The Wages of Selfishness
WHEN I BEGAN TO think about today’s program, I had the notion that I would talk with you about something positive and optimistic for a change, instead of telling you about still more instances of media cover-up of Black-on-White hate crimes or about the Clinton government’s crooked shenanigans or about the Jews’ efforts to corrupt our society even further and take away even more of our freedom. Unfortunately, I couldn’t think of anything really positive to tell you about. I mean, when you see everything around you coming to pieces, when you see your whole society going down the drain, when you’re having your face rubbed every day in the prospect of imminent racial extinction, when you see Bill Clinton’s grinning mug on every television news program, it’s pretty difficult — and unrealistic, I believe — to be optimistic.
But then I remembered a book I had read while flying back from an interview in New York last week. It’s a book someone had sent me, and its title had grabbed my attention, and so although I ordinarily never have time to read books these days I grabbed it and took it with me when I headed for the airport to go to New York last week, and on the way back I actually read it. The book is titled The Rise of Selfishness in America, and its author is a fellow named James Collier, who has written some 50 other books about our society. So here’s the optimistic angle to today’s program: Collier is a flaming liberal, but he nevertheless has come to many of the same conclusions I have.
The man cherishes the ideas of democracy and equality, and he has a lot of other really foolish notions as well, but he has examined the world around him and understands that it is coming apart. He understands that America is in a state of terminal decline and is headed toward a disaster from which it probably will not recover. And he assigns most of the blame for this impending disaster to the transition during the last century from a community-oriented citizenry to a self-oriented citizenry.
He certainly looks at the world differently than I do. He focuses on different things and describes things differently. He manages to avoid mentioning the Jews, for example, even when writing about the destructive role of television in our lives. But he nevertheless reaches many of the same conclusions I have reached. I doubt that it would have been possible for a liberal to have written such a book 20 years ago. I think it must have been very difficult for a liberal even in 1991, when The Rise of Selfishness was written, to take off his rose-colored spectacles and decide that all of the wonderful, “progressive” programs being pushed by the government and the media were not really producing progress.
I remember that during the 1960s and the 1970s, when the Jews were in the process of turning American society upside down, all of the liberals I knew were deliriously happy about the changes. Even today most liberals look back on that period as a time of wonderful social progress. But Collier has taken a closer look than most liberals have at the implications of the changes of the 1960s and 1970s. Anyway, the fact that even a few liberals are beginning to understand that many of the liberal programs of the last century have had profoundly damaging consequences is encouraging to me. I think that what has happened is that these few liberals finally have realized that they are in the same boat with the rest of us, and that when the boat sinks as a result of all those holes they’ve been so industriously boring in the hull, they’re going to drown along with the rest of us.
Among other things, Collier contrasts the Victorian ethos — that is, the ideas, attitudes, and ideals which characterized American society during roughly the latter half of the 19th century — with the ethos of the latter half of the 20th century, and especially of the last quarter of the 20th century. I should confess that the word “Victorian” used to have a negative connotation for me, primarily because I have associated Victorianism with prudery and hypocrisy. I always have appreciated female beauty and female company, and the refusal of the Victorians to deal in a forthright manner with the sexual side of life seemed unnatural and unhealthy to me. Collier correctly points out, however, that there was far more to the Victorian ethos than prudery.
The Victorians had roots; they had obligations; they had responsibilities. The essence of Victorianism was self-discipline and responsibility. Every man had a responsibility to his wife and children, to his forebears, to his community, to his nation, and to his race, and he was expected to take all of these responsibilities seriously and to put them ahead of his personal self-interest. Having a strong sense of national and racial identity in a much more homogeneous America helped a man accept his responsibilities, but self-discipline was necessary too.
Parents raised their children with this in mind, not hesitating to apply external discipline, including corporal punishment, when needed. Thrift was a virtue, and waste a sin. People paid first for what they wanted to buy, not later. There were no credit cards. A man chronically in debt was a man whose honor was in jeopardy. Temperance and self-restraint also were virtues. A man constitutionally unable or unwilling to postpone self-gratification was held in low esteem.
Of course, during most of the Victorian period there were virtually no Jews in America. It wasn’t until the huge flood of Jews began arriving from eastern Europe in the last two decades of the 19th century that the Victorian ethos began eroding. Collier doesn’t attribute the change to Jews, of course; he simply points out that the immigrants at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century began changing the attitudes and ideals of Americans. Increasing industrialization and urbanization also undermined Victorian virtues.
The author traces changing attitudes and behavior in America all the way up to a decade ago, making copious use of statistics and sociological studies to document his observations. What he presents to us is a gradual loosening of social bonds, a gradual abandonment of responsibilities, a gradual increase in permissiveness and loss of self-discipline through the first two thirds of the 20th century, followed by a rapid acceleration of these tendencies during the 1970s.
Although I might question some of Collier’s statistics and the objectivity of some of the studies he cites, I find myself in general agreement with his observations. It was because I had made roughly the same observations during the 1960s and early 1970s that I wrote my novel The Turner Diaries in 1975, projecting in fictional form where I saw these tendencies leading 20 years in the future.
In the 1970s, of course, the liberals as a whole scoffed at my predictions. In their view, the revolutionary changes taking place in America were all positive developments, and I suspect that Collier was among them at that time. Now, as I mentioned earlier, Collier and a few other liberals have swung around, as the realization has hit them that they also are going down with the boat, and soon.
I even agree in part with Collier’s analysis of the causes of the American disaster. Specifically, he cites the rise in prosperity after the Second World War, which gave Americans more leisure time and more disposable income than they ever had had before: gains which most Americans did not use wisely. He also cites the advent of television in the 1950s, but he focuses entirely on television advertising, with its propaganda in favor of ever-increasing consumption. He also attributes part of the change to the influence of the hippies: the so-called “counterculture movement,” with its ideal of total self-indulgence: “If it feels good, do it.” Finally, he blames Americans’ loss of respect for their government in the 1970s: the consequence of the unpopular Vietnam war and of the Watergate scandal.
And certainly, all of these things played a role, but the dynamics of the revolution of the 1960s and 1970s actually were a bit different than Collier sees them. Like Collier I experienced that revolution at first hand, but I was not hampered in my view of things by liberal blinders.
Yes, the Madison Avenue propaganda of consumerism played a role in leading Americans to be more self-indulgent, but so did the Hollywood propaganda of television entertainment. The spend-and-consume propaganda was driven by the greed of businessmen, but the Hollywood propaganda which saturated TV entertainment was driven by darker motives.
And the values of the hippies did penetrate the larger society, but only because the Jewish media deliberately facilitated that penetration. As Collier correctly points out, the counterculture movement never involved more than a tiny portion of the young people of that era. The reason it was able to influence mainstream society was because the media Jews were sympathetic to the counterculture Jews, who occupied most of the leadership positions in the counterculture movement, and also because introducing hippie values into the mainstream served the racially destructive purpose of the media Jews.
Jerry Rubin, probably the best known hippie publicist, laid out all of the mindlessly destructive hippie worldview in his 1970 book Do It!. The book is a real piece of filth that could have been produced only by a Jew. It glorifies the Black Panthers, the Viet Cong, the killing of White policemen, indiscriminate sex, the use of every illegal drug known to man, and the total abandonment of all self-discipline and restraint.
It even recommends to young Americans that they kill their parents if their parents stand in the way of their doing whatever they want to do.
Such a book would have circulated only in the hippie underground and would have had no influence at all on most young people — except that it was published by Simon & Schuster, one of the largest mainstream publishers in New York, which was able to put hundreds of thousands of copies of Rubin’s book on college campuses all over America. Simon & Schuster is owned by Sumner Redstone’s Viacom Corporation, the same Jewish media conglomerate which owns MTV and CBS. Hippie values didn’t just diffuse into mainstream America by osmosis; they were pumped in deliberately by the most powerful opinion-molding apparatus the world ever has known.
The Vietnam war and the Watergate scandal of the second Nixon administration provide an even better illustration of the fact that the change in American values and attitudes which occurred during the 1960s and 1970s didn’t just happen, as part of some natural historical development. The change was engineered; it was contrived; it was planned and cold-bloodedly implemented. And as in the case of the infusion of hippie values the Jew-controlled mass media were the instrument by which this was accomplished.
Collier certainly is correct that the Vietnam war was an unpopular war and that a great decline in respect for the US government occurred during the latter part of the war, but he’s wrong about the causal relationship between these two things. Collier writes, and I quote:
[A]fter the Tet offensive of January 1968 it became obvious to the majority of Americans that Presidents, generals — the government — had been lying about the conduct of the war. The general public was also coming to believe that it was a bad war — an unjustifiable one being fought in the wrong way.
Well, that certainly was the liberal view of the war at the time, but the general public certainly didn’t “come to believe that it was a bad war.” The general public never “comes to believe” anything on its own.
The general public doesn’t have the wits for that. Every idea in the mind of the general public is put there by the controlled mass media.
Certainly, my idea of the Vietnam war at the time was that the only thing that it was good for was as a testing ground for new weapons and military tactics. But the hundreds of thousands of university students who were bused to Washington to march down Pennsylvania Avenue and chant for the Viet Cong were taught that the war was “bad” because it was being fought against little Brown people by White imperialists. It was liberals like Collier on university campuses all over America who were helping the Jewish media teach them that.
But what made the war really unpopular with the general public was that the government clearly wasn’t trying to win it. And also the fact that at a time when the government was drafting young Americans for the war, and the Viet Cong were killing them at the rate of about a hundred a day, the government was providing police protection for massive demonstrations in Washington in favor of the Viet Cong. The government knew who was organizing these demonstrations, but it did nothing to stop them. It was really demoralizing to Americans who had family members killed or wounded by the Viet Cong to see these hundreds of thousands of young Bill Clintons chanting and marching in Washington with Viet Cong flags while the politicians went about their business as usual.
To me this whole performance seemed insane. It seemed like a calculated way to destroy respect for the government and for authority. Eventually I realized that’s exactly what it was. The people in the White House would have loved to extricate themselves from Vietnam, but they were scared to death of the media. Whenever they used tactics that really hurt the enemy, the Jewish media would scream bloody murder, and the White House would back off. Washington was fighting the war with one hand tied behind its back — deliberately. Liberals, in the government and out, were talking openly about the desirability of not winning a military victory in Vietnam. They had this wacky feminist-liberal idea that we had to talk the Viet Cong into some sort of negotiated compromise settlement, instead of just pulling out all of the stops and killing all of them — and their supporters in Hanoi and in New York and in Hollywood.
The military leaders understood that the Vietnam war was easily winnable, and they were very frustrated because they weren’t permitted to win it. They also understood who was keeping them from winning it.
Only a few of them, however, had the courage to speak out in this regard. General William Westmoreland, the top military commander in the war, regarded the New York Times and the Washington Post as a Fifth Column which operated more effectively against America’s forces than a hundred enemy divisions on the battlefield. By the time the war finally was over, everyone was disgusted with the government, but that wasn’t because, as Collier put it, the public “came to believe that it was a bad war.” It was because we all were fed up with the embarrassing spectacle that the media and the spineless gang of politicians in Washington were making of what could have been a short, hot, and successful war against the communists in Vietnam.
The Watergate scandal also undermined public respect for the government and for authority, but again, that was primarily because the media manipulated the scandal to that end. Richard Nixon was an unlovable, indecisive sort of person, but the things he did in connection with the Watergate investigation which were actually criminal or harmful to the country pale to insignificance beside the criminal acts of his predecessor Lyndon Johnson or those of the current occupant of the White House. So some low-level Republican gumshoes decide to bug the Democratic Party offices: Is that more scandalous than a Democratic gumshoe in the White House being caught with a big stack of confidential FBI files on Republicans that he shouldn’t have had?
The difference is that the Jewish media bosses made the conscious decision to brew a giant scandal out of the Watergate affair and to use the scandal to weaken the bonds of American society. And they did that by keeping the story on the front burner month after month, dribbling out tiny morsels of new information each day, and gradually building a huge mountain out of a molehill. Watergate was the Elian Gonzales story of 1973, except that the motive behind Watergate was to bring down the government, while in the Elian Gonzales case it is merely to keep the more sentimental and simpleminded couch potatoes engaged.
Anyway, it is not surprising that where many of the developments leading to the revolution of the 1960s and 1970s are concerned, Collier, because of his liberal bias, just doesn’t get it. In particular, he doesn’t get anything about Jewish scheming or the downside of “diversity.” But to return to the positive side of this broadcast, he does understand that the consequences of that revolution are double-plus ungood for all of us. For a liberal, that is a remarkable achievement.
The most dangerous consequence Collier sees in the transition from a community-oriented population to a wholly self-centered population which has taken place in the last century is the destruction of the family. He looks at the trends — children growing up without fathers, working mothers putting consumerism ahead of proper parenting — and he is clearly worried:
[W]e have seen in America an abandonment of parental responsibility which is unmatched in human history.
He also notes the growing disregard for laws and the growing contempt for authority that have sprung from the trend to more and more selfishness. But still, it is the destruction of the family about which he is most concerned. He writes, and I quote:
Increasingly younger people reject marriage, divorce easily, abandon their children, have fewer friends and see less of them. . . . How do we explain this? In part it may have to do with the intense involvement with the media, which provide a substitute for human interaction. . . . But at bottom, it seems to me, the increasing fragmentation of the American people is a consequence of the long-term turning inward to the self as the primary concern of life.
What Collier has to say about the American family makes an irreparable break between him and the feminists, who have played a major role in the deliberate destruction of the family and constitute a very important part of the coalition which is destroying our people. I mean, how can the feminists forgive him when he concludes that, despite all its faults, Victorian society was a healthier and more fit society than ours today? So let us be thankful, at least, for the break between a few liberals and virtually all feminists.
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Source: National Alliance
