Isegoria

John Earl Haynes describes his research in Soviet subsidies in America:

My research colleague, Harvey Klehr, and I were extremely fortunate to be the first historians to explore several major long-closed archives: the Communist International and Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA) records in Moscow, the decrypted Soviet cables of the National Security Agency’s Venona project, and the KGB archival notebooks of Alexander Vassiliev.

Among the most surprising discoveries was that the Soviet Union’s secret subsidies of the CPUSA were much larger and lasted much longer than we expected, only ending in 1988 with a $3 million secret payment. In addition, the number of American sources recruited into Soviet espionage between 1935 and 1945 was much larger than we had earlier expected, and the extent of the CPUSA’s direct involvement in that espionage, making itself into an auxiliary of Soviet intelligence, was much more extensive than we expected.

[...]

Too-large of a segment of the academic world is inclined to a benign view of communism in general, and of the CPUSA in particular. They prefer to think of Communists as idealists interested only in social justice and peace. They resent historical accounts such as those Klehr and I produced that present archival documentation of the CPUSA’s totalitarian character and its devotion to promoting Soviet victory over the United States in the Cold War.

In particular, many historians resent our finding documents that firmly establish the guilt of certain Americans accused of espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union such as Alger Hiss, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and Harry Dexter White. Even after the superb books by Ronald Radosh on the Rosenberg case and Allen Weinstein on the Hiss case, convincingly showing both men guilty, there remained in the academic world a vocal minority proclaiming their innocence and a larger group saying there was still doubt as to their guilt. Many textbooks for high schools and colleges promoted the doubt position. The documents Klehr and I found in the Venona decryptions and the Vassiliev notebooks closed both cases: they were guilty.

Today only a few pro-communist fanatics in the academic world hold for their innocence. However, in too many cases, the recognition in the academic world that Hiss, Rosenberg, and White were Soviet spies is given grudgingly. It interferes with the ideologically preferred narrative that Hiss and Rosenberg were liberal innocents wrongly convicted by evil anticommunists. They don’t like it that the documents Klehr and I found made maintaining that narrative impossible, and they certainly don’t thank us for establishing the truth.

John McAfee explains what really happened in Belize:

My most prominent act of civil disobedience occurred in Belize, when I refused to be extorted by the government. This led to a series of events that to this day, no fictional movie has matched.

Politics has again raised my Belize experience into public awareness. My opponents in the Libertarian party have cloaked me yet again with questions about Belize.

I would like to put this issue to rest, and I will do my best, now, to do so. Belize, by any standards, is one of the most corrupt countries in the world. Its officials are intimately connected with the illegal drug trade, human trafficking, and money laundering. For all practical purposes it is barely distinguishable from the Sinaloa Cartel.

Into this morass I inserted myself.

I moved to Belize in 2008, thinking I would retire and fish, scuba dive, sail and otherwise enjoy my declining years.

I was 63 at the time. My retirement lasted just a few months. I moved to the North Island of San Pedro, where the roads were impassable and all residents depended on the one ferry service — Island Ferry — whose dozen or so boats ferried people back and forth to town from the 30 mile coastline of the North Island. The boats were unreliable and schedules were seldom kept.

This annoyed me so I started my first business in Belize — the Coastal Xpress.

I charged less than half of what the Island Ferry was charging, ferried school children back and forth from school for free, charged one quarter of Island Ferry prices for local Belizeans, bought a fleet of brand new covered boats, kept to a strict schedule, and put Island Ferry out of business within three months. The owner of Island Ferry was a Canadian with friends in high places within the Belizean Government.

Needless to say, I made no friends with my first business venture, other than the Belizean citizens working for my new company, who shared whatever profits were made. I never took a single penny out of Coastal Xpress. My benefit came from having reliable transportation to and from town.

I formed more than a dozen other companies in Belize, from a water sports rental company, to a coffee producer to an antibiotic research lab. They were all staffed by local Belizeans and from no company did I take a single penny.

Doing business in Belize brought me quickly into direct contact with the corruption that is Belize. Government officials frequently expect a piece of the business, a share of the profits or regular bribes, which I, foolishly perhaps, declined to co-operate with.

I also foolishly began to speak openly about the system of corruption and how it kept the majority of Belizean citizens in abject poverty.

In 2011, I caught wind of a government plot to kill me. The following two secretly taped conversation between an agent of the Belizean government and a number of conspirators details the options that the government was considering to get rid of me. The conversations are in Creole — a barely understandable form of English, but written translations accompany each tape. The assassination methods considered ranged from a sniper attack to planting explosive devices in my car. They are very entertaining tapes (tape 1 and tape 2).

It takes more than a simple assassination plot to cause me to run. I instead beefed up my security and, again, unwisely perhaps, stepped up my verbal attacks on the government.

In April of 2012, a local representative visited my jungle compound in the interior, and discreetly suggested that a $2 million dollar donation to the ruling party could cause our impasse to simply go away. I declined.

One week later, on May 2, 2012, my jungle compound was stormed by 42 paramilitary soldiers of the universally feared GSU.

They shot my dog in front of eyes, destroyed a half million dollars worth of my property, subjected me to indignities, and arrested me on false charges which were dropped a few hours later.

The following day, I was contacted by the same representative that had originally asked for the $2 million dollars and who now asked whether or not I had changed my mind. I told him to f— off.

Thus began a war between myself and the government of Belize that went on until October of 2012, when my neighbor was murdered. To this day I believe the target was myself, and that the incompetence of the government caused the assassins to enter the wrong house.

While working as a pyschiatrist in a prison and in a hospital serving the poor, Theodore Dalrymple “saw almost straight away that raw want was not the explanation” for the poor behavior of the poor in Britain:

Blame is reserved for the intellectual class that made all this happen. Not through the indifference of the 1930s, but overindulgence. Trendy 1960s social theories have run amok and caused endless harm to the people they are supposed to be helping, he says. Academics, writers, artists and journalists tore down old values like personal responsibility and civility, replaced by ideas that “society is to blame” and a moral relativism that says that nothing is wrong.

“It has disastrous effects on those worst off,” he says, “those least able to withstand the practical results” of that moral anarchy.

Zero self-control and zero connection between effort and reward did not make people happy, but left them trapped in “cheerless self-pitying hedonism and the brutality of the dependency culture”, he wrote in the book, Life at the Bottom.

In his conversation with Tyler Cowen, Jonathan Haidt mentions that he has “become more libertarian, but with a real sense of respect for what social conservatives say about family stability” — but there are hints of other changes, too:

Cowen: Some of your core ideas in psychology and also I would say anthropology, if you had to pick a famous movie, or famous novel, or play, that illustrated those, that you would use to teach some of your ideas, what would you point to, and what would your account be?

Haidt: Oh my God. I should have a great answer to this question. I am so poorly read, my wife makes fun of me that I haven’t read a novel since I met her in the year 2000, I’ve just been so busy reading non?fiction. Let’s see. Gosh, almost any of these BBC epics, anything that illustrates, I think English aristocratic life in the 19th century illustrates a rich, morally rich society with hierarchy and all those things that have disappeared from modern morality.

I should have a much better answer for you, but I think just reading novels from non?Western cultures, and I would consider 19th century British aristocracy to be sort of a foreign culture now, just can give you an idea of cultures other than our own.

[...]

Cowen: What’s the best replacement for religion in modern, secular society?

Haidt: Oh boy, the best replacement.

Cowen: Good question. Durkheimian question.

Haidt: Yeah. A few years ago I would have tried to give you an answer and say we should have some other sacred value to replace it, but given what’s happened in the last year on campuses, I’m really afraid of it, because you might think, “Humanitarianism should replace it. We should all have a religion of helping the poor, helping each other.” Now, of course, it’s really important to help the poor. It’s really important to help people who are oppressed.

But once you make it a religion, that means you are impervious to evidence. You are committed to certain religious rituals even if those rituals make things worse. For example, I’ve been studying the research on affirmative action and diversity training. As far as I can tell there’s no evidence that they make things better and there is some evidence that it makes things worse.

Now, it’s messy. I can’t say for sure that they do, but the point is, we seem to be doing things on campus that are making things worse. The activists are largely asking for things that will make things worse. Much more affirmative action, much bigger racial preferences, which will cause much bigger gaps between Asians at the top and African-Americans at the bottom. Which is going to inflame prejudice, not reduce it.

Once you make something a religion, you’re not open to evidence. You do really crazy, stupid things. What I would say is, let’s not have a replacement for religion. Let’s set things up so that there isn’t a big religion that unites us all to take on our enemies. Let’s try to return to a climate in which people find meaning and purpose in their private lives and in their smaller associations, but we don’t have a big sense of national purpose.

The experienced Screwtape speaks to the younger devils about the latter half of the nineteenth century and recent developments:

The great movement toward liberty and equality among men had by then borne solid fruits and grown mature. Slavery had been abolished. The American War of Independence had been won. The French Revolution had succeeded. In that movement there had originally been many elements which were in our favour. Much Atheism, much Anticlericalism, much envy and thirst for revenge, even some (rather absurd) attempts to revive Paganism, were mixed in it. It was not easy to determine what our own attitude should be. On the one hand it was a bitter blow to us — it still is — that any sort of men who had been hungry should be fed or any who had long worn chains should have them struck off. But on the other hand, there was in the movement so much rejection of faith, so much materialism, secularism, and hatred, that we felt we were bound to encourage it.

But by the latter part of the century the situation was much simpler, and also much more ominous. In the English sector (where I saw most of my front-line service) a horrible thing had happened. The Enemy, with His usual sleight of hand, had largely appropriated this progressive or liberalizing movement and perverted it to His own ends. Very little of its old anti-Christianity remained. The dangerous phenomenon called Christian Socialism was rampant. Factory owners of the good old type who grew rich on sweated labor, instead of being assassinated by their workpeople — we could have used that — were being frowned upon by their own class. The rich were increasingly giving up their powers, not in the face of revolution and compulsion, but in obedience to their own consciences. As for the poor who benefited by this, they were behaving in a most disappointing fashion. Instead of using their new liberties — as we reasonably hoped and expected — for massacre, rape, and looting, or even for perpetual intoxication, they were perversely engaged in becoming cleaner, more orderly, more thrifty, better educated, and even more virtuous. Believe me, gentledevils, the threat of something like a really healthy state of society seemed then perfectly serious.

Thanks to Our Father Below, the threat was averted. Our counterattack was on two levels. On the deepest level our leaders contrived to call into full life an element which had been implicit in the movement from its earliest days. Hidden in the heart of this striving for Liberty there was also a deep hatred of personal freedom. That invaluable man Rousseau first revealed it. In his perfect democracy, only the state religion is permitted, slavery is restored, and the individual is told that he has really willed (though he didn’t know it) whatever the Government tells him to do. From that starting point, via Hegel (another indispensable propagandist on our side), we easily contrived both the Nazi and the Communist state. Even in England we were pretty successful. I heard the other day that in that country a man could not, without a permit, cut down his own tree with his own axe, make it into planks with his own saw, and use the planks to build a toolshed in his own garden.

Such was our counterattack on one level. You, who are mere beginners, will not be entrusted with work of that kind. You will be attached as Tempters to private persons. Against them, or through them, our counterattack takes a different form.

Democracy is the word with which you must lead them by the nose. The good work which our philological experts have already done in the corruption of human language makes it unnecessary to warn you that they should never be allowed to give this word a clear and definable meaning. They won’t. It will never occur to them that democracy is properly the name of a political system, even a system of voting, and that this has only the most remote and tenuous connection with what you are trying to sell them. Nor of course must they ever be allowed to raise Aristotle’s question: whether “democratic behaviour” means the behaviour that democracies like or the behaviour that will preserve a democracy. For if they did, it could hardly fail to occur to them that these need not be the same.

You are to use the word purely as an incantation; if you like, purely for its selling power. It is a name they venerate. And of course it is connected with the political ideal that men should be equally treated. You then make a stealthy transition in their minds from this political ideal to a factual belief that all men are equal. Especially the man you are working on. As a result you can use the word democracy to sanction in his thought the most degrading (and also the least enjoyable) of human feelings. You can get him to practise, not only without shame but with a positive glow of self-approval, conduct which, if undefended by the magic word, would be universally derided.

The feeling I mean is of course that which prompts a man to say I’m as good as you.

The first and most obvious advantage is that you thus induce him to enthrone at the centre of his life a good, solid, resounding lie. I don’t mean merely that his statement is false in fact, that he is no more equal to everyone he meets in kindness, honesty, and good sense than in height or waist measurement. I mean that he does not believe it himself. No man who says I’m as good as you believes it. He would not say it if he did. The St. Bernard never says it to the toy dog, nor the scholar to the dunce, nor the employable to the bum, nor the pretty woman to the plain. The claim to equality, outside the strictly political field, is made only by those who feel themselves to be in some way inferior. What it expresses is precisely the itching, smarting, writhing awareness of an inferiority which the patient refuses to accept.

And therefore resents. Yes, and therefore resents every kind of superiority in others; denigrates it; wishes its annihilation. Presently he suspects every mere difference of being a claim to superiority. No one must be different from himself in voice, clothes, manners, recreations, choice of food: “Here is someone who speaks English rather more clearly and euphoniously than I — it must be a vile, upstage, la-di-da affectation. Here’s a fellow who says he doesn’t like hot dogs — thinks himself too good for them, no doubt. Here’s a man who hasn’t turned on the jukebox — he’s one of those goddamn highbrows and is doing it to show off. If they were honest-to-God all-right Joes they’d be like me. They’ve no business to be different. It’s undemocratic.”

Now, this useful phenomenon is in itself by no means new. Under the name of Envy it has been known to humans for thousands of years. But hitherto they always regarded it as the most odious, and also the most comical, of vices. Those who were aware of feeling it felt it with shame; those who were not gave it no quarter in others. The delightful novelty of the present situation is that you can sanction it — make it respectable and even laudable — by the incantatory use of the word democratic.

Under the influence of this incantation those who are in any or every way inferior can labour more wholeheartedly and successfully than ever before to pull down everyone else to their own level. But that is not all. Under the same influence, those who come, or could come, nearer to a full humanity, actually draw back from fear of being undemocratic. I am credibly informed that young humans now sometimes suppress an incipient taste for classical music or good literature because it might prevent their Being Like Folks; that people who would really wish to be — and are offered the Grace which would enable them to be — honest, chaste, or temperate refuse it. To accept might make them Different, might offend against the Way of Life, take them out of Togetherness, impair their Integration with the Group. They might (horror of horrors!) become individuals.

All is summed up in the prayer which a young female human is said to have uttered recently: “O God, make me a normal twentieth century girl!” Thanks to our labours, this will mean increasingly: “Make me a minx, a moron, and a parasite.”

Meanwhile, as a delightful by-product, the few (fewer every day) who will not be made Normal or Regular and Like Folks and Integrated increasingly become in reality the prigs and cranks which the rabble would in any case have believed them to be. For suspicion often creates what it expects. (“Since, whatever I do, the neighbors are going to think me a witch, or a Communist agent, I might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb, and become one in reality.”) As a result we now have an intelligentsia which, though very small, is very useful to the cause of Hell.

But that is a mere by-product. What I want to fix your attention on is the vast, overall movement towards the discrediting, and finally the elimination, of every kind of human excellence – moral, cultural, social, or intellectual. And is it not pretty to notice how “democracy” (in the incantatory sense) is now doing for us the work that was once done by the most ancient Dictatorships, and by the same methods? You remember how one of the Greek Dictators (they called them “tyrants” then) sent an envoy to another Dictator to ask his advice about the principles of government. The second Dictator led the envoy into a field of grain, and there he snicked off with his cane the top of every stalk that rose an inch or so above the general level. The moral was plain. Allow no preeminence among your subjects. Let no man live who is wiser or better or more famous or even handsomer than the mass. Cut them all down to a level: all slaves, all ciphers, all nobodies. All equals. Thus Tyrants could practise, in a sense, “democracy.” But now “democracy” can do the same work without any tyranny other than her own. No one need now go through the field with a cane. The little stalks will now of themselves bite the tops off the big ones. The big ones are beginning to bite off their own in their desire to Be Like Stalks.