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Jan. 31, 1995 - Bill Cooper
56:48
The Ominous Parallels #1
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- "The power of the power, the power of the power." the power of the power." I don't know.
I don't know.
You're listening to the Hour of the Time.
I'm William Cooper.
So before we get into our broadcast, I have a couple of letters.
to read to you that are important.
For I made you a promise, and true to my word, this is a letter from Mrs. Tommy F. Lyon to Mr. Tal Brook.
Hearing you on a Marlon Maddow point-of-view repeat broadcast last week reminded me of a question I've been wanting to ask.
Last July 7, 1994, William Cooper, on his shortwave radio program, Hour of the Time, stated that you, Tal Brook, had written Pat Robertson's New World Order book.
Cooper did not say how he came by the information.
Would you please tell me if this is true, or if you assisted in writing the book in any way?
I realize that ghostwriting is an accepted practice, so there is no problem.
I would simply like to know if Bill Cooper's statement was true, partially true, or untrue.
Yours truly, Mrs. Tommy F.
Lyon." And here's the reply from Mr. Hal Brooke, dated January 24, 1995.
I believe this was faxed.
Said, Dear Mrs. Lyon, In answer to your query, I did not write Pat Robertson's New World Order book, and I had nothing to do with the writing of his book.
Yes, he cites my writings in the book, but that does not make someone who is quoted either a co-author or a contributor.
Nor have I ever spoken with William Cooper.
I barely know who he is, nor has he ever checked with me.
So he is wrong about me and Pat Robertson's book, sadly.
There is no better business bureau that can endorse the credibility, reliability, and integrity of various experts at large.
If Cooper is wrong about me and Pat Robertson's book, and he is, what does that say about the rest of the stuff he claims to know?
Yours truly, Tal Brook.
My sources, I believe, are pretty close to impeccable.
Signed Mrs. Lyon.
Mrs. Lyon and everyone else, as I have told you over and over and over and over and over again, listen to everyone, read everything, believe absolutely nothing unless you can prove it.
My sources, I believe, are pretty close to impeccable.
Two are insiders in the Pat Robertson organization, whom I cannot name because they would obviously lose their job.
Another is a prominent person within Christian circles who has nothing to do with the Pat Robertson organization.
And it was from this person that I first heard this statement.
Now After hearing this, I found it incredible, but after reading Pat Robertson's book, where he says absolutely nothing in it that is revelatory in any way.
I began to check with people who listen to this broadcast and who write to me, who are on the inside in Mr. Robertson's own organization.
They confirmed to me that Talbrook had indeed written a major part of the book, if not all of the book.
Now, if Talbrook had indeed written Pat Robertson's book entitled The New World Order, he probably would have had to sign a contract stating that he could not reveal that fact because his name is nowhere on the cover sheet as a ghostwriter or as a contributor or published with or anything else.
In fairness to Mr. Talbrook and Pat Robertson and everyone else, I read Mrs. Lyons' letter to Talbrook and his reply.
We were unable to contact either Talbrook, who was traveling at the time, or Mr. Pat Robertson before we aired that broadcast.
So, remember folks, I've always told you, if there's even a possibility that I could be wrong, I'm going to let you know so that you can make up your own mind.
I've always done it, always will do it.
I will confront my three sources with Mrs. Lyons' letter and Mr. Talbrook's reply, and see if I cannot get any further clarifications, or if I can substantiate That my sources were wrong.
And if so, I will further relay that information to you, as I have always done in the past, and will continue to do in the future.
There's one difference between me and other broadcasters, ladies and gentlemen.
If I'm wrong, I'll tell you.
If I make a mistake, I'll tell you.
You see, I could have kept that secret.
None of you would ever know.
But you don't hear anybody else ever, ever do that.
And that's why you're safe, listening to the Hour of the Time.
But only if you have a habit of conducting your own research, and as I have admonished over and over again, listen to everyone, read everything, believe nothing unless you can prove it yourself.
For the deception in this world is so deep, ladies and gentlemen, and truth is so elusive, that if you do not do that as a normal and regular practice in your life, you will be deceived.
And so is everyone else who is in the information business.
We make mistakes.
I have told you over and over again that we are constantly fed bad information by people who want to damage our credibility, and just wading through it and determining the truth from the false is a major part of what we do around here.
And every once in a while, we will get trapped.
But not as often as you get trapped, I guarantee you.
Thank you.
It is thus necessary that the individual should finally come to realize that his own ego is of no importance in comparison with the existence of his nation.
A nation can be read people, race, church, folk.
You can substitute any of those words for nation.
As you will see, and because I interrupted, I will back up and start again.
It is thus necessary that the individual should finally come to realize that his own ego is of no importance in comparison with the existence of his nation, that the position of the individual ego is conditioned solely by the interests of the nation as a whole.
That, above all, the unity of a nation's spirit and will are worth far more than the freedom of the spirit and will of an individual.
The state of mind which subordinates the interest of the ego to the conservation of the community is really the first premise for every truly human culture.
The basic attitude from which such activity arises, we call, to distinguish it from egoism and selfishness, By this we understand only the individual's capacity to make sacrifices for the community for his fellow men.
These statements were made in our century, ladies and gentlemen, by the leader of a major western nation.
His countrymen regarded his viewpoint as uncontroversial.
His political program implemented it faithfully.
The statements, dear listeners, were made by Adolf Hitler.
He was explaining the moral philosophy of Nazism, which is, at its heart, nothing more or less than Socialism.
Just one step above Communism, and, by all definitions, a couple of steps below a republic.
That's measured on the scale of right to left, going from total control to total absence of control.
The Nazis are on the left.
You see, the Nazis were not a tribe of prehistoric savages.
Their crimes, ladies and gentlemen, were the official legal acts and policies of modern Germany, an educated, industrialized, civilized Western European nation.
A nation renowned throughout the world for the luster of its intellectual and cultural achievements.
And by reason of its long line of famous artists and thinkers, Germany has been called, quote, the land of poets and philosophers, end quote.
And make no mistake about it, their contribution to civilization has been great.
But its education offered the country no protection against the sergeant moles in its ranks.
The German university students, you see, were among the earliest groups to back Hitler.
The intellectuals, as they always are, were among his regime's most ardent supporters.
And you find that today in the United States on every college campus across this country.
Professors with distinguished academic credentials eager to pronounce their benediction on the Führer's cause, put their scholarship to work full-time.
They turned out a library of admiring volumes, adorned with obscure allusions to the learned references, veiled in mysticism and a perverted spirituality.
The Nazis did not gain power, ladies and gentlemen, against the country's wishes.
It didn't happen that way.
In this respect, there was absolutely no gulf between the intellectuals and the people.
The Nazi party was elected to office by the freely cast ballots of millions of German voters, including men on every single socio-economic and educational level.
In the national election of July 1932, the Nazis obtained 37% of the vote and a plurality of seats in the Reichstag.
On January 30, 1933, in full accordance with the country's legal and constitutional principles, Hitler was appointed Chancellor.
And only five weeks later, in the last and semi-free election of the pre-totalitarian period, the Nazis obtained 17 million votes, which was a full 44 percent of the total.
The voters were aware of the Nazi ideology.
Nazi literature, including statements of their plans for the future, tapered the country.
They could be found everywhere, blowing with the wind in the gutters, tacked upon fences, pasted upon walls, all during the last years of the Weimar Republic.
Mein Kampf alone sold more than 200,000 copies between 1925 and 1932.
The essence of the political system, ladies and gentlemen, which Hitler intended to establish in Germany, was very clear.
It was no mystery to anyone.
In 1933, when Hitler did establish the system that he had promised, he did not find it necessary to forbid foreign travel until World War II.
And those Germans who wished to flee the country could do so with little, if any, problem.
The overwhelming majority did not flee.
They were satisfied to remain.
You see, the system which Hitler established, the social reality which so many Germans were so eager to embrace, or so willing to endure, for it must have been one or the other, The politics which began in a theory and ended in the concentration camps was, very simply, the total state.
The term from which the adjective totalitarian derives was, in fact, coined by Hitler's mentor, Mussolini.
The state must have absolute power over every man And over every sphere of human activity, the Nazis declared, and I quote, the authority of the Fuhrer is not limited by checks and controls, by special autonomous bodies or individual rights, but it is free and independent, all-inclusive and unlimited, end quote.
That statement was made by Ernst Huber, an official party spokesman in 1933.
And he went on to say, the concept of personal liberties of the individual, as opposed to the authority of the state, had to disappear.
It is not to be reconciled with the principle of the nationalistic Reich, said Huber to a country which listened and nodded.
And he went on, quote, There are no personal liberties of the individual which fall outside of the realm of the state, and which must be respected by the state.
The constitution of the nationalistic Reich is therefore not based upon a system of inborn and inalienable rights of the individual." Now, folks, if the term statism designates a concentration of power in the state at the expense of individual liberty, then Nazism in politics was definitely a form of statism.
In principle, it did not represent a new approach to government, for it was a continuation of the political absolutism, the absolute monarchies, the oligarchies, the theocracies, the random tyrannies, the racism which has characterized most of the racism which has characterized most of human history.
Now, many writers, dear listeners, have noted many, Many similarities between America today and Germany before Hitler, and I have brought this to your attention on many occasions during the hour of the time.
These same writers have then shrugged off their own observations.
They succumbed to the notion, spread by today's intellectuals who have bought into Socialism's hook, line and sinker, that it is bad history to compare two different countries And this notion itself, a symptom of our current crisis, means that there are no principles governing human action, and that it is bad history to learn from history.
And that, I can assure you, we have never learned to do.
For history goes in cycles and repeats itself over and over and over again throughout the ages.
The similarities however, cannot be shrugged off.
The crisis is real.
You see, the crisis is the fact that our country, the United States of America, the freest, the most productive, and until recently the most moral country in the world, is now moving in Hitler's direction.
America is moving, ladies and gentlemen, toward a Nazi form of totalitarianism.
It has been doing this for decades.
It has been doing so gradually, by default, and for the most part unknowingly, but it is doing this systematically and without any significant opposition.
In every cultural area, from science and education, to art, religion, to politics and economics, The trend is now unmistakable.
There are differences between America and the Weimar Republic.
You see, our future, as far as one can judge, is still indeterminate.
There is a chance.
In fact, the great question mark of uncertainty hangs over the heads of every citizen, almost every day.
But the current trend will not be checked unless we grasp in terms of essentials the ominous parallels between the two countries, and above all, the basic cause behind those parallels.
You see, if we are to avoid a fate like that of Germany, we must find out what made such a fate possible.
We must find out what, at the very root, is required to turn a country, Germany or any other, into a Nazi dictatorship, and then we must uproot that root, if it can be done.
We have to look for something deeper than practical conditions, something that dictates man's view of what constitutes the practical.
You see, in an advanced, civilized country, a handful of men were able to gain for their criminal schemes the enthusiastic backing of literally millions of decent, educated, law-abiding citizens.
And just what is the factor that made this possible?
You see, criminal groups and schemes have existed throughout history, in every country.
Someone is scheming in your town right this moment.
They have been able to succeed only in certain periods.
You see, the mere presence of these groups is not sufficient to account for their victory.
Something made so many Germans so vulnerable to a takeover.
Something armed the criminals and disarmed the country.
Does that sound familiar?
It should ring bells all over your house, all over the room you're sitting in.
Observe in this connection that the Nazis correctly regarded the power of propaganda as an indispensable tool.
So, They could not have won the support of the German masses but for the systematic preaching of a complex array of theories, doctrines, opinions, notions, beliefs, mysticism.
And not one of those central beliefs was ever original, as are none of those being bandied about today original.
They found those beliefs widespread and waiting in the culture, and they seized upon them and broadcast them at top volume, thrusting them with an intensity back into the streets of Germany.
And the men in the streets heard and recognized and sympathized with this propaganda, and they embraced those beliefs, and then they voted for their exponents.
The Germans, ladies and gentlemen, would not have recognized or embraced those beliefs in the nineteenth century, when the West was still being influenced by the remnants of the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment, when the doctrines of the rights of man and the autonomy of the individual were paramount.
But by the twentieth century, such doctrines, and the convictions on which they depended, were no longer paramount.
Germany was ideologically ripe for Hitler, just as the United States of America is ripe for whatever messiah has the charisma and the political savvy to step up on the throne.
The intellectual groundwork had been prepared.
The country's ideas, a certain special category of ideas, were ready, born deep within the mysteries.
There's a science whose subject matter is that category of ideas.
And today in our colleges, this science has sunk to the lowest point in its history.
Its teachers have declared that it has no questions to ask, no method to follow, and no answers to offer.
And as a result, it is disappearing.
It's losing its identity, its intelligibility, its students, And the last vestiges of its once noble reputation.
It is the science of asking questions.
Something that I have tried to instill in each and every one of you every single night of this broadcast for the last two and three quarter years.
No one among the intellectuals of today or the general public would even suspect any longer that this science could be relevant to human life or action.
Yet it is practiced amongst an elite group behind the closed doors of the Lodges of the Mysteries.
And this science, ladies and gentlemen, and make no mistake about it, this science determines the destiny of nations and the course of history.
It is the source of a nation's frame of reference and code of values.
The root of a people's character and culture, the fundamental cause shaping men's choices and decisions in every single crucial area of their lives.
It is the science which directs men to embrace this work or to seek out some other that is said to transcend it, which directs them to reason or superstition, to the pursuit of happiness or self-sacrifice, to production or starvation, to freedom or to slavery, to life, or even to death.
It is the science, ladies and gentlemen, which made the difference between the East and the West, between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, between the founding fathers of the new continent and the Adolf Hitlers of the old.
It is the science which had to be destroyed if the catastrophes of our time were to become possible.
And that science is philosophy.
Philosophy is the study of the nature of existence, of knowledge, and of values.
And values translates into ethics and morals.
The branch of philosophy that studies existence is metaphysics.
And you have been taught to laugh at it.
Metaphysics identifies the nature of the universe as a whole.
It tells men what kind of world they live in.
And whether there is a supernatural dimension beyond it, or nothing at all.
It tells men whether they live in a world of solid entities, natural laws, absolute facts, or in a world of illusory fragments, unpredictable miracles, and ceaseless flux.
It tells men whether the things that they perceive by their senses and mind form a comprehensible reality with which they can deal, or some kind of unreal appearance which leaves them staring and helpless.
The branch, ladies and gentlemen, of philosophy that studies knowledge, is epistemology.
And epistemology identifies the proper means of acquiring knowledge.
You see, it tells men which mental processes to employ, as methods of cognition, and which to reject as invalid or deceptive.
You see, above all, epistemology tells men whether reason is their faculty of gaining knowledge, and if so, how it works.
Or whether there is a means of knowledge other than reason, such as faith, or the instinct of society, or the feelings of the dictator.
Or as Mr. Clerken put it, listening to the blood.
The branch of philosophy that studies values is ethics, or morality, which rests on both the above branches.
On a view of the world in which man acts, and of man's nature, including his means of knowledge.
For ethics defines a code of values to guide human actions.
It tells men the proper purpose of man's life and the means of achieving it.
It provides the standard by which men are to judge good and evil, right and wrong, the desirable and the undesirable.
Ethics tells a man, for instance, to pursue his own fulfillment or to sacrifice himself for the sake of something else, such as God or his neighbor or his nation or his race.
The branch of philosophy that applies ethics to social questions is politics, which studies the nature of social systems and the proper functions of government.
And this is probably the first time that many of you have ever known that.
Politics is not the start, but the product of a philosophic system.
And if that system is absent, politics is chaotic.
By their nature, political questions cannot be raised or judged except on the basis of some view of existence, of values, and of man's proper means of knowledge.
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Since men cannot live or act without some kind of basic guidance, The issues of philosophy in some form necessarily affect every man and every social group and class.
Most men, however, do not consider such issues in explicit terms.
They absorb their ideas implicitly, eclectically, and with many contradictions from the cultural atmosphere around them, building into their souls without identifying it the various ideological vibrations emanating from school and church and arts and media and much more.
A cultural atmosphere is not a primary.
It is created, ultimately, by a handful of men, by those whose life work it is to deal with, originate, and propagate fundamental ideas.
For the great majority of men, the influence of philosophy is indirect and unrecognized, but you must understand that it is real.
The root causes of Nazism lies in a power that most people ignore, disparage and underestimate.
The cause is not the events hailed or cursed in headlines and street rallies, but the esoteric writings of the professors who decades or centuries earlier laid the foundation for those events.
The symbol of the cause is not the munitions or the Union Halls, or bank vaults of Germany or any other country, but its ivory towers, its universities, its lodge buildings.
What came out of the towers in this regard is only coils of obscure, virtually indecipherable jargon, but that jargon is fatal.
Make no mistake, it is fatal, and America is heading down that road now.
The Nazi camps, notes a writer in the New York Times, were conceived, built, and often administered by Ph.D.s, doctors of philosophy.
Now, what had those PhDs been taught to think in their schools and universities, and where, dear listeners, did such ideas come from?
It took centuries, literally centuries, and a brain-stopping chain of falsehoods to bring an entire people to the state of Hitler worship, For that's exactly what it was.
Well, Modern German culture, including its Nazi climax, is the result of a complex development in the history of philosophy involving dozens of figures stretching back to the beginnings of Western thought.
The very same figures whom I have revealed to you on this broadcast helped to shape every western nation, all of them.
But in other countries, to varying extents, the results were mixed because there was also an opposite influence or an antidote at work.
In Germany, by the turn of our century, the cultural atmosphere was unmixed.
The traces of the antidote had long, long since disappeared, and the intellectual establishment was monolithic.
Now, if we were to view the West's philosophic development in terms of essentials, there are three fateful turning points which stand out.
Three major philosophers who above all others are responsible for generating the disease of collectivism and transmitting it to the dictators of our century.
Whether it's collectivision within a nation, collectivision within a race, collectivism within the world.
It is the same and it emanates from the same source.
Whether you call it socialism, communism, Our hippie-ism makes no difference.
It is the same.
Whether it is a Nazi, a fellow traveler, or a socialist, or just someone living down on the commune, it is all the same, and it comes from the same source.
These three, these three men, these three philosophers—for that is exactly what they were—are responsible, for the most part, for the situation wherein we find ourselves.
The three are Plato, Kant, and Hegel, and the antidote to them is Aristotle.
When's the last time you heard the name Aristotle?
Plato, dear listener, is the father of collectivism in the West.
He's the first thinker to formulate a systematic view of reality with a collectivist politics as its culmination.
You see, in essence, Plato's metaphysics holds that the universe consists of two opposed dimensions, which are true reality, a perfect, immutable, supernatural realm, non-material, non-spatial, non-temporal, non-perceivable, and the material world in which we live.
The material world, Plato holds, is only an imperfect appearance of true reality, a semi-real reflection or projection of it.
Because Plato's metaphysics holds that reality is thus fundamentally spiritual, or non-material in nature.
He describes it technically in philosophy as idealism.
So his reality is idealism, which most of us who strive for idealism found cannot be reached, and rejects the world around us which we perceive as reality as non-reality.
The concept of true reality, according to Plato, is a set of universals or forms, in effect, a set of disembodied abstractions representing that which is in common among various groups of particulars in this world.
And because of this, for Plato, abstractions are supernatural existence.
They are non-material entities in another dimension, independent of man's mind and of any of their material embodiments.
The forms, Plato tells us, repeatedly, are what is really real.
The particulars they subsume, the concretes that make up this world, are not.
They have only a shadowy, dreamlike, half-reality.
And I can see you shaking your head.
This can't be true, you say.
No one would pay any attention to this gobbledygook, but I can assure you they do.
It is the heart and soul of the religion taught in the Freemasonic lodges.
And if you've listened to our series on the Mysteries, you already know that.
Momentous conclusions about man are implicit in this metaphysics and were later made explicit by a long line of Platonists, since individual men are merely particular instances of the universal man.
They are not ultimately real.
What is real about men is only the form which they share in common and reflect.
To common sense, There appear to be many separate individual men, each independent of the others, each fully real in his own right.
But to Platonism, to Platonism this is a deception, you see.
All the seemingly individual men are really the same one form in various reflections or manifestations of itself.
Thus all men ultimately comprise one unity And no earthly man is an autonomous entity, just as if a man were reflected in a multifaceted mirror, the many reflections would not be autonomous entities, and the whole is God.
Thus the concept that man, if he perfects himself through the teachings of the mysteries behind the lodged doors will himself be ungod.
This is the promise of Lucifer, of Satan in the Garden of Eden.
But remember, to these men, that is only a metaphor, a tale explaining the inexplicable.
Now what follows in regard to human action, according to Plato, is a life of self-sacrificial service.
When men gather in society, says Plato, the unit of reality and the standard of value is the community as a whole.
Whatever community you belong to, whether it is a racial community, a community within a nation, the world as community as is being touted now in the universities, the environment as your community, a religious organization, Makes no difference.
This applies in any case where a community exists and where the life is considered to be a self-sacrificial service to that community.
Each man, therefore, according to this philosophy, must strive as far as he can to wipe out his individuality, his personal desires, his ambitions, and everything else, and merge himself into the community, becoming one with it, and living only to serve its welfare.
On this view, the collective is not an aggregate, but an entity.
You see, society, the state, is regarded as a living organism.
This is the so-called organic theory of the state.
And the individual becomes merely a cell of this organism's body, with no more rights or privileges The first and highest form of the state and of the government and of the law, Plato writes,
is a condition in which the private and individual is altogether banished from life, and things which are by nature private, such as eyes and ears and hands, have become common, and in some way see and hear and act in common, and all men express praise and blame and feel joy and sorrow on the same occasions, and whatever laws there are, unite the city to the utmost."
As for those individualistic terms, mine and not mine, another's and not another's, yours and mine and hers and his, the best-ordered state will be the one in which the largest number of persons use these terms in the same sense, and which accordingly most nearly resembles a single person.
Ladies and gentlemen, he's describing Communism in its purest form, a dialectic which has never in history appeared in its purest form, even though some have tried to bring it into the world.
But the old human failings always get in the way.
The advocacy of the omnipotent state follows from the above as a matter of course.
The function and authority of the state, according to Plato, should be unlimited.
The state should indoctrinate the citizens with government-approved ideas in government-run schools, censor all art and literature and philosophy, Assign men their vocations as they come of age, regulate their economic and, in certain cases, even their sexual activities, as was done in Nazi Germany.
The program of government domination of the individual is thoroughly worked out.
In Plato's Republican Laws, one can read the details which are the first blueprint of the totalitarian ideal.
The blueprint includes the view that the state should be ruled by a special elite, the philosophers.
And its branches are spreading throughout this country, and indeed throughout the world.
The blueprint includes the view that the state should be ruled by a special elite, the philosophers.
Their title to absolute power, Plato explains, is their special wisdom, a council of wise men, a wisdom which derives from their insight into true reality, and especially into its supreme governing principle, the so-called form of the and especially into its supreme governing principle, the so-called form of And without a grasp of this form, according to Plato, no man can understand the universe or even how to conduct his own life.
But to grasp this crucial principle, Plato continues, and here you can just begin to see the relevance of epistemology to politics.
The mind is inadequate.
The form of the good, you see, cannot be known by the use of reason.
It cannot be reached by a process of logic, according to Plato.
It transcends human concepts and human language.
It cannot be defined, described, or discussed.
It can be grasped, but only after years of ascetic preparation.
Only by an ineffable mystic experience, a kind of sudden, incommunicable revelation or intuition which is reserved to the philosophical elite.
The mass of men, by contrast, are entangled in the personal concerns of this life.
Sheeple, if you will.
They're enslaved to the lower world revealed to them by their senses.
They only work Because they need money to buy some booze, to have a party, and get laid.
They're incapable of achieving mystic contact with a supernatural principle.
They are fit only to obey orders.
This is the Platonic philosophy.
Such, ladies and gentlemen, in its essentials is the view of reality, of man, and of the state which one of the most influential philosophers of all time infused into the stream of Western culture.
It has served ever since as the basic theoretical foundation by reference to which aspiring and actual dictators, both ancient and modern, have sought to justify their political systems.
Some of those Never read or even heard of Plato, I can assure you, but absorbed his kind of ideas indirectly at home, in church, in the streets, in the prisons, or from the gutter.
Some, however, did go back to the source.
Plato, notes Walter Kaufmann, and I quote, was widely read in German schools Under the Nazis, and special editions were prepared for Greek classes in the gymnasium, gathering together allegedly fascist passages.
Instead of compiling a list of the many similar contributions to the Plato literature, it may suffice to mention that Dr. Hans F. K. Gunther, from whom the Nazis admittedly received their racial theories, also devoted an entire book to Plato."
And as do Alfred Rosenberg, Hitler's official ideologist and a Jew, he celebrates Plato as one who wanted in the end to save his people on a racial basis through a forcible constitution, dictatorial in every detail.
Now, if mankind has not perished from such constitutions, if it has not collapsed permanently into the swamp of statism, but has fought its way up through tortured centuries of brief rises and long drawn-out falls.
Like a man fighting paralysis by the power of an inexhaustible vitality, it is only because that power has been provided by a giant whose philosophic system is on virtually every fundamental issue, the opposite of Plato's, and that great spokesman for man and for this earth is and has always been Aristotle.
You see, Aristotle is the champion of this world, the champion of nature as against the supernaturalism of Plato.
Denying Plato's world of forms, Aristotle maintains that there is only one reality—the world of particulars in which we live.
The world men perceive by means of their physical senses.
The universals, he holds, are just aspects of existing entities, isolated in thought by a process of selective attention.
They have no existence apart from particulars.
Reality is comprised, not of platonic abstractions, but of concrete individual entities, each with a definite nature, each obeying the laws inherent in its nature.
Aristotle's universe is the universe of science, the physical world, and his view is not a shadowy projection controlled by some divine dimension, but an autonomous, self-sufficient realm.
It's an orderly, intelligible, natural realm open to the mind of man.
And in such a universe, ladies and gentlemen, Knowledge cannot be acquired by special revelations from another dimension.
There's no place for ineffable institutions of the beyond.
He repudiates the mystical elements in Plato's epistemology.
Aristotle is the father of logic and the champion of reason as man's only means of knowledge.
Knowledge, he holds, must be based on and derived from the data of sense experience.
It must be formulated in terms of objectivity, defined concepts.
It must be validated by a process of logic.
You see, for Plato, the good life is essentially one of renunciation and selflessness, a life that is not a life.
Man should flee from the pleasures of this world in the name of fidelity to a higher dimension, just as he should negate his own individuality in the name of union with the collective.
And in that kind of a world, liberty does not exist.
There are no Creator-endowed rights for man, nor protection of those rights.
But for Aristotle, the good life is one of personal self-fulfillment.
Man should enjoy the values of this world.
He should use his mind to the fullest.
Each man should work to achieve his own happiness here on earth.
And in the process, he should be conscious of his own value.
Pride, writes Aristotle, a national pride—I should say a rational pride—in oneself and in one's moral character is when it is earned The crown of the virtues.
And we will continue tomorrow night, ladies and gentlemen, for this is important that you understand what is happening and where it is coming from.
And if you haven't been to a university in a long time, I suggest you go and sit in on some of these classes.
You will hear what I have relayed to you tonight, being taught to your children over and over and over again in almost every classroom that they inhabit.
Thank you.
This broadcast tonight was brought to you from a book entitled The Ominous Parallels by Leonard Pykoff.
It's a brilliant study, ladies and gentlemen, of America today, and the ominous parallels with the utter chaos of pre-Hitler Germany.
good night, and God bless you all, and God save this republic.
Thank you.
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