Sorel (2)

"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State."
Joseph Goebbels

The state comes later: we are interested here in the lie. The lie of cultures' Being, the lie that we all think of as the reason for the state's greatness, or conversely the power of our enemies' state, is the Myth of the People and the State, both usually being folded into one in the persona of the great leader-figure, some rock star, movie idol, or king, ruler, or dictator who is a god on Earth, the personification of the People, the History, The Land, the Mission. For the rational person it's all nonsense; but for the Irrationalist it is the proving point of the Right of the Few to call themselves the best, the ones who should, by virtue of themselves as they are, but more, as they were-- and will be again-- that the Leader, the embodiment of the Nation, the Elect of God, is powerful and rallying the masses to arms to conquer the others. The Myth of the greatness of the people in the figure of the leader is enough to prove to the fascist-minded that they are the ones who must rule the world. The Myth, not the facts, not the evidence, not the reality of Nature, is the ruling motivation and ethos of the fascist.

You smile, dear reader? Yes, here we have often and will always promote the agenda of Western Triumphalism treading in the footsteps of William Walker, American colonialist, psychotic killer, and pre-Confederate slaver. Incoherent? Not at all. Fascistic? Never.

What then is the Myth of the fascist? Georges Sorel explains it in his "Letter to Daniel Halevi" and in his book Reflections on Violence. We can see the effects of Myth in action today, and also, more clearly, in our recent history of world fascism and Communism.

Sorel (1847-1922) was a French civil servant. He was also an intellectual who wrote on political theory, theory based on extremist socialism, Syndicalism, or what we might think of as Socialist Worker Unionism.

Sorel asks why there is no socialist victory in Europe. He concludes that the socialist theoreticians and politicians are too busy discussing socialist theory to ever get around to over-throwing the captialist system. If there is to be a socialsit victory, it will not come from the intellectuals but from the workers themselves; and they will not move onto the streets in struggle against capitalism on the strength of arguments from socialist intellectuals with arcamne socialist economic theories.The working classes won't fight for the theory of surplus value. Socialist analyses and economic critiques of the history of class development don't move the masses to revolution. They move the workers to tears of boredom, as you, dear reader, might well expect.

What will move the working classes to revolution and the installment of the workers rule is something beyond theories and analyses:

Against this noisy, garrulous, and lying Socialism, which is exploited by ambitious people of every description, which amuses fellow buffoons, and which is admired by decadents, revolutionary Syndicalism takes a stand and endeavours, on the contrary, to leave nothing in a state of indecision; its ideas are honestly expressed, without trickery and without mental reservations; no attempt is made to dilute doctrines by a stream of confused commentaries. Syndicalism endeavours to employ methods of expression which throw a full light on things, which put them exactly in the place assigned to them by their nature, and which bring out the whole value of the forces in play.

As you see, we are already knee-deep in anti-intellectualism, and as Sorel continues we'll find ourselves over our heads in sheer irrationalism.

The point here is that the modern Left in alliance with the modern Right is irrationalist at heart, involved in the Myth along the lines of Sorel's myth. Today's myth is "Anti-Americanism," which has nothing at all to do with America per se but with Modernity; not with whether one likes or hates Geo. W. Bush or Israel or this or that but sheer, amazed, repetitive, stupid, mindless, profoundly reactionary hatred of Modernity as learned by the masses who have not a clue about what they actually think because they do not think: They Mythologize by zeitgeist, they think what others think, and the form is the content, the Myth of Anti-Americanism.

Look at Sorel's description of myth below and see how Goebbles and Mussolini and Lenin and Mao and others have used his ideas, and how those same Sorelian ideas are in use today in the fascist Left and in Islam. If it weren't so creepy and violent it would almost be beautiful.

Oppositions, instead of being glossed over, must be thrown into sharp relief if we desire to obtain a clear idea of the Syndicalist movement; the groups which are struggling one against the other must be shown as separate and as compact as possible; in short, the movements of the revolted masses must be represented in such a way that the soul of the revolutionaries may receive a deep and lasting impression.
These results could not be produced in any very certain manner by the use of ordinary language; use must be made of a body of images which, by intuition alone, and before any considered analyses are made, is capable of evoking as an undivided whole the mass of sentiments which corresponds to the different manifestations of the war undertaken by Socialism against modern society. The Syndicalists solve this problem perfectly, by concentrating the whole of Socialism in the drama of the general strike; there is thus no longer any place for the reconciliation of contraries in the equivocations of the professors; everything is clearly mapped out, so that only one interpretation of Socialism is possible. This method has all the advantages which "integral" knowledge has over analysis, according to the doctrine of Bergson; and perhaps it would not be possible to cite another example which would so perfectly demonstrate the value of the famous professor's doctrines.

The myth must be judged as a means of acting on the present; any attempt to discuss how far it can be taken literally as future history is devoid of sense. It is the myth in its entirety which is alone important: its parts are only of interest in so far as they bring out the main idea. No useful purpose is served, therefore, in arguing about the incidents which may occur in the course of a social war, and about the decisive conflicts which may give victory to the proletariat, even supposing the revolutionaries to have been wholly and entirely deluded in setting up this imaginary picture of the general strike, this picture may yet have been, in the course of the preparation for the Revolution, a great element of strength, if it has embraced all the aspirations of Socialism, and if it has given to the whole body of Revolutionary thought a precision and a rigidity which no other method of thought could have given.

To estimate, then, the significance of the idea of the general strike, all the methods of discussion which are current among politicians, sociologists, or people with pretensions to political science, must be abandoned. Every-thing which its opponents endeavour to establish may be conceded to them, without reducing in any way the value of the theory which they think they have refuted. The question whether the general strike is a partial reality, or only a product of popular imagination, is of little importance. All that it is necessary to know is, whether the general strike contains everything that the Socialist doctrine expects of the revolutionary proletariat.

To solve this question we are no longer compelled to argue learnedly about the future; we are not obliged to indulge in lofty reflections about philosophy, history, or economics; we are not on the plane of theories, and we can remain on the level of observable facts. We have to question men who take a very active part in the real revolutionary movement amidst the proletariat, men who do not aspire to climb into the middle class and whose mind is not dominated by corporative prejudices. These men may be deceived about an infinite number of political, economical, or moral questions; but their testimony is decisive, sovereign, and irrefutable when it is a question of knowing what are the ideas which most powerfully move them and their comrades, which most appeal to them as being identical with their socialistic conceptions, and thanks to which their reason, their hopes, and their way of looking at particular facts seem to make but one indivisible unity.

Thanks to these men, we know that the general strike is indeed what I have said: the myth in which Socialism is wholly comprised, i.e. a body of images capable of evoking instinctively all the sentiments which correspond to the different manifestations of the war undertaken by Socialism against modern society. Strikes have engendered in the proletariat the noblest, deepest, and most moving sentiments that they possess; the general strike groups them all in a co-ordinated picture, and, by bringing them together, gives to each one of them its maximum of intensity; appealing to their painful memories of particular conflicts, it colours with an intense life all the details of the composition presented to consciousness. We thus obtain that intuition of Socialism which language cannot give us with perfect clearness-and we obtain it as a whole, perceived instantaneously.

We may urge yet another piece of evidence to prove the power of the idea of the general strike. If that idea were a pure chimera, as is so frequently said, Parliamentary Socialists would not attack it with such heat; I do not remember that they ever attacked the senseless hopes which the Utopists have always held up before the dazzled eyes of the people.

They struggle against the conception of the general strike, because they recognise, in the course of their propagandist rounds, that this conception is so admirably adapted to the working-class mind that there is a possibility of its dominating the latter in the most absolute manner, thus leaving no place for the desires which the Parliamentarians are able to satisfy. They perceive that this idea is so effective as a motive force that once it has entered the minds of the people they can no longer be controlled by leaders, and that thus the power of the deputies would be reduced to nothing. In short, they feel in a vague way that the whole Socialist movement might easily be absorbed by the general strike, which would render useless all those compromises between political groups in view of which the Parliamentary regime has been built up.

The opposition it meets with from official Socialists, therefore, furnishes a confirmation of our first inquiry into the scope of the general strike.

http://www.cooper.edu/humanities/classes/coreclasses/hss3/g_sorel.html

By this point we have perhaps again tested the patience of the dedicated reader (Dag shakes his head in disgust,) and we will return to this theme at a later time.

In conclusion, Sorel articulates for us the irrationalist programme of the modern Left/fascist Islamic agenda. Step by step we can follow the anti-intellectual development of the modern Left dhimmi down the slope into madness. Sorel is dead right in suggesting that the masses will follow the Myth rather than the dry analyses of intellectuals and theorists to revolution. Now that the fascists have a symbol to focus on, not the General Strike of Sorel's inflamed imagination but Anti-Modernity, and particularly "Anti-Americanism," thinking can go out the window in favor of fascist idiocies immune to reason and rational debate. There is much more to discuss here regarding Sorel's "Myth" at a late date, this being a brief introduction to yet another peice of the puzzle that is modern dhimmitude.