[KnjazMihailo]

(05-14-2019 05:12 AM)ilostabet Wrote:  

@911,

First, thanks for the kind words.

I think there is a misconception about the ‘old regime’, that it was ‘economically backwards’ – and I start here because it goes back to the misleading definition of ‘developed’ the IMF, the World Bank and every other respectable and reputable source uses. I think this term itself is part of the social engineering you mentioned.

We had a mostly agrarian society when Salazar took over and when he died, 40 years later, we had pretty much caught up to the rest of Western Europe in terms of industrialization. Were it not for our three front war in Africa (which I won’t go into now – I have in the past in this same thread), we would have been able to catch up entirely – if Salazar wanted it to happen. But that is the important part is he didn’t want to. Why didn’t he?

As a Catholic, he knew the importance of poverty – the virtue of poverty – and the pitfalls of wealth. Camels and eyes of needles and so forth. I don’t need to quote mine the Bible or the Fathers to find ample explanation of this concept. It can be understood individually and collectively. For a society, as for a person, the rapid increases in wealth, leisure time, etc, can have drastic consequences.

Could we have reached the industrialization, economic efficiency and capital formation of Germany, UK or France? Well, maybe not so much due to our temperament – but we could get pretty close, a little bit like the Italians, or the Irish. But Salazar knew that if we did, that it would require many things that destroy stability, economic, financial, geographical, social, cultural and, eventually, moral. You could argue, as many have, that Salazar just wanted to keep the people “poor and stupid” to keep his power. Regardless of motives, the ‘poor and stupid’ part is true or at least, poorer than most Western countries and with less schooling. But regardless of motive the fact remains, that his stated and acted upon intention was to avoid, at all costs, rapid disruptions of society, and those include the economic. He knew that such rapid changes, even if raising wealth exponentially, would cause social upheaval and the destruction of morals.

Also note the word schooling. Few lies are more pernicious in the globohomo than the idea that schooling equals education. More people now are able to read and write papers on gender war, or construct a perfect machine that runs on its own and will lead to economic ruin for millions of people; we know how to engineer babies, and have advanced techniques on how to prevent them from ever coming into being. But do we know how to farm, kill an animal, understand the seasons? Shit, we have pretty much destroyed the seasons anyway. We also knew the value of community, morality, public shame. Now we don’t, because we don’t need to. What exactly is the purpose of education? In some things we did learn a lot: technical things, how to make things more efficient and effective. But does that serve us? Or is this schooling’s only purpose to serve the system itself? The system, of course, is not ONLY technological and organizational – but technology is the means through which it spreads, and at the basis of it is the same Materialism, the same drive to create heaven on earth by human means, subjection of the natural order, the worship of technique.

Mass scale social engineering like we have been subjected to is only possible with modern technology. Even E. Michael Jones admits this, when he mentions that before and during the French Revolution the masonic method of choice to destroy social cohesion was to fill theatres showing live pornography, but that its impact was very limited compared to Weimar Germany for example because of modern broadcasting and printing, which not only allowed mass production but also mass circulation and constant immersion in the propaganda. Social engineering cannot be understood without modern technology.

Back to Salazar and his ‘enforced poverty’ policy and our 'backwards economy'. He knew that modern, rapid economic growth required usury to function – the high rate of trial and error required to find the most efficient way of production in a highly competitive market economy can only be sustained through continuous inflation of the money supply and the lending of that new money through the banking system, since there is too much risk to fund all the endeavors with real savings. Salazar understood this (he was an economics teacher, then finance minister before he was a dictator), and he abhorred it. When he died we had one of the largest gold reserves in the world, a budget surplus, nobody died of hunger or preventable diseases, all while fighting a war in three fronts in another continent and facing major upheaval at home financed by both the Soviets and the Americans – two sides fighting us before they would fight each other. As late as 2010, and despite the 30 years of mass plunder, mostly legalized, done by the democratic parties and their banking allies, we still had one of the largest gold reserves in relation to our population – most of it, still from Salazar’s policy.

So we were never poor during Salazar – except maybe when the whole of Europe was at war, but so was everyone else and in much worse shape than us. Again, stability. After the war, and in the 60s, we had less amenities and appliances, less entertainment available, less consumer choices and more physical labor. Is this ‘economically backwards’? Perhaps. But then I don’t want to be forward. Will anyone say that one of the things we need to fix society is more amenities and appliances, more entertainment, more consumer choices and more bullshit office jobs? I can certainly say that, not only we don’t need more, we need a lot less.

It is true that some societies can survive, at least temporarily, the morally and culturally destructive aspects of technology – probably the prime example was 30s Germany indeed. However, such a society must be by necessity a highly regimented one. Unintended consequences of technology must be either tamed by tight regulation or solved by further technology. The loop is not really closed, but the society will become more and more regimented, to make the man fit the needs of the machine. Traffic laws are made for cars, and so will they be made for people in a society that is technologically advanced. As we embed these machines into our daily lives, we are made subject to their unintended consequences, or we are subject to the regulations of them. You don’t lose moral principles built over millennia in one year – but you do put a process in motion. When your people no longer eat by the sweat of their brow, you have a problem. Do we want to live in a dictatorship, where everything has to be regimented and fit to purpose, to avoid the natural consequences of economic prosperity and technological advancement? Because that is required – but that too is unnatural.

One good example of countering the effects with regulation and regimentation: why do we need fertility policies? In the current context, obviously I would welcome them but it does not change the fact that modern living has made us infertile, chemically, physically and spiritually. We are either unable or don’t want to have children. It is a iatrogenic solution to ‘promote families’ – because obviously our system is not conductive to their creation, so it must be artificially stimulated. Think about this: our most basic instinct has to be artificially stimulated. Pro-family policies are a symptom of an unnatural society.

Social engineering is obviously a key issue, and I’m glad it is being understood and the details coming to light. But once you do see that tree, think of what makes it part of the forest – and it is the technical worship that has created modern technology, and destroyed the human spirit.

There are no Jews in Japan.

I’ll finish with two quotes from Jacques Ellul:

«Enclosed within his artificial creation, man finds that there is "no exit"; that he cannot pierce the shell of technology again to find the ancient milieu to which he was adapted for hundreds of thousands of years. . . . In our cities there is no more day or night or heat or cold. But there is overpopulation, thralldom to press and television, total absence of purpose. All men are constrained by means external to them to ends equally external. The further the technical mechanism develops that allows us to escape natural necessity, the more we are subjected to artificial technical necessities.»

«Technique has penetrated the deepest recesses of the human being. The machine tends not only to create a new human environment, but also to modify man's very essence. The milieu in which he lives is no longer his. He must adapt himself, as though the world were new, to a universe for which he was not created. He was made to go six kilometers an hour, and he goes a thousand. He was made to eat when he was hungry and to sleep when he was sleepy; instead, he obeys a clock. He was made to have contact with living things, and he lives in a world of stone. He was created with a certain essential unity, and he is fragmented by all the forces of the modern world.»

Interesting. I once remember being curious about Salazar and briefly reading about him and Portugal during his rule on Wikipedia to get the basics. I always had the feeling that Salazar was being demonized by liberal historians for things that are non-issues or simply have no basis in reality.

Of course, i'm far from an expert on this, but from the way you described it, it seems like he did literally nothing wrong and genuinely did everything he thought was right for his country and its people.