Edward Babinski
http://edward-t-babinski.blogspot.com
“In another dimension, the three most popular social ideas of Indust-reality--democracy, socialism, and anarchism--have a family resemblance, despite their differences. All represent what Arlen Riley Wilson has called "Stone Age Backlash." That is, as Imperialism spread, more Stone Age "Partnership Societies" were discovered and they set the intelligentsia to thinking ferociously, as the French say. Democracy, socialism and anarchy all represent various persons' ideas of how to re-create Partnership Society within the context of an expanding technological world. This explains the various attempts to blend them: Democratic Socialism; Mutualist Anarchism; Libertarian (anti-State) Marxist heresies, etc.”
― Beyond Chaos and Beyond: The Best of Trajectories, Vol. II
― Beyond Chaos and Beyond: The Best of Trajectories, Vol. II
“Nonsense! Nonsense!” snorted Tasbrough. “That couldn’t happen here in America, not possibly! We’re a country of freemen.” “The answer to that,” suggested Doremus Jessup, “if Mr. Falck will forgive me, is ‘the hell it can’t!’ Why, there’s no country in the world that can get more hysterical—yes, or more obsequious!—than America. Look how Huey Long became absolute monarch over Louisiana, and how the Right Honorable Mr. Senator Berzelius Windrip owns his State. Listen to Bishop Prang and Father Coughlin on the radio—divine oracles, to millions. Remember how casually most Americans have accepted Tammany grafting and Chicago gangs and the crookedness of so many of President Harding’s appointees? Could Hitler’s bunch, or Windrip’s, be worse? Remember the Kuklux Klan? Remember our war hysteria, when we called sauerkraut ‘Liberty cabbage’ and somebody actually proposed calling German measles ‘Liberty measles’? And wartime censorship of honest papers? Bad as Russia! Remember our kissing the—well, the feet of Billy Sunday, the million-dollar evangelist, and of Aimée McPherson, who swam from the Pacific Ocean clear into the Arizona desert and got away with it? Remember Voliva and Mother Eddy?. . .Remember our Red scares and our Catholic scares, when all well-informed people knew that the O.G.P.U. were hiding out in Oskaloosa, and the Republicans campaigning against Al Smith told the Carolina mountaineers that if Al won the Pope would illegitimatize their children? Remember Tom Heflin and Tom Dixon? Remember when the hick legislators in certain states, in obedience to William Jennings Bryan, who learned his biology from his pious old grandma, set up shop as scientific experts and made the whole world laugh itself sick by forbidding the teaching of evolution?. . .Remember the Kentucky night-riders? Remember how trainloads of people have gone to enjoy lynchings? Not happen here? Prohibition—shooting down people just because they might be transporting liquor—no, that couldn’t happen in America! Why, where in all history has there ever been a people so ripe for a dictatorship as ours! We’re ready to start on a Children’s Crusade—only of adults—right now, and the Right Reverend Abbots Windrip and Prang are all ready to lead it!” “Well, what if they are?”
― It Can't Happen Here
― It Can't Happen Here
“As far as I am concerned, anyone who hopes for the universal reconciliation of all creatures with God must already believe that this would be the best possible ending to the Christian story; and such a person has then no excuse for imagining that God could bring any but the best possible ending to pass without thereby being in some sense a failed creator.”
― That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation
― That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation
“Even more disturbing as you say, is the ghastly record of Christian persecution. It had begun in Our Lordʼs time - ‘Ye know not what spirit ye are of’ (John of all people!) I think we must fully face the fact that when Christianity does not make a man very much better, it makes him very much worse…Conversion may make of one who was, if no better, no worse than an animal, something like a devil.”
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“dressed in her finest, sword at her hip, off to do something that is What Princesses Do when there are monsters and demons and wizards in the world. Something that was surely not actually what they did, back in the days her myth-cycles originated in. Because myths miss out all the sordid realities and preserve only What we wish we’d done, rather than How we actually did it.”
― Elder Race
― Elder Race
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