capitalism

Crisis Films

Crisis Films on September 24, 2011

Two interesting films have already appeared about the arrival in the USA of the financial and economic crisis which has been threatening since 2008 to undermine the whole Western way of life. Both films are well made. Both are persuasive. Yet one says the bankers are heroes while the other says they are villains. If Western society is to have any future, the contradiction deserves thought.

The documentary film Inside Job consists of a series of interviews with bankers, politicians, economists, businessmen, journalists, academics, financial consultants, etc. There emerges a frightening picture of greed and collusion in fraud at the top of American society in all these domains. Free enterprise was the justification for the financial de-regulation of the 1980’s and 1990’s, which gave to the money-men steadily more power until they were able to bring under their control all politicians or journalists or academics of influence. Thus a process of merciless plundering of the middle and working classes is still going on. The anger of the victims is building towards an explosion, but at least for the moment the money-men cannot stop gorging at the trough they have so well designed for themselves. “Greed is good. It makes the world go round,” say the banksters.

In the second film, Too Big to Fail, the dramatic events of autumn 2008 centring around the collapse of Lehman Brothers, a major New York investment bank, are re-constructed. Hank Paulson, then Secretary of the US Treasury, is shown making a classic free enterprise decision by refusing a government bail-out to let Lehman Brothers go bankrupt. But the result is such a shock to the global financial community, threatening a meltdown of worldwide finance and commerce, that Paulson with his comrades in government and with the help of all the leading bankers of New York has to persuade the US Congress to approve a taxpayer bail-out of all the big banks which cannot be allowed to fail. He just succeeds. The system is saved. The government and bankers are the heroes of the day. Once again capitalism is proved to be the marvel we always knew it was – thanks to socialist intervention!

Then are the bankers heroes or villains? Answer, heroes at the very most in the short run, but certainly villains in the long run, because it needs very little common sense to realize that, all society requiring selflessness, no society can be built on greed, meaning selfishness. In any society there will always be the haves and the have-nots (cf. Jn.XII, 8). The managers of society who have the money and power absolutely must look after the masses who have neither, otherwise there will be revolution and chaos. Of course the globalists are planning on this chaos tomorrow to give them world power the day after, but while they may propose, it is God who disposes.

Meanwhile Catholics and anybody who cares about the future should go to see both films and then ask themselves some hard questions about capitalism and free enterprise. How on earth could capitalism be saved this time only by socialism? Is government then really all that bad? Is capitalism really all that good? How can a society possibly depend on greedy men to survive? How can it have got itself into such a dependency? And is there any sign right now that anybody is asking such questions? Or is everybody’s worship of Mammon – let us call things by their name – proceeding unchecked?

Unless Jesus Christ absolves men of their sins through his priests, no post-Incarnation system of society can ultimately work. Capitalism only ever lived off the Catholicism from earlier centuries. It is today’s exhaustion of Catholicism that spells the death of capitalism.

Kyrie eleison.

Capitalism Unfolding

Capitalism Unfolding on December 18, 2010

Selfishness cannot make a society. Now money represents essentially its owner’s claim upon the services of the rest of his society. If then capitalism be defined, in anything more than just economic terms, as a way of organizing society whereby every citizen is to be left free to make as much capital, i.e. money, as he can and will, then capitalism is riddled with contradiction. It is trying to make a society requiring selflessness out of encouraging everybody to be selfish.

Thus capitalism can only survive for as long as members of a capitalist society still have pre-capitalist values, such as common sense, moderation in the pursuit of money, and respect for the common good. But capitalism as defined above does nothing to promote any such pre-capitalist values. On the contrary, it works against them, as selfishness works against selflessness. Therefore capitalism is a parasite, living off a social body whose pre-capitalist values it works to undermine.

This internal contradiction of a society built upon the pursuit of money is reaching its devastating conclusion in the present state of world finance and the world economy. Since the end of World War II especially, the peoples of the world have more and more sought money to provide the material comforts they now prefer to the spiritual comforts that formerly gave purpose to their lives. Admiring and seeking money, they have been happy to let the money-men take power over their societies. Admired and sought after, the money-men have taken to themselves more and more money and power. After all, what intrinsic brakes do money or power have to limit their own further acquisition? None. The bankers turn into veritable gangsters.

Hence, for instance, the invention 10 or 15 years ago of “derivatives,” financial instruments which make a fortune in fees for the banksters who purvey them, but which act upon the delicate mechanisms of world finance like weapons of mass destruction, because they easily fabricate an unreal world of colossal and unpayable debt. In this destabilized and fraudulent world of unpayable debt, a semblance of order is maintained by one government after another fabricating out of thin air vast quantities of “money” to “pay” the debt, but this process can only end up in an inflation which empties of any usefulness the currency involved. Thus all the world’s paper and digital money – for years it has had no other – is now doomed.

But money is to a society what lubricating oil is to an engine. Without oil, an engine seizes up and is killed dead. Without money in a society, exchange becomes much more difficult, and commerce can be slowed to a standstill. If for any such reason the food-trucks (or lorries) could not run, and food ran short, especially in the big cities, what could a politician do to head off the food riots, and to stop the peasants from coming after him with pitchforks? Start a war!

World War III may not be far off. Lord, have mercy!

Kyrie eleison.

Rampant Reality

Rampant Reality on September 4, 2010

“But, your Excellency, how can you possibly declare (EC 163) that the Lord God is the one true solution for all social problems of a big modern city, such as your friend presented them to you in his own city three weeks ago? What does God have to do with politics or social problems? I always thought He was only concerned with things like religion and spirituality!”

Ah, my dear friend, who is God? Not only did He Himself create the soul of each one of us and the matter out of which our parents put together our bodies, but also He goes on creating them for every moment that they continue and will continue to exist. He is thus closer to each of us human beings than we are to ourselves. So the Church teaches that any offence against our neighbor is first and foremost an offence against God, because He is more deeply and closely within us than we are in ourselves. So whoever offends neighbor, offends more deeply God, and whoever never offends God will not offend his neighbor. If then in the parish and school of the Society of St Pius X (EC 163) parishioners and children learn to put God first and His Ten Commandments, are they not learning to solve all big city problems, between neighbor and neighbor, at their root?

Let us recall the social problems of my friend’s big city. In the outlying suburbs mostly white people are living beyond their means in falsely luxurious mansions. They wish to appear rich, and dream of being rich. Are they not worshipping materialism and Mammon, i.e. money? What is taught on the contrary in the parish? “You cannot worship God and Mammon. It is one or the other” (Mt.VI, 24). In the inner suburbs, mostly non-white people to a large extent neglect their housing, to the despair of city planners, no doubt. But is it not a similar form of materialism to measure the good life or the goodness of souls by the maintenance of one’s housing? Cleanliness may be next to godliness, as the saying goes, but what do the parishioners learn?—”Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His justice, and all these things will be added unto you” (Mt.VI, 33). In other words, seek godliness first, and the cleanliness will follow.

Finally in the inner city the city’s industrial life-blood is ebbing away. Why? Is it not capitalism itself that, in pursuit of greater profits by the subordination of industry to finance, has out-sourced American industry? Is it not the putting of money before men that is causing the ever worsening unemployment, the de-populating of the city-centres and the transfer of all power to the money-men who are using that power to transform faster and faster the once proud United States into just one humiliated part of their global police-state?

How could it happen? By the whites turning away from God, resigning (as my friend implied) from their God-given mission to lead the world to Him, and by their worshipping Mammon instead as the supreme reality. Long may the little parish and school of the Society of St. Pius X, outside the city, make the supremacy of God, of Our Lord Jesus Christ, rampant!

Kyrie eleison.

Christmas Fear

Christmas Fear on December 26, 2009

So Christmas Day has come and gone once more, reminding us of the great joywhichOur Lord brought to the entire world by His Incarnation and Birth, but especially to his Mother. At last she holds him safe in her arms where she tends to him like a mother, but where she also adores him as her God. Alas, who that has an inkling of religion cannot lament how the world around us cashes in on the joy, but in large part forgets the God?

In this respect the joy of Christmas today resembles the smile of the Cheshire Cat, especially in capitalist lands (but Pius XI observed back in 1931 that capitalism was extending all over the world – “Quadragesimo Anno,” 103–104). Readers of “Alice in Wonderland” will remember how the smile of the Cat could still be seen when the rest of the Cat had disappeared. The substance is gone, but the effects linger, at least for a while. Belief in the Divine Child is being killed off all the time, thanks especially to Vatican II, yet the joy of Christmas is lingering. This is partly because God, being supremely generous, commemorates each year the Birth of his Son amongst men with a flood of actual graces, to which many souls respond by being a little nicer than they are at any other time of year, but it is partly also because joy is enjoyable. This is rather less secure.

For as the true worship of God continues to disappear, and with it any true grasp of what the coming of the Saviour meant, indispensable for our eternal happiness, so the joy of Christmas is being reduced to the commercialism and carousing we all know. The smile cannot indefinitely survive the Cat. Even the nicest of NIFs (Nice Internal Feelings) cannot survive indefinitely without their object. If Jesus Christ is not God, let alone the one and only Saviour of mankind, why rejoice in his birth? I love my Nifs, but if they are based only on themselves, sooner or later they will collapse, leaving only a sour taste of disillusion behind them. I may love feeling all “Christmassy,” but if I am reacting to my feelings instead of to what they are based on, I am heading for some emotional collapse or other.

It is the difference between sentimentality and sentiments. Our Lord was full of sentiments, when for instance he met the widow of Naim, distraught over her only son being carried to the grave (Lk. VII, 11–15). But there was no trace of sentimentality in Our Lord (nor, I declare, in “The Poem of the Man-God”), because the sentiments are never being sought out for their own sake. His sentiments were always stirred directly by a real object, eg the widow’s grief, which put him vividly in mind of what would be his own Mother’s desolation when he himself was being carried to the grave.

Subjectivism is the plague of our times, i.e. man shutting out objective reality in order to re-arrange it how he likes it subjectively within himself. Subjectivism is the heart and soul of the Neo-modernism now desolating the Church. And subjectivism cutting off the mind from its outside object necessarily engenders sentimentality in the heart, because it takes away from the heart all outside object for its sentiments. Capitalist Christmas will finally be killed by sentimentality. Either men return to the true God, to Our Lord Jesus Christ and to the true importance of his Birth, or the collapse of some of their nicest Nifs, the “Christmassy” Nifs, risks leaving the little that remains of “Western Civilization” with one more reason for suicidal sourness.

Kyrie eleison.

Frankfurt School

Frankfurt School on November 7, 2009

Valuable lessons for all friends or lovers of “Western civilisation” are to be culled from an analysis of the USA’s leftwards lurch in the 1960’s by a Californian Professor of Psychology, accessible at www.theoccidentalobserver.net/articles/MacDonald-WheatlandII.html . Professor Kevin MacDonald is there reviewing the critique of mass culture in a book on “The Frankfurt School in Exile.”

The Frankfurt School needs to be much better known. It was a small but highly influential group of non-Christian intellectuals who, when Hitler came to power, fled from Germany to the USA, where in conjunction with a like-minded group of New York Trotskyists they continued to exert an influence out of all proportion to their numbers. Feeling a profound alienation from the “traditional Anglo-American culture,” says MacDonald, they made war on it by promoting the individual against the family, multi-culture against White leadership, and modernism against tradition in all domains, especially the arts. “Theodor Adorno’s desire for a socialist revolution led him to favour Modernist music that left the listener feeling unsatisfied and dislocated – music that consciously avoided harmony and predictability.” The Frankfurt School wanted “the end of the order that bore the sonata.”

The Frankfurt School scorned the American people’s lack of desire for Revolution, and they blamed it on the people’s “passivity, escapism and conformism,” says the Professor, and on “late capitalist” control of the mass culture by, for instance, conservative organisations imposing moral standards on Hollywood. Yet when in the 1960’s they themselves gained control of the media, universities and politics, they exploited to the full the mass culture and Hollywood and the people’s on-going sleep-like condition to swing them to the left. The Professor laments the resulting vicious attack upon “White interests,” “White identity” and the “traditional people and culture of the West.”

The Professor is right on several counts. For instance, the war is not mainly between capitalism and communism, as the leftists originally thought, and as many Americans still think. Material comfort has lulled the American people to sleep, after the 1960’s as before them. Also, on or off the leash, Hollywood and culture play a huge part in moulding minds and masses (which is why “Eleison Comments” often treat of cultural topics). Also, there does exist a small group, conscious and resolute, of highly influential enemies of “traditional Western culture.”

However, to defend “White interests” the Professor needs to go well beyond White interests as such. The real problem is religious. Why did White Europeans ever have so much to give Because for centuries and centuries they co-operated with God’s grace to profit best by the Catholic Faith. Why does this small group of leftists so hate “Western culture”? Because it is the lingering remains of that Faith. And why did the small group become so powerful from the 1960’s onwards? Because at Vatican II the same “Whites” were mainly responsible for the Catholic officials’ betrayal of the Faith which took place at that Council. Today’s triumph of the leftists is no more nor less than a just punishment from God.

Professor, you are not asleep. Now pick up a Rosary!

Kyrie eleison.

Shifting Perspectives

Shifting Perspectives on August 29, 2009

A remarkable yet possible plan of Heaven for today’s world can be guessed at, if Orthodox Christianity is reviving within Russia in the manner described to me a few days ago in London by a Russian. His description corresponds to the impression brought away from Russia by an American friend visiting St Petersburg a few years ago – the average Russian has distinctly more spiritual substance in him then has the average spiritually wasted Westerner. Does this connect with Our Lady of Fatima . . .?

The Russian in London told me that the Orthodox Church in Russia is following rather than leading a revival of Orthodoxy amongst the people. Attendance at the Orthodox liturgy has increased by half over the last two years, and now 80% of Russians are at least calling themselves “Orthodox,” i.e. believers. New parishes are springing up everywhere. Bibles are snatched up as soon as they come on sale. Religious literature is flourishing, whilst atheistic propaganda is dying. “Holy Russia” is rising from the grave in which Communism from 1917 to 1989 strove to bury it.

For when the Communist structures of the Soviet “empire of evil” (Pres. Reagan) collapsed in 1989, the Russians turned for an ideology to replace Communism not to Western Liberalism but to their national and religious roots in Russian Orthodoxy. What indeed had the decadent West had to offer to Russia’s new needs in the 1990’s? In economics, the plundering of their wealth by capitalist vultures; in politics, the still on-going encirclement of their frontiers to ensure the United States’ permanent global hegemony by the construction of a ring of military bases which are one, if not the real, reason for the disastrous occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan never to come to an end; in religion, the attempted push eastwards into their land of Conciliar ecumenism, with which apparently the Russian churchmen want nothing to do – on the contrary, they are aware of the Traditional Catholic movement, and support it.

However, let us be under no illusion: Russian Orthodoxy welds together religion and patriotism in a not wholly godly mixture, and Orthodoxy is still schismatic by refusing the Papal Supremacy, and heretical by refusing a number of dogmas, so Russians do need to be converted to the truly Universal or Catholic Church. But if Our Lady of Fatima has singled out their country for the Consecration to her Heart, may the reason not be, not that the Russians are still wicked Communists but that the Russian people’s huge sufferings from their 70 Babylonian years of Communist captivity are calling forth from the always religious depths of “Holy Russia” an upsurge of spiritual vitality? And could this not save the true Church, presently wilting in the West, where the mainstream Church may still have large numbers but has little Faith whilst the Traditional remnant has the true Faith but negligible numbers? God knows how the Western Church also needs conversion!

May it then be Russia’s smashing of the encirclement in a Third World War leading to an occupation of Europe, which will at last drive the Latin Pope to consecrate Russia to Our Lady’s Heart, as she has so long been asking for in vain? Will at that moment the Russians’ renewed religious vigor save our languishing Catholic Tradition, whilst our Tradition will cleanse their errors? If so, then God will once again have “concluded all in unbelief, that He may have mercy on all . . .How incomprehensible are His judgments, and how unsearchable His ways . . . To Him be glory for ever” (Rom. XI, 32 . . .36).

Catholics, mainstream and of Tradition, pray your hearts out for the Consecration of Russia to the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of the Mother of God, or “Theotokos” as she is known in the Eastern Church.

Kyrie eleison.