Who Doesn’t Love Identity Politics?
CJ Hopkins
If there is one thing that still unites Americans across the ever more intellectually suffocating and bitterly polarized political spectrum our imaginations have been crammed into like rush hour commuters on the Tokyo Metro, it’s our undying love of identity politics.
Who doesn’t love identity politics? Liberals love identity politics. Conservatives love identity politics. Political parties love identity politics. Corporations love identity politics. Advertisers, anarchists, white supremacists, Wall Street bankers, Hollywood producers, Twitter celebrities, the media, academia … everybody loves identity politics.
Why do we love identity politics? We love them for many different reasons.
The ruling classes love identity politics because they keep the working classes focused on race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and so on, and not on the fact that they (i.e., the working classes) are, essentially, glorified indentured servants, who will spend the majority of their sentient existences laboring to benefit a ruling elite that would gladly butcher their entire families and sell their livers to hepatitic Saudi princes if they could get away with it. Dividing the working classes up into sub-groups according to race, ethnicity, and so on, and then pitting these sub-groups against each other, is extremely important to the ruling classes, who are, let’s remember, a tiny minority of intelligent but physically vulnerable parasites controlling the lives of the vast majority of human beings on the planet Earth, primarily by keeping them ignorant and confused.
The political parties love identity politics because they allow them to conceal the fact that they are bought and paid for by these ruling classes, which, in our day and age, means corporations and a handful of obscenely wealthy oligarchs who would gut you and your kids like trout and sell your organs to the highest bidder if they thought they could possibly get away with it. The political parties employ identity politics to maintain the simulation of democracy that prevents Americans (many of whom are armed) from coming together, forming a mob, dismantling this simulation of democracy, and then attempting to establish an actual democracy, of, by, and for the people, which is, basically, the ruling classes’ worst nightmare. The best way to avoid this scenario is to keep the working classes ignorant and confused, and at each other’s throats over things like pronouns, white privilege, gender appropriate bathrooms, and the complexion and genitalia of the virtually interchangeable puppets the ruling classes allow them to vote for.
The corporate media, academia, Hollywood, and the other components of the culture industry are similarly invested in keeping the vast majority of people ignorant and confused. The folks who populate this culture industry, in addition to predicating their sense of self-worth on their superiority to the unwashed masses, enjoy spending time with the ruling classes, and reaping the many benefits of serving them … and, while most of them wouldn’t personally disembowel your kids and sell their organs to some dope-addled Saudi trillionaire scion, they would look the other way while the ruling classes did, and then invent some sort of convoluted rationalization of why it was necessary, in order to preserve democracy and freedom (or was some sort of innocent but unfortunate “blunder,” which will never, ever, happen again).
The fake Left loves identity politics because they allow them to pretend to be “revolutionary” and spout all manner of “militant” gibberish while posing absolutely zero threat to the ruling classes they claim to be fighting. Publishing fake Left “samizdats” (your donations to which are tax-deductible), sanctimoniously denouncing racism on Twitter, milking whatever identity politics scandal is making headlines that day, and otherwise sounding like a slightly edgier version of National Public Radio, are all popular elements of the fake Left repertoire.
Marching along permitted parade routes, assembling in designated “free speech areas,” and listening to speeches by fake Left celebrities and assorted Democratic Party luminaries, are also well-loved fake Left activities. For those who feel the need to be even more militant, pressuring universities to cancel events where potentially “violent” and “oppressive” speech acts (or physical gestures) might occur, toppling offensive historical monuments, ratting out people to social media censors, or masking up and beating the crap out of “street Nazis” are among the available options. All of these activities, by herding potential troublemakers into fake Left ghettos and wasting their time, both on- and off-line, help to ensure that the ruling classes, their political puppets, the corporate media, Hollywood, and the rest of the culture industry can keep most people ignorant and confused.
Oh, and racists, hardcore white supremacists, anti-Semites, and other far-Right wing nuts … my God, do they love identity politics! Identity politics are their entire worldview (or Weltanschauung, for you Nazi fetishists). Virtually every social, political, economic, and ontological phenomenon can be explained by reducing it to race, ethnicity, religion, or some other simplistic criterion, according to these “alt-Right” geniuses. And to render everything even more simplistic, each and every one of their simplistic theories can be subsumed into a meta-simplistic theory, which amounts to (did you guess it?) a conspiracy of Jews.
According to this meta-theory, this conspiracy of Jews (which is headquartered in Israel, but maintains offices in Los Angeles and New York, from which it controls the corporate media, Hollywood, and the entire financial sector) is responsible for … well, anything they can think of. September 11 attacks? Conspiracy of Jews. Financial crisis? Jews, naturally. Black on Black crime? Jews again! Immigration? Globalization? Gun control laws? Abortion? Drugs? Media bias? Who else could be behind it all but Jews?!
See, the thing is, there is no essential difference between your identity politics-brainwashed liberal and your Swastika-tattooed white supremacist. Both are looking at the world through the lens of race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, or some other type of “identity.” They are looking through this “identity” lens (whichever one it happens to be) because either they have been conditioned to do so (most likely from the time they were children) or they have made a conscious choice to do so (after recognizing, and affirming or rejecting, whatever conditioning they received as children).
Quantum physicists, Sufi fakirs, and certain other esoterics understand what most of us don’t, namely, that there is no such thing as “the Truth,” or “Reality,” apart from our perception of it. The world, or “reality,” or whatever you want to call it, is more than happy to transform itself into any imaginable shape and form, based on the lens you are looking at it through. It’s like a trickster in that regard. Look at “reality” through a racist lens, and everything will make sense according to that logic. Look at it through a social justice lens, or a Judeo-Christian lens, or a Muslim lens, or a scientific or a Scientologist lens, or a historical materialist or capitalist lens (it really makes no difference at all) … and abracadabra! A new world is born!
Sadly, most of us never reach the stage in our personal (spiritual?) development where we are able to make a conscious choice about which lens we want to view the world through. Mostly, we stick with the lens we were originally issued by our families and societies. Then we spend the rest of our fleeting lives desperately insisting that our perspective is “the Truth,” and that other perspectives are either “lies” or “errors.” The fact that we do this is unsurprising, as the ruling classes (of whatever society we happened to be born and socialized into) are intensely invested in issuing everyone a “Weltanschauung lens” that corresponds to whatever narrative they are telling themselves about why they deserve to be the ruling classes and we deserve to exist to serve them, fight their wars, pay interest on their loans, not to mention rent to live on the Earth, which they have claimed as their own and divided up amongst themselves to exploit and ruin, which they justify with “laws” they invented, which they enforce with armies, police, and prisons, which they teach us as children to believe is “just the way life is” … but I digress.
So, who doesn’t love identity politics? Well, I don’t love identity politics. But then I tend to view political events in the context of enormous, complex systems operating beyond the level of the individuals and other entities such systems comprise. Thus I’ve kind of been keeping an eye on the restructuring of the planet by global capitalism that started in the early 1990s, following the collapse of the U.S.S.R., when global capitalism (not the U.S.A.) became the first globally hegemonic system in the history of aspiring hegemonic systems.
Now, this system (i.e., capitalism, not the U.S.A), being globally hegemonic, has no external enemies, so what it’s been doing since it became hegemonic is aggressively destabilizing and restructuring the planet according to its systemic needs (most notably in the Middle East, but also throughout the rest of the world), both militarily and ideologically. Along the way, it has encountered some internal resistance, first, from the Islamic “terrorists,” more recently, from the so-called “nationalists” and “populists,” none of whom seem terribly thrilled about being destabilized, restructured, privatized, and debt-enslaved by global capitalism, not to mention relinquishing what remains of their national sovereignty, and their cultures, and so on.
I’ve been writing about this for over two years, so I am not going to rehash it all in detail here (this essay is already rather long). The short version is, what we are currently experiencing (i.e., Brexit, Trump, Italy, Hungary, et cetera, the whole “populist” or “nationalist” phenomenon) is resistance (an insurgency, if you will) to hegemonic global capitalism, which is, essentially, a values-decoding machine, which eliminates “traditional” (i.e., despotic) values (e.g., religious, cultural, familial, societal, aesthetic, and other such non-market values) and replaces them with a single value, exchange value, rendering everything a commodity.
The fact that I happen to be opposed to some of those “traditional” values (i.e., racism, anti-Semitism, oppression of women, homosexuals, and so on) does not change my perception of the historical moment, or the sociopolitical, sociocultural, and economic forces shaping that moment. God help me, I believe it might be more useful to attempt to understand those forces than to go around pointing and shrieking at anyone who doesn’t conform to my personal views like the pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
But that’s the lens I choose to look through. Maybe I’ve got it all assbackwards. Maybe what is really going on is that Russia “influenced” everyone into voting for Brexit and Donald Trump, and hypnotized them all with those Facebook ads into hating women, people of color, transsexuals, and the Jews, of course, and all that other “populist” stuff, because the Russians hate us for our freedom, and are hell-bent on destroying democracy and establishing some kind of neo-fascist, misogynist, pseudo-Atwoodian dystopia. Or, I don’t know, maybe the other side is right, and it really is all a conspiracy of Jews … transsexual, immigrant Jews of color, who want to force us all to have late-term abortions and circumcise our kids, or something.
I wish I could help you sort all that out, but I’m just a lowly political satirist, and not an expert on identity politics or anything. I’m afraid you’ll have to pick a lens through which to interpret “reality” yourself. But then, you already have, haven’t you … or are you still looking through the one that was issued to you?
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This is total class reductionist nonsense! Of course we have our own uniquenesses, but that in no way implies that we cannot cooperate with others for our mutual benefit. Nor does it mean that we can be more easily ‘herded’ if we embrace our identities. Ironically, what this author either misses or is deliberately ignoring is that reducing every individual to simply a member of one, oppressed class actually makes it much easier to control and dominate us. It also ignores the probability that humans naturally bond according to shared attributes and always will. So uniting despite our differences to defeat our oppressors should be the focus of our attention, and not this spurious attempt to sidetrack our thinking!
I cannot stand identity politics as I am white, male, hetero, intelligent and reasonable.
If you want to know who’s in charge, find out whom you’re not allowed to criticise. — Voltaire
https://thesaker.is/a-crash-course-on-the-true-causes-of-anti-semitism-part-ii-the-hunt-for-anti-semites/
A former inmate of a German death-camp, a Jew, once summed it up succinctly-‘Once an antisemite was someone who hated Jews, but today it is someone who the Jews hate’. Not all Jews, by any means, but the Zionazi elites, certainly.
It is nice to have my misgivings about the dread JQ taken away from me. This alleged conspiratorial body never formed what is known as PNAC then? They do not rule and sway as they see fit the body politic of the US and UK?
Not to say France, and Germany? So they are not able to steer and manage the evil that is NATO?
Henry Makow will be so disappointed.
One of the insurmountable problems with identity politics is the puritanical and hyper-judgemental tendency amongst too many of its self-appointed spokespersons.
One drunken tweet, one ancient transgression, one lack of insight into the labyrinthine sensitivites of certain groups and you are quite literally toast (if ID pureists have their way).
Paradoxically ID hardliners end up becoming obstacles to the very things they are trying to improve.
Identity conflict is the root of all evil. Mis-identification conflicts with true. True does not ‘fight back’ but can SEEM to be destructive to a self-assertion taken as a self-possession. And so, symbols of true conflict with symbols of false – with truth playing no part in a mind-at-war with itself.
Any interpretation is always OF “something” or “someone” and any mis-identification is by definition distorting or usurping the awareness of “true” or indeed the true of awareness. The attention given to a substitution for awareness of true is LOSS OF SELF (awareness) to illusion or self-image. ‘Narcissus’ relates to the forgetting of relational being in the wilful fixation in self-image or self-definition. That this operates the believed need of defence against attack is its emotional charge that of course substitutes for feeling-awareness or relational being.
You may feel know and recognize truth because it is written on your heart. That self-honesty is aligned or open to true recognition is a redundant statement but self-image or self-concept runs as the distorting filter through which we interpret everything. This includes the substitution of self-convicted guilt for honesty of relational being – and thus ‘self-honesty’ becomes associated with exposure and penalty and pain of loss. We thus ‘lock ourselves’ into a mask – and a masquerade – that protects self-illusion from the truth that undoes and thus heals and reintegrates, while the purpose of the mask substitutes for the desire of true relational being which is to know and be known in truth – as the expression of true desire which can be denied but cannot be eradicated because it is the Movement of being Life Itself and not something made by judgemental interpretation that works to make it something ELSE and hide it.
Truth cannot be translated into image or form and the form itself BE true. But the belief one HAS possession is the mis-identifiction be-lived as if true. But truth never leaves Itself – nor you – even though the journey away from yourself has been long and bitter, it is a journey in perception, not Fact. Yet we live and suffer our experience.
No communication can reach a determination to think alone, set apart and set over – or under – in self-specialness.
But the non-reinforcement of its identification can then extend a quality of being that holds the nature of being seen, heard, honoured and known – but as a quality beneath the radar of the machinations of a mind set in defence.
I completely support the recognition that freedom is conscious or awake to its thought in terms of self-definition (identity in relation to) or else it runs as ‘one who knows not what they do’. As the slave who believes slavery is freedom and freedom slavery. Illusions true and truth threatening. Fear strong and love weak.
There is NOWHERE else to go but to look at our foundational ‘thinking’, because persisting in the ‘mindset’ of a false sense of self goes NOWHERE – at cost of sharing in (living) where we actually are – and what we are the expression and embodiment of.
I stopped reading when you went off a rant about the “Jewish conspiracy”. Just take a look at the big players in many different areas: news media, publishing, social media corporations, Hollywood, Wall Street, Federal Reserve, politics, higher education, etc. When you look at the overall percentage of Jewish Americans (2 – 4% of the entire US population) vs the percentage of people who are Jewish who are the movers and shakers in these industries, you start to realize that Jewish control in the US is REAL. It isn’t a conspiracy — it is a fact. The fact that you have been conditioned like Pavlov’s dogs to tremble and disavow any notion of Jewish power when it is mentioned is proof that they are indeed in control. No other group is afforded the protection from criticism that Jews are. NO OTHER GROUP.
Everyone else is fair game. Any criticism of Jews (though none is really tolerated) all has to be predicated with disavowal of anti-semitism, explicity professed hatred of Hitler and Nazis, hand wringing over the horrors of the Holocaust and declartions of love for the state of Israel and its right to “defend itself”. Even then, you are risking career suicide (and maybe a small plane crash) if you dare it.
Are all Jews knowingly, directly involved in it? No. I know regular Jewish people who are just like everybody else — trying to pay their bills and take care of their kids. They aren’t sitting around plotting to take over the world. However, when you get into this notion of ENABLERS, a lot of Jews fall into that category. Although, I take the view that average Jews are just as much victims of Zionism as anyone else. They are raised with the idea that it is the Jews vs. the world. That if any criticism of Jews is allowed, it will lead to another Holocaust. Jewish leaders use this fear to control ordinary Jews. And if there isn’t enough anti-semitsm out there — they manufacture it. Just look at how many times swastikas are painted by Jews themselves. It is a fear tactic to keep the average Jews in line. The old “you are either with us or against us” routine. Not just a Jewish tactic, but the Jews have pretty much perfected that for centuries. That is what a racist ideology will do. When you have to convince your group to avoid assimilation at all costs, you have to convince them that they are superior to everyone else. So, yes, “the Jews” are behind a great deal of this. They believe that their strength lies in their genetic purity. In other words, they were basically Nazis before Hitler emulated their ideology. This is also why they push diversity so much. They think it weakens us. And, if we are honest, it does. It is easy to get along with your neighbors when they are just like you. Same culture, same religion, same values, etc. It doesn’t require much effort. The real test is when you have to live around people who are very different from yourself. You can unintentionally rub each other the wrong way. You won’t like some of their values or customs. You may disagree vehemently with their religion. It takes a certain level of maturity and also a strong sense of self to live in a diverse community. Not many people can do that. It isn’t that diversity is bad — it is just that it is more difficult to navigate. The Jews know this and this is why they push “identity” politics.
You’ll notice that Jews are always for separation of church and state. Not in Israel, though. They believe in racial equality, except in Israel. They support immigration — not in Israel, though. They have one set of rules for themselves and another set for non-Jews. We can pretend that this isn’t the case, but pretending doesn’t change reality. They also routinely put the welfare of Israel above the welfare of the US (or any other nation that they live in). Again, we can be politically correct and refuse to mention this, but, denying reality does not make it any less true. And until we come to grips with the reality of our situation, we do not have a snowball’s chance in hell of actually fixing what is wrong. That is the equivalent of noticing a giant tumor on a patient and instead focusing on their hangnail and pretending that if you just treat that — the patient will get better. Sure, they might slightly improve — but they are still going to die if you don’t fix the potentially deadly problem. Unfortunately, it requires that we have some courage to say the difficult things and that we have skin thick enough to handle the inevitable charges of anti-semitism that will be thrown up as a defense mechanism. If we don’t have that courage, maybe we do deserve to live like indentured servants while the Kushners/Rothschilds/Soros of the world (and their lackey Trump) keep plugging away at their dreams of world domination — just like the Nazis they so clearly idolize once tried to do.
I think the point is you don’t combat the restrictive divisive aims of identity politics by blaming it on the Jews!
Of course you dont! But the author quite needlessly caricatured genuine criticism of some Jewish-directed divisive propaganda (eg, ant-Muslimism during the rape of Iraq, demonisation of Hamas, Hezb’Allah and Palestinians generally as “terrorists”, demonization of Dr.Assad, demonization of the Iranian govt, demonization of JCorbyn as “antisemitic”, etc, etc. He did this by deliberately conflating the genuine criticism with the frankly ridiculous; as I pointed out in my reply te Mog on this thread, by separating out the genuine points and casting away the author’s wilder fancies about critics “blaming the Jews for just about anything you can think of”.
It is vital to emphasise that the Evil machinations of the Zionazi elites, both the open manipulation and control of the corrupt Western elites, and the covert conspiracies to do so, and interfere around the would, are not blamed on all Jews. That falls into the Zionazi elite’s ‘antisemitism’ trap.
I heart CJ Hopkins. It is a huge problem that many of the best alternative news sites, like Moon of Alabama or the Off-Guardian, are populated, below the line, by anti-semites and conspiratorial fantasists like yourself. And no, I am not talking about critics of Israeli politics or parapolitical researchers. There is a difference…
quoting from post above:
The fact that you have been conditioned like Pavlov’s dogs to tremble and disavow any notion of Jewish power when it is mentioned is proof that they are indeed in control.
Don’t be ridiculous. People shrink from those who accuse “the Jews” because they don’t want to be associated with people who think blaming entire racial or religious groups for the actions of some individuals is a good move.
Don’t try to corrupt this discussion into some hate rant please. Read the article again. The point seems to have passed you by
I assumed this was edited to expose the need to be SEEN to be actively or openly supportive to the ‘power that can make or break’ a career or reputation. But it seems to actually be made by the Telegraph – (?)
Anyone can lie, but only power can enforce it over true.
Is such power given by us or taken from us?
Does that answer depend on whether we align with someone else’s actions or against them?
The accusing in ‘others’ of one own open acts is a wilful blindness or dissociative state.
Enforcing wilful blindness keeps the mind and world in a darkness by which illusions rule over true.
The slaved mind cannot truly see because is trained and conditioned not to see anything but its ‘freedom’ relative to unspeakable evils.
purest gobbledegook, as is every one of your outings. it’s almost as if it’s the output of a computer algorithm, driven by a random number generaror.
So you do not see the repeated standing ovations as ‘needing to be seen compliant’? What do you see?
The video was cut and reassembled – no? Such a hugely popular man…
Your refusal to engage a point hides behind ‘put-down’.
The seeding of anti-Jewish reaction is necessary to maintain the ‘Jewish identity’ across otherwise great diversity of racial and ideological backgrounds. But you’d know that well enough already.
If the rest of your comments were relevant and concise, as this one is, there would be no cause for complaint. It’s the seventeen paragraphs of meaningless New-Age verbiage that usually follow the single relevant one, that raise questions about their provenance.
Evasive manoeuvre successfully completed.
If you cannot, or care not to understand, why judge?
So I don’t offer support or reinforcement for your chosen ‘identity’?
But I do offer support and reinforcement for your freedom to choose.
That’s part of knowing and living my own.
Judging others always belittles the one who judges.
What you give out, sets the measure of your return.
I rest in the value of what I write whether or not anyone is looking where I am coming from.
There is a power that does not rest on the disempowering or invalidating of others.
All conflict stems from a conflicted identification – but takes forms that hide the cause.
Perhaps ‘power by deceit’ will teach us this, whether it knows it serves such a function or not. Because it reveals itself as the manipulation and generation of ‘identity’ manipulation as a disempowerment.
But only if we use the experience to ignite the desire to uncover and live a true identification.
… and suddenly, you’re back to meaningless New-Age verbiage and pure gobbledegook.
But maybe I’m just not intellectually equipped to appreciate such an endless stream of scintillating discourse.
Honesty would admit to not understanding or not wanting to look, but smear and put-down hides honesty in the ‘protection’ of an identity construct.
I have respect for your personal view, even if I may not always share it.
New age garbage is just a version of garbage that has accrued upon a core idea of the end of an old Age and the opening within a new perspective at a most fundamental level.
Garbage is where the new idea is put into the old wine bottle framework, so as to exchange awakening for another cycle of delay in garbage or in terms of this page; identity politics.
The ability to mark and censor or deny any attention to information other than restating the judgement runs as an automatic protection, or automatic mind.
Because such identity assertion works as a sleepwalking substitution for conscious responsibility, it gives power away to the ideas and rules under which it feels the protection of a sense of separation and judgement over others. But unlike the free discernment of aligning in the living purpose of the moment, judgement gives a negative charge of identifying against denied and rejected facets of self SEEN or associated with the other, and thus gives power to what it hates or fears while SEEMING to be apart from and set over and against it.
The ‘New Age’ is the re-awakening within the psycho-physical nature of being from the Racket of identity in and under fear – that seeks to escape and avoid it responsibility for fear by covering over fears and denying them in self by fixating upon ‘otherness’ as the source of conflict. So it is really only the willingness to see the situation with new eyes or from a new reference point.
One cannot resolve a problem within the framework of the problem – but one CAN invest energy and identity in the framework of the problem so as to ensure it will NEVER be resolved. And if the resolution of conflict is threatening to your ‘bottom line’ of identified power, possession and status then you WANT the problem and actively cultivate and protect under guise of defeating the ‘Greatest Threats and Evils to the World and to Human Civilisation’ (Or to any specific group identity), under whose banner any weakening or undermining of such ‘morally righteous’ cause MUST be denied awareness, denied a voice, walled out and declared and enforced as ‘out of bounds’.
I also disavow any notion of the power of reptiles from outer space when it is mentioned. Is that proof that they are in control?
Sheesh.
No, because there is no evidence for reptiles from outer space — but plenty of evidence for the malign influence of Anglo Zio Capitalism.
I see your point, but I was addressing the form of the argument: Please feel free to insert any group you like instead of “reptiles from outer space”. The argument that the fact that nobody says that a certain group of people is in control PROVES that they ARE in control is not very intelligent, I am afraid.
I hold that ‘US power’ as a phrase should NOT indiscriminately incriminate or smear the people of that nation. And so likewise the phrase ‘Jewish power’ needs NOT to be used as a racial identity or it feeds into incitement of hate and violence that works the ‘justifications’ and reinforcements FOR aligning under or conforming to ‘power’ working through the Jewish identity.
Anti-‘Semitism’ (note that ‘anti-Jewish’ is not used) is necessary for the maintaining of the Jewish Identity AS a means to power over and through it.
‘Enemy’ is likewise necessary to the maintaining of a ‘protection racket’. This can be any and every kind of threat.
This is not to say there are not enmities arising from conflicting and competing interests as well as inherited blood feud.
The influence of inherited and culturally transmitted fears and hatreds is probably the most under-estimated and the most unconscious.
The attempt to ‘rationalise’ life in terms of the surface awareness of wishful thinking that seeks to escape personal responsibility for thought is the ‘narrative identity’ that is effectively a self-evasion masked in terms of a personal and collective identity. And the demand for unconsciousness in forms of seeming power and protection invites and forms the basis for subjection under tyrannous thought, feeling, and experience.
Addressing the corruption of power cannot be ‘the pot calling the kettle black’. But a reference point in shared consciousness from which a deceit or mind-trap is revealed as nothing else.
Whatever intent, motive or purpose operates in the minds of others, our own is our freedom to accept and align in. Fixating on or giving undue attention to the hateful serves its becoming in us. The identity set AGAINST, is defined in and by what it hates, envies or fears. This is to re-iterate what I understand from Jesus’ saying “Resist ye not evil!” – because what we resist, persists and by like reaction takes possession of its host unawares.
In ‘overcoming evil’ is no sin incurred but only divine duty!
“In 1932-3, the years of the great famine which followed the forced collectivisation of the land, I travelled widely in the Soviet Union, writing a book which was never published. I saw entire villages deserted, railway stations blocked by crowds of begging families, and the proverbial starving infants. . . . [T]hey were quite real, with stick-like arms, puffed up bellies and cadaverous heads. I reacted to the brutal impact of reality on illusion in a manner typical of the true believer. I was surprised and bewildered—but the elastic shock-absorbers of my [Communist] Party training began to operate at once. I had eyes to see, and a mind conditioned to explain away what they saw. This “inner censor” is more reliable and effective than any official censorship. . . . ~ Arthur Koestler
The Aztecs structured their identity on saving the world or at least delaying its Age-ending catastrophe by means of specifically enacted ritual human sacrifice. All other tribes were warred upon and subjugated to their own role as ‘divinely’ chosen. At one event 80,000 were killed. The power of belief is the power to make the world we live. Once an ‘evil’ is given power to set a ‘divine’ identity, it operates AS IF the power for Good. It isn’t when ‘good people do nothing’ but when people presume themselves ‘good’ and see nothing but the evils or sins of ‘others’.
The freedom to gift our world and our fellow being is the freedom to extend the gift OF being – which knows itself in all that is – without attacking or demonising or giving power of a negative charge to all that is NOT. This opens the way for extending a true identification or recognition. Or rather for the true of life to move through us and waken from ‘evil dreams’ by opening a point of true Sanity from which to live.
The first rule of Jewish Identity Politics is, you do not talk about Jewish Identity Politics, on pain of being labelled an “anti-semite”, and banished to the outer darkness.
Nicholas Lysson — Holocaust and Holodomor
Well if you are a ‘no one’ then you can – but will immediately be associated with the worst of humanity.
The Jewish identity is also ‘worked’ by Jewish ‘power interests’ upon Jewish people. While racism or self-specialness comes into it, I see the ‘cartel of power’ as being willing to use anyone and anything as a means to get and maintain such power.
This is the fundamental division in terms of active purpose is it not? The striving for power that subordinates all else to its goal, is the blind mind of self-illusion. While it is fashionable to use terms like psychopath, sociopath and narcissist as pejorative or terms of guilt calling for punishment, the mob identity works the pharmakoi or scapegoat magic of hiding and denying the hatred in our selves.
In contrast to the sickness of a hate-management or guilt ‘economy’ is the willingness to align truly by seeking the reference point from which to correctly identify and undo delusions.
Delusions of power are not without power, for nothing given power by the mind that holds all meaning is powerless. But the power to make powerless, as if power over life, is to be ruled by hatred under the belief that defiance is freedom, and that attack is salvation.
Any communication that actually serves healing, will be attacked rather than engaged in AS communication because true communication (and relationship) threatens the identity in self-specialness.
And this applies to all, even if some exemplify the pattern of denial in recognisable forms.
It is the mind of hate and denial that is first to export or outsource its motivations onto others and direct attention in a call for hate and incite the ‘throwing of stones’.
Learning to recognize the patterns and devices of deceit cannot ONLY apply to ‘others’. But rather, the recognition of ourself in others serves the uncovering and undoing of our own unmindful reactive complicity in hate.
Where the ‘self-special’ seek offence, the willingness for a true alignment in being is vigilant against the use of guilt as a basis from which to claim power in appeal for sympathy and ‘moral’ superiority or justified vengeance.
The fear-belief in powerlessness and lack MUST seek outside itself and cannot know what it does because its is driven by a mis-identification, clung to and protected against exposure to the light of awareness. Such ‘power’ rules out the communication that would expose its lack of true foundation by setting the mind against itself and usurping dialogue with defence – or rather with attack, for in power struggle, attack is the best form of defence regardless what form or ruse it takes.
The politics of identity and the identity of politics traps people within the matrix. The divide and rule of tribal identity, as reactive to the rulers and their control becomes equally controlling and divisive, by enforcing a new set of rules to follow. When all we wanted was freedom..
Franz Fanon
:In order to assimilate the culture of the oppressor and venture into his fold, the colonized subject has to pawn some of his own intellectual possessions. For instance, one of the things he has had to assimilate is the way the colonialist bourgeoisie thinks. This is apparent in the colonized intellectual’s inaptitude to engage in dialogue. For he is unable to make himself inessential when confronted with a purpose or idea. On the other hand, when he operates among the people he is constantly awestruck. He is literally disarmed by their good faith and integrity. He is then constantly at risk of becoming a demagogue. He turns into a kind of mimic man who nods his assent to every word by the people, transformed by him into an arbiter of truth. But the fellah, the unemployed and the starving do not lay claim to truth. They do not say they represent the truth because they are the truth in their very being.
During this period the intellectual behaves objectively like a vulgar opportunist. His maneuvering, in fact, is still at work. The people would never think of rejecting him or cutting the ground from under his feet. What the people want is for everything to be pooled together. The colonized intellectual’s insertion into this human tide will find itself on hold because of his curious obsession with detail. It is not that the people are opposed to analysis. They appreciate clarification, understand the reasoning behind an argument, and like to see where they are going. But at the start of his cohabitation with the people the colonized intellectual gives priority to detail and tends to forget the very purpose of the struggle – the defeat of colonialism. Swept along by the many facets of the struggle, he tends to concentrate on local tasks, undertaken zealously but almost always too pedantically. He does not always see the overall picture. He introduces the notion of disciplines, specialized areas and fields into that awesome mixer and grinder called a people’s revolution. Committed to certain frontline issues he tends to lose sight of the unity of the movement and in the event of failure at the local level he succumbs to doubt, even despair. The people, on the other hand, take a global stance from the very start. “Bread and land: how do we go about getting bread and land?” And this stubborn, apparently limited, narrow-minded aspect of the people is finally the most rewarding and effective model.”
―
Pity that CJ mars his largely persuasive essay by defending homophobia, and by offering an extreme, grotesquely mis-characterised description of the philosophical position of idealism (which doesn’t actually assert that nothing is real, hard truth doesn’t exist, and any description of the world is as valid as any other. Study the astonishing life-work of one of the most impressive quantum physicists currently active, Tom Campbell of ‘My Big TOE’ fame, for more insight on the rapidly resurging philosophical position of idealism amongst younger physicists. Quiet paradigm-shift in the hardest of hard sciences going on there, folks! And entirely based on replicable, falsifiable experimental data).
The otherwise-excellent Neil Clark also holds – last time I checked – that state-imposed death penalties are an essential part of civilised society. Sic!
I put these obviously irrational glitches down to a rule of thumb: that everyone, without any exceptions at all, has blind spots and hot buttons, and once these are in play even the most intellectually and morally impressive of us goes right off the rails of reality, promptly. This embarrassing human weakness is just one of those lugubrious facts of life-as-it-actually-is. Even mahatma Chomsky – no sark intended! – is still clinging to his ridiculous, research-free assertion that 11/9 was more or less as the current official cospithirry pretends, and not a false flag. Going to be especially painful for Noam if he ever takes on board the detailed evidence that – yes – it was a false flag; and yes, as objective evidence also suggests very strongly, it was originated and steered into existence by zionist Israelis and their sympathisers amongst the US ruling ‘elite’.
EVERYONE has their own selection of ridiculous blind-spots/hot-buttons. And no, you’re not likely to be too aware of your own, even when others can see them en claire. The clue is in the name. It takes a whole lot of painful introspection, assisted by the guidance of loving and tactful friends, to get even a partial handle on your own. I’m still working on realising my own BS/HBs consciously, even as I’m pushing 80. LOL!
Why do you say CJ is defending homophobia??
This quantum guru Tom Campbell seems to be quite a character. A real cosmic visionary – who prides himself on being “presently, and for the past 20 years, [..] at the heart of developing US missile defense systems.”
Yes, I had an email conversation with Tom about this, but didn’t get a satisfactory answer. Another example of an irrational blind-spot marring an otherwise admirable record.
On re-reading the passage, I see that it can be construed differently. My error, perhaps. More unequivocal phrasing needed, maybe?
Who doesnt love identity politics? I dont. I know who I am. Like this man from Algeria:
BBC interviewer: So you live in an Arab country though your parents were not Arab and you love French culture — doesnt that give you an identity crisis?
Interviewee: I know who I am.
I don’t either. IdPol is as nothing: beneath my current threshold.
You were correct until you did the blame the Jews schtick. The Jews are at the top all of these big things you speak of the gun control people the pro abortion people (I seem to be one of only a few socialists who is against abortion except in extreme circumstances) the pro lgbtq stuff the pro white nationalism the anti racism stuff…….all Jewish controlled. Jut do a little look at anything that matters and you’ll find a shekel grabber involved
I seem to be one of only a few socialists who is against abortion except in extreme circumstances
Indeed, you are one of very few.
Most “socialists” regard the idea that women’s bodies should be state property, as a mediaeval grotesquerie too self-evidently offensive as to merit serious comment.
There are, in fact, no “pro-abortion people”, only people who believe that women’s bodies and lives are theirs to control as they see fit, in any society which claims to have transcended serfdom and slavery.
Identity politics is practiced to cultivate ‘vote banks’: a group of some identity which is supposed to vote as one. For this voters have to be kept dumb as sheep, in need of a Shepard and a few watch dogs.
The term ‘holographic paradigm’ comes to mind.
We’re all connected, whether we like it or not.
Problem is, ignorance and tunnel vision block our perception of those connections.
And the result is chaos.
How easily you are all impressed by Hopkins’ take on the realities of existence on this planet in the 21st Century. Viewing all this through Hopkins’ Lens will present him as a genius as you sink further into the pit of despair that comes of neither finding any real answer to the problems of existence or discovering a great philosophy of life that will sustain you through this epoch of confusion and turmoil. However, take heart in knowing that there is a ‘lens’ through which you will be able to view everything with clarity and that will inform you of how to proceed from here – the truth is, however, that you have yet to find it. . . . .
Here it is.
As close as your breath.
As far away as your hubris.
http://www.headless.org/english-welcome.htm
Everything CJ Hopkins writes is brilliant.
Identity politics kept the Kavanaugh hearing focused on what happened or didn’t happen at a party decades ago and not on his role in drafting the Patriot Act.
So job done.
It does not take much to shine in those circles. Look at David Frum, for example at the Atlantic. He coins the absurd term ‘axis of evil’ or was that asskiss of evil? And he reaches virtual neocon sainthood, with endless fartcatching dinners and obsessive self-abuse in neocon think tanks. His only contribution since has been to spend time and others’ money trying to smear the Chinese with the claim they are ‘invaders’ because they fought with internal Uighur tribesmen. I fear K is a smarter and more successful Frum with similar sincerity..
this, Edwige, is what i fell out with my identity-politics obsessed wife over. not permanently, of course, but the twisting of reality is being done in some clever ways, these days. old allegiance is discarded in favour of concepts that people i know would have run a mile from previously..why? because Trump.
it’s fascinating in that way you’d be fascinated if strapped next to a volcano or something..black has indeed become white. war is becoming peace.
Because O’Bama, mulatto became black.
There is much here that is perceptive (and entertaining). Too bad it is marred by a
philosophical idealism concerning the nature of reality which, ironically, fits in with
Nazi ideology, that there is no objective truth, hence the technique of the Big Lie, etc.
joe kaye – wow, that’s quite a leap Joe. CJ acknowledging a rather basic aspect of our human condition, that we each interpret the world and thus “reality” through the “lens” we have either unwittingly inherited, or more consciously chosen somehow in your mind – (“fits in with Nazi ideology” to use your words?
When a U.S. drone kills someone in Yemen the only knowable aspect of the “objective reality” of that event often ends with the event itself (did it or did it not happen?) – with all future explanations, denials, rationals, excuses, amounting to various forms of spin on the matter, official and non-official. I am quite aware of the “lens” through which I tend to interpret such a report, as it is hard won over decades of reading, research and 4 trips into war zones and much introspection. I will first assume it is the reports from the victims of U.S. illegal immoral military violence that are telling the truth and not the representatives of the U.S. government. My “lens” is shaped by decades of experience in attempting to understand and get to the “truth of” immoral American global violence, having waded through countless official lies in doing so, while also talking face to face with victims.
However, the “America can do no wrong” crowd will see the report through a very different “lens” that allows them to filter out such routine U.S. barbarism as something unthinkable to our asserted “humanitarian” intentions and christian morality, and in so doing assume that is the victims who are lying. I really don’t think CJ is suggesting we can’t “know” whether the drone strike in my example “happened,” rather that how each of us “interpret” the information available to us will be based less upon that acknowledged physical “fact” and more upon the “lens” through which we tend to interpret the world. Just my take on CJ’s position.
From the article:
‘According to this meta-theory, this conspiracy of Jews (which is headquartered in Israel, but maintains offices in Los Angeles and New York, from which it controls the corporate media, Hollywood, and the entire financial sector) is responsible for … well, anything they can think of. September 11 attacks? Conspiracy of Jews. Financial crisis? Jews, naturally. Black on Black crime? Jews again! Immigration? Globalization? Gun control laws? Abortion? Drugs? Media bias? Who else could be behind it all but Jews?!’
I wonder if Hopkins has read Atzmon’s work or would care to respond to it, as the case is made that identitiy politics itself emerged from, and was promoted by a primarily Jewish intellectual movement. (?) ‘Jewish’ politics is the quintessence of identitarianism, according to Atzmon.
Or is he just caught in a ‘meta-theory’ making unfounded ‘simplifications’?
Relatedly, there is Griffin’s masterly dissection of Sunstein’s essay, ‘Cognitive Infiltration’ currently available to read free on Unz:
http://www.unz.com/book/david_ray_griffin__cognitive-infiltration/
I wonder if/how Griffin’s points of analysis support or discredit the ‘meta-theory’ satirised by Hopkins, and whether instead of ‘headquarters’,’offices’, and top down ‘control’, there might be a degree of straight forward ‘in-group’ identity interests (i.e. tribalism) at play ?
mog, yes tribal thinking is the glue of groups. Re your clip above, I do not believe that “Jews are responsible for anything one can think of” — but I do believe that a tightly knit “tribe” of Anglo Zio Capitalists (both Jewish, Christian and Muslim) are responsible specifically for these items in your list above:
“this conspiracy …which is … in Israel, … in Los Angeles and New York, [and London] from which it controls the corporate media, Hollywood, and the … financial sector… is responsible for … September 11 attacks … Financial crisis? … Immigration [recent waves from countries destroyed by AZC armies] … Globalization … Drugs [eg AZC poppy fields in Afghanistan] … Media bias… Who else could be behind it all ?!’
Thanks for that link, Mog. I had been wanting to read this book.
There are likely deep biological roots to self-identification. It is glaringly obvious in the animal world, and of distinct survival advantage. Intraspecies shunning can be seen to derive from minor visible differences. But humans with their cleverness try very hard to game identifiers and successfully so. Tapping in to innate xenophobia, or what is left after much effort to snuff it out, must work politically or it would not be done.
Nowadays it is oh so subtle, but the often unspoken tendencies are still there and exploitable.Following how ambitious pols play the game parallels following the money by the forensic investigator. Willie Sutton had impeccable logic, and I am sure he would find politics entertaining if there were money in it – and there is.
So Corbyn is an anti-Semite because he has human empathy for the Palestinians and it might thwart his ambitions if the fecal flinging can be made to stick in the minds of the voter, who can be counted on to be misled. The MSM makes much of Trump’s Germanic ancestry because there might be capital in it etc.
How many admit to immediately calculating the origin of a surname before knowing anything else about a prospective acquaintance, employee, or professional?
As long as the best predictor of future performance is past performance, in its broadest sense, identity politics will continue with vigour, no matter how much cognitive dissonance there is between what people are taught and are supposed to do, and what their instincts might be.
Manipulators (any of us who seeks to coerce an outcome rather than arrive or unfold through open relationship) are seeking out and tapping into hidden (unconscious or unacknowledged) fears, shames and guilts – and feeding the intent to inflate such a sense of self-lack into postures of identity-assertion that are but a masking defence against self-exposure. Terror (inducing fear) is one of the ways to defend a mask – particularly when so identified in mask as to equate it with life – perhaps under noble ideals of freedom and power of protection. Another is the ‘victim’ as the appeal for sympathy and vengeance. The expression of hate is not accounted as such when interfering in the elections or choices of others ‘for their own good’. And so generating ‘evils’ works the framework in which the unwary give willingness freely to hate agenda under belief they are ‘saving the world’ or eradicating ‘disease’.
The development of the human psyche can indeed find correlations with a catastrophic past that provided the ‘mythological’ archetypes. The overlay of a ‘conscious’ rational mind upon such a monstrous past is part of airbrushing it to make a ‘rational’ world seem believable. But the underlying ‘identity structures’ are not rendered inactive just by being put out of mind. On the contrary, a falsely predicated sense of reason limits its consciousness as away of making its experience ‘fit’ its own rationalising defences – and part of this is to invalidate and block any information that does not fit it presumed rationale.
The idea of embracing one’s shadow or at least opening the honesty of noticing and owning what is ours, is a key shift from the persistence of a self-blinded ‘light’ that presumes to know the problem and correct it in others.
The movement of Creation is a creating Universe – that is – we are a creative extension of a creating universe. In limiting consciousness under a flight-response to rage and terror, we become armoured against further change or movement – in an identity of ‘survival’ or persistence of a fragmented psyche – seeking to become whole through external manipulations that redistribute psychic energy (guilt and blame) via power struggle played across the broad spectrum of an intent to dominate, prevail or resist and oppose.
No one will open the capacity to look on their own identifications without moving through the bounds set by fear.
The personal, family and cultural – and even species-wide (biological) conditioning is our ‘curriculum’ for the undoing of a fragmented psyche. Hiding it while blaming others piles up denial in the body, the family, the society and the living environment. Under the old purpose, the disempowering of others by inducing them to self-division, doubt, vulnerability to false promise or reaction into dependence, gains the ‘top place’ in a prison world. Selling others down the river does not buy freedom, but only a deeper slavery masked in more desperate denials.
There are key patterns that become obvious to the ability to notice. But the perpetual engagement of a restless, shifting or diverted mind has little free attention and little inclination to pause and give attention. Thus an actual identity breakdown offers a true opportunity for re-awakening self-responsibility while passing through exposure to the usually masked and hidden fears.
If I SEES that an identity is NOT who I am, I am no longer one with it as presumed reality. If I still use it despite recognizing it is in some sense false, it is because I believe it serves or protects me in some way that I haven’t yet SEEN, and so growing in the desire to see is the staying present in focus amidst whatever ‘triggers and shifts of identity are going on. So I say I don’t love identity politics – but find love is the nature of a shared identity. Not the imposition of any ‘should’ but the aligning in freedom and the extension of freedom, because the only way to know I Have, is to Give. And the experience of lacking self is a direct reflection of a miser-y or refusal and unwillingness to give.
Singing can only be truly remembered in the singing. Living can only be truly remembered in the living. The nature of love is in complete reversal to the manipulative substitutions that take its name in vanity. But love of self in image is not even a true self loving – because the experience of such acceptance immediately and automatically shines or goes out to your world.
Division begins with an induced self-attack, hidden and covered over by the narrative of a ‘necessary survival’.
Regardless how patchy, and untrue. It’s your story an by sticking to it, you give it power to unstick you from feared truth.
Swiftian.