Compare and Contrast Agenda 21 and the Communist Manifesto:
Manifesto of the Communist Party:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrdmjBAX0E0&feature=player_embedded
Vacillation, 180 degree aboutfaces, and unpredictability, “arbitrary and capricious” decision-making, constitute regular themes in the history of tyranny from time immemorial: the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten (Ikhnathon, Khuenaten, Amenhotep IV) may have been the first arbitrary and capricious tyrant interested in social reform. He not only abolished all the prerogatives of the Ancient Egyptian Priesthood (who largely controlled and administered agricultural production and food storage for the entire Nile Valley—the most fertile stretch of land in the world, until the Aswan High Dam was completed….the construction of this murderous dam was another idiotic “from the top” elite decision made arbitrarily and capriciously without any regard for ecological process or the reality of how Nile River Valley fertility had been maintained at the top of the world food chain for over five thousand years).
Akhenaten also ordered a forced resettlement and demographic redistribution of the Egyptian “power elite” the entire decentralized nobility of Egypt to be concentrated around him (like planets around the sun…) at a brand new city, El Amarna, designed and decorated strictly according to the new king’s desire to make himself, and his “one God, the Sun Disk Aten” the center of a brand new agricultural, biological, cultural, demographic, economic, fiscal, geographical, historical, ideological, knowledge dispensing, legal, moral, normative, official, political, and social world order. Akhenaten’s tyrannical experiment was so disastrous that he (and his son/heir Tutankhaten/Tutankhamen) were so despised that they were stricken from the already two thousand year old dynastic king lists of Egypt, and their described in later history (e.g. Manetho) as the time of the Leper Kings…. Now writers from Sigmund Freud (Moses & Monotheism) to Jan Assmann have of course been intrigued by the chronological correlation between the reigns of Akhenaten/Nefertiti/Tutankhamen and the “Shashu-Hapiru” “Exodus” led by Moses, but whether this was the inauspicious start of monotheistic Hebrew Religion, Judaism, Christianity and Islam is entirely beyond the scope of the present essay.
I mention Akhenaten’s first the tyrant decrees only because his was the first recorded episode of forced resettlement and urban redesing or “urban planning” for the sole purpose of ideological purity and to make cities the expression of a supreme ideology.
In our time, really over the past 165 years since February 1848, we have seen Communist ideologues in the tradition of Akhenaten first decree that cities are bad, then engage in 140 years of continuous “suburbanization” an decreased demographic density, only to suddenly start turning around sometime in the late 1980s-1990s and start decreeing that CITIES are good, the SUBURBS and SUBURBAN LIVING are evil, that all ecological disasters come from DIFFUSE DEMOGRAPHICS with high consumption (i.e. easy, high quality) lifestyles. Starting with the “urban renewal” under Ronald W. Reagan followed by the accession of King George H.W. Bush in 1989, the ideological trend continued so that urban dwelling now epitomizes sacrifice and limited living in comparison to the grotesque and ecologically flagrant excesses of the high end consumer lifestyle to which the world living in the suburbs has become accustomed.
IS IT ONLY a coincidence that the final excessive bulge of suburban development under Clinton & King George W. Bush ended in what appears to have been a preplanned, premeditated mortgage foreclosure holocaust with the intended purpose of abolishing the suburbs?
It is hardly news that Karl Marx & Frederick Engels, between the two of them, effectively invented the modern social sciences—ALL OF THEM. Oh, to be sure, Political Philosophy & Practical Theory had existed since at least the time of Plato and Aristotle, and economics had existed at least since the 18th Century and the writings of Adam Smith. But Sociology & Anthropology certainly had no pre-Marxist existence at all, and were formed as academic disciplines largely in reaction and response to the Marxist theory of Cultural Evolution.
The Communist Manifesto of February 1848 was primarily an exhortation to action (in the form of World Revolution and the resultant obliteration of “culturally normative, moral and political reality” as know prior to that date). But it contained amazing little nuggets which have haunted the world ever since.
It is unclear to me what the origin of the Manifesto’s advocacy of an abolition of the distinction between urban and rural living may have been. I have no ready explanation for why human populations should NOT have both urban and rural components. To me it seems quite natural that civilization, among its other “discontents”, involves a division of labor and of interests which align very nicely along the division of society into urban and rural foci.
But for whatever reason, I suppose primarily the abolition of all sources of differentiation between human beings, Marx and Engels proposed a progressive elimination of the distinctions between urban and rural living, and the Social Sciences have been obsessed with this distinction and its significance EVER SINCE.
But not only to the academic mind, but also to the “applied social sciences”—political and social engineers of what has come to be known as “urban planning” or “community development”, the distinction between the city and the countryside has become a major preoccupation.
After 1850, for the very first time in both Great Britain and America, and then in the rest of the world, we witness the conscious development of “less dense” urban peripheral settlement which rapidly became known as “suburbia.” The decrease of population density BY DESIGN was consistent with the Communist Manifesto and hence with social sciences.
There was an academic movement at the University of Chicago Department of Sociology in the 1920s-1940s under the direction of Dr. Robert Redfield to study and deepen our understanding of what he called “the Folk-Urban Continuum”. It turned out the definition of this continuum almost always depended on local history and politics rather than direct in situ cultural evolution, but the Marxist plan was that “cultural evolution by design” was meant to shape the future.
And so it was that first London and then Boston and New York and New Orleans developed “suburbs” whose houses and land tenure regimes were somewhere between “high density urban” living (characteristic of the boroughs of Manhattan and Queens, for example) and true rural areas. Cambridge and Somerville Massachusetts and the “Boston Back Bay” were 19th century examples of suburban developments in the United States, but even the City of Jefferson and Faubourg Livoudais in New Orleans (aka “the Garden District”) had this characteristic of low density suburbs gradually added on to the city.
By the 1960s, everything was up to date, even in Kansas City, and “suburban development” had gone about as far as it could go in Overland Park and Leawood, and in North Dallas and all around the Houston Beltway, and all along the western edge of Chicago, never mind throughout the San Fernando Valley and Orange County in the great metropolitan agglomeration of suburbs that grew up around the originally tiny railroad terminus city Los Angeles and became monstrously unified as a single political entity in the County of that same name, along with a few stubborn smaller cities like Pasadena, San Marino, Beverly Hills, Long Beach, and Santa Monica.
After some stagnation and malaise during the 1970s, under Ronald W. Reagan, American EXURBIA was born to continue the Communist Manifesto’s plan to break down the distinctions between urban and rural. For the past 33 years, people have been putting “suburban” houses on mega-lots of 2-10 acres all around the country, eating up valuable farm and orchard and ranch land while producing nothing, and it seems that the barrier between urban and rural had finally really and truly been abolished. Nobody knew where they lived any more: in a city or suburb or exurb, and it just didn’t matter because everybody had CARS, Fords fulfillment of Freud’s advocacy of instant gratification without much effort.
And then, even in the ashes of Ronald W. Reagan’s promise to restore capitalism and sound government and economy to America, starting with the most deceitful and dishonest of all politicians, namely George H.W. Bush, his sons, the Clintons, and their-jointly anointed Kenyan-born heir and preserver Barack Hussein Obama, Agenda 21 was born: the first major totalitarian ideal since the Communist Manifesto (namely global world-movement ENVIRONMENTALISM).
Now, oddly enough, the primary target of Agenda 21 is the SUBURBAN and EXURBAN lifestyle born in, created-developed-and-elaborated by Communism. Even more ironic is how the primary opponents of Agenda 21 are those who value and treasure the suburban and exurban lifestyles and decry the One World Government and Wealth transfers implied by Agenda 21.
The Social Sciences have now all magically turned against the suburbs and back in favor of the cities and promoting DENSE, TIGHTLY PACKED URBAN LIFESTYLE—basically going back to living the way Abraham and his family lived in Ur before they decided to seek an less densely populated “promised land” deeded them by covenant some days west of Ur in what must have seemed (at that time) much like the empty California of the 1850s—a land of milk and honey….
The arrogance of elite social engineers is staggering to me. I personally hold Harvard Ph.D. in Anthropology & History so I think I know something about elitist Social Science arrogance, especially since I took this over to the University of Chicago somewhere in the late interim between the socialists of Robert Redfield’s & Barack Obama’s eras when the U of C was pretending to be a “conservative” and “free market oriented” island in Academia…. under the leadership of such nominally anti-Marxist non-Keynsian monetarist fence-sitters as Milton Friedman and the members of the “Chicago School of Law & Economics”….
Knowledge is freedom—this I have always believed in the spirit of He who taught us, “Know the Truth and the Truth will Set You Free.” I suggest that the true-anti-Marxist, anti-Collectivist, anti-Agenda 21 counterrevolution should focus on returning each family to autonomous food production and the genuine self-sufficiency that only such production can provide. The great modern technological innovations of Solar Power and Wind Power as sources of electricity should be harnessed on the individual, family, and at largest multi-family neighborhood level so that “freedom from the grid” will again become a reality.
I look to my Southern Agrarian ancestors and the Southern Literary movement known as “the Fugitives” which saw virtue and autonomy in the truly rural world of the Old South as an inspiration. The Southern Agrarian Tradition has its roots in the philosophies of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson who looked to truly rural production as the primary source of wealth and power in society. Agenda 21 advocates, through the mechanisms of communist totalitarianism, the world of elitist power control over people which can ONLY exist in cities, densely packed cities….which have always been the grounds most inimical to freedom….. America’s freedom has diminished directly and proportionally to the increase of its cities, and this is a pattern to be reversed. How ironic that the world planning elite has now gone back on itself, against one of the original tenets of the communist manifesto from which it derives all of its inspiration and “academic” authority as creator/masters of the social sciences…..
OH FOR A REBIRTH OF THAT RED-ROOSTER CROWING WORLD!
Note: I acknowledge and look back to my freshman year at Tulane (1975-1976) with great nostalgia for my introduction to the literature of the Fugitives and Southern Agrarians in a course called “Crisis in Culture as Reflected in Modern Literature” that I took from Cleanth Brooks, one of the last survivors of the Southern Agrarian Movement.
