A Warning to the West

Following is an excerpt from a speech given by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in New York City in 1975….

July 9, 1975

Is it possible or impossible to transmit the experience of those who have suffered to those who have yet to suffer? Can one part of humanity learn from the bitter experience of another or can it not? Is it possible or impossible to warn someone of danger?

How many witnesses have been sent to the West in the last 60 years? How many waves of immigrants? How many millions of persons? They are all here. You meet them every day. You know who they are: if not by their spiritual disorientation, their grief, their melancholy, then you can distinguish them by their accents or their external appearance. Coming from different countries and without consulting with one another, they have brought to you exactly the same experience; they tell you exactly the same thing: they warn you of what is now taking place and what has taken place in the past. But the proud skyscrapers stand on, jut into the sky and say: It will never happen here. This will never come to us. It’s not possible here.

It can happen. It is possible. As a Russian proverb says: “When it happens to you, you’ll know it’s true.”

But do we really have to wait for the moment when the knife is at our throat? Couldn’t it be possible, ahead of time, to assess soberly the world-wide menace that threatens to swallow the whole world? I was swallowed myself. I have been in the dragon’s belly, in its red-hot innards. He wasn’t able to digest me. He threw me up. I have come to you as a witness to what it’s like there, in the dragon’s belly.

It’s an astonishing phenomenon that communism has been writing about itself in the most open way — in black and white — for 125 years, and even more openly, more candidly in the beginning. The Communist Manifesto, for instance, which everyone knows by name, and which almost no one ever takes the trouble to read, contains even more terrible things than what has actually been done. It’s perfectly amazing. The whole world can read, everyone is literate, but somehow no one wants to understand. Humanity acts as if it does not understand what Communism is, as if it does not want to understand, is not capable of understanding.

I think it isn’t only a question of the disguises which communism has assumed in the last decades. It’s rather that the essence of communism is quite beyond the limits of human understanding. It is hard to believe that people could actually plan such things and carry them out. And precisely because its essence is beyond comprehension, communism is so difficult to understand.

In my last address in Washington I spoke a great deal about the Soviet state system, how it was created and what it is today. But it’s perhaps more important to discuss with you the ideology that inspired the system, that created it, and that still governs it. It’s much more important to understand the essence of this ideology, and above all its legacy which hasn’t changed at all in 125 years. It hasn’t changed since the day it was born.

That Marxism is not a science is something which is entirely clear to intelligent people in the Soviet Union. One would feel awkward to refer to it as a science. Leaving aside the exact sciences, such as physics, mathematics, and the natural sciences, even the social sciences can predict an event — when, in what way, and how an event might occur. Communism has never made any such forecasts. It has never said where, when, and precisely what is going to happen. Nothing but declamations. Rhetoric to the effect that the world proletariat will overthrow the world bourgeoisie and the most happy and radiant society will then arise. The fantasies of Marx, Engels, and Lenin break off at this point, not one of them goes any further to describe what this society would be like. They simply said: the most radiant, most happy society. Everything for the sake of man.

~Excerpt taken from Warning to the West, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1976, pg 52-55

Thomas Sowell Quotes #9

“Those among us who are constantly rhapsodizing about ‘change’ in vague and general terms seem to have no fear that a blank cheque for change can be a huge risk in a world where so many other [non-western] countries that are different are also far worse off.”

~from The Thomas Sowell Reader: Social Issues, page 6-7

Jesus and Godel’s Theorem by Richard Bledsoe (Re-blog)

babel

Here is a thought provoking article written by Richard Bledsoe on Theopolis Institute….

Jesus and Godel’s Theorem

“Religion” is an attempt to create or build a tower with a top, or to build a temple that is self-contained. The story of The Tower of Babel in Genesis 11 is the story of mankind’s attempt to create a world that is self-contained and does not need God. All ancient pagan temples were renewed attempts to complete the Tower of Babel. These were termed “ziggurats,” and were viewed as connecting points, or umbilical cords between heaven and earth. Heaven and earth were in the ancient pagan cosmology, part of one eternal entity.

The Temple in Israel was purposely built with a similarity to the ancient ziggurat, and as an answer to the ziggurat. It was built on the top of a mountain, and was a “connecting” place to the God of Israel. But the God of Israel was not encompassed or contained within it, nor was His liberty compromised by it, as were pagan gods by their temples. Never-the-less, Israel was constantly tempted to believe that their temple was like the temples of the nations. The destruction of Shiloh, the capture of the Ark in Samuel’s time (1 Samuel 4), and the destruction of Solomon’s Temple (2 Chronicles 36:15-21) contradicted Israel’s constant temptation to “religion”. The theology of Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark is quite accurate. The Nazis, like Israel at Shiloh, believed that possession of the Ark entailed possession and control of Jehovah. In this they were wrong.

Arend Theodoor van Leeuwen says that the destruction of Herod’s Temple in 70 A.D. was in principle the destruction of all temples. The last 20 centuries of Christian history have progressively undone one temple after another. But, Christians themselves are tempted to new temples. Byzantine was an attempt to recreate on a Christian basis, at least a partial “ontocratic” or self-contained church/state, to use van Leeuwen’s terminology. The Roman Catholic Church has constantly been tempted in this way, and Protestant sectarianism is guilty in these ways as well.

Hopefully, it is increasingly clear that there is no top to the towers of this world, as we saw demonstrated in the 20th century when we saw all of the great ideologies fall. This opens the door to nihilisms, but also makes more clear than ever that it is only the Sovereign Triune God who is the I Am that I Am, and I Will Be that I Will Be. Only He is self-contained.

The modern city, and indeed, the modern world as a “global village,” is a “tower without a top.” Religion is done for. Bonhoeffer glimpsed this possibility in what he termed a “religionless Christianity. The story of The Tower of Babel sets the theme for all of God’s redemptive work in history. Fallen man’s idolatrous desire is to make for himself a self-contained world of complete adequacy.

When Carl Sagan says, “The Cosmos is all there is, or all there ever will,” he is stating the sentiments of the builders of the Tower of Babel. For them, the upper emporium was the realm of the gods, but it was by human effort and construction, a reachable realm, and that was itself a part of one cosmos. As one moved up the tower to the realm of the gods, one’s own being could also be “divinized”. Man’s being was potentially divine, given the right techniques and methods, amongst which “tower construction” was foremost. But God frustrated them and left them off with an incomplete tower, a tower without a top.

Click here for full article (2400 more words)

Thomas Sowell Quotes #3

“Where [democratic socialism and communism] differed was in whether the government officials who were to wield this power [to control the nation’s economy] should be elected by the general public, as advocated by democratic socialists, or chosen by some autocratic process, including dictatorship, as advocated by communists.*

“Although both socialist and communist governments began by replacing market economies with centrally planned economies in the twentieth century, by the end of that century most democratic socialist governments and most communist dictatorships had abandoned central planning after experiencing its results. Then, as many economic decisions were transferred from government officials to private individuals and organizations operating in markets, the rate of growth of output usually increased — dramatically in India and China. In both of these countries, this lifted millions of people out of dire poverty, as had happened in various other countries before. Despite the Marxian premise that the poor are poor because they are exploited by the rich, none of the Marxian dictatorships around the world with comprehensive central planning ever achieved as high a standard of living as was common in various market economies in Western Europe, North America or in such Asian nations as Japan and South Korea.

“Despite the indispensability of government for some economic activities and its value for some other economic functions, the limitations of its ability to carry out some more sweeping economic activities under comprehensive central planning are not simply the limitations of particular individuals who wield power, but include inherent limitations on what power itself can accomplish.”

* “Other central planners include fascists, who allowed private ownership of the means of production, but with these owners subject to government dictates. In Germany, a special xenophobic form of fascism was called National Socialism, more commonly known by a contraction of this party’s name in Germany as Nazis.”

~from Wealth, Poverty and Politics, page 257

Wealth Inequality & Guaranteed Income

Inequality Why is there poverty in the world? Is there not enough wealth for everyone? Some believe that the resources which produce wealth are fixed, but there is enough for everyone. Those people tend to also believe that wealth must be collected by a benevolent force, like government, and distributed fairly.

Others believe that wealth is created and the resources which are used to do so are not fixed or limited. As humanity gains knowledge about the world around us, we are able to convert more and more new kinds of resources into wealth. The key is having the skills and knowledge to do so.

But what about poverty? How can poverty be abolished once and for all? Is that even possible?

One idea is called “Basic Income” or “Guaranteed Income”. Here’s a video from Vox presenting the idea…

You can read the full article how Vox lays out this program here. But basically they say this:

“‘Basic income’ is shorthand for a range of proposals that share the idea of giving everyone in a given polity a certain amount of money on a regular basis. A basic income comes with no categorical eligibility requirements; you don’t have to be blind or disabled or unemployed to get it. Everyone gets the same amount by virtue of being a human with material needs that money can help address.”

Another site defines it like this:

“A basic income is the best policy idea you’ve never heard of. The idea is simple: instead of, or in addition to, the panoply of government transfer programs currently in place, we just give everyone in the country a set amount of money per year, no strings attached. The benefit could phase out as one’s income rises (this variant is known as a ‘guaranteed minimum income’) or could just be granted unconditionally: you get $10,000 a year, I get $10,000 a year, the poorest of the poor get $10,000 a year, Bill Gates gets $10,000, etc.”

Milton Friedman is mentioned in the Vox video as being someone who supported “Basic Income”. But, according to the two definitions above, that’s not necessarily true. Whereas the definitions above call for everyone to receive a certain amount of money, regardless of pre-existing wealth or lack thereof, Friedman proposed a system called “Negative Income Tax” (NIT). NIT only provides money to those who are poor and are in a tax bracket where, instead of paying taxes, they receive a negative tax. Also, with Friedman’s plan, the amount they receive is not necessarily enough to live on, but rather, would be an incentive for them to work and generate their own higher income. He lays out his plan here…

Friedman was against the welfare program, and he saw his NIT program as an answer to welfare.

The New York Times also wrote about Friedman’s plan. The following opening quote from the Times article shows that they either didn’t understand Friedman’s plan or were pushing their own agenda. Probably the latter.

“Milton Friedman, who died last week at 94, was the patron saint of small-government conservatism. Conservatives who invoke his name in defense of Social Security privatization and other cutbacks in the social safety net might thus be surprised to learn that he was also the architect of the most successful social welfare program of all time.”

NIT was not proposed by Friedman as a welfare program. And, how can the Times say it was the most “successful social welfare program of all time” when it was never tried?

Friedman discusses welfare, poverty, and equality here…

Poverty is not just a problem of insufficient cash, as the Vox video suggests. The Vox video states that the solution to people not having enough money is to give them money, and that the tool to eliminate poverty is cash. Well, there’s a lot more to it than that.

“Human Capital” is essential to eliminating poverty. Human capital can be defined as the skills and knowledge of people to create and sustain wealth. The post-WW2 reconstruction of Europe can be used as an example. Billions of dollars were given by the USA to help in the reconstruction. And, the European nations did rebuild successfully. Billions of dollars have also been given to third-world nations over the decades, but yet, they remain poor. Why the difference? Europe, despite being devastated by war, still had its human capital, whereas the third-world nations never had the human capital in the first place.

Another example which follows the same logic… Cambodia was decimated by the Khmer Rouge in the late 1970s. Afterward, the United Nations decided it would use Cambodia as a test experiment to use UN dollars to establish a democratic government. Somewhere around three billion dollars were spent to accomplish that goal. Did it work? No, it did not. The human capital required to create and sustain a democratic system did not then, and does not yet today, exist in Cambodia.

Handing out free money without any incentive for the receiver to produce his or her own wealth is not any kind of solution — the poverty still exists and the poor are simply paid to remain poor. Increasing human capital, however, through education and the free-market system, is a historically proven method. People are very inventive, and the ability to create wealth out of what was previously considered to be valueless is our greatest asset. Where there is no incentive, there is no inventiveness.