Disclaimer

The author of this blog does not advocate hate or unprovoked violence against any group. The purpose of this blog is to provide the very best information regarding philosophy, mindset training, and technique for the Christian Martialist in their broader Biblical, theological and cultural contexts. Nothing posted here should be construed as promoting or excusing hostile speech or acts toward anyone.

Saturday, October 22, 2011

War Upon the Middle Class -- Who? Why?

Note: I have incorporated this material, with slight editing and elaboration, into this site's page entitled "Conflict".

Over the past few years, both secular conservative and Christian observers have chronicled a concerted effort that amounts to a war upon the middle class in America. The attacks come from all directions: civil government, education, arts & media and more than a few religious leaders.

Most will lay the blame for these attacks at the feet of Marxists and liberal Democrats. Of course Christians see the hand of Satan behind this, but they generally identify the earthly perpetrators in terms of Marxism and Liberalism.

In the West, however, the great power behind the plan to destroy the middle class lurks in the shadows. In order to find who wages war upon us, I will first direct your attention to a now-deceased, obscure college professor.

So, Who Was Carroll Quigley, and Why Did He Hate Us?


Carroll Quigley taught history in the Foreign Service School of Georgetown University. He trained future diplomats and State Department functionaries . . . AND at least one U.S. president. When Bill Clinton accepted his party's nomination for president in 1992, he referred to Carroll Quigley as his mentor.

In 1966 Quigley published Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time. He evidently intended it as a manual that would inform his students of their future bosses -- the clandestine network that drives U.S. foreign policy -- and their agenda. Quigley's ties to that network and his firsthand knowledge of their history and operations uniquely qualified him to reveal their existence and pervasive influence.

What this little-known liberal professor at an Establishment university did not count on was that his text would become a major source for researchers on the opposite end of the political spectrum. Former-FBI-agent-turned-author W. Cleon Skousen (The Naked Capitalist, 1970) and Birchite journalist Gary Allen (None Dare Call It Conspiracy, 1970) quoted extensively from Tragedy and Hope in their works.

Immediately below you'll find an example of Quigley's revelations that, through Skousen and Allen's books, hit a large segment of the Conservative movement like a blockbuster. Notice that a lot of what he calls a radical right myth is still a part of the present-day conservative worldview.

The radical Right version of these events as written up by John T. Flynn, Freda Utley,and others ... had a tremendous impact on American opinion and American relations with other countries in the years 1947-1955. This radical Right fairy tale, which is now an accepted folk myth in many groups in America, pictured the recent history of the United States, in regard to domestic reform and in foreign affairs, as a well-organized plot by extreme Left-wing elements, operating from the White House itself and controlling all the chief avenues of publicity in the United States, to destroy the American way of life, based on private enterprise, laissez faire, and isolationism, in behalf of alien ideologies of Russian Socialism and British cosmopolitanism (or internationalism). This plot, if we are to believe the myth, worked through such avenues of publicity as The New York Times and the Herald Tribune, the Christian Science Monitor and the Washington Post, the Atlantic Monthly and Harper's Magazine and had at its core the wild-eyed and bushy-haired theoreticians of Socialist Harvard and the London School of Economics. It was determined to bring the United States into World War II on the side of England(Roosevelt's first love) and Soviet Russia (his second love) in order to destroy every finer element of American life and, as part of this consciously planned scheme, invited Japan to attack Pearl Harbor, and destroyed Chiang Kai-shek, all the while undermining America's real strength by excessive spending and unbalanced budgets.


This myth, like all fables, does in fact have a modicum of truth. There does exist, and has existed for a generation, an international Anglophile network which operates, to some extent, in the way the radical Right believes the Communists act. In fact, this network, which we may identify as the Round Table Groups, has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists, or any other groups, and frequently does so. I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960's, to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for much of my life, been close to it and to many of its instruments. I have objected, both in the past and recently, to a few of its policies (notably to its belief that England was an Atlantic rather than a European Power and must be allied, or even federated, with the United States and must remain isolated from Europe), but in general my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is significant enough to be known. (Tragedy & Hope, pp.949-950)

Interspersed among his historical accounts Carroll Quigley revealed his personal knowledge of the origin and development of a network of secret societies called Round Table groups that exists within the very highest socioeconomic tier. They operate on behalf of the international corporate and financial elites, and clandestinely exert influences upon and within our national civil institutions.

My purpose here is not so much to give a detailed report on the Round Table (although I may in the future). Suffice it to say that I have done research and cross-referenced Tragedy and Hope where I could and have found it accurate.

Furthermore, I do not object to the idea of a ruling elite. Every society has a ruling class, and every time there is a coup that overthrows a ruling elite, another replaces it. The existence of a wealthy ruling class accords with Biblical truth.


The rich ruleth over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender. (Proverbs 22:7)

A ruling class that embraces the message and mission of the Heavenly King can serve as a great blessing to any society. It it will lead the masses toward the earthly peace, justice and prosperity which the Bible describes as the result of Christ's rule over a society (Isaiah 65:9-25, et. al.).


I do take exception, however, to America's power elite because they have deliberately and secretly conspired  to use their influence to increase their own power and profit through force -- the force of civil government. In addition, they have aided and promoted the corruption of our governmental, social and cultural institutions toward their ungodly ends.

Quigley's book has revealed the existence of this secret network, although he approved their objectives and their methods. One need only do a little digging to corroborate what he has revealed.

David Rockefeller, for example, while he has not specifically named the Round Table, admits to being part of a cabal that has worked to make America part of a one-world system. He wrote,

For more than a century, ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents such as my encounter with Castro to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as 'internationalists' and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure - one world, if you will. If that is the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it. (David Rockefeller: Memoirs, p.405)

Now, all of this is preparatory to our discussion of the war on the middle class. Quigley discussed the middle class at length in his book. He makes no pretense of hiding his contempt for them, even as he discusses their origins:

As the middle classes and their commercialization of all human relationships spread through Western society in the centuries from the twelfth to the twentieth, they largely modified and, to some extent, reversed the values of Western society earlier. In some cases, the old values, such as future preference or self-discipline, remained, but were redirected. Future preference ceased to be transcendental in its aim, and became secularized. Self-discipline ceased to seek spirituality by restraining sensuality, and instead sought material acquisition. In general, the new middle-class outlook had a considerable religious basis, but it was the religion of the medieval heresies and of puritanism rather than the religion of Roman Christianity. (p.1236)

You see that Quigley rightly places the origins of the middle class in the spirit of Puritanism, but to him, this is heresy. He elaborates on this with a table that juxtaposes Puritanism with what he calls the "Orthodox" position.. 


        Orthodox                                     Puritan


Evil is absence of Good.                Evil is positive entity.


Man is basically good.                 Man is basically evil


Man is free.                                       Man is a slave of his nature


Man can contribute to                  Man can be saved only by God.
his salvation by good works.


Self-discipline is necessary         Discipline must be external and total.
to guide or direct.


Truth is found from                      Truth is found by rational deduction from 
experience and revelation,          revelation
interpreted by tradition.                                                                                             (p.1239)

Please observe that his representation of Puritanism is part characterization and part caricature. What he calls orthodox represents the viewpoint of liberal Episcopalianism, the main denominational affiliation of the upper class. (See The Power of Their Glory: America's Ruling Class, The Episcopalians by Kit Konolige)


Quigley and the ruling class's antipathy toward the middle class springs from their spiritual rejection of the Biblical doctrines of sin and salvation as well as the underlying morality of Biblical Law and justice.


Even in its anemic mid-20th Century form, middle-class American morality evoked their disgust and contempt. This explains the coalition between the upper and lower classes in their revolt against middle class morality.

Strangely enough, the non-middle classes had more characteristics in common with each other than they did with the middle classes in their midst. The chief reason for this was that all other groups had value systems different from the middle classes and, above all, placed no emphasis on display of material affluence as proof of social status. From this came a number of somewhat similar qualities and attitudes that often gave the non-middle-class groups more in common and easier social intercourse than any of them had with the middle classes. For example, all placed much more emphasis on real personal qualities and much less on such things as clothing, residence, academic background, or kind of transportation used (all of which were important in determining middle-class reactions to people). In a sense all were more sincere, personally more secure (not the Lumpenproletariat), and less hypocritical than the middle class, and accordingly were much more inclined to judge any new acquaintance on his merits. Moreover, the middle classes, in order to provide their children with middle-class advantages, had few children,while the other groups placed little restriction on family size (except for some intellectuals). Thus aristocrats, religious, workers, the de-classed, and many intellectuals had large families, while only the uppermost and most securely established middle-classfamilies, as part of the transition to aristocracy, had larger families. (pp. 1241-1242)

Is it not interesting that Quigley finds the middle class preoccupation with material things so odious, while he has only good things to say about those of the ruling class who have accumulated billions. The antipathy of Quigley and the non-middle classes springs from two sources.

The lower classes dislike the middle class through envy of their material possessions. The power elite, however, view the middle class's material acquisitions differently.

The middle class arose as a byproduct of the Protestant Reformation. The values of the Puritan (Biblical) work ethic, right to private property, honesty and thrift combined to make a highly productive folk who served the market by providing the needs of others more cheaply and more efficiently.

This produced great wealth that began to rival the wealth of the aristocracy (and later the plutocracy). The middle class represented great wealth not concentrated in the hands of a few, but diffused through a much larger stratum of society.

People like Quigley and the insiders of the ruling elite see that middle class material acquisition is an outcome of middle class productivity which in turn is an outcome of the spiritual roots of the middle class in the Protestant Reformation.

In short, the message and mission of the Church of Jesus Christ threatens the power of the few at the top who exercise control through their amassed wealth and power.

To be continued . . .

Here's a link to an important article that connects middle class decline with a decline in ethics & values:


1 comment:

  1. Excellent, I'm very interested so far, as well as unacquainted....

    ReplyDelete