Mordor has Awakened

Thanks to Kevin of the Smallest Minority for point me to the Forbes piece by Jerry Bowyer entitled American Nomeklatura. The whole article is good, and you should read all. I wanted to highlight this though:

“The new order articulated in [the Pentateuch] stands in contrast to a primary socioeconomic structure prevalent … throughout … the ancient Near East: the divide between the dominant tribute-imposing class and the dominated tribute-bearing class… These two groups, the exploiters and the exploited, are opposite sides of the same coin. The dominant tribute-imposing class consists, in short, of the political elite…This class includes not only the nobility but all who benefited by association with it: administrators, military and religious retainers, merchants, and landowners who directly or indirectly benefited from state power. What all of these have in common is that they all participated in the extraction of produce, or surplus, from the dominated tribute-bearing class: agrarian and pastoral producers, slaves, unskilled workers … Their production was drawn as surplus in the form of taxation, slave labor, rent, or debt service…”

Reading about dominant tribute-imposing tribes and their exploitation of dominated tribute-bearing classes by means of debt, tax and mandated labor, seemed strangely similar to modern times. It seems that Washington is not as far removed from Ur, Nineveh, Cairo or Babylon as we would hope. It seems also that our emerging system of central control is not what its advocates claim: It is not new; it is ancient.

There is a point that I have been making as well: that far from being new and improved, original, fresh, innovative, the latest thing! and whatever other buzzwords you want to use, Marxism is just the same old dusty politics of the past dressed up in class envy clothing.  Tribal chiefs, kings, emperors, tyrants, dictators, and whatever title they ascribe to themselves have been around since man first walked the earth.  It is the strong man theory.  The strong man, no matter his initial intentions, always ends up taking your wealth and your freedom, but doesn't fulfil his end of the bargain, which is to protect the freedom of those under him.  Even the ancient tribes of Israel living under the Judges, did not achieve freedom and liberty for the people, though I suspect they had more of it than when they petitioned Samuel for a King.

The first "new thing" under the sun in terms of a system of governance was the Constitution of the United States.  It was the practical working out of nearly 1800 years of Christian philosophy.  For the first time in history, and apparently the last, the philosophical roots of the Constitution set the individual above the collective, and made the government the servant of the citizen.  But what we have going on today, and for almost a century now, is a reversion to older ideas.  Boyer points out that there is little difference between Socialism and Crony Capitalism in practice.  I would also note that there is little difference between these two systems and the old idea of the King's friends getting the Royal franchise, and everyone else gets out of the business.  These are not new ideas.

People are impressed by the Roman Empire.  My high school Latin teacher was mightily impressed, but should have known better.  People are impressed with the roads, the aqua ducts, the stadiums, the imposition of Roman culture, and the Pax Romana.  But if I were to pinpoint the time that the Roman Empire began to crumble, it would be when Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon.  All of the wealth of Rome, you see, was stolen wealth.  When the Empire could no longer extract enough tribute, the Roman Empire began to die.  The truly remarkable thing about Rome wasn't the Empire, but the Republic that preceded it.

A somewhat longer, and I think somewhat angrier argument can be found at the American Thinker yesterday entitled Obama, Islam, and the Forcible Virginity Test by James Lewis. In the opening paragraphs, Lewis gives us some insight into the Egyptian revolution by noting that some of the unmarried women protesting were arrested, and then forced to undergo a "virginity test," without anything being said by various womyn's groups. There should be outrage, but there is not. Then comes this part:

The United States Constitution is still by far the most successful political outcome of the Enlightenment. Nothing else comes close. Constitutionalism is the only successful political tradition that has ever been designed to deal with the disease of abuse of power. If you want an image of raw abuse of power, think Tahrir Square and the forcible virginity test.

Apparently the White House and every liberal looneytunes airhead in the West is stunned, just stunned, m'dear, by the Muslim reactionaries who are grabbing power all over the Arab world. Who coulda thunk? Obama meant so well. All the good libs are eager to vote for him again in 2012, 'cause of all the good intentions and lovely words he has brought to our foreign policy. Liberal delusions are always stronger than reality. If reality had anything to do with it, they would have dumped their dysfunctional beliefs fifty years ago.

Conservatives have known about the threat of Islamic fascism for 30 years, ever since Jimmy Carter let "some kind of saint" Ayatollah Khomeini assume absolute power in Tehran in 1979. When Carter stopped Iran's military from supporting the Shah, Khomeini promptly had assassinated, imprisoned, and tortured the Shah's supporters, plus any democratic opposition groups, plus the Communist faction of the Mujahhedin Khalq, plus anybody else who stood in this way -- including those American diplomats he kept locked up at the US Embassy for a year until Ronald Reagan got elected.

Lewis is angry because time, after time, after time the Left attempts to put its schemes into place, and time after time, after time, they fail. But the Left never sees the failures as a reason to rethink their position. No, instead they begin working on the next moonbattery. They always think the last one didn't work because they didn't have the right people in power.  Hitler, Mussolini, Lenin and Stalin, Castro, Pol Pot, Mao-they all just weren't the right people, but this time we'll get it right.

No kidding. Really?  It is just the strong man theory wrapped up in appealing language.

Another thing Conservatives have known, and are constantly telling Leftists is there are no "the right people." Give a person power, and he will inevitably be corrupted by it. Give a person absolute power, and he becomes a tyrant, a "President for Life," a Dictator, or whatever he wants to call himself.

The New York Times reports that the Egyptian Bros and the military are now allied to take over. Right at the start the Bros called for war with Israel, because it was their enemy Mubarak who kept the Egyptian-Israeli Peace treaty going for three decades. The Bros also brought back from exile their own Ayatollah Khomeini, Al Qaradawi, and celebrated with their own Million Muslim March in Tahrir Square. They also threw out the Google twitter mobster who helped make the revolt happen.

Which brings us full circle. Let me ask this, have you ever wondered why a so called "Abrahamic Religion" which is founded on the same Pentateuch that Christians also use as the Old Testament, hates Jews? Not just hates them, but wants to savagely exterminate them? Are not the Jews God's chosen people to be a light to the nations? Note the word, Light. Christians are also called to be a Light? Islam? Not so much:

Islam came straight from the Arabian desert of the 7th century. It reflects the lives of desert pirates, robbers, rapists and genociders, which was perfectly suited to nomadic life in the desert. That's how tribes conquered each other, as Lawrence of Arabia found out again in World War I. Desert Arabs literally took no prisoners -- except for women and children, who became slaves. Lawrence was a British romantic who hero-worshipped the desert Arabs, and then, after putting King Faisal into power, he decided to disappear forever, in deep disgust with his own romance with murderous primitives.

Wherever reactionary Islam takes over it re-creates the 7th century desert. Since the breakdown of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I, the Muslim world has been zig-zagging between modern values, like equality for women, and medieval desert values. Iran was a great victory for the reactionary throwbacks, and Obama has just tipped the balance in that direction again.

Something ancient is stalking the land again. Mordor has awakened.