Divide and Conquer

For John, BLUF:  There are uniters and dividers.  Don't be a divider.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Dogs slammed as ‘settler-colonial’ as pooches and owners blamed for ‘gentrifying’ NYC by woke activists

From The New York Post, by Reporter Chris Nesi, 21 April 2024, 6:34 p.m. ET.

Here is the lede plus seven:

This is a ruff take!

City-dwelling dog owners are marking their “colonial” territory with pooches who are “gentrifying” neighborhoods, critics say in a bizarre online debate.

Sparking the controversy was a story in The Cut that delves into the growing hostility between dog owners and the dog-free in New York.

The article quotes Mia, of Prospects Lefferts Gardens, the proud owner of two terriers, who noticed a growing anti-dog sentiment brewing on her community Facebook group.

One post about picking up dog poop eventually spiraled into bonkers accusations that the pooches of PGL were “gentrifying the neighborhood.”

Mia, a New York-born Latina, told the outlet upon reading this she wondered “Are they saying that only white people have dogs?”

Another woman with an off-leash dog was apparently confronted in Prospect Park by someone filming her with her cellphone camera.

“She was asking me why I thought I was special, why my dog didn’t need to be leashed. Was it because of my white privilege?

First, isn't it the job of the Editor to spare us from bad puns?  Perhaps The Post cut one too many editors during its recently announced restructuring.

As to the issue of the article, we are seeing our fellow Americans falling into the "settler colonial" terminology of serious Marxists.  A pet dog is about companionship, not a marking of territory.  The fact that we would have so little respect for our fellow Citizens by accusing them of using a pet dog to dominate a neighborhood suggests we are not getting out and socialiizing enough.  Someone with a pet should be an opportunity to strike up a conversation,  "What a nice dog you have.  What is his name?"  Maybe even pet the pooch.

Marxism seems to be about pitting one group against another.  It can get ugly.  Ask the kulaks, if you can find one.  And not just Soviet Marxists.  Look at "between the wars Germany," where the Jews, and Romi, were singled out, persecuted and killed.  It doesn't end with the extermination of one unfavored group.  New ones are selected.  Ask Lutheran Pastor Martin Niemöller.

Hat tip to Ann Althouse.

Regards  —  Cliff

Dimmitude

For John, BLUF:  "The traditional Islamic world exhibited a modicum of tolerance.  Christians and Jews were dhimmi, allowed to exist, but on the condition that they accepted their subordinate role in society.  While studying this arrangement, sociologists coined the term “dhimmitude,” which refers to the mentality of those who have internalized their second-class status."  Per the author we are seeing a new form of dimmitude, when thought and analysis are required.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Why I Stopped Hiring Ivy League Graduates

Here is the sub-headline:

Even those who aren’t woke seem damaged by the experience, and they’re deprived of role models.

Fron The Wall Street Journal, by Mr R.R. Reno, 7 June 2021, 5:56 pm ET.

Here is the lede plus three:

I’m not inclined to hire a graduate from one of America’s elite universities.  That marks a change.  A decade ago I relished the opportunity to employ talented graduates of Princeton, Yale, Harvard and the rest.  Today?  Not so much.

As a graduate of Haverford College, a fancy school outside Philadelphia, I took interest in the campus uproar there last fall.  It concerned “antiblackness” and the “erasure of marginalized voices.”  A student strike culminated in an all-college Zoom meeting for undergraduates.  The college president and other administrators promised to “listen.”  During the meeting, many students displayed a stunning combination of thin-skinned narcissism and naked aggression.  The college administrators responded with self-abasing apologies.

Haverford is a progressive hothouse.  If students can be traumatized by “insensitivity” on that leafy campus, then they’re unlikely to function as effective team members in an organization that has to deal with everyday realities.  And in any event, I don’t want to hire someone who makes inflammatory accusations at the drop of a hat.

Student activists don’t represent the majority of students.  But I find myself wondering about the silent acquiescence of most students.  They allow themselves to be cowed by charges of racism and other sins.  I sympathize.  The atmosphere of intimidation in elite higher education is intense.  But I don’t want to hire a person well-practiced in remaining silent when it costs something to speak up.

The inability of our young intellectuals to entertain a variety of views means long-term intellectual rigidity, which, in turn, means lack of progress, except along an "approved" party line.

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff

The Nuclear Urge

For John, BLUF:  North Korea has been limping along economically for some time as it fights off sanctions for its nuclear development program and tries to make a command economy work.  For example, the Arduous March famine (94-98) killed some 240,000 to 3,500,000 North Koreans out of a total population of some 22 million.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Gaps between market prices in different North Korean regions are growing

Here is the sub-headline:

Chinese food product prices are 45% to 250% higher in Hoeryong than in Pyongsong

From The Daily NK, by Reporter Seulkee Jang, 8 April 2021, 10:00am.

Here is the lede plus four:

Amid North Korea’s attempts to strengthen control over its markets following the closure of the country’s borders last year, the gap between market prices in different regions has been growing more pronounced recently.

Differences in prices between regions in North Korea have steadily decreased as North Korean marketization has created more diverse means of transport.  Much of this can be attributed to the increase in North Korean servi-cha, which are vehicles that operate like a taxi or courier service and can traverse the entire country within a single day.

Despite the increase of oil prices due to international sanctions, there has been few gaps between commodity prices in different areas of the country.  However, as North Korean authorities tightened their control over travel between different areas of the country following the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, markets – which rely on stable logistics networks to thrive – have suffered.

A source recently told Daily NK that 450 grams of Chinese flavor enhancer was selling for KPW 165,000 at a market in Hoeryong, North Hamgyong Province, on Mar. 25.  One kilogram of sugar cost KPW 45,000, while one kilogram of Chinese flour was KPW 28,000.

Before the authorities enforced the border blockade in January of last year, 450 grams of Chinese flavor enhancer sold at the same market for KPW 5,000, while one kilogram of sugar and flour sold for KPW 5,500 and KPW 4,700, respectively.

I don't see any way Noth Korean Dictator Kim Jung-un is giving up his nuclear weapons. None.  I am sure he drew conclusions from the way we treated Libya strongman Muammar Gaddafi after he gave up his own nuclear weapons program.

Neither China nor Russia have interest in helping us deal with North Korea.

Our hope of ending North Korea's nuclear weapons program rests in reunification of the Korean Peninsula following the collapse of the North Korean Government.  That collapse will result when the People have had enough and refuse to do more.  When is the $64 Question.  In the mean time North Korea limps along economically, with tens of thousands on the edge.

Regards  —  Cliff

An Education View From Korea

For John, BLUF:  These folks have seen the way China and North Korea have changed education and in doing so have destroyed (classic) liberal ideas about education and democracy.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Left-wing education destroying the world’s liberal democratic system

From One Korea Network, by Professor Jebong Lee, 14 April 2021.

Here is the lede plus three:

Many people believed that communism had come to an end after watching the collapse of the former Soviet Union and the communist states of Eastern Europe. And as communist China transformed itself into a more free-market economy, we expected that as their economy developed and its society became more diversified, it would inevitably lead them to develop into a freer and more democratic system.

However, the Communist ideology has not changed at all and its methods have evolved. They have infiltrated into all aspects of society—home, school, church, politics, economy, culture, media, etc., while calling themselves the New Left and Liberals.  Communist China also developed a new method of controlling the people by means of new technologies and have revised their strategies to further communization, such as dissemination of Communist ideas, industrial espionage, and mass indoctrination of pro-Chinese personnel through the Confucius Institutes.  Meanwhile, we were seduced by low-cost Chinese goods and have forgotten about the slave labor of the Chinese people and have even turned a blind eye to the pains of the Uighurs who have become victims of organ harvesting.  We didn’t even know that our children were taught in school that the Republic of Korea should not have been established, and that school education is being destroyed by teachers who reject the liberal democratic system.  Even though they knew that students’ rights were being violated, teachers pretended not to know because they are afraid of radical left teachers’ unions.  This article explains the threat of the world’s left-wing ideologies, specifically the infiltration methods of Communism into education, and will attempt to explain the reality of education in Korea, which has become a tool of left-wing educators.

The Spread of Left-wing Ideological Education

There are five main ways by which Communist ideas infiltrate into Western education, which are explained as follows:  (1) direct introduction, (2) blocking traditional ideas and culture, (3) encouraging a decline in basic learning skills such as reading, writing, etc., (4) infiltration of perverted notions of economic, gender, and class liberation, and (5) propagandizing selfishness, greed, and a mentality of self-indulgence.  On the other hand, in Asian communist countries like China, they destroy traditional culture and slaughter scholars and use “the art of deceiving people with distorted education and propaganda while cutting the pulse of cultural transmission.”  (Gupyong editorial department, 2019: 3-5)

In fact, left-wing ideological concept have continuously evolved.  They have developed into many fields, such as traditional Marxism, Neo-Marxism, subordinate theory, liberation theology, cultural colonialism, leftist feminism, leftist-postmodernism in academia and school education, and ideas and theories related to this are taught as subjects in many universities around the world.  Not all of their effects on academic development are negative.  There have been some modifications to the liberal democratic system, some that are self-declining, and others that have evolved.  However, the most worrisome thing about this is that many of these ideologies are intentionally aimed at overthrowing the liberal democratic system and the fact is that these theories serve as the ideological motivations of radical left-wing activists.

I don't see this as an imminant threat, but I do see it as a possible longer term future.  Of course, in things like this them do seem to be going along OK, and then the bottom drops out and it is too late.

Regards  —  Cliff

Whither Portland

For John, BLUF:  I get the need to fix homelessness, which requires jobs, housing and social mores, as well as mental health care.  This will require elected leadership, which, so far, appears to be absent.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Death Of A City:  The Portland Story?

From Forbes, by Senior Contributor Bill Coner ly, 28 January 2021, 07:30am EST.

Here is the lede plus three:

How long does it take for a city to die?  Downtowns across the country have emptied due to the pandemic, causing many stores and restaurants to close.  Suburbs are doing much better, in many cases hardly touched by the recession.  But in Portland, Oregon, continued violence and vandalism have combined with high housing costs, homelessness and poor community leadership to raise the question:  how long before this city dies?

Portland has been doing well for years, and current problems are not certain to end the city’s life.

But without significant change, decline is certain. In many other cities, leaders stepped up to the challenge and saved their cities. That will probably happen in Portland, but there are few signs of change at this point.

Cities can die. Death can be sudden, as with Pompei, or gradual, as with the Mayan city of Tikal and the Jordanian city of Petra.  The United States abounds with ghost towns in the mining country as well as communities left behind by economic change.  Down the road from Portland are a number of mill towns that have emptied out.

The Marxists trying to impose their view of how society should operate are not bringing about useful change, but are making life miserable for those they come in contact with.

We, as Americans, need to unite and work together for a better society, one based on reality and an understanding of economics and social interaction.

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff

Saint Nick Finds John Calvin

For John, BLUF:  It is scary to think about how life turns on small things.  If the Puritans had prevailed then this wouldn't be far from wrong.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Santa Claus Converts To Calvinism, Moves Everybody To Naughty List

From The Babylon Bee, 22 December 2020.

Here is the lede plus one:

NORTH POLE—After a transformative moment reading R.C. Sproul’s What Is Reformed Theology? for the first time earlier this week, legendary Christmas icon Santa Claus reportedly converted to a full-on, five-point Calvinist, and almost immediately moved every single person on the planet to the naughty list, sources confirmed Friday.

“How can I put anyone on the nice list, when every human being is totally depraved from birth?” St. Nick was overheard saying to Mrs. Claus in his office.  “No matter what filthy rags of righteousness they bring before the Lord, they are condemned already based on their sin nature.”

And there it is.  Progressivism meets Religion.

Either way, we are all sinners, and we can not save ourselves.

In the case of John Calvin, he lost sight of the love of God.  Because God so loved the world that he sent his only begotten son, as it says in John 3:16.

In the case of Progressives, they can look back on Karl Marx and Antonio Gramsci.&nsp; That is a grim duo and they want to make people perfect, by taking away their freedom.  Between Calvin and Marx, take Calvin.  There you would find space to grow.

Merry Christmas!

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff

The Long March Through the Institutions

For John, BLUF:  Here is a look at the ideas of Antonio Gramsci, who helped subvert some of our most cheristed institutions.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Cultural Marxism's Origins:  How the Disciples of an Obscure Italian Linguist Subverted America

From Ammo dot Com, by Mr Sma Jacobs.

Here is the first part:

You may have heard the terms “Cultural Marxism,” “Critical Theory” or “Frankfurt School” bandied about.  And while you might have an intuitive approximation of what these terms mean for America in the 21st century, there’s a good chance that you don’t know much about the deep theory, where the ideology comes from, and what it has planned for America – and the world.

The underlying theory here is a variant of Marxism, pioneered by early-20th-century Italian Marxist politician and linguist Antonio Gramsci. Gramscian Marxism is a radical departure from Classical Marxism.  One does not need to endorse the Classical Marxism of Marx, Engels and others to appreciate the significant differences between the two.  He is easily the most influential thinker that you have never heard of.

Marx's original idea was that Communism was a historical inevitability, an evolutionary transition that would lead to a bottom-up eruption of revolutionary violence sparked by the Proletariat’s frustration and fury over having been used and abused by the Bourgeoisie for long enough that “the revolutionary subject” (Marx’s term for the broad working class) would overthrow capitalism and usher in socialism.

Gramsci, on the other hand, held that such a revolution was unlikely – particularly in the West, where general prosperity and the lassitude of relative contentment would tend to dull the working class’ passion for a bloody, bothersome overthrow.  In successful Western nations, a Marxist state was far more likely to develop through a slow, patient process of incrementalist takeover of the cultural institutions – the arts, entertainment, and news media, and most especially the schools and universities.  As such, the weapon to be used for revolution was not the economic might of an organized working class, but a “long march through the institutions” (a phrase actually coined by German Marxist Rudi Dutschke), whereby every institution in the West would be subverted through penetration and infiltration.

For Gramsci, culture was more important than either economics or politics.

Gramsci’s divergence from Classical Marxism was nothing short of brilliant; certainly, the results speak for themselves when one considers the social unrest that is gripping America and the West today.  In a sense, we are living through the endgame of a Gramscian revolution.

Throughout this article, we will use the term “Cultural Marxism” as a catchall to refer to this phenomenon, because it is the most all-encompassing and does not limit us to discussing any one specific variation (Gramsci, the Frankfurt School or what have you).  Finally, we should briefly echo the words of Dr. Jordan Peterson on “the bloody postmodern Neo-Marxists,” because he has helped raise awareness of the phenomenon:

“It’s not obvious by any stretch of the imagination why postmodernism and Neo-Marxism or Marxism proper would be aligned because postmodernism is an anti-grand narrative philosophical movement and Marxism is a grand narrative.  The fact that these two things seem to coexist in the same space needs some explanation, because it’s a very tricky thing to get to the bottom of."

Because Cultural Marxism is ideologically distinct from postmodernism and deconstruction, we will not touch on either in this article, though they certainly have been influential on the international left.

More to come in future installations.

No, I am not violating a copyright.  They said cite and give a link.  I did.

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff

Choosing the Future

For John, BLUF:  Tomorrow we decide our fate.  We seem to have divided into two opposing camps, one that accepts the injustice of differences in people and one that wishes for everyone to be the same in ability and outcome  Choose wisely.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Kamala Harris vs James Madison

Here is the sub-headline:

She wants to replace the free market engine of prosperity with a top-down leveling of aspiration and achievement

From The American Spectator, by Mr Roger Kimball, 2 November 2020.

Here is a three para extract (at the link is the accompanying video):

The third culprit in Joe’s loss tomorrow is his running mate, Kamala Harris.  I believe that we do not yet know the full story of how Harris, the spectacularly unpopular senator from California, was tapped to be Biden’s VP.  Perhaps we never will.  The whole process by which Biden emerged as his party’s front man is shrouded in mystery, and the mystery includes the behind-the-scenes machinations that resulted in Harris’s elevation.  I believe, though I have no proof, that the ticket resulted from the ascension of the hectoring, radical-left flank of the party.  They chose Biden as a convenient empty vessel into which they planned to instill the angry socialist agenda of Bernie Sanders, AOC, and others via the instrumentality of Harris.

Be that as it may, I cite Harris as the third culprit in Biden’s loss because she has impatiently let her mask slip. The Biden-Harris ticket was sold under the banner of ‘moderation’.  It was always a lie.  There is nothing moderate about either one of them, but the word contrasted nicely with Trump’s supposed ‘extremism’, a media confection, to be sure, but one that has been so assiduously repeated and amplified by a compliant press that it has become one of those undislodgeable bits of folklore, untrue but somehow ‘known’ by everyone.

But yesterday, Harris shattered what remained of the meme of moderation with a video posted to her Twitter feed explicitly promoting socialism and explaining that true equality means that ‘we all end up in the same place’.  Equality of outcome, that is to say, not just equal opportunity. Karl Marx couldn’t have put it more succinctly.

But you and I know that there never will be true equity, because "Bob's your uncle".

That, and the fact that we know that equality of outcome is not the same as a level playing field on which all can compete.  When we get to High School (if not before) we want our team to win.  That means we move beyond equity to measuring talent and equality to compete.

Senator Harris is cute and perky, but she comes across as a socialistMarxist.  That is a look that signals both bad economic theory, but also a willingness to hold back the overall good of society so no one suffers the ignorminity of coming in second.

Regards  —  Cliff

“Miracle on the Vistula River”

For John, BLUF:  The United States has been intertwined with Poland for our whole history as a nation.  From Casimir Pulaski until today, we have worked together, off and on, and we have provided a home for several million Polish Immigrants.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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American Valor Once Thwarted a Marxist Revolution 100 Years Ago—We Can Do It Again

Here is the sub-headline:

Merian C. Cooper helped to stop the Communist takeover of Europe in 1920. Today another Marxist revolution is surging—in the United States.  We can stop it again by following his example.

From American Greatness, by Mr Sheldon Bart, 14 August 2020.

Here is the lede plus two:

Hollywood mogul Merian C. Cooper, creator, producer, and co-director of the original “King Kong,” was an authentic hero of the August 15, 1920 Battle of Warsaw, which in David and Goliath fashion saved Europe from Communism.  Remembered today in its centennial year as the “Miracle on the Vistula River,” the battle eternally links Poland and America in a historic fight against totalitarian revolutionaries.

Following World War I, the map of Europe was radically redrawn.  Poland, occupied and dismembered by aggressor nations for more than 100 years, was recreated as an independent nation. Lenin and the Bolshevik Party, having seized control of a demoralized and destabilized Russia in a brazen 1917 coup, marched on Poland in 1919, expecting to sweep across its fragile, uncertain borders and export their Communist revolution to Germany and beyond.

A fighter pilot in World War I, Cooper sought to repay America’s debt to the Polish heroes Tadeusz Kościuszko, Casimir Pulaski, and others who risked their lives fighting for America’s freedom in our Revolutionary War.  He recruited nine fellow American aviators and veterans of the Great War to fly with him on Poland’s behalf against the oncoming Bolsheviks.

We were lucky that Marxism as a militant force was stopped from swallowing up Europe in 1920.  The division of Europe in 1945 was very unfortunatde, but at least we were there in force, and held the line, until nations like Poland and Hungary and East Germany overthrew the yoke of Communism.

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff

Credentialism

For John, BLUF:  In sum, it appears to some that universities have moved from learning and thinking to indoctrination.  If you are looking for a real education you are probably better off at a local, less well known, commuter school.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Yale Blinds Itself

From The American Conservative, by Mr Rod Dreher, 19 February 2020.

Here is the lede plus six:

This is about Yale University’s faculty deciding that it hates the West.  There really is no other way to explain this. What an extraordinary thing. Has there ever been a civilization whose elites turned on it in quite this way?  The Soviets and their minions in Europe all but destroyed education by making most of it serve Marxism-Leninism, but if I understand it correctly, that was generally something imposed on university faculties.  This is chosen.  Yale is one of the richest universities in the world.  Nobody is making it trash the West like this.

You might be thinking:  “Don’t like it? Don’t send your kid to Yale.”  That would be terribly naive.  First, here’s Hannah Arendt, from 1951’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, talking about the cultural decay that paved the way for totalitarianism:

The members of the elite did not object at all to paying a price, the destruction of civilization, for the fun of seeing how those who had been excluded unjustly in the past forced their way into it.

And here’s Czeslaw Milosz, from The Captive Mind, which was published the same year:

It was only toward the middle of the twentieth century that the inhabitants of many European countries came, in general unpleasantly, to the realization that their fate could be influenced directly by intricate and abstruse books of philosophy.

His point:  what happens in the universities, and wherever intellectual elites gather to do their work, eventually has massive impact on the rest of society.

Yale — rightly or wrongly — is a leading institution in American academic life.  What it does today, others will do tomorrow (The New York Times serves the same function in American journalism).  Yale is teaching the children of American elites to hate their civilization and the people who built it.

This is a serious indictment, but it is part of the non-academic response to The Long March Through the Institutions, a revolutionary approach articulated by German "activist" Rudi Dutschke (aka Rudi the Red).  Herr Dutschke developed his ideas from those of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci.  In his thinking Herr Dutschke was supported by University of California San Diego Professor Herbert Marcuse.♠ 

And there you have it.  The culture clash.  Those of us who are happy with the direction of Western Civilization (like Writer Rod Dreher, and myself), who think Democracy is an evolving good and Capitalism has pulled many millions out of poverty.  Then there are those who think that Western Civilization is a terrible corruption of individuals and their society and Capitalism is a terrible system.  They see Western Civilization as racist and sexist and homophobic.  Those who think poorly of Western Civilization seek hope and salvation in other cultures and other social organizations.  These are the people who are powerful in Academia and in Education and in many parts of Government.  These are the Democratic Socialists.

Needless to say, I am with the first group and worried about the second.  The second group would like to take these United States and shake them up and reorganize them in their new vision, a vision that is Marxist, in the image of Gramsci.

Here is how Mr Rod Dreher wraps up his story:

Are people at Yale paying for an education?  Or are they paying for credentialism that allows them access to the American elite?

They are paying for credentials, and thinking they are securing their futures in the upper crust of society.  However, by participating in the corroding of the Western Canon they are placing their futures at risk.

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff

♠  The World Wide Web both provides information and buries it.  For example, Professor Marcuse is said to have said "Abolish the Weimar Republic.  Whatever replaces it has got to be better."  Back before 1933. 

Dystopian View

For John, BLUF:  People like Antonio Gramsci have been providing intellectual cover for American Marxists for decades.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Gramscian damage

From the Blog Armed and Dangerous, by "esr", 11 February 2006.

Here is the lede plus six:

Americans have never really understood ideological warfare.  Our gut-level assumption is that everybody in the world really wants the same comfortable material success we have.  We use “extremist” as a negative epithet.  Even the few fanatics and revolutionary idealists we have, whatever their political flavor, expect everybody else to behave like a bourgeois.

We don’t expect ideas to matter — or, when they do, we expect them to matter only because people have been flipped into a vulnerable mode by repression or poverty.  Thus all our divagation about the “root causes” of Islamic terrorism, as if the terrorists’ very clear and very ideological account of their own theory and motivations is somehow not to be believed.

By contrast, ideological and memetic warfare has been a favored tactic for all of America’s three great adversaries of the last hundred years — Nazis, Communists, and Islamists. All three put substantial effort into cultivating American proxies to influence U.S. domestic policy and foreign policy in favorable directions.  Yes, the Nazis did this, through organizations like the “German-American Bund” that was outlawed when World War II went hot.  Today, the Islamists are having some success at manipulating our politics through fairly transparent front organizations like the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

But it was the Soviet Union, in its day, that was the master of this game.  They made dezinformatsiya (disinformation) a central weapon of their war against “the main adversary”, the U.S.  They conducted memetic subversion against the U.S. on many levels at a scale that is only now becoming clear as historians burrow through their archives and ex-KGB officers sell their memoirs.

The Soviets had an entire “active measures” department devoted to churning out anti-American dezinformatsiya.  A classic example is the rumor that AIDS was the result of research aimed at building a ‘race bomb’ that would selectively kill black people.

On a different level, in the 1930s members of CPUSA (the Communist Party of the USA) got instructions from Moscow to promote non-representational art so that the US’s public spaces would become arid and ugly.

Americans hearing that last one tend to laugh.  But the Soviets, following the lead of Marxist theoreticians like Antonio Gramsci, took very seriously the idea that by blighting the U.S.’s intellectual and esthetic life, they could sap Americans’ will to resist Communist ideology and an eventual Communist takeover.  The explicit goal was to erode the confidence of America’s ruling class and create an ideological vacuum to be filled by Marxism-Leninism.

This erosion of confidence in American culture is a serious and ongoing problem.

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff

Another Face of Marxism

For John, BLUF:  The Antisemitism within the Democratic Part this year is repulsive.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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The Democratic Party Is Being Corbynized

That would be British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbin, who has brought Antisemitism back to British politics.

From The Daily Wire, by Ms Ziva Dahl, 2 April 2019.

Here is the lede plus one:

Anti-Semitism now thrives within the Democratic Party, representing a normalization of Jew-hatred not previously seen in the U.S. political mainstream.  The progressive Left’s socialism, devotion to intersectional ideology, and defense of Islamism have incubated and birthed this reality.

Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) (the socialist), Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) (the Palestinian) and Ilhan Omar (D-MN) (the Islamist) — three “women of color” who are “untouchable” in the identity politics of the Left — have changed the conversation regarding anti-Semitism and Israel.  As Omar recognized, it is now “OK” to discuss anti-Semitic slurs such as Jewish dual loyalty and Zionist influence-peddling.  As Ocasio-Cortez put it, support for Israel today should be equated with support for the Iraq War.

According to the Democratic Left, American Jews, quintessentially “white” and “privileged,” must be stripped of their power in order to isolate, marginalize, and destroy Israel — the proxy for capitalism and colonialism.  Normalizing anti-Semitic slurs seems a small price to pay for a sea change in American foreign policy.

The nineteenth-century socialist movements in Europe often exploited the anti-Semitic stereotype of the Jewish capitalist as a tool to target the entire mercantile class.  They used the same arguments to critique capitalism as anti-Semites used to attack Jews. Socialist Charles Fourier portrayed the Jews as evil moneylenders and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon considered them the embodiment of corrupt commerce.

Karl Marx echoed those sentiments.  Professor Robert Wistrich observed, “The net result of Marx’s essay ['On The Jewish Question'] is to reinforce a traditional anti-Jewish stereotype — the identification of the Jews with money-making — in the sharpest possible manner.”  Some of Marx’s followers used anti-Semitism to introduce anti-capitalism to the public.  Hate the Jewish merchants and you’ll come to hate the non-Jewish ones.

So, Capitalism is seen as an evil by Progressives and tying Jews to Capitalism is an OK move.

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff

May Day Games

For John, BLUF:  Communism, in the name of equality, is evil.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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L.A. Antifa Group Hangs Trump in Effigy, Calls for 'Revolutionary Violence' Against 'the Capitalist State'

From Pajama Media, by Ms Debra Heine, 3 May 2018.

The first paragraph:

An antifa group in Los Angeles celebrated May Day by holding a small march, hanging a Trump effigy, and advocating for "revolutionary violence" against the "capitalist state" in order to "create real political power."

So, the Antifa, the Anti-Fascists, in the name of Marxist-Leninist Revolution, want to make things worse for the world than the Fascists did.  Remember, Fascism comes from a guy, Benito Mussolini, who rejected Communism and then moved on to found his own Party, which, when it spread to Germany and Spain, killed proportionally far fewer people that Communism.  Now there is an indictment.

Don't be fooled.

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff

Happy Birthday Karl Marx

For John, BLUF:  Karl Marx unleashed a lot of death and destruction on the world in the 20th Century.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Marx’s defenders should explain why his ideas never actually work

From CAPX, by Kristian Niemietz, 3 May 2018.

Here is the lede paragraph:

This week will mark the 200th birthday of Karl Marx.  It will be an occasion for a deluge of articles repeating the well-worn cliché that even though Marx’s predictions ultimately did not materialise, his analysis of capitalism was nonetheless spot on, and remains hugely relevant today.  (In fact, it’s already started.)

If you guessed The Old Gray Lady for the source of the URL for "It's already started" you are correct.

Then there is this from Mr Michael Moore:

Happy 200th Birthday Karl Marx!  You believed that everyone should have a seat at the table & that the greed of the rich would eventually bring us all down.  You believed that everyone deserves a slice of the pie.  You knew that the super wealthy were out to grab whatever they could.

And I am sure it will, at some point.  In the mean time "the greed of the rich" has only served to elevate the living standards of the rest of us, since the time of Karl Marx, and before.  Think South Korea vs North Korea.  Or West Germany vs East Germany.  Think Venezuela.

As a side note, South Korea has a higher GDP than Russia.

Regards  —  Cliff

A Deadly Century, Continued

For John, BLUF:  Our abhorrence of Fascism has blinded us to an even greater evil, International Socialism.  Yes, in the early 1940s we worked with the long term threat to defeat the near term threat.  But Communism was still a threat to tens of millions.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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An Ideology to Die For

By Francis Turner from L'Ombre de l'Olivier25 January 2018.

Here is the lede plus one:

Sometimes you have to feel sorry for Herr Hitler.  The Fuhrer got a terrible rep as a genocidal tyrant but in terms of 20th century murderous tyrants he is – at best – in the top 3.  The same in fact goes for things like ecological and economic mismanagement.  Fascism a.k.a. National Socialism may have been inefficient and poor at the creating economic growth its leaders promised and it’s followers demanded but it didn’t totally trash otherwise viable economies.  Nor did it create ecological disaster zones big enough to be seen from space.

The ideology that did all this, and also pipped Herr Hitler in genocide stakes is International Socialism a.k.a. Communism.

Even if Herr Hitler had succeeded with Generalplan Ost, it is unlikely his ideology would have resulted in deaths matching those of the Marxist-Leninist brand.  Even if he got credit for deaths due to Messrs Benito Mussolini, António Salazar and Francisco Franco

And yet, there are those who admire the Bolivarian Socialist Regime in Venezuela, and those who admire North Korea.  I am blaming the teachers of High School History and College Professors.  They are, at best, negligent, and at worst, sick, twisted individuals.♠

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff

♠  Jim Peters and George Anthes aside.  And a couple of others.

Critical Theory, Critically Analyzed

For John, BLUF:  The Universities have become places where the received truth can not be questioned.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Jordan B Peterson, Critical Theory, and the New Bourgeoisie

From Quillette, by Uri Harris, 17 January 2018.

Here is the lede plus one:

Critical Theory draws heavily on Karl Marx’s notion of ideology.  Because the bourgeoisie controlled the means of production, Marx suggested, they controlled the culture.  Consequently, the laws, beliefs, and morality of society reflected the interests of the bourgeoisie.  And importantly, people were unaware that this was the case.  In other words, capitalism created a situation where the interests of a particular group of people—those who controlled society—were made to appear to be universal truths and values, when in fact they were not.

The founders of critical theory developed this notion.  By identifying the distorting effects power had on society’s beliefs and values, they believed they could achieve a more accurate picture of the world.  And when people saw things as they really were, they would liberate themselves.  “Theory,” they suggested, always serves the interests of certain people; traditional theory, because it is uncritical towards power, automatically serves the powerful, while critical theory, because it unmasks these interests, serves the powerless.

All theory is political, they said, and by choosing critical theory over traditional theory one chooses to challenge the status quo, in accordance with Marx’s famous statement:  “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”

There’s no question critical theory can be useful, and that viewing societal elements—beliefs, values, norms, institutions—through a lens of power and examining whose interests they serve can provide highly valuable insights.  But as it becomes more widespread and its adherents more powerful a challenging situation emerges, because then critical theory must then be turned on itself.

From the article one sees that, coming out of a Marxist analysis, we questioned the past, but having done so, we stopped questioning.  The reason we have not collapsed from this is, as Adam Smith said, "There is a great deal of ruin in a nation."♠  We can only hope that we can plow through this phase and look back and see the good things of the past and bring them back into the mainstream.  I am hoping that, aside from a few believes, the American People realize that Marxism in action is about enslavement of the people, body, mind and soul.

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff

♠  It was a quip to Sir John Sinclair, upon the surrender of Burgoyne at Saratoga, New York, in October 1777

The Ever Changing Left

TRIGGER WARNINGS:  In which we look at how the left has evolved and students have regressed.

For John, BLUF:  And they haven't gotten better.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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THE OLD NEW LEFT AND THE NEW NEW LEFT

From The Claremont Review of Books, by Editor Charles R. Kesler, from 31 July 2017.

This is going to be one of those longer, Jim Peters like, Posts.

This is about how the left of the late 1950s and the 1960s thought and how the left today thinks and the differences in understanding America and understanding who they are and who we all are.

Since we are jumping in in the middle of the essay, we have to explain who the SDS, the Students for a Democratic Society are and their 1962 Manifesto, the Port Huron Statement, drafted by SDS Field Secretary, the late Tom Hayden (later the husband of Ms Jane Fonda).  Click the Links.

Some review:

Yet there was something ingenuous and almost admirable about the SDS’s early manifesto that is lacking in post-Obama radicalism.  Tom Hayden had spent fall 1961 as a Freedom Rider, getting beaten up by the KKK in Mississippi and jailed in Georgia.  He and his comrades were appalled by the racial bigotry of the American South (and North), and they revered, at least in the beginning, the non-violent civil rights movement of the 1950s and early 1960s.  They longed, in a way, to emulate the heroes of that movement, who like Martin Luther King drew explicitly from Christian sources, among others, and insisted on strenuous “self-purification” as an essential stage of non-violent consciousness.  Indeed, the Port Huron Statement quoted the Declaration of Independence and Abraham Lincoln, even as the civil rights leaders did, accusing the country of not living up to its own principles.  It assailed American hypocrisy, and the apathy and alienation that went with it.

No such Americanism, however vestigial, remains in today’s campus protestors, who celebrate only victims, not martyrs, and who have been taught to believe that America, and the West as a whole, are oppressors and nothing but oppressors, six ways from Sunday—racists, sexists, imperialists, homophobes, xenophobes, transphobes, etc.

There you are.  When Candidate Hillary Clinton said "Deplorables" she was talking the language of the New Left.  We are Les Deplorables and probably irredeemable.

Then there is this contrast with today:

The old New Left hated being treated as children by professors and deans who claimed to stand in loco parentis.  Nothing offended Tom Hayden more, as he remarked in his 1961 Letter, than American universities’ “endless repressions of free speech and thought, the stifling paternalism that infects the student’s whole perception of what is real and possible and enforces a parent-child relationship until the youth is suddenly transplanted into ‘the world.’”  When the Free Speech Movement (FSM) formed at Berkeley in 1964, its analysis of frustrated, alienated students, as Allen J. Matusow writes in his very fine The Unraveling of America:  A History of Liberalism in the 1960s (1984), “came straight out of the Port Huron Statement.”  “In our free-speech fight,” said one of FSM’s leaders, Mario Savio, “we have come up against what may emerge as the greatest problem of our nation—depersonalized, unresponsive bureaucracy.”

Well, that trend reversed, sharply.  The question, for me, is what is the intellectual basis for the views of the modern leftist students?  Below is the background for the 1960s New Left.

It hasn’t disappeared entirely, but the theory embraced by today’s campus Left is far different from that of the ’60s New Left.  The Port Huron Statement reflected deep intellectual engagement, if not exactly seriousness.  Its contemporary influences included Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization (1955) and C. Wright Mills’s The Power Elite (1956).  Marcuse, a student of Martin Heidegger’s, had perhaps the primary philosophical influence on the movement, and along with other writers helped to connect it, however tendentiously, to Freud, Nietzsche, Marx, Hegel, and Rousseau.

Ah, Herbert Marcuse.  He supposedly said, at one point, "Tear down the Weimar Republic.  Whatever replaces has to be better."  The problem is, Professor Marcuse was working to tear down the Weimar Republic.  And he was wrong about what replaced it being better.  It was replaced by the Third Reich, via the Enabling Act of 1933.

The next excerpt asks if the question is "equal rights" or "equal results".  There is a difference.

It is all quite dreary.  Consider the “basic tenets” of the position.  First, in America (and the theory seems to be purpose-built for this country) racism is pervasive, inescapable, “ordinary” and “not aberrational,” the “common, everyday experience of most people of color in this country.”  Only “most”? That equivocation is one of the many slips in this slipshod argument.  But it pales beside the refusal to define “racism.”  Does discriminating against people on the basis of race mean denying them equal rights, or objecting to the imposition of equal results?  The second principle is “material determinism” or “interest convergence,” meaning that whites (but not other races?) are guaranteed to pursue their own economic interests as a race, thus ensuring and perpetuating “white supremacy.”  Third, the “social construction” thesis, which holds that race and races are not “objective, inherent, or fixed” and correspond to no “biological or genetic reality,” but are social inventions.  But how can there be “material determinism” if races are immaterial?

Tolerance, once a goal, became, by the mid-1960s, a bad thing. 

Liberals were the enemy, but in a more urgent and comprehensive way than in the Statement.  Marcuse’s influence was growing among the radicals, and his essay “Repressive Tolerance,” published in ’65, pointed them away from their old free speech idealism and towards a more ruthless, revolutionary consciousness.  Toleration was once a great progressive cause, he argued, when liberals adopted it as a weapon against authoritarian societies.  But now it risked becoming silently repressive:  toleration in a liberal society like America was a means of neutralizing and coopting all opposition to the power structure or power elite.  It was a means of preventing a liberal society from being replaced by a revolutionary one.  Marcuse urged the students to treat tolerance as a partisan tool, i.e., to show no tolerance for “affluence,” corporate capitalism, and the war.  His argument laid the groundwork for political correctness.

So, the last extract talks about how the New Left, went violent in the late 1960s.  People like now Professor Bill Ayers.  It probably doesn't impact most of us, but I actually had met one of the men killed by the Weathermen, at the University of Wisconsin, in Madison.  A real human being, and an intellectually smart one, a Post-Doc, with a wife and kids.  Dead due to a deliberate act of some Weathermen.

As the New Left came more and more to resemble the old, cheering Marx and Mao, it turned its back on the Port Huron Statement’s hope for “participatory democracy” and adopted Lenin’s principle of democratic centralism, concentrating control at the top, finally in 1969 in the so-called “Weatherman” faction.  The Weatherman’s call for “Days of Rage” in Chicago, designed ultimately to stop the imperialists’ war by starting a civil war at home, failed miserably.  Afterwards, keen to sow terror, the Weathermen went underground to plant bombs, which later blew up several of their own. From Summer of Love to Days of Rage had taken a little more than two years.

The scary part is that the New New Left seems to have not learned anything.  In violent protests they could polarize the nation and bring it down.  The thing is, one may be against the Klan and Fascism, but still be against a more Stalinist approach.  The question is, where is the acceptable middle in all of this?

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff

Feral Children

For John, BLUF:  To much respect for credentialed authority and not enough independent thinking.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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A Cultural Revolution in Slow Motion

This is a commentary by Science Fiction Writer Sarah Hoyt, back on 24 June 2017.

Here is the lede:

I don’t believe in grand historical conspiracies, or in designs that go on over generations.  The right suffers from a bad case of “the individualists failed to organize” and the left, by now in their third generation of social dominance, are approaching the sort of behavior and IQ one saw in the last days of the Soviet Union.  Or if you prefer, Marxist scientific efficiency has given us in three generations what it took the royal houses of Europe sixteen generations of inbreeding to achieve:  an “elite” so profoundly dumb they couldn’t pour p*ss out a boot with instructions on both sides.

My recollection is the expression is "with instructions written on the heel".  But, you get the idea.

Somewhere in this article, which you should read in its entirety, the author introduces the term "Reeeee brigades".  As in that is the sound they make as they protest how awful the current world is and how they are going to fix it.  Nothing coherent, just noise.

Down in the article are these two paragraphs, which capture an important point.  Marxism, in its various forms, promises the make a perfect world, but, Israel aside, hasn't.  On the other hand, the freedom that we characterize as the "Rights of Englishmen" has moved the ball quite a way down field.

Western civilization is not – of course, being human – perfect.  It has had its share of monsters and madmen.  We were, after all, responsible for Marx, whose ideas have been a worse scourge in Africa than all the supposed greedy colonialists.

We are, however, simply put, the most successful human civilization ever.  That is, if you judge success in terms of “fed the most people” and “lifted most of the world above the demands of immediate need”, to be able to create and think as never before.  Other things we’ve done go a long way to eliminate the quotidian misery of disease and push back aging by decades.

And Ms Hoyt concludes:

More importantly, tell your kids their school books are full of hokum. Mock the idiocy on exhibit. Make fun of it.  Yes, I’m telling you they need to disrespect their teachers “authority.”  In fact, you should make fun of it as much as possible.  What part of Americanism was ever “respect authority?” Particularly when that authority is destroying us from within.

Disprove, mock, giggle, guffaw.  The only answer to the Reeeee brigades is to show them for what they are:  Malignant, ignorant children, who deserve no more respect than their malignant, ignorant father and his Communist Manifesto.

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff