Love him or hate him, Trump’s speech in Miami about Venezuela was very well done. You can find it in full here.
Trump was introduced by a woman who grew up in Communism (his wife, Melania) and
he
introduced the mother of a Venezuelan murdered by the Maduro regime and
also a mayor who's grandfather fled Socialism, and whose father fled it
to, and now the mayor has had to flee it. Very well done, indeed. And
Trump strongly asserted that the U.S. will never become a Socialist
nation, to the cheers of the crowd.
It
will never cease to amaze me how so many people can be so enamored of
an economic system that just doesn't work. That never has worked. And
no, Scandinavia is not Socialist; it is very capitalist economically,
and wealthy enough because of its homogeneous dour, hard-working native
population to afford extensive welfare states. (And it is having trouble
now after importing for many Muslims.) Einstein was supposed to have
said the definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over
again, yet expect different results. Whether he said it or not, it is a
real question of why so many people, especially educated ones such as
the products of the American academies, can be so in favor of something
that can only be kept in power by the gun.
Yes,
the American youth have been educated by Communists on a "Long March"
through the U.S. educational institutions. But what motivates the Long
Marchers?
Socialism
of course has been tried in different forms, like a demonic Vaudeville
act that keeps changing costume but otherwise has the same unfunny,
murderous skit. We've had Black or National Socialism (one-time Communist Mussolini invented this version, Hitler murdered tens of millions with it), Red or Class Socialism (a.k.a. Communism, which killed over 100 million people in the 20th century) and now Green
or Environmental Socialism. Global Warming (Or now "Climate Change") is
only the most recent effort to take a supposedly imminent natural
catastrophe as the reason, the trigger, for imposing Socialism –
we've had over-population and acid rain and also a new ice age-themed
version of this, all since the Silly Sixties; but these were only essays
in the craft: now has it come close to actually being imposed.
On and on it goes, like a Vaudeville act that won't get off the stage, but keeps machine gunning the audience.
There's
a branch of metaphysics called First Philosophy. It details principles,
indeed, the First Principles necessary for rational thought. There are
Real Principles (pertaining to being itself, the principle from which
being proceeds; Real Principles include beginning, foundation, origin,
location, condition, cause of any type, and elements of composition),
and Logical Principles (a principle of knowledge, a truth from which
other truths proceed). As Fr Chad Ripperger writes, "A logical principle
is one that governs how we come to know a thing and logical principals
are said to be built into the very structure of our intellect. By virtue
of the fact they are built into our intellect by nature they are said
to be connatural...(belonging) to a nature as it exists". And "It is
connatural to the human intellect to perform its operations according to
first principles, e.g. it is contrary to the nature of the (human)
intellect to violate the principle of non-contradiction."
These
First Principles are innate to the human mind, and they are
self-evident, such as the principles of non-contradiction (a thing
cannot both be and not be at the same time in the same respect or
relation". They come "naturally" to us, as human beings, these first
principles. Decartes famously said, "I think, therefore I am," but of
course René had it backwards: because it is natural to the human mind to think, and because René was a human, therefore he should have written, "I am, therefore I think."
So,
one can "mess up" even the most basic thinking, the most basic ways of
knowing. Fr Ripperger points out that some humans don't have all this
fully developed because they're children and of course still developing,
or also the mentally ill or mentally handicapped in some manner.
However, there's a third category of human that can't grasp these
innate principles. Fr R writes, "Another impediment is the foolishness
of the person, i.e. as Aristotle observes, it pertains to the fool to
deny what is self-evident; or we may say a person who denies
self-evident principles is irrational." An example would be David Hume,
Fr R writes "For example, Hume in his critique of causality not only
denies the principle of causality which is self-evident, but he must
also deny the principle of sufficient reason and non-contradiction as a
result of his rejection of the principle of causality."
(My
favorite modern philosopher, Edward Feser, a superb Scholastic, has a
great time pummeling the "plump Scotsman" David Hume, the doyen of the
Enlightenment and a complete idiot.)
I
think there can be no doubt that the literal "foolishness" of Hume (and
Kant, who basically spent a lifetime arguing against Hume, but within
Hume's demented intellectual framework) laid the foundation for the
"foolishness" of the Moderns. It is obvious, as a matter of self-evident
first principles, that a man cannot marry a man or change his sex via
hormones and plastic surgery. And it is certainly self-evident, after
all the blood and horror and tragedy of the 20th century, that
Socialism, whether Black, Red, or Green, is a disaster.
Yet
people of a certain type keep pushing for it. G. K. Chesterton wrote
somewhere that a vice is bad enough, but no vice is as dangerous as a
virtue gone bad. All Socialism is, on one level, is Christian Charity
gone insane: "You will be charitable or you will be shot!" I'm sure that
virtue gone rogue figures into it, at least in many confused
individuals.
But maybe, in the end, and as
we can see in different ways unique to each color of Socialism, it is
just really a thanatos, a death wish. The Nazis were going to ultimately
not just kill Jews and Gypsies, but the French were to be liquidated,
and everyone else, eventually, and finally, no doubt, it was envisioned
the Germans would commit national suicide (in actually, in very real way
they did; look at how many Germans Hitler killed in general, or
through his insanity made them toxic, which got them expelled from so
much of Europe where they had live and contributed to for centuries; and
finally, left them with such guilt that they seem to be not
reproducing). Of course Red Socialism kills everyone in the end too, via starvation. The Ukraine in the Stalin times or Venezuela today. And there's absolutely no doubt that Green
Socialism would be happiest if the human race just went out of
existence. How often have you heard or read of someone saying the planet
would be better off if humans went extinct?
A certain type of human will indeed eventually go extinct. The type that cannot grasp the self-evident.
An Préachán
