SCHOLAR ISLAND

"Land shall now be farmed by all, rice eaten by all, Clothes worn by all, money spent by all. There shall not be inequality and no person shall be without food or fuel. For under Heaven all belongs to the great family of the Heavenly Father."

Hung Hsiu Ch’uan

(visionary prophet of Taiping uprising)

(see : Gods Chinese Son)

....(T)he weaver's fingers ache...../could you see her weaving,/you'd pity her too!"

-Po Chu-i (AD 772-846)

"You see." I said, "I'm a socialist. I don't think this world was made for a small minority to dance on the faces of everyone else.."

H.G. Wells

   "the mother of the socialist organizations of nineteenth-and twentieth-century Europe and the Americas, was the international organization built up around Guiseppe Mazzini, run directly by an international freemasonic organization, including Britain's Lord Palmerston; this freemasonic organization was a front for a network of wealthy oligarchical families centered in Venice. This included Mazini's Young Europe and Young America organizations, the latter centered in Harvard's "Concord" circles and the South Carolina secessionists. The socialist organizations of nineteenth-century continental Europe, were products of Mazzini's organization, and were run as covert operations of wealthy oligarchcal families. British socialism was created under the direction of the Pre-Raphaelite Society of Oxford university's John Ruskin, with cooperation from the Cambridge Apostles."

-Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

The Power of Reason: 1988

-

"Everybody knows now that Socialism is a proposal to divide-up the income of the country in a new way. What you perhaps have not noticed is that the income of the country is being divided up every day and even every minute at present, and must continue to be divided up every day as long as there are two people left to divide it."

G.B. Shaw

The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism, Communism, Capitalism , Sovietism, and Fascism

"Ownership of the means of production cannot be entrusted to socialistic bureaucrats any more than to monopolistic plutocrats. Three acres and a cow may seem hopelessly out of date as an answer to the cries of the needy-especially in light of the burden of taxation and regulation heaped upon the freeholds of our day. But the great lesson of history is clear enough: when men are left free to faithfully work at home, they are happiest and society is securest."

-James Stuart (1849-1901)

"The contention that the civil government should at its option intrude into and exercise control over the family and the household is a great and pernicious error."

Pope Leo XIII

"The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries."

Winston Churchill

"Socialism was not then either the popular or unpopular vogue it has since become, but it was much more of a cult, with affiliation in directions now quite disowned-with Theosophy, arts and crafts, vegetarianism, the ‘simple life’ and almost, as one might say, the musical glasses."

Orage 1926

"That dreary tribe of high-minded women and sandal wearers and bearded fruit juice drinkers who come flocking toward the smell of 'progress' like bluebottles to a dead cat."

George Orwell's definition of a socialist, quoted in the New Yorker

"Of all the tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely expressed for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent ideological busybodies."

-C.S. Lewis (1898-1963)

"In fact, the rich would be eager as the present class of the poor to become socialists if they should find themselves suddenly dispossessed. Society as it exists by the accumulation of wealth is not the result of needs that have been overcome but of greed and a "Terrible impatience."

William Hubben

"Feed liberal ideas or planned-economy measures or even a passion for social justice into one end of the gigantic automatic grinder that is the democratic or Marxist nation-state, and the result will be the same: you’ll get canned Totalitarianism at the other end."

Denis de Rougemont

The Last Trump

"Totalitarianism is much more than mere bureaucracy. It is the subordination of every individual's whole life, work, and leisure, to the orders of those in power and office. It is the reduction of man to a cog in an all-embracing machine of compulsion and coercion. it forces the individual to renounce any activity of which the government does not approve. it tolerates no expression of dissent. It is the transformation of society into a strictly disciplined labor-army (as the advocates of socialism say) or into a penitentiary (as the opponents say). At any rate it is the radical break from the way of life to which the civilized nations clung in the past....(Modern socialism) is totalitarian in the strict sense of the term. It holds the individual in tight rein from the womb to the tomb. At every instant of his life the "comrade" is bound to obey implicitly the orders issued by the supreme authority. The State is both his guardian and his employer. The State determines his work, his diet, and his pleasures. The State tells him what to think and what to believe in."

Ludwig von Mises 

"The circumstances of human society are too complicated to be submitted to the rigor of mathematical calculation."

Marquis De Custine (1790-1857)

Empire of the Czar, Journey through Eternal Russia (1843)

"Socialists make the mistake of confusing individual worth with success. They believe you cannot allow people to succeed in case those who fail feel worthless."

Kenneth Baker

   "In socialist theology, this class is the proletariat, the Chosen People of the Marxist faith. The proletariat, according to Marx, is a class "which has a universal character by reason of the universality of its sufferings, and which does not lay claim to any specific rights because the injustice to which it is subjected is not particular but general.....It cannot liberate itself without breaking free from all the other classes of society and thereby liberating them also.....It stands for the total ruin of man, and can recover itself only by his total redemption." 

David Horowitz

The Politics of Bad Faith

"The socialist crusader interprets the conduct of others according to his own idea of History.....Because he proclaims the universal truth of a single view of History, he reserves the right to interpret the past as he pleases."

-Raymond Aron

The Opium of the Intellectuals

"Industrial crisis, unemployment, waste, widespread poverty, these are the incurable diseases of capitalism."

Joseph Stalin (Speech 1931)

"The basic economic law of contemporary capitalism could be formulated as follows: Assurance of maximum capitalist profits....by means of enslavement, and systematic plundering of the peoples of other countries, especially backward countries."

Joseph Stalin

Book: "Koba the Dread: Laugher and the twenty million" by Martin Amis

"It (Socialism) is not merely a doubt about God; it is rather specially a doubt about Man. The old morality, the Christian religion, the Catholic Church, differed from all this new mentality because it really believed in the rights of men. That is, believed that ordinary men were clothed with powers and privileges and a kind of authority. Thus the ordinary man had....the right of property......;a right to judge about his own health, and what risks he would take with the ordinary things of his environment.....;a right to judge of his children's health, and generally to bring up children to the best of his ability.....Now in these primary things in which the old religion trusted a man, the new philosophy utterly distrusts a man."

-G.K. Chesterton

"What happened to socialism?

   It succumbed to the spirit of capitalism which it had wanted to replace. Instead of understanding socialism as a movement for the liberation of man, many of its adherents and its enemies alike understood it as being exclusively a movement for the economic improvement of the working class. The humanistic aims of socialism were forgotten, or only paid lip service to, while, as in capitalism, all the emphasis was laid on the aims of economic gain. Just as the ideals of democracy have lost their spiritual roots, the idea of socialism lost its deepest root-the prophetic-messianic faith in peace, justice , and the brotherhood of man. "

-Erich Fromm  from the foreword of Looking Backward/Edward Bellamy

"Q. In the race between adaption and disaster, who's winning?

A. As between modern-day state socialism and capitalism, capitalism is winning. But that does not interest me as much as the limits of adaptation of capitalism. I have written, half tongue-in-cheek, half seriously, that socialism is the last stage of capitalism. That brings a smile to everybody's face. But what I mean by socialism is Western bourgeois ideas of individual freedom, participation, democracy, equality. All these words that we like so much re, it seems to me, associated with the rise of the bourgeois culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Capitalism is thus moving in a generally "socialist" direction. However, history is not a railroad track and it would be foolish to say that all capitalist nations will, in the fullness of time, become Scandinavias. They will not. Countries have their cultural and political differences. I am quite sure that countries can find branch lines from the main track, maybe disastrous ones like "national socialism" or Fascism, or maybe simply ones that end in a kind of cultural or political stagnation or a morass of indecision and blindness. I feel myself that the United States is right now in such a position of indecision and blindness, not knowing where we are and not knowing where to go. We might easily move to the right. But for me the more interesting question is how far capitalism might move in a socialist direction."

Robert L. Heilbroner

Behind the Veil of Economics

   "The first of May used to be the day on which the Soviet Union celebrated its Communist system. Though the Soviet Union is history, May Day remains a public holiday in Finland, Norway, Sweden, Germany, Belgium, France, Spain, Portugal, and Italy. In Oslo, the annual parade always begins in Youngstorget, a dreary square dominated by the Socialist Realist-style headquarters of the Labor Party and the rusty-metal headquarters of the all-powerful Norwegian Confederation of Trade Unions. The marchers are always mostly young-too young to have any meaningful memories of Soviet Communism. On May Day 2005, it took over an hour for the parade to file past. While the dozens of marching bands played a bizarre mixture of creaky old Communist anthems (such as "The Internationale") and kitschy homecoming-parade fare ("Hello Dolly"), participants waved red flags and carried huge banners that read: "Stop occupation and terror-stop the U.S. and Israel!" "Reject globalized capitalism-yes to socialism!" Non-socialist politics is greed reduced to a system!" and "We are eternal optimists and proud socialists!"

Bruce Bawer

While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying The West from Within

   "Chavez is called a Marxist and a socialist. He is neither. His reformist, cooperative and redistributionist program, and his handling of oil wealth, is clearly "Norwegian-ist." Chavez is a dramatist, calling his Scandinavian-style reforms the "Bolivarian revolution." It seems to drive Washington just crazy that brown people are demanding Nordic privileges."

-Greg Palast

Armed Madhouse

"How ludicrous I find the socialists, with their nonsensical optimism concerning the "good man", who is waiting to appear from behind the scenes if only one would abolish the old "order" and set all the "natural drives" free."

-Nietzsche   Will to Power #755

"Socialism has not consciously willed the destruction of society. it believed it was creating a higher form of society. But since a socialist society is not a possibility every step towards it must harm society."

-Ludwig Von Mises, Socialism

"....there is little reason to believe that....socialism will mean the advent of which orthodox socialists dream. It is much more likely to present fascist features. That would be a strange answer to Marx's prayer. But history sometimes indulges in jokes of questionable taste."

-Joseph A. Schumpeter  ,Capitalism, socialism and Democracy

"Private capital tends to become concentrated in a few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of the small ones....The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio education). it is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizens to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights."

-Albert Einstein Monthly Review  "Why I Am a Socialist" 1949

"Although our socialist system is still imperfect and has suffered disruption, it much better than the capitalist system....Our system will improve more and more with the passage of time. By absorbing the progressive elements of other countries, it will become the best in the world. Capitalism can never achieve this. It is absolutely wrong to lose faith in socialism and think that it is inferior to capitalism just because we have made mistakes."

-Deng Xiaoping

".....The essential fact of the history of 1919 which does not figure in official chronicles, consists in the single-mindedness of the ruling classes of every country to arrest the march of humanity towards socialism. In this way a new problem was added to all the national and international problems of the world: the problem of class. Within a few years that problem dominated all others. It upset all the traditional national policies of the preceding century."

-Pierre Van Paassen

Days of Our Years

"Socialism can only arrive by bicycle." (100,000.000 bicycles made per year)

Jose Antonio Vierra Gallo (ed note: as of 2004 China is now going full blast for the automobile & is affecting the world market in bicycle's by dumping their surplus bikes on the world market)

"I live in Norway, which meets Kelly's definition of old socialism, The currency is strong, and health care and education are free. When you retire, the state pays you a pension. The unemployment rate is 3 percent. Some of Norway's newspapers  are controlled by the government. The state-owned radio station satirizes political leaders. So much for "harsh penalties for criticizing leaders" and "forced labor in government factories."

Mads Tobias  & Wichstrom Hunter   Kekkestua, Norway   letter to editor Wired Mag Aug 2009

"Economy! We have fulfilled the annual

plan:

1,00 street hustlers: 2,000 young

   prostitutes; 8,000 opportunists.

Plus, 300 non-mentally disabled and the

   syndrome of mediocrity.

Economy! In times of a Havana that is

   unrecognizable,

By sweeping the house, you cleanse the

   economy.

Strong legs for the rocky path,

Legs that are only for the percentages  of

 economic shame.

Shameful economy! Economy of shame!

Economy of shame!"

-Yoani Sanchez   Cuban writer

See: Virtually Outspoken in Cuba by Larry Rohter  New York Times  Oct 18, 2009

"On an Island where acquiring cement, cinderblocks or steel is comparable to obtaining a bit of lunar dust, destroying in order to build has become a common practice. They are specialists in removing bricks of clay intact from the walls in which they have been embedded for 80 years; experts in disengaging blue ceramic tiles from demolished mansions: and skillful "deconstructors" who extract metal beams from heaps of rubble. They use what they have recovered to create their own living space, this in a country where no one can legally buy a house. The main "quarries" where they obtain their material are houses that have collapsed or workplaces that the state's inactivity has left abandoned for many years. They fall upon these with an efficiency in their plunder that one would wish to see in the lethargic bricklayers working for a salary.

   Some of these skillful recyclers have died when a roof collapses or when a wall too riddled with holes at its base falls. But some times luck smiles on them, and they find a toilet without cracks or an electrical outlet that the owners of the demolished house could not-in their haste-take with them. A kilometer from the looting site, a small house of tin and zinc slowly begins to change. They have added the tile pavement from a building that collapsed at the corner of Neptuno and Aguilo, a piece of the exterior grating from an abandoned mansion on Linea Street and even a stained-glass window plucked from a convent in the old part of Havana. Within this home that is the fruit of looting, a family-equally ravaged by life-dreams of the next factory to be dismantled and carried away on their shoulders."

-Yoani Sanchez

Ibid

"Make no mistake about it, America is a Socialist Country. Indeed, it would be quite impossible to find any country that isn't, since the term simply connotes some degree of public funded benefits which accrue to all of society's members, without them there would be no society."

-Tom Blees

Prescription for the Planet

   "Both capitalism and socialism engage in redistribution. It's just that capitalism inherently redistributes costs from the rich to the poor, as opposed to socialism, which redistributes income."

-Bob Powell Colorado Springs Independent Nov 5-11 2009

   "it was during he Cold War that Americans became so adversely sensitized to socialism as a step toward the implied evil of Communism that still to this day millions of people cannot discuss the subject rationally. Decades of Cold War paranoia and the red-scare tactics that led to McCarthyism, combined with unrelenting political propaganda between America and the former Soviet Union, became an ideological war internalized as good versus evil on both sides.

   But what does the word socialism really mean? There are many theoretic varieties of socialism, but most revolve around economic systems in which cooperation trumps competition, and collective ownership trumps private property rights. The most extreme example of socialistic behavior is military service, in which members of the group are actually called upon frequently to give up their lives to save others. If you point this out during political discourse, however, you will likely be regarded as completely mad by those who still recoil at the mere mention of anything that appears to be overly shared. Military service is not generally thought of as socialistic, but that's indeed what it is.

   Economic socialism is simply an ethos that enlarges the group and increases the equity of ownership on the part of individuals in the group. it's neither good nor evil in and of itself any more than capitalism is good or evil without regard to the conditions in which it operates. Social security is somewhat of a mixture of socialism and capitalism because what one receives in benefits is dependent in part on the amount of one's contribution."

-Charles Hayes

September University

"...The socialism of Marx, Fourier, Kropotkin, Owen, Jaures, Rosa Luxemburg, and Gorki was the most important genuine religious movement of the the last hundred years. The breakdown of the humanistic tradition, beginning with the World War of 1914, almost completely destroyed this nontheistic "religious" movement. Nietzsche said that God was dead; what happened after 1914 was that man was dead. Only in small circles and among a few individuals did the humanist spiritual tradition continue; its greatest representatives in our times are men like Gandhi, Einstein, and Schweitzer."

-Erich Fromm Beyond the chains of Illusion (1968)

   "We started to dismantle communism six years ago without the slightest flirtation with the possibility of reforming it. We knew there was no fundamental structural difference between communism and socialism, that the system was not reformable, that there was nothing like socialism with a human face, and that there was no third way between capitalism and socialism. At least in our country, our position on that was clear and straightforward. Soon after the break, my almost innocent remark at the World Economic Forum in Davos that "the third way is the fastest way to the third world" became quite popular."

-Vaclav Klaus

Renaissance: The Rebirth of Liberty in the Heart of Europe

   "Indeed, we have a rich heritage which waits for its realization. But in contrast to the men of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who had an unfailing belief in the continuity of progress, we visualize the possibility that, instead of progress, we may create barbarism or our total destruction. The alternative of socialism or barbarism has become frighteningly real today, when the forces working toward barbarism seem to be stronger than those working against it. But it is not the "socialism" of managerial totalitarianism which will save the world from barbarism. it is the renaissance of humanism, the emergence of a new West which employs its new technical powers for the sake of man, rather than using man for the sake of things; it is a new society in which the norms for man's unfolding govern the economy, rather than the social and political process being governed by blind and anarchic economic interests."

-Erich Fromm

Beyond the Chains of Illusion

"On the debris of a dead imperialism, the victorious people would create with extreme rapidity a civilization thousands of times higher than the capitalist system, and a truly beautiful future for themselves."

-Mao Tse-Tung The Peking People's Daily (April 19,1960)

"Government and monopoly are natural allies. Both share the ideology of socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor. In this view, the bracing chill of capitalist competition is good for the poor; it toughens their fiber so they can better work their way up out of poverty. The rich, on the other hand, have already made that climb and are tired; they deserve to be excused from further effort. They are to be supported under our form of socialism."

-David Hapgood

The Screwing of the Average man

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Book: "The First Bolshevik" by Albert L. Weeks

Book: "Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism" by Joshua Maraochik

Book: "Whither Marxism? ed B. magnus & S. Cullenberg

Book: "The Opium of the Intellectuals" by Raymond Aron

Book: "One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century" by Donald Sassoon

Book: "The Democratic Socialism of Emile Vandervelde: Between Reform and Revolution" by Janet Polasky

Book: "Harp Song For a Radical: The Life and Times of Eugene Victor Debs" by Maugerite Young

Book: "The Diaries of Beatrice Webb" Ed. by Norman & Jeanne MacKenzie

Book: "It Didn't Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States" by S.M. Lipset & G. Marks