Alert: American Autumn Threatened

by Dr. Robert D. Crane

    The 40-year-old Association of Muslim Social Scientists under its new leadership has its first major challenge in its core mission to rehabilitate classical Islamic and classical American thought.  Richard Foley, who is a staple in the Just Third Way movement and supporter of Senator Mike Gravel’s 12-year-old Direct Democracy movement (ni4d.us, national initiative for direct democracy, and http://www.mikegravel.us) is sending out reports, including today’s one, that might not be covered by the mainline media.  His report highlights a new Direct Democracy movement, which started in Greece a few months ago and now is being picked up by the Occupy Wall Street movement. 

    This development is a serious threat to peace, prosperity, and freedom through justice, at least in the United States as envisioned in classical Islamic and traditionalist American thought, because it advocates the abolition of representative democracy, rather than the addition of a parallel system of direct democracy for transparency.  This can be counter-productive, like calls to End the Fed rather than to reform it as potentially a key instrument to End the Wealth Gap.

    Now is the time for Muslims and others to network with the Occupy Wall Street leaders, because otherwise the socialist extremists may take over, like the guy who joined the New York demonstration from Tahrir Square in Egypt yesterday as the keynote speaker and advocated Marxism, to the cheers of a substantial portion of the crowd.  Such potentially fascist extremism is a danger in all revolutions, because revolution, rather than reform, is made to order for those who threaten to impose a regime that in practice might become worse than the one they are revolting against.  Che Guevara, who was killed in 1967, exactly 44 years ago today, comes to mind, as does the iconic Syed Qutb.

    From the very beginning in my many articles I have been skeptical of the Arab Spring movements for the very reason that we may have to become skeptical of its American counterpart unless it advocates that money be created only for production to expand the economy, not for consumption to bribe the voters, and only in ways that reduce the wealth gap by making every citizen a capitalist (to use Ronald Reagan’s unfortunate wording).  We must not let the twin evils of Socialist and Capitalist ideology, based, respectively, on envy and greed, crowd out the paradigmatic and pragmatic justice of the Just Third Way. 

See http://www.cesj.org/thirdway/comparison3rdway.htm, capitalhomestead.org/notes/Core_Principles_of_the_Coalition_for_Capital_Homesteading, and capitalhomestead.org/notes/Organizations_in_the_Coalition.