Friday, March 23, 2018

A Decline Of The American Republic - 5


Arnold Toynbee was the historian who, at one point in his career, was the most often quoted historian.

He lost favor, eventually, by speaking truth to power and by disturbing the "it can't happen here" mistaken belief or trance of way too many people.

Famously, he studied twenty-six civilizations which came and went down through time, and voiced his analysis as to why they were not perpetual:
"In other words, a society does not ever die 'from natural causes', but always dies from suicide or murder --- and nearly always from the former, as this chapter has shown."
(Choose Your Trances Carefully - 3). His works were the subject of many books and encyclopedias:
"In the Study Toynbee examined the rise and fall of 26 civilizations in the course of human history, and he concluded that they rose by responding successfully to challenges under the leadership of creative minorities composed of elite leaders. Civilizations declined when their leaders stopped responding creatively, and the civilizations then sank owing to the sins of nationalism, militarism, and the tyranny of a despotic minority. Unlike Spengler in his The Decline of the West, Toynbee did not regard the death of a civilization as inevitable, for it may or may not continue to respond to successive challenges. Unlike Karl Marx, he saw history as shaped by spiritual, not economic forces" ...
(Hypothesis: The Cultural Amygdala - 5, quoting Encyclopedia Britannica) . What happens to civilizations happens to cultures too, because it is not a matter of quantity it is a matter of quality (Etiology of Social Dementia - 18).

II. Next

The U.S. Culture was commenced by people who knew these things, because they used words that gave rise to the notions of both foreign and domestic enemies:
"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God."
(U.S. Senate Oath of Office, emphasis added). That oath has changed a few times over the centuries because of, among other things, the definition or meaning of "foreign and domestic enemies."

During the civil war one side thought that those who wanted to eradicate slavery in the U.S. were domestic enemies, then later those slaves became domestic enemies in their eyes.

To many of those despots it is still that way (Symbolic Racism: A Look At The Science - 3).

To others who have been smitten by militarism, your health care provider is seen as a domestic enemy:
"The U.S. military keeps searching the horizon for a peer competitor, the challenger that must be taken seriously. Is it China? What about an oil rich and resurgent Russia?

But the threat that is most likely to hobble U.S. military capabilities is not a peer competitor, rather it is health care."
(The Enemy the Pentagon Should Fear Most: Health Care, National Defense Magazine, emphasis added). This is the ideology of the current War Cabinet, headed up by warmonger Bolton.

III. Last

Arnold Toynbee was not the only one to see Militarism as a destructive disease to free nations.

One of our most venerated statesmen saw it that way too:
Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied: and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manners and of morals, engendered by both. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare. Those truths are well established.
(A Tale of Coup Cities - 13, quoting Madison). The former commander of NATO, General Clark, indicated that there has been a plan by the real domestic enemies in the Epigovernment to take out seven nations (Epigovernment: The New Model, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11).

It is a plan to take out the nation of Iran (the only remaining country on the "list of seven" ?).

It is a plan which warmonger Bolton wants to complete (see the second video below featuring Gen. Clark, former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO).

If you do not believe in nationalism, militarism, and the despotic minority, you may become a domestic enemy to those who are part of the 'suicidal' aspects of the direction in which the U.S. is proceeding (Oil-Qaeda & MOMCOM Conspire To Commit Depraved-Heart Murder- 3).

The previous post in this series is here.