Russian/Chinese Geo-political Strategies Versus the West

Angelina Jolie on the set of "Salt," in which she plays a Soviet sleeper agent deeply embedded in the CIA.  She holds on set a copy of "War of Necessity" by Richard N Haas, CFR

Angelina Jolie on the set of “Salt,” in which she plays a Soviet sleeper agent deeply embedded in the CIA. She holds on set a copy of “War of Necessity” by Richard N Haas, CFR

Related – See The West, Russia, Eurasian Union and Esoterism

By: Jay

Some analysts have noted that the Cold War is, on an important level, still raging.  The continued espionage between China, Russia and the U.S. represents a real strategic threat that will mean an eventual confrontation between the superpowers.  It is worth noting that the Western media never rarely focuses on threats from either China or Russia, aside from sensationalistic stories that circulated about Anna Chapman.  However, Bloomberg did recently run a story that shows there are still plenty of good people in the FBI and CIA.  The article states:

“Hearkening back to Cold War anxieties, growing signs of spying on U.S. universities are alarming national security officials. As schools become more global in their locations and student populations, their culture of openness and international collaboration makes them increasingly vulnerable to theft of research conducted for the government and industry.”

The idiocy here is that the very establishment that publishes Department of Defense analysis papers on strategic risk trends is the same establishment that pushes all the very policies that lead to a mass influx of foreign intelligence recruits.  It may seem odd to some that youth would be the target of intelligence recruitment or foreign spying, but the truth is the very opposite.  The youth were recruited by both Hitler and Stalin.  Youth is the prime time of life, when arrogance is at its highest and the tempting lure of becoming a “spy” is irresistible to naive young minds.

The Wall Street Journal reports of the Chapman spy ring: “A Russian spy ring busted in the U.S. two years ago planned to recruit members’ children to become agents, and one had already agreed to his parents’ request, according to current and former U.S. officials….Children born or reared in America were potentially more valuable espionage assets than their parents because when they grew up they would be more likely to
pass a U.S. government background check.”  As a side note, remember that Salt came out around the time of the Anna Chapman event, and included Jolie inviting Chapman to attend the Moscow premier of the film.

This is standard fare and nothing new, historically.  Grevork Andreyevich Vartanyan was a famed spy for Russia and was recruited by the Stalinist regime at an early age.  The DailyMail writes: ”The legendary Russian-born spy was the son of  an Iranian factory owner of Armenian origin. His father took the family back to  Iran in the 1930s as part of a mission decreed by Stalin.  He enlisted his son who was working  undercover by the age of 16.”

The standard, modern authoritarian leftists and republiconmunists live in a delusional fantasy world where none of this history happened.  The real world is full of espionage, conspiracy and theft of important secrets, despite the very modern idea that “conspiracy” is a fringe circle with little actual evidence to back it up.  Particularly during the Clinton era, the Anglo-American powers armed and built up the North Korean arsenal through its aid to China.  Newsmax reported in 2003:

Russian Spy Ring of 2010

Russian Spy Ring of 2010

“During the early Clinton years, hard-liners and so-called conservative hawks advocated a pre-emptive strike to halt North Korea’s nuclear weapons development before it could field an atomic bomb. Instead of taking the hard-line, President Clinton elected to rely on former President Jimmy Carter and decided to appease the Marxist-Stalinist dictatorship.

China and North Korea: partners in communism.

China and North Korea: partners in communism.

Carter met with North Korean leader Kim Jong-il in Pyongyang and returned to America waving a piece of paper and declaring peace in our time. Kim, according to Carter, had agreed to stop his nuclear weapons development.  The Clinton appeasement program for North Korea included hundreds of millions of dollars in aid, food, oil and even a nuclear reactor. However, the agreement was flawed and lacked even the most informal means of verification.  In return, Kim elected to starve his people while using the American aid to build uranium bombs. The lowest estimate is that Kim starved to death over 1 million of his own people, even with the U.S. aid program.” Read more of this post

Jay’s Analysis-In Defense of Capitalism

*Note: I misspoke and meant to state that Austrian school investors are bullish* on Asian markets.

In this installment, I deal with an overview of other systems, including Marxism/socialism and its variants, mixed economies, Catholic distributism, and Austrian Economics, as well as analyzing the arguments of collectivist positions in general, laying the groundwork for the biblical basis for capitalism, private property, human action and prosperity. I also look at theology in the history of the West and its relationship to religious systems, focusing primarily on the philosophic basis for market capitalism. I chiefly answer the criticisms of a distributist friend.

Recommended reading:
Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal By: Ayn Rand
How an Economy Grows and Why it Crashes By: Peter Schiff
Meltdown By: Tom Woods
http://www.mises.org
http://www.jaysanalysis.com

Horkheimer, Adorno, Habermas, and the Dialectic of Enlightenment

 

Horkheimer and Adorno's 'Dialectic of Enlightenment"

By: Jay

Max Horkheimer and Theodore W. Adorno, key figures of the Frankfurt School of Marxist Critical Theory, wrote in their landmark work, “Dialectic of Enlightenment,” that “myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology.”1 By this, the authors mean that the historical progression of the enlightenment tradition has actually subverted its original intentions of, as Francis Bacon wrote, making man the sovereign of nature, and has actually produced the opposite: barbarity and domination of the social nature in fascism and Stalinism.2 In response to this, later Frankfurt School writer, Jurgen Habermas, responds to Horkheimer and Adorno with an interesting counter-critique. The purpose of this paper will be to examine Horkheimer and Adorno’s criticism of enlightenment and Habermas’ response.

The project that Horkeimer and Adorno engage in is correctly titled an “immanent critique”; called by Habermas “ideology critique.” This type of critique arises out of Kant and Hegel. In this approach, a system, or ideology is investigated internally to see whether its presuppositions are consistent with one another. If they are not, then the system is considered self-refuting. Thus, Horkheimer and Adorno make the case that the enlightenment tradition fails the test, and the inheritors of the enlightenment tradition, namely the Vienna Circle positivists and nominalists, are involved in promulgating a self-destructive, self-refuting ideology.3

Horkheimer and Adorno set forth their case in the essay, “The Concept of Enlightenment.” They hold that enlightenment thinking has displayed a couple major motifs: demythologizing the natural world through knowledge and control, dominating that demythologized nature through autonomous, instrumental reason. These motifs are inter-connected, and actually interact and affect one another in a dialectical fashion.

First, they argue that the enlightenment tradition has, from mankind’s beginning, been bound up with myth. A study of the social evolution of ancient societies demonstrates, according to Horkheimer and Adorno, myth actually arises as a response to mystery and the domination of man by the natural world. Thus, one can see in the earliest known human societies the mythological scheme actually produces a kind of classification, a seeking for origins, and reductionism, though not self-consciously. In other words, just like enlightenment, “myth seeks to explain.”4Enlightenment, however, since Bacon, Kant, Hume, and up to the positivists, has failed to recognize this dialectical relationship. Instead, For the Enlightenment, anything which cannot be resolved into numbers, and ultimately into one, is illusion; modern positivism consigns it to poetry. Unity remains the watchword from Parmenides to Russell. All gods and qualities must be destroyed.5

  Read more of this post

The Soviet Story

Documentary Here.

Glenn Beck Shows 30 Rock’s Communist Symbolism

And he’s spot on here. Props to Peter Parker for this one.

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