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Mapping the Veil
Part 1: Impressions of The Fourth Turning by William Strauss and Neil Howe: Utah, 8/20/24
© 2024 James LaFond
DEC/18/24
I come to every general history presentation, in audio, visual or print form, with the question: “Will forced European labor in Plantation America, be glossed over in favor of, voluntary immigration of heroic farmers to Colonial America?”
The answer is always, yes, there were no white slaves.
What is it that generates this permanent blindness to the massive trove of primary source material on the actual condition, in favor of the strange fixation upon an imagined condition?
Even entertainment would dictate that Americans read about William Moraley or Isrаel Potter rather than re-reading Benjamin Franklin. No. Not only do we continue to fixate on [but not read] Franklin, but we mythologize him and gloss over whatever he had in common with William or Isrаel.
On the other side of the racial coin, only Frederick Douglas and a few high class black slaves get attention, with no one concerned with William Wells Brown or Moses Roper.
Why must we read the same story over and over again?
So that we will stop reading! So that we will turn away from the past out of boredom, turning our spirit of inquiry away from the key to inquiring into our current situation, and instead directly inquiring into the current world without any of the reference tools necessary to understand it. This is the brilliant crux of American Myth making.
Over the past month it has been a great pleasure, as I sit with Bob, to view interviews by various podcasters with historians. While these historians have specialties, in terms of the periods in the past they investigate, they are all generalists. Mister Howe does admit to this, as well as being at base a demographer for politicians and the system functionaries that operate their puppet strings. I do recall the fuss about this general history, based on general histories, being promoted as a right wing conservative handbook for the cyclic return to greatness of the nation.
The author does claim 5 predictions, including the pandemic, which was not a pandemic but a shamdemic, initiated by the progressive elites, which proved only that those folks read his book more deeply and purposefully than their conservative enemies.
I will get back to this concept, and the fact that the author’s cyclic observations have been correctly correlated and for this latest cycle, arrested by two full decades.
First, this history, like most general histories, is correct in its measure of past cycles, but only within the false construct that life on this planet is only experienced by the literate elites, such as himself. His every example is from the top strata of society, concerning the ruling 1% who write to each other in Time and down through Time. His examples are of higher arts, religious leadership, scientific policy, military policy, macro-economics, activities of the ruling elites, to include their celebrity meat fetish actors.
Such general histories, of which numerous are currently being propounded, unwittingly follow Ovid’s 4 Ages: Golden, Silver, Bronze & Iron, but in microcosm. We, on this planet have lived within the last, Iron Age since antiquity. What is lost is the perspective of the ordinary human, of the common worker, soldier, farmer, slave.
The irony of the written word that I am so enamored with—perhaps more than any of my meaty fellows—is that we, the common debt slave of today, since we have, rare among the “Lower Orders,” literacy. We thereby identify with the literary class of early Modernity, of The Middle Ages, of Antiquity, the people who would hate us for the very condition of our birth, if we shared time with them. Rather than identifying and empathizing with our social analogues of yesteryear; the slaves, servants, vagabonds, paupers, serfs and peasants who once did what we do, we identify with the towering elites. This single dynamic has rendered historical investigation a process of curtain dropping before the stage of the past and discussion of the fabric of the curtain instead of what has been concealed behind it. We have been conditioned to see the fantasy of the decorative curtain, the paisley veil, the intricate mask, not the plain face of reality it conceals.
First, to buttress the concept of The Class Curtain, I shall quote from the forward of an academic book discussing the veracity of an ancient source, through a lens that pretends to be modern, but is a class lens. This is the crux we are hung upon, the empathy that makes ideological identification with our pitiless masters possible, making nationalism and globalism function, along with all of the isms in between. Unlike our mostly illiterate Ancient to Early Modern social analogues, who knew damned well that the ruling class despised them, ruled them and owned them, we, by tittering turns, actively fantasize that our nations, our governments, our politicians, NGOs and the unseen and unnamed functionaries they represent, are our SERVANTS, our collective Leviathan Slave, our Tlalos, guarding our island of moral perfection.
Xenophon the Athenian
The Problem of the Individual and the Society of the Polis
By W.E. Higgins, NY, 1977, 183 pages
The first question, is why this book is readily available, while Xenophon’s writings are not. Xenophon was not wordy. You can read his every word in a week of 2 hour daily readings, even if you are a slow reader. Yet to find them on a book shelf outside a facility of higher learning [despite the animus “the learned’ hold for Xenophon, is unheard of.
That is the first part of the dilemma, that we require a distillation by some professional and do not trust the very words of the subject. It is the same in current life. The mugging victim is not given a sound bite on the newscast, rather a police spokesperson or “expert” describes their plight, very often mis characterizing the taking of their autonomy and possessions as “a fight.”
Higgins seems an honest fellow and conducts a debate with historians past and present, some of which is quoted:
“… that a simple author like Xenophon, who never managed to research his facts as well as he might have, can be taken seriously.”
This warrior, who wrote about the war he fought in, is devalued for not spending his life in libraries and schools rather than on the battlefield. The subtext tells us that experience is of no value, and that writing in a vacuum is. He is most distrusted for writing plainly and not engaging in class jargon.
“Xenophon’s reputation among the learned has yet to recover… a squire in tweeds, tiresome and hardly rigorous… the very simplicity of style which renders him so accessible to the beginner in Greek has charmed out of perception the scrutiny of scholars… the danger in reading Xenophon is the feeling of fast comprehension which derives from the ease of expression.”
These quotes are from page 1, laying out a portion of the scholarly argument by many ivory tower intellectuals over 150 years who instinctively hate the man of action who was Xenophon. Higgins will go on to defend Xenophon, presenting himself as an outlier in his own field.
Historians of our day detest Herodotus and Arrian for these same reasons, that Herodotus walked the world he wrote of and interviewed both sides and that Arrian himself committed the unredeemable sin of taking the field in war. In the academic opinion, no act could better disqualify Arrian for writing about war in Asia than the fact that he fought a war in Asia!
Hence, it is no surprise, that the following professional thinkers wrote a history that focused on 13 generations of the ruling class, not 13 generations of the doomed and dammed.
The Fourth Turning
An American Prophecy [Turning this arrogance into hubris is one artful thing our Plutarchs have done in the name of our oppression.]
What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America’s Next Rendezvous with Destiny
William Strauss and Neil Howe, authors of Generations and 13th-Gen.
NY, 1997, 382 pages
I am low on space here and must cut to America and Rome, Part 2, which will Post on the very next open Monday, Wednesday or Friday on this site.
Spoiler Alert:
Despite the author’s contention, a few months ago, while selling his sequel on the Patrick Bet-David Podcast, that his predictions came true, the 4th turning did not happen!
The author and his deceased coauthor, predicted the 4th turning from Unraveling into Crisis for 2005. Yet, according to their writing on pages 104-5, the conditions have remained in the unraveling.
The Postponement of the 4th Turning will be continued under America and Rome, with examples from the book its self, refuting its conclusions, and, also agreeing that the concept and models were correct, and that the author’s were not wrong, but rather that their excellent book compelled the “Enemy of All Mankind,” our collective tyrant, to break the rhythm of Social Time, the dance of Discord and Concord, and cast the world into a former failed form.
Part 2 will be a superimposition of this 4 cycle concept upon the best period in the history of the empire, that ancient polity which America was consciously modeled on, Rome, and the period of the Pax Romana. That shall close with a suggestion of what our rulers have achieved over we, the idiot, emotive mass of humanity.
‘What Books Influenced You?’ #3
book reviews
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under the god of things
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into leviathan’s maw
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your trojan whorse
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barbarism versus civilization
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fate
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solo boxing
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orphan nation
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hate
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