Page 18 THE VILLADOM TIMES I • September 29, 2010 stood, and to be helped. They are not to wreck the economy by organizing a fourth branch of the armed forces for a War on Drugs. Let the local police handle it, and promote those who make good arrests. The expensive programs don’t work. Some people close to the situation have told me this in confidence. The Chinese, I think, have no desire to conquer America. They don’t think we are that bright, although they admire our lifestyle. They have had a civilization for 4,000 years, are wonderfully skilled business people, and cannot be effectively understood in the outmoded context of Marxism, which developed out of a perversion of 19th century German Romanticism and out of a blasphemous parody of Christianity. Marxism has never worked except as a fulcrum for a serious ulterior motive. People use Marxist rhetoric – look at the last two chapters of The Book of Revelation in the New Testament – to get people to do whatever they want. The Russians wanted to get out of World War I, where they suffered nobody knows how many casualties fighting a real army when their own army was an entitlement program for caste-ridden snobs. Certain Russians also wanted to seize power not theirs by birthright. The Chinese wanted to kill the opium pushers and landlords who had sucked the life out of the world’s greatest small-lot farmers. In the short term, both succeeded. In the long run, both flopped. Marxists are good at killing people, but they can’t stand up to capitalism economically, assuming that the capitalism is tempered by Christianity to eliminate the worst excesses of greed. The worst feature of Marxism is its attack on Christianity, a vital component of any working system, because it prevents the extreme abuse of the poor that leads to revolution or kills off the work force. The second worst feature is that, by handing control of the economy over to the political sector, communism hands the economy over politicians who are more interested in protecting their jobs than making money. Crassly put, they have no motive to succeed in the manufacture and sale of goods, but want to prove their slavish loyalty to Marx, who lived all his adult life off the interest on bonds purchased by his best friend’s father, or to Lenin, who was a paid agent of the German General Staff when he touched off the revolution that took Russia out of World War I. I have no patience or tolerance for Americans who regard Russians as subhuman because they put up with this brutal and evil system for so many years. They were victims of circumstance -- mislead by people who were not ethnic Russians and dragged into a half-century of conflict with Germany, which was tottering, versus Britain and France, which were functionally dead by the end of the Victorian Era in Britain or the neo-Napoleonic era in France. Some of the world’s greatest literature was written as a dying declaration by Dickens and Galsworthy from Britain; and Dumas (part African), Honore de Balzac, Victor Hugo, and Emile Zola from France. They knew they were finished. Oswald Spengler, the epochal German historian, said “Gothic” – Western European civilization – was finished by 1850. German writers before 1850 wrote about God as perceived through nature, about love as a redemptive force, about human brotherhood – just as the French had a century before. Once Goethe (d. 1832) and the German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine (d. 1848) were safely dead and Wagner’s operas vectored from Christianity into Buddhism, the Germans also culturally died and – after Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy -- took the admiring Russians down with them. The hapless Russians paid for it with the best men of two generations. Your chances of dying in bed if you were a Russian born after 1900 were seriously circumscribed by World War I, where the Russians lost more men than all the others allies combined; Stalin’s purges, which killed off huge numbers of intelligent people; and World War II, which killed 11 million Russian soldiers and 16 million Russian civilians. Most of the German casualties of World War II were inflicted in Russia and Eastern Europe. The war in Western Europe, staggering as it was for Americans to fight a first-rate modern army, was a sideshow despite individual American heroism. “The Germans I was fighting were old men and kids, and they were plenty bad enough,” a friend of mine reported. “I’m a Yugoslav and I hate communism, but I haven’t got a bad word to sat about the Russian Army. I if we had to face the A-Team the way they did, they would have pushed us right back into the Atlantic.” Those days are over. Russia and China don’t want us dead, and a surprising number of Muslims don’t want us dead either. Japan and South Korean and Taiwan are simply hoping we stay afloat. The fantasy of constant threats from outsiders – a staple of George Orwell’s “1984” – are a prop for the defense industry and repressive government, just as the idea that healthy kids from stable families are at serious risk for heroin addiction. American people don’t need to be over-administered, over-enforced, or over-taxed so “college for everybody” means you will need a Ph.D. to get a decent job. The American people need the government to offer a safety net for people who need help. After that, the government needs to get out of our lives. The rest of the world already knows that. China and Russia have had it with Marxism and socialism. P.S. I ordered the Mark IV tank from Connecticut. That is what’s known as an economic incentive program. I recently described the trouble I had trying to get a stamped metal model of a British Mark IV tank. The model, which is made in China, was not in stock. This had also happened when I tried to order a model of a French FT-17 tank. The company in Georgia that advertised the model told me the one set of dies used to make the model had vanished and the order could not be filled. Some time later, the same model showed up in a pricier catalogue from Connecticut. That is the essence of capitalism. The article I wrote prompted two readers to contact me and tell me where models or kits of Mark IV tanks were available at reasonable prices, but before I could launch an e-mail, the Mark IV showed up in the catalog from Connecticut. It’s on back order, but said to be available. I might add that the price is $20 higher than when it was advertised from the place in Georgia. Obviously, Chinese Communism is dead, or soon to be dead, because nobody will put up with the theoretical nonsense of Marxism if they understand the basic principle of capitalism: Show me the money! In the long run, history is approximately fair. The United States kept China afloat, and backward, as a market for about 100 years through the “Open Door” policy to prevent wholesale colonization, and even instigated war with Japan, a former Anglo-American ally. Now the Chinese are keeping America afloat against our own tendency to subsidize worthless social programs and reward poor management with massive loans and subsidizing politicians they know can be bought to preserve the U.S. as a market. They don’t feel any guiltier about selling us toys covered with lead paint and electronics that don’t measure up to Japanese or South Korean standards than we did when Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s grandfather and great-uncle were selling them opium in the 19th century. A handful of honest people in the Chinese administration had banned opium as “foreign mud” and tried to keep it out of China as poisonous and socially destructive, much as we today try to keep heroin and cocaine out of the United States for the same reason, and with a similar lack of success. The Roosevelt boys, writing before the Civil War, said opium-trading was better than slavery as practiced in the American South. Perhaps true, but it wasn’t much better. Henrik Ibsen said so in “Peer Gynt.” Pre-Communist China wallowed in opiate addiction, as every honest Chinese knows and admits. In the Japanese Empire next door, then including Korea, nobody really cared when foreign sailors swapped heroin to prostitutes, who were mostly addicts, but if you got caught retailing for general consumption your head appeared on a utility pole, even if you tried to bribe the cops. Japan had the lowest incidence of heroin and morphine addiction of any industrial nation for two simple reasons: most cops were patriotic and honest, and the chance to get rich pushing opiates was non-existent. If you got caught, you were dead -- literally. If you have lived long enough and know a few addicts personally, you know that serious drug abuse is a form of suicide by people who have looked around and really don’t want to live. These people are to be pitied, to be under- Harbingers of a better world This month, the Franklin Lakes Meals on Wheels program celebrated 25 years of continuous service to the elderly residents of Franklin Lakes. Organized on May 28, 1985 from a coalition of concerned representatives from different churches and organizations, Franklin Lakes Meals-on-Wheels has been responding to the community’s needs by providing meals at a minimal charge to people with medical or social needs. To many of the recipients, the delivery is more than a hot meal or sandwich – it is an essential service accompanied by a heartfelt greeting and smile to brighten their day. The following people attended the organizational meeting: Judy Opper, welfare director of Franklin Lakes; Rev. Howard Remaly, United Methodist Church; James and Eleanor Kate, Franklin Lakes Christian Reformed Church; Margot Badenhausen, Most Blessed Sacrament Church; Helen Valenta, president, Franklin Lakes Seniors; Nina Di Iorio, Woman’s Club of Franklin Lakes; Eula Reall, president, Woman’s Club of Franklin Lakes; Fern Brown, president of Wyckoff Meals on Wheels; Rev. Peter Nordstrom, Union Reformed Church; Fred Taylor, United Methodist Church; Carol Wilcox, Presbyterian Church of Franklin Lakes; Elaine Krause, League of Women Voters; Kyung Lee, Visiting Nurse Service; and Wilma Cassell, Office of Aging. After several organizational meetings through the Franklin Lakes Meals-on-Wheels celebrates 25 years of service summer of 1985, and a fierce letter campaign by Nina Di Iorio to fund this project by receipt of charitable donations, the Franklin Lakes Meals on Wheels, Inc. program began on Labor Day, Sept. 5, 1985. Since then, this non-profit organization, has served over 175 residents with help from over 200 different volunteers. Hot meals and sandwiches with special dietary modifications are delivered Monday through Friday throughout the calendar year, excluding Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Day. Christian Health Care Center prepares the food, and Most Blessed Sacrament Church is the central location to pick up the delivery coolers. During the recent anniversary celebration, service awards were presented to dedicated volunteers for past and current work. Honorees included Hans Mauz, past board member and driver for over 10 years; Pearl Spector, long-time board member and driver; Anna Auerbacher and Marion Mahn for delivering meals for over 15 years; Millie Vichiconti, who delivered the first day the program began; and Nina Di Iorio, who worked to get the funding to launch this program. Gina Venner, RD, current coordinator, welcomes new drivers to devote some time to Franklin Lakes’ residents in need. A meeting for prospective volunteers will be held in October. Interested individuals are welcome to call Gina Venner at (201) 310-8474.