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Occupy Plymouth Rock! |
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© Jack Cashill arl Marx would have fit right in at Zuccoti Park. Like much of the Occupy crowd, he loathed Jews. And like all of them, he hated capitalism. From what Marx knew, America was “pre-eminently the country of religiosity,” and yet it seemed to be the one nation that had been most thoroughly corrupted by the Judaic spirit. Two strikes against us right there. The “free inhabitant” of New England, Marx wrote in “On The Jewish Question,” was convinced “that he has no other destiny here below than to become richer than his neighbor.” When he traveled, said Marx, the Yankee worried “only of interest and profit.” The world for the New Englander was “no more than a Stock Exchange.” As to idols, he had but one, and that was, of course, Mammon. One sees in Marx’s rant a precocious anti-Americanism that would deform the thinking of the international left for the next 165 years and come to full flower amidst the debris of our occupied cities. Marx penned this attack when John Tyler was president, and Texas and Florida had yet to become states. “Greed” is not a new phenomenon. As the left defines it, “greed” has shaped the American experience from the beginning. This almost did not happen. Nearly four hundred years before our OWS friends began defecating on police cars, the very first New Englanders had taken a serious stab at the social scheme the Occupiers seem to be advocating. Plymouth Plantation Governor William Bradford describes here the outcome of the colony’s ambitious “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” experiment. This is not an easy read, but it is an essential one:
Freed from the theoretical, and unable to retreat to their parents’ basements, these proto-Americans set about creating a distinctive and largely spontaneous commercial culture. Self-interest would drive it and self-control would restrain it. The Judeo-Christian legacy would inform that self-control and inspire it, but always imperfectly, given the fallen nature of man. The relative absence of external control would allow this dynamic to work itself out and, in the process, forge the most productive industrial enterprise in world history. As seems to be proving out, alas, those who ignore that history seem condemned to repeat it. If nothing else this blessed day, we should be thankful there are not more of them. |
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