Understanding Walls

2016-02-19-03-57-23

Communists have to build walls to keep people in. Capitalists have to build walls to keep people out.

“Come, let us rebuild the wall of Jerusalem, and we will no longer be in disgrace.”

Nehemiah 2:17

About Tony Heller

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38 Responses to Understanding Walls

  1. Tel says:

    Because the capitalists have something worth stealing.

  2. omanuel says:

    Regretfully, for the past ~500 years the Roman Catholic Church, Joseph Stalin, and the post-WWII United Nations (worldwide association of nations and their National Academies of Sciences) have maintained an invisible wall to try to keep the public ignorant of the FORCE that
    1. Copernicus first reported in 1543
    2. Einstein explained as E = mc^2 in 1905, and
    3. Aston quantified as rest masses of atoms and reported in his 1922 Nobel Lecture, . . .

    The FORCE that powers and gives life to the expanding universe from the cores of
    _ a.) Heavy atoms like Uranium
    _ b.) Some planets like Jupiter
    _ c.) Ordinary stars like the Sun
    _ d.) Galaxies like the Milky Way
    _ e.) The infinite, cyclic Cosmos

    Thanks in large measure to the Climategate emails that surfaced in late November 2009, that wall is coming down.

    • We had the same problem at Access to Energy. Once you start swimming against the current because it’s wrong, whack jobs obsessed with some mystical fallacy imagine they’ve at last found a fellow Traveller from Altruria.

  3. Jason Calley says:

    You can have open borders or you can have a welfare state — but you can’t have both at the same time, at least not for long. Personally, I prefer neither.

      • Some nice testimonials there, Jason.

        The 15-minute video below was taken by a Hungarian truck driver on the highway at the Eurotunnel portal in Calais and gives a perspective of the nature and scope of the problem. I thought about RAH when I first saw it. I think that even with all his combat training he’d rather drive ten times through blizzards than being boxed in once as a sitting duck in Calais and run the gauntlet through the “refugee” corridor.

        We will see more of this as the situation further deteriorates and we’ll be well advised to not follow Europe’s path.

        Here it is with English subtitles (I don’t speak Hungarian and I don’t know how true they are). Expect strong language:

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ESI4pTDI9g

        And here is the Hungarian original for those who’d rather not know what the driver is saying:

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WuAGjBQX0A

        • Neal S says:

          I happen to speak fluent Hungarian. (First US born child of Hungarian immigrants who came here in 1956). The subtitles are accurate enough, although if anything they are somewhat tamer than the original. (Only watched up to 7 minutes thus far) A few of the idioms are not quite right, but the difference is not really important.

        • Yes, 1956. A tragic year in Hungarian history.

        • Neal S says:

          The most common incorrect idiom is what is translated as “F… you” but more accurately should be “F… it” as it is an expression of exasperation and not directed at any particular individual. Phonetically it sounds like “buzz meg”.

        • Thanks, Neal. Besides some common roots words I did hear “kurva” and “baszd meg” quite a few times but that’s where my knowledge ends. Just shows what circles I frequented in my younger and wilder years.

          Now, I think I even recognized “kurva szuka buzi” and I know it doesn’t mean “too many gays”.

          I don’t know if I should be pleased how worldly and well-versed I am or if I ought to hang my head in shame.

  4. RAH says:

    The current Pontiff apparently believes that all nation states except the Vatican City should have no walls or borders or protect their own interests or citizens. If there has been a more hypocritical statement by a Pope during my 60 year life time, I can’t remember it.

    The Iron curtain was not just a “wall” it was two walls or fences with a kill zone between them. I well remember the wall in Berlin and standing on platforms looking over to prison side. Remember “Check Point Charlie” and a little museum on the free side which preserved all the examples of human ingenuity that had been created by the prisoners to get out . Seeing the Soviets changing of the Guard at their war memorial just across the line and noting how similar their ceremonial goose step march was to the very Nazis they claimed to have “liberated” the people of East Europe from.

    • True. The absolute majority of inhabitants of Communist countries never saw the barbed wire fences standing at the “demarcation lines” and couldn’t touch the actual Berlin border wall. The no-go zones inside the Communist borders were deep and entry into them was strictly controlled. There is a reason why the Berlin Wall had graffiti only on the free side. East Germans could not get to their side. Check Point Charlie was basically a “corridor building” through the kill zone. I have stood at both ends of the crossing in the 80s and last summer I visited for the first time the memorial built along the only preserved section of the Wall just off the infamous border crossing which is now a busy intersection.

    • Pacelli is the central character in Hitler’s Pope. And those East German altruist sharpshooters gunning down fugitives in at the deadline before the Berlin wall? Those were todes-schutzen.

      • gator69 says:

        Time to correct the record…

        Several Catholic countries and populations fell under Nazi domination during the period of the Second World War (1939-1945), and ordinary Catholics fought on both sides of the conflict. Despite efforts to protect its rights within Germany under a 1933 Reichskonkordat treaty, the Church in Germany had faced persecution in the years since Adolf Hitler had seized power, and Pope Pius XI accused the Nazi government of sowing ‘fundamental hostility to Christ and his Church’. Pius XII became Pope on the eve of war and lobbied world leaders to prevent the outbreak of conflict. His first encyclical, Summi Pontificatus, called the invasion of Poland an “hour of darkness”. He affirmed the policy of Vatican neutrality, but maintained links to the German Resistance. Despite being the only world leader to publicly and specifically denounce Nazi crimes against Jews in his 1942 Christmas Addres, controversy surrounding his apparent reluctance to speak frequently and in even more explicit terms about Nazi crimes continues.[1] He used diplomacy to aid war victims, lobbied for peace, shared intelligence with the Allies, and employed Vatican Radioand other media to speak out against atrocities like race murders. In Mystici corporis Christi (1943) he denounced the murder of the handicapped. A denunciation from German bishops of the murder of the “innocent and defenceless”, including “people of a foreign race or descent”, followed.[2]
        Hitler’s invasion of Catholic Poland sparked the War. Nazi policy towards the Church was at its most severe in the Polish territories it annexed to Greater Germany, where the Nazis set about systematically dismantling the Church – arresting its leaders, exiling its clergymen, closing its churches, monasteries and convents. Many clergymen were murdered.[3][4] Over 1800 Catholic Polish clergy died in concentration camps; most notably, Saint Maximilian Kolbe. Nevertheless, security chief Reinhard Heydrich soon orchestrated an intensification of restrictions on church activities. Hitler and his ideologues Goebbels, Himmler, Rosenberg and Bormann hoped to de-Christianize Germany in the long term.[5][6] With the expansion of the war in the East, expropriation of monasteries, convents and church properties surged from 1941. Bishop August von Galen’s ensuing 1941 denunciation of Nazi euthanasia and defence of human rights roused rare popular dissent. The German bishops denounced Nazi policy towards the church in pastoral letters, calling it “unjust oppression”.[7][8]
        From 1940, the Nazis gathered priest-dissidents in dedicated clergy barracks at Dachau, where (95%) of its 2,720 inmates were Catholic (mostly Poles, and 411 Germans), 1034 died there. Mary Fulbrook wrote that when politics encroached on the church, German Catholics were prepared to resist, but the record was otherwise patchy and uneven with notable exceptions, “it seems that, for many Germans, adherence to the Christian faith proved compatible with at least passive acquiescence in, if not active support for, the Nazi dictatorship”.[9] Influential members of the German Resistance included Jesuits of the Kreisau Circle and laymen such as July plotters Klaus von Stauffenberg, Jakob Kaiser andBernhard Letterhaus, whose faith inspired resistance.[10] Elsewhere, vigorous resistance from bishops such as Johannes de Jong and Jules-Géraud Saliège, papal diplomats such as Angelo Rotta, and nuns such as Margit Slachta, can be contrasted with the apathy of others and the outright collaboration of Catholic politicians such as Slovakia’s MsgrJozef Tiso and fanatical Croat nationalists. From within the Vatican, Msgr Hugh O’Flaherty coordinated the rescue of thousands of Allied POWs, and civilians, including Jews. While Nazi antisemitism embraced modern pseudo-scientific racial principles rejected by the Catholic Church, ancient antipathies between Christianity and Judaism contributed toEuropean antisemitism; during the Second World War the Catholic Church rescued many thousands of Jews by issuing false documents, lobbying Axis officials, hiding them in monasteries, convents, schools and elsewhere; including the Vatican and Castel Gandolfo.

        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_and_Nazi_Germany_during_World_War_II

  5. Steve Case says:

    1. Liberals need a constituency to vote them into office.

    2. Liberals believe in “The Population Bomb” and through birth control and abortion have managed to reduce their numbers.

    3. Liberals want an influx of aliens in order to satisfy the needs of #1 and offset the effects of #2.

    4. This guns or butter basic dynamic should be taught in university Political Science courses, but I’d bet money it isn’t.

    • Barbara says:

      Well put. Concise and accurate. Thanks.

    • Incorrect. Liberal means laissez-faire. The word was corrupted in English after National Socialists made it a synonym of jewish bad thing, which Republicans glommed onto to explain why Herbert Hoover, who destroyed the entire economy to enforce the 16th and 18th coercion amendments, failed to be reelected. Calling looters liberals says more about the speaker than about the looters.

      • DougM says:

        Maybe he should have used the more appropriate term of “Progressives”…

        • Steve Case says:

          American Liberalism is left wing. Now that everyone knows that, they want to be called Progressives. When everyone figures out what that means, they will want to change it to something else.

  6. Andy DC says:

    I don’t know why liberals have such a hard time understanding this. No one, not even Trump is saying we should stop immigration. The only point he is making is that as a sovereign nation, we have the right and a responsibility to ensure that the process is legal and orderly. Especially in this age of terrorism and narco gangs, we have the right to vet and know who the hell is coming over here.

    • “I don’t know why …”

      I do, Andy (and I think you do, too).

      The assortment of “progressive” platitudes that comprises their “understanding” has nothing to do with thinking. I suspect you’ve had plenty of opportunity to witness how they react when pressed with simple arguments like yours.

      Cognitive dissonance is not just a psychology textbook term. For the self-described “progressives” I know it’s A normal day-to-day state of mind. It is very common in Boulder to speak to someone about an unrelated subject when they suddenly blurt out something derogatory about Republicans, conservatives, the religious right or Trump. They don’t really want to talk about it and all they want to get is some kind of quick and shallow affirmation. I believe it’s their way to check the other party is in agreement and make it seem like their world is still in order. It’s sad but instructive to watch how they react when they don’t get the expected “correct” response.

      Robert A. Heinlein’s “all right-thinking people” term is describing them perfectly.

    • Narco-gangs? When customs agents murdered Henry Virkula from behind, narrowly missing his wife and kids in 1929, Herbert Hoover replied to local government protests that they should aid and abet the murderers were simply responding to international criminals engaged in “systemic war” against the “laws of the United States” banning beer. That, according to Aldous Huxley, is terrorism.

  7. Steve Kross says:

    Excellent! The pope is such a hypocrite.

  8. Robertv says:

    The question should be why there are terrorist and narco gangs.

  9. Marsh says:

    You don’t have to be pillaged to be dispossessed; And it’s not only your possessions but your principles! Walls are just as important today & can take any form; even a PC has a firewall & Trojans are not limited to Computers… some things never change.

  10. mogur2013 says:

    Joshua 6:20-21

    “So the people shouted, and priests blew the trumpets; and it came about, when the people heard the sound of the trumpet, that the people shouted with a great shout and the wall fell down flat, so that the people went up into the city, every man straight ahead, and they took the city.

    And they utterly destroyed everything in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox and sheep and donkey, with the edge of the sword.”

    This is the Judeo-Christian tradition. A decree had been declared by god, that not only should the sinful men and women of Jericho be slaughtered, but every innocent child, the vile ox, sheep and donkeys, as well. The spaghetti monster hath issued a fatwa.

    Evangelists think that the United States has become a morally corrupt society. Do you think that Jesus Mendez from the Christian state of Mexico should be tasked with blowing down the wall of Trump to slaughter the men and women of the US, along with their cows, chickens, pigs and frog legs? I hope not. And I hope that reasonable people can see the idiocy of that.

    • The stupidity of progressives is infinite

    • AndyG55 says:

      Mogit has been smoking the weird stuff…… yet again !!

      You need a serious period in abused chemicals re-had, Mogit !!

    • RAH says:

      I don’t remember anyone going into East Germany and plundering and destroying when the Iron Curtain came down. I do remember that it put a tremendous financial burden upon the Germans from the west to build modern infrastructure and bring the Germans in the east back up to western European standards of living. And from before then I also leaned about a thing called “The Marshall Plan” devised and named for the former architect of the US Army for the “great crusade” to rid the world of that National Socialist Hitler. That plan, using the amassed wealth of the US to help rebuild western Europe after that great war. And that is why when the “wall” was still up and I was there one could still see bullet holes in the sides of the buildings in the east from the battle of Berlin while in the west to see an example of the destruction from that war one had to visit the Kaiser Wilhelm church which had been preserved as a memorial to all those lost in the bombings.

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