Laodicean wrote:The captains of industry, or monopoly trusts, accrue enough wealth and power to become a ruling class, an oligarchy, and the country degenerates into a caste society under their tyranny. Given that, at the time, eleven or so trusts had expanded their holdings to include every sector of the national economy and had the state and federal legislatures in their pockets, it was not an unforeseen conclusion, nor one of which the politically astute were not apprehensive. Meredith footnotes a quote from Abraham Lincoln’s 1864 letter to Colonel William F. Wilkings: “Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money-power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in a few and the Republic is destroyed.” Lincoln’s impressively concise and summary admonition is exactly what unfolds in the book.
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"The Great driving force of the oligarchs is the belief that they are doing right. Never mind the exceptions, and never mind the oppression and injustice in which the Iron Heel was conceived. All is granted. The point is that the strength of the Oligarchy today lies in its satisfied conception of its own righteousness."
http://philippic.com/?p=181#more-181
For some reason I recall that when the Sioux were at their most desperate, just before the assassination of Sitting Bull and the massacre at Wounded Knee, there rose among them a prophet who promised an imminent day of reckoning, when the white men would all be taken away and the land would belong to the Indians again. I also remember the Boxer Rebellion, they thought the power of their faith in the cause would stop the foreigners' bullets.
The difference between these hopeful but in practice suicidal salvation beliefs and Alex Jones with his DMT trolling is that he knows just how full of bullshit he is in peddling magic (in this case meaning: made up, whole cloth) explanations, or he would if it figured at all in his considerations.
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