64

Happenings in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave

Edward Curtin

There’s something happening here
What it is ain’t exactly clear.”
Buffalo Springfield

The Sunday newspaper had been left on the park bench. Its book page had lists of best-sellers, as if numbers two through ten could be the “best” along with number one. Absurdities were everywhere for the taking.

On the Non-Fiction Hardcover list, numbers 3, 5, and 10 each had the word fuck in the title.

The books were published by two old and respected publishing houses: Harper and Little Brown. However, something was odd, for the word fuck was spelled f*ck. These books were about hope, acceptance, and living the good life, cliché topics in a feel-good culture: The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, Everything is F*cked, and Calm the F*ck Down.

It seemed you had to be fucked first before you could accept the hope that the good life was coming your way.

He wondered if these publishing houses thought that by eliminating the “u” they kept their hands clean and were not descending into the gutter with hoi polloi, while simultaneously titillating potential readers.

Did they think readers would be offended by the word fuck, but would not be by f*ck?

Then it occurred to him that he didn’t know what the fuck non-fiction books were anyway. Maybe he had been wrong all his life and the opposite of up was non-up, not down.

*

On every table in the seaside resort’s breakfast room there was a brightly colored flower in a clear watered vase. When he picked it up to smell the orange blossom, there was no smell and the water didn’t move. He imagined an ersatz form of plastic happiness, a conjurer’s delight, where everything was a trick, nothing moved, not even water.

*

Leaving the Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton in southern California where white and black Marines were regularly fighting and there were even some killings never reported by the press, the two young Marines escaped the tense and claustrophobic atmosphere on a weekend pass.

It was early February 1967, and they took an overnight bus up the coast to San Francisco where they wandered around and found a breakfast restaurant near Union Square. There they read in the newspaper that for the week of January 12-19 the U.S. military had suffered its highest casualty count so far in Vietnam: 144 killed, 1,044 wounded, and 6 missing-in-action. It jolted them awake more than the coffee.

Later that afternoon, the two naifs wandered into the Haight-Ashbury district where they were startled by the first waves of acid-dazed hippies, who would soon arrive in hoards for the “summer of love.” In the evening when they visited a bar for some beers, the waitress who delivered their drinks was topless. While they regarded this slight anomaly with manly indifference, she must have noticed their military haircuts that stood out among the longhairs, and so she served them buttons with their beers.

The buttons read: Vietnam Love It Or Leave It.

Heading back to the base, they knew where they didn’t want to go.

*

The young man was studying for a PhD. He was intent on learning what made the world and people tick. He was attending a small seminar at the home of his professor, a famous German emigre who had worked for the Rand Corporation and U.S. Intelligence.

Each of the five students was to give a short presentation on the subject of fake news and the issue of knowledge, since the course concerned the sociology of knowledge.

The student began his presentation by quoting a famous philosopher’s words:

“In formulating any philosophy, the first consideration must always be: What can we know? That is, what can we be sure we know, or sure that we know we knew it, if indeed it is all knowable. Or have we simply forgotten it and are too embarrassed to say anything? Descartes hinted at the problem when he wrote, ‘My mind can never know my body, although it has become quite friendly with my legs.’ By “knowable,” incidentally, I do not mean that which can be known by perception of the senses, or that which can be grasped by the mind, but more that which can be said to be Known or to possess a Knownness or Knowability, or at least something you can mention to a friend.”

The student paused and the eminent professor said, “So very interesting. Who is that philosopher?”

The student replied, “Woody Allen.”

“He is very perceptive,” said the professor, “and yet I have never heard of him. I will have to read his work.”

The student realized he was in good hands with such U.S. intelligence and Rand Corporation experts, so he asked the professor’s wife for another glass of the German wine she was serving and toasted his good fortune with a wry grin.

None of the other students got the joke.

*

A young man was reading a book that he highly recommended to his uncle. Leafing through it, the older man came upon this passage: “the free individual is just a fictional tale concocted by an assembly of biochemical algorithms.”

So what was the point of reading such a book, he wondered, since doing so was an exercise in pre-programmed absurdity since there was no freedom.

You have probably seen the bumper sticker that says: “Shit Happens.” Some people are just lucky, I suppose, and odd coincidences mark their lives.

When he was just out of Columbia College and working for a reputed CIA front company, Business International Corporation, Barack Obama had a chance encounter with a young woman, Genevieve Cook, with whom he had a 1-2 year relationship.

Like Obama and at about the same time, Cook just happened to have lived in Indonesia with her father, Michael Cook, who just happened to become Australia’s top spook, the director-general of the Office of National Assessments, and also the Ambassador to Washington.

Of course, Obama’s mother, as is well-known, just happened to be living in Indonesia with Barack and Obama’s step-father, Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian military officer, who had been called back to Indonesia by the CIA supported General Suharto three months before the CIA coup against President Sukarno.

Suharto subsequently slaughtered over a million Indonesian Communists and Indonesian-Chinese.

As is also well-known, it just so happened that Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham, trained in the Russian language, after teaching English in the US Embassy in Jakarta that housed one of the largest CIA stations in Asia, did her “anthropological” work in Indonesia and Southeast Asia financed by the well-known CIA conduits, USAID and the Ford Foundation.

Then there is Cook’s stepfather, Philip C. Jessup, who just happened to be in Indonesia at the same time, doing nickel-mining deals with the genocidal Suharto government.

Anyway, “shit happens.” You never know whom you might meet along the way of life.

*

The hostess at the seaside restaurant had an eastern European accent, so he asked her where she was from.

She said, “Belgrade, Serbia.” He told her he was sorry for what the U.S. government led by Bill Clinton had done to her country and that he considered Clinton a war criminal.

She said the bombing in 1999 was terrifying, and even though she was young at the time, she vividly remembered it. It traumatized her, her parents, and her family. Then she smiled and said that in the month she had been in the U.S. for her summer job, all the Americans she had met had been so friendly.

He welcomed her to the U.S., and as he was walking away, he remembered that Clinton’s savage bombing of Serbia that had killed so many Serbian children and other innocents had been code-named “Operation Noble Anvil.”

He wondered what kind of “noble” people would think of innocent children as anvils: “heavy usually steel-faced iron blocks on which metal is shaped,” and did the friendly Americans accept Clinton’s sick lies when he ended his March 24, 1999 war address to the American people with these words:

Our thoughts and prayers tonight must be with the men and women of our armed forces, who are undertaking this mission for the sake of our values and our children’s future. May God bless them, and may God bless America.”

*

The banal, 1967 hit song, “San Francisco (Be sure to wear flowers in your hair)”, which was influential in enticing young people to come to San Francisco for the Summer of Love, was written by “Papa” John Philips, who attended the US Naval Academy at Annapolis and whose father was a Marine Corps Captain.

“Papa” John’s wife had worked at the Pentagon and her father was involved in covert intelligence work in Vietnam.

His neighbor and Laurel Canyon (Los Angeles) buddy was Jim Morrison of Doors fame, whose father US Navy Admiral George Morrison commanded U.S. warships in Vietnam’s Tonkin Gulf during the “Tonkin Gulf Incident.”

Frank Zappa, the father figure of Laurel Canyon’s many musicians who just happened to converge in one place at the same time where a covert military film studio operated, had a father who was a chemical warfare specialist at Edgewood Arsenal.

Stephen Stills, David Crosby and many other soon to be famous musicians all came from military and intelligence backgrounds and frolicked in Laurel Canyon. Although they were draft age, none of them was drafted as they played music, dropped acid, and created the folk-rock movement whose music was catchy but innocuous and posed no threat to the establishment.

But “shit happens.”

In his disturbing book, Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon, David McGowan raises the question:

…what if the musicians themselves (and various other leaders and founders of the ‘movement’) were every bit as much a part of the intelligence community as the people who were supposedly harassing them? What if, in other words, the entire youth culture of the 1960s was created not as a grass-roots challenge to the status quo, but as a cynical exercise in discrediting and marginalizing the budding anti-war movement and creating a fake opposition that could be easily controlled and led astray….What if, in reality, they were pretty much all playing on the same team?

*

The reporter was interviewing four of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s young “executive governors,” who were all dressed in three-piece business suits. They were in the process of conducting Transcendental Meditation’s weeklong course leading to supernormal abilities, including, flying, levitating, disappearing, x-ray vision, and other siddhis, or supernormal powers. Their recent press release had advertised the course as “a new breakthrough for human life on earth” for any person.

The reporter was a bit skeptical that people could be taught – for a large fee – to fly or disappear. He asked one of the executive governors, “Can you literally rise into the air and move horizontally; can you see yourself and can others see you actually fly?”

“Absolutely,” Larry Johnson replied without hesitation, “absolutely. Once you eliminate all stress from your nervous system, you have unbounded, unlimited potential. A human can achieve any desire he wants, flying is only one of them.”

“People will be skeptical,” the reporter continued, “How about a demonstration?”

“A public demonstration would cause too much of a ruckus,” said Johnson. “And we couldn’t show you because we only do it for each other. Actually, we do our techniques with our eyes closed, but we do peek out once in a while and see each other flying around the room. You know, one of the siddhis is a technique for making yourself invisible, and the Mararishi has said, ‘Don’t peek out to see if you’ve disappeared.’”

Johnson giggled and added, “We can also teach people to x-ray their own bodies and see through walls. Absolutely, absolutely. It’s all about infinite correlation. Absolutely.”

As the battered reporter left the interview, he wondered if the Maharishi was a creation of the CIA. He remembered John Lennon’s song lines about the Maharishi’s assistant: “But he often spread rumors through his right-hand man/Who used to be with the CIA”

*

What is “exactly clear” is that Buffalo Springfield (Stephen Stills, Neil Young et al.) toured with their Laurel Canyon buddies, the Beach Boys, in late 1967 (their other mutual bud, Charlie Manson, stayed out west presumably to work on his craft) and performed at a very odd venue for a “dissident” rock group, The U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

At that time nearly 500,000 American troops were waging war on the Vietnamese. That concert was an odd happening, wouldn’t you say?

*

If everyone actually looked, they’d see precisely what went down, “what’s going down,” and why we are going down. If you think many of these things “just happen” for no reason, then I guess you are just “f*cked.”

Excuse me, but it’s true.

Does the asterisk help?

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John
John
Jul 9, 2019 12:53 PM

Most young people who make it as Popstars etc they often have parents in places of influence deep within the intelligence and military departments

bevin
bevin
Jul 9, 2019 1:19 AM

Alfred McCoy in the introduction to his book In The Shadow of the American Century (?) has a fascinating description of the relationships between his family members and other WWII veterans and the Military Industrial Complex. In some ways its the best part of the book.
It is difficult to underestimate the depth and breadth of influence of the arms industry and the security state in the post war USA. It affected millions and no sector of society was more marinated in its poisons than Academia and the learned professions.
That’s ‘horde’ by the way, unless I’m missing a really clever bit of word play, not hoard.

Kathy Woods
Kathy Woods
Jul 8, 2019 11:19 PM

What a pseudo intellectual circle jerk. The author buries nothing at all beneath a mountain of bullshit, and the commenters eagerly jump in with shovels. Zionism, Buddhism, Rubber Soul and Gramasci (sic), no two commenters agree on what they find buried beneath the steaming mound. Coincidence? Well no, there’s no coincidence among them. Shit doesn’t happen, it’s produced.

bevin
bevin
Jul 9, 2019 1:21 AM
Reply to  Kathy Woods

‘…Shit doesn’t happen, it’s produced.”
Are you sure about that?

milosevic
milosevic
Jul 8, 2019 11:14 PM
Kolokol
Kolokol
Jul 8, 2019 6:12 PM

…”If you think many of these things “just happen” for no reason, then I guess you are just “f*cked.”

DunGroanin
DunGroanin
Jul 8, 2019 4:21 PM

Not having a place to post daily Groaniad ‘Balls’ – please please Admins, the raison d’être of this site is surely to kick them daily where it hurts? – 2 items today in the daily Groan to illustrate the full spectrum establishment propoganda machinations that Curtin records.

First, Matt the D’onkey, attempts to lead the soft brained readership towards a ‘coalition dream team’, the photo of two spice girls being Greasy & Balls. ( when was that picture taken? ).

Comments open and shut at lightning speed on there.

Second, the return of Steve Bell, fabulously recasting Noddy and Big Ears!

Comments reveal the ‘election mode’ the mejia has been put on. The number of anti-jezza posters and their ‘likes’ reveal the total number of 77th/II identities being deployed.
They used to be around the 50 mark last year – now approaching 200! Probably many are sock puppets.
But along with all the ‘banned’ from there (any way of getting that info?) the impression presented is that there is a dropping away of Labour supporters – if they can’t risk a GE they will move to a coup.

Anyway the peerless JC (not that one!) puts it in an article well worth reading in full :

““There is a conspiracy at work here, though it is not of the kind lampooned by critics: a small cabal of the rich secretly pullng the strings of our societies. The conspiracy operates at an institutional level, one that has evolved over time to create structures and refine and entrench values that keep power and wealth in the hands of the few. In that sense we are all part of the conspiracy. It is a conspiracy that embraces us every time we unquestioningly accept the “consensual” narratives laid out for us by our education systems, politicians and media. Our minds have been occupied with myths, fears and narratives that turned us into the turkeys that keep voting for Christmas.”
https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2019-07-03/plot-corbyn-out-power/

Jonathan clinically lays out the ‘gauntlet’ that Corbyn endures, just like another JC once did (yes, that one).

Be kind, mods.

Yarkob
Yarkob
Jul 8, 2019 12:27 PM

“Red and white, blue suede shoes
I’m Uncle Sam, how do you do?
Give me five, I’m still alive
Ain’t no luck, I learned to duck
Check my pulse, it don’t change
Stay seventy-two come shine or rain
Wave the flag, pop the bag
Rock the boat, skin the goat

Wave that flag, wave it wide and high
Summertime done, come and gone, my, oh, my

I’m Uncle Sam, that’s who I am
Been hiding out in a rock and roll band

Shake the hand that shook the hand of P.T. Barnum and Charlie Chan
Shine your shoes, light your fuse
Can you use them old U.S. Blues?
I’ll drink your health, share your wealth
Run your life, steal your wife

Wave that flag, wave it wide and high
Summertime done, come and gone, my, oh, my

Back to back chicken shack
Son of a gun, better change your act
We’re all confused, what’s to lose?
You can call this song the United States Blues

Wave that flag, wave it wide and high
Summertime done, come and gone, my, oh, my
My my my oh my my my my
Summertime done, come and gone, my”

US Blues – Grateful Dead
(of whom it was said, at least two members inhabited that shady world that Jim M et al did)

Francis Lee
Francis Lee
Jul 7, 2019 9:50 PM

Okay Mark:
I think that it was Virginia Woolf who once said. ‘’I loathe Zionism, but I don’t like Jews’’. Which is rather strange since she married one. But I would go 50% of the way with her. But let’s instead turn to the issue at hand: to wit. ‘’Cultural Marxism.’’
The Bolsheviks, as you never retire of reminding us, were Jews (not counting Lenin, Bukharin and Stalin of course) whose object was to do what exactly? At a guess to overthrow capitalist imperialism (sounds okay to me). But that is possibly just my understanding. Additionally, these wicked Bolsheviks were in league with Jewish high finance and banking circles in a plot to take over the world (whooo). Soros and Habermas as bedfellows – really! This also rather disregards the fact that refugees Marx and Engels spent their lives campaigning against the capitalist system, minor point perhaps, but of course you can’t trust these people. But, anyway just let’s consider the Russian Revolution. The Tsarist autocracy which was installed in an autocratic state, totally corrupt, and complete with its own secret police, the Okrana, led an ill-equipped Russia into a disastrous war against Germany for which they were totally unprepared and the consequences of which made Russia actually ripe for revolution. I state that as an objective fact and not a value-judgement. Contrary to the usual White-Guard appraisal we repeatedly get from the likes of Aleksandr Dugin and the Saker, the Revolution did bring Russia into the modern world – albeit at enormous costs – and enabled it to defeat the imperialist assaults that took place in 1920 and the Nazi invasion in 1941.
The ‘Long March’ through the institutions, a phrase used by Mao in this long war with the Kuomintang was adopted by a left which by now had become social-democratised into thinking it could win the battle of ideas and ideology through the ballot box. It didn’t. Capitalism, as it always does, simply readapted and co-opted the radical wave and then simply counter-attacked and re-established it’s cultural hegemony through neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism.
It’s not ‘cultural Marxism’ which is the enemy it is ‘cultural liberalism’. And it leaves out those intrepid Jewish intellectuals like Chomsky, Finkelstein and Gideon Levy at Haaretz who stick their necks out and get the shit from both anti-semites and Zionists.

mark
mark
Jul 8, 2019 2:11 AM
Reply to  Francis Lee

The Bolshevik leadership was 85% Jewish. Much the same could be said for Bolshevik Revolutions in Germany, Hungary and elsewhere. They were bankrolled by Uber Capitalist banksters like Warburg, Kuhn Loeb, and Schiff to the tune of tens of millions of dollars in the money of the time. Why? Why would bankster capitalists do that against their “class interests”? Why would they do that? What would they have to gain? What is the connection?

Lenin was Jewish. Trotsky was Jewish. Stalin was married to a Jewess and his children were raised as Jews. So much for religion being the “opium of the masses.” Engels moved seamlessly from the world of the capitalist mill owner to the Bolshevik revolutionary.

In the lust for power and wealth, concepts like left wing and right wing, capitalism and communism are interchangeable and largely redundant. They are just a means to an end.

So many coincidences.
The world is full of coincidences.

The Russia of 1914 was developing and industrialising rapidly. Its political system had failed to keep pace. Wilhelmine Germany went to war because it saw a window of opportunity to destroy the country that would not last.

George
George
Jul 8, 2019 9:37 AM
Reply to  mark

So what is your solution then? You clearly have no sympathy for any Marxist analysis (Marrx being another Jew and therefore unreliable). I take it that you expound the racist policies of white nationalism?

mark
mark
Jul 8, 2019 3:30 PM
Reply to  George

Maybe “white nationalism” is just identity politics for white people.
Identity politics is perfectly okay for blacks, Asians, Hispanics, Jews, women, gays, trannies, so why not?
If society has to be fragmented into as many mutually antagonistic groups as possible, each one shilling that it hasn’t got enough beans on its plate, why not white people as well?
Let’s go the whole hog.
The more the merrier.

George
George
Jul 8, 2019 3:39 PM
Reply to  mark

Ah – so you’re now playing the “white victimhood” card i.e. taking up the identity politics mantra while simultaneously denying it!

mark
mark
Jul 8, 2019 6:26 PM
Reply to  George

If identity politics is all that matters in Clown World, go for it. The more the merrier. If you can’t beat em, join em.

John Thatcher
John Thatcher
Jul 9, 2019 10:35 AM
Reply to  mark

You really are a disgusting little racist guttersnipe “mark”.What it will take for the mods to remove you is anybody’s guess.Message to the mods,please don’t expect me to be polite to this disgusting creep,or his fellow nutter Milosevic.

mark
mark
Jul 9, 2019 3:21 PM
Reply to  John Thatcher

That’s the one good thing about hasbara trolls, “John”, you’re so easily triggered.
Oy vey! Shut him down!!
Standard Zionist response.

George
George
Jul 8, 2019 9:57 AM
Reply to  mark

And having perused your curious comment again, I have to ask: What exactly IS a “Jew”? Are “Jews” qualitatively different from “non-Jews”. And how Jewish do you have to be to qualify as “Jewish”. Lenin’s mother was half Jewish and yet you unhesitatingly call him “Jewish”.

BigB
BigB
Jul 8, 2019 12:43 PM
Reply to  George

George:

You hit the nail on the head. Classificatory analytics based on ‘whole inclusive’ sets with definable essences that make that set exclusively that set …and excludes being identifiable as any other set …this form of ‘object with particulars’ analytics (analytical set theory) is in itself logically flawed.

You cannot reduce any group of people to a label: and add defining characteristics to that label …it is a dehumanising and discriminatory classificatory system in and of itself. One that has no basis in science. It is a morbid symptomology lingering from genetic determinism: which is now a 19/20th century bad education.

Race determination has moved from redundant scientific to a purely political constructivism. To say someone did something because they were or are a Jew; from ethnocentric exceptionalist and exclusionary motivations – that in themselves are inherently and essentially due to their identifiable and classificatory ‘Jewishness’; that these identifiable, essential, and classifiable motivations were intentionally purposive toward the furthering the larger all-inclusive set of implied ‘World Jewry’ – which has had its exclusive essential own goals and intentions; which entails the concept that if someone can be identified as a ‘Jew’ – by birth, marriage, or having once walked past a Synagogue – then it is scientifically proven that they will share those essential character and physical traits …and be genetically determined to act in an algorithmic behavioural pattern to further ‘World Jewry’; which is to undertake “the long march” through the institutions …Judaising and subverting Western Culture …There is only one quality that can make this seem logical: and that is racism.

Science moved on: but opinion is slow to follow. That is opinion is a top-down cultural dictate. Political constructivism is a curious blend of Greek, Judeo-Christian, Cartesian, Newtonian and Darwinian principles …which make up the Enlightenment anti-humanist political construct. A construct where qualities – like race – linger: not because they are empiric and scientific …but because they are powerful. Language itself has been co-opted as a tool of power. But now we are moving away from the Establishment Enlightenment in the direction the Continental School took over a century ago. To suppress the Continental School by discriminatively denigrating it as a ‘Jewish’ ethnocentric infiltration is to try to shut down the debate and end human inquiry at the Establishment Enlightenment (a goal Stephen Hicks makes explicit).

But the Continental School does open itself to criticism: criticism which should be made …but not by silencing everything that 150 years of phenomenology and anti-philosophy have to say. David Ray Griffin – who I enormously admire – has proposed the term “positive postmodernism” which includes his own process theology (when he is not speaking 9/11 truth to power). Postmodernism is then a process in want of completion. It has spawned morbid hybrid symptomologies – there is no doubt of that. PoMo and critical theory (excepting Paulo Friere) were short on praxis: it was confined to the critical stage. But the end of capitalism conclusions are as obvious as they are in Marxist- and Weberian-humanism.

We are being oppressed by a capitalised consciousness: one that commodifies everything as an object with particulars; confined it in its own definable set – with individuated essences; attributes an axiological hierarchy of status, worth, and value to the commodified set; defines agency and instrumental utility with the consumer value to the system of commodified hierarchical status…

…Is it any wonder that the system is institutionally racist: when everything is reductively objectified and commodified in the same classificatory process as race? Or that the political power constructivism will absolutise this classificatory system as its own? Power over is programmed in the deep conceptual structure of the language.

If we do not want to be a commodity in a box set …we need a new system of classification. One that takes Universal Humanism as its universalised value base (see McMurtry’s ‘onto-axiology’ – big words for common sense). The language can stay the same: a mistake Derrida made when he said we would have to find an ‘alterity’ of language. We don’t, we just have to stop putting things in strictly stereotyped boxed sets. Starting with race.

BigB
BigB
Jul 8, 2019 12:58 PM
Reply to  BigB

I might add that the ‘Vienna Circle’ that followed Frege and Russell to develop the Enlightenment to its zenith – as a mathematicised logic ‘meta-ontology’ (logical posivitism; logical empiricism)…the set theory classificatory system I refer to above …was pluralistic but attracted various ‘Jewish’ intellectuals.

I have never come across the ‘Vienna Circle’ egregore infiltration meta-conspiracy theory. They must have been ‘good Jews’: ones who supported Enlightenment principles. It appears only ‘bad Jews’ belong to the infiltration cabal that is marching through the institutions.

Yarkob
Yarkob
Jul 8, 2019 12:48 PM
Reply to  mark

I’m “Jewish”, Mark.

Am I evil?

Are my “relatives” or “compatriots” evil? (yes, I have spent time in Israel – it left me sickened to the core and a lifelong critic of Zionism and the Israeli state)

I have to ask what George is asking: “what are Jews” in your context? By your measure anyone who calls themselves “Jewish” is complicit. For what it’s worth, I don’t call myself Jewish, because I’m really not. Judaism is a religion. Zionism isn’t. I don’t identify with either group and actively try to fight and frustrate anyone who identifies with the latter.

I say “I’m Jewish” because my fathers family are all Russian Jews (how topical) from a long time ago (19th, early 20th c.) but none of them identify with your grand conspiracy either, so what is the entry bar? Do I have to be a homicidal maniac? A politician? A banker? Someone who works in the media? It’s all very well telling us how all Jews are not to be trusted (that seems to be your oft-repeated insinuation) You need to be more specific. Neither i nor my family are trying to take over the world. Nor any other Jewish people I know (not very many b/c I don’t identify with their – or any – religion)

You almost sound like someone put here to make this site seem overly anti-Semitic..You know, like the Mossad and Unit 8200 love to do..astroturf to the max..there’s loads of it going on over at Zero Hedge right this minute…

And yet..I agree with your sentiments up to a point. That’s the point where you blame any and all jewish people for the ills in the world…

But…there is a shady cabal running shit. They are not all Jews. They don’t even do Judaism. I suspect they worship other shady entities, but it doesn’t really matter, as all of this “the jews did it” shit is exactly that..a massive distraction….A bit like Trump

mark
mark
Jul 8, 2019 3:17 PM
Reply to  Yarkob

I don’t know you, Yarkob, so I can’t say if you’re “evil” or not.
Probably not, certainly not just on the grounds of Jewish religion or heritage.
I would base that on Jews I have known and met, who didn’t seem at all “evil.”
Talmudic Judaism is a hate based racist supremacist cult, if that answers your question. Something like a more extreme form of Wahabism.
Of course a lot of Jews are atheists or not religious at all.
Zionists have gone to great lengths to try to prove the existence of a Jewish “race” based on DNA characteristics, though features of people identifying as Jews like appearance and skin colour vary widely.

But all that is a red herring.
The US is owned and controlled by a small group of about 6,000 people.
The UK is owned and controlled by a slightly smaller group of about 5,000 people.
These and similar small groups in other countries form the Globalist Power Elite.
Not all of these are Jews though many are.

If 85% of Bolshevik leaders were Mormons, or Jehovah’s Witnesses, or Bulgarians, or Botswanans, it would seem legitimate to comment on that curious phenomenon.
But they weren’t.
If US schoolteachers were required to take loyalty oaths to Bulgaria on pain of instant dismissal, it would seem legitimate to comment on that. But they aren’t.
If US hurricane victims were required to take loyalty oaths to Bulgaria before receiving government assistance, it would seem legitimate to question that, but they aren’t.
If criticism of Bulgaria were to be a criminal offence carrying 20 years’ imprisonment and a $250,000 fine, some people might wish to comment on that. But it isn’t.
If every Bulgarian household received $23,000 a year in US aid, it might be legitimate to ask why. But they don’t.
If US Congressmen jumped up and down like trained seals to give the President of Botswana 50 standing ovations if he so much as broke wind, it would seem normal to remark on that. But it’s not the President of Botswana who enjoys such adulation.
If Botswana exerted a complete stranglehold over US/ UK/ Canadian/ French/ Australian political/ economic/ media life, people might well comment on that strange fact. But it doesn’t. A certain other small country does.
If wars were routinely waged and threatened to serve the interests of Botswana, that might appear strange as well.
If US presidential candidates were required to grovel and kiss the rings of Bulgarian or Botswanan billionaires before being allowed to stand, some people might comment on that. But they aren”t.
If the Bulgarian embassy was funding and orchestrating campaigns against UK politicians to “drive them out of public life”, people might begin to notice. But it isn’t. A certain other embassy is.

Hope that explains it Yarkob and George.

Yarkob
Yarkob
Jul 9, 2019 11:03 AM
Reply to  mark

“Talmudic Judaism is a hate based racist supremacist cult”

This I can agree on. The rest I haven’t got time to respond to to right now. Our positions are way closer than you think, or would perhaps imagine..

I’m a Yehudon, according to a Jewish commenter on another site, apparently (I had to look it up, not speaking Hebrew) 😉

Prejudice seems to be far more prevalent in the prejudiced

Yarkob
Yarkob
Jul 9, 2019 11:05 AM
Reply to  Yarkob

I meant “prejudiced against” of course..My previous sentence is gibberish

milosevic
milosevic
Jul 8, 2019 11:06 PM
Reply to  Yarkob

I’m “Jewish”.

I don’t call myself Jewish, because I’m really not.

In other words, you’re not one of what Gilad Atzmon calls “third-category Jews”, those who regard their Jewishness as a political category. Although this hatefact is systematically suppressed, and strenuously denied whenever it cannot be suppressed, the essential core of Political Judaism is ethnic supremacism. This explains zionism, its international support movement, and much else besides.

Goyim were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world; only to serve the People of Israel. — Ovadia Yosef, chief Sephardi rabbi of Israel

Third-Category Jews and the
Palestinian Solidarity Movement
, by Gilad Atzmon

As far as self-perception is concerned, those who call themselves Jews can be divided into three main categories:

1. Those who follow Judaism.

2. Those who regard themselves as human beings that happen to be of Jewish origin.

3. Those who put their Jewishness over and above all of their other traits.

Obviously, the first two categories specify a harmless group of people. We do tend to respect religious people, as they are generally expected to be living inspired by their beliefs and are expected to abide by some sort of a higher spiritual code. Needless to say, we have no problem with the second category as well. One cannot choose one’s origin. We agree that people must be respected and treated equally regardless of their origin or their racial and ethnic belonging.

However the third category is largely problematic. Clearly, its definition may sound inflammatory to some. And yet, bizarrely enough, it is a general formulation of Chaim Weizmann’s view of the Jewish identity as expressed in his famous address at the First Jewish Congress: “There are no English, French, German or American Jews, but only Jews living in England, France, Germany or America.”

According to Weizmann, a prominent Zionist figure, Jewishness is a primary quality. You may be a Jew who dwells in England, a Jew who plays the violin or even a Jew against Zionism. But above all else you are a Jew. And this is exactly the idea conveyed by the third category. It is all about viewing Jewishness as the key element in one’s being. Any other quality is secondary.

mark
mark
Jul 8, 2019 11:38 PM
Reply to  milosevic

Juden Uber Alles! Heil Juden!!

John Thatcher
John Thatcher
Jul 9, 2019 10:38 AM
Reply to  Yarkob

You are attempting dialogue with the unreachable Yarkob.I note your comment “You almost sound like someone put here to make this site seem overly anti Semitic” etc with interest.

Yarkob
Yarkob
Jul 9, 2019 10:53 AM
Reply to  John Thatcher

Not “unreachable” John, just extremely busy. I have a very demanding job that requires me not to be looking at Off-G all day, which is a bummer to say the least. I haven’t even properly read the replies for the same reason..

I shall attempt to respond properly later on, though I’m not sure it’s worth it..Mark and Milosevic have made up their minds about “jews” and what sort of “jew” I am, and are already placing me, a lifelong critic of Israel in some sort of “jew meter”- like philosophical box. “How Jewish are you really?”..quite a catchy name..TV show?

Tbh I haven’t got any time for it. I knew who I am; I know what is right and wrong; I know what I believe, and I also know what I, personally, have done to try and make some small difference to the status quo. Clue: it didn’t involve posting lengthy philosophically inept rebuttals of peoiple’s characters on a website.

Have a nice day!

John Thatcher
John Thatcher
Jul 9, 2019 11:25 AM
Reply to  Yarkob

Yarkob,the unreachable I was referring to is “mark” not you!

BigB
BigB
Jul 8, 2019 9:28 AM
Reply to  Francis Lee

I tried reasoning with Mark’s ‘buddy’ Milosevic. You’ll get nowhere. I was awarded “Shabat Goy of the year” for my efforts in historical reasoning. They are self-convinced that a tiny cabal of (Talmudic) Jews (who are “maggots”) are ‘Judaising’ culture and destroying the edifice of white privilege imperialism. I suspect that will not change: but good luck with the effort to bring light into a very dark place.

milosevic
milosevic
Jul 8, 2019 10:37 PM
Reply to  BigB

I was awarded “Shabat Goy of the year” for my efforts in historical reasoning.

One of the primary services for which people might be celebrated as “Shabat Goy of the Year”, is for concealing, discrediting, hasbarizing, or otherwise neutralizing history such as that discussed in the articles below. Read them, and you will understand why powerful people might prefer that you didn’t.

Nicholas Lysson — Holocaust and Holodomor

Ron Unz — The Bolshevik Revolution and Its Aftermath

BigB
BigB
Jul 9, 2019 11:07 AM
Reply to  milosevic

I’ve read Lysson’s list of non sequitur racist lies – spaffed in the face of history – more than once. I’m not reading them again.

What links blood libel in the 12th century to kidney buying in the 21st? Nothing but racism …or Lysson’s imaginary intentionality based or ersatz racial stereotyping.

The Bolshevik-Jews did NOT carry out a revenge genocide in the Ukraine.

Lysson’s contrived and unsupported conclusion that 7m Ukrainians matter less than 6m Jews is negated by the fact that they were not intentionally genocided. And Holocaust relativism is a slimey, dirty, game to play to make the case of ‘ethnocentric exceptionalism’.

I went into McDonald’s methodology – based on evolutionary biology – to show how the pseudo-scientific racial genetic determinism is a false classification and imagined sociology. But you have consistently portrayed ALL Jews to be racists and supremacists – based not on their allegiance to Zionism, but based on their alleged ‘Jewishness’. Which is racist.

Or am I mischaracterising your POV? Because it seemed quite clear to me that you were not distinguishing 3 types of Jews – based on Atzmon’s classification below. In fact, as I remember it …when I made the argument ‘not all Jews’, I was awarded my ”Shabat Goy” award (which I never received, by the way).

So Yarkob gets a pass, because he has left the ”Chosen People’s” death cult? Or have you mellowed and retracted from the view that all Jews can be profiled by their common ethnocentrism …a view you consistently uphold by legitimating Lysson’s racist lies?

mark
mark
Jul 9, 2019 3:12 PM
Reply to  BigB

Israel is the world centre of organ trafficking, whether you like it or not.
That may well be “anti semitic”, because the truth and any inconvenient facts are “anti semitic.” Objecting to Zionist genocide and atrocities is “anti semitic.” Criticising any politician or anybody else who happens to be a Jew is “anti semitic.” Questioning the activities of banksters, Bilderbergers, Soros, or the Davos set is “anti semitic.”

I know a lot of Ukrainians who would give you an argument over whether there was a holocaust in the Ukraine or not. But of course they’re just goys and matter a lot less then the Chosen People.

BigB
BigB
Jul 10, 2019 8:07 AM
Reply to  mark

When you engage in Holocaust relativism; and your argumentation relies on demeaning real human tragedies …to the point of inventing a Holodomor to dehumanise the real Holocaust – there really isn’t much lower you can go.

Unless you invoke the support of Banderite neo-Nazi anti-semites – who you claim to personally know – to further your propagandic ideological hate speech by legitimating their propagandic ideological construction of a Holodomor …then that really is rock bottom.

The only way now is up: starting with Professor Tauger’s research …and Wheatcroft’s “Years of Hunger” – that show that it was a cyclical famine that devastated the Ukraine.

To manipulate this human tragedy – as Lyssson does – into an intentional revenge genocide perpetrated by Bolshevik Jews – acting not for Communism – but for the precise invented ideology of furthering ‘International Jewry’ is a mendacious and racist hate propagandic counterfeiting of history …one that furthers the neo-Nazi NATO agenda in the Ukraine; making it doubly foul and morally reprehensible.

C’mon Mark; you are better than this. Stop spreading hate speech about Jews and “gimmegrants” and rejoin the human race.

milosevic
milosevic
Jul 10, 2019 5:41 AM
Reply to  BigB

have you mellowed and retracted from the view that all Jews can be profiled by their common ethnocentrism?

Have you stopped beating your wife, yet?

BigB
BigB
Jul 10, 2019 8:13 AM
Reply to  milosevic

I would appeal to your better nature: only, it seems to be deeply buried under a mountain of hate.

Somewhere in there is a human being struggling to escape the conditioning and reconditioning of discrimination and racism.

To your innate, suffering, yet unstainable humanity: I wish you well in your struggle for liberation.

The rest of you – the imagined part you have so convinced yourself is real – can fuck off.

Kolokol
Kolokol
Jul 7, 2019 7:33 PM

I love David McGowan’s fascinating work on Laurel Canyon, but I have major disagreements. Basically, McGowan’s connections lead to conclusions of a vast social engineering project created out of some think tank (Rand, Tavistock et al) but having lived thru the era I saw the grassroots rise of the 60’s. I remember my thoughts and feelings, were they ‘implants”? It is possible but I believe they were a natural consequence and reaction to the ’50s, at least in the US, remember The ’60s were an international phenomenon. Anyway, my take is that the grassroot rise was seized and hijacked (It always is thus) and that is where McGowan’s work is valuable.

George
George
Jul 7, 2019 11:16 PM
Reply to  Kolokol

I’ve read McGowan’s book and it was fascinating stuff – although I think he overdoes the occult calendar stuff. (I started to get the impression that every day in the year must be close to some “spooky” date or other.) As for that “vast social engineering project”, well Dave was basically focussing on Laurel Canyon itself. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there was a big collective attempt to co-opt or even pre-empt a burgeoning youth movement from that base. But he wasn’t saying that everyone everywhere else was some kind of government plant. There are also certain matters that are obviously not that simple e.g. I get it that Zappa’s dad worked in chemical warfare. But if Zappa himself was merely programmed as some kind of patsy decoy, then the awesome prolixity of his work wouldn’t make much sense. Not to mention the complexity of it. He was clearly SOME kind of genius.

Kolokol
Kolokol
Jul 8, 2019 5:51 PM
Reply to  George

It’s been a while. I read McGowan as a series when it came out on his website rather than the book. There is a startling McGowan quote, his “World’s Longest Run-On Conspiracy Paragraph” here: http://fallingrepublic.blogspot.com/2007/04/mindfuck-revisited.html
I’m certain there actually was a collective attempt at engineering his social movement. I’m thinking of the film Das Netz (The Net) among others as well as the book “Storming Heaven” by Jay Stevens here: https://archive.org/details/stormingheavenls00steve

Seamus Padraig
Seamus Padraig
Jul 7, 2019 2:10 PM

Quite of a meandering essay … but interesting.

Bemildred
Bemildred
Jul 7, 2019 1:29 PM

A more accurate picture of the 60s than I have seen since, well, the sixties. Thanks Mr. Curtin, takes me back. I think about, am reminded of, the sixties a lot these days, even though this now is, well, it’s a lower turn on the spiral down, isn’t it?

Harry Stotle
Harry Stotle
Jul 7, 2019 12:03 PM

Fascinating article, thanks Edward.

My take is that although the authorities may have attempted to co-opted them, cultural movements in the 60s were real and primarily driven by the questioning of traditional roles.

These ideas were reflected in music, films and literature of the era – although not perfect there was at least a more equal distribution of wealth back then, even though jarring juxtapositions arose such as the ‘mystical’ George Harrison writing this one.

Jen
Jen
Jul 7, 2019 11:59 AM

Ha, no wonder so many people in those days hated Black Sabbath: among other things, that band equated politicians and their fellow warmongers to Satanists and witches.

Antonym
Antonym
Jul 7, 2019 5:49 AM

One canyon in the US =/ all of the sixties movements on the globe. Paris 1968? No. Some? Possible.
Too much drugs? Sure; an income source on which the CIA was depending during Iran-Contra.

Jules Moules
Jules Moules
Jul 7, 2019 5:18 AM

That weirded me out. Is nothing what it seems? Or is it?

Yarkob
Yarkob
Jul 8, 2019 12:52 PM
Reply to  Jules Moules

Nothing is what it seems, Jules. Never was; never will be. Best get used to it or it’ll drive you bonkers 🙂

mark
mark
Jul 7, 2019 3:08 AM

People put great faith in the 60s anti war/ counter culture environment, and compare it unfavourably with the situation today, as the US rampages around the globe like Nazi Germany on steroids, slaughtering, starving and immiserating tens of millions without any domestic pushback whatsoever.

But this is deceptive. That was a wasted generation, shallow, self indulgent and infantile, epitomised by the babyish obscenity of hippydom, the early products of Cultural Marxism. This has continued apace to the present day. An even more decadent, self destructive and drug ridden society, wallowing in a cesspit of 57 varieties of degeneracy, characterised by the twin obscenities of identity politics and the global warming hoax.

Events just have to be allowed to run their course. The system contains the seeds of its own decay and will collapse under its own weight in its own good time. But so called popular movements and pseudo popular movements will play no part in this.

Fair dinkum
Fair dinkum
Jul 7, 2019 9:20 AM
Reply to  mark

‘global warming hoax’ -Mark.
What?
Along with polluted rivers, warming oceans, dead reefs, methane releases in the Arctic Tundra, Fukushima, toxic soils, increasing frequency of fires and floods, mudslides and insect and animal extinctions.
Just to mention a few.
All hoaxes as well Mark ?
Gimme a break.
Billions of vehicles, millions of factories, tens of billions of farm animals and no damage done ?
A tad Pollyannish methinks.

Rhisiart Gwilym
Rhisiart Gwilym
Jul 7, 2019 5:11 PM
Reply to  Fair dinkum

Always fun to spot and archive the various blind-spots that regular commenters display – eventually; eg: Mark – climate-shift denialist… :O)

mark
mark
Jul 7, 2019 7:56 PM
Reply to  Fair dinkum

Leap aboard the Global Warming bandwagon if you want to.
Fall in line behind Little Greta and pay your Macron Green Taxes and applaud as Goldman Sachs trousers billions and trillions from selling its Global Warming Hot Air Certificates.
Just count me out.

I’m still waiting for the new Ice Age that “all the scientists” promised us.
Surprisingly though, I haven’t had to break out the snow shoes and skis I bought yet, the sledge has remained unused, and the team of huskies are looking mightily bored.
But of course we’ve only got 12 years/ 11 years/ 4 years/ 27 minutes (whatever figure Little Greta has now decided on) to “save the planet.”

Fair dinkum
Fair dinkum
Jul 8, 2019 12:09 AM
Reply to  mark

I hope the ‘bandwagon’ floats and has solar air conditioning.
It’s hard isn’t it Mark ?
Being scolded by a child.
Oh well, that’s humility for you.

different frank
different frank
Jul 7, 2019 9:27 AM
Reply to  mark

Cultural Marxism?
Pathetic

Francis Lee
Francis Lee
Jul 7, 2019 10:01 AM
Reply to  mark

Ah, yes, ‘cultural marxism’ a fashionable trope, commonly used by conservative ‘intellectuals’ which is doing the rounds and is equated for all the pestilences afflicting mankind. Its usage is widespread and promiscuous and is customarily used by people who don’t know what they are talking about. But anyway I suppose this is a reference to the Frankfurt school which was set up in Germany in the 1930s and fled to the United States since the Institute was banned by the Nazis. Bu in the 19th century Marx/Engels themselves were generally speaking unconcerned with cultural issues; there forte was economics (political economy) philosophy, politics. The major works included – Capital, 3 volumes, Grundrisse 900 pages, Theories of Surplus Value. 3 volumes, Engels, Anti-Duhring, The Condition of the Working Class in England 1844, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, and of course they both co-wrote The Communist Manifesto 1848, and this is only some of their prodigious output.

These early days were concerned with involvement with separatist movements in the Rhineland for which they were pursued by the Prussian secret police and had to depart for England one jump ahead of the Prussian authorities. There they continued to agitate and live the res of their lives.

What is termed ‘cultural marxism’ is in fact an amalgam of the theories of Marx, and other significant social theorists such Max Weber and Sigmund Freud. The French social theorist Raymond Aaron made the astute observation that ”Inside every neo-Marxist there is a neo-Weberian trying to get out.’ A pretty good assessment. But I always found that the trouble with this whole ‘Frankfurt school – Marcuse, Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin – of eclectic social theory frankly unintelligible.

The following being an offering from Herbert Marcuse.

”Being, for dialectical logic, is a process through contradictions that determine the content and development of all reality. The Logic that had elaborated this timeless structure of this process. but the intrinsic connection, between the Logic and other parts of the system, and above all, the implications of the dialectical method destroy the very idea of consciousness. The logic had shown that the true being is the idea, but the idea unfolds itself in space (as nature) and ‘in time’ as mind.” (Herbert Marcuse – Reason and Revolution).

I’ll stop here as I don’t have the remotest idea what the esteemed gentleman is talking about. The same goes for the rest. As a student I tried (emphasise tried) to read ‘The Dialectic of the Enlightenment’ of Adorno and Horkheimer – same problem of intelligibility. I tried again 20 later. Same result.

What Marx was won’t to say, commenting on the French “Marxists” of the late [18]70s:

“All I know is that I am not a Marxist.””
(-Letter to Schmidt, 1890).

Even less he would have called himself a ‘cultural marxist’

What the users of the term ‘cultural marxism’ actually mean is the sort of the eclectic mish-mash which was common fare in the Frankfurt School which came into existence in the 1930s and had a brief flowering in the 1960s and 1970s. I suppose the two leading neo-marxists of the earlier part of the century were Luckacs who is very difficult to read and Gramasci who seemed to me to be just pointing out the obvious. These were simply two radicals who drew on a number of ideas which were also common among social-democrats and anarchists at the time.

Gezzah Potts
Gezzah Potts
Jul 7, 2019 12:30 PM
Reply to  Francis Lee

Francis – your Marcuse quote; how do I translate this? What language was that? Made numerous attempts to read Kafka years back. Bit like your attempts at reading Marcuse… Good comment by the way.

BigB
BigB
Jul 7, 2019 1:56 PM
Reply to  Francis Lee

I concur: anyone who employs the phrase “cultural Marxism” has committed the cardinal intellectual error of letting someone else dictate their ill-informed opinions for them. It exposes that the utterer has never read any critical theory (CT), or Marx …and probably not much else other than the Ron Unz school of “everything is a Jewish plot” toilet dribble.

Having read much CT: the Marcuse quote makes perfect sense …though presenting it as two paragraph’s will destroy that sense. Marcuse developed his theory of ‘one dimensionality’ most fully in “One Dimensional Man” – which was his polemic against consumerism as a repression of the real, and neo-totalising form of control.

Which is a key conceptual awareness, that has more relevance now than ever.

As a society: we have ‘collapsed’ to a digitised algorithmic representation of ourselves; which is the technological subjugation of who we really are. In Lacanian terms: we have become our own ‘matheme’ – our own self-representational algorithm or internal ‘avatar’.

Our own infinite macrocosmic reality has been objectively reduced to the level of a capitalist Baudrillardian ‘Code’ of commodification and consumption. That is, whether the individual – you or I, or anyone else – sees themselves that way (and I pray to God no one ever sees themselves that way!) …the governance superstructures of a technocratic (surveillance) society see us that way – and act to fulfill the self-maximising desires they think we have, and would like to create for us …through a coded advertorial narrative constructivism. In other words, the technocratic development of society is to fulfill the false consciousness desires of an imaginary and mythological self-identified, self-absorbed, self-maximising, narcissistic and hedonistic scientific individual technophiliac …one that only exists in the rationale and internal logic of the society itself (in its coded reality). A one-dimensional technocratic consumer society accommodates only for its own imagined constituents …of one-dimensional technophile consumers

That is the nature of the civilisational tyranny over consciousness …we are not that politico-economic ‘homo techno-economicus’ imaginary model. We are multi-dimensional humans, not uni-dimensional (flatscreen); trans-human; holographic internal self-representations and algorithmic Code.

In the quote above: Marcuse explains how this code is itself coded into the language we use. Specifically, in the mathematisation of language of Anglo-American analytical philosophy that was (post Frege; Russell; Carnap; early Wittgenstein) prevalent at the time. In fact, most of CT and PoMo was a reaction to the meta-ontology of logical atomism, and logical posivitism, and the entire reductive scientific materialist epistemology of ‘objectivity’.

“The logic had shown that the true being is the idea, but the idea unfolds itself in space (as nature) and ‘in time’ as mind”.

Space, time, mind, and Being are our root axioms on which all propositional logic is predicated. That is the objective technological paradigm is predicated on these core idealisations (extended to include objective materialism and event causality). These root idealisms are taken-for-granted bedrock predicates that are not up for debate. They are the binary logic and axiomatised protocols of our self-representational language. As such: they are the concrete foundations of our advanced technological civilisation. And the dialectics of the false consciousness self-representation that creates it.

Only, they are false. We are not machine men with machine minds, we are organic flesh and blood animated more by empathy than we can ever know under a technocracy totalitarianism. As could be easily demonstrated by simple reasoning (nothing is independent of anything else). But they are never subjected to any reasoning. Otherwise, the entire capitalist technological tyranny over all life would be in question.

I do not agree totally with Marcuse (he had no praxis of liberation, he merely presented the situation as it was and is) …but he was prescient.

Instead of reducing all of CT to the dismissive nominative demonisation “Cultural Marxism” (which is to legitimate a crass Americanist ‘pro-Enlightenment’ imperialism) …perhaps CT should be more widely read? Or read at all?

[Which makes clear why I am unintelligible to the average reader: I read all the wrong books and unnaturally assumed the concepts of Saussurian and Piercian semiotics where more mainstream …as being foundational of the New Left. The whole ‘Continental School’ that I follow absolutely nails capitalism. Which is why the neo-Enlightenment intellectuals – Hicks, Peterson, Pinker et al – want to demonise it. Don’t do their dirty work for them. The alternative is an Ayn Randian objective libertarian fascist totalitarianism over humanity forever. No one wants that].

Seamus Padraig
Seamus Padraig
Jul 7, 2019 2:16 PM
Reply to  BigB

You’re setting up a false dichotomy here. There are plenty of alternatives other than Ayn Rand and Cultural Marxism.

BigB
BigB
Jul 7, 2019 6:02 PM
Reply to  Seamus Padraig

No, I was illustrating a false dichotomy. The labeling of ‘Cultural Marxism’ and the broader labeling of ‘PoMo’ is a deliberate ploy to lump over 300 hundred years of humanist philosophy into one or two commodified nominative objects and dismiss them out of hand …without any reference to what they have to inform the inquiry into the human condition. Which is plenty: of subjective, pluralist and informative humanist perspectives.

The dominant hegemonic paradigm of rational objectivity will hear nothing said against it. Listen to the defences of Peterson, Scruton, etc. Anything other than the libertarian and the objective is totalitarian. That is the nature of the anti-debate the label “Cultural Marxism” is designed for.

For the exegesis from the objective, rational, Enlightenment point of view: read Stephen Hick’s “Explaining Postmodernism” – which he wrote having never read any PoMo (it’s full of mis-attributions and misinterpretations) …or Peterson’s dismissal of Marxism …where he clearly displays that he has never read Marx.

A fact he admitted to in his preparation for non-debating Zizek – for which he read the Communist Manifesto and proceeded to say the bosses would never exploit their workers…

There are a plurality of debates that need to be addressed. Because the socio-political paradigm is built on archetypal root concepts – notably Being, self, individuality, and mind – that are demonstrably wrong. Correcting them – such as Being => Becoming – will yield a new liberational ’embodied’ humanist paradigm.

That debate is being suppressed. So much so that the literal objective truth paradigm has become an ossified coercive political paradigm – a false truth and knowledge regime of power. There is no fixed Being, that it is our fallacy that has become our tyranny …as means and ends commodification of control.

There is plenty to say against this. Like developing an entire new politic to counteract the control and co-option mechanisms that have colonised conventional politics. I merely chose Rand as one who epitomises this libertarian fascism. Or her acolytes the Kochs and Tillerson. But it is the whole accultured paradigm that oppresses us: not the individuals that epitomise ‘the system’.

We are all the system to the system: a fact that can be seen in our reduction to bits and bytes of binary information for data analysis commodification for profit. Think about how you are reduced to information on your drivers licence or birth certificate to see how the system represents you as a digitised DoB or social security number (name and number). Capitalism is already tailoring its consumer experience to our advertorially manufactured desire-dreams for shit we never knew we wanted.

Whole people do not need excess shit, capitalism, or least of all …globalism. Whole people will demand a shift from fixed individuated Being-over power (the ‘ASI Ubermensch’) and control hierarchical hegemony.

But still the common view is that the objective conceptual paradigm we were acculturated into is literal and true to reality (Correspondence Theory of Truth). It is not. It creates its own reality: one that is an endocolonisation and tyranny over consciousness. Which is what Marcuse pointed out over sixty years ago. And still that is being suppressed.

Let’s stop the suppression, and have the dialogue that they do not want us to have. It might just set us free.

Rhisiart Gwilym
Rhisiart Gwilym
Jul 7, 2019 5:07 PM
Reply to  BigB

Congratulations B! You’ve just managed to be as impenetrably incomprehensible as Marcuse! If this is what CT does for lucidity of mind and speech, I think I’ll give it a miss… :O)

Ramdan
Ramdan
Jul 7, 2019 6:11 PM

….if looking for (real) enlightenment then go to the source: Read Buddha!!…

Philosophers sometimes try to say similar things but with much grandiloquece (intelectual snobism??) that tends to obscure the message.

Buddha is simple, direct, straight to the point…no hocus pocus…

Good, real spiritual teachers either don’t talk or are direct….and are for free nor like the Maharishi….
“A human can achieve any desire he wants”….For God sake!!! Sooooo anti-enlightment!!!….

BigB
BigB
Jul 8, 2019 8:44 AM
Reply to  Ramdan

I can say exactly the same thing in Buddhist terminology. The Yogacarans were fiercely intellectual and categorical systemisers of Buddhist thought. They enhanced Buddhist phenomenology. I can describe what Marcuse was saying in terms of Vasubhandu’s ‘Three Natures’ (trisvabhava) of parakalpita, paratantra, and parinispanna …natures which I have actually introduced here.

I can tell you the sanskrit terminology for the ‘linguistic turn’ of consciousness (vijnana-parinamo): etc etc…

Nothing is obscured by concepts or language: it’s that language and concepts themselves create Being. We have an inherited and indoctrinated belief that language is literal, objective and corresponds to the true, essential nature of reality. It is therefore counterintuitive and probably unintelligible that language creates its own binary version of reality …all the protocols for the domination and destruction of the planet follow from the binary language function and the canonical binary logic function.

Breaking out of a lifetime habituated in linguistic Being cannot be achieved by reading a comment. I know this, but it certainly can’t be achieved by remaining silent. I think you radically underestimate the complexity of Buddhist phenomenology. I’m looking at Dan Lusthaus’ 600 page treatise on the subject; one of about twenty on my bookshelf.

The whole ethos of Yogacara was that the canonical sutras of the Pali Canon were corrupted by generations of misinterpretation. The Yogacarans set about recalibrating Buddhist teaching from fundamental principles. There is adequate evidence that the early sutras were altered to support metaphysical truth claims that did not originate from the Buddha. I’m afraid your statement somewhat oversimplifies matters.

Why do people have to study Zen for decades to gain insight if they could just read a sutra or two? Or a clear and concise word statement? The problems are much more deep seated. The Western mind is indoctrinated in such a way to make such ease impossible. You have to completely unlearn everything you think you know. That is what the ‘koan’ is: a tool of uunlearning. There is never any end to this, and ‘enlightenment’ is a bullshit concept too.

And you fail to pass on that the biggest obstacle to understanding is understanding. If you get it, you don’t get it. There is no intellectual understanding. You cannot answer the Koan.

Yogacara means practice of yoga. There is only the practice. We now know that meditators brains are structurally and functionally different from non-meditators brains. We have retrained our perception without the conceptual overlay. Duality collapses: the object and the subject do not separately exist. The imagined externality of the object is ‘Vijnapti matrata’.

This is a radically different non-paradigm …if it could be explained in simplistic terms and words of one syllable – we wouldn’t be destroying the planet for the want of it. The essential programming effect of language and logic is hidden in the deep structure of language. The root correlation is that we believe that our concepts have essences that directly relate to the essences of things. This is false and logically flawed.

Now, let us start the process of elucidation by stating that all propositions predicated on Being are false …including this one. This is not a word trick: it is an indication of the paradox of language and the impossibility of creating a monolithic conceptual paradigm that does not contradict itself. Which is exactly what the Western tradition of thought has tried to do since Plato.

Buddhism brought in the para-logic function (catusoki) to deal with the inconsistencies. The Western mind cannot deal with intentional undecidability because it breaks the cardinal Aritotlean logic function and causes language to ‘rupture’. Which is exactly the reason why PoMo was derided and rejected – because we reject undecidability. But decidability is destroying us.

The failure of the linguistic paradigm is the failure of humanity. Sorry Ramdan, if you think that that can be unravelled with a few pithy epithets, you are massively understating the problem. Not least that there is an enormous vested interest in not confronting the problem.

Ramdan
Ramdan
Jul 8, 2019 12:41 PM
Reply to  BigB

Thanks for your reply BigB. I praise all the knowledge you have accumulated and carefully keep.

Not all human beings have the same underestanding, there are different levels of comprehension and different approaches to a single problem: “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.”

–How will someone benefit from a theory presented in terms difficult to underestand?

–How will someone… anyone, will be capable to trascend the meaningless chatting of the mind by focusing on more chatting?

–How will someone attain freedom from illusion if they need 3 lifes to know all the references of the references of the references that made up the discourse that will lead them to that freedom?

“Philosophies are made of the mind and speculative words mean little if they have no ability to control passions” Milarepa said.

Words were used to justify torture and are used to sell something you have rightfully called (not your exact words) green capitalism…. ecocide.

Using words, elitists conceptions of the world took hold of man’s imagination and gave birth to a competitive society that separated beings– and continues to do so– on the base of mind created concepts that led to slavery, colonization, exploitation, separation, domination…and all sorts of man-made suffering…in addition to those that naturally come with this life.
Also with words, those man-made additions have been made “natural”.

All, just because our minds, the mind of the modern man is twisted and see permance on the impermanent, satisfaction in what is unsatisfactory and self and what is no-self. Just because of that, men strive for the ‘infirm glory of the positive hour’, ‘the vanished power of the usual reign’.

We need no more words, we need no more teachings: We need more practice.
Nothing replaces direct experience, and intuitive learning is possible, but for that, you need a quiet mind, a silent mind. You need inner Silence.

Am I oversimplifying? I think I’m just simplifying things in an already overcrowded world… Isn’t it simplicity what we are missing after all?

But again, there are different levels of comprehension and different approaches to a single problem: “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.”

Thanks again.

mark
mark
Jul 7, 2019 7:43 PM
Reply to  Francis Lee

Cultural Marxism was a key element of the doctrines of Moses Mordecai Levy.
But it was put on the back burner till the 1930s.
WW1 was a big disappointment for Levy’s followers.
The sheeplike proletariat were confidently expected to rise up and overthrow the established order under their direction and install Levy’s acolytes in power.
Instead, the ties of patriotism, family, religious faith and other traditions proved far more durable.
Hence it was back to Plan B, Cultural Marxism.
Destroy borders and nations. Smash the family. Abolish religion. Leave isolated atomised individuals with no loyalties to serve as the requisite cannon fodder.
The Long March through the institutions.
We see the poisoned fruit of their handiwork today, the reduction of civilised nations to third world hellholes, the destruction of the family and the perversion of religion. The relentless promotion of identity politics, and all the 57 varieties of degeneracy, with more in the pipeline.
With the same people pulling all the strings.
But of course all this is a “trope” and “Ron Unz toilet dribble.”
It’s just pure coincidence that all the cultural Marxists and 85% of the Bolshevik leadership were Jews.

George
George
Jul 7, 2019 8:40 PM
Reply to  mark

I daresay that WW1 was “a big disappointment” for most.

But as usual, it seems that complaint against “Cultural Marxism” like the complaint against Marxism, secular humanism and various other bolshy movments is really a diversion from the effects, not of socialism, but of capitalism. It is capitalism that has been the great transforming force, ruthlessly knocking down the old traditions, cultures, religions etc. It is capitalism that has caused the rise in universal claims, atomization, increasing abstraction etc. Or as Marx and Engels put it:

“The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.”

BigB
BigB
Jul 8, 2019 9:17 AM
Reply to  mark

Actually, the Bosheviks were’nt just Jews: they were ethnocentric exceptionalist Jews who used Bolshevism to settle centuries of scores and slander for ‘blood libel’. So goes the most pernicious non sequitur set of lies to ever be spaffed in the face of history. Doesn’t your pseudo-theory include the Jewish mediaeval death cult – the Kabalistic egregore – that infiltrated every institution from the Catholic church to Marxism, Bolshevism, “Cultural Marxism”, and PoMo? Just to undermine your white privilege and challenge your own entitled exceptionalism? Don’t you know that the REAL Holocaust was not the fake Shoah – which you lack the courage to actually commit to saying, but make clear that is what you think – it is of white patriarchate culture.

Poor snowflake. Grow up. There are people of colour that have been oppressed and enslaved for centuries to build the ivory towers of Western culture. Third world hellholes that built white privilege. Critical theory challenges this. Western culture is collapsing because of the contradictions of its own iniquity. It doesn’t need an outside force to catalyse it. It is degenerate to the core in and of itself. To invent a force of corrosion is a pure shadow projection that illuminates the source racism in anyone who is cognitively challenged enough to accept it. Read Marx, CT, and key PoMo texts before dismissing them. They might just cleanse your mind.

George
George
Jul 7, 2019 8:46 PM
Reply to  Francis Lee

I don’t find Luckacs that difficult to understand. I think he was spot on about Adorno:

“A considerable part of the leading German intelligentsia, including Adorno, have taken up residence in the ‘Grand Hotel Abyss’ which I described in connection with my critique of Schopenhauer as ‘a beautiful hotel, equipped with every comfort, on the edge of an abyss, of nothingness, of absurdity. And the daily contemplation of the abyss between excellent meals or artistic entertainments, can only heighten the enjoyment of the subtle comforts offered.’ “