nourishing obscurity

Some nice parts here:

The 1920s was the debut of the modern intellectual, as Tom Wolfe wrote in his essay “In the Land of the Rococo Marxist”:

After the First World War, American writers and scholars had the chance to go to Europe in large numbers for the first time. They got an eyeful of the Intellectual up close. That sneer, that high-minded aloofness from the mob, those long immaculate alabaster forefingers with which they pointed down at the rubble of a botched civilization-it was irresistible.

The only problem was that when our neophyte intellectuals came back to the United States to strike the pose, there was no rubble to point at. Far from being a civilization in ruins, the United States had emerged from the war as the new star occupying the center of the world stage. Far from reeking of decadence, the United States had the glow of a young giant: brave, robust, innocent and unsophisticated.

But young scribblers roaring drunk (as Nietzsche had predicted) on skepticism, cynicism, irony, and contempt were in no mood to let such … circumstances … stand in the way. From the very outset the attempts of this country cousin, the American intellectual, to catch up with his urbane European model was touching, as only the strivings of a colonial subject can be.

Bruce Thornton, in Destructive Passion, wrote:

One of modern history’s most important questions is how so many intelligent, privileged people could be seduced by a political ideology so intellectually incoherent and bloody in practice as communism. 

An illuminating approach for understanding this phenomenon can be found in the memoirs and biographies of true believers who awoke from their dogmatic Marxist slumbers and wrote about both their sleep and their waking. 

In its focus on how leftist ideology warps the lives and characters of those who embrace it, David Horowitz’s Radicals. Portratis of a Destructive Passion (Regnery, $27.95) is a book that can be ranked with such classics of this genre as The God That Failed and Paul Hollander’s The End of Commitment. 

But unlike those other studies, Horowitz in his new book analyzes radicals who never had the “second thoughts” that lead to conversion, but instead maintained their faith in the radical progressive creed until the bitter end.

And of course, such talk of believers and conversion is the language of religion.   The role of personal neuroses can’t be discounted either:

A consistent phenomenon evident in these portraits is the way political ideology becomes subordinated to psychological needs and dysfunctions, transforming into a symbolic expression of the self and its traumas.  Consider Bettina Aptheker, daughter of Herbert Aptheker, the American Communist Party’s “most prominent intellectual and ‘leading theoretician.’” 

Horowitz’s analysis of her memoir reveals how personal neuroses and failures become validated and glamorized by radical politics. 

The struggles against “social injustice” or “racism” are metaphors for the struggle against the trauma of her father’s sexual abuse of her, her ambivalence about her sexual identity, and her guilt about the serial betrayals of her husband and children: “What stands out as the theme of all her melodrama,” Horowitz writes, “is victimhood and a passive aggression against family, friends, and authority.

Yuri Bezmenov, on when the leftist radical finally becomes disillusioned [count me in here]:

“When they become disillusioned, they become the worst enemies, which is why my KGB instructors specifically made a point, “Never bother with leftists, forget about these political prostitutes, aim higher.   Try to get into large circulation, established, conservative media, reach filthy rich movies makers, intellectuals, so-called academic circles, cynical, ego-centric people who can look into your eyes with angelic expression and tell you a lie.   These are the most recruitable people – people who lack moral principles … or who suffer from self-importance – they feel that they matter a lot.”

These are the people KGB wanted very much to recruit.”

These are the people of Common Purpose, “leading beyond authority”, their way is the only way, manipulated by NLP in the CP courses.  And where is the home of such doings?   The local HQ of the Socialist Workers Party?   Not in the least – look no further than Chatham House, supposedly the bastion of conservatism but actually the legacy of the global socialist Tavistock, Milner, Rhodes and that lot.

Do your own research on the antecedents of that place.

A leftist reads this and says it’s insane, a person basically apolitical reads this and can’t see it referring to himself as all he wants is peace, love and mutual understanding and asks, “Don’t you want those too?” and being essentially politically naive, simply cannot and will not see that he is being duped by the hardwired Them.

David Horowitz woke up and saw it, I woke up and saw it – that the things I believed in – the peace, mutual understanding and love for all – was being cruelly exploited for the political ends of enslavement of the population and the destruction of the middle-class.

And note Bezmenov’s target group of rightwing mega-pundits – now who would that comprise? Glenn Beck, who turns everyone off sane politics, who drives moderate people away and Alex Jones, who by going on Piers Morgan’s show as the spokesperson of Amendment 2, made it possible for the left and many others to ask, “Would you allow a gun in the hands of such an uncontrolled person?”

Thus the Boiling Frog [see OoL post] can say that it is our own political “leaders”, not the EU per se, which is leading us up the garden path.  Cameron and Osborne have been called pink and hardly conservative before but what requires a further shift in perception is to see that they are very much loyalists to the world view which, in the quid pro quo, saw them elevated to high office as a job lot in the first place.

The path of preselection is a murky one.

And who’s waiting as the alternative?  The Millipedes and Balls.

See the Europrobe documents on the antecedents of the EU and it’s a tale of betrayal, of long laid plans, of things kept from a misdirected public.

The techniqueof faux leadership  is well-known in Christianity. The Christian right – Paisley, Billy Graham, the tele-evangelists who drive Mercs and have affairs on the side, the bible-thumpers – dominate the coverage, letting real faith, hope and charity in the ordinary care and charity worker go unheralded, unpraised.

Management of the image in the public perception is what it’s all about and these stooges of the left-controlled Right manage to turn the ordinary citizen away from policies they should be supporting and allow them to elect the Obamas and Hollandes, the Blairs.

The great hope of France, Sarkozy, speaker of all the right words to get himself elected, abandons them and becomes the bling-bling, pro-EU President who singlehandedly sends UMP back to the stone age, to be bitterly fought over by two mega-rivals.

And where does the real message about lower taxes, sane immigration policies, smaller government – where does that go? It falls by the wayside in the dog-and-pony show. There is no better way of destroying a political or religious stance than to put someone in there bombastically shouting inanities and twisting truths into jingoistic rhetoric.

Or the Great Hope turning out to be incompetent, vacillating and fast and loose about integrity.

Filed under: History & Culture, Politics & economics