SEDUCED FROM VICTORY

How the Lost Corpse
Subverts the American
Intellectual Tradition

by Stanley Ezrol

I believe, further, that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other.

—Benjamin Franklin, Sept. 17, 1787 (urging the unanimous endorsement of the draft Constitution of the United States)

Men at sometime, are Masters of their Fates.
The fault (deere Brutus) is not in our Starres,
But in our Selves, that we are underlings.

—Cassius to Brutus, from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar

Most of us know, or at least suspect, with good reason, that the nearly stillborn Bush II administration's bungling, yet brutal, attempt at "management" of the onrushing financial, economic, and strategic calamities of 2001, threatens to open this new century with even worse terror than that of the last, devastating, Century of War. The historical features of the last thirty-five years' "Southern Strategy," which imposed the Presidential "choice" between Al "Bore" Gore and "Boy George" Bush on the United States, are readily available,[1] and yet it remains for us, in this report, to explain why we allowed matters to come to this state of affairs. We must discover how we must develop the immunity to any future such pestilence. Just as many millions of us have been eager to gobble down the deadly, but imperceptible E. coli bacteria provided, at no extra cost, with our name-brand hamburgers, we have accepted an organized array of opinions regarding political-economic policy, philosophy, and theology, which are what Vladimir I. Vernadsky would call the "natural products" of an evil intention, an evil intention heretofore unknown to almost all of you, in its essential details.[2]

Our job in this report, is to focus the microscope on a particular variety of what President Franklin Roosevelt identified as the "American Tory" infection. We point to the avowedly "counter-revolutionary," Ku Klux Klan revivalist, pro-fascist, Confederate loyalists known as the Nashville Agrarians.

What you will discover is the extent to which well-known institutions and shapers of culture have, in fact, been, or been trained by, totally open, public, stubborn partisans of bloody treachery against the United States and its mission. These have included poets and novelists including Robert Penn Warren, historians including Ken Burns and Shelby Foote, political leaders including Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, and educators including Cleanth Brooks and John Crowe Ransom, all among whom have been promoted as ostensibly benign, almost boring, "thinkers."

Through the microsopic inspection which we conduct in these pages, we will point out the characteristic features of the oligarchical system of ideas which our nation was founded to destroy, and the peculiar variety of this infection which is our main enemy today. Our intention is, that once this class of disease has been identified, you will come to understand how it has poisoned not only much of what you think, but, more important, the way many of you think. You will discover that this occurs, generally, through the mechanism of unconsciously accepted ideas about how the universe functions. These are mechanisms which control your opinion in spite of the popular delusion, that you must accept the opinions you swallow and repeat, because they, like your hamburgers, are made according to your habituated, acquired tastes.

The problem did not begin with the Year 2000 Presidential campaign. To explain how it came to this, we must look back approximately two centuries, with some understanding of the two and a half-millennia which led up to that point.

Our Republic was founded out of the great conflict between two great principles. The first, the Renaissance idea of the Nation-State[3] dedicated to the Common Good, or the General Welfare. The second, the anti-Renaissance, Medieval, or Feudal idea of the Empire composed of feuding warlords, in constant conflict over their property titles to land and to those serfs or slaves who work it, as well as to financial accounts.

The English colonization of America had been launched by friends and followers of the great ecumenical "Tudor Renaissance" leaders, Thomas More, William Shakespeare, William Gilbert, and Thomas Harriott, who sought to preserve the idea of a Nation from that Venetian-manipulated religious sectarian warfare, which had dominated Europe from 1511 on, and was to continue until the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia. The immediate impulse for the establishment of an independent nation here, came from the 1688 through 1714 drive to expel the influence of our own intellectual forebear, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, from England, and to establish England as the "Brutish" Empire enforcer, modelled on ancient Rome, for the world's capital of financier power, Venice. This plunged Europe and its American colonies into a new Century of War, culminating in the unstable 1815 Congress of Vienna agreement between the Brutish, Habsburg,[4] and Russian Empires, which has been the basis for the bloody conflicts from 1848 to date.

Out of that conflict, Benjamin Franklin, in direct collaboration with Abraham Kästner, and with the circles of Moses Mendelssohn, Gotthold Lessing, and their allies amongst the champions of Leibniz's tradition throughout Europe, designed what became the United States, to be the cradle of the greatest advance in Civilization in the history of humankind. It worked. The age of combustion-powered technology and electricity, fostered here through the American System policies typified by high-tariff protectionism, technology-vectored internal improvements, and quality public education, has made possible a 150-year explosion of population and living standards, as well as the extension of our reach beyond our home planet Earth.

As you read about how the United States was seduced away from its tradition, apparently by a fairly small, multi-generational clique of traitors, fix in your mind, the image of the learned and proper Professor Rath of the 1930 German film, The Blue Angel, who taught his students from Shakespeare's Hamlet, but only so they could learn to pronounce "the English `th';" who was tempted, outwitted, and degraded to a miserable vaudeville "geek" by his own infatuation with the burlesque tramp, "Lola," portrayed by Marlene Dietrich. Which of the two, Lola or the Professor, was responsible for the calamity?

I. The American Tories and How They Grew

We start with the ideas that forced England's American Colonies to separate forever from the London regime. The Earl of Shaftesbury's 1688, so-called "Glorious Revolution," which placed the Dutch House of Orange on the English throne and launched the 25-year campaign to establish the "Brutish" Empire, included a plan to eliminate the American colonies' status as self-governing "Commonwealths."[5] Shaftesbury's "idea man" in this assault, was his philosopher of law, John Locke, who you were probably taught was a mentor of our own Founders. But, he wasn't. He was one of the creators of the British disaster, culminating in the coronation of the first George I, that made our revolution necessary. Locke's theories of political economy were promoted along with degenerate loon Sir Isaac Newton's mathematics, to replace the philosophy of our real forefather, Leibniz.[6]

By contrast with Leibniz's idea of "Happiness" in the joy of Creation, Locke's theory of government, expounded in his Two Treatises of Government, starts with the lie, that there was a predator versus predator "State of Nature" in which all men are servants and property-slaves; and, that this is the work of God, "made to last during His, not one another's pleasure." In this State, Locke claimed, any man has the right to forcibly seize back property taken by another, or kill a murderer, "as a lion or tiger," or even a thief who seizes property by force. Anyone whom one has the right to kill, Locke reasons further—in accord with the logic of the Roman assassin, Cassius, portrayed in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar—one has the right to enslave, "For, whenever he finds the hardship of his slavery outweigh the value of his life, it is in his power, by resisting the will of his master to draw on himself the death he desires."

From the State of Nature, Locke derives his own "God," now worshipped by those Yahoos who have arrayed themselves behind President George W. Bush. Locke's god is "Property," sometimes known as "shareholder value." "Whatsoever, then, he removes out of the state that Nature hath provided and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with it, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property," he explained. Of course, neither John Locke, nor Boy George and his Yahoos, ever found anything in a state of Nature, and certainly never produced any "labour," but, if you ask them to give back anything they claim as "Property" you'll likely find one of these "wild savage beasts" Locke says you can kill if he gets in your way, baring his fangs in front of you. Since, as you will realize upon considering how things that might be claimed as "property" are actually produced, Locke's theory means nothing, what the Lockeans really believe, and, as we will see, claim as a direct gift from God, is that anything they say is theirs, is; and that they can kill anyone they want to, to keep it—as Bush's family and friends are now doing with their price-gouging takeover of our public energy utilities, their theft of our formerly public health care system, and their "little wars" against nations struggling for sovereignty.

Locke's fable was used to justify the hideous system of absolute property rights in African slaves, removed "out of the State that Nature hath provided" through forcible relocation at the cost of millions who died in the kidnapping raids, the horrid trans-Atlantic shipments, and the other aspects of this removal from the State of Nature. Under Shaftesbury's patronage, Locke helped produce a draft for the Carolina Constitution, which established this principle of "law," which has been the most pernicious internal enemy of this Republic from that time until today.

These Yahoos, Locke then claims, conclude a contract, surrendering their rights of "equality, liberty, and executive power" to "government" for the "great and chief aim" of "preservation of their property." For Locke, as for "Boy George" Bush, who loves the Death Penalty, but just cares too much for "the people's money" to impose a "Death Tax," Property Rights are more important than Life:

[N]either the sergeant that could command a soldier to march up to the mouth of a cannon, or stand in a breach where he is almost sure to perish, can command that soldier to give him one penny of his money, nor the general that can condemn him to death for deserting his post, cannot yet with all his absolute power of life and death dispose of one farthing of that soldier's estate, or seize one jot of his goods; whom yet he can command anything and hang for the least disobedience.

Our Founding Fathers rejected Locke's government of, by, and for Property, when they struck the word "Property" from an early draft of the Declaration of Independence and replaced it with Leibniz's "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness." Our own General Welfare principle, in opposition to Locke's, "If you grab it, God wanted you to have it," recognizes the right of all citizens to that which is necessary for the continued productive life of themselves and their progeny. Yet, like malaria, Locke's idea keeps coming back. It is his claimed right to human "Property" and the breaking of the alleged "compact" to defend it, which is the sole cause cited in South Carolina's 1860 Declaration of Secession, and hence, defending the Slavery idea of human worthlessness, and the system of political economy that required it, was ostensibly the sole cause of the founding of the Confederate States of America and its Civil War against our Republic.

Today, that "Critter Company" which backed Richard M. Nixon's 1966-68 "Southern Strategy," claims that the Confederate "States' Rights" principle is a defense against tyrannical "Big Government" theft of your property. The one right denied the States by the Confederate Constitution was the right to outlaw Property in Slaves. The difference today, is that you have become the mere property of those who hold you and this nation to that form of bondage known as "shareholder value."

Like his Property theory of government, Locke's companion fraudulent theory of knowledge, expounded in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, was also an attack on Leibniz. Along with the whole genus of oligarchical philosophers, Locke denies that man can come to know Universal Physical Principles. All man is capable of, he claims, are "simple ideas" derived only from "sensation and reflection." Locke claims that complex ideas are no more than the repetition, comparison, and conjunction of simple ideas, and that, "it is not in the power of the most exalted wit or enlarged understanding, by any quickness or variety of thought, to invent or frame one new simple idea in the mind." Locke denies the evidence of all human history, that man actually expands his understanding of the intentions of the Creator and His Creatures. He claims that man is totally incapable "to fashion in his understanding one simple idea, not received by his senses from external objects, or by reflection from the operations of his own mind about them."

He further claims, "This is the reason why it is not possible for any one to imagine any other qualities in bodies, however constituted, whereby they can be taken notice of, besides sounds, tastes, smells, visible and tangible qualities." He then rejects the idea of Man created in God's Image, saying, "God has given us no innate ideas of himself; . . . he has stamped no original characters on our minds," and divides the universe into two distinct types, "cogitative" beings, which are revealed to the senses, and "incogitative" beings. Thus, he rejects the obvious: That our "sense perceptions" are internal to our own minds, and may be triggered by "outside" processes, but are, at best, like Plato's shadows on the wall of a cave, partial and indirect evidence of those processes. In reality, man can verify his understanding of the "intentions" of the Creator, which are in no way revealed through the senses, only by demonstrating, through experiment, that he can make the Universe obey his wishes. That capacity is the source of "happiness" which our Nation was founded to un-Locke.

And, So, Locke Begat Jonathan Edwards

Locke's views were not immediately embraced in America. Our tradition is that of Apostle John's view of Christ, whose last, repeated, request to his apostles, was, "Feed my sheep." We understand this, as did our father, Benjamin Franklin, who wrote, "I believe in one God, creator of the Universe. That he governs it by his providence. That the most acceptable service we render to him is doing good to his other children."[7] Throughout his life, Franklin bubbled over with excitement at the prospect of devising and exhibiting experiments to test his hypotheses about how God had constituted the universe, and devised plans to use electricity and steam, dig canals, organize fire brigades, postal services, universities, philosophical societies, and, finally, our own Great Republic, all for the improvement of man's mastery over nature.

To attack Franklin's idea here in North America, and solidify the institution of absolute property rights in slaves, which was not generally accepted until well into the Eighteenth Century, Locke's sickness was spread by the so-called "Christian" forerunners of President Boy George Bush's Yahoo supporters, like our own racist Attorney General John Ashcroft, who would prefer to feed the Lord's sheep to the lions.

In the time of Benjamin Franklin, the great advocate of Locke's bestial notion of man was Jonathan Edwards, John Locke's student and a contemporary admirer of Locke's Scottish protégé, David Hume. Edwards became the guru of New England's "Great Awakening," and later President of what we now know as Princeton University. His grandson was to be Alexander Hamilton's assassin, the Tory traitor and schismatic intriguer, Aaron Burr.[8] From that time to the present, the Jonathan Edwards version of the Lockean model, is the persisting characteristic of our republic's "American Tory" enemy, as we shall see, time and time again, in the course of this report. Our traitors have always disguised their appeal in the hand-me-down old clothes of the Locke-Edwards-Burr tradition: the idea that mindless greed, ignorant of the world beyond its own desires, rather than what the "American" poet John Keats called "branchèd thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain," paves the way to prosperity.

What Edwards sold here, under the Christian slogan "Born Again," was the cult of Oligarchy, of Mesopotamian despotism, of Rome, the Whore of Babylon, and its Venetian and British successors. His view is the same as that of the Roman Empire and its Persian and Babylonian precursors. It is the view of that ancient Rome which called its people, "populi," which means "predators." According to this oligarchical—or Romantic—cult, the history of humanity is one of constant warfare amongst predators. The Creator, and the joy of Man in participating in Creation, is nowhere to be found. Like Hollywood's Godzilla, Edwards' God is merely the biggest and baddest predator, and his men are mean little predators whose only hope for "salvation," to be "born again," is to outwit Godzilla.

Since Edison had not yet invented the motion picture, Edwards' method was to terrorize audiences, including children, poorly educated laborers and others, under the sweltering hot tents of the "Great Awakening." In his written "sermon," "God's Sovereignty in the Salvation of Men," Edwards explained that God, like Godzilla, may, at whim, with no concern for right or wrong, do as he pleases to anyone:

God may save any of the children of men without prejudice to the honour of his majesty. God may deny salvation to any natural person without any injury to the honour of his righteousness. God may deny salvation to any unconverted person whatever without any prejudice to the honour of his goodness. God does actually exercise his sovereignty in men's salvation: In calling one people or nation and giving them the means of grace, and leaving others without them. In calling some to salvation, who have been very heinously wicked, and leaving others, who have been moral and religious persons.

He then goes on to claim that God has granted European Americans special privileges over Africans, Native Americans, and even Jews, whom God now has abandoned to the devil, and, by implication, to whatever evil designs men have for them as well:

The savages, who live in the remote parts of this continent, and are under the grossest heathenish darkness, as well as the inhabitants of Africa, are naturally in exactly similar circumstances towards God with us in this land. They are no more alienated or estranged from God in their natures than we; and God has no more to charge them with. And yet what a vast difference has God made between us and them! In this he has exercised his sovereignty. He did this of old, when he chose but one people, to make them his covenant people, and to give them the means of grace, and left all others, and gave them over to heathenish darkness and the tyranny of the devil, to perish from generation to generation for many hundreds of years. God showed his sovereignty, when Christ came, in rejecting the Jews, and calling the Gentiles. God rejected that nation who were the children of Abraham according to the flesh, and had been his peculiar people for so many ages, and who alone possessed the one true God, and chose idolatrous heathen before them, and called them to be his people. When the Messiah came, who was born of their nation, and whom they so much expected, he rejected them.

In his most famous rant, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," he laid down the fear:

We find it easy to tread on and crush a worm that we see crawling on the earth; so it is easy for us to cut or singe a slender thread that any thing hangs by: thus easy is it for God, when he pleases, to cast his enemies down to hell. What are we, that we should think to stand before him, at whose rebuke the earth trembles, and before whom the rocks are thrown down? Yea, God is a great deal more angry with great numbers that are now on earth: yea, doubtless, with many that are now in this congregation, who it may be are at ease, than he is with many of those who are now in the flames of hell. It is plain and manifest, that whatever pains a natural man takes in religion, whatever prayers he makes, till he believes in Christ, God is under no manner of obligation to keep him a moment from eternal destruction. So that, thus it is that natural men are held in the hand of God, over the pit of hell; they have deserved the fiery pit, and are already sentenced to it . . . neither is God in the least bound by any promise to hold them up one moment; the devil is waiting for them, hell is gaping for them, the flames gather and flash about them, and would fain lay hold on them, and swallow them up. In short, they have no refuge, nothing to take hold of; all that preserves them every moment is the mere arbitrary will, and uncovenanted, unobliged forbearance of an incensed God. . . . He will crush you under his feet without mercy; he will crush out your blood, and make it fly, and it shall be sprinkled on his garments, so as to stain all his raiment. He will not only hate you, but he will have you in the utmost contempt: no place shall be thought fit for you, but under his feet to be trodden down as the mire of the streets.

Finally, Edwards concluded his pitch, no doubt with the huckstering tones of a modern day "One Time Only" department store sale advertisement:

But this is the dismal case of every soul in this congregation that has not been born again, however moral and strict, sober and religious, they may otherwise be. Oh that you would consider it, whether you be young or old! There is reason to think, that there are many in this congregation now hearing this discourse, that will actually be the subjects of this very misery to all eternity. And now you have an extraordinary opportunity, a day wherein Christ has thrown the door of mercy wide open, and stands in calling and crying with a loud voice to poor sinners; a day wherein many are flocking to him, and pressing into the kingdom of God. Many are daily coming from the east, west, north and south; many that were very lately in the same miserable condition that you are in, are now in a happy state, with their hearts filled with love to him who has loved them, and washed them from their sins in his own blood, and rejoicing in hope of the glory of God. How awful is it to be left behind at such a day! To see so many others feasting, while you are pining and perishing! To see so many rejoicing and singing for joy of heart, while you have cause to mourn for sorrow of heart, and howl for vexation of spirit! How can you rest one moment in such a condition? Are not your souls as precious as the souls of the people at Suffield, where they are flocking from day to day to Christ?. . . Therefore, let every one that is out of Christ, now awake and fly from the wrath to come. The wrath of Almighty God is now undoubtedly hanging over a great part of this congregation. Let every one fly out of Sodom: Haste and escape for your lives, look not behind you, escape to the mountain, lest you be consumed.

The Battle To Revive Leibniz

The birth of the United States, in 1776, was the culmination of a trans-Atlantic battle for the revival of Leibniz against the Brutish Lockean loan-shark forces. The founding of this Republic was the cutting edge of a movement which also included the development of the great German Classical period in drama, poetry, music, mathematics, and physics. In France, its representatives were the scientific and military geniuses of the École Polytechnique, which helped build our own West Point, and Germany's Göttingen. In Britain itself, this movement sparked a post-Congress of Vienna insurgency including the pro-Franklin poets John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley and the anti-Newtonian circle of mathematicians led by Charles Babbage. The essential idea, and playful good humor, of this movement is captured in Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn," with its famous concluding "slogan" on Truth and Beauty.[9]

The Romantic opposition to this Renaissance, as it affected the United States, was led by Locke's successor David Hume, the Scottish mentor of the German Romantic, Immanuel Kant. In his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, Hume claims to prove that Truth is never Beauty, and Beauty is never Truth. Following the usual procedure of those who place their faith in mere deductive logic, he first claims that what he intends to "prove" by deduction is true: that there is a distinction between "reason" or "truth" on the one hand, and "sentiment" or "taste" on the other. "The harmony of verse, the tenderness of passion, the brilliancy of wit, must give immediate pleasure. No man reasons concerning another's beauty," he claims, without offering any reason why he should be trusted on this. He then endeavors to determine to which realm Morality belongs. He proposes to do this by applying the experimental method of Sir Francis Bacon, claiming—as if Benjamin Franklin, the greatest English-speaking figure of his century, did not exist—"Men are now cured of their passion for hypotheses and systems in natural philosophy, and will hearken to no arguments but those which are derived from experience. It is full time they should attempt a like reformation in all moral disquisitions; and reject every system of ethics, however subtle or ingenious, which is not founded on fact and observation."

Hume concludes that argument, by foreshadowing both the argument of his disciple Adam Smith (The Theory of the Moral Sentiments), and the Pragmatism of William James, claiming Morality is merely a matter of utility:

Thus, the rules of equity or justice depend entirely on the particular state and condition in which men are placed, and owe their origin and existence to that utility, which results to the public from their strict and regular observance. Reverse, in any considerable circumstance, the condition of men: Produce extreme abundance or extreme necessity: Implant in the human breast perfect moderation and humanity, or perfect rapaciousness and malice: By rendering justice totally useless, you thereby totally destroy its essence and suspend its obligation upon mankind.

Finally, he concludes, "morality is determined by sentiment. It defines virtue to be whatever mental action or quality gives to a spectator the pleasing sentiment of approbation; and vice the contrary." In this, of course, he is in agreement with the Romantic Vox Populi, or the Twentieth-Century "Public Opinion," which LaRouche rightly calls, "Vox Pox."

Thus Locke, Edwards, Aaron Burr, and the influence of Hume typify a characteristic feature of that variety of Romantic pathology which the American Tory represents down to the present day.

We, in what is called the American Intellectual Tradition, are passionate about science and passionate about the welfare of our brethren and our posterity. For us, the love for Truth, for Beauty, for our fellow man, and for God are one and the same thing.

Our republic's enemies from within all agree, that there is a strict, uncrossable divide between ideas and "matter," between reason and emotion, and that one realm must not influence the other. Whether these American Tories claim to be devout Christians or otherwise religious, atheists, or Satanists (or any combination thereof), they all agree that God's ways, whether they claim to like them or not, are completely unknowable to man, and therefore indistinguishable from Satan's, or that of any other irrational Godzilla-like force. Man must obey only his own irrational will, or one which proves more powerful. Some fanatics may claim the most powerful Will is God, some make a case for Satan, some for Nature, but they tend to switch back and forth between these views, and be just as immoral whichever "side" they choose for the moment.

The Scottish school tended to downplay the Edwards-style "Godzilla" image, in favor of what Lyndon LaRouche has called the "Little Green Men" under the floorboards, who act invisibly toward the same effect. They all follow the tradition of that post-Elizabethan protégé of the Venetian "guru" Paolo Sarpi, Sir Francis Bacon, the corrupt prosecutor and embezzler who, most of us were taught, was the inventor of the modern scientific experimental method, despite his failure to have ever produced a valid experimental result. "Truth" is cut and dried, and totally divorced from morality. Genius may be good or evil, just like in the comic books. In his Novum Organum, Bacon went so far as to call the opposing Platonic and Christian view, "evil":

The corruption of philosophy by the mixing of it up with superstition and theology, is of a much wider extent, and is most injurious to it both as a whole and in parts. For the human understanding is no less exposed to the impressions of fancy than to those of vulgar notions. The disputatious and sophistic school entraps the understanding, whilst the fanciful, bombastic, and, as it were, poetical school, rather flatters it. There is a clear example of this among the Greeks, expecially in Pythagoras, but it is more dangerous and refined in Plato and his school. This evil is found also in some branches of other systems of philosophy, where it introduces abstracted forms, final and first causes. Yet some of the moderns who have indulged this, follow [it] with such consummate inconsiderateness, that they have endeavored to build a system of natural philosophy on the first chapter of Genesis, the Book of Job, and other parts of Scripture . . . not only fantastical philosophy, but heretical religion spring from the absurd mixture of matters divine and human. It is therefore most wise soberly to render unto faith the things that are faith's.

What we have identified—Baconism, Romanticism, whatever you call it—is, in fact, Gnosticism. It is the same as the ancient Cult of the Oracle at Delphi which formed the basis of Spartan and later Roman culture; or the so-called "Mystery Religions," the Bogomil cult, or Rosicrucian Freemasonry. That is, man is incapable of knowing anything through his own powers of reason, but must depend on some mysterious authority, which is passed from generation to generation through a cult priesthood, to which "truth" is revealed through visions, signs, and so on, which only the priesthood may interpret for the rest of us. This is the religion of Oligarchism, of Mafias, of Inquisitions.

It is the religion of the Bible preacher who says you must believe every word of the Bible, but then sermonizes for an hour on the interpretation of the meaning of each word which Little Green Men have whispered in his ear. If you want to know something, you gotta get in with the people what know. You play your cards right and don't cross the wrong people, and we might just let you on the inside. You should recognize this, also, as the axiomatic view which underlies the "guru"-riddled cult of the "Information Society."

Bacon's identification of cognition as "evil" is the dirty secret of the Romantics. Despite all of their talk about "Liberty," they—including the Twentieth-Century "anti-Authoritarian Personality" crowd of the Frankfurt School irrationalists Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt—identify as the enemy they are dedicated to exterminate, the idea that truth in any form actually exists to be known. As for Bacon, for Adorno and Arendt, there is only arbitrary opinion.

The Traitor Cuts a Romantic Figure

This Romantic plague infested America, even during the Revolution. Edwards' grandson, Aaron Burr, founded the Bank of Manhattan in 1799, which has now developed into what we know as Chase Manhattan Bank. From that base, he was elected the second Vice President of the Republic, and, while serving in that office, assassinated the father of the American System of political-economy, the Alexander Hamilton who had acted to prevent the treasonous Burr from being chosen President by the Electoral College. There followed some period of disgrace surrounding the assassination of Hamilton and his own trial for Treason, in an intrigue involving the raising of private filibustering forces in the Southwest. Burr went on to found the New York Democratic Party. In this he collaborated with Jeremy Bentham, the chief Lieutenant of Britain's Lord Shelburne in the British attempt to re-group after the 1781 surrender at Yorktown.

The following quote of Burr's opinion from Bentham's The Principles of Morals and Legislation provides us insight into Bentham agent Burr's role as a Romantic opponent of Jefferson and of the American Revolution:

The pursuit of happiness is a natural right. Here we have a sly allusion to our celebrated Declaration of Independence; a paper which our author examined once paragraph by paragraph, with an acuteness and vigour, which were never exceeded. Take one example—We declare that certain rights [!] are inalienable, among which [rights!] are life; liberty, and the pursuit of happiness! But if they are inalienable, how comes it that our legislators may deprive us of them? How can they exercise the right of confining us—of hindering our pursuit of happiness, of taking away our property, or of putting us to death, unless we give it to them? And how can we give them a right, which we ourselves have not? In other words, how are we to alienate what is inalienable? The pursuit of happiness is certainly a natural inclination; but can we call it a natural right? That depends upon the mode of pursuit. The assassin pursues his happiness by assassination. Has he the right to do so? If he has not, why declare it? What tendency in that declaration is there, to make men happier or wiser?. . .

I shall finish with a general observation. The language of error is always obscure, feeble, and changeable. A great abundance of words only serves to hide the poverty and falsity of ideas. The more the terms are varied, the more easy it is to lead people astray. The language of truth is uniform and simple: the same ideas, the same terms. All these refer to pleasures and to pains. We avoid all that may hide or intercept that familiar notion. From such or such an act, results such or such an impression of pain or pleasure. Do not trust to me; trust to experience; and above all, to your own. Between two opposite modes of action, would you know to which the preference is due? Calculate the effects, in good and ill, and decide for that which promises the greatest amount of happiness.

Bentham promoted himself as being anti-Locke, by opposing Locke's hoax "Compact," but, as you see, he had a view of man as bad as Locke's, or, perhaps a worse: man as a mere calculating machine, totally devoid of any real cognitive ability. In this, he merely plagiarized the Venetian Giammaria Ortes, whose work, in addition to his essay "Calculation of the Pleasures and Pains of Human Life," had been the (not original) source for Adam Smith's anti-American theory of Economics, and Thomas Malthus' overpopulation theory. Again we see the characteristic of Romanticism: the terror of human cognition. Poke a rabid environmentalist, obsessed with population control, and you will discover their fear that human beings might actually solve the problems they claim are insoluble, thereby eliminating the excuse they've used to justify the state of stupefaction they've chosen to live in.

II. Emerson and the De-Flowering of New England

So, the enemies of Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin de-flowered New England. The battle lines were drawn. The union of Kant and Hume bore fruit in New England, in the soil made fertile by Jonathan Edwards' crap, in the person of Ralph Waldo Emerson and his so-called Transcendentalist School. Emerson grew up in the period of the "Hartford Convention," a group of wealthy war-time traitors to the U.S.A., which threatened to bring about New England's 1814 secession from the young United States. Emerson, like Kant, was an admirer of the Swedish Newtonian scientist turned mystic cult founder, Emanuel Swedenborg. This queer fellow, Emerson, became the paradigm for the American Tory enemy of real cognitive work, whose Twentieth Century Nashville Agrarian and Bohemian varieties will become our main subject. Like our Twentieth Century expatriate "poets," Emerson's affections were in Europe, primarily in England and Scotland, and his life was punctuated by pilgrimages to his spiritual masters in Britain and on the continent, typified by Thomas Carlyle; Jeremy Bentham's protégé and editor, John Stuart Mill; and the apostle of the anti-Renaissance "pre-Raphaelite" movement, John Ruskin.

Emerson's mission, like that of today's Bush-league "Critter Company," was to mask Gnostic degeneracy with an American flavor. So, he promoted his infection as the coming age of "The American Scholar." In his 1837 address of that title to the Cambridge, Massachusetts, Phi Beta Kappa Society, he appealed to American Patriotism, announcing:

Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. The millions, that around us are rushing into life, cannot always be fed on the sere remains of foreign harvests. Events, actions arise, that must be sung, that will sing themselves. Who can doubt, that poetry will revive and lead in a new age, as the star in the constellation Harp, which now flames in our zenith, astronomers announce, shall one day be the pole-star for a thousand years?

This flourish, with its vague reference to real scientific discovery, is typical of Emerson, and, perhaps you will recognize the stock from which grew our more modern scientasters like Al Gore, Jimmy Carter, or Carl Sagan. This sprinkling of his work with the artificial essence of science, was a way of weaning Americans away from the real article, as we knew it in Dr. Franklin. Though claiming to be the high priest of American Philosophy, Emerson bragged, as a student, "I can't multiply seven by twelve with security." In the "American Scholar," he said, "science is nothing but the finding of analogy, identity, in the most remote parts." The secret of Emerson's abiding appeal is plain old laziness of the brain. He uses the scent of scientific language to argue, in effect, that real work isn't necessary, we can chatter all we like because anything we feel is Truth, is:

That great principle of Undulation in nature, that shows itself in the inspiring and expiring of the breath; in desire and satiety; in the ebb and flow of the sea; in day and night; in heat and cold; and as yet more deeply ingrained in every atom and every fluid, is known to us under the name of Polarity, these "fits of easy transmission and reflection," as Newton called them, are the law of nature because they are the law of spirit. The soul knows only the soul; the web of events is the flowing robe in which she is clothed. After its own law and not by arithmetic is the rate of its progress to be computed. The soul's advances are not made by gradation, such as can be represented by motion in a straight line; but rather by ascension of state, such as can be represented by metamorphosis,—from the egg to the worm, from the worm to the fly. The growths of genius are of a certain total character, that does not advance the elect individual first over John, then Adam, then Richard, and give to each the pain of discovered inferiority, but by every throe of growth the man expands there where he works, passing, at each pulsation, classes, populations, of men. With each divine impulse the mind rends the thin rinds of the visible and finite, and comes out into eternity, and inspires and expires its air. It converses with truths that have always been spoken in the world, and becomes conscious of a closer sympathy with Zeno and Arrian, than with persons in the house.

In this he apes the Leibnizian scientific method, from Nicholas of Cusa's work on the quadrature of the circle, through Leibniz, Gauss, and Bernhard Riemann, who rigorously developed a geometrical method based on the lawful process of generation of successions of incommensurable "geometries." Contradicting his own claims about the inadequacies of arithmetic measure, Emerson has learned and taught precisely zero about how Nature really works. The real scientists know that nature follows no single precise arithmetic law, but they can multiply seven by twelve. In fact, before the development of electronic computers, Kepler, Gauss, and others were notorious for their painstaking arithmetic calculations, and precise physical measurements, to produce the real science which they have bequeathed to us.[10]

Four years after his "American Scholar" address, Emerson promoted his cult of "I know what I know," hostility to real cognitive work, in "The Over-Soul":

We know truth when we see it, let skeptic and scoffer say what they choose. Foolish people ask you, when you have spoken what they do not wish to hear, "How do you know it is truth, and not an error of your own?" We know truth when we see it, from opinion, as we know when we are awake that we are awake. It was a grand sentence of Emanuel Swedenborg, which would alone indicate the greatness of that man's perception,—"It is no proof of a man's understanding to be able to confirm whatever he pleases; but to be able to discern that what is true is true, and that what is false is false, this is the mark and character of intelligence."

He then, like our modern Hollywood ding-bat spiritualists, attempts to paint this cult of stupidity with the aura of "Revelation":

We distinguish the announcements of the soul, its manifestations of its own nature, by the term Revelation. These are always attended by the emotion of the sublime. For this communication is an influx of the Divine mind into our mind. It is an ebb of the individual rivulet before the flowing surges of the sea of life. Every distinct apprehension of this central commandment agitates men with awe and delight. A thrill passes through all men at the reception of new truth, or at the performance of a great action, which comes out of the heart of nature. In these communications, the power to see is not separated from the will to do, but the insight proceeds from obedience, and the obedience proceeds from a joyful perception.

Emerson doesn't write about splattering your blood, the way Jonathan Edwards did, but he's just as dangerous for your mind. He proceeds to anticipate the ideas later presented by his famous protégé, William James, in his Varieties of Religious Experience. Emerson wrote as follows:

A certain tendency to insanity has always attended the opening of the religious sense in men, as if they had been "blasted with excess of light." The trances of Socrates, the "union" of Plotinus, the vision of Porphyry, the conversion of Paul, the aurora of Behmen, the convulsions of George Fox and his Quakers, the illumination of Swedenborg, are of this kind. What was in the case of these remarkable persons a ravishment has, in innumerable instances in common life, been exhibited in less striking manner. Everywhere the history of religion betrays a tendency to enthusiasm. The rapture of the Moravian and Quietist; the opening of the internal sense of the Word, in the language of the New Jerusalem Church; the "revival" of the Calvinistic churches; the experiences of the Methodists, are varying forms of that shudder of awe and delight with which the individual soul always mingles with the universal soul.

Is it surprising that this New England abolitionist, Emerson, called his longtime correspondent, "Prince" Achille Murat, the spawn of Napoleon Bonaparte, whom Metternich deployed to Florida after Napoleon's defeat to agitate for what was to become the Confederacy, "an ardent lover of truth, a type of heroic manners and sweet-tempered ability?" He praised the anti-slavery terrorist, John Brown, in almost the same way.

While patriotic Americans—John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, Henry Carey, and Abraham Lincoln—fought for Franklin-style "internal improvements," tariff protection for domestic industrial development, and the withering away of the horrid slave system, the Confederacy bubbled up out of our Southern cauldron, fuelled by an alliance between Emerson's New England and the lords of Dixieland. The latter was an alliance in the slave, sugar, and opium trades. Emerson and his circle laid the groundwork for the rot that would virtually disarm the United States morally, as well as militarily, and that would open the fortress gates to the post-Civil War, romantic's cultural revival of the notion of the Confederacy as a Lost Cause.

The Transcendentalist periodicals, The Dial, The Atlantic Monthly, and Harpers, allied with the British Blackwood to spread Emerson's fake American cult of hostility to cognition. This is what Franklin's admirers John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley fought against, in England and from exile in Italy, and what Edgar Allan Poe fought against through the Southern Literary Messenger and other venues, here in the United States. No American's education is complete unless he understands this war against the Transcendentalist Romantics through, amongst other things, reading Poe's stories: such as, "The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq.," "How to Write a Blackwood Article," "A Predicament," "X-ing a Paragrab," "Never Bet the Devil Your Head," "Eureka," or "Mellonta Tauta"; or his famous plea to Nathaniel Hawthorne, whom he praised as the most talented of the Transcendentalists in his review of Hawthorne's Twice Told Tales, to leave "The Old Manse" (the Emerson family seat) and start writing with "visible ink."

And so, it came to War, beginning really, not in 1861, but with "Bleeding Kansas" in the 1850s. Despite Lincoln's heroic efforts to, somehow, maneuver a peace between enemies smoldering with blood fever, he took the oath of office and assumed the Presidency of a nation already, in reality, at War. Although Emerson, too old to be expected to serve in the military, remained a vocal supporter of the Union, his disciples leaned toward the views of Aaron Burr's anti-War Democrats, as typified by General George McClellan, who, after Lincoln cashiered him for his refusal to lead a serious threat to the Confederacy, confirmed Lincoln's judgment by running for President against Lincoln as a Democrat on a platform of surrender to the inferior Confederate forces. A sampling of Emerson's youthful protégés gives an idea of the Transcendentalist contribution to the cause.

The Swedenborgian William James—who went on to found the Harvard University Psychology department, and its tradition as a dispensary of psychotropic drugs, and the philosophy he called "Pragmatism"—failed to enlist.

James' lifelong friend, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.—who went on to be appointed to the Supreme Court by Theodore Roosevelt—enlisted, but resigned his commission in support of McClellan's 1864 surrender campaign, explaining to his father, the famous Poetaster, who excelled his son in patriotism, that he thought Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation had "politicized" the war, thus relieving him of any responsibility to fight further. In the Twentieth Century, he served as a sort of "uncle" to some of H.G. Wells' New Republic collaborators.

The Swedenborgian William Dean Howells, was named by the Transcendentalist clique at the outset of the War to inherit the editorship of The Atlantic, from which position he was to serve as the patron of two generations of writers. They, therefore, arranged to have him appointed Assistant Consul to Venice to avoid danger.

The Lost Cause: The Dead That Walk and Talk

After the military defeat of the Confederacy, the battlefront shifted to financial and cultural warfare. The alliance among New England and New York financial interests and Southern drug-running and slave-trading interests, promoted a pro-Confederate counteroffensive, which has been more dangerous than the shooting war itself.

Within days of the close of the War, Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. Despite this, the program of "internal improvements," notably railroad building and the development of the Agricultural and Mining schools, launched by Lincoln and his economic adviser, the world's greatest economist of that time, Henry C. Carey, continued. As a result, by the time of the famous 1876 Exposition, the United States was clearly the dominant industrial, and economic force in the world, and had developed the base from which much of the world would be "electrified" in the course of the succeeding half-century. In the same period, an American current of Classical musical composition, based on the "Negro" Spiritual, was fostered here, by the work of such artists as the Fisk Jubilee Singers, and the later help of Antonin Dvorák.

The American Tory opposition to these developments was fierce. The events of the next thirty-six years, including the assassination of Republican President James Garfield in 1881, and ending with the assassination of Republican President William McKinley in 1901, delivered the White House to a pro-Confederate, Wall Street, British Empire fanatic, Theodore Roosevelt. This had its effect, much as has the recent period since the assassination of President Kennedy, through the Vietnam War, and the assassinations of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert Kennedy, and other Civil Rights leaders. Then, two generations of War, and the assassination of three Presidents in 36 years, left many Americans vulnerable to the idea that not the hard, but joyful work of discovery, but rather, the raw, unthinking lust for wealth and power, was the surest means of Progress.

Increasingly, the American System of Economics, based on Leibniz and Franklin, was replaced, even within the slain Lincoln's Republican Party, with the Lockean ideas of "Property," rapacious profiteering, or today's "shareholder values." This, like the replacement of Leibnizian science with empiricist claptrap, was done under the authority of Herbert Spencer's and Charles Darwin's "Survival of the Fittest" hoax. Emerson's "Kindergarten" was instrumental in the cultural degradation which opened the door for Roosevelt's coup, and they played a prominent role in his Junta and its aftermath. Theodore Roosevelt himself, was one of William James' psychology students. John Hay, one of the Transcendentalist-backed "western" writers, who shared a Washington residence with James' intimate, Henry Adams, was Roosevelt's Secretary of State, and in 1902, James' lifelong friend, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., was appointed by Roosevelt to the Supreme Court.

Now, focus on the cultural aspects of this post-Civil War campaign for the Lost Cause.

In Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1866, Confederate Generals and Scottish Rite Freemasons, Albert Pike and Nathan Bedford Forrest, along with other "Templars of Tennessee," founded the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan's founders and defenders describe it as a secret fraternal organization, modelled on ancient cult practices, intended simply as a way for idled former Confederate soldiers to amuse themselves, which developed into a force of vigilantes, or "regulators" dedicated to terrorizing freed slaves who didn't know their place, and any whites who might defend them. Their costumes, symbols, ranks, and precepts were an infantile mimicry of an ancient mystical warrior cult. This wonder of imbecility, with its Grand Dragons, Wizards, Giants, Cyclops, Magi, Monk, Exchequer, Turk, Scribe, Sentinel, Ensign, Centaurs, Yahoos, and Ghouls, who organized themselves to lord it over the Realms and Dominions comprising the Invisible Empire, became a major terrorist force throughout the nation.[11] The incongruity between the Klan's own self-description and their bloody work, reminds one of Shakespeare's Hamlet's famous quip, "No, no, they do but jest, poison in jest; no offence i' the world."

Founder Albert Pike was the Sovereign Grand Commander, and intellectual—as well as gastronomical—giant of the Scottish Rite order. He became the principal author of the Scottish Rite "Bible," Morals and Dogma,[12] and is now honored with a bust and crypt in the nether regions of the order's Mother Temple in Washington, D.C., as well as a prominent statue provided for by an Act of the United States Congress, in the Capital's Judiciary Square. Pike identified Masonry's roots in the same occult traditions (Rosicrucianism, Zoroastrism, Theosophy) as Emerson's Swedenborgianism. The fundamental idea being that there are no knowable ideas, only mysteries which some people have been given the key to and others haven't. God likes some and doesn't like others, and that's all there is to it, and we know who we are, and we know who you are.

In this climate of terror against Lincoln's legacy, Emerson's "Kindergarten" rose to dominate cultural life in America. His literary disciples, led by William Dean Howells, who returned from Venice once the war was safely over, promoted sectional literature, and the literature of soap opera-like personal feelings. Industrial and economic progress were often portrayed in this literature, to appeal to American taste, but with the heart and brain removed. Ambition, lust, and greed, rather than passion for Truth and Beauty, were what made the world go round. The paradigm of this movement was the Transcendentalists' Country and Western "superstar," Mark Twain.[13] Meanwhile, the immensely wealthy, lazy, and virtually unemployable Swedenborgian draft dodger, William James, launched an attack on the very idea of Truth through his promotion of what many today believe is the American Intellectual (or anti-Intellectual) Tradition, the philosophy he called "Pragmatism."

James, like his mentor Emerson, was an intimate of the British political and cultural elite. After the assassination of Lincoln, accomplished by Confederate spies with connections to the British and the Habsburgs, Emerson's circle set out to do what Lincoln had declared couldn't be done, namely, to "fool all of the people all of the time." James became an unofficial member of the British elite "Cambridge Apostles," participating in groups including the "Scratch 8," and the "Metaphysical Society," led by the Apostles.

Personally, James and his lifelong "soulmate," Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., were directed by Sir Frederick Pollock, a leader of British Freemasonry, who, during the First World War, was to head the Royal Colonial Institute Lodge, with special responsibility for maintaining Masonic influence in the colonies—including the United States. Pollock owed his title to his Grandfather, who had sat as a judge, who violated British neutrality during the Civil War by ordering the release of the British-built warship, the Alabama, to the Confederate Navy.

As the founding head of Harvard's Psychology Department, James became the father of American psychology, and also, in concert with John Dewey and others, one of the molders of Twentieth-Century American educational policy. The period in which he came to dominate American psychology and philosophy, was the period in which, with the assassination of McKinley, the Lincoln current in the Republican Party was murdered and replaced with the British Empire chauvinism of Theodore Roosevelt. With such a precedent, no one has a right to be surprised by the more recent case of Harvard LSD guru, Dr. Timothy Leary. For James, Emerson's mere talk against cognition wasn't adequate; he used drugs and promoted a cult of drug-induced insanity to chemically castrate the brain. I quote from his most famous work, based on lectures delivered in Edinburgh, Scotland, The Varieties of Religious Experience:

Borderland insanity, crankiness, insane temperament, loss of mental balance, psychopathic degeneration (to use a few of the many synonyms by which it has been called), has certain peculiarities and liabilities which, when combined with a superior quality of intellect in an individual, make it more probable that he will make his mark and affect his age, than if his temperament were less neurotic. . . .

He then offers his prescription:

The next step into mystical states carries us into a realm that public opinion and ethical philosophy have long since branded as pathological, though private practice and certain lyric strains of poetry seem still to bear witness to its ideality. I refer to the consciousness produced by intoxicants and anaesthetics, especially by alcohol. The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. It is in fact the great exciter of the Yes function in man. It brings its votary from the chill periphery of things to the radiant core. It makes him for the moment one with truth. Not through mere perversity do men run after it. To the poor and the unlettered it stands in the place of symphony concerts and of literature; and it is part of the deeper mystery and tragedy of life that whiffs and gleams of something that we immediately recognize as excellent should be vouchsafed to so many of us only in the fleeting earlier phases of what in its totality is so degrading a poisoning. The drunken consciousness is one bit of the mystic consciousness, and our total opinion of it must find its place in our opinion of that larger whole.

Nitrous oxide and ether, especially nitrous oxide, when sufficiently diluted with air, stimulate the mystical consciousness in an extraordinary degree. Depth beyond depth of truth seems revealed to the inhaler. This truth fades out, however, or escapes, at the moment of coming to; and if any words remain over in which it seemed to clothe itself, they prove to be the veriest nonsense. Nevertheless, the sense of a profound meaning having been there persists; and I know more than one person who is persuaded that in the nitrous oxide trance we have a genuine metaphysical revelation.

Some years ago I myself made some observations on this aspect of nitrous oxide intoxication. . . .

Some years later, James published Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, dedicated to Emerson's friend and Jeremy Bentham's editor, John Stuart Mill, in which Harvard dope-freak William James smeared Leibniz, without mustering an argument, saying, "Leibniz's feeble grasp at reality is too obvious to need comment from me." Those of you who think that "Pragmatic" means practical, hard-headed, getting the job done, American, or something like that, remember, it is the philosophy not of a man, but of his dope:

[T]he days are over when it could be said that for Science herself the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament showeth his handiwork. Our solar system, with its harmonies, is seen now as but one passing case of a certain sort of moving equilibrium in the heavens, realized by a local accident in an appalling wilderness of worlds where no life can exist. In a span of time which as a cosmic interval will count but as an hour, it will have ceased to be. The Darwinian notion of chance production, and subsequent destruction, speedy or deferred, applies to the largest as well as to the smallest facts.

[W]e ought to be able to show some practical difference that must follow from one side or the other's being right. If you follow the pragmatic method. You must bring out of each word its practical cash-value. Theories become instruments, not answers. Against rationalism as a pretension and a method, pragmatism is fully aroused and militant.

Now truth is always a go-between, a smoother-over of transitions. It marries old opinion to new fact so as ever to show a minimum of jolt, a maximum of continuity.

The reason why we call things true is the reason why they are true, for `to be true' means only to perform this marriage-function.

Old fashioned theism was bad enough, with its notion of God as an exalted monad . . . but, so long as it held strongly by the argument from design, it had kept some touch with concrete realities. Since, however, Darwinism has once for all displaced design from the minds of the `scientific,' theism has lost that foothold;

. . . as I have enough trouble in life already without adding the trouble of carrying these intellectual inconsistencies, I personally just give up the Absolute. I just take my moral holidays. . . .

James' agnosticism may appear to differ radically from Jonathan Edwards' Thunder of Doom, but, he claims, modern science has doomed Man just as surely as Edwards' Godzilla. In Varieties of Religious Experience, he wrote:

For naturalism, fed on recent cosmological speculations, mankind is in a position similar to that of a set of people living on a frozen lake, surrounded by cliffs over which there is no escape, yet knowing that little by little the ice is melting, and the inevitable day drawing near when the last film of it will disappear, and to be drowned ignominiously will be the human creature's portion.

In tandem with Pragamatism, a school of explicit support for the Lost Cause—featuring praise of the Confederacy and the Pike/Forrest Ku Klux Klan—arose, featuring Southern historians, including one of Edwards' successors as President of Princeton University, Thomas Woodrow Wilson, who was himself a protégé of one of James' Metaphysical Society "brothers," the longtime editor of the London Economist, Sir Walter Bagehot.

III. Twentieth-Century Romanticism

As Pragmatism rose in the United States, Classical Culture was also under attack in Europe. The Crimean War, the Franco-Prussian War, and the installation of Louis Napoleon at the head of the French Second Empire, typified the developments leading to the bloody "geopolitical" wars of the Twentieth Century. The German, "God is Dead" school, epitomized by the mad philosopher of the irrational will, Friedrich Nietzsche, and the lust and rage-driven Mazzinian bomber Richard Wagner, was on the rise. In Britain, Emerson's friend John Ruskin and his pro-Venetian school spawned a movement in the arts, especially painting, known as pre-Raphaelism, which explicitly pressed for a return to pre-Renaissance, feudal culture and political organization. Various cults and secret orders, claiming to be modelled on pagan mysticism, were formed, or re-invigorated, including Theosophy, Rosicrucianism, and Freemasonry's "Order of the Golden Dawn." Each of these was but a re-packaging of Jonathan Edwards' idea of the specially privileged, whether called "Elect," "Adepts," "Ascended Masters," "Magi," or "Little Green Men." These cults became the inspiration for a dizzying assortment of schools of literature, music, dance, philosophy, and psychology. What "conspiracy theorists" see as secret plots and disguised intentions is actually much more insidious. Much as occurred with the succeeding "counterculture" of the last third of the Twentieth Century, the Euro-American "intellectual" elite was largely, and quite openly, mired in the extended social relations of this shifting pattern of cult associations. The essential features of "Little Green Men" irrationalism remained as the basis for the whole she-bang, as individual alliances shifted between various of these "theological" cults and the new political "-isms"—socialism, communism, Fascism, Nazism.

H.G. Wells, a protégé of Charles Darwin's boss, Thomas Henry Huxley, blended the ideas of "God"-caused, "Nature"-caused, "Technology"-caused, and "Geopolitical"-caused Doom, into a unified notion of ultimate "Godzilla" terror, for which the only solution was global tyranny. Wells' early political success in the United States was his control of the policies of the Klan cheerleader made President, Woodrow Wilson.[14] In fact, Huxley was the patriarch of a British-centered grouping, identified as the New Dark Ages Conspiracy,[15] which formed an Anglo-American alliance for Doom with the Emerson Kindergarten and the Lost Cause afficionados here. Leading figures included Wells, Huxley's grandchildren, Julian and Aldous, whom Huxley hired Wells to train, and Lord Bertrand Russell, the latter the most infamous of the "Cambridge Apostles."

Enter the Nashville Agrarians

The quintessential product of this rancid stew was "The Great Beast," Aleister Crowley, a leader of Rosicrucian Freemasonry and darling of the "Quatuor Coronati" Masonic branch of British Intelligence, whose career encompassed five decades of activity in Britain, the European Continent, and North America.

The fashionable pornographers of the "Gay Nineties" through the "Roaring Twenties"—such heroes of today's "counterculture" as D.H. Lawrence, H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, the Virginia novelist James Branch Cabell, and the leading promoter of Friedrich Nietszche, H.L. Mencken, were all in Crowley's orbit. Beyond his immediate following, the chic Brits, and the American forerunners of the "Beat" and "Hippie" eras—who, much like Emerson, preferred the seedy nightlife of Paris and the Caribbean to their hometowns in places like Missouri or Idaho—all knew Crowley or his cult. They all had friends who had visited his "Abbey of Thelema," to join in the "sex magic," the animal sacrifices and blood-drinking, and the opium and heroin use, which would, eventually, cost Crowley his respectability, but would build the legacy which his admirers among today's establishment entertainment figures, including Mick Jagger and Sir Paul McCartney, have emulated. This wider circle included Ernest Hemingway; F. Scott Fitzgerald; Edmund Wilson of Princeton University and The New Republic; John Peale Bishop of Princeton, who went from being a Beat poet in the twenties to war-time propagandist for Co-ordinator for Inter-American Affairs Nelson Rockefeller; William Butler Yeats' one-time house-boy, Ezra Pound, who became a propagandist for Mussolini, but remains a darling of both the supposedly patriotic neo-Conservatives as well as the doped-up counterculture; T.S. Eliot; Gertrude Stein; Sylvia Beach; and Isadora Duncan.

Out of this mess, arose the monstrosity which is at the core of this story, the Twentieth-Century heirs of the Ku Klux Klan, the Nashville Agrarians, who have come to dominate much of the nation's politics, culture, and theology. Before continuing, review the characteristic features of this illness:

• Godzilla theology: The denial that Man is in the Image of God or deserving of anything other than death and damnation, and the belief that all knowledge and authority come from secret sources (Godzillas and Little Green Men).
  
  
• Opposition to the Renaissance Nation-State and support for Empire, especially the Brutish. Hatred for the actual cultural achievements of European Civilization, and affection for its legacy of hideous "Feudal" and other oppressions.
  
  
• Denial of any connection between Reason and Sentiment, Science and Emotion, Truth and Beauty. This includes the claim that precise, logical, mathematical determinism is the only "science," and that the only alternative mode of cognition is wild irrationalism.
  
  
• Hatred of real cognitive work, the belief that drug-induced or similar states of wild irrationalism are the source of "creativity," and that belief in the cognitive capabilities of man is an "evil" to be eradicated.
  
  
• Opposition to technological progress, "internal improvements," high protective tariffs, and freedom. Support for "free trade" and slavery.

Enter the Nashville Agrarians, from which such spawn as former U.S. Secretary of State (Sir) Henry A. Kissinger were bred.

The Agrarians have taken this American Tory disease and wrapped it with a down-home "American" country package, in which it's been marketed massively for seventy years under a variety of trade-styles.

Then, there was also that revival of the Ku Klux Klan which was to carry both Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter into the White House.

It started in 1915, the same year that Hollywood gave birth to evil twins: the modern movie industry and the born-again Ku Klux Klan. The second Klan was launched by Hollywood's first full-length feature motion picture, D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation. The film, now revered as a great "classic," features then-President Wilson's praise of the Klan in its opening frames. He promoted the film and the Klan by sponsoring showings at the White House, the Supreme Court, and for the assembled Government and Diplomatic grandees of our Capital.[16] That same year, in Nashville, Tennessee, a seemingly random group of Vanderbilt students and faculty began meetings and discussions on philosophy and poetry in the home of a Rosicrucian mystic of an allegedly Jewish Masonic family, Sidney Mttron Hirsch.

Vanderbilt itself, had just gone through a tumultuous ten-year process of takeover by Wall Street money, in part coordinated by the involvement of then-President Theodore Roosevelt, Supreme Court Chief Justice William Fuller, and Britain's financial mogul in America, J. Pierpont Morgan. From then, until now, Vanderbilt has been one of the leading recipients of Wall Street Foundation money—Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie, the works. The stated purpose of this seizure of Vanderbilt from its former Southern Methodist affiliation, was to turn it into the Southern center of John Dewey, "Pragmatic"-style teacher training and culture generally.[17] Vanderbilt's histories do not explain why this "conversion" to New England-born Pragmatism should have included the appointment, in 1917, of Walter L. Fleming, one of the nation's leading KKK partisans, as Dean, but, perhaps, you're beginning to get the idea.

The Nashville-based core of the Hirsch circle was drawn from, and had the financial and other backing of the leading families and business interests of Nashville, including the Cheek-Nichols family which owned Maxwell House Coffee. They were to found a literary magazine in 1922, called the Fugitive, and a political movement in 1930, the "Nashville Agrarians." The early meetings, at which Hirsch reclined on a chaise, propped up by feathery pillows, surrounded by his acolytes, perfected the circle as practitioners of Nietzschean or Rosicrucian "Little Green Man" occultism. This is how Fugitive Donald Davidson described the Hirsch salons:

[We] fell silent and became listeners when—as always happened—Sidney Hirsch picked out some words—most likely a proper name like Odysseus or Hamlet or Parsifal, or some common word like foot or fugitive—and then, turning from dictionary to dictionary in various languages, proceeded to unroll a chain of veiled meanings that could be understood only through the system of etymologies to which he had the key. This, he assured us, was the wisdom of the ages—a palimpsest underlying all great poetry, all great art, all religion, in all eras, in all lands. All true poets possessed this wisdom intuitively, he told us, solemnly, repeatedly. Furthermore he proved it later on, when we began to forsake philosophy for poetry, by pointing out that some image that had crept into our verses, no matter what we intended it to mean, revealed exactly the kind of mystic symbolism he had traced from the Ramayana to Homer to Sophocles to Dante to Shakespeare to William Blake.[18]

Most histories of the Fugitives/Agrarians tend to dismiss Hirsch's influence as unimportant, but his training and early leadership was the basis for everything the Fugitives and their disciples were to become. The Fugitives later developed Hirsch's "Little Green Men" method into the dominant school of English Literature, the so-called, "New Criticism." It was Hirsch who, in 1922—after a seven-year association interrupted by the War—proposed and pushed through the idea of starting a poetry magazine, and named it the Fugitive. John Crowe Ransom, who went on to become the acknowledged founder of what is fairly dubbed "The New Crittercism," and is otherwise called the leader of the group, introduced his 1930 work, God Without Thunder, with an adoring note to his mentor, "S.M.H.," and reports that Hirsch was the source of a proposal he made in the American Review, in 1933, to build a new capital city in the heartland of the country.

Forty years after the salon first met, the Rockefeller Foundation financed a "Fugitives Reunion," at Vanderbilt University. The presiding figure at this event was Fugitive's "editor in absentia," William Yandell Elliott, who as head of Harvard University's Government Department, launched the foreign policy careers of Zbigniew Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger, the mentors of two generations of Democratic and Republican policy "gurus," notably including our last Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and her virtual foster sister, current National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice.

At the reunion, Elliott—who had been an intimate of London's literary elite, was then serving on Dwight Eisenhower's National Security Council, and had spent years, in conjunction with his favorite, Kissinger, hosting world leaders at Harvard's International Summer Seminars—said, "Sidney had this dominating, almost mesmeric habit of addressing people in the Socratic manner. . . . The insights that he had about the struggle of myths and systems, and the nature of the struggle of the people who became the epic exemplars, was superior in its political insight to any figure I've known." In unpublished tape-recorded remarks to that gathering, Elliott reports having escorted Hirsch from his home to the Vanderbilt campus.

Eyewitnesses report that in that period, Hirsch's home, which Elliott visited, featured occult artifacts, a life-size nude portrait of himself, and a human pelvis hanging from the ceiling, which Hirsch would caress as he engaged in conversation.

So, who was Sidney Mttron Hirsch? He was a product of the fin de siècle witches' brew described in the last section. His family were wealthy Nashville merchants, but he led a Bohemian existence. After a career as a Navy boxer he worked as a model for a sculptor named Chase, with whom he roamed the degenerate seas. He is said to have posed for August Rodin (who had a brush with Aleister Crowley) and Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, and to have met William James' favorite student, Gertrude Stein, and Lorado Taft (a Chicago sculptor and art historian, with whom life-long homosexual Stark Young, of whom you'll learn more, had a flirtation as well). In 1913, with support from the Nashville Art Association and the Board of Trade, he produced The Fire Regained, a Dionysian pageant on the subject of "Lesbian Love"—complete with hundreds of sheep, doves, dancers in diaphanous costume, and the governor's wife, Lucy McMillan, playing the Goddess Athena.

Hirsch's "kids" were remarkably successful. Of the handful at the core of what we now know as the Fugitive/Agrarian group, John Crowe Ransom, William Yandell Elliott, Bill Frierson, Robert Penn Warren, and Cleanth Brooks became Rhodes Scholars; Andrew Nelson Lytle studied at Oxford; Stark Young was a lifelong intimate of top British cultural warrior Julian Huxley (whose primary foray into United States politics was as a founding faculty member of Rice University in Houston, Texas, under the patronage of Captain James Baker, grandfather of Boy George Bush's lead attorney, the third of that line), and a leader of British spymaster H.G. Wells' New Republic group.

Allen Tate became an intimate of the above-mentioned Crowleyite literati, in Greenwich Village, New York, Paris, and other Bohemian outposts, who were patronized by the British establishment, and of Gertrude Stein. In the Twenties, Tate frequently published in Wells' The New Republic, and The Nation, The Saturday Review of Literature, and the literary pages of many other journals. In the Thirties, he served as editor of the horsey Hound and Horn.

The story behind the British promotion of the Fugitives, however, originated prior to their meeting with Hirsch, and, really, prior to their births. The Nashville-centered core of the group, and their out-of-town cousins, were part of a leading clique composed of the second- and third-generation descendants of the "Tennessee Templars," who had founded the Ku Klux Klan. Ransom was the great-nephew of James R. Crowe, a leader of Scottish Rite Freemasonry in Tennessee, and one of the inner circle of Masons, with Albert Pike and Nathan Bedford Forrest, who had founded the Klan. Crowe was cited by Fleming as a key source for his "insider" history of the KKK. Ransom's mother, Ella, had fond memories of evenings spent by the fireside with the other Crowe women, sewing sheets together for Klan rallies. Stark Young's father and Cleanth Brooks' grandfather fought in Forrest's "Critter Company," during the Civil War. William Yandell Elliott's grandfather was an ostensibly anti-slavery Republican, who reportedly provoked an incident after the War, resulting in the deaths of eight freedmen. He, nonetheless, belonged to the same Masonic Lodge in Murfreesboro, Tennessee as James D. Richardson, who, as a Congressman in 1898, caused Federal land in the nation's capital to be set aside for the monument to Klan founder Pike. Young, Lytle, Frank Lawrence Owsley, Ransom, and Elliott all claimed connections to the McGehee family—one of the wealthiest and largest slave-holding families in the South, which claimed descent from the British Stuart royalty. Robert Penn Warren's father worked as a clerk for the McGehee retail chain in Kentucky.

So, to summarize, the Fugitives were, by family and social connections, Anglophile, pro-Confederate, "White Sheet" babies, who were given an intensive indoctrination in "Little Green Men" theology by Hirsch, who, apart from the support given his efforts by Nashville's leading commercial, cultural, and political institutions, appears to have been the village loon.

The Fugitive was launched in 1922, sandwiched in time between the installation of Mussolini's Fascist government in Italy, and Adolf Hitler's rise to prominence in the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. The electorate had replaced the Klan's Woodrow Wilson with a pro-Industrial Republican, Warren Gamaliel Harding. Under Harding's leadership, the Anglophile Klan revival which had led the U.S.A. into World War I was threatened with being side-lined. At the time, Elliott and Bill Frierson were at Oxford doing their Rhodes Scholarship studies. Elliott was listed on the masthead as "Editor in Absentia." He, in fact, promoted the Nashville Fugitives, arranged publication deals, and so on, amongst the British literary elite. At Oxford, he worked through a late-night drinking and discussion circle including the mystic poet and estranged Lodge brother of Aleister Crowley, William Butler Yeats, and long-time Fugitive intimate, Robert Graves. Graves is known today for his adoring history of the Roman Empire, I Claudius and his promotion of the cult of the White Goddess. Thus, the Fugitives became leading figures in the "modernist" literary establishment of the Twenties, with a definite aroma of what we would recognize today as "Bohemian," "Beat," "counterculture," and definitely "weird."

They were to become something different. In 1923, Harding died mysteriously from food poisoning. He was the fourth President to die suddenly in office in sixty years. The other three had been gunned down by assassins. He was succeeded by Wall Street's Calvin Coolidge, whose policies were to create what we know, unjustly, as the "Hoover Depression." The change in the Fugitives was prompted when, as some viewed this matter, Satan decided to promote what he advertised as a fight between Jesus and Science, in Dayton, Tennessee. It was planned in Richmond, Virginia, in 1925, in the home of occultist, pornographic novelist James Branch Cabell, at a meeting between his friend, the Baltimore curmudgeon journalist H.L. Mencken, known as the leading popularizer in the United States of Nietzsche, and the Nietzschean atheist attorney, Clarence Darrow. A fourth, unseen, presence in the room would have been the mutual friend and collaborator of Cabell and Mencken, "The Great Beast," Aleister Crowley. Crowley and Mencken had collaborated in spreading "pro-German" propaganda in the United States prior to America joining the British side in the First World War. Whether their propaganda, painting the Germans as the Nietzschean super-race about to crush the American weaklings, helped turn the tide for Britain or Germany, is not the subject of our story here. Mencken had introduced Crowley to Cabell, who, in his medieval "Sorcerers and Dragons"-type sex fantasy novels, expressed ideas he shared with Crowley through the mouth of his fictional hero, Juergen, who often repeated the following slogans:

Do that which pleases you. For all men that live have but a little while to live and none knows his fate thereafter. So that a man possesses nothing certainly save a brief loan of his body: and yet the body of man is capable of much curious pleasure.

and,

I'll drink anything once.

To this day, Crowley's followers use excerpts of Cabell's novels as scripts for their black magic rituals. Cabell was, himself, an heir of one of the most respected Freemasonic families of the "Old South." His relations include the notorious "Randolphs of Roanoke," whose most notorious figure—the drug-addicted John Randolph—is, today, a hero of the Buckleyite conservative movement; as well as Air Force General and Deputy Director of the CIA, George Cabell, and the recent Kissingerian intelligence agents and diplomats, David and Evangeline Bruce. The Bruces, of course, like the McGehees and MacGregors, trace their lineage to Robert the Bruce—the forebear of the Stuart line of Scottish and English royalty. Thus Cabell, himself a "Green Men" occultist, was a cousin to his sometime collaborators and sometime competitors amongst the Fugitives.

What Cabell, Mencken, Darrow, and the unseen Crowley agreed to, was to launch a court fight, to be argued by Darrow and publicized by Mencken, against the Tennessee laws banning the teaching of Darwinism. This was to become the celebrated "Scopes Monkey Trial," in which the Satanists of medievalist Cabell's Richmond parlor, undertook to represent the forces of Huxley's Darwinism, which they called "modern science," against the Bible-thumping "Christians" represented by former Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson, William Jennings Bryan. By doing this, they turned David Hume's hermetic division between science and morality into a popular fighting issue. To the extent you, or anyone you meet today, believes that religion, morality, or aesthetics are matters of irrational taste, while science comes only from cold experience: Hume, and Satan's plot, planned in Richmond and executed in Dayton, deserve at least some of the thanks.

The Fugitives were offended by the treatment given the South by Mencken and others in and around this trial. They were particularly upset at Mencken's essay about the South, "The Sahara of the Bozart," in which he alleged that Southern Whites were genetically inferior to the "Mulattoes," because, he argued, the Whites were largely Celtic, whereas the "Mulattoes," were enriched with the Norman (out of which came the Venetian-allied English Plantagenet Kings) genes of the plantation owners. There followed several years of feverish correspondence amongst the Fugitives and their friends, out of which arose a project to re-launch Confederate culture. It seems that Mencken's prodding of the White Sheet baby poets had about the same effect as his war-time "defense" of Germany.

The Night Writers Take a Stand

The result of the Night Writers' fevered response was a series of hotly promoted books and articles published by 1931. These included biographies of Confederate President Jefferson Davis and General Stonewall Jackson by Allen Tate; Andrew Nelson Lytle's fawning biography of the Klan's First Imperial Wizard: Bedford Forrest and His Critter Company; and John Crowe Ransom's call for a Godzilla theology takeover of all existing religions, in God Without Thunder. The flagship of the Night Writers' fleet was I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, by Twelve Southerners.[19] This literary assault, published, debated, and promoted in the period of descent into economic depression following the 1929 stock market crash, and leading into the installation of the Hitler Nazi regime in Germany and the initiation of last Century's second Global War, was the articulation of the main outlines of what was to triumph as the Conservative Revolution, which culminated in Boy George's year 2000 Black Sheet coup.

As you will see, this involved the open takeover of American culture by the Godzilla theology of Rome and kindred Empire cultures, clothed as good ole' Southern Americanism. You may be shocked, or amused, to learn that this Southern tribe are the kissin' cousins of the ecology freak counterculture, which organized the Gorey mess in the Democratic Party to lose to Bush.

Tate coordinated the production of I'll Take My Stand from Paris, financed by a Guggenheim fellowship arranged by a curious individual then known as Ford Madox Ford, in whose apartment he stayed while working on his biography of Stonewall Jackson, which he sub-titled "The Good Soldier," after one of Ford's novels. Thursday afternoons, he called at the Salon of William James' favorite student, Gertrude Stein, and her "wife," the hashish-baking Alice B. Toklas. Although Stein and Toklas became heroes to the Beat and hippie generations, they were no liberated couple. According to Tate, Stein would sit in the front room with the men, including such dissolute expatriates as Ernest Hemingway, John Peale Bishop, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, to discuss matters literary and philosophic, while Toklas served the ladies her famous chocolate cake in the rear. With this provenance, it should be no surprise that I'll Take My Stand was dedicated to the Ku Klux Klan's authorized historian, Walter L. Fleming.

To understand the Agrarian variety of American Tory treason, first read from the joint statement of the I'll Take My Stand twelve, drafted by White Sheet baby, John Crowe Ransom, which, but for the word "Southern," and, perhaps, one or two others, could be from any "environmentalist" tract of the 1970s or later. Note the "Little Green Men" rejection of the idea that man has "power over nature," which Ransom claims is "something mysterious," and the strange idea that, as long as they have some slave to do it for them, "labor" is good in itself, and, therefore, the less efficient the better:

All tend to support a Southern way of life against what may be called the American or prevailing way . . . Agrarian versus Industrial.

The capitalization of the applied sciences has now become extravagant and uncritical; it has enslaved our human energies to a degree now clearly felt to be burdensome.

The philosophy of applied science is generally quite sure that the saving of labor is a pure gain. . . . This is to assume that labor is an evil, that only the end of labor or the material product is a good.

The true Sovietists or Communists . . . are the Industrialists themselves. They would have the government set up an economic super-organization, which in turn would become the government. We therefore look upon the Communist menace as a menace indeed, but not as a Red one; because it is simply according to the blind drift of our industrial development to expect in America at last much the same economic system as that imposed by violence upon Russia in 1917.

We receive the illusion of having power over nature, and lose the sense of nature as something mysterious and contingent.

It is strange, of course, that a majority of men anywhere could ever as with one mind become enamored of industrialism: a system that has so little regard for individual wants. There is evidently a kind of thinking that rejoices in setting up a social objective which has no relation to the individual. Men are prepared to sacrifice their private dignity and happiness to an abstract social ideal, and without asking whether the social ideal produces the welfare of any individual man whatsoever. But this is absurd. The responsibility of men is for their own welfare and that of their neighbors; not for the hypothetical welfare of some fabulous creature called society. . . .

Next, Ransom's essay, "Reconstructed But Unregenerate," elaborates further the connection between "environmentalism" and the oligarchy's "Little Green Men" cult. Note the slavish admiration for England, and the appeal to intellectual sloth which abhors the "infinite series" of progress in favor of the mind-dead siren call of "tradition." To this dopey, lazy brain, even slavery is preferable to an American-style life of creativity:

The nearest of the European cultures which we could examine is that of England; and this is of course the right one in the case. . . . England was actually the model employed by the South. . . . And there is in the South even today an Anglophile sentiment quite anomalous in the American scene.

England differs from America doubtless in several respects, but most notably in the fact that England did her pioneering an indefinite number of centuries ago, did it well enough, and has been living pretty tranquilly on her establishment ever since. . . . Their descendants have had the good sense to consider that this establishment was good enough for them. They have elected to live . . . in accordance with the tradition which they inherited, and they have consequently enjoyed a leisure, a security, and an intellectual freedom that were never the portion of pioneers.

In most societies man has adapted himself to environment with plenty of intelligence to secure easily his material necessities from the graceful bounty of nature. And then, ordinarily, he concludes a truce with nature. . . . But the latter-day societies have been seized—none quite so violently as our American one—with the strange idea that the human destiny is not to secure an honorable peace with nature, but to wage an unrelenting war on nature.

This is simply to say that Progress never defines its ultimate objective, but thrusts its victims at once into an infinite series. Our vast industrial machine . . . is like a Prussianized state which is organized strictly for war and can never consent to peace. . . .

Then, Ransom pronounces his "feed the people to the lions" opposition to loving God's "other children":

Along with the gospel of Progress goes the gospel of Service. . . .

The feminine form is likewise hallowed among us under the name of Service . . . service means the function of Eve, it means the seducing of laggard men into fresh struggles with nature . . . it busies itself with the heathen Chinese, with the Roman Catholic Mexican, with the "lower" classes in our own society. Its motive is missionary. Its watchwords are such as Protestantism, Individualism, Democracy, and the point of its appeal is a discontent, generally labeled "divine."

Slavery was a feature monstrous enough in theory, but, more often than not, humane in practice; Industrialism is an insidious spirit, full of false promises and generally fatal to establishments. The attitude that needs artificial respiration is the attitude of resistance on the part of the natives to the salesmen of industrialism. It will be fiercest and most effective if industrialism is represented to the Southern people as—what it undoubtedly is for the most part—a foreign invasion of Southern soil, which is capable of doing more devastation than was wrought when Sherman marched to the sea.

"The Irrepressible Conflict" by Frank Lawrence Owsley, who, in effect, succeeded Fleming in Vanderbilt's chair of Lynchin' and Cross Burnin', is a bloody assault against the freed slaves, but what's worse is his open recognition of his heritage, from Rome to Locke, which leads to the sentiment that it's better to be a lump of manure rotting on "the soil," than to have to think. He starts with a justification for the Klan's terrorism after the Civil War:

There was no generosity. For ten years the South, already ruined by the loss of nearly $2,000,000,000 invested in slaves, with its lands worthless, its cattle and stock gone, its houses burned, was turned over to the three millions of former slaves, some of whom could still remember the taste of human flesh and the bulk of them hardly three generations from cannibalism. These half-savage blacks were armed. Their passions were roused against their former masters by savage political leaders like Thaddeus Stevens, who advocated the confiscation of all Southern lands for the benefit of the negroes, and the extermination, if need be, of the Southern white population; and like Charles Sumner, whose chief regret had been that his skin was not black.

Not only were the blacks armed; they were upheld and incited by garrisons of Northern soldiers, by Freedman's Bureau officials, and by Northern ministers of the gospel, and at length they were given the ballot while their former masters were disarmed and, to a large extent, disfranchised [sic]. For ten years ex-slaves, led by carpetbaggers and scalawags, continued the pillages of war, combing the South for anything left by the invading armies, levying taxes, selling empires of plantations under the auction hammer, dragooning the Southern population, and visiting upon them the ultimate humiliations.

. . .The rising generations read Northern literature. . . . Northern textbooks were used in Southern schools; Northern histories, despite the frantic protests of local patriotic organizations, were almost universally taught . . . , books that were built around the Northern legend. . . .

The real cause of conflict, Owlsey explains was:

[T]he North was commercial and industrial, and the South was agrarian. . . . All else, good and bad, revolved around this ideal—the old and accepted manner of life for which Egypt, Greece, Rome, England, and France had stood. History and literature, profane and sacred, twined their tendrils about the cottage and the villa, not the factory. Each word, name, sound, had grown from the soil and had behind it sweet memory, stirring adventure, and ofttimes stark tragedy.

. . . it was the Romans of the early republic, before land speculators and corn laws had driven men from the soil to the city slums, who appealed most powerfully to the South. These Romans were brave, sometimes crude, but open and without guile—unlike the Greeks. They reeked of the soil, of the plow and the spade; they had wrestled with virgin soil and forests. . . .The industrial North demanded a high tariff. . . . It was an exploitative principle, originated at the expense of the South and for the benefit of the North. . . . The industrial North demanded internal improvements—roads, railroads, canals—at national expense to furnish the transportation for its goods to Southern and Western markets. . . . The South objected to internal improvements at national expense because it had less need of transportation. . . . The North favored a government-controlled bank. . . .

Slavery had been practically forced upon the country by England—over the protest of colonial assemblies. . . . However, when the Revolution came and the Southern colonies gained their independence, they did not free the negroes. . . . Negroes had come into the Southern Colonies in such numbers that people feared for the integrity of the white race. For the negroes were cannibals and barbarians, and therefore dangerous. No white man who had any contact with slavery was willing to free the slaves and allow them to dwell among the whites. Slaves were a peril, at least a risk, but free blacks were considered a menace too great to be hazarded. . . .

These [economic and social rights] were not the only interests which the state-rights doctrine was expected to protect from an overbearing and unsympathetic national government. Perhaps the greatest vested interest was "personal liberty," the old Anglo-Saxon principles expressed in the Magna Carta, bill of rights, habeas corpus act, supported in the American Revolution, and engrafted finally in every state constitution. . . . Jefferson had called the "inalienable rights of man" and Locke and Rousseau had called the "natural rights"—right of life, liberty, property. . . .

Since the Confederate Constitution unequivocally supported the right to slave ownership, and granted its States no rights to overrule that "personal liberty," Owsley, and all supporters of the Confederate model of "States Rights" and "personal liberty," place themselves in the peculiar position of asserting that "Liberty" requires the right to slave ownership. Unfortunately, this is not a dead idea. Southern Partisan magazine, the well-respected organ of Buckleyite Conservatism, whose pages have been graced with adoring interviews by notables including Attorney General John Ashcroft, former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, Senator Jesse Helms, Senator John East, Senator Phil Gramm, and former Virginia Republican Party Chairman Patrick McSweeney, re-published this genocidal essay in 1991 as part of its Sixtieth Anniversary homage to I'll Take My Stand.

Two of the essays directly attacked Universal Public Education, saying that there was no point in providing real education for anyone but a small elite, and certainly not for negroes. John Gould Fletcher of Arkansas, who claimed that growing up in the former home of Albert Pike inspired him to his career as an imagist poet, a British Fabian Socialist, and an ardent booster of Benito Mussolini,[20] and who later founded the Arkansas Folklore Society and drowned himself, presented his case against universal education, and in favor of the Southern, "Private Academy" system, which is the idea behind today's "school vouchers," movement, and many of our "home schoolers":

. . . what is the good of sending an unspoiled country boy or girl to a city high school and still later to a college, if after some seven years' sophisticated flirting with knowledge he or she has to return and unwillingly take up ploughing and washing dishes again?

. . . a considerable proportion of our population are negroes. Although there is no doubt that the negro could, if he wished, pass easily through the high school and college mill (such a task does not require any profound knowledge. . .), yet under the present social and economic conditions under which he has to live it is simply a waste of money and effort to send him there. . . .

The inferior, whether in life or in education, should exist only for the sake of the superior. . . . We can pick out the most promising and enterprising pupils who appear in our high schools annually and set them apart, as actual students taught by real teachers, to form an intellectual elite. . . . We can also support . . . such institutions for training the negro as Tuskegee and the Hampton Institute, which are adapted to the capacity of that race and produce far healthier and happpier specimens of it than all the institutions for "higher learning" that we can give them.

Robert Penn Warren, who was to become the most famous and "successful" of the Night Writers—First Poet Laureate of the United States, winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, author of two Hollywood movies, co-author of the ubiquitous textbook, Understanding Poetry, and so forth—wrote "The Briar Patch," which despite attacking equal education for "the negro," was controversial amongst the Agrarians, for being a bit more genteel than Cousin Owsley's attack on the supposed flesh-eating cannibals:

[After Reconstruction], [t]he negro was as little equipped to establish himself, as he would have been to live again, with spear and breech-clout, in the Sudan or Bantu country. The necessities of life had always found their way to his back or skillet without the least thought on his part. . . . He did not know how to make a living. . . . Always in the past he had been told when to work and what to do. . . .

For what is the negro to be educated?

Booker T. Washington realized the immediate need of his race; he realized that the masses of negroes . . . had to live by the production of their hands, and that little was to be gained by only attempting to create a small group of intellectual aristocrats in the race.

In the past the Southern negro has always been a creature of the small town and farm. That is where he still chiefly belongs, by temperament and capacity. . . .[21]

Allen Tate's "Remarks on the Southern Religion" reflect his agreement with Ransom's attacks on Christianity, and, something which is often the subject of his letters to friends: his plain old preference for stupidity over "intellectual agility," like the fellow with the Stars and Bars on his pick-up, or the teenie-bopper at the mall, who, in the words of the old Tareyton ad, would rather fight than change their minds. Some years later, he, like his friend, the Missouri-born defector to Britain, T.S. Eliot, became a pro-Feudalist Catholic.

. . . since the Christian myth is a vegetation rite, varying only in some details from countless other vegetation myths, there is no reason to prefer Christ to Adonis.

. . . the old South . . . was a feudal society without a feudal religion.

The South could remain simple-minded because it had no use for the intellectual agility required to define its position. Its position was self-sufficient and self-evident; it was European where the New England position was self-conscious and colonial. The Southern mind was simple, not top-heavy with learning it had no need of. . . .

We are very near an answer to our question—How may the Southerner take hold of his Tradition? The answer is, by violence. For this answer is inevitable. He cannot fall back upon his religion. . . . Reaction is the most radical of programs; it aims at cutting away the overgrowth and getting back to the roots. . . .

Andrew Nelson Lytle, who went on to be the long-term editor of the Sewanee Review—one of the nation's leading literary magazines, published by the Episcopal Church's flagship Southern university, the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee—as well as a founder of the traditionalist Anglican Society for the Book of Common Prayer, contributed, "The Hind Tit," where he, like cousin Owsley, says he'd really just rather be a stinkin' goat than a "progressive farmer":

Since 1865 an agrarian Union has been changed into an industrial empire bent on conquest of the earth's goods and ports to sell them in. This means warfare, a struggle over markets, leading, in the end, to actual military conflict between nations . . . men, run mad by their inventions, supplanting themselves with inanimate objects. . . .

. . . the Republican government and the Russian Soviet Council pursue identical policies toward the farmer . . . Russian Soviet is the more admirable. It frankly proposes to make of its farmers a race of helots.

. . . prophets do not come from cities. . . . They have always come from the wilderness, stinking of goats and running with lice. . . . The progressive-farmer ideal is a contradiction in terms. A stalk of cotton grows. It does not progress . . . as soon as a farmer begins to keep books, he'll go broke shore as hell.

Industrialism gives an electric refrigerator, bottled milk, and dairy butter. Industrialism saves time, but what is to be done with this time? The milkmaid can't go to the movies. . . . In the moderate circumstances of this family . . . she will be exiled to the town to clerk all day. If the income of the family can afford it, she remains idle, and therefore miserable. . . . It is true that labor-evicting machines will give a greater crop yield. . . . It means overproduction and its twin, price deflation. It [the South, I suppose—SE] is our own, and if we have to spit in the water-bucket to keep it our own, we had better do it.

The manifesto's conclusion was by the best-known Agrarian at the time, the homosexual drama critic Stark Young. He was also the Agrarian most closely allied with the Wells-Huxley-Lord Bertrand Russell, "New Dark Ages" crowd. He had been a special friend of Julian Huxley, since 1912, and was to remain so until Huxley's death. He made it clear in his letters that he was similarly devoted to Huxley's brother, Aldous, the mescaline and LSD fiend, who was, he wrote, "closer far in sentiment to Julian than anybody knows." As such, Young was involved in the circles including Colonel Edward House and Sidney Mezes, who ran Woodrow Wilson's policies during World War I and at the Versailles peace negotiations. Huxley, as we said, had been brought to Houston, Texas before the War by House's friend, Captain James Baker, grandfather of George W. Bush's lawyer, The Third, to found Rice University. Young was a leading figure in the Wells circle operations in the post-War United States, including The New Republic and the New School for Social Research. He was particularly close to the Communist Party financier, Dororthy Elmhirst Straight, who also paid to bring many "Fran