The anonymous letter below expresses the general view of the Western masses today on the subject of the evils of American imperialism, the quest for oil, and c. Following that is a piece by a journalist on the same topic, followed by a series of quotations, fairly well-known to the public, from Smedley Butler, USMC.
These three entries, particularly the last, should be cause for some concern and thought. We will leave our commentary for tomorrow's entry here on Manifest Destiny.
***
Anonymous writes:
I think that you have a concern for what is awry in our society and you are using your blob to air your views in an effort to make things better as well as giving yourself more of a purpose in life. It is my opinion that your focus on anti- muslim and anti-arab affairs is misdirected and that you are missing the big picture. It is true that belief in Islam holds back free thought and interaction.
The religion of Islam is based on belief without evidence and faith alone, submitting to the will of God or Allah. This tends to hold families together and stabilizes their society quite successfully but at the same time is very intolerant of dissent and deviation from the norm.
I for one who do not believe in God and am deviant in some respects and, worse, a free-thinker to boot, would not fare well in such a society. The criticism that I make towards Islam can be expressed towards all intolerant religions, including Judaeism and Christianity, the former having been very violent towards unbelievers and break-away sects in early historical times and the latter more recenty. So it would seem that these religions should be attacked and obliterated as the Chinese government is trying to do with the Falun Gong-Dafa.
The trouble is there seems to be an inherent need by many people for such religions, where their awareness of the esoteric and mysterious (though perhaps spurious by modern thinking) combines with their fear of death and felt need for a benevolent power to look after them, directing them within a prescribed framework, during life and in a future promised heaven if they are accepted, and a horrible hell if they are not. Belief in a group "thing" is easy for those people who are indoctrinated or for many reasons do not want to think logically.
Conforming to a common belief of one's group is less socially disruptive particularly when it is
dangerous for one's family and children to offer criticism or dissent. In your case you have no traditional religious principles to adhere to or very much social adherence. You have considerable power of analytical thinking, but perhaps early conditioning by the American Patriotic process has made you critical without reasoned thought of "America's enemies." An independant thinker may navigate through the cloying morass of unproven beliefs but some inherent tendency to believe may remain in the amazing neural networks of our minds.
By all means criticize Islam, but don't forget the cancer of elite capitalism is acting in cahoots with religions to engender more profits by war at the expense of ordinary people. Some of these ordinary people are you and me, who really don't get much from the vast profits of the multi-nationals, only the dribs and drabs via government that keep us in line.
What makes your blogging activities pathetic is that you seem to be adhering to the propaganda that is fed to the public and regurgitating it as hate against "America's enemies". The truth is the real enemies of America are the cancerous multi-nationals that are depriving millions of Americans of adequate jobs, health-care and the "right to liberty and the enjoyment of happiness." Your critical aim is scewed.
***
Manifest Destiny: American Imperial Myth, Then & Now
Michael Fitzgerald
There is a thread in American history that runs through Indian Removal, the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War, the Asian Rimland Wars, right on into the current conflict in Iraq. These adventures constitute a "pattern of racism and imperialism that began with the first Indian war in Virginia in 1622," writes historian James Loewen.[1]
History shows clearly that whenever Americans want something another nation has--such as land or oil or other resources--we are able to justify taking it. The usual contrivance is the age-old theory that non-white peoples are unable to govern themselves, so we must heed our "divine mission" to liberate them from their own ignorance and corruption, bringing our gifts of freedom, democracy and Christianity--whether they want them or not.
The difficult part is getting the American public to go along with these adventures. Sometimes as a justification we employ appeals to national security. In the case of Iraq, we’ve seen two sets of rationales: one official, the other unspoken. The official one, which has long since been discredited, was the threat of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. The unofficial and unspoken ones are racism and religious chauvinism ("Nuke 'em all").
When all three elements are present, you have something for everybody. This country has not seen such an explosive mixture of racism, religious chauvinism and naked greed since the war against Mexico in 1846.
Foundation myths
The conceit that we have a special mission from God to remake the world in our image is called American exceptionalism, but there is nothing exceptional about it. The Babylonians, Assyrians, Medeans, Persians, Egyptians, Israelites and Romans all espoused foundation myths designating themselves the "chosen people" of God.
Scottish economist C.H. Douglas wrote in 1943 that the chosen-race myth "is the key myth of history… in it, we can find an almost complete explanation of the world’s insanity."[2]
A foundation myth provides polyglot cultures a sense of kinship, a common if manufactured heritage. The Romans recognized the individual’s bond to the group could become a more powerful force than his or her own survival. What did the Romans think was the foundation of existence? What would they fight and die for?
"There are three things … we are willing to die for: God, country and family," Michelle Jones, command sergeant-major, U.S. Army Reserves, told an Army-base newspaper.[3]
It works on all sides. Suicide bombers believe they are dying for the glory of Allah.
Superiority means never having to say you’re sorry
Racist views were successfully exploited by the Franks, who led the Crusades in 1097. The Franks claimed descent from the "lost tribe" of Benjamites, driven out of Palestine by the Israelites. They thereby claimed the throne of David, and, through this claim, the Merovingian dynasty developed its "divine right" to rule.[4]
Having God on your side on every issue means you can never be wrong. U.S. leaders have often become infected with infallibility. Campaigning for a comeback in 1912, Theodore Roosevelt piled it on: "We battle for the Lord," he thundered. "[W]e stand at Armageddon."[5]
During the Cold War, Senator Lyndon Johnson proclaimed: "We shall, we must, with the guidance of God, embark on this course to redeem humanity… and with the righteous strength which centuries of freedom under God have given us, we cannot fail." [6]
Capitalism, Calvinism and Chauvinism
It’s no coincidence that capitalism and Protestantism ascended simultaneously. Jean Calvin theologically discredited the feudal system in 1541, paving the way for an upwardly mobile merchant class to replace the landed aristocracy. The genius of Calvin, observed sociologist Max Weber in 1904, was the creation of a new concept of God.[7] Prior to this crucial paradigm shift, surplus wealth--i.e., capital--was expected to be donated to the Church.
Essentially, Calvinism was a variation of the chosen-race myth. Its key element was a spiritual "elect" whose elevated position is preordained. The only way one can know if he or she is among the Elect is by his or her level of worldly success[8]-- in other words, if you’re rich, it’s because God loves you.
The Puritans of Plymouth Bay were staunch Calvinists and their legacy remains powerful. "American culture, in particular, is thoroughly Calvinist… [A]t the heart of the way Americans think and act, you’ll find this fierce and imposing reformer [Calvin]."[9]
The City on the Hill
Puritan leader John Winthrop, borrowing from the New Testament,[10] came up with one of the most enduring images in American myth: The City on the Hill. Aboard the Arbella, Winthrop exhorted his fellow travelers: "We are entered into a covenant with [God] … we shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us..."[11] This 1630 speech marks the birth of American exceptionalism: Puritans will build a new nation, destined to become the light of the world.
Winthrop’s trope became part of the national fabric. It has been "interwoven throughout our history and our foreign policy," writes Duke University professor Gerald Wilson.[12] Some scholars insist every presidential candidate must allude to it or face rejection.[13] The City on the Hill image resurfaces in speeches by John Adams, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan.[14] Reagan found it a surefire crowd pleaser. "I’ve spoken of the Shining City all my political life," he said in his farewell address.[15]
Tale of Two Cities
There are two schools of thought as to how the City on the Hill trope should be deployed. The America-as-example model purports that as a "Christian nation" we should be a model of freedom, democracy and piety, and lead the world through example. The later, activist interpretation insists America has the right--no, the duty--to "save" the world through intervention, with force if necessary. This is the America-as-instrument model; it was conceived during the Manifest Destiny era and later developed by expansionists such as William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt.
Some Christians take issue with the instrumental position. Francis Bremer, professor of history at Millerton University and author of John Winthrop: America’s Forgotten Founding Father, thinks Winthop would be "very disturbed" at the spin instrumentalists gave to his expression. Most upsetting, he said, is the way the idea has been taken from its original intent of America as an example to "America carrying its values into other countries."[16]
Americans feel obliged to "act on the belief that our system is … the best way for other people to live [and] we are going to bring it to them whether they want it or not," writes First Amendment scholar Charles Haynes.[17]
This contrivance ushered in a new era of interventionism. President Woodrow Wilson ran amok with it. Despite campaign promises to keep the country out of war, Wilson was one of the most warlike presidents ever. He sponsored several interventions in Mexico ("I am going to teach [them] to elect good men!"),[18] along with others in China, Nicaragua, Panama, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Cuba, Guatemala, Honduras, the Phillipines, Yugoslavia and even the U.S.S.R.
Major General Smedley Butler was one of Wilson’s most capable strongmen. Butler stuck a pin in Wilsonian "idealism" in a 1940 speech:
I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism…. I could have given Al Capone a few hints….. I helped make Mexico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys…. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street…. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers…. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested."[19]
The instrumental model was taken even further during the Cold War and led to all-out wars in Korea and Indochina and interventions in Lebanon, Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo and elsewhere.
Manifest Destiny and Teutonic Supremacy
Instrumentalism, racism and greed became inextricably bound. "A search for personal and national wealth was put in terms of world progress, under the leadership of a supreme race," writes historian Reginald Horsman[20]
"Indian removal"--what today would be called ethnic cleansing--was unofficial federal policy during the Monroe presidency. Upon his election, General Andrew Jackson, having earned fame as an Indian fighter, made it official. Jackson’s policies became the model for Hitler’s "final solution."[21]
As a slogan, "Indian removal" was a bit blunt. "Manifest destiny" had a more Orwellian snap. The term was coined in 1845 by Democratic Review editor John L. O’Sullivan, an Irish-Catholic.[22] O’Sullivan intended the phrase to mean the flowering of democracy, not Anglo-Saxonism. Ironically, Manifest Destiny became a metonym--and a justification--for Anglo-Saxon domination. O’Sullivan, perhaps unwittingly, spoke to the Calvinist mindset: The word "destiny" alluded to predestination. "Manifest" hinted at the materialization of wealth reserved for the Elect. Manifest Destiny was nothing more than "a cluster of flimsy rationalizations for naked greed," writes historian George Tindall.[23]
It was a sentiment Americans inherited from their British forebears. "[T]he idea that England and Israel are intimately connected goes back at least to the 17th century. The extreme English Puritans believed they were God’s chosen people…."[23] Like the Franks, the "Anglo-Israelites" insisted they were descended from the "lost" tribes of Israel. They further asserted that the Jews are "cursed" for not accepting Jesus and that England was now the "true" Israel.[24] Linguists, however, found no connection between English and any Semitic language.[25]
From 1812 to 1840, a wave of German immigration washed over the U.S. Abandoning strict Anglo-Saxonism, Senator Thomas Hart Benton and Caleb Cushing, U.S. Commissioner to China and later U.S. Attorney General, proposed a new "American race"--a hybrid of English, French, German, Scots and Irish. The myth became more inclusive, but its effect remained unaltered: "In America’s relentless expansion," Cushing proclaimed, "men, nations, races, may, must, will perish before us. That is inevitable."[26]
Manifest Destiny simply meant Teutonic supremacy. "God has not been preparing the English-speaking and Teutonic peoples for 1,000 years for nothing," Indiana Senator Albert Beveridge bellowed. "He has marked the American people as His chosen nation to finally lead in the redemption of the world."[27]
Germany’s Answer to Manifest Destiny
At that time, a united Germany was still struggling to be born. German nationalists admired the effectiveness of Anglo-Saxon foundation myth. They could even have claimed it as their own--the Angles and Saxons were both from German regions. Pan-Germanic theories of racial superiority became the rage in European scientific circles,[28] and scientific principles were perverted to fit the racist agenda.
British economist Thomas Malthus’s 1798 theory that world population growth would outstrip food supply spread alarm among Teutonic supremacists. Charles Darwin’s theory of survival of the fittest was distorted to suggest that "inferior" peoples deserved extinction. Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton proposed the science of eugenics. Malthus and Galton had only proposed controlling population growth, but later proponents of the "master race" would interpret this to justify mass murder and genocide.[29]
A transatlantic colloquy of supremacist ideas took flight. German geographer Friedrich Ratzel visited the U.S. in the 1890s. Ratzel’s Politische Geographie lent scientific credence to the concept of lebensraum ("living space"). This merely echoed an 1846 statement by U.S. editor and poet William Simms: "[T]he race must have expansion."[30]
In Europe, theories of Teutonic racial superiority that had been around for hundreds of years reached critical mass. Adolph Hitler borrowed liberally from the American model. Many methods of Hitler’s Final Solution were "inspired by the U.S. government’s subjugation of the American Indian…. He often praised the efficiency of America’s extermination of the [Indians]." Hitler referred to Slavic peoples as "redskins."[31]
Again, racism became a tool of greed. Anyone in Hitler’s way or anyone who had resources he needed was fair game. Nazis were to show no mercy to subhumans, and should "delight in killing and displacing them and stealing their property…"[32]
During the Nuremberg trials, Hitler’s No. 2 man, Hermann Goering, insisted Nazi policy had been identical to U.S policy toward Native Americans.33 But the holocaust in the Americas outdid the Nazis’ Final Solution many times over: "The destruction of the Indians in the Americas was far and away the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world," writes historian David E. Stannard.34 Stannard estimates about 12 million Native Americans died as a result of ethnic cleansing in the U.S. and Canada; 68 to 90 million died in the entire western hemisphere.[35]
Manifest Mercantilism
As Benton predicted, Manifest Destiny marched westward and kept going. First came Texas in 1845, then New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Utah, Nevada and California in 1846, and Oregon in 1848. But it would not stop at the Pacific. Hawaii was taken in 1898, and soon, Guam, Samoa and the Philippines would be added--a nearly straight line to the Orient.
China was the crown jewel in Benton’s plan. The Columbia River valley would become the granary of Asia, he said. From there, Benton foresaw a route to India. This trade would move through his hometown of St. Louis, "the gateway to the West."[36] Benton was indeed a visionary: in 1846--52 years before it came to pass--Benton proposed war with Spain in order to seize the Philippines as a base for Asian operations.[37]
In 1902, British economist John A. Hobson spotted what was happening: In order to cut costs and boost profits, the big industrialists cut back on labor--machinery was a big boon to that end--but they laid off too many people. As a result, U.S. businesses destroyed each other’s customer bases and created recessions. Few workers had money to buy anything. So, in order to keep the goods moving, manufacturers shipped them overseas. In short, U.S. industrialists exported their under-consumption problem.[38] Hobson predicted military force would be necessary to keep foreign markets open.
Garnering foreign markets for U.S. overproduction became a prime objective of foreign policy. Whenever markets for American goods--even potential markets--are threatened, U.S. reaction is predictably fierce. Commercial considerations were at the forefront of both world wars: Both were fought primarily to keep foreign markets open for business.
Shortly after World War I, Benton’s dream came true: China was brought into the American sphere with help from the corrupt Kuomintang government. But in 1931, Japan shut us out: It closed not only China, but the Philippines and Korea, to U.S. trade.
The U.S. could not afford to lose Europe--its largest market--to either Nazi Germany or the U.S.S.R.[39] After WWII, it seemed the Soviets would shut the West out of crucial markets in central and eastern Europe. Neo-liberals wanted an "open door" to as many markets as possible and were losing ground. The Cold War was intended to "contain," if not "roll back," this exclusion.[40]
Russians were a slightly easier propaganda target than Germans. Since they were white, the race card wouldn’t work. Wilson’s tepid fighting-for-democracy heuristically was revived, but wasn’t particularly effective. Finally, U.S. propagandists hit on the religious justification: communists are atheists! In 1954, the phrase "under God"--a dig at "godless communists"--was quickly added to the Pledge of Allegiance.[41]
Race wars
American business leaders had long dreamed of a wide-open Asian market for their goods--along with the prospect of cheap labor. "Asia is our Eldorado," said Charles Denby, former minister to China, in 1899. "Here are hundreds of millions of the human race to be civilized [and] Christianized…."[42]
Even after Japan’s defeat in 1945 and the re-establishment of U.S. dominance in the Philippines, there were problems: In 1949, a communist revolution in China took control. The door to Western trade was again closed.
At the same time, a nationalist movement led by communists threatened to lose Vietnam as a French neocolony. President Dwight Eisenhower’s "domino theory" delineated U.S. fears: The Philippines might go next; perhaps Japan and the entire Pacific Rim would fall into the "communist orbit." The U.S. would be denied the area’s strategic raw materials: oil and rubber. This could seriously damage the U.S economy and "our way of life." Ultimately, the U.S. wasted $205 billion and slaughtered more than three million Vietnamese,[43] plus 150,000 Laotians and Cambodians, trying to keep Southeast Asia in the U.S. orbit.
Racial justifications made it easier. Asians were fair game. "We had to dehumanize our victims before we did the things we did," writes Stan Goff, former U.S. Special Forces master sergeant in Vietnam. "We knew deep down what we were doing was wrong. So they became dinks or gooks--just like Iraqis are now being transformed into ‘rag-heads’" [44]
Today we have all three elements of Manifest Destiny in play: racism, religious chauvinism and greed. Since 9/11, the U.S. has found another enemy that is easily demonized. The feeding frenzy should be as easy to stir as it was during the Mexican-American War. The average yahoo scarcely knows the difference between Iraqis, Iranians and Indonesians. "Nuke ‘em all," he rants --a predictable reaction when the enemy is both dark-skinned and non-Christian, not to mention sitting on our oil.
White man’s burden
One of the favorite tenets of Manifest Destiny asserts subhumans are not fit to govern themselves; therefore, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants are doing them a favor by ruling them. Currently we are bringing democracy and civilization to the middle east--an area that was civilized when Europeans were still living in caves.
This is the arrogance of paternalism. "Can President Bush… do better with Muslims [in teaching them to elect ‘good men’] than Wilson did with Latin Americans? It seems unlikely, since neither seems ready to drop the didactic tone, with its attendant belief that the native population in question is made up not of men and women, but of ignorant children," writes New York Observer columnist Caleb Carr.[45]
Clearer than truth
The U.S., being founded on anti-monarchical and anti-imperialist ideals, is constrained by its own foundation myth. Expansionism and foreign adventures must be couched in language that obscures the real objective. "Duplicity in foreign affairs has sometimes served the national interest…. The assumption that the public won’t understand… has long made it tempting for both Democratic and Republican administrations to make their arguments ‘clearer than the truth.’"[46]
Expansionism can only be presented to the U.S. public with one or more of the following "official" justifications:
- national security: there must be some threat, real or manufactured;[47]
- humanitarianism: we have a moral responsibility to "liberate" oppressed peoples from ruthless dictators or, in the case of civil wars, each other;
- idealism: it is our responsibility to protect democracy and/or freedom for the rest of the world.
Tacit elements of racism, religious chauvinism and greed operate below the surface.
Away with wretched cant
No U.S. leader would openly declare, "We’re going in there because there is something we want." But there have been exceptions. One was Representative William Duer of New York. During the furor leading up to the Mexican-American War, Duer thundered, "If you wish this plunder, this dismemberment of a sister republic, let us stand forth like conquerors and plainly declare our purposes…. Away with mawkish morality, with this desecration of religion, with this cant about Manifest Destiny, a divine mission, a warrant from the Most High, to civilize, Christianize and democratize our sister republic at the mouth of a cannon!"[48]
Racism and religious chauvinism are the primary components of Manifest Destiny, but they obscure the true objective: plunder.[49] Albert Gallatin, a Swiss immigrant who became Thomas Jefferson’s and James Madison’s secretary of the treasury, saw racist rhetoric as a smokescreen for greed: "The allegations of superiority of race and destiny… are but pretenses under which to disguise ambition [and] cupidity…"[50]
The point was put even plainer by George Orwell. In Burmese Days, a character very much like Orwell himself--who was once a British imperial policeman in Burma--asks a comrade: "How can you make out that we are in this country for any purpose except to steal?"[51]
***
Michael Fitzgerald is a journalist, currently a correspondent for the Jacksonville Business Journal and a contributing writer and book reviewer for The Humanist. He’s written for Folio Weekly in Jacksonville, FL and is a former columnist for Orlando’s JAM magazine and Boston-based The Musicians Trade Journal. He lives in Jacksonville, FL.
For references, please go to:
http://www.leftcurve.org/LC29WebPages/ManifestDestiny.html
***
Major-General Smedley Butler (1881-1940)
By Richard Sanders, Editor, Press for Conversion!
Major-General Smedley Darlington Butler, a 33-year veteran of the Marine Corps who was twice decorated with the Medal of Honor, blew the whistle on the fascist plot to oust FDR. He also confessed to having been a “high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.”
In his book War is a Racket, 1935, Butler opens with these lines:
"War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope.... [and] the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.
A racket is best described as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small ‘inside’ group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.
For a great many years, as a soldier, I had a suspicion that war was a racket; not until I retired to civil life did I fully realize it.... I must face it and speak out."
In “Time of Peace,” Common Sense, Nov. 1935, Butler said:
"There isn’t a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has its ‘finger men’ (to point out enemies), its ‘muscle men’ (to destroy enemies), its ‘brain men’ (to plan war preparations), and a “Big Boss” (super-nationalistic capitalism).
It may seem odd for a military man to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to.
I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups.
I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras “right” for American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927, I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested....
I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket.... I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was operate his racket in three city districts. We Marines operated on three continents....
Our exploits against the American Indian, the Filipinos, the Mexicans, and against Spain are on a par with the campaigns of Genghis Khan, the Japanese in Manchuria and the African attack of Mussolini. No country has ever declared war on us before we first obliged them with that gesture. Our whole history shows we have never fought a defensive war."
Butler made these conclusions in his book War is a Racket:
"* We must take the profit out of war.
* We must permit the youth..., who would bear arms, to decide whether or not there should be war.
* We must limit our military to defense purposes....
Secretly each nation is studying and perfecting newer and ghastlier means of annihilating its foes wholesale.... Ships will continue to be built, for shipbuilders must make their profits. And guns still will be manufactured... powder and rifles will be made, for the munitions makers must make their huge profits.... Victory or defeat will be determined by the skill and ingenuity of our scientists.
If we put them to work making poison gas and more and more fiendish mechanical and explosive instruments of destruction, they will have no time for the constructive job of building greater prosperity for all peoples. By putting them to this useful job, we can all make more money out of peace than we can out of war – even the munitions makers.
So...I say, TO HELL WITH WAR!"
Source: Press for Conversion! magazine, Issue # 53, "Facing the Corporate Roots of American Fascism," March 2004. Published by the Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade.
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Saturday, July 02, 2005
Friday, July 01, 2005
Flight of the Dhimmi
"With some on the Left, hatred of the U.S. is all that remains of their Leftism...."
We have argued here that "America" is a confused and semi-conscious eumphemism for Modernity; and that America is a geography of the mind, not the American nation or its people in the flesh.
The quotation above comes from an essay in the New York Review of Books, Jan. 17, 2002, written by Avishai Margalit and Ian Buruma, "Occidentalism."
It's not our purpose here to condemn the Left but to condemn fascism, which today the Left mostly feeds from. What is fascism? How can the Left be facist when fascism is a Rightist ideology? We look at the details of fascism here, and over and again we see that if fascism is a Right ideology it is also conflated with Left ideology into something unrecognizable as anything other than fascism itself, neither Leftism nor anything resembling classical Left ideologies from the time of the Wat Tyler Rebellion to the time of Eduord Bernstiein--except that it is, as we can see from the archived texts, fascist and reactionary in all its details, anti-progressive from the beginning. Therefore, we argue that it is past time to abandon the French Revolutionary dichotomy of Left and Right and refer to the division of the masses as into fascists and Modernists. All of our positive attributes as societies stem from our progressive Modernity; and all of our enemies are the forces of fascist reaction, most glaringly in the world of fascist Islam and their dhimmi collaborators, many of whom will identify themselves as Left, and many of whom are of the Right. In the fascist Will there is no real distinction to be made again between Left and Right but only between Modernists and fascists.
Margalit and Buruma [M-B] write: "...modern civilization was another term for Western civilization...." (p.1.) That was true in the minds of Japanese fascists in the 1940s, and it is true of the world fascists today. Modernity, not the political fiction of America, not the Jews, not Israel-- Modernity is fascism's enemy.
Beginning with Japanese fascism A-M write: "But what was 'the West' which had to be purged? What needed to be 'overcome'? They are, not in any particular order, materialism, liberalism, capitalism, individualism, humanism, rationalism, socialism, decadence, and moral laxity. [Overcome by] self-sacrifice, discipline, austerity, individual submission to the collective good, worship of divine leadership, and a deep faith in the superiority of instinct over reason." (p.1.) In short, fascism and reaction would overcome the modern West.
The enemies of Modernity were defeated in the 1940s in parts of Asia and Europe, but the monster lives on. the fascist ethos is as old as Humanity, not a trait to be eradicated in a matter of a few years by a small per centage of the world's current population. Fascism is the norm; it is we, Modernist Revolutionaries, who are the radical fringe group. It is we who are the edge of the Human telos, the purpose of life as our species. And we are unloved. Our defeat of the fascist force is not a permanent victory but one that we will fight for eternity, it seems.
"Don't rejoice in his defeat, you men. For though the world stood up and stopped the Bastard, the Bitch that bore him is in heat again."
Berthold Brecht, Arturo Ui, May 6th, 1945.
"Nazi ideologues and Japanese militarist propagandists were fighting the same Western ideas. The West they loathed was a multi-national, multi-cultural place, but the main symbols of hate were republican France, capitalist America, liberal England, and, in Germany more than Japan, the rootless, cosmopolitan Jews." (M-B: p.1.) Today the fascist bitch has born yet another bastard: fascist Islam. The runt of the litter is the dhimmi Left in our midst. This fight is on-going, and we must rejoice in our mission to defeat it yet again. We are fighting the same enemies our grandparents fought, and for the same reasons: for the precepts of the three revolutions of Modernity.
We have claimed in these pages that the intellectual ground of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment gave riose to the French, American, and Industrial Revolutions, i.e., to Modernity, and that the Force of reaction has fought against our modern revolutions from the beginning, and they will continue to do so until such time that they are obliterated by our necessary Violence, in reference to Sorel. We have claimed that, in spite of Huntington's dismissal of our position, the world's population is bifurcating, and that split is between Modernity and reaction, between "Us and Them."
Fascist reaction has a dozen or so main themes, all of them highly visible in fascist Islam and in Western Left dhimmitude. If we can show the fascism inherent in Islam and its dhimmi support group, we can claim the rightness of the moral agenda in the public discourse as our own. If we can clearly and from the historical texts show that Islam and dhimmi-Leftism are fascist, that the politicaly correct discourse is in fact fascist, then we can stop refering to our moral agenda in the defensive and go on to attact the fascist agenda for what it most obviously is.
As the Japanese and German fascist saw, Modernity is the enemy of fascism. One of our traits is Rationalism. Theirs is irrationalism. The dhimmi Left has an irrationalist hatred of America. So does fascist Islam. One of the characteristics of fascism is it's irrational approach to reality as seen in rune mythology or crystal mysticism; in fact, in any number of so-called 'New-Age' cliques. That does not make crystal collectors fascists, but it does lead to unfathomed and unexamined fascist sympathies, which we must expose in favor of Modernity.
Science, but not scientism, is a pillar of Modernity. We must reclaim the virtues of Bacon and Feynman, reclaim the meme, as Dawkins explains the concept, from the pseudo-irrationalists, from the faddist dilettantes who glibly just do not get the idea that they are reactionary in attitude if not in spirit itself. Separating a lack of personal interest in science from the privileging of irrationality is a necessary step in our struggle against Islam and dhimmitude.
M-B write: "...the 'Jewish' idea that 'science is international' and human reason, regardless of blood-lines, is the best instrument of sicentific inquiry is regarded by enemies of livberal, urban, civilization as a form of hubris. Science, like everything else, must be infused with a higher ideal: the German Volk, God, Allah, or whatnot." (p.4.)
Modernity, particularly science, is written off by Islam and the fascist dhimmi Left, as a pursuit of philistines, a pursuit that negates the humanity of Humans. We are 'materialists,' meaning, one must guess, consumerists as well as non-Idealists in the Platonist sense. We are 'inauthentic,' as Heidegger would have it. We Modernists are not real people but simply cold, mindless, robotical types who have no "soul." Forget that a scientist without intuition is a clerk. The Moslems and their dhimmi touts have decided that Modernity is spiritually vacant, that we make up our own laws for ourselves, rather than following the ways of shari'a or the 'tradional' ways of 'The People.'
"Soul is a recurring theme of Occidentalism. The skeptical intellect, to promoters of soul, is always viewed with suspicion, fragmented, indeed as a higher form of idoiocy, with no sense of 'totality,' the 'absolute.' and what is truly important in life." (p.4.)
We have written before that the greatest phobia of the fascists is their confrontation with their own mediocrity. When the frustrated dhimmi is confronted by his own mediocrity, he moves toward that which will provide him with a snse of the recognition he feels he deserves, a case of philobarbarism resulting therefrom. Science, being an individual effort rather than one tribal or communitarian, stemming not from the grandness of the Volk or from the stars being in Virgo, the mediocrity flees into Romanticism to escape his own recognition of failure. He abandons science, reason, and rationality in favor of stupidities and irrationalist hopes that if only he does something grand he will be recognized for the truly grand thing he thinks he should be seen as being. Good luck, Grover.
In the flight from mediocrity to Romanticism the dhimmi becomes part of the greater whole, something likely impossible for all the successes of modern science to produce for him. Being a mediocrity himself, he blames the assigned mediocrity of Modernity. He flees to irrationality. He becomes a fascist. He loses the world but he gains 'soul.' He becomes moralistic, self-righteous, condemnatory of all others who are suddenly less than he; and he allows for the destruction of the mediocre and the victory of his own newly adopted tribe of primitives, pygmies among whom he is a giant--at last.
"Enemies of the West usually aspire to become heroes. Islamism, Nazism, fascism, communism are all heroic creeds. [They try to create societies] invigorated by constant heroic violence. The common enemy of revolutionary heroes is the settled bourgeios, the city dweller, the petty clerk, the plump stockbroker going about his business, the kind of person, in short, who might have been working in an office in the World Trade Center." (p.4.)
Once we can clearly and provably show that dhimmis are self-righteous fascist losers, then the plastic Che mask will fall into the dust and th dhimmis will be shunned and depised for the evil poseurs they are. They are not heroes. Not even in their own pot-smoker's dreams. It is up to us to provide the expose of fascism to give the evidence in the court of the public marketplace of ideas, mixed metaphors and all.
M-B contiinue: "Lack of heroism in the bourgeois ethos, of committing great deeds, has a great deal to do whith this [bourgeois self-hating] peculiarlity. The hero courts death. The bourgeois is addicted to personal safety. The hero counts death-tolls, the bourgeois counts money. Intellectuals, themselves only rarely heroic, have often displayed a hatred of the bourgeois and an infatuation with heroism-- heroic leaders, heroic creeds. [The bourgeois, Von Selchow writes:] is anxious to eliminate 'fighting against Life, as he lacks the strength necessary to master it in its very nakedness and hardness in a manly fashion.'
Much in our affluent, market-driven societies is indeed mediocre, and there is nothing admirable about luxury per se, but when contempt for bourgeois creature comforts becomes contempt for [your] life you know the West is under attack. This contempt can come from many sources, but it appeals to those who feel impotent, marginalized, excluded, or denigrated: the intellectual who feels unrecognized, the talentless art student in a city filled with brilliance, the time-serving everyman who disappears into any crowd, the young man from a third-world country who feels mocked by the indifference of a superior West; the list of possible recruits to a cult of death is potentially endless." (pp.4-5.)
The mediocre loser who wants to die for a-cause is usually deluding himself into dying for the very second-rate b-cause, because he's a mediocre loser who can only redeem his own failure in his own eyes by dying for something greater than himself, thereby not having to continue with the day-to-day petty pace of working for a living to pay the rent. The 'grand gesture' becomes the reason for living, and it is death, big, lush, Romantic, memorable to his admiring friends who will weep copious tears when they recall him throughout all of history gesture, like some teen-age high school drama-queen performance of the day--but bigger. Like, you know? Really Big. The suicide bomber, the girl under the bricks, heroes ad nauseum. May we suggest: "Get a life, loser." Ah, can't get a life? Then take one. Our hero.
The failed dhimmi and the worthless Moslem peasant in the modern world, these are people who live with the false hope that Modernity will somehow crash into flaming ruin if only they can hijack enough of our planes and destroy enough of our buildings and show enough video tapes of them beheading our civilians. The flight of the dhimmi, (no, not the opera of the same name,) and the suicidal rage of the redundant peasant, these are ugly things to witness-- the opera being quite attractive though. It is necessary for us to reclaim the public discourse to show our moral agenda and to expose the fascism of Islam and the fascism of the Left dhimmis. Once they are seen as losers, as primitives who do not count in the modern world of counting, then they will be seen not as they currently pose themselves for the puiblic view, as morally superior but as idiot losers, violent, stupid, and evil. If the best they have to offer is hatred of America, basing it all on some foolish ideas from their intuitive grasp of reality as shown by a Tarot card reading, then, once we see them and show for what they are, then we will begin to regain our own standing in our own view of ourselves.
The Japanese military fascists thought that because of their mystical grasp of the heavens they were certain to win their war against Modernity. We dropped atomic bombs on them. Personally, I don't like that idea, but if we don't act soon to control the fascist wave of primitive reaction against Modernity we might be forced in the end-game to do that again, next time to the world at large. Not just twice, but a thousand Hiroshimas. They love death? Well, if we must we could kill them with Pepsi Cola. Let's first try exposure.
We have argued here that "America" is a confused and semi-conscious eumphemism for Modernity; and that America is a geography of the mind, not the American nation or its people in the flesh.
The quotation above comes from an essay in the New York Review of Books, Jan. 17, 2002, written by Avishai Margalit and Ian Buruma, "Occidentalism."
It's not our purpose here to condemn the Left but to condemn fascism, which today the Left mostly feeds from. What is fascism? How can the Left be facist when fascism is a Rightist ideology? We look at the details of fascism here, and over and again we see that if fascism is a Right ideology it is also conflated with Left ideology into something unrecognizable as anything other than fascism itself, neither Leftism nor anything resembling classical Left ideologies from the time of the Wat Tyler Rebellion to the time of Eduord Bernstiein--except that it is, as we can see from the archived texts, fascist and reactionary in all its details, anti-progressive from the beginning. Therefore, we argue that it is past time to abandon the French Revolutionary dichotomy of Left and Right and refer to the division of the masses as into fascists and Modernists. All of our positive attributes as societies stem from our progressive Modernity; and all of our enemies are the forces of fascist reaction, most glaringly in the world of fascist Islam and their dhimmi collaborators, many of whom will identify themselves as Left, and many of whom are of the Right. In the fascist Will there is no real distinction to be made again between Left and Right but only between Modernists and fascists.
Margalit and Buruma [M-B] write: "...modern civilization was another term for Western civilization...." (p.1.) That was true in the minds of Japanese fascists in the 1940s, and it is true of the world fascists today. Modernity, not the political fiction of America, not the Jews, not Israel-- Modernity is fascism's enemy.
Beginning with Japanese fascism A-M write: "But what was 'the West' which had to be purged? What needed to be 'overcome'? They are, not in any particular order, materialism, liberalism, capitalism, individualism, humanism, rationalism, socialism, decadence, and moral laxity. [Overcome by] self-sacrifice, discipline, austerity, individual submission to the collective good, worship of divine leadership, and a deep faith in the superiority of instinct over reason." (p.1.) In short, fascism and reaction would overcome the modern West.
The enemies of Modernity were defeated in the 1940s in parts of Asia and Europe, but the monster lives on. the fascist ethos is as old as Humanity, not a trait to be eradicated in a matter of a few years by a small per centage of the world's current population. Fascism is the norm; it is we, Modernist Revolutionaries, who are the radical fringe group. It is we who are the edge of the Human telos, the purpose of life as our species. And we are unloved. Our defeat of the fascist force is not a permanent victory but one that we will fight for eternity, it seems.
"Don't rejoice in his defeat, you men. For though the world stood up and stopped the Bastard, the Bitch that bore him is in heat again."
Berthold Brecht, Arturo Ui, May 6th, 1945.
"Nazi ideologues and Japanese militarist propagandists were fighting the same Western ideas. The West they loathed was a multi-national, multi-cultural place, but the main symbols of hate were republican France, capitalist America, liberal England, and, in Germany more than Japan, the rootless, cosmopolitan Jews." (M-B: p.1.) Today the fascist bitch has born yet another bastard: fascist Islam. The runt of the litter is the dhimmi Left in our midst. This fight is on-going, and we must rejoice in our mission to defeat it yet again. We are fighting the same enemies our grandparents fought, and for the same reasons: for the precepts of the three revolutions of Modernity.
We have claimed in these pages that the intellectual ground of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment gave riose to the French, American, and Industrial Revolutions, i.e., to Modernity, and that the Force of reaction has fought against our modern revolutions from the beginning, and they will continue to do so until such time that they are obliterated by our necessary Violence, in reference to Sorel. We have claimed that, in spite of Huntington's dismissal of our position, the world's population is bifurcating, and that split is between Modernity and reaction, between "Us and Them."
Fascist reaction has a dozen or so main themes, all of them highly visible in fascist Islam and in Western Left dhimmitude. If we can show the fascism inherent in Islam and its dhimmi support group, we can claim the rightness of the moral agenda in the public discourse as our own. If we can clearly and from the historical texts show that Islam and dhimmi-Leftism are fascist, that the politicaly correct discourse is in fact fascist, then we can stop refering to our moral agenda in the defensive and go on to attact the fascist agenda for what it most obviously is.
As the Japanese and German fascist saw, Modernity is the enemy of fascism. One of our traits is Rationalism. Theirs is irrationalism. The dhimmi Left has an irrationalist hatred of America. So does fascist Islam. One of the characteristics of fascism is it's irrational approach to reality as seen in rune mythology or crystal mysticism; in fact, in any number of so-called 'New-Age' cliques. That does not make crystal collectors fascists, but it does lead to unfathomed and unexamined fascist sympathies, which we must expose in favor of Modernity.
Science, but not scientism, is a pillar of Modernity. We must reclaim the virtues of Bacon and Feynman, reclaim the meme, as Dawkins explains the concept, from the pseudo-irrationalists, from the faddist dilettantes who glibly just do not get the idea that they are reactionary in attitude if not in spirit itself. Separating a lack of personal interest in science from the privileging of irrationality is a necessary step in our struggle against Islam and dhimmitude.
M-B write: "...the 'Jewish' idea that 'science is international' and human reason, regardless of blood-lines, is the best instrument of sicentific inquiry is regarded by enemies of livberal, urban, civilization as a form of hubris. Science, like everything else, must be infused with a higher ideal: the German Volk, God, Allah, or whatnot." (p.4.)
Modernity, particularly science, is written off by Islam and the fascist dhimmi Left, as a pursuit of philistines, a pursuit that negates the humanity of Humans. We are 'materialists,' meaning, one must guess, consumerists as well as non-Idealists in the Platonist sense. We are 'inauthentic,' as Heidegger would have it. We Modernists are not real people but simply cold, mindless, robotical types who have no "soul." Forget that a scientist without intuition is a clerk. The Moslems and their dhimmi touts have decided that Modernity is spiritually vacant, that we make up our own laws for ourselves, rather than following the ways of shari'a or the 'tradional' ways of 'The People.'
"Soul is a recurring theme of Occidentalism. The skeptical intellect, to promoters of soul, is always viewed with suspicion, fragmented, indeed as a higher form of idoiocy, with no sense of 'totality,' the 'absolute.' and what is truly important in life." (p.4.)
We have written before that the greatest phobia of the fascists is their confrontation with their own mediocrity. When the frustrated dhimmi is confronted by his own mediocrity, he moves toward that which will provide him with a snse of the recognition he feels he deserves, a case of philobarbarism resulting therefrom. Science, being an individual effort rather than one tribal or communitarian, stemming not from the grandness of the Volk or from the stars being in Virgo, the mediocrity flees into Romanticism to escape his own recognition of failure. He abandons science, reason, and rationality in favor of stupidities and irrationalist hopes that if only he does something grand he will be recognized for the truly grand thing he thinks he should be seen as being. Good luck, Grover.
In the flight from mediocrity to Romanticism the dhimmi becomes part of the greater whole, something likely impossible for all the successes of modern science to produce for him. Being a mediocrity himself, he blames the assigned mediocrity of Modernity. He flees to irrationality. He becomes a fascist. He loses the world but he gains 'soul.' He becomes moralistic, self-righteous, condemnatory of all others who are suddenly less than he; and he allows for the destruction of the mediocre and the victory of his own newly adopted tribe of primitives, pygmies among whom he is a giant--at last.
"Enemies of the West usually aspire to become heroes. Islamism, Nazism, fascism, communism are all heroic creeds. [They try to create societies] invigorated by constant heroic violence. The common enemy of revolutionary heroes is the settled bourgeios, the city dweller, the petty clerk, the plump stockbroker going about his business, the kind of person, in short, who might have been working in an office in the World Trade Center." (p.4.)
Once we can clearly and provably show that dhimmis are self-righteous fascist losers, then the plastic Che mask will fall into the dust and th dhimmis will be shunned and depised for the evil poseurs they are. They are not heroes. Not even in their own pot-smoker's dreams. It is up to us to provide the expose of fascism to give the evidence in the court of the public marketplace of ideas, mixed metaphors and all.
M-B contiinue: "Lack of heroism in the bourgeois ethos, of committing great deeds, has a great deal to do whith this [bourgeois self-hating] peculiarlity. The hero courts death. The bourgeois is addicted to personal safety. The hero counts death-tolls, the bourgeois counts money. Intellectuals, themselves only rarely heroic, have often displayed a hatred of the bourgeois and an infatuation with heroism-- heroic leaders, heroic creeds. [The bourgeois, Von Selchow writes:] is anxious to eliminate 'fighting against Life, as he lacks the strength necessary to master it in its very nakedness and hardness in a manly fashion.'
Much in our affluent, market-driven societies is indeed mediocre, and there is nothing admirable about luxury per se, but when contempt for bourgeois creature comforts becomes contempt for [your] life you know the West is under attack. This contempt can come from many sources, but it appeals to those who feel impotent, marginalized, excluded, or denigrated: the intellectual who feels unrecognized, the talentless art student in a city filled with brilliance, the time-serving everyman who disappears into any crowd, the young man from a third-world country who feels mocked by the indifference of a superior West; the list of possible recruits to a cult of death is potentially endless." (pp.4-5.)
The mediocre loser who wants to die for a-cause is usually deluding himself into dying for the very second-rate b-cause, because he's a mediocre loser who can only redeem his own failure in his own eyes by dying for something greater than himself, thereby not having to continue with the day-to-day petty pace of working for a living to pay the rent. The 'grand gesture' becomes the reason for living, and it is death, big, lush, Romantic, memorable to his admiring friends who will weep copious tears when they recall him throughout all of history gesture, like some teen-age high school drama-queen performance of the day--but bigger. Like, you know? Really Big. The suicide bomber, the girl under the bricks, heroes ad nauseum. May we suggest: "Get a life, loser." Ah, can't get a life? Then take one. Our hero.
The failed dhimmi and the worthless Moslem peasant in the modern world, these are people who live with the false hope that Modernity will somehow crash into flaming ruin if only they can hijack enough of our planes and destroy enough of our buildings and show enough video tapes of them beheading our civilians. The flight of the dhimmi, (no, not the opera of the same name,) and the suicidal rage of the redundant peasant, these are ugly things to witness-- the opera being quite attractive though. It is necessary for us to reclaim the public discourse to show our moral agenda and to expose the fascism of Islam and the fascism of the Left dhimmis. Once they are seen as losers, as primitives who do not count in the modern world of counting, then they will be seen not as they currently pose themselves for the puiblic view, as morally superior but as idiot losers, violent, stupid, and evil. If the best they have to offer is hatred of America, basing it all on some foolish ideas from their intuitive grasp of reality as shown by a Tarot card reading, then, once we see them and show for what they are, then we will begin to regain our own standing in our own view of ourselves.
The Japanese military fascists thought that because of their mystical grasp of the heavens they were certain to win their war against Modernity. We dropped atomic bombs on them. Personally, I don't like that idea, but if we don't act soon to control the fascist wave of primitive reaction against Modernity we might be forced in the end-game to do that again, next time to the world at large. Not just twice, but a thousand Hiroshimas. They love death? Well, if we must we could kill them with Pepsi Cola. Let's first try exposure.
Thursday, June 30, 2005
Sorel (3)
We label and identify many ordinary things as fascist, and unless we explain why they are fascist we'll antagonize those who do not understand the meaning and concepts of fascism. Simple things like rune mythology and crystal mysticism are fascist; but that in itself does not mean that the practicioner is going to don black-shirt and jack boots to rampage in the Jewish Ghetto. Fascism is short, simple, and stupid, but it covers a wide variety of ideas and practices we all assume to be innocuous, and that likely in fact are so. But we must know what fascism is to identify it and see in our own ideas what our own fascist assumptions are, even if it's as simple as animal rights sympathies and worshipping Mother Nature. Damned near everything that we consider today as politically correct has its roots in fascism; but we won't be able to show that to be true until we go through this process of explaining the history of such proto-fascist theoreticians as Georges Sorel.
Cooking steaks in the back-yard, drinking beer after the soft-ball game, playing with the kids, these are the results we have from our revolutions. Who on Earth decided we are wrong to do these Revolutionary things? It is all the grand idiot "Myth" of the fascist dhimmi alliance with fascist Islam and the barbarians of the world that we of the West, living in a state of Modernity, are responsible for the catastrophies of primitivism. Our opponents are fascists. But what the hell is a fascist? That's what our enemies call us! They are wrong; and when we look at the texts posted on these pages the evidence is clear and provable that the Left is fascist, Islam is fascist, and that we are up to 'here' in fascism in our cultures without knowing what fascism is. We are swamped by the fascist "Myth," and since it's destroying the West and Modernity itself we'll do well to understand our predicament.
As tedious as it might well be to wade through some of the classical texts of fascism and the history of revolutionary doctrines and theories we think it is essential that it at least be in the archive for those who wish to examine in detail the proof at hand that we need to see ourselves as progressive, as GOOD.
Most readers today will have no idea who Georges Sorel was, nor the slightest idea why his work is important for us today to understand. If we place Sorel in line ahead of some of his successors we might get an indication of why he's important to us: Mircea Eliade, C.G. Jung, Julius Evola, Joseph Campbell, Martin Heidegger. The commonalities are in the elevation of irrationality and myth, but especially in the personal and professional following and promotion of political fascism. Think Jung and Campbell are swell and lovable old duffers? Think again. They were fascists. Jung was a Nazi sympathizer; Heidegger went to the grave a committed Nazi. We'll come to them in time. Let's look first at Georges Sorel.
Georges Sorel is one in a long line of radical thinkers who hate the society they live in and who argue for its destruction by any means, fair or foul. In Sorel's case he opted for Syndicalist socialism. In future posts we'll look closely at the fascist personality and there we will see the roots of Sorel's hatred of "Now," and why it shows him as a fascist, particularly in light of the fact that "Sorel supported at various times such disparate alternatives to the existing order as extreme French monarchism and the Bolshevik revolution."
There is one element of Sorel's thinking that we will see over and again in our examiniation of Left fascist dhimmitude, and that is the hatred of "Now" and the hatred of "mediocrity," hatreds that lead people into such either/or positiions that they would rather support fascist Islam than not so long as Islam is not capitalist, or whatever the prevailing "mediocrity" might be at the time, for example, State Catholicism in the time of Savanarola. In Sorel's time, and in our own, they being the same, capitalism is the ruling mediocrity. Fascism, being an irrationalist ethos, a death-worship, an ethos dedicated to the "grand gesture," is today the anti-capitalist opposition to mediocrity. Whatever the opposition, regardless of its obvious reaction and primitivism, in fact, because of its vileness, it is good in the mind of the fascist. Sorel can feel at home with French absolutism in monarchy or equally at home with Bolshevism or Italian Fascism; and our modern Left dhimmi fascists feel as welcome in the embrace of fascist Islam as they did in the loving arms of the Khemer Rouge. No matter what the opposition to capitalism is, the Left dhimmi fascist is comfortable with it so long as it is not mediocre, and so long as it is not "Now."
Keeping those ideas in mind we can look at Sorel's views on people and power, at "Violence and Force," and the idea of "Myth." At this time we'll rely on the "Letter to Daniel Halevi, 1907" for our information.
http://www.oswaldmosley.com/
Georges Sorel and Syndicalism
The most famous and most extreme advocate of syndicalism, Georges Sorel's passion for revolutionary activity in place of rational discourse made him most influential in shaping the direction of fascism, especially in Mussolini's Italy.
Georges Sorel stated his theory of "social myths" most clearly in a letter to Daniel Halevy in 1907:
.....Men who are participating in a great social movement always picture their coming action as a battle in which their cause is certain to triumph.
***
In many future posts we will look closely at the "furturity" of fascism, both Left and Right. We'll pay close attention to Eric Hoffer, The True Believer to find the psychology of the average fascist, and we will see in other authors as well that futurity, the anti-Now, is paramount in their feelings, their irrationality, their intuitive approach to life and death. And we will see that the great enemy of the fascist is "mediocrity" as opposed to the "Great Social Movement." Not now, but later everything will be grand, not mediocre as it is today as things are in the lost paradise taken over by the mediocre who fear death.
Above we see already a picture that shows us clearly the fascist inclination of the average Moslem suicide killer: the longing for death, the longing for the paradise to come, and the hatred of Now. We see the "grand gesture" of suicide by bomb-blast, the de-personalization of the bomber in terms of his own privacy, and the worship of State, ruler, blood, and soil. Sorel continues:
These constructions, knowledge of which is so important for historians, I propose to call myths; the syndicalist "general strike" and Marx's catastrophic revolution are such myths. As remarkable examples of such myths, I have given those which were constructed by primitive Christianity, by the Reformation, by the Revolution and by the followers of Mazzini.
I now wish to show that we should not attempt to analyze such groups of images in the way that we analyze a thing into its elements, but that they must be taken as a whole, as historical forces, and that we should be especially careful not to make any comparison between accomplished fact and the picture people had formed for themselves before action.
I could have given one more example which is perhaps still more striking: Catholics have never been discouraged even in the hardest trials, because they have always pictured the history of the Church as a series of battles between Satan and the hierarchy supported by Christ; every new difficulty which arises is ****only an episode in a war which must finally end in the victory of Catholicism.
In employing the term myth I believed that I had made a happy choice, because I thus put myself in a position to refuse any discussion whatever with the people who wish to submit the idea of a general strike to a detailed criticism, and who accumulate objections against its practical possibility.
It appears, on the contrary, that I had made a most unfortunate choice, for while some told me that myths were only suitable to a primitive state of society, others imagined that I thought the modern world might be moved by illusions analogous in nature to those which Renan thought might usefully replace religion. But there has been a worse misunderstanding than this even, for it has been asserted that my theory of myths was only a kind of lawyer's plea, a falsification of the real opinions of the revolutionaries, the sophistry of an intellectual.
If this were true, I should not have been exactly fortunate, for I have always tried to escape the influence of that intellectual philosophy, which seems to me a great hindrance to the historian who allows himself to be dominated by it.
I can understand the fear that this myth of the general strike inspires in many worthy progressives, on account of its character of infinity, the world of today is very much inclined to return to the opinions of the ancients and to subordinate ethics to the smooth working of public affairs, which results in a definition of virtue as the golden mean; as long as socialism remains a doctrine expressed only in words, it is very easy to deflect it towards this doctrine of the golden mean; but this transformation is manifestly impossible when the myth of the "general strike" is introduced, as this implies an absolute revolution.
You know as well as I do that all that is best in the modern mind is derived from this "torment of the infinite"; you are not one of those people who look upon the tricks by means of which readers can be deceived by words, as happy discoveries. That is why you will not condemn me for having attached great worth to a myth which gives to socialism such high moral value and such great sincerity. It is because the theory of myths tends to produce such fine results that so many seek to refute it....
As long as there are no myths accepted by the masses, one may go on talking of revolts indefinitely, without ever provoking any revolutionary movement; this is what gives such importance to the general strike and renders it so odious to socialists who are afraid of a revolution....
The revolutionary myths which exist at the present time are almost free from any such mixture; by means of them it is possible to understand the activity, the feelings and the ideas of the masses preparing themselves to enter on a decisive struggle: the myths are not descriptions of things, but expressions of a determination to act.
A Utopia is...an intellectual product; it is the work of theorists who, after observing and discussing the known facts, seek to establish a model to which they can compare existing society in order to estimate the amount of good and evil it contains. It is a combination of imaginary institutions having sufficient analogies to real institutions for the jurist to be able to reason about them; it is a construction which can be taken to pieces, and certain parts of it have been shaped in such a way that they can...be fitted into approaching legislation.
While contemporary myths lead men to prepare themselves for a combat which will destroy the existing state of things, the effect of Utopias has always been to direct men's minds towards reforms which can be brought about by patching up the existing system; it is not surprising, then, that so many makers of Utopias were able to develop into able statesmen when they had acquired a greater experience of political life.
A myth cannot be refuted, since it is, at bottom, identical with the conviction of a group, being the expression of these convictions in the language of movement; and it is, in consequence, unanalyzable into parts which could be placed on the plane of historical descriptions.
A Utopia, on the other hand, can be discussed like any other social constitution; the spontaneous movements it presupposes can be compared with the movements actually observed in the course of history, and we can in this way evaluate its verisimilitude; it is possible to refute Utopias by showing that the economic system on which they have been made to rest is incompatible with the necessary conditions of modern production.
[T]he myth of the "general strike" has become popular, and is now firmly established in the minds of the workers; we possess ideas about violence that it would have been difficult for him [Marx] to have formed; we can then complete his doctrine, instead of making commentaries on his text, as his unfortunate disciples have done for so long. [Cf Eduord Bernstein.]
People who are living in this world of "myths" are secure from all refutation; this has led many to assert that Socialism is a kind of religion. For a long time people have been struck by the fact that religious convictions are unaffected by criticism, and from that they have concluded that everything which claims to be beyond science must be a religion.
[B]y the side of Utopias there have always been myths capable of urging on the workers to revolt. For a long time these myths were founded on the legends of the Revolution, and they preserved all their value as long as these legends remained unshaken. Today the confidence of the Socialists is greater than ever since the myth of the general strike dominates all of the truly working-class movement. No failure proves anything against Socialism since the latter has become a work of preparation (for revolution); if they are checked, it merely proves that the faith has been insufficient; they must set to work again with more courage, persistence, and confidence than before; their experience of labour has taught workmen that it is by means of patient apprenticeship that a man may become a true comrade, and it is also the only way of becoming a true revolutionary. (July 15, 1907)
***
[B]y the side of Utopias there have always been myths capable of urging on the Muslims to shahadah. For a long time these myths were founded on the legends of the Rightly Guided Caliphs' Revolution, and they preserved all their value as long as these legends remained unshaken. Today the confidence of the Muslims is greater than ever since the myth of the Caliphate dominates all the truly Islamic movement. No failure proves anything against Islam since the latter has become a work of preparation (for the shari'a revolution); if they are checked, it merely proves that the faith has been insufficient; they must set to work again with more courage, persistence, and confidence than before; their experience of terrorism has taught Muslims that it is by means of patient apprenticeship that a man may become a true believer, and it is also the only way of becoming a true Muslim. (July 15, 1907)
***
Of course, some joker could easily rewrite Sorel's final passage by substituting Islam, Muslims, et cet., for Left dhimmis and fascism, et cet.; but who would be so cruel?
What is the myth of today? It is that Modernity is evil; and we being Modernists and revolutionary progressivists are evil ourselves. Many of us believe that our own modernity is responsible for the ruin of the primitives. The fascists drill it into us via the meme, as Dawkins writes, or, as Sorelians put it, in terms of "Myth."
Without thinking it through, many of us accept that our culture is evil: we love Mother Nature, protect animal rights, cherish Amazonian rainforests, hate multi-national corporations who rob and destroy "traditional peoples" in our imperialist quest for more and greedier profits from the destruction of natural habitats, The Land. We destroy the ozone layer. We wage unjust war on pastoralists who lived in harmony with nature until we invaded them and destroyed their prior idyllic lives, and by impoverishing them turned them into refugees and terrorists against our arrogance. We Modernist revolutionaries colonized the noble savages and corrupted their purity. We drive big cars. We grow grains that strip the Earth of its goodness so we can take that grain from the now starving vegetarian peoples of the world and instead feed its non-sustainable growth to polluting cattle so McDonald's can feed us junk food. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're the bad guys. Or so the fascist myth tells us.
And those of us who aren't evil? Well, we would be those who are multi-cultural, inclusive, passive in the face of aggression against us for fear of social exclusion. And on that goes, another idiot "Myth" of Left fascism.
We face fascism, believing that it's a good thing when in fact we don't recognize it as fascism because we confuse fascism with concentration camps, swastikas, and burning Crosses. Fascism is more insidious than we know, and in coming posts we'll examine it more closely so we do know. We must know our enemies, and we must know if we are them. Maybe we are. Or maybe there are aspects of fascism that we like. We must know.
Our greatest myth today is the myth of "Anti-Americanism." The real myth is broader: it is anti-Westernism, and it is essentially anti-Modernism. Maybe that's a good position to take. We'll look at it. If we think afterward that we are not in favor of fascism we'll know what our enemies are about, and from that we'll know clearly "What is to be Done?"
Cooking steaks in the back-yard, drinking beer after the soft-ball game, playing with the kids, these are the results we have from our revolutions. Who on Earth decided we are wrong to do these Revolutionary things? It is all the grand idiot "Myth" of the fascist dhimmi alliance with fascist Islam and the barbarians of the world that we of the West, living in a state of Modernity, are responsible for the catastrophies of primitivism. Our opponents are fascists. But what the hell is a fascist? That's what our enemies call us! They are wrong; and when we look at the texts posted on these pages the evidence is clear and provable that the Left is fascist, Islam is fascist, and that we are up to 'here' in fascism in our cultures without knowing what fascism is. We are swamped by the fascist "Myth," and since it's destroying the West and Modernity itself we'll do well to understand our predicament.
As tedious as it might well be to wade through some of the classical texts of fascism and the history of revolutionary doctrines and theories we think it is essential that it at least be in the archive for those who wish to examine in detail the proof at hand that we need to see ourselves as progressive, as GOOD.
Most readers today will have no idea who Georges Sorel was, nor the slightest idea why his work is important for us today to understand. If we place Sorel in line ahead of some of his successors we might get an indication of why he's important to us: Mircea Eliade, C.G. Jung, Julius Evola, Joseph Campbell, Martin Heidegger. The commonalities are in the elevation of irrationality and myth, but especially in the personal and professional following and promotion of political fascism. Think Jung and Campbell are swell and lovable old duffers? Think again. They were fascists. Jung was a Nazi sympathizer; Heidegger went to the grave a committed Nazi. We'll come to them in time. Let's look first at Georges Sorel.
Georges Sorel is one in a long line of radical thinkers who hate the society they live in and who argue for its destruction by any means, fair or foul. In Sorel's case he opted for Syndicalist socialism. In future posts we'll look closely at the fascist personality and there we will see the roots of Sorel's hatred of "Now," and why it shows him as a fascist, particularly in light of the fact that "Sorel supported at various times such disparate alternatives to the existing order as extreme French monarchism and the Bolshevik revolution."
There is one element of Sorel's thinking that we will see over and again in our examiniation of Left fascist dhimmitude, and that is the hatred of "Now" and the hatred of "mediocrity," hatreds that lead people into such either/or positiions that they would rather support fascist Islam than not so long as Islam is not capitalist, or whatever the prevailing "mediocrity" might be at the time, for example, State Catholicism in the time of Savanarola. In Sorel's time, and in our own, they being the same, capitalism is the ruling mediocrity. Fascism, being an irrationalist ethos, a death-worship, an ethos dedicated to the "grand gesture," is today the anti-capitalist opposition to mediocrity. Whatever the opposition, regardless of its obvious reaction and primitivism, in fact, because of its vileness, it is good in the mind of the fascist. Sorel can feel at home with French absolutism in monarchy or equally at home with Bolshevism or Italian Fascism; and our modern Left dhimmi fascists feel as welcome in the embrace of fascist Islam as they did in the loving arms of the Khemer Rouge. No matter what the opposition to capitalism is, the Left dhimmi fascist is comfortable with it so long as it is not mediocre, and so long as it is not "Now."
Keeping those ideas in mind we can look at Sorel's views on people and power, at "Violence and Force," and the idea of "Myth." At this time we'll rely on the "Letter to Daniel Halevi, 1907" for our information.
http://www.oswaldmosley.com/
Georges Sorel and Syndicalism
The most famous and most extreme advocate of syndicalism, Georges Sorel's passion for revolutionary activity in place of rational discourse made him most influential in shaping the direction of fascism, especially in Mussolini's Italy.
Georges Sorel stated his theory of "social myths" most clearly in a letter to Daniel Halevy in 1907:
.....Men who are participating in a great social movement always picture their coming action as a battle in which their cause is certain to triumph.
***
In many future posts we will look closely at the "furturity" of fascism, both Left and Right. We'll pay close attention to Eric Hoffer, The True Believer to find the psychology of the average fascist, and we will see in other authors as well that futurity, the anti-Now, is paramount in their feelings, their irrationality, their intuitive approach to life and death. And we will see that the great enemy of the fascist is "mediocrity" as opposed to the "Great Social Movement." Not now, but later everything will be grand, not mediocre as it is today as things are in the lost paradise taken over by the mediocre who fear death.
Above we see already a picture that shows us clearly the fascist inclination of the average Moslem suicide killer: the longing for death, the longing for the paradise to come, and the hatred of Now. We see the "grand gesture" of suicide by bomb-blast, the de-personalization of the bomber in terms of his own privacy, and the worship of State, ruler, blood, and soil. Sorel continues:
These constructions, knowledge of which is so important for historians, I propose to call myths; the syndicalist "general strike" and Marx's catastrophic revolution are such myths. As remarkable examples of such myths, I have given those which were constructed by primitive Christianity, by the Reformation, by the Revolution and by the followers of Mazzini.
I now wish to show that we should not attempt to analyze such groups of images in the way that we analyze a thing into its elements, but that they must be taken as a whole, as historical forces, and that we should be especially careful not to make any comparison between accomplished fact and the picture people had formed for themselves before action.
I could have given one more example which is perhaps still more striking: Catholics have never been discouraged even in the hardest trials, because they have always pictured the history of the Church as a series of battles between Satan and the hierarchy supported by Christ; every new difficulty which arises is ****only an episode in a war which must finally end in the victory of Catholicism.
In employing the term myth I believed that I had made a happy choice, because I thus put myself in a position to refuse any discussion whatever with the people who wish to submit the idea of a general strike to a detailed criticism, and who accumulate objections against its practical possibility.
It appears, on the contrary, that I had made a most unfortunate choice, for while some told me that myths were only suitable to a primitive state of society, others imagined that I thought the modern world might be moved by illusions analogous in nature to those which Renan thought might usefully replace religion. But there has been a worse misunderstanding than this even, for it has been asserted that my theory of myths was only a kind of lawyer's plea, a falsification of the real opinions of the revolutionaries, the sophistry of an intellectual.
If this were true, I should not have been exactly fortunate, for I have always tried to escape the influence of that intellectual philosophy, which seems to me a great hindrance to the historian who allows himself to be dominated by it.
I can understand the fear that this myth of the general strike inspires in many worthy progressives, on account of its character of infinity, the world of today is very much inclined to return to the opinions of the ancients and to subordinate ethics to the smooth working of public affairs, which results in a definition of virtue as the golden mean; as long as socialism remains a doctrine expressed only in words, it is very easy to deflect it towards this doctrine of the golden mean; but this transformation is manifestly impossible when the myth of the "general strike" is introduced, as this implies an absolute revolution.
You know as well as I do that all that is best in the modern mind is derived from this "torment of the infinite"; you are not one of those people who look upon the tricks by means of which readers can be deceived by words, as happy discoveries. That is why you will not condemn me for having attached great worth to a myth which gives to socialism such high moral value and such great sincerity. It is because the theory of myths tends to produce such fine results that so many seek to refute it....
As long as there are no myths accepted by the masses, one may go on talking of revolts indefinitely, without ever provoking any revolutionary movement; this is what gives such importance to the general strike and renders it so odious to socialists who are afraid of a revolution....
The revolutionary myths which exist at the present time are almost free from any such mixture; by means of them it is possible to understand the activity, the feelings and the ideas of the masses preparing themselves to enter on a decisive struggle: the myths are not descriptions of things, but expressions of a determination to act.
A Utopia is...an intellectual product; it is the work of theorists who, after observing and discussing the known facts, seek to establish a model to which they can compare existing society in order to estimate the amount of good and evil it contains. It is a combination of imaginary institutions having sufficient analogies to real institutions for the jurist to be able to reason about them; it is a construction which can be taken to pieces, and certain parts of it have been shaped in such a way that they can...be fitted into approaching legislation.
While contemporary myths lead men to prepare themselves for a combat which will destroy the existing state of things, the effect of Utopias has always been to direct men's minds towards reforms which can be brought about by patching up the existing system; it is not surprising, then, that so many makers of Utopias were able to develop into able statesmen when they had acquired a greater experience of political life.
A myth cannot be refuted, since it is, at bottom, identical with the conviction of a group, being the expression of these convictions in the language of movement; and it is, in consequence, unanalyzable into parts which could be placed on the plane of historical descriptions.
A Utopia, on the other hand, can be discussed like any other social constitution; the spontaneous movements it presupposes can be compared with the movements actually observed in the course of history, and we can in this way evaluate its verisimilitude; it is possible to refute Utopias by showing that the economic system on which they have been made to rest is incompatible with the necessary conditions of modern production.
[T]he myth of the "general strike" has become popular, and is now firmly established in the minds of the workers; we possess ideas about violence that it would have been difficult for him [Marx] to have formed; we can then complete his doctrine, instead of making commentaries on his text, as his unfortunate disciples have done for so long. [Cf Eduord Bernstein.]
People who are living in this world of "myths" are secure from all refutation; this has led many to assert that Socialism is a kind of religion. For a long time people have been struck by the fact that religious convictions are unaffected by criticism, and from that they have concluded that everything which claims to be beyond science must be a religion.
[B]y the side of Utopias there have always been myths capable of urging on the workers to revolt. For a long time these myths were founded on the legends of the Revolution, and they preserved all their value as long as these legends remained unshaken. Today the confidence of the Socialists is greater than ever since the myth of the general strike dominates all of the truly working-class movement. No failure proves anything against Socialism since the latter has become a work of preparation (for revolution); if they are checked, it merely proves that the faith has been insufficient; they must set to work again with more courage, persistence, and confidence than before; their experience of labour has taught workmen that it is by means of patient apprenticeship that a man may become a true comrade, and it is also the only way of becoming a true revolutionary. (July 15, 1907)
***
[B]y the side of Utopias there have always been myths capable of urging on the Muslims to shahadah. For a long time these myths were founded on the legends of the Rightly Guided Caliphs' Revolution, and they preserved all their value as long as these legends remained unshaken. Today the confidence of the Muslims is greater than ever since the myth of the Caliphate dominates all the truly Islamic movement. No failure proves anything against Islam since the latter has become a work of preparation (for the shari'a revolution); if they are checked, it merely proves that the faith has been insufficient; they must set to work again with more courage, persistence, and confidence than before; their experience of terrorism has taught Muslims that it is by means of patient apprenticeship that a man may become a true believer, and it is also the only way of becoming a true Muslim. (July 15, 1907)
***
Of course, some joker could easily rewrite Sorel's final passage by substituting Islam, Muslims, et cet., for Left dhimmis and fascism, et cet.; but who would be so cruel?
What is the myth of today? It is that Modernity is evil; and we being Modernists and revolutionary progressivists are evil ourselves. Many of us believe that our own modernity is responsible for the ruin of the primitives. The fascists drill it into us via the meme, as Dawkins writes, or, as Sorelians put it, in terms of "Myth."
Without thinking it through, many of us accept that our culture is evil: we love Mother Nature, protect animal rights, cherish Amazonian rainforests, hate multi-national corporations who rob and destroy "traditional peoples" in our imperialist quest for more and greedier profits from the destruction of natural habitats, The Land. We destroy the ozone layer. We wage unjust war on pastoralists who lived in harmony with nature until we invaded them and destroyed their prior idyllic lives, and by impoverishing them turned them into refugees and terrorists against our arrogance. We Modernist revolutionaries colonized the noble savages and corrupted their purity. We drive big cars. We grow grains that strip the Earth of its goodness so we can take that grain from the now starving vegetarian peoples of the world and instead feed its non-sustainable growth to polluting cattle so McDonald's can feed us junk food. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're the bad guys. Or so the fascist myth tells us.
And those of us who aren't evil? Well, we would be those who are multi-cultural, inclusive, passive in the face of aggression against us for fear of social exclusion. And on that goes, another idiot "Myth" of Left fascism.
We face fascism, believing that it's a good thing when in fact we don't recognize it as fascism because we confuse fascism with concentration camps, swastikas, and burning Crosses. Fascism is more insidious than we know, and in coming posts we'll examine it more closely so we do know. We must know our enemies, and we must know if we are them. Maybe we are. Or maybe there are aspects of fascism that we like. We must know.
Our greatest myth today is the myth of "Anti-Americanism." The real myth is broader: it is anti-Westernism, and it is essentially anti-Modernism. Maybe that's a good position to take. We'll look at it. If we think afterward that we are not in favor of fascism we'll know what our enemies are about, and from that we'll know clearly "What is to be Done?"
Wednesday, June 29, 2005
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.
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.
Tuesday, June 28, 2005
Left/Right Conflation
The Left and the Right are the same: In their mad pursuit of fascist anti-Modernity, in their longing for fascist Romanticism, irrationality, and tribal nostalgia. In short, the Left and the Right are united in a fascist pursuit of the destruction of the three great revolutionary movements of the 18th century: The French, American, and Industrial Revolutions, the revolutions of Modernity. The Left and Right make alliance with the barbarian world in their fascist struggle to destroy Modernity. The Left is dhimmified, while the Right today is inseparable from their 19th century fascist heritage. As we have seen, and as we will see more deeply to come, the Left and the Right are fascist, and together they have united with fascist Islam to destroy the Modernity of our time.
We are building here an archive of political theory from which one may in time dig into the ground of fascist ideology to find easily each and every segment and layer of fascist thought that prevails today in the dhimmi mind of the West. Yes, it's boring. But to make a claim such as above we need documented proof, and we have so far provided some but not all of the tips of the fascist ideological and psychological imperatives.
We make no appologies for the tedious readings of our project. For those with the patience to follow the development of this task it will become clear that the ideological ground of modern dhimmis is fascism pure and simple; and that knowing the ground of fascism will give one the foundational counter-ground from which to build a solid revolutionary platform to fight the fascist force of today's dhimmi counter-revolutionaries.
Know thine enemy--obsessively.
There aren't many of us in the West who will shout down "anti-war" speakers. Who is silly enough among us to claim that war is a good thing? Well, "Hello, I'm Dag." We can here refer to Hugo Grotius and the archived post on "Just War vs. Crusade" to find why one would make such a statement as above. Look too at the post on the "Melian Dialogue" or at "William Walker." Let's not be naive here. War, for all its evils, is a fact of real living, and we must examine it carefully so we are not sucked into sophistries and taqiyya so cleverly planted in our societies by jihadis and dhimmis. If we get along by going along, we will find ourselves in the position of Adam Czerniakow:
ADAM CZERNIAKOW, 1880-1942
July 19, 1942 - "Incredible panic in the city .... I do not know whetber I managed to calm the population, but I did my best. I try to hearten the delegations which come to see me. What it costs me they do not see."
Adam Czerniakow, an engineer by profession, served in various positions in Jewish communal and Polish political life prior to World War II. On October 4, 1939, he was appointed by the Nazis as Chairman of the judenrat (the Jewish Council established by the Nazis). When the Warsaw Ghetto was established one year later (October 1940) Czerniakow and the Judenrat became responsible for the daily organization and structure of the Jewish community. This included food, work, health, housing, sanitation, education and relief efforts. Although he had some early opportunities to escape, Czerniakow refused to abandon what he considered his responsibility to his community. He attempted to convince the Nazis to ease the situation in the Ghetto, and to limit their direct intervention, while trying to keep the Jewish community organized and functioning. While he was criticized by some in the underground as being aloof and uninvolved with the fate of the community, the prevailing opinion saw Czerniakow as a man of great personal decency and good intentions.
Adam Czerniakow committed suicide on July 23, 1942 when he was pressured to hand over Jewish children to be deported to their deaths. It is reported that he left a note: "They are demanding that I kill the children of my people with my own hands. There is nothing for me to do but die."
http://motlc.wiesenthal.com/
***
We generally stay away from topicalities in favor of presentation of general ideological writings and analyses from the historical Left and from the fascist Right in order to show exactly why and how our modern dhimmi intellectuals arrive at their positions, and how we turn ourselves unconsciously toward dhimmitude by nature of our traditional revolutionary liberalism, not knowing that it is vitiated by reactionary pseudo-Left ideologues. Our innately benevelent Liberalism is corrupted by fascisms that we do not always recognize as such; and it is one goal of this blog to open the debate on fascist dhimmitude by exposing the fascist background of the Left dhimmis among us. Our good intentions, our platitudinizing, our cliches, and our normal moral decency lead us to the best opinion of others who, in truth, do not deserve our good opinions. They deserve our hatred, even our aggression. Our enemies are fascists. But who are our enemies, and how do we know we are not them? Maybe we are in favor of many of the Left axioms that truly are at root and branch fascist. It's our argument here that it's better to know the truth and choose evil than to do evil thinking we are doing good. Yes, much of the background reading in previous posts will be to many readers boring. That won't change here for a long time, not until the theoretical works are finished and the analytical work begins. But for those of us who continue struggling through the likes of Hobbes. et al., the insights into dhimmitude will pay off wonderfully in deep understanding. We will know our enemies better than they know themselves, and from that we will be able to formulate our own doctrines clearly in preparation for the founding of a new revolutionary movement that will, we hope, take on the professionalism of Lenin [cf. archive: "What is to be Done?"] and the praxis of William Walker to win our struggle against our own dhimmis, [cf. archive: "American Civil War."] Once this bank of histories is complete we can begin to address topicalities. Until such time, we remain commited to providing at least a beginning of in-depth texts on the history and nature of fascism.
In the article below we will see news that the Left and Right are combined in fascist dhimmitude. Many of the previous posts here show why that happened and how we can understand its roots. That building of the archival bank is not complete by any means, and it won't become more readable for some long time yet. We appreciate your patience and do not appologize for that which is to come.
***
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/050623/23euroleft.htm?track=rss
National Security Watch: Eurolefties fund Iraq insurgency
Posted 6/23/05
By David E. Kaplan
Who's funding the insurgents in Iraq? The list of suspects is long: ex-Baathists, foreign jihadists, and angry Sunnis, to name a few. Now add to that roster hard-core Euroleftists.
Iraq insurgency vital to al Qaeda (6/22/05)
More from Nation & World
***
Turns out that far-left groups in western Europe are carrying on a campaign dubbed Ten Euros for the Resistance, offering aid and comfort to the car bombers, kidnappers, and snipers trying to destabilize the fledgling Iraq government. In the words of one Italian website, Iraq Libero (Free Iraq), the funds are meant for those fighting the occupanti imperialisti. The groups are an odd collection, made up largely of Marxists and Maoists, sprinkled with an array of Arab emigres and aging, old-school fascists, according to Lorenzo Vidino, an analyst on European terrorism based at The Investigative Project in Washington, D.C. "It's the old anticapitalist, anti-U.S., anti-Israel crowd," says Vidino, who has been to their gatherings, where he saw activists from Austria, Denmark, Germany, and Italy. "The glue that binds them together is anti-Americanism." The groups are working on an October conference to further support "the Iraqi Resistance." A key goal is to expand backing for the insurgents from the fringe left to the broader antiwar and antiglobalization movements.
One conference sponsor, Campo Antiimperialista (the Anti-Imperialist Camp), credits the 10-euro campaign for buying 2 tons of medicine for Al Anbar province, a hotbed of resistance, to be distributed "completely independent from both the occupiers as well as their local puppets."
But some funds may be buying more deadly stuff; one leader boasted to Vidino that the campaign will send "everything it takes" for the resistance to win, including weaponry. Neither Iraq Libero nor Campo Antiimperialista responded to questions from U.S. News about where their funds end up. The groups' impact, though, may ultimately be limited. "They have a pretty big following, but we're not talking about big money," says Vidino. At one conference, he notes, many militants looked so ragged he doubted they even had 10 euros in their pockets.
***
If this were simply a gaggle of frayed and greying bums on the streets and la stradas, then why would we care? Ten-a-pennie losers do not make a ruffle; but the problem we have is that the bums are simply the ugly face on the public streets whom we see mouthing the assumed attitudes of the masses. Like it or not, dhimitude is the ruling ethos of the West, not Modernity. Why? Because Modernity is weak. And how do we redeem Modernity in the eyes and minds of the public?
We'll come to that soon.
We are building here an archive of political theory from which one may in time dig into the ground of fascist ideology to find easily each and every segment and layer of fascist thought that prevails today in the dhimmi mind of the West. Yes, it's boring. But to make a claim such as above we need documented proof, and we have so far provided some but not all of the tips of the fascist ideological and psychological imperatives.
We make no appologies for the tedious readings of our project. For those with the patience to follow the development of this task it will become clear that the ideological ground of modern dhimmis is fascism pure and simple; and that knowing the ground of fascism will give one the foundational counter-ground from which to build a solid revolutionary platform to fight the fascist force of today's dhimmi counter-revolutionaries.
Know thine enemy--obsessively.
There aren't many of us in the West who will shout down "anti-war" speakers. Who is silly enough among us to claim that war is a good thing? Well, "Hello, I'm Dag." We can here refer to Hugo Grotius and the archived post on "Just War vs. Crusade" to find why one would make such a statement as above. Look too at the post on the "Melian Dialogue" or at "William Walker." Let's not be naive here. War, for all its evils, is a fact of real living, and we must examine it carefully so we are not sucked into sophistries and taqiyya so cleverly planted in our societies by jihadis and dhimmis. If we get along by going along, we will find ourselves in the position of Adam Czerniakow:
ADAM CZERNIAKOW, 1880-1942
July 19, 1942 - "Incredible panic in the city .... I do not know whetber I managed to calm the population, but I did my best. I try to hearten the delegations which come to see me. What it costs me they do not see."
Adam Czerniakow, an engineer by profession, served in various positions in Jewish communal and Polish political life prior to World War II. On October 4, 1939, he was appointed by the Nazis as Chairman of the judenrat (the Jewish Council established by the Nazis). When the Warsaw Ghetto was established one year later (October 1940) Czerniakow and the Judenrat became responsible for the daily organization and structure of the Jewish community. This included food, work, health, housing, sanitation, education and relief efforts. Although he had some early opportunities to escape, Czerniakow refused to abandon what he considered his responsibility to his community. He attempted to convince the Nazis to ease the situation in the Ghetto, and to limit their direct intervention, while trying to keep the Jewish community organized and functioning. While he was criticized by some in the underground as being aloof and uninvolved with the fate of the community, the prevailing opinion saw Czerniakow as a man of great personal decency and good intentions.
Adam Czerniakow committed suicide on July 23, 1942 when he was pressured to hand over Jewish children to be deported to their deaths. It is reported that he left a note: "They are demanding that I kill the children of my people with my own hands. There is nothing for me to do but die."
http://motlc.wiesenthal.com/
***
We generally stay away from topicalities in favor of presentation of general ideological writings and analyses from the historical Left and from the fascist Right in order to show exactly why and how our modern dhimmi intellectuals arrive at their positions, and how we turn ourselves unconsciously toward dhimmitude by nature of our traditional revolutionary liberalism, not knowing that it is vitiated by reactionary pseudo-Left ideologues. Our innately benevelent Liberalism is corrupted by fascisms that we do not always recognize as such; and it is one goal of this blog to open the debate on fascist dhimmitude by exposing the fascist background of the Left dhimmis among us. Our good intentions, our platitudinizing, our cliches, and our normal moral decency lead us to the best opinion of others who, in truth, do not deserve our good opinions. They deserve our hatred, even our aggression. Our enemies are fascists. But who are our enemies, and how do we know we are not them? Maybe we are in favor of many of the Left axioms that truly are at root and branch fascist. It's our argument here that it's better to know the truth and choose evil than to do evil thinking we are doing good. Yes, much of the background reading in previous posts will be to many readers boring. That won't change here for a long time, not until the theoretical works are finished and the analytical work begins. But for those of us who continue struggling through the likes of Hobbes. et al., the insights into dhimmitude will pay off wonderfully in deep understanding. We will know our enemies better than they know themselves, and from that we will be able to formulate our own doctrines clearly in preparation for the founding of a new revolutionary movement that will, we hope, take on the professionalism of Lenin [cf. archive: "What is to be Done?"] and the praxis of William Walker to win our struggle against our own dhimmis, [cf. archive: "American Civil War."] Once this bank of histories is complete we can begin to address topicalities. Until such time, we remain commited to providing at least a beginning of in-depth texts on the history and nature of fascism.
In the article below we will see news that the Left and Right are combined in fascist dhimmitude. Many of the previous posts here show why that happened and how we can understand its roots. That building of the archival bank is not complete by any means, and it won't become more readable for some long time yet. We appreciate your patience and do not appologize for that which is to come.
***
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/050623/23euroleft.htm?track=rss
National Security Watch: Eurolefties fund Iraq insurgency
Posted 6/23/05
By David E. Kaplan
Who's funding the insurgents in Iraq? The list of suspects is long: ex-Baathists, foreign jihadists, and angry Sunnis, to name a few. Now add to that roster hard-core Euroleftists.
Iraq insurgency vital to al Qaeda (6/22/05)
More from Nation & World
***
Turns out that far-left groups in western Europe are carrying on a campaign dubbed Ten Euros for the Resistance, offering aid and comfort to the car bombers, kidnappers, and snipers trying to destabilize the fledgling Iraq government. In the words of one Italian website, Iraq Libero (Free Iraq), the funds are meant for those fighting the occupanti imperialisti. The groups are an odd collection, made up largely of Marxists and Maoists, sprinkled with an array of Arab emigres and aging, old-school fascists, according to Lorenzo Vidino, an analyst on European terrorism based at The Investigative Project in Washington, D.C. "It's the old anticapitalist, anti-U.S., anti-Israel crowd," says Vidino, who has been to their gatherings, where he saw activists from Austria, Denmark, Germany, and Italy. "The glue that binds them together is anti-Americanism." The groups are working on an October conference to further support "the Iraqi Resistance." A key goal is to expand backing for the insurgents from the fringe left to the broader antiwar and antiglobalization movements.
One conference sponsor, Campo Antiimperialista (the Anti-Imperialist Camp), credits the 10-euro campaign for buying 2 tons of medicine for Al Anbar province, a hotbed of resistance, to be distributed "completely independent from both the occupiers as well as their local puppets."
But some funds may be buying more deadly stuff; one leader boasted to Vidino that the campaign will send "everything it takes" for the resistance to win, including weaponry. Neither Iraq Libero nor Campo Antiimperialista responded to questions from U.S. News about where their funds end up. The groups' impact, though, may ultimately be limited. "They have a pretty big following, but we're not talking about big money," says Vidino. At one conference, he notes, many militants looked so ragged he doubted they even had 10 euros in their pockets.
***
If this were simply a gaggle of frayed and greying bums on the streets and la stradas, then why would we care? Ten-a-pennie losers do not make a ruffle; but the problem we have is that the bums are simply the ugly face on the public streets whom we see mouthing the assumed attitudes of the masses. Like it or not, dhimitude is the ruling ethos of the West, not Modernity. Why? Because Modernity is weak. And how do we redeem Modernity in the eyes and minds of the public?
We'll come to that soon.
Monday, June 27, 2005
Where is the Life we have lost in Living?
Moslems do have valid points of criticism of the modern world, and so do the feared and hated fundamentalist Christian. We would do well to consider those objections when we think of our positions as anti-fascists and anti-jihadis.
Below is a truncated version of a Victorian poem by Francis Thompson, followed by a news article from the Internet. There's more than a gulf of nearly 100 years between the two pieces: There's a gulf between us today in our own settlement of mind, as T.S. Elliot writes above. What is better? What is the Good Deed we wish to do?
***
"The Hound of Heaven."
I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
***
Whether man's heart or life it be which yields
Thee harvest, must Thy harvest fields
Be dunged with rotten death?
Now of that long pursuit
Comes on at hand the bruit;
That Voice is round me like a bursting sea:
"And is thy earth so marred,
Shattered in shard on shard?
Lo, all things fly thee, for thou fliest Me!
Strange, piteous, futile thing,
Wherefore should any set thee love apart?
Seeing none but I makes much of naught," He said,
"And human love needs human meriting,
How hast thou merited--
Of all man's clotted clay rhe dingiest clot?
Alack, thou knowest not
How little worthy of any love thou art!
Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee
Save Me, save only Me?
All which I took from thee I did but take,
Not for thy harms.
But just that thou might'st seek it in my arms.
All which thy child's mistake
Fancies as lost, I have stored for the at home;
Rise, clasp My hand, and come!"
Halts by me that footfall;
Is my gloom, after all,
Shade of His hand, outstreched caressingly?
"Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest,
I am He Whom thou seekest!
Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest Me."
Francis Thompson (1859-1907)
***
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,15739502-13762,00.html
News Home | Story
Boffins create zombie dogs
By Nick Buchan of NEWS.com.au
June 27, 2005
From:
SCIENTISTS have created eerie zombie dogs, reanimating the canines after several hours of clinical death in attempts to develop suspended animation for humans. US scientists have succeeded in reviving the dogs after three hours of clinical death, paving the way for trials on humans within years.
Pittsburgh's Safar Centre for Resuscitation Research has developed a technique in which subject's veins are drained of blood and filled with an ice-cold salt solution.
The animals are considered scientifically dead, as they stop breathing and have no heartbeat or brain activity.
But three hours later, their blood is replaced and the zombie dogs are brought back to life with an electric shock.
Plans to test the technique on humans should be realised within a year, according to the Safar Centre.
However rather than sending people to sleep for years, then bringing them back to life to benefit from medical advances, the boffins would be happy to keep people in this state for just a few hours,
But even a this should be enough to save lives such as battlefield casualties and victims of stabbings or gunshot wounds, who have suffered huge blood loss.
Duing the procedure blood is replaced with saline solution at a few degrees above zero. The dogs' body temperature drops to only 7C, compared with the usual 37C, inducing a state of hypothermia before death.
Although the animals are clinically dead, their tissues and organs are perfectly preserved.
Damaged blood vessels and tissues can then be repaired via surgery. The dogs are brought back to life by returning the blood to their bodies,giving them 100 per cent oxygen and applying electric shocks to restart their hearts.
Tests show they are perfectly normal, with no brain damage.
"The results are stunning. I think in 10 years we will be able to prevent death in a certain segment of those using this technology," said one US battlefield doctor.
***
Fascism offers some answers to the questions of life that we Moderns cannot answer with facility. We have to unravel our responses to these dilemmas to know where we stand so we can effectivley combat fascist Islam. There's more to this problem than deportation of Europe's and America's Moslem masses and melting Mecca. What kind of people are we, and what kind of people do we wish to become in our quest for universal revolutionary modernity?
Below is a truncated version of a Victorian poem by Francis Thompson, followed by a news article from the Internet. There's more than a gulf of nearly 100 years between the two pieces: There's a gulf between us today in our own settlement of mind, as T.S. Elliot writes above. What is better? What is the Good Deed we wish to do?
***
"The Hound of Heaven."
I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
***
Whether man's heart or life it be which yields
Thee harvest, must Thy harvest fields
Be dunged with rotten death?
Now of that long pursuit
Comes on at hand the bruit;
That Voice is round me like a bursting sea:
"And is thy earth so marred,
Shattered in shard on shard?
Lo, all things fly thee, for thou fliest Me!
Strange, piteous, futile thing,
Wherefore should any set thee love apart?
Seeing none but I makes much of naught," He said,
"And human love needs human meriting,
How hast thou merited--
Of all man's clotted clay rhe dingiest clot?
Alack, thou knowest not
How little worthy of any love thou art!
Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee
Save Me, save only Me?
All which I took from thee I did but take,
Not for thy harms.
But just that thou might'st seek it in my arms.
All which thy child's mistake
Fancies as lost, I have stored for the at home;
Rise, clasp My hand, and come!"
Halts by me that footfall;
Is my gloom, after all,
Shade of His hand, outstreched caressingly?
"Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest,
I am He Whom thou seekest!
Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest Me."
Francis Thompson (1859-1907)
***
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,15739502-13762,00.html
News Home | Story
Boffins create zombie dogs
By Nick Buchan of NEWS.com.au
June 27, 2005
From:
SCIENTISTS have created eerie zombie dogs, reanimating the canines after several hours of clinical death in attempts to develop suspended animation for humans. US scientists have succeeded in reviving the dogs after three hours of clinical death, paving the way for trials on humans within years.
Pittsburgh's Safar Centre for Resuscitation Research has developed a technique in which subject's veins are drained of blood and filled with an ice-cold salt solution.
The animals are considered scientifically dead, as they stop breathing and have no heartbeat or brain activity.
But three hours later, their blood is replaced and the zombie dogs are brought back to life with an electric shock.
Plans to test the technique on humans should be realised within a year, according to the Safar Centre.
However rather than sending people to sleep for years, then bringing them back to life to benefit from medical advances, the boffins would be happy to keep people in this state for just a few hours,
But even a this should be enough to save lives such as battlefield casualties and victims of stabbings or gunshot wounds, who have suffered huge blood loss.
Duing the procedure blood is replaced with saline solution at a few degrees above zero. The dogs' body temperature drops to only 7C, compared with the usual 37C, inducing a state of hypothermia before death.
Although the animals are clinically dead, their tissues and organs are perfectly preserved.
Damaged blood vessels and tissues can then be repaired via surgery. The dogs are brought back to life by returning the blood to their bodies,giving them 100 per cent oxygen and applying electric shocks to restart their hearts.
Tests show they are perfectly normal, with no brain damage.
"The results are stunning. I think in 10 years we will be able to prevent death in a certain segment of those using this technology," said one US battlefield doctor.
***
Fascism offers some answers to the questions of life that we Moderns cannot answer with facility. We have to unravel our responses to these dilemmas to know where we stand so we can effectivley combat fascist Islam. There's more to this problem than deportation of Europe's and America's Moslem masses and melting Mecca. What kind of people are we, and what kind of people do we wish to become in our quest for universal revolutionary modernity?
George Sorel
Our concern here is to draw lines between ourselves and our enemies, between those of us who favor and offer to fight for the spread of the Good in the pursuit of the telos of Humanity; in short, those of us who are willing to make a commitment to the spread of universal human rights and the protection of those who are oppressed by fascism of all kinds; and those who are fascists themselves, particularly Islamic fascists and their dhimmi fascists collaborators.
Most readers here understand well the fine points of Islamic ideology, and there's little need to go into it here when there are honest experts available on-line, such as Robert Spencer at http://jihadwatch.org.; but it is necessary for us here to understand the nature of Islam's inherent fascism and the fascism of the dhimmi intellectuals who aid and abet it. Therefore, we spend some long amounts of time defining and elaborating on the definition of fascism so that we can move beyond purile pejoratives and to a clear understanding of fascism itself to get a clear understanding of the nature of our struggle and of our enemies, to know their history, their motivations, their beliefs, some of which, as modern revolutionaries, we actually share with them. Below we'll look at some of the ideas of Georges Sorel, a French intellectual who is influential in the area of extremist ideologies of the 20th century, and also who is capable of providing us today with useful insights as well as tactics for our struggle against fascist Islam and dhimmitude. We can learn the fine-points of fascist Islam, but we must also know the fine-points of fascist Left dhimmitude to free ourselves from illusions that we are like them or in agreement with things that once we consider them we will find are ordinary beliefs held by the majority of reasonable and rational people but that are ideas sneaked into the public discourse via fascism, ideas that have no right place in the liberal democracy of Modernity.
We'll look at the concept of Left and Right and see, as Robespierre did when faced with capture and execution by his past fellows, that "Extremes meet." That when we argue that there is a conflation of Left and Right, and that they are both fascist, there is certain truth to it, not simply name-calling and bitterness. The so-called Post-modern Left is a fascism, and we'll see so clearly in the course of this blog; we'll see how to draw a line between reasonable and rational democrats and liberals and those fascist dhimmis who've betrayed democracy and Liberalism in favor of collaboration with the forces of reaction and fascist Islam for whatever various reasons they might have. We won't be fooled again. We can also take some of the ideas of the fscsists to use against them. Sorel is roughly a bad guy who had some good ideas. We can use them to our benefit, and we can see what the fascist elements are in his work and see those same elements in our Leftist dhimmi compatriots. When we know who aour friends are and who our enemies are--and why--then we'll be properly prepared for the struggle against fascism, prepared and ready to win this war against evil. Us and them, and we shall meet.
Our political vocabulary gained "Left-wing" and "Right -wing" from the division of interests and therefore factions within the French Revolutionary parliament; and those so far from either wing that they had to find seating in the top-most rows being known as the Montanists, those at the top of a mountain, extremists who looked down, who were removed from the general debate, who occupied the metaphical cheap-seats. In terms of 19th century European socialism, Anarcho-Syndicalism occupies the top of the revolutionary mountain, so to say, a place prominently occupied by the ghost of Georges Sorel, sometime right-wing fanatic, sometimes left-wing fanatic, but always at the edge of reality in political terms.
What was politically extreme 100 years ago, such as female sufferage, is today seen as completely normal and universally applicable to all. But Sorel is still an extremist. He will always be an extremist because his position is of extremism for its own sake; but his extremism is taken on by the Left and the Right in the 20th century, and it was made main-stream, made ordinary by the extremist status quo of Communist Russia, Fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany.
Sorel, though a menace to Modernity in many ways, is also capable of providing us, Modern Revolutionaries, with some useful tactical weapons, even strategic weapons in our fight against fascism, the Islamic and the dhimmi-Left fascism of today.
If we are going to win this war against anti-Modern Revolution, against fascist Islam and dhimmitude, then we must organize ourselves professionally. We've already begun the process here of discussing Lenin's essay What is to be Done," a work on organizing a party of professional revolutionaries, and here we'll look at some of Sorel's concepts, such as "Myth," "The General Strike," and "Force and Violence."
(Due to the length of this post we'll continue next time in greater detail.)
***
Although he claimed himself to be a Marxian, Sorel held a deep suspicion for "armchair socialists", particularly those who mumbled about the inevitability of "progress".
Instead, Sorel advocated massive general strikes and worker action -- not for the small concessions from employers those might bring, but rather as a way of continuously disrupting the capitalist industrial machine and thus eventually achieving worker control of means of production.
In his most famous work (1908), Sorel emphasized the violent and irrational motivations of social and economic conduct (echoing Pareto in many ways). His identification of the need for a deliberately conceived "myth" to sway crowds into concerted action was put to use by the Fascist and Communist movements of the 1920s and after.
http://cepa.newschool.edu/
Sorel found in the political and social life of bourgeois democracy the triumph of mediocrity and espoused various forms of socialism, chiefly revolutionary syndicalism. In his best-known work, Reflections on Violence (1908, tr. 1912), which became the basic text of syndicalism, Sorel expounded his theory of violence as the creative power of the proletariat that could overcome force, the coercive economic power of the bourgeoisie. He supported belief in myths about future social developments, arguing that such belief promoted social progress. Sorel supported at various times such disparate alternatives to the existing order as extreme French monarchism and the Bolshevik Revolution.
1
See J. J. Roth, The Cult of Violence: Sorel and the Sorelians (1980); J. R. Jennings, Georges Sorel (1985).
http://www.bartleby.com/
GEORGES SOREL
From Reflections on Violence
Although Marxist socialism was the dominant political ideology of workers, syndicalism was widely preferred in areas of France, Spain, and Italy. Syndicalism grew out of trade union associations that espoused the utopian vision of one day controlling their industries and, eventually, the political state. The strike became the central weapon of syndicalism, but it was the general strike that made syndicalism revolutionary. The thousands of strikes in Europe at the end of the century offered the potential of one mighty, total work-stoppage that would ruin capitalism and dismantle the state.
Georges Sorel (1847-1922) wrote his treatise on syndicalism in 1908. The following excerpt includes Sorel's important notion of the general strike as a mythic belief, the widespread acceptance of which would prompt collective action by workers as well as soften employers' resolve against concessions.
***
Against this noisy, garrulous, and lying Socialism, which is exploited by ambitious people of every description, which amuses a few buffoons, and which is admired by decadents-- revolutionary Syndicalism takes its 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. 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 possibility of the actual realisation of the general strike has been much discussed; it has been stated that the Socialist war could not be decided in one single battle. To the people who think themselves cautious, practical, and scientific the difficulty of setting great masses of the proletariat in motion at the same moment seems prodigious; they have analysed the difficulties in detail which such an enormous struggle would present. It is the opinion of the Socialist-sociologists, as also of the politicians, that the general strike is a popular dream, characteristic of the beginnings of a working-class movement; we have had quoted against us the authority of Sidney Webb, who has decreed that the general strike is an illusion of youth, of which the English workers-- whom the monopolists of sociology have so often presented to us as the depositaries of the true conception of the working-class movement-- soon rid themselves.
And yet without leaving the present, without reasoning about this future, which seems forever condemned to escape our reason, we should be unable to act at all. Experience shows that the framing of a future, in some indeterminate time, may, when it is done in a certain way, be very effective, and have very few inconveniences; this happens when the anticipations of the future take the form of those myths, which enclose with them all the strongest inclinations of a people, of a party, or of a class, inclinations which recur to the mind with the insistence of instincts in all the circumstances of life; and which give an aspect of complete reality to the hopes of immediate action by which, more easily than by any other method, men can reform their desires, passions, and mental activity. We know, moreover, that these social myths in no way prevent a man profiting by the observations which he makes in the course of his life, and form no obstacle to the pursuit of his normal occupations.The truth of this may be shown by numerous examples.
The first Christians expected the return of Christ and the total ruin of the pagan world, with the inauguration of the kingdom of the saints, at the end of the'first generation.' The catastrophe did not come to pass, but Christian thought profited so greatly from the apocalyptic myth that certain contemporary scholars maintain that the whole preaching of Christ referred solely to this one point. The hopes which Luther and Calvin had formed of the religious exaltation of Europe were by no means realised; these fathers of the Reformation very soon seemed men of a past era; for present-day Protestants they belong rather to the Middle Ages than to modern times, and the problems which troubled them most occupy very little place in contemporary Protestantism. Must we for that reason deny the immense result which came from their dreams of Christian renovation?
In our own times Mazzini pursued what the wiseacres of his time called a mad chimera; but it can no longer be denied that, without Mazzini, Italy would never have become a great power, and that he did more for Italian unity than Cavour and all the politicians of his school.
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. Everything 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
***
Georges Sorel (1847-1922) stated his theory of social myths most clearly in a letter to Daniel Halevy in 1907, from which these selections are taken. Sorel was a socialist, a syndicalist, and after 1917, a vigorous admirer of Lenin. His anti-intellectualism and his passion for revolutionary activity in place of rational discourse made him most influential in shaping the ultimate direction of fascism, especially in Mussolini's Italy.
***
...Men who are participating in a great social movement always picture their coming action as a battle in which their cause is certain to triumph. These constructions, knowledge of which is so important for historians, I propose to call myths; the syndicalist "general strike" and Marx's catastrophic revolution are such myths. As remarkable examples of such myths, I have given those which were constructed by primitive Christianity, by the Reformation, by the Revolution and by the followers of Mazzini. I now wish to show that we should not attempt to analyze such groups of images in the way that we analyze a thing into its elements, but that they must be taken as a whole, as historical forces, and that we should be especially careful not to make any comparison between accomplished fact and the picture people had formed for themselves before action.
I could have given one more example which is perhaps still more striking: Catholics have never been discouraged even in the hardest trials, because they have always pictured the history of the Church as a series of battles between Satan and the hierarchy supported by Christ; every new difficulty which arises is only an episode in a war which must finally end in the victory of Catholicism.
In employing the term myth I believed that I had made a happy choice, because I thus put myself in a position to refuse any discussion whatever with the people who wish to submit the idea of a general strike to a detailed criticism, and who accumulate objections against its practical possibility. It appears, on the contrary, that I had made a most unfortunate choice, for while some told me that myths were only suitable to a primitive state of society, others imagined that I thought the modern world might be moved by illusions analogous in nature to those which Renan thought might usefully replace religion. But there has been a worse misunderstanding than this even, for it has been asserted that my theory of myths was only a kind of lawyer's plea, a falsification of the real opinions of the revolutionaries, the sophistry of an intellectual.
If this were true, I should not have been exactly fortunate, for I have always tried to escape the influence of that intellectual philosophy, which seems to me a great hindrance to the historian who allows himself to be dominated by it.
In can understand the fear that this myth of the general strike inspires in many worthy progressives, on account of its character of infinity, the world of today is very much inclined to return to the opinions of the ancients and to subordinate ethics to the smooth working of public affairs, which results in a definition of virtue as the golden mean; as long as socialism remains a doctrine expressed only in words, it is very easy to deflect it towards this doctrine of the golden mean; but this transformation is manifestly impossible when the myth of the "general strike" is introduced, as this implies an absolute revolution. You know as well as I do that all that is best in the modern mind is derived from this "torment of the infinite"; you are not one of those people who look upon the tricks by means of which readers can be deceived by words, as happy discoveries. That is why you will not condemn me for having attached great worth to a myth which gives to socialism such high moral value and such great sincerity. It is because the theory of myths tends to produce such fine results that so many seek to refute it....
As long as there are no myths accepted by the masses, one may go on talking of revolts indefinitely, without ever provoking any revolutionary movement; this is what gives such importance to the general strike and renders it so odious to socialists who are afraid of a revolution....
The revolutionary myths which exist at the present time are almost free from any such mixture; by means of them it is possible to understand the activity, the feelings and the ideas of the masses preparing themselves to enter on a decisive struggle: the myths are not descriptions of things, but expressions of a determination to act. A Utopia is...and intellectual product; it is the work of theorists who, after observing and discussing the known facts, seek to establish a model to which they can compare existing society in order to estimate the amount of good and evil it contains. It is a combination of imaginary institutions having sufficient analogies to real institutions for the jurist to be able to reason about them; it is a construction which can be taken to pieces, and certain parts of it have been shaped in such a way that they can...be fitted into approaching legislation. While contemporary myths lead men to prepare themselves for a combat which will destroy the existing state of things, the effect of Utopias has always been to direct men's minds towards reforms which can be brought about by patching up the existing system; it is not surprising, then, that so many makers of Utopias were able to develop into able statesmen when they had acquired a greater experience of political life. A myth cannot be refuted, since it is, at bottom, identical with the conviction of a group, being the expression of these convictions in the language of movement; and it is, in consequence, unanalyzable into parts which could be placed on the plane of historical descriptions. A Utopia, on the other hand, can be discussed like any other social constitution; the spontaneous movements it presupposes can be compared with the movements actually observed in the course of history, and we can in this way evaluate its verisimilitude; it is possible to refute Utopias by showing that the economic system on which they have been made to rest is incompatible with the necessary conditions of modern production.
For a long time Socialism was scarcely anything but a Utopia; the Marxists were right in claiming for their master the honor of bringing about a change in this state of things; Socialism has now become the preparation of the masses employed in great industries for the suppression of the State and property; and it is no longer necessary, therefore, to discuss how men must organize themselves in order to enjoy future happiness; everything is reduced to the revolutionary apprenticeship of the proletariat. Unfortunately Marx was not acquainted with facts which have now become familiar to us; we know better than he did what strikes are, because we have been able to observe economic conflict of considerable extent and duration; the myth of the "general strike" has become popular, and is now firmly established in the minds of the workers; we possess ideas about violence that it would have been difficult for him to have formed; we can then complete his doctrine, instead of making commentaries on his text, as his unfortunate disciples have done for so long.
In this way Utopias tend to disappear completely from Socialism; Socialism has no longer any need to concern itself with the organization of industry since capitalism does that....
People who are living in this world of "myths," are secure from all refutation; this has led many to assert that Socialism is a kind of religion. For a long time people have been struck by the fact that religious convictions are unaffected by criticism, and from that they have concluded that everything which claims to be beyond science must be a religion. It has been observed also that Christianity tends at the present day to be less a system of dogmas than a Christian life, i.e., moral reform penetrating to the roots of one's being; consequently, new analogy has been discovered between religion and the revolutionary Socialism which aims at the apprenticeship, preparation, and even reconstruction of the individual -- a gigantic task....
...by the side of Utopias there have always been myths capable of urging on the workers to revolt. For a long time these myths were founded on the legends of the Revolution, and they preserved all their value as long as these legends remained unshaken. Today the confidence of the Socialists is greater than ever since the myth of the general strike dominates all the truly working-class movement. No failure proves anything against Socialism since the latter has become a work of preparation (for revolution); if they are checked, it merely proves that the apprenticeship has been insufficient; they must set to work again with more courage, persistence, and confidence than before; their experience of labor has taught workmen that it is by means of patient apprenticeship that a man may become a true comrade, and it is also the only way of becoming a true revolutionary.
[Source: The full text of Sorel's Letter to Daniel Halevy is presented in his Reflections on Violence (1908), trans. T. E. Hulme and J. Roth, (New York: Collier, 1950), pp.26-56.]
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copyright © 2000 Steven Kreis
Most readers here understand well the fine points of Islamic ideology, and there's little need to go into it here when there are honest experts available on-line, such as Robert Spencer at http://jihadwatch.org.; but it is necessary for us here to understand the nature of Islam's inherent fascism and the fascism of the dhimmi intellectuals who aid and abet it. Therefore, we spend some long amounts of time defining and elaborating on the definition of fascism so that we can move beyond purile pejoratives and to a clear understanding of fascism itself to get a clear understanding of the nature of our struggle and of our enemies, to know their history, their motivations, their beliefs, some of which, as modern revolutionaries, we actually share with them. Below we'll look at some of the ideas of Georges Sorel, a French intellectual who is influential in the area of extremist ideologies of the 20th century, and also who is capable of providing us today with useful insights as well as tactics for our struggle against fascist Islam and dhimmitude. We can learn the fine-points of fascist Islam, but we must also know the fine-points of fascist Left dhimmitude to free ourselves from illusions that we are like them or in agreement with things that once we consider them we will find are ordinary beliefs held by the majority of reasonable and rational people but that are ideas sneaked into the public discourse via fascism, ideas that have no right place in the liberal democracy of Modernity.
We'll look at the concept of Left and Right and see, as Robespierre did when faced with capture and execution by his past fellows, that "Extremes meet." That when we argue that there is a conflation of Left and Right, and that they are both fascist, there is certain truth to it, not simply name-calling and bitterness. The so-called Post-modern Left is a fascism, and we'll see so clearly in the course of this blog; we'll see how to draw a line between reasonable and rational democrats and liberals and those fascist dhimmis who've betrayed democracy and Liberalism in favor of collaboration with the forces of reaction and fascist Islam for whatever various reasons they might have. We won't be fooled again. We can also take some of the ideas of the fscsists to use against them. Sorel is roughly a bad guy who had some good ideas. We can use them to our benefit, and we can see what the fascist elements are in his work and see those same elements in our Leftist dhimmi compatriots. When we know who aour friends are and who our enemies are--and why--then we'll be properly prepared for the struggle against fascism, prepared and ready to win this war against evil. Us and them, and we shall meet.
Our political vocabulary gained "Left-wing" and "Right -wing" from the division of interests and therefore factions within the French Revolutionary parliament; and those so far from either wing that they had to find seating in the top-most rows being known as the Montanists, those at the top of a mountain, extremists who looked down, who were removed from the general debate, who occupied the metaphical cheap-seats. In terms of 19th century European socialism, Anarcho-Syndicalism occupies the top of the revolutionary mountain, so to say, a place prominently occupied by the ghost of Georges Sorel, sometime right-wing fanatic, sometimes left-wing fanatic, but always at the edge of reality in political terms.
What was politically extreme 100 years ago, such as female sufferage, is today seen as completely normal and universally applicable to all. But Sorel is still an extremist. He will always be an extremist because his position is of extremism for its own sake; but his extremism is taken on by the Left and the Right in the 20th century, and it was made main-stream, made ordinary by the extremist status quo of Communist Russia, Fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany.
Sorel, though a menace to Modernity in many ways, is also capable of providing us, Modern Revolutionaries, with some useful tactical weapons, even strategic weapons in our fight against fascism, the Islamic and the dhimmi-Left fascism of today.
If we are going to win this war against anti-Modern Revolution, against fascist Islam and dhimmitude, then we must organize ourselves professionally. We've already begun the process here of discussing Lenin's essay What is to be Done," a work on organizing a party of professional revolutionaries, and here we'll look at some of Sorel's concepts, such as "Myth," "The General Strike," and "Force and Violence."
(Due to the length of this post we'll continue next time in greater detail.)
***
Although he claimed himself to be a Marxian, Sorel held a deep suspicion for "armchair socialists", particularly those who mumbled about the inevitability of "progress".
Instead, Sorel advocated massive general strikes and worker action -- not for the small concessions from employers those might bring, but rather as a way of continuously disrupting the capitalist industrial machine and thus eventually achieving worker control of means of production.
In his most famous work (1908), Sorel emphasized the violent and irrational motivations of social and economic conduct (echoing Pareto in many ways). His identification of the need for a deliberately conceived "myth" to sway crowds into concerted action was put to use by the Fascist and Communist movements of the 1920s and after.
http://cepa.newschool.edu/
Sorel found in the political and social life of bourgeois democracy the triumph of mediocrity and espoused various forms of socialism, chiefly revolutionary syndicalism. In his best-known work, Reflections on Violence (1908, tr. 1912), which became the basic text of syndicalism, Sorel expounded his theory of violence as the creative power of the proletariat that could overcome force, the coercive economic power of the bourgeoisie. He supported belief in myths about future social developments, arguing that such belief promoted social progress. Sorel supported at various times such disparate alternatives to the existing order as extreme French monarchism and the Bolshevik Revolution.
1
See J. J. Roth, The Cult of Violence: Sorel and the Sorelians (1980); J. R. Jennings, Georges Sorel (1985).
http://www.bartleby.com/
GEORGES SOREL
From Reflections on Violence
Although Marxist socialism was the dominant political ideology of workers, syndicalism was widely preferred in areas of France, Spain, and Italy. Syndicalism grew out of trade union associations that espoused the utopian vision of one day controlling their industries and, eventually, the political state. The strike became the central weapon of syndicalism, but it was the general strike that made syndicalism revolutionary. The thousands of strikes in Europe at the end of the century offered the potential of one mighty, total work-stoppage that would ruin capitalism and dismantle the state.
Georges Sorel (1847-1922) wrote his treatise on syndicalism in 1908. The following excerpt includes Sorel's important notion of the general strike as a mythic belief, the widespread acceptance of which would prompt collective action by workers as well as soften employers' resolve against concessions.
***
Against this noisy, garrulous, and lying Socialism, which is exploited by ambitious people of every description, which amuses a few buffoons, and which is admired by decadents-- revolutionary Syndicalism takes its 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. 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 possibility of the actual realisation of the general strike has been much discussed; it has been stated that the Socialist war could not be decided in one single battle. To the people who think themselves cautious, practical, and scientific the difficulty of setting great masses of the proletariat in motion at the same moment seems prodigious; they have analysed the difficulties in detail which such an enormous struggle would present. It is the opinion of the Socialist-sociologists, as also of the politicians, that the general strike is a popular dream, characteristic of the beginnings of a working-class movement; we have had quoted against us the authority of Sidney Webb, who has decreed that the general strike is an illusion of youth, of which the English workers-- whom the monopolists of sociology have so often presented to us as the depositaries of the true conception of the working-class movement-- soon rid themselves.
And yet without leaving the present, without reasoning about this future, which seems forever condemned to escape our reason, we should be unable to act at all. Experience shows that the framing of a future, in some indeterminate time, may, when it is done in a certain way, be very effective, and have very few inconveniences; this happens when the anticipations of the future take the form of those myths, which enclose with them all the strongest inclinations of a people, of a party, or of a class, inclinations which recur to the mind with the insistence of instincts in all the circumstances of life; and which give an aspect of complete reality to the hopes of immediate action by which, more easily than by any other method, men can reform their desires, passions, and mental activity. We know, moreover, that these social myths in no way prevent a man profiting by the observations which he makes in the course of his life, and form no obstacle to the pursuit of his normal occupations.The truth of this may be shown by numerous examples.
The first Christians expected the return of Christ and the total ruin of the pagan world, with the inauguration of the kingdom of the saints, at the end of the'first generation.' The catastrophe did not come to pass, but Christian thought profited so greatly from the apocalyptic myth that certain contemporary scholars maintain that the whole preaching of Christ referred solely to this one point. The hopes which Luther and Calvin had formed of the religious exaltation of Europe were by no means realised; these fathers of the Reformation very soon seemed men of a past era; for present-day Protestants they belong rather to the Middle Ages than to modern times, and the problems which troubled them most occupy very little place in contemporary Protestantism. Must we for that reason deny the immense result which came from their dreams of Christian renovation?
In our own times Mazzini pursued what the wiseacres of his time called a mad chimera; but it can no longer be denied that, without Mazzini, Italy would never have become a great power, and that he did more for Italian unity than Cavour and all the politicians of his school.
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. Everything 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
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Georges Sorel (1847-1922) stated his theory of social myths most clearly in a letter to Daniel Halevy in 1907, from which these selections are taken. Sorel was a socialist, a syndicalist, and after 1917, a vigorous admirer of Lenin. His anti-intellectualism and his passion for revolutionary activity in place of rational discourse made him most influential in shaping the ultimate direction of fascism, especially in Mussolini's Italy.
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...Men who are participating in a great social movement always picture their coming action as a battle in which their cause is certain to triumph. These constructions, knowledge of which is so important for historians, I propose to call myths; the syndicalist "general strike" and Marx's catastrophic revolution are such myths. As remarkable examples of such myths, I have given those which were constructed by primitive Christianity, by the Reformation, by the Revolution and by the followers of Mazzini. I now wish to show that we should not attempt to analyze such groups of images in the way that we analyze a thing into its elements, but that they must be taken as a whole, as historical forces, and that we should be especially careful not to make any comparison between accomplished fact and the picture people had formed for themselves before action.
I could have given one more example which is perhaps still more striking: Catholics have never been discouraged even in the hardest trials, because they have always pictured the history of the Church as a series of battles between Satan and the hierarchy supported by Christ; every new difficulty which arises is only an episode in a war which must finally end in the victory of Catholicism.
In employing the term myth I believed that I had made a happy choice, because I thus put myself in a position to refuse any discussion whatever with the people who wish to submit the idea of a general strike to a detailed criticism, and who accumulate objections against its practical possibility. It appears, on the contrary, that I had made a most unfortunate choice, for while some told me that myths were only suitable to a primitive state of society, others imagined that I thought the modern world might be moved by illusions analogous in nature to those which Renan thought might usefully replace religion. But there has been a worse misunderstanding than this even, for it has been asserted that my theory of myths was only a kind of lawyer's plea, a falsification of the real opinions of the revolutionaries, the sophistry of an intellectual.
If this were true, I should not have been exactly fortunate, for I have always tried to escape the influence of that intellectual philosophy, which seems to me a great hindrance to the historian who allows himself to be dominated by it.
In can understand the fear that this myth of the general strike inspires in many worthy progressives, on account of its character of infinity, the world of today is very much inclined to return to the opinions of the ancients and to subordinate ethics to the smooth working of public affairs, which results in a definition of virtue as the golden mean; as long as socialism remains a doctrine expressed only in words, it is very easy to deflect it towards this doctrine of the golden mean; but this transformation is manifestly impossible when the myth of the "general strike" is introduced, as this implies an absolute revolution. You know as well as I do that all that is best in the modern mind is derived from this "torment of the infinite"; you are not one of those people who look upon the tricks by means of which readers can be deceived by words, as happy discoveries. That is why you will not condemn me for having attached great worth to a myth which gives to socialism such high moral value and such great sincerity. It is because the theory of myths tends to produce such fine results that so many seek to refute it....
As long as there are no myths accepted by the masses, one may go on talking of revolts indefinitely, without ever provoking any revolutionary movement; this is what gives such importance to the general strike and renders it so odious to socialists who are afraid of a revolution....
The revolutionary myths which exist at the present time are almost free from any such mixture; by means of them it is possible to understand the activity, the feelings and the ideas of the masses preparing themselves to enter on a decisive struggle: the myths are not descriptions of things, but expressions of a determination to act. A Utopia is...and intellectual product; it is the work of theorists who, after observing and discussing the known facts, seek to establish a model to which they can compare existing society in order to estimate the amount of good and evil it contains. It is a combination of imaginary institutions having sufficient analogies to real institutions for the jurist to be able to reason about them; it is a construction which can be taken to pieces, and certain parts of it have been shaped in such a way that they can...be fitted into approaching legislation. While contemporary myths lead men to prepare themselves for a combat which will destroy the existing state of things, the effect of Utopias has always been to direct men's minds towards reforms which can be brought about by patching up the existing system; it is not surprising, then, that so many makers of Utopias were able to develop into able statesmen when they had acquired a greater experience of political life. A myth cannot be refuted, since it is, at bottom, identical with the conviction of a group, being the expression of these convictions in the language of movement; and it is, in consequence, unanalyzable into parts which could be placed on the plane of historical descriptions. A Utopia, on the other hand, can be discussed like any other social constitution; the spontaneous movements it presupposes can be compared with the movements actually observed in the course of history, and we can in this way evaluate its verisimilitude; it is possible to refute Utopias by showing that the economic system on which they have been made to rest is incompatible with the necessary conditions of modern production.
For a long time Socialism was scarcely anything but a Utopia; the Marxists were right in claiming for their master the honor of bringing about a change in this state of things; Socialism has now become the preparation of the masses employed in great industries for the suppression of the State and property; and it is no longer necessary, therefore, to discuss how men must organize themselves in order to enjoy future happiness; everything is reduced to the revolutionary apprenticeship of the proletariat. Unfortunately Marx was not acquainted with facts which have now become familiar to us; we know better than he did what strikes are, because we have been able to observe economic conflict of considerable extent and duration; the myth of the "general strike" has become popular, and is now firmly established in the minds of the workers; we possess ideas about violence that it would have been difficult for him to have formed; we can then complete his doctrine, instead of making commentaries on his text, as his unfortunate disciples have done for so long.
In this way Utopias tend to disappear completely from Socialism; Socialism has no longer any need to concern itself with the organization of industry since capitalism does that....
People who are living in this world of "myths," are secure from all refutation; this has led many to assert that Socialism is a kind of religion. For a long time people have been struck by the fact that religious convictions are unaffected by criticism, and from that they have concluded that everything which claims to be beyond science must be a religion. It has been observed also that Christianity tends at the present day to be less a system of dogmas than a Christian life, i.e., moral reform penetrating to the roots of one's being; consequently, new analogy has been discovered between religion and the revolutionary Socialism which aims at the apprenticeship, preparation, and even reconstruction of the individual -- a gigantic task....
...by the side of Utopias there have always been myths capable of urging on the workers to revolt. For a long time these myths were founded on the legends of the Revolution, and they preserved all their value as long as these legends remained unshaken. Today the confidence of the Socialists is greater than ever since the myth of the general strike dominates all the truly working-class movement. No failure proves anything against Socialism since the latter has become a work of preparation (for revolution); if they are checked, it merely proves that the apprenticeship has been insufficient; they must set to work again with more courage, persistence, and confidence than before; their experience of labor has taught workmen that it is by means of patient apprenticeship that a man may become a true comrade, and it is also the only way of becoming a true revolutionary.
[Source: The full text of Sorel's Letter to Daniel Halevy is presented in his Reflections on Violence (1908), trans. T. E. Hulme and J. Roth, (New York: Collier, 1950), pp.26-56.]
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