Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year of 2014

O BIPARTIDARISMO E AS OPÇÕES (IN)EXISTENTES

 O BIPARTIDARISMO E AS OPÇÕES (IN)EXISTENTES

A POLITICA DA IDIOTICE, DO CORSO OU DA INVEJA/O ÓDIO?

“The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers.”
Prof. Carroll Quigley

"O resultado da conhecida encenação politica bipartidária é de que os Europeus, Americanos, assim como a maioria dos cidadãos dos países do Mundo Ocidental, são vítimas duma grande ilusão.

Os eleitores tem sido iludidos ao terem sido levados a pensar que estavam participando no seu próprio destino politico quando, na realidade, estavam a ser arrebanhados num feudalismo de alta tecnologia, sem o seu consentimento e, em grande medida, sem o seu conhecimento.

Isto é conseguido através da miragem de uma escolha útil em época de eleições quando, na realidade, os maiores partidos e seus candidatos são apenas dois ramos da mesma árvore - frequentemente a do "colectivismo" global.

Os eleitores hoje não são atraídos pelos candidatos por causa de seus princípios políticos. Embora havendo excepões, regra geral eles não têm muitos, ou mesmo nenhuns. De qualquer forma os princípios políticos nem são permitidos como tema de debate.

Em vez disso, os eleitores fazem escolhas com base na boa aparência dos candidatos, nos seus sorrisos, na avaliação do quão "espertos" eles são em debates televisivos, na percepção acerca da sua sinceridade e, especialmente, no volume de "benefícios" que eles prometem dar a alguns cidadãos mas que serão pagos com impostos a incidir sobre outros cidadãos. "Pilhagem" legalizada pode ser um poderoso motivador e pode ser usada com precisão pelos dois maiores partidos.

Muitos eleitores têm vindo a considerar as eleições como jogos magníficos em que apenas os concorrentes mais inteligentes merecem ganhar. Ficam fascinados pelas estratégias, recursos e técnicas adoptadas para se esquivarem de questões difíceis; pelo ar inteligente nas apresentações ou “spots” televisivos e pela capacidade para atrair grandes massas de votos. Eles, os eleitores, realmente não se importam com quem ganha, desde que consigam posicionar-se do lado do vencedor. Para eles a eleição é como fazer apostas num jogo de futebol ou num Totobola. Eles podem gostar mais de uma equipa do que doutra mas vão apostar na equipa que julgam ter maiores probabilidades de ganhar, mesmo não sendo a sua favorita. Para eles, os eleitores, ganhar é tudo.

E é assim que votam. Podem até preferir um determinado candidato, mas não votarão nele se acham que outro vai ganhar. Quantas vezes já ouvimos: "Eu gosto do “António Sampaio” mas ele não consegue vencer. Assim sendo, votarei no “José Barroso”."

O que os "media" tem a fazer é convencer os eleitores de que “António Sampaio” não conseguirá ganhar (alegando sondagens ou usando outras técnicas), e isso influenciará gente suficiente a redireccionar o seu voto e tornar uma mera previsão num desfecho eleitoral real e concreto.

O objectivo fundamental do voto não é o de escolher um vencedor mas para sim de expressar uma escolha. Trata-se de estabelecer um registo público do numero de pessoas que apoiam as políticas e princípios de um determinado candidato, de tal forma que, mesmo que ele não saia vencedor, o vencedor e a comunidade fiquem cientes do apoio que o candidato perdedor tem. Esta é a mais importante sondagem de opinião pública.

Nós poderemos não ter interesse num sistema em que o vencedor fique com tudo; onde aqueles que se considera terem as melhores perspectivas de ganhar recebam uma esmagadora, mas enganosa, votação de apoio.

Um tirano que receba 51% dos votos comportar-se-á de forma mais contida do que um que receba 80%.  Um bom cidadão que receba 49% dos votos, apesar de não sair vencedor, torna-se um concorrente de peso para aqueles de mente semelhante. Ele torna-se, nessa circunstância, num concorrente muito mais sério às eleições seguintes do que seria depois duma eleição onde apenas tivesse conseguido 20% dos votos.

Não faz qualquer sentido votar num candidato a menos que isso seja a expressão da nossa escolha. Escolha de Governação Representativa é coisa séria e lidá-la como se de apostas de Totobola se tratasse é sucumbir às políticas da estupidez.

Existe um terceiro cenário que é ainda pior que os anteriores. Os eleitores poderão votar em “António Sampaio”, não porque achem que ele tenha melhores perspectivas que “José Barroso”, mas porque acham que ele é o menor dos males, ou o menos diabólico. Assim votam não a favor dum candidato mas contra o outro. Não é que eles gostem do candidato “A”, mas assim expressam o seu ódio ao candidato “B”. Isto é exactamente aquilo que está prescrito pela Fórmula de Quigley .

Quigley escreveu que num sistema controlado por dois partidos é permitido que os eleitores “expulsem os patifes”  e que estes sejam substituídos por uma nova equipa, com novo vigor, podendo assim o governo continuar num regime bi- partidário, direccionado ao colectivismo global, ou a outro propósito, e com o apoio do eleitorado - até ao ciclo seguinte, altura em que talvez seja vantajoso regressar novamente à governação do partido anterior. Se os eleitores se questionarem porque razão está o mal instalado no Governo, a resposta é porque nele votaram. O menor de dois males é ainda um mal.

 

Esta é a política do ódio e é arma eficaz contra aqueles que não estão cientes desta táctica - ou seja: a maioria dos eleitores.

A votação num candidato porque odiamos o outro, e pensar que não podemos ir para fora do sistema bipartidário porque um terceiro candidato não tem chances de ganhar, é uma armadilha . Para escapar a essa armadilha temos de entender não apenas a Fórmula Quigley, mas também mais qualquer coisa  …"

 

 

Weapons systems and political stability - Carroll Quigley

“Weapons systems and political stability”
Prof. Carroll Quigley’s Last Public Lecture
Last Public Lecture Given (months before his death)
Oscar Iden Lecture – Georgetown University - School of Foreign Service
1978

Introduction by Peter F. Krogh
I: “The State of Communities,” A.D. 976 - 1576

II: “The State of Estates,” A.D. 1576 - 1776

III: “The State of Individuals,” A.D. 1776 - 1976

A summary of Prof. Carroll Quigley’s Last Public Lecture, given 1976. His text is worth a read. With his great vision and sight, he touches the key wounds of the current Western civilization and suggests urgent attention.

Present government policies are unleashing future hard times. The middle class and the less instructed or protected are being marginalized and are being forced to pay for the irresponsible actions of the elite.  The Portuguese state is now under the control of the financial "traps" in Europe and the "National" politicians (sometimes pampered beyond belief) are the mouthpieces and enforcers of “policy” as dictated by these absentee "Investors".

These essays covered the growth of the State in the Western tradition from 976 – 1976. It is said that his approach went against the grain of most academics who only taught history in short sound bites. He believed that people could not understand anything unless they saw the whole picture - and the essence of his philosophy was that history is logical - things happen for a reason. For him the core of all that occurs throughout the ages is the underlying force of fundamental human values.

Carroll Quigley noticed that American society, and Western Civilization, were in serious trouble in the late 70’s. And his final essay “The Sate of Individuals” was particularly prophetic and events during the subsequent decades have “cleaned” his controversial conclusions.

--------

III: “The State of Individuals,” A.D. 1776 - 1976

“…. Currently our desires are remote from our true  needs. Societies are built on needs and they are ultimately destroyed through desires.

Power between the state and the society rests on the ability of the state to satisfy human needs.

The state is a good state if it is sovereign and responsible.

There are seven level of culture or aspects of society:

military, political, economic, social, emotional religious and intellectual.

Military: men cannot live outside of groups. They can satisfy their needs only by co-operating within community. This group needs to be defended.

Political: If men operate within groups you must have a method to settle disputes. Economic: The group must have organizational patterns for satisfying material needs. Social: Man and women are social beings. They have a need for other people. They have a need to love and be loved.

Emotional: Men and women must have emotional experiences. Moment to moment with other people and moment to moment with nature.

Religious: Human beings have a need for a feeling of certitude in their minds about things they cannot control and do not fully understand.

Intellectual: Men and women have a need to comprehend and discuss.

Power is the ability in society to med these eight fore-mentioned human needs. Community is group of people with close inter-personal relationships. Without community no infant will be sufficiently socialized. Most of our internal controls which make society function have historically been learnt in community.

Prior to 976 most controls in society were internal. In the West after 976 due to specialization and commercial expansion controls began to be externalized.

Sovereignty has eight aspects: defense, judicial, administrative, taxation, legislation, executive, monetary and incorporating power.

Expansion in society brings growing commercialization with the result that all values, in time, become monetized. As expansion continues it slows with the result that society becomes politicized and eventually militarized. This shift from customary conformity to decision making by some other power in its final stages results in the dualism of almost totalitarian imperialism and an amorphous mass culture of atomized individuals.

The main theme in our society today is competition and no truly stable society can possibly be built on such a premise. In the long term society must be based on association and co-operation.

From 1855 Western Civilization has shown signs of becoming increasingly unstable due to: technology and the displacement of labor: increased use of propaganda to brainwash people into thinking society was good and true; an increased emphasis on material desires; the increased emphasis on individualism over conformity; growing focus on quantity rather than quality; increased demand for vicarious satisfactions.

As a result more and more people began to comprehend that the state was not a society with community values. This realization brought increasing instability.

Another element of the trend towards instability in Western Civilization was the growth in weapon systems that if actually used would ensure total destruction of the planet. This in effect meant that they were effectively redundant.

In addition the expansion of the last 150 years has in essence been based on fossil fuels. The energy which gave us the industrial revolution, coal – oil – natural gas – represented the combined savings of four weeks of sunlight that managed to be accumulated on earth out of the previous three billion years of sunshine. This resource instead of being saved has been lost. Gone forever never to return.

The fundamental all pervasive cause of World instability today is the destruction of communities by the commercialization of all human relationships and the resulting neurosis and psychosis. Medical science and all the population explosions have continued to produce more and more people while the food supply and the supply of jobs are becoming increasingly precarious, not only in the United States, but everywhere, because the whole purpose of using fossil fuels in the corporate structure is the elimination of jobs. Another  reason for the instability of the Western system is that two of the main areas of sovereignty are not included in the state structure: control of credit/banking and corporations.

These two elements are therefore free of political controls and responsibility. They have largely monopolized power in Western Civilization and in American society. They are ruthlessly going forward to eliminate land, labor, entrepreneur-management skills and everything else the economists once told us were the chief elements of production. The only element of production they are concerned with is the one they control: capital. Thus capital intensification has destroyed food, manufacturing, farming and communities. All these processes create frustrations on every level of modern human experience and result in the instability and disorder we see around every day. Today in America there is a developing constitutional crisis. The three branches of government set unpin 1789 do not contain the eight aspects of sovereignty. As a result each has tried to go outside the sphere in which it should be restrained. The constitution completely ignores, for example, the administrative power. As a result the courts, in particular the Supreme court, is making decisions it should not be making. In addition the President, who by the constitution should be easily impeached, has become all powerful to such an extent that the office is now as basically Imperial. However, to me the most obvious flaw in our constitutional set-up is the fact that the federal government does not have control over money and credit and does not have control over corporations. It is therefore not really sovereign and is not really responsible. The final result is that the American people will unfortunately prefer communities. They will cop or opt out of the system. Today everything is a bureaucratic structure, and brainwashed people who are not personalities are trained to fit into it and say it is a great life but I think otherwise.

Do not be pessimistic. Life goes on; life is fun. And if a civilization crashed it deserves to. When Rome fell the Christian answer was. “Create your own communities”.

 

Introduction by Peter F. Krogh
I: “The State of Communities,” A.D. 976 - 1576

II: “The State of Estates,” A.D. 1576 - 1776

III: “The State of Individuals,” A.D. 1776 - 1976

 

  Quotes - Carroll Quigley

“...when a society is reaching its end, in the last couple of centuries you have... a misplacement of satisfactions. You find emotional satisfaction in making a lot of money... or in proving to the poor, half-naked people in Southeast Asia, that you can kill them in large numbers.”

“...a state is not the same thing as a society, although the Greeks and Romans thought it was. A state is an organization of power on a territorial basis.”

 “Thus, the use of fiat money is more justifiable in financing a depression than in financing a war.”

“Hitler's economic revolution in Germany had reduced financial considerations to a point where they played no role in economic or political decisions.”

“In addition to their power over government based on government financing and personal influence, bankers could steer governments in ways they wished them to go by other pressures.”

“On this basis, which was originally financial and goes back to George Peabody, there grew up in the twentieth century a power structure between London and New York which penetrated deeply into university life, the press, and the practice of foreign policy.”

“The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies ... is a foolish idea.

Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can throw the rascals out at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy.

Then it should be possible to replace it, every four years if necessary, by the other party which will be none of these things but will still pursue, with new vigor, approximately the same basic policies.”  

 

Others quotes in:

http://izquotes.com/author/carroll-quigley/

 

O "Dubay" de Rabo de Peixe - S. Miguel - Açores

Esta obra tem, provavelmente, um destinatário principal. E o seu destinatário deverá ser, provavelmente, aquele que entre as receitas e as despesas conta ter um saldo positivo garantido.
Dão-se alvíssaras a quem descortinar quem possa ser!

Afinal é apenas mais um acrescento ao já anteriormente acrescentado ...
Valerá a penas avaliar o valor acrescentado que o "pocinho" remanescente a este grande terrapleno trás. Mas não se esforcem muito, pois a conta parece ser simples.


Origem das fotos: autor desconhecido / internet.

Why financiers LOVE modern democracy (and Sovereign Debts)

Why financiers LOVE modern democracy (and Sovereign Debts)(Despite being aware about the fact that the concept of Democracy has broad amplitude and that, in most cases, is anchored in a Constitutional base, which can be favorable, or not, to a collective secure, peaceful, prosperous, just and a sustainable path)

Posted by Alex Krainer on October 12, 2010
http://thejubilee.wordpress.com/2010/10/12/why-financiers-love-democracy-and-why-2010-nobel-peace-prize-went-to-liu-xiaobo/

“Financiers just love western-style democracies. They’re the absolute dream clients. Politicians who promise the most tend to be most popular with the electorate. Once in office, they need not worry about the cost of their promises; if there’s a shortfall in funding, they can always turn to the financiers to borrow the extra funds.
The more they can borrow and spend, the better. After all, spending money is fun and makes you feel all powerful and important. By contrast, repaying debts is no fun and you get to feel small and humble. But paying back debts is irrelevant – it’s a problem for future administrations (well, if they’re smart, they’ll pay the old debts with new debts).
Debt is a liability for the government, but it’s an asset on the financiers’ balance sheets. Debt (+ interest) repayments represent a continuous flow of wealth going from the people whose labor generates it, to the bankers, via the government (through taxes). To keep that flow abundant, financiers encourage governments to incur more debt. Consider the following tidbit from Hillary Clinton’s Congressional testimony involving one of the financiers’ agents, Alan Greenspan:
Hillary Clinton answering to Ron Paul (25 February, 2010): “Ten years ago we had a balanced budget. We were on the way to paying down the debt of the United States of America. I served on the budget committee in the senate and I remember as vividly as it were yesterday when we had a hearing at which Alan Greenspan came and justified increasing spending and cutting taxes, saying that we didn’t really need to pay down the debt. Outrageous!”
How much wealth flows to the financiers in this way? Take the UK, one of the oldest democracies in the West: at present (2012), just the interest payments on the UK’s public debt represents 5% of GDP. So if you live in the UK, every time you buy a loaf of bread, fill up your gas-tank or pay your electricity bill, 5% of that money goes to the financiers – just to cover the interest on the debts. That’s a really sweet deal (if you happen to own UK debt).
The most wonderful feature of western-style democracy is that a country’s debts never go down but tend to balloon with time, and with them the proportion of wealth that’s transferred from those who create it to the financiers. Thus, the BIS (Bank of International Settlements) projects that the payments on the UK’s public debt will double to 10% of GDP within a decade (2020), and will rise to 27% by 2040.
This is why financiers love democracies. Simply, they are great clients and always come back for more. On the other hand, financiers absolutely hate the regimes that refuse to play along. Like China. Imagine if China became a parliamentary democracy and politicians started competing for power in a western-style popularity contest. Imagine China paying 5%, 10%, or 27% of its GDP straight into the pockets of the financiers! Now you’re talking real money!!
If I were a high-powered financier, I’d try to move China in the right direction by supporting pro-democracy dissidents in China. I’d poke at China in my own back-yard through a lot of talk about human rights, freedom of speech, and other such cherished values in the West. I’d also use my influence to arrange for some highly exalted honor like the Nobel Peace Prize to be awarded to one of China’s pro-democracy dissidents. Oh wait, they’ve already done that. Good thinking guys!!!”

Western Europe Sovereign Debt crisis and ensuing depression (Tragedy and Hope)

Western Europe Sovereign Debt crisis

and ensuing depression
(Tragedy and Hope)

Trying to understand the reasons for the financial crisis raging in the Western world at the beginning of the XXI century, especially in Southern Europe (allegedly associated with the crisis called "Sovereign Debt" contracted by the majority of modern Democratic States), and the ensuing economic depression, I revisited an excerpt the work of Professor Carroll Quigley (Tragedy and Hope – 1966) which is transcribed below.

These chapters don't focus on the monetary, financial and strategic control of natural and vital resources (demand for power), and it is not guaranteed that some understanding of the facts that are at the root of this crisis would alleviate the hardships of the depression. But the knowledge of the basic mechanisms (economic, in this case) of their formation and its conduction may allow better interpret, decode or discard the "Bulletin of socioeconomic meteorology" which daily is presented in the media, schools and in daily life.

TRAGEDY AND HOPE

XI - CHANGING ECONOMIC PATTERNS

THE ECONOMIC FACTORS

Economic depressions and ways to deal with them

Pag. 545

The basic concepts ...

The way in which the relative decline of investment in respect to savings results in economic crisis is not difficult to see.

In the modern economic community (closed economic system), the sum total of goods and services appearing in the market is at one and the same time the income of the community and the aggregate cost of producing goods and services in question.

Aggregate costs, aggregate incomes and aggregate prices are the same since they are merely opposite sides of the identical expenditures.

The purchasing power available in the community is equal to income minus savings. If there are any savings, the available purchasing power will be less than the aggregate prices being asked for the products for sale and the amount of the savings. Thus, all the goods and services produced cannot be sold as long as savings are held back. In order for all the goods to be sold, it is necessary for the savings to reappear in the market as purchasing power. The disequilibrium between purchasing power and prices which are created by the act of saving is restored completely by the act of investment, and all the goods can be sold at the prices asked. But whenever investment is less than savings, the available supply of purchasing power is inadequate by the same amount to by the goods being offered.

This margin by which purchasing power is inadequate because of an excess of savings over investment may be called the "deflationary gap". This "deflationary gap" is the key to the twentieth century economic crisis and one of the three central cores of the whole tragedy of the century.

 

Pag. 546

THE RESULTS OF THE ECONOMIC DEPRESSION

(Methods of outdoing the deflationary-gap)

The deflationary gap arising from a failure of investment to reach the level of savings can be closed either by lowering the supply of goods to the level of available purchasing power or by raising the supply of purchasing power to a level able to absorb the existing supply of goods, or a combination of both. The first solution will give a stabilized economy on a low level of activity; the second will give a stabilized economy on a high level of activity. Left to itself, the economic system under modern conditions would adopt the former procedure working as follows: The deflationary gap will result in falling prices, declining economic activity and rising unemployment.

This will result in a fall in national income resulting in an even more rapid decline in the volume of savings. This decline continues until the volume of savings reaches the level of investment at which point the fall is arrested and the economy becomes stabilized at a low level.

This process did not work itself out in any industrial country during the great depression because the disparity in national income was so great that a considerable portion of the population would have been driven to zero incomes and absolute want before savings of the richer segment fell to the level of investment. Under such conditions, the masses of population would have been driven to revolution and the stabilization, if reached, would have been on a level so low that a considerable portion of the population would have been in absolute want. Because of this, governments took steps to arrest the course of the depression before their citizens were driven to desperation (and uprisings).

The methods used to deal with the depression and close the deflationary gap were all reducible to two fundamental types:

a) those which destroy goods (reducing production capacity), and

b) those which produce goods which do not enter the market (monumental works or armmement).

Preventing depression through destruction of goods

The destruction of goods will close the deflationary gap by reducing the supply of unsold goods through lowering the supply of goods to the level of the supply of purchasing power. It is not generally realized that this method is one of the chief ways in which the gap is closed in a normal business cycle where goods are destroyed by the simple expedient of not producing the goods which the system is capable of producing. The failure to use full level of 1929 output represented a loss of $100 billion in the US, Britain and Germany alone. This loss was equivalent to the destruction of such goods.

Destruction of goods by failure to gather the harvest is a common phenomenon under modern conditions. When a farmer leaves his crop unharvested because the price is too low to cover the expense of harvesting, he is destroying the goods. Outright destruction of goods already produced is not common and occurred for the first time as a method of combating depression in the years 1930-1934. During this period, stores of coffee, sugar, and bananas were destroyed, corn was plowed under, and young livestock was slaughtered to reduce the supply on the market. The destruction of goods in warfare is another example of this method of overcoming deflationary conditions in the economic system.

Page 548

Preventing depression producing goods that don’t enter the market

The second method of filling the deflationary gap, namely, by producing goods which do not enter the market, accomplishes its purpose by providing purchasing power in the market, since the costs of production of such goods do enter the market as purchasing power, while the goods themselves do not drain funds from the system if they are not offered for sale. New investment was the usual way in which this was accomplished in the normal business cycle but it is not the normal way of filling the gap under modern conditions of depression.

We have already seen the growing reluctance to invest and the unlikely chance that the purchasing power necessary for prosperity will be provided by a constant stream of private investment. It this is so, the funds for producing goods which do not enter the market must be sought in a program of public spending.

Any program of public spending at once runs into the problems of inflation and public debt. These are the same two problems mentioned in connection with the efforts of government to pay for the First World War.

“The environment in which any solution may be implemented”

The methods of paying for a depression are exactly the same as the methods of paying for a war, except that the combination of methods used may be somewhat different because the goals are somewhat different.

In financing a war, we should seek to achieve a method which will provide a maximum of output with a minimum of inflation and public debt.

In dealing with a depression, since a chief aim is to close the deflationary gap, the goal will be to provide a maximum of output with a necessary degree of inflation and a minimum of public debt. Thus the use of fiat money is more justifiable in financing a depression than in financing a war. Moreover the selling of bonds to private persons in wartime might well be aimed at the lower-income groups in order to reduce consumption and release facilities for war production, while in a depression (where low consumption is the chief problem) such sales of bonds to finance public spending would have to be aimed at the savings of the upper-income groups. 
These ideas on the role of government spending in combating depression have been formally organized into the "theory of the compensatory economy." This theory advocates that government spending and fiscal policies be organized so that they work exactly contrary to the business cycle, with lower taxes and larger spending in deflationary period and higher taxes with reduced spending in a boom period, the fiscal deficits of the down cycle being counterbalanced in the national budget by the surpluses of the up cycle.

Page 549

This compensatory economy has not been applied with much success in any European country except Sweden. In a democratic country, it would take the control of taxing and spending away from the elected representatives of the people and place this precious "power of the purse" at the control of the automatic processes of the business cycle as interpreted by bureaucratic (and representative) experts. Moreover,

all these programs of deficit spending are in jeopardy in a country with a private banking system. In such a system, the creation of money (or credit) is usually reserved for the private banking institutions and is deprecated as a government action. The argument that the creation of funds by the government is bad while creation of funds by the banks is salutary is very persuasive in a system based on traditional laissez faire and in which the usual avenues of communications (such as newspapers and radio) are under private, or even banker, control. 

Public spending as a method of counteracting depression can vary very greatly in character, depending on the purposes of the spending.

Spending for destruction of goods or for restriction of output, as under the New Deal agricultural program, cannot be justified easily in a democratic country with freedom of communications because it obviously results in a decline in national income and living standards.

Spending for non-productive monuments is somewhat easier to justify but is hardly a long-run solution.

Spending for investment in productive equipment (like … Dams and other productive equipment) is obviously the best solution since it leads to an increase in national wealth and standards of living and is a long-run solution but it marks a permanent departure from a system of private capitalism and can be easily attacked in a country with a capitalistic ideology and a private banking system.

War possible solutions

Spending on armaments and national defense is the last method of fighting depression and is the one most readily and most widely adopted in the twentieth century.

A program of public expenditure on armaments is a method for filling the deflationary gap and overcoming depression because it adds purchasing power to the market without drawing it out again later (since the armaments, once produced, are not put up for sale). From an economic point of view, this method of combating depression is not much different from the method listed earlier under destruction of goods, for, in this case also, economic resources are diverted from constructive activities or idleness to production for destruction. The appeal of this method for coping with the problem of depression does not rest on economic grounds at all, for, on such grounds, there is

no justification. It's appeal is rather to be found on other, especially political, grounds.

Note1 -  from third party:  (Military spending tends to help "heavy" industry directly and immediately. Heavy industry suffers earliest and most drastically in a depression, which absorbs manpower most readily (thus reducing unemployment). This tends to make it very influential in most countries)  

Page 550

The adoption of rearmament as a method of combating depression does not have to be conscious. The country which adopts it may honestly feel that it is adopting the policy for good reasons, that it is threatened by aggression, and that a program of re-armament is necessary for political protection. It is very rare for a country consciously to adopt a program of aggression, for, in most wars, both sides are convinced that their actions are defensive. It is almost equally rare for a country to adopt a policy of re-armament as a

solution for depression. If a country adopts re-armament because of fear of another's arms and these last are the result of efforts to fill a deflationary gap, it can also be said that the re-armament of the former has a basic economic cause.

Note 2 -  from third party:  (Increasing defense spending enhances the political clout of the military-industrial complex and tends increase a nation’s reliance on the military in the conduct of its foreign policy and an escalation of conflict which leads to further increases in military spending. The vicious cycle ultimately results in the emergence of fascism: the adoption by the "vested interests" in a society of an authoritarian form of government in order to maintain their vested interests and prevent the reform of the society.

In the 20th century, the vested interests usually sought to prevent the reform of the economic system (a reform whose need was made evident by the long-drawn-out depression) by adopting an economic program whose chief element was the effort to fill the deflationary gap by re-armament.

Note 3 -  from third party:  (Quigley’s analysis, based on the historical developments in the aftermath of the economic depression of the early 1930’s closely parallels today’s events. The economic crises which germinated from the same systemic feature present in the modern economic system, followed a similar pattern in economic and political developments that we are witnessing today).

…………………..

CONCLUSION – Quigley “TRAGEDY AND HOPE”

Tragedy and Hope? The tragedy of the period covered by this book is obvious but the hope may seem dubious to many. Only the passage of time will show if the hope I seem to see in the future is actually there or is the result of mis-observation and self-deception.

The historian has difficulty distinguishing the features of the present and generally prefers to restrict his studies to the past, where the evidence is more freely available and where perspective helps him to interpret the evidence. Thus the historian speaks with decreasing assurance about the nature and significance of events as they approach his own day. The time covered by this book seems to this historian to fall into three periods: the 19th century from 1814 to 1895; the 20th century after World War II, and a long period of transition from 1895 to 1950.

The 20th century is utterly different from the 19th century and the age of transition between the two was one of the most awful periods in all human history. Two terrible wars sandwiching a world economic depression revealed man's real inability to control his life by nineteenth century techniques of laissez-faire, materialism, competition, selfishness, nationalism, violence, and imperialism.

These characteristics of late nineteenth-century life culminated in World War II in which more than 50 million persons were killed, most of them by horrible deaths.

The hope of the twentieth century rests on the recognition that war and depression are man-made, and needless. They can be avoided in the future by turning from the 19th century characteristics just mentioned and going back to other characteristics that our Western society has always regarded as virtues: generosity, compassion, cooperation, rationality, and foresight, and finding an increased role in human life for love, spirituality, charity, and self-discipline.

On the whole, we do know now that we can avoid continuing the horrors of 1914-1945 and on that basis alone we maybe optimistic over our ability to go back to the tradition of our Western society and to resume its development along its old patterns of Inclusive Diversity.

Portuguese translation in the link bellow: