Monthly Archives: January 2015

ISIS “Made in USA”: Iraq “Geopolitical Arsonists” Seek to Burn Region Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Fourth Generation Warfare, Military

This makes sense in light of recognition that the U.S. grand strategy in the Middle East is the elimination of nationalist regimes such as Syria and Iran that stand in the way of Western domination of the region’s oil production and trade, the creation of a Greater Israel, hegemony over Central Asia and its fuel resources, and the prevention of Russia from maintaining client states in the region.

By Tony Cartalucci

Global Research

When a fire is raging, firefighters are called – not the arsonist who started it, especially if they return to the scene of the crime dragging a barrel of gasoline behind them. Yet, this is precisely what the US proposes – that they – the geopolitical arsonists – be allowed to return to Iraq to extinguish the threat of heavily armed sectarian militants streaming from NATO territory in Turkey and edging ever closer to Baghdad.

ISIS: Made in USA

The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is a creation of the United States and its Persian Gulf allies, namely Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and recently added to the list, Kuwait. The Daily Beast in an article titled, “America’s Allies Are Funding ISIS,” states:

The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), now threatening Baghdad, was funded for years by wealthy donors in Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, three U.S. allies that have dual agendas in the war on terror.

Despite the candor of the opening sentence, the article would unravel into a myriad of lies laid to obfuscate America’s role in the creation of ISIS. The article would claim: More…

Who are the Independent Greeks? Reply

by • Activism, Economics/Class Relations, Electoralism/Democratism, Left and Right, Strategy

This is how you do it.

Once again, the election results in Greece represent what I have been pushing for years, i.e. the creation of a radical left that eclipses the center-left and then builds a coalition with the populist right against the establishment center, the global elites and the transnational ruling class.

The primary obstacle to replication the Greek model in Western Europe and North America is totalitarian humanism, i.e. the fact that the radical left in the West is dominated by the cultural left (the “pink and green” left) rather than the traditional economic left and is usually more than happy to back the center-left establishment against the cultural right. The solution is to build a “new radical left” of the kind for which ATS is a prototype, and that subsequently pushes the cultural left towards the center and eclipses it.

Of course, I am neither a conventional socialist nor any kind of right-winger. I am considerably to the left of Syriza on most questions. I regard the cultivation of a radical left/populist-right convergence as merely a transitional stage towards the development of a popular base for a revolutionary anarchism.

The Guardian

Rightwing party differs on many issues with radical leftist Syriza, but they are united by a mutual hatred for bailout programme.

Panos Kammenos
Panos Kammenos, leader of Independent Greeks (Anel). Photograph: Michael Kappeler/dpa/Corbis

Syriza just missed out on the 151 MPs it needed to govern alone after Greece’s election, winning 149 seats with a 36.3% share of the vote. The party has formed a coalition government with Independent Greeks, who took 13 seats.

The populist, rightwing Independent Greeks (Anel) would at first sight make for a strange bedfellow for the radical leftists Syriza and the deal makes an unusual alliance, but they are brought together by a mutual hatred for the bailout programme keeping Greece afloat.

The two parties have vastly diverging world views, standing well apart on issues such as illegal migration, Greece’s ever-fractious relationship with Nato rival Turkey, gay marriage and the role of the Greek Orthodox church.

More…

The rise of the Greek left is a call for pan-European change Reply

by • Activism, Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Economics/Class Relations, Electoralism/Democratism, Left and Right, Strategy

Some observations about the recent election in Greece.

First, I am hesitant base any general assessment of Western politics on domestic Greek politics, which is still very much in the mode of mid-twentieth century models of Left and Right. Greek’s communists are Old Leftists, not New Leftists. Their fascists, Golden Dawn, are classical fascists. And their anarchists are “black and red” anarchists, not “pink and green” anarchists of the kind found in Western Europe and North America. Still, this model of the radical left and populist right coming together to oppose the transnational neoliberal ruling class is the model I have pushed for since the late 1990s.

Syriza’s election is rather extraordinary.

“This is the first time since the Spanish revolution of 1936 that a left party wins general elections in Europe. In this weekend’s national elections in Greece the leftist SYRIZA took 149 out of 300 seats and will now form a coalition government with a small right-wing anti-austerity party to run the country.”

From the late 70s until the economic crisis of 2007-2008, Greece essentially had a standard brand two-party system with a center-right and a center-left party. However, Syriza (which means “coalition of the radical left”) has emerged now not only to become the largest party in parliament but has marginalized and replaced the center-left party, and rendering it to minor party status. It is comparable to what would happen if a coalition of the far left third parties in the US replaced the Democrats and held half of the seats in Congress.

“After seven years of neoliberal overkill the Greek people overthrew the two-party regime that has been governing the country for the past 40 years with socially catastrophic results. The populist-right New Democracy (ND) party took 27,8% and the ex-socialist (now turned neoliberal) PASOK received a petty 4,6% of the votes. SYRIZA has increased its electoral base by 10% since the 2012 elections, by amassing the votes of the underclasses and the violently proletarianized lower middle class.”

The Greek working class has always been more proletarianized than the working classes of Western Europe and, especially, the “working middle class” of the United States. However, the Western working classes are undergoing a process of reproletarianization, particularly the American working middle class.

By Antonis Broumas

RoarMag.Org

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Ideology Is Not a Thing 26

by • Left and Right, Political Correctness/Totalitarian Humanism

A discussion of the views of Michael Enoch, Greg Johnson, and myself on “Cultural Marxism.”

By Duns Scotus

Alternative Right

Recently there has been some discussion about this thing called “Cultural Marxism,” and whether–or how–it exists or not. The discussion began with an article by Jason Wilson in Britain’s premier left-wing broadsheet the Guardian, titled “Cultural Marxism: a uniting theory for right wingers who love to play the victim,” to which Michael Enoch at The Right Stuff responded with “I Acknowledge That Cultural Marxism Exists,” with which alt-right stalwarts Keith Preston and Greg Johnson then seemingly concurred.

First, here is Wilson setting out his stall:

“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.”

Enoch, perhaps taking inspiration from his recent reading of Kevin MacDonald’s Culture of Critique, states that Cultural Marxism doesn’t need to be an actual conscious conspiracy. Here is the summing up of his argument:

“In the end the argument is just a semantic shell game used by leftists to avoid any discussion or criticism of actual ideas and policies and keep the debate focused on word games and obfuscation. Cultural Marxism is a useful and coherent label for a body of easily recognizable leftist theories and ideas concerning identity politics and oppression. We could just as easily call it Flying Spaghetti Marxism for all it matters though. What is important is the substance, which people like Wilson never actually want to discuss.”

Preston’s view, expressed in an article commenting on Enoch’s article, stresses the abandonment of Economic Marxism implicit in the term Cultural Marxism and explicit in the various causes that Cultural Marxism promotes:

“Lastly, PC and capitalism are not necessarily in conflict. Capitalism wants workers, consumers, investors, and new markets. This means operating among an ever greater number of demographics. It is therefore perfectly logical that capitalism would embrace anti-racism, feminism, gay rights, etc. They want to sell products to minorities, women, and gays, and hire them as workers and managers, not discriminate against them. (See Noam Chomsky’s comments on how big business supports anti-racism). I suspect the serious thinkers among the cultural Left realize this, which is part of the reason why they have softened their anti-capitalism in their old age. This also explains why the corporate class has mostly rolled over in the face of PC. Remember that Singapore (which the Left considers to be fascist, and which free market conservatives often hold up as a model) also has strict “hate speech” laws.”

Johnson, in a comment on Enoch’s article, follows a similar tack: More…

The Left, The State And (Opportunistically As Always) Big Business Reply

by • Left and Right

Dr. Gottfried and I were part of the same panel on the Left and the State at the 2014 H.L. Mencken Club conference. Here is the text of Paul’s presentation.

By Paul Gottfried

VDare.Com

Adapted from Paul Gottfried‘s address to the 2014 H.L. Mencken Club Conference, at a panel focused on “The Left and the State,“ following remarks made by Carl Horowitz of the National Legal and Policy Center and Keith Preston of Attack the System.

I’d like to come back to a remark that Carl Horowitz made in his presentation about the state, which also occurred to me while working on a book dealing with fascists and anti-fascists. During my research I discovered that American anti-New Dealers, in particular Libertarians, characterized fascism as a movement of the far Left The reason was that fascism gave a central role to the state, and any movement that exalts the state, we are told, must be on the Left.

However, apparently unbeknownst to those who make these arguments, the European Right for many centuries favored an authoritarian state. This is the essence of European conservative thought—that the state, by which one must understand a traditional state that defends a traditional, stratified society, has certain imprescriptible rights. The state is not only a political player, but is essential to a well-ordered society.

I remember discussing this with European traditionalists. They could not even understand why Libertarians in America were considered to be on the Right. Given their view of political power, Libertarians sounded like left-wing eccentrics.

I wouldn’t go quite that far and in fact see a positive role for Libertarians in our own society, but I think their notion of the state is extremely skewed.

More…

How Marine Le Pen is winning France’s gay vote Reply

by • Left and Right, Sexuality and the State
 The political realignment I have long predicted is beginning to materialize. On economics, secularism, and (apparently) homosexuality, the National Front is now arguably the most left-wing party in France.
By Rachel Halliburton
The Spectator
The Front National now has the support of a quarter of Paris’s gay voters – and only 16 per cent of the straight ones.
FRANCE-POLITICS-FN-LEPEN

A week before the attack on Charlie Hebdo, France’s leading gay magazine, Têtu, announced the winner of its annual beauty contest. His name was Matthieu Chartraire, and he was 22, doe-eyed and six-packed, with perfectly groomed hair, stubble and eyebrows. A pin-up in every way — until he started talking.

To the anger of many of the magazine’s readers, the Adonis of 2015 turns out to be an outspoken supporter of the Front National.

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The Coming Golden Age of Anarchism Reply

by • Activism, American Decline, Anarchism/Anti-State, Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Economics/Class Relations, Electoralism/Democratism, Environment, Fourth Generation Warfare, Law/Justice, Left and Right, Military, Police State/Civil Liberties, Political Correctness/Totalitarian Humanism, Race and Ethnicity, Religion and Philosophy, Science and Technology, Secession, Strategy

It is not unreasonable to suggest that the decades ahead will witness the unfolding of a golden age of anarchism. What is the evidence for this?

-The most powerful state in the world, the United States, the mother country of the empire, is slowly losing its internal legitimacy and serious political discontent is beginning to rise.

-Antiwar sentiment in the United States is at an all time high. War fever could rise again in the event of a war with ISIS or Iran, an intervention in Syria, or a confrontation with Russia. But none of these scenarios would turn out well for the United States in the long run. Instead, the state would continue to lose its legitimacy and antiwar and anti-imperialist feeling would come back on an even stronger level.

-Class divisions are the widest they have been in a century in the United States. This all but guarantees the re-emergence of class-based politics at some point in the future. Proponents of alternative forms of decentralist economics will then begin to find a ripe audience for their ideas.

-Public opinion is slowly turning against the police state, prison-industrial complex, and the war on drugs. Sentiment of this kind will likely begin to grow exponentially in the future. It is likely that resistance to domestic American fascism will be the civil rights movement of the 21st century.

-One in four Americans are now sympathetic to secession by their region or community, and these sympathies will probably increase as the system begins to deteriorate.

-One in four American adults now has a criminal record due to overcriminalization. This can only have the effect of undermining respect for the state and its legal decrees.

-The idea of the state as the savior of humanity is an idea that is coming under increasing disrepute. The fiscal debts alone of modern welfare states likely guarantee their ultimate demise.

More…

Why Anarchists Must Confront Totalitarian Humanism 12

by • Anarchism/Anti-State, Left and Right, Police State/Civil Liberties

It can reasonably be said that the overwhelming majority of liberals, progressives, social democrats, and Marxists would affirm all or most of the following presumptions:

-The state is an expression of popular democracy (see Jean Jacques Rousseau)

-The ever increasing centralization of institutions is conducive to economic and technological progress

-Ever larger states with an ever greater number of functions are necessary to modern society

-The state is a means of advancing the disadvantaged and imposing progressive values on benighted or reactionary local communities and regions

-The legitimacy of an eventual world federal government, and the principles of collective security, liberal internationalism, human rights internationalism, or what Noam Chomsky critically calls “military humanism”

-The desirability of forging a national and international consensus around “progressive” values with these to be imposed by national governments and international institutions

-The desirability of the welfare state, the managerial state, and managed economy

-The core principles of the Enlightenment religion of reason, progress, and scientism

-The legitimacy and necessity of the  public administration state

-The desirability of the nanny state and its involvement in such issues as the compulsory use of seat belts, smoking bans, diet regulation, firearms prohibition, compulsory education, far reaching measures aimed at “child protection,” etc.

It goes without saying that the overwhelming majority of these precepts, perhaps all of them, cannot be reconciled with libertarian, anarchist, anti-statist, decentralist, or anti-authoritarian values of ANY kind. It also goes without saying that since the days of the rivalries between Marx and Engels, and Proudhon, Stirner, and Bakunin, authoritarian leftists, statist socialists, and centralizing progressives have been our enemy. Period. It is time for anarchists to carve out an entirely new paradigm for themselves that defines the political spectrum not in terms of left and right or reactionary and progressive, but in terms of anti-authoritarian vs authoritarian, anti-statist vs statist, and decentralist vs centralist. This will be among the primary dividing lines of the future.

Panarchist Party, U.S.A. Reply

by • Activism, Secession, Strategy

An interesting proposal from Joe Kopsick. See more here. This is very similar to the concept of a pan-secessionist meta-party that I wrote about in “Liberty and Populism” and that Ryan Faulk has previously suggested with his concept of an “All Nations Party.” As far as pan-anarchist/pan-secessionist involvement in electoral politics goes, it would probably be best to work to build an alliance of actually existing minor parties for the common purpose of advancing minor party interests (e.g. ballot access). Pan-anarchists could then work their way into leadership positions in these parties, and use them as vehicles for pan-secessionism, with parties with conflicting agendas and ideologies agreeing to stay out of each others’ backyards, e.g. leftist parties focus on the blue zones and rightist parties focus on the red zones.

Pan-secessionists could also apply the Mailer model or Ron Paul model, e.g. entering the major parties as dissident or maverick candidates or activists. At the national level, there could indeed be a pan-anarchist led, pan-secessionist party, organized internally as an alliance of minor parties and regionalist movements for the purpose of defending secessionist or other interests at the federal level. I would suggest calling such a group something like “The Federalist Party,” because it’s a familiar term to most Americans, and there actually was a federalist party early in U.S. history.

The Panarchist Party is a potential federal-level U.S. political party.

It is philosophically opposed to oligopolization and monopolization of business, representation of labor, and political representation.

The Panarchist Party aims to:

1) require the federal government to permit citizens to choose whether to
submit to its jurisdiction,

2) require the federal and state governments to permit citizens to choose
which state governs them (regardless of which state they are located in),

More…

Anarchism 101 14

by • Anarchism/Anti-State

These are some comments I recently posted in a social media forum concerning the basics of anarchist theory, and why it is important and helpful.

From my readings of the classical anarchist theorists, I don’t know that any of them literally believed in a society with no social organization of any kind. The closest to that might be Max Stirner, but his views are more in the realm of abstract philosophical and ethical considerations that politics. As the critics of anarchism will point out, most serious anarchists advocate some alternative form of social organizations like municipal socialism, syndicalism, kibbutz-like communes, villages, guilds, cooperatives, etc. Even the anarcho-capitalists more or less favor abolishing the public state in favor of private governments with territorial sovereignty defined on the basis of Lockean property theory.

I think one of the most important aspects of anarchist theory is its demystification of the notion of the sanctity of the law or the benevolence of the state. Much of mainstream conservative and liberal philosophy alike postulates that law is somehow sacred and must be upheld no matter what, whereas as Proudhon noted the law is more often a weapon by which the ruling class works to subjugate its subordinates. The criticism of law that you find in classical liberal-libertarians like Bastiat that recognizes that the law is often just as much on the side of private interests and mere power holders as it is on the side of the common good is also important. A good example of why these ideas are important is the criticism of Vietnam War draft resisters for “breaking the law.” The reality of the Vietnam draft is that it was about enslaving young people and sending them off to be slaughtered in a war of imperialist aggression so that the United States could gain control of the former French colonies in Indochina (the domino theory be damned). So “breaking the law” was the only sensible thing to do if you were subject to the Vietnam draft.

More…

How Social Justice Warriors Are Creating An Entire Generation Of Fascists 5

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Left and Right, Political Correctness/Totalitarian Humanism

As I have written before, the key strategic task for pan-anarchism is to develop a radical centrist position that is libertarian (against the state), populist (framing the conflict in terms of the people vs the elites), and revolutionary (totally rejecting the present state and ruling class). Such a radical center libertarian populism would need to draw from both the far left and far right, while containing the totalitarian tendencies of both. This can be done in two ways: first, by providing a political outlet for the expression of issues that both sides raise, thereby defusing the most extreme tendencies of both sides; second, by utilizing a decentralized organizational structure and strategic model that essentially keeps hostile groups away from each other.

By Joshua Goldberg

Thought Catalog

One lasting legacy (among others) of the Soviet Union is its deceptive distortion of language – dressing up ugliness with innocuous and nice-sounding terms, as predicted by George Orwell in his seminal and much-quoted work Nineteen Eighty-Four. For example, if someone says that they’re for “human rights”, that means that they’re for Stalinist thought control, hardcore government authoritarianism, and international warmongering. “Human rights activists” are, in actuality, a vile, twisted, and extremely dangerous plague upon humanity. So, too, are the self-proclaimed supporters of “social justice” (who are, of course, often the same people). “Social justice” blogging is most associated with Tumblr, a blogging platform started in February 2007 which is now among the most visited sites on the Internet. “Social justice” bloggers are notoriously zealous and exceptionally nasty people, which has led to the coining of the ironic term “social justice warrior”, or SJW for short.
via Tumblr

via Tumblr

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Strange And Hateful Bedfellows: How Neo-Nazis And Social Justice Warriors Feed Off Of Each Other Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Left and Right

By Joshua Goldberg

Thought Catalog

Perhaps the most fundamental difference between the political right and the political left is that right-wingers hate other cultures, while left-wingers hate their own culture. Right-wing politics is all about hatred for others; left-wing politics is all about self-hatred. Since both are, at the end of the day, all about hate and fear, they have a lot more similarities than differences. And, since both tend to focus heavily on identity politics nowadays, both are very prone to self-cannibalization and infighting.

Being called a hard worker by a Hispanic means a million times more to me than some worthless white guy saying it. #killwhitey

— Hank Gamble (@hankgamble) September 23, 2014

As left-wing and right-wing politics grow more extreme – on both sides – the differences between them grow even more minimal. I’ve long stated that there is almost no difference between the far-left and the far-right. If anything, the ideology of “social justice” is very similar to the ideology of Nazism. Yes, I am quite blatantly invoking Godwin’s law here – and yes, I am well aware that Social Justice Warriors (SJWs) have never killed 12 million people or started any wars (although I’m sure they would love to if given the chance) – but bear with me on this. Nazis and SJWs both have a designated “oppressor group” that controls and dominates everything. For Nazis, it was the Jews; for SJWs, it’s whites/males/”cishets”/patriarchy. Both have an “oppressed group” that suffers horribly at the hands of this designated “oppressor group” or “privileged group”. For Nazis, it was white Europeans; for SJWs, it’s women, “People of Color” (“PoC”), gays, transsexuals, and other designated victim groups. Both subsist on feelings of hatred, inadequacy, fear, and a desire to be superior. Both have extreme paranoid persecution complexes and are eager to find (and invent) conspiracies everywhere. And, most of all, both firmly believe that all dissent and questioning of their ideologies must be immediately quashed with an iron fist.

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The Great Iran Debate Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy

By Justin Raimondo

Antiwar.Com

The stage is set, the actors have committed their lines to memory, and the curtain is now rising: the Great Iran Debate is on! It’s a war story, as so many of our national narratives are these days, one pitting the President of the United States – and the overwhelming majority of Americans – against the US supporters of a foreign government, a “fifth column,” if you will.

This debate underscores an amazing fact: not since the war of 1812, when the New England Federalists sided with Great Britain against their own government, has a fifth column wielded such power in this country. As President Obama seeks to avoid war with Iran – what would amount to World War III in terms of its military and economic consequences – the fifth columnists in our midst, ensconced in some of the highest councils of government, are actively undermining his efforts to avoid catastrophe. Unlike subversives of the past, however, whose treason was found hidden in pumpkin patches and took cover in the darkest corners of the State, these proclaim their allegiance to a foreign government quite openly.

The administration’s negotiations with Tehran over Iran’s nonexistent nuclear weapons program have been extended beyond the deadline for success twice now, reflecting the eagerness of both sides to reach some kind of agreement. Neither wants war: but there are those who do. In a demonstration of how radically different societies nonetheless share overarching patterns of human folly, both the Americans and the Iranians face pretty much the same conundrum at home: how to overcome the influence of their hardliners in order to avoid a war that would surely be the ruination of both. In this sense, our neoconservatives and their Republican sock-puppets are mirror images of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), both of which are trying their damnedest to sabotage the talks.

Not that the neocons are pro-IRGC, except in the sense that they share the same fanatic mindset: in making their case against even the faintest possibility of peace, they echo the arguments made by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has declared that Iran represents an “existential threat” to the Jewish state and conjures images of a Second Holocaust to make his rather unsubtle point.

Unlike subversives of the past, the neocons make no effort to hide their allegiance to a foreign government. Indeed, with refreshing honesty, they openly proclaim it, as House Speaker John Boehner has done with his invitation to Netanyahu to address a joint session of Congress as the Great Iran Debate takes place.

More…

Is War Between ISIS and Saudi Arabia on the Way? Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Fourth Generation Warfare, Military

This is an extremely important development. If ISIS launches a full-scale invasion of Saudi Arabia, the U.S. would most certainly intervene on behalf of the Saudis. The State would attempt to justify the intervention against ISIS to the American people on the grounds of “We’ve gotta have oil! Gas prices will be ten dollars a gallon if we don’t go to war!” It would probably be a successful propaganda effort. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia would become Round Three after Afghanistan and Iraq, and probably no more successful. Additionally, if the Republicans return to the White House in 2016, and the neocons are once again placed in charge of foreign policy, an intervention is Syria or even war with Iran will likely be a greater possibility. At present, antiwar sentiment is pretty high in the U.S. but it was also pretty high during the interwar period of the 1920s, and we know what happened after that. Either way, continued U.S. involvement in wars in the Middle East will not have a happy ending from the American perspective.

By John Robb

Global Guerrillas

Last week I wrote that ISIS would attack Saudi Arabia this spring.  This week the opportunity to attack with a high likelihood of success arrived: The King of Saudi Arabia died today.  Unfortunately for the Saudi’s, King Abdulla died before his Kingdom’s gambit to gain control of ISIS paid off.   Here’s what they were trying to do but failed to pull off in time:

  • Saudi Arabia has been pumping oil like crazy to drive the price of oil down.  It worked.  Prices dropped.  Lower oil prices are undercuting the funding ISIS gets from its illicit oil sales across the region.
  • Given time, the Saudis believed that this reduction in funding from oil sales would eventually force ISIS to approach Saudi Arabia for financial support.  When it did ask for financial help, the Kingdom would be able to gain the leverage necessary to neutralize the threat it posed (as it did with al Qaeda decades earlier).
  • Needless to say, this gambit didn’t work.  ISIS proved much more resilient financially than al Qaeda and other non-state groups are.  ISIS has many, many more sources of income than donations from sympathisers and oil sales.

More…

The Cultural Marxist Hypothesis 3

by • Economics/Class Relations, Left and Right, Political Correctness/Totalitarian Humanism

By Michael Enoch

Libertarian Alliance

RightStuff.Biz

It seems rather odd in this day and age to deny the existence of Cultural Marxism as an intellectual movement. But it seems that this meme has been gaining traction lately on the left. It was recently the subject of a rather low quality, but nonetheless enlightening, editorial in the Guardian by one Jason Wilson.

So what does Wilson mean when he says that “the theory of cultural Marxism is integral to the fantasy life of the contemporary right.”? The first question I would ask anyone making this claim is “What do you mean when you say Cultural Marxism?” Wilson has an explanation for that, and it’s not entirely bad.

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.

More…

Keith Preston on the Cultural Marxism Hypothesis 7

by • Economics/Class Relations, Left and Right, Political Correctness/Totalitarian Humanism

by Keith Preston

Libertarian Alliance

I generally agree with Michael Enoch’s article, with several qualifications.

First, it is indeed problematic to identify as Marxism a theory that is not rooted in economic determinism and the view of class conflict as the defining element of capitalist society. Marx and Engels themselves had many ideas that would be considered “far right” today, particularly their views on racism and imperialism. Leftist anti-racism really doesn’t take off until the post-WW2 era (mostly as a backlash against Nazism, in my view). Marx and Engels were essentially Germanic or at least Nordic supremacists, viewed indigenous peoples as non-historical, and regarded Western imperialism as a historically progressive force (they had the same view of capitalism). The early anarchists took an anti-imperialist position but Marxist anti-imperialism really begins with Lenin. At best, the Frankfurt School’s “cultural Marxism” is a revision of orthodox Marxism…at the very best. These are among the reasons I prefer the term totalitarian humanism for PC rather than cultural Marxism.

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Same Wine, Different Bottle 6

by • Religion and Philosophy

“The historical record is pretty clear that during the medieval period and even later Protestants, Catholics, and Muslims all engaged in fairly extensive persecutions of their sectarian opponents. In fact, the same thing still happens today in states where religion and politics have not been separated. Much of the Christian world in the pre-modern era wasn’t much different from what you find in places like Saudi Arabia today. In African Christianity, you still have witch burnings, executions of ‘sodomites,’ and the like.

It’s also true that when the religions were eclipsed by the rise of secular Enlightenment thinking, religious persecution gave way to persecutions in the name of secular ideologies. The French revolutionaries, their “cult of reason,” and their de facto Catholic genocide (which matched the earlier French Catholic genocide of the Huguenots) is an early example. Nietzsche said in the 19th century that the 20th century would be a time of wars between secular ideologies just like the seventeenth century had seen the wars between contending religions, and he was right. 20th century totalitarian ideologies had all the trappings of a religious cult. Some of them persecuted religions as well. In fact, they still do in places like China and North Korea.”

-Keith Preston

The State of the Culture War and the Class War Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Economics/Class Relations, Immigration, Men and Women, Race and Ethnicity, Religion and Philosophy, Sexuality and the State

Neoliberalism and totalitarian humanism converge.

“Feminism: Originally a necessary and progressive movement. Today it’s a crowd of attention-starved, hysterical totalitarians masking themselves as progressives, and whose continued screaming existence shows that the movement has destroyed itself with its success.

Multiculturalism: All dandy, as long as it is not a smokescreen for the right’s industrial magnates importing cheap labor, and the left’s power brokers importing voting-cattle.

Gay rights: Whatever that is. Gays have, or should have, the same rights as any other human in a somewhat enlightened society.

Atheism: Far preferable to dressed-up theocrazy, especially (but not limited to) since the rise of theocratic tendencies tends to drag down scientific and technological advances with it.

Summary of the activist central bank policies since 2008 in the US: These have remarkably enriched the top1%, while keeping the US warfare state afloat.”

-Peter Bjorn Hansen

On The Fourth Political Theory 6

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Economics/Class Relations, Left and Right, Religion and Philosophy

By Batidan Bantu

Alexander Dugin’s The Fourth Political Theory is a highly-inventive and relevant work; its renouncement of Liberalism and, more importantly, its advocacy of a new syncretic framework –a fourth political theory to challenge the premises of liberalism, fascism, and communism– is nothing short of radical. However, Dugin’s analysis is crippled by a series of grave category errors and historical inaccuracies that need to be addressed if serious opposition to the reigning Liberal ideology is to occur.

Dugin’s failure to accurately identify the nature of the principal enemy of today –Liberals (as distinguished from classical liberals) and “progressives” (an Orwellian term that many swallow without a hint of irony) –is one of the foundational errors in his well-intentioned attack on modernity. More…

Anarchists, Secessionists, and the Grey Tribe: Where We Conflict Reply

by • Activism, Anarchism/Anti-State, Left and Right, Secession, Strategy

In a perfect world, there would be a federation of anarchist organizations, representing many kinds of political and cultural groups with a generally anti-authoritarian orientation (a libertarian Grey Tribe in opposition to the various forces of statism, totalitarianism, imperialism, militarism, corporatism, and fascism). Further, the overarching strategic outlook for the anarchist-Grey Tribe would be pan-secessionism (a kind of contemporary version of the classical anarchist notion of the general strike). It is indeed probable that a relatively unified anti-state force will need to emerge at some point if the enemy is to be effectively combated and overthrown.

However, it is also true that there is also a great deal of division between and among anarchists, libertarians, Grey Tribers, and secessionists. For example, a large majority of anarchists are cultural leftists while a significant percentage of the much larger Grey Tribe are right-wingers or social conservatives. And many serious libertarians, not to mention Grey Tribe sympathizers, are neither anarchists nor secessionists. Likewise, there are many fellow travelers of the Grey Tribe who have a foot in either the Red Tribe, Blue Tribe, or some other tribe. How can a coherent much less cohesive movement emerge from such an array of contradictory and often hostile opinions?

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