You know you are a Philistine when...

chlamor
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Re: You know you are a Philistine when...

Post by chlamor » Sat Jan 06, 2018 2:43 pm

The Old Man concerning philistines:

It is true that the old world belongs to the philistine. But one should not treat the latter as a bugbear from which to recoil in fear. On the contrary, we ought to keep an eye on him. It is worth while to study this lord of the world.

He is lord of the world, of course, only because he fills it with his society as maggots do a corpse. Therefore the society of these lords needs no more than a number of slaves, and the owners of these slaves do not need to be free. Although, as being owners of land and people, they are called lords, in the sense of being pre-eminent, for all that they are no less philistines than their servants.

As for human beings, that would imply thinking beings, free men, republicans. The philistines do not want to be either of these. What then remains for them to be and to desire?

What they want is to live and reproduce themselves (and no one, says Goethe, achieves anything more), and that the animal also wants; at most a German politician would add: Man, however, knows that he wants this, and the German is so prudent as not to want anything more.

The self-confidence of the human being, freedom, has first of all to be aroused again in the hearts of these people. Only this feeling, which vanished from the world with the Greeks, and under Christianity disappeared into the blue mist of the heavens, can again transform society into a community of human beings united for their highest aims, into a democratic state.


https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/w ... /43_05.htm

chlamor
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Re: You know you are a Philistine when...

Post by chlamor » Sat Jan 06, 2018 2:44 pm

You know you're a Philistine if that summabitch Romney pisses you off. That lying sack-of-shit says one thing one day and another thing the next day and all the while he is smiling into the camera and you know that he is going to do exactly as he pleases and it has nothing to do with you and you are nothing but a sucker for buyin' into this shit and the contrast with the other...

Oh... wait...

Never mind.

---------------------------------------------------------

You know you're a Philistine when you look at that Obama visage and you feel so good about your choice 4 years ago because he kept us safe and he re-established American power in the world and he slew a raft of dictators who were creating barriers to American investment (err.. to "Democracy") and all the while re-visiting that subtle shit: empty human rights talk + death from above = "Our interests".

Well, maybe you started out with a different view on things and didn't quite understand how dangerous a place the world was, but still... kudos to you and your wisdom in working for Obama... so he could explain it all to you... and prove that you were inclined in that direction anyway...

Because, you were pretty much a Philistine all along, weren't you?

You had that inner, American-exceptional, flag-waving, silent-majority, bomb-them-into-the-stone-age Philistine screaming to get out. Legalizing pot is one thing but... rollback Imperialism? That would be intemperate.

- anaxarchos

chlamor
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Re: You know you are a Philistine when...

Post by chlamor » Sat Jan 06, 2018 2:45 pm

The idea that Obama and Romney are so close together on "foreign policy" aught to give those worthless fucks over there pause, but no! They laugh and see Romney as "clueless" and "out of his depth". The fact that Obama, geopoliticaly, is to the right of George Bush causes not one iota of concern. Those evil-doers...I mean, those dictators deserve to be bombed to oblivion in their poor Pakistani villages and Yemeni pastures! They hate freedom! And women! And...stuff!

Makes me sick. I will admit that back in 2003 or so, I actually thought that there was a legitimate anti-war movement. Stupid me. Now, these enlightened progressives count it as a victory that Obama has "damaged" Iran's economy. We have to protect Israel, don't we? Fuck...

chlamor
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Re: You know you are a Philistine when...

Post by chlamor » Sat Jan 06, 2018 2:47 pm

Originally Posted by Kid of the Black Hole:

The New York Times (David Brooks) makes the case that Romney is the more flexible flip-flopper. Its definitely a self-serving argument from Brooks and I think it is only true as far as it goes (which ain't far) but there's something humorous about it, all the same.
And who better to make that argument? The preeminent establishment mouthpiece makes it clear that neither truth, ideology nor anything else should get in the way of the ruling class agenda.

- KOBH

I think he's wrong though, while Romney has been wildly erratic over his career and especially during this campaign he does not cover his tracks too well. Obama, largely because of who he is, mastery of mushy rhetoric and media savvy, is teflon. Again, the more effective evil.

- BP

chlamor
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Re: You know you are a Philistine when...

Post by chlamor » Sat Jan 06, 2018 2:47 pm

You might be a philistine if you believe in any of the following:

Bi-partisanship...
That people "hire" politicians...
That there is a debate over the size and function of government...
That politics used to "work better"...
That the truth is revealed in moments of crisis...
That there is any such thing as a unique "American Spirit", different from any other spirit (unless you are a Hegelian, in which case you are in the wrong century)...

You are definitely a Philistine if you use any two of the above, positively, in a single paragraph...

And, if you use three, you are a Philistine Pundit, deserving of the fate of Anacharsis (either the ancient Scythian or the less ancient Prussian).

- anaxarchos

chlamor
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Re: You know you are a Philistine when...

Post by chlamor » Sat Jan 06, 2018 2:49 pm

You know you are a Philistine if it's getting close to that time when you have to go up into the attic and dust off those slogans of 4 years ago (40 years ago?) in preparation for the next round of disappointments:

Nothing will ever really change until we elect TRUE progressives...

Obama should be more like FDR...

You know that if we really want change, we have to "make him do it"...

He said he would protect Social Security and Medicare and he (mostly/kinda) will...

The Supreme Court - that's what really matters...

He can't do anything without the House (60 votes in the Senate? 65 votes in the Senate?)...

No matter what else happens, we are still a center-right country...

People want bi-partisanship and real solutions (or was that new ideas?)...

It's better than the alternative...

What can you do in the face of the DLC (Citizens United? The 4-H Club?)...

He's doing what he promised; he can't help it if people don't listen...

----------------------------

You know you are a double-super-secret Philistine if you intersperse the above with threats to:


Never donate or work for the Democratic Party again (THIS time you've learned your lesson)...

Leave the country...

Leave politics for good...

Join the Green Party...

Dropout to the outback to grow your own food (and run an Internet business)...

Withhold your vote the very next time (except for true progressives)...

chlamor
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Re: You know you are a Philistine when...

Post by chlamor » Sat Jan 06, 2018 2:49 pm

I will withhold the appellation "philistine" (at least momentarily) and ask about folk we all know. They fume and fulminate against Obama and Democrats of every stripe. They get them some radicalization! And they pump their fists in the air and throw down gauntlets and draw lines in the sand; and then every four years, right around the end of Oct. they lose their minds. They get shaky of hand, and trembling of knee, their chins quiver and their eyes tear-up. Then, while speaking in tongues, they rush to the polls and vote Democratic. They wake up a day or two later, feeling sore in embarrassing places and without a clear memory of where they have been and what they have done. And it all starts over again.

How do we explain these folks and how do we not waste time on them - or is there "hope" even for these?

- Dhalgren

chlamor
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Re: You know you are a Philistine when...

Post by chlamor » Fri Jul 27, 2018 1:05 pm

What Is Millennial Socialism?
BEN JUDAH
This is not your parents’ Left. And you’d better believe they’ll leave a mark.

You know it when you see it. The rose emojis, the Chapo Trap House downloads, the Jacobin subscriptions, and the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez retweets. This is millennial socialism. But how is it different from the old?

Spoiler: it’s very different. Because whilst the Right continues to fall for to the straw man drawn by Jordan Peterson—that of the ghoulish neo-Stalinist “Cultural Marxist”—the ideological building blocks of millennial socialism have changed.

This “dirtbag left” has a new sense of class, revolution, and democracy.

This is not their parents’ class struggle. Rewind a generation: the idea of the working class as an agent of change, embodying a Hegelian idea of Geist, was fundamental to socialism. The enemy was the middle class, the bourgeoisie—big and petty—exactly as Karl Marx’s described class power in the 19th century. Not anymore.

The slogan “We are the 99 percent” defines millennial socialism.

“I can tell you this: as I suggested we call ourselves the 99 percent,” says Professor David Graeber, the author most recently of Bullshit Jobs. “And I knew what I was thinking.” The slogan that went viral out of Zuccotti Park redefined class power.

“‘We are the 99 percent’ is a class model for a financialized political model. It was a way of talking about class power in a financialized version of capitalism. The idea is anyone but the 1 percent is on the receiving end of it. It allowed us to move beyond the inveterate divisions of traditional leftist politics and create a point of unity for everyone.” By making the enemy “the 1 percent,” it opened the ranks of the Left and made it so anyone who wasn’t Sheldon Adelson could be a socialist.

“People had been throwing around the idea of the 1 percent,” says Graeber. “What really struck us was that it was the same 1 percent of the population that was taking the benefits of all economic growth, that it was the same 1 percent that were making almost all the political campaign contributions. So we were defining them as the people who are turning power into wealth and their wealth into power.”

What this slogan did was break decades of socialist thinking with its virality. The fraying middle class was not the natural ally of the wealthy; it was not protected by the 1 percent. People who looked middle class, thought of themselves as middle class, and had ‘middle class jobs’, but were in fact now drowning in mortgage debt, with their children saddled with vast college debt—these were also victims of the 1 percent.

“I don’t think it’s being emphasized enough: this was a massive shift in public consciousness that Occupy led to, about class and capitalism,” says Graeber.

Zuccotti Park set off a long slow-burning change of perceptions on the Left. Beginning with face-to-face encounters, with a sense that people were out, Occupy transformed into a lasting social force, leaving in its wake a slew of magazines, sites, activists, Twitter communities, intellectuals—a movement that has changed popular culture. And the shifts are real: respondents under 30 rated socialism more positively than capitalism—43 percent to 32 percent—in 2016.

“Where are they getting it from?” says Graeber. “You won’t have seen nothing, ever, nowhere, that would have had anything positive to say about socialism on American television. So it has to be from social movements. And that’s the legacy of Occupy.” Behind the slogan is the idea of an alliance of all against the super rich. Gone is the idea of the working class against the bourgeoisie. The suburban mortgage holder isn’t the enemy anymore; the hedge funds are.

“What I always tell people who tell me that Occupy failed because it didn’t set itself up like the Tea Party and try and get legislation through is that that’s not what we were trying to do. Because of course what we were trying to do was a long-term transformation. And that seems to have worked.”

This has allowed millennial socialism to be a movement for the middle class—class struggle as against the likes of Elon Musk, and not the suburbs. But the Right—keep tuning into that silly Ben Shapiro show—is missing this. When an outlet like Newsmax tries to show that someone in the Democratic Socialists of America of America is middle class, it doesn’t bother millennial socialists one bit. Flagging up that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez grew up in a house in Yorktown Heights? That is missing 99 percent of the point.

“Revolution” was to a generation of socialists what Godot was to Vladimir and Estragon. Waiting for the revolution, anticipating the revolution, planning for the revolution, paralyzed a generation of socialists in Britain and America.

“We can’t sit around waiting; our chance is happening right now,” I remember my friend James Schneider told me when he co-founded Momentum to support Jeremy Corbyn. This attitude, and how prevalent it is, matters.

The idea of the revolution crippled a generation of socialist activists and intellectuals. Not anymore. Britain’s millennial socialists believe that the Labour Party can be made the vehicle for the revolution they want—breaking 1 percent financial capitalism—and they can achieve it through the ballot box.

This idea of the revolution could not be more different from the older generation. The old Left—think Perry Anderson and his New Left Review—went from believing Harold Wilson could open the path to socialism through the ballot boxes, to waiting expectantly for a May ‘68-type situation to emerge in the United Kingdom, to writing it off completely as a historic impossibility in the 1990s.

That old idea of the revolution—the massive crowds, the vanguard and the Kalashnikov chic—is so absent from millennial socialism that it’s hard to get across how important it was to the old Left. What for the new is commodified ironic Soviet kitsch was deadly serious to the founders of the New Left Review, for whom October 1917 was an inseparable part of thinking about socialism. Late-night discussions in the upstairs room at pubs in Islington about the exact moment to seize Parliament based on analysing Karl Liebknecht’s mistakes for when the ‘situation’ next comes round? That was the old 1970s Left. Go to the pub with millennial socialists and all you will hear about is party politics.

What Corbyn has done for Britain—turning a generation that might otherwise have gone on to be Vladimirs and Estragons into a party generation—Bernie Sanders has done for America. Through his unashamed class rhetoric and his campaign organization “Our Revolution,” Sanders has mobilized a generation to believe party politics can break the power of the 1 percent.

Now—even more so since the success of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—millennial socialist activists are convinced that the hollow establishment parties that their forerunners disdained are instruments ripe for the taking. This is chalk and cheese to the old Left. The new want to move the “Miliband window.” When Marxist intellectual Ralph Miliband published Parliamentary Socialism in 1961, he spoke for his generation in arguing that Labour was committed to parliamentarism, and thus could never be a socialist party. Both his sons, Ed and David Miliband, as if convinced by his thesis, and that the revolution was never going to happen either, ended up centrist Labour politicians. Today the millennial socialists I know are dedicated to proving that thesis wrong.

And in doing so, they have both downsized and got the violent out the idea of the revolution.

What makes millennial socialism different from what we saw in the Cold War is not just class and revolution but its idea of democracy. This is a generation whose spirit is not Marxist-Leninist or Marxist-Stalinist, but Marxist-anarchist.

The Left has always been an alphabet soup of hyphenated socialists.

But a generation ago, hard Left socialists were likely to have negative understandings of democracy. With a few exceptions here and there, they were either Marxist-Leninist, or Socialist-Trotskyites, or Stalinists, with ideas of “democratic centralism.” Or Western Maoists and Guevaraists, whose Marxism was wedded to the idea of the militarized, paramilitary vanguard. Not anymore.

Yet again this comes from Occupy. “There are a lot of would-be Leninists and Stalinists trying to organize the DSA,” says David Graeber, who identifies as an anarchist himself. “But the general spirit is not with them. It makes sense to talk about what’s happening in the way that Immanuel Wallerstein talked about 1789, 1848 and 1917 being world revolutions, which happened on a certain level all over the world, because they were revolutions that changed political common sense. This is what happened in 2011, with Occupy, the idea of how to organize.”

This is often the trickiest thing for liberals to grasp: for millennial socialists, America does not need a GOSPLAN, a super powerful state, or central planning. What they believe it needs is as much democracy as possible.

Workers’ control, autonomism, corporate democracy, locally supervised nationalized industries—not high-up, mandarin-allocated indicative planning. This is millennial socialism: dreams of socially-owned Ubers and AirBnBs.

You could even say this generation has absorbed part of the neoliberal critique of the state—that it is not the site of liberation—and kept something of the “think global, act local” into which the Left retreated in the 1990s. What they want is a patchwork of social enterprises, collectives, town enterprises, and union-run factories, because they reject Soviet-style centralization.

“What’s happening with people is the basic idea of democracy has changed,” says Graeber. “It no longer has just to do with the state. This is the legacy of Occupy and also seeing how social movements have played out across the world. And there has come to be the idea that you need to have institutions outside of the political structures to maintain democracy that you can integrate with those working inside the political system.”

This is because millennial socialists think in terms of a matrix of oppression.

Intersectionality has convinced this generation—feminism is socialism, anti-racism is socialism, LGBTQI is socialism. Their understanding of it is as a democratic process that reverts marginalization, through above all, voice. “I would compare what has happened since Occupy,” says Graeber, “to feminism and abolitionism—about changing people’s basic moral perceptions.”

Those listening to Jordan Peterson and seeing, like he does, little Soviet troopers in the advance of Corbynism and the Jacobin Generation are missing the point. Leave the psychologist to fight his imaginary Left.

The best place to see what a millennial socialist agenda might look like in practice is the Labour Party’s 2017 report on Alternative Models of Ownership. The expert group commissioned by the party lays into ministerial central planning, the very essence of old socialism, lamenting that in the 20th century “national state ownership has traditionally been in the hands of a private and corporate elite” and that “these industries were heavily constrained in their ability to borrow to finance investment” on the market.

These are some of their alternatives: national profit sharing-schemes, community land trusts, municipal businesses, workers’ cooperatives like Legacoop in Italy or the Mondragon Group in Spain, employee stock ownership plans or a sovereign wealth fund to which FTSE-listed companies are required to issue a percentage of stock on incorporation.

Millennial socialism is not trying to stop the market economy, but to change its players and rewrite its rules.

“What the Labour people are are trying to figure out,” says David Graeber, “Is mixing these notions of bottom-up democracy with a parliamentary model. That’s the puzzle for today. Nobody has yet worked out a way to make these two types of institutions not undercut each other.” But are these wonkish plans going to live up to millennial socialists’ visions of radical democracy?

Maybe not. Ideas never survive contact with the real world in their pure form. But so far this generation has one major advantage: a kind of grassroots energy fueling turnout and internet culture that keeps going viral. And if you believe these millennial socialists will have no effect on real world politics, then you have to be captive to a whole other set of rigid and fossilized beliefs.

Just like Joe Lieberman, Howard Schultz or “fellow Democrats” like James Comey clearly are.

https://www.the-american-interest.com/2 ... socialism/

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Re: You know you are a Philistine when...

Post by blindpig » Fri Jul 27, 2018 1:47 pm

The rose emojis, the Chapo Trap House downloads, the Jacobin subscriptions, and the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez retweets. This is millennial socialism.
Yep, nailed it, but perhaps not the way ol' Ben meant.

But I would not get into generational tiffs, those kids are our kids, gotta own that and move on to the tasks at hand.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: You know you are a Philistine when...

Post by blindpig » Tue Jul 31, 2018 1:29 pm

Under The Blood Moon

By John Steppling

“U.S. imperial actions in Vietnam and elsewhere are often described as reflecting “national interests,” “national security,” or “national defense.” Endless U.S. wars and regime changes, however, actually represent the class interests of the powerful who own and govern the country.”

— John Marciano

“The Bretton Woods institutions are like arsonists, lighting new social fires, then waiting for the NGOs and local communities to play firefighter.”

— Eric Toussaint, (Your Money or Your Life:
The Tyranny of Global Finance)

“We found the weapons of mass destruction [in Iraq]. We found biological laboratories.”

— President George W. Bush, May 29, 2003

“There is no evidence to confirm that [US-supported El Salvador] government forces systematically massacred civilians in the [El Mozote] operations zone.”

— Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Enders, February 8, 1982

Today here in Norway, it is expected that this will go down as the hottest day in Norwegian history. It is also the day of the *Blood Moon lunar eclipse*. Somehow this seems fitting, in a sort of mytho-poetic way. For I can’t shake the sense of apocalyptic dread that permeates life everywhere today. I suppose it might have to do with the historic level wild fires near the arctic circle, or the dozen major floods that are happening on every single continent, or the methane bubbles that are growing weekly across Siberia and the Arctic. Or just the drought that has hit my home state of California, as well as the previously inviolate countryside of Norway.

The U.S. government continues to occupy itself with the matters of Imperialist aggression (which, besides, you know, killing people, contributes something like 40% of the world’s pollution). And with the endless, necessary, selling of the mythology of freedom and democracy that is so important to sustain the fantasy lives of its citizens. So, to just sort of track semi randomly the madness that is gripping the Empire today, we can start with the fact that most of Trump’s cabinet are Dominionist Evangelical Christians. I don’t think most people, at least most of those not brainwashed by Christianity, realize just how barking mad the Dominionists are. Pence is one, Pompeo is one, DeVos and Kudlow and Carson are also such. Think about that. This label covers a variety of belief systems, but in the U.S. these are the legatees of the surge of Christian Nationalism that started in the 70s (really, there are two branches of Dominionism, that of the late R.J. Rushdoony, and the 7 Mountains brand favored by Ted Cruz and others).

Pompeo and John Bolton are the two most significant advisors to Donald Trump. Both men are what in conventional terms could be described as unstable and perhaps suffering from one or another personality disorder (antisocial personality disorder, or APD, is no doubt accurately assigned to Bolton). But these are the obvious examples. Trump is the cartoon bad guy writ large, in primary colors (including hair) and he invites such hatred because part of his schtick is to troll the public. And his own administration, for that matter. (And its funny how suddenly liberals are aghast because he insulted the Queen of England — or rather “broke protocal”….I mean seriously who gives a fuck. That old racist harpy long ago deserved to work stacking boxes in a WalMart warehouse…but I digress). No, the deeper madness that has taken hold is found in the educated classes, actually. I wrote before about Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, and her rather obvious intellectual bankruptcy as well as her disingenuous presentation of self. And yet, leftists continue to defend her and plead to give her a chance and how she is part of some mythic insurgency in the Democratic Party. Now most of these writers, those I am thinking about, spent the last couple years deriding the DNC, attacking the criminal record of Hillary Clinton. And yet, now there is a sort of mushy appeal to consider the Democratic Party in any calculus for building a movement toward change. No longer do I hear the word communism, and I only hear *socialism* when it is hyphenated with Democratic (Democratic-Socialist). What happened? Well, part of what happened is the rise of the marketing left. The entrepreneur left. Or the branded left. The capitalist left. All of these terms apply. In other words, these people are no longer (and probably never were) in any way the opposition. The magazines of these entrepreneurs (Sunkara and Jacobin, which Nick Beams amusingly called the ‘the house journal for the middle class pseudo-left milieu, in particular the Democratic Socialists of America’) found a niche sort-of-left market demographic and capitalized (sic) on it. This is the place one reads of strategic alliances but never reads of the positives of communism. Or the likes of Charles Davis, a puerile fascist masquerading as pseudo left. I mean he is sort of the fake fake left.

And invariably these new non marxist and anti communist leftists will quote and include those western educated voices in matters of foreign policy ( on Syria in particular). They will claim these Syrian voices, who speak English with perfect vowels, are the voices of the people. And they will always find a way to damn with faint praise the Bolivarian Revolution, and they will be anti Castro and anti the late Colonel Qadaffi. Most take a mulligan on Milosevic, even at this late date when literally all the propaganda has been debunked. They will use the term *thug* for any number of revolutionary leaders in the 3rd world. Think Maduro or Kim Jong Un, or Mugabe or Ortega.They call it is realism or something. It is the illusion of fairness. It is the subject position of the educated bourgeoisie. Now, never mind the failings or not of these leaders, their real crimes in the eyes of the West (like Iran) is their independence. And rarely is much thought given to the forces assembled against these independent countries. (think the embargo of five or six decades against Cuba, or the what was done to crush the Sandinistas, the dismantling of the former Yugoslavia, the sanctions against Iran). Remember, too, the U.S. targeted Syria thirty some years ago and that hasn’t changed.


I think in earlier times, a time before the internet, when news was not nearly instantaneous, one relied on certain principles, a certain ideological experience (I was accused this week of being blinded by my ideology, when in fact I think my ideology allows me to see more clearly…but I digress) that meant one knew who had the power, one knew that such power is almost always used to preserve privilege, and hence one would be inclined to side with those who had no power. Regardless. But it is also the tendency, today, to imagine a level playing field –a field that exists in one’s own cultural landscape. And this is what I am coming to call the new Orientalism. When I think back to Vietnam and how those of us who resisted and protested that Imperialist war, there was no question of tweezing apart if Ho Chi Minh was *nice*. I suspect he kind, but not probably *nice*, but that was not the issue. The issue was the United States and its massive military killing machine against a largely peasant population. And the opposition to the war had deep working class roots, and it was a resistance that began with a refusal to support any U.S. Imperialist aggression.

“The domestic antiwar movement was the largest in U.S. history, and the October 1969 Moratorium Against the War alone was the greatest single antiwar protest ever recorded in this country. The movement was deepened and strengthened by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), that in January 1966 issued a public statement against the war—a courageous dissent that nearly bankrupted it financially. SNCC called U.S. involvement “racist and imperialist.”

— John Marciano

Artists and poets travelled the country giving free readings and offering support for draft resisters. Robert Bly, Galway Kinnell, W.S. Merwin…even Robert Lowell, were creating work that was organically political, and not simply agit prop. They were doing what artists traditionally do, they were engaging in the world around them, and with the people around them, and with the life of planet. They weren’t selling anything. Not even a T shirt.

Now, this branded left of today, or the anti-dialectical left, is also acutely anti Maoist and anti Stalinist. And again, my experience suggests the core of this ideological grouping are white men under or about 40, and University educated. And they are the exemplars, too, of this new Orientalism. And this Orientalism tends to enclose a particular strain of racism. Jay Tharappel wrote over at Big Russ News last week….“Racism is not just a tool of capital to divide labour (which is the dominant definition of the term among first–world Left); it is also an ideological weapon employed primarily by empires to shape how their citizens think about other nations in accordance with their geopolitical strategy.” These New Orientalist Leftists are also, as I say, rabidly anti-Stalinist and anti-Maoist; and this is less because they possess any real historical knowledge but because the caricature of the evil *totalitarian* despot is a necessary figure in their personal anti communist imaginary.

“President Barack Obama made his first visit to sub-Saharan Africa as president in July, 2009, speaking in Accra, Ghana. Despite a decades-long trail of broken promises to Africa on aid and development, Obama’s speech in Accra was marked by finger-wagging and reprimands, and an insistence that African nations’ own “mismanagement” and “lack of democracy” are to blame for their economic and social problems.”

Lee Wengref (International Socialist Review, #103)

“Nations that establish their dominance can afford to be more liberal especially if they’re not threatened by more powerful enemies, whereas countries that find themselves actively fending off aggression by more powerful enemies do not have the luxury of adhering to ‘liberal’ standards premised on a privileged place in global affairs.”

— Dan Tharappel

When liberals and New Orientalists (branded left, anti communist left etc) look to find that neutrality of argument, the one that suggests just because I don’t like U.S. and NATO wars doesn’t mean I have to like Assad (Castro, Maduro, Ortega, Milosevic et al). They are assuming their privileged state of existence is outside all critiques. Any country colonized by one of the European powers automatically inherited bureaucratic and administrative structures and a political apparatus (including European policing). Syria inherited the French colonial structures for the most part. Such burdens constitute a psychic wound, a kind of mythic burden of both guilt and rage. But if those western educated sources with the posh vowels are consistent with NGO testimony and reports (western based and funded) such as Amnesty International, then this serves as evidence of third world savagery. The history of Hill & Knowelton, or any of the other Madison Avenue firms the State Department employs is simply ignored. It is literally tossed into the black hole of Western amnesia. If one cites the even very recent perfidy of western media and NGOs one is usually called a conspiracy theorist. I’ve been so called for citing things the CIA actually admits and brags about.

“In 1998 the U.S. Air Force document, titled Information Operations, states that “Information Operations are applied across the range of military operations, from peacekeeping to full conflict … it is important to emphasize that the Information warfare is a formula that is implemented in all Air Force activities, from peace to war in order to enable the effective execution of all tasks … The execution of information operations in the aeronautical, space and cyberspace across all aspects of the conflict “(note the use of” doublespeak “[or” dual language “, in the context of the terms” peace “and” military operations “).” (from The Yellow Brick Road Free Blog).

And of course this leads to items such as this…

and this…

“In a quite constant way, Orientalism depends for its strategy on this flexible positional superiority, which puts the Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing him the relative upper hand.”

— Edward Said

The looming environmental catastrophe, or multiple catastrophes, are impossible to calculate in effect. But clearly there are going to be enormous changes to how the wasteful west, the privileged white world, lives. The current dementia or hallucinatory fever that is gripping the U.S. has far less to do with Donald Trump (though it does, in a sense, have to do with Putin and Russia…but I will return to that) than it does with the degraded state of daily life for nearly everyone that lives within it. And that includes the very wealthy, who I maintain are just as miserable, only they have far better coping mechanisms available to them. The sheer sense of despair that cuts across all western societies today is visible and palpable, and the new homeless camps on the edges of EVERY big city in America, are the symbol of the dying society. And yet, this predatory nation of slave owning Presidents, a nation that is the only in history to use nuclear weapons, this country of mass incarceration and provable indelible racism, still seems to attract those claiming they want to change it. Liberals are of course always going to side with authority. Always will look to preserve the status quo. They are most comfortable, really, with open displays of fascist symbolism and style. I know few liberals who do not secretly admire or find Mussolini attractive. For such fascist leaders are very similar to the protagonists Hollywood turns out. Of late, I’ve noticed, a sharp uptick in heroes fashioned after Zuckerberg or Elon Musk, or Steve Jobs — the lone genius who goes off and discovers the solutions to everything. Never are they seen at work with countless colleagues, or vast armies of researchers working in near anonymity. No, it is the Zuck/Mussolini figure that does it alone. And these figures are always allowed to be vain, rude, selfish and destructive. And most often reactionary. Genius is forgiven. It is a very attractive fantasy for the western bourgeoisie today. It also suggests these figures are hard at work solving global warming for example. Solving all those things that can’t be faced. But this new ‘branded left’ — the New Orientalists, the anti communists under the age of forty five, are also attracted to power. And they find positions that are not greatly different than an HRC supporter (or Bernie, or Elizabeth Warren et al). Its the old lets hold their feet to the fire fantasy. As I think on it, there is rather a lot of fantasy taking place on all levels and at all rungs of contemporary society. Which is probably why such emphasis is put on *being realistic*. Which reminds me that today the public intellectual is either a Jordan Peterson (for the Jr College student or under grad at some directional state University) or Stephen Pinker (for the post grad from more expensive schools). To think only a few decades back Gore Vidal and James Baldwin appeared with regularity on TV opinion shows. As an aside, there is so much ludicrously wrong with Pinker that time and space prevent a full listing. But one observation regarding his claim that violence is in decline and that mankind has never known such a sustained peace. Now he arrives at this absurdity by simply ignoring the violence visited upon the global south. Post 1945 he figures the big “civilized” states aren’t at war. And that’s all that counts. Pinker and Peterson both are new Orientalists. As Ed Herman wrote…

“Pinker completely ignores the phenomenon of structural violence, or the kind of violence that is “built into the structure” of social relations, and “shows up as unequal power and consequently as unequal life chances,” in Johan Galtung’s famous rendering. On a planet with more than 7 billion people facing mounting ecological pressures, the increasingly savage global class war of the 1% against the other 99, and the “endemic undernutrition and deprivation” that afflicts billions of people even in “normal” times—to extend Amartya Sen and Jean Drèze’s writings on India to the world as a whole—takes a toll every day that overshadows the violence of war. “

Pinker, by the by, teaches at Harvard. Something I find rather fitting and revealing regards the state of intellectual discourse today.

Fanon, of course, said “…decolonization is always a violent phenomenon.”

And today the structural violence is finding new avenues of expression. I wrote a while back about the rise of a new antisemitism. In one way much of that antisemitism is found in structural relationships. Just as racism is, though perhaps to a lesser degree (for white black racism remains steadfastly overt and concrete). Those homeless encampments also are testimony to the alienation of modern western society. For these are the camps of the newly poor. And it has been an opening of the flood gates of penury for much of what was once working class America. And these are people without protection, either from government, unions (which largely dont exist anymore) or extended family.

When the USSR collapsed another sort of symbol disappeared. For it was the USSR that fought for the independence of African nations. They fought against colonial rule. The US fought for the colonizer. They supported the apartheid state. And they would today, too, which is what many Africans instinctively know. Across the poorest regions of the planet the figures of Mao and Fidel and Stalin are symbols of hope, not tyranny.

So the rabid insane demonizing of Putin is both an extension of a cold war comfort zone, and simply the furious irrational tantrum of the DNC. But to be clear, the Bush and Putin bromance came to an end when Obama took office. That was the real sea change in US/Russia relations. And it marked the serious infiltration of Hollywood by the Clinton mafia. Obama was the errand boy for the deep state, for the CIA and state department, but also the NSA, and certainly for Wall Street and the even bigger finance that controls Wall Street. Now, tracking the logic and movement of this change is too complex for this post, but what is germane here is that Obama’s pivot to Asia included a pivot against Russia. For no matter how one *feels* about Putin, the historic role of the Russian people matters greatly. It matters because Russia has always defied Western diktats, and because Russians themselves, as a culture, a society, tend toward a sensibility of independence. And because as Andre Vltchek pointed out, they look white, the look *normal*, but they are in fact *different*. And it feels as if they are closer to Roma than to Americans. They have the same streak of absolute indifference to *our* opinion of them. In a sense they are closer to much North African culture, too, funny as that sounds. One thing they are not is British or French or American. There is a real split in cultural character between the European colonizing culture and that of Russia, the Islamic world, and Africa. So Putin becomes this, on the one hand, slightly camp figure, barechested on horseback, but also surgically intelligent former KGB agent. Putin feels too smart for Americans, I think. I mean whatthefuck, whothefuckdoeshethinkheis? Few world leaders project intelligence. Castro did, but he, alas, is gone now. Commandante Marcos is smart. And your average liberal will try to explain that Obama was smart, Harvard Law Review and whatever. (Harvard where that Pinker guy teaches, right?). But its not the same smart. Its another varietal of smart, another sort that grows under other conditions. Obama did not project more than a kind of detached wonky intelligence. Intelligence but without a soul.

Meanwhile, I see where Tony Blair (speaking of not so smart) was just gifted with ten gajillion dollars or pounds or something…by Mohammed Bin Salman, the presumptive next king of Saudi Arabia. Billions, as a gift, from the man who launched a merciless pointless genocide against Yemen. And Tony, ever the good Christian, accepted giddy with gratitude. The obscenity of the United States and UK today depresses me, I have to say. I see nothing good that comes out of trying to reform a ruthless profiteering death infected party of rich and the very rich and their courtiers. The Democratic Party should not even be mentioned when the discussion turns to change. Not even mentioned, let alone praised for anything. The Democratic Party, as noted before, are drawing candidates primarily from the intelligence community and the military. Remember that. For those erstwhile leftists, those who side with NATO and the U.S. against any third world ruler, ANY of them, are collaborators really. That is how I look upon them. If, as an example, Lula da Silva functioned as a sort of ersatz collaborator, for a time, I tend to forgive him more than I would Angela Merkel. Or Theresa May. For da Silva was leader of the world’s largest former colony. And the scars of the colonial period are always visible even today. And besides that, those arraigned against him are the same neo aristocrat fascists massed against Maduro. Against Bolivia, too. The real threat to mankind is the american establishment.

The other thing worth asking is if, as we know, the U.S. CIA black budget is in excess of fifty billion dollars a year, what is that being spent on? And one has to wonder if infiltrating the left is not something of a priority. I would submit it is. So these publications of the pseudo left (now routinely mentioned in articles by CNN and at the NY Times) must have connections. And when other supposed radical voices take up the cause of the Democratic Party, one has to wonder. When they suddenly starting citing, as an authority, the findings of NGO reports or the data collected by front groups…it gives one pause.

Ben Rhodes (Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications under Obama) has a memoir out, and in it is a paragraph he wrote, regarding the speeches at Fidel Castro’s funeral. He writes…“For the next several hours the global left was heard from in speech after speech. The message was tired, out of date. Africans talking about the struggle to shake off colonialism. Latin Americans honouring the Cuban people and their resistance to Empire in the North.” So you see, this is the Democratic Party. Even mentioning colonialism is soooo five minutes ago.

“The Soviet Union was the only Great Power whose stand conformed to our people’s will and desire. That is why the Soviet Union was the only Great Power which has all along been supporting the Congolese people’s struggle. I should like to convey the heartfelt gratitude of the entire Congolese people to the Soviet people and to Prime Minister Nikita Khrushchov personally for your country’s timely and great moral support to the young Republic of the Congo in its struggle against the imperialists and colonialists. I should also like to thank the Soviet Union for the assistance in food which it is extending to the Congo.”

Patrice Lumumba, July 28th 1960. (Interview).

https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/07/31 ... lood-moon/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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