V.J. Chalupa

On Post-Modern Politics

NOTES

1. Wars were fought and scholars debated about how best to achieve the former and avoid the latter. Until WW I, in many countries prayer books in the hands of ordinary people still reminded them of the eternal consequences of mortal life: there were morning prayers and evening prayers, prayers before and after meals, prayers for all occasions of life, joyous and tragic, prayers of adoration, of thanksgiving and of petition.

2. The breakfast cereals must meet specifications decided upon by politics and bear labels  with information and warnings decreed by politics. The car that takes people to work is to be made according to government specifications, and so must be the gasoline used.  Politics decides whether the fence posts on the market are imported from China or from Mexico, whether the TV set is from Japan or USA. Politics decides questions of life (contraception, abortion) or death (right to die, assisted suicide), politics decides the rate of inflation and unemployment and the size of budget deficits, the fate of other nations.

3. This explains why members of an organization act differently than they would, if the organization were not there. In modern society, actions of individuals would be largely inexplicable without the existence of organizations to which they belong. Why would thousands of people leave in the morning their homes and travel in discomfort to places where they spend their time and energy in a manner unpleasant to them? Why would they distribute printed pieces of paper from house to house to people who do not welcome them and sometimes behave rudely, in other words why would they participate in electoral campaigns? Why would they pay taxes? Only because they belong to organizations to which they have surrendered a portion of their freedom in exchange for the pursuit of a common goal: earning money, have a candidate elected, ensure security and order.

4. In history, there existed side by side the principle of territoriality with the principle of personality; the state's subjects "carried with them" the duty to observe the law of the place from which they came and be exempt from the law of the state on whose territory they were. Remnants of the legal principle of personality survive in the immunity of embassies and their personnel; also United States observes some of its provisions: children born to U.S. citizens acquire American citizenship no matter where born, American laws assume the right to impose legal duties on subsidiaries of U.S. firms in foreign countries and enterprises which belong to U.S. citizens abroad.

5. For instance, a freeway planned by the national government might be compromised by the refusal of a community through whose recreation area the freeway would lead. The proclamation of a city as a nuclear free zone may hamper the construction of a port facility for nuclear submarines.

 6.  In the United States, the right to refuse residency has been taken away from communities by the Supreme Court; in Europe, the same process is taking place by provisions of Europe's supra-state institutions. In the United States, communities protect their character and traditions by other means, such as building codes, taxation, various types of permits, etc.

7.  Assuming ten electoral districts with the same number of voters; if one political party gains victory in two of them by a relationship of 80 to 20% and the other party is victorious in the remaining districts by the relationship of 55 to 45%, then the latter party obtains 8 mandates to 2, i.e., 80% to 20%, in spite of having received only 48% of votes while the defeated party obtained 52%. The key to the defeat of the majority lies in the distribution of voters; if the districts were delineated so that the majority is spread more equally across all districts, the results could correspond to the numeric proportions of votes. Therefore, one precondition for victory in a majority system is the determination of boundaries of electoral districts. Modern technology makes it possible to estimate very accurately which groups of voters will prefer a given party, candidate or program, and to ascertain their territorial distribution. The political party which accordingly decides the boundaries of electoral districts, is ensured political victory or at least advantage in elections for a long time. (This is the reason why electoral districts in the United States resemble the pieces of a very complicated puzzle.)

8. A somewhat similar situation happens in the United States when one political party is victorious in the elections of the President (he is selected on the basis of his position on nationwide matters) and the other political party obtains a majority of congressmen or senators (they are elected on the basis of local interests and issues).

9. Lenin, Works, Russian edition vol. vii, pp. 355 and 361.

10.Organizations in favor of abortion, organizations promoting euthanasia, organizations of feminists, of homosexuals, radical environmentalists, for preferential status of certain minorities, for women priests usually participate in each others' manifestations although, for instance, the interest of homosexuals in the right to abortion or the involvement of radical ecologists in the advocacy of women priests is less than obvious. -- During the debate concerning the release of funds by US AID for worldwide "health services" (which include depopulation measures) the following organizations kept up the campaign in favor of immediate release: IPPF, NOW, National Wildlife Federation, NARAL, PPFA,  Feminist Majority,  ZPG,  InterActivism and about a dozen of smaller groups.

11. "Under pressure from the Department of Education's Civil Rights office to boost girls' scores on the PSAT, the College Board announced that it would add a multiple-choice section on writing and language structure to the test. It has long been known that boys do better than girls on standardized tests, particularly on the math sections. ... This is a "problem" because these tests play a large role in determining National Merit Scholarships, and as a result boys have an 'unfair' advantage in the competition for these awards. The 'solution' is to de-emphasize the math section. This is already accomplished by counting the verbal score twice in the Merit selection process; the new verbal section will further decrease the importance of a high math score." (Excerpt from "The Week," National Review, October 28, 1996.)

12.Historically perhaps the strongest impact had the Marxist use of the expression "exploitation" originally conceived as a technical economic term. American politics is especially fecund in this manipulation of terms. Terms like "gay" have replaced "homosexual," "homophobe" is used instead of "heterosexual," "pro-choice" has replaced "proabortion" and "anti-abortion" has replaced "pro-life." "Critical" has become in selected instances "judgmental," approval of vice has become "compassion." To abandon one's principles in favor of "politically correct" opinions is "maturing" or "growing," faithfulness to opposing principles is "rigidity." In questions concerning human life: euthanasia is "death with dignity," "assisted suicide" or "medicide," an aborted fetus is "uterine tissue," pro-life opinions are always "extreme right" or "religious right" whereas opposite, anti-life opinions are never "left," they are "moderate." Introduction of these biased terms into the public discourse would have been impossible without the control of the media.

13.The Soviet Union managed to surmount German technical superiority and the element of surprise thanks to the numbers and self-sacrifice of its population. On the other hand, Great Britain was unable to maintain the tranquility of its world-wide empire and to protect it from disruption without sufficient numbers of its own soldiers, sailors, administrators and security forces. In Central Europe, the relationship between Czechoslovaks and Germans was 1 to 8; if it had been 3 to 8, Czechoslovakia would not have accepted Munich without fighting.

14. Such a location are the Balkans. When, after the First World War, the great powers were pushed out of that area, the center of tensions became Central Europe where a number of small and weak states replaced the previous great powers of Austria-Hungary, Russia and Germany.

15. An exception in international law is the so-called "live pursuit," i.e., an armed pursuit of retreating insurgents or terrorists across a border provided the army does not penetrate deeply into foreign territory and withdraws immediately after the conclusion of its action.

16. For instance, lately a new infringement on human rights was discovered in California under the designation of "lookism," lookism being avoidance or disapproval of people on the basis of their disgusting looks, offensive habits, careless appearance, obesity, eccentric jewelry.

17. Nonviolence succeeded in India and was crushed in China, nonviolent methods succeeded in the United States when used by the black civil rights movement, and were crushed when applied by the pro-life movement. Self-immolation of opponents of the regime toppled the military government in South Vietnam and utterly failed to shake the communist government in Czechoslovakia.

18. Mr. Feierabend, member of the central organ of Czech anti-Nazi resistance in the first year of occupation and later minister in the exile government, describes how information about the places, dates, and participants of the Center's meeting was bandied around in Prague's cafés by society ladies. Not dissimilar was the situation surrounding the group of the (later executed) Milada Horáková during the first years after communist seizure of power. One of the key resistance groups against communism in Czechoslovakia used to keep minutes of its meetings including lists of participants; when they were seized by the secret police, they constituted indisputable proof of illegal activities.

19. Unless an illegal organization has access to professionally created codes, its safest method of coded communication is the use of books (most often, the bible or a dictionary are used). An indication placed somewhere in the message indicates the page and line which is the key to the code; over such line, the alphabet is superimposed. Every message is then coded on a different basis.

20. In view of these circumstances, the Czech anti-Nazi  resistance developed certain rules for the behavior of an arrested member of the underground. An arrested key member of the resistance or any member having information endangering the organization is to commit suicide by swallowing a poison tablet he is supposed to carry with him all the time in an easily accessible place.  This is usually possible only shortly after arrest, because secret police agents are expecting such attempts. If suicide is impossible or if the arrested person has no information fatal to the organization, he is supposed to deny guilt, deny any relevant knowledge, and give out false information during initial interrogations in order to learn at least approximately what the security organs already know. He should then at an appropriate moment, such as torture, exhaustion and blatant impossibility to persist in his denials fake a break-down and confess, respectively betray the minimum, mostly things he had identified as already known to or easily discoverable by the interrogators, and then to deny to the end knowledge of any information of key importance. He may embellish, but must not change his story, because it would then lose credibility and the interrogations, i.e., torture, would continue past his endurance. Other rules apply in different circumstances, but the basics are generally identical.

21. Argentina suppressed its guerillas only by mass annihilation of actual or suspected sympathizers; they were arrested and disappeared forever; later investigation indicated that some of them were dumped alive from airplanes into volcanoes. By somewhat less drastic measures did Chile rid itself of a communist underground. Iraq applied extermination methods -- use of nerve gas -- to entire villages suspected of supporting Kurdish insurgents. Stalin initiated mass famine in the Ukraine is in this category.

22. During the occupation of Czechoslovakia, German Reichsprotektor Karl Herrman Frank kept in a concentration camp a leader of the Czech resistance Vladimír Krajina and when the collapse of Germany became evident, he tried to induce Krajina to form a Czech government which would assume power from the Germans and thus prevent the takeover by the Czech government in exile. Frank hoped this move would save his life and block the influence of communism in Central Europe. (The plan failed, Krajina refused the offer and Frank was later sentenced and executed.) In Yugoslavia, German authorities used the conflict between resistance forces under Mihajlovi™ loyal to the exiled king and pro-communist ones led by Tito to strengthen the former which in turn occasionally helped the Gestapo to destroy the latter.

23. Literature: E.J. Dionne, Why Americans Hate Politics, New York, 1991; Alvin Gouldner, The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class, New York, 1979; Mickey Kraus,  The End of Equality, New York, 1992; Roger Kimball, Tenured Radicals; Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, New York, 1995,  Robert B. Reich, The Work of Nations, New York, 1992.

24.  "An Economic  Workout," by W.J.Holstein, Dan McGraw and Viva Hardigg, in U.S. News and World Report, November 1996. Geographic and social isolation narrows down the choice of marriage partners: members of the elite marry among themselves and not with members of other social strata -- they are choosing someone whose income is equal or higher, who has a promising career or a well paid job. M. Kraus (in The End of Equality) mentions the example of a lawyer with an income of $60,000 who, in the past, might have married his secretary with an income of $20,000, but at present marries a lady lawyer whose income is also $60,000, while his secretary marries a clerk with an income equal to hers; the disparity between the two families has now increased: $120,000 against $40,000. (The wife's career is a necessary condition for the comfortable, sometimes conspicuous life-style of the elites.)

  Christopher Lash sees the final stage of this development in Hollywood: on one hand film stars and film moguls, on the other hand an army of individuals providing to them personal services: teachers of fencing, dancing, singing, trainers in posture and sports, suppliers of the latest in videos, televisions, telephones, computers and luxury cars, yachts, motor boats and private planes, caretakers of their personal needs, travel and entertainment, all of whose existence depends on the pleasure of their masters. The relationship of these servants towards their customers lacks the personal relationship between servants and masters of the past; it is depersonalized, commercialized, courteous to deferential, in reality personally indifferent and often salacious.

25. One of such processes elevated above other values is self-expression whose extreme examples appear mainly in art. Among them are the "Piss on Christ" sculpture consisting of a plastic crucifix in a bottle filled with the artist's urine, the scene in a New York production where the actress urinates in front of the public, a display in a Chicago museum necessitating that the viewer step on the U.S. Flag -- creations of persons supported by the Endowment for Arts. Another process to which supreme value is attributed, is choice, regardless of outcome.

  The personal lives of Congressman Barnes, the Kennedys and President Clinton are generally known and publicly displayed; this does not prevent them from aspiring for public office -- and attaining it. Still better known are the affairs and scandals of movie and sport stars, singers and actors -- they even have publicity and monetaray value, same as "kiss and tell" books which are best-sellers.

26. In view of the pervasiveness and importance of the use of sex for pleasure and entertainment in elitist culture, it is necessary to state that its separation from reproduction constitutes waste of the most important, because life-giving, material and of nervous energy whose control and spiritualization provides an irreplaceable  source of refinement in human culture -- in manners, literature, music and arts. It is argued that this sublimation of the sexual impulse causes neuroses. It does, but its dissipation has much more serious consequences as roots of the coarsening of western culture, growth of venereal diseases, break-up of family,  criminality, drug abuse, loss of respect for women, neuroses in children, juvenile suicides.

 27.In some schools, the pupils are requested to describe to the class their erotic dreams, phantasies or sexual experimentation, as well as to debate their observing the intimacy of their parents.

28. According to two prestigious Hong Kong dailies the consumption of bodies of aborted fetuses in communist China was reported and verified by United Press International. According to these articles, many Chinese doctors recommend the eating of aborted babies as health food cooked in the soup or stew. Their ingestion helps skin to be smoother, the body stronger and kidneys better. The supply of this health food is sufficient due to the government policy of one child per family. Prices are between $1.28 and 1.50 per piece. Dr. Zou Quin from the Luo Hu Clinic consumed, per her own estimates, more than 100 bodies during the past six months and commented matter-of-factly they would be wasted, if not eaten. According to her opinion, the first babies of young women are the best. (From Human Life International Report of January 1996.)

29.  Culture Wars , Vol. I, No. 9 (February 1996) p.19, commented on a complaint by Ms.Kimberly DuBont against doctor Ricardo Asch from the University of California published in Washington Post. She alleged he stole from the infertility center her fertilized ova and gave them to a research institute for dissection. Ms.DuBont's complaint was that the doctor kidnapped her babies and caused them to be murdered.

  In this connection, it is worthwhile to mention a conversation of Bernard Shaw with a famous actress. She offered to have his child which would combine his brains and her beauty. Shaw's rejoinder: "But what if it has my beauty and your brains?"

30. In 1968 the government of Thailand refused to introduce a birth control program against pressure exerted by a delegation of the World Bank. Pressure continued through refusal of grants, loans or development assistance both from the World Bank and the United States. In 1974, Thailand caved in and within a short time obtained from the two sources assistance amounting to one billion dollars. Since that time, fertility decreased by more than 50%.

31. Some of the most preposterous predictions are in the famous work by Ehrlich, The Population Explosion. Although proven wrong, his thesis of population explosion remains an article of faith by the intellectuals of the movement.

32. In Florida, protected alligators multiplied so that they started to hunt  dogs and cats in peoples' gardens. A similar situation developed in Inverness, a rich suburb of Chicago. Coyotes introduced in the local wooded areas took to killing dogs of the residents, and when they endangered some infants, the citizens decided to hire an exterminator to reduce their numbers. This brought about indignant protests from local environmentalists arguing that it is up to the house owners to take measures for protection of their property and children rather than exterminating the coyotes which, after all, did only what was natural to them.

  The fund raising literature of organizations for protection of endangered species boasts that their efforts prevented the extinction of "the majestic Bengal tiger." Since the tiger is a beast of prey, it is questionable whether the wildlife, cattle and peasantry of Bengal felt the salvaging of tigers as a benefit. Anecdotical evidence of similar conflicts abounds.

33. Two glaring examples of this approach are the case of the snail darter, a two inch fish which feeds by snapping off the extruded eyes of snails; their survival required arresting the completion of a dam which already cost about hundreds of millions of dollars. The other case is that of the spotted owl: to allow some 60 pairs of them to multiply, about 6000 acres of forest were closed to harvesting. Local instances when agricultural activities were forbidden and housing developments stopped in the interest of bird watching or landing of migrating geese are too frequent to be listed. Also some animals, especially birds, laboriously collected and transported to other areas, have the ability and preference to return to their original habitat. The public TV in the Chicago area presented a documentary featuring pictures of protected vultures crowding on roofs of farm houses, depositing their dirt everywhere and protected from extermination. To prevent them from landing on the roofs, the farmer was advised to string wires which would prevent the vultures from gripping the roof tops and landing. The result: the vultures acquired the habit of plucking the wires with their beaks adding a concerto to the bird droppings.

34. Literature: Michel Schooyans, The Totalitarian Trend of Liberalism, St.Louis: Central Bureau, 1997, Bioethics and Population: The Choice of Life , St. Louis, Central Bureau,  1997,  V. J. Chalupa: Catholic Politics? an Examination, Ed.Regnery Books, Chicago, 1970, T§i roky, ed.Melantrich, Prague, 1990, Human Life International 1976-1997, HLI Reports 1979-1997.

35. For instance, in 1983, IPPF received an allocation of 28 million dollars from the U.S. federal budget and grants were made since then regularly in increasing amounts through the State Department's Agency for International Development until 1996 (575 million dollars) decreased to 385 million in 1997. About 50% of these amounts earmarked for health were spent for depoplation measures; during the debate about release of funds AID claimed that any delay would deprive the developing countries of 50,000.000 condoms and several millions of abortifacients, most of these funds disbursed through the International Planned Parenthood Federation.

36. At the UN FAO (UN Food and Agriculture Organization) World Food Summit (November 1996), U.S. Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman voiced a thinly disguised threat that the U.S. stands ready to help those nations that demonstrate the political will necessary to achieve food security, "achieving food security" being a new euphemism for depopulation.

37. Between 1952 and 1991, the amount spent for this purpose totalled 11,123.7 million in constant US dollars of which the 17 developed countries contributed  8194.4, UN specialized agencies 454.1, and the World Bank 1,404.4, which does not include amounts spent by the UNPF. The most comprehensive and accurate study of this matter is the authoritative The Totalitarian Trend of Liberalism by Michel Schooyans, St.Louis: Central Bureau, 1997.

38. At the Cairo Conference, some delegates from the underdeveloped countries protested during the sessions that the entire agenda was devoted to depopulation while the conference's main theme, namely development, was completely ignored. A similar confrontation developed at the Istanbul Conference on the Habitat for Humanity.

39. UNPF executes and coordinates some 2000 birth control programs with an annual expense exceeding 100 million dollars (122.7 million in 1983) to which  the United States contributes 25%, and it finances NGOs promoting birth control such as the those listed below in the section on private organizations. In its report on population for the year 1991, UNPF requested an increase in subsidies for global contraceptive activities from 4.5 billion to 9 billion dollars as the only way of reducing the fertility of the Third World countries from 3.7 children to 3.3 by the year 2000.

40. "Awake Ups" in East Africa, "And the Nile Flows On" in Egypt, "The Equatorial Trilogy" in Indonesia with measurable increases in the use of contraceptives. About the general tendency of future "soap operas" there can be little doubt in view of the composition of the participants of the above "television summit." A 1983 study of American "TV elite" disclosed that 97% of Hollywood's actors, screenwriters, producers and directors supported abortion, and later polls have shown similar results. All major TV networks have gradually increased the pace of breaking traditional moral norms of the majority, representing them as mindless taboos and prejudices and featurimg the ideology of this "herd of independent minds" under the heading of entertainment .

(41.Such a step was the attempt to force a judge in Montgomery to remove the Ten Commandments from his chambers. The pettiness of this obvious personal degradation of the victim's religion evoked more indignation than the inexorable progress of the elitist political program through invisible oppression. It provoked the refusal of the State of Alabama to allow the forced removal and to open a fundamental question of the limits of jurisdiction of federal organs and especially the federal judiciary.