…by ending their attempt at Marxism.
It’s an old story, but many remain unaware of it. I doubt that it’s taught that way in school. It certainly wasn’t when I was a kid. We got the old false story about how the Indians taught them how to farm and fish, and all was well.
And in the spirit of Thanksgiving, I’m going to rant about the mayor of Seattle, the city with a statue of Lenin, and those liberals who claim Thanksgiving is a secular celebration and openly eschew and mock our revered traditions.
From the Washington Post
A Christian would never pardon a processed vegetable product. That’s pagan. The mayor pulled his stunt because he’s out of touch with the religious foundations of the United States, and indeed of Western civilization. Among those roots are the ancient history of feasts, sacrifices, and pardons, from Cain and Abel, to Abraham and Isaac, to the destruction of the Second Temple, to Jesus’s death and resurrection, to the first Thanksgiving. Seattle’s mayor mocks both God and us, and invites the very destruction of his city. He fears not, and Psalms 111:10 says:
Wisdom says that vegetable sacrifices just don’t cut it, starting right out with Genensis 4:3-5 (KJV)
The pardoning of a molded vegetable byproduct brings Seattle no respect from God, just as Cain found out. The mayor is thumbing his nose, and that can have serious consequences for their city, as alluded to in Hosea 8:13-14
This point is reiterated time and time again throughout the Bible, and yet the heathen hippies of Seattle are heedless of the warnings, such as the one in 1 Samuel 12:14,15
And if that’s not enough of a warning from the Judeo-Christian perspective, the mayor’s Tofurkey stunt also runs counter to the rituals of pagan sacrifice as well. From “The Cabin in the Woods” – page 28:
Seattle, like all cities, must respect the traditions or lose God’s favor. If they lose His protection then all they can do is trust to the ancient ritual punishment of the five, and we’re not talking about five vegetables. Joss Whedon explained how that ritual works, and did so in great detail. We all know who the five are (paraphrasing from the script):
The whore. She is corrupted. She must die first. The athlete, the scholar, the fool. All suffer and die at the hands of the horror they have raised, leaving the last, the virgin, to live or die as fate decides. If that sacrifice fails, the ancient gods awaken. The sleeping gods. The giants in the Earth that used to rule it. If they are not appeased by the ritual they will bring about the agonizing death of every human soul on the planet.
This is open knowledge to every horror fan who was properly educated with Texas approved schoolbooks, and the hippies in Seattle would be wise to repent lest they die in agony and fire, with demons and monsters feasting on their screaming souls. They can’t possibly complete the pagan ritual – because although Seattle has plenty of whores, athletes, scholars, and fools, lots and lots of fools – it is plum out of virgins. If they go the pagan route they’re screwed.
So their mayor would be wise to stick with what’s safe and traditional, and pardon actual turkeys instead of molded tofu, and learn something about our culture and- history.
But he’s gay, so that makes up for everything. Homosexuals don’t commit crimes.
In all fairness to Karl Marx, he wasn’t born until 1818, so he could not have given them their ideas or ideologies. Their failure was their own fault.
It was the same idea. It’s one of the oldest ideas in the world. Marx just codified it.
Ehh, Christian utopian socialism and Marxism are fruit of the same tree, but I wouldn’t call them “the same idea”. Marx had a lot of distinctly non-Christian scientism-inflected ideas, as well as the whole Hegelian dialectic approach, which aren’t really related to the covenant-based utopianism of the Pilgrims, the Fourier and Owens utopians, and pretty much anyone who takes the political ideas of the Early Church seriously.
Also, Marx operated on that middle-modern European conceit of class above all things, which is not at all what you find in typical left-wing Christian notions of “charity” and brotherhood. It’s a relatively painless move from Christian socialism into the more nerfed versions of Marxian socialism, but it is still a move.
The fundamental idea of Marxism, and socialism in general, is that an individual’s needs can be determined (and enforced) by someone else. All other differences between flavors of that idea are trivial in comparison.
Is a monastery under Benedictine rule “Marxist” in any reasonable sense? Most Christian utopian projects are attempts to extend the monastic ideal across an entire organic community, whereas your typical monastic establishment is supported by a greater community of secular order, self-organized in the usual fashion, and often obliged to support the monks either through basic piety or by donation or assignment of assets by powerful benefactors.
The two are actually intimately entwined. There were more attempts at setting up Christian communes in America, almost always abysmal failures, of course, and in the 1800’s British Industrialist Robert Owen financed several more disastrous attempts. As one diary recounted, “The pigs are running through the fields, the weeds overgrow the crops, and all the men do is stand around accusing each other of not working.” Robert Owen was receiving reports, but flat out lying to the English socialists who were following the experiments. One of those who was initially doubtful about socialism but became convinced it would work based on Owen’s false reports was Frederick Engels, Marx’s collaborator. Had the truth of every attempt at forming communal Christian communities since Plymouth Rock been openly admitted, Marxism might never have been born.
the city with a statue of Lenin.
The city with a revered statue of Lenin in the district of Fremont whose motto is “Center of the Universe”. And calling the occupants of Fremont ‘hippies’ is a nearly unforgivable insult on many fronts: their hygiene, taste, and sanity to name just a few.
On another note, my Thanksgiving was filled with turkey and stuffing and I got to listen to stories of riding the vomit comet in 1968 from Bill Cloyd, who used to work with NASA and who is good friends with Story Musgrave (our Thanksgiving topic is usually rocketry). On his flights there was a big box full of rocks in the rear of the aircraft, and on the missions where they were used, the lid would be flown open while the plane flew a 1/6th G profile, and astronauts would jump in and practice picking them up. There was also a big cylindrical section in the back that was classified, because astronauts were using it to practice working in space by sticking themselves to a surface with Velcro so they could turn a wrench.
Let me get this, it was classified to do what Stanley Kubrick showed in Cinerama in 1968?
He’s getting on in years and some details may be a bit cloudy. I surmise that they told him that the idea had been kept secret when they were first trying it on the comet earlier in the 1960’s.
Marxists suffer form the, “Next time we’ll do it better.” syndrome. They do not realize that the reason it fails is an intrinsic flaw that cannot be overcome.
I ususally get “That wasn’t true Marxism/socialism/communism.” whenever I bring up the USSR or China; I haven’t gotten a cogent answer why not though.
I have had fun with “Real Capitalism has never been tried either! So, until you can give me an example of the attempt at “Real Capitalism” failing as bad as all the attempts to create “Real Communism”, why not go with the system that feeds people so well they get fat?”.
The fools who say “That wasn’t true Marxism” don’t know Karl from Groucho. I think the problem is one of two things:
1. They are unfamiliar with a key component of Marxism, the dictatorship of the proletariat – which the USSR and Red China achieved.
2. These dictatorships didn’t proceed as Marx envisioned. They did not make any progress toward achieving the classless society.
Regarding Point 2, Marx was boneheadedly naive about human psychology. As Rule of Acquisition 284 states, “Deep down everyone’s a Ferengi. ” You give people monopoly power over resources, they will never let go willingly without coercion. Humans are driven by self-interest by nature, and Marxism can’t destroy that instinct. Marx thought the dictatorship would share everything evenly over time. He was an idiot.
Leftism in general, and Marxism specifically, has to deny the existence of human nature.
Hmmm, have you ever heard someone say that Obama isn’t a true progressive?
They don’t see the intrinsic flaw because they want something better than what they see as the immoral exploitations of capitalism, and therefore their alternative _has to_ work right if done right. The flood of evidence of failed socialist experiments – not to mention murderous ones – counts for nothing beside that.
If PilgrimCare had been implemented, it would have been a more fair and more just society.
Even as a kid, the Thanksgiving story made no sense. They lived in Europe. 90-99% of labor were farmers. None of them knew how to do it? We’re supposed to believe they were just city slickers stumbling over a plow like a Kirstie Alley movie? I usually got in trouble asking those questions.
They actually were city slickers. Most of them were tradesmen (cobblers, carpenters, printers, tailors, etc. They weren’t ideal colonists from that standpoint. Also, the original plan was to go to Virginia, where the winters weren’t as harsh and the growing season longer. They ended up in New England because they got blown off course. As I point out in the book, the original Jamestown settlers weren’t ideal, either, in terms of skills, other than fighting (and there were essentially no women). To say that early English settlements were poorly planned would be an understatement.
Oops. On further reading, while I’d thought they were headed for Virginia, they were actually planning to settle the mouth of the Hudson, in present-day New York or New Jersey. So they weren’t as far off course as I’d thought.
It’s too bad you got into trouble asking reasonable questions. At the very least, a teacher should be able to show you the section of the library where there are books on the subject (or an online site.)