Dear Friends,
WARNING: This is quite depressing. It's also quite true. The highlighted word 'fatally' is Mr. Robert's apparent defeatest conclusion. I'm at least 1/2 of 1% more optomistic than him that America will rise again.
Oscar
Paul Craig Roberts (archive)
July 12, 2000
A house divided
Now that the Fourth of July is over, let's be honest with ourselves about our country. Abraham Lincoln said that "a house divided against itself cannot stand." Lincoln was speaking geographically. Today our only unity is geographical. We are a land bordered East and West by the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and North and South by Canada and Mexico.
Lincoln would tremble at the divisions in the American house. Not even a Grant and a Sherman could force the country together again. Americans are no longer a people with a common heritage, sharing common values, aspirations and a mother tongue.
Our divisions are not merely political, or along economic or class lines. We are divided in new ways that reflect a fatal disintegration.
Feminists have divided women against men. Politicians have divided "people of color" against whites. Homosexuals are divided against heterosexuals. "Child advocates" have divided children against parents and public schools against family. Education is used against religion and a common heritage.
Divorce laws have divided wives from husbands, as Jed Abraham makes clear in his new book, "From Courtship to Courtroom: What Divorce Law is Doing to Marriage." Women have been empowered to divorce at will and to expropriate the husband of income, wealth and children, regardless of fault.
Our multicultural tower of Babel is divided by 350 languages. "Foreign" languages are no longer foreign in America. Neither is their broadcast.
The multiple divisions that have shattered our society are not confined to debate clubs or sophomoric media rant. They are institutionalized in the laws of the land.
In our present legal system, the pilot of a Japanese aircraft that attacked Pearl Harbor is preferred over the U.S. sailor on whom the bombs fell in matters of employment, university admission, government contracts or commercial loan applications. A recent immigrant who is a descendant of an African or Arab slave-trader enjoys the same preferment over the white descendant of an abolitionist of the Civil War era.
Americans have watched for three decades while federal courts and legislators overturned the equal standing of citizens in law. We now have "preferred" categories of people with special legal rights, like the aristocrats of old.
Originally, liberal elites justified overturning our constitutional system in the name of more rapid integration of blacks. Today, integration has lost its political correctness. The new legal privileges are now justified in the name of ensuring multiculturalism -- the opposite of assimilation. The new privileged groups have even been obliged by the creation of new crimes that can only be committed against them.
While this has been happening, the income tax burden has been shifting to a smaller and smaller group of people who are highly productive, English-speaking and almost entirely white. This non-preferred group of legally second class citizens is ruthlessly exploited. Comprising 10 percent of taxpayers, they shoulder over 63 percent of the income tax burden. Their estates are confiscated at death.
Historically, this group provided the leadership that made our country successful. Today this group is tarred as the "white-male hegemonic order." Breaking it apart is deemed to be more important than winning World War II.
Things that men loved have been taken away. They have lost their clubs and playing fields, military schools and the military itself. A man no longer has a wife who joins her fate with his. Instead, he has unlimited liability in a business arrangement that has a 50-50 chance of failure. In a work environment, he dare not hold a woman or minority accountable, as only he can be guilty by accusation alone of sexual harassment and racial discrimination. His paternal authority long gone, he cannot discipline his children without the risk of interference by Child Protective Services.
The private loyalties that once united people have fallen to state intrusion. Government now tries to regulate by law what formerly was regulated by behavior. To ensure against behavior's return, a college recently banned the use of the words "ladies and gentlemen."
In the next war, who is going to fight for the country? The feminists and the homosexuals? The non-English speaking non-assimilated racial minorities? With the elitists' war against the Second Amendment and guns, and boys expelled from school for playing cops and robbers at recess, where will the young men come from who can shoot straight?
Conservative military analysts still worry and fret about a terrorist attack and a future adversary. But the adversaries many Americans experience are right here at home. They are more sanguine about Washington going up in smoke and less certain that life under a conqueror would be any different than it is today.
WARNING: This is quite depressing. It's also quite true. The highlighted word 'fatally' is Mr. Robert's apparent defeatest conclusion. I'm at least 1/2 of 1% more optomistic than him that America will rise again.
Oscar
Paul Craig Roberts (archive)
July 12, 2000
A house divided
Now that the Fourth of July is over, let's be honest with ourselves about our country. Abraham Lincoln said that "a house divided against itself cannot stand." Lincoln was speaking geographically. Today our only unity is geographical. We are a land bordered East and West by the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and North and South by Canada and Mexico.
Lincoln would tremble at the divisions in the American house. Not even a Grant and a Sherman could force the country together again. Americans are no longer a people with a common heritage, sharing common values, aspirations and a mother tongue.
Our divisions are not merely political, or along economic or class lines. We are divided in new ways that reflect a fatal disintegration.
Feminists have divided women against men. Politicians have divided "people of color" against whites. Homosexuals are divided against heterosexuals. "Child advocates" have divided children against parents and public schools against family. Education is used against religion and a common heritage.
Divorce laws have divided wives from husbands, as Jed Abraham makes clear in his new book, "From Courtship to Courtroom: What Divorce Law is Doing to Marriage." Women have been empowered to divorce at will and to expropriate the husband of income, wealth and children, regardless of fault.
Our multicultural tower of Babel is divided by 350 languages. "Foreign" languages are no longer foreign in America. Neither is their broadcast.
The multiple divisions that have shattered our society are not confined to debate clubs or sophomoric media rant. They are institutionalized in the laws of the land.
In our present legal system, the pilot of a Japanese aircraft that attacked Pearl Harbor is preferred over the U.S. sailor on whom the bombs fell in matters of employment, university admission, government contracts or commercial loan applications. A recent immigrant who is a descendant of an African or Arab slave-trader enjoys the same preferment over the white descendant of an abolitionist of the Civil War era.
Americans have watched for three decades while federal courts and legislators overturned the equal standing of citizens in law. We now have "preferred" categories of people with special legal rights, like the aristocrats of old.
Originally, liberal elites justified overturning our constitutional system in the name of more rapid integration of blacks. Today, integration has lost its political correctness. The new legal privileges are now justified in the name of ensuring multiculturalism -- the opposite of assimilation. The new privileged groups have even been obliged by the creation of new crimes that can only be committed against them.
While this has been happening, the income tax burden has been shifting to a smaller and smaller group of people who are highly productive, English-speaking and almost entirely white. This non-preferred group of legally second class citizens is ruthlessly exploited. Comprising 10 percent of taxpayers, they shoulder over 63 percent of the income tax burden. Their estates are confiscated at death.
Historically, this group provided the leadership that made our country successful. Today this group is tarred as the "white-male hegemonic order." Breaking it apart is deemed to be more important than winning World War II.
Things that men loved have been taken away. They have lost their clubs and playing fields, military schools and the military itself. A man no longer has a wife who joins her fate with his. Instead, he has unlimited liability in a business arrangement that has a 50-50 chance of failure. In a work environment, he dare not hold a woman or minority accountable, as only he can be guilty by accusation alone of sexual harassment and racial discrimination. His paternal authority long gone, he cannot discipline his children without the risk of interference by Child Protective Services.
The private loyalties that once united people have fallen to state intrusion. Government now tries to regulate by law what formerly was regulated by behavior. To ensure against behavior's return, a college recently banned the use of the words "ladies and gentlemen."
In the next war, who is going to fight for the country? The feminists and the homosexuals? The non-English speaking non-assimilated racial minorities? With the elitists' war against the Second Amendment and guns, and boys expelled from school for playing cops and robbers at recess, where will the young men come from who can shoot straight?
Conservative military analysts still worry and fret about a terrorist attack and a future adversary. But the adversaries many Americans experience are right here at home. They are more sanguine about Washington going up in smoke and less certain that life under a conqueror would be any different than it is today.