Monday, October 13, 2008
Saturday, October 11, 2008
How Modern Liberalism came to existence
The modern liberals, a.k.a. cultural marxists, emphasize that they don't have anything to do with the classic marxism, however the modern liberalism is not only a culture against Christianism, but also tries to fool people proposing anti-Christian ideas as if they were Christian. For example, the idea of worldly peace without Christ, symbolized by the logo of the inverted cross with the broken arms (peace logo).
Democracy needs a moral basis of mutual respect where left and right can get along. But with the cultural marxism hegemony, things have changed in such a way that what was considered leftist has became center; what was the ultra-radical left, has became the current left; and what was right, is in the endangered species list and disappearing very rapidly from the political scenario.
The communist manifesto of Marx called the proletarian workers from around the world to unite and proposed that they should revolt against the property owners. From this perspective, Marx foresaw a great conflict across Europe in which the "oppressed workers" would attack "the oppressors bosses" according to the interests of their economic class.
However, the conflict occurred not according to the Marxists' vision. The First World War started in 1914 and lasted until 1919. The German Kaiser said "there are no more parties, we are all Germans" and turned workers against workers from other countries, each defending the "interests of their bosses."
In 1917, the Bolshevik revolution gave hope to Marxists, although all other attempts to communist revolution failed.
In 1919, the Spartacus revolution in Berlin - with Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg and Spartacus - failed.
Also in 1919, there was a Soviet government in Munich, whose interim government failed to attract the support of workers.
In Hungary, the provisional government of Bela Kun, with involvement of the philosopher Georg Lucács, also failed.
In Italy there was a unionist revolt in Turin, which also failed.
These failures were a major problem for the Marxism theory: the reality does not follow this theory! A normal brain would have discarded any theory that it is not compatible with reality, but the Marxist brain is not normal: if the reality does not confirm the theory, to hell with the reality!
Antonio Gramsci and Georg Lukács concluded that the Western culture "alienated the proletarians and prevented them from fighting against the interests of other classes." They concluded that Russia was not "Western" enough, so the revolution was successful there for that reason.
In their view, Western culture is sustained in 3 columns: Roman law, Greek philosophy and Judeo-Christian morality.
To deploy socialism in the West, they concluded that it was necessary to destroy Judeo-Christian morals. That is why the new Marxism, the cultural Marxism, or modern liberalism aims to destroy anything that is Jewish and Christian.
However, this has created a schism in Marxism. In the West, they began to fight for a different kind of Marxism that was different from the orthodox Marxism practiced in the East, behind the Iron Curtain.
The CULTURAL MARXISM
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a French philosopher, coined the term "Western Marxism" to differentiate that heterodox Marxism which was somewhat heretical in the eyes of communist Russia. Stalin hated the Communists in the West who did not accept the orders from Moscow despite also being Marxists. Later, the KGB welcomed these new collaborators, seeing how they could be useful, and started paying them.
Several famous writers and philosophers in the West were participants in the Western Marxism. Ernst Bloch (important influence on the European students revolution), Walter Benjamin, Jean Paul Sartre, Louis Althusser, Jürgen Habermas (who once discussed with the future Pope, who was then Cardinal Ratzinger).
In 1923, Germany held the Week of Marxist Labor. Marxist philosophers gathered to discuss the crisis of Marxist theory (why the reality was not following the theory?) That crisis had existed since 1919. At that meeting, stood out Felix Weil and Georg Lukács. Felix Weil came from a rich family and spent his dad's money creating and sustaining financially the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt in 1924: the famous School of Frankfurt.
This group originally intended to use the name "Marx-Engels Institute," mirroring the office of the same name in Moscow, but in the West they have decided that there was greater advantage in not identifying themselves as Marxists. The institute published the first volume of the General Works of Marx and Engels (a.k.a. MEGA - Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe) at the same time the office of Moscow did.
These rich young studied the German society and the Western thinking to figure out how to destroy it. With the rise of Hitler to power and his persecution of Jews and Marxists, they fled to the United States.
A main feature of the cultural Marxists is that they do not predominantly want armed struggle, however they want to "occupy territories" in the culture, preaching their doctrines in the universities, in the media, in churches or anywhere where there is speech.
Several of these thinkers, who did not identified themselves as Marxists, infiltrated and taught in American universities. Of these, it is worth mentioning Teodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse, who were teaching at Columbia University, in New York. Horkheimer and Adorno returned to Europe after the end of World War II and made many disciples. Marcuse worked for the CIA (then called the OSS) in anti-Nazi propaganda projects and then moved to California. At the time the student revolution of 1968 flared up, he was teaching at the University of San Diego.
Marcuse has greatly influenced the culture of the West, changing the Western marxist thought into a kind of intellectual marriage between Marx and Freud. The Marxists wanted a revolution and so they needed angry people. The revolt of workers, exploited by classical Marxism, was demonstrably inadequate. It was necessary to find more angry people. Marcuse discovered the youth and the sexually repressed people.
Their discourse then became: "the capitalist society" - that is, Western society - "is a repressive society. It oppresses people, repressing them sexually. You can not freely exercise your sexuality. Revolt!" They wanted to destroy the Christian morals but did not openly confess their intentions.
These Marxist "preachers" proposed the liberation of sexuality, abortion, homosexuality and divorce, calling the monogamous marriage as "bourgeois morality" (codename for Christian morality).
Erich Fromm, Cornelius Castoriadis (who took part in the student revolution in Paris), Michel Foucault (one of the first victims of AIDS - he was a drug addict and a quite promiscuous homosexual) and Herbert Marcuse were the biggest influences in universities. When the student revolution of 1968 broke out, Marcuse, Foucault, Castoriadis and others helped the students in Paris.
In Hollywood, the Marxists also worked to destroy the "bourgeois morality". About twenty of them were denounced by Senator Joseph McCarthy but he ended up being victim of the ideological police.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Venona Code was discovered in the KGB archives and it revealed that not only twenty, but more than a hundred Marxists were working in Hollywood under orders of KGB. The book "Venona Code" explains in detail these historical facts.
In 1955, Marcuse wrote "Eros and Civilization", a widely used book in universities which became the "bible" of the hippie revolution. According to its text, the capitalist society leads to war and sexual repression, therefore, "make love, not war," "Love and peace, dude!"
To have the courage to de-repress, some young people, who were also raised in Christian families, needed to take drugs so they could practice those sexual perversions (the "sexual liberation"). With that came Woodstock and the protest against the war in Vietnam. The young and the perverted served as fuel for the engine of Marxist revolution.
CASE STUDY: BRAZIL
In 1964, Brazil was a very conservative country, with a society capable of uniting for the "March of Families for Freedom with God" in protest against the impending revolution of president João Goulart, who among others was pushing the country towards a Cuban-style communist dictatorship.
That has changed with the indoctrination through the widely watched soap operas of Rede Globo - among several other occupied spaces in the media. There were many Communists working in the Globo organizations and other bodies of the mainstream Brazilian media. Roberto Marinho (big media owner) reacted against the military regime and protected the communists in the Globo enterprises: "Let me handle my Communists by myself." Of these communists, the most notable - Dias Gomes and Janete Clair - dominated the 70 with their soap operas.
In Dias Gomes' biography, "Just A Subversive", he recounts preaching divorce - it was taboo at that time - in his 1970 soap opera "Red Summer". In his second 1970 soap opera, "On Earth just as it is in Heaven", he attacked the Catholics for their celibacy. In the 1975 soap opera "Roque Santeiro", which had been censored by the military government, he attacked Christianity by way of Catholicism.
In "Roque Santeiro," Father Albano (a liberation theology priest) and Father Hipólito (supposedly a conservative) discussed before the statue of Roque Santeiro, who had died and became worshipped as a Catholic saint. Under the protest of priest Albano, corrupt Father Hipólito sold images of Roque Santeiro and tried to cover up the fact that Roque Santeiro had not died. The intent of Dias Gomes was to make people believe that Christianity created false myths and the denounciation of these myths was necessary to prevent Christians from taking advantage of people.
The military government had no idea about cultural Marxism. They searched the house of Dias Gomes looking for weapons and books teaching guerrilla tactics and they didn't find anything. Only with wiretapping they discovered something when Dias Gomes explained his intentions to his friend Nelson Werneck Sodré: "But will the censors miss this?" "... Doing it this way it will pass. The military is very stupid!" That conversation was described in Arthur Xexéo's book, "Janete Clair, the Maker of Dreams." Once the government learned of it, they outlawed "Roque Santeiro" and explained: "The novel contains affront to morality, public order and good customs, and attacks the church."
The general Golbery do Couto e Silva, with his "theory of the pressure cooker," was one of the main culprits for the misfortunes that occur today in Brazilian universities. "Every pressure cooker should have a valve." The valve that he handed to the Marxists in a platter were the universities.
Although there were military government agents watching the lessons of the Marxists in the universities, they could preach anything, provided they would not touch the topics of land redistribution and guerrilla. They were free to talk about abortion, divorce, free sex because that was not identified as Marxism. Today the universities are completely dismantled in terms of Christian culture, becoming barely disguised anti-Christian factories, accusing the conservatives and denouncing their "bourgeois morality" and their "backward thinking".
The politically correct is a Marxist invention. It was created to try to convince people that Christian moral convictions were flawed and that it would be necessary to make everybody equal.
On September 7th (Brazilian independence day), a date that should be a commemoration of patriotism, the CNBB (National Conference of Brazilian Bishops, the part of Brazilian Catholicism dominated by liberation theology) had created the "Cry of the Excluded". The "excluded" is a category created by Pierre Bourdieu to perpetuate the idea of class warfare.
In Ibiúna in 1968, there was a congress of the UNE (National Union of Students), under the leadership of the current left-wing politicians who are in the Brazilian government and the opposition. The Marxists Aldo Rebelo (PC do B - Communist Party of Brazil), Jose Serra (PSDB - Democratic-Socialist Party of Brazil) and Jose Dirceu (PT - Workers' Party) were in that conference and all of them belong to currently hegemonic parties.
In today's Brazil, dominated by the cultural Marxism, there are virtually only leftist parties. They all try to enforce and encourage sexual promiscuity, abortion and homosexuality, racial conflict and environmental hysteria.
The PT calls the PSDB "right-wing", but the PSDB is not right-wing. PSDB is to the right of the PT but is still a left-wing party. The PSOL accuses the PT and the Lula government of not being leftists, but that only means that the PSOL is further left than the PT.
The Brazilian right today no longer exists in the form of parties, but as the Marxists still need an imaginary enemy, they use the DEM as a scarecrow and punching bag. The DEM is the former PFL, a party created to oppose the military regime which was taken by opportunists and today they form a mediocre, subservient and easily handled opposition.
IDEOLOGY PATROLLING - "You shall not disagree with the Left!"
The leftist hegemony today is maintained largely through ideological policing.
If someone dares to denounce the evil deeds of the Marxists, they use the tactic proposed by Lenin: jump on the victim collectively, making numerous allegations.
"You are a CIA agent, you are paid by Wall Street, you are bourgeois, you are the white elite, you are homophobic, you're a fool" - all possible and imaginable accusations and slander are used with the aim of intimidating other people so that they dare not agree with whoever denounced the evil deeds of cultural Marxists.
The goal is to make others afraid and make them think twice before speaking or denounce the same things - that is the ideological policing.
Sunday, September 7, 2008
Documentary about the communist subversion in the US media
The interview is conduced by G. Edward Griffin, political commentator and author of The Creature from Jekyll Island. This interview took place in 1984.
The interview has been divided in 9 parts for YouTube and the play list is here.
Understandably, Yuri Bezmenov, being a foreigner with counterintelligence background, underestimated American society's capacity to resist the onslaught of Soviet propaganda.
With the fall of the evil empire, this interview explains the communist plans that fortunately failed, a horrible scenario from which America and the world have escaped, even though the US media continues to be infected.
Monday, September 1, 2008
Sunday, August 31, 2008
Saturday, August 30, 2008
Differences between leftists/liberals, socialists and communists
All of the three have in common the fascism. "Fascists" is a word very appropriate for lefitsts. Fascist is the one who proposes that the state dominate everything and this is what the leftists preach.
However, when the leftist call someone a "fascist", he is not concerned about the meaning of this word, he just wants to use it to offend and express his hate. With misuse, words end up losing their power of precising what one wants to express and the discourse loses its meaning to the lay people.
The word "communist" is another that has double meaning: it can refer to both cultural marxism and to the ideology that preaches the end of private property and the state. That is why lay people do not understand when we call some politicians communist. They say "He, a communist? Absurd!" and then ignore the rest of the message, not understanding that what was meant is that the politician mentioned is a representative of cultural marxism.
There are differences between leftism, socialism and communism. Communists and socialists are leftists and every communist is socialist. But there are a few leftists who are not socialists and there are a lot of socialists who are not communists. How? For example, a Fabian socialist is not communist.
To better visualize this, you can imagine that there is a box labelled "Leftism (cultural marxism)". Inside of it, there are other smaller boxes and one of them has the label "Socialism". And inside of the Socialism box, there are other boxes and one of them has the label "Communism".
A true communist wants the end of private property in order to have equality (or so they say) but they also preach the end of state.
Those are in contradiction because the end of private property can only be achieved through the monopoly of power of coercion and whoever monopolizes the coercion becomes the de facto state - a perverse state that instead of guaranteeing freedom and property rights, guarantees robbery and tyranny. Thus, communism is something that will never exist and will be merely an excuse to take power. Communism is absurd - but there are those who want the absurd and do not recognize it.
In the strict sense, most of the communist parties are not merely fascists (preaching, for example, the "nationalization" of private companies and friendlier foreign relations with totalitarian countries such as China, Cuba, Vienam, North Korea). However, these parties are part of "communism" in the ample sense of the word, that is, cultural marxism.
The socialists consider the state as the ideal agent to foster equality. It is obvious that there are socialists that say one thing and desire the opposite, but the declared intention of the socialists is to make all properties belong to the state, who would give the citizens a very limited control over properties.
There are those who label themselves communists, but they are in fact socialists. If, for example, Fidel Castro say he is communist, he's lying. He can be socialist and fascist, but he is not a communist because this Cuban dictator admits the existence of the state. Fidel is "communist" only in the ample sense: Fidel, like Guevara, is an icon of the cultural marxism.
The leftist is more or less those who are "against" and those who preach moral relativism, that is, disregard for the standards of moral conduct. Some of them may not give attention to socialism, but some of them steal, cheat, kill, are promiscuous, want things for themselves without giving anything in exchange, consider everything relative, etc.
Example: it is very well possible that an abortionist doesn't care or completely ignore the equality that socialists and communists preach. It is also possible that several of those gay supremacy militants do not want the end of private property.
Those types of abortionists and gay militants are leftists, but they are not necessarily socialists or communists. However, all of them are part of "communism", that is, cultural marxism.
Thus, leftism is a general attitude of moral denial, socialism is also an attitude of moral negation but more directed against property and individual rights. And communism is an attitude of moral negation that emphasizes the denial of property and individual rights and the state too.
Leftism, socialism and communist do not have existence by themselves and are instead defined by the negation of something that exists. Therefore, this is trying to define and delimit things that are contradictory by themselves and of course that this is not a perfect explanation - it takes into account only some of the aspects.
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Brief History of Machismo
Olavo de Carvalho
Jornal da Tarde, August 16th, 2001
(This translation has not been reviewed by the author)
The women have always been exploited by the men. If there is a truth that nobody disputes, this is the one. From the solemn conference rooms in Oxford to the Fausto Silva show, from the Collège de France to the band of Ipanema, the world reinforces this certainty, maybe the most unquestioned certainty that has passed through the human brain, if it really has ever been on it and did not leave the womb straight to the academic thesis.
Since I am not willing to oppose such lordly unanimity, I propose to list some facts that can reinforce, in the believers of all existing genders and the genders yet to be invented, their feeling of hate against the adult heterosexual male, this despicable type that no one who has had the misfortune of being born male wants to be alike when grown up.
Our narrative starts in the dawn of time, in an imprecise moment between the Neanderthal and the Cro-Magnon. In those dark ages, the exploitation of women started. Those were hard times. Living in caves, the human communities endured constant attacks from the beasts.
The males, taking advantage of the prerogatives of the dominant class, have soon took the safest and most comfortable places in the social order: the interior of the caves. The nerve of these scoundrels! Making food for the babies and combing their hairs while the poor females, armed with only clubs, left to fight lions and bears.
When the economy of gathering was replaced by agriculture and animal breeding, again the men came with their smartarseness, giving the women the heaviest tasks, such as carrying stones, taming the horses, plowing the earth, while the males, the slackers, stayed at home painting the pottery and playing with textile mills. Disgusting!
When the great empires of antiquity were dissolved, giving place to the feuds in perpetual war against each other, these soon formed their private armies, composed entirely of women, while the men sheltered in the castles and relaxed there, enjoying the poems that the warrior women composed in the interval of combat to praise their virile charms.When someone had the extravagant idea of Christianize the world, making necessary to send missionaries everywhere, where they risked being impaled by the unbelievers, knived by highway robbers or lynched by the audience bored with their sermons, it was again on the women that the heavy burden was put, while the machos stayed, machiavellically praying novenas before the domestic altars.
An identical exploitation the unfortunate women suffered during the Crusades, when, armed with the heaviest armor, they crossed deserts only to be cut with a sword by the Moors (also women, since the machismo of Mohammed followers could not be any less than ours).
And what about the great navigations? Seeking gold and diamonds to decorate the lazy men, the brave women crossed the seven seas and fought ferocious native cannibals.
Finally, when the modern State created the conscripted military service, the state armies were drafted from the women, subjecting them to the guillotine for the stubborn and the draft dodgers - all of this so that men could stay at home reading "The Princess of Clèves".
For thousands of years, in summary, the women died in the battle fields, carrying stones, constructing buildings, fighting with beasts, crossing deserts, seas and jungles, sacrificing everything for us, the idle males, to which there is no challenge more dangerous than to make our hands dirty with the diapers of our babies.
In exchange of the sacrifice of their lives, our heroic female defenders have not demanded from us anything other than the right to be the head of the family, to leave their clothes in the wrong place and, sometimes, to leave a pair of socks in the middle of the room for us to pick up.
Monday, August 25, 2008
Sunday, August 24, 2008
A very short list of contradictions of the Leftism
American leftists are in favor of preventing voluntary student praying in schools, but at the same time they demand freedom of religious services to the terrorists kept in the Guantanamo base.
Brazilian leftists today wear the clothes of nationalism, promoting paranoid alarms against a supposed foreign domination, but in the anniversary of 500 years of Brazil, they said it would have been better that the Portuguese had not settled and created Brazil off of the land.
Leftists scream against the tobacco industry but at the same time they want drug liberalization.
While American leftists complain that economic globalization is causing them to lose their jobs to the Third World workers, the Latin American leftists complain that globalization is bad for the workers.
Leftists say that they are humanists, but in a rally of Jews against terror in the Middle East that took place at the San Francisco university, leftists organized a counter-protest and yelled that "Hitler had not finished the job".
The left is against gun owners, but in Latin America, their MST (Brazilian landless movement) and FARC (Colombian drug guerrillas) do carry weapons and, during Brazil's military dictatorship, the leftist guerrillas taught their knowledge to the common criminals in the penitentiary of Ilha Grande, which resulted in today's violence of the PCC (a vast crime organization in Brazil).
The radical environmentalism of the left depicts human beings as a "blight" that harms the planet and they say it would be better if the humans were extinct. At the same time, the left alleges that it defends the same ones they call "blight" with a discourse supposedly in favor of the poor.
Leftists use demagoguery and flattery on the poor, but when a poor person is about to be born, their solution is to kill him/her through abortion.
They are against oil drilling the USA at the same time they don't say absolutely anything against oil drilling just outside the coast of Florida by the Chinese with the consent of the government of the left's favorite prison-island: Cuba. And the leftists do not say anything against oil drilling in other countries, where there are absolutely no concern for the environment.
They are against the so called bourgeois morality (codename for Christian) and favor the sexual liberation, but the sexual liberation, promoted by leftists, was the main cause for women being treated as sexual objects.
Brazilian leftists proposed "ethics in politics" to overthrow president Collor in the 90s, using a theme that was typical of the old middle class Right (it was on that platform that Janio Quadros was elected in the 60s) and it was despised back then by the leftists who used to call it "petty bourgeois moralism".
They allege they defend the freedom of expression against censorship, but when someone expresses ideas contrary to theirs, the leftists try to censor in most despicable ways.
They scream against the Brazilian military dictatorship (mid 60s to early 80s) and the violations of human rights, but at the same time they defend the longest dictatorship of Latin America (Castro) and completely ignore the human rights of the Cubans.
Leftists ignore terrorism and defend Palestinians at the same time they say that they defend homosexuals. But among the Palestinians, gays are persecuted and murdered and have to flee to Israel, the only place in the Middle East where they can live in peace.
The leftists say that they defend women against machismo and preach the liberalization of abortion, but in the communist China, abortion is liberalized and the main target of abortion are girls because Chinese families prefer to have boys.
They say they are against the rich, but the majority of the leftists is in the middle class and upwards.
Leftists have defended Fidel Castro, Yasser Arafat and Saddam Hussein. Castro was exposed in the Forbes magazine as the owner of at least $110 million dollars, that is, 10% of Cuba's GDP. Yasser Arafat had more than $300 million dollars, on top of the profits from a casino and a company that bottled soft drinks. Saddam had a minimum of $2 billion dollars before Iraq was liberated.
The socialists consider the state as the ideal agent to realize equality, making all properties belong to the state, which concedes the citizens a very limited control over properties. The communists desire the end of private property so there would be equality (or so they say) but they also preach the end of the state. These are contradictory. The end of private property can only be achieved through the monopoly of the power of coercion and whoever monopolizes the coercion becomes the state de facto.
Gun control laws in Brazil = nightmare
All pistols and revolvers must be registered.
A citizen is forbidden to have a gun with ammunition better than .380 (short 9mm) for pistols.
A citizen is forbidden to have rifles and carabines that use any ammunition other than the one allowed for pistols/revolvers.
A citizen is forbidden to have more than 2 pistols/revolvers, 2 rifles and 2 shotguns (only sport shooters and collectors registered in the Army can have more than this).
A citizen is forbidden to buy more than a gun per year.
Only sport shooters belonging to a shooting association/club can restock his ammunition, which can only be bought through the association/club.
If a citizen is caught with an unlicensed gun, it does not matter whether it is locked in a box, he can be jailed for 2 years (4 years if it is a pistol).
The license for transport of guns must be obtained in a police department and it takes a week.
The concealed gun license is very hard to obtain.
The taxes over the gun commerce in Brazil are one of the highest in the world: 81%.
The average wait time for registering a gun is 30 days. In Rio de Janeiro, it is 3 months.
All these controls have created a huge black market. Brazil is one of the fewest places in the world where an illegal gun is cheaper than in the stores: 1/3 of the price for revolvers.
Drug lords have absolutely no problem in obtaining weapons such as AR15, M16, SIG 551, HKG3, AK47, and even tracer bullets (forbidden to the honest citizens).
If anyone still believes in the rigid gun control for honest citizens, Brazil is one of the worst examples: according to an study by the American CDC, Brazil is the second highest in the world ranking of deaths by fire weapons.
Now, take a look at these testimonies from FrugalSquirrel users:
"I just read where the Brazilian people rejected a nationwide referendum to outlaw firearms. It seems that the people know that to give up their weapons is bad news.
What can you tell me about Brazil, especially Rio.
Thanks.
Don’t be fooled by that. It sure looks like a pro gun victory, but the truth is that Brasil has some of the worst gun laws around. Almost everything is banned , except for 22 and other odd ball rounds. Anything equal or bigger to 9mm diameter is banned, so forget about 9mm 38, etc. Only .22 semi autos are legal. It truly is a terrible place to live in. Criminals have no problem obtaining Imbel FALs and big bore guns, but civilians have it bad. You can’t carry or shoot the guns you have, except in shooting ranges, and the laws concerning self defense wont favor you much if you use guns to defend yourself.
Terrible place, with terrible laws.
The only thing they won was the keep having guns at all, which the gov. wanted to ban completely.
It’s a bad place, and Rio is swarming with crime. The natural sights are beautiful, places such as beaches and the hotels are supposed to be high quality, but I would go there.
I have some friends that used to vacation in Brasil all the time, until one day a neighbor complained about the music and they spent almost a week in jail. Now they don’t think that Brasil is that great any more.
Some think Brasil is great, then again those same folks also think Cuba is some sort of paradise…"
"I lived in/around Rio for a few months, and spend over a year in the surrounding areas. I can paint a mostly unpleasant picture. I personally knew two people who were shot and killed (one by police), I saw virtually no private ownership of firearms. Three more people I knew were shot but pulled through. The people I met generally put 'law enforcement' about on par with drug lords, and the former LEO I befriended agreed... I generally kept a low profile and I was only mugged once during my stay. This was all pre-2001...
I love the place, and many of the people. I had many good times in my stay there and met many quality people. But the bottom line is that it is the most violent and lawless place I have ever spent time. The people are generally rather politically blind and believe most anything coming from 'o jornal' (the news).
Anyway, that's my experience."
Now read this:
Brazil murder rate similar to war zone, data shows
55,000 Brazilians dying of homicide per year. Is it any wonder?
Brazil has ~ 190 million people, the highly strict gun control laws and 55 thousand murders per year.
And this:
Brazil launches anti-gun appeal
And yet they say any minuscule reduction in crime is thanks to their gun control initiatives. Disgusting.
As comparison, USA has ~ 300 million, infinitely better gun laws and 30 thousand homicides per year. Although they are not countries with continental dimensions and population such as USA and Brazil, Canada and Swiss have more legal weapons per capita than USA and yet an even lesser number of homicides.
Swiss is a country that even Machiavelli mentioned in his book The Prince (written in the 1500s) as a highly armed country. This is enough to ask whether this has to do with this country not being involved in any war (especially the I and II World Wars) and having the smallest rates of deaths by fire weapons and crimes.
Now back to Brazil: there are places in which the power of the state is weaker (such as in the rural areas of the Northeast region) and where police is insignificant - the police department doesn't even have a vehicle and has to do their diligence by taxi cabs - and where everyone breaks the gun control laws and has their unlicensed guns (some get their first gun at 11 years old).
Nobody shoots at anyone and people try to be very polite to each other (maybe because they bet that the other person is armed so it is wise to avoid getting them angered as much as possible), some of the civilians shoot better than people who belong to shooting associations.
There was a lady who argued for more gun controls because she "could not even cuss other people while driving, since the other drivers could be armed". Now this is their best reason to have more gun control... to be allowed to call other people names and get away with it... seriously!
Stupid laws such as gun controls - and there are not only stupid gun control laws but stupid laws for everything else in Brazil - are what people are used to live with and they have been brought up in an environment where they are encouraged to break the law here and there in order to keep their sanity, to keep their businesses, and, in some cases, to survive. Example: in Rio, people run red lights at night when they can - they fear stopping and take the chance of being assaulted and having their car taken.
Now, I am not saying that most illegal aliens in the US are Brazilians - they are not - or even that most illegal aliens take pleasure in breaking the law - they don't - but you can get the idea that in these other countries the situation is not unlike what happens in Brazil.
My theory is that this is what makes illegal aliens more prone to disrespect laws - they have not been brought up in an environment where there are laws that make sense and where there is this thing called rule of law, they ended up having a somewhat hazy view of the law: "it is to be obeyed only nominally in most of the cases, but should be bent and it should be ok to ignore it in brief moments in order to get going with your business of living".
Well, this can make anyone tired of the complaining. So, to end this post on a higher note, please watch this uplifting video:
Friday, August 22, 2008
The desire to murder
Olavo de Carvalho
Jornal da Tarde, January 22nd, 1998
(This translation has not been reviewed by the author)
My readers and friends inquire about my opinion on abortion. However, being prone to sparing the efforts, my brain refuses to create an opinion about anything whatsoever it be, except when it finds a good reason to do so. Standing before any non specific problem, my instinctive reaction is to hold forth to my natural right to not think about the matter.
But while trying to defend this right, my mind asks why this cursed problem exists in the first place. Thus, what started as a decision to not think ends up being an investigation of principles, that is, the greatest philosophical enterprise that could exist.
The future authors of my depreciative biographies will say, and rightly so, that I became a philosopher because I was too lazy to think. But, since laziness grades the matters according to the minimum priority of attention, I have started to develop an acute sense of the distinction between the problems posed by the nature of things and the problems that exist just because some people want it to exist.
Well, the problem of abortion belongs, according to all evidences, to this second type. The dispute about abortion exists because the practice of abortion exists and not the opposite. Someone decides in favor of abortion - that is the premise of the existence of the abortion debate. But the premise of a debate cannot be its own logical conclusion. The option for abortion, preceding all discussion, is unaccessible to a debate. The abortionist is an abortionist by his own decision, which does not offer any reason. This freedom is stated directly by the very act of realization, and, when multiplied by millions, it becomes a freedom recognized in general and consolidated into a "right".
It is for this reason that the public discourse in favor of abortion avoids the moral problem and holds tight to the legal and political grounds: the abortionists don't want to propose a value, they want merely to rule and establish a right (and this right, in theory, can even coexist with the moral condemnation of the act).
As for the content of the debate, the opponents of abortion state that the fetus is a human being, that to kill it is a crime of homicide. The abortionists allege that the fetus is just a piece of tissue, a part of the mother's body, who has to have a right to cut it off at will. In the current score of this dispute, none of the sides managed to convince the other. And it is not even reasonable to expect it, since there is not even a minimal consensus in the current civilization about what belongs and what does not belong to the human nature, there are no common premises that could serve as basis to uneven the score.
But the tie itself ends up transforming the discussion: we have left an ethical-metaphysic dispute that is unsolvable in the current conditions of the Western culture and we have arrived at a simple mathematical equation whose solution must be, in principle, identical and provable to any person capable of understanding it.
This equation is formulated as follows: if there are 50% of probability that the fetus is human and 50% of probability that it is not, to bet in the latter hypothesis is, literally, to choose an act that has 50% of chances of being a homicide.
With this perspective, the whole issue becomes clear to even the most obstinate of all minds. Since there is no absolute certainty of the non-humanity of the fetus, to extirpate it is to make a moral (or immoral) decision in the dark. We can preserve the life of this being and discover later that we have wasted our highest ethical feelings in a vain defense of what was, in the bottom line, a mere thing. But we also can decide to destroy it under the risk of discovering too late that it was a human being.
Is it right to choose between a precaution and an irresponsible bet? Who, armed with a gun, would believe to have the right to pull the trigger knowing that there are 50% of chances of killing an innocent being? In other words: to bet in the non-humanity of the fetus is to leave the survival or death of a human being to the flip of a coin.
Once arriving at this point of the reasoning, all points for abortion become anti-abortion. We have left the ground of the undetermined and found a worldwide consensus firmly established: no defensible or indefensible advantage, no real or hypothetic benefit can justify that the life of a human being be put at risk in a bet.
However, as we have already seen, the pro-abortion option precedes all discussion and this is the reason for which the abortionist hates and denounces as "repressive violence" all of the evidences presented against it. The pro-abortion decision, being the premise of the debate, could not seek anything other than the ex post facto legitimization of something that has already been decided irreversibly, with or without debate.
The abortionist would not concede not even before a full proof of the humanity of the fetus, and even less so before a mere evaluation of the moral risk. He simply wants to incur in the risk, even with zero chances of succeeding. He wants because he wants. To him, the death of the undesired fetuses is a question of "honor": to display, through acts and not reasoning, a self-founded freedom that dispenses with reasons, a Nietzschean pride for which the least of the objections is still an intolerable constraint.
I believe I have found the reason why my mind refused stubbornly to think about the matter. It is of no use all the reasoning before the brutal and irrational affirmation of the pure desire to murder. Of course, in several abortionists, this desire stays in the subconscious level, hidden under a veil of humanitarian rationalizations, which are strengthened by the endorsement from the media and corroborated by the screams of the militants. But it is also very clear that it is futile to argue with people so capable of lying to themselves so tenaciously.
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Phrases from a Conservative Brazilian Philosopher
The world would be much better if there was not so many people trying to improve it.
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When I started as a reporter, about forty years ago, the cynic disillusionment of the old professionals who used to say "We, journalists, are prostitutes" sounded unbearably offensive to me. Today it is still offensive. Offensive to the prostitutes.
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In a debate, do not ever use the language of the opponent, otherwise you will allow him to shape the debate, ..., you should not wear the verbal straitjacket imposed on you by an opponent that is dishonest and has evil intent.
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The difference between Brazilian public education and organized crime is that the organized crime is organized.
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In truth, all ideologies are totalitarian because the essence of an ideology (and I remind you that conservatism, if properly understood, is not an ideology) is to affirm, starting from a philosophy, that some things should be in agreement with it - such as, for example, the idea that all the history of our culture is summarized as the oppression of women. Since reality contradicts this philosophy, then the reality itself must be forbidden. And they need to forbid reality so that we can recognize the "reality" of their "history". People must be forced to live a lie, and since people are naturally reluctant to do so, they use their eyes and ears naturally and think: "Wait a minute. This is not true. I can see that it is not." Thus the power of the State must enforce the demand to live a lie. This is why ideologies always give birth to totalitarian States.
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... the Marxist brain never is normal.
- http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/semana/06082002globo.htm
True heroes are made from within, in the struggle of the soul for the truth of existence. Before they shine in spectacular actions, they have to defeat the internal lie and pay, with extreme moral solitude, the price of sincerity.
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Only the one who, in solitude, knows how to be severe and just with oneself - and against oneself - is capable of judging others with justice, instead of letting oneself be pushed by the shouts of the mob, by the stereotypes of propaganda and by the self-interest disguised as beautiful moral excuses.
- http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/semana/testemunhas.htm
Intelligence is the relation that is established between man and truth, a relation that only man has with truth, and that exists only at the moment he understands and recognizes truth, since he can be unintelligent in the next moment, when he forgets or denies the truth.
- Intelligence and Truth - http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/apostilas/intver.htm
The incapacity of a people to recognize the dangers that threaten them is one of the strongest signals of the self-destructive depression that forebodes the great social failures. The apathy, the indifference in regard to their own destiny, the concentration of attention to the secondary matters together with total negligence in regard to the essential and urgent maters, flag the lethargy of the victim, who, foreseeing a blow that is stronger than he can stand, prepares himself, through a anesthetic reflex, to deliver himself helpless and semi-conscious to the hands of his executioner, like a lamb that offers his neck to the blade. But when the torpor not only invades the soul of the people, but it also takes the mind of the intellectuals and the voice of their best, their voices are raised only to make a chorus to the hypnotic chanting, then the last hope for the reawakening of conscience is put out.
- The Garden of Afflictions
If, knowing that, you are still vulnerable to the stares of accusation and the poisonous words, if you still feel reverent fear of the malicious and slanderers and try to placate them with a display of submission so that they will not expose you to shame and not punish you in any other way, then you still have not understood the meaning of Christmas.
This meaning is simple and straight: the evil ones and the slanderers do not have authority over you any longer. Do not bow your head to them, do not consent that your weaknesses be exploited by the malice of the world.
Jesus Christ has already paid your debt. This is why we commemorate Christmas.
- http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/textos/natal_2003.htm
Whatever will be the future of the human species and whatever are our concepts about it, the [Left's] revolutionary mindset has to be radically obliterated from the acceptable social and cultural possibilities before it tries to force the appearance of a so called better world so many times that it makes the world a gigantic abortion and turn the millennial trajectory of the human species on the Earth into a senseless history crowned with a bloody end.
- http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/semana/070813dc.html
Whatever has come into existence, even if for a brief instant, can never return to nothing, which is devoid of any existence.
- http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/semana/060417_1dc.html
When some Liberal with an university diploma comes toward me, I reach for my roll of toilet paper.
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If this guy has not studied this, he doesn't know anything, he has to shut up. I think that the right of having an opinion is proportional to the sincere interest that the person has for the subject. If you don't have interest for the subject and did not even read anything, why should we have interest in hearing your opinion? Take your opinion and shove it. It is very simple!
Someone should invent an opinion suppository. You can use the capsule, open it, put your opinion in there, right? Then you introduce it in your anal orifice. That is the best thing you can do with your opinion.
- in response to a leftist
To talk about vulgar Marxism is a redundancy, because Marxism has already been born vulgar.
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The socialist-democracy is the condom that the Left uses to rape us.
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I remember a story written by someone about a guy that was so depressed, but so depressed that he threw himself in a toilet and pulled the flush cord. When he arrived at the bottom of the sewer, the turds rejected him: "We don't want you here! Get out!" This is what is happening to Brazil.
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In response to the bishop Pedro Casaldáliga who endorsed the leftist proposal of banning crosses from all public offices:
"So you mean that you want to remove the symbol of your Lord and Savior from the wall?? Go @#$@#$ you @#$@#$@#!!!"
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Only the idealist man is realist; the others are either dreamers or cynics.
- www.olavodecarvalho.org/apostilas/ideais.htm
In the land of the blind, whoever has one eye is the king, but whoever has both eyes is seen as a lunatic.
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Brazilians are over, someone has cut both of their balls and gave to the cats to eat. Brazil has a national crisis of testosterone, I don't know how there are people still being born there.
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The existence of God is not a matter of faith, it is a matter of rational proof, this is more than proved for a long time...
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I have been suggesting, to eliminate the polemic around abortion and to satisfy the humanitarian instincts of the ones who espouse that practice, an easy and quick solution that I name as Voluntary Retroactive Self-Abortion (VRSA) ...
Every abortion lover can, thus, reach the full satisfaction of their demands by crushing their own skull with a forceps or any other proper obstetrician instrument and request, before or after this surgery procedure, the cancellation of his own birth certificate. Once the complete elimination in the physic and historic world is done, the distinctive abortionist would have the satisfaction of entering the sphere of the beyond with a curriculum mortis identical of those millions of babies who, before him, exercised the inalienable right to be aborted.
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Now, there are people who do not see the difference between man and monkey. My friend, you can ignore that there are differences, but the monkey knows it.
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It is not you who will understand the Bible, you have to understand the facts of your life under the light of the Bible. The Bible gives meaning to your life, it is not you who will give meaning to the Bible, you have to let the Bible explain your life.
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It is not you who has to explain who is God, you have to let the Person of God show you who He is. You have to let God show Himself to you.
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There are secret hands, of course, but they are many and keep slapping each other, sometimes slapping themselves. Nobody has the hegemonic control of the world historic process, even though many try to obtain it, often incurring in catastrophic errors that take their plans to results opposite of what they were expecting.
- The world, how it has never worked http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/semana/061211dc.html
You ask a believer whether God responds to his prayers. He answers that most of the time, yes, but sometimes, no.
Then you ask a communist to explain where in the world his ideas have ever worked. He will not know how to answer, but in spite of that, he continues to believe his ideas. This is what faith is.
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All of the Left, without exception, are comprised of 4 kinds of people: crooks, idiots, crooks who are becoming idiots without ceasing to be crooks and idiots who are transforming themselves into crooks but continuing to be idiots. Both extremes are rare, they are in fact pure Weberian ideal types that do not exist in reality: the Left is comprised, in effect, of crooked idiots and idiotic crooks, in a perpetual interchange of roles.
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When Roberto Campos used to say that there was no Leftist who was at the same time intelligent and honest, he still had the hope that many would have managed to have each of those two qualities separately. But malice is not intelligence and pretense is not honesty. The brain of a Leftist works like this: to be smart when defrauding and to be a cretin when seeing himself as honest.
- The head of the leftist http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/semana/060410dc.html
An honest communist, a honorable communist, a good communist, a communist that, by principle, speaks the truth against the Party, a communist that puts his opponents' rights to life and liberty above the agenda of his cursed revolution, a communist without sick hate in his heart and megalomaniac ambitions in his head, is a circle with 3 sides, an elephant with wings, a stone that speaks, a lion that hoots instead of roar and only eats lettuce. It has never existed, it does not exist today and will never exist.
-The scum of the earth http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/semana/080520dce.html
Communists are like cockroaches. You turn on the lights, they run and disappear. When you turn it off, they come back.
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We cannot know ourselves by putting ourselves in a table and examining as if we were a corpse in the anatomy table. You know yourselves by the decisions you take, by your actions and by what you create in the world. It is by the actual choices, acts and imprints that you leave. Then you will have a history to tell, and in the moment you tell your history, you will understand yourself; you will tell your history and as in descriptive geometry, you will project your past into the plane of the future and you will understand what you have been, who you can be and who you should be.
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The only places in the world where it [Darwinism] has been officially sponsored by the cult of the State were, from one side, the nazist Germany, and from the other side, the communist countries. Both these totalitarianisms saw history, substantively, as a Darwinian competition between the species. The difference was merely a nuance: to the nazists, "species" meant "race"; to the communists, "class". The method for the survival of the fittest, in both cases, was the same: to kill the unfit.
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Brazil was a sick country. Today the country is dead and only the sickness is left.
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To be reactionary is to react as uncompromising and as hostile as you can to the diabolic ambition of rearranging the world.
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You can read Olavo de Carvalho's articles in English by visiting his site: http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/english/
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
Why billionaires favor socialism?
Thus, "Communism" is only a hypothetical construction devoid of materiality, a name without anything inside, an universal abstract formalism that does not escape unharmed from Occam's razor. There never was a communist economy, only camouflaged or perverted capitalist economies, barely enough to sustain a gang of political leeches.
Since Ludwig von Mises explained this obviousness in 1922, many consequences have followed.
The communist leaders, however stupid they were, understood immediately that the Austrian scholar was right, but could not concede it in public. Tolerating increasing doses of capitalism - legal or illegal - in the territories they dominated, they continued to insist on any arrangement that disguised the inevitable.
Eduard Kardelij, Minister of Economy of Yugoslavia, has even imagined that there could be a committee of planners to determine one by one, by decree, the prices of millions of articles, from supersonic aircraft to sewing needles. The idea was never put into practice, because it was too reminiscent of the dumb method of killing cockroaches by trying to hit them with naphthalene balls.
The Soviets allowed the officially banned capitalism to continue prospering in the shadow and to answer for almost fifty percent of the economy of the USSR. Hence the swarm of millionaires who emerged from their hiding places, suddenly after the fall of the Soviet state: they would never have been able to exist in a system of effective prohibition of private property.
Some major Western capitalists took from Mises' demonstration some more pleasant conclusions (for themselves). If the communist economy was impossible, all efforts designed to create it nominally would generate into something else. That something else could only be a hidden capitalism, as in the USSR, a half-bred socialism, a symbiosis between the power of state and the most powerful economic groups, an oligopoly, in short.
The two hypotheses promised formidable profits - first, from the absolute absence of taxes, secondly, from the State guarantees granted to the friends of the government against any competitors. If the first feature still involved some minor risks (extortion, personal vendettas of public officials unsatisfied with the low amount of their bribe), the second was absolutely safe.
It was then that a group of billionaires created the most Machiavellian strategic plan in the world's economic history - the formula was so ironically summarized by columnist Edith Kermit Roosevelt (granddaughter of Theodore Roosevelt): "The best way to fight Communism would be a socialist New Order governed by 'experts' such as themselves."
This idea spread like fire among the members of the CFR, Council on Foreign Relations, the powerful NY-based think tank. This policy has been adopted by all U.S. governments (except Reagan) in regards to the Third World: combat the "extreme left" by giving support to the "moderate left".
The scheme is supposedly infallible: if the "moderates" won, there would be monopoly, and if the Communists rose to power, the Plan B would automatically be put into action - the black market capitalism. The "extreme left", presented as "the" enemy was not the actual target, it was only the lefthand half of the plan.
The real target was the free market, which should perish under the dual attack of its enemies and their "defenders" who would use the communist revolution as a scarecrow and make increasing concessions to the "prophylactic" type of socialism of the "nice" Left.
For half a century, the permanent goal of the billionaire inventors of the New World Order has been to reduce the range of political options to a dispute between Communists and Social Democrats. Brazil today is the laboratory of their dreams.
Excerpt of "Who invented Brazil?", by Olavo de Carvalho
This translation was not reviewed by the author.
Zero Hora , 11 de junho de 2006
Sunday, July 27, 2008
The gay supremacist scheme to persecute Christians
Figueira got irritated with the preaching, in which the priest spoke against gays. Figueira then walked to the altar and tried to use the microphone to say "I am in the house of God, not the priest's house". He alleges that he was hit by the priest, who supposedly tried to choke and kick him.
During the mass, there was a gay parade outside in the street in front of the church. The priest allegedly started to "attack the homosexuals verbally" - the priest would have said "every one eats what one wants, but not here in my church" - and used Figueira's history as example in his sermon.
Figueira was taken outside by the other Eucharistic ministers so the priest could continue the mass, and he heard the believers applauding the priest at the end.
"He hit me and was applauded. I have lesions on my legs from the many kicks they gave me. I am surprised that a black priest, who knows the problems of minorities, is so prejudiced." said Figueira.
http://noticias.terra.com.br/brasil/interna/0,,OI3031935-EI5030,00.html
Here is a picture of "Mayara" (Figueira) and more of his side of the story:
http://www.ofluminense.com.br/noticias/167885.asp?pStrLink=2,284,0,167885&IndSeguro=0
The accusation of violence and discrimination made against the priest has caused indignation in the Catholic community during the week.
Opposite to what the homosexual said, the seminarist Flavio Thurler Moreira told that Figueira started an aggression against the priest. The mass was proceeding normally and after the priest cited a passage of the Bible that says that families are result of the union between man and woman and their descendants. Figueira ran towards the priest and took the microphone from his hands.
"He called the priest 'scum bag' and said that he would not be humiliated. Figueira promised to come back to beat the priest," said the seminarist.
The priest's attorney, Cícero Matos, said that he would watch this case closely. Matos thinks that the attack was deliberate.
"According to the article 208 of the Penal Code, a religious service of any kind cannot be interrupted. I and the Archidiocese attorneys are watching and we will take the just measures at the right time. In my opinion, he had planned this."
http://www.ofluminense.com.br/noticias/167965.asp?pStrLink=2,284,0,167965&IndSeguro=0
Sunday, July 13, 2008
Why the Happiest Coutries are Happy?
In a list of 98 countries, the United States occupied the 16th place, a very reasonable performance for a nation in war, and Brazil, in 30th place, below Nigeria but way above richer nations such as Germany, China and France.
Ronald Inglehart, political scientist of the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research who directed the poll, has reached a conclusion that should be printed in bumper stickers and placed in the foreheads of every bureaucrat and socialist:
Puerto Rico and Colombia are not rich nations by any stretch, but their people are happy because their governments know how to protect them against the violence and chaos without that dubious protection against themselves, which is the main excuse for all the abuses of the bureaucratic authority today.
Another revelation from the research is that economic liberty is important, but it is not the most essential liberty as so many economic liberals imagine. Every normal human being is willing to suffer a degree of government interference in the economy, even if one is decidedly against it, as long as the government does not interfere in his private life - not forcing one to educate his children in a certain manner, not deciding what one should eat or not eat and, most of all, not putting one in prison for the crime of opinion.
When some soi-disant anti-socialists, in the pursuit of preserving economic freedom, negotiate with statism and make concessions in the moral and cultural grounds, they are contributing to make capitalism into a regime of unhappy prosperity and making the socialist cultural critique a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In the latest decades, in no other country has economic freedom increased as it did in China. But in the happiness ranking, the Chinese are in 54th place. The economicism is the infant disease of the liberalism.
The presence of Colombia in the third place is something that should make all of the liberals think. That is, if they did not have visceral fear of that painful activity.
How can a country in a war of several decades against terrorist organizations be happy? They can because war was the cause for national unity, creating in the Colombians that feeling of solidarity and trust that makes everyone feel strong in the midst of danger.
Ninety seven percent of Colombians hate the FARC, about eighty percent of them trust the president who has been directing with strong hands, from victory to victory, in war against that band of criminals and the gigantic diplomatic and advertising scheme built to give them support.
Under the leadership of Álvaro Uribe, Colombia has proved that it is a country capable of facing all of their enemies, internal and external - from the narco-traffickers hidden in the jungle to the Pelosis and Kennedys who give them protection in the highest circles of power. The Colombians fear no one. How could they not be happy?