politics Archives • Outliers Academy

Communication

“Wikipedia is…broken,” controlled by special interests and bad actors, says co-founder

By Guest Post June 5, 2019

by Sharyl Attkisson

I’ve done quite a bit of reporting about how Wikipedia is definitely not “the encyclopedia anyone can edit.” It’s become a vehicle for special interests to control information. Agenda editors are able to prevent or revert edits and sourcing on selected issues and people in order to control the narrative.

Watch Sharyl Attkisson’s TedX talk on Wikipedia and other Astroturf tools

My own battle with Wikipedia included being unable to correct provably false facts such as incorrect job history, incorrect birth place and incorrect birth date.

What’s worse is that agenda editors related to pharmaceutical interests and the partisan blog Media Matters control my Wikipedia biographical page, making sure that slanted or false information stays on it. For example, they falsely refer to my reporting as “anti-vaccine,” and imply my reporting on the topic has been discredited. In fact, my vaccine and medical reporting has been recognized by top national journalism awards organizations, and has even been cited as a source in a peer-reviewed scientific publication. However, anyone who tries to edit this factual context and footnotes onto my page finds it is quickly removed.

What persists on my page, however, are sources that are supposedly disallowed by Wikipedia’s policies. They include citations by Media Matters, with no disclosure that it’s a partisan blog.

Another entity quoted on my Wikipedia biographical page to disparage my work is the vaccine industry’s Dr. Paul Offit. But there’s no mention of the lawsuits filed against Offit for libel (one prompted him to apologize and correct his book), or the fact that he provided false information about his work and my reporting to the Orange County Register, which later corrected its article. Obviously, these facts would normally make Offit an unreliable source, but for Wikipedia, he’s presented as if an unconflicted expert. In fact, Wikipedia doesn’t even mention that’s Offit is a vaccine industry insider who’s made millions of dollars off of vaccines.

Meantime, turn to Dr. Offit’s own Wikipedia biography and– at last look– it also omitted all mention of his countless controversies. Instead, it’s written like a promotional resume– in violation of Wikipedia’s supposed politics on neutrality.

Watch Sharyl Attkisson’s TedX talk on Fake News

These biographies are just two examples of ones that blatantly violate Wikipedia’s strict rules, yet they are set in stone. The powerful interests that “watch” and control the pages make sure Offit’s background is whitewashed and that mine is subtly tarnished. They will revert or change any edits that attempt to correct the record.

This, in a nutshell, exemplifies Wikipedia’s problems across the platform as described by its co-founder Larry Sanger.

Watch “Wikipedia: The Dark Side,” a Full Measure investigation

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Bank

The Origins of the Deep State in North America

By Guest Post May 10, 2019

by Matthew Ehret

“Two systems are before the world; the one looks to increasing the proportion of persons and of capital engaged in trade and transportation, and therefore to diminishing the proportion engaged in producing commodities with which to trade, with necessarily diminished return to the labor of all; while the other looks to increasing the proportion engaged in the work of production, and diminishing that engaged in trade and transportation, with increased return to all, giving to the laborer good wages, and to the owner of capital good profits… One looks towards universal war; the other towards universal peace. One is the English system; the other we may be proud to call the American system, for it is the only one ever devised the tendency of which was that of elevating while equalizing the condition of man throughout the world.”

-Henry C. Carey (Lincoln’s advisor), Harmony of Interests, 1856

The British Hand Behind the Deep State Today

With the election of Donald Trump in November 2016, it has become apparent for that America isn’t what many thought it was.

Suddenly, for the first time since the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, there was no longer one America but rather two opposing forces within America itself, and the question was raised “which is the real America and what is it that Trump was re-activating?”

Here was a political leader who wasn’t from the technocratic establishment, and who campaigned to work with Russia and China, end regime change wars, reverse the nation-killing effects of NAFTA, reviving the JFK-era space mission and even discussed restoring Glass Steagall.

A clue to what he chose to represent can be witnessed in his defense of the “American System” when he said “this is the system our Founders wanted. Our greatest American leaders — including George Washington, Hamilton, Jackson, Lincoln — they all agreed that for America to be a strong nation it must also be a great manufacturing nation.”

Soon, it became apparent that this Deep State structure mobilized to stop the re-emergence of the American System was not even American as many had supposed, but rather of a purely British Imperial pedigree and was even caught working against British nationalists such as Jeremy Corbyn. It finally came to light that the British Empire had never gone away after WWII, but had evoked a powerful sleight of hand after FDR’s untimely death in 1945.

How did this happen? By what means and motives did this Deep State arise? Was it always there or were there key moments in history that give us clarity into its origins and how it took over both America and other nations alike?

By approaching history shaped by a battle between British and American systems of social order (which represents much more than merely British or American nations per se), a “master key” to unlock the secrets of Britain’s takeover of America (and Europe) can be found by exploring the strange case of Canada.

What is this “strange partly British/partly American monarchy of the Americas”? At the best of times, it was uplifted by the best constitutional traditions of America cited by Donald Trump above, and at the worst of times, it was a platform to spread British intrigues upon the world exemplified by the Montreal-based assassinations of American System leaders Abraham Lincoln in 1865 and John F. Kennedy in 1963. Today those intrigues are led by such Rhodes Scholars as Chrystia Freeland and the modern Round Table movement of Ben Rowswell who have together played leading roles in the overthrow of Venezuela, the protection of fascists in Ukraine and advance of NATO against Russia and China.

The time has come to drag some skeletons out of the closet.

Lincoln’s American System Goes Global

Canada’s struggle for existence as a sovereign nation has been caught between two opposing views of mankind represented by the British and American System of social organization. As the great economist Henry C. Carey laid out while he was advancing the policy of Abraham Lincoln, the American System was designed to become a global system operating amongst sovereign nations for the progress and mutual benefit of each and all. By the end of the 19^th century, American System thinking was resonating with statesmen and patriots in all corners of the globe who were fed up with the ancient imperial system of British Free Trade that had always strived to maintain a world divided and monopolized. This view for a post-colonial world was exemplified by Lincoln-ally and first Governor of Colorado William Gilpin who described a world united by railways across all continents centered around the Bering Strait rail connection. This was outlined in his widely read 1890 “The Cosmopolitan Railway”.

Although British propagandists had made every attempt to keep the illusion of the sacredness of the British System alive in the minds of its subjects, the undeniable increase of quality of life, and creative thought expressed by the American System everywhere it was applied become too strong to ignore… especially within colonies such as Canada that had long suffered a fragmented, and underdeveloped identity as the price paid for loyalty to the British Empire.

In Germany, the American System-inspired Zollverein (customs union) had not only unified a divided nation but elevated it to a level of productive power and sovereignty which had outpaced the monopoly power of the British East India Company. In Japan, American engineers helped assemble trains funded by a national banking system, and protective tariff during the Meiji Restoration.

In Russia, American System follower Sergei Witte, Transport Minister and close advisor to Czar Alexander II, revolutionized the Russian economy with the American made trains that rolled across the Trans-Siberian Railway. Under the influence of Witte and other American System allies Czar Nicholas II endorsed the Bering Strait rail connection in 1905, though a tragic turn of fate sabotaged it from unfolding.

Not even the Ottoman Empire remained untouched by the inspiration for progress, as the Berlin to Baghdad Railway was begun with the intention of unleashing a bold program of modernization of southwest Asia.

The American System Touches the Canadian Mind

In Canada, admirers of Lincoln and Henry C. Carey found their spokesman in the great American System statesman Isaac Buchanan (1). Buchanan rose to his highest position of political office in the Dominion of Canada when in April 1864, the new MacDonald-Taché Ministry appointed him the President of the Executive Council. This put him in firm opposition to the Imperial agenda of George Brown, and the later Prime Minister John A. Macdonald, of whom he and all patriotic co-thinkers counted as bitter enemies to Canada’s independence and progress. The policy which Buchanan advocated as he rose to higher prominence was outlined in his December 1863 speech:

“The adoption by England for herself of this transcendental principle [Free Trade] has all but lost the Colonies, and her madly attempting to make it the principle of the British Empire would entirely alienate the Colonies. Though pretending to unusual intelligence, the Manchester Schools are, as a class, as void of knowledge of the world as of patriotic principle… As a necessary consequence of the legislation of England, Canada will require England to assent to the establishment of two things: 1^st, an American Zollverein [aka: Customs Union]. 2^nd: Canada to be made neutral territory in time of any war between England and the United States”. (2)

While the customs union modeled on the Zollverein program of American System economist Friedrich List in Germany laid out by Buchanan, was temporarily defeated during the operation known as the Articles of Confederation in 1867, the potential for its re-emergence returned in 1896 with the election of Wilfrid Laurier, Canada’s next Prime Minister. By 1911, the customs union policy advanced by Laurier, who was a devout admirer of Abraham Lincoln, finally came to fruition. Laurier long recognized that Canada’s interests did not reside in the anti-American program of MacDonald which simply tied Canada into greater dependence towards the mother country, but rather with the interests of its southern neighbour. His Reciprocity program proposed to lower protective tariffs with the USA primarily on agriculture, but with the intention to electrify and industrialize Canada, a nation which Laurier saw as supporting 60 million people within two decades. With the collaboration of his close advisors, Adam Shortt, Oscar Skelton and later William Lyon Mackenzie King, Laurier navigated the minefield of his British enemies active throughout the Canadian landscape in the form of the Masonic “Orange Order” of Ontario, and later, the insidious Round Table movement.

While Laurier’s attempts to actualize a true Reciprocity Treaty of 1911 that involved free trade among North American economies united under a protective tariff against British dumping of cheap goods, it would not last, as every resource available to the British run Orange Order and Round Table were activated to ensure the Reciprocity’s final defeat and the downfall of Laurier’s Liberal government and its replacement by the Conservative government of Sir Robert Borden in its stead.(3) Laurier described the situation in Canada after this event:

“Canada is now governed by a junta sitting at London, known as “The Round Table”, with ramifications in Toronto, in Winnipeg, in Victoria, with Tories and Grits receiving their ideas from London and insidiously forcing them on their respective parties.” (4)

Two years before Laurier uttered this warning, the founder of the Round Table movement, Lord Milner wrote to one of his co-conspirators laying out the strategic danger faced by Buchanan and Laurier’s program with America:

“As between the three possibilities of the future: 1. Closer Imperial Union, 2. Union with the U.S. and 3. Independence, I believe definitely that No. 2 is the real danger. I do not think the Canadians themselves are aware of it… they are wonderfully immature in political reflection on the big issues, and hardly realize how powerful the influences are…” (5)

Without understanding either the existential struggle between the two opposing systems related above, or the creation of the Round Table movement by a new breed of British Imperialist as a response to Lincoln’s international victory in the face of the total bankruptcy of the British Empire at the turn of the last century, then no Canadian could honestly ever make sense of what has shaped his or her cultural and political landscape. It is the purpose of this present report to shed a clear light upon some of the principal actors on this stage of universal history with the hope that the reader’s powers of insight may be strengthened such that those necessary powers of judgment required to lead both Canada and the world out of our current plunge into a new dark age may yet occur.

The Round Table Movement: New Racist Breed, Same Racist Species

The Round Table movement served as the intellectual center of the international operations to regain control of the British Empire and took on several incarnations over the 20th century. It worked in tandem with the Coefficients Club, the Fabian Society, and the Rhodes Trust, all of whom witnessed members moving in and out of each other’s ranks. The historian Carrol Quigley, of Georgetown University wrote of this cabal in his posthumously published “Anglo-American Establishment” (6):

“This organization has been able to conceal its existence quite successfully, and many of its most influential members, satisfied to possess the reality rather than the appearance of power, are unknown even to close students of British history. This is the more surprising when we learn that one of the chief methods by which this Group works has been through propaganda.

It plotted the Jameson Raid of 1895; it caused the Boer War of 1899-1902; it set up and controls the Rhodes Trust; it created the Union of South Africa in 1906-1910; it established the South African periodical The State in 1908; it founded the British Empire periodical The Round Table in 1910, and this remains the mouthpiece of the Group; it has been the most powerful single influence in All Souls, Balliol, and New Colleges at Oxford for more than a generation; it has controlled The Times for more than fifty years, with the exception of the three years 1919-1922, it publicized the idea of and the name “British Commonwealth of Nations” in the period 1908-1918, it was the chief influence in Lloyd George’s war administration in 1917-1919 and dominated the British delegation to the Peace Conference of 1919; it had a great deal to do with the formation and management of the League of Nations and of the system of mandates; it founded the Royal Institute of International Affairs in 1919 and still controls it; it was one of the chief influences on British policy toward Ireland, Palestine, and India in the period 1917-1945; it was a very important influence on the policy of appeasement of Germany during the years 1920-1940; and it controlled and still controls, to a very considerable extent, the sources and the writing of the history of British Imperial and foreign policy since the Boer War.” (7)

To understand the pedigree of the Round Table movement as it was “officially” unveiled in 1910 as the ideological shaper of the policies and paradigm of the new “managerial class” of international imperialists dedicated to the salvation of the British Empire under an “Imperial Federation”, it would be necessary to go back a few decades prior, to 1873-74. It was in this year that a young Canadian named George Parkin lectured at Oxford on the subject imperial union as the sacred duty of all Anglo Saxons to advance. Parkin is popularly heralded by Oxford historians as “the man who shifted the mind of England”.

1873-1902 Empire on the Verge of Collapse: Re-organize or Perish

During this same period, a grouping of Imperial intellectuals known as the “X Club” (f. 1865) centering on Thomas Huxley, Matthew Arnold, Herbert Spencer, and Joseph Hooker were assigned the responsibility to overhaul the British Empire’s controlling ideological structures that had proven themselves worn out. Each would specialize in various branches of the sciences and would all promote gradualist interpretations of change to counteract explanations which required creative leaps. This program was applied with the intention of 1) saving the collapsing empire and 2) establishing the foundation of a new scientific religion based upon Charles Darwin’s highly materialistic model of Natural Selection as the explanation for the evolution and differentiation of new species.

As X Club co-founder Herbert Spencer went on to elaborate the system of “social Darwinism” as the logical outgrowth of Darwin’s system into human affairs, the intention behind the propagation of the Darwinian program was never “the enlightenment liberalism in battle against the ignorant dogmas of religion”, as it is so often recounted by popular historians of science. Rather, the “revolution in science” initiated by the X Club was merely the re-packaging of an idea as old as Babylon: The control of the masses by a system of oligarchical rule, simply under a new type of “scientific dictatorship”. But how, when the demonstration of creative reason’s power to elevate humanity’s conditions of life by encouraging new discoveries and applied technologies, as promoted by the American System of Political Economy, would the world now accept the conditions of mental and political enslavement demanded by the imperialist in a fixed system struggle for diminishing returns?

This was the challenge upon which young Oxford men would set their creative energies using the “scientific” reasoning established by Thomas Huxley’s X Club and for the service of the ruling oligarchical families of Europe. George Parkin like all young Oxford men at this time was highly influenced by this network’s ideas and used them to justify the “natural scientific inevitability” of the hegemony of the strong over the weak. In this case, the Anglo Saxon master race dominating the inferior peoples of the earth. This message could be seen in his 1892 work Imperial Federation: “Nations take long to grow, but there are periods when, as in the long-delayed flowering of certain plants, or in the crystallization of chemical solutions, new forms are taken with extreme rapidity. There are the strongest reasons for believing that the British nation has such a period immediately before it. The necessity for the creation of a body of sound public opinion upon the relations to each other of the various parts of the Empire is therefore urgent.” (8)

In elaborating upon the danger of the British System’s collapse in light of nationalist movements following the American System model, Parkin went on to ask: “Has our capacity for political organization reached its utmost limit? For the British people, this is the question of questions. In the whole range of possible political variations in the future, there is no issue of such far-reaching significance, not merely for our own people but for the world at large, as the question whether the British Empire shall remain a political unit… or yielding to disintegrating forces shall allow the stream of the national life to be parted into many separate channels.” (9)

One of Parkin’s Oxford contemporaries was Alfred Milner, a character who plays a vicious role in our drama as the catalyzer behind the formation of the Round Table Movement. Milner credited Parkin with giving his life direction from that point on (10). It was during 1876 that another contemporary of Milner and Parkin, named Cecil Rhodes left Oxford in order to make a fortune on a cotton plantation in South Africa. All three characters were also highly influenced by John Ruskin, the leader of the “artistic” branch of British Intelligence led by the “Pre-Raphaelite Society”.

The proceeds of Rhodes’ cotton fortune were multiplied many times by ventures into the diamond industry of South Africa, allowing him to rise to gargantuan heights of political power and wealth, peaking with his appointment as Prime Minister of Cape Town and Founder of Rhodesia. The current London-centered mineral cartels Rio Tinto, De Beers, and Lonrho now pillaging Africa, as well as the legacy of Apartheid which has stained so much of South Africa’s history are among two aspects of the scarring legacy Rhodes has passed down to present times.

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Capitalism

The Nature of Socialism Explained in 5 Short Videos by Milton Friedman

By Terence Gillespie May 3, 2019

Socialism is Force

Socialism vs. Capitalism

The Rise of Socialism is Absurd

What is “Democratic” Socialism?

Milton Friedman vs. Socialist Michael Harrington

The Emotional Appeal of Socialism Despite Its Long History of Failure

From Milton Friedman’s Introduction to “The Road to Serfdom” by Frederick Hayek:

To understand why it is that ‘good’ men in positions of power will produce evil, while the ordinary man without power but able to engage in voluntary cooperation with his neighbors will produce good, requires analysis and thought, subordinating the emotions to the rational faculty.

Surely that is one answer to the perennial mystery of why collectivism [and socialism], with its demonstrated record of producing tyranny and misery, is so widely regarded as superior to individualism, with its demonstrated record of producing freedom and plenty. The argument for collectivism is simple if false; it is an immediate emotional argument. The argument for individualism is subtle and sophisticated; it is an indirect rational argument. And the emotional facilities are more highly developed in most men than the rational, paradoxically or especially even in those who regard themselves as intellectuals.

Experience has strongly confirmed Hayek’s central insight—that coordination of men’s activities through central direction and through voluntary cooperation are roads going in very different directions: the first to serfdom, the second to freedom. That experience has also strongly reinforced a secondary theme—central direction is also a road to poverty for the ordinary man; voluntary cooperation, a road to plenty. The battle for freedom must be won over and over again. The socialists in all parties to whom Hayek dedicated his book must once again be persuaded or defeated if they and we are to remain free men.

Cosmocrats

We’ll Be So Much Better Without Them

By Guest Post April 14, 2019

By Paul Rosenberg

There are millions of people – a majority in many places – who believe in a liberty philosophy: That the golden rule is the right way for humans to interact, that centralization is a problem, that leaving markets alone is better than rigging them, and so on. But there is a problem: Rather than pushing forward into action, most of these well-intentioned people limp along in uncertainty.

There are many explanations for this, of course, but the root is probably a fear that rulers have some kind of magic. We fear that without them we’d crash and burn. After all, we’ve been trained in precisely that for a hundred generations. Rationally we know it isn’t true, but emotionally we’re not entirely convinced.

So today I’d like to make an important point: That we’ll be better off – massively better off – without them. The nagging fear that we’re missing something is simply false. The better we get away from rulership, the better off we’ll be.

The Numbers

I like crunching the numbers on these things because the failure of rulership is hidden in plain sight, little recognized. Digging into numbers the rulers themselves publish can help break through the blockage.

And so…

In the US, the social safety net costs at least 2.5 trillion dollars per year. If you add up the federal programs ($717 billion back in 2010 and more now), the state programs ($210 billion in 2010), Medicare and Social Security ($1.3 trillion) and perhaps a few smaller items, it comes to that.

Now, here’s what you should know: That annual spending equates to 7 million new houses, plus feeding 100 million families, plus providing health care for 100 million families. The second year we could build another 7 million houses as well as feeding and doctoring almost everyone in the country… again.

If you have a nagging feeling that these numbers can’t be right, please find them and run them for yourself, it’s not that hard to do and it’s likely to help you a great deal.

Now, let’s look at the “keep us safe” expenses.

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History

Why is ‘separation of church and state’ so misquoted?

By Guest Post February 6, 2019

After King Henry VIII broke from Rome in 1534, England began enforcing Anglican religious uniformity. Some wanted to purify the Anglican Church from the inside, being given the name “Puritans.” Others separated themselves completely from the Anglican Church as dissenters. Of those were Thomas Helwys, John Murton and John Smyth, who founded the Baptist faith in England.

Thomas Helwys wrote “A Short Declaration of the Mystery of Iniquity,” 1612, considered the first English book defending the principle of religious liberty: “Queen Mary … had no power over her subjects consciences … neither hath our Lord the King … power over his subjects consciences. … The King is a mortal man, and not God, therefore he hath no power over the mortal soul of his subjects to make laws and ordinances for them and to set spiritual Lords over them. …”

He continued: “If the King’s people be obedient and true subjects, obeying all humane laws made by the King, our Lord the King can require no more: for men’s religion to God is betwixt God and themselves; the King shall not answer for it, neither may the King be judge between God and man.”

Thomas Helwys was arrested and thrown into London’s notorious Newgate Prison, where he died in 1616.

Another Baptist dissenter, John Murton, was locked in Newgate Prison as punishment for spreading politically incorrect religious views. Prisoners were not fed, but instead relied on charity of friends to bring them food, such as bread or bottles of milk.

Roger Williams referred to John Murton in his work, “The Bloody Tenet (Practice) of Persecution for the Cause of Conscience,” 1644: “The author of these arguments against persecution … being committed (a) prisoner to Newgate for the witness of some truths of Jesus … and having not use of pen and ink, wrote these arguments in milk, in sheets of paper brought to him by the woman, his keeper, from a friend in London as the stopples (corks) of his milk bottle. … In such paper, written with milk, nothing will appear; but the way of reading by fire being known to this friend who received the papers, he transcribed and kept together the papers, although the author himself could not correct nor view what himself had written. … It was in milk, tending to soul nourishment, even for babes and sucklings in Christ … the word of truth … testify against … slaughtering each other for their several respective religions and consciences.”

Williams wrote: “Persecution for cause of conscience is most contrary to the doctrine of Christ Jesus the Prince of Peace. … Enforced uniformity is the greatest occasion of civil war, ravishing of conscience, persecution of Christ Jesus in his servants.”

Roger Williams was a contemporary of John Bunyan, who wrote “Pilgrim’s Progress” while in prison for conscience sake. When the government sought to arrest Roger Williams for preaching religious liberty, he fled to Boston, Massachusetts, on Feb. 5, 1631.

To his dismay, Puritans in Massachusetts had begun enforcing Puritan religious uniformity. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black wrote in Engel v. Vitale, 1962: “When some of the very groups which had most strenuously opposed the established Church of England found themselves sufficiently in control of colonial governments … they passed laws making their own religion the official religion of their respective colonies.”

A controversy raged among inhabitants of Massachusetts, between “a covenant of grace” versus “a covenant of works.” The “covenant of grace” leaders were Sir Henry Vane, Rev. John Cotton, Rev. John Wheelwright, and his sister-in-law, Anne Hutchinson.

Rev. John Wheelwright fled Puritan uniformity in Massachusetts in 1637 and founded Exeter, New Hampshire. Roger Williams was briefly the pastor a church till “notorious disagreements” caused the Massachusetts General Court to censor his religious speech. Upon hearing the sheriff was on his way to arrest him and send him back to England, Williams fled again, in freezing weather, January of 1636. For weeks he traveled alone till he was befriended by the Indians of Narragansett. He founded Providence Plantation, Rhode Island – the first place where the church was not controlled by state.

Roger Williams wrote in 1661: “I having made covenant of peaceable neighborhood with all the Sachems (Chiefs) and natives round about us, and having in a sense of God’s merciful providence unto me in my distress called the place Providence … a shelter for persons distressed of conscience.”

A historical plaque reads: “To the memory of Roger Williams, the Apostle of Soul Liberty, Founder of the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantation.”

The reverse of the plaque reads: “Below this spot then at the water’s edge stood the rock on which according to tradition Roger Williams, an exile for the devotion to the freedom of conscience, landed. 1636.”

In 1638, Roger Williams organized the first Baptist Church in America.

A plaque reads: “The First Baptist Church, Founded by Roger Williams, AD 1638, The Oldest Baptist Church in America, The Oldest Church in this State.”

Physician John Clarke came to Rhode Island and founded another Baptist Church in Newport. Other dissenters arrived in Williams’ Rhode Island Colony, such as William Coddington, Philip Sherman, and Anne Hutchinson. Anne soon left again to settle in the Dutch settlement of the Bronx in New York City, where all her family was scalped and beheaded by raiding Indians in 1643. There was only one survivor, Anne’s nine-year-old daughter Susanna, who was taken captive. After several years, she escaped and married an innkeeper, Samuel Cole. Their descendants included three U.S. presidents.

The Governor of Massachusetts from 1636 to 1637 was Sir Henry Vane, who helped found Harvard. He supported the efforts of Roger Williams. Due to the “covenant of grace” versus “covenant of works” controversy, Governor Sir Henry Vane was not reelected, being replaced by John Winthrop.

In 1639, Sir Henry Vane returned to England where he backed the Puritan Revolution, led by Oliver Cromwell, though he did not support the Rump Parliament which beheaded Charles I.

During the brief English Commonwealth, Vane helped draft for Roger Williams the Patent for Providence Plantation, which was unique in that it did not acknowledge a king, and it guaranteed freedom of religion and conscience. Vane later defended the Patent on behalf of Roger Williams against a competing charter.

Roger William wrote of Vane in April of 1664: “Under God, the great anchor of our ship is Sir Henry Vane … an instrument in the hand of God for procuring this island.”

A statue of Sir Henry Vane is in the Boston Public Library with a plaque that reads: “Sir Henry Vane … An ardent defender of civil liberty and advocate of free thought in religion. He maintained that God, Law, and Parliament were superior to the King.”

The Plantation Agreement at Providence, Sept. 6, 1640, stated: “We agree, as formerly hath been the liberties of the town, so still, to hold forth liberty of conscience.”

The Government of Rhode Island, March 19, 1641, stated: “The Government … in this Island … is a Democracy, or Popular Government; that is to say, It is in the Power of the Body of Freemen orderly assembled.”

Roger Williams responded to Puritan leader John Cotton’s accusations by publishing “The Bloody Tenet (Practice) of Persecution for the Cause of Conscience and Mr. Cotton’s Letter Lately Printed, Examined and Answered in 1644.” In this, Williams first mentioned his now famous phrase, “wall of separation”: “Mr. Cotton … hath not duly considered these following particulars. First, the faithful labors of many witnesses of Jesus Christ, existing in the world, abundantly proving, that the Church of the Jews under the Old Testament in the type and the Church of the Christians under the New Testament in the anti-type, were both separate from the world; and that when they have opened a gap in the hedge, or wall of separation, between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world, God hath ever broken down the wall itself, removed the candlestick, &c. and made his garden a wilderness, as at this day. And that therefore if He will ever please to restore His garden and paradise again, it must of necessity be walled in peculiarly unto Himself from the world, and that all that shall be saved out of the world are to be transplanted out of the wilderness of the world and added unto His Church or garden … a separation of Holy from unHoly, penitent from impenitent, Godly from unGodly.”

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Communism

Watching the World Wake Up From History

By Guest Post January 27, 2019

by Michael J. Kramer

Reviewing “Intellectual Radicalism after 1989: Crisis and Reorientation in the British and the American Left” by Sebastian Berg

For much of the twentieth century, Marxists thought they would be the ones declaring the end of history. Instead, it was a more conservative figure, Francis Fukuyama, who became famous for arguing that the game was up. Worse yet for Marxists, Fukuyama contended that the final destination of the historical dialectic was not a communist state of liberated workers, but rather Western-style capitalism and liberal democracy. This may appear rather quaint given how history has currently led to the Age of Trump and the rise of authoritarian regimes around the world. During the early 1990s, however, the situation looked different. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the demise of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, and the Tiananmen protests in China, Fukuyama’s analysis struck a chord. Leftwing radicalism, or any radicalism for that matter, seemed to be dead. The permanent revolution belonged to be bourgeoisie.

The success of Fukayama’s argument, published first in a 1989 essay for The National Interest _and then as the best-selling book _The End of History and the Last Man, _suggests how difficult the years around 1989 were for the left. While a few theorists of radicalism in Britain and the United States thought that the end of the Cold War heralded new opportunities for emancipatory politics, most despaired of what was to become of socialism. “We are in a period of uncertainty and confusion,” Michael Walzer wrote in _Dissent in 1992, “The collapse of communism ought to open new opportunities for the democratic left, but its immediate effect has been to raise questions about many leftist (not only communist) orthodoxies: about the ‘direction’ of history, the role of state planning in the economy, the value and effectiveness of the market, the future of nationalism, and so on” (7). For British political scientist Andrew Gamble, “Nothing quite as cataclysmic, however, has occurred before in the history of Marxism as the collapse of the Soviet Union between 1989 and 1991.” Writing at the end of the 1990s, Gamble thought that “despite the ossification of Marxism as a doctrine in the Soviet Union, and the open repudiation of the Soviet system by Marxists in other parts of the world, the extent to which in the previous seventy years the meaning of Marxism and of socialism had become inextricably bound up with the fate of the Soviet Union had not been fully appreciated” (8).

These quotations open Sebastian Berg’s book Intellectual Radicalism after 1989: Crisis and Reorientation in the British and the American Left. _Written in the dry, analytic, slow-paced style befitting its origins as a German university dissertation, the book nevertheless manages to reveal vividly how uncertain, if not downright bleak, the situation appeared to left-wing intellectuals during the early 1990s. Yet in carefully tracking writing in four magazines—_Dissent _and _Monthly Review _in the United States and, across the Atlantic, _New Left Review _and _Socialist Register _in England—_Berg also documents how even in this period of bewilderment, new ideas, positions, and imaginings of radicalism were also beginning to take shape. Among them, a “post-Marxist” transition to what would become the “anti-globalization” movement would eventually crystallize in the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle. A renewed curiosity about non-statist modes of radical activity in the realms of community and civil society emerged, both within conventional parliamentarian spaces of reformist politics and also out in the streets. This line of thinking would culminate in the Occupy movement of 2011. More abstractly, but just as importantly, intellectual radicals began to reexamine ideas about history itself: what was it, exactly? And how was history still in flux if no longer on the march toward a clear destination?

Today, rather than communism, it is democratic socialism—the “democratic left” as Michael Walzer called it—that is growing in unexpectedly expansive forms in the United States, particularly after the 2008 financial crisis and in the seemingly endless toll of violence and despair called the War on Terror. The surprising success of the 2016 Bernie Sanders presidential campaign is one indicator of something new afoot. So too, in Britain, the fiery leadership of Jeremy Corbyn has reinvigorated a more left-leaning Labour Party. At the same time, we are in a period of enormous backlash, some of it fostered, ironically, by the very Russian government whose leader, Vladimir Putin, rose to power within the Soviet Union’s security apparatus and then emerged, Phoenix-like, from the ashes of communism’s demise. Most of all, our vexing and traumatic times give the lie to Fukuyama’s prediction. History did not end. In fact, history is very much alive and kicking, in terrifying as well as hopeful ways. A look back to those first uncertain years after 1989 therefore seems worthwhile. What were intellectuals on the left writing in that moment of crisis? And how did their thinking relate to a larger cultural context in which many sang along approvingly with Mike Edwards of the London band Jesus Jones as he sat in front of a television screen “watching the world wake up from history” in the 1991 MTV video for the hit song “Right Here, Right Now,” which quickly becoming something of a soundtrack for the moment?

A number of recent books have, like Berg, begun to address these questions, but they have done so not by directly analyzing intellectuals, but rather by focusing on the realms of popular culture and political economy—and where the two meet. Cultural critic Joshua Clover’s fabulously strange 1989: Bob Dylan Didn’t Have This to Sing About, published in 2009, suggests that a “constellation of changes in pop music around 1989 might be tied to changes in the world at large—that is, might provide ways of thinking about the historical situation of ‘1989’” (7). Listening to grunge, gangsta rap, acid house, and other genres, Clover concludes that music such as Billy Joel’s truly awful “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” released just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, captured “an experience of immutable endlessness, of exploded time and a superfluity of history in the face of which meaningful action is impossible—this is the secret sense of the period in pop music. A feeling, if not a structure” (95). Ultimately, it is the teen pop of the era that best encapsulates the culture of the 1990s: “Teenpop is the dominant’s dominant,” Clover writes, “for the dot-com boom and Pax Americana—the very figure of the endlessly expanding market as celebratory stomping ground for risk-free adolescence…” (104). Brilliantly, even “Fukuyama’s version” of history becomes “more like a pop song” to this cultural critic’s sharp ears. “A formula that seems at once to tell a total story and condense it into a slogan, a logo, an image.” For Clover, “Is that not what the perfect chorus is for—in which ’the end of history’ becomes a hook so catchy and memorable, so improbably pleasing to repeat, that it spins around the globe in a blink?” (8).

Like Clover’s book, Phillip E. Wegner’s Life Between Two Deaths, 1989-2001: US Culture in the Long Nineties, _published in 2009 as well, focuses not only on details of the period drawn from popular culture, but also links them to political economy and asks how history itself was up for grabs during the supposed “end of history” (everybody sing along now!). Wegner, like Clover, takes his intellectual apparatus from cultural studies, and contends that “the 1990s represented a moment of heated debate over the direction of the future, and hence of immense historical possibilities for a global left, possibilities that are now, in the aftermath of the events of September 11, 2001, and the emergent global regime of the so-called war on terror, at risk of being forgotten” (1). Looking to novels and films as his sources more than pop music, Wegner wants to better understand the continuities between the fall of the wall in 1989 and the fall of the Twin Towers in 2001 rather than follow the dominant interpretation of 9/11 as a fundamental rupture from “the way things were.” He concludes that the uncertainty of the “long nineties” is worth revisiting now, particularly for those on the left: as the period just prior to our contemporary moment, it sits in an ambiguous location between the past and the present, and rather than convey “the way it really was,” Wegner seeks to extract its more utopian longings and desires because, he believes, these have the capacity to erupt in a Benjaminian “moment of danger” as a means of “fanning the spark of hope.” In fact those words, from Walter Benjamin’s famous “On the Concept of History” essay, serve as the epigraph for the introductory chapter in _Life Between Two Deaths (1).

These two studies draw upon pop cultural and literary materials to give us a much wider context in which to locate the leftwing magazine writers in Berg’s careful, focused study. In doing so, they reveal the growing distance between the focused orientation of radical intellectuals and the sprawling energies of the larger culture industry in the aftermath of 1989. Clover and Wegner themselves orient their historical thinking to the cultural studies approach of Raymond Williams, Frederic Jameson, Alain Badiou, and, perhaps most of all, Benjamin. The contrast between their adventurously wide-ranging subject matter as well as their theoretical orientation and Berg’s careful intellectual history spadework in examining four small radical journals indicates that odd gaps remain between the fields of cultural studies and intellectual history. Despite the fact that these two fields investigate similar topics, time periods, and methods here, it is almost as if one were watching two ships (of thought) that pass in the night. The historians and the cultural studies scholars both want to know how the history of ideas relate to ideational worlds in richer context; they both are thinking carefully about periodicity and how we organize change and continuity over time; and they both stake their claims in “readings” of artifacts, texts, and other materials. Yet, in the end, they do not meet. While cultural studies scholars such as Clover and Wegner take more risks in querying the uncanny ways in which very different areas of social life (pop culture and political economy) relate to shape the very ways we understand history itself, intellectual historians remain most interested in stabilizing history in order to perceive a certain construction of linearity, relationality, and a more static, organized map of how different levels of social interaction relate to each other. Perhaps, one wonders, these cultural studies scholars might do a bit more contextualization of the linkages between the ephemeral burble of pop and the clanking chains of political realities? And perhaps intellectual historians could use a good dose of the “trippier” approaches to historical inquiry found in cultural studies scholarship. This might especially be the case for trying to make sense of the period after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when, in the historical moment itself, thinkers such as Fukuyama were ready to claim, in eerily pop-song-like tones (as Clover contends), that history had come to an end.

Intellectual historians are, thankfully, taking up this task. There is Andrew Hartman’s A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars, published in 2015, which surveys the culture wars of the 1990s and argues that what binds them together is a debate over “the idea of America” in the aftermath of the tumultuous events of the 1960s, when “new people, new ideas, new norms, and new, if conflicting, articulations of America itself” ruptured the fabric of post-World War II consensus and conformity. So too, James Livingston touches on the culture, politics, and intellectual life of the 1990s his book The World Turned Inside Out: American Thought and Culture at the End of the 20th Century, _published in 2010. Livingston’s book is quirkier than the more well-known _Age of Fracture _by Daniel Rodgers, which came out one year later, however, _The World Turned Inside Out offers what is, in many ways, a more intriguing argument: intellectual life did not merely fragment in the latter half of the twentieth century, Livingston contends, but did so in a particular way—it troubled, and sometimes outright flipped or reversed, the boundaries between insides and outsides, centers of power and margins of powerlessness, the everyday and the epic, the normal and the abnormal, the direct and the mediated, the instinctually felt and the abstractly reasoned, and, perhaps most of all, the 1990s witnessed a breaking down of the line between the internal self and the external world.

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