The Architects of Control

Michael Tsarion

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7MUGZ6JuRI

BIOLOGICAL AND CHEMICAL TESTING ON HUMAN BEINGS & CHEM TRAILS

Millions exposed' in 1960s experiments

Radioactive gas was flung from Harwell During the early 1960s. Millions of people were exposed to clouds of radioactive xenon gas from the Harwell Nuclear Research Establishment, the BBC has discovered.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/england/2254664.stm

Millions were in germ war tests. Much of Britain was exposed to bacteria sprayed in secret trials. The Ministry of Defence turned large parts of the country into a giant laboratory to conduct a series of secret germ warfare tests on the public. http://www.observer.co.uk/politics/s...688089,00.html

Porton Down used soldiers for Sarin gas tests in 1983. Servicemen were experimented on with Sarin, the deadly nerve gas, as late as 1983 at the Government's defence research centre at Porton Down, documents seen by The Telegraph reveal.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main...3/nport13.xml&sSheet=/news/2002/10/13/ixhome.html

Records: U.S. did open-air biological, chemical weapons tests in Florida. AP 10/08/02: Matt Kelley Original Link: http://www.miami.com/mld/miami/news/local/4241240.htm

The United States held open-air biological and chemical weapons tests in at least four states - Alaska, Hawaii, Maryland and Florida - during the 1960s in an effort to develop defenses against such weapons, according to Pentagon documents. http://www.rense.com/general32/cvvf....iological.html

US admits chemical weapons tests; BBC 10/10/02 Original Link:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/2315081.stm

The Pentagon has published previously secret information revealing that it carried out more extensive tests of chemical and biological warfare agents than had previously been thought.
http://www.prisonplanet.com/news_ale...iological.html

US planes sprayed Wiltshire with Sarin; London Times 10/10/02: Chris Ayres and Michael Evans Original Link: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article...441704,00.html

CROPDUSTER aircraft flown by British and US military personnel sprayed deadly chemical weapons, including Sarin and VX, over the Wiltshire countryside in the late 1960s. News of the tests is broken in declassified documents released this week by the Pentagon. http://www.prisonplanet.com/news_ale...ological1.html

Vaccinia/Rabies Wildlife Bait Dropped From The Sky
http://www.rense.com/general32/cvvf.htm

Pentagon: Chem, bio tests involved U.S. troops; The USS George Eastman decontaminates after a nuclear test. The ship was used to monitor nuclear tests in the 1950s and for chemical and biological warfare tests in the '60s. WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The Pentagon revealed for the first time Thursday that almost 3,000 U.S. military personnel were involved in Cold War-era tests involving actual chemical and biological agents. http://www.cnn.com/2002/US/05/23/pen...bio/index.html

Sailors: 'We were used' Vets exposed to toxic agents want answers, justice When Navy veteran Jim Brocklebank served as a radioman on the USS Power in the 1960s, he was intrigued by civilians in masks and body suits doing tests on his destroyer. http://www.floridatoday.com/%21NEWSR...oryA42276A.htm

Sailors Skeptical of Chemical Tests
http://www.firebase.net/sailors_skep...hemical_te.htm

Pentagon confirms Cold War program; "Our government poisoned us," said Cast, who suffers chronic respiratory problems. "They should have given us a chance to opt out or tell us when we were doing (the testing)."
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/m...9_1m15gas.html

Sailors Sprayed With Nerve Gas in Cold War Test, Pentagon Says;http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/24/po...ex=1022817600&en=c569e031539ed222&ei=5009&partner=MSN_NYTHOME

Pentagon Program Promotes Psychopharmacological Warfare In The Futurological Congress (1971), Polish writer Stanislaw Lem portrayed a future in which disobedience is controlled with hypothetical mind-altering chemicals dubbed "benignimizers". Lem's fictional work opens with the frightening story of a police and military biochemical attack on protesters outside of an international scientific convention. As the environment becomes saturated with hallucinogenic agents, in Lem's tale the protesters (and bystanders) descend into chaos, overcome by delusions and feelings of complacency, self-doubt, and even love.
http://austin.indymedia.org:8081//fr...rticle_id=3278

The U.S. Government's Secret Testing of Radioactive, Chemical and Biological Weapons on Humans. As we travel through a period of increasing government secrecy, it is worth taking a second look at these books that document secret U.S. government radioactive, chemical and biological weapons testing on U.S. citizens.
http://www.mapcruzin.com/rev_governm...cret_tests.htm

U.S. conducted open-air tests of biological, chemical arms; The United States secretly tested chemical and biological weapons on American soil during the 1960s, newly declassified Pentagon reports show.
http://newstribune.com/stories/10090...1009020996.asp

Fuzzy Strands Fill Skies Over Texas City; GALVESTON, Texas (AP) _ Galveston residents are still trying to figure out what caused the skies over their coastal city to literally be filled on Friday with floating strands of wads that looked like spider webs. http://apondemo.mm.ap.org/articles/D7O2GGFG1.html

The Biowarriors, Richard Sanders, November 7, 2001 On dozens of separate occasions since the Second World War, biological weapons have been used against innocent U.S. civilians. These actions were perpetrated not by foreign terrorists but by the U.S. Army during secret "open-air" biowarfare experiments that used the American public as guinea pigs.
http://www.guerrillanews.com/sci-tech/doc209.html

THE MUSHROOM POLICY: HUMAN EXPERIMENTATION
"Keep them in the dark and feed them b.s." I want to believe my government is good. However too often what we want to believe proves to be fantasy.
http://www.etherzone.com/2003/metc010703.shtml

The 1994 Rockefeller Report: Examining Biological Experimentation on U.S. Military During the last few years, the public has become aware of several examples where U.S. Government researchers intentionally exposed Americans to potentially dangerous substances without their knowledge or consent.
http://www.mindcontrolforums.com/199...ler-report.htm

Burning of Chemical Arms Puts Fear in Wind
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/15/na...odaysheadlines

Army Aerial Spraying Tests Panic, Anger Florida Keys Residents
http://www.rense.com/general24/we.htm

Of Microbes and Mock Attacks - 51 Years Ago, The Military Sprayed Germs on U.S. Cities
http://www.rense.com/general15/ofmicrobesandmock.htm

GERM WARFARE

The Hall of Shame: The United States has a long history of experimentation, on unwitting human subjects, which goes back to the beginning of this century. Both private firms and the military have used unknowing human populations to test various theories. However, the extent to which human experimentation has been a part of the U.S. Biological Weapons programs will probably never be known; http://home.earthlink.net/~bkonop/GermIncidents2.html

Protecting Yourself from Occult Biowarfare In this bizarre real-life crypto-medical mystery, Dr. Leonard Horowitz, author of "Emerging Viruses: AIDS and Ebola -- Nature, Accident or Intentional" (1996) continues his exploration of the origin and meaning of contemporary diseases -- many of them seemingly artificially created, man-made pathogens for population control produced by Illuminati-sponsored scientists who carry on the genocidal Nazi legacy.
http://www.steamshovelpress.com/healingcodes.html

HOSPITALS JAMMED AS BANNED PESTICIDE IS SPRAYED FROM THE SKIES
http://www.healthresearchbooks.com/a.http://chemtrailawareness.multiply.com/pesticide.htm

Inspect This: The NWO's own secret bioweapons program. As the controversy rages on over how long the United Nations should continue weapons inspections in Iraq, questions are being raised about the NWO's own stockpile of chemical and biological weapons and new clandestine weapons programs. Activists and scientists are calling for weapons inspections in the United States.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Conspi.http://chemtrailawareness.multiply.com/message/12011

Chemicals giant paid students to drink pesticide: London Sunday Times 01/12/03: Lois Rogers Original Link: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article...540016,00.html

ONE of the world's biggest chemical companies faces an inquiry after it was found to have used students to test a highly hazardous pesticide linked to serious disorders.
http://www.prisonplanet.com/news_ale...3_general.html

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Now that we know that such deliberate spraying and experimentation have gone on unhindered for decades, we can look at some of the best sources on the internet for chemtrail information:

CHEMTRAILS DATA AEROSOL OPERATION CRIMES & COVER-UP
http://www.carnicom.com/contrails.htm

CHEMTRAIL WATCH

Are BioWarfare weapons being tested on the population, is it a form of vaccination, or population control? - or is it Mass Paranoia? Research the information and draw your own conclusions!
http://www.centrexnews.com/chemtrails/

Chemtrails Data Page
http://www.rense.com/politics6/chemdatapage.html

Chemtrail Illness Mycoplasma Links
http://www.geocities.com/canadianchemtrails/Mycoplasma

CANADIAN CHEMTRAILS
http://www.geocities.com/canadianchemtrails/

CHEMTRAILS - ISLE OF MAN CHEMTRAILS AFFECTING THE ISLE OF MAN AND IRISH SEA AREA OF THE BRITISH ISLES; http://chemtrails.iomonline.co.im/

MICHIGAN CONTRAILS AND CHEMTRAILS
http://members.tripod.com/~michcon/

CHEMTRAIL EVIDENCE 'THE CAMPAIGN AGAINST CHEMTRAILS'
http://www.world-action.co.uk/evidence.html

CHEMTRAILS ARTICLES Chemtrails Over Santa Barbara
http://www.rense.com/general34/trails.htm

Chemtrails outlaw The government says they don't exist, but Kucinich wants Congress to take action; http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/FIT203A.html

Space Preservation Act of 2001 (Introduced in House)
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c107:H.R.2977.IH:

Rep. Kucinich's HR 2977: Names Chemtrails As An 'Exotic Weapon'
http://www.rense.com/general19/ex.htm

Congress Admits Chemtrails Are Real After years of denial from government, military, and environmental agencies, the reality of the controversial issue regarding the covert programs known as Chemtrails has been acknowledged. http://www.indymedia.org/front.php3?...&group=webcast

CONGRESSMAN ACKNOWLEDGES CHEMTRAILS
http://www.rebfile.com/chemtrails%20latest.htm

Chemtrails: Delivery System For Dept. of Defense's Toxic Cocktails
http://www.geocities.com/canadianche...erySystem.html

Chemtrails Campaign Adds To Air Force Woes
http://www.rense.com/general27/qoes.htm

Military Behind Up To Four Different Chemtrail Programs
http://www.rense.com/general11/chmmill.htm
http://www.healthresearchbooks.com/a...hemtrails3.htm

Air Traffic Controllers Concerned Over Chemtrails
http://www.rense.com/general20/cc.htm

A Field Guide to Chemtrails
http://www.ufos-aliens.co.uk/cosmicchems.html

Stolen Skies: The Chemtrail Mystery Jet Trails in the Sky Used to Disappear. Now they Linger http://www3.bc.sympatico.ca/Willthom...pdates/EIJ.htm

Chemtrails over America - Let US Spray!!
http://www.reformation.org/chemtrails.html

Logged:

Dr. Scott A. Johnson MP3 teachings.
Independent, Fundamental, Bible & Current Event Study

http://scottjohnsonarchives.blogspot.com/

http://contendingfortruth.com/

What Is Anti-Imperialism?

Anti-imperialism, strictly speaking, is a term that may be applied to or movement opposed to some form of imperialism. Generally, anti-imperialism includes opposition to wars of conquest, particularly of non-contiguous territory or people with a different language or culture. Examples of anti-imperialists include Republican senators of the Roman Republic, and members of the Anti-Imperialist League that opposed the occupation of the Philippines during the Spanish-American War.

As a self-conscious political movement, anti-imperialism originated in Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in opposition to the growing European colonial empires and the US takeover of the Philippines. However, it reached its highest level of popular support in the colonies themselves, where it formed the basis for a wide variety of national liberation movements during the mid-20th century and later. These movements, and their anti-imperialist ideas, were instrumental in the decolonization process of the 1950s and 1960s, which saw most Western colonies in Asia and Africa achieving their independence.

Soon thereafter, as the modern process of globalization began, many anti-imperialists saw it as a new form of imperialism - one that relies on economic domination rather than direct military conquest. Thus, anti-imperialists began to focus on opposing globalization, and they were one of the elements that gave birth to the present-day anti-globalization movement. To the extent that anti-imperialists are still concerned about military force, they tend to be opposed to what they see as the American empire, especially after the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Marxism, Leninism and anti-imperialism

“ We must bear in mind that imperialism is a world system, the last stage of capitalism — and it must be defeated in a world confrontation. The strategic end of this struggle should be the destruction of imperialism. Our share, the responsibility of the exploited and underdeveloped of the world is to eliminate the foundations of imperialism: our oppressed nations, from where they extract capitals, raw materials, technicians and cheap labor, and to which they export new capitals — instruments of domination — arms and all kinds of articles; thus submerging us in an absolute dependance ”
— Che Guevara, Message to the Tricontinental, 1967 [1]

While Karl Marx never published a theory of imperialism, he referred to colonialism in Das Kapital as an aspect of the prehistory of the capitalist mode of production. Using the Hegelian dialectic, Marx predicted the phenomenon of monopoly capitalism in The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), hence the slogan "Workers of the world, unite!"). Lenin defined imperialism as "the highest stage of capitalism" (the subtitle of his outline), the era in which monopoly finance capital becomes dominant, forcing nations and corporations to compete themselves increasingly for control over resources and markets all over the world. Lenins theory of imperialism has since been adopted by a majority of Marxists. The Marxist-Leninist view of imperialism primarily addresses the economic rather than military or political (though these are related) dominance of certain countries over others.

Marxist theories of imperialism, or related theories such as dependency theory, focus on the economic relations between countries (and within countries, as outlined below), rather than the more formal political and/or military relationships. Imperialism thus consists not necessarily in the direct control of one country by another, but in the economic exploitation of one region by another, or of a group by another. This Marxist usage contrasts with a popular conception of 'imperialism', as directly controlled vast colonial or neocolonial empires.

Lenin held that imperialism was a stage of capitalist development with five simultaneous features as outlined below:

1) Concentration of production and capital has led to the creation of national and multinational monopolies - not as understood in liberal economics, but in terms of de facto power over their enormous markets - while the "free competition" remains the domain of increasingly localized and/or niche markets:

Free competition is the basic feature of capitalism, and of commodity production generally; monopoly is the exact opposite of free competition, but we have seen the latter being transformed into monopoly before our eyes, creating large-scale industry and forcing out small industry, replacing large-scale by still larger-scale industry, and carrying concentration of production and capital to the point where out of it has grown and is growing monopoly: cartels, syndicates and trusts, and merging with them, the capital of a dozen or so banks, which manipulate thousands of millions. At the same time the monopolies, which have grown out of free competition, do not eliminate the latter, but exist above it and alongside it, and thereby give rise to a number of very acute, intense antagonisms, frictions and conflicts. Monopoly is the transition from capitalism to a higher system. (Ch. VII)

(Following Marx's value theory, Lenin saw monopoly capital as plagued by the law of the tendency of profit to fall, as the ratio of constant capital to variable capital increases. In Marx's theory only living labor or variable capital creates profit in the form of surplus-value. As the ratio of surplus value to the sum of constant and variable capital falls, so does the rate of profit on invested capital.)

2) Industrial capital as the dominant form of capital has been replaced by finance capital (repeating the main points of Rudolf Hilferding's magnum opus, Finance Capital), with the industrial capitalists being ever more reliant on finance capital (provided by financial institutions).

3) The export of the aforementioned finance capital is emphasized over the export of goods (even though the latter would continue to exist);

4) The economic division of the world by multinational enterprises, and the formation of international cartels; and

5) The political division of the world by the great powers, in which the export of finance capital by the advanced capitalist industrial nations to their colonial possessions enables them to exploit those colonies for their resources and investment opportunities. This superexploitation of poorer countries allows the advanced capitalist industrial nations to keep at least some of their own workers content, by providing them with slightly higher living standards. (See labor aristocracy; globalization.)

For these reasons, Lenin argued that a proletarian revolution could not occur in the developed capitalist countries as long as the global system of imperialism remained intact. Thus, he believed that a lesser-developed country would have to be the location of the first proletarian revolution. For this reason, Leninism places an exceptionally strong emphasis on the struggle against imperialism. [1]

War is generally seen as a method of furthering imperialist interests, which is why Marxists generally see antimilitarism and opposition to 'capitalist wars' as an integral part of anti-imperialism. The relationship of Marxists and other radical left-wing groups with anti-war movements often involves them trying to convince other activists to turn pacifism into anti-imperialism - that is, to move from a general opposition to war towards a condemnation of the economic system that is seen as driving wars (or from pacifism to specific anti-imperialist antimilitarism). [2]

The Soviet Union, which claimed to follow Marxism, also claimed to be the foremost enemy of imperialism and supported many independence movements throughout the Third World. However, at the same time, it can also be argued that it was imperialist, as it asserted its dominance over the countries of Eastern Europe. This has led many to accuse the Soviet Union of hypocrisy, and it is often used as an argument for the idea that the Soviet Union did not, in fact, follow Marxist principles, or alternatively, for example by anarchists, as an argument for the failure of Marxism as a solution to imperialism.

The term "anti-imperialism" is today most commonly used by Marxists and those with closely similar ideas (anti-capitalism, a class analysis of society). Others who might be accurately described as anti-imperialists, and who would probably accept the description, nevertheless tend to use different terminology.

Postcolonialism, postmodernism and anti-imperialism

Postmodernists generally challenge the notion that imperialism is primarily economic and place a greater stress on cultural and social exploitation. Originating in continental Europe in the mid 1900s postmodernists emphasise the essentially pluralistic nature of society as people move away from a dependency on manufacturing and industry for economic and social status. (Heywood, 2004). This shift in focus is a reason for praise from scholars as it gives a 'respect for difference', incorporating the views of the population on the ground often overlooked by other theorists (Griffiths and O'Callaghan, 2004). They thus argue that anti-imperialism must involve the promotion of non-dominant cultures as well as non-dominant economic interests.[citation needed]

Postcolonialism is the term, and Postcolonial Studies the field, most often associated with this postmodernist anti-imperialism. A number of other approaches fall under the category of critical international relations theory. Postcolonialism itself stems from the prevalent European nationalism that stimulated the empire building of the 1800s by European powers such as the British, French and Dutch. A strong sense of nationalism, combined with the prevalent economic, political and cultural conditions in the newly independent countries after the imperial powers withdrew often pushed the agenda of anti-colonialism and imperialism, with a strong anti-western, pro-socialist slant (Heywood, 2004). The notion of a postcolonial approach to development and political growth has been popular amongst developing countries and often used by academics as it offers an alternative viewpoint to what are often Eurocentric political theories.

Authors often associated with postcolonialism include Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak. Postmodernists outside that field who could be described as anti-imperialists include Judith Butler and James Der Derian.

Sustainable development advocates and related academic disciplines such as anthropology and ecology as well as linguistics are also opposed in principle to imperialism because it violates the principles of diversity -- human diversity/cultural diversity and bio-diversity -- that are viewed as essential to human survival on the planet. Imperialism is seen as destroying natural processes of evolution and adaptation and reducing the entropy of systems, thus making it more likely for civilizations to collapse and for massive losses to ensue. Several disciplines have also moved towards imperial studies as a way of understanding modern phenomenon.

Some prominent organizational and advocates of cultural and bio-logical diversity who note the threats from empire are Cultural Survival, International Union for Conservation of Nature, Terralingua and scholars such as Michael Krauss, Joseph Tainter and David Lempert.

Forty Acres and a Mule

The Failed Promise of Equality
Oct 20, 2009 Ron Goodwin

Sharecropping replaced slavery as the southern labor system after the Civil War and became just as restrictive to the freedoms of blacks.

As repulsive as slavery is, it is merely a form of forced labor. No one group owns it nor should be identified by it. However, in this country, slavery will always be associated with black Americans and their supposed inferiority to whites. Even though the Civil War abolished slavery, any form of social and economic recovery would not be possible until a new labor system replaced slavery in the South. Sharecropping did eventually replace slavery, but it eventually became just as restrictive to the social and economic freedoms of blacks.

Forty Acres and a Mule
Overwhelmingly, Southern blacks gravitated to farming after emancipation and believed the government would support General William Sherman’s idea of confiscating Confederate lands and redistributing them to former slaves. Following his epic march through Georgia, Sherman confiscated approximately 400,000 acres of land, which he divided into 40 acre plots, along the Atlantic Coast. He proposed giving this land to the approximately 18,000 former slaves already living in the region so they could be economically independent landowners and farmers.

However, following the death of Abraham Lincoln, southerner Andrew Johnson succeeded him as president and believed the South had suffered enough. As a result, a majority of blacks failed to acquire title to the lands they were working, and the dream of economic independence through landownership became an unfulfilled promise; a casualty of the new sympathies given to the former slave owners.

A Return to the Cotton Fields
For most of the former slaves, the only economic alternative to landownership was a return to the cotton fields owned by their former masters. While the idea of sharecropping initial seemed a definite improvement over slavery, over time it proved just as disastrous. By the 1870s, sharecropping became a new form of slavery. Sharecroppers lived on credit until their crops were sold and the landowners would often cheat them out of their share of the profits. Thus a vicious cycle of debt evolved where blacks became tied to the land until the debt was paid. Of course the debt would never be paid.

During the 1930’s Depression, surviving slaves recalled the expressions of joy upon learning of the defeat of the Confederacy and the end of slavery. Many former slaves said they wept for joy believing their prayers had been answered. Unfortunately, they also remembered the new realities of sharecropping, debt, and mistrust. Many were aware that their former masters were manipulating crop prices and profits so that they would remain indebted indefinitely. They also remembered how the promises of economic independence and social equality were tied into failed promise of “forty acres and a mule.” For most former slaves throughout the South, this was an unfulfilled promise


Read more at Suite101: Forty Acres and a Mule: The Failed Promise of Equality;

Christianity Behind the Founding of Islam

to Wreak Havoc with the Jews;

Excerpt: "Islamic tradition informs us that a Christian monk named Buhaira, proclaimed Talib’s young nephew is the last prophet and warns him about the Jews."

http://www.truthnet.org/islam/whatisislam.html

U.S. Financial Aid To Israel: Figures, Facts, and Impact

Dated but Relevant Article

Summary
Benefits to Israel of U.S. Aid
Since 1949 (As of November 1, 1997)

Foreign Aid Grants and Loans
$74,157,600,000

Other U.S. Aid (12.2% of Foreign Aid)
$9,047,227,200

Interest to Israel from Advanced Payments
$1,650,000,000

Grand Total
$84,854,827,200

Total Benefits per Israeli
$14,630
Cost to U.S. Taxpayers of U.S.
Aid to Israel

Grand Total
$84,854,827,200

Interest Costs Borne by U.S.
$49,936,680,000

Total Cost to U.S. Taxpayers
$134,791,507,200

Total Taxpayer Cost per Israeli
$23,240

Special Reports:
Congress Watch: A Conservative Total for U.S. Aid to Israel: $91 Billion—and Counting

Congressional Research Report on Israel: US Foreign Assistance by Clyde Mark (213K pdf file)

U.S. Aid To Israel: The Strategic Functions

U.S. Aid to Israel: What U.S. Taxpayer Should Know

U.S. Aid to Israel: Interpreting the 'Strategic Relationship'

The Cost of Israel to U.S. Taxpayers: True Lies About U.S. Aid to Israel


THE STRATEGIC FUNCTIONS OF U.S. AID TO ISRAEL
By Stephen Zunes

Dr. Zunes is an assistant professor in the Department of Politics at the University of San Francisco

Since 1992, the U.S. has offered Israel an additional $2 billion annually in loan guarantees. Congressional researchers have disclosed that between 1974 and 1989, $16.4 billion in U.S. military loans were converted to grants and that this was the understanding from the beginning. Indeed, all past U.S. loans to Israel have eventually been forgiven by Congress, which has undoubtedly helped Israel's often-touted claim that they have never defaulted on a U.S. government loan. U.S. policy since 1984 has been that economic assistance to Israel must equal or exceed Israel's annual debt repayment to the United States. Unlike other countries, which receive aid in quarterly installments, aid to Israel since 1982 has been given in a lump sum at the beginning of the fiscal year, leaving the U.S. government to borrow from future revenues. Israel even lends some of this money back through U.S. treasury bills and collects the additional interest.

In addition, there is the more than $1.5 billion in private U.S. funds that go to Israel annually in the form of $1 billion in private tax-deductible donations and $500 million in Israeli bonds. The ability of Americans to make what amounts to tax-deductible contributions to a foreign government, made possible through a number of Jewish charities, does not exist with any other country. Nor do these figures include short- and long-term commercial loans from U.S. banks, which have been as high as $1 billion annually in recent years.

Total U.S. aid to Israel is approximately one-third of the American foreign-aid budget, even though Israel comprises just .001 percent of the world's population and already has one of the world's higher per capita incomes. Indeed, Israel's GNP is higher than the combined GNP of Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the West Bank and Gaza. With a per capita income of about $14,000, Israel ranks as the sixteenth wealthiest country in the world; Israelis enjoy a higher per capita income than oil-rich Saudi Arabia and are only slightly less well-off than most Western European countries.

AID does not term economic aid to Israel as development assistance, but instead uses the term "economic support funding." Given Israel's relative prosperity, U.S. aid to Israel is becoming increasingly controversial. In 1994, Yossi Beilen, deputy foreign minister of Israel and a Knesset member, told the Women's International Zionist organization, "If our economic situation is better than in many of your countries, how can we go on asking for your charity?"


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U.S. Aid to Israel: What U.S. Taxpayer Should Know
by Tom Malthaner

This morning as I was walking down Shuhada Street in Hebron, I saw graffiti marking the newly painted storefronts and awnings. Although three months past schedule and 100 percent over budget, the renovation of Shuhada Street was finally completed this week. The project manager said the reason for the delay and cost overruns was the sabotage of the project by the Israeli settlers of the Beit Hadassah settlement complex in Hebron. They broke the street lights, stoned project workers, shot out the windows of bulldozers and other heavy equipment with pellet guns, broke paving stones before they were laid and now have defaced again the homes and shops of Palestinians with graffiti. The settlers did not want Shuhada St. opened to Palestinian traffic as was agreed to under Oslo 2. This renovation project is paid for by USAID funds and it makes me angry that my tax dollars have paid for improvements that have been destroyed by the settlers.

Most Americans are not aware how much of their tax revenue our government sends to Israel. For the fiscal year ending in September 30, 1997, the U.S. has given Israel $6.72 billion: $6.194 billion falls under Israel's foreign aid allotment and $526 million comes from agencies such as the Department of Commerce, the U.S. Information Agency and the Pentagon. The $6.72 billion figure does not include loan guarantees and annual compound interest totalling $3.122 billion the U.S. pays on money borrowed to give to Israel. It does not include the cost to U.S. taxpayers of IRS tax exemptions that donors can claim when they donate money to Israeli charities. (Donors claim approximately $1 billion in Federal tax deductions annually. This ultimately costs other U.S. tax payers $280 million to $390 million.)

When grant, loans, interest and tax deductions are added together for the fiscal year ending in September 30, 1997, our special relationship with Israel cost U.S. taxpayers over $10 billion.

Since 1949 the U.S. has given Israel a total of $83.205 billion. The interest costs borne by U.S. tax payers on behalf of Israel are $49.937 billion, thus making the total amount of aid given to Israel since 1949 $133.132 billion. This may mean that U.S. government has given more federal aid to the average Israeli citizen in a given year than it has given to the average American citizen.

I am angry when I see Israeli settlers from Hebron destroy improvements made to Shuhada Street with my tax money. Also, it angers me that my government is giving over $10 billion to a country that is more prosperous than most of the other countries in the world and uses much of its money for strengthening its military and the oppression of the Palestinian people.


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"U.S. Aid to Israel: Interpreting the 'Strategic Relationship"'
by Stephen Zunes

"The U.S. aid relationship with Israel is unlike any other in the world," said Stephen Zunes during a January 26 CPAP presentation. "In sheer volume, the amount is the most generous foreign aid program ever between any two countries," added Zunes, associate professor of Politics and chair of the Peace and Justice Studies Program at the University of San Francisco.

He explored the strategic reasoning behind the aid, asserting that it parallels the "needs of American arms exporters" and the role "Israel could play in advancing U.S. strategic interests in the region."

Although Israel is an "advanced, industrialized, technologically sophisticated country," it "receives more U.S. aid per capita annually than the total annual [Gross Domestic Product] per capita of several Arab states." Approximately a third of the entire U.S. foreign aid budget goes to Israel, "even though Israel comprises just…one-thousandth of the world's total population, and already has one of the world's higher per capita incomes."

U.S. government officials argue that this money is necessary for "moral" reasons-some even say that Israel is a "democracy battling for its very survival." If that were the real reason, however, aid should have been highest during Israel's early years, and would have declined as Israel grew stronger. Yet "the pattern…has been just the opposite." According to Zunes, "99 percent of all U.S. aid to Israel took place after the June 1967 war, when Israel found itself more powerful than any combination of Arab armies…."

The U.S. supports Israel's dominance so it can serve as "a surrogate for American interests in this vital strategic region." "Israel has helped defeat radical nationalist movements" and has been a "testing ground for U.S. made weaponry." Moreover, the intelligence agencies of both countries have "collaborated," and "Israel has funneled U.S. arms to third countries that the U.S. [could] not send arms to directly,…Iike South Africa, like the Contras, Guatemala under the military junta, [and] Iran." Zunes cited an Israeli analyst who said: "'It's like Israel has just become another federal agency when it's convenient to use and you want something done quietly."' Although the strategic relationship between the United States and the Gulf Arab states in the region has been strengthening in recent years, these states "do not have the political stability, the technological sophistication, [or] the number of higher-trained armed forces personnel" as does Israel.

Matti Peled, former Israeli major general and Knesset member, told Zunes that he and most Israeli generals believe this aid is "little more than an American subsidy to U.S. arms manufacturers," considering that the majority of military aid to Israel is used to buy weapons from the U.S. Moreover, arms to Israel create more demand for weaponry in Arab states. According to Zunes, "the Israelis announced back in 1991 that they supported the idea of a freeze in Middle East arms transfers, yet it was the United States that rejected it."

In the fall of 1993-when many had high hopes for peace-78 senators wrote to former President Bill Clinton insisting that aid to Israel remain "at current levels." Their "only reason" was the "massive procurement of sophisticated arms by Arab states." The letter neglected to mention that 80 percent of those arms to Arab countries came from the U.S. "I'm not denying for a moment the power of AIPAC [the American Israel Public Affairs Committee], the pro-Israel lobby," and other similar groups, Zunes said. Yet the "Aerospace Industry Association which promotes these massive arms shipments…is even more influential." This association has given two times more money to campaigns than all of the pro-Israel groups combined. Its "force on Capitol Hill, in terms of lobbying, surpasses that of even AIPAC." Zunes asserted that the "general thrust of U.S. policy would be pretty much the same even if AIPAC didn't exist. We didn't need a pro-Indonesia lobby to support Indonesia in its savage repression of East Timor all these years." This is a complex issue, and Zunes said that he did not want to be "conspiratorial," but he asked the audience to imagine what "Palestinian industriousness, Israeli technology, and Arabian oil money…would do to transform the Middle East…. [W]hat would that mean to American arms manufacturers? Oil companies? Pentagon planners?"

"An increasing number of Israelis are pointing out" that these funds are not in Israel's best interest. Quoting Peled, Zunes said, "this aid pushes Israel 'toward a posture of callous intransigence' in terms of the peace process." Moreover, for every dollar the U.S. sends in arms aid, Israel must spend two to three dollars to train people to use the weaponry, to buy parts, and in other ways make use of the aid. Even "main-stream Israeli economists are saying [it] is very harmful to the country's future."

The Israeli paper Yediot Aharonot described Israel as "'the godfather's messenger' since [Israel] undertake[s] the 'dirty work' of a godfather who 'always tries to appear to be the owner of some large, respectable business."' Israeli satirist B. Michael refers to U.S. aid this way: "'My master gives me food to eat and I bite those whom he tells me to bite. It's called strategic cooperation." 'To challenge this strategic relationship, one cannot focus solely on the Israeli lobby but must also examine these "broader forces as well." "Until we tackle this issue head-on," it will be "very difficult to win" in other areas relating to Palestine.

"The results" of the short-term thinking behind U.S. policy "are tragic," not just for the "immediate victims" but "eventually [for] Israel itself" and "American interests in the region." The U.S. is sending enormous amounts of aid to the Middle East, and yet "we are less secure than ever"-both in terms of U.S. interests abroad and for individual Americans. Zunes referred to a "growing and increasing hostility [of] the average Arab toward the United States." In the long term, said Zunes, "peace and stability and cooperation with the vast Arab world is far more important for U.S. interests than this alliance with Israel."

This is not only an issue for those who are working for Palestinian rights, but it also "jeopardizes the entire agenda of those of us concerned about human rights, concerned about arms control, concerned about international law." Zunes sees significant potential in "building a broad-based movement around it."

The above text is based on remarks, delivered on. 26 January, 2001 by Stephen Zunes - Associate Professor of Politics and Chair of the Peace and Justice Studies Program at San Francisco University.


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The Cost of Israel to U.S. Taxpayers: True Lies About U.S. Aid to Israel
By Richard H. Curtiss

For many years the American media said that "Israel receives $1.8 billion in military aid" or that "Israel receives $1.2 billion in economic aid." Both statements were true, but since they were never combined to give us the complete total of annual U.S. aid to Israel, they also were lies—true lies.

Recently Americans have begun to read and hear that "Israel receives $3 billion in annual U.S. foreign aid." That's true. But it's still a lie. The problem is that in fiscal 1997 alone, Israel received from a variety of other U.S. federal budgets at least $525.8 million above and beyond its $3 billion from the foreign aid budget, and yet another $2 billion in federal loan guarantees. So the complete total of U.S. grants and loan guarantees to Israel for fiscal 1997 was $5,525,800,000.

One can truthfully blame the mainstream media for never digging out these figures for themselves, because none ever have. They were compiled by the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. But the mainstream media certainly are not alone. Although Congress authorizes America's foreign aid total, the fact that more than a third of it goes to a country smaller in both area and population than Hong Kong probably never has been mentioned on the floor of the Senate or House. Yet it's been going on for more than a generation.

Probably the only members of Congress who even suspect the full total of U.S. funds received by Israel each year are the privileged few committee members who actually mark it up. And almost all members of the concerned committees are Jewish, have taken huge campaign donations orchestrated by Israel's Washington, DC lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), or both. These congressional committee members are paid to act, not talk. So they do and they don't.

The same applies to the president, the secretary of state, and the foreign aid administrator. They all submit a budget that includes aid for Israel, which Congress approves, or increases, but never cuts. But no one in the executive branch mentions that of the few remaining U.S. aid recipients worldwide, all of the others are developing nations which either make their military bases available to the U.S., are key members of international alliances in which the U.S. participates, or have suffered some crippling blow of nature to their abilities to feed their people such as earthquakes, floods or droughts.

Israel, whose troubles arise solely from its unwillingness to give back land it seized in the 1967 war in return for peace with its neighbors, does not fit those criteria. In fact, Israel's 1995 per capita gross domestic product was $15,800. That put it below Britain at $19,500 and Italy at $18,700 and just above Ireland at $15,400 and Spain at $14,300.

All four of those European countries have contributed a very large share of immigrants to the U.S., yet none has organized an ethnic group to lobby for U.S. foreign aid. Instead, all four send funds and volunteers to do economic development and emergency relief work in other less fortunate parts of the world.

The lobby that Israel and its supporters have built in the United States to make all this aid happen, and to ban discussion of it from the national dialogue, goes far beyond AIPAC, with its $15 million budget, its 150 employees, and its five or six registered lobbyists who manage to visit every member of Congress individually once or twice a year.

AIPAC, in turn, can draw upon the resources of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, a roof group set up solely to coordinate the efforts of some 52 national Jewish organizations on behalf of Israel.

Among them are Hadassah, the Zionist women's organization, which organizes a steady stream of American Jewish visitors to Israel; the American Jewish Congress, which mobilizes support for Israel among members of the traditionally left-of-center Jewish mainstream; and the American Jewish Committee, which plays the same role within the growing middle-of-the-road and right-of-center Jewish community. The American Jewish Committee also publishes Commentary,one of the Israel lobby's principal national publications.

Perhaps the most controversial of these groups is B'nai B'rith's Anti-Defamation League. Its original highly commendable purpose was to protect the civil rights of American Jews. Over the past generation, however, the ADL has regressed into a conspiratorial and, with a $45 million budget, extremely well-funded hate group.

In the 1980s, during the tenure of chairman Seymour Reich, who went on to become chairman of the Conference of Presidents, ADL was found to have circulated two annual fund-raising letters warning Jewish parents against allegedly negative influences on their children arising from the increasing Arab presence on American university campuses.

More recently, FBI raids on ADL's Los Angeles and San Francisco offices revealed that an ADL operative had purchased files stolen from the San Francisco police department that a court had ordered destroyed because they violated the civil rights of the individuals on whom they had been compiled. ADL, it was shown, had added the illegally prepared and illegally obtained material to its own secret files, compiled by planting informants among Arab-American, African-American, anti-Apartheid and peace and justice groups.

The ADL infiltrators took notes of the names and remarks of speakers and members of audiences at programs organized by such groups. ADL agents even recorded the license plates of persons attending such programs and then suborned corrupt motor vehicles department employees or renegade police officers to identify the owners.

Although one of the principal offenders fled the United States to escape prosecution, no significant penalties were assessed. ADL's Northern California office was ordered to comply with requests by persons upon whom dossiers had been prepared to see their own files, but no one went to jail and as yet no one has paid fines.

Not surprisingly, a defecting employee revealed in an article he published in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs that AIPAC, too, has such "enemies" files. They are compiled for use by pro-Israel journalists like Steven Emerson and other so-called "terrorism experts," and also by professional, academic or journalistic rivals of the persons described for use in black-listing, defaming, or denouncing them. What is never revealed is that AIPAC's "opposition research" department, under the supervision of Michael Lewis, son of famed Princeton University Orientalist Bernard Lewis, is the source of this defamatory material.

But this is not AIPAC's most controversial activity. In the 1970s, when Congress put a cap on the amount its members could earn from speakers' fees and book royalties over and above their salaries, it halted AIPAC's most effective ways of paying off members for voting according to AIPAC recommendations. Members of AIPAC's national board of directors solved the problem by returning to their home states and creating political action committees (PACs).

Most special interests have PACs, as do many major corporations, labor unions, trade associations and public-interest groups. But the pro-Israel groups went wild. To date some 126 pro-Israel PACs have been registered, and no fewer than 50 have been active in every national election over the past generation.

An individual voter can give up to $2,000 to a candidate in an election cycle, and a PAC can give a candidate up to $10,000. However, a single special interest with 50 PACs can give a candidate who is facing a tough opponent, and who has voted according to its recommendations, up to half a million dollars. That's enough to buy all the television time needed to get elected in most parts of the country.

Even candidates who don't need this kind of money certainly don't want it to become available to a rival from their own party in a primary election, or to an opponent from the opposing party in a general election. As a result, all but a handful of the 535 members of the Senate and House vote as AIPAC instructs when it comes to aid to Israel, or other aspects of U.S. Middle East policy.

There is something else very special about AIPAC's network of political action committees. Nearly all have deceptive names. Who could possibly know that the Delaware Valley Good Government Association in Philadelphia, San Franciscans for Good Government in California, Cactus PAC in Arizona, Beaver PAC in Wisconsin, and even Icepac in New York are really pro-Israel PACs under deep cover?

Hiding AIPAC's Tracks

In fact, the congressmembers know it when they list the contributions they receive on the campaign statements they have to prepare for the Federal Election Commission. But their constituents don't know this when they read these statements. So just as no other special interest can put so much "hard money" into any candidate's election campaign as can the Israel lobby, no other special interest has gone to such elaborate lengths to hide its tracks.

Although AIPAC, Washington's most feared special-interest lobby, can hide how it uses both carrots and sticks to bribe or intimidate members of Congress, it can't hide all of the results.

Anyone can ask one of their representatives in Congress for a chart prepared by the Congressional Research Service, a branch of the Library of Congress, that shows Israel received $62.5 billion in foreign aid from fiscal year 1949 through fiscal year 1996. People in the national capital area also can visit the library of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in Rosslyn, Virginia, and obtain the same information, plus charts showing how much foreign aid the U.S. has given other countries as well.

Visitors will learn that in precisely the same 1949-1996 time frame, the total of U.S. foreign aid to all of the countries of sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean combined was $62,497,800,000--almost exactly the amount given to tiny Israel.

According to the Population Reference Bureau of Washington, DC, in mid-1995 the sub-Saharan countries had a combined population of 568 million. The $24,415,700,000 in foreign aid they had received by then amounted to $42.99 per sub-Saharan African.

Similarly, with a combined population of 486 million, all of the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean together had received $38,254,400,000. This amounted to $79 per person.

The per capita U.S. foreign aid to Israel's 5.8 million people during the same period was $10,775.48. This meant that for every dollar the U.S. spent on an African, it spent $250.65 on an Israeli, and for every dollar it spent on someone from the Western Hemisphere outside the United States, it spent $214 on an Israeli.

Shocking Comparisons

These comparisons already seem shocking, but they are far from the whole truth. Using reports compiled by Clyde Mark of the Congressional Research Service and other sources, freelance writer Frank Collins tallied for theWashington Report all of the extra items for Israel buried in the budgets of the Pentagon and other federal agencies in fiscal year 1993.Washington Report news editor Shawn Twing did the same thing for fiscal years 1996 and 1997.

They uncovered $1.271 billion in extras in FY 1993, $355.3 million in FY 1996 and $525.8 million in FY 1997. These represent an average increase of 12.2 percent over the officially recorded foreign aid totals for the same fiscal years, and they probably are not complete. It's reasonable to assume, therefore, that a similar 12.2 percent hidden increase has prevailed over all of the years Israel has received aid.

As of Oct. 31, 1997 Israel will have received $3.05 billion in U.S. foreign aid for fiscal year 1997 and $3.08 billion in foreign aid for fiscal year 1998. Adding the 1997 and 1998 totals to those of previous years since 1949 yields a total of $74,157,600,000 in foreign aid grants and loans. Assuming that the actual totals from other budgets average 12.2 percent of that amount, that brings the grand total to $83,204,827,200.

But that's not quite all. Receiving its annual foreign aid appropriation during the first month of the fiscal year, instead of in quarterly installments as do other recipients, is just another special privilege Congress has voted for Israel. It enables Israel to invest the money in U.S. Treasury notes. That means that the U.S., which has to borrow the money it gives to Israel, pays interest on the money it has granted to Israel in advance, while at the same time Israel is collecting interest on the money. That interest to Israel from advance payments adds another $1.650 billion to the total, making it $84,854,827,200.That's the number you should write down for total aid to Israel. And that's $14,346 each for each man, woman and child in Israel.

It's worth noting that that figure does not include U.S. government loan guarantees to Israel, of which Israel has drawn $9.8 billion to date. They greatly reduce the interest rate the Israeli government pays on commercial loans, and they place additional burdens on U.S. taxpayers, especially if the Israeli government should default on any of them. But since neither the savings to Israel nor the costs to U.S. taxpayers can be accurately quantified, they are excluded from consideration here.

Further, friends of Israel never tire of saying that Israel has never defaulted on repayment of a U.S. government loan. It would be equally accurate to say Israel has never been required to repay a U.S. government loan. The truth of the matter is complex, and designed to be so by those who seek to conceal it from the U.S. taxpayer.

Most U.S. loans to Israel are forgiven, and many were made with the explicit understanding that they would be forgiven before Israel was required to repay them. By disguising as loans what in fact were grants, cooperating members of Congress exempted Israel from the U.S. oversight that would have accompanied grants. On other loans, Israel was expected to pay the interest and eventually to begin repaying the principal. But the so-called Cranston Amendment, which has been attached by Congress to every foreign aid appropriation since 1983, provides that economic aid to Israel will never dip below the amount Israel is required to pay on its outstanding loans. In short, whether U.S. aid is extended as grants or loans to Israel, it never returns to the Treasury.

Israel enjoys other privileges. While most countries receiving U.S. military aid funds are expected to use them for U.S. arms, ammunition and training, Israel can spend part of these funds on weapons made by Israeli manufacturers. Also, when it spends its U.S. military aid money on U.S. products, Israel frequently requires the U.S. vendor to buy components or materials from Israeli manufacturers. Thus, though Israeli politicians say that their own manufacturers and exporters are making them progressively less dependent upon U.S. aid, in fact those Israeli manufacturers and exporters are heavily subsidized by U.S. aid.

Although it's beyond the parameters of this study, it's worth mentioning that Israel also receives foreign aid from some other countries. After the United States, the principal donor of both economic and military aid to Israel is Germany.

By far the largest component of German aid has been in the form of restitution payments to victims of Nazi attrocities. But there also has been extensive German military assistance to Israel during and since the Gulf war, and a variety of German educational and research grants go to Israeli institutions. The total of German assistance in all of these categories to the Israeli government, Israeli individuals and Israeli private institutions has been some $31 billion or $5,345 per capita, bringing the per capita total of U.S. and German assistance combined to almost $20,000 per Israeli. Since very little public money is spent on the more than 20 percent of Israeli citizens who are Muslim or Christian, the actual per capita benefits received by Israel's Jewish citizens would be considerably higher.

True Cost to U.S. Taxpayers

Generous as it is, what Israelis actually got in U.S. aid is considerably less than what it has cost U.S. taxpayers to provide it. The principal difference is that so long as the U.S. runs an annual budget deficit, every dollar of aid the U.S. gives Israel has to be raised through U.S. government borrowing.

In an article in the Washington Report for December 1991/January 1992, Frank Collins estimated the costs of this interest, based upon prevailing interest rates for every year since 1949. I have updated this by applying a very conservative 5 percent interest rate for subsequent years, and confined the amount upon which the interest is calculated to grants, not loans or loan guarantees.

On this basis the $84.8 billion in grants, loans and commodities Israel has received from the U.S. since 1949 cost the U.S. an additional $49,936,880,000 in interest.

There are many other costs of Israel to U.S. taxpayers, such as most or all of the $45.6 billion in U.S. foreign aid to Egypt since Egypt made peace with Israel in 1979 (compared to $4.2 billion in U.S. aid to Egypt for the preceding 26 years). U.S. foreign aid to Egypt, which is pegged at two-thirds of U.S. foreign aid to Israel, averages $2.2 billion per year.

There also have been immense political and military costs to the U.S. for its consistent support of Israel during Israel's half-century of disputes with the Palestinians and all of its Arab neighbors. In addition, there have been the approximately $10 billion in U.S. loan guarantees and perhaps $20 billion in tax-exempt contributions made to Israel by American Jews in the nearly half-century since Israel was created.

Even excluding all of these extra costs, America's $84.8 billion in aid to Israel from fiscal years 1949 through 1998, and the interest the U.S. paid to borrow this money, has cost U.S. taxpayers $134.8 billion, not adjusted for inflation. Or, put another way, the nearly $14,630 every one of 5.8 million Israelis received from the U.S. government by Oct. 31, 1997 has cost American taxpayers $23,240 per Israeli.

It would be interesting to know how many of those American taxpayers believe they and their families have received as much from the U.S. Treasury as has everyone who has chosen to become a citizen of Israel. But it's a question that will never occur to the American public because, so long as America's mainstream media, Congress and president maintain their pact of silence, few Americans will ever know the true cost of Israel to U.S. taxpayers.

Richard Curtiss, a retired U.S. foreign service officer, is the executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.

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The Choice We Must Face

Democracy and Imperialism,
Or Democracy and Standards?
Irving Babbitt

Irving Babbitt, who taught French and Comparative Literature at Harvard from 1894 to 1933, was one of the leading social and cultural thinkers of his era. This article, adapted from the chapters entitled "Democracy and Imperialism" and "Democracy and Standards" in Babbitt's 1924 classic, Democracy and Leadership, may be even more pertinent to the dilemmas of the contemporary, post-Cold War world than to those of Babbitt's own time.

In our recent crusade to make the world safe for democracy [World War I] it was currently assumed that democracy is the same as liberty and the opposite of imperialism. The teachings of history are strangely different. Democracy in the sense of direct and unlimited democracy is, as was pointed out long ago by Aristotle, the death of liberty; in virtue of its tyrannical temper, it is likewise, in the broad sense in which I have been using the term, closely akin to imperialism.* Now the distinction of Rousseau is, as we have seen, to have been the most uncompromising of all modern theorists of direct democracy. How far have the actual results of Rousseauism justified Aristotle rather than those who have anticipated from the diffusion of the Rousseauistic evangel, a paradise of liberty, equality, and fraternity? The commanding position of Rousseau in the democratic movement is at all events beyond question, though even here it is possible to exaggerate. "Democracy," says M. de Vogüé, "has only one father—Rousseau. . . . The great muddy stream which is submerging us flows from the writings and the life of Rousseau like the Rhine and the Po from the Alpine reservoirs which feed them perpetually."1 It is interesting to place alongside of this and similar passages which might be multiplied indefinitely, passages2 from German authorities, likewise very numerous, to the effect that Rousseau is more than any other person the father of their Kultur. Here, too, one must allow for an element of exaggeration. Much in Germany that is often ascribed to Rousseau may be traced to English influences, the
same influences that acted on Rousseau himself.

Passages of the kind I have just cited seem to establish a first connection between Kultur, which has come to be regarded as in its essence imperialistic, and Rousseauistic democracy. Kultur, when closely scrutinized, breaks up into two main elements—on the one hand, scientific efficiency, and on the other, a nationalistic enthusiasm to which this efficiency is made to minister. The relationship to Rousseauism must evidently be looked for first of all in the second of these elements, that of nationalistic enthusiasm. . . . According to the new ethics, virtue is not restrictive but expansive, a sentiment and even an intoxication. In its unmodified natural form, it has its basis in pity which may finally develop into the virtue of the great cosmopolitan souls of whom he speaks in the Second Discourse, who transcend national frontiers and embrace the whole of the human race in their benevolence. We are here at the headwaters of the sentimental internationalism of the past century. But Rousseau, as I have already said, distinguishes sharply between the virtue of man simply as man and the virtue of the citizen. When man is "denatured" by entering the state, his virtue is still a sentiment and even an intoxication, but is very far from being cosmopolitan. Rousseau oscillates between the two types of virtue, that of the man and that of the citizen, and can scarcely be said to have attempted a serious mediation between them. According as he wants the one or the other type of "virtue," he devises different systems of education. In Emile, for example, he sets out to make a man, in the "Considerations on the Government of Poland," a citizen. The love of country and the love of mankind are, he declares, incompatible passions.3 What is Rousseau's own choice, one may ask, as between an emotional nationalism and an emotional internationalism? On this point no doubt is possible. The love of country he takes to be the more beautiful passion. The virtuous intoxication of the internationalist seems to him pale and ineffectual compared with the virtuous intoxication of the citizen; and herein history has certainly confirmed him. The fact that l'ivresse patriotique may make the citizens of one country ruthless in their dealings with the citizens of other countries seems to him a matter of small moment.4 In his schemes for inbreeding patriotic sentiment, he seems to be looking forward to the type of nationalism that has actually emerged during the last century, especially perhaps in Germany. The question of war becomes acute if Europe, and possibly the world, is thus to be made up of states, each animated by what one is tempted to term a frenzied nationalism, without any countervailing principle of unity. That the new nationalism is more potent than the new internationalism was revealed in August 1914 when millions of socialists, in response to the call of country, marched away to the slaughter of their fellow socialists in other lands. That Protestant unity has likewise proved inadequate seems sufficiently clear from the fact that the men of the two chief Protestant countries, at the same time that they were blowing one another to pieces with high explosives, sought to starve one another's women and children en masse. The papacy again, representing the traditional unity of European civilization, has also shown itself unable to limit effectively the push of nationalism.

Furthermore, nationalities of the kind that have grown up in modern Europe will not, as Rousseau points out, be kept from fighting with one another by treaties and alliances. He warns the Poles that among the Christian nations, treaties and alliances are only scraps of paper . . . . Rousseau shows much shrewdness in reviewing . . . the problem of peace and war in Europe from the Middle Ages down. One institution, he admits, had done much in the past to lessen political conflicts. It is undeniable, he says, that Europe owes to Christianity above all, even today, the species of union that has survived among its members. He goes on to say, anticipating Heine and following Hobbes, that Rome, having suffered material defeat, sent her dogmas instead of her legions into the provinces. To this spiritual Rome, medieval and modern Europe has owed what small equivalent it has enjoyed of the Pax romana. The ultimate binding element in the medieval order was subordination to the divine will and its earthly representatives, notably the pope. The latter Middle Ages and the Renaissance saw a weakening of this principle of union and the rise of great territorial nationalities. According to the school of Grotius, the relations of these nationalities are to be regulated primarily not by will in any sense, but by reason. The Abbé de Saint-Pierre, perhaps the earliest complete French example of the professional philanthropist, has a still more naive confidence in reason. He saw well enough, says Rousseau, how his schemes would work if they were once established, but was childish (and herein he resembled other "reformers" down to the present day) in his notions of the means for getting them established. His fundamental error, Rousseau complains, was in thinking that men are governed by their reason, when they are in reality governed by their passions.5 . . .

Though Rousseau can speak on occasion with positive contempt of cosmopolitans, he can be shown to have exercised his main influence on those who began by standing, both nationally and internationally, for fraternity, a fraternity that was to be ideally combined with liberty and equality. We need to trace briefly the imperialistic upshot of this evangel, especially in the French Revolution, and then, turning away from the more peripheral aspects of the relation between democracy and imperialism, to try to get at the root of the whole matter in the psychology of the individual.

Rousseau, we have seen, seeks to discredit not merely a particular aristocracy, but the aristocratic principle in general. "The people," he says, "constitute the human race": all that is not the people is parasitic and "scarcely deserves to be counted were it not for the harm it does." Perhaps no doctrine has ever been more cunningly devised to fill the poor man and the plebeian with self-righteous pride, and at the same time to inflame him with hatred and suspicion of those who enjoy any social or economic superiority. It is a curious fact, known to all students of the period, that those who perhaps did the most to promote Rousseauism, and in general the new philanthropy, were the members of the privileged classes themselves. The causes of this strange phenomenon are complex, but have been traced with sufficient accuracy by Taine in his Ancien Regime. The members of the French aristocracy, and that as far back as Richelieu and Louis XIV, had largely ceased to perform the work of an aristocracy. They had become drawing-room butterflies and hangers-on at court. Now the enemy of those who have ceased to work, in some sense or other of the word, has always been ennui; and in addition, the denizens of the drawing-room suffered during the first half of the eighteenth century from rationalistic dryness and an excess of artificial decorum. They finally sought relief in a return to nature and the simple life. An idyllic element had been present in the life of the drawing-room from the start, as all know who have studied the influence of d'Urfé's Astrée on the Marquise de Rambouillet and her group; and this perhaps made the way easier for another form of pastoralism. "The fops," as Taine phrases it, "dreamt between two madrigals of the happiness of sleeping naked in the virgin forest." Marie Antoinette milked her own cows and lived the pastoral dream at the Petit Trianon. Many of the nobles and higher clergy, won over to the new enthusiasm, took oath to divest themselves of all the privileges of rank in favor of the new equality which was itself to be only a preliminary to the golden dawn of brotherhood. The advent of this brotherhood was actually celebrated in the Federation of the Champ de Mars (1790) which was meant to symbolize the melting of all Frenchmen together in a fraternal embrace. Anacharsis Cloots, the "orator of humankind," had representatives of the different races and nations of the Earth, each appropriately garbed, parade before the National Assembly as the symbol of a still more universal fraternity. "Never," says the Comte de Ségur, "were more delightful dreams followed by a more terrible awakening." Instead of universal brotherhood there was a growing mania of suspicion. The malady of Rousseau became epidemic, until, at the height of the Terror, men were "suspect of being suspect." The very persons who had rushed into one another's arms at the Federation of the Champ de Mars began to guillotine one another. In the number of those who thus perished was the "orator of mankind." Among the earliest victims were the members of the privileged classes who had been so zealous in promoting the new philanthropy, just as the parlor socialists of our own day would be among the first to suffer if the overturn they are preaching should actually occur. As Chesterton says, if the social revolution takes place, the streets will run red with the blood of philanthropists.

If one wishes to enter into the psychology of the later stages of the Revolution, one should devote special attention to avowed disciples of Rousseau like Robespierre. He adopts in a rather uncompromising form Rousseau's view of "virtue," and so is led to set up an "ideal" France over against the real France, and this "ideal" France is largely a projection of what I have termed the idyllic imagination. The opposition that he established between the virtuous and the vicious is even less an opposition between virtuous and vicious individuals than between whole classes of individuals. The judging of men by their social grouping rather than by their personal merits and demerits, that seemed to Burke so iniquitous, has as a matter of fact, been implicit in the logic of this movement from the French to the Russian Revolution. Danton already says: "These priests, these nobles are not guilty, but they must die, because they are out of place, interfere with the movement of things, and will stand in the way of the future." Danton, so far as he was responsible for the September Massacres, made some application of this revolutionary logic. Leaders like Robespierre and Saint-Just, however, developed it far more than Danton into a program of wholesale proscription. The actual France was too rich and populous. Robespierre and Saint-Just were ready to eliminate violently whole social strata that seemed to them to be made up of parasites and conspirators, in order that they might adjust this actual France to the Sparta of their dreams; so that the Terror was far more than is commonly realized a bucolic episode.6 It lends color to the assertion that has been made that the last stage of sentimentalism is homicidal mania.

In theory, Robespierre is, like Rousseau, rigidly egalitarian. He is not a real leader at all—only the people's "hired man." But at critical moments, in the name of an ideal general will, of which he professes to be only the organ, he is ready to impose tyrannically his will on the actual people. The net result of the Rousseauistic movement is thus not to get rid of leadership, but to produce an inferior and even insane type of leadership, and in any case leadership of a highly imperialistic type. This triumph of force can be shown to be the total outcome of liberty, equality, and fraternity in the Rousseauistic sense. Rousseau himself . . . would force people to be free. The attempt to combine freedom with equality led, and, according to Lord Acton, always will lead, to terrorism. As for Jacobinical fraternity, it has been summed up in the phrase: "Be my brother or I'll kill you." Moreover, the clash of a leader like Robespierre is not only with enemies of the Revolution, but with other more or less sincere revolutionary fanatics whose imaginations are projecting different "ideals." The sole common denominator of leaders thus obstinate, each in the pursuit of a separate dream, is force. The movement had repudiated the traditional controls, and so far as any new principle of cohesion was concerned, had turned out to be violently centrifugal. The only brotherhood the Jacobinical leaders had succeeded in founding was, as Taine puts it, a brotherhood of Cains.

Robespierre, however, was not the type of leader finally destined to emerge from the Revolution. As early as 1790 Burke had predicted that the Revolution would turn at last to the profit of some military adventurer. The doctrine of popular sovereignty as developed from the Social Contract had been found to encourage a sort of chronic anarchy. Inasmuch as society cannot go on without discipline of some kind, men were constrained, in the absence of any other form of discipline, to turn to discipline of the military type. In the army it was still possible to find the orderly subordination and loyalty to acknowledged merit that the Jacobins had, on principle, been undermining in civil France. Bonaparte is therefore no accident. He is the true heir and executor of the Revolution. After his grenadiers had chased members of the Cinq-Cents through the doors and out of the windows of the Orangerie at Saint-Cloud (18 Brumaire), and when he had revealed himself more and more nakedly as the imperialistic superman, it is not to be supposed that the Jacobins as a body stood aloof. What became apparent, on the contrary, was the affinity that has always existed between an unlimited democracy and the cult of ruthless power. No one crawled more abjectly at the feet of Napoleon than some of the quondam Terrorists. "On the point of becoming barons and counts, the Jacobins spoke only of the horrors of 1793, of the necessity of punishing the proletarians and of repressing popular excesses. From day to day there was taking place the transformation of republicans into imperialists and of the tyranny of all into the despotism of a single man." 7 . . .

I have been trying to make clear the relation between Rousseauistic democracy and imperialism in France itself. The same relationship appears if we study the Rousseauistic movement internationally. Perhaps no movement since the beginning of the world has led to such an inbreeding of national sentiment of the type that in the larger states runs over very readily into imperialistic ambition. I have said that the Revolution almost from the start took on the character of a universal crusade. The first principles it assumed made practically all existing governments seem illegitimate. The various peoples were invited to overthrow these governments, based upon usurpation, and, having recovered their original rights, to join with France in a glorious fraternity. What followed is almost too familiar to need repetition. Some of the governments whose legitimacy was thus called into question took alarm and, having entered into an alliance, invaded France.8 This foreign menace moved France to the first great burst of national enthusiasm in the modern sense. The cry of the revolutionary army—Vive la nation—heard by Goethe in a pause of the cannonading of Valmy—was rightly taken by him to mark the dawn of a new era.9 The beginnings of the very type of warfare we have recently been witnessing in Europe, that is, the coming together of whole nations for mutual massacre (la levée en masse), go back to this period. The new national enthusiasm supplied France with soldiers so numerous and so spirited that she not only repelled her invaders, but began to invade other countries in turn, theoretically on a mission of emancipation. In the actual stress of events, however, the will to power turned out to be stronger than the will to brotherhood, and what had begun as a humanitarian crusade ended in Napoleon and imperialistic aggression. This aggression awakened in turn the new national sentiment in various countries, and did more than all other agencies combined to prepare the way for a powerful and united Germany.10 France ceased to be the "Christ of nations" and became the traitor to humankind universally denounced by the disillusioned radicals of the time, especially after the invasion of Switzerland (1798).11

Anyone who rejects the humanitarian theory of brotherhood runs the risk of being accused of a lack of fraternal feeling. The obvious reply of the person of critical and experimental temper is that, if he rejects the theory, it is precisely because he desires brotherhood. After an experience of the theory that has already extended over several generations, the world would seem at times to have become a vast seething mass of hatred and suspicion. What Carlyle wrote of the Revolution has not ceased to be applicable: "Beneath this rose-colored veil of universal benevolence is a dark, contentious, hell on-earth." One is finally led to the conviction that the contrast between the ideal and the real in this movement is not the ordinary contrast between the willingness of the spirit and the weakness of the flesh; that on the contrary this particular field of union among men actually promotes the reality of strife that it is supposed to prevent. One might without being too fanciful establish a sort of synchronism between the prevalence of pacifistic schemes and the actual outbreak of war. The propaganda of the Abbé de Saint-Pierre was followed by the wars of Frederick the Great. The humanitarian movement of the end of the eighteenth century, which found expression in Kant's treatise on "Perpetual Peace," was followed and attended by twenty years of the bloodiest fighting the world has ever known. The pacifist agitation of the early twentieth century, that found outer expression in the Peace Palace at The Hague, was succeeded by battle lines hundreds of miles long. The late M. Boutroux, whom no one will accuse of being a cynic, said to a reporter of the Temps in 1912 that from the amount of peace talk abroad, he inferred that the future was likely to be "supremely warlike and bloody." . . .

From a strictly psychological point of view,** the movement we are studying had not only produced all its characteristic fruits over a hundred years ago, but also its two outstanding and truly significant personalities—Rousseau and Napoleon. If there had been no Rousseau Napoleon is reported to have said, there would have been no Revolution, and without the Revolution, I should have been impossible. Now Rousseau may be regarded as being more than any other one person the humanitarian Messiah. Napoleon, for his part, may be defined, in Hardy's phrase, as the Christ of War. So that the humanitarian Messiah set in motion forces that led by a process that I have attempted to sketch in rough general outline to the rise of a Christ of War.

A remarkable feature of the humanitarian movement, on both its sentimental and utilitarian sides, has been its preoccupation with the lot of the masses. "All institutions," says Condorcet, for example, "ought to have for their aim the physical, intellectual, and moral amelioration of the poorest and most numerous class." But on the utilitarian no less than on the sentimental side of the movement, the contrast between the ideal and the real is so flagrant as to suggest some central omission in humanitarian psychology. If the Rousseauist set up an ideal of universal brotherhood that led actually to universal conscription, the utilitarian for his part has put prime emphasis on material organization and efficiency and so, with the aid of physical science, has gradually built up an enormous mass of interlocking machinery which was, in theory, to serve humanity and promote the greatest good of the greatest number, but has in practice been pressed into the service of the will to power of individuals and social groups and nationalities. As a result of the coming together of the various factors I have enumerated, war has become almost inconceivably maleficent. The chief victims have been the very masses whom both Rousseauist and Baconian have professed themselves so eager to benefit. The clashes between states and coalitions of states have, under existing conditions, become clashes between Frankenstein monsters. . . .

The whole Occident, and increasingly, indeed, the whole world, is now faced with a similar problem as to the quality of the "soul" that animates the vast mechanism of material efficiency, to the building up of which the Occident has for several generations past been devoting its main effort. Is this "soul" a Rousseauistic or a genuinely ethical "soul"? One is tempted to define the civilization (or what we are pleased to term such) that has been emerging with the decline of the traditional controls as a mixture of altruism and high explosives. If anything is amiss with the altruism, the results may prove to be rather serious. The idealists affirm either that man is so lovely in his natural self that he needs no control at all, or else that he can be induced to exercise the necessary control with reference to the good of his fellows. Everything hinges, in either case, on the presence in the natural man of an element of love or will to service that is of itself a sufficient counterpoise to the natural man's will to power. Here is the dividing line between egoists and altruists, and not merely in the appeal to utility. . . .

A gross and palpable error of the era that is just closing has been the confusion of mechanical and material progress with moral progress. Physical science is excellent in its own place, but when supreme moral issues are involved, it is, as has been rightly remarked, only a multiplying device.12 If there is rightness at the center, it will no doubt multiply the rightness. If, on the other hand, there is any central error, the peripheral repercussion, with men bound together as they are at present, will be terrific. With the development of inventions like the radio and the wireless telephone, the whole world is becoming, in a very literal sense, a whispering-gallery. It is hardly necessary to dilate on what is likely to follow if the words that are whispered are words of hatred and suspicion. An increasing material union among men who remain spiritually centrifugal means . . . a triumph . . . of the law of cunning and the law of force . . . on a scale to which the past has seen no parallel. Superlatives are dangerous things, but one is perhaps justified in describing the present situation as one of unexampled gravity.

In dealing with democracy and the special type of fraternity it has preached, as related to imperialism, I have thus far been confining myself for the most part to the national and international phases of this relationship. It is time to fulfill my promise, and, working in from the periphery toward the center, seek to get at the root of the whole matter in the psychology of the individual. For behind all imperialism is ultimately the imperialistic individual, just as behind all peace is ultimately the peaceful individual.

I have already made a distinction of the first importance for the study of the question of war or peace in terms of the individual, and that is the distinction between the traditional Christian conception of liberty, which implies spiritual subordination, and the Rousseauistic conception which, whether we take it in the no-state of the Second Discourse or the all-state of the Social Contract, is resolutely egalitarian. At the end of his "Prometheus Unbound" Shelley has portrayed in the very spirit of the Second Discourse the paradise that is to result from the abolition of the traditional subordinations and inequalities:

The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains
Scepterless, free, uncircumscribed, but man
Equal, unclassed, tribeless and nationless,
Exempt from awe, worship, degree.
But on any attempt to carry out this program, the enormous irony and contradiction at the very heart of this movement becomes manifest. It leads one to break down standards in the real world in favor of purely chimerical ideals. For what actually follows the attempt to establish egalitarian liberty, we need to turn from Shelley to Shakespeare:
Take but degree away, untune that string,
And hark, what discord follows! each thing meets
In mere oppugnancy: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Then every thing includes itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite.
This last line reminds one of a remark of Jeremy Taylor that, in the absence of ethical control, "men know no good but to please a wild, indetermined, infinite appetite." The word infinite adds an essential idea. Other animals have appetite, but within certain definite bounds, whereas man is, either in good or bad sense, the infinite animal. Machiavelli is very metaphorical when he speaks of his prince as combining the virtues of the lion and the fox. The lion and the fox do not put forth their power or cunning beyond what is needed for the satisfaction of their actual physical wants. They do not strive to set up a vulpine or leonine empire over other animals. One cannot truthfully say of them, as Carlyle says of his boot-black, that, if given half the universe, they will soon be quarreling with the owner of the other half. To be sure, as Swift remarks,
Now and then
Beasts may degen'rate into men.
But, as a rule, the man who is infinite after the fashion of Carlyle's boot-black is in a fair way to become not beastly, but fiendish. As a result of his infinitude, man is almost necessarily either better or worse than other animals. His prime need is not, as in the case of other animals, to satisfy certain limited physical wants, but to keep in good conceit with himself. Now it is of the essence of conceit, a word which, as once used, was synonymous with imagination in general, and as now used is nearly related to the egocentric type of imagination, to strain out toward the unlimited. This conceit is, it is to be feared, closely associated in unregenerate man with envy and jealousy of anyone whose conceit seems to set up rival pretensions to his own. Conceit also determines largely man's attitude toward the truth. Truth according to the natural law*** he welcomes because it ministers to his power or comfort and in any case piques his wonder and curiosity. Spiritual truth is less welcome because it diminishes his conceit. Truth in this sense, as Goethe says, is less congenial to human nature than error, because it imposes limitations, whereas error does not. Tell the average person that some one is planning to get into wireless communication with Mars, or to shoot a rocket at the moon, and he is all respectful interest and attention at once. Tell him, on the contrary, that he needs, in the interest of his own happiness, to walk in the path of humility and self-control, and he will be indifferent, or even actively resentful.
Man's conceit, and the tendency toward unlimited expansion that it gives to the impulses of the natural man is of various types. Perhaps as good a classification as any of the main types is that of the three lusts distinguished by traditional Christianity—the lust of knowledge, the lust of sensation, and the lust of power. It is interesting to study the lust of power as it has appeared in the conquerors and great military adventurers of history. Saint-Evremond has made some penetrating observations on this form of imperialistic psychology in his "Dissertation on the Word Vast." The vastness that the great dominators have displayed in their projects and ambitions is due, as he points out, to the quality of their imaginations. The outward straining of the imagination toward the unlimited Saint-Evremond takes to be the weakness and not the strength of a Pyrrhus, an Alexander and a Richelieu. It is a pity that Saint-Evremond was not able to extend his scrutiny to a Napoleon. Napoleon plainly displayed two entirely different types of vision: in dealing with the natural order, in planning a battle, for instance, he showed himself capable of a tremendous concentration upon the facts; but in his political ambitions, where factors of a more purely human order came into play, he revealed an inability to limit his imagination that was destined sooner or later to result in disaster. The coming together of the two kinds of vision I have just defined gives a type with which we have become very familiar, not only in our political and military, but in our commercial leaders—that of the efficient megalomaniac. A surprising number of these leaders have been, in intention at least, supermen, and little Napoleons.

Assuming that Napoleon's imagination is of the general type that Saint-Evremond ascribes to various great dominators of the past, we still have to explain, if we are to understand the triumph of the imperialistic push for power over Rousseauistic idealism, why a Napoleon so captivates the imagination of other men; for this sort of leader would evidently be helpless unless he had many accomplices. The Rousseauist, I have said, breaks down traditional controls without setting up new ones. What emerges in the many men who have as a result lapsed to the naturalistic level is not the will to brotherhood, but the will to power; so that in this sense the Rousseauist is actually promoting what he is in theory seeking to prevent. For what follows we need to make an application of Freudian psychology to a libido even more fundamental perhaps than the libido with which the Freudians themselves have thus far been chiefly concerned—namely, the libido dominandi. In a naturalistic era, the average man finds himself more or less in the state of Carlyle's boot-black, but is at the same time hampered on every side and kept from expanding freely along the lines of power, and is thus diminished in his conceit of himself. He suffers from repressed and thwarted desire. But what he is unable to get directly, he may secure vicariously. At this point one begins to perceive the meaning of Hardy's description of Napoleon as the Christ of War. The spell that Napoleon exercised was not merely over the former Jacobins . . . but over the French masses. Let one reflect on the way these masses rallied to him on the return from Elba, and that, too, after he had wrought them almost incalculable evil:

Bien, dit-on, qu'il nous ait nut,
Le peuple encore le révère, etc.
I have said that to look on the state of Burke with its ethical leadership as merely "pooled self-esteem" is misleading. The phrase has a certain relevancy, however, when applied to the state that is under Napoleonic leadership. The intrusion of this imperialistic element is strong not only in all secular establishments, but also in the churches of the world, if only because these churches, however immaculate they may be in theory, are administered by human beings. It is not easy to overlook this element in the papacy, even though one does not go so far as to say roundly with Tyrrell: "Rome cares nothing for religion—only for power." The very divinities that men have set up often impress one as being in a considerable measure their pooled self-esteem. "We are glad," as Dryden says, '"to have God on our side to maul our enemies, when we cannot do the work ourselves." Jonathan Edwards has genuine religious elevation; but the Jehovah in whose "fierceness" he plainly rejoices, and who tramples sinners under his feet until their blood is "sprinkled on his garments," might lead some to dismiss Edwards as a theological imperialist. . . .
It goes without saying that the imperialistic element I have noted in religious beliefs, as well as in those who administer them, is not the whole story. Above all, it is not the whole story in the case of Christianity. Christianity has actually done much to curb the expansive lusts of the human heart, and among its other lusts, the lust for power. . . . Christianity in its medieval form actually did secure for Europe no small degree of spiritual unity and cohesion . . .

Judged by any quantitative test, the American achievement is impressive. We have ninety percent of the motors of the world and control seventy-five percent of its oil; we produce sixty percent of the world's steel, seventy percent of its copper, and eighty percent of its telephones and typewriters. This and similar statistical proof of our material preeminence, which would have made a Greek apprehensive of Nemesis, seems to inspire in many Americans an almost lyrical complacency. They are not only quantitative in their estimates of our present accomplishment, but even more so if possible in what they anticipate for the future. . . .

If quantitatively the American achievement is impressive, qualitatively it is somewhat less satisfying. What must one think of a country, asks one of our foreign critics, whose most popular orator is W. J. Bryan, whose favorite actor is Charlie Chaplin, whose most widely read novelist is Harold Bell Wright, whose best-known evangelist is Billy Sunday, and whose representative journalist is William Randolph Hearst? What one must evidently think of such a country, even after allowing liberally for overstatement, is that it lacks standards. Furthermore, America suffers not only from a lack of standards, but also not infrequently from a confusion or an inversion of standards. . . .

The problem of standards, though not identical with the problem of democracy, touches it at many points and is not therefore the problem of any one country. Europeans, indeed, like to look upon the crudity and chaotic impressionism of people who are no longer guided by standards as something specifically American. . . . The deference for standards has, however, been diminished by a certain type of democracy in many other countries besides America. The resulting vulgarity and triviality are more or less visible in all of these countries . . . . If we in America are perhaps preeminent in lack of distinction, it is because of the very completeness of our emancipation from the past. Goethe's warning as to the retarding effect of the commonplace is well known (Was uns alle bändigt, das Gemeine). His explanation of what makes for the commonplace is less familiar: "Enjoyment," he says, "makes common" (Geniessen macht gemein). Since every man desires happiness, it is evidently no small matter whether he conceives of happiness in terms of work or of enjoyment. If he work in the full ethical sense that I have attempted to define, he is pulling back and disciplining his temperamental self with reference to some standard. In short, his temperamental self is, in an almost literal sense, undergoing conversion. The whole of life may, indeed, be summed up in the words diversion and conversion. Along which of these two main paths are most of us seeking the happiness to the pursuit of which we are dedicated by our Declaration of Independence? The author of this phrase, Thomas Jefferson, remarks of himself: "I am an Epicurean."13 It cannot be gainsaid that an increasing number of our young people are, in this respect at least, good Jeffersonians. The phrase that reflects most clearly their philosophy of life is perhaps "good time." . . .

One is inclined, indeed, to ask, in certain moods, whether the net result of the movement that has been sweeping the Occident for several generations may not be a huge mass of standardized mediocrity; and whether in this country in particular we are not in danger of producing in the name of democracy one of the most trifling brands of the human Species that the world has yet seen. To be sure, it may be urged that, though we may suffer loss of distinction as a result of the democratic drift, by way of compensation a great many average people will, in the Jeffersonian sense at least, be made "happy." If we are to judge by history, however, what supervenes upon the decline of standards and the disappearance of leaders who embody them is not some egalitarian paradise, but inferior types of leadership. We have already been reminded by certain developments in this country of Byron's definition of democracy as an "aristocracy of blackguards." At the very moment when we were most vociferous about making the world safe for democracy the citizens of New York refused to reelect an honest man as their mayor and put in his place a tool of Tammany, an action followed in due course by a "crime wave"; whereupon they returned the tool of Tammany by an increased majority. The industrial revolution has tended to produce everywhere great urban masses that seem to be increasingly careless of ethical standards. In the case of our American cities, the problem of securing some degree of moral cohesion is further complicated by the presence of numerous aliens of widely divergent racial stocks and cultural backgrounds.14 . . .

We are assured, indeed, that the highly heterogeneous elements that enter into our population will, like various instruments in an orchestra, merely result in a richer harmony; they will, one may reply, provided that, like an orchestra, they be properly led. Otherwise the outcome may be an unexampled cacophony. This question of leadership is not primarily biological, but moral. Leaders may vary in quality from the man who is so loyal to sound standards that he inspires right conduct in others by the sheer rightness of his example, to the man who stands for nothing higher than the law of cunning and the law of force, and so is, in the sense I have sought to define, imperialistic. If democracy means simply the attempt to eliminate the qualitative and selective principle in favor of some general will, based in turn on a theory of natural rights, it may prove to be only a form of the vertigo of the abyss. As I have tried to show in dealing with the influence of Rousseau on the French Revolution, it will result practically, not in equality, but in a sort of inverted aristocracy. One's choice may be, not between a democracy that is properly led and a democracy that hopes to find the equivalent of standards and leadership in the appeal to a numerical majority, that indulges in other words in a sort of quantitative impressionism, but between a democracy that is properly led and a decadent imperialism. One should, therefore, in the interests of democracy itself seek to substitute the doctrine of the right man for the doctrine of the rights of man.

The opposition between traditional standards and an egalitarian democracy based on the supposed rights of man has played an important part in our own political history, and has meant practically the opposition between two types of leadership. The "quality" in the older sense of the word suffered its first decisive defeat in 1829 when Washington was invaded by the hungry hordes of Andrew Jackson. The imperialism latent in this type of democracy appears in the Jacksonian maxim: "To the victors belong the spoils." In his theory of democracy Jackson had, of course, much in common with Thomas Jefferson. If we go back, indeed, to the beginnings of our institutions, we find that America stood from the start for two different views of government that have their origin in different views of liberty and ultimately of human nature. The view that is set forth in the Declaration of Independence assumes that man has certain abstract rights; it has therefore important points of contact with the French revolutionary "idealism." The view that inspired our Constitution, on the other hand, has much in common with that of Burke. If the first of these political philosophies is properly associated with Jefferson, the second has its most distinguished representative in Washington. The Jeffersonian liberal has faith in the goodness of the natural man, and so tends to overlook the need of a veto power either in the individual or in the state. The liberals of whom I have taken Washington to be the type are less expansive in their attitude toward the natural man. Just as man has a higher self that acts restrictively on his ordinary self, so, they hold, the state should have a higher or permanent self, appropriately embodied in institutions, that should set bounds to its ordinary self as expressed by the popular will at any particular moment. The contrast that I am establishing is, of course, that between a constitutional and a direct democracy. There is an opposition of first principles between those who maintain that the popular will should prevail, but only after it has been purified of what is merely impulsive and ephemeral, and those who maintain that this will should prevail immediately and unrestrictedly. The American experiment in democracy has, therefore, from the outset been ambiguous, and will remain so until the irrepressible conflict between a Washingtonian and a Jeffersonian liberty has been fought to a conclusion. The liberal of the type of Washington has always been very much concerned with what one may term the unionist aspect of liberty. This central preoccupation is summed up in the phrase of Webster: Liberty and union, one and inseparable. The liberty of the Jeffersonian, on the other hand, makes against ethical union like every liberty that rests on the assertion of abstract rights. . . .

Jefferson . . . associated his liberty, not with God, but with "nature." He admired, as is well known, the liberty of the American Indian.15 He was for diminishing to the utmost the role of government, but not for increasing the inner control that must, according to Burke, be in strict ratio to the relaxation of outer control. When evil actually appears, the Jeffersonian cannot appeal to the principle of inner control; he is not willing again to admit that the sole alternative to this type of control is force; and so he is led into what seems at first a paradoxical denial of his own principles; he has recourse to legislation. It should be clear at all events that our present attempt to substitute social control for self-control is Jeffersonian rather than puritanical. . . .

Standardization is . . . a less serious menace to standards than what are currently known as "ideals." The person who breaks down standards in the name of ideals does not seem to be impelled by base commercial motives, but to be animated, on the contrary, by the purest commiseration for the lowly and the oppressed. We must have the courage to submit this humanitarian zeal to a close scrutiny. We may perhaps best start with the familiar dictum that America is only another name for opportunity. Opportunity to do what? To engage in a scramble for money and material success, until the multimillionaire emerges as the characteristic product of a country dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal? According to Napoleon, the French Revolution was also only another name for opportunity (la carrière ouverte aux talents). Some of our commercial supermen have evidently been making use of their opportunity in a very Napoleonic fashion. In any case, opportunity has meaning only with reference to some true standard. The sentimentalist, instead of setting up some such standard by way of protest against the wrong type of superiority, inclines rather to bestow an unselective sympathy on those who have been left behind in the race for economic advantage. Even when less materialistic in his outlook, he is prone to dodge the question of justice. He does not ask whether a man is an underdog because he has already had his opportunity and failed to use it, whether, in short, the man that he takes to be a victim of the social order is not rather a victim of his own misconduct16 or at least of his own indolence and inattention. He thus exposes himself to the penalties visited on those who set out to be kinder than the moral law.

At bottom the point of view of the "uplifter" is so popular because it nourishes spiritual complacency; it enables a man to look on himself as "up" and on some one else as "down." But there is psychological if not theological truth in the assertion of Jonathan Edwards that complacent people are a "particular smoke" in God's nostrils. A man needs to look, not down, but up to standards set so much above his ordinary self as to make him feel that he is himself spiritually the underdog. The man who thus looks up is becoming worthy to be looked up to in turn, and, to this extent, qualifying for leadership. Leadership of this type, one may add, may prove to be, in the long run, the only effectual counterpoise to that of the imperialistic superman.

No amount of devotion to society and its supposed interests can take the place of this inner obeisance of the spirit to standards. The humanitarian would seem to be caught here in a vicious circle. If he turns from the inner life to serve his fellow men, he becomes a busy-body. If he sets out again to become exemplary primarily with a view to the benefit of others, he becomes a prig. Nothing will avail short of humility. Humility, as Burke saw, is the ultimate root of the justice that should prevail in the secular order, as well as of the virtues that are specifically religious. The modern problem, I have been insisting, is to secure leaders with an allegiance to standards, now that the traditional order with which Burke associated his standards and leadership has been so seriously shaken. Those who have broken with the traditional beliefs have thus far shown themselves singularly ineffective in dealing with this problem of leadership, even when they have admitted the need of leaders at all. The persons who have piqued themselves especially on being positive have looked for leadership to the exponents of physical science. Auguste Comte, for example, not only regarded men of science as the true modern priesthood, but actually disparaged moral effort on the part of the individual. I scarcely need to repeat here what I have said elsewhere—that the net result of a merely scientific "progress" is to produce efficient megalomaniacs. . . .

One cannot grant that an aristocracy of scientific intellectuals or indeed any aristocracy of intellect is what we need. This would mean practically to encourage the libido sciendi and so to put pride in the place of humility. Still less acceptable would be an aristocracy of artists; as the word art has come to be understood in recent times, this would mean an aristocracy of aesthetes who would attempt to base their selection on the libido sentiendi. The Nietzschean attempt, again, to found the aristocratic and selective principle on the sheer expansion of the will to power (libido dominandi) would lead in practice to horrible violence and finally to the death of civilization. . . .

The democratic idealist is prone to make light of the whole question of standards and leadership because of his unbounded faith in the plain people. How far is this appeal to the plain people justified and how far is it merely demagogic? There is undoubted truth in the saying that there is somebody who knows more than anybody, and that is everybody. Only one must allow everybody sufficient time to sift the evidence and add that, even so, everybody does not know very much. Burke told the electors of Bristol that he was not flattering their Opinions of the moment, but uttering the views that both they and he must have five years thence. Even in this triumph of the sober judgment of the people over its passing impression, the role of the true leader should not be underestimated. Thus in the year 1795 the plain people of America were eager to give the fraternal accolade to the French Jacobins. The great and wise Washington opposed an alliance that would almost certainly have been disastrous. . . .

A democracy, the realistic observer is forced to conclude, is likely to be idealistic in its feelings about itself, but imperialistic about its practice. The idealism and the imperialism, indeed, are in pretty direct ratio to one another. For example, to be fraternal in Walt Whitman's sense is to be boundlessly expansive, and a boundless expansiveness, is, in a world like this, incompatible with peace. Whitman imagines the United States as expanding until it absorbs Canada and Mexico and dominates both the Atlantic and the Pacific—a program that would almost certainly involve us in war with the whole world. If we go, not by what Americans feel about themselves, but by what they have actually done, one must conclude that we have shown ourselves thus far a consistently expansive, in other words, a consistently imperialistic, people.17 We have merely been expanding, it may be replied, to our natural frontiers; but we are already in the Philippines, and manifestly in danger of becoming involved in Asiatic adventures. Japan, a country with fifty-seven million inhabitants (increasing at the rate of about six hundred thousand a year), on a group of islands not as large as the state of California, only seventeen percent of which is arable, has at least a plausible pretext for reaching out beyond her natural frontiers. But for us, with our almost limitless and still largely undeveloped resources, to risk the horrors of war under modern conditions for anything we are likely to gain from expanding eastward, would be an extreme example of sheer restlessness of spirit and of an intemperate commercialism. . . . We are willing to admit that all other nations are self-seeking, but as for ourselves, we hold that we act only on the most disinterested motives. We have not as yet set up, like revolutionary France, as the Christ of Nations, but during the late war we liked to look on ourselves as at least the Sir Galahad of Nations. If the American thus regards himself as an idealist at the same time that the foreigner looks on him as a dollar-chaser, the explanation may be due partly to the fact that the American judges himself by the way he feels, whereas the foreigner judges him by what he does.

This is not, of course, the whole truth. Besides our tradition of idealism there is our unionist tradition based on a sane moral realism. "It is a maxim," says Washington, "founded on the universal experience of mankind, that no nation is to be trusted further than it is bound by its interests; and no president, statesman or politician will venture from it." All realistic observation confirms Washington. Those who are inspired by his spirit believe that we should be nationally prepared, and then that we should mind our own business. The tendency of our idealists, on the other hand, is to be unprepared and then to engage in more or less general meddling. A third attitude may be distinguished that may properly be associated with [Theodore] Roosevelt. The follower of Roosevelt wants preparedness, only he cannot, like the follower of Washington, be counted on to mind his own business. The humanitarian would, of course, have us meddle in foreign affairs as part of his program of world service. Unfortunately, it is more difficult than he supposes to engage in such a program without getting involved in a program of world empire. The term sentimental imperialism may be applied to certain incidents in ancient Roman history.18 Some of the motives that we professed for entering the Great War remind one curiously of the motives that men like Flamininus professed for going to the rescue of Greece. Cicero, writing over a century later and only a few months before his assassination by the emissaries of the Triumvirs, said that he himself had once thought that Rome stood for world service rather than for world empire, but that he had been bitterly disillusioned. He proceeds to denounce Julius Caesar, the imperialistic leader par excellence, as a demon in human form who did evil for its own sake. But Caesar had at least the merit of seeing that the Roman ethos was changing, that as the result of the breakdown of religious restraint (for which Stoical "service" was not an adequate substitute), the Romans were rapidly becoming unfit for republican institutions. . . .

Are we witnessing a similar moral deliquescence in this country, and, if so, how far has it gone? One of our foreign critics asserts that we have already reached the "Heliogabalus stage"—which is absurd. But at the same time it is not to be denied that the naturalistic notion of liberty has undermined in no small measure the two chief unifying influences of the past—the church and the family. The decline in the discipline of the family has been fairly recent. Persons are still living who can remember the conditions that prevailed in the Puritan household.19 The process of emancipation from the older restraint has not usually presented itself as a lapse into mere materialism. Idealism in the current sense of that term has tended to take the place of traditional religion. The descendants of the Puritans have gone in for commercialism, to be sure, especially since the Civil War, but it has been commercialism tempered by humanitarian crusading. As I have pointed out, the humanitarian does not, like the genuine Puritan, seek to get at evil in the heart of the individual, so that he is finally forced to resort to outer regulation. The egoistic impulses that are not controlled at their source tend to prevail over an ineffectual altruism in the relations of man with man and class with class. The special mark of materialism, which is to regard property, not as a means to an end, but as an end in itself, is more and more visible. The conservative nowadays is interested in conserving property for its own sake and not, like Burke, in conserving it because it is an almost indispensable support of personal liberty, a genuinely spiritual thing. As for the progressive, his preoccupation with property and what he conceives to be its just distribution amounts to a morbid obsession. Orderly party government will become increasingly difficult if we continue to move in this direction, and we shall finally be menaced by class war, if, indeed, we are not menaced by it already. Every student of history is aware of the significance of this particular symptom in a democracy. One may sum up what appears to be our total trend at present by saying that we are moving through an orgy of humanitarian legalism toward a decadent imperialism.

Notes

1. Introduction & l'Iconographie de J.-J. Rousseau, pp. vii-viii.[Back]

2. I have cited some of these passages in Rousseau and Romanticism, p. 194 n. [Back]

3. See Political Writings (Vaughan), II, p. 172. [Back]

4. See the opening paragraphs of Emile ("Tout patriote est dur aux étrangers," etc.). [Back]

5. Political Writings (Vaughan), I, p. 392 n. [Back]

6. Cf. Chateaubriand, Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe, II, pp. 12-14. [Back]

7. Ibid., p. 243. [Back]

8. Both monarchists and revolutionary idealists had of course other motives in addition to those they professed. For this whole period, see E. Bourgeois, Manuel historique de politique étrangère, II, pp. 1-184. [Back]

9. According to M. Chuquet, the remark of Goethe to which I refer dates from 1820 and not from the evening of the battle (September 20, 1792). See article in Revue hebdomadaire, December 18, 1915. [Back]

10. "La Révolution française fut le fait générateur de l'idée de l'unité allemande." Renan, Réforme intellectuelle et morale, p. 130. [Back]

11. See Coleridge's France: An Ode. For corresponding German developments, see G. P. Gooch, Germany and the French Revolution, passim. [Back]

12. This point has been well made by Mr. J. Middleton Murry in his essay on "The Nature of Civilization" (The Evolution of an Intellectual, p. 168). [Back]

13. Works (ed. Ford), x, p. 143. [Back]

14. For example, 41 percent of the residents of New York City are actually foreign-born; if we add those whose father or mother or both were born abroad, the more or less foreign element in its population amounts to 80 percent. [These figures refer to the early 1920s.—ed.] [Back]

15. See Works (ed. Ford), III, p. 195. [Back]

16. "This is a chain of galley slaves," cried Sancho, "who are going to the galleys." Be it how it may," replied Don Quixote, "these people, since they are being taken, go by force and not of their own will. . . . Here comes in the exercise of my office, to redress outrages and to succor and aid the afflicted." "Let your worship reflect," said Sancho, "that justice, which is the King's self, does no violence or wrong to such people, but chastises them in punishment of their crimes." (Don Quixote, Part I, ch. XXII.). [Back]

17. This consistent imperialism has been traced by H. H. Powers in his volume America Among the Nations. [Back]

18. See Tenney Frank's Roman Imperialism, especially chap. 8 ("Sentimental Politics"). [Back]

19. Professor G. H. Palmer has written from his own memories an article on "The Puritan Home" (Atlantic Monthly, November 1921). [Back]

*By "imperialism" Babbitt refers to arbitrary assertiveness not only among nations but also among individuals and groups. [Back]

**Here as elsewhere Babbitt uses the word "psychological" in a sense roughly equivalent to "philosophical," indicating that the evidence involved is not metaphysical but a matter of concrete and universal human experience. [Back]

***By the term "natural law" Babbitt refers to the principles of the natural sciences. What moral philosophers have traditionally termed the "natural law" Babbitt calls the "law for man." [Back]



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