THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

HOW TO SPOT A FLAKE | 2004-08-22

When you are working for the cause the way I do, there are certain types of people you need to sum up fast and avoid even faster.

I have told you abut the dyspeptic old men whose constant theme is, "All is lost! The world is going to hell!"

Get away from them and treat them like the enemies they are. A defeatist is always the best friend the enemy has.

Another group to get away from is the flakes.

When you start to talk about strategy or a diagnosis of the situation that you have been thinking about for along time, the flake will interrupt you and say, "Did you hear about the woman who was raped by a bunch of illegal immigrants in El Paso?'

You try to explain how some fundamental attitudes have changed in America over the last couple of decades and want to discuss how we can use that change.

The flake says, "The black birth rate is huge. Did you read that article in the Panic Gazette about the growth in the black population of Sinkhole, Missouri?"

What I am thinking is, "No, I didn't spend the last fifty years predicting all this. I was in a Trappist Monastery with no access to newspapers."

When the flake starts explaining to me how Bush has secret foot odor, I tell him I am busy.

And that is the last thing you ought to EVER say to a flake.

MAO AND MUSSOLINI | 2011-07-12

In the 1920s one main line magazine pointed out, "But Mussolini is not perfect..."

Today the idea that someone would have the impression that Mussolini was perfect is astonishing.

In the 1920s main line magazines were organs of the capitalist establishment, in line with Calvin Coolidge and Warren G. Harding. If this line is quoted at all, it is not put into that context.

Only in context do historical incidents make sense.

Today one can easily find some equivalent in main line magazines to "Mao was not perfect..."

Mao's slaughters and starvation make Hitler or even Stain look like a piker. The Cultural Revolution made Lenin's Terrors look placid. But The Sayings of Chairman Mao is not criticized, the way any copy of Mein Kampf would be.

You can use an incident to shock and awe or you can use it to demonstrate the real-world context.

In the 1920s Mussolini was very much like Mao today. He did what America's ruling group desperately wanted done, and the only criticism was that he was a bit too far in his methods, he was, as the media like to see it, a bit too idealistic.

Mussolini came along right after the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia at the end of World War I when Europe was in shambles and Communist revolutions were breaking out all over Europe. It is easy for us to put it into context today, but at that time no one knew how far it would go.

In the United States and Britain, the stability of society stopped Communism, but even in these countries the Red Scare was extreme.

In Europe only the fascists put the Red threat down firmly. Elsewhere on the Continent, the Communist Party was firmly established and places like Hungary and Bavaria were actually temporarily ruled by Communist governments.

In our historical context, Communism has always been there but contained. No one had such a context in the 1920s.

Once again, we cannot get the lesson out of "Mussolini is not perfect" because of temporal provincialism.

You can tell the nature of the group that is in power by how it treats extremists. Today, Maoists are discussed as a reasonable if extreme point of view whereas Hitler, and to far lesser extent Mussolini, are pure Satanism.

OUR ESTABLISHED RELIGION 3: NONE DARE CALL IT SILLY | 2010-10-31

What destroys an established religion in our latter days is not being wrong, it is being SILLY. In Nietzsche's day, the various churches had fought vaccination, the idea that earth was over 4500 years old, the idea that the earth was not the center of the universe, and in fact worn a dunce hat over and over and over again for all to see.

When Nietzsche said God is Dead, he meant for intellectuals, real ones, not Mommy Professors. He meant that at the top of the idea chain, the God Industry had made a laughing stock of faith.

The Religious Industry lives entirely in THIS world. For a millennium and a half it had dictated all reality. The idea that His Kingdom is not of this world was absolute heresy.

I did a review of a Galbraith book many years ago for National Review. Posing as an intellectual biography, it was the same crap he had put in the hundred books before it. It had the usual supply and demand don't work in it.

My statement was, "Galbraith is still talking about leftism in theory. Leftism is collapsing because it has been put into practice."

Faith in the next world cannot be proven by discrediting evolution here.

This is a routine lesson no one has learned: You win power on theory, but once the theory is tried out, you are in deep trouble.

That's what happened to the religion decided on at Trent and that's what happened to the main line Protestant faiths invented by Luther and Calvin. Until competition from the Pentecostals made them toe the line more, they were actually on their way to the complete collapse European Protestantism has accomplished.

Exactly the same thing happened to the left with the trying out of Communism in the real world. You won't see much real difference between how a Marxist today argues and how anti-evolutionists argue.

When the Soviet Empire collapsed FROM PURE SILLINESS, the whole leftist charade was exposed. No Christian wants to talk about the Christianity Industry's battle against smallpox, and no leftist wants to talk about the fall of Communism.

Why not? Because any discussion of these things shows how SILLY they were. Not how their theories had imperfections, but just plain dribble-mouth silliness. I remember right after the USSR fell, one after another leftist commentator congratulated a respectable conservative on his understanding that liberalism is NOT Communism.

Actually Kennedy had been working with the Communists to undermine Reagan. The KGB files are filled with the people McCarthy called Communists. The last desperate bid to save the Soviet Empire by defeating the Strategic Defense Initiative they called Star Wars took out all the stops, all the pretense that the entire left was on the same side.

Joe Sobran noticed that, and wrote an article for National Review called "Congress's Red Army."

With new advances in knowledge about real animal behavior, the whole BASIS of leftist theory has been swept away. As it is tried out in practice it really shows its nonsense.

The Obama election has been a shouting example of this reality.

None Dare Call it Silly. That is, none who want to make a living in the kept opposition.

WHERE WAS EVERYBODY? | 2000-10-21

Newsmen keep asking people about something in this year's election that puzzles them. Why, they say, is Gore having problems when the economy is in such great shape?

There is indeed a general rule that the party in the White House should have an automatic win when the economy is in good shape. Nobody claims that the party in power need prove it is responsible for the economy being in good shape. Everybody agrees it is usually largely a matter of luck. Nonetheless, the party in power is expected to benefit from it.

So the wide-eyed newsmen ask how it is possible that Gore should have a problem when Clinton has experienced eight years of boom. Conservatives share their puzzlement. Everybody is respectable, wide-eyed, and says "DUH!" in unison.

Apparently I was all alone as I watched the enormous embarrassment of the Clinton Administration in the Lewinsky affair and the cover up. Now, the media was unanimous in agreeing that Clinton shouldn't be impeached, but nobody outside of Geraldo Rivera said that what Clinton did was OK. Even the media admit it was a gigantic scandal.

At any other time in American history, that scandal would have meant total defeat for the party in the White House in the next election.

As I explained on May 22, 1999 in KINKY SEX, the reason we are in an economic boom is so obvious that it takes the combined efforts of the media and respectable conservatives to ignore it. The reason for the present boom would be a major embarrassment for the political left, so the respectable right will never discuss it.

So Clinton had nothing to do with the continuing boom. But that is not necessary for him to get credit for it. Regardless of the reason for it, the Administration normally gets credit for it if the economy is good, and Gore will share in that. It isn't fair, but it is the reality.

Likewise, the scandal which I spent a year watching on television -- all by myself, apparently -- was also not Gore's fault. But the fact is that when you are the heir apparent, you take both the good and the bad of your predecessor. Gore gets a boom, and Gore gets a scandal, neither of which he earned.

This explains another Major Media Mystery.

At the time of the Republican Convention, when Bush had a huge lead, there was no gender gap for the first time in decades. I saw a number of liberal women interviewed who said that they were infuriated by what Clinton had done and were seriously considering voting Republican because of it.

Naturally the media said Bush's lead was all due to his Mexican Convention and his mealy-mouthing on issues. But his "moderation" and his "appealing to the minority vote" doesn't explain anything about the temporary disappearance of the gender gap, which is what really put him in front for a while by double digits. So let us explain all these Major Media Mysteries at once: women were upset at Clinton's behavior and blamed Gore.

For the same reason that Gore gets credit for a boom he doesn't deserve, he gets blame as the heir apparent to Clinton for Clinton's misdeeds.