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Home » The age-old question: fools or knaves?

The age-old question: fools or knaves?

The New Neo Posted on by

In my previous post for today, I called those who discount the jihadist intent of the Muslim Brotherhood fools and useful idiots.

But it occurs to me that they might instead be knaves. Or both.

It’s the age-old question—although what would be in it for them in supporting jihadists who are out to destroy all the advances of the Enlightment is a puzzlement to me. That’s why I go with the “fools” hypothesis.

Your mileage may differ.

[ADDENDUM: And is this any real surprise?

he Obama administration said for the first time that it supports a role for groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood, a banned Islamist organization, in a reformed Egyptian government.

The organization must reject violence and recognize democratic goals if the U.S. is to be comfortable with it taking part in the government, the White House said…

Monday’s statement was a “pretty clear sign that the U.S. isn’t going to advocate a narrow form of pluralism, but a broad one,” said Robert Malley, a Mideast peace negotiator in the Clinton administration. U.S. officials have previously pressed for broader participation in Egypt’s government.

The George W. Bush administration pushed Mubarak for democratic reforms, but a statement in 2005 by then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice did not specifically address a role for Islamists.

“This is different,” said Malley, now with the International Crisis Group. “It has a real political edge and political meaning.”…

[The Brotherhood] is not listed on U.S. terrorism lists, as the militant Hamas and Hezbollah organizations are…Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, who has become the leading symbol of the effort to oust Mubarak, has said the group poses no threat. The Muslim Brotherhood on Sunday announced its support for ElBaradei as a transitional president if Mubarak was toppled.]

[ADDENDUM: Caroline Glick weighs in. Her conclusion, “The US policy towards Egypt is dictated by the irrational narcissism of two opposing sides to a policy debate that has nothing to do with reality.”]

Comments

The age-old question: fools or knaves? — 25 Comments

  1. Some of both. Those in on the joke are knaves. Those aiding and abetting and not in on the joke are fools / useful idiots. The ones in on the joke (the knaves) tend to fit a certain demographic profile I don’t think I need to detail for present company.

    http://libertyatstake.blogspot.com
    “Because the Only Good Progressive is a Failed Progressive”

  2. Read Jane Jacobs “Systems of Survival.” Muslims and Socialists favor a Guardian-dominant society, the opposite of America, which began, at least, as a Commercial (bourgeois) dominant society. “Systems” works for me, because it is a theory, a conceptual model, that pulls together the observations that I have made, over three quarters of a life time. Live long enough, fail at a few things, succeed at a few others, and you make observations of the same sort. The library in Newton has at least one copy, I know, because a friend who lives there, read it.

  3. Willi Mé¼nzenberg innocents clubs

    Following the rise to power of the Bolsheviks, he pioneered most of the manipulative political techniques which are a feature of life in Britain today. Ad hoc committees for endless causes, politicized arts festivals, mock trials, celebrity letterheads, disinformation stunts and protest marches all sprang from Mé¼nzenberg’s sheer genius for propaganda.

    Most of this army of workers in what Mé¼nzenberg called ‘Innocents’ Clubs’ had no idea they were working for Stalin. They were led to believe that they were advancing the cause of a sort of socialist humanism.

    and after spain, they were referred to as fifth columns..

    so the whole knave argument is misleading, and puts forth a falsity that provides cover for the truth and allows intents over outcomes to be the rule.

    who cares if society falls and we are all enslaved, we had good intentions.

    Mé¼nzenberg’s right-hand man, Otto Katz, established an Anti-Nazi League in Hollywood, placing the writer Dorothy Parker in charge as celebrity window-dressing. The novelist Thomas Mann was one of the few to detect a swindle, although it took him five years to grasp the realities

    and

    Katz worked hard in Britain to establish the Left Book Club. It networked the Stalinist influence and promoted the left as the chic fashion of the time. The Club ran camps, conferences and propaganda tours of Russia. As in all the Western countries in which ‘the Mé¼nzenberg men’ extended their networks, the ‘innocents’ believed that they were working to oppose Hitler. In reality the purpose was the undermine the West and pave the way for Soviet style control.

    -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

    The Comintern were able to play upon the vanity of the elite for whom life could never reach their gilded expectations. The secret world offered a “wonderful restorative” — Koch’s phrase again — with a particular appeal to the homosexual milieu of Bloomsbury which made up its centre. A connection to power is an aphrodisiac to people of this ilk.

    Despite the formal collapse of Communism in 1989, the legacy of Stalin’s strategy of destroying the West by propaganda has an increasing hold through the cult of ‘political correctness.’ The undermining of our society by the media has steadily intensified since then. Mé¼nzenberg’s spectre hovers as vital as ever in contemporary life. At a time when Communism has little remaining formal influence, Mé¼nzenberg’s techniques of propaganda and disinformation pervade our lives.

    His legacy had far outlasted the formal cause it served, and now works for new masters. The opinion-formers who so misjudged Communism still claim legitimacy in dictating political ideals. Their track record is little considered. Marx wrote in 1857, “It is possible I’ve made a fool of myself, but that can always be remedied with a little bit of dialectics.” The malady lingers on.

    this whole knave fool argument is a waste of time.

    either they are nasty and complicit
    or they are too stupid to avoid being used.

    EITHER way, they are not right wherever they are.

    deciding which is which is for what reason?

    forgiveness of ignorance, where as long as you remain stupid and don’t try, you can be absolved of even the tortured murder of millions under good intentions?

    why waste our time on people who have shown themselves to be idiots regardless of which branch they choose, complicity, or ignorance..

    this whole thing becomes an exercise in fantasy as long as the majority of the opinions are ignorant of history!!!!!!!!!!!!

    the idea is that this whole ideology and movement is about making knaves out of misfits, and ignorant slaves out of the others… and pit those two against the good people who just want to live their lives.

    in this way, you create an army within a society, and in this way, you grow a civil war (what do you think revolution is?)

    well a majority have been singing the song of desire for revolution for 40+ years.

    its divide and conquer…
    its collusion of our leaders against the people

    and endless discussions abotu placing people on a spectrum of complicity, or not, is a complete waste.

    kind of like discussing whether the patterns on the deck chairs match the flooring on the titanic.

    so let me know, is philby below a fool or a knave or a knavish fool?

    The recruitment of the key figure, Kim Philby, shows the seamless nature of the distinction between the Comintern underground and Soviet intelligence. In 1933 the conclusion of Kim Philby’s studies at Cambridge coincided with his decision to become an active Marxist. In doing so he asked the advice of a Cambridge academic and CPGB member, Maurice Dobb, ‘how I should go about it’. As others have remarked, instead of simply recruiting him to party membership, Dobb advised him to contact the Paris-based World Committee for the Relief of Victims of German Fascism.
    Though the founder of the Committee, Willi Munzenberg, was a talent spotter for the KGB, there is no evidence he saw the potential of Philby. Members of his Committee in turn advised Philby that he could best help the anti-fascist cause in Vienna working for the Comintern-based group which went under various names, International Organisation for the Assistance of Revolutionaries, Red Aid or MOPR, its Russian acronym. Years later Philby explained clearly his transition. The Munzenberg group was ‘a perfectly legal and open group’. This group then ‘passed me on to a communist underground organisation in Vienna.’ The work of MOPR became crucial in the period 1933-34 which saw a bloody attack on the Austrian Left, with the shelling of workers’ apartments and the lynching of a number of its leaders. Thousands of Austrian communists and socialists were on the run, joining thousands more fleeing the first waves of Hitler’s repression in Germany.

    after all these organizations were formed before you were born, have reputations in public sphere, have a dark back, and think nothing of using people and letting them take the blame.

    the idea of honest dealings is null…

    “Of course, you know that we at the executive level here were, at one time or another, active in either the OSS, the State Department, or the European Economic Administration. During those times, and without exception, we operated under directives issued by the White House. We are continuing to be guided by just such directives… The substance [of these directives] was to the effect that we should make every effort to so alter life in the United States as to make possible a comfortable merger with the Soviet Union.” H. Rowan Gaither, President of the Ford Foundation, to Norman Dodd director of the Special [Reece] Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations

    who are the fools?

    “This is the key to the mental enslavement of mankind.

    The individual is made into nothing … he operates as the physical part of a higher group intelligence … he has no awareness of the plans the higher group intelligence has for utilizing him …

    What now became clear to me was the collusion of these two forces: the Communists with their timetable for world control, and certain mercenary forces in the free world bent on making profits from blood.”

    Dodd

    Can we add puppet to the list?

    read Senator William Jenner from the record..

    “Today the path to total dictatorship in the U.S. can be laid by strictly legal means, unseen and unheard by Congress, the President, or the people… We have a well-organized political-action group in this country, determined to destroy our Constitution and establish a one-party state… The important point to remember about this group is not its ideology but its organization. It is a dynamic, aggressive, elite corps, forcing its way through every opening, to make a breach for a collectivist one-party state. It operates secretly, silently, continuously to transform our Government without suspecting that change is under way… If I seem to be extremist, the reason is that this revolutionary clique cannot be understood, unless we accept the fact that they are extremist. It is difficult for people governed by reasonablenss and morality to imagine the existence of a movement which ignores reasonableness and boasts of its determination to destroy; which ignores morality, and boasts of its cleverness in outwitting its opponents by abandoning all scruples. This ruthless power-seeking elite is a disease of our century… This group…is answerable neither to the President, the Congress, nor the courts. It is practically irremovable.”

    Senator William Jenner of Indiana (1954)

    sigh
    Fool
    Knave
    Puppet
    Proxy

  4. Artfldgr: I agree that in a sense it doesn’t matter which (fool or knave). I’m interested in the question, however, because I’m interested in the psychology of such people.

    But I do think it matters in one regard: theoretically at least, fools can learn and change (too slowly, unfortunately, to make a difference in many instances). Knaves are much less likely to do so, although every now and then it happens.

  5. The knaves have created a cultural taboo within liberalism of applying critical judgement toward anyone said to be oppressed by western society. The fools can’t think outside that box. They only know they’d feel bad if they did.

  6. read about Reece Committee…

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_Select_Committee_to_Investigate_Tax-Exempt_Foundations_and_Comparable_Organizations

    He stated that his research staff had discovered that in “1933-1936, a change took place which was so drastic as to constitute a “revolution” . They also indicated conclusively that the responsibility for the economic welfare of the American people had been transferred heavily to the Executive Branch of -the Federal Government ; that a corresponding change in education had taken place from an impetus outside of the local community, -and that this “revolution” had occurred without violence and with the full consent of an overwhelming majority of the electorate .” He stated that this revolution “could not have occurred peacefully, or with the consent of the majority, unless education in the United States had been prepared in advance to endorse it .”

    from the same link

    “Cumulative evidence supports the conclusion that in the United States as in other countries, the age of laissez faire in economy and government is closing and a new age of collectivism is emerging.” — p.16 “As to the specific form which this “collectivism,” this integration and interdependence, is taking and will take in the future, the evidence at hand is by no means clear or unequivocal. It may involve the limiting or supplanting of private property by public property or it may entail the preservation of private property, extended and distributed among the masses. Most likely, it will issue from a process of experimentation and will represent a composite of historic doctrines and social conceptions yet to appear. Almost certainly it will involve a larger measure of compulsory as well as voluntary co-operation of citizens in the conduct of the complex national economy, a corresponding enlargement of the functions of government, and an increasing state intervention in fundamental branches of economy previously left to individual discretion and initiative-a state intervention that in some instances may be direct and mandatory and in others indirect and facilitative. In any event the Commission is convinced by its interpretation of available empirical data that the actually integrating economy of the present day is the forerunner of a consciously integrated society, in which individual economic actions and individual property, rights will be altered and abridged.” — p. 17

    you can read books, policy papers, and all kind of stuff that only the elite bother with..

    i point them out, but only the elite bother with, others dont bother, they got their training by the same people who made thos plans and would rather they not have other wishes.

    here is the quote on the plan to integrate all our economies globally before such a soviet merger

    “The Commission deems possible and desirable an enlightened attitude on the part of the masses of the American people toward international relations, involving informed appreciation of the cultural bonds long subsisting among the nations of Western civilization and now developing rapidly among all the nations of the world, and special knowledge of the increasing economic interdependence of politically separate areas and peoples, and of the emerging economic integration of the globe.”

    “Organized public education in the United States, much more than ever before, is now compelled, if it is to fulfill its social obligations, to adjust its objectives, its curriculum, its methods of instruction, and its administrative procedures to the requirements of the emerging integrated order.” — p. 35 “If the school is to justify its maintenance and assume its responsibilities, it must recognize the new order and proceed to equip the rising generation to cooperate effectively in the increasingly interdependent society and to live rationally and well within its limitations and possibilities….” — p. 35 “The program of social science instruction should not be organized as a separate and isolated division of the curriculum but rather should be closely integrated with other activities and subjects so that the entire curriculum of the school may constitute a unified attack upon the complicated problem of life in contemporary society.” — p. 48

    and finally he said:
    n summary, our study of these entities and their relationship

    to each other seems to warrant the inference that they constitute a highly efficient, functioning whole . Its product is apparently an educational curriculum desisrned to indoctrinate the American student from matriculation to the consummation of his education . It contrasts sharply with the freedom of the individual as the cornerstone of our social structure . For this freedom, it seems to substitute the group, the will of the majority, and a centralized power to enforce this will-Presumably in the interest of all.
    lts develop-‘ ment and production seems to have been largely the work of those organizations engaged in research, such as the Social Science Research Council and the National Research Council.

    whats creepy is to read the two sides arguing in the 40s and 50s, then watch the winners change everything and then watch the victims sit aroudn confused trying to figure it all out in their own way sans history, and all this.

    it was at this time that feminism was tapped to be the big front to push all this, as once you were able to tax womens labor and destroy the family, you had the children in state schools being endoctrinated.

    you can READ the plans and such just like reading mein kampf before actualization.

  9. The Islamists use the progressives and vice versa. Each thinks they’ll come out on top when the shooting’s over.
    Problem is, the Islamists are generally better at shooting people than the progressives are. The latter are romantic about it.
    The best shots are the rest of us who are supposed to be controlled by one or the other.
    Going to be interesting.

  10. Liberals since 9/11 have become more and more invested in denying reality. Right now we are sliding toward a new World War — a religious war of the West vs. Islam, fought with everything from knives to nukes.

    But to American and European liberals, the thought of that is intolerable. They abhor war, no matter what the cause or the stakes. So they have persuaded themselves that the West isn’t worth defending — it’s evil, imperialist, racist, etc. And they simply cannot see or understand evidence of the growing evil within the Islamic world.

    For all their talk of “nuance” and their superficial sophistication, liberals have a very black-and-white view of the world. Brown people are automatically Good. The West is automatically Bad. War is Bad. So there is no way they can support a war to defend the West against Islam. Therefore, the threat is simply wished away. They’ve decided to pretend it doesn’t exist.

  11. Note, by the way, that the liberal Enlightenment ideals of America are likely to be ground away to nothing in the coming struggle. If liberals had gotten on board sooner, they might be able to preserve them, but they’ve abdicated. In the war between Evangelical Christians and Fundamentalist Islam, secular liberalism will cease to exist.

    And the outcome is by no means certain.

  13. “Obama, army chiefs tell Mubarak to go now and leave Egypt
    DEBKAfile Special Report February 1, 2011, 9:49 PM (GMT+02:00)

    Ominously, Mubarak is hanged in effigy by Cairo protesters
    In a final ultimatum, Washington Tuesday, Feb. 1, told Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak bluntly that his time was up. He must quit now and leave Egypt without further delay.”

    The Dope is too stupid to be a knave. He sure is scaring the Hell out of our allies, like Israel.

  14. When Obama was elected I tried to comfort myself by thinking this country had survived the Civil War; the Great Depression; two World Wars; and 12+ years of FDR. Surely, surely it could survive four years of a socialist idiot. Perhaps I was a bit optimistic.

  15. To kaba:
    The US has survived having both fools and knaves as President.
    However, I don’t think we have ever had a president that apparently works toward the destruction of our country and our constitution before.
    That is what I find concerning.
    Perhaps Obama doesn’t really want to destroy the Constitution and our nation but if his every action tends toward that end, does it really matter?
    Goes back to the fool vs. knave question. I don’t care which he is.

  16. BTW the Malley quoted in the article is an anti-Israel activist that Obama had to let go.

  17. I just read that 250,000 demonstrated against Mubarack. In a city the size of Cairo that number is a joke. This whole thing may be a case of a lot more meeting the eye than is happening. I noticed this in Israel. The reason the Middle east crisis makes so much news is that it is the only war zone in the world were a reporter can record a conflict at 10 o’clock, file at 11 lunch at 12 and be at a nude beach at 3 (at least if they are lucky enough to be stationed in Israel).

    Judging from the number of people who have not been killed I suspect something similar is happening. The big surprise maybe that there are no big surprises.

    Also the Israelis from Egypt all agree the Egyptians are not a violent or militaristic people.

  18. Bob from Virginia: it’s not the number of people demonstrating, it’s what may or may not be behind them. This seems big. And Obama’s reaction is part of it.

  19. I remember the slogans from the 60s. The Viet Cong were agrarian reformers. Just wanted better farming conditions and freedom from oppression. Did not turn out quite that way. Not that the MSM ever noticed.

    The mantra now is much the same. These are young, unemployed reformers thirsting for democracy and jobs. Give them a chance and they’ll turn Egypt into a Jeffersonian democracy. Or at least a Muslim Republic. Nothing wrong with that is there? Mention Iran and the MSM and progressives change the subject.

    Interesting e-mail from a young Egyptian published by Clarice Feldman at American Thinker. Here:
    http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/02/the_story_of_the_egyptian_revo.html

  20. This will end very badly. Under the guise of “democracy,” the Muslim Brotherhood will take over. The “ban” on importing arms into Gaza, formerly lightened by corruption, will be lifted completely.

    With Hezbollah in control in Lebanon and the Muslim Brotherhood in control in Egypt, rockets will start raining down.

    Israeli attempts at self defense will be condemned as “disproportionate.”

    Obama will stand on the sideline as Israel is destroyed, and in the process nukes half the Middle East.

  21. But the rockets will not start raining down until Hezbollah and Hamas figure they have enough to do real damage. Wait 6 months.

  22. The Turks are next.

    Dodger, I found your material interesting. You couldn’t find one American in a thousand who has even heard of the ComIntern.

  23. The only reasonable move for US now would be make airlift of wheat flour as emergency aid to Egypt, distributed to population by Egyptean Army, with promisses to send more by cargo vessels in weeks to come.

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