September 29, 2010 THE VILLADOM TIMES II • Page 15 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 Letters to the Editor Dear Editor: For those who are in favor of the Valley Hospital renewal it is most upsetting to learn that the Concerned Residents of Ridgewood (CRR) have filed a lawsuit challenging the validity of the Hospital Zone Amendment. Suit causes concern Why did they not request instead that the Hospital Renewal be submitted to a vote by the Ridgewood citizens - or are they perhaps too much concerned that their position would be voted down? George Gerliczy Ridgewood libraries and museums. Teachers will collaborate in teams to develop best practice lessons engaging students in problem-solving, decision-making, writing, simulations, historiography, media technology, and analyzing primary source documents. Participating teachers will take a pre and posttest and a benchmark for improvement has been set at an increase of 10 percent a year with the goal of 85 percent of the teachers receiving a passing score on a test based on national and college level questions. In addition, six master educators will observe each teacher four times during the year to evaluate the level of student engagement and critical thinking during the lesson. The collaborative best-practice lessons will be available on the Internet. The two history seminars scheduled for Saturdays and the evening “Kick-Off” event will provide a time for the public, teachers, and students to attend the presentation by one of the historians at The Hermitage. The Core Steering Committee began meeting in August to plan for the implementation of the grant. Students will directly benefit from the best practice lessons and engaging classroom activities, and teachers and administrators in urban and suburban districts will be encouraged to collaborate, share resources, and partner with universities and The Hermitage. History grant (continued from page 8) of a pre-test of 40 items taken by 60 teachers with a failing score of 51 percent. The weakest area was on the teaching of the American Revolution and Early Republic (1763-1815) with an average score of 42 percent. It was determined that the reason for these scores was that 67 percent of the teachers in the participating districts did not major in American history in college and the fact that 39 percent of the teachers have not taken a college level course in over five years, and an additional 31 percent have not had professional development in the past 10 years. The TAH Grant includes 13 days of seminars and workshops where teachers will read and discuss books, participate in seminars with historians, and conduct research. There are planned opportunities for teachers to research at The Hermitage (local history), Princeton University (Jefferson Papers), Rutgers University (Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton Papers), the FDR Library, and expectations for independent research at the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library, and presidential