Would you use a doctor or dentist who didn’t believe in germ theory and used the same instruments all day without sterilizing them? What would you say if, when their patients developed infections, the doctor or dentist insisted he meant well and argued that capitalism, not germs, causes infections?
Allowing such a practitioner to keep their license would be madness. Yet we elect and support politicians who believe something other than socialism causes the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Venezuela.
Starvation Is Standard Under Socialism
In hisWall Street Journalreport, "Venezuela is Starving," Juan Forero reports on the worsening tragedy:
Jean Pierre Planchart, a year old, has the drawn face of an old man and a cry that is little more than a whimper. His ribs show through his skin. He weighs just 11 pounds.
His mother, Maria Planchart, tried to feed him what she could find combing through the trash—scraps of chicken or potato. She finally took him to a hospital in Caracas, where she prays a rice-milk concoction keeps her son alive.
“I watched him sleep and sleep, getting weaker, all the time losing weight,” said Ms. Planchart, 34 years old. “I never thought I’d see Venezuela like this.”
Venezuela “was once Latin America’s richest, producing food for export. Venezuela now can’t grow enough to feed its own people in an economy hobbled by the nationalization of private farms, and price and currency controls.”
In 2010, many in Venezuela were already going hungry while120,000 tons of rotting foodsat at the government-run port of Puerto Cabello. That was an ominous warning of what was to come. Western supporters of Chavez apparently took no notice or didn’t care. Thor Halvorssen, president of theHuman Rights Foundation,noticed andwrote, “it is no surprise then that Venezuela’s agricultural policy is modeled on that of another country with chronic food shortages — communist Cuba.”
Vernon L. Smith is a Nobel laureate in economics. Recently, he made theseinformal observationson Facebook about Forero’s report:
The government of Venezuela in the name of the people and for the benefit of the people seized the big bad profit-grabbing oil companies, thinking that anyone off the street could manage a business. They started redistributing wealth to poor, made electricity free, were praised by some (well at least one) American Nobel economists for reducing inequality.
This small incredibly oil rich country cannot now feed itself. Markets, whose prices coordinate and incentivize the creation of wealth cannot function. Farmers cannot buy seed or fertilizer, food imports have declined 70% and people cannot find enough food in the garbage cans. The invisible-to-the-eye workings of the complex economy of plenty—which of course cannot assure that all will be productive enough to share in its plenty—has utterly collapsed.
Smith continues with these haunting words: “REVERSE all those policies, and its effects would be immediately reversed and plenty restored easily as quickly as it disappeared.” Let Smith’s words sink in—the human suffering would almost immediately end as soon as freedom is restored to Venezuela.
The Delusion of Central Planning
Given that the Venezuelan tragedy is manmade, it is hard to fathom why politicians such as Jeremy Corbyn (who could be the next prime minister of the UK) and Bernie Sanders, who provided succor to the Hugo Chavez regime, are not laughed out of politics. Corbynhas also supportedChavez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro. Maduro supported Sanders in 2016, calling him a“revolutionary friend.”
In 2013, Jeremy Corbyn said: "We salute Chavez and the people of Venezuela for turning the clock of history full circle... I look forward to the development of Venezuela, the efficiency of Venezuela, in providing good services and decency for all the people of that country."
When Hugo Chavez, the father of Venezuela’s nightmare, passed in 2013, President Carter praised Chavez’s good intentions, saying, "Although we have not agreed with all of the methods followed by his government, we have never doubted Hugo Chavez's commitment to improving the lives of millions of his fellow countrymen.”
Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, and every other despotic mass murderer also claimed they had good intentions.What are good intentions worth?Milton Friedman famously wrote, “Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.” ........... Read more: fee.org
Respecte la dignité des personnes et la présomption d’innocence ;
Tient l’esprit critique, la véracité, l’exactitude, l’intégrité, l’équité, l’impartialité, pour les piliers de l’action journalistique ;
Tient l’accusation sans preuve, l’intention de nuire, l’altération des documents, la déformation des faits, le détournement d’images, le mensonge, la manipulation, la censure et l’autocensure, la non vérification des faits, pour les plus graves dérives professionnelles.
Il s’agit ici de la dernière version de la Charte de déontologie, fondatrice de la profession, adoptée par le Comité national en mars 2011, pour le 93e anniversaire du SNJ.
Le droit du public à une information de qualité, complète, libre, indépendante et pluraliste, rappelé dans la Déclaration des droits de l’homme et la Constitution française, guide le journaliste dans l’exercice de sa mission. Cette responsabilité vis-à-vis du citoyen prime sur toute autre.
Ces principes et les règles éthiques ci-après engagent chaque journaliste, quelles que soient sa fonction, sa responsabilité au sein de la chaîne éditoriale et la forme de presse dans laquelle il exerce.
Cependant, la responsabilité du journaliste ne peut être confondue avec celle de l’éditeur, ni dispenser ce dernier de ses propres obligations.
Le journalisme consiste à rechercher, vérifier, situer dans son contexte, hiérarchiser, mettre en forme, commenter et publier une information de qualité ; il ne peut se confondre avec la communication. Son exercice demande du temps et des moyens, quel que soit le support. Il ne peut y avoir de respect des règles déontologiques sans mise en œuvre des conditions d’exercice qu’elles nécessitent.
La notion d’urgence dans la diffusion d’une information ou d’exclusivité ne doit pas l’emporter sur le sérieux de l’enquête et la vérification des sources.
La sécurité matérielle et morale est la base de l’indépendance du journaliste. Elle doit être assurée, quel que soit le contrat de travail qui le lie à l’entreprise.
L’exercice du métier à la pige bénéficie des mêmes garanties que celles dont disposent les journalistes mensualisés.
Le journaliste ne peut être contraint à accomplir un acte ou exprimer une opinion contraire à sa conviction ou sa conscience professionnelle, ni aux principes et règles de cette charte.
Le journaliste accomplit tous les actes de sa profession (enquête, investigations, prise d’images et de sons, etc…) librement, a accès à toutes les sources d’information concernant les faits qui conditionnent la vie publique et voit la protection du secret de ses sources garantie.
C’est dans ces conditions qu’un journaliste digne de ce nom :
• Prend la responsabilité de toutes ses productions professionnelles, mêmes anonymes ;
• Respecte la dignité des personnes et la présomption d’innocence ;
• Tient l’esprit critique, la véracité, l’exactitude, l’intégrité, l’équité, l’impartialité, pour les piliers de l’action journalistique ; tient l’accusation sans preuve, l’intention de nuire, l’altération des documents, la déformation des faits, le détournement d’images, le mensonge, la manipulation, la censure et l’autocensure, la non vérification des faits, pour les plus graves dérives professionnelles ;
• Exerce la plus grande vigilance avant de diffuser des informations d’où qu’elles viennent ;
• Dispose d’un droit de suite, qui est aussi un devoir, sur les informations qu’il diffuse et fait en sorte de rectifier rapidement toute information diffusée qui se révèlerait inexacte ;
• N’accepte en matière de déontologie et d’honneur professionnel que la juridiction de ses pairs ; répond devant la justice des délits prévus par la loi ;
• Défend la liberté d’expression, d’opinion, de l’information, du commentaire et de la critique ;
• Proscrit tout moyen déloyal et vénal pour obtenir une information. Dans le cas où sa sécurité, celle de ses sources ou la gravité des faits l’obligent à taire sa qualité de journaliste, il prévient sa hiérarchie et en donne dès que possible explication au public ;
• Ne touche pas d’argent dans un service public, une institution ou une entreprise privée où sa qualité de journaliste, ses influences, ses relations seraient susceptibles d’être exploitées ;
• N’use pas de la liberté de la presse dans une intention intéressée ;
• Refuse et combat, comme contraire à son éthique professionnelle, toute confusion entre journalisme et communication ;
• Cite les confrères dont il utilise le travail, ne commet aucun plagiat ;
• Ne sollicite pas la place d’un confrère en offrant de travailler à des conditions inférieures ;
• Garde le secret professionnel et protège les sources de ses informations ;
• Ne confond pas son rôle avec celui du policier ou du juge.
Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen (article XI) : « La libre communication des pensées et des opinions est un des droits les plus précieux de l’Homme : tout Citoyen peut donc parler, écrire, imprimer librement, sauf à répondre de l’abus de cette liberté, dans les cas déterminés par la Loi. »
Constitution de la France (article 34) : « La loi fixe les règles concernant les droits civiques et les garanties fondamentales accordées aux citoyens pour l’exercice des libertés publiques ; la liberté, le pluralisme et l’indépendance des médias. »
Déclaration des devoirs et des droits des journalistes (Munich, 1971) : le SNJ, qui fut à l’initiative de la création de la Fédération Internationale des Journalistes, en 1926 à Paris, est également l’un des inspirateurs de cette Déclaration qui réunit l’ensemble des syndicats de journalistes au niveau européen.
Pacte de Marrakech : l’outil d’un génocide culturel programmé ?
Lundi dernier a été signé, par un représentant du gouvernement français, l’accord de Marrakech. Malgré ce qu’affirment les promoteurs du texte, celui-ci sera forcément, à terme, contraignant car même si l’État en freine l’application, les associations en obtiendront, de la Justice, la mise en œuvre intégrale au nom de l’article 55 de la Constitution qui stipule que « les traités ou accords(internationaux) régulièrement ratifiés ou approuvés ont, dès leur publication, une autorité supérieure à celle des lois » nationales.
La signature de l’accord de Marrakech est la porte ouverte au raz-de-marée migratoire qui annonce moins une nouvelle page à écrire de notre histoire, que sa conclusion, car demain sera autre, avec l’officialisation désormais signée de ce « Grand Remplacement » évoqué par l’écrivain Renaud Camus et qu’annonçait, avant lui, en d’autres mots, l’universitaire Jacques Dupâquier, de l’Institut, dévoilant, dès l’an 2000, dans un article paru dans la revue Le Spectacle du Monde, la« programmation (par l’ONU) d’une substitution de population en Europe ».
Si la dilution du peuple français historique dans un « nouveau peuple » s’annonce inévitable, peut-on pour autant parler, à ce propos, de génocide culturel comme le fit, au début des années 1940, le juriste Raphael Lemkin, créateur du concept de « génocide », pour le drame alors vécu par le peuple ukrainien, victime, en plus des déportations et des famines organisées, d’une submersion migratoire voulue par Staline pour détruire son nationalisme supposé ?
Lemkin écrivait à ce sujet que « la quatrième étape du processus (de génocide) a consisté en une fragmentation immédiate du peuple ukrainien grâce à l’installation en Ukraine de populations étrangères », suivant la méthode visant à détruire les « fondements essentiels de la vie de groupes nationaux en vue de leur anéantissement ». Vu ainsi, le pacte de Marrakech pourrait bien être l’outil efficace d’un génocide ethnoculturel des peuples signataires.
La situation actuelle fait aussi penser aux étranges écrits du comte Richard de Coudenhove-Kalergi, le théoricien de la construction européenne qui, en 1925, en appelait, dans Idéalisme pratique, à la mise en œuvre d’un « eugénisme social » par migrations afin de créer, sur le Vieux Continent, un peuple multiethnique facile à dominer et qui « remplacera la diversité des peuples par la diversité des individus ».
Le pacte de Marrakech a relancé, sur la Toile, la rumeur selon laquelle un plan Kalergi de remplacement de population prolongerait la théorie publiée en 1925 par l’aristocrate austro-japonais. Si cet hypothétique plan Kalergi, dont les premières mentions datent de 1978 seulement, paraît relever du complotisme, il faut avouer qu’aujourd’hui, le réel onusien rejoint remarquablement la fiction qui enflamme les réseaux sociaux.
Au point que l’on peut se demander si la submersion de l’Europe par des populations porteuses d’une autre culture ne sert pas, effectivement, des objectifs prémédités d’arasement de la « superstructure culturelle » traditionnelle du Vieux Continent, comme autrefois la mise en œuvre de populicides sanglants, dans les pays communistes, avait pour but de créer un « nouveau peuple » par élimination des « arriérés sociaux ».
Ainsi, l’« ancien peuple » serait victime d’une stratégie d’extermination de classe frappant les rentiers de l’identité de souche au bénéfice des nouveaux venus mis en position de prolétariat, l’appauvrissement ressenti par les Français conscients de payer la note de l’immigration ne se comprenant alors qu’en fonction du diptyque léniniste : réquisition/répartition.
Le mouvement des gilets jaunes pourrait bien, fondamentalement, n’être que la réaction de survie d’un peuple confronté à la mise en œuvre d’un chaos-constructeur provoqué par l’ingénierie sociale mondialiste.
(12 généraux et un ancien ministre de la Défense )
Paris, le 07 décembre 2018
Monsieur le Président,
Vous vous apprêtez à signer les 10 et 11 décembre prochains le « pacte mondial sur les migrations sûres, ordonnées et régulières » qui institue un véritable droit à la migration. Il pourra s’imposer à notre législation nationale par le biais de traités préexistants ou du principe de responsabilité commune fixé dans ce pacte.
Il nous apparaît que la seule souveraineté qui restera à la France consistera à fixer librement la façon dont les objectifs du pacte devront être mis en œuvre. Vous ne pouvez pas céder ce nouveau pan de la souveraineté nationale sans un débat public alors que 80% de la population française considère qu’il faut stopper ou réguler drastiquement l’immigration. En décidant seul de signer ce pacte, vous ajouteriez un motif de révolte supplémentaire à la colère d’un peuple déjà malmené. Vous vous rendriez coupable d’un déni de démocratie, voire de trahison à l’égard de la nation.
Par ailleurs, les finances de notre pays sont exsangues et notre endettement progresse. Vous ne pouvez donc pas prendre le risque d’un appel d’air migratoire coûteux sans avoir démontré préalablement que vous ne serez pas obligé de recourir à plus d’impôts pour répondre aux objectifs du pacte. D’autre part, vous devez être capable, en terme sécuritaire, de juguler les conséquences liées à l’arrivée de populations extra-européennes. Enfin, vous ne pouvez pas ignorer que l’essence même du politique c’est d’assurer la sécurité à l’extérieur et la concorde à l’intérieur. Or, cette concorde ne peut être obtenue qu’à la condition de maintenir une certaine cohérence interne de la société seule capable de permettre de vouloir faire ensemble, ce qui devient de plus en plus problématique aujourd’hui.
En effet, l’Etat français réalise un peu tard l’impossibilité d’intégrer des populations trop nombreuses, de surcroît de culture totalement différente, qui se sont regroupées au cours de ces quarante dernières années dans des zones qui ne se soumettent plus aux lois de la République.
Vous ne pouvez pas décider seul d’effacer nos repères civilisationnels et nous priver de notre patrie charnelle.
Nous vous demandons donc de surseoir à la signature de ce pacte et d’appeler par voie de référendum les Français à se prononcer sur ce document. Vous êtes comptable devant les Français de vos actions. Votre élection ne constitue pas un blanc seing.
Nous soutenons l’initiative du Général MARTINEZ contre la signature de ce pacte qui doit être adopté par les États membres de l’ONU à la Conférence intergouvernementale de Marrakech.
The malls have been decorated for Christmas and the vapid holiday songs have been assaulting our ears since somewhere around Labor Day. But in the Christian calendar, we are still in the season of Advent, a time when believers around the world remember the 500 years in which the people of Israel lived and died under political oppression, waiting for the Messiah who would somehow “bring forth justice to the nations.”
While it may not be the first book that comes to mind, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s novel “In the First Circle” is an especially appropriate work for the Advent season because it asks, “How do you go on living when suffering and injustice will follow you all the way to the grave?”
A Life Like Hell
The novel is set in 1949, in a Sovietsharashka, a prison research institute where “class enemies” with useful skills are sent to develop and apply new technologies for the Soviet state. Here prisoners work in offices and laboratories instead of camps, and enjoy decent food and living conditions.
The residents are aware, however, that their state is like that of the souls in the first circle of Dante’s Hell — a place where worthy pagan philosophers and sages are permitted to live free from the torments of the lower depths but eternally separated from the joys of Heaven. Most of the sharashka’sprisoners will never be free, and they know it.
It is not fear of physical pain or imminent death that torments the prisoners. Rather, it is the knowledge of all they have lost and the hopelessness of the long years ahead:
Perhaps prison is most horrible when there is no horror? When the horror consists in the gray routine never varying from week to week? When you forget that the one and only life given to you on this earth has been wrecked? When you are willing to forgive, have already forgiven the swine for all this? …The reality of prison life can fully appreciated only after years of confinement, without a break and with no end in prospect.
On Christmas Eve a diplomatic service officer named Innokenty Volodin makes an anonymous call to the U.S. embassy to report that Soviet spies are about to steal American nuclear weapons secrets. The people in the sharashka are tasked with identifying the voice on the recorded conversation with all the machinery at their disposal.
Thus we are introduced to a (very) large host of characters, including the prisoners, their loved ones on the outside, the free workers, and their government overseers, including Solzhenitsyn’s Satan, Joseph Stalin himself, who like Dante’s, sits friendless and alone in the darkness, feeding on old resentments, on growing fears, and on the underlings who carry out his will.
Respect for Even His Enemies’ Humanity
“In the First Circle” is most definitely a Russian novel. Solzhenitsyn describes his world and its people in all their complexity. But where Tolstoy could not resist commenting ironically on the thoughts of every character he created, Solzhenitsyn more often shows restraint (and respect) in revealing his characters’ inner thoughts. When his prison philosophers engage in Karamazovian debates, he allows all sides to score points. Even those loyal to the ideology he hates are human beings first.
It is the unfairness of (most of) the prisoners’ suffering that infuriates the reader. Soldiers fighting on the front lines of the Great Patriotic War are imprisoned for counseling humane treatment of German civilians. Engineers are imprisoned en mass when the government’s economic failures require a scapegoat. Craftsmen are arrested to provide free labor to prison bosses. Even loyal soldiers liberated from Nazi “cannibal camps” are given 25-year sentences on their return.
The characters we meet respond in various ways to their fate. Gleb Nerzhin is a 31-year-old mathematician whose biography and development correspond with Solzhenitsyn’s. Imprisoned for a careless remark about “The Unsleeping One,” he has witnessed first-hand the inhumanity of the Soviet state, and he begins his search for a truth beyond the ideology that once inspired him.
Nerzhin’s wife Nadya is a graduate student who hides her grief and the fact that her husband is a zek lest she be “brought out into the open, isolated, hemmed in by the right-thinking public.” She waits for justice in silence, and “wept only at night.”
Nerzhin’s best friend in the sharashka is the committed Communist Lev Rubin, who remains loyal to his Revolutionary faith and even defends it to his fellow prisoners, like a religious believer offering answers to the Problem of Evil. Rubin hopes to be vindicated in the end through his undying zeal for the cause.
Rubin’s opponent in heated debates is Dmitri Sologdin, who holds to an idiosyncratic mix of “reactionary” political and cultural beliefs, takes the Soviet state as a permanent feature of life, and decides that serving his enemies is his only hope of winning his freedom.
Spiridon, the sharashka’s yardman, has survived decades of revolution, civil war, world wars, and government persecution. Spiridon’s sole devotion is to his family, and he shifts his allegiance, such as it is, to whoever will allow him to protect his loved ones. Spiridon distracts himself with hard work and waits for the day when the Soviet state that has separated him from his children will fall.
Disillusioned by Collectivism
On the outside, Innokenty Volodin, who made the fateful call to the embassy, has lived by the Epicurean maxim that you are only given one life. So he enjoys the perks of political power: a nice home; a beautiful — if shallow and unfaithful — wife; the best food and drink; and stints abroad.
But growing disenchantment with his life, disillusionment with his government, and a chance discovery of his deceased mother’s letters awaken in him a desire for Party-denigrated virtues like justice and pity. His mother’s words sink deep: “Injustice is stronger than you, it always was and always will be, but let it not be done through you.” So, by degrees, Volodin is driven to take action against the “insensate mass” that would enslave the whole world. He has no choice, he concludes. Just as we are given only one life, “we are given only one conscience, too.”
The main character and our guide through the novel, however, is Nerzhin. Readers watch him take on the hard work of thinking, listening, and debating his way to new conclusions about good and evil, the human heart, and the fate of his country. He is utterly helpless in the face of the armies and agents that oppress him and his fellow prisoners. But rather than remain mired in cynicism and despair, he searches for a solid grounding for our instinctive desire for justice.
A Witness to Evil
While Solzhenitsyn’s style is understated, and more than a few times even funny, “In the First Circle” is first and foremost a lament. The writer is as powerless as the prisoners to stop the pitiless machine from grinding up millions of innocent lives. All he can do is tell what he sees. But a lament is an act of faith, or at least of hope. In exposing the evil he witnessed, Solzhenitsyn implicitly invoked a Power that he hoped would someday bring an end to his country’s suffering.
Solzhenitsyn lived to see the fall of the wicked regime he battled all his life. But most of its victims did not. Like the Israelites who waited centuries for their liberation, Solzhenitsyn grieved so as to be heard. The Israelites also held fast to the truth that good and evil are real, and to the hope that one day a righteous Judge would make all things right. Among many possible responses, Nerzhin, like Solzhenitsyn, chooses to do the same.
Reader of “In the First Circle” are left with a healthy sense of outrage, but also offered glimpses of friendship, selflessness, beauty, humor, and love even in an earthly Hell. Above all, Solzhenitsyn’s novel gives readers hope that while we must wait for it over agonizing years, justice will one day be done on earth as it is in heaven. Note: A “distorted” version of Solzhenitsyn’s novel was published in English under the title “The First Circle.” A more recent version with the missing chapters and other changes that Solzhenitsyn himself restored was published in English in 2008 under the title “In the First Circle.”
* Mike Sikorski is an ESOL instructor living in Fairfax, Virginia.
John Taylor Gatto is worthy of a hero’s eulogy for his work as a true champion of children, as an insightful author on education, and as an award-winning New York public school teacher. Such heroic work and devotion are not always easy to detect in a society run as amok as ours.
I was deeply saddened to hear of his recent death. I don’t believe anybody else in our time has fought as hard to restore the right of children to learn and to think independently. Certainly no one else has been so courageously fierce in exposing an obstructive education establishment that has deprived children of their birthright.
Gatto took on a struggle that should not be daunting, because his vision was so simple and true. It’s a vision that was once universally accepted in America: that children learn when their natural curiosity is allowed to flourish in the joy of learning; that we should respect the mind of the child and encourage his ability to think independently; and that we should especially support loving bonds between children and their families, between children and their communities.
The Rise of the Educrat
Yet, as morally right as such things are, they are anathema to the machinery of public schooling. Various elitist forces––including teachers’ unions and corporate interests––actually work to squash the natural development of human beings as self-reliant and independent thinkers. They long ago discovered that in order to keep their power intact, a compulsory, factory model of schooling worked best for them.
If you think about it, you too will realize that powerful elites in our institutions are always trying to suppress human ingenuity and imagination. This happens constantly in the media, academia, the corporate world, and in the mind-numbing world of entertainment. In this way, children can be molded to comply with the status quo and know their place in the caste system devised for them.
Gatto soon realized that educrats expected him, as a teacher, to put children through “an animal training system.” In his book, “The Underground History of American Education,” he describes forced schooling as a means to bring the entire population into conformity so it would be regarded as a “human resource” and managed as a “workforce.” He wrote that this required a “massive psychological campaign…the ability of Americans to think as independent producers had to be curtailed.”
Battling such a state of affairs is all the more difficult in a culture that has grown increasingly hostile to the innocence and dignity of children. After studying and documenting this perverse connection, Gatto asks a question that may seem harsh to those who haven’t given it much thought: “How does a fellow human being come to regard ordinary people’s children as experimental animals? What impulse triggers the pornographic urge to deprive kids of volition, to fiddle with their lives?”
The utter contempt of this system for freewill short-circuits the right to choice. This is “a rapist’s tactic,” Gatto notes. For those of us who put our kids in public schools, this rings very harsh. It’s the passion of someone who has witnessed crimes against humanity.
Watch here as Gatto rhetorically asks: “What could be more crazy than agreeing to give your child over to total strangers for 12 years while they tinker with his mind?”
The priorities of such a system are to pigeonhole kids, use humiliation to enforce conformity, and feed them ignorance instead of knowledge. It’s no wonder that people like Professor Jordan Peterson have taken noticeof Gatto’s brilliance and recommend reading his work.
A Public School Teacher Gone Rogue
No one can doubt the brilliance and effectiveness of Gatto when he taught public school in New York City. He was awarded New York City’s “Teacher of the Year” three years in a row in 1989, 1990, and 1991. He was declared New York state’s “Teacher of the Year” in 1991 as well. Shortly after receiving those accolades, however, he decided he’d had enough of a system that hurt children far more than it helped them.
On July 25, 1991, at age 55, Gatto wrote a public letter of resignation that was published as an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. It was headlined, “I Quit, I Think.” Here’s an excerpt:
I’ve come slowly to understand what it is I really teach: A curriculum of confusion, class position, arbitrary justice, vulgarity, rudeness, disrespect for privacy, indifference to quality, and utter dependency. I teach how to fit into a world I don’t want to live in. I just can’t do it anymore. I can’t train children to wait to be told what to do; I can’t train people to drop what they are doing when a bell sounds; I can’t persuade children to feel some justice in their class placement when there isn’t any, and I can’t persuade children to believe teachers have valuable secrets they can acquire by becoming our disciples. That isn’t true.
Government schooling is the most radical adventure in history. It kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and by teaching disrespect for home and parents. An exaggeration? Hardly. Parents aren’t meant to participate in our form of schooling, rhetoric to the contrary. My orders as schoolteacher are to make children fit an animal training system, not to help each find his or her personal path.
So after 26 years of teaching, Gatto decided to spend the rest of his life reversing the intellectual and emotional damage that compulsory, factory schooling does to children. From the inside, Gatto realized that there was a war going on, and he had to take up arms.
In fact, it’s been a sinister, generational war against the human mind. If allowed to continue without confrontation, it could end in the extinction of that spark of genius that I believe is in everyone. Gatto was the firebrand the American public needed in order to see how badly things had gone awry.
Connecting The Dots
Gatto was a compelling speaker and author of several books that shed light on the train wreck of schooling in America. Among them are “The Underground History of American Education,” “Dumbing Us Down,” and “Weapons of Mass Instruction.” He was relentless in pursuing his mission to expose the machinery of schooling. He soldiered on even after suffering a debilitating stroke in 2011. His Twitter page continues to promote his legacy.
Gatto was born in 1935 in Monongahela, Pennsylvania, so he could recall getting a real education before the cancer of compulsory factory schooling metastasized. He remembered the joys of learning and the intact families and communities that played a major role in the development of children into responsible adults. He recalled the wisdom of his grandfather, who reminded him that to be bored is to be a boring person.
Gatto’s devotion to family is reflected in his half-century marriage to his wife, Janet. His extensive dedication to her in “Underground History” ends with the words: “until death do us part.” They raised two children.
For Gatto, Monongahela symbolized America at its finest. A major turning point in our history as a free people took place there, with a decisive battle of the French and Indian War in 1755. At the time, a young George Washington served as a volunteer officer in the British efforts to take Fort Duquesne in the Ohio River Valley. Thinking outside the box, Washington asked British Gen. Edward Braddock if he could engage the enemy in wilderness fashion; Braddock denied permission.
Instead, Braddock had his well-schooled British soldiers fight in the same old rote formations. It got the British disastrously routed, and Braddock killed. The young Washington took note, and the rest is history. If we hadn’t gotten rid of the British, writes Gatto, “the competence of ordinary people to educate themselves would never have had a fair test.” Perhaps it was divine providence that Gatto heralded from a place that provided a special lesson about true education and the independent mind.
Bait and Switch: Educrats’ Grand Theft of Childhood
As harsh as Gatto’s criticisms sound, the dehumanizing conditioning and programming of kids has a long history going back a couple of centuries. Gatto painstakingly provided documentation of it in his book “The Underground History of American Education.” (The latest edition includes a forward by former congressman Ron Paul.)
Gatto explains how today’s model of factory schooling is based on the Prussian model of sorting people for an efficient society in which a minority of elites rule over a vast majority of subjects who have been deliberately dumbed down. This may not be the only possible explanation for the schools putting the brakes on effective reading, but it surely is the most plausible one.
Take, for example, the crazy curriculum change starting in the ‘50s to replace the easy de-coding of phonics with the guessing game of “look/say” whole word recognition. (To understand how idiotic such a program is, consider a piano teacher who never instructs beginners in how to read notes on the scale. Or how about we all just return to Egyptian hieroglyphics instead of an alphabet?) According to Gatto, the move away from phonics was probably responsible for the doubling of the illiteracy rate among black Americans from 1940 to 2000 and the quadrupling of whites’ illiteracy rate during that same period.
Get the Kids Away from Their Families
Chronologically, our current model of regimented, factory schooling begins more or less with industrialization in the mid-19th century, which triggered a decline of agriculture and deterioration of family life. People grew more dependent with urbanization. Pedagogues in Massachusetts, led by Horace Mann, saw opportunity in that crisis, and spoke about how the state could assert itself into a parental role. By 1852, schooling was made compulsory in Massachusetts. Gatto says:
After the Civil War, utopian speculative analysis regarding isolation of children in custodial compounds where they could be subjected to deliberate molding routines, began to be discussed seriously by the Northeastern policy elites of business, government, and university life…effective early indoctrination of all children would lead to an orderly scientific society, one controlled by the best people, now freed from the obsolete straitjacket of democratic traditions and historic American libertarian attitudes.
Again, this may all sound harsh—maybe almost unbelievable to children of the elites who have benefited from this system of social engineering. But here are several other excerpts that Gatto offers us to think about:
In the first decades of the twentieth century, a small group of soon-to-be-famous academics, symbolically led by John Dewey and Edward Thorndike of Columbia Teachers College, Ellwood P. Cubberly of Stanford, G. Stanley Hall of Clark and an ambitious handful of others, energized and financed by major corporate and financial allies like Morgan, Astor, Whitney, Carnegie, and Rockefeller, decided to bend government schooling to the service of business and the political state – as it had been done a century before in Prussia.
Ellwood P. Cubberley’s “Public Education in the United States” (1934) has a section entitled “A New Lengthening of the Period of Dependence.” Cubberly concedes that the forced nature of schooling was not what people wanted: “The history of compulsory attendance legislation in the states has been much the same everywhere and everywhere laws have been enacted only after overcoming strenuous opposition.”
Arthur Calhoun’s “Social History of the Family” (1919) declared that the fondest wish of utopian writers was coming true, the child was passing from its family “into the custody of community experts.” He offered a significant forecast, that in time we could expect to see public education “designed to check the mating of the unfit.”
The “Behavioral Science Teacher Education Project” identified the future as one “in which a small elite” will control all important matters, one where participatory democracy will largely disappear. Post-modern schooling, we are told is to focus on “pleasure cultivation” and on “other attitudes and skills compatible with a non-work world.”
With “Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives,” (1949-1953) school is “a tool to classify the ways individuals are to act, think, or feel as the result of some unit of instruction.” Using methods of behavioral psychology, children would learn proper thoughts, feelings, and actions, and have their improper attitudes brought from home “remediated.” Today, such a utopian agenda goes by the name “Social and Emotional Learning,” and it is being pushed hard into all of the schools under the banner of Common Core.
From Rockefeller’s General Education Board’s 1906 document:
“in our dreams people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands…The task we set before ourselves is very simple…we will organize children…and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way.”
According to the work, “Social Control,” by Edward A. Ross in 1901:
“Plans are underway to replace community, family and church with propaganda, education and mass media…the State shakes loose from Church, reaches out to School…People are only little plastic lumps of human dough.”’
Gatto attests that when people are interested in learning, they can learn all of the basics of reading, math, and writing in about 100 hours of attentive study. The mind simply fires away at the connections, when allowed and encouraged to do so. Given that fact, why would public mass schooling demand approximately 25,000 hours of a person’s life?
The obvious answer is so that person’s life can be socially engineered, and children’s independent maturity can be retarded, or even stopped. Gatto doesn’t shrink from calling this psychic violence in the name of social efficiency, and humiliation is the tool it uses: “Something in the structure of schooling calls for violence…[schools] are state-of-the-art laboratories in humiliation.”
What are the final results of this massive bait-and-switch, divide-and-conquer program we call public schooling? Gatto sums it up here: “It’s as if government schooling made people dumber, not brighter; made families weaker, not stronger; ruined formal religion with its hard-sell exclusion of God; set the class structure in stone by dividing children into classes and setting them against one another.”
Reclaiming The Freedom To Think
The effects of Gatto’s work are yet to be measured. But his writing and speaking, throughout the United States (and internationally), sowed seeds far and wide. He may have felt like a voice crying in the wilderness, but many listened, including yours truly. His writing was a decisive factor in my decision to pull my fourth-grader and sixth-grader out of the supposedly desirable “blue ribbon” public schools in Potomac, Maryland. Home education was the best decision I ever made in raising my kids. I only wish I had done it from the beginning and more completely.
Compulsory public schooling as we know it does indeed deserve to die. It will no doubt continue to be propped up by the usual suspects––the elites who depend on cultivating ignorance while building a vast, dependent, and compliant underclass. But at some point, its bubble will burst. Its implosion is inevitable, as long as we retain a spark of humanity that resists succumbing to the automaton existence public schooling has designed for all of us.
When that happens, John Taylor Gatto will have had a big hand in it. What a beautiful legacy: to reclaim for our children their birthright of free thought.
A cento anni dalla nascita di un maestro di libertà: Aleksandr Solženicyn
Aldo Vitale
Durante tutta la sua vita, rivendicando la libertà di coscienza, di pensiero e di parola, criticò in profondità il materialismo declinato secondo le due opposte forme: comunismo e capitalismo
«Il silenzio è il linguaggio di tutte le forti passioni, dell’amore (anche nei momenti dolci) dell’ira, della meraviglia, del timore»: così ha scritto nel suo Zibaldone Giacomo Leopardi, dimenticando, forse volontariamente, che il silenzio è anche il linguaggio dell’imbarazzo, come del resto appare fortemente imbarazzato il silenzio del mondo culturale occidentale che tra lo scorso 3 agosto e l’11 dicembre prossimo avrebbe dovuto ricordare i dieci anni della morte e i cento anni della nascita, rispettivamente, di uno dei pilastri della civiltà occidentale quale è statoAleksandr Solženicyn.
L’OPPIO DEL SOCIALISMO
Solženicyn, infatti, tanto più andrebbe ricordato e commemorato quanto più ci si professa amanti della democrazia e della libertà, specialmente in un’epoca, come quella attuale, in cui le parole “democrazia” e “libertà” sono così usate e abusate da inflazionarsi a tal punto da perdere tutto il loro intenso e reale peso specifico morale e umano.
Probabilmente, proprio per questo motivo, l’intellighenzia del mondo occidentale odierno tace su un evento così importante, poiché ha contribuito in questi ultimi anni ad erodere i significati autentici di democrazia e di libertà così, invece, genuinamente incarnati dalla vita, dalle opere e dal pensiero di Aleksandr Solženicyn di cui furono traditi lo spirito e l’insegnamento proprio per mano dei suoi colleghi scrittori, letterati e intellettuali occidentali obnubilati dall’oppio del socialismo (per parafrasare la felicissima formula di Raymond Aron).
IL REGIME SOVIETICO
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L’INVASIONE NAZISTA
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PRIGIONE E CONFINO
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IL PARADISO DEI LAVORATORI
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PENSIERO UNICO COMUNISTA
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LIBERI DI ESPRIMERSI ...
COMUNISMO E CAPITALISMO ...
MAESTRO DELLO SPIRITO CRISTIANO
Solženicyn, alla luce di ciò, può essere considerato, dunque, come uno degli ultimi coraggiosi maestri dello spirito cristiano che hanno speso tutta la loro esistenza e tutte le loro fatiche per ricordare, specialmente alla cultura contemporanea, che «non di solo pane vive l’uomo», come si evince, con estrema chiarezza, dalla intensa preghiera composta dallo stesso Solženicyn che in conclusione si riporta per esteso e che quanto mai opportuna appare proprio in questo periodo di Avvento:
«Che sollievo vivere con te, Signore! Che sollievo credere in te! Quando cede al dubbio o vacilla il mio intelletto, quando la gente più intelligente non vede oltre la sera che viene e non sa che fare domani, Tu infondi in me l’assoluta certezza che esisti e provvedi a che non tutte le vie del bene siano precluse. Dal sommo della gloria terrena io guardo stupito il percorso attraverso la disperazione fino a qui, il punto da dove ho potuto inviare all’umanità un riflesso dei Tuoi raggi. E concedimi quanto è necessario per rispecchiarli ancora. Ma quanto non è nelle mie corde so che Tu l’hai destinato ad altri».
