THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

DAMN IT, A PRISON IS A PRISON IS A PRISON, PERIOD! | 2016-06-13

When he died in 2011, Christopher Hitchens was a recovering Marxist

In a society where people don't like to commit themselves to being "atheists,"Hitchens declared himself an "antitheist."

Hitchens declared not only that he was an atheist, but that religion itself was a bad thing. He called himself an antitheist. His book on this subject was called, "Religion Spoils Everything."

After a lifetime of watching people creep around issues, the simple fact that he dropped all the crap and said it bluntly was a relief to a lot of people like me. I did not fall into a goofy love affair with him the way respectable conservatives did, but I was impressed by this.

Of course those in recovery never use the term "recovered" alcoholic.  It's always "recovering," and I think we all know why.

Hitchens also said that he understood how becoming atheists can be hard on them psychologically. Rejecting their version of God robs a person of the central theme of his life.

Hitchens explained that he knew this agony because Marxism had been his religion.

The fact that Marxism is a religious faith is something Marxists hate to hear.

Like all religious fanaticism, Marxism declares that it is against all OTHER religions.

But the most basic tenet of the Marxist Faith is that Marxism is NOT a faith.

But Hitchens was a recoverING Marxist. It is possible he would have taken the next step in his recovery had he not died of cancer at 62 years of age.

He had realized that Marxism was silly. But given time, he might have seen the basic fault of Marxism. It might have occurred to him that there is something wrong with countries that have to use walls and machine guns to keep their people inside as all Marxist states must.

When he denounced all the horror of the Stalins and Maos, he still made the fundamental error converts from Marxism make. He admitted that Marxism was not just an intellectual mistake, but was also causing horror after horror in the name of humanitarianism, just as other religious faiths had done throughout history. He never saw the fundamental error Marxism represents.

Like every anti-Communist who wants to be "fair," he said that anti-Communists were often just as bad as Communists. His favorite examples of an anti-Communist error was apartheid.

In saying apartheid was as bad as Stalin, Hitchens spoke like a good conservative.

And a good conservative always makes the same fundamental error: To be respectable, conservatives are like every other elitist:

They do not understand the difference between freedom and a prison.

For me, and for those who wrote our Constitution, what one wants is not a country that is dedicated to Ideals that the intellectual elite agree on.

The aim of our Founders was to create a country they would want to live in, ideals be damned.

The Founders had had quite enough of Great Ideals, thank you very much. The example of Evil that towered over their tie was the centuries of European Religious Wars that had slaughtered a third of Germany's entire population in the century before the Constitution was written.

The Founders were all too familiar with how people tortured and slaughtered each other in the name of Love and Brotherhood.   The last thing they were obsessed with was the Ideal of Equality or some other abstract. They only put that crap in the Declaration to appeal to Europeans to take their side in the war against Britain.

Jefferson would have been appalled if someone making POLICY in America actually took this "all men are created equal nonsense" seriously.

That crap was for Europeans, and none-too-intelligent Europeans at that.

So Hitchens's talk about apartheid showed that he had not yet taken the critical step in recovery from his Marxist faith.

Apartheid was a system that survived the acid test that Marxism always fails.

There was no fence around apartheid South Africa. Illegal IMMIGRATION was their only problem in this respect. A major complaint of actual South African Blacks was that the apartheid government did not enforce IMMIGRATION laws.

With Whites in power, cheap African labor coming into South Africa was encouraged, just as our ruling money men are all for cheap labor coming into America.

The acid test of any society is not whether it fits in with the Ideals laid out by the "Intellectuals" and "Idealists."

The acid test of a country is whether people want to live there.

Communist countries all had to have walls and millions of men to keep their people IN.

America needs walls to keep people OUT.

Hitchens'  recovery from Marxism never reached the point where he saw this most fundamental reality of all.

A society where the people must be fenced in or where Whites have to be chased down in the name of Diversity is failure, Idealistic nonsense be damned.

DAMN! COMMENTS HAVE BEEN GOOD! | 2008-04-17

This was great!

This time, when I went silent for a while, there was no the radio silence we usually get. There was a set of THOUGHTS that set me to thinking. THAT is where we ae going!

You talked about BASICS.

When I come up with a thought, it often seems to me to be so obvious that I have trouble getting anybody but you to understand how long it took me to get it, and why no one would be likely to EVER come up with it.

One commenter talked about the basic w questions, who what where and why. You don't get that in group which is trying to impress each other with how many details they know. And that means just about any discussion group I have ever seen.

We are engaged in a war in which all the detailed knowledge in the world won't win. Pain and Simmons talked about knowledge versus wisdom. They concluded that our definition of Wisdom has nothing to do with the accepted version, which consists ENTIRELY of trying to impress people.

It occurs to me that one never grows up unless he goes through the Porch Talk phase.

A small child wants ANSWERS. He needs discipline and adults who ACT adult. But there comes a time when he begins to have to make his own decisions. As he gets into his teens he needs adults who will help HIM become adult. That means that the adult must stop dictating truth and begin to explain to the teen how he must begin to deal with a LACK of information.

In our society, that time never comes. I remember when I took some grad courses in 1992 I was amazed to see grad students sitting around CRAMMING for the exam. They were doing exactly what they had done during twelve years of grammar school and high school and four ears of college. The professor had done what the grammar school teacher does with pre-teens, putting together an exam to see if the kids could repeat what at they had heard.

I have said that a high-level executive should not HAVE a job description. He MAKES job descriptions. By the same token, no professor is ready to conduct a seminar if he must give an examination at the end of it. If fifty hours of open discussion can't tell him how well a student is doing, he should go back to teaching grammar school.

ABOUT THE BLOG | 2004-09-26

From the May 1st, 2004 WOL

A "blog" is a personal web page where you just write down whatever you damned well please and put in public for people to see.

If you have an idea, you can put it on the public record by putting it on your blog.

If you have an invention, you can put it on the public record by writing it on your blog.

If you are like me and your best ideas cannot be published, you put them on record in your blog.

A blog is usually a kind of public diary of your thoughts.

My blog is more like a diary than it is like a web page.

My blog is not written for the reader, but you are welcome to read it until you get so bored you can't stand it.

DO NOT HOLD ME TO ANYTHING I SAY IN MY BLOG.

Do not expect the blog to be nearly as professional as my writing. I am talking to me, not to you.

You are listening to the meanderings of a person with Adult Attention Deficit Disorder. That makes real writing hard work. My blog is not going to be hard work, so it is going to be a bit scatterbrained.

You are welcome to tell me anything my blog makes you think of.

I have been confidential advisor to everything from mercenary soldiers to alcoholics and drug addicts to the President. This list could go on a long, long way. I have learned to think like a host of people.

So my blog will be an exercise in writing from inside the skin of a lot of other people besides me.

I can try to think like a Klansman one day and like a Communist the next. I've known plenty of both, and I have given advice to both, free of charge. I respect and will give PERSONAL help to any honest person, wherever that honesty leads them.

That attitude is part of my own personal Bible Belt heritage, "Judge not that ye be not judged." But it has repaid my efforts many, many times over, not the least because I can walk in a lot of people's shoes.

If this doesn't give you the warning you need, you need to go back to Kindergarten.

If you are the kind of person who permanently rejects someone because of one wrong thing he said, I don't want you near me anyway.

I warn you, that kind of person is not worth knowing. Get away from him!

I realize my blog is public. So I won't identify people in it or give information that would allow anybody to identify them. Trust me, I've had to do that all my life.

After I have said all this, if my blog infuriates somebody, that person is a fool.

And I am retired, I have all the money I want, and I have done enough in my life so that I need to impress nobody, so I don't give a damn.

If that sort of person reads my blog, he will reject me forever. That would be a favor to me. If the blog gets rid of people like that, that alone would make it worthwhile.

A blog never ends, so if you want to take a look now, do so. But it will be there a long time, and it will get longer and longer. But remember, WhitakerOnline is written for you, Bob's Blog is written for me.