provoke them into supporting inherently evil agendas.

At the basis of all political and economic systems is the mandate that the individual educate themselves.  If they can not think and act in clear and concise ways, then they are at the mercy of those who do.  Thus, they become tools for elites who use them for ends which are anathema to the individual's goals and beliefs.  The ubiquitous use of TeeVee to manipulate mass audiences through the use of symbols is causing so much suffering and misunderstanding in the world.  It is incumbent on every human being to learn what is being done to their minds, so that they can put a stop to elitist agendas that are abhorrent to those things we consider good and desirable and moral and ethical.

Fortunately, the Universe provides balances for all things.  The problem is that Universe does not chose and direct, it simply is.  Thus, we can choose our fate and how we treat our fellow human beings, or we can have it chosen for us by a Universe that always rights itself, but without regard to the constituent pieces of the whole.

Yes, western elitists have been pursuing a program of global domination for centuries.  North America and South America are prime examples.  Yes, they are trying to create a New World Order that will impose the will of the elites on the global populace.  However, they are finding a foil to their plans created by the Chinese and the eastern world.  While we are all using the same economic and political tools, our fundamental goals and means are quite different.

In Universe, for all yin there is a yang.