184

The Battle of Seattle was Fought by the Pro-war “Left” in Northern Syria

Max Parry

SEATTLE, WA – JUNE 14: A sign welcomes at the so-called “Capitol Hill Organized Protest” (Photo by David Ryder/Getty Images)

The ongoing series of protests, riots and unrest following the death of George Floyd culminated in the establishment of a self-declared “autonomous zone” by activists in Seattle, Washington, after police abandoned a local precinct in the city’s Capitol Hill district.

Lasting just three weeks until law enforcement retook the six-block territory from occupants on July 1st, the Capitol Hill Organized Protest (CHOP) — initially called the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) — was a short-lived experiment which unfortunately exhibited all the contradictions of the so-called Left that have become characteristic in the United States today.

Although it is undeniable that American police have a brutality and racism problem (having been trained by Israel), within weeks it was clear that what began as spontaneous protests were hijacked for an establishment agenda.

Meanwhile, the ill-fated demise of the Seattle commune should be understood as symptomatic of a larger problem within the U.S. left as a whole.

One of the most influential figures of the French Revolution, Maximilien Robespierre, who died 226 years ago this month, famously said:

the secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant.”

The Paris Commune was established after the storming of the Bastille fortress on July 14, 1789. Unfortunately, this protest movement could not be any less educational and the siege of the Seattle Police Department’s East Precinct was certainly no Bastille Day.

Many have speculated as to why Mayor Jenny Durkan and the SPD seemingly allowed the protesters to occupy the neighborhood, while they enjoyed direct support from local politicians such as Seattle City Council member Kshama Sawant of the Trotskyite Socialist Alternative organization who fancies herself the first “socialist” to win an election in the city since Anna Louise Strong in 1916.

However, the more meaningful question is what has this movement accomplished besides recoiling the US working class further away from progressive politics?

The biggest misconception across the political spectrum, especially on the Right, is that this leaderless and haphazard movement is somehow “Marxist.”

Karl Marx, whose entire worldview was based on a material and scientific understanding of history, focused on the class system and would be spinning in his grave knowing what a mess identity politics has made in his name.

In contrast, the ‘wokist’ cult at the center of these marches ignores both science and class with no political vision beyond destruction, vindictiveness, and the stifling of free speech.

This is why the U.S. political establishment, which has been completely unable to implement the most elementary measures in providing healthcare and securing employment to Americans during the pandemic, is quite happy to jump on board a narrative that pits divisions of the working class against each other based on race while wealth trickles up to the 1%.

The CHOP/CHAZ occupants reportedly established a reverse hierarchical social structure where whites self-flagellated by performing quasi-religious rituals of atonement for the sins of slavery. There was also a diversity quota of “centering” certain individuals based on their ethnic background, gender and sexual orientation to cede leadership roles at the co-op, with white participants coerced into overcoming their “fragility” (or sensitivity in discussing racism).

Concurrent with the protests, corporate consultant and University of Washington professor Robin DiAngelo’s intellectually fraudulent book White Fragility shot to the top of the New York Times bestseller list and is a perfect example of how such identity politics fails in dealing with social issues.

Collective punishment is never a suitable guiding principle in addressing social problems, nor is using a conception akin to the religious idea of original sin where “white privilege” is the root cause of racism. There were even mini-reparations demanded of repenting white protesters reminiscent of the collection plate passed around by worshippers in a church.

This sort of bizarre and self-indulgent identity politics is much like what was widely mocked in a viral video of a Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) convention collapsing into infighting last year.

What began as protests against police brutality were not only derailed into efforts to set-up communes in major cities but a nationwide debate on statues, after the wave of demonstrations and rioting across the country led to the Taliban-style destruction of historical monuments perceived as glorifying racism.

As a result, the toxic political atmosphere which surrounded the events in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 was reignited.

While the calls for the removal of Confederate statues erected during the Reconstruction era is long overdue, more debatable is the removal of those honoring slave-owning Founding Fathers such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson which were toppled in Portland, Oregon. This was followed by a statue of Union General Ulysses S. Grant being knocked over in San Francisco and calls to remove the Lincoln Memorial in DC, two men who victoriously led the North in the Civil War.

Regrettably, the prioritization of such iconoclastic gestures has not only defanged the protests but diverted them from bringing real change to social inequities in the immediate future.

This is not the first time we have witnessed this phenomena.

Last year, a more troublesome example were the calls to remove a historic mural at George Washington High School in San Francisco that were capitulated to by the city school board. The thirteen panel mural, Life of Washington, painted in 1936 by Russian-American artist Victor Arnautoff was commissioned as part of the Federal Art Project, a New Deal program funded by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) which employed visual artists to create public works during the Great Depression.

One controversial panel depicts George Washington pointing to a group of armed colonizers standing over the corpse of a Native American, while another fresco portrays two colonizers surveying land as slaves toil in a field. It would seem obvious to anyone that the mural is not only explicitly anti-racist but representative of an important period in US history where art was a force for social change and progressive politics was at the center of American life.

Arnautoff was a Russian immigrant who was an assistant to Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, while the WPA and its art program were dominated by communists such as the two men. Still, no matter the context or intent — the unflinching depiction of American history was deemed “offensive to certain communities” because students were “triggered” by the harsh realities illustrated.

This might seem unrelated, but the same illogic is behind the vigilantism of the statue removals.

While the Arnautoff mural is clearly anti-racist and certain monuments may glorify slavery, the distinction is indecipherable to the social justice sect which needs its “safe space” from the uncomfortable truths of American history. The differentiation between a left-wing WPA mural opposing racism and colonial statue commending it is illegible to them.

The entire purpose behind the Arnautoff mural is to make one uncomfortable because its subject matter is something no one should ever be at ease with. Yet its undeniable educational and artistic value did not prevent the San Francisco school board from voting to paint over it, while articles were published in the New York Times and even The Nation magazine applauding their decision.

What on earth is happening to the left when it is censoring anti-racist art in the name of fighting racism?

The whole point of education at a high school is to teach students to analyze and interpret subjects like art and history, not just emotionally react to them. When the very fabric of culture and society like a historic mural or statue can be torn down simply because people are upset by them, the next plausible step is book burning.

San Francisco High School completely failed to educate its students when they decided upon the most backwards way of interpreting the mural, just as the protesters tearing down these statues did not use their faculties to understand them in a historical context.

Genocide and slavery are indeed the foundations of the US, but we should learn from our tragic history to grasp the equivalent injustices happening today. Simply eradicating murals and statues that remind us of it, whether they oppose or elevate them, is totally ineffectual.

While some activists have expressed concern that the protests have deviated from their original purpose, the right has fixated on the presence among the marches of “Antifa” which Trump wants to designate as a “terrorist organization”, a reckless idea given the completely decentralized nature of the group. The original Antifa movement in the 1930s had been part of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in its effort to form a popular front against fascism, but the dilettantes in the modern incarnation are closely associated with black bloc anarchism and other amateurish orientations.

Two decades ago, Seattle was the site of the 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization (WTO), often referred to as the ‘Battle of Seattle’, which saw 40,000 march against globalization. Some may recall this was where the black bloc first became notorious for injecting vandalism and senseless violence into peaceful demonstrations and were widely thought to have been infiltrated by law enforcement.

In 2016, the current embodiment of Antifa first came to attention during protests on college campuses against speaking appearances by far-right media personalities during the US presidential election, including at the University of California at Berkeley which had ironically been the site of the Free Speech Movement in the 1960s.

Following Trump’s election, the stage was set in Charlottesville during the Unite the Right rally and counter-protests over the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue in August 2017 for “Antifa” to be crowned as heroes shadowboxing the historical ghost of fascism. When the likes of the New York Times is suddenly promoting the black bloc, that’s your first clue something else is afoot.

In order to prevent the emergence of a truly progressive movement in the wake of Hillary Clinton’s defeat, a false narrative was concocted by the political establishment about the significance of Trump’s victory, which we were told was the result of alleged Russian meddling and the racism of “deplorable” Trump voters. Instantly, any critique of the system which produced Trump disappeared and the establishment wing of the Democratic Party was able to neutralize the Bernie Sanders-led opposition in its ranks.

As a result, the vast majority of the left became convinced by the interpretation that Trump’s election was purely the outcome of a resurgence of “fascism”, thus making Trump the singular, most immediate danger — while US imperialism and endless war continue unopposed, including the support for actual fascists in Ukraine. It should be understood that what Trump and the wave of pro-Zionist, Islamophobic right-wing populists in the EU represent is something qualitatively different.

Still, anyone on the left who dares oppose US imperialism today is risking being branded a ‘red-brown’ collaborator. The Democratic Party, which spearheaded the Orwellian idea of “humanitarian interventionism” used to justify the wholesale destruction of uncooperative nations by the American war machine in recent decades, has since tricked the majority of the left into unwittingly backing US imperialism to unseat “dictators.”

Even when the Left today ostensibly opposes war, it is often forced to qualify its objections by repeating the same talking points about countries attacked by Washington used to justify it.

The US foray in the Syrian war is a perfect example. Trump’s idea to designate Antifa as a terrorist group would be especially ironic considering that many American leftists who self-identify using the “Antifa” black and red standard have thrown their support behind the creation of another infamous “autonomous zone” in Northeast Syria established by mostly-Kurdish militias known as Rojava — with the help of none other than the US military.

There is even a self-proclaimed International Freedom Battalion of American and European volunteers fighting to defend the enclave that purports to be in the tradition of the International Brigades which defended the Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War.

These “Antifa” conscripts fight alongside the YPG (People’s Protection Units), a Kurdish-majority militia which has been rebranded by the Pentagon as the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). These leftists are apparently in serious need of a history lesson, considering it was the Soviet Union alone which intervened to defend the Spanish Republic from fascism, not the United States.

From Washington’s perspective, CHOP/CHAZ should be considered blowback from this policy.

The US creation of the SDF has not been without controversy, as the YPG is widely regarded as the Syrian branch of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in Turkey which Washington’s NATO ally regards as a terrorist organization. While the Kurds and their Western volunteers may believe they are creating an anarchist utopia, in reality they are infantryman for the Zionist plan to balkanize Syria and prevent Damascus from accessing its own resources. So it makes perfect sense that they would try to replicate what they learned in Afrin in an American city using Rojava as a model.

When Trump tried to follow through on his anti-interventionist pledges as a candidate and pull US troops out of Syria, it sparked outrage from the pro-war “left” which glorifies Rojava as a ‘libertarian socialist’ and ‘direct democracy’ experiment, even though non-Kurds such as Arabs and Assyrian Christians face ethnic cleansing at hands of Kurdish nationalists in their efforts to create an ethno-state.

The ideological inspiration for the Rojava federation is the Jewish-American Zionist anarchist philosopher Murray Bookchin who was especially influential to PKK founder Abdullah Öcalan. Unbeknownst to many, Bookchin was also a noted Zionist — but this is not as unlikely a paradox as it may seem.

After all, Israel itself was initially established with the settlement of communes and the Zionist form of “autonomous zones” known as kibbutz (“gathering” in Hebrew).

Even prior to WWII, European Zionists and early kibbutniks came to Mandatory Palestine as illegal immigrants and began living in their communes while fusing Jewish nationalism and their own conception of socialism, an amalgamation not unlike what the Kurds are practicing in Syria today.

One other highly influential thinker in the anarchist community who purports to be a ‘libertarian socialist’, Noam Chomsky, was himself part of the Zionist kibbutz movement in his youth. This explains why Chomsky would call for a continuation of the US occupation of northern Syria on the basis of “protecting the Kurds“, who are trying to repeat the formula used to found Israel to create a Syrian Kurdistan as another US protectorate in the Middle East.

It is no coincidence that in the manifesto listing the demands of the sit-in in Seattle, nowhere to be found is the defunding of the Pentagon — the primary supplier through the 1033 Program of the militarized police violence being protested. The same cognitively dissonant left calling to “defund the police”, which will almost certainly be used as a pretext to privatize them, completely ignores endless US wars abroad and opposed efforts by the Trump administration to scale back expansionism in Syria.

The focus on the tearing down of statues from America’s colonial ‘past’ has also coincided with Israel’s preparations in colonizing what remains of Palestinian territory with the annexation of the West Bank — where are the mass protests to stop that? If Black Lives Matter dared focus on AIPAC, it would be shut down very quickly.

In 2016, when BLM endorsed the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign to boycott Israel, their previously enjoyed benefits suddenly were in jeopardy and was revealed to be the direct result of sabotage by the Zionist lobby.

In the last several decades, there has been a retreat of class conscious forces in U.S. political life, especially after the fall of the Soviet Union.

The degenerate form of the left that exists today is an unfortunate result of the academization of social issues and the influence of the Frankfurt School critical theorists whose bourgeoisification of Marxism reduced it to a lens by which to critique culture and the arts while removing its class politics.

The politically correct obsession with the policing of language by the postmodern cult of identity politics is excluding the working class from the conversation and counteracting its revolutionary potential.

The CIA fronts in the Open Society, Ford, and Kellogg Foundations of the non-profit industrial complex have successfully corralled the protests while no substantial change has been made to the real ills in US society where the 1% has made trillions during the pandemic and subsequent economic depression.

While the masses are busy tipping over statues and monuments in a crusade to purify history, the ruling class is laughing all the way to the bank.

Originally published at Dissident Voice
Max Parry is an independent journalist and geopolitical analyst. His work has appeared in several independent publications. Read him on Medium. Max may be reached at: [email protected].

SUPPORT OFFGUARDIAN

If you enjoy OffG's content, please help us make our monthly fund-raising goal and keep the site alive.

For other ways to donate, including direct-transfer bank details click HERE.

4 16 votes
Article Rating
Subscribe
Notify of
guest

184 Comments
newest
oldest most voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Dogma
Dogma
Sep 20, 2020 9:19 PM

ANTIFA is CANVAS. Which is the American version of OTPOR. The NED, Ford Foundation,CIA and later financed by Soros. Others have covered this for a long time. Lincoln was on the take from the bankers and England. The Cival War was about killing US sovereignty from England. Sherman’s march to the sea was complete genocide by the government on it’s own people. Go read The Real Lincoln. Alexander Hamilton was an agent of England. The US has been infiltrated and subverted since it’s inception.

Rick Giombetti
Rick Giombetti
Aug 16, 2020 11:23 PM

As far as Rojova goes, we don’t need to be supporting the creation anymore sectarian ethno states. This has been going on with particular intensity since the overthrow of the Soviet Union, starting with break up of Yugoslavia starting in 1990. It has helped play a negative role in reducing pay and overall living standards for working people in more developed countries. What Washington wants is a world of mostly small, weak states that can be easily coerced into follow “The Guidelines” of the Washington Consensus.

Beside a being a base for the U.S. led West to destabilize Turkey, Iran and Iraq, I see in a Rojova the potential to become a Maquiladora zone for Israeli, U.S. and E.U. companies looking for cheap easy to exploit labor.

richard
richard
Jul 18, 2020 4:00 PM

What we have in the US is Civic nationalism or ethnic nationalism. Which one will win?

John Milton
John Milton
Jul 18, 2020 9:02 AM

“Although it is undeniable that American police have a brutality and racism problem”

Brutality yes, but a racism problem? I see no evidence of that

Estompista
Estompista
Jul 19, 2020 12:38 PM
Reply to  John Milton

Maybe you’re just an oblivious white person?

John Milton
John Milton
Jul 19, 2020 1:08 PM
Reply to  Estompista

No, I just haven’t seen any evidence. The MSM often talks of institutional racism, but provides no evidence. This is my point.
 
I’m not saying some white people are not racist. Of course they are (as are people of any other race). But to make a statement like “the police have a racism problem” needs to be backed up by evidence. And a video of some idiotic cops arresting / killing a black man does not mean they are racist! Thugs, yes. But automatically assumed to be racist? That assumption in itself is racist, surely?
 
If, say, on average 10% of people are racist and 20% of police are racist, then yes you could argue that the police has a racism problem. But if the percentage of racists in the police force is equal to the general percentage of racists in the population at large then you can’t really state they have a ‘racism problem’ since they would be no more racist than any other institution.
 
At least you didn’t insult me for having an opinion that doesn’t follow the woke agenda. So, thanks for that.

goldhoarder
goldhoarder
Jul 24, 2020 4:48 PM
Reply to  John Milton

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jul/17/jakhary-jackson-black-portland-cop-rails-against-w/
 
Officer Jackson said his cousin, who is Black, tried to participate in one of the marches but ended up leaving because he felt so uncomfortable.
“He left and he said this has turned into something else, this is weird,” he said. “It’s been very eye-opening. It says something when you’re at a Black Lives Matter protest, and you have more minorities on the police side than you have in a violent crowd, and you have white people screaming at Black officers.
Officer Jackson, who said he was hit during a recent protest by a full beer can, a rock, and a frozen water bottle, said he was heartened to spot two Black men cleaning up the streets later that night.
“They had two garbage bags, and they were just running and cleaning up,” he said. “A few of us from my team went over and I had to shake their hands. I was so moved by that and so impressed. They said, ‘We’re from here, this is our city. I don’t understand why people are coming here and destroying it.’”

deschutes
deschutes
Feb 28, 2021 11:14 AM
Reply to  John Milton

Indeed. What’s more, the countless white police murders of black Americans happening on a weekly basis, all thoroughly documented by smartphone videos certainly back up your position. I also think the all the white Police acted with restraint and professionalism when they killed George Floyd…Daniel Prude…Breonna Taylor…Stephon Clark..etc…etc..the list is virtually endless and ongoing. I’m sure you’d also agree that good race relations in the USA between blacks and whites have always been the rule, even going back to when they had slavery in the USA before the civil war in the 1860s.

Paul Vonharnish
Paul Vonharnish
Jul 17, 2020 3:34 PM

Like all protests, the “protesters” seldom know anything about actual history. They choose to replace social order with mayhem and theatrics, because they lack the credentials of any true education.
 
Articles of Confederation – Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Articles_of_Confederation_and_Perpetual_Union 
 
The former American Republic was intentionally established as a Confederacy for very good reasons. The bastardization and unionization of America resulted in a Unitary State, not a Confederate Republic. Banking and mercantile interests love manipulating the complicit idiocy of the greedy and uneducated.
 
Excerpted from: Unitary state – Wikipedia
 
A large majority of the world’s states (166 of the 193 UN member states) have a unitary system of government. [2]
 
Unitary states stand in contrast with federations, also known as federal states. In federations, the provincial governments share powers with the central government as equal actors through a written constitution, to which the consent of both is required to make amendments. This means that the sub-national units have a right of existence and powers that cannot be unilaterally changed by the central government. [3]
 
Complete text: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitary_state

Ed Dodge
Ed Dodge
Jul 17, 2020 12:31 PM

This was a brilliant, insightful piece to read. My compliments to Max Parry, the author!

sharon marlowe
sharon marlowe
Jul 17, 2020 12:30 PM

“The entire purpose behind the Arnautoff mural is to make one uncomfortable because its subject matter is something no one should ever be at ease with. Yet its undeniable educational and artistic value did not prevent the San Francisco school board from voting to paint over it, while articles were published in the New York Times and even The Nation magazine applauding their decision.
What on earth is happening to the left when it is censoring anti-racist art in the name of fighting racism?”
 
Quit calling them “Left”! They’re obviously right wingers. They don’t want to see the history of genocide/colonialism, because it makes the imperialist right wingers uncomfortable. Just say they’re right wingers already.

Moneycircus
Moneycircus
Jul 17, 2020 12:23 PM

CHOP/CHAZ built a border wall. One of the first things they did. They posted sentries. They deported people they didn’t like.
 
CHOP/CHAZ ruled by force. With guns and armed patrols. Brutality followed. Unarmed people were killed.
 
CHOP/CHAZ “took the knee” (what a Milquetoast phrase) to the State. We cynics asked who the hell they were kneeling to – and it turned out that when the Liberal elite and its police asked them to go home, they obliged with alacrity and not a single demand. Were they literally missing mama’s warm milk and avocado toast?
 
Nah. Someone gave an order.

Kalen
Kalen
Jul 17, 2020 4:32 AM

The confusion, about what political leftism is, is rampant and it is not only because of massive blatant anti socialist propaganda of lies, manipulating terms Orwellian style but because it is supported by modern cult of scientism promoted among lapsed Marxists remaining in academia.

Such anti socialist propaganda of corrupted postmodernism gained aura of academic legitimacy and in some cases is being peddled as step further into Marxist ideas of socialism as organization of equal, equitable and egalitarian self governed classless society but only considered classless because class has been eliminated from politics and socioeconomics as irrelevant driver of social development and equal solely in abstract cultural terms.

The philosophy of identarianism and Identity politics of division took over the world as seen by postmodernists claiming that subjectivity is objective and hence subjective reasoning adopted selected dynamic social groups including their definition of truth or facts is valid objective social reality and expresses meaning of diversity as conflicting interests among those groups. As Horkheimer pointed out such approach is very similar to small proto-fascist groups who continued to be driven by their own subjective as seen by others but objective to them truths into Nazism reaching national scale.

The same foundation was shared by government supported Institutions of white supremacy in the US peddling unreality of pseudo scientific race theory and eugenics to cover up economic reliance on exploitation of people via chattel slavery or more profitable on the Industrial Age wage slavery.

Marx analysis dispelled any claims of identity politics (as revolutionary force) as supposedly being founded on Marx’s class theory of historical process.

Marx attitude to slavery as first of all socioeconomic system supporting profits and not solely a as cultural or political system as they were in fact devised purposefully in order to support slavery.

Marx understood industrial revolution as changing socioeconomic realities of capitalism forcing slavery (meaning owning labor force) almost completely out in the west by 1848 and instead slaves joined extorted, under economic blackmail, global productive forces via part time renting of labor (wage slavery) via capitalist class monetized financialized labor market under full control of money changers.

That the decisive branch of English industry is based upon the existence of slavery in the southern states of the American union, that a Negro revolt in these areas could ruin the whole system of production as it exists today is, of course, an extremely depressing fact for the people who spent £20 million a few years ago on Negro emancipation in their own colonies.

However, this fact leads to the only ‘realistic’ solution of the slave question, which has recently again been the cause of such long and violent debate in the American Congress. American cotton production is based on slavery. As soon as the industry reaches a point where it cannot tolerate the United States’ cotton monopoly any longer, cotton will be successfully mass-produced in other countries, and it is hardly possible to achieve this anywhere today except with free workers. But as soon as the free labour of other countries can deliver sufficient supplies of cotton to industry more cheaply than the slave labour of the United States, then American slavery will be broken together with the American cotton monopoly and the slaves will be emancipated, because they will have become useless as slaves.”

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1850/11/01.htm?fbclid=IwAR2BBo3oiS1aVFuCfBwdCORC0yZ9hyA22SbNKUbZdQp0DEQu5yOOvbTpuQI#%5B43%5D

It was not moral stand against slavery although many including white people did take such stand, or Identity politics of black slaves peddled by black elites that prompted real change as demanded change was not systemic. Instead it was global capitalism competition and industrial revolution in agriculture and that not only included mechanization but Argo chemistry and bio technologies and sciences that broke US cotton monopoly as cotton was possible to grow in many places and productivity exponentially increased.

There is no revolutionary Marxist bone among those who buy into subjectivity (avoiding reality) of radical Identity politics that serve to obfuscate class foundation of any social struggle and proliferate identity politics of division and conflict of warring among themselves razor thin slices of society while leaving all dominant class politics of ruling elite beyond reproach. Such attitude in part explains infatuation of phony left with empire subjectively used for furthering interests of their own identity politics against other identity groups worldwide that often amount to cruelty and absurd repudiating their own supposedly noble goals. Such ideas of imperial post Marxism or postmodernism are theorized in a book entitled “Empire” by Hardt and Negri both former radical revolutionary Marxists.

Of course such massive movements of divided people along delusional beliefs and their own subjective ideas of social reality, angry, not at embedded by ruling elite into fabric of society calcified institutions of class apartheid and socioeconomic discrimination including it’s mutated form of slavery, fascism and racism, sexism etc., but on brothers and sisters fellow victims of the system and by that destroying political power of broad working class solidarity.

Such mobs are no threat to oligarchic elites at all as they are put on pedestal of objective arbiters of elite instigated conflicts and hence are not only tolerated but nurtured by oligarchy.

Moneycircus
Moneycircus
Jul 17, 2020 5:22 AM
Reply to  Kalen

I have always picked up the scent of fascism in the identify politics crowd.

“As Horkheimer pointed out such approach is very similar to small proto-fascist groups who continued to be driven by their own subjective as seen by others but objective to them truths into Nazism reaching national scale.”

Of course there is not a Marxist bone in the amorphous BLM leadership… Who actually would say the phrase “we’re trained Marxists!”!

… trained by that old Marxist-I-mean-Nazi-oh-shucks pantomime queen (fronting for oh-I-cannot-imagine-whom) George Soros.

Howard
Howard
Jul 17, 2020 3:39 AM

There’s a very simple rule of thumb: if other people are for it, I’m against it. Left-Right-Center-Bottom-Top: it’s all the same self-serving mess. All it takes for something to go hideously awry is for two people to get together and plan how to make the world a better place.
 
The world will become a better place on the day the last human being lies down and dies. Until then, everything humans do is of a type with Betsy’s finger painting (that would be Betsy the Chimp, who was shown how to create pictures with finger paints).

David F
David F
Jul 17, 2020 3:12 AM

If you want to know what BLM is worth, you only have to ask one very simple question. Of those who voted in the last US Presidential election, who did they vote for?
 
Yeah! Let’s tear down this 200-year old statue! Now let’s get out and vote for a woman who shares direct personal responsibility for the fact that black people are being stood on a stump and sold as slaves in market places in Libya today…

Doctortrinate
Doctortrinate
Jul 17, 2020 1:51 AM

Two peaceable tribes….but another wants to divide them…so, they steal some of tribe1s cattle, leaving behind beads from tribe2 to be found – tribe 2 are then declared responsible by tribe 1 for the theft of their cattle (some of which were found roaming on tribe 2s land) – but tribe2 pleads innocence and prefers to keep the peace so offers tribe1 some of their cattle…and other precious things. Tribe1 seem happy with the settlement and accept.
A little time later….tribe2 awakes one morning to find some of their cattle missing…and a goat with an arrow from tribe1 stuck in it. Tribe2 feel terribly aggrieved that tribe1 didn’t believe them and after discussion with their elders, decide to go to war.
All manner of dreadfullness ensues,and as a result, both tribes were greatly weakened.
Enter the machiavellian other….stronger through their divison, it was able to offer them a choice – do as they say, or suffer further violent experience from them… unfortunately, tribe1 chose not to restore friendly relations with tribe2, and accepted life under their rule. Tribe2 chose not to follow them into subservience – and as punishment for its defiance,it was driven from the land.
 

aspnaz
aspnaz
Jul 17, 2020 1:56 AM
Reply to  Doctortrinate

Nature will enable tribe 3 to survive. The other tribes are inferior at defending themselves. Defense is an important part of survival: tribes 1and 2 are not fit for purpose.

Doctortrinate
Doctortrinate
Jul 17, 2020 3:04 AM
Reply to  aspnaz

or – Tribe2 joined the dark triad – and did the very same thing that the other (tribe3) – did to them.

aspnaz
aspnaz
Jul 17, 2020 1:29 AM

I wonder how many CCP operatives are working at the NYT. In the hundreds?

aspnaz
aspnaz
Jul 19, 2020 12:30 PM
Reply to  aspnaz

A down vote? OK, I wonder how many CIA operatives are working at the Global Times? Is that a more acceptable question?

sandy
sandy
Jul 16, 2020 9:26 PM

Ah, so I see now… the communist vanguardists crawl out of their crypt again after sabotaging revolution worldwide since The Spanish Civil War and blame it on the “Left”? Once one hears the rants on anarchists, we know something’s up alright.
 
To characterize the NYT article “suddenly promoting the black bloc, that’s your first clue something else is afoot” is malfeasance. Read the article. It is only surprisingly neutral and promotes no one.
 
The CHOP manifesto never mentions any foreign policy (such as an excellent flattening of the Pentagon to 10% w/pull back to domestic soil) and is limited to City of Seattle policy. Conflating Occupy style CHOP to supporting US Syrian occupation is ludicrous.
 
Questioning why there aren’t BLM demos on Palestine when POC are being literally lynched daily by cops in the streets of America while protests are actually affecting legislation, is also ludricrous.
 
The idea that anarchists breaking windows recoils Progressives is what Liberals (Democratic Partyites) accuse any protest of doing: soiling their “compromises” better called sell-outs. This is the knee-jerk liberal mind that protects it’s cloaked authoritarian capitalist heart that throttles all ground-up change in this country.
 
Where hear are “liberals” noted within the left?. The article conflates the “left” as some giant container from Democrats to anarchists, omitting “vanguard” Marxists. New boss just like the old boss, huh?We can see what that produced: stongman authoritarian states easily ridiculed by capitalist propaganda. A pawn.
 
What this article best points out becomes clearest in what it omits. Liberals, the good cop to the conservative’s bad cop routine that has trapped Western Republic’s serf populations to feedback looping powerlessness since inception, are the real problem. What terrifies all elements of the system, Liberals and every existing spectrum mentioned in the article, is what was thrown under the bus, “direct democracy”. Vilifying Rojava for direct democracy, just as the supposed evil sytemic oppressors now do is shameless. Direct democracy threatens wealth and power more than any political option now because it is not a political option, it is self-governing. It is self-determination. Leaving decisions in the hands of the Commons of the People in direct democracy town halls linked with technology is unthinkable in the authoritarian mind. If Occupy taught us anything it taught us direct democracy can work even with 90% consensus as it did at Occupy Oakland. But we will never hear about this because of the political authoritarians who occupy our economy, media and governing worldwide: alt-right, right, libertarian, conservative, neoliberal, liberal, socialist or communist. Real socialism or communism must have direct democracy, a self creation, advise & consent on Policy & Budget. The idea of having collective society as boss over an obedient employee government staff is just too far fetched for THE SYSTEM.
 
Another word omitted universally within Western Empire is egalitarianism which is the driving motivation behind self-rule, direct democracy, socialism and democracy in the workplace which is humanity’s only future. Wakey, wakey!
 
 
 

aspnaz
aspnaz
Jul 17, 2020 1:37 AM
Reply to  sandy

So how will this ideal system prevent the normal predators that are inherent in human kind? How will you stop the Clintons and Bidens from corrupting the system? How will you stop people from building power bases that can blackmail you into submission? How will you handle the people who do not agree with your system? Wakey wakey, you can’t just ignore the people in this Nirvana.

sandy
sandy
Jul 17, 2020 9:34 PM
Reply to  aspnaz

By limiting wealth and poverty. 1x base living income to 5x max income (as in the Mondragon in northern Spain). All excess as taxation goes back into the Public Commons for re-investment. Without poverty or power over others, an egalitarian society’s criminality becomes sole property of the mentally ill, aberrant, that in tribal culture are exiled if they can’t fit in. Very rare. But if you listen to the capitalist version of anthropology, like the capitalist version of history they will tell you humanity is a vile species that must be policed vigilantly or bad things will happen. THEY, the rich and those lives who they destroy and make desperate, are what their false reality narratives hide. And the sole reason is because they don’t want you stopping their free-for-all-money-orgy behind that wall of cops and military that enforce their empire. Wakey, wakey indeed!

aspnaz
aspnaz
Jul 18, 2020 2:16 AM
Reply to  sandy

You didn’t tackle the reality: how do you stop people cheating the system? If there was a real answer we would be using it today. There is no humanitarian solution to that problem, only extermination or exile. So your egalitarian society becomes a private club and you persecute dissent. Sounds worse than what we have at the moment.

Sandy
Sandy
Jul 18, 2020 9:06 PM
Reply to  aspnaz

Really? No. The only cheats are the 1% and they own this system that protects their cheating everyone else the 99%. Anyone who actualizes their wealth with conspicuous behavior will identify themselves right away. Nationalizing the banking system into a Public Banking System will make surveillance easy. And what’s more anyone who wants more than 250k/yr with free public everything is an assole. Business accounts will be separate, Hording money will just be stupid. It’s a whole new mindset. Egalitarian is everyone friend. No more private clubs and you can dissent all you like.

aspnaz
aspnaz
Jul 19, 2020 2:46 AM
Reply to  Sandy

The only cheats are the 1%

 
No unemplyment benefit cheats? There used to be when I was in the UK. But, let’s say you are right, the 1% do the cheating: how do they do all that cheating without an army of helpers? Are the helpers naive innocents? Are they too dumb to realise they are part of a “cheating” scheme? Like an army fighting a war, it takes people to do this sort of thing and lots of people. The rot descends to the bottom of the pyramid, always has, always will. Your assessment of people is not very convincing.

wardropper
wardropper
Jul 18, 2020 7:34 PM
Reply to  sandy

Yes, Sandy, but the wealthy won’t agree to having their wealth limited.
There has never been a lack of good ideas for making society better, but it always boils down to HOW to do it.
The French showed us how to do it in 1789, but today we don’t find that solution to be sufficiently politically-correct…
So we’re just stuck with the same ol’ same ol’ “Let’s form a committee and discuss what to do, and, if too many conflicting ideas emerge, then we can form another committee to decide what the first committee should do”…
Result: Nothing.
It’s a dilemma. I know several very wealthy people who could do a great deal of good with their money (apart from getting tax exemptions for off-loading lots of it onto charitable organizations which will then be obliged to repay the favour with votes, or other political fiddling), but I can’t for the life of me think of a single way in which I could pry one penny of that money from their grasping hands…
Wealth in itself is no bad thing – it comes and goes – but when do we ever see a politician stand up in Parliament and insist upon new laws which will forcibly limit the obscene levels of personal wealth which now follow the American model? It’s all dismissed as “market forces”, which are allowed to rule everything, because all the decisions are taken by marketeers.

Sandy
Sandy
Jul 18, 2020 9:13 PM
Reply to  wardropper

Wealth, horded money, is in itself evil and the wealthy won’t have a choice, there will be limits like 1x -5x, as in Mondragon. Public Banking makes money available to anyone and keeps everyone from hording and keeping money from not circulating. Everyone has at minimum a public service job and plenty of time off. Capitalism’s 500 year life-death cycle is over and only the Vampire Zombie is left as an inverted monster consuming the host. We need to put a direct democracy socialist wooden stake in it’s heart and start living in an actual “civilized” society where all the monsters are LOCKED DOWN.

wardropper
wardropper
Jul 18, 2020 10:54 PM
Reply to  Sandy

I agree with everything you say, but I don’t see how we can force any of it to happen. Capitalism’s huge (stolen) resources have chosen to ignore Mondragon, to ignore common decency and to ignore us. Who is going to lock them down? You? Me?
I would LIKE to lock down the City of London, but it is VAST. What then?

aspnaz
aspnaz
Jul 19, 2020 2:57 AM
Reply to  Sandy

“Evil” is an emotional assessment, almost a jealous assessment. What is the real problem with hoarding money? There is nothing wrong with hoarding money, the wrong is in how they got the money in the first place and sometimes that is not wrong. Are the Australians bad for selling their resources to make themselves richer? Is that “evil”? The wishywashy statements like “evil” take us nowhere when trying to find solutions.
 
There is only one solution and it is violence. Violence is the only proven way of reseting economic disparity and even they you will never get everybody back to the same level, just reduce the disparity.
 
Is violence “evil”? Difficult one. If you can invent a better way that would actually work then your name would go down in history as a miracle worker.

sandy
sandy
Jul 21, 2020 8:20 PM
Reply to  aspnaz

Denialist nonsence. You are just justifying greed. Hording wealth you don’t need to live a decent life is greed, criminal and ultimately when one knows what horded capital has done to about 95% of planet Earth, evil. Socialism, redistribution and contiuous circulation of humanity’s wealth to a 1x to 5x (like 50k base to 250K max) scale for everyone, when most public services are paid for, eliminates the power, greed and stupidity from selfishly destroying other’s lives. This is totally doable if we all collectively participate in agreeing to these limits. Who needs more? Greedy, selfish, criminal and evil people do.
 

Charlotte Russe
Charlotte Russe
Jul 16, 2020 8:56 PM

 
ALL THE SAME SCHEMES
 
It makes total sense that the same machinations deployed by the national security state against indigenous populations would be used against its own citizenry, especially if the objectives are the same– regime change.  
 
It should be stressed that for decades identity politics has been used by the CIA to co-opt
Leftist movements. “In 1958, Gloria Steinem was recruited by CIA Cord Meyer’s to direct the “informal group of activists” now called the “Independent Research Service.” This was part of Meyer’s “Congress for Cultural Freedom,” which created magazines like “Encounter” and “Partisan Review” to promote a left-liberal chic to oppose Marxism. It was this operation that Steinem’s “student festivals” was a part of. Besides spying on students, Steinem also acted as an agent provocateur, helping to provoke riots.” http://www.wrongkindofgreen.org/2012/05/01/black-feminism-the-cia-and-gloria-steinem.
 
And then there’s Angela Davis the famous Black Panther activist and professor of feminist studies, who was mentored by a OSS/CIA agent who worked for the US propaganda dept named Herbert Marcuse. Interesting, that “revolutionary” Angela Davis recently advised her followers to vote for reactionary warmongering Joe Biden whose policies resulted in the imprisonment of hundreds of thousands of blacks. http://nomoremisandry.blogspot.com/2016/01/radical-feminist-angela-davis-ties-to.html
 
And then we have Noam Chomsky who serves as a gatekeeper and tells his supporters every four years to vote for sociopathic Hillary or braindead reactionary Joe Biden. One has to be suspicious of “leftist icons” like Chomsky and Davis, no one considered a threat to the status quo would be allowed to teach at colleges like MIT or UCLA for decades.  Anyone who genuinely opposes the ruling class is treated like Norman Finkelstein who was fired from Hunter College and hounded by Zionist pedofile Dershowitz.  
 
Co-opting the Left is nothing new COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program) is a series of covert projects conducted by the FBI aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting American political organizations. They say it came to an end years ago, but I seriously doubt that’s the case.  All the same schemes used in foreign nation-states are used to compromise the US Left.  Recently George Soros pledged to invest $150 million in grants for Black-led racial justice groups, and another $70 million toward local grants for criminal justice reform and civic engagement opportunities. What this really means is Soros is going to compromise numerous black social justice organizations by paying-off   
its leadership big time. Soros, will eventually determine who runs the organization and their agenda. 
 
The corrupt Democratic Party has given up on the working-class that’s why they’re forced to use COVID-19 to terrorize the electorate and then compound this anxiety stressing racial inequality rather than focusing on social justice issues that affect ALL workers.  The Dems current catchphrase is “reimagining the role of the police.” However, before you can reimagine police forces you need to start reimagining the social structures causing brutal austerity resulting in social unrest and crime. As long as populations remain uneducated, unemployed, indigent and hopeless there will be social instability. Everyone knows that, however, the military/security/surveillance/corporate state has no intention of resolving those issues, because it would hinder the funds absconded by war profiteers and all ancillary crooks. It’s simpler to implement a psyops operation centering on identity politics which elevates a few minority figures to positions of money and power.

Nixon Scraypes
Nixon Scraypes
Jul 16, 2020 7:44 PM

The whole history of the world is gang warfare. All this talk of racism, equality and just causes is just hype to get people on board, it’s all bullshit. Power and plunder is all. It’s not much more than a hundred years ago our PM Disraeli was saying “race is everything”. He was a realist and knew what really held people together. We’re all idealists round here,thank goodness, but in the big bad world of geo politics we don’t count for anything except as dupes for people who have no morals and no conception of what they even are!

George Mc
George Mc
Jul 16, 2020 7:20 PM

Off topic perhaps but here is an example of government “mind-fuckery” in action: 
 
https://www.dw.com/en/uk-russia-report-brexit/a-54182899
 
Russia has been influencing British politics and …. here it comes!…the government are trying to hide this from you! Implication: it must be true! 
 
Note the sweet payoff with an appropriation of “corona lingo”: 
 
“…a report which suggests that the Conservative Party has not been as secure as it might be in its social distancing from Russian influence…” 
 

Donald Duck
Donald Duck
Jul 16, 2020 7:59 PM
Reply to  George Mc

Yes we now have our own little Russiagate. Total claptrap, no evidence, just the usual string of assertions from unnamed and unknown sources. Why is it that the British establishment rolls over for it belly rub from its American masters. The MSM liberal or conservative just functions as the mouthpiece of security, judicial and political branches of the establishment. Actually I gave up reading newspapers and watching political broadcasts years ago. There used to be a saying in the old Soviet Union. ‘When you read the newspapers you don’t get the news, you just get the Party Line. Same in the West.

George Mc
George Mc
Jul 16, 2020 10:21 PM
Reply to  Donald Duck

I recall another old saying about the difference between the way propaganda works in the East and in the West: “In the Soviet Union, hardly anything is permitted but every little thing is important. In the West, everything is permitted and nothing is important.”

wardropper
wardropper
Jul 18, 2020 10:59 PM
Reply to  George Mc

That was probably true of the old Soviet, like 60 years ago… but Russia is not at all the same country it was back then, even though you’d be hard put to find anybody in Washington who realizes it…

George Mc
George Mc
Jul 19, 2020 9:52 AM
Reply to  wardropper

I didn’t mean my post as a criticism of Russia. I was simply pointing out how different propaganda systems work. Gore Vidal cited the amazement of a visiting Soviet official to America who was expecting to find a vast array of opinion expressed in the US’s fabled “free” press and was astonished to find a near uniformity. Vidal pointed out that there were far easier and cheaper ways of controlling people’s minds than direct authoritarianism.  

wardropper
wardropper
Jul 19, 2020 2:21 PM
Reply to  George Mc

I didn’t intend my post as a criticism of you either, George. Just a general aside about the way people talk about today’s Russia, with particular emphasis on Washington…

Koba
Koba
Jul 16, 2020 6:59 PM

I love those reformists who oppose the brutal war loving system by getting permission to be kettled for a day achieving nothing and fall for most bogeymen fears

Walter
Walter
Jul 16, 2020 6:02 PM

In the past it was normal to establish official spokesmen and people who represented the options of these movements, so that no confusion would develop over their stance on relevant issues.
 
This is no longer the case. Today an entire news item can be based on an anonymous statement from a nobody on the CIA’s prioritized social media. Anything can be and is attributed to these groups by the right wing media. That is just another way that the CIA have taken control of the discussion.
 
I heard today on the BBC that they are ‘opening up’ of the scientific paper review process, to random reviews & attacks prior to official review by unknown scientists or anyone else.
 
This is the same thing, where false scientific claims will be half way around the world, before the scientific paper is even reviewed or approved.
 
I’m sure the Mi5 have opened up a new department already to publish fake scientific papers. The first victim was the erroneous reports that immunity from covid, post infection, is very weak and lasts only 3 months. Which is not true at all, according to those who wrote the paper.

wardropper
wardropper
Jul 18, 2020 11:04 PM
Reply to  Walter

Very true. I think their strategy and tactics have become pretty transparent to many of us these days, and the resulting contagion of 4th-Stage stupidity is now rampant.
For the record, there IS no 5th Stage…

TreacyNext
TreacyNext
Jul 16, 2020 2:35 PM

Has the CIA’s massive war on the socialist Left really ended,…… since now that war seems almost invisible or has it been that energy redirected, focused and been reborn in another form. It seems to me that the CIA have started its own ‘left’ movement’, far more useful and more outrageous to help in the destruction of the true left. You could call them the phony controlled opposition.

Just remember the extent of that previous war on Socialism in the USA; they murdered their own pop-stars, civil rights leaders, they declared wars in Asia, torturing and murdering millions in South America, they even planted bombs in allied countries in Europe and murdered their politicians. During the McCarthy era they demoted or muzzled their finest minds and performers and seeded a chill deep into their own culture, from which they have never recovered.

So has the CIA’s war on Communism disappeared?…….. Have the CIA stopped fighting the evil reds under every bed, that challenge their white, christian Neo-liberal utopia ?

No, of course not, they have just created a ‘left wing’ for themselves, that says all kinds of useful things. It is like the CIA’s own inner communist demon, that spouts, rages and spits out, cartoon level nonsense, totally unrelated to communists, marxist or socialist ideology or aims. Does the CIA’s ’left’ demand union representation for workers, do they demand economic or education equality, or decent wages for workers….? No of course not. They demand the compulsory homosexuality in schools, the legalization of pedophilia, they demand that your wife and children be forced to share a toilet with depraved, fake trans pedophiles. They rather usefully intrudes many forms of censorship for the CIA to build on via their social media platforms.

That is what the CIA’s fake Left demand, and that is the organization you are giving authenticity too, by taking them seriously, in an oh so considered and serious fashion. You are debating the validity of their absurd pronouncements, and you threaten us with the dangers if they are allowed to seize power, as they seem on the verge of doing? I don’t think so. The pantomime CIA-left have not yet taken control of the democratic party but they will in many forms. The Democrats will talk about race and sexual politics but never the real social economic issues that blight America today just like Obama did.

As they say, I learned more about you as a publication than I did about the phony left during that article. Your swastika is showing under you petticoats. Tip to other readers, always reverse engineer the far-right to know what is going on in the US and in their satellites today, because they hold many of the important cards, not least the very active security services.

aspnaz
aspnaz
Jul 17, 2020 1:51 AM
Reply to  TreacyNext

Well the comments section is thick with people making excuses for the left. Not very convincingly as the left is driven by emotion, not by pragmatism. Arguing a good reason for blanket adoption of left policies is pointless as the sociopaths will take over your land of emotion and make you slaves – sound familiar?

A world run by emotion: lockdown is an emotional response, not a pragmatic response. Mao used the same tactic to mobilise the masses, but there is no egalitarian society in China. Left wing passionate idiots who just “wish” the world was a better place.

wardropper
wardropper
Jul 18, 2020 11:08 PM
Reply to  aspnaz

To be fair, there are a lot of people who are not “left-wing” (a meaningless phrase in 2020) who also wish the world was a better place… In fact, who doesn’t?

aspnaz
aspnaz
Jul 19, 2020 3:01 AM
Reply to  wardropper

Even on this site there is no appetite to criticise the CCP. Why not? PC gone mad! Here you have an authoritarian government tht has used Marxism to run a revolution that then dropped all Marxism and developed an authoritarian government that provides very little to the people, other than plenty of control and what they need to work as government owned slaves.

wardropper
wardropper
Jul 19, 2020 5:45 AM
Reply to  aspnaz

You simply overestimate CCP wickedness, while you underestimate Western hypocrisy, which can match it in every way.
If, to you, there seems to be no “appetite to criticize the CCP”, it is because these days many of us have been to China and seen for ourselves that the people there are the same as people anywhere else – with of course different cultural traditions, but nevertheless with the same wish to bring up their children in peace and not have their property stolen from them.
What desperately needs to be criticized is not the characteristics of other countries, which are simply, and quite reasonably, just the way they are.
What needs to be criticized is the sort of person who willingly goes into ANY kind of political career today, be it China, Russia, USA, UK, or Iceland. Modern politics have been so corrupted by unbelievable amounts of money that, effectively, only very corrupt people actually WISH to work in such an environment. It is their individual corruption which does such harm to all their fellow citizens and communities, and that is true whatever country you are talking about.
Ranting about Chinese, or Russian regimes in 2020 – as so many Americans do, as if nothing had changed since James Bond’s 1950s – reveals hopelessly obsolete thinking, and it is destructive to reasonable initiatives to harmonize the genuine humanity which is found all over the globe.
Our only target should be individual and corporate corruption, along with the even worse mainstream media which support, authorize and magnify that corruption.
 

aspnaz
aspnaz
Jul 19, 2020 12:08 PM
Reply to  wardropper

I live in HK, my wife is Chinese, and until the virus struck was regularly working in mainland China for a few weeks at a time. As I live here, my local politics are all about the CCP. As you say, all politicians are evil but the ones in the west are relatively restrained because they are voted in: in China that restraint is not needed, most of these leaders, such as Xi, are the children of the Mao artistocracy that conquered and divided the country. They rule with absolute power and are absolutely corrupt.
 
People do not disappear in anything like the same quantities in the West as they do in China. People in the West have some recourse to a judicial system, here in China the judicial system is the political government, so there is no recourse to justice. Property in China can be taken away from you which is why they are able to build new cities on a regular basis without all the hearings that happened in the UK when trying to build the high speed rail link to London.
 
These are very different worlds and as a visitor, your knowledge of China is minimal, given your probable inability to speak the language and the fact that almost nobody in mainland China speaks English or would discuss any opinions they may have with you as you are an outsider so you are not to be trusted. The main difference is that the people of China have no feeling of ownership: each Chinese person is an island in a sea of other islands. They don’t care about the other Chinese and don’t want anything to do with them. This all changes in the islands, as the islands – as is probably true everywhere in the world – involve much more community than mainlanders.
 
In addition, you will not have entered the restricted zones in China, God knows what is happening in those areas which are the size of countries. Yes, they exist, I have driven up to the police checkpoint and been turned back. You need some sort of pass to enter and as a foreigner you cannot get those.
 
One of the worst traits of the Chinese is that, despite claiming to be a communist party, they do not provide the people with anything such as health care or unemployment benefit. Of course, there are hospitals, but everybody has to pay. It is mildly subsidised, but not by much, but doctors do not earn much in China and healthcare is cheap.
 
Facilities in Hong Kong are so much better than China, we have loads of public leisure facilities (you can always book a squash court, go for a swim etc), we have properly subsidized healthcare for the poor (funded by the Hong Kong jockey club) and other “arrangements” to make life easier for the people. You will not see anything like that in mainland China: if you don’t have money in China then you don’t play.

wardropper
wardropper
Jul 19, 2020 2:36 PM
Reply to  aspnaz

I can well imagine how living in HK must be a very different experience from that of a European visiting mainland China, but I am generally in favour of caution when criticizing one country, as if to imply that the rivals of that country were automatically pure and good.
So when you state that in China the authorities “rule with absolute power and are absolutely corrupt”, I would urge you to consider that the same is 100% true of those who currently rule in Washington, London and Brussels.
You may have received the impression from the mainstream media that western politicians are “voted in”, but once you notice how they all act like clones of one another, you can see how they are, in fact, chosen, and not elected.
Even Mark Twain noticed this a very long time ago: “If voting made any difference, they would never let us do it”…
The penalty paid by those who offer serious opposition to all corrupt regimes is, essentially, the same: Their lives are either literally taken, or their lives are wrecked in other ways. Which country does not matter.
 

aspnaz
aspnaz
Jul 20, 2020 12:30 AM
Reply to  wardropper

Criticising one country does not imply anything about that country’s rivals. If that is what happens in your brain then you have an emotional influence obscuring your logical judgement.
 
If I say that China persecutes religious minorities, what is the implication for the USA? There is none, unless you are so sure that China is pure and that this is all lies spread by the CIA. If you think that then you are already showing your bias and should come out and say that it is lies and that China is pure. But for me that is a very difficult stance to take as I already know that religion is against the law in China and I know that the law is enforced.
 
But in the case that you believe this is all the CIA, you are making an emotional judgement which is based on zero facts other than, I assume, a bias in favour of the little guy being bullied by the big guy.
 
Being bullied does not make you innocent, far from it. Many of the bullied are themselves bullies and have done terrible deeds on the scale of those in the White House. They are often being bullied because that is the only method to bring them into line.
 
We see occasional videos and pictures that hit the internet from the internment areas in China. I personally know such restricted areas exist because I have seen the police check points in China. Are these all White House lies? Do you have any evidence for that?
 
If they are all lies, what does China do with its religious minorities? Religion is outlawed in China and religious gathering will get you arrested: so what happens when the underground churches are discovered? What is the punishment? Do you know?
 
I read about what happens, usually in a a good source such as the Taipei Times, but maybe they are lying to help the CIA? Maybe the mainland Chinese just release the religious people and let them go back into society?
 
Your obvious hatred for the system that brought you such a comfortable life is evident in what you write, but having grown up in Africa I can tell you there are bad things happening everywhere and the bad things done by the CIA does not change anything about what other bad things people are doing.

wardropper
wardropper
Jul 20, 2020 2:50 AM
Reply to  aspnaz

Well your first paragraph shows that your basic comprehension of what I said about that matter is non-existent. It is YOU who imply, by going on and on about how awful China is, that its main rival, the USA, is somehow better, and I am simply reminding you that it is not.
The US is very different culturally, but the corruption is the common global variety.

aspnaz
aspnaz
Jul 20, 2020 2:52 AM
Reply to  wardropper

Ummm, I think my original post was about the CCP: that was the subject! Apologies for sticking to the subject.

wardropper
wardropper
Jul 20, 2020 3:05 AM
Reply to  aspnaz

I only wish you would stick to the subject… At least your last comment is brief.
I get your point: CCP is bad and anything else is better.
Except it isn’t.

wardropper
wardropper
Jul 20, 2020 2:59 AM
Reply to  wardropper

In any case you don’t even seem to realize that we are in complete agreement about several points you raise, for example about bad things happening everywhere.
But you certainly don’t have the right to presume that my life is “comfortable”, nor do you know anything at all about my background or the political systems which might have influenced me. As for “hatred of the system”, that, again is sheer impertinence on your part. Systems consist of people – individuals – and I consider it a foolish waste of time to hate, or love, a system, when it is the people who run it who are either incompetent or brilliant. That’s where my focus is, and I’m quite happy to give praise where it’s due to those individuals.
 
 

wardropper
wardropper
Jul 18, 2020 11:21 PM
Reply to  TreacyNext

Some interesting observations, but the conclusions are ridiculous. I can’t speak for everybody here, but there are clearly many of us who do not fit into your own CIA-like caricature of this site, which features all kinds of articles – some brilliant, some quite interesting, and some rather misguided, but that is their author’s responsibility, not OffG’s. Why don’t you write one?
There’s far too much straw-man argument in your comment, which basically boils down to, “There are so many fake left manipulators in the world today that anybody who criticizes the Establishment (like those of us who comment at OffG), must be one of them.”
That’s an unfair, unjustifiable and, frankly, malicious distortion of the largely sincere sharing of information which goes on here, although there are, of course, a few regular trouble makers, who, nevertheless, get to let off steam on the site.
Nobody spoonfeeds other commenters here, nor does anybody try to imply that you can find limitless wisdom in OffG articles, or in our comments, without doing your own homework and sifting through it all for the information which strikes you as credible and which stands up to serious scrutiny.
 
 

Peter Jennings
Peter Jennings
Jul 16, 2020 2:25 PM

It’s questionable whether the hierarchy and management of these groups are indeed ‘leftists’. Most of their demands are way beyond that. Socialism was never about minorities ruling over the majority.
The socialist groups in the US seem to bear little resemblance to socialists in europe.
Could it be that US socialist groups have been infiltrated and used? what better camoflage than an organisation know for pushing for a fairer deal for all. Or could it be another case of US bastardisation of the English language.
 

TreacyNext
TreacyNext
Jul 16, 2020 2:45 PM
Reply to  Peter Jennings

The pronouncements coming from these fake left groups are truely absurd, they are clealy scripted by the minds of people who hate and fear the left.
 
The people writing their scrips are not socialists, these issues, race and sexuality are not the obsessions of the left, these are the obsessions of the far-right. So why are they coming out of the mouths of ‘scoailists’? that is the question to be asked.

Peter Jennings
Peter Jennings
Jul 16, 2020 8:09 PM
Reply to  TreacyNext

I’m glad to see that others have noticed, and who are probably socialists themselves. I wouldn’t call soros a socialist but i would hope that he is called on to answer that question.
 
A now not so secret group of people have their organised groups on either side of the political and racial divide and it seems to me that both sides share some of the same management and probably funders too. The Bilderbergs want their new world order where they get to rule a depleted human race feudal style.

Moneycircus
Moneycircus
Jul 17, 2020 5:44 AM
Reply to  TreacyNext

Precisely!
“… race and sexuality are not the obsessions of the left, these are the obsessions of the far-right. So why are they coming out of the mouths of ‘socialists’.”

aspnaz
aspnaz
Jul 19, 2020 3:16 AM
Reply to  Peter Jennings

Society before the individual is left wing.

wardropper
wardropper
Jul 19, 2020 6:10 AM
Reply to  aspnaz

It used to be 70 years ago.
Now it is gaining recognition as a sign of being human.
You do realize that nobody needs to stop being an individual in order to do good things for his society…? It isn’t an either/or thing any more. You can do both, and neither left nor right comes into it at all.
But to answer your point:
A bad individual is certainly not better than a good society, and nobody even cares whether your bad individual is left or right.
Margaret Thatcher was a horrible individual who said that there was no such thing as society, and spent her life making sure that there never would be such a thing. Some call that right-wing. I call it wicked.
However, some dictators have been communists and have claimed to dedicate their lives to society, yet they, too, were wicked.
It all boils down to what you use as your yardstick for measuring human worth:
Success? Money? Ruthless personal ambition? Ruthless dogmatic ideology?
Everything depends on the character of the person you’re talking about.
“Society”, “left wing”, “humanity”, are all words and phrases which can be used by wicked people to mean anything they want them to mean. But we have the option of thinking about what those people say, and comparing what they say to what they actually do with their lives.
From that comparison, we can make meaningful distinctions between the corrupt individuals and the decent ones, having in mind that it is the decent ones who will quite naturally benefit their society, even if they don’t think of themselves as “socialists”.
Today’s labels actually wreck productive political discussion in any case.
 

aspnaz
aspnaz
Jul 19, 2020 12:28 PM
Reply to  wardropper

some dictators have been communists

 
No dictator was ever a communist: how does dictatorship and egalitarian society mix? Dictators use idealistic communists to get into power then dump the communism.
 
Nobody is saying that society robs you of all individualism, it just robs you of some individualism. A left wing policy will tend to rob you of some individualism while a right wing policy will tend to give you back some individualism.
 
If you wish to use a different differentiator between left and right, then that is fine, but I believe my description is the traditional differentiator between left and right: I don’t know of any other definition.
 
Your value judgements about left and right are irrelevant when it comes to determining how to label a policy as left or right wing. As most people lie somewhere in the center range, they will see value in policies on both sides.

wardropper
wardropper
Jul 19, 2020 2:53 PM
Reply to  aspnaz

I think we have to think about concrete examples here, and not abstract concepts.
Mao was, essentially, a dictator, as is the current North Korean leader, and as was Stalin. All examples of ruthless individuals with enough charisma to influence millions of people, but basically power-mad.
Left – right – communist – socialist – Marxist – Trotskyite, etc. None of that matters when you’re basically dealing with bad people.
Tony Blair thought he was acceptable as leader of the Labour Party, but the man had nothing in common with the working people of that party, and he succeeded, as an infiltrator with personal ambition as his motive, in changing the Labour Party into something practically indistinguishable from the Conservative party as regards its actual policies and economic interests.
That leaves the working class unrepresented in today’s Britain, and it shows. In his own way, Blair was also a dictator, and the best example I can give of what I mean is to imagine Blair and Thatcher sitting down to high-tea together at the Ritz Hotel and comparing notes on their rise to fame and fortune. Yet Blair wishes to be considered “left”, while Thatcher would rather have been boiled in oil than share that designation with him.
So there we have left and right, with no essential difference between them as individual representatives.
Labels confuse and distort reality. Blair and Thatcher inspire my contempt equally, but they would never understand why, because they represent corruption.
You state, “As most people lie somewhere in the center range, they will see value in policies on both sides”, but many also see a complete LACK of value in policies on both sides nowadays…

aspnaz
aspnaz
Jul 20, 2020 12:09 AM
Reply to  wardropper

Blair was not a dictator: stop trying to redefine words. We should all know what a dictator is and just because you didn’t like Blair does not make him a dictator. What is the point of having such a rich vocabulary if every bad person is Hitler?

wardropper
wardropper
Jul 20, 2020 2:44 AM
Reply to  aspnaz

I’m not redefining words, and I did specify, “in his own way” when describing Blair. The Labour Party used to be full of genuine people who knew what a worker was. Blair simply moved in and squashed them. Dictators do that.
My liking or disliking Blair is of no importance, and has nothing to do with what his actions showed about his character. He was our Mussolini to Cheney’s Hitler, and as sociopathic as any well-known dictator.

Jim McDonagh
Jim McDonagh
Jul 16, 2020 2:20 PM

A fact laden historical article that offers no alternatives , making it rather inane , other than to point out that there is no “LEFT” left ? Good to see someone address the nonsense that Karl Marx was of the left when fact he was attempting to improve and stabilize Adam Smiths notion of “Moral Capitalism” with some success in the 20th century as the enormous population growth among humans is testament.
 

S Cooper
S Cooper
Jul 16, 2020 2:17 PM

Odd how none of the reveling MASK NAZIS political cliches at the month long CIA-Soros sponsored/funded Mardi Gras-Shindig held in Seattle last month did not find time to sashay on down to ‘Doc’ Billy Eugenic’s Xanadu digs (less than a hour away) and burn it to the ground, speaking of missed opportunities.
 
https://www.paktales.com/bill-gates-house/

Reg
Reg
Jul 16, 2020 2:10 PM

And this here is the zeitgeist in a neat little commercial . . .
 


gordon
gordon
Jul 16, 2020 3:48 PM
Reply to  Reg

sas what is scandi
a sodomized population
 
nothing but year zero a clean slate a transformation a un migration contract
 
a zionist satanick project
 
thank you ashkanazi khazars
 
 
 
We MUST Transform Europe Barbara Lerner Spectre 
 

Donald Duck
Donald Duck
Jul 16, 2020 4:28 PM
Reply to  gordon

Yes, it could only be Sweden. It is such a crackpot place I am told that police tap the telephones of men who are willing to pay prostitutes for sexual favours. It makes you wonder why the police don’t have anything better to do. They could, and this is my humble suggestion, try perhaps to arresting foreign born rapists who have made Sweden the rape-capital of Europe. Then there is the absurd injunction instructing men in hotel rooms to sit down and urinate female style after 10 p.m. Like I said crackpot country with a will to self-hate.

gordon
gordon
Jul 16, 2020 8:57 PM
Reply to  Donald Duck

i believe in upsalla yes upsala
in hotel the local law is when toilet for men
you have to get down on one knee
 
this is a difficult compliance test as depending on the height of the man
the liquids and the solids wastes
do not end up in the toilet head
 
strange laws indeed
yes sir

Reg
Reg
Jul 17, 2020 12:47 AM
Reply to  gordon

This has always been the aim. It’s not by accident that every waking moment of our lives has been chaotic. And now the muzzle. People happily putting them on, thoroughly oblivious of the symbolism. The message is loud and clear: you’re gagged, morons, and you loathe yourselves while dancing around like puppets in a world with no future and no past. This is Year Zero.

ZenPriest
ZenPriest
Jul 16, 2020 4:17 PM
Reply to  Reg

Hahahahhaha that was funny. What wonderful things will they bring home next, indeed. No mention of rape and car bombs I notice?

ZenPriest
ZenPriest
Jul 16, 2020 4:23 PM
Reply to  Reg

Also see
 
what is a man? (no c0ck & balls)
what is a woman? (doesn’t have vagin)
what is 2+2? (not 4)

IANA
IANA
Jul 16, 2020 5:10 PM
Reply to  Reg

Nauseating bs.

crank
crank
Jul 16, 2020 2:09 PM

Max takes it so far, but stops short of the elephant over by the standard lamp.
Those coming from the Left who insistently deny an ethnic element to the unfolding revolution are merely clinging to an aspiration of framing politics in terms of class. Even if that is arguably a decent preference for where the playing field should lie, the truth is that so many of the ‘ruling class’ have definite ethnic interests, and act upon those interests. They are open about it if you read around. Who were the Frankfurters and why didn’t they apply their critical theories to their own religio-ethnic culture ? (The fact that B’nai B’rith helped publish some of their key texts might give you a clue).
Still, this from Max is a better effort than recent works from the likes of Caitlin Johnstone, who, after years of excellent writing carefully encouraging the reader to ‘question the narrative’, now – when the narrative is more absurd and consequential than ever, simply walks away from it. Her latest musings about billionaires do not even mention Bill Gates or George Soros, and mention Covid only to express an opinion that she thinks the nature of this crisis is irrelevant and not worthy of discussion. Is a more obvious resignation from any political relevance even possible ?
The Left need to simply be honest about the characters at the helm. Not easy, but I think possible in a way that does not rely upon demonisation if one considers the ancient roots of the latter’s supremacism. Max makes some good points, shows us the dots. If there was any justice in this world, Whitney Webbs’ series on the Maxwells would bring down the Gates cabal too and end this shit.
 
“We are in the midst of an attempt by the oligarchs to eliminate the human spirit, and if this attempt is successful, the singular majesty of the human experience will have been abolished, and only a technocratic black hole of emptiness and despair will remain. This is the essence of a failed society brought about by the destruction of human intellect by state education, mass propaganda, and the planned control of individuals through physical and psychological manipulation due to fear.” -Gary Barnett
 
 

ples
ples
Jul 16, 2020 6:01 PM
Reply to  crank

Webb’s work? I think you mean Ryan Dawson’s work.

crank
crank
Jul 16, 2020 7:44 PM
Reply to  ples

They both on that beat as far as I can tell.
Dawson can be the most tiresome braggart sometimes, even though I would say hats off to him for getting there first with many of the reveals. If he was more of a team player it would help the cause of truth in my opinion.

Zen Priest
Zen Priest
Jul 16, 2020 1:35 PM

The same values as Bolsheviks espoused, no?

The true racists, you know, the group that is raised on the belief they are superior to all gentiles, have gaslighted whites into thinking themselves racist.

Haha! It is breathtaking in its achievement. One has to give them credit. What a stupid moron is your average whitey.

Jim McDonagh
Jim McDonagh
Jul 16, 2020 2:26 PM
Reply to  Zen Priest

Russian Bolshevism died with Lenin?

hotrod31
hotrod31
Jul 16, 2020 2:51 PM
Reply to  Zen Priest

I suspect that your juvenile comment at the end is rather demeaning to ALL the well-meaning Anglos who will generally go to the ends of the earth in their endeavours to try to undo past injustices. There will always be racists among ALL ethno-cultural groups, and this is NOT monopolised by people of Anglo background only. Sadly, it is a learned human weakness which one has to work very hard – to suppress. So, button up Einstein and do your bit for the eradication of this disgraceful form of prejudice.

ZenPriest
ZenPriest
Jul 16, 2020 3:26 PM
Reply to  hotrod31

It’s not juvenile, it’s profound. Your average person has ZERO understanding of history and is hamstrung by their worry of being labelled a racist, or whatever. If this leads to our demise (how can you say it is not?) then this is truly stupid, moronic, cowardly and immoral.

ZenPriest
ZenPriest
Jul 16, 2020 3:42 PM
Reply to  hotrod31

This is the perfect example of why we are demoralised, deracinated and subjugated. Our unwillingness to be ‘prejudiced’.
It’s getting to the time where we can’t afford not to be. If lambs are carrying me along to the slaughter, I want no part of it. They are as much my enemies as the perpetrators.
Nothing else is going to shake your average normie from his stupor. Attacking them in this way is worth a shot. Or have you considered, this is taking leadership also.

George Mc
George Mc
Jul 16, 2020 7:07 PM
Reply to  Zen Priest

The true powers have gaslighted everyone into blathering about “whiteness” and “blackness” and all that irrelevant divisory bullshit.
 

Zen Priest
Zen Priest
Jul 16, 2020 7:11 PM
Reply to  George Mc

Yes that’s true. Without it no one would really give a toss about skin tone.
But since I am white, and I am being targeted for extinction, dont expect me to sit there quietly like the majority.

George Mc
George Mc
Jul 16, 2020 7:54 PM
Reply to  Zen Priest

So without all that media gas lighting, nobody would give a toss about it – and yet you are “being targeted for extinction”? What does that even mean anyway? Are you personally being targeted? Are all “whites” being so targeted? And what does “white” even mean?

Zen Priest
Zen Priest
Aug 19, 2020 4:48 PM
Reply to  George Mc

The white race has been targeted for extinction by the ruling group, since only the white race presents a genuine threat.
It really is not difficult if you have your background knowledge. Which you do not.

George Mc
George Mc
Aug 20, 2020 7:55 AM
Reply to  Zen Priest

The white race is, by and large, the ruling group – although their “whiteness” is irrelevant.

dion matthews
dion matthews
Aug 19, 2020 3:26 PM
Reply to  Zen Priest

I think you have it arse about face …you are not being targeted for extinction(not just yet anyway) however certain others ,due to melanin content of their skin, are.If you fail to see that i cannot help you…They are allowed to follow the crumbs of increasing confidence being laid before them and all thats happening is that the boots in readiness for the big stomp are being laced…I truly fear what is coming

Zen Priest
Zen Priest
Aug 19, 2020 4:51 PM
Reply to  dion matthews

All races other than the ruling group are not required in the ruling group’s ultimate objective. So we are all targeted for extinction.
However the white race, being the strongest and most powerful and crucially, mostly on the side of God, is attacked most vehemently. Promoting other races above whites is simple subversion, designed to foment race war between all races.
In reality all races are on the same side or they should be, of only theh could identify their common enemy.

Eyes Open
Eyes Open
Jul 16, 2020 1:17 PM

I thought the Paris Commune, which worked well when given the chance, was destroyed by outside forces and the military loyal to the ruling class.

Jim McDonagh
Jim McDonagh
Jul 16, 2020 2:29 PM
Reply to  Eyes Open

Karl Marx was “German” and never very popular among the French Philosophes. Do a time line on the rise and fall of the Paris Commune , the Internet makes it quick and easy.

Arsebiscuits
Arsebiscuits
Jul 16, 2020 10:05 PM
Reply to  Jim McDonagh

He was a Jew. Not German

Jim McDonagh
Jim McDonagh
Jul 19, 2020 2:10 AM
Reply to  Arsebiscuits

Born and raised as a German . His lack of commitment to the Hebrew religion may have been the source of many of his social problems?

wardropper
wardropper
Jul 18, 2020 11:35 PM
Reply to  Jim McDonagh

Such an irrelevant comment… So now anybody who stands up to protest systemic injustice is a Marxist? Good luck with that one…

Jim McDonagh
Jim McDonagh
Jul 19, 2020 2:15 AM
Reply to  wardropper

Not irrelevant at all Mr Marx has undergone several historical /hysterical rewrites since arriving in England and America. Hell even Stalin rewrote him after Lenin died? Marxism like god or freedom can be made to mean all sorts of nonsense , especially in England and America.

wardropper
wardropper
Jul 19, 2020 5:08 AM
Reply to  Jim McDonagh

What you say about Marx-rewriting is true, but does not explain why you chose to bring him into this thread at all – unless you think “Marxism” caused the fall of the Paris Commune…?

Jim McDonagh
Jim McDonagh
Jul 19, 2020 1:59 PM
Reply to  wardropper

The various interpretations of what is called Marxism were products of of Paris in the mid 1800s where Marx was in some form of exile at the time ? He has bee assigned a leading role in the events in that place and time since. It was an off hand comment to Eyes Open who did not respond?

wardropper
wardropper
Jul 19, 2020 3:05 PM
Reply to  Jim McDonagh

All good. Apologies for the misunderstanding.

Tom Larsen
Tom Larsen
Jul 16, 2020 3:17 PM
Reply to  Eyes Open

Yeah, that was a big error by Parry. The Paris Commune was in 1871. Marx describes it in his short book (written as events unfolded, we get to see Marx as journalist here) called “The Civil War in France” which apparently Parry has not read. He makes some good points, but his piece is shoddy. His portrayal of Murray Bookchin as a “noted Zionist” by one article written by Ben Norton as a “gotcha” peice is also cheap.(Norton has stated that anyone that believes 9/11 was an inside job is a right wing conspiracy nut.) Norton bases his conclusion of Bookchin as a Zionist on one obscure article from a Burlington, Va newspaper in the mid 1980’s (before the first Intifada). If you read the article itself, it is not so clear. Also it is clear that Norton has not read any Bookchin – an intellectual giant of his time.Even describing Bookchin as an anarchist is lazy. Most anarchists don’t consider him to be an anarchist. In fact, Parry misses the historical roots of identity politics in the lifestyle anarchism dominant in the 1980’s and early 1990’s roundly criticized by Bookchin in a scathing and seminal polemic called Social anarchism or lifestyle anarchism: an unbridgeable chasm. 
https://libcom.org/library/social-anarchism–lifestyle-anarchism-murray-bookchin
 
 

Errnest Judd
Errnest Judd
Jul 16, 2020 8:15 PM
Reply to  Tom Larsen

Also a good read:
The Ecology of Freedom, 1975/6 Black Rose Press

Tom Larsen
Tom Larsen
Jul 16, 2020 9:24 PM
Reply to  Errnest Judd

Yes, absolutely! A magisterial work! If you take human freedom seriously, then then this book has to be read. To me Bookchin is the 2nd half of the 20th century’s Marx! Someday, he will be seen as the giant he was.

Steve Hayes
Steve Hayes
Jul 16, 2020 1:14 PM

What on earth is happening to the left when it is censoring anti-racist art in the name of fighting racism?

The answer is they are not left-wing. They hold none of the values of the left. They are blind to the central conflict of capitalist society: class, the fundamental basis of all structural exploitation and oppression. They are epistemological relativists, which ensures they are unable/unwilling to even accept objectivity and determinism, the central philosophical pillars of all genuine study and knowledge. They assume they are morally superior, not because of their actions, but because they hold the “correct” opinions, which means whatever they do is moral and anyone who dissents is immoral. They are as judgemental as any Nazi. They are opposed to freedom of expression. They are totalitarians. For them the terms liberal and left are nothing more than rhetorical devices designed to obscure their authoritarianism.

Jim McDonagh
Jim McDonagh
Jul 16, 2020 2:32 PM
Reply to  Steve Hayes

Agreed “Class Warfare” has been with us since the first surpluses were seized by those who would become our rulers at the end of the last Ice-Age, as agriculture and herding became common.

wardropper
wardropper
Jul 18, 2020 11:37 PM
Reply to  Steve Hayes

Indeed. “Left-wing” they are certainly not, but, basically, opportunistic froth.

breweriana
breweriana
Jul 16, 2020 12:51 PM

This is what the ‘modernists’ have been creating for us since the 1920’s, at least, telling us how natural human values were now ‘old fashioned’, ‘so dated’ etc. Amongst the first to go along with this were the ‘educators’: the teachers, lecturers, university professors, setting the bar so high with their impossible ‘equality’ mantra.

Steve Hayes
Steve Hayes
Jul 16, 2020 1:33 PM
Reply to  breweriana

This is what the ‘modernists’ have been creating for us since the 1920’s

I suspect you are referring to the postmodernists.

breweriana
breweriana
Jul 16, 2020 2:41 PM
Reply to  Steve Hayes

Yes.
The edit button timed out, however.

breweriana
breweriana
Jul 16, 2020 12:48 PM

No human should have a statue to ‘honour’ them. They are graven images for idolators.
The good amongst us should be remembered for their works alone.
 
“Ozymandias”
 
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
 
Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Rhys Jaggar
Rhys Jaggar
Jul 16, 2020 12:37 PM

You have a very naive view of what education is about.
 
Education is about keeping kids off the streets whilst their parents have to go to work.
 
Getting them to think critically is very much the very thin icing atop a very big cake.
 
Schools are about brainwashing these days: just look at ‘climate education’, ‘transgender inclusivity’ nonsense, no doubt Covid19 brainwashing, not to mention defining Communists as anyone to the left of Maggie Thatcher. And in some countries anyone to right of Lenin as being a fascist….
 
Schools are about inculcating conformity, ostracising dissidents.
 
Oh, the idealistic school might exist in one or two places, but most of them in no way seek to teach children to think critically.
 
They are just glad to get to the end of the day without any shootings or stabbings.

wardropper
wardropper
Jul 18, 2020 11:44 PM
Reply to  Rhys Jaggar

Hard to know whether to upvote or downvote that interesting comment.
I’m upvoting it because education has indeed BECOME the thing you say, the thing which keeps the kids off the streets while their parents have to go to work. But it’s also a catastrophic and tragic thing for education to have become such a cheap shadow of its former self…

Moneycircus
Moneycircus
Jul 16, 2020 11:50 AM

With all the discussion of riots, protests and “autonomous zones” the focus on the Woke movement and Antifa misses the broader control of society by forces for whom the former are simple tools.
 
 What do we stand to lose – and to whom?
 
The destruction of everything that competes with the corporation and the state: the family; the individual; the freeholder; the freelance; the family business; the inventor; main street; our right to our own labour and free time; perhaps our children, certainly our birthright, those universal, natural and common rights beyond the authority of any government or international body to dismiss.
 
The assertion that there are forces who would reshape society to their benefit often elicits guffaws.
 
We simply ask the wrong question. Schools neglect to enlighten students that the answer is less important than the question. Ask a poorly-framed question and a true answer may tell you little. As every politically-motivated fact checker knows, reframe the question ever so slightly and you can change the answer.
 
Who or what are the forces that seek to reshape society? Well, to a great extent, they already have.
 
Modern society is the direct creation of heavy industry and its successors. Corporations influence education but also shape society: holding down wages; creating flows of migrant labour; eliminating competition; shifting the burden of taxation from corporations to workers; eliminating national borders, duties and customs; buying politicians through the lobby system and eliminating the independent voice, physically if necessary; using international institutions to subject nations to the will of corporations; and if that fails, creating pretexts for war in order to grab resources.
 
Then there’s the reshaping of people: the elimination of everything small* that rivals the authority of the big: We forget that before WW1 small companies and farmers, inventors and family businesses dominated the economy. This required the participation of all members of society, an ancient piece of clockwork in which all played a role.
 
Its destruction was not accidental. In retrospect one can see that the huge forces deployed to change society were not organic nor grass root. Activists turn out to be funded by corporate foundations and intelligence agencies; advised by psychologists and public relations consultants, social engineering institutes and universities; and turned into the New Normal through cultural programming conducted by publishers, Hollywood and the corporate media (Tom Secker at https://www.spyculture.com and and the involvement of author Aldous Huxley with mind control experiments in Spies in Academic Clothing: The Untold History of MKULTRA and the Counterculture – And How the Intelligence Community Misleads the 99%.
 
The women’s liberation movement turns out to have been manipulated by intel agencies, and likewise Black feminism (Gloria Steinem). Despite the huge advances and mixed blessings for women, the Corporatist Media still finds it necessary to pump the message of women “having it all”.
 
It now takes a couple to earn the same income as one spouse earned in the 1950s. Women point out that their wages remain lower than the equivalent male. Isn’t that the point, if the intention is to bring down male wages and thus wages overall?
 
Welfare legislation was written explicitly to expel fathers from poor homes. The CIA and its mafia contractors sold drugs into Western cities to finance wars abroad. Prisons were privatized and criminal legislation explicitly rewritten to increase the flow of poor people, mainly Black men, as inmates providing low-paid (slave) labour to corporations. Aggregate these policies and it is hard to escape the conclusion that the Black population has been targeted for suppression if not eugenic control.
 
Non-profit organizations have been key to achieving these societal changes. These non-profit are the corollary of for-profit: two arms of the same corporations. The for-profit sells the product, the non-profit manipulates the worker and the consumer. They are not the charities that the naiive fondly believe, they are not “giving back” any more than John D Rockefeller when he handed out dimes to children. They are pursuing the corporations’ objectives by other means.
 
*Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered is a collection of essays by German-born British economist E. F. Schumacher.
 
Continued at: https://moneycircus.blogspot.com/2020/07/tptb-syndicate-cabal-and-new-normal.html

gordon
gordon
Jul 16, 2020 10:56 AM

libya iraqi syria year zero reset
and why not
to much fuckin history
 
 
 
the children of seatle are crying out for freedom
animal trump drumph is using all his powers to crush the spring summer shoots of liberty
 
we must all demand justice for keith emerson lake and harry palmer
and chaz floyd
we need a pink purple reign rain movement to save the crop.
human harvesting
the seeds and shoots are well bedded in
gates soros bag men must provide the manure
 
for without molech goy sacrifice
the crops may fail
the crops may fail
the crops may
 
into saturn infinity and all that
whatever

crank
crank
Jul 16, 2020 1:46 PM
Reply to  gordon

we need a pink purple reign rain movement to save the crop.

 
There’s a war going on. The battlefield is in the mind and the price is the soul. So let’s be careful. Be very careful.” – The artist sometimes known as Prince
 
[h/t Truthstream]

Jim McDonagh
Jim McDonagh
Jul 16, 2020 2:37 PM
Reply to  crank

Prince ? A neurotic poseur who died of a drug overdose. May as well reference Michael Jackson as a wise prophet ? Works as mocking irony !

gordon
gordon
Jul 16, 2020 3:55 PM
Reply to  Jim McDonagh

qui bono
 
all crimes should ask that
 
prince was a slave he put it on his face
he died just when he was about to get the rights to his music back
 
 
all those years a slave then he snuffs it 2 months before financial and artistic pay day
 
funny those things
called
suicide
suicided
murder

Jim McDonagh
Jim McDonagh
Jul 16, 2020 4:57 PM
Reply to  gordon

A goofy response. I have a relative that believes that John Lennon was Jesus , and becomes angry if anyone insinuates a modicum of reality in disagreement ?

Errnest Judd
Errnest Judd
Jul 16, 2020 8:44 PM
Reply to  Jim McDonagh

You missed his point.
Prince was “offed” because the psychopaths did NOT want to pay back the money they stole…

Arsebiscuits
Arsebiscuits
Jul 16, 2020 10:26 PM
Reply to  Jim McDonagh

He was a communist.

Science Of No Mind
Science Of No Mind
Jul 16, 2020 10:49 AM

The BLM-Antifa Marxist revolt by ‘woke’ young people in the West, hijacked and controlled by the ruling elite, is very meaningful, very significant.
It is a historical point of change to year zero, a whole new tyranny, a whole new change of consciousness.
Now the West cannot continue as it has been.
A point of deep crisis has come.
The West will have to move in another direction to survive now.
That direction is existential.
It is no mind!
The whole attitude of modern youth is one of revolt against capitalism, individual freedom, property rights and democracy.
The youth are demolishing western society using Cultural Marxism, social justice, identity politics, group think and cancel culture.
They will continue destroying western society until they can fully replace it with a Marxist Utopia.
A ‘Utopia’ free of all the oppressors that they now ‘think’ are everywhere?
A ‘Utopia’ that according to their far left political worldview, will be far more just, honest and transparent? 
If it is taken to the extreme, western society as we know it will collapse.
Everything that the west has worked to build and develop over centuries will be shattered, and the collective hive mind will be forced to move to the opposite polarity.
This has happened throughout history, this has been the dialectic.
We have been trained in Aristotelian logic, which is linear, one-dimensional.
Life is not Aristotelian at all, it is Hegelian.
Logic is not linear, logic is dialectical.
The very process of life is dialectic, a meeting of the opposites.
A conflict between the opposites and yet a meeting of the opposites.
And life goes through this dialectical process.
Hegel says life moves from thesis to antithesis to synthesis.
Then the synthesis becomes a thesis again.
Once the thesis is there, antithesis is created.
Again they start creating a new balance.
A higher synthesis arrives.
That’s how life moves.
Thesis needs antithesis.
Unless there is a thesis opposed by an antithesis there is no dynamism, life becomes stagnant.
We ordinarily understand two things, the positive and the negative.
Mind moves between the positive and the negative, the left brain and the right brain, reason and intuition, the masculine and the feminine, for and against, the left and right.
But mind has no approach, no way to go beyond this polarity, this duality, this dialectic.
If we continue to chose only one part of the mind, we deny the opposite part.
Then there is bound to be revolt.
But there is a possibility of a synthesis.
This synthesis is the goal of all religiousness, of all mysticism.
The meeting of the opposites.
The whole experience of the awakened ones emphasizes only this one thing, which is beyond duality and dialectics.
To realize this transcendental experience is to transform the individual.
Only awakened individuals then working together can transform the societies of the world.
The person who is working for enlightenment can find a bridge between the dualities, because without finding the bridge you cannot transcend them, you cannot go above them.
And the bridge is there, it has only to be discovered.
Before enlightenment, growth is dialectical.
Always divided, always finding something which joins it and then again another division and another division. 
You have to pass through a process of dialectics, because where we are now, with mind, we are under the law of dialectics.
To get free from dialectics is one of the major projects of spiritual evolution.
It is very easily possible if one works through meditation.
Because that is the only way to find out the golden mean, the middle point which is transcendence.
The moment you have found the middle point between.
You have entered into a new area, unexplored.
One must accept the total human potentiality, bringing everything within oneself to a peak without feeling any inconsistency, any contradiction.
The secret key is balance through awareness.
And one who learns how to balance through awareness becomes capable of knowing what life is, what existence is.
We call our home the universe, because it is One.
Still the oneness has multiplicity in it, variety, distinctions, differences.
The oneness is not a monotonous oneness.
The oneness is not dead, it is alive.
And the oneness is not static, it is dynamic.
Oneness gives you the most important insight into existence.
Existence is everywhere alive – this very moment.
You will always find life itself – herenow.
So in one way enlightenment is the end of the old mind.
In another way it is a beginning, a tremendous beginning.

Rancid
Rancid
Jul 16, 2020 12:10 PM

You can search for the bridge all you want but without the correct moral foundation it will elude you. Enlightenment is not a purely intellectual exercise.

Jim McDonagh
Jim McDonagh
Jul 16, 2020 2:42 PM
Reply to  Rancid

True enough , reining in emotions and appetites is the real chore, and self awareness makes that difficult. However, “Morality” is a mental construct as well only identified in self aware humanity?

lundiel
lundiel
Jul 16, 2020 1:06 PM

Complete and utter nonsense. There is no Marxist revolt, elites have always had complete control of higher education, not for nothing was Jack Straw head of the students Union. Not for nothing is Oxford and Cambridge swimming in post-grad Americans sponsored by NGOs and security service recruiters. This isn’t about “utopia” or the search for it. It’s the seeding of higher education, something that germinated when going to Uni became commonplace. Before that it was limited to the elite universities. This isn’t about hive minds or meditation it is a hard nosed mix of marketing, social media and inverted totalitarianism where dissent is encouraged and shaped….it has nothing what-so-ever to do with Marxism.

Jim McDonagh
Jim McDonagh
Jul 16, 2020 2:46 PM
Reply to  lundiel

In that Mr Marx was about stabilizing “capitalism”, it indeed had a lot to do with the success capitalism has enjoyed until it ran up against the limits of growth , which Mr Marx thought were infinite.

lundiel
lundiel
Jul 16, 2020 3:09 PM
Reply to  Jim McDonagh

Marx never said growth was infinite, that’s the ramblings of ecofascists.

Jim McDonagh
Jim McDonagh
Jul 16, 2020 4:47 PM
Reply to  lundiel

When I studied Mr Marx in the early 1970s it was accepted as true that he believed in unlimited economic growth . Now that like notion of a Flat Earth , that idea has been disproved a rewrite of his ideology has been attempted , as many of the posts here indicate. Cite a section of his writings where Mr Marx did not take for granted unlimited growth?
 
 

lundiel
lundiel
Jul 16, 2020 6:12 PM
Reply to  Jim McDonagh

I’ll keep it simple: “To each according to his needs” Karl Marx

Jim McDonagh
Jim McDonagh
Jul 16, 2020 7:22 PM
Reply to  lundiel

Exactly, to infinity is assumed . Or 3 acres and a cow as the English intellectual Chesterton hectored for.

lundiel
lundiel
Jul 16, 2020 7:53 PM
Reply to  Jim McDonagh

Chesterton? Thouroughly unsavoury company you keep. No wonder you assume so much.

Jim McDonagh
Jim McDonagh
Jul 16, 2020 8:53 PM
Reply to  lundiel

I might have agreed with you in the late 1960s , but today Mr Chesterton is far more on point than Mr Marx who has been extensively rewritten in an attempt to keep him in the pantheon of English/US bogeymen , at least from my perspective.

aspnaz
aspnaz
Jul 17, 2020 2:25 AM
Reply to  lundiel

Their wish for an egalitarian society identifies them as believers in left wing “respectable” nonsense, it may as well be Marxist nonsense.

wardropper
wardropper
Jul 19, 2020 5:23 AM

A paragraph would be nice. This is like listening to somebody with serious lung disease who is unable to do anything but stutter in short gasps, and it gives the impression that one sentence has nothing whatever to do with the next one.
It’s not enlightening to have to go into a spiritual trance in order to try and fathom an OffG comment. Even Madame Blavatsky’s 1,000-page “Secret Doctrine” links her very complex grasp of cosmic wisdom by means of organized thought, rather than cliché-like aphorisms.
I have a considerable interest in philosophy, but the brain I use to digest it is nevertheless human, and appreciates being met half-way… I regret I couldn’t make it through this.

Who D. Who
Who D. Who
Aug 15, 2020 3:48 PM

I generally agree with your meandering comment, but for the fact that the pseudo-woke are not Marxist at all. Identity politics is by nature reactionary and by definition deterministic. While these silly wokesters might indeed lay claim to Marxism, they shun, as you say, the dialectical approach, which is so essential to Marxism or any other enlightened social. The term “cultural Marxism” is, as Donald Duck says above, an invention of rightwingers. If the wokesters were real Marxists, with phalanxes of proletarians and labor unions behind them, the powers-that-be would have put them down long ago. Neither they, nor their poor excuse for an ideology, actually threatens the current system in any structural way.

Antonym
Antonym
Jul 16, 2020 10:38 AM

Is it true that this hooliganism was more extensive in mayority “Democrat” voting and thus ruled states?

Seamus Padraig
Seamus Padraig
Jul 16, 2020 3:26 PM
Reply to  Antonym

Yes. Same as with the ‘COVID-19’ deaths.

Skeptic
Skeptic
Jul 16, 2020 10:25 AM

This is clearer footage of the Democratic National Convention.
 
https://youtu.be/ANKgazqZ16Y

Edwige
Edwige
Jul 16, 2020 10:21 AM

The Seattle P.D. might have liked to do something about CHAZ but they were too busy attending the City’s “Interrupting Internalized Racial Superiority and Whiteness” course:
 
https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1280277423846653953?lang=en-gb
 
BTW anyone interested in the Ghislaine Maxwell arraignment might listen to the report by Roberta Glass on ‘William Ramsey investigates’. It’s been seriously under-reported including in the alt-media. (N.B. This is to hear an account from someone who was physically present, not necessarily an endorsement of all of her interpretations of what transpired).

johny conspiranoid
johny conspiranoid
Jul 16, 2020 9:32 AM

Yes its all an obvious psy-op but what’s its true purpose?
The degenerate state of the Left is probably a result of deep state activity. As Lenin said “the best way to manage the opposition is to run it yourself”.
As for the Frankfurt School, is there nothing to be said for understanding culture in terms of class strugle?
If use of language didn’t matter why would the Deep State go to so much trouble to cloud the issue with absurdities?
How does this exclude the working class from the converstion?
Generaly I agree with the article.

Eyes Open
Eyes Open
Jul 16, 2020 1:26 PM

Most of the Left that’s allowed a voice (Owen Jones, Novara Media et al) is a fake Left that’s sold the working class down the river. Lenin was correct when he said the UK Labour Party and the US Democrat Party would always betray the working class.

It seems George Galloway has jumped into bed with the ruling class too by endorsing lockdown. He’s another fake Left talking head with career aspirations who now finds himself allied with Tony Blair and his ID 2020 project.

Peter Jennings
Peter Jennings
Jul 16, 2020 8:17 PM

Here’s a quote commonly thought to be from a cia director William Casey in the 60’s:
 
‘We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.’
 
This now obviously apllies to all western societies and especially those involved in 5 eyes.

Arsebiscuits
Arsebiscuits
Jul 16, 2020 10:37 PM
Reply to  Peter Jennings

Well if that’s the case that means even everything we think we know is stemmed from a disinformation program? Even everything on this site? Where does it end or begin?

Peter Jennings
Peter Jennings
Jul 17, 2020 6:35 PM
Reply to  Arsebiscuits

Just as financial pundits are speculating about share prices when the whole game is rigged anyway, and analysts are now analysing the manipulation rather than the market.
So it is with media who rely on the Bush mantra of ‘Let us never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories..’ And when these conspiracy theories shed more light on the crime than any official claptrap, ignore them and prevent them being heard.
We live in an intelligence agency soup. However, one can tell the bullshit from the facts because the bullshit is repeated over & over.

Donald Duck
Donald Duck
Jul 16, 2020 9:28 AM

The Nonsense of ‘Cultural Marxism’
 
The culture war that so defines current debates between the left and right sides of politics has its history in the insane theory of ‘cultural Marxism’
 
 Anders Breivik killed young social democrats because he believed that their party was involved in a cultural marxist plot to undermine traditional European values by means of mass immigration from the Islamic world.’
 

What are they talking about? The tale varies in the telling, but the theory of cultural Marxism is integral to the fantasy life of the contemporary right. It depends on a crazy-mirror history, which glancingly reflects things that really happened, only to distort them in the most bizarre ways.

It begins in the 1910s and 1920s. When the socialist revolution failed to materialise beyond the Soviet Union, Marxist thinkers like Antonio Gramsci and Georg Lukacs tried to explain why. Their answer was that culture and religion blunted the proletariat’s desire to revolt, and the solution was that Marxists should carry out a “long march through the institutions” – universities and schools, government bureaucracies and the media – so that cultural values could be progressively changed from above.

The later ‘Frankfurt School’ having emigrated to the US, decided that the key to destroying capitalism was to mix up Marx with a bit of Freud, and non-Marxist liberal intellectuals  such as Max Weber, since workers were not only economically oppressed, but made orderly by sexual repression and other social conventions. The problem was not only capitalism as an economic system, but the family, gender hierarchies, normal sexuality – in short, the whole suite of traditional western values.

The conspiracy theorists claim that these “cultural Marxists” began to use insidious forms of psychological manipulation to upend the west. Then, when Nazism forced the (mostly Jewish) members of the Frankfurt School to move to America, they had, the story goes, a chance to undermine the culture and values that had sustained the world’s most powerful capitalist nation.

The vogue for the ideas of theorists like Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno  in the 1960s counterculture culminated with their acolytes’ occupation of the commanding heights of the most important cultural institutions, from universities to Hollywood studios. There, the conspiracy says, they promoted and even enforced ideas which were intended to destroy traditional Christian values and overthrow free enterprise: feminism, multiculturalism, gay rights and atheism. And this, apparently, is where political correctness came from. I promise you: this is what they really think.

The whole story is transparently insane. If humanities faculties are really geared to brainwashing students into accepting the postulates of far-left ideology, the composition of western parliaments and presidencies and the roaring success of corporate capitalism suggests they’re doing an astoundingly bad job. Anyone who takes a cool look at the last three decades of politics will think it bizarre that anyone could interpret what’s happened as the triumph of an all-powerful left.

The theory of cultural Marxism is also blatantly antisemitic, drawing on the idea of Jews as a fifth column bringing down western civilisation from within, a racist trope that has a longer history than Marxism. Like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the theory was fabricated to order, for a special purpose: the institution and perpetuation of culture war. We can even nominate an author for this lunacy: William S Lind, a polymath of the American hard right, who sought to put rightwing activism on a new footing as the cold war drew to a close.

In the late 1980s, Lind wrote a couple of monographs arguing that there was an emerging mainstream political consensus on free-market economics (due in part to the “disarray” of the traditional social-democratic left), but that many Americans across the political spectrum were dismayed by the decline in traditional values, the family and middle-class life. If conflict with the left could be shifted to the ground of culture, there was a chance of binding the right and even claiming some socially conservative voters who had traditionally voted for the Democrats.

When the Berlin Wall fell, it was time for Lind’s strategy of “cultural conservatism” to become a central strategy for US Republicans: it identified a new kind of social enemy for the right to mobilise against. The changing parameters of economic debate and the beginning of American decline demanded that conservatives embrace a politics “centred more, not less, on cultural issues” – the family, education, crime and morality. The fairytale of cultural Marxism provided a post-communist adversary located specifically in the cultural realm – academics, Hollywood, journalists, civil rights activists and feminists. It has been a mainstay of conservative activism and rhetoric ever since.

While Lind has recently become a more marginal figure, his story of cultural Marxism has proved durable and useful across the spectrum of right-wing thought because it offers so much. 

It allows those smarting from a loss of privilege to be offered the shroud of victimhood, by pointing to a shadowy, omnipresent, quasi-foreign elite who are attempting to destroy all that is good in the world. It offers an explanation for the decline of families, small towns, patriarchal authority, and unchallenged white power: a vast, century-long left wing conspiracy. And it distracts from the most important factor in these changes: capitalism, which demands mobility, whose crises have eroded living standards, and which thus, among other things, undermines the viability of conventional family structures and the traditional lifestyles that conservatives approve of.

The story of cultural Marxism is also flexible and can be tailored to fit with the obsessions of a range of right-wing actors. As such, it’s one example of an idea from the extremes which has been mobilised by more mainstream figures and has dragged politics as a whole a little further right.

Anders Breivik killed young social democrats because he believed that their party was involved in a cultural Marxist plot to undermine traditional European values by means of mass immigration from the Islamic world

The idea of a cultural Marxist conspiracy has also endured because, in the absence of a genuine clash of ideas about the way the economy should be run, it provides an animating idea for the political contest. For those that claim that X  is a Marxist of any kind is laughable precisely because to the extent that the opposition leader is explicitly offering anything, it’s plainly just a slightly more cushioned version of the same underlying economic orthodoxy embraced by run-of-the-mill journalists. Until that changes, the right will always be able to offer their story of victim hood.
 
The great failure of the Frankfurt School is that their texts are virtually unreadable.

Moneycircus
Moneycircus
Jul 16, 2020 12:54 PM
Reply to  Donald Duck

The problem with the Frankfurt School cultural Marxism story is that a) it is not necessary to explain how we got to this point. There is plenty of evidence that corporations played both sides of the Nazis-Bolsheviks and desire some form of Oligarchical Collectivism without the need to hide behind a bunch of shaggy-bearded leftists.
 
b) Gloria Steinem defended her collaboration with the CIA by saying she found them to be progressive, Liberal types. Well, you’d have to sign up to Gloria’s version of reality to believe that the OSS/CIA simulaneously imported the Nazis and the Frankfurt School; that the CIA penetrated every social institution while allowing the cultural Marxists to achieve dominance in academe and the media; that the friends of Klaus Barbie, Martin Bormann and Reinhard Gehlen rubbed shoulders with a group of Marxist mostly-Jews.
 
Then again, the intel types hire the skills they need. Whether it be the Gestapo, the SS or the rocket scientists. The psychologists and neuro scientists numbered among them very many Jews, not surprisingly many came from Germany, Austria and Hungary. Likewise the nuclear scientists. Likewise the PR gurus and advertising writers, the songsters and the cultural programmers. And Hollywood. And the Mafiya. Some were very right wing, even Nazis. Others were Frankfurt School. Try sorting that lot.
 
Having said that, the cultural Marxists are a thing, as you document carefully while dismissing it as ‘nonsense’ 😉
 

George Mc
George Mc
Jul 16, 2020 1:00 PM
Reply to  Donald Duck

Excellent post. I recommend the writings of Thomas Frank as one who recognised the con of “conservative capitalism” I.e. the world’s biggest oxymoron. I myself used to read Adorno who I thought was a Marxist before I read Marx and realised they had nothing in common.

Tom Larsen
Tom Larsen
Jul 16, 2020 4:06 PM
Reply to  George Mc

Right. “Cultural Marxism” has absolutely nothing to do Marx or genuine Marxism. But it is a way to discredit Marx without having to engage in any of his arguments.

lundiel
lundiel
Jul 16, 2020 1:15 PM
Reply to  Donald Duck

Well said. An actual sensible comment among all the dross.

Gary Weglarz
Gary Weglarz
Jul 16, 2020 1:32 PM
Reply to  Donald Duck

And along came a pied piper to rally against “cultural Marxism.” His message was tailored to the ever growing masses of disillusioned young white men in the West who are slowly coming to the realization that they in fact have no future as they are simply of no use or value to oligarchy (except perhaps as future pawns) – and who like the young of all races everywhere in the West are now simply superfluous to the goal of – “more wealth in fewer hands forever.”
 
The pied piper’s message to the young – forget about social change, embrace hierarchy as “natural,” and to instead of working ‘collectively’ for a more just society and a future worth living to just ‘individually’ buck up and go “clean their room:” How perfect, and such timing:
 
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/03/the-intellectual-we-deserve
 
 

Eyes Open
Eyes Open
Jul 16, 2020 1:34 PM
Reply to  Donald Duck

Thank you.

Regarding Covid-1984, I’m dismayed to see so many commentators of late decrying Bill Gates and Big Pharma’s plans for turning humans into living cash cows in order to feed their shareholders’ greed ‘Marxists’.

The current nightmare dystopia we’re witnessing is being driven by capitalism/neoliberalism.

Seamus Padraig
Seamus Padraig
Jul 16, 2020 3:41 PM
Reply to  Eyes Open

What’s in a name? Globalism is under the control of a power-hungry international élite. Whether they call themselves ‘capitalists’ or ‘Marxists’ or ‘fascists’ or anything else is just a matter of branding. The real struggle is not left-versus-right; it is top-versus-bottom.

Seamus Padraig
Seamus Padraig
Jul 16, 2020 3:37 PM
Reply to  Donald Duck

Modern cultural Marxists are not interested in economics anymore. It may be the case that Gramsci and the Frankfurt Schoolers once saw cultural Marxism as a means to an end, but they’re all long dead, and modern Wokesters see overthrowing traditional values, culture and the family as an end in itself … all of which makes them very useful to the globalists who sponsor them.

richard
richard
Jul 16, 2020 9:24 AM

I haven’t read this article yet as I have to rush out and so I’m not quite sure if what I have to say is relevant. But it seems to me that all this “black lives matter” nonsense could be sorted out quite easily. – I read that someone has been killed and others fired from their job for saying the obvious that “all lives matter”.
If President Trump were to go on telly and make a pronouncement that “All Lives Matter”, who could argue with him? It is so patently, obviously true. Any tribunal debating whether or not to sack some teacher or university professor for saying this would have some, shall we say, guidance.
Just a thought.

richard
richard
Jul 16, 2020 9:52 AM
Reply to  richard

Well… I showed this to my wife and she said it’s offensive to black people to say “all lives matter” because they have been oppressed in the past – and still are, she says.
So, all animals are equal but some are more equal than others…
Yes, black people have been oppressed in the past but so have white people. We have had to fight against kings and church for centuries to get what passes for the democracy we now enjoy. Blacks AND whites are oppressed by those who would rule us and they are doing their best to set us at each other’s throats while they laugh their heads off.

Seamus Padraig
Seamus Padraig
Jul 16, 2020 3:46 PM
Reply to  richard

All true, richard. Too bad George Soros disagrees with you though. He just decided to donate $220 million to Black Lives Matter. You don’t happen to have any money laying around that you could donate to ‘All Lives Matter,’ do you? 😉

Skeptic
Skeptic
Jul 16, 2020 9:24 AM

The system’s neatest trick, in a nutshell, is this:

For the sake of its own efficiency and security, the System needs to bring about deep and radical social changes to match the changed conditions resulting from technological progress.

 

The frustration of life under the circumstances imposed by the System leads to rebellious impulses.

 

Rebellious impulses are co-opted by the System in the service of the social changes it requires; activists “rebel” against the old and outmoded values that are no longer of use to the System and in favor of the new values that the System needs us to accept.

 

In this way rebellious impulses, which otherwise might have been dangerous to the System, are given an outlet that is not only harmless to the System, but useful to it.

 

Much of the public resentment resulting from the imposition of social changes is drawn away from the System and its institutions and is directed instead at the radicals who spearhead the social changes.

 

C. L.
C. L.
Jul 16, 2020 8:36 AM

“These leftists are apparently in serious need of a history lesson, considering it was the Soviet Union alone which intervened to defend the Spanish Republic from fascism, not the United States”

Yes, but didn’t the Soviet Union, Communist Party and the in-fighting on the left let in the fascists? I just feel this is an important point at this stage.

Donald Duck
Donald Duck
Jul 16, 2020 9:32 AM
Reply to  C. L.

See Orwell – Homage to Catalonia – where he was a member of the POUM (Workers Party of Marxist Unity) militia. He spills the beans ok.

C. L.
C. L.
Jul 16, 2020 4:00 PM
Reply to  Donald Duck

Yes, that’s what I might have been referring to Orwell. Probably Land and Freedom, Ken Loach also. Thanks.

Tom Larsen
Tom Larsen
Jul 17, 2020 7:04 PM
Reply to  C. L.

Great film! Land and Freedom was based on Homage to Catalonia.
 

Tom Larsen
Tom Larsen
Jul 16, 2020 4:18 PM
Reply to  Donald Duck

Yeah, I thought that was a weird comment by Max Parry, while technically true, the USSR was the only government to intervene on the side of the Spanish Republic, they ultimately betrayed the cause and did it for their own geopolitical reasons as Homage to Catalonia lays out.
 

Max Parry
Max Parry
Jul 17, 2020 8:02 PM
Reply to  Tom Larsen

Homage to Catalonia is notoriously historically inaccurate

Tom Larsen
Tom Larsen
Jul 17, 2020 8:46 PM
Reply to  Max Parry

Sources? I hope this changes Max ’cause I think you have important things to say. I don’t trust your writing. If you look at the comments, it is fair to say that people are not coming from a shared historical perspective. Maybe you should state your biases upfront – we all have them.
 

Max Parry
Max Parry
Jul 17, 2020 10:54 PM
Reply to  Tom Larsen

I have been accused of many things by readers, concealing my biases isn’t one of them…

Tom Larsen
Tom Larsen
Jul 18, 2020 2:30 AM
Reply to  Max Parry

Well, spell them out. I kinda an “old left” guy.

Tom Larsen
Tom Larsen
Jul 18, 2020 2:49 AM
Reply to  Max Parry

The edit function cuts you off! Below is what I intended to say:
 
Well then, spell them out. I’m kinda an “old left” guy. 30 years ago I sat in a living room of a tiny craftsman house with about 70 other people crammed in to talk with and listen to Murray Bookchin (someone who understood at a high level the weaknesses of the movements of his time and articulated them).
 
I am interested in dialog. We, working people, the vast majority, are in deep shit right now and need to find way for those that get it (i.e. plandemic) to coalesce around some common ideas and do something to fight back.

Seamus Padraig
Seamus Padraig
Jul 16, 2020 3:49 PM
Reply to  C. L.

Don’t worry, CL. In our contemporary farce-version of the Spanish Civil War, both the ‘anarchists’ and the ‘communists’ (jointly known as Antifa) are now secretly controlled by the capitalists, so it is highly unlikely we’ll see any infighting between them this time around.

lundiel
lundiel
Jul 16, 2020 8:05 AM

This is an excellent article that begs a response from Louis/Crispy. It certainly exposes what an utter tool he is.
 

Moneycircus
Moneycircus
Jul 16, 2020 7:49 AM

Ignorance being the secret to tyranny — a revealing quote of Maximilien Robespierre, purveyor of terror on behalf of the French State.
 
This is why the Woke can be manipulated to any purpose. The Woke and their organized muscle will turn against any target, or even upon each other, at the flick of the propaganda switch. Why? Because the ground has been prepared, cultivation of knowledge is replaced not just with ignorance (the absence of knowledge) but the rejection of logic as patriarchal.
 
Upon this barren desert any mirage can be conjured. The bull horn being academe with its grievance studies, amplified by the Corporatist Media and the political pantomime. They would march with Röhm’s Brown Shirts; their empty heads as open to any ringing declaration as an adolescent Komsomol.
 
Too much focus on the Woke and Antifa misses the broader control of society by forces for whom the former are simple tools.
 
Gareth Jones had reported from Soviet Russia and Fascist Italy, and when he arrived in Germany to interview Joseph Goebbels in 1933, he found the same atmosphere, the same techniques, the same manipulation of youth. The following report is worth quoting at length: Methods Of Nazis, Fascists And Bolsheviks: Striking Similarities of Three Movements, Gareth Jones for the Western Mail & South Wales News, June 10th 1933 

As in Fascist Italy and Soviet Russia, youth is in the saddle in Germany today, and that is one of the similarities which strike one who has been both to Russia and Germany. 

There are young men everywhere in responsible positions. A young man whom I met and whom I thought had, on account of his youth, quite a minor position turned out to be the President of one of Germany’s most important provinces! 

The use of force is another feature which Germany has in common with the Soviet Union, and this leads to the disregard of the individual and to the worship of the State. The State is to the Nazis and the Bolsheviks the God before whom all must bow and to whom individuals must offer up their most sacred rights….

But the idealism of the Nazis and of the Bolsheviks has its dark side of intolerance and their faith is that of the fanatic who, driven by deep emotion, keeps his mind completely closed to another point of view. 

The ‘Nazi Party has almost as complete control’ of the State in Germany as the Bolsheviks have in Russia or the Fascists in Italy; and their method of keeping power is very similar to that of the Bolsheviks and the Fascists. They have captured the whole life of the country; they have put Nazis in control of offices, of factories, of newspapers, of debating clubs, of boards of directors, of every little organisation. Nazis have been made, Commissars of Bavaria, of Saxony, of Wurttemberg. They have been put in the key positions in the police force. Thus, within a few months, the Nazis have entrenched themselves in so skilful a manner that only a civil war could drive them out. 

To dig themselves still further in power the Nazis have formed a secret police of many thousand members, with rights of search which almost make them counterpart of the Soviet O.G.P.U. As in Russia and Italy, letters are opened and there are house searchings for counter revolutionary propaganda and for weapons. To British people this intrusion into the sanctity of the home seems preposterous but it must be remembered that for two or three years Germany has almost been on the verge of civil war and that Bolshevism was seriously feared.

As in Soviet Russia and in Fascist Italy, the press is Government controlled and independent newspapers have been muzzled. Still appearing under their old titles, these newspapers are but a ghost of their former selves and scarcely venture to breathe a word of’ criticism. Liberty of expression has also vanished and the careful guarded way in which Germans now talk makes one think of Moscow or of Rome. 

Just 120 years before the Bolsheviks and Fascists, another man had roused the youth to a frenzy of social justice, Maximilien Robespierre:
 
“Virtue is impotent without Terror. Terror is only Justice prompt, severe and inflexible.”

Ted
Ted
Jul 16, 2020 6:43 AM

Paris commune, 1789?! Really? Does Off G even bother with rather mundane editorial checks?
 
Just because you can type words into a word processor does not mean you should be published.
 
Or is there something I have misunderstood here?
 
The revolutionary Commune was formed in 1789 and lasted until 1795. The insurrectionary Paris Commune of 1871 was formed as a response to the occupation of France by Prussian troops after the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. Two different communes. It’s Ted who needs to do some checking – ed
 

Loverat
Loverat
Jul 16, 2020 8:55 AM
Reply to  Ted

I really don’t know my French history but is it possible Paris Commune established at various points in history. Bastille fits in with the date 1789 but one also set up in 1871. Is this reason for confusion?

Steve Hayes
Steve Hayes
Jul 16, 2020 1:28 PM
Reply to  Ted

There was a Paris Commune established after the storming of the Bastille in 1789, which lasted until 1795. There was another, more famous Paris Commune, which was established in 1871 and lasted a few months.

Tom Larsen
Tom Larsen
Jul 16, 2020 9:51 PM
Reply to  Steve Hayes

I have only read one book on the French Revolution and it didn’t say anything about the Commune or any commune. (I checked.) Yes, I understand that may not mean much. I just did a Google search on the “Paris Commune” and I had to go page 5 of the list of results before I found a single result that was not about the 1871 Paris Commune. I even did a search on the Marxist Internet Archive and still it was all the 1871 Paris Commune. It seems to me that Max Parry to expect this to be common knowledge is a stretch.

Steve Hayes
Steve Hayes
Jul 17, 2020 11:07 AM
Reply to  Tom Larsen
Tom Larsen
Tom Larsen
Jul 17, 2020 5:19 PM
Reply to  Steve Hayes

Wikipedia? Are you serious? Is that where Parry got his info?

Max Parry
Max Parry
Jul 17, 2020 8:04 PM
Reply to  Tom Larsen

There were two Paris Communes and no, Wikipedia is not my source. Apparently your knowledge of the French Revolution is as limited as your understanding of the Spanish Civil War

Steve Hayes
Steve Hayes
Jul 18, 2020 9:19 AM
Reply to  Tom Larsen

I directed you to the Wikipedia page to show that it is “common knowledge.” As to Mr Parry’s source(s): I have no knowledge of that and I wasn’t attempting to answer for him.

sylviad
sylviad
Jul 16, 2020 5:12 AM

I am always amazed that anybody still cannot see that Marxism and fascism and identity politics are all the tools of the SAME agenda, wielded by the same people.

That there are still apologists for the atrocities of communism, as if the working class/peasants were/are not victims of its poison!

So much dishonesty; so little piecing together of the puzzle. Communism was ALWAYS about centralizing banking, consolidating power in the hands of a few!

George Mc
George Mc
Jul 16, 2020 8:33 AM
Reply to  sylviad

And I’m amazed that nowadays four decades after the collapse of even nominal communism, it still gets the blame for everything that goes wrong. Claims that e.g. Keir Starmer is purging Labour of the last vestiges of Marxism/Trotskyism are such awesome non-sequiturs that they have become a pure noise as is the drivel spouted by those foaming American capitalist jocks who are terrified of anything that interferes with the profit margin.  

Dr NG Maroudas
Dr NG Maroudas
Jul 16, 2020 4:33 AM

Very illuminating connection between the (mostly) racist Leftism of the Second Apart-Hate State’s kibbutzim, the racist Leftism of Rothschild’s oil fiefdom Eretz Kurdistan, and the mostly racist Leftism of the Liberal Democratic West which cheers the rape of small wog countries. Paradox which on reflection, becomes a truism: The racist battle for Seattle started in Syria. And the battle for secular, non-discrinatory socialism is being won, not in Seattle but in Syria.
 
“There was a stone in the middle of the road / In the middle of the road there was a stone”
 
And the stone was Syria.

Dr NG Maroudas
Dr NG Maroudas
Jul 16, 2020 7:18 AM
Reply to  Dr NG Maroudas

PS The stone in the middle of the road was not Syria alone. The war for Seattle is being won in The Arc of Resistance — Syria, Lebanon, Iran:
 
Posted on 15/07/2020 by Elijah J Magnier  By Elijah J. Magnier: @ejmalrai
 
 U$-I$rael’s war against the “Arc of the Resistance” [Syria, Lebanon, Iran] continues but with different tools: from waging [unsuccessful] wars against the Arc with armies on the ground, the Anglo Zio Capitalist regimes are now turning on their financial power: the U$ $anctions war on Iran, Syria and Lebanon (plus a dozen other countries). Syria has already survived ten year siege conditions: military, diplomatic and financial. But now in Lebanon, Hezb’Allah is storing hundreds of tons of food supplied by Iran, in dozens of improvised warehouses on the Syrian-Lebanese border.
 
This reflects Hezb Secretary General Nasr’Allah’s promise to prevent Lebanese starvation from the U$ blockade. Sayyed Nasr’Allah’s blow “below the belt” pushed the U$ regime off balance, turning Lebanon’s compass towards two countries (China and Iran) declared most despicable by the U$ regime. These two countries have the capacity to counteract US actions against Lebanon.
 
Uncle $cam reminds me of the $poilt Brat whose dad gave him a golf club for his birthday. It was a very exclu$ive club, and Brat organized a very successful membership drive: managed to drive away most club members. Making the club a little too exclusive.
 
Uncle $cam is worried: his “soft war” on Syria is backfiring. What would happen to Uncle and all the Men from Uncle if their “$oft war” against the people of their own country also began to backfire?
 

Antonym
Antonym
Jul 16, 2020 3:39 AM

Good except the obligatory Leftist ritual of having to drag Israel into any topic.
 
Even when the Left today ostensibly opposes war” abroad, they easily go for a form of civil war, so violence is not their issue.

George Mc
George Mc
Jul 16, 2020 8:25 AM
Reply to  Antonym

I’m afraid it’s Israel itself that goes through the obligatory ritual of dragging itself into any topic.

paul
paul
Jul 16, 2020 8:37 PM
Reply to  George Mc

We can’t ignore our Zionist masters. We are just donkeys and insects put on the earth to serve their needs.