You are right about Crooke's misunderstanding of the 'left-right' political spectrum. I like Crooke but to understand him it helps to look at his biography which is that of the victim of an imperialist educational system that denies the existence of a capitalist ruling class.
Crooke is constitutionally incapable of understanding that the political system in the United States (and most other countries) involves battles between interests which differ only on marginal matters- Trump, Clinton, Biden and RFK Jr are all sponsored by and answerable to the capitalist class. Their politics are rooted in the unquestioning acceptance of the primacy of the elites which control the means of production and use that control to exploit the great mass of the population and to 'cancel' any questioning of the socio-economic system.
Which is one of the reasons why they couch the internecine feuds that divide them when offices are being elected, in terms of cultural issues.
Interestingly, as the impossibility of continuing to squabble over matters such as abortion, homosexuality, church attendance, sex education in schools etc becomes more obvious, rather than discussing matters of importance- control over the economy, the dangers of permanent war policies, the decline of living standards thanks to the neo-liberal policies both pursue, and other questions of fundamental importance- they simply double down on 'cultural' matters, which become ever more exotic and wild.
Which is where Crooke comes in and where there is broad agreement that castrating, or planning to castrate children, regarding gender as purely matters of choice,- the whole slew of nonsensical 'transexual' issues (all of which are merely functions of the crassness of capitalist class ruled society) are used as subcstitutes for the real questions facing society which are about the environment, the economy, inequalities of income, power, opportunities, living conditions, life expectancy, access to healthcare, diet and shelter.
These are the matters that interest and always have interested human beings- not to the exclusion of 'spiritual' concerns but because these are the basic requirements that we need to rake care of before we can contemplate philosophical questions.
And these matters, that have to do with filling bellies and keeping sound roofs over heads are precisely those which neither Democrats nor Republicans want to discuss.
It's good you note the increasing escalation of "issues" contrived to fuel the ongoing Culture War Narrative. We've seen how and what's been done over our years, but the newer generations lack that insight and seem more prone to swallow the Narrative.
this is very true and my observation working with younger musicians in the 20's and 30's.. that is my own subjective take off my own personal connections as well karl..
I know little about the US – however recently I read an alternative explanation for the full spectrum experimentation ongoing in that place
Which is not only much more cynical, but more depressing as a scure expression of total dominance, with additional back up by way of referring to a well known historical tendancy
It is most visible and on display in education – all diversity programs, all homogenisation of the curriculum, all reduction of reason, merit, and the objective, with the corresponding fantasy examples or specimens of colourful individual variations and tweaks…all these serve merely and entirely as a ‘well curated’ spectacle for the ruling class pupils, a labworld in miniature they pass through before taking their places at Court
As I replied to marcjf, manipulation of the educational system has always been present. As Hudson, myself and others have documented, the most recent big change began in the 1880s with the attack on Classical Political-Economy in the UK which was imported and put to work in the USA so that by the end of the 1920s no major university taught the history of political-economy any longer--it was canceled by the Donors who sat on the boards that owned/controlled the private Ivy League "prestige" universities. It's all related to the counter-attack made by Big Money that has resulted in the establishment of Neoliberalism and its Junk Economics. Humanity's attempt to establish a Multipolar World is its attempt to overthrow the Neoliberal Imperialist system that's been dominant since the 1890s.
Some good thoughts here. Here is my contribution, but it is very much a personal view (rant?).
If you listen to Jordan Peterson he argues that the new Cultural Revoultion that is currently destroying (or if you like remaking) the West is neo-Marxist in origin - that is based on power structures and intersectional victimhood (and like Marxism it frames its arguments in gobbligook words). I'm not one for getting too hung up on definitions but that puts its origins on the left. There are actually those that claim its origins were a KGB plot to undermine the west, hatched in the 1960's, started in the fertile ground of academia. Well I don't know about that, but if so it has been a monumental success!
I actually think right and left are the wrong ways to describe this movement - or is it mass delusion? Now no system is perfect but you could argue that in say 1990 the West was the least worst. We mainly had some from of representative democracy based on free speach and the free debate of ideas, facts were generally facts in those days, the media has always been a bit pro-left IMHO but you could find in almost any outlet a range of views and opinions - and you were not made a non-person for disagreeing with someone else or indeed the establishment. Critical thinking was still a thing and education had not yet dumbed down.
What I see developing in the West now is more akin to facism than anything else - but involves mass surveillance and censorship, propaganda, the absence of the equal application of the law, the criminalisation of dissent, new speak and double think, managed elections and media narratives and general brainwashing. And the problem is that very many -possibly a majority - of younger people think this is the right way to proceed.
Well I am at the right end of my life if things carry on like this. These young people will reap what they sow.
Many don't know there are other paths because of what's happening within education. I saw what was happening there in the early 2000s during my brief teaching career. To explain it all requires a long article, not just a short comment.
I await with interest - but maybe I am too disillusioned with Education now to be surprised. When you have illiterate teachers you cannot expect literate students...
Yes. I was what's known as a non-traditional student since I returned to college after a 20 year-long career and was often a peer or elder to many of my profs and in some cases knew more about the class subject than they, and they had PhDs. That's one very small facet of the overall story. My goal as a student was to turn every course into a grad-level course as I had no interest in chasing women or partying. So, my 156 credit hours were more like 250, and all at Summa Cum Laude level. At least I correctly read education's future direction and declined to pursue a PhD.
I do hope that at some stage you were an irresponsible undergraduate and chased all the wrong sorts of women whilst fuelled with too much beer. I was great at the beer, less so with the girls. Oh well....
That was at the beginning when I emerged from high school and liked chasing women and partying too much so I had to go to work to afford those follies. 20+ years later, I returned to my knowledge quest.
cancel culture is a religion. actions that deny Christian right to their moral code and belief.
denial of Christian belief by legislation, legal action, or weaponized “justice enforcement” is contrary to the Bill of Right which makes all men and women free from forced state religion.
as such Christians should be prepared for persecutions, seek due process and non violent resistance.
I wrote about it at my VK a few months back and see it as a fascistic mechanism not differing much from previous and ongoing Divide and Rule devices/narratives that have been employed within the USA since the 1880s. There are other Meta aspects regarding the USA's Culture Wars. For example, why did most of the South flip its political allegiance from the Ds to the Rs, a process that began in the late 1950s? And there's much more than just that. Cancel Culture attacks all, not just one group. Anyone or thing can get cancelled as we've seen. It's Baconesque.
"The problem however is that the new ‘grand narrative’ is as factually incorrect and as ideologically driven as the ‘from Plato to NATO’ myth. It is the substitution of one flawed repressive narrative by another."
LOL From where I sit - atheist, individualist anarchist, radical Transhumanist, not to mention psychopath - everyone is so far behind the curve of reality that you'd need the Hubble Telescope to see it.
I understand this comment is attributed incorrectly to Hermann Goering, but it applies both to culture and ideology on any side:
"Whenever I hear the word culture…I release the safety-catch of my Browning!"
“Revolution is aimed at new arrangements; insurrection leads us no longer to let ourselves be arranged, but to arrange ourselves, and set no glittering hope on "institutions”
― Max Stirner
“The men of the future will yet fight their way to many a liberty that we do not even miss.”
thanks karl.. we don't need more confirmation of things falling apart.. it's happening one day at a time and coming quickly.. meanwhile other parts of the world seem intent on going in the opposite direction.. i hope they aren't too late... i heard about seaweed in florida and the increased nitrogen levels in the sea related to this, along with the causes.. we are close to midnight as i see it..
First. Good article, even if not enough from yourself, perhaps. Second re:
"As for Rufo’s book, America’s Cultural Revolution, my brief look reveals an ideologue who has twisted history to fit his own imagination, such as his interpretation of 1776 as a People’s Revolution that was somehow overthrown by events of 1968. However, as we see with Ukraine, false narratives can be fatal and very destructive. The characterization of those who took over the Federal government of the USA as being leftists of any sort—new or old—is an abomination and shows a complete misunderstanding of what has transpired within the USA since WW2."
Your dismissal comes off a tad magisterial, IMO. The phrase 'People's Revolution' could mean many different things so if you are going to call it a 'false narrative' I think it worth a few sentences. Indeed, doing so would further unpack some of the points you are trying to make. Without it, I can't tell what it is you find objectionable.
And the same goes for "The characterization of those who took over the Federal government of the USA as being leftists of any sort—new or old—is an abomination.." How so an 'abomination?' Very strong judgment. Again, this is not explained, merely pontificated from on high. Again, would it not be worth a few sentences explaining why you find his view 'abominable' especially when you saw fit to quote from an article praising Rufo's work at such length?
Indeed, I suspect that unpacking these two related issues might get to a deeper level of what yours and Crooke's article is about, which has something to do with how what is going on viz cancel culture involves deep undercurrents and is very important.
Maybe that's worth an article in itself. What on earth does the word 'left' mean? Of course, it means different things to different people at different times, making it perhaps an impossible topic to cover. But if you could track that word's various incarnations, you might also reveal much about the nature of the polity that is self-destructively unraveling in plain view of us all.
I'm republishing an archived essay that further deals with both Woke and Cancel for they're one and the same tool. The additional context is there if you read what Crooke links to.
As you know the left/right spectrum was based on the seating arrangements arrived at by delegates to the Assemblies and Conventions of the French Revolution; for safety as much as taste delegates of a like mind sat or stood together. The radicals, demanding a complete revolution on the left, those fighting a rearguard action to retain monarchical instututions and feudal privileges on the right.
The salient point is that the left was for a change in the system, a complete replacement of the ruling class- the institution of a new society. In modern terms, in a capitalist/imperialist society the 'left' is opposed to both capitalism and imperialism. It wants a new sort of society without hierarchy and without minority class rule. It is against the 1%. .
Do the Democrats or those who Jordan Peterson regards as villains fot this bill? Hardly.
If they are not the 'left' then, who are these people preaching childhood transexual rights etc?
They are, of course, the extreme libertarians, the ultras among the individualists, the nihilists who regard any sort of society as an affront to individual freedom. And their mission is to smash up all communal and social organisation from trade unions and tenants associations to tribes, clans and families.
This nihilism wins the cynical support of the oligarchs who see , in community, the threat to their individual rights to plunder, rape and kill. Their ideal of government is terror conducted downwards, by violent force dsposed of by the wealthy, the owners of capital. Jim Crow was a trailer- a preview of fascism.
Among the consequences of this sort of movement, towards fascism, is the breaking up of conservatism as it divides into those who wish to preserve traditional human community and its morality, onthe one hand and the real libertarians, who regard their rights to sport with nature and humanity alike, their right to do as they please, though it might be drinking virgins' blood or barbecuing Vietcong villages.
It is high time that people realised that the option of retaining capitalism while taming it to be friendly to humanity or thoughtful about the environment does not exist. Those who want to retain capitalist rule or believe that it is inevitable, a function of human nature, are being unrealistic. Rosa Luxemburg told us, at the beginning of the last century that our choice is between barbarism and socialism- barbarism being the rule of an anti-social minority class and socialism being thoroughgoing democracy demanding not only our support but our participation .
The spirt of Bacon lives on, which Linebaugh explained in "The Many Headed Hydra." And of course, he wasn't the first. Rome's elite appear to have that distinction.
Thank you for your comment-reply. I wrote one in return with lots of quotes from Rufo book but it is too long for this substack.
Basically, Rufo concluded by positing a current (evil) revolution (now ongoing and involves a managerial-elite level of oppression of ordinary people) and rather proposing a counter-revolution which will restore America to an ideal 1776 style republic. His closing paragraphs go:
"In the end, America under counter-revolution will return to being a patchwork republic: local communities will have the autonomy to pursue their own vision of the good, within the framework of the binding principles of the Constitution. The common citizen will have the space for inhabiting and passing down his own virtues, sentiments, and beliefs, free from the imposition of values from above. The system of government will protect the basic dignity and political rights of the citizen while refraining from the hopeless and utopian task of remaking society in its image. The promise of this regime lies in the particular, rather than the abstract; the humble, rather than the grandiose; the limited, rather than the limitless; the shared,
rather than the new sensibility.
Under the cultural revolution, the common citizen has been shamed, pressed, and degraded. His symbols have been subverted and buried below the earth. But he still retains the power of his own instincts, which orient him toward justice, and the power of his own memory, which makes possible the retrieval of the symbols and principles that contain his own destiny.
The partisans of the counter-revolution must provide a clear vision of this process, so that the common citizen can begin to see the source of the nihilism that threatens to bury him, too. The counter-revolutionaries must put themselves in the breach, so that the common citizen can finally look up, with his worn and weary face, toward that eternal and unchanging order that will put him at peace and allow him to finally escape the emptiness and desolation that surrounds him.
From that humble beginning, America’s cultural revolution can be overcome. The American public can restore the mechanisms of democratic rule, reform the institutions that have compromised public life, and revive the principles of the revolution of 1776. And, unlike their enemies, whose promises always vanish into the ether, they can make them real. They can re-secure the rights of the common citizen, allowing him to live as an equal, raise a family, participate in the Republic, and pursue the good, the true, and the beautiful. "
That sounds pretty good to me. Now maybe how he got there and his understanding of 'the neo-left' in US political history after the perceived failures of both Russian and Chinese communism is something you and Karlof might take umbrage at, or maybe it is his rose-colored view of 1776 republicanism, but his conclusion has merit nonetheless, at least so it seems to me.
It is unclear to me where Rufo's terminating paragraphs end and your commentary begins.
I haven't read his book. And I have no idea what he thinks societies are, or how he accounts for the way that they are organised. Common citizens do not exist in a vacuum- nor do their rights or their living standards. Underneath the Norman Rockwell suburb was the AFL-CIO, not to mention the Solid South and the Military Industrial complex.
My instinct when hearing about the American Revolutiion is to think of the Royal Proclamation of 1763 and the case of James Somerset. and the corruption in Pennsylvania that struck Peter Porcupine on the morrow of the 'Revolution."
As to the failures of the Russian and Chinese revolutions, these are very early days yet far too early to judge, but the signs look very good: China has rebounded from a starving victim of imperialism to a major force for the good internationally. And Russia's revolution helped spark its revival.
Groups are always complicated and the American Founding was a group grope process par excellence by all accounts with some very adversarial skeins in the mix. So a messy business at the beginning, we are now in the middle and it remains to be seen if this is an end or a pre-reform period.
China and Russia have moved on from the initial pure communism phase which had various successes but also cost millions of lives. There is simply no way to whitewash away all the slaughter in Russia except to deny, as you seem to do, that it happened. For all I know you are right and Solzhenitsyn is a shameless fabulist and the Red Terror is a Capitalist Propaganda Psyop story like the Holodomor which wasn't. (But forevermore millions are going to believe otherwise either way.) These things are extremely hard to know and resolve given the amount of lying before, during and after all major events.
But it seems to me that it's fair to say that after a shot at 'pure communism' so to speak after overthrowing the old orders almost entirely, both polities have moved to something with some communist remnants but much more mixed. They have market economies with strong central state governance. China supposedly has Peoples'-Money Banking, no doubt controlled by an aristocracy that isn't officially there but not a credit cartel like the Fed, and Russia seems to have a bit of both still, a Rothschild-started Central Bank which is sometimes described as independent and sometimes not. Russia also still has a very powerful oligarch class which in the West I believe you would call 'capitalist bourgeoisie' or some such.
But, yes, both look extremely promising though their materialist emphasis gives me pause since usually such polities end up 'floundering without Heaven' and so cannot generate high culture which all true civilizations at some point blossom into. This also means that they will almost certainly fail to prevent corrupt materialist elements from gradually taking over, which is what has happened in the West. In 1823 the US was just beginning to muster as a nation and grow. Now only 200 years later it is overwhelmingly corrupted.
China is now about 50 years into its latest mixed-model incarnation and Russia perhaps younger, so they are both currently in a youth mode, with China especially entering the post-industrial revolution phase with a vengeance, rapidly become the most modern state in the world though not without flaws (the floods were partly caused by a design decision by Xi a few years back apparently, cutting corners as leaders are wont to do).
Rufo has a vision of the left as being essentially destructive and totalitarian/centralist, but his particular interest in the book is the current neo-left that formed in the US during the 60's and after. Here we have an infiltration of the managerial class, not a working-class movement at all, and indeed it is the working classes who are now most victimized by this new Left. But then some would argue that communism victimized the working classes too even if officially they were rescuing them. And many would argue that the powers that be are not Left at all.
These sorts of difficulties coming up with agreed vocabulary seemingly go on forever in our too-rapidly-changing polities. But I think Rufo is right: a 'counter-revolution' is needed to push back against the bastards - whoever they are, left, right, capitalists, psychopaths - lest they prevail and we the people lose any chance of enjoying ordinary, decent lives. I think his description of a more decentralized, regional and local community centered polity is in the spirit of the American Revolution, though maybe not intended by some of the more corrupt Grandees in the mix already back then.
I certainly don't deny the loss of life in the Soviet Union. Rather like the Holodomor though it was both a fact -enormous numbers died of famine- and a myth, the Politburo did everything it could to bring food to the starving. Something similar might be said of Solzhenitsyn's highly coloured accounts- there were certainly labour camps, from which most returned after serving their sentences, in which conditions were primitive though rations were adequate. And there were large numbers of prisoners sentenced to them. But were there more in Soviet than in British Imperial or US prisons? I'm not sure. Were conditions worse than in the "West" - it is hard to believe that they were, though they might have been. Certainly during the Nazi attacks from 1941-44 all bets so far as rations and conditions will have been off, though it was still preferable, by orders of magnitude, to be in Soviet rather than German custody. And why were so many in the 'gulags'? I'm far from being an expert but it is well established that, if Stalin was paranoid, he had reason to be: the Soviet Union was under attack continually from its foundation until it's quietus. And many of the attacks took the form of internal subversion, from sabotage and espionage (the defectors were hardly saintly democrats, they were more likely to be opportunists well rewarded for, inter alia, telling their new employers what they wanted to hear.) It is also very likely that angry losers in factional struggles within the CPSU were contacted, on occasion, by foreign interests and did look for foreign assistance to regain their positions. I'm not sure. And few people are. And there are millions of reasons for misrepresentation. Two things that, almost a random, I suggest are worth considering about the 'Purges' are, firstly that there is evidence that Nikolai Yezhov when he ran the NKVD engaged in incredible excesses that resulted in hundreds of thousands of people being victimised and secondly that Stalin genuinely hoped to re-institute the democratic checks and balances that had largely been eroded from the Soviet system by the late 1920s. His motive being that only popular control could check the abuses of the bureaucracy. Two things that are certain are, firstly that the sort of accounts that the British IRD systematised and have become a kind of cottage industry for the Conquests, Applebaums and Snyders of the bourgeois intellectual world are completely unreliable, corrupted by propaganda and, in a word, sad songs sung for lavish suppers provided by the nastiest elements of any states anywhere, the people who have been responsible for ten murders in the Empire for any of those in the most exaggerated claims of Conquest et al. Did Stalin have an Operation Condor? An El Salvador or Jakarta option? An Operation Phoenix? We know that he didn't. There is not the slightest evidence that the Red Army raped any more women than the British or American armies did. Or that its march to Berlin was characterised by brutality and sadism- the contrary is the case. It liberated tens of millions, some from places like Auschwitz others from starved and terrorised cities. Compare the actions of the Soviet Union in Berlin in 1953, Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslovakia in 1968 with France's reaction to Algerian nationalism or that of the US to Guatemalan or Iranian attempts to assert their democracy and independence- the Shah's Secret Police carried on torturing dissidents for thirty years, in Guatemala under US auspices wave after genocidal wave was aimed at eradicating the proto VietCong of Central America. And then there was South Africa, the Congo, Rwanda, where the beat goes on, Indonesia...Chile.. the tens of thousands of college kids just like north Americans who were disappeared, on US orders, in Argentina before the military there fell out with their friend and inspiration Maggie Thatcher. The point makes itself: those who equate the Soviet Union with terror are missing the point. Just as those who embroider the 1932 famines into a Holodomor are ignoring annual events in Bengal and elsewhere in the British (and the Dutch) Empire. To change the subject slightly: to understand China's policies it is necessary to consider them as being transitional. The CPC understands that socialism in a backward peasant country at odds with a world dominated by capitalism is not an option- that was what the Russian Revolution taught them, not only Trotsky and Lenin but Stalin understood as much. What China has done is to allow a capitalist class to develop (there is nothing new in this back in 1949 it was talking of an alliance with national capitalists) while ensuring that it cannot use its wealth to debauch the political system. There is, so long as capitalism exists, a trend towards corruption, it is in Capital's nature to set out to control the state and dictate to society. And this is why the anti-corruption campaigns are so important in China: during a transitional period, while the state is strengthening itself and society is developing the skills and abilities to manage democracy, despite the auto-subversion of property, the Revolution is on a tightrope. The Imperialists are well aware of this which is why every sort of obstacle is being thrown in China's way- Taiwan, Trade sanctions, attempts to rebuild guerrilla armies on bordering countries (Myanmar, Thailand etc), threats from Australia, bribes in The Philippines, re-armament in Japan, revanchism and reaction in south Korea, Naval demonstrations in the South China Sea meddling in Mongolia, Hong Kong and Xinkiang. Imperialism is trying the old anti-Soviet playbook. But it is unlikely to work. Most likely China, which is regularly gaining allies and admiring friends across the world, will march across the tightrope with ease. When it does so the old imperial metropoles- western europe, North America and their creole comprador creatures- will find themselves isolated, not just morally and politically but economically. And the more they postpone coming to terms with socialism the more isolated, meaner and hungrier they will become.
One way of description, bevin, is to say Russia/USSR, China, and any other nation attempting to be sovereign will be subjected to a never-ending cascade of color revolutions in every guise possible. The Info War in media and academia is also part of the ploy. it's clear the combination of megalomania and pleonexia are both addictive and brutal to those oppressed by the addicts.
Just so you know, I am never in the game of comparing one side versus another. Am more interested in truth versus falsehood because it seems there has often been so much of the latter and much less of the former.
And generally I believe that most of the revolutions were more unfortunate than fortunate. I believe Russia could have been reformed without the murder-loss of 40-80,000,000 lives. Totally unnecessary and tragic. No revolution is worth that. But that's just me. About China I know even less than Russia so shall remain mum except to remark that have also read that tens of millions died from that revolution as well.
In any case, have no ideological axe to grind. I don't think either communism, capitalism, fascism or socialism are actual things, rather conceptual overlays, but that's just a somewhat uninformed, intuitive opinion.
You are right about Crooke's misunderstanding of the 'left-right' political spectrum. I like Crooke but to understand him it helps to look at his biography which is that of the victim of an imperialist educational system that denies the existence of a capitalist ruling class.
Crooke is constitutionally incapable of understanding that the political system in the United States (and most other countries) involves battles between interests which differ only on marginal matters- Trump, Clinton, Biden and RFK Jr are all sponsored by and answerable to the capitalist class. Their politics are rooted in the unquestioning acceptance of the primacy of the elites which control the means of production and use that control to exploit the great mass of the population and to 'cancel' any questioning of the socio-economic system.
Which is one of the reasons why they couch the internecine feuds that divide them when offices are being elected, in terms of cultural issues.
Interestingly, as the impossibility of continuing to squabble over matters such as abortion, homosexuality, church attendance, sex education in schools etc becomes more obvious, rather than discussing matters of importance- control over the economy, the dangers of permanent war policies, the decline of living standards thanks to the neo-liberal policies both pursue, and other questions of fundamental importance- they simply double down on 'cultural' matters, which become ever more exotic and wild.
Which is where Crooke comes in and where there is broad agreement that castrating, or planning to castrate children, regarding gender as purely matters of choice,- the whole slew of nonsensical 'transexual' issues (all of which are merely functions of the crassness of capitalist class ruled society) are used as subcstitutes for the real questions facing society which are about the environment, the economy, inequalities of income, power, opportunities, living conditions, life expectancy, access to healthcare, diet and shelter.
These are the matters that interest and always have interested human beings- not to the exclusion of 'spiritual' concerns but because these are the basic requirements that we need to rake care of before we can contemplate philosophical questions.
And these matters, that have to do with filling bellies and keeping sound roofs over heads are precisely those which neither Democrats nor Republicans want to discuss.
It's good you note the increasing escalation of "issues" contrived to fuel the ongoing Culture War Narrative. We've seen how and what's been done over our years, but the newer generations lack that insight and seem more prone to swallow the Narrative.
this is very true and my observation working with younger musicians in the 20's and 30's.. that is my own subjective take off my own personal connections as well karl..
I know little about the US – however recently I read an alternative explanation for the full spectrum experimentation ongoing in that place
Which is not only much more cynical, but more depressing as a scure expression of total dominance, with additional back up by way of referring to a well known historical tendancy
It is most visible and on display in education – all diversity programs, all homogenisation of the curriculum, all reduction of reason, merit, and the objective, with the corresponding fantasy examples or specimens of colourful individual variations and tweaks…all these serve merely and entirely as a ‘well curated’ spectacle for the ruling class pupils, a labworld in miniature they pass through before taking their places at Court
A grandiose Versailles
As I replied to marcjf, manipulation of the educational system has always been present. As Hudson, myself and others have documented, the most recent big change began in the 1880s with the attack on Classical Political-Economy in the UK which was imported and put to work in the USA so that by the end of the 1920s no major university taught the history of political-economy any longer--it was canceled by the Donors who sat on the boards that owned/controlled the private Ivy League "prestige" universities. It's all related to the counter-attack made by Big Money that has resulted in the establishment of Neoliberalism and its Junk Economics. Humanity's attempt to establish a Multipolar World is its attempt to overthrow the Neoliberal Imperialist system that's been dominant since the 1890s.
Some good thoughts here. Here is my contribution, but it is very much a personal view (rant?).
If you listen to Jordan Peterson he argues that the new Cultural Revoultion that is currently destroying (or if you like remaking) the West is neo-Marxist in origin - that is based on power structures and intersectional victimhood (and like Marxism it frames its arguments in gobbligook words). I'm not one for getting too hung up on definitions but that puts its origins on the left. There are actually those that claim its origins were a KGB plot to undermine the west, hatched in the 1960's, started in the fertile ground of academia. Well I don't know about that, but if so it has been a monumental success!
I actually think right and left are the wrong ways to describe this movement - or is it mass delusion? Now no system is perfect but you could argue that in say 1990 the West was the least worst. We mainly had some from of representative democracy based on free speach and the free debate of ideas, facts were generally facts in those days, the media has always been a bit pro-left IMHO but you could find in almost any outlet a range of views and opinions - and you were not made a non-person for disagreeing with someone else or indeed the establishment. Critical thinking was still a thing and education had not yet dumbed down.
What I see developing in the West now is more akin to facism than anything else - but involves mass surveillance and censorship, propaganda, the absence of the equal application of the law, the criminalisation of dissent, new speak and double think, managed elections and media narratives and general brainwashing. And the problem is that very many -possibly a majority - of younger people think this is the right way to proceed.
Well I am at the right end of my life if things carry on like this. These young people will reap what they sow.
Many don't know there are other paths because of what's happening within education. I saw what was happening there in the early 2000s during my brief teaching career. To explain it all requires a long article, not just a short comment.
I await with interest - but maybe I am too disillusioned with Education now to be surprised. When you have illiterate teachers you cannot expect literate students...
Yes. I was what's known as a non-traditional student since I returned to college after a 20 year-long career and was often a peer or elder to many of my profs and in some cases knew more about the class subject than they, and they had PhDs. That's one very small facet of the overall story. My goal as a student was to turn every course into a grad-level course as I had no interest in chasing women or partying. So, my 156 credit hours were more like 250, and all at Summa Cum Laude level. At least I correctly read education's future direction and declined to pursue a PhD.
I do hope that at some stage you were an irresponsible undergraduate and chased all the wrong sorts of women whilst fuelled with too much beer. I was great at the beer, less so with the girls. Oh well....
That was at the beginning when I emerged from high school and liked chasing women and partying too much so I had to go to work to afford those follies. 20+ years later, I returned to my knowledge quest.
cancel culture is a religion. actions that deny Christian right to their moral code and belief.
denial of Christian belief by legislation, legal action, or weaponized “justice enforcement” is contrary to the Bill of Right which makes all men and women free from forced state religion.
as such Christians should be prepared for persecutions, seek due process and non violent resistance.
I wrote about it at my VK a few months back and see it as a fascistic mechanism not differing much from previous and ongoing Divide and Rule devices/narratives that have been employed within the USA since the 1880s. There are other Meta aspects regarding the USA's Culture Wars. For example, why did most of the South flip its political allegiance from the Ds to the Rs, a process that began in the late 1950s? And there's much more than just that. Cancel Culture attacks all, not just one group. Anyone or thing can get cancelled as we've seen. It's Baconesque.
Great read. I am with Viktor Orban.
Most memorable quote and vomit city ‘From Plato to NATO.
I dislike the term too, but her book appears to be good. It's free at the VK link I provided.
"The problem however is that the new ‘grand narrative’ is as factually incorrect and as ideologically driven as the ‘from Plato to NATO’ myth. It is the substitution of one flawed repressive narrative by another."
LOL From where I sit - atheist, individualist anarchist, radical Transhumanist, not to mention psychopath - everyone is so far behind the curve of reality that you'd need the Hubble Telescope to see it.
I understand this comment is attributed incorrectly to Hermann Goering, but it applies both to culture and ideology on any side:
"Whenever I hear the word culture…I release the safety-catch of my Browning!"
“Revolution is aimed at new arrangements; insurrection leads us no longer to let ourselves be arranged, but to arrange ourselves, and set no glittering hope on "institutions”
― Max Stirner
“The men of the future will yet fight their way to many a liberty that we do not even miss.”
― Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own
thanks karl.. we don't need more confirmation of things falling apart.. it's happening one day at a time and coming quickly.. meanwhile other parts of the world seem intent on going in the opposite direction.. i hope they aren't too late... i heard about seaweed in florida and the increased nitrogen levels in the sea related to this, along with the causes.. we are close to midnight as i see it..
and i would encourage anyone who missed aurelians 'reality would like to have a word' to read it.. it lines up well with this article and gives more meat to it too.. https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/reality-would-like-a-word
First. Good article, even if not enough from yourself, perhaps. Second re:
"As for Rufo’s book, America’s Cultural Revolution, my brief look reveals an ideologue who has twisted history to fit his own imagination, such as his interpretation of 1776 as a People’s Revolution that was somehow overthrown by events of 1968. However, as we see with Ukraine, false narratives can be fatal and very destructive. The characterization of those who took over the Federal government of the USA as being leftists of any sort—new or old—is an abomination and shows a complete misunderstanding of what has transpired within the USA since WW2."
Your dismissal comes off a tad magisterial, IMO. The phrase 'People's Revolution' could mean many different things so if you are going to call it a 'false narrative' I think it worth a few sentences. Indeed, doing so would further unpack some of the points you are trying to make. Without it, I can't tell what it is you find objectionable.
And the same goes for "The characterization of those who took over the Federal government of the USA as being leftists of any sort—new or old—is an abomination.." How so an 'abomination?' Very strong judgment. Again, this is not explained, merely pontificated from on high. Again, would it not be worth a few sentences explaining why you find his view 'abominable' especially when you saw fit to quote from an article praising Rufo's work at such length?
Indeed, I suspect that unpacking these two related issues might get to a deeper level of what yours and Crooke's article is about, which has something to do with how what is going on viz cancel culture involves deep undercurrents and is very important.
Maybe that's worth an article in itself. What on earth does the word 'left' mean? Of course, it means different things to different people at different times, making it perhaps an impossible topic to cover. But if you could track that word's various incarnations, you might also reveal much about the nature of the polity that is self-destructively unraveling in plain view of us all.
I'm republishing an archived essay that further deals with both Woke and Cancel for they're one and the same tool. The additional context is there if you read what Crooke links to.
As you know the left/right spectrum was based on the seating arrangements arrived at by delegates to the Assemblies and Conventions of the French Revolution; for safety as much as taste delegates of a like mind sat or stood together. The radicals, demanding a complete revolution on the left, those fighting a rearguard action to retain monarchical instututions and feudal privileges on the right.
The salient point is that the left was for a change in the system, a complete replacement of the ruling class- the institution of a new society. In modern terms, in a capitalist/imperialist society the 'left' is opposed to both capitalism and imperialism. It wants a new sort of society without hierarchy and without minority class rule. It is against the 1%. .
Do the Democrats or those who Jordan Peterson regards as villains fot this bill? Hardly.
If they are not the 'left' then, who are these people preaching childhood transexual rights etc?
They are, of course, the extreme libertarians, the ultras among the individualists, the nihilists who regard any sort of society as an affront to individual freedom. And their mission is to smash up all communal and social organisation from trade unions and tenants associations to tribes, clans and families.
This nihilism wins the cynical support of the oligarchs who see , in community, the threat to their individual rights to plunder, rape and kill. Their ideal of government is terror conducted downwards, by violent force dsposed of by the wealthy, the owners of capital. Jim Crow was a trailer- a preview of fascism.
Among the consequences of this sort of movement, towards fascism, is the breaking up of conservatism as it divides into those who wish to preserve traditional human community and its morality, onthe one hand and the real libertarians, who regard their rights to sport with nature and humanity alike, their right to do as they please, though it might be drinking virgins' blood or barbecuing Vietcong villages.
It is high time that people realised that the option of retaining capitalism while taming it to be friendly to humanity or thoughtful about the environment does not exist. Those who want to retain capitalist rule or believe that it is inevitable, a function of human nature, are being unrealistic. Rosa Luxemburg told us, at the beginning of the last century that our choice is between barbarism and socialism- barbarism being the rule of an anti-social minority class and socialism being thoroughgoing democracy demanding not only our support but our participation .
The spirt of Bacon lives on, which Linebaugh explained in "The Many Headed Hydra." And of course, he wasn't the first. Rome's elite appear to have that distinction.
Thank you for your comment-reply. I wrote one in return with lots of quotes from Rufo book but it is too long for this substack.
Basically, Rufo concluded by positing a current (evil) revolution (now ongoing and involves a managerial-elite level of oppression of ordinary people) and rather proposing a counter-revolution which will restore America to an ideal 1776 style republic. His closing paragraphs go:
"In the end, America under counter-revolution will return to being a patchwork republic: local communities will have the autonomy to pursue their own vision of the good, within the framework of the binding principles of the Constitution. The common citizen will have the space for inhabiting and passing down his own virtues, sentiments, and beliefs, free from the imposition of values from above. The system of government will protect the basic dignity and political rights of the citizen while refraining from the hopeless and utopian task of remaking society in its image. The promise of this regime lies in the particular, rather than the abstract; the humble, rather than the grandiose; the limited, rather than the limitless; the shared,
rather than the new sensibility.
Under the cultural revolution, the common citizen has been shamed, pressed, and degraded. His symbols have been subverted and buried below the earth. But he still retains the power of his own instincts, which orient him toward justice, and the power of his own memory, which makes possible the retrieval of the symbols and principles that contain his own destiny.
The partisans of the counter-revolution must provide a clear vision of this process, so that the common citizen can begin to see the source of the nihilism that threatens to bury him, too. The counter-revolutionaries must put themselves in the breach, so that the common citizen can finally look up, with his worn and weary face, toward that eternal and unchanging order that will put him at peace and allow him to finally escape the emptiness and desolation that surrounds him.
From that humble beginning, America’s cultural revolution can be overcome. The American public can restore the mechanisms of democratic rule, reform the institutions that have compromised public life, and revive the principles of the revolution of 1776. And, unlike their enemies, whose promises always vanish into the ether, they can make them real. They can re-secure the rights of the common citizen, allowing him to live as an equal, raise a family, participate in the Republic, and pursue the good, the true, and the beautiful. "
That sounds pretty good to me. Now maybe how he got there and his understanding of 'the neo-left' in US political history after the perceived failures of both Russian and Chinese communism is something you and Karlof might take umbrage at, or maybe it is his rose-colored view of 1776 republicanism, but his conclusion has merit nonetheless, at least so it seems to me.
It is unclear to me where Rufo's terminating paragraphs end and your commentary begins.
I haven't read his book. And I have no idea what he thinks societies are, or how he accounts for the way that they are organised. Common citizens do not exist in a vacuum- nor do their rights or their living standards. Underneath the Norman Rockwell suburb was the AFL-CIO, not to mention the Solid South and the Military Industrial complex.
My instinct when hearing about the American Revolutiion is to think of the Royal Proclamation of 1763 and the case of James Somerset. and the corruption in Pennsylvania that struck Peter Porcupine on the morrow of the 'Revolution."
As to the failures of the Russian and Chinese revolutions, these are very early days yet far too early to judge, but the signs look very good: China has rebounded from a starving victim of imperialism to a major force for the good internationally. And Russia's revolution helped spark its revival.
Everything in inverted commas was the book.
Groups are always complicated and the American Founding was a group grope process par excellence by all accounts with some very adversarial skeins in the mix. So a messy business at the beginning, we are now in the middle and it remains to be seen if this is an end or a pre-reform period.
China and Russia have moved on from the initial pure communism phase which had various successes but also cost millions of lives. There is simply no way to whitewash away all the slaughter in Russia except to deny, as you seem to do, that it happened. For all I know you are right and Solzhenitsyn is a shameless fabulist and the Red Terror is a Capitalist Propaganda Psyop story like the Holodomor which wasn't. (But forevermore millions are going to believe otherwise either way.) These things are extremely hard to know and resolve given the amount of lying before, during and after all major events.
But it seems to me that it's fair to say that after a shot at 'pure communism' so to speak after overthrowing the old orders almost entirely, both polities have moved to something with some communist remnants but much more mixed. They have market economies with strong central state governance. China supposedly has Peoples'-Money Banking, no doubt controlled by an aristocracy that isn't officially there but not a credit cartel like the Fed, and Russia seems to have a bit of both still, a Rothschild-started Central Bank which is sometimes described as independent and sometimes not. Russia also still has a very powerful oligarch class which in the West I believe you would call 'capitalist bourgeoisie' or some such.
But, yes, both look extremely promising though their materialist emphasis gives me pause since usually such polities end up 'floundering without Heaven' and so cannot generate high culture which all true civilizations at some point blossom into. This also means that they will almost certainly fail to prevent corrupt materialist elements from gradually taking over, which is what has happened in the West. In 1823 the US was just beginning to muster as a nation and grow. Now only 200 years later it is overwhelmingly corrupted.
China is now about 50 years into its latest mixed-model incarnation and Russia perhaps younger, so they are both currently in a youth mode, with China especially entering the post-industrial revolution phase with a vengeance, rapidly become the most modern state in the world though not without flaws (the floods were partly caused by a design decision by Xi a few years back apparently, cutting corners as leaders are wont to do).
Rufo has a vision of the left as being essentially destructive and totalitarian/centralist, but his particular interest in the book is the current neo-left that formed in the US during the 60's and after. Here we have an infiltration of the managerial class, not a working-class movement at all, and indeed it is the working classes who are now most victimized by this new Left. But then some would argue that communism victimized the working classes too even if officially they were rescuing them. And many would argue that the powers that be are not Left at all.
These sorts of difficulties coming up with agreed vocabulary seemingly go on forever in our too-rapidly-changing polities. But I think Rufo is right: a 'counter-revolution' is needed to push back against the bastards - whoever they are, left, right, capitalists, psychopaths - lest they prevail and we the people lose any chance of enjoying ordinary, decent lives. I think his description of a more decentralized, regional and local community centered polity is in the spirit of the American Revolution, though maybe not intended by some of the more corrupt Grandees in the mix already back then.
I certainly don't deny the loss of life in the Soviet Union. Rather like the Holodomor though it was both a fact -enormous numbers died of famine- and a myth, the Politburo did everything it could to bring food to the starving. Something similar might be said of Solzhenitsyn's highly coloured accounts- there were certainly labour camps, from which most returned after serving their sentences, in which conditions were primitive though rations were adequate. And there were large numbers of prisoners sentenced to them. But were there more in Soviet than in British Imperial or US prisons? I'm not sure. Were conditions worse than in the "West" - it is hard to believe that they were, though they might have been. Certainly during the Nazi attacks from 1941-44 all bets so far as rations and conditions will have been off, though it was still preferable, by orders of magnitude, to be in Soviet rather than German custody. And why were so many in the 'gulags'? I'm far from being an expert but it is well established that, if Stalin was paranoid, he had reason to be: the Soviet Union was under attack continually from its foundation until it's quietus. And many of the attacks took the form of internal subversion, from sabotage and espionage (the defectors were hardly saintly democrats, they were more likely to be opportunists well rewarded for, inter alia, telling their new employers what they wanted to hear.) It is also very likely that angry losers in factional struggles within the CPSU were contacted, on occasion, by foreign interests and did look for foreign assistance to regain their positions. I'm not sure. And few people are. And there are millions of reasons for misrepresentation. Two things that, almost a random, I suggest are worth considering about the 'Purges' are, firstly that there is evidence that Nikolai Yezhov when he ran the NKVD engaged in incredible excesses that resulted in hundreds of thousands of people being victimised and secondly that Stalin genuinely hoped to re-institute the democratic checks and balances that had largely been eroded from the Soviet system by the late 1920s. His motive being that only popular control could check the abuses of the bureaucracy. Two things that are certain are, firstly that the sort of accounts that the British IRD systematised and have become a kind of cottage industry for the Conquests, Applebaums and Snyders of the bourgeois intellectual world are completely unreliable, corrupted by propaganda and, in a word, sad songs sung for lavish suppers provided by the nastiest elements of any states anywhere, the people who have been responsible for ten murders in the Empire for any of those in the most exaggerated claims of Conquest et al. Did Stalin have an Operation Condor? An El Salvador or Jakarta option? An Operation Phoenix? We know that he didn't. There is not the slightest evidence that the Red Army raped any more women than the British or American armies did. Or that its march to Berlin was characterised by brutality and sadism- the contrary is the case. It liberated tens of millions, some from places like Auschwitz others from starved and terrorised cities. Compare the actions of the Soviet Union in Berlin in 1953, Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslovakia in 1968 with France's reaction to Algerian nationalism or that of the US to Guatemalan or Iranian attempts to assert their democracy and independence- the Shah's Secret Police carried on torturing dissidents for thirty years, in Guatemala under US auspices wave after genocidal wave was aimed at eradicating the proto VietCong of Central America. And then there was South Africa, the Congo, Rwanda, where the beat goes on, Indonesia...Chile.. the tens of thousands of college kids just like north Americans who were disappeared, on US orders, in Argentina before the military there fell out with their friend and inspiration Maggie Thatcher. The point makes itself: those who equate the Soviet Union with terror are missing the point. Just as those who embroider the 1932 famines into a Holodomor are ignoring annual events in Bengal and elsewhere in the British (and the Dutch) Empire. To change the subject slightly: to understand China's policies it is necessary to consider them as being transitional. The CPC understands that socialism in a backward peasant country at odds with a world dominated by capitalism is not an option- that was what the Russian Revolution taught them, not only Trotsky and Lenin but Stalin understood as much. What China has done is to allow a capitalist class to develop (there is nothing new in this back in 1949 it was talking of an alliance with national capitalists) while ensuring that it cannot use its wealth to debauch the political system. There is, so long as capitalism exists, a trend towards corruption, it is in Capital's nature to set out to control the state and dictate to society. And this is why the anti-corruption campaigns are so important in China: during a transitional period, while the state is strengthening itself and society is developing the skills and abilities to manage democracy, despite the auto-subversion of property, the Revolution is on a tightrope. The Imperialists are well aware of this which is why every sort of obstacle is being thrown in China's way- Taiwan, Trade sanctions, attempts to rebuild guerrilla armies on bordering countries (Myanmar, Thailand etc), threats from Australia, bribes in The Philippines, re-armament in Japan, revanchism and reaction in south Korea, Naval demonstrations in the South China Sea meddling in Mongolia, Hong Kong and Xinkiang. Imperialism is trying the old anti-Soviet playbook. But it is unlikely to work. Most likely China, which is regularly gaining allies and admiring friends across the world, will march across the tightrope with ease. When it does so the old imperial metropoles- western europe, North America and their creole comprador creatures- will find themselves isolated, not just morally and politically but economically. And the more they postpone coming to terms with socialism the more isolated, meaner and hungrier they will become.
One way of description, bevin, is to say Russia/USSR, China, and any other nation attempting to be sovereign will be subjected to a never-ending cascade of color revolutions in every guise possible. The Info War in media and academia is also part of the ploy. it's clear the combination of megalomania and pleonexia are both addictive and brutal to those oppressed by the addicts.
Excellent post, bevin, thank you.
Just so you know, I am never in the game of comparing one side versus another. Am more interested in truth versus falsehood because it seems there has often been so much of the latter and much less of the former.
And generally I believe that most of the revolutions were more unfortunate than fortunate. I believe Russia could have been reformed without the murder-loss of 40-80,000,000 lives. Totally unnecessary and tragic. No revolution is worth that. But that's just me. About China I know even less than Russia so shall remain mum except to remark that have also read that tens of millions died from that revolution as well.
In any case, have no ideological axe to grind. I don't think either communism, capitalism, fascism or socialism are actual things, rather conceptual overlays, but that's just a somewhat uninformed, intuitive opinion.
All best and thank you again for the exchange.