97

The West has Performed a “Philosophical Coup” Against the Left

Andre Vltchek

French anti-Communism poster, c. 1930.

It has been happening for quite some time, but no one has been paying much attention: Western academia, mainstream media, and the most visible propagandists, were trying to convince the world that 1) ideology has died, or at least became irrelevant 2) in case it did not die, the Left is actually… hold your breath…right-wing!

Especially the Left that is holding power, particularly in Asia and in Latin America, is being ‘re-defined’ in London, Paris and Washington. The Western propaganda gurus are apparently rejuvenated, lately, as there are great budgets available to them, in the United States, United Kingdom, and elsewhere. They are openly told to go after certain countries, particularly Russia, China and Iran.

This is an extremely complex but important development. You see, the West has been losing, and so has capitalism and especially imperialism, which is synonymous with neo-colonialism.

People all over the world had enough. Even certain groups inside the imperialist countries, have had enough.

The main problem is that after decades, during which philosophy has been locked up, imprisoned, inside the decaying aulas of the toothless universities, most people have lost any idea what really disgusts them; what they are against, and what they desire.

Philosophy and such deep and essential topics like ‘in what direction the world should be evolving’, are not discussed at UNESCO meetings, anymore, as they are not debated by talk show hosts and ‘public intellectuals’, at least not in open.

Light pop music, horror movies, the promotion of selfish, often infantile values and desires, never really deeply satisfied the masses, but they damaged them, reducing people’s ability to think freely, to analyze and to make sober and well-informed conclusions.

‘-isms’ have been spat at, particularly the left-wing ‘-isms’. Increasingly, the left was smeared and then compared to the extreme right, even with fascism. In fact, pronouncing Communism and fascism in one breath, became tremendously well rewarded. In the West, thousands of ‘thinkers’ and ideologues made a great living doing nothing else than that.

*

This essay has been inspired by an exchange with an Irish academic, who called, in his email to me, one of ‘my’ publications (NEO – New Eastern Outlook), an ‘extreme right-wing Russian nationalist magazine’.

I exploded, wrote back, clarifying that NEO is a left-wing, internationalist magazine, and that the people who are running it have nothing to do with anything right-wing, whatsoever. But I soon realized that this was not about the evidence, but about something very different.

Bizarre and unpleasant exchange did not end there. The academic declared, after watching my film (which I describe as a ‘poetic documentary’) about North Korea (Faces of North Korea), that I am wrong and that the DPRK is not Communist, nor socialist.

I was supposed to participate in his book project, but I withdrew. My friend Eduardo Galeano used to say about such people: “I don’t know for whom he works, and he wouldn’t tell”.

Similar, confusing messages are coming from everywhere, whenever I go to Europe or North America, or whenever I tune in to their television or radio channels. Something twisted is being broadcast, day and night. Political reality gets extremely fuzzy. Great left-wing political leaders are called names: demagogues, populists, even worse. And those constant, insane Cold War propagandist comparisons of Stalin and Hitler (any logical comparisons never appear, like Hitler = Churchill, German Nazism = European colonialism, etc.).

The biggest problem is that a great majority of Western citizens have succumbed to this propaganda. They are not capable of questioning anything related to these issues, anymore, and were they to want to question, they don’t even know where to search for the sources that could effectively challenge the official dogma.

They are indoctrinated, but they think that they are free. Not only that, they don’t realize that they are deeply conditioned and brainwashed: they actually think that they are in a position to preach, obliged to enlighten others, instructing the world with what they have been taught. And so, they speak and write, get paid for it. They join the U.N., ‘international cultural institutions’ and the NGOs, universities, and they continue spreading all those dogmas developed by the Western ideologues for one and the only purpose: to exploit and to control the world. They do not present these fabrications as theses, but as facts. Of course, there are no facts behind what they are preaching, as there is no hard evidence, but who would search for the evidence, and how? Even the Internet is not so easy to navigate, anymore, and Western bookstores are nowhere as diverse as those in China or Russia.

*

Back to the main issue: it is essential for the West to discredit socialism, Communism, and also all anti-imperialist movements that are now getting stronger all over the world.

In fact, many propagandists in London, Paris and Washington, are clearly realizing that the West and its control over the world, is almost finished. The more they are aware of this fact, the more aggressively they go after their adversaries (their jobs often depend on that control, and the privileges of their nation, of course, too).

Attacking socialists or Communists who are holding power in Asia or Latin America, is not enough, anymore.

Now the Empire is spreading pessimism, defeatism and dark nihilism, both at home and abroad (please read my latest book: Revolutionary Optimism, Western Nihilism”). “All people are the same”, it says. Sounds nice, but what it means is actually extremely sinister: “All people are maniacal egotists like us, mass murderers like us, and of course, thieves!”

Terms and definitions get all mixed up, confused. Nothing is defined precisely.

For instance, when the left-wing governor of Jakarta, ‘Ahok’, began cleaning the most polluted city on Earth, building public transportation, providing the poor with social housing, several Indonesian NGOs paid by the West, as well as countless individuals, began calling ‘Ahok” a ‘right-winger’, because he was evicting petite capitalist street vendors and thugs who were shamelessly blocking the few sidewalks that the turbo-capitalist Jakarta has in its possession. Thugs and street vendors, who flourished during the fascist, anti-Communist dictatorship, have been terrorizing the city and its mainly poor dwellers for decades. But the argument went: “The Governor is against the little people”.

There was actually a ‘great danger’ that this deeply popular governor could make it to a much higher post, even the highest one in the country. That would be unacceptable, and the servile ‘city planners’, academics and ‘civil society’ groups shamelessly teamed up against him. First, he was discredited (being called right-wing), then accused of insulting religion (Islam) and finally, thrown into prison. He is rotting there until now, for being a true socialist (a word that is even still illegal to pronounce in Indonesia, as it is being connected with Communism).

The Jakarta scenario is of course no exception. The same is happening in the Philippines. The West and its local lackeys are attacking, with the same twisted ‘logic’ and zeal, countries such as Venezuela, Brazil, but especially China, Iran and Russia.

To call China by what it really is: ‘Communist (with the Chinese characteristics) and presently the most successful country on Earth”, would be totally unacceptable, anywhere in the West or its ‘client’ states. That would greatly boost China’s popularity. Why? Because even deep in the dark belly of the capitalist and imperialist beast – Europe and North America – the common people actually want something ‘left-wing’, something socialist, even Communist. They were told to hate it, to trash it publicly, and they do. But deep inside, many are still longing for it.

The Empire knows psychological warfare extremely well: to discredit China, it really has to be called capitalist. Or call it imperialist. Say it is ‘like us’. (“Like us” is definitely not good. The people on all continents hate ‘us’). Say that China is not helping African people by building infrastructure, hospitals and schools (although that is precisely what China is doing, if you ask Africans – something that no Western journo is bothering to do). Say that China is ‘following its own interests’, and that it is doing business (again, these days, a dirty word, except in a few Southeast Asian helplessly corrupt and servile ‘client’ states).

The same is true when it comes to Russia. The foreign policy of Russia is clearly anti-imperialist. In many ways, it is still that good old Soviet foreign policy – internationalist, egalitarian, based on humanism. Present-day Russian diplomats are brilliant, soft-spoken philosophers. The West can never match them. Therefore, it smears them, their country and everything that it stands for.

President Putin is portrayed as some right-wing strongman and lunatic, and Russia as a capitalist state. It is thorough nonsense, as Russia is in many ways, increasingly, similar to its close ally – China. Russia counts on a mixed economy with a great accent on social welfare, and it is a country that is ready to defend and protect those who are brutalized by Western neo-colonialism. It occupies nobody, overthrows no governments. It is increasingly a good, solid and compassionate country, but the more it is, the more demonized it gets. The better it behaves, the more it gets smeared, mostly by being called ‘capitalist’, ‘right-wing’, an ‘oligarchy’. Well, great propaganda barks for sure; the Western demagogues and intelligence officers certainly know their trade.

Syria, oh how is it being defined by the Western demagogues? How it is being defamed! It is never called by what it really has been for decades – a Pan-Arab socialist state! Its ‘regime’ (a favorite British derogatory term, which I actually love to use against their own, British fascist, stale, passive-aggressive monarchy) is constantly branded as ‘dictatorial’. You will never hear expressions like ‘socialist’ or ‘internationalist’. You know why? Because, let me repeat it again, these terms, deep inside, evoke sympathy in the ears of people worldwide, even in the hearts of some Westerners, subconsciously.

‘Socialist’, ‘serving the people’ – you may smear it, but that is what people really want, and wanted for decades and centuries. That is what they have fought for, were dying for; on the barricades. Some instincts are still there, in people’s hearts, or do you think that they were sacrificing their lives in order to be governed by individuals like Macron or May?

Therefore, the socialists, not some European pseudo-traitors-socialists, but true socialists and Communists, are constantly branded by the West as ‘populists’, demagogues and often, even as right-wingers.

This negative, nihilist, depressing propaganda blurs and confuses the people everywhere. It calls white, black, and black, white. It labels Communists as fascists, and then declares that both fascists and Communists are the same.

Now the people, at least those who are the most exposed to the Western mass media, are ‘unable to commit themselves’ to anything, from political labels, to revolutionary ideals, and even to each other. They go ‘by issues’, arrogantly selfish (hundreds of millions of atomized centers of the universe) in both personal lives and in politics. In London or Paris, not to speak of New York City, those who are believed to be the ‘most educated’, are sadly the most conditioned, indoctrinated and feeble.

It is quite remarkable that in some parts of the world like Southeast Asia, the West has managed to create an absolutely bizarre West-lookalike-but-not-really-alike ‘upper class’, by injecting an idiotic type of education and cheap ‘cultural values’ (I will address this issue soon, in my upcoming essay). The result is – obedient and soulless countries unable to create anything new and substantial.

*

All of this, just in order to prevent the world from following its instincts – from choosing socialism and Communism.

You see, the task of the Western regime is tremendous: to break, to pervert, the natural reflexes of human beings. Whenever people anywhere in the world have been given a true opportunity, they voted, or fought for, some type of socialism, or Communism.

Basically, all the countries of Latin America selected, democratically, left-wing governments. And they were overthrown by the West and by their lackeys. It is happening to this day. Millions have been dying in the process.

In Africa – precisely the same. It began with Patrice Lumumba and his murder, and it never stopped. Fascist monsters and mentally sick individuals were injected from abroad, and paid to govern.

Asia? Absolute horror: from the socialist Iran in 1950’s to internationalist, Communist Indonesia before 1965, people wanted Communism and got murdered, raped and in the end, robbed of everything. By whom: by the West and its apparatchiks and local spooks from the colonial era. Countries that resisted and won, like China, and Vietnam, are now much better off than others.

They all wanted socialism, all over the world: The Middle East, too, and yes, Europe as well! It truly takes great discipline and continuous brainwashing, to forget that the US and UK intelligence services prevented Europeans in France, Italy and even West Germany, from voting in Communists after WWII. Nazis were employed to intimidate and to murder left-wing candidates. Then they were shipped to South America, where they either ‘retired’, or began collaborating with the fascist pro-Western regimes. I know it: I spoke, couple of decades ago, to those old beasts who were allowed to escape with their loot of gold teeth from the concentration camps – to Paraguay, Argentina, Chile.

Destroying the natural human longing for socialism is the main task of the Western regimes, be they ‘constitutional monarchies’ or ‘guided multi-party hoaxes’.

The result is total global schizophrenia. Intuitively, people desire something, but they are told that it is wrong, and then they are ordered what to desire (unless they want to become unemployable).

It is the same with love and sex. We, men, are told that our bodies should be longing for certain types of women. Women are instructed what type of man to desire.

It is the same with jobs, or how people pass their free time: banging into mobile phones, playing degenerate video games, and studying some nonsense at university, just to get a diploma that certifies them as some good future servants of the regime.

What did they do to people, really? Adults, fathers and mothers, ‘respected’ individuals are moving their fingers all over the phone monitors, playing infantile games and making babyish faces, while taking their own photographs at every corner. European intellectual cinema has collapsed, as well as literature. And everyone is grinning like idiots. And almost everyone is suicidal.

It is clearly a post-coup situation. It is abnormal.

Pathological. Almost nobody is happy. Everyone pretends to be happy.

You see, deep inside, people like to dream about a better world, they like to commit, even sacrifice themselves for another being, or for an ideal, or revolution.

This insanity, which the West has spread, just so its dear capitalism and neo-colonialism stays in control of the planet, will not last much longer.

Soon, people will realize that there is nothing more glorious than to build his or her country, to improve conditions all over the world, to clean up our environment, to love and to fully commit to that love.

Before that, however, the lies have to be exposed. White is white and black is black. War is war, peace is peace. Aggressors are aggressors and victims are victims.

The West has immobilized people all over the world with its filthy, depressing lies. It stares at humans, like a cobra stares at a tiny, poor mouse.

Soon, I am sure the world will rise and demand the truth! With the truth, the psychological balance will return. People will learn how to dream again. With dreams, the insanity that the West has been spreading will be confronted. Imperialism will shout, howl; it will try to bite everything that moves, but relatively quickly, it will lose all its power and, hopefully, kick the bucket. I believe in it. Millions are now, again, ready to fight for it.

Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. Three of his latest books are Revolutionary Optimism, Western Nihilism, a revolutionary novel “Aurora” and a bestselling work of political non-fiction: “Exposing Lies Of The Empire”. View his other books here. Watch Rwanda Gambit, his groundbreaking documentary about Rwanda and DRCongo and his film/dialogue with Noam Chomsky “On Western Terrorism”. Vltchek presently resides in East Asia and the Middle East, and continues to work around the world. He can be reached through his website and his Twitter.

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Ian Stuart
Ian Stuart
Aug 10, 2018 10:35 AM

Anti imperialism is not solely associated with the left. Right libertarians and paleoconservatives are staunchly anti-imperialistic, more so than the “international socialists” who envisaged world social justice and were also prepared to fight (that is, kill) for it. Some argue that these Trotskyists morphed into neoconservatives.

I can’t see that the world is as binary as left-right as the author imagines, or that the left is so squeeky clean either.

BigB
BigB
Aug 8, 2018 11:33 PM

That was meant as a reply to Bevin and Gary below.

BigB
BigB
Aug 8, 2018 11:28 PM

I can see neither of you bothered to read Professor Bond’s proposal “Toward a Broader Theory of Imperialism”. If you had, you’d see that he was broadening the definition of imperialism to credit and financial imperialism. To focus on just military imperialism only gives a partial reflection of the dehumanizing effects of super-exploitation. Sub-imperialism is a perfectly viable term to explain the corporate rape. BRICS countries are no less exploitative: hence the global neoliberal order.

Rather than expand your thinking to embrace a broader definition of imperialism: you choose to denigrate me instead …well hey ho, if it makes you feel good?

binra
binra
Aug 9, 2018 9:49 AM
Reply to  BigB

Denigration indicates lack of substance or unwillingness to engage. Imperial as relating to empire or domination applies also to medical and technological as the result of distorted science. The dominion of mind-capture, narrative control, identity management operates deceits that we are attracted to or induced to choose as a result of the study and manipulation of the human personality construct. To some degree we all already do this to ourselves – as self-illusion given priority over true relation – but the intent to gain private self reinforcement or gratification by manipulating others is to a large extent what social behaviours are – beneath the masking. Those whose study of humans does not include their self (intimacy of being) perceive mechanical golems or fear, guilt or greed driven mechanism – as the basis of humanity – and elect to use and exploit and dominate it. This may be framed in definitions… Read more »

vexarb
vexarb
Aug 9, 2018 10:52 AM
Reply to  BigB

A good old ding-dong spat is going on below, too technical for me to follow but I gave everyone an upvote for persuasive argument. My own tendency is more in line with Schlueter’s blog Beware Fragmentation, “We´re too easily getting involved into minor conflicts about tertiary contradictions”. Tó my nose BigB does not smell like a Trot. He presents hard data and invites us to follow the money. Re the S in BRICS, he is right: my native Land may have turned into the Rainbow Nation (which is wonderful) but its money still flows into the deep pockets of Anglo-American Co in London’s Zio City.

binra
binra
Aug 9, 2018 12:51 PM
Reply to  vexarb

The fixated fascination of focus within the dynamic of conflict operates the fragmentation of identity. Loving to hate is hating to love. Its a clear choice that is clearly invisible to those whose choice is given to accept hate as if it is love – or false as if true etc. There is no ding dong spat, but only the projection of conflicted identity in mutually reinforcing entanglement. The nature of the self-conflicted is to seek self-reinforcement. This can be in shifting alliances as much as rivalry or enmity. The models of thought by which to ‘understand’ the problem, tend to persist the problem while seeming to escape or overcome it. The intent to define, predict and control is the underlying usurpation of a wholeness of being that is inconceivable to the fragmented or split off identity investment. The conflict operating system or matrix, is also known as divide and… Read more »

binra
binra
Aug 8, 2018 6:45 PM

Human freedom – is the human IDEA of freedom? Animals will seek to free themselves from danger but is that simply instinctual or inherent to biological response? Humans operate a subjective mind in a virtual environment which is not only a modelling of reality, but an augmentation of ‘machine learning’ – ie: the development and evolution of past learning. This ‘freedom’ to imagine is the development of the ego as the adaptation to the inherited construct. The reason we do not communicate on this is because we are predicated in completely different assumptions. You think of freedom in a body. I think freedom is mind – that includes the identification IN a body – as distinct from through it. Thus I hold for the freedom to see the mind in act – rather than identify in the scripted character being acted out. However, existing self-definitions will frame and determine what… Read more »

Schlüter
Schlüter
Aug 7, 2018 7:07 PM
Rhys Jaggar
Rhys Jaggar
Aug 7, 2018 4:42 PM

Actually, the most interesting issue is how brainwashed individuals deal with the impulses of decency still within them when confronted by reality which contradicts their brainwashing. They are often faced with a collapse of their societal niche or an immediate repression of reality. I have worked for and with scum psychopaths who seriously believe they have the right to put those with tertiary degrees under surveillance at work because they are for some reason superior. If they were superior, it never manifested itself in their sexuality which was either repressed or BDSM in nature. Clearly these tools would lose their careers if required to justify their utterly unjustifiable actions. Almost all were typical working class first to university types, correlating ambition with scumbaggery. Pointing out unpalatable facts about how their children responded to such types as parents drew ferocious destructive responses: hell hath no fury like women scorned, after all.… Read more »

Gary Weglarz
Gary Weglarz
Aug 7, 2018 4:27 PM

It is interesting how some prefer to ignore Vltchek’s central arguments about the death of a “left” in the West in order to focus on whether China or Russia are definably “neoliberal” or to question how many in the West might actually prefer socialism. Kind of misses the point I’d say. In fact such thinking suggests the very narcissistic focus that now defines the West in toto. Any discussion in the West of socialism / communism and anti-imperialism as an alternative to the standard militarized neoliberal plunder of course can only be dismissed as a pipe dream, while our neoliberal nirvana rapidly renders the planet uninhabitable – except of course for those blessed by the “invisible hand” and therefore wealthy enough to build their own bunker. The truth of Vltchek’s “death of the Western left” I can see quite clearly here in the U.S. The very same people I shared… Read more »

email
email
Aug 7, 2018 6:31 PM
Reply to  Gary Weglarz

Gary, I like your post and agree there is much zombification in the EUSA; nevertheless I believe that reports about the Death of the Left have been greatly exaggerated; and by the same people who spread that rumour about the End of History.

geoffreyskoll
geoffreyskoll
Aug 7, 2018 8:02 PM
Reply to  email

To email:
So then what succeeded the New Left and the liberation movements of the 1960s-70s? I saw none. All the liberation movements turned into identity politics. Granted, there are individuals and small groups (the remnants of Black Panthers, radical socialist feminists, Weatherman Faction, etc., but they do not a movement make. Even the Wobblies have been overtaken by millennial identitarians.

Gary Weglarz
Gary Weglarz
Aug 7, 2018 9:15 PM
Reply to  geoffreyskoll

geoffreyskoll – I quite agree that “identity politics” became the pill used to poison the Left – in the U.S. at least. Here it is the ONLY thing that differentiates two imperialist neoliberal war parties. In the U.S. voting choice has been reduced to the the question: “Do you want your illegal invasions, torture, drone murders and regime change ‘with’ or ‘without’ gay marriage and gender specific bathrooms at home?”

I think in many ways the Obama years ushered in the final death of any “hope” for “change” in the U.S. as Occupy Wall Street was crushed during those years, and Black Lives Matter was vilified as somehow “terrorist” by opposing the cold blooded murder of unarmed black men by police all over the nation.

Mulga Mumblebrain
Mulga Mumblebrain
Aug 9, 2018 11:46 PM
Reply to  Gary Weglarz

‘Identity Politics’ is just ‘Divide and Rule’ taken to its end-stage extremity. But everything in human society has reached its End-Stage as the Fermi Paradox is solved right before our, mostly, uncomprehending eyes.

binra
binra
Aug 10, 2018 9:57 AM

Yes those who choose to be identified AGAINST their own shadow bring on their own destruction by attacking it in others. Only ‘attack’ on Self can set up the division from which all subsequent conflict and limitation proceed. The reversal of the Fermi paradox is a mind devoted it its OWN alienation from All That Lives – such as to redefine life in terms of an alien will – to be suppressed and dissociated from as a sense of personal salvation or temporary existence. Such a mind literally cannot see or interpret anything Living but through the lens of threat to itself or a sense of self-exclusion. While divide and rule pertains to the nature of an exclusive assertion of identity, its own true source and nature such as can come into awareness at all – are distorted by the lens of fear and interpreted as demonic or overwhelming threat.… Read more »

vexarb
vexarb
Aug 9, 2018 5:12 AM
Reply to  geoffreyskoll

@Geoff. Old and frail but not dead. Michael Hudson, one of the old Missouri Trotskyists, interviewed by the Chinese University of Sustainability:

http://michael-hudson.com/2018/08/life-thought-an-autobiography/

binra
binra
Aug 7, 2018 10:25 PM
Reply to  email

I thought that socialism/communism was incorporated into systems management a long time back and as such is a captured opposition that can be used strategically as a front end to statism – of an essentially global dictate. I see that the environmental movement has been effectively captured and diverted into Co2 demonisation and self-enforced sacrifice in penitence for carbon-guilt and appeasement of the End Of The World – depending on the simulation parameters. History as often said is made by the victors or the dominant established power of the day. The importance of narrative control as a means of mind capture cannot be overstated. It is possible now to access historical information outside the official reality bubble of mainstream acceptance but it may not be possible to discuss it with anyone but those willing to listen outside the boundaries of social acceptance. Such information may also be associated or mixed… Read more »

BigB
BigB
Aug 7, 2018 9:08 PM
Reply to  Gary Weglarz

Gary: if you title your piece “The West has Performed a “Philosophical Coup” Against the Left”; you have to define your terms. Comrade Vltchek defines “the Western Empire” or “regime” indirectly by defining, inter alia, “Russia-China”. He defines China thus: “To call China by what it really is: ‘Communist (with the Chinese characteristics) and presently the most successful country on Earth”: and Russia: “Russia is in many ways, increasingly, similar to its close ally – China.” – i.e. a socialist “mixed economy”. He posits Russia’s foreign policy as: “clearly anti-imperialist.”. So, central to his thesis is his definition of Russia-China as a socialist and a communist state: both anti-imperialist countries (he speaks of other socialist countries, but I have no desire to go through the whole list). This is clearly absurd and groundless conjecture: neither country is either socialist, communist or anti-imperialist. Both countries are neoliberal globalist and corporate capitalist.… Read more »

Gary Weglarz
Gary Weglarz
Aug 8, 2018 1:22 AM
Reply to  BigB

BigB – I appreciate the passion of your contention that there is – “There is no imperialist West: in as much as there is a sub-imperial BRICS that “amplifies” its imperialism” – whatever that is supposed to mean. However, I find it so out of touch with the everyday realities of life in many of those nations Russia and China are sheltering from the 500+ year project of Western imperialism that it seems absurd to even engage on this. Libya, Syria, Iraq, Ukraine, Honduras, Iran in the gun sights, Venezuela in the gun sights, North Korea in the gun sights – all the focus of Western imperialism, but you see a united neoliberal world? Syria still exists today as a nation because your thesis is wrong. N. Korea exists as a nation because your thesis is wrong. I dare say the same is true of Iran. Russia and China are… Read more »

bevin
bevin
Aug 8, 2018 2:08 AM
Reply to  Gary Weglarz

“Your contention that “there is no imperialist West” is simply laughable…” It is worse than that: it is the ideology of the imperialists themselves. The last line of defence “oppose us and what comes next will be worse. At least we speak your language. The Chinese and Russians, Brazilians et al would take our place, make their own empire, out of their ‘sub imperialisms’, and, being more deprived, would be even greedier than we are. Best stick with us. You lose any way.” BigB’s message is the last whine of an expiring neo-trotskyism which teaches us that there is no hope because there are no alternatives to the Empire’s domination. And yet the Empire is crumbling. Its power is daily diminishing. The dawn of a new age in which Wall St and The Pentagon will not dictate to those we elect to govern us is approaching. There could not be… Read more »

Gary Weglarz
Gary Weglarz
Aug 8, 2018 3:06 AM
Reply to  bevin

bevin – “BigB’s message is the last whine of an expiring neo-trotskyism which teaches us that there is no hope because there are no alternatives to the Empire’s domination.” – thank you for that succinct and satisfying observation. His nonsense posts remind me of the rather odious Louis Proyect over at Counterpunch – another flaming neo-trotskist to the bitter end who is always ready and eager to critique the sins of those who oppose the empire, rather than the empire itself. These are the same ilk of “progressive” who for decades constantly criticized Castro from their cushy penthouses in the U.S. – labeling him a “dictator” because his prisons harbored “political prisoners.” Never mind that throughout that time the U.S., the most powerful nation on the planet, was busily at work from only 100 miles away trying to kill Castro at every turn. Still these “leftists” could not comprehend that… Read more »

BigB
BigB
Aug 9, 2018 9:49 AM
Reply to  Gary Weglarz

Bevin; Gary: thanks for the replies. I linked to an article “Towards a Broader Theory of Imperialism”: that is in itself a critique of the Smith-Harvey debate on imperialism. If you had bothered to read it, or followed up on its links, you would see there is a strong case for sub-imperialism being an amplifier of imperialism. The proposition that offends was itself a quote, with a link to its own article by Vivek Chibber. Clearly you did not read it? Instead, you value your own cherished opinions above data; ignore the dialogical by dismissing mine and others reasoned (and empirically linked) arguments; and project your own dominance stricture on me; ad hom-ing my intention, which you both misrepresent. You label your own views “progressive” to denigrate me …well, so what: you have done little to rebut my, or anyone else’s argument: in doing so, perhaps you prove my point?… Read more »

binra
binra
Aug 9, 2018 10:06 AM
Reply to  BigB

This is also called ‘full spectrum dominance’ – and in my view the USA is an asset – that may believe it is what it is led to believe by its handlers. Self-specialness is the nature of the lure – as is its threat of loss and the need to defend self-illusion ‘made real’.

To extend the old say;
steal a loaf and they hang you. Steal a kingdom and they call you king. But to steal the mind of the Sovereign will in ‘king’ or ‘people’ is to frame their thinking and run a human botnet while people call each other anything you direct – unaware of the nature of their predicament and vigilant to defend and maintain it against the threat of exposure in pain of loss that truth is assigned by false thinking.

Mulga Mumblebrain
Mulga Mumblebrain
Aug 8, 2018 1:14 AM
Reply to  Gary Weglarz

Sanders was ALWAYS a phony, a Trojan Horse to lead the Left opposition to the blood-soaked Harpy, Clinton, into the desert. But he did better than expected, so the DNC ‘interference’ and ‘meddling’ had to be pronounced, and then Sanders, the good sheep-dog, rolled over to Clinton’s larceny without a murmur.

mog
mog
Aug 7, 2018 3:24 PM

‘There is no greater misnomer in our Western world than calling our systems of electoral representation ‘democracies’. This misnomer -or illusion – began to take hold around 1800. Before then ‘democracy’ was understood to mean the opposite of electoral representation. It meant citizens participating in government in three ways : by voting directly on issues and appointments; by acting as part-time public officials themselves; and by being members of parliament-type assemblies selected (as juries are) by lot. These practices are all opposite to electoral representation.’ Ivo Mosley -‘In The Name of The People’ The myth that the West was dedicated to ‘spreading democracy’ has usually been (rightly) countered with a catalogue of its violent interventions. However, the word itself has been inverted in meaning. White is black, black is white, democracy through representation was called ‘natural aristocracy’ by the very people generally credited with cooking the whole thing idea. The… Read more »

Mulga Mumblebrain
Mulga Mumblebrain
Aug 8, 2018 1:18 AM
Reply to  mog

You cannot meld capitalism in any form, let alone Market Fundamentalist neo-liberalism, with ‘democracy’ in any meaningful sense. The two are utterly antipathetic.

BigB
BigB
Aug 7, 2018 2:24 PM

I’m not going to write a Tractatus: but the only one trying to pull a “philosophical coup” is Andre himself. Russia-China are full paid up members of the neoliberal globalism Club: economically employing the Liberalise-Privatise-Globalise (LPG) mantra of debt-fuelled expansionism. Regular commenters can take this – or not – from my previous comments (with links): I refer anyone else no further than the “longest suicide note in history” of the recent BRICS 2018 Johannesburg Declaration. This commits them to “global governance” under the aegis of the current post-Bretton Woods institutions. There really is no argument to be made against this POV: it is epistemologically sound and based on what is there in black and white in the Declaration. Even the Saker has admitted that “Putin is a neoliberal”, and the Saker is hardly a pro-Western propagandist? PCR and Michael Hudson have been saying as much for 18months or so. The… Read more »

Francis Lee
Francis Lee
Aug 7, 2018 3:47 PM
Reply to  BigB

Yes, there was never anything other than a commitment to a neoliberal global order from the emerging Eurasian bloc spearheaded by Putin and from a slightly different position vis-a-vis Xi Jinping. The notion of a rules-based free trade area stretching from Vladivostock to Lisbon (sounds utopian, and is) was the Russian position in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall. This was the goal of both Gorbachov and more latterly Putin. Although Jinping’s model had more of a statist, mercantilist element than Putin’s. The real bone of contention, however, was the assumption by the US to being the hegemon morally mandated (by whom we might wonder) to rule the world with Russia being one of many subalterns in the existing structures. ”The contemporary subaltern challenge is an ambivalent phenomenon. Russia and China are not revisionist powers in the classical sense; but neo-revisionist. They do not challenge the… Read more »

Mulga Mumblebrain
Mulga Mumblebrain
Aug 8, 2018 1:22 AM
Reply to  Francis Lee

Your reference to Xi Jinping as ‘Jinping’ seems overly familiar, particularly as you address all the others by their surnames.

binra
binra
Aug 7, 2018 10:10 PM
Reply to  BigB

“What people really want is the end of the linguistically generated dialectic of hatred and dehumanisation, and the perpetual cycles of Rule and violence”. Do people know what they really want? Do they dare to feel it or know how to get in touch with feeling it. If you ask what people want you will get all kinds of answers that may of course be symbolic of deeper desires. Those who feel compelled to sacrifice what they want for what they feel they have to do or be instead may want an improvement in terms of the devil they know rather than risking deeper change. I don’t know that many have an ability to articulate or understand their situation nor perhaps the desire to know. Simplified good v evil narratives operate in place of a complex entanglement. Including avoidance of the disturbing and dispiriting. Focusing in what’s wrong does not… Read more »

James Graham
James Graham
Aug 7, 2018 7:45 AM

Admit it….deep down we all want communism. Issue the concrete slippers and sling the ruling class off a bridge. Happy days.

O.K. That’s a bit OTT. I’ll meet you half way. Give them swimming lessons first.

binra
binra
Aug 7, 2018 11:58 AM
Reply to  James Graham

Communality in free willingness would uncover common creative potential – but communism requires a ruling class under whatever name, to enforce itself upon the people ‘for their own good’. As does any other imposed ideology. Most are very content to let others take responsibility for them when it suits and blame them for their lives when it doesn’t. I find that the true meaning of response-ability is lost to the equation or co-fusion with a blame based economy which predates the Co2 version of it by a few millennia. Equality of worth is something to claim by living FROM the gift of it rather than tearing down everything to a lowest common denominator. Power envy is not righteous – and the intent to nurture resentments and target them to others is not honest.The true of power is corrupted by the false or usurping mind. So sweep out the false thinking… Read more »

Seamus
Seamus
Aug 7, 2018 12:20 PM
Reply to  James Graham

You prefer to see nurses and care workers queuing up at food banks in order to feed their children? Nice person aren’t you James Graham.

James Graham
James Graham
Aug 8, 2018 1:03 AM
Reply to  Seamus

Seamus. I was a care assistant in a care home, a sort of “nurse,” and I worked voluntarily in addiction services. I have also been sanctioned 3 times, twice when I was doing voluntary work and I have also used a food bank. I just gave you my word. You are wasting your breath trying to be smart. I would bring the ruling class down the first chance I got. Your emotional blackmail is in the post….return to sender.

Antonyl
Antonyl
Aug 7, 2018 5:25 AM

To call China by what it really is: ‘Communist (with the Chinese characteristics) Luckily Marx & Engels are dead because they would get major fits on calling today’s China Communist. It is neither classic Capitalist. It is State supported Capitalism for Chinese benefit only – so no fair competition. Lenin & Stalin would have liked it: totalitarian and very powerful. Some in the US might be jealous of it.

Why do the US/K deep states vilify Russia, Iran and China now: habit, fear of power competition, lack of imagination, financial interests in having fake bogeys.
Trump is on another path: unfair trade by China, and he is correct there. All other nations suffer too cheap Chinese imports: nice in the short run, deadly on the long term.

Mulga Mumblebrain
Mulga Mumblebrain
Aug 7, 2018 10:43 AM
Reply to  Antonyl

You Zionists REALLY hate China, because it is the one great global civilization that you will not be able to penetrate, buy up the elites as Sabbat Goyim stooges, and have them dance to your tune. Of course the Chinese are so disrespectful as to see you as just human beings like the est of us, and Israel as just another state, like all the others. And you hate that, don’t you.

bevin
bevin
Aug 6, 2018 11:57 PM

Speaking of coups:
As SKWAWKBOX warned, a #CoupOfCowardice is underway. #NoPasaran
by SKWAWKBOX
Yesterday, as the attacks on Jeremy Corbyn’s video message to the Jewish community was cynically attacked, the SKWAWKBOX warned that the response removed any reasonable doubt that a new coup had begun:……

BigB
BigB
Aug 7, 2018 3:28 PM
Reply to  bevin

The #CoupOfCowardice is surely on: only, who is the coward? The ending of disciplinary proceedings against a vile unrepentant Hodge leaves no room for doubt (except to the SKWAWKBOX mentality). Anyone can accuse any anti-Zionist, anti-racist, BAME-activist, anti-capitalist or 9/11 truth-seeker, of anything in full knowledge that they will be expelled. They are pre-indemnified from anything other than support – so long as they are Jewish. Labour has capitulated to Zionist exceptionalism, betraying its heritage of universalism. And the SKWAWKing parrots flock together in defence of the chief coward? Hodge, Mann, Smeeth, Austin, and the ‘honorable member for Tel Aviv’ Ellmann have to go or the coup will be never ending….. only, if you point out that Labour only has its own self-generated problem: you are part of the problem …thus ended the freedom of speech.

Mulga Mumblebrain
Mulga Mumblebrain
Aug 8, 2018 1:30 AM
Reply to  BigB

The Zionazis, allied to their Blairite servants, their Tory friends and allies (NO support for the evil Palestinian ‘tewworwists’ there)and the filthy sewer of the Rightwing media led by the filthy Fraudian, have won. The rest is commentary. Corbyn may or may not have been a dupe all along, but Labour is finished, Momentum is now a Zionist-controlled yeshiva for adoring Israel, and the party will split with the Blairites inundated by cash from grateful Zionists. May will remain PM, perhaps as long as Thatcher, and all those fools who thought that you could reverse neo-liberalism through mass ‘democracy’; will, hopefully, have been taught a lesson as to where ALL real power lies under capitalism-with the rich, the few, the Chosen few, NEVER the many.

homeslicez
homeslicez
Aug 6, 2018 10:44 PM

The author throws out “left-wing” and “right-wing” as if those are meaningful terms. No, I won’t read your books if they’re as crappy as this article.

Mulga Mumblebrain
Mulga Mumblebrain
Aug 7, 2018 2:52 AM
Reply to  homeslicez

A pip just squeaked.

brankabrankov
brankabrankov
Aug 6, 2018 10:31 PM

We’ve All Been Fooled! SHARE THIS! from Truth Warriors on Vimeo

https://player

comite espartaco
comite espartaco
Aug 6, 2018 10:20 PM

This a very long and poor article that epitomises the warped, confused and deficient ideology and manners of a left that has infiltrated and destroyed the Working Class movement around the world. Essentially, it is based on a profound misunderstanding of Socialism and Communism, that leads the author to a trite an irrational ‘racist’ or ethnicist Third World ideology that is, sadly, very widespread and drives underdeveloped countries to disaster. The raving hate of the West, is an infantile, ignorant and extreme distortion of international solidarity that has enabled the exploiters of the Third World, to maintain and reinforce the captivity of their subject populations and prevented the union of workers around the world, allowing the false resentment of ‘colonial’ and backward peoples, to be projected against fake Western populations imagined by corrupt, conservative and sectarian minds. As a matter of fact, it is the West, through its genuine Socialist… Read more »

Jen
Jen
Aug 7, 2018 12:04 AM

I read the article from start to finish and Vltchek is very clear in his support for socialism and those socialist policies and programs that improve people’s lives and well-being. He is clear in his opposition to the fake Left you refer to. You should read the article again and you’ll see Vltchek speaks up for the oppressed and the exploited, as he has always done. But I think you will not do so. 1 Judge not, that ye be not judged. 2 For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. 3 And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? 4 Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and,… Read more »

comite espartaco
comite espartaco
Aug 7, 2018 1:42 AM
Reply to  Jen

It is clear that the author of this article is no Socialist/Communist and no amount of ‘red’ flag waving will transform him into one. We are not denouncing the fake left, but saying that ALL left, in the Third World or in The First, is fake and that its mission was to destroy the Working Class Movement. Something that it has done to perfection. This article shows, without any shadow of doubt, that the writer, like you, has not grasped the essentials of Marxism and Communism in general and that he has not been able to move from a superficial, anti-Western and preposterous, ‘populist’, racist and ethnicist type of logic that is very common in the Third World and among those that have converted their hallucinations about the West into impotent hate. It will be too long to explain all this to people that is obsessed with anti-Western rhetoric and,… Read more »

Mulga Mumblebrain
Mulga Mumblebrain
Aug 7, 2018 2:58 AM
Reply to  Jen

comite’s tripe, Jen, was replete with Racist and Orientalist condescension, even contempt, crude pathopsychological projection, grandiose ignorance and laughable egotism. It really does encapsulate the racism and cultural supremacism that drives Western aggression and genocide, however.

bevin
bevin
Aug 7, 2018 12:20 AM

This is a peculiar contribution. It is certainly not ” a matter of fact, it is the West, through its genuine Socialist and Communist movement, that has stirred the conscience, fighting spirit and organisation of underdeveloped countries and instilled in them the craving for progress and liberation….” It is certainly true that socialists and communists in the imperialist countries -‘the West’- played a role in inspiring the national liberation movements. But theirs was a marginal contribution which pales in significance beside the complicity of ‘socialists’ and trade unionists in imperial rule. Or did you think that India achieved independence because Nehru had friends in the Labour party?. And the Indian Raj ended-in the blood of partition and the transfer of power to a new bourgeoisie- the same year that our socialists handed over Palestine to their zionist comrades. In reality it was from the east-China, Korea, Cuba and above all… Read more »

comite espartaco
comite espartaco
Aug 7, 2018 2:30 AM
Reply to  bevin

You simply show a complete lack of understanding of the situation at hand, sir. The movements for independence, self-government or revolution in the colonies, either were supported, organised or created by the Socialist/Communist movement, from which many colonial peoples took example an where many of their leaders were trained in Western methods of struggle and politics. After the Komintern was created (and the USSR was nothing but a massive effort at Westernisation of the Russian Empire and the East), the struggle for independence took another decisive dimension. Nehru was a product of Western education, private Western tutors and Harrow School (like Eton), Trinity College, Cambridge, sir. He was a high flying lawyer in London and was close to the Fabian Society of the Labour Party. And yes, India achieved independence because of the PM Clement Attlee of the Labour Party, an expert in India and committed to Indian independence in… Read more »

Mulga Mumblebrain
Mulga Mumblebrain
Aug 7, 2018 3:03 AM

Your utter racist contempt and condescension towards non-Westerners is that of a creature of the racist Right, not any ‘Left’ in any meaningful sense. At least you are blatant, but that would be your White Man’s Ego Burden acting out.

Jen
Jen
Aug 7, 2018 5:13 AM

We’re dealing with a troll and a boringly repetitive one at that, blathering on and on about how the White Socialist / Communist / Western Man’s Burden benefited non-Westerners and how ungrateful the non-Westerners are for throwing their colonial masters out of their countries.

At least kicking Louis Proyect around with other Off-Guardian commenters was entertaining, not least because Proyect kept insisting on drowning in his own idiocy the more we kept on at him.

binra
binra
Aug 7, 2018 10:32 AM
Reply to  Jen

If I were to be in the purpose of trolling division I would seek an alloy of token truths and lies within the framing of blame-guilt appeals. The appeal to victimism as the power of guilting is a manipulative evasion in displacement and diversion. Regardless mumblebrain’s knowing or unknowing status, the framing in smear, innuendo and blame-hate makes such a noise as to distort any signal that may or may not be intended. Much of this may be invisible because many here are often willing to join in hate where they feel it justified. Exclusive self-reinforcement in pet-hate terms for others is more of a mythologising into personal/group terms, that generates a bubble ‘reality’ to indulge in a sense of righteousness gained from assigning blame away. The intent to not use such linguistic distortions, can on the other hand by unintelligible to those conditioned and adapted to operate within the… Read more »

Mulga Mumblebrain
Mulga Mumblebrain
Aug 7, 2018 10:46 AM
Reply to  Jen

His product is ‘proyectile vomitus’.

binra
binra
Aug 7, 2018 3:24 PM

I thought it was about your input!. What you manage to project onto others who do not support your worldview is of course all the stuff you want to get rid of.
You cannot engage in the issues and so attack the person.
What if new information was actually of real benefit to you instead of a threat to what you currently think?
What would real benefit feel like?
Expansion, integration, connection, appreciation, gratitude.
What are the benefits of persisting in your current mindset – apart from always being right?

comite espartaco
comite espartaco
Aug 7, 2018 12:36 PM
Reply to  Jen

You have a big problem now. You have been found out and uncovered, not by leftist wishy-whasy philistines, but by a true Communist international group (this is the Komintern talking), and you can run with your delirious minoritymongering and thirdworldist racist rhetoric, but cannot hide anymore in a free publication. No matter how much ethnicist bile and scorn you throw on the West and its peoples, it will still remain the centre of gravity and reference point for the liberation of all mankind, East, West, North and South and the sooner you understand that, the better will be for your psychological health.

bevin
bevin
Aug 8, 2018 1:51 AM

A very Churchillian point of view. And a very mistaken one.

Mulga Mumblebrain
Mulga Mumblebrain
Aug 7, 2018 2:54 AM

Racist, Orientalist, tripe-to be generous.

James Graham
James Graham
Aug 7, 2018 11:35 PM

I like this. Vitchek turns capitalism into a “philosophical” problem of knowledge, “psychological warfare” and a problem of “deeply conditioned and brainwashed” people. It’s not that. Marx believed capitalism represented an alienated form of pseudo-existence defined by the legal institutions of the ownership and control of land, labour and capital and law enforcement. All of those interests are legally documented and easily verifiable. However, contrary to the claims of the ruling class, Marx found that is irrational and unreasonable…commodity production is fetishistic. In the arena of class struggle law enforcement includes the use of armed force. So. there are material forces at work to support this irrational system and that is why the “literary or moral critique” of capitalism is no match for it. All of this philosophy and psychology is whistling in the wind and does not get at the source of ruling class power and control over the… Read more »

binra
binra
Aug 6, 2018 7:00 PM

” Terms and definitions get all mixed up, confused. Nothing is defined precisely. ”

That’s a summary of what I felt about the article.

Solidarity with each other in a sense of shared worth that refuses the framing terms of the manipulators would be something of a movement FOR humanity rather than ‘against evil’ and defined in its terms.

vexarb
vexarb
Aug 7, 2018 4:49 AM
Reply to  binra

@binra (one mind inmany). I think you will find a greater sense of solidarity and shared worth in Vltchek than in 300 Neo-Falangist Spartans.

binra
binra
Aug 7, 2018 8:49 AM
Reply to  vexarb

Solidarity in victimism is a form of sacrifice to a blind and cruel god – perhaps seeking to make hell a little less hot (metaphorically speaking). My sense of a living movement is that which both inspires and arises from a genuine willingness of communication – as opposed to and framed by emotion-backed prejudice. In this sense I see the movement that steps out of a fear-framed sense of self and world to embody and meet a new world. The ‘mind habit’ seeks to re-interject itself and its sense of ‘control’ as a new set of clothes for the naked emperor. The subversion of the living to the marketisation and weaponisation (control) agenda goes on in every mind. Why then be surprised to see it as the dominant theme of our world? Where we get or receive identity from is the determiner of the nature of what then issues forth.… Read more »

vexarb
vexarb
Aug 7, 2018 10:04 AM
Reply to  binra

@binra: “Comunication is the nature of Life”. Agreed; only connect. But that Committee of 300 Neo-Liberal Would-be Spartans is not trying to connect with the rest of humanity — “Lesser breeds” — except in the sense of a predator connecting with its prey.

Vltchek means WolfCub in Polish, but he is a Lamb.

binra
binra
Aug 7, 2018 3:10 PM
Reply to  vexarb

The presumption in verbal mental tramlines is that communication means words. As a recent contributor intimated, (I think) language has developed as a way to limit, filter and rule the flow of communication. But expand the idea of communication to the energetic communication of shifting resonantly charged vibrational states and you are at one with the underpinnings that we ‘dance to’ unheeding of the music beneath our narrative identity and world. Taking this energetic as an informational carrier opens to the word or definitional structure beneath the appearance. The word in your heart is not the word of the mouth – though of course you can be congruent in thought and deed. How do you communicate with anything that comes into your field of relation? Do you not ‘feel your way’ – or do you operate as a fight-flight mechanism based on past associations? I recall a radio interview with… Read more »

JJ139
JJ139
Aug 6, 2018 6:52 PM

Well Macron was legally a child when his much older piano teacher got in his pants.

JJ139
JJ139
Aug 6, 2018 6:50 PM

“Back to the main issue: it is essential for the West to discredit socialism, Communism, and also all anti-imperialist movements that are now getting stronger all over the world.”

Not simply, discredit. To also bomb the shit out of countries, such as Yugoslavia for daring to be seen as successful.

geoffreyskoll
geoffreyskoll
Aug 6, 2018 6:33 PM

What else should we have expected? At about the same time (1956) Comrade K (compare to Kafka’s Joseph K) betrayed the workers’ revolution in the USSR, the “philosophical” Claude Levi-Strauss was fitted out by the French academic ruling class to efface Existentialism (you know, the philosophical movement that addressed what was important in life and which had the unfortunate genealogy of coming from an avowed Marxist–Jean Paul Sartre). When Levi-Stauss’s simplistic so-called structuralism didn’t quite do the trick, the same French ruling academics found a reactionary academic out in the hinterlands named Michel Foucault, and brought him to the College de France to give his obscurantist lectures. Needless to say, American and British intellectual poseurs fell in love with Foucault’s nonsense along with a few other so-called post-structuralists and postmodernists (the latter a true academic, but far from intellectual, abomination. Americans, Brits, and all the Anglophone academies just love the… Read more »

Mulga Mumblebrain
Mulga Mumblebrain
Aug 7, 2018 3:05 AM
Reply to  geoffreyskoll

The process you describe reached its ludicrous apotheosis in the carnival huckster and clown, Zizek.

vexarb
vexarb
Aug 7, 2018 4:59 AM

And Bernard Levi. A sad comedown for a nation that once”baked the intellectual bread for the world”.

Mulga Mumblebrain
Mulga Mumblebrain
Aug 7, 2018 10:49 AM
Reply to  vexarb

Bernard-Henry Levy is, in my opinion, nothing but a racist war-monger, the highlight of whose career was basking in the glory of the jihadist victory in Libya, and the 50,000 dead Libyans murdered by NATO terror bombing, all mitzvot to Levy’s psychopathic God-himself.

geoffreyskoll
geoffreyskoll
Aug 7, 2018 7:52 PM

Agreed.

BigB
BigB
Aug 7, 2018 9:23 AM
Reply to  geoffreyskoll

Geoffrey: Claude Levi-Strauss was the prototypical cultural anthropologist – and a very good one. His fieldwork on the basic pan-cultural psycholinguistic structure of experience; kinship; binary oppositions; and cultural universals (echoing Joe Cambell’s ‘Monomyth’) lays the basis for a universal essential humanity. You might as well include Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who shared CL-Ss’ “Eurocentism” critique of Sartre. Formerly, they were all friends (Simone De Beauvoir worked with CLS and MMP; and included his work of the importance of women to kinship in “The Second Sex”). Though they did fall out with MMP – I do not recall a “French academic ruling class” plot – merely a heated difference of focus. Perhaps you could elucidate me? MMP was the first to ’embody’ Husserl’s phenomenology: between them (with others) this is bringing the focus of science and philosophy back to the ‘first person experiential’: which objectivity, logical empiricism, and the Western ontotheological canon… Read more »

binra
binra
Aug 7, 2018 12:40 PM
Reply to  BigB

I haven’t followed (studied) the evolution of thought that you describe but I resonate with your core message. The use of language to undo linguistic mind-trapping is of course liable to further empower the ‘separative’ sense of consciousness set against Life, Nature (Cosmos) and as if in power over it. The interjection of a ‘middleman’ between the need and its fulfilment operates the scarcity principle when used as a point of control. Keeping ourselves in the dark is essential for the false to pass off as if true and who has not got skin in the game? I find the metaphor of fig-leaf thinking over a sense of self-lack (lack of separate self-authorship), to demand the setting up of ‘external authorities’ by which to associate and align in as a sense of self-empowerment or protection (against true exposure). Perhaps the archetype-ture of our mythic personality construct is indeed a fairly… Read more »

binra
binra
Aug 7, 2018 12:49 PM
Reply to  BigB

PS: The ‘end of man’ is in his beginning – but known for the first time. (paraphrasing T.S Eliot). The revealing of what we have made (and be-lived) to our Self is the disentegration of the masking. All are called but few choose to listen… at this time.

geoffreyskoll
geoffreyskoll
Aug 7, 2018 7:51 PM
Reply to  BigB

We could have an interesting dialogue, but this is not the forum for it. Maybe we could do it on academia.edu. You could message me, and we could set up something. Search for Geoffrey R Skoll.

brankabrankoranka
brankabrankoranka
Aug 6, 2018 5:59 PM

Have you seen/read this, this is sick beyond believe. If this doesn’t wake up People massively nothing will.

France Passes Law Saying Children Can Consent To Sex With Adults

President Macron’s government has voted against having an age of consent in France, becoming the latest nation to give in to pressure from an international network of liberal activists determined to normalize pedophilia and decriminalize sex with children across the world.

Federal law in France now has no legal age of consent, meaning adults who have sex with children of any age will not be prosecuted for rape if the child victim is unable to prove “violence, threat, duress, or surprise.”

https://yournewswire.com/french-law-children-consent-sex/amp/?__twitter_impression=truth

homeslicez
homeslicez
Aug 6, 2018 10:54 PM

All age-based laws are arbitrary and should not exist.

Jen
Jen
Aug 7, 2018 6:02 AM

Just checked around Google and DuckDuckGo and found that the age of consent in France is 15 years of age. This was set in March 2018.

That YourNewsWire.com website is not a reliable site.

BigB
BigB
Aug 7, 2018 9:31 AM
Reply to  Jen

To abrogate the age of consent (below 15) is part of a longterm campaign that all the French intellectuals – including De Beauvoir, Sartre, Derrida, Barthes, Foucault, etc – backed. What is it with the French?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_petition_against_age_of_consent_laws

binra
binra
Aug 7, 2018 11:34 AM
Reply to  Jen

Thanks Jen for correcting the record. I do not know a ‘reliable site’ so much as diverse perspectives that suffer different blindspots. My sense of the assertion being made was that it made such an appeal to guilt-hate that I didn’t trust the package. There is no age related protection against corporately contrived social engineering – which is a kind of mind-grooming sedition into a managed ‘identity’ in place of true relationship lived. Excepting such residual parental and societal protections of real relationship that ARE being lived. I suspect adult/child sex is part of the capture and control of persons of influence. The abuse of others for private fantasy gratification is pervasive in many other forms that may not attract censure – or in old terms some sins are made sacred while others are normalised. The dissociative and destructive effect of using others or being used by others is poison… Read more »

jo pac
jo pac
Aug 6, 2018 5:40 PM

I truly wonder if Main Street citizens in Amerika will ever wake up?
Thanks for the article.

Mulga Mumblebrain
Mulga Mumblebrain
Aug 7, 2018 3:20 AM
Reply to  jo pac

The truth concerning the ecological Holocaust does seem to be percolating out, and The Great Awakening is at hand. Today a group of ‘mainstream’ scientists have published research that shews that the ludicrous, voluntary, pathetic ‘Paris target’ of keeping global average temperature rises to 2 degrees Celsius is insufficient to stop the world passing a ‘tipping point’ to runaway, unstoppable rises to four, five or more degrees Celsius increase. The current burning and baking of the entire Northern Hemisphere and a number of other weather and climate disasters clearly shew that which any interested observer has known for some years-that the IPCC Reports have downplayed the extremity of our predicament, in the search for consensus’ with denialist scum regimes like Austfailure and the Sordid Barbarians. The ‘tipping points’ and, more to the point, ‘points of no return’ were passed some time ago, most particularly the loss of Arctic sea ice… Read more »

vexarb
vexarb
Aug 6, 2018 5:29 PM

Down in the woods and undergrowth of the Alternative Media something is stirring. Andre Vltchek here and Rami Mazaheri on Saker Vineyard. Coincidence? Don’t think so. Capitalism has made a muckup just like in the 30s, poverty, financial insecurity and endless war.

Vltchek’s video on North Korea is beginning to drop pennies in the telephone of my head, and I am beginning to get the message about efficiency. All those new housing blocks are free: no rent to pay, no electricity bills, no income tax, no mortgage firms, no insurance forms, fewer middle men.

And I can’t forget these uncrowded trains, unjammed roads, fit young adults and clean, brightly dressed children. Too clean, tots too well dressed? Never been to Korea, but my family are sending me wotsups from India and it doesn’t look as clean and bright as Vltchek’s Korea — except for the Taj Mahal.

Francis Lee
Francis Lee
Aug 6, 2018 5:22 PM

”They are indoctrinated, but they think that they are free. Not only that, they don’t realize that they are deeply conditioned and brainwashed: they actually think that they are in a position to preach, obliged to enlighten others, instructing the world with what they have been taught.” I’m not sure that this is absolutely true, or it is at least a little overstated. Talk to ordinary folk about the society and system they live under and they will tell you it’s a racket. They know money talks, politicians are corrupt, much of the entertainment output of the media is crap, and all the ‘white man’s burden’ stuff is to them so much irrelevant bullshit. Social mobility is a day dream. Lived experience is a strong counter-tendency to propaganda as the East European communist states found out. How else do we explain the populist movements in Europe and the US. The… Read more »

Willem
Willem
Aug 6, 2018 6:55 PM
Reply to  Francis Lee

I consider it a compliment when a writer reminds you of Orwell. This is what Orwell said in his essay ‘looking back on the Spanish civil war’ When one thinks of all the people who support or have supported Fascism, one stands amazed at their diversity. What a crew! Think of a programme which at any rate for a while could bring Hitler, Petain, Montagu Norman, Pavelitch, William Randolph Hearst, Streicher, Buchman, Ezra Pound, Juan March, Cocteau, Thyssen, Father Coughlin, the Mufti of Jerusalem, Arnold Lunn, Antonescu, Spengler, Beverley Nichols, Lady Houston, and Marinetti all into the same boat! But the clue is really very simple. They are all people with something to lose, or people who long for a hierarchical society and dread the prospect of a world of free and equal human beings. Behind all the ballyhoo that is talked about ‘godless’ Russia and the ‘materialism’ of the… Read more »

binra
binra
Aug 6, 2018 7:20 PM
Reply to  Willem

Everyone protects their investments until they recognize the cost to them and disinvest of it, write it off or abandon it. Equality is something to live from. There is no communication excepting between equals – for otherwise it is merely a form of communication used to mask or manipulate in power struggle, self-reinforcement or justification. The use of language to manipulate or set the narrative extends to philosophy and ideology. One could say that the mind in its own spin, has subverted the true movement of communication – or life. The idea of sovereignty as true freedom of will is lost to the idea of overriding the will or suppressing and conforming it to ‘rules’. The latter is a slavery that believes itself free – and defends against true freedom as a feared and threatening loss of control or ‘face’. While many simply want enough to live a human life… Read more »

binra
binra
Aug 7, 2018 9:36 AM
Reply to  Francis Lee

Freedom can be defined negatively in terms of freedom from threat. Or positively in terms of freedom to act. But I believe that freedom is coincident with our mind – that is with our freedom to accept or not, the idea that we then MUST act from. The predatory intent to gain freedom to ‘do’ at the expense of others is the disposition of attack relative to others under masking strategy of private self interest. This Hobbesian world of kill or be killed is feared and believed by many to be the ‘truth’ running beneath a masking of moral wishfulness, make-believe and weakness. And so the ‘moral’ mind is mined for the leverage by which to manipulate the ‘weak-minded’ who lack the discipline that ‘honest’ fear-driven greed ensures. In a sense I see they act as a purifying agency for the emergence of a consciousness of awakened responsibility – because… Read more »

James Graham
James Graham
Aug 7, 2018 9:43 AM
Reply to  binra

Human freedom just means not under any orders or master. You can invoke it when you like or not.

binra
binra
Aug 7, 2018 1:00 PM
Reply to  James Graham

All thought given attention, acceptance and belief operates the ‘master’ from which actions proceed. There is no independence of self or experience from Idea – but there are self-contradictory concepts that generates a tyrannous thought system – as there are living Ideas that create in the image and likeness of their source and communicate the primary qualities of being. It is always up to you, where you look to find your self, but what you vote for will veto what you disregard. The authority problem is the root of all evil. The idea that we create our self is a self-contradiction. But that does not mean it cannot be given power, and suffered as if real. The decision to be free is aligning with a core truth of our nature, but letting that nature into our awareness is blocked by giving away of power to conditions. In other words we… Read more »

James Graham
James Graham
Aug 8, 2018 2:34 AM
Reply to  binra

binra I just told you human freedom is not under orders or in any order. It is not equivalent or “aligned with a core truth of our nature.” That is in order. Also I would not confuse the existence of anything or being with the natural properties and qualities they may or may not possess at one time and not at another. Existence is not a property. Although I’m a Marxist I know Hegel quite well. He says action or movement springs from the confrontation in conscience between what it is of and what it is not. There is no Kantian unknowable thing in itself in Hegel….true knowledge expresses relations between one existence, their properties and their others. What appears to be “contradictory” is explained away in terms of what it means to exist. A=A is not a movement. A to B is. Lenin referred to “the Hegelian pearl in… Read more »

James Graham
James Graham
Oct 6, 2018 12:18 PM
Reply to  binra

Hegel. Action or movement arises from the confrontation in conscience between what is or what we are and what is or what we are not. A to A is not a movement. A to B, an other, is. Action has no master. The human spirit is not natural…nature is in order.

binra
binra
Oct 6, 2018 7:54 PM
Reply to  James Graham

“Action or movement arises from the confrontation in conscience between what is or what we are and what is or what we are not.” (says Hegel?) In having learned to act out from beliefs that we are what we are NOT – (by the covering over and overriding of an original nature), we set up a reversal ‘consciousness’, where true Cause is effectively hidden and denied, by substitution of a narrative or mythic set of ’causes’ derived from meanings we assigned TO conditions and events outside an immediate sense of ‘mind – control’ that becomes the focal point to the defence of what we are NOT, (but believe true) against change perceived as destructive to The construct of a self and world is a virtual consciousness construct – but that is not to say it is not physically experienced as real. Without acquiring such a model the human organism itself… Read more »

James Graham
James Graham
Oct 7, 2018 10:00 AM
Reply to  binra

No. No. No. The line is from Alasdair MacIntyre, “Hegel on Faces and Skulls” “A Collection of Critical Essays-Hegel,” Edited by MacIntyre, Anchor, 1972. Page 232. Hegel claims existence is not a property…they’re not equivalent or synonymous. If I say I exist….then the OTHER of me is properties that may or may not be attributable to me at one time and not at another and OTHER existences. It’s about the historical development or movement of knowledge or the conscience of mind. To be reasonable you have to provide for some conception of movement or development…..or history. At the end of the “Philosophy of Mind,” Miller and Findlay, OUP, 1971, Hegel says, “it is the nature of the fact(of existence), the notion, which causes the movement or development, yet this same movement is equally the action of cognition.” Page 314 Hegel has 2 natures. The common one about the world of… Read more »

binra
binra
Oct 7, 2018 8:46 PM
Reply to  James Graham

Summary: We know our OWN existence in everything and everyone we ‘meet’ but while we hold ourself separate from Existence, ‘other-self’ is simply assigned ‘not self’ and is thus ‘other’ or ‘world’ of relations. That Self is NOT under control, is its Reason of Sanity or Wholeness. Wholeness is simply nothing added and nothing taken away. You can use the same term for transparency or direct and unobstructed knowing/being. The capacity of mind or thought to operate as doublethink or ‘split perception’ is the capacity to accept what is not (true) and act as if it is (true) to thus experience it as believable reality. This ‘false flag’ is a device by which to then operate an oppositional sense from artificial or arbitrary divisions when associated with fear and threat of pain (conflict) and loss (disconnection from or denial of sustenance and support). Once we assign the virtues, qualities and… Read more »

James Graham
James Graham
Oct 25, 2018 2:41 AM
Reply to  binra

You like to give yourself more work to do, don’t you? The words are in order. Just observe the order of what it is to know. You can invoke your freedom any time you like. You’re not under orders or a slave. Exists and property are 2 words and they’re not equivalent. You don’t OWN your existence…it’s you. What you OWN or possess is particular properties or attributes or interests. It’s because they are particulars that they do not exist. You can’t part exist just a bit…either you do or you don’t exist. And it has nothing to do with the measure wither it’s whole or in part or a property…it’s because you EXIST…that is the word and that is the order. Hegel is reconstituting REASON post-Kant’s critique of pure reason and…”the unknowable thing in itself.” This is Hegel’s proof that we truly do know. He’s not saying we can’t… Read more »

binra
binra
Oct 25, 2018 2:55 PM
Reply to  James Graham

Words can be taken to mean different things. If we can recognize the meanings in their context, then we don’t take them as an affront to our own preferred usage. The undefinable is also an Intimacy of being – or a transparency to being. In that sense everything you have experience of relation with is the having of your being – but of course language just separated having from being. It is a conceptual ‘separation’ only. I don’t apply or adhere to philosophical systems so much as reach for the word or phrase for the currently felt movement of a desire, that is both an ask and an answer. If Hegel speaks truth to my recognition, then great! If my handicapped daughter speaks truth, to my recognition, then great! Gratitude is a great attitude. So the true as I use the term is a relational coherence within a wholeness without… Read more »

James Graham
James Graham
Oct 27, 2018 8:55 AM
Reply to  binra

…or you could just try to exist and stop trying to be some other different person, trying to talk their way out of it. All existences or universals are infinite in Hegel. Say I write a book about 20 varieties of APPLES. Each time you come across that word you know it…because it exists. In order to attribute properties you’re required to have an existence to attribute them to. It’s the properties that bring the APPLES into the finite…their nature on the outside. So you have cox’s pippins, mac reds, golden delicious and granny smiths etc. The context changes….but they are still APPLES….and there is more than one. Conception is an actuality in Hegel…it’s practised, the mind or spirit works. If there’s going to be difference and movement from one state to the next you need separation. But that doesn’t mean there are no relations. On the contrary, if one… Read more »

binra
binra
Oct 28, 2018 10:51 AM
Reply to  James Graham

James. I feel an understanding in what you have said. Thankyou. A point I feel to offer is that an identity in separation (as conceiver), perceives only explicit relations to a subjective view as a self-referencing result. The subject-object split is also the self other-split and the dynamic of relation is the explicate ‘world to which the conceiver adapts, develops and defines as the intent to prevail over it or indeed survive it. To the mind of such an ‘order over chaos’, the apprehension of an Implicate order or wholeness in all its parts of no true separation, is unthinkable or unsupported by the experience in the physically (externally) defined sense. But to an awakened reference point from which a conceit can be evaluated as such, is a basis from which to ‘bracket’ or suspend beliefs, and definitions of presumed reality, so as to be re-aligned or repurposed to a… Read more »

binra
binra
Oct 28, 2018 11:21 AM
Reply to  James Graham

“…or you could just try to exist and stop trying to be some other different person, trying to talk their way out of it.” There is no trying to exist! You but chase your own tail! For NEVER have you created your own existence. The pseudo problem of ‘trying to exist’ is the ‘different’ person, narrative controlling their way into KEEPING the problem. If you would yield to that you already are, you would come back into your true inheritance – which because your creation is timeless, is your Inherence. But you cannot accept what you are unwilling to give. Nor will you escape the result of what you choose to give instead of an equal love. For love based on conditions is the hierarchy of levels, and the struggle within it for the escape from rejection and exclusion. The attraction of guilt is its use in pushing others down… Read more »