Modern Times was and is highly recommended

Hello everyone,

Its been a while since I stopped and wrote something for this blog, I think I'll do a little catching you up to speed:

Since taking office, Donald Trump has moved his way through the beaurocrocy of the DC establishment and demanded, either overtly or otherwise, loyalty to his administration and it's goals of changing it, fundamentally changing the mentality of our government. By the way, it has been needed for a long, long time.

DJT is not an established WashingtonDCphile, so his clearly stated efforts to clean out the swamp were met with fierce resistance. I'm happy to say he is scoring some decisive points in this ongoing battle against the deeply entrenched politi-class of the ruling elite. The Russia Collusion probe isn't producing anything lately with the exception of Paul Manafort, who had apparently done side business with Russian contacts not tying into the Trump campaign as they would so desire it be so.
An investigation, or a reopening of the investigation of deleted, destroyed and covered-up emails from then Sec. Clinton appears to be close. For those with a short memory google 'bleach bit'.

At this date, Trump has had his meeting with Chairman Kim from DPRK and further negotiations are presumed to be ongoing regarding denuclearization. If legitimization was Kim's prize, he has won already. If he joins the civilized world his people may soon rejoice also.

"Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties" Paul Johnson

In reading this recommended book, I have found some very strong evidence for the origins of our political climate. The times we are going through have no precedent, which sounds comical, but it's difficult to take direct meaning and actionable advice from the events of the past to some degree. The times are different. Our society has evolved from it's frontier American start-up to the technological and resource-affluent superpower status it has today. We are much more educated, enlightened, sophisticated and open to learning than were the people of previous centuries.

We still feel, with good reason, that, as with most cliche's, they are based in truth: Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it. I urge you to pick this book up, and til then read these few excerpts, I am barely half-way along, circa. 1940.



(the following excerpts and commentary from "Modern Times" Johnson)

Cottingham, you won’t have to go home alone”

This from Cambridge Professor Arthur Eddington upon proving Einstien’s theory correct, which if it had been disproven Eddington was said to have gone mad and his assistant, E.T. Cottinham would have to go home alone!

Einstien’s theory was proven on 29 May 1919 by Eddington’s expedition and ushered the world into the modern times.  In the 1920’s relativity became confused with relativism, “…at the beginning of the 1920’s the belief began to circulate, for the first time at a popular level, that there were no longer any absolutes; of time and space, of good and evil, of knowledge, above all of value.”

“ By early 1933, therefore, the two largest and strongest nations of Europe were firmly in the grip of totalitarian regimes which preached and practiced, and indeed embodied, moral relativism, with all it’s horrifying potentialities. Each system acted as a spur to the most reprehensible characteristics of the other. One of the most disturbing aspects of totalitarian socialism, whether Leninist or Hitlarian, was the way in which, both as movements seeking power or regimes enjoying it, they were animated by a Gresham’s Law of political morality: frightfulness drove out humanitarian insticts and each corrupted the other into ever-deeper profundities of evil.”

(p307-8)    The attempt by Western intellectuals to defend Stalinism involved them in a process of self-corruption which transferred to them, and so to their countries, which their writings helped to shape, some of the moral decay inherent in totalitarianism itself, especially its denial of individual responsibility for good or ill. Lionel Trilling shrewdly observed of the Stalinists of the West that they repudiated politics, or at least the politics of ‘vigilance and effort’:

(from ‘The Last Decade’ Lionel Trilling)

“In an imposed monolithic government, they saw the promise of rest from the particular acts of will which are needed to meet the many, often clashing requirements of democratic society…they cherished the idea of revolution as the final, all embracing act of will which would forever end the exertions of our individual wills”

For America, the development was particularly serious because the Stalinists then formed the salient part of the new radical movement, and as Trilling also noted:

“In any view of the American cultural situation, the importance of the radical movement of the Thirties cannot be overestimated. It may be said to have created the American intellectual class as we now know it in its great size and influence. It is fixed the character of this class as being, through all mutations of opinion, predominantly of the Left.”

I am understanding more and more the full origins and meaning of leftist ideology-

Ian Carroll