http://attackthesystem.com/2008/07/updated-news-digest-july-20-2008/

Part One

Part Two

If we were Soviet or East European citizens in the 1950s, 60s or 70s, and we were attempting to build a revolutionary underground, classical criticisms of the state would certainly be helpful. For instance, the Augustinian view of the state as a “robber band writ large”. However, we would be selling ourselves short by simply criticizing “the state” as an entity unto itself without focusing the nature of the particular kind of state we wished to resist. For this, we would need to look further than simple critiques of statism qua statism and delve deeper into criticisms of Marxist states as particular manifestations of the state. Further, we would need to critique the ideological underpinnings of Marxist states: the ideologies of Marxism, Leninism, Stalinism, Hoxhaism, etc.

So it is with those of us who would resist the present day regimes of the West. Most manifestations of the state except one are considered illegitimate in modern societies. Very few people take seriously the supposed philosophical justifications for monarchy, theocracy, aristocracy, fascism, communism, or military dictatorship. Only “democracy” is considered legitimate, and not just any kind of democracy. Iran is arguably just as democratic in the political sphere as any of the Western countries, yet it is considered a pariah nation. Instead, “democracy” must be fused with “the free-market” (state-capitalism), “the public sector” (the welfare state), “multiculturalism” (state-enforcement of compulsory racial/ethnic/cultural integrationism), state-regulation of “public health” (the therapeutic state) and a number of other things.

Additionally, the Western nations have, over the past 30-50 years, undergone a de jour cultural and social revolution and a de facto revolution in politics, law, education and a number of other institutions. Fifty years ago, racism was nearly universal and frequently mandatory. Today, it is regarded as the ultimate horror. A friend of mine’s sixtyish mother was told as a young girl that her aspirations to become a physician were inappropriate, “as boys become doctors, girls become nurses”. Such sentiments would be considered laughable today, even by most social conservatives. A generation ago, homosexuality was a serious felony. Five years ago, the US Supreme Court declared it to be a constitutional right. Abortion and pornography were once criminally prohibited vices, akin to drug use at the present time, yet these have likewise been declared constitutional rights.

No doubt many people, including myself, would consider most of these changes to be positive in nature. No one wants to return to Jim Crow, or endorse crass sexism, or hail the persecution of homosexuals by the state. And the rights of free speech, freedom of the press and privacy are essential to keeping the state at bay. But that brings us to another interesting matter. As all of this supposed liberation and breakdown of oppressive social structures has occurred, the state has become increasingly ruthless and pernicious in its expression. For instance, the US Constitution allows for the prosecution of only three federal crimes-treason, piracy and counterfeiting. Today, there are over 3,000 federal crimes and forty percent of these have been created since 1970.  Prior to the mid-1980s, drugs were illegal, with drug crimes being treated in a manner comparable to serious property offenses like burglary or grand larceny. Today, even the most minor players in drug offenses are frequently sentenced to greater periods of incarceration than even some who commit violent crimes. Asset forfeiture laws were originally used to go after the holdings of members of drug trafficking cartels. Today, such laws apply to 140 other types of “crimes”. The US prison population has increased a dozen times over since the 1960s. Paramilitary policing was a new phenomenom in the 1970s, and originally intended as a means of dealing with either civil unrest or particularly difficult matters of law enforcement like hostage situations. Today, paramilitary policing is normal, even for routine police work, like execution of a search warrant. Even at the height of the Nixon era, the idea that a president would claim the right to unilaterally suspend habeus corpus and imprison suspects indefinitely in secret prisons without trial would have been considered absurd.

As the state has grown more pernicious, so has the economic position of the working class declined as US elites have adopted the Third World economic model. The American state, for the first time, is openly proclaiming a policy of reserving the right to wage ”preemptive war” against virtually any other state it wishes, for any reason, at any time. Further, the cultural revolution of the past generation is being used as the foundation of a whole new kind of authoritarianism. Babies are now accused of “racism” for disliking exotic ethnic foods. A university janitor is reprimanded for reading a book about the Ku Klux Klan during his break time, even though the book in question was anti-Klan. A mother is arrested for spanking a child even when no evidence of genuine abuse exists.

One thing that is rather interesting about this new totalitarian humanism that seeks to establish a Big Brother state to make sure no one is ever being abused or discriminated against is its arbitrariness. Spanking a child is “child abuse” yet the US federal government can roll over dozens of children with tanks at Waco and no one from the System raises an eyebrow. “Racism” is regarded as the ultimate horrorshow, yet the single policy that inflicts the greatest amount of harm upon black communities, the War on Drugs, continues unabated.

It is this totalitarian humanism that is the foundation of modern state tyrannies. Just as we need the traditional critiques of statism found in the works of various historic thinkers, just as we need a coherent critique of the relationship between “big government” and “big business” of the kind that Kevin Carson has developed, so do we need a similar critique of totalitarian humanism and its tentacles like cultural Marxism and the therapeutic state.

The overwhelming majority of North American and probably European “radicals” still proceed as if it were perpetually 1968, if not 1928. Just as the simultaneous rise of the global economy and the decreased viability of the welfare state has mandated a search for new economic alternatives, so does the rise of totalitarian humanism necessitate a critique of this phenomenon beyond what most “radicals” could ever offer. A primary barrier to the formulation and dissemination of such a critique is the fact that most “radicals” essentially share the same value system as the proponents of totalitarian humanism. Yes, many liberals and leftists, for instance, oppose some of the excesses of Bush and cronies concerning civil liberties, but most of them also hold to the view that state-enforced multiculturalism, state-regulated “public health”, state interference in private institutions and local communities to prevent or deter illiberal social practices are legitimate and share the view of the current ruling class that racism, sexism, gay discrimination, fundamentalism, xenophobia, carrying a handgun, failing to attend public schools until age eighteen, etc. are the ultimate sins. Perhaps this explains why the antiwar movement has been utterly impotent and ineffective in opposing the neocons’ wars,i.e., because they share they same fundamental values of spreading “enlightenment”, “democracy”, “equality”, yet may have some reservations about the neocons’ methodology (like American unilateralism and defiance of international law). And, of course, some, like Christopher Hitchens, do not possess even those qualms.

One reason I find tendencies like the national-anarchists or the left-conservatives or the national-maoists or the neo-secessionists to be rather refreshing is that they represent an outlook that genuinely rejects establishment values. After all, what would be more frightening to the American ruling class and political establishment: A bunch of college students, middle class leftists and hippies marching in the streets in a manner that looks more like a rock concert protesting global warming, racism, and Third World honor killings or a disciplined, orderly march of hard-core revolutionaries drawn from the ranks of inner-city gangbanger/ghetto types, Appalachian rednecks, or ex-convicts and other genuinely lumpen elements carrying banners with menacing slogans like “Death to the System!”, wearing all-black and red outfits and demanding overthrow of the government, smashing the ruling class and dissolution of the system into separatist/secessionist communities?

I know which team I’d pick.

Quote of the Week:

“ Those who expect to reap the benefits of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it.”

- Thomas Paine

Strip Search a Thirteen-Year-Old and Keep Your Job

Proudhon Seminar: What is Property?  Ch. 2 notes, Pt. 1 by Shawn Wilbur

Gangsters in Blue

Proudhon Seminar: What is Property?  Ch. 1 notes, by Shawn Wilbur

Bush Acts Like an Oaf at Gang of Eight Conference  by Eric Margolis

 Iowa Mom Busted by Police for Spanking Child

Indiana University Janitor Reprimanded for Reading Anti-Ku Klux Klan Book

Take a Picture of a Cop, Go to Jail

A Phony Crisis—and a Real One, On The Path To War With Iran by Pat Buchanan

Enabling Tyranny—Brigitte Bardot And Other Victims by Paul Craig Roberts

Police Quotas Motivate Unfair Treatment from Left Conservative Blog

The Lesser Evil Just Keeps Getting More Evil by Kevin Carson

 All You Need to Know About Obama   by Brad Spangler

Why They’re Called “Cockroach Caucuses”  by Kevin Carson

Black Baltimore Drug Dealers Use “Far Right” Legal Theories

“Have Nothing to Do with Conquest”  by Michael Scheuer

Tom Woods Speaks at Ron Paul March

Conservative Confusion on Iran by Philip Giraldi

Just Another Drug War Rant  by Kevin Carson

You Say You Want a Revolution  by Kevin Carson

One Million Terrorists?   by Paul Craig Roberts

Nothing Honorable About the Vietnam War  by Ted Rall

John McCain is the Candidate of Mars, God of War  by Doug Bandow

Little War Criminals Get Punished, Big Ones Don’t  by Paul Craig Roberts

America’s First Affirmative Action Candidate  by Pat Buchanan

Is There Sovereignty Beyond the State?  by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.

The Myth of the Conservative Legal Movement     by Kevin R. C. Gutzman

Housing and Squatting      from AnarchoNation

Notes on the Revolution March      from Social Memory Complex

Report Finds Horrendous Conditions at Chicago Jail

Military Court Upholds Free Speech for Soldiers

Heavy Metal Monk

Drug War Hogwash     by Charley Reese

Panarchy: A Means to Jeffersonian Ideals  by Mike Rozeff

We’re in a World Economic Crisis by William Norman Grigg

Blow it Out Your Ass, Phil Gramm!

(Thanks, Jeremy)

Text of a speech from Adam Kokesh of Iraq Veterans Against the War

http://kokesh.blogspot.com/2008/07/duty-to-resist.html

Saturday, July 12, 2008

Duty to Resist

Thanks to Josh Rhodes for digging this up:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7420469.stm

Meeting Spain’s last anarchist

By Alfonso Daniels San Buenaventura, Bolivia Hours after flying on a rickety 19-seater propeller plane and landing on a dirt strip, you get to the village of San Buenaventura in the heart of the Bolivian Amazon. Here, in a simple one-storey brick house next to a row of wooden shacks, is the home of Antonio Garcia Baron. He is the only survivor still alive of the anarchist Durruti column which held Francoist forces at bay in Madrid during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and the founder of an anarchist community in the heart of the jungle. Mr Baron, 87, was wearing a hat and heavy dark glasses. He later explained that they were to protect his eyes, which were damaged when he drank a cup of coffee containing poison nine years ago. It was, he said, the last of more than 100 attempts on his life, which began in Paris, where he moved in 1945 after five years in the Mauthausen Nazi concentration camp, and continued in Bolivia, his home since the early 1950s. Stateless He was keen to share his views on 20th Century Spanish history with a wider audience. THE DURRUTI COLUMN Column of anarchist fighters during Spanish Civil War Led by Buenaventura Durruti until his death fighting Franco’s forces on outskirts of Madrid in November 1936 After defeat of Republican forces in 1939, many surviving members fled to France. Many interned in French prison camps. After Nazis invaded, many imprisoned in concentration camps, others joined resistance “The Spanish press has covered up that the (Catholic) Church masterminded the death of two million Republicans during the civil war, not one million as they maintain,” Mr Baron said before launching into one of his many anecdotes. “I told Himmler (the head of the Nazi SS) when he visited the Mauthausen quarry on 27 April, 1941, what a great couple the (Nazis) made with the Church. “He replied that it was true, but that after the war I would see all the cardinals with the Pope marching there, pointing at the chimney of the crematorium.” On the walls of Mr Baron’s house is a picture of him taken in the camp. Next to it is a blue triangle with the number 3422 and letter S inside, marking the prisoners considered stateless. “Spain took away my nationality when I entered Mauthausen, they wanted the Nazis to exterminate us in silence. The Spanish government has offered to return my nationality but why should I request something that was stolen from me and 150,000 others?” he said angrily. Mr Baron wanted to be as far from modern life as possible Mr Baron arrived in Bolivia on the advice of his friend, the French anarchist writer Gaston Leval. “I asked him for a sparsely populated place, without services like water and electricity, where people lived like 100 years ago - because where you have civilisation you’ll find priests.” Some 400 people, mostly Guarani Indians, lived there at the time, but in fact also a German priest. “He was a tough nut to crack. He learnt of my arrival and told everyone that I was a criminal. They fled and made the sign of the cross whenever they saw me, but two months later I started speaking and they realised I was a good person, so it backfired on him.” Convinced that the priest still spied on him, a few years later he decided to leave and create a mini-anarchist state in the middle of the jungle, 60km (37 miles) and three hours by boat from San Buenaventura along the Quiquibey River. With him was his Bolivian wife Irma, now 71. They raised chicken, ducks and pigs and grew corn and rice which they took twice a year to the village in exchange for other products, always rejecting money. Dunkirk Life was tough and a few years ago Mr Baron lost his right hand while hunting a jaguar. For the first five years, until they began having children, they were alone. Later a group of some 30 nomadic Indians arrived and decided to stay, hunting and fishing for a living, also never using money. “We enjoyed freedom in all of its senses, no-one asked us for anything or told us not to do this or that,” he recounted as his wife smiled, sitting in a chair at the back of the room. Recently they moved back to the village for health reasons and to be closer to their children. They live with a daughter, 47, while their other three children, Violeta, 52, Iris, 31, and 27-year-old Marco Antonio work in Spain. Paintings of scenes from the camp are a visual reminder of his past They also share the few simple rooms arranged around an internal patio with three Cuban doctors who are part of a contingent sent to help provide medical care in Bolivia. The hours passed and it was time to take the small plane back to La Paz before the torrential rain isolated the area again. Only then, as time was running out, did Mr Baron begin speaking in detail about Mauthausen and the war - as if wishing to fulfil a promise to fallen comrades. How the Nazis threw prisoners from a cliff, how some of them clung to the mesh wire to avoid their inevitable death, how the Jews were targeted for harsh treatment and did not survive long. His memory also took him to Dunkirk where he had arrived in 1940, before he was caught and imprisoned in Mauthausen. “I arrived in the morning but the British fleet was some 6km from the coast. I asked a young English soldier if it would return. “I saw that he was eating with a spoon in one hand and firing an anti-aircraft gun with the other,” he laughed. “‘Eat if you wish’, I told him. ‘Do you know how to use it?’ he asked since I didn’t have military uniform and was very young. “‘Don’t worry,’ I said. I grabbed the gun and shot down two planes. He was dumbstruck. “I’ll never forget the determination of the British fighting stranded on the beach.”

In response to my statement “Is the Left salvagable? In and of itself, it does not appear to be,”, Jeremy raises some helpful points concerning the defintions of “left” and “right”:

That begs the question: what is this “Left”? If it is merely establishmentarianism with a cultural attachment to civil disobedience and protest, then one wonders whether the term “left” even applies. And so when you characterize the entire Left by its most objectionable qualities, it does give me pause. This is a very broad movement, with a wide variety of personalities.

And at least historically speaking, it seems like the Right has a much more basic need to align with established norms and power than the Left (whether we’re using it in the traditional anti-establishment sense or in the modern, pejorative sense you employ). I’m all for transcending left and right, but not as an alternative to performing a much needed analysis of the current political conditions.

I’m not accusing you of laziness, but merely suggesting that we make sure we qualify our generalizations of convenience as such. There’s no need to turn anybody off by attacking their label of preference, is there? I’ve always liked the tack you’ve seemed to take where you out-left the left, and out-right the right, demonstrating that they lack the conviction of their own principles. This is the way to get serious people to think seriously about their own motivations. We transcend the political poles by not by dispensing with them but by clarifying what they were originally intended to represent.

In strictly historical terms, virtually all people in modern societies (those of the West and others with similar politico-economic systems) are “leftists”. The “right”, properly understood in its historical context, was the ideology of defense of the monarchy, theocracy and aristocracy: “Throne and Altar”. Such sentiments are marginalized to say the least in liberal democracies, particularly the United States, which has no “throne and altar” tradition of its own. In other words, nearly all Americans and most Westerners in general start with the American or French Revolutions and move leftward from there, often considerably leftward. The closest thing the United States has to a “right-wing” is the so-called “religious right”, which is rather liberal by historical and even contemporary world standards. For instance, compare the “religious right” in America versus that in Saudi Arabia.

Most contemporary “right-wing” ideologies are historically on the Left. For instance, the godfather of modern philosophical “conservatism”, Edmund Burke, was a Whig who opposed British imperialism in Ireland, America and even India. American “conservatism” owes much to the classical liberalism of Locke and Adam Smith. The neoconservatives are an outgrowth of either Cold War liberalism or Trotskyism (depending on who you ask or which neoconservative you’re talking about). “Right-wing” libertarianism is really the radical classical liberalism of Herbert Spencer. American “right-wing populism” is distinctively rooted in the American republican tradition and owes very little to European royalism to say the least.  

The mainstream Republican-oriented right is really a kind of “right-wing liberalism”, and therefore historically on the left, particularly since the neocon takeover of the right. What is now called “liberalism” in the US is really social democracy, and this is very much a centrist, if not reactionary, position in modern societies. American “liberalism” and European “social democracy” both maintain roughly the same levels of state intervention into the economy, though the European social welfare system is slightly more extensive (and mad possible only by the absence of a large military-industrial complex of the kind found in the USA). This system, whether European or American, is becoming an archaism, given the fiscal difficulties of modern welfare states.

The Left established itself as the party of the welfare state several generations ago. That’s why a distinction was initially made between the Old Left and the New Left. As we all know, the New Left abandoned class politics for a cultural politics that is now relatively status quo. At the same time, as all of this cultural “liberation” has occurred, the grip of political totalitarianism has tightened. The “Campus Progress” group I mentioned in the previous post seemed, from the contents of DeAnna’s review, to represent a wide cross-section of the Left, from the mainstream Democratic-oriented left to The Nation to the radical gay/trans,etc. left to the Weathermen-friendly. Yet I also noticed from the content of that article that most of the issues covered involved the same cultural politics that has defined the Left since the 60s.

The fundamental problem I see with the Left is that not only does it not offer anything new, but does not take many fundamentally anti-establishment positions. Of course, if we wish to define “left” in the historic sense of opposition to the status quo, then it would seem that most of the currents I previously identified as “revolutionary right” would also be the true “left”. This would certainly include the “left-libertarian” tendency that Jeremy leans towards, particularly considering that many liberals and leftists consider libertarianism to be just a variant of fascism. It would certainly include Dylan Waco and Daniel Bein’s “left-conservatism”. Of course, it would include “national-anarchism” or the “national-maoism” of the Patriotic Workers’ Party.

The problem I see is that most orthodox leftists would consider all of these positions to be heresy. If the “left” is the orthodox left, then are all of these genuine anti-establishment positions on the left, or are they something entirely new, or are they just a “left to the left of the left”? I remember Sam Dolgoff saying once that “there’s the left and then there’s the further left and then the even further left, and then there’s an even further left and that left is me.”

Maybe that’s what we are.

I wrote in the “Liberty and Populism” article that the real struggle in modern times is a continuation of the historic battle between Marxism and Anarchism, with Marxism representing the status quo, whether right-wing liberalism/Trotskyism in the form of the Neocons, centrist totalitarian humanism of the US Democratic Party and the ruling classes of the European nations, the crypto-Stalinist cultural Marxism of the PC Left, the post-Maoism of the Chinese Communist Party, et.al.

I suppose the true left is whatever is resisting all of this. Are religious conservatives standing up to totalitarian humanism by opening home schools leftist or rightists? Are gun nut militias left or right? Are the cultural nationalists of Vlaams Bloc advocating an independent Flanders left or right?

It’s a complicated question.

http://attackthesystem.com/2008/07/updated-news-digest-july-13-2008/

NA23 offers this suggestion:

The key is the breaking down of the Left/Right dichotomy with a real social alternative. We have to disrupt the labels and stereotypes held by the left, right and the media. This can only be done succesfully through frequent street actions and public involvement, on as many issues as is possible.

The strategy of tension and the disruption of dogmas through confusion.

This may well be correct, as it has been the National-Anarchists of Australia and New Zealand that have been achieving the highest level of recognition so far as “neither left nor right” movements go, and they have been doing it through street actions.

Some examples:

http://www.newrightausnz.com/?p=110

http://www.newrightausnz.com/?p=109

http://www.newrightausnz.com/?p=4

What the folks in Australia have shown is that even a small group that acts correctly can make something of an impact.  A few years ago, I was having a conversation with a non-political acquaintance who told me that most leftist demonstrations he had observed appeared to be nothing more than chaotic, incoherent nonsense with a bunch of people swarming around and heading off into all sorts of different directions and often carrying signs (usually exhibiting the quality of what a third-grader with a box of crayons might produce) with slogans that were irrelevant to the purpose of the protest itself, for instance, “Save the Whales” signs being carried at an antiwar demo. I suggested in response that it would be more effective if a group of protestors simply marched in an organized way, carrying one big banner that was professionally done and that got the message across, with relevant literature available to give out to interested passersby.

From the photos of the New Right Aus/Nz actions, it appears that this is precisely what they do. Hence, their effectiveness. Also, notice that many of them are wearing black outfits and some are wearing masks (warning: wearing a mask in public is illegal in some US jurisdictions). This is good as it gives the marchers an appearance of seriousness that counterbalances the hippy-dippy, hysterical leftoid image of protest demonstrations.

So how would we do what our Australian/Nz friends are doing in the USA? NA23’s position of adopting such tactics towards many issues seems appropriate. No doubt different issues will be more significant in certain places and at certain times. On the secession question itself, image a demo similar to that depicted in these NA-NR Aus/NZ photos outside of federal buildings in the capital cities of individual states demanding autonomy for regions and cities. Imagine such demos outside courthouses, jails and police stations demanding an end to the police state and the legal racket and prison-industrial complex built up around it. Imagine demos outside the headquarters of corporations, banks and businesses institutions involved in nefarious activities. Imagine such a demo outside military recruitment centers handing out antiwar literature making serious arguments as opposed to the usual “No Blood for Oil” leftoid crap.  There could be similar actions against the eradication of low income housing, or against corporate welfare-funded development projects, and many other targets.

What would be particularly advantageous is if anti-System groups from opposite ends of the political or cultural spectrum could get in the habit of marching together against common enemies, not out of a sense of brotherly love, but out of recognition of common enemies. For instance, religious fundamentalists and environmentalists demanding an end to the feds’ harassment of pro-life, environmental or animal rights groups. Left-wing anarchists, black nationalists and white nationalists marching over, say, police brutality or housing issues (yes, such groups have actually engaged in joint actions in the past). Homosexuals and motorcycle gangs marching in protest over harassment of gay bars and biker bars by zoning and liquor licensing boards.

You get the idea.

Of course, any such actions have the potential for violence as well as legal complications. Go in with your eyes open. Consult with lawyers, train your people in how to deal with the police when arrested, do your homework, etc.

Maybe we can reclaim the good name of protest.

Jeremy raises an interesting question in the Comments section:

I don’t think the Left is so utterly irretrievable as you seem to, but a line must be drawn in the sand when it comes to revolutionary potential. Many on the Left (and RIght, no doubt) will be found wanting.

And Mike offers a few important observations as well:

The analysis of today’s “liberalism” as totalitarianism is spot on. I would only add that there is a like tendency of thought from those on the “conservative” side of the political sphere that would likewise recognize no limitation or boundary to the use of state power to create their utopia.

Over at the Ancien’ Regimer page Taki’s Mag Kevin DeAnna has a piece that is highly relevant to this issue:

http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/rules_for_radicals/

Most of DeAnna’s piece is an attack on the Left, but look at what he says about what passes for the mainstream “Right”:

In contrast, the majority of young CPAC attendees believed the purpose of political action was wearing a suit and preparing for a career. It is the difference between activists and politicos. Many Beltway conservatives are not activists and despise those who engage in protests or think of political alternatives beyond voting for Team Red. A mainstream conservative organization awarding young activists for direct action is simply unconceivable. Conservative organizations systematically funnel them into the dead end of Republican business as usual. Culture is largely ignored. The result is a youth “movement” that is actually less committed and effective than the older conservative grassroots. Campus Progress is building activists and the campus Right is building politicians and politicos. 

In other words, the mainstream Republican-oriented “Right” is simply a movement of careerists and opportunists for whom political or party affiliation is simply seen as a career move. Well, duh, who would have ever thought that about Young Republican-types? This gets us to the difference between “conservatives” and a wide body of perspectives that might be called the “revolutionary Right”. What is a “conservative”? Roughly defined, a conservative is someone who wants to conserve a particular status quo (in the tradition of De Maistre) or is suspicious of change, or at least rapid or radical change (in the tradition of Burke). American conservatism also has a classical liberal strand to it, particularly the Lockean emphasis on property rights, though many right-wing histrionics over “property rights” amount to little more than an apology for the state-capitalist status quo (see Kevin Carson).

There is still another branch of “conservative” thinking, and one which I personally adhere to, that does not necessarily commit one to a particular ideological outlook in the political realm. This perspective draws on the realist tradition of Machiavelli and Hobbes and is found in modern thinkers like Carl Schmitt, Ernst Junger, Vilifredo Pareto, Georges Sorel, James Burnham, Lawrence Dennis, Robert Michaels and Gaetano Mosca. This point of view is elitist, anti-egalitarian, pessimist, anti-utopian, social darwinian (or at least recognizes the inevitability of conflict), anti-humanist, cynical and espouses no small degree of moral skepticism. Unlike other brands of “conservatism”, this outlook does not commit one to the preservation of any particular status quo. One can be a “rightist” in the Machiavellian tradition, as I am, and also be an extreme revolutionary, as I also am.

The bottom line is that most of the American right-wing is a bunch of jingoistic flag-wavers or a bunch of middle-class people whining about taxes. Of course, we should want nothing to do with such people. Instead, we should seek to cultivate a “revolutionary right” that is far outside the mainstream “conservative” milieu. But what about the Left?

Back to Kevin DeAnna’s experience of attending the conference of some lefto-freakazoid outfit called “Campus Progress”. Here’s some of the better gems from DeAnna’s review:

I reported to registration to receive my official totebag, T shirt, and condoms. In the bustle, I was only able to grab three packs, but luckily, Students for a Sensible Drug Policy and NARAL were handing out prophylactics in the display area (unfortunately labeled “Screw the Drug War”). The Campus Progress National Conference had begun.

This is genuinely sad, because the drug war is a serious issue, a foundation of the exponential expansion of the American police state over the past twenty or so years, and a means by which the state has tyrannized millions and brought about all sorts of social wreckage in the process. However, the approach of these folks is to make opposition to the drug war look like just another PC joke issue like demands to change the names of sports teams named after American Indian tribes or the right of men to use women’s restrooms in public buildings.

New Republic editor James Kirchick made an appearance during the panel on gay rights—his Barack Obama-style flag pin being the only American flag at the entire conference. At CP, Kirchick was the official representative of right-wing extremism in that he argued that gays should become “normal” by gaining entry to bourgeoisie institutions such as marriage and the family and disowning terms like “queer.” This prompted cries of disapproval. 

We know we’re in the Twilight Zone when the “conservative” representative at a leftist conference is a neocon homo who did a hit piece on Ron Paul for the center-left New Republic.

Richard Kim of The Nation argued the queer agenda should be about pan-sexual liberation, including liberalizing divorce laws and pushing for acceptance of alternative family models beyond squares like Kirchick and his hypothetical partner. A matronly trans-queer named Mason rumbled in a deep baritone that before openly becoming “trans,” he had “no identity.”

If the purpose of radicalism or activism or whatever we want to call it is simply to promote one big fuck-fest, wouldn’t it be easier to forget about politics altogether and just open an adult film company?

The Young Democratic Socialists handed out a flyer featuring Martin Luther King stating, “We are saying that something is wrong with capitalism, there must be a better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism”—which would shock my movement colleagues who tell me every January that MLK was a conservative Republican.

Compared to these folks, MLK was a conservative Republican.

The fact that an organization that has hosted senators, presidents, and the current Democratic nominee shares space with racists, communists, and homosexual activists that consider gay marriage to be reactionary is newsworthy. 

Gay marriage is reactionary. The radicals of yesteryear would denounce marriage as a bourgeois institution and burn their marriage certificates, and this was true not only of free-lovers, free-thinkers, anarchists and bohemians but even many old guard socialists of the Fabian ilk. Nowadays, we have gays running out to join the bourgeoisie. Well, actually, we don’t. In Holland and other countries where gay marriage is recognized, only a small number of homosexuals have taken advantage of this “opportunity”.

As Campus Progress also recruits and advertises at the even more radical National Conference on Organized Resistance, which openly promotes force against military recruitment centers, the links between Democratic Party leaders and violent extremists goes well beyond Obama living in the same neighborhood as Bill Ayers.  Campus Progress’s magazine’s feature on the “Lessons of the Weather Underground” is no aberration. 

Well, now we might actually be getting somewhere. All Hail Violent Extremists!

It is to Campus Progress that U.S. Congressman Keith Ellison can speak, in his own words, “vanguard to vanguard.” The tendency of attendees to speak of overthrowing the “system” and in the next sentence talking about the upcoming Obama Administration is exactly how activists should think. While participating in Democratic campaigns, Campus Progress and the activists that work with it are building a force independent of partisan efforts—but not irrelevant to it. They understand that the role of activists is to push politicians towards an independently defined agenda rather than serving as cannon fodder.

Hence, a common concern of many activists was how to avoid being “co-opted” by the Democratic establishment—even if that establishment is headed by the most liberal candidate in American history. Similarly, a comment during the civil rights panel about how any movement needs a “militant resistance” was met not with nervous glances but agreement to what all perceived to be an obvious point. 

This is an illustration of the split between mainstream liberal totalitarian humanism and the more hard-core PC cultural Marxist Left. I don’t know that there are any significant doctrinal differences, except maybe on a few economic points, e.g., welfare-capitalism vs outright socialism/Marxism. It’s basically the same as the historic divisions between Social Democrats and Commies. How fast do we want to go, and all that.

Is the Left salvagable? In and of itself, it does not appear to be. Instead, it appears to be more along the lines of a demented cult whose counterparts on the Right might be folks like the followers of Rev. John Hagee. But before I get too self-righteous about it all, I should point out that as a pan-secessionist I would welcome the development of both “Campus Progess” lefto-freakazoid secession movements as well as John Hagee Fan Club secession movements. Also, I was an evangelical Christian with views not unlike Hagee’s until I was a teenager and I also participated extensively in lefto-freakazoid activities not unlike these “Campus Progress” loons for a few years when I was in my early twenties.

I basically see both “movement conservatism” and lefto-freakazoidism as useful transitional phases for superior people who will eventually move on to something more concrete. For instance, some of the better people in the paleo milieu-Tom Woods, James Wilson, Joe Sobran-came out of “the conservative movement” (forgive them, for they knew not what they were doing). And many in the “beyond left and right” milieu came out of the Left-myself, Ean Frick and a number of other folks around Attack the System. I think we should look at both movements-conservatism and leftism-as sinking ships that may contain rare individuals actually worthy of being thrown a life preserver or picked up by a rescue boat. Let the rest of them drown.

What do others think about this? Is the Left salvagable?