Ceaselessly Tossed To and Fro

Seething In Vain

All Christians are utopians insofar as they believe that a day is coming when the Lord of heaven and earth will descend from heaven to dwell here and establish a perfect world, without sin–the unfolded and optimised and glorified Paradise of God’s original creation. 

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more  And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.  And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man.  He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God.  He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”  (Revelation 21: 1-4)

Most human beings–whether Christian or not–are utopians of one stripe or other.  But at the same time, there is a strong streak of dystopianism running through the race.  In the Unbelieving frame, evil threatens to destroy us all; were it to succeed, suffering devastation would be universal.  The causes vary–global warming, asteroid strike, economic inequality, famine, destructive ideologies, disease–but the general theme remains fairly constant.  So, the human race is bedevilled by a contradictory utopian-dystopian antithesis which gives no peace–social, personal or otherwise.  Sound familiar?  Any regular reader of a daily metropolitan newspaper will confirm it so. 

The Christian perspective is that evil is real, but since the incarnation, birth, life, death, resurrection, and ascension of our Lord Jesus Christ, evil and its powers have been defeated.  The Church is engaged in a mopping up operation, removing the last vestiges of sinful rebellion–pretty much like the Cleansing of the Shire, after the final defeat of Sauron the Great.  Thus, for the Christian, whilst evil is real, the possibility that the world will become a dystopian horror is a falsehood.  The world now belongs to our Man in heaven, not the Devil and his demons.  He rules, not they.  Thus, whilst creation groans under the weight of sin, awaiting its final redemption (as described in Revelation 21 above), the certainty of the coming utopia is already absolute, final, and inevitable.  Our Lord, our Man at God’s right hand, will see it done. 

The mind of Unbelief, however, is tossed back and forth between wild enthusiasm and euphoria, on the one hand, and dyspeptic discouragement and depression, on the other.  Societies and cultures ceaselessly move from one to the other as new generations succeed the former.  Christopher Dawson provides an historical example of utopian euphoria that erupted during the Enlightenment.  Commenting upon the Abbe de St. Pierre, he wrote:

But underlying all this was his fundamental doctrine of the “perpetual and unlimited augmentation of the universal human reason,” which will inevitably produce the golden age and the establishment of paradise upon earth.  Nor would this happy consummation be long delayed.  All that was necessary was the conversion of the powers that be to the Abbe’s  principles, for St. Pierre shared the beliefs of his age as to the unlimited possibilities of governmental action.

And this doctrine became the ruling conception of the new age, for while the God of the Deists was but a pale abstraction, a mere deus ex machina, the belief in Progress was an ideal capable of stirring men’s emotions and arousing a genuine religious enthusiasm. . . . The French Enlightenment was, in fact, the last of the great European heresies, and its appeal to Reason was in itself an act of faith which admitted no criticism.  [Christopher Dawson, Progress and Religion: An Historical Enquiry (London: Sheed and Ward, 1945),  p. 191f.]

The unquestioning belief in Reason and a belief in an inevitable Progress–technological, scientific and moral–still mark our age.  It is the secularist version of the Gospel.  Yet, despite all the hoopla and triumphalism of Man and His Progress, secular society is, at the same time, gnawed by fears of terrible calamities and fearful catastrophes.  Entire industries have been built upon such fear-mongering. 

The prevailing utopian-dystopian antithesis tears modern Unbelief apart.  It is the diabolical pattern of arrogance racked with perpetual fear.  It’s father is the Devil.  It is an accurate reflection of his heart.  It is the course of the Demons.  It leaves modern Western culture seething in vain, all its vainglorious hopes marred with dyspeptic fear-ridden discontent. 

Hollow Progress

 In Need of Mercy

Christians believe in progress.  For good reason.  They believe in things getting better because they believe in God, Who is the Creator, Sustainer and Redeemer of all things.  In other words, the Christian view of progress is decidedly non-secular. 

Redemptive history reveals at the earliest beginnings that without God, human history becomes a maelstrom of self-destructive evil.  The covenant God subsequently made with Noah assures us that never again would He permit evil to become universally regnant upon the earth.  Progress becomes at least possible in a world where evil is constantly being restrained from its worst excesses.

Secondly, the Bible declares God’s providential control and sustenance of His creation.  He loves what He has made, and hates the despoilation wrought by wickedness.  He feeds the animals and cares for them.  He sets boundaries for the sea.  He brings the life-giving sequence of the seasons. 

Thirdly, He has settled the reign over all things upon His Son, Who has come into human history to cast out the Devil and destroy all his works.  This gives a certain assurance of historical progress.
  In the end, the entirety of creation will be released from the burden that sin has placed upon it.  There is absolutely no doubt that this is happening and will continue happen.  It is as certain and rock-solid as God Himself and His oaths and covenant.  The only doubts about this come from our sinful impatience.  Things are not improving as fast as we would like–therefore, maybe, progress is chimerical, or so we are tempted to think from time to time. 

The ancient world had no belief in progress.  It was a distinctly Christian doctrine. This, from

Robert W. Merry’s review of John Gray, The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013)

. . . the power of the progress idea stems in part from the fact that it derives from a fundamental Christian doctrine—the idea of providence, of redemption. Gray notes in The Silence of Animals that no other civilization conceived any such phenomenon as the end of time, a concept given to the world by Jesus and St. Paul. Classical thinking, as well as the thinking of the ancient Egyptians and later of Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism, Shintoism and early Judaism, saw humanity as reflecting the rest of the natural world—essentially unchanging but subject to cycles of improvement and deterioration, rather like the seasons. “By creating the expectation of a radical alteration in human affairs,” writes Gray, “Christianity . . . founded the modern world.”

The modern world secularized this doctrine of  progress, stripping out all its Christian underpinnings.   The engine of progress was to be Man, freed from the constraints of religious myths and superstitions, cool, calm, calculating–above all, rational.  The humanist utopia beckoned.  Many in the nineteenth century believed fervently that it was almost upon them.  But now only fools and horses now still cling to the idea of secular progress.  A rising living standard and material progress does not a utopia make.

The apostles of secular humanism assured us all that progress included human nature.  By reason we would all be redeemed and human nature would be perfected.  We would evolve to a new order.

The noted British historian J. B. Bury (1861–1927) captured the power of this intellectual development when he wrote, “This doctrine of the possibility of indefinitely moulding the characters of men by laws and institutions . . . laid a foundation on which the theory of the perfectibility of humanity could be raised. It marked, therefore, an important stage in the development of the doctrine of Progress.”

We must pause here over this doctrine of progress. It may be the most powerful idea ever conceived in Western thought—emphasizing Western thought because the idea has had little resonance in other cultures or civilizations. It is the thesis that mankind has advanced slowly but inexorably over the centuries from a state of cultural backwardness, blindness and folly to ever more elevated stages of enlightenment and civilization—and that this human progression will continue indefinitely into the future. “No single idea,” wrote the American intellectual Robert Nisbet in 1980, “has been more important than, perhaps as important as, the idea of progress in Western civilization.” The U.S. historian Charles A. Beard once wrote that the emergence of the progress idea constituted “a discovery as important as the human mind has ever made, with implications for mankind that almost transcend imagination.” And Bury, who wrote a book on the subject, called it “the great transforming conception, which enables history to define her scope.”

To which we respond with a Chestertonian belly laugh.

The Christian view of history to this point has the course of the world fundamentally changing with the resurrection and ascension and session of our Lord Jesus Christ.  From that time onwards all would belong to Him and would answer to Him.  Under His aegis the West saw the emergence of the first Christendom.  It has broken down now, riven with apostasy and defalcation.  Thus, we see illustrated that the Christian doctrine of progress, whilst believing in its ultimate inevitability, does not make it automatic.  Human progress depends upon fidelity to Christ and faithfulness to His covenant.  When men come to see themselves as smarter, not just than the average bear, but of Christ Himself, consequences follow.  Judicial consequences.  We begin to taste the bitter fruits of the curses of the divine covenants, which are as certain and sure as their blessings.

So passes the West today.  Its ideologies have resulted in the deaths of hundreds of millions of human souls; it literally tears apart the bodies of its own children; unable now to replace its dying populations; it has become its own Black Death–a plague spread not by literal rats, but by ideological rodents of its own making.    

What will take the curse from us?  Or, more accurately, who will remove it?  There is only One given amongst men to do this thing.  Only the Lord Himself can remove this curse we have brought upon ourselves.  It is to Him that the West must turn, in humility and repentance and simple child-like belief. His invitation and command remains true: “come unto me, all who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.  Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly of heart, and you will find rest for your souls.  for my yoke is easy and my burden is light. (Matthew 11:28-30)

May the Lord have mercy upon us all. 
 

Progress and Its False Prophets

Moving Backwards

Most people assume that history is moving forward.  The present is better than the past.  The human race is heading to a higher, greater future.   In our secular humanist culture this assumption is undergirded by Darwinian evolutionism.  This has always seemed to us to be a most amusing idea: Darwinian evolutionism claims that development is achieved by the survival of the fittest.  That implies that there must be plenty of casualties along the way. 

Modern Western man never assumes that he (or Western culture) will be one of those casualties.  It’s always someone else, some other culture that is less than fit and will be destroyed.  Yet within the Darwinian philosophy, Islam might prove to be the better, more powerful culture that sweeps the West into the sea.  Darwinianism cannot predict such things; it only identifies the more fit ex post facto.  Herein lies one of its idiocies.
 

There is another stream of thought which has been married to Darwinianism.  Hegel proclaimed that human history was moving to an inevitable triumph.  The mechanism which moved it forward was the dialectic.  Each stage of human development had the seeds of its own destruction.  Those seeds would eventually coalesce into an antithesis, which would tear down the present, leading to a new synthesis, and another antithesis, and so on.  But eventually  the perfect would emerge, in which there would be no incipient antithesis any longer.  Thus, Francis Fukuyama wrote The End of History and the Last Man when liberal democracy triumphed over communism.  Fukuyama was asserting that western liberal democracy was the highest stage of human evolution: it represented the last (great) man, beyond which there would no development. A silly idea in hindsight, much mocked.  But consistent with current ideology, nonetheless.

The political ideology known as progressivism believes these inanities with a vengeance.  History is always making progress.  Given the previous rise and fall of prodigious numbers of civilizations this is a stupid position to hold, but idiocy is no respecter of persons.  Jonah Goldberg summarizes the progressive folly:

The Whiggish assumption in contemporary politics that today must be better than yesterday, this year more advanced than last year, this century wiser than the one that preceded it, is held most dogmatically by so-called progressives.  For them history is a vehicle with no reverse gear, and the engine that powers it is nothing more or less than the State.  This is the hardened, metaphysical, dogmatic cliche that makes it possible for journalists to glibly describe any expansion of the government into our lives as a “step forward” or an “advancement” and any retrenchment of government as a step “backward.”  [Jonah Goldberg, The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas (New York: Sentinel/Penguin, 2012), p.12.]

All of which is nonsense, of course.  But it explains why the dominant religion of secular humanism and its Commentariat mouthpieces despise the Christian faith–for it speaks of judgment to come.   Christianity is thus rejected as blasphemous from the outset.  When Christians testify to the secular humanist world that if a certain course is pursued it will result in great harm and damage, even destruction, the prevailing religious secular orthodoxy cannot accept it.  It is deaf.  It simply does not compute.  Worse, it gives license to attack Christians as either mad or negative, evil, judgemental, and destructive.  Why?  Because they are questioning the religion of secular progress.

In the time of the apostles, sometimes rulers would choose the deluded, mad option.  When Paul was defending himself before Agrippa and Festus, we read that Festus said, “Paul you are out of your mind!  Your great learning is driving you mad.”  (Acts 26: 24)  Today, given the stranglehold of progressive ideology over our culture, it is much more common to see Christians rejected as being antithetical to society’s interests: negative, and destructive and even subversive is the Christian Gospel which rejects the implicit utopianism of our generation.

 The bottom line is this: without Christ the future of any culture is never bright.  We Christians love our cities, our nations.  But we do not love their destruction.  Therefore, we strive mightily to tear down the idolatry of secular humanism and its corollary of inevitable State engineering progress.  In Christ alone our hope is found.   

You Shall Not Pass!

Only Force Standing in the Gap

Being Christian is one thing. Fighting for a cause is another, and much easier to acknowledge – for in recent times it has grown clear that the Christian religion is threatened with a dangerous defeat by secular forces which have never been so confident.

Why is there such a fury against religion now? Because religion is the one reliable force that stands in the way of the power of the strong over the weak. The one reliable force that forms the foundation of the concept of the rule of law.

The one reliable force that restrains the hand of the man of power. In an age of powerworship, the Christian religion has become the principal obstacle to the desire of earthly utopians for absolute power. [Peter Hitchens, The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith]

The New Model Man

Trying Harder

Over recent months we have discovered the corpus of C J Sanson, a writer of tight, illuminating historical novels.  His premier character is a hunchback lawyer, Matthew Shardlake practising amidst the turbulent times of Henry VIII.  It has often been observed that superior historical novels are one of the best ways to access particular historical periods and times: Dr Sanson’s work perfectly illustrates the point.  His historical knowledge is both comprehensive and compelling. 

He has also set novels in the twentieth century.  We have recently read Winter in Madrid, a novel set in Franco’s Spain in the early 40’s.  In this novel Sanson portrays (in passing) the fantastical notion held by many communists and socialists of the day: when the revolution comes, human nature will be transformed.
  Self-interest, even enlightened self-interest would be naturally and irresistibly replaced with the interests of the collective, or society, being placed first in the heart of every man (recalcitrants having been either re-education camps or executed).  The New Model Society both creates the New Model Man and is progressively built by the same transformed humanity.

The idea lingers on today, albeit now widely discredited and exploded.   But it keeps appearing, attempting a revival, a comeback in various forms.  This transformation in human nature from self-interest to collective-interest is now to be achieved by persuasion, education, conditioning, regulations and laws.  The attempts are most often derisory and stupid.  For some reason their protagonists don’t realise how inane they appear. 

Here is one egregious example: the attempt to create the New Model Man in the US State Department.  Within the miasmic halls of Foggy Bottom there are attempts underway to bring forth this New Model.  In the vanguard is a Chief Diversity Officer.  His role is to ensure that all bureaucrats and functionaries within the State Department properly reflect the collective interest, which, in this case, means collective man first.  All discrimination between human beings is to be wiped away from the collective memory.  All discriminatory language is to be erased from individual memory banks. 

Idiotic, but true apparently, according to the Daily Caller:

New frontiers in hypersensitivity: State Department officer says ‘holding down the fort’ is racist

Will Rahn

8/30/2012

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John M. Robinson, the Chief Diversity Officer at the U.S. Department of State, wants America’s diplomats to know that common phrases and idioms like “holding down the fort” are, in fact, deeply racist.

Robinson, who also serves as director of the Department’s Office of Civil Rights, used his “Diversity Notes” feature in the July/August issue of the official “State Magazine” to examine the hateful roots of everyday sayings. In one recent public relations kerfuffle at Nike, Inc., he wrote, the company torpedoed a sneaker called the “Black and Tan.”

“What a wonderful celebratory gesture and appreciation for Irish culture. Not!” wrote Robinson, an adult.
Robinson notes that “Black and Tan,” in addition to being an enjoyably robust alcoholic concoction, can refer to the brutal Protestant militiamen who ravaged the Irish countryside in the early 20th century — which is why Irish bartenders always get so upset when you order one.

In an effort to avoid offending those notoriously fragile Irish sensibilities, Nike pulled the shoe from stores. Robinson would like us all to learn from the sneaker company’s inadvertent racism and really start watching what we say. For example, did you know “going Dutch” is a reference to Netherlanders’ apparently well-known parsimoniousness, and that your widowed neighbor, sweet old Mrs. Rasmussen, cries every time she hears you use it?

And did you know using the phrase “holding down the fort” is the linguistic equivalent of scalping a Cherokee? According to Robinson, the phrase dates back to American soldiers on the western frontier who wanted to “hold down” all that land they stole.

“Handicap” and “rule of thumb” are two more figures of speech that Robsinon, in his wisdom, has decreed offensive. The latter, Robinson says, refers to the width of a stick a man could once use to legally beat his wife.

And in case you’re wondering how he could have done all the etymological detective work necessary to conclude that these phrases came from where he says they came from, and still have time to perform his Chief Diversity Officer duties at the State Department, wonder no more: Robinson doesn’t really know if any of this is true.

“Much has been written about whether the etymologies below are true or merely folklore, but this isn’t about their historical validity,” Robinson writes. “[I]nstead, it is an opportunity to remember that our choice of wording affects our professional environment.”

Duly noted, Mr. Robinson.

As Chesterton observed, when men stop believing in God, they don’t believe nothing: they believe everything.  The idiotic credulity of believing in the creation of the New Model Man at Foggy Bottom is an apt example of the syndrome.  Pathetic, but true. 

Waiting for the Inevitable

Another Grandiose Utopian Project To Follow the Dodo

Ho hum.  Another day.  Another crisis meeting in Europe.  We predict after this weekend’s meeting communiques will be issued and declarations made to the effect that “important steps” have been taken.  The crisis can now abate.  It will last twenty-four hours, then the crisis will return, with a vengeance.

Euro-politicians are living in denial.  They cannot bring themselves to face the inevitable and brutal truth.  The euro project is finished.  It is over.  It has to be broken apart.  You can do this in a relatively orderly fashion, once the pollies bow to reality, or it can break apart by itself.  Either way it is going.  Jeff Randall, writing in the Financial Times and the Sydney Morning Herald explains why the euro has to fail:

New Communism on the Trail

The Comeback Kid

Communism is making a comeback.  The windshift has fired up the radicals of yesteryear and got them out on the barricades again “occupying” things.

Where is the new wind coming from?  A cluster of intellectuals who have “had it” with capitalism.  Strangely they are being listened to.  Apparently desperate times call for desperate measures.  Irony lurks here because the European Union of Socialist Republics has told itself for generations that if the states of Europe did not agree to subsidize and fund everyone using other people’s money the resulting social dislocation would lead to a recrudescence of National Socialism.  Apparently the diagnosis and prognosis was right yet quite wrong.  The hardships of fiscal austerity are causing a resurgence of interest in Communism amongst the intellectual elites, not Nazism (which so far remains the preserve of the uneducated disaffected).

Alan Johnson, writing in World Affairs, documents the new Communism.  Funnily enough it looks woolly, vacuous, and wishfully utopian–remarkably like the Occupy Wall Street people.
 

The New Communism: Resurrecting the Utopian Delusion 

Alan Johnson

A specter is haunting the academy—the specter of “new communism.” A worldview recently the source of immense suffering and misery, and responsible for more deaths than fascism and Nazism, is mounting a comeback; a new form of left-wing totalitarianism that enjoys intellectual celebrity but aspires to political power.

The Slovenian cultural theorist Slavoj Zizek and the French philosopher and ex-Maoist Alain Badiou have become the leading proponents of this new school. Others associated with the project are the authors of the influential trilogy Empire, Multitude, Commonwealth, the American Michael Hardt of Duke University and the Italian Marxist Toni Negri; the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo (who recently declared that he has positively “reevaluated” The Protocols of the Elders of Zion); Bologna University professor and ex-Maoist Alessandro Russo; and the professor of poetry at the European Graduate School (and another ex-Maoist) Judith Balso. Other leading voices include Alberto Toscano, translator of Alain Badiou, a sociology lecturer at Goldsmiths in London, and a member of the editorial board of Historical Materialism; the literary critic and essayist Terry Eagleton; and Bruno Bosteels from Cornell University.

Most spoke at “The Idea of Communism,” a three-day conference held in London in 2009 that, to the astonishment of the organizers, attracted nearly a thousand people willing to pay more than one hundred pounds each. After that event, a companion publishing industry, powered by Verso Books, has grown up to accompany the movement, making it respectable on campuses. . . . 

So, that’s a brief on who is involved in the revival and some of the evidence of its attraction amongst the Chattering Classes on the campuses.   What are the core precepts?  At the heart is the age old attraction of the necessity of revolution.  Unfortunately the perceptive words of Barbara Tuchmen, that “revolutions produce other men, not new men” appear lost on those with dizzying intellects in the academy.

So, why this new interest in communism, of all things? After all, the leading new communists have refused to plumb the gist of the historic failures of the past and freely admit that they have almost no idea how to proceed in the future. And in the present they are politically irrelevant. The appeal rests on one fact above all: only the new communists argue that the crises of contemporary liberal capitalist societies—ecological degradation, financial turmoil, the loss of trust in the political class, exploding inequality—are systemic; interlinked, not amenable to legislative reform, and requiring “revolutionary” solutions.

The new communists would have us think that there is no necessary relation between communist idealism and the tyrannical bloody communist regimes of actual, real history.  The blood letting tyrannies of Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, and the Kim clique in North Korea are irrelevant because they are not intrinsic to communism per se.  In other words the New Communists are taking refuge in the world of idealist utopian dreams.  As Marx and Lenin did before them.  Utopian dreams such as the “withering away of the state”.  The new communists have deliberately shut their eyes to historical reality. 

The new communists seek to rehabilitate communism by treating it not as a historical movement with a record of labor camps and enormity but as a beautiful Platonic “Idea.” The catastrophe of actually existing communism is acknowledged, but only as the first failed approximation to an obvious good. As Zizek puts it, “Try again, Fail again, Fail better.”

As a capitalized “Idea” or an eternal “hypothesis,” the new communism turns out to be a simple repetition of the old. The goal is the old dream of a leap into the kingdom of freedom—a society wholly beyond the market and representative democracy; a perfectly equal stateless society. For Badiou, class divisions, along with “capitalo-parliamentarism” will be “overcome,” the division of labor “eliminated,” the private appropriation of great wealth and its transmittance by inheritance will “disappear,” and a coercive state, separate from civil society, will “wither away.” 

At this point, the new communism descends into stupid self-willed irrationality.   It cannot be tested or refuted by historical or empirical reality.  It just is.  It is a “just so” story. 

Under scrutiny, it becomes clear that we are not dealing with a communist “hypothesis” at all—that would involve testing and the possibility of falsification—but rather a communist dogma, and the relation of the new communists to that dogma is fundamentally religious, marked by piety and faith, and not at all critical.

When confronted with such flights of free fancy needing to be gain intellectual respectability, the first refuge of the charlatan is to big airy words that obfuscate. Such expressions of the faith can neither be understood, nor, thereby, tested and refuted.  Vagueness is the characteristic mode.   

The duty of the new communist is to “help a new modality of existence of the [communist] hypothesis to come into being,” says Badiou. Likewise, uninterested in the purely theoretical, Alberto Toscano’s desire is to “connect the prospects of communism to a partisan knowledge of the real and its tendencies.” But they do not deliver. In fact they rarely rise above the merely gestural. For example, Jacques Rancière defines communism as “the autonomous growth of the space of the common created by the free association of men and women implementing the egalitarian principle.”

Good luck with making sense of that mess of verbiage.  

Others do not even reach the level of vagueness. Instead they resolve the strategic impasse by mere rhetoric. Gianni Vattimo sees a communist future in “an undisciplined social practice which shares with anarchism the refusal to formulate a system, a constitution, [or] a positive ‘realistic’ model according to traditional political methods.” Instead, Vattimo thinks that “communism must have the courage to be a ‘ghost’” . . . whatever that means. And what sense can we make of these effusions of Jean-Luc Nancy?: “The common means space, spacing, distance and proximity, separation and encounter. But this ‘meaning’ is not a meaning. It opens precisely beyond any meaning. To that extent, it is allowed to say that ‘communism’ has no meaning, goes beyond meaning: here, where we are.”

 No.  No.  They are serious.  It’s impolite to mock.  There is a sinister side to all this nonsense, of course.  It is the determination to ignore the record of bloodshed etched on the historical annals of the twentieth century.  The “culture of memory” is to be rejected: it is a right-wing plot! 

[T]here is a brazen promotion of evasion as a virtue. The “culture of memory” is right-wing, according to Bruno Bosteels, so it must be combated by “active forgetfulness”; Badiou declares that “the period of guilt is over”—as if it ever started. About criticism of Stalin and other communist leaders, he warns that it is “vital not to give any ground in the context of criminalization and hair-raising anecdotes in which the forces of reaction have tried to wall them up and invalidate them.” 

In a nutshell, the new communists don’t want to talk about the actual bloody annals of communism.  Rather, they recognize they need to re-institute it, to “fail better”–by which they apparently mean, enslave and kill more people than old communism.  New revolutionary violence will transform people, creating the New Man.

When it tries to make the turn from ethereal philosophy to practical politics, the new communism is mostly a cult of force committed to magical thinking about the transformational power of revolutionary violence and expropriation. . . . Thus Zizek: “Revolutionary politics is not a matter of opinions but of the truth on behalf of which one often is compelled to disregard the ‘opinion of the majority’ and to impose the revolutionary will against it.”

The democratic socialist Eduard Bernstein issued a warning at the turn of the nineteenth century to his fellow Marxists. The danger of a “truly miraculous belief in the creative power of force,” he prophesied, is that you begin by doing violence to reality in theory, and end by doing violence to people in practice. What distinguishes the new communism is that its leading partisans are fully aware of that potential . . . and embrace it as a strategy. As Zizek puts it:

The only “realistic” prospect is to ground a new political universality by opting for the impossible, fully assuming the place of the exception, with no taboos, no a priori norms (“human rights,” “democracy”), respect for which would prevent us from “resignifying” terror, the ruthless exercise of power, the spirit of sacrifice . . . if this radical choice is decried by some bleeding-heart liberals as Linksfaschismus [left-wing fascism], so be it!

The rapine violence of the Occupy Wall Streeters becomes illustrative of the new communist movement.  The ethereal philosophy is irrational bunkum.  The real way forward is revolutionary violence.  Its handprints can be seen all over the present May “uprising”. 

Communism itself, of course, is dead. But when Zizek recommends the “insight” of the 1970s Baader-Meinhof gang that “in an epoch in which the masses are totally immersed in capitalist ideological torpor . . . only a resort to the raw Real of direct violence . . . can awaken them,” we should be concerned.

Recent history tells us that authoritarian philosophical and political ideas can still find their way to the streets in advanced capitalist societies. The new communist ideas might yet connect with the young, the angry, and the idealistic who are confronted by a profound economic crisis in the context of an exhausted social democracy and a self-loathing intellectual culture. Tempting as it is, we can’t afford to just shake our heads at the new communism and pass on by.

And let’s not forget “the young, the angry, and the idealistic” are the generation which has swallowed the propaganda of the Progressives and the Left that gummint can and will create for them the perfectly cocooned society which will swaddle them from the cradle to the grave.  As the promises have failed the “little dears” have become petulantly angry.  The post-Christian West has created its own bitter spawn. 

Alan Johnson is an editorial board member of Dissent magazine and a senior research associate at the Foreign Policy Centre. He blogs weekly for World Affairs.

Afghanistan Stocktake

So, How’s It Working Out, Then?

Readers of this blog will know that we oppose the war in Afghanistan as an ill-considered utopian debacle, without ethical foundation.

To say this is not to deny the courage or skill or tenacity or application of the combatants on both sides.  But it is to say that whilst the US fight in Afghanistan began as a defensive invasion to defend the US against Al Qaeda–a perfectly legitimate moral and just action–it soon morphed into “nation building”, which is unethical and imperialistic.  It is a classic example of the adage that little wars grow into big wars and big wars suck out all your blood. 

But, we really could not expect anything else, given the US’s maniacal utopian vision of bestowing the West’s peculiar, secular “human rights” doctrine on the rest of humanity.
  And if bestowal won’t work, then there is always the barrel of a gun.  But sooner or later, no matter how big one’s military might, resources dry up, expenses mount, and people become war weary.  Consequently, there is just no way that Obama and Clinton are going to go to war in Syria–the current hotspot–to impose western human rights utopianism on that nation, because as the headline in Drudge brazenly put it: “You can’t overthrow them all.”   The US has gone a bridge too far. 

The spurious messianic ideology is as fervently held as ever of course.  It’s just that the US is exhausted, having been fighting continually somewhere in the world ever since the Vietnam War.  Making “the world safe for democracy” is a big task.  Acting as the world’s Messiah is a huge burden that would bring any nation to its knees eventually. 

In Afghanistan it is becoming more clear by the day that the US has lost, not only the will to fight, but the war itself.  It will depart that country only to see it return to precisely the same country it was before the US began its arrogant “nation building”.  This from The Guardian:

The civilian death toll for the war in Afghanistan reached a record high last year with 3,021 deaths, according to the United Nations.  The number killed rose by 8% last year – the fifth consecutive rise – with a further 4,507 civilians wounded, the UN report said. Many were killed by roadside bombs or in suicide attacks, with Taliban-affiliated militants responsible for three-quarters of the deaths.

The number of deaths caused by suicide bombings jumped to 450, an 80% increase over the previous year, even though the number of suicide attacks remained about the same.  “A decade after the war began, the human cost of it is still rising,” said Georgette Gagnon, director for human rights for the UN mission in Afghanistan.  The single deadliest suicide attack since 2008 occurred on 6 December, when a bomber detonated his explosives-filled vest at the entrance of a mosque in Kabul, killing 56 worshippers during the Shia Muslim rituals of Ashoura.  Roadside bombs remain the biggest killer of civilians. The homemade explosives – which can be triggered by a footstep or a vehicle and are often rigged with enough explosives to destroy a tank – killed 967 people in 2011, nearly a third of the total.

The Pashtun tribesmen and the Taliban are fighting for their home valley and the way of life they have known for centuries.  To them it represents who they are; their raison d’etre.   When the US leaves Afghanistan it will immediately revert to what it was before their arrival–yet likely worse.  No amount of scathing criticism of the world-view of Pashtun tribespeople, their culture, their degradation, their cruelty, their oppression of women–all of it justified–will change the outcome.  The fact is inescapable–but rarely acknowledged: you cannot change human hearts and human culture with the barrel of a gun.  What you can do with the gun, however, is to enrage a people to the point of magnificent resentment so that the hold of their culture over their hearts and minds becomes stronger than ever. 

The foolish and unjust actions of the West in Afghanistan have just served to make the primitive culture of Afghanistan tribesmen many times more powerful a stronghold over hearts and minds than it was in the first place.  Western human rights utopianism has a lot to answer for.  But we, in the West, deserve it.  Anyone with half an education in the rudiments of history and human nature could see it coming ten miles off. 

Bad Weather Coming

Idiotic Utopians and Mountains of Vainglorious Pride

The Soviet Union believed in Five Year Plans–central, government plans–to develop the economy of the Soviet Union to reach a prosperous nirvana whilst creating a new order in the world.  Government planners would focus the resources of the economy on what was vital and important; resources would be delivered; production targets would be set; and the entire army of Soviet New Socialist Citizens would go to work to transform the USSR from poverty to a socialist paradise.

None can gainsay that every attempt was made, every resource was committed.  Yet for nearly one hundred years the Soviet Union was so poor and backward that it did not have enough food for its own people.  Millions upon millions died through starvation and its attendant diseases.  Ah, but the propaganda machine had a ready series of excuses and explanations.
  The most consistent was bad weather.  Literally.  For just on a hundred years, every year there was bad weather in the Soviet Union which prevented agricultural production targets being met.  Can you believe it?  What bad luck.  The weather gods did not like Koba the Dread.

All centrally planned, command and control economies fail.  They devolve into waste, destruction, and ultimately, the degradation of poverty.  But every generation breeds its own special brand of idiots who want to try it all over again.  The latest crop is currently running the government of the United States.  The results are completely as expected. Today, another stellar part of the Central Committees Five Year Plan fell to bits.  Another “green energy” company went into bankruptcy.

The company, Ener1, received a $118 million grant from DOE in 2010 as part of the president’s stimulus package. The money, which went to Ener1 subsidiary EnerDel, aimed to promote renewable energy storage battery technology for electrical grid use.

But despite generous federal support for the company, Ener1 was racked by problems last year. In October, NASDAQ delisted the company due to non-compliance with Securities and Exchange Commission filing requirements. A month later, the company’s president, chief executive, and top financial officer were fired. . . .

Ener1 is not the first energy storage technology company to file for Chapter 11 after receiving significant stimulus support. Beacon Power, which manufactures flywheel energy storage technology, received a $43 million loan guarantee from the same stimulus program that funded Solyndra. Despite having used $3 million marked for loan repayment to continue funding its daily operations, Beacon filed for Chapter 11 in November.

Why did this much lionized battery company fail?  Did the boss run off with the money?  Nothing so prosaic. Just boring economics.  There was no demand for the products.  The government had built yet another bridge to nowhere or as we say in New Zealand, A Bridge to Erewhon.  This from the CEO:

In a statement announcing the company’s bankruptcy, CEO Alex Sorokin said that the company’s business plan was crippled by insufficient consumer demand.  “We moved aggressively to reduce costs and shift focus when the marketplace did not evolve as quickly as anticipated.  Our business plan was impacted when demand for lithium-ion batteries slowed due to lower-than-expected adoption for electric passenger vehicles,” Sorokin wrote.

No-one wanted the things.  Oops.  That was a slight oversight.  But far, far more to the point: every human economy is so complex, so interrelated and interdependent, so dependent upon local motivations and aspirations and knowledge and actions that no central planning agency can ever cope.  There is no computer big enough, nor will there ever be.  And if there ever were, human beings would strive and conspire to beat it and avoid it and get around it, trying to make money by outsmarting it.

The only economic structure that both persists and works to produce efficiently to the best possible outcomes at the time is one where economic decision making is devolved, not centralised in the hands of bureaucratic experts.   But fools, such as now run the US Government, never learn.  A hundred blows on the back of a fool makes no impression!

Let’s go back a few months.  Watch this “promo” video below, where President Obama’s Five Year Plan was unveiled to the nation.  Note all the nationalistic central planning adages and slogans.  Observe the implicit utopianism.  Then watch Biden’s grease-balling at the company (warning: you may face an involuntary urge to disembogue from your gut.)

The irony is this: if the US does not utterly reject a government planned, command and control economy it will indeed set up the future for the United States.  But not as they hoped.  There will be a ton of excuses along the way to explain the failures like those of Ener 1–we will name them now: Congress, Republicans, millionaires, the “Top One Percent”, racism, gun owners, ignorance.  All these excuses will wear thin, eventually.  Finally, the ultimate excuse will be trotted out as rising economic despite grips the land like a perpetual winter storm.  Americans will be told the real cause of despite will be bad weather, every year, all the time. Social justice, central planning style.

It is always the last refuge of the intellectually and morally bankrupt Central Planner.