Marxism

Good move. Sorry I got carried away over there. I said it SHOULD be voluntary, I didn't say anybody was following it as it should be followed. I also said that conservatives generally fail to live up to this teaching and instead tend to have a self-congratulatory attitude about their own hard-earned success story and a moralistic superior attitude to the unfortunate, which is why the socialist drive to turn it all over to government was so successful. They don't have to have stolen anything as in the case of some Wall Street execs, and some of them don't have much either. And of course they aren't all Christians anyway. But even Christians don't live by this Biblical teaching consistently either although as a group we are the biggest givers of financial aid in general. I believe I was clear that I condemn that kind of snobby attitude to the poor in my post. Did you actually read it? That attitude that the unfortunate are just lazy and freeloaders that so many conservatives seem to have is offensive to me. They aren't obeying the Biblical exhortation I mentioned. That was the point.No, I'm not against the VA. The government and all the citizens of the country owe it to our military to support them because they serve all of us. Some things government MUST do in its role as government. Taxes for any purpose other than legitimate government functions we all need to finance, yes. Taxes that go from hard working citizens to other citizens is just stealing. Giving should be voluntary not coerced from us.Public education would be fine if it weren't also indoctrination in values that some don't share. For that reason there should be a lot more private education.

Maybe some time on the school topic. Not now. Trying to follow many branches to a conversation is tiring and means the best thinking doesn't happen either. That's the same stress I'm trying to escape from on my own thread, which I hope to get back to soon so I don't want to get mired down elsewhere.Back to Marxism, I simply originally objected to a poster's indignant assertion that there hasn't been any Communist/Marxist indoctrination in this country, because I know there has both from my own personal experience and from my reading. As I wrote over there. I don't know how to link to a specific post (post 206) but this is the url on the page:
EvC Forum: Gun Control & 2nd AmendmentI just found David Horowitz's Radical Son at Google Books, the book I referenced for information about the thirties American Communist Party movement and its offspring in the Sixties radicals. Tried to link it and managed to get it wrong so here's the raw url:Radical Son: A Generational Oddysey - David Horowitz - Google Books<Edited by Faith, : straight out mess I made of a link

Anything we get that we actually paid into is not socialism/Marxism, though there is a socialist element in those programs too as more is paid out than is paid in by many recipients.Welfare is socialism, food stamps are socialism -- they are determined entirely by need rather than earning. The ridiculous idea of Earned Income Credit is socialist/Marxist. Anything that "takes from the rich to give to the poor" is Marxism. It's stealing. "From each according to ability, to each according to need." Stealing. Depriving people of the incentive to work or create businesses etc. because they're only going to be forced to pay for those who don't work or so much for those who work for them that they can't afford it and are forced out of business. Regulation is necessary to keep one group from exploiting another but Marxism forces one group to pay for another group and that's a whole nother thing.We don't have full blown economic Marxism in this country yet, but we do have an administration that is steeped in Marxist thinking.The whole attitude that the wealthy are some sort of oppressor class is also Marxist and that's certainly a biggie these days. I think big business needs to be regulated and certainly fraud must be punished, but the attitude that big business as such is evil is Marxist, the idea that capitalism as such is evil is Marxist, as is the idea that government should take the money away from successful business owners and capitalists and give it to the poor. I suspect you can find some such attitudes in yourself and others here.Many popular cultural attitudes today are conditioned by the Marxist influence. Cultural Marxism is responsible for gay liberation, the destruction of marriage (there's a thread here about how there is no meaning to marriage in anyone's mind any more -- that's the work of the cultural Marxists), sexual liberation to the point that we pass out condoms to kids because we no longer have a cultural moral basis for insisting they abstain. Marriage is dead as a cultural value, Chrsitian morality is dead as a cultural value; now we have the idea that freedom means pretty much whatever you want to do, the slogan from the sixties now in living actuality. There are other influences than Cultural Marxism on all this but they wrote books specifically pushing these attitudes. Marcuse, Norman O Brown, Wilhelm Reich, they were very big in the sixties.The topic on the other thread was started by someone expressing incredulity at the idea that there is or was any kind of Marxist/Communist influence in this country. I recommended a book that documents the American Communist Party of the thirties and the radical movement that was born from it in the sixties. They were both economic and cultural Marxists. In other words I already supplied enough references and evidence that this movement exists in this country, but this post may contribute some more if you still don't believe it.We're swimming in it, you argue for it every day, that's why you can't see it. You don't know that's Marxism. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

David Horowitz certainly didn't make up his entire childhood and experiences as part of the radical movement in the sixties. People around here sling the epithet "liar" against anything they don't like ideologically. If you quote only leftists you'll never find out what Horowitz is really like. Leftists think their point of view is simply the normal point of view so when you call them leftists they get all indignant and call you a liar. Read the source. It's online at Google books. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Well, there you are with the typical leftist mantra, and it's interesting how it's always a vicious attack on character. You won't give Horowitz the slightest benefit of the doubt, you just want to chew him up and leave nothing left of him.And I bet you've never read a thing he ever wrote, just leftist hate tracts against him, right?But when he was a Marxist radical oh how you would have loved him.

You are right. It took guts for him to leave his ingrained political upbringing, oppose his own parents, turn his back on the radical movement of which he was once a leader. It took guts and soul searching. It still takes guts because he has to put up with the hatred of all his former friends and colleagues and those who are indoctrinated by them.Radical Son is a good read. But I lived through those times myself in the San Francsico Bay Area and he invokes vividly the political atmosphere I remember so it touches me in a way it might not touch someone younger. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

I did read what you posted. Short tidbits out of context. Read his book.Oh and quoting all those professors objecting to his characterizations of them is really really funny. Like I said above, leftists don't know they are leftists -- today's leftists anyway. They're so indoctrinated they think they are just expressing a standard American doctrine of "peace and freedom" instead of a Marxist-defined idea of peace and freedom. {abe: Actually she said "peace and social justice." Same situation}You have to read a LOT more to begin to get a picture of both sides. For starters you've got to read the side you don't like. Take a look at Horowitz's book Radical Son at Google Books.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

No, it isn't illegal to be leftist or Marxist either. Be leftist all you want. What I'm talking about is people not KNOWING they are leftist and being completely ignorant of the source of their ideas and how they are opposed to the fundamental principles of the founding of this country as generally understood before the last few decades of Marxist revisionism in the universities. The poster on the other thread was incredulous at the idea there was any kind of Marxist/Communist influence in this country at all. I hope I've made it clear that his knowledge of history is sadly deficient. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

I think so, yes, but I can hardly wait to hear what you think he attempted to do.

That is leftist propaganda right there. He did no such thing.

Hello slevesque, I just now saw your post here. Yes, but they CHOSE to get together and share their resources, and they did this only as a group among themselves, for EACH OTHER.This was not government forcing them to do it and do it for people they didn't even know. To do that is against the spirit of this passage, and it is stealing.There is not even anything in that passage to require Christian believers to organize ourselves in that fashion, although it is a model we can follow among ourselves if we want to. I like the idea and wish I were among Christians who think that way. I think more Christians should live like that and not be so dependent on worldly systems such as socialism.But again, that's entirely different from a secular government's forcing it on the entire citizenry. Surely, again, it IS stealing to take from anyone who doesn't willingly offer it, to give to someone else. There is no empathy in coercion. Empathy volunteers to give. There is only bitterness and resistance in coercion.And I don't think capitalism is about greed, I think it is about people working freely to support themselves and produce goods and services and inventions and everything else people do when left to themselves to be creative in their work.What one DOES with one's money is what is sinful or not, but earning it fairly and squarely and getting rich by it is not greed.Greed is just one human sin that poor people certainly have as well as rich, and Marxists have it as much or more than capitalists. The leaders of the Communist Party in Russia lived like the czars they had overthrown, while they murdered everyone who opposed them and the people stood in lines all day for bread that never came. That's Marxism at its rawest of course. We only have a modified Marxism.

It's possible to get so precise about the words that one misses the point. There are all kinds of socialism, but what I've been talking about is what was understood by its American practitioners in the thirties to be Marxist Communism and even drew some Americans to Russia. They were people who read Marx and sincerely tried to follow his teachings. My sources are people who experienced it, such as David Horowitz, but including some of my own friends.The children of those Communists became the founders of Sixties radicalism which they also understood to be Marxism and they read Marx and some of them read Mao's Little Red Book. I was around these people and saw this and read and heard their stuff and I know it's alive and well today, all the stuff they were teaching then, in the form of multiculturalist notions and "American imperialism" and all the liberationisms that are now just standard American morality. Straight out of their playbook.One friend was a history professor who taught Marxism for years. He told me that Cultural Marxism was not considered by true Marxists to be "really" Marxism -- but he sort of laughed when he said it, as if what's pure Marxism is up to whoever is defining it -- but he gave me some books by the Cultural Marxists and he taught them in his courses too.There may be many Marxisms but we certainly have one or a few of them solidly entrenched in Americans' minds today.Yes there are all kinds of socialism but what's the point in trying to parse it all out so closely? The original statement was that there is NONE. Now it turns out onifre, whose post I hope I'll get to next -- but they told us where I live that they're going to shut down the power in about twenty minutes for the rest of the night because the wind knocked down a pole so I don't know if I'll get to his or not -- Anyway he also is getting so sophisticated about different kinds of Marxists and socialists that the point is getting lost. There are cultural and philosophical and political and economic influecnes all going on in different ways taht can be traced to teachings that called themselves Marxism or Communism back when. We don't need to split hairs here. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Please read the last post I wrote. You are making such fine distinctions about what's really Marxism that you seem to forget you acted absolutely incredulous to ICANT that he considered anything in America to be Marxist and that's not fair if you just mean he has a Marxism in mind that to your mind isn't pure Marxism. You implied there is NO Marxism in this country. But there's a ton of it that comes from sources that called themselves Marxist and Communist in the early and middle 20th century. And it's thoroughly embedded in the culture today. I don't care if it's "pure" by someobody's definition or not, it uses Marxist quotes and Marxist concepts and for all intents and purposes it is Marxism and it's in every aspect of our lives today.

You know why this ideal has never been reached? Because it's so far removed from human reality that it can't be reached. That's the problem with Marx, he lived in his head in some kind of economic neverneverland, and that's why his theories spawned such evil in the world and will continue to wherever people try to implement his ideas. That's the fate of all utopian fantasies. They ARE fantasies. Marx had foolish notions about human nature based on pure theory, pure fantasy, and that can only create monsters.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Man, the ways of being misunderstood continue to astonish me. The context was a voluntary society among Christians. The emphasis was not meant to be on the WHO one gives to, the emphasis is on the VOLUNTARY aspect of it. We give to strangers all the time, but we GIVE to them, it shouldn't be stolen from us to give to strangers. Good grief. I give to people I see rummaging in the trash cans or standing with signs for help. All Christians do. {abe: The point about giving to strangers should be clarified -- the point is that you don't know WHAT you are supporting when your money is taken from you for some national program. We know we are going to be forced to pay for abortion in this new health care program for instance. Many things we would regard as immoral we may be required to finance. That is a violation of the individual conscience to do that to us.) I'm saying such an organization should be VOLUNTARY. Anyone who wants to can organize that way, I'm saying nothing against it, but it should be VOLUNTARY. The first Christians organized that way out of mutual love for the brethren. The first Christians were also prodigious givers and helpers to unbelievers. There is no merit in a "giving" taht is simply taken from you without the invovlement of your will. I think you misunderstand. They are crying out against the concept of government COERCION, which is NOT giving. They are crying out against the CORRUPTION AND DISTORTION of giving, turning it into an obligation, and one that will so separate people from the object of the "gift" that it will not be a gift at all. It will be a theft that people won't even think about after a while. Fine, you don't have very stringent socialism there. Right, and all of them do it from Christian love, right? Give me a break. Most of them do it just becauase it's required by the government and they don't even think about who gets it. It's taken from them without any participation of their own minds in the process. They are deprived of the engagement of their will and sympathy in the act of giving. They are being stolen from. But they too benefit from the government programs and that's probably where their minds are really, on self, not on the poor weak and feeble. Fine, sometimes a degree of socialism doesn't kill the human spirit. Nevertheless if the point is to be sure that the needy are taken care of it DOES deprive the giver of the actual act of giving and turns it into an impersonal mechanical thing.I've heard that saying about greed and capitalism and communism (the quote disappeared in my edits somehow) and there is a bit of truth in it, but I don't think the basic function of capitalism has anything to do with greed at all. People work hard to make money under capitalism. Greed wants to win the lottery while lying around all day. In fact, there's more greed in people wanting government to take care of them than there is in capitalism where people expect to work hard to make their living. Capitalism doesn't promote greedy behavior. It promotes hard work, ambition and creative solutions to problems. Greed can misuse any political or economic system. Any. If "the government" want to encourage us to give to heal the sick, let them encourage us to do it by other means than sending it to the government. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.