One of the most articulate eugenicists of the era was a man who survived until 1950, and remains one of the world’s most famous and respected dramatists. George Bernard Shaw, literary giant, author of more than sixty plays, and winner of the Nobel Prize.
The Irishman’s opinions are, however, coming back to mangle and even smash his reputation. A group of students at RADA have called for Shaw’s name to be removed from the drama school’s theatre as part of an anti-racism action plan. This matters, because Shaw provided for the school in his will, and last year the royalties from his work contributed more than £78,000 to RADA. Yet the accusation that the renowned theatre college “celebrates historical figures who embraced racist ideologies” does have a certain merit. Problem is, as has been debated myriad times: do, can, and should we separate an artist’s work from their period, character and ideas? If the ghosts of anachronism and historical assumptions are never to be exorcised, there are an awful lot of people who will fail and fall to the wide-awake litmus test.
Shaw did indeed write, that, “The only fundamental and possible socialism is the socialisation of the selective breeding of man” and, chillingly, “A part of eugenic politics would finally land us in an extensive use of the lethal chamber. A great many people would have to be put out of existence simply because it wastes other people’s time to look after them.” He lectured for the Eugenic Education Society, praised Stalin (naturally) the early Mussolini, and even Hitler as late as 1935. He abandoned most of all this in his old age but never made any formal apology.
He was also an incisive critic of imperialism, mercilessly exposed establishment hypocrisy, opposed war and oppression throughout his career, and cared passionately about actors and writers – the very people at RADA trying to expunge his name from their place of learning. And here’s another challenge and even embarrassment for those who would remove the social engineers from the litany of the great and the good: many of their harshest opponents were not others on the left but, in Edwardian Britain and in the 20s and 30s, conservative Roman Catholic writers led by G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc.
Michael Coren, “Eugenics and the intellectual left”, The Critic, 2020-09-16.
January 6, 2021
December 10, 2020
QotD: Italian Fascism and “corporatism”
From Benito Mussolini: “Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.”
This quote is often misconstrued nowadays by leftists who view profit-making corporations under capitalism (especially multinational corporations) as instruments of the devil. They love the implied image of capitalist fat-cats and fascist dictators conspiring in gilded opulence. Alas for them that this quote actually doesn’t imply anything like that; the terminological ground under it has shifted.
The “corporatism” Mussolini to which was referring had, actually, nothing to do with corporations, joint-stock or otherwise (in the 1920s the word “corporation” did not yet have its modern sense, either in English or Italian). His use of the word had to do with a feature of fascist theory forgotten by almost everybody but specialist historians.
In fascist theory, “corporations” were bodies like unions, craft guilds, professional societies, and grange associations. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism for discussion; see especially the section “[F]ascist corporativism” [section name changed since 2009].
What Mussolini was actually enunciating was a sort of organic statism in which the state would bless or admit representatives of various “corporations” into its governing councils — and no, that didn’t mean Fiat or Beretta but (say) the Abruzzo Building Trades Association, or the Society of University Professors.
While corporations-in-the-modern-sense were not outright excluded from being legitimized “corporations” in the fascist sense, neither did they have any special status or power in the system. Actually, it was rather the reverse …
It’s worth remembering that the founders of fascism were mainly Leninists like Mussolini with a sprinkling of anarcho-syndicalists (George Sorel being the best known of those). Actual fascism retained the founders’ doctrinal hostility to what modern leftists would call “corporate power”, never renouncing its state-socialist roots and being (in fact) hostile to all centers of power other than the state itself.
The modern idea that German and Italian fascism were conservative or pro-business ideologies is essentially a fantasy constructed by pro-Soviet propagandists during and after World War II. In fact, classical fascism never wandered very far from its left-wing origins; corporatism can be seen as an elaboration of the theoretical role of worker’s soviets in Leninist theory.
Eric S. Raymond, “Misconstruing Mussolini”, Armed and Dangerous, 2009-06-29.
December 3, 2020
New York Prohibits Booze and Socialists | BETWEEN 2 WARS: ZEITGEIST! | E.06 – Winter 1920
TimeGhost History
Published 2 Dec 2020Science and technology is marching on as the world enters the 1920’s. But Americans have more to reckon with than just a new decade: every state in the country has gone “dry”.
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Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Indy Neidell and Francis van Berkel
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Maria Kyhle
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Indy Neidell and Francis van Berkel
Image Research by: Daniel Weiss
Edited by: Daniel Weiss
Sound design: Marek KamińskiColorizations:
Daniel Weiss – https://www.facebook.com/TheYankeeCol…
Spartacus Olsson
Mikolaj UchmanSources:
Some images from the Library of Congress
Image from the Holocaust MuseumFrom the Noun Project:
Baker – by Wichai
Protest – by Juan Pablo Bravo
Store – by FahmiSoundtracks from Epidemic Sound and Frédéric Chopin
– “One More for the Road” – Golden Age Radio
– “Dark Shadow” – Etienne Roussel
– “Heroes On Horses” – Gunnar Johnsén
– “That’s How I Like It” – Oakwood Station
– “Not Safe Yet” – Gunnar Johnsen
– “Dark Beginning” – Johan Hynynen
– “Chopin Sonata no2” – 3rd movement
– “Faith in Truth” – Oakwood Station
– “Innocence of a Child” – Rupert Sachs
– “Endlessness” – Flouw
– “First Responders” – SkryaArchive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.
A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.
November 30, 2020
Cultural Marxism or cultural leftism?
In the most recent Libertarian Enterprise, Sean Gabb discusses what British Conservatives have been warned against describing as “Cultural Marxism”:
So far as I understand him — and I write as an outsider to any school of Marxist ideology — Marx made five essential points. First, there have been, since the French Revolution, two classes — the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Second, the bourgeoisie owns the means of production and exploits the proletariat through the extraction of surplus value. Third, this is an unstable parasitism, as the reinvestment of surplus value leads to periodic crises of over-production. Fourth, these crises concentrate wealth in fewer hands and expand and immiserise the proletariat. Fifth, there will be an inevitable revolution, in which the expropriators will be expropriated and a communist society will emerge. A further and perhaps optional sixth point is that the inevitable revolution can be hurried by the defection of informed bourgeois intellectuals to radicalise and form a vanguard for the proletariat.
Now, where is any of this in the present mix of climate alarmism and obsession with the alleged oppression of racial and sexual minorities? How is capitalism supposed to be overthrown by getting Sainsbury to fill its advertisements with pictures of black people eating Christmas dinner? Ditto boycotts of Israeli pharmaceuticals? Ditto arguing with or against radical feminists over the exact status of men who change sex?
The answer, of course, is the Cultural Marxist hypothesis — that the present culture wars are a product of the writings of Antonio Gramsci and the Frankfurt School. These men took the Marxian concept of “false consciousness” — that the bourgeoisie keeps the workers quiet by making them believe that all is for the best — and enlarged it into a project for achieving a counter-hegemony by taking over the means of cultural reproduction.
There is some truth in this answer, so far as these writings are prescribed in most university humanities departments, and many advocates of the new totalitarianism have at some time called themselves Marxists. It is, even, so a weak answer. Before about 60 AD, most Christians were Jews, and Christianity ever since has retained some Jewish religious writings among its core texts. But nothing is achieved by describing Christianity as “Gentile Judaism.” The differences between the two faiths are too essential to define either by reference to the other. In the same way, the present totalitarianism has nothing to do with the essential claims of Marxism. It lacks any interest in the analysis of surplus value, and its belief in the instability of unregulated markets derives mainly from a reading of Keynes and the welfare economists of the Cambridge School.
I prefer the term “cultural leftism.” I prefer this because the present totalitarianism is based on belief in an appearance of equality mediated by the State. It therefore has elements of socialism as reasonably defined. But it is in no sense Marxist. Its revealed preference is for a ruling class that is a coalition of politicians, administrators, policemen, lawyers, educators, plus media and business interests. So far as individuals move freely between them, these groups are mutually permeable. If they disagree over incidentals, they preside collectively over a mass of the ruled who are mostly well-nourished, but who are too atomised and intimidated by often meaningless words to combine in opposition.
Indeed, if I prefer my chosen term, I see little point in arguing against what it describes. Undoubtedly, this must be explained and opposed. But too much analysis of particulars can risk an overlooking of the much more important generality. This is that, in every time and place, there have been those who want to get on with their lives and those who want to control others. These latter will take up whatever body of ideas is most likely within the prevailing assumptions of their age to legitimise their urges.
November 17, 2020
“We are so well off here in the United States that our poverty line begins 31 times above the global average. Thirty. One. Times.”
Alyssa Ahlgren ponders the fact that we North Americans take our unprecedented-in-human-history prosperity very much for granted:
I’m sitting in a small coffee shop near Nokomis trying to think of what to write about. I scroll through my newsfeed on my phone looking at the latest headlines of Democratic candidates calling for policies to “fix” the so-called injustices of capitalism. I put my phone down and continue to look around.
I see people talking freely, working on their MacBooks, ordering food they get in an instant, seeing cars go by outside, and it dawned on me. We live in the most privileged time in the most prosperous nation and we’ve become completely blind to it. Vehicles, food, technology, freedom to associate with whom we choose.
These things are so ingrained in our American way of life we don’t give them a second thought. We are so well off here in the United States that our poverty line begins 31 times above the global average. Thirty. One. Times. Virtually no one in the United States is considered poor by global standards. Yet, in a time where we can order a product off Amazon with one click and have it at our doorstep the next day, we are unappreciative, unsatisfied, and ungrateful.
Our unappreciation is evident as the popularity of socialist policies among my generation continues to grow. Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently said to Newsweek talking about the millennial generation, “An entire generation, which is now becoming one of the largest electorates in America, came of age and never saw American prosperity.”
Never saw American prosperity. Let that sink in. When I first read that statement, I thought to myself, that was quite literally the most entitled and factually illiterate thing I’ve ever heard in my 26 years on this earth. Now, I’m not attributing Miss Ocasio-Cortez’s words to outright dishonesty. I do think she whole-heartedly believes the words she said to be true. Many young people agree with her, which is entirely misguided. My generation is being indoctrinated by a mainstream narrative to actually believe we have never seen prosperity. I know this first hand, I went to college, let’s just say I didn’t have the popular opinion, but I digress.
Let me lay down some universal truths really quick. The United States of America has lifted more people out of abject poverty, spread more freedom and democracy, and has created more innovation in technology and medicine than any other nation in human history. Not only that but our citizenry continually breaks world records with charitable donations, the rags to riches story is not only possible in America but not uncommon, we have the strongest purchasing power on earth, and we encompass 25 percent of the world’s GDP. The list goes on.
October 25, 2020
QotD: The omnibenevolent, omniscient state
Ivor Thomas, The Socialist Tragedy, 1951.
October 20, 2020
QotD: The errors of socialist experiments
Ivor Thomas, The Socialist Tragedy, 1951.
August 28, 2020
QotD: Communism and socialism
If you have something — some money, a car, a house, a plot of land, a factory, a body of literary accomplishments, even things like television sets and devices to play music — you can bet that somebody, somewhere is trying to figure out how to appropriate, expropriate, steal, or simply take it away from you. And most of those schemers will be college professors and politicians.
Under a set of natural laws that can be seen as ethical addenda to the laws of thermodynamics, it is always less effort to destroy than to build, which is what makes war an attractive threat for barbarians and looters to wield, and it is always less effort to steal things than to create or earn them, which is why we have always had thieves of various stripes among us, including college professors and politicians.
Within a democracy, socialism is a cynical con-game that, like all con-games everywhere, can’t operate without larceny in the heart of the “victim” or mark. Convince young voters that they can have a free higher education (regardless of how it’s going to get paid for or who’s going to pay for it), and, having been taught nothing useful by the socialist primary and secondary education systems they were compelled by force to attend, they will ignorantly vote you into office. Convince them that you deserve the power to order private businesses to pay them fifteen dollars an hour (whether their labor is actually worth it and it damages the business or not), and they will stupidly make you king.
That, in a nut-shell, and spread out over the entire culture, is what happened to Venezuela and why they’ve had to eat their pets. It’s what’s happened for three generations in North Korea, and why, it’s rumored, that cannibalism is being practiced there. The history of a hundred other countries that have tried socialism and suffered hideously for it informs us that these kinds of developments are inevitable.
L. Neil Smith, “Bernie Sanders Wants You Dead”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2018-05-12.
August 11, 2020
Orwell’s “Notes on Nationalism”
In Quillette, Adam Wakeling discusses George Orwell’s essay in the postwar magazine Polemic:
In the bleak post-war Britain of October 1945, an essay by George Orwell appeared in the first edition of Polemic. Edited by abstract artist and ex-Communist Hugh Slater, the new journal was marketed as a “magazine of philosophy, psychology, and aesthetics.” Orwell was not yet famous — Animal Farm had only just started appearing on shelves — but he had a high enough profile for his name to be a boon to a new publication. His contribution to the October 1945 Polemic was “Notes on Nationalism,” one of his best and most important pieces of writing. Amidst the de-Nazification of Germany, the alarmingly rapid slide into the Cold War, and the trials of German and Japanese war criminals, Orwell set out to answer a question which had occupied his mind for most of the past seven years — why do otherwise rational people embrace irrational or even contradictory beliefs about politics?
As a junior colonial official in Burma, the young Eric Blair (he had not yet adopted the name by which he would be known to posterity) had been disgusted by his peers and superiors talking up the British liberty of Magna Carta and Rule Britannia while excusing acts of repression like the massacre of Indian protestors at Amritsar in 1919. As a committed socialist in the late 1930s, he openly ridiculed those who claimed to be champions of the working class while holding actual working-class people in open contempt. And he had watched the British Communist Party insist that the Second World War was nothing more than an imperialist adventure right up until the moment when the first German soldier crossed the Soviet frontier, at which point it instantly became a noble struggle for human freedom.
Orwell’s most personally searing experience, though, had come in Barcelona in 1937. The previous year, he had travelled to Spain to fight in the Civil War on the Republican side. His poor relationship with the British Communist Party led him to enlist in the militia of an anti-Stalinist socialist party, the POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista, or Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification). Even while it was fighting a bitter winter campaign in the Aragon mountains, the POUM was subject to a relentless propaganda campaign by pro-Soviet Republicans who insisted it was a secret front for fascism.
Over May and June 1937, the POUM and the other independent left-wing organisations in Barcelona were brutally suppressed by the Republican Government and Soviet-backed Communists. Orwell saw his friends and comrades smeared, arrested, and in some cases shot. He only made a narrow escape back into France himself. Upon his return to Britain, he found the British Communist Party resolute in its line that the POUM was a fascist party. Admitting that there could be a difference of opinion among left-wing groups with respect to the Soviet Union, or that the Spanish Communists could have acted unjustly, was unacceptable. And when Orwell published his own account of the events in Spain, Homage to Catalonia, few were interested in reading it. The betrayal of the POUM weighed on Orwell’s mind through the Second World War, and Animal Farm provided an outlet for his anger. But those bloody spring days in Barcelona also informed “Notes on Nationalism.”
“Notes on Nationalism” is not an ideal title, as Orwell was not talking only about loyalty to country. Rather, he used nationalism as a short-hand for any type of group loyalty — to a country, but also to a religion, a political party, or an ideology itself. A nationalist may be defined by his membership of a group, or by his opposition to one, which Orwell called “negative” nationalism. Orwell used anti-Semites as an example of the latter, as well as the “minority of intellectual pacifists whose real though unadmitted motive appears to be hatred of Western democracy and admiration of totalitarianism.” He then set out to explain how everyone — no matter how reasoned and level-headed — is capable of irrational and biased thinking when our sense of group identity is challenged.
He identified three characteristics of “‘nationalistic’ thinking.” First, obsession — the ideologue’s need to filter everything through an ideological lens. Entertainment is not entertaining unless it is orthodox. Second, instability — the ability of the ideologue to go from believing one thing to quickly believing another to follow the party line. And thirdly, indifference to reality. One of the most interesting aspects of “Notes on Nationalism” is the “inadmissible fact” — something which can be proven to be true and is generally accepted but cannot be admitted by the adherents of a particular ideology. Or, if the fact is admitted, it is explained away or dismissed as unimportant.
The ideas explored in “Notes on Nationalism” run through much of Orwell’s writing, most obviously his anti-totalitarianism and hatred of hypocritical pieties. But central to his argument is how nationalistic thinking exposes our inescapable biases. “The Liberal News Chronicle,” he wrote, “published, as an example of shocking barbarity, photographs of Russians hanged by the Germans, and then a year or two later published with warm approval almost exactly similar photographs of Germans hanged by the Russians.” This anticipated the doublethink of Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which atrocities “are looked upon as normal, and, when they are committed by one’s own side and not by the enemy, meritorious.” The first step down the deceptively short road to totalitarianism is believing that our political enemies pose such a grave threat that defeating them takes precedence over truth, consistency, or common sense.
August 7, 2020
A Career Anti-Fascist – George Orwell – WW2 Biography Special
World War Two
Published 6 Aug 2020George Orwell is one of the most famous English writers in the modern age. But how did he become the man who would coin so many of the words we still use in our political debates?
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Source list: http://bit.ly/WW2sourcesHosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Rune Væver Hartvig
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Rune Væver Hartvig
Edited by: Mikołaj Cackowski
Sound design: Marek Kamiński
Map animations: Eastory (https://www.youtube.com/c/eastory)Colorizations by:
Cassowary https://www.flickr.com/photos/cassowa…
Klimbim https://www.flickr.com/photos/2215569…Sources:
Wellcome Images V0014461
Bundesarchiv
Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe
From the Noun Project: Pig by supalerk laipawat, Horse by supalerk laipawat, Goat by Laymik, Sheep by Laymik, Cow by supalerk laipawat, Chicken by supalerk laipawat, Farmer by Symbolon, Podium by Focus LabSoundtracks from the Epidemic Sound:
Howard Harper-Barnes – “London”
Johannes Bornlof – “Deviation In Time”
Johannes Bornlof – “The Inspector 4”
Skrya – “First Responders”
Jo Wandrini – “Puzzle Of Complexity”Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.
A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.
August 1, 2020
EP Thompson: The Foremost Marxist in History | Historians who changed History
The Cynical Historian
Published 1 Nov 2018Today let’s talk about Marxist historians. Edward Palmer Thompson makes perhaps the best introduction to the realm of Marxist history. His work on the English Labor Class, allows for a better understanding of the Marxist project, and how understanding class consciousness can lead to revolution.
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references:
Beard, Charles. “Written History as an act of Faith”, The American Historical Review 39, no. 2 (January 1934), 219-231.Marx, Karl. The Essential Marx. ed. Leon Trotsky, abridgment of Das Kapital, Vol. I. 1939; Mineola, N.York: Dover Publications, 2006. https://amzn.to/2MWygco
Thompson, E.P. “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century”, Past and Present, No. 50 (Feb., 1971), 76-136.
Thompson, E.P. The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Pantheon Books, 1963. https://amzn.to/2KFSESC
Special thanks to Dr. Colleen Hall-Patton for proofreading the script for this episode.
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Wiki:
Edward Palmer Thompson (3 February 1924 – 28 August 1993), usually cited as E. P. Thompson, was a British historian, writer, socialist and peace campaigner. He is probably best known today for his historical work on the British radical movements in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, in particular The Making of the English Working Class (1963). He also published influential biographies of William Morris (1955) and (posthumously) William Blake (1993) and was a prolific journalist and essayist. He also published the novel The Sykaos Papers and a collection of poetry. His work is considered to have been among the most important contributions to labour history and social history in the latter twentieth-century, with a global impact, including on scholarship in Asia and Africa.Thompson was one of the principal intellectuals of the Communist Party in Great Britain. Although he left the party in 1956 over the Soviet invasion of Hungary, he nevertheless remained a “historian in the Marxist tradition”, calling for a rebellion against Stalinism as a prerequisite for the restoration of communists’ “confidence in our own revolutionary perspectives”. Thompson played a key role in the first New Left in Britain in the late 1950s. He was a vociferous left-wing socialist critic of the Labour governments of 1964–70 and 1974–79, and an early and constant supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, becoming during the 1980s the leading intellectual light of the movement against nuclear weapons in Europe.
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Hashtags: #History #Marx #EPThompson #ClassConsiousness #Materialism #TheMakingOfTheEnglishWorkingClass
July 8, 2020
H.G. Wells, fortunately for his reputation, is mostly remembered for his science fiction writings
I was well into my twenties before I found out that H.G. Wells the science fiction writer was only a small slice of his career. I picked up a one-volume edition of his Outline of History, but it didn’t seem to have the same interest for me that The War of the Worlds or The Time Machine had done (and honestly, it was Jeff Wayne’s musical interpretation of War of the Worlds that pushed me to read any of his writing). His analysis of the events of his day fell well short of his reputation, as George Orwell pointed out:
In March or April, say the wiseacres, there is to be a stupendous knockout blow at Britain … What Hitler has to do it with, I cannot imagine. His ebbing and dispersed military resources are now probably not so very much greater than the Italians’ before they were put to the test in Greece and Africa.
The German air power has been largely spent. It is behind the times and its first-rate men are mostly dead or disheartened or worn out.
In 1914 the Hohenzollern army was the best in the world. Behind that screaming little defective in Berlin there is nothing of the sort … Yet our military “experts” discuss the waiting phantom. In their imaginations it is perfect in its equipment and invincible in its discipline. Sometimes it is to strike a decisive “blow” through Spain and North Africa and on, or march through the Balkans, march from the Danube to Ankara, to Persia, to India, or “crush Russia”, or “pour” over the Brenner into Italy. The weeks pass and the phantom does none of these things — for one excellent reason. It does not exist to that extent. Most of such inadequate guns and munitions as it possessed must have been taken away form it and fooled away in Hitler’s silly feints to invade Britain. And its raw jerry-built discipline is wilting under the creeping realisation that the Blitzkrieg is spent, and the war is coming home to roost.
These quotations are not taken from The Cavalry Quarterly but from a series of newspaper articles by Mr. H. G. Wells, written at the beginning of this year and now reprinted in a book entitled Guide to the New World. Since they were written, the German Army has overrun the Balkans and reconquered Cyrenaica, it can march through Turkey or Spain at such time as may suit it, and it has undertaken the invasion of Russia. How that campaign will turn out I do not know, but it is worth noticing that the German general staff, whose opinion is probably worth something, would not have begun it if they had not felt fairly certain of finishing it within three months. So much for the idea that the German Army is a bogey, its equipment inadequate, its morale breaking down, etc. etc.
What has Wells to set against the “screaming little defective in Berlin”? The usual rigmarole about a World State, plus the Sankey Declaration, which is an attempted definition of fundamental human rights, of anti-totalitarian tendency. Except that he is now especially concerned with federal world control of air power, it is the same gospel as he has been preaching almost without interruption for the past forty years, always with an air of angry surprise at the human beings who can fail to grasp anything so obvious.
[…]
Mr. Wells, like Dickens, belongs to the non-military middle class. The thunder of guns, the jingle of spurs, the catch in the throat when the old flag goes by, leave him manifestly cold. He has an invincible hatred of the fighting, hunting, swashbuckling side of life, symbolised in all his early books by a violent propaganda against horses. The principal villain of his Outline of History is the military adventurer, Napoleon. If one looks through nearly any book that he has written in the last forty years one finds the same idea constantly recurring: the supposed antithesis between the man of science who is working towards a planned World State and the reactionary who is trying to restore a disorderly past. In novels, Utopias, essays, films, pamphlets, the antithesis crops up, always more or less the same. On the one side science, order, progress, internationalism, aeroplanes, steel, concrete, hygiene: on the other side war, nationalism, religion, monarchy, peasants, Greek professors, poets, horses. History as he sees it is a series of victories won by the scientific man over the romantic man.
In addition to being a surprisingly consistent one-note proponent of the same solution to every problem, he was, as Michael Coren relates, a nasty piece of work in his personal life:
There’s an anecdote concerning H.G. Wells that rather exemplifies his character. A London theatre in the 1920s. Wells was approached by a nervous, eager young fan. “Mr. Wells, you probably don’t remember me”, he said, holding out his hand. “Yes, I bloody do!” replied Wells, and rudely turned his back. Personality aside, Wells also embraced anti-Semitism, racism, and social engineering, and in this atmosphere of outrage and iconoclasm it’s surprising that he hasn’t been more targeted for symbolic removal. Then again, perhaps not. Because while the undoubtedly gifted author said and believed some dreadful things he was also a man of the left. And when it comes to cancel culture, socialism is the ultimate prophylactic.
George Bernard Shaw said of his nastiness and his ugly views, “Multiply the total by ten; square the result. Raise it again to the millionth power and square it again; and you will still fall short of the truth about Wells — yet the worse he behaved the more he was indulged; and the more he was indulged the worse he behaved.”
In fact, for much of the 20th-century eugenics was a creature of the left as much if not more than the right. Shaw himself, Sydney and Beatrice Webb and many other left-wing intellectuals were convinced that for the lives of the majority to improve there had to be a harsh control of the minority.
Wells argued that the existing social and economic structure would collapse and a new order would emerge, led by “people throughout the world whose minds were adapted to the demands of the big-scale conditions of the new time … a naturally and informally organized educated class, an unprecedented sort of people.” The “base,” the class at the bottom of the scale, “people who had given evidence of a strong anti-social disposition,” would be in trouble. “This thing, this euthanasia of the weak and the sensual, is possible. I have little or no doubt that in the future it will be planned and achieved.” He wrote of, “boys and girls and youth and maidens, full of zest and new life, full of an abundant joyful receptivity … helpers behind us in the struggle.” Then chillingly, “And for the rest, these swarms of black and brown and dingy white and yellow people who do not come into the needs of efficiency … I take it they will have to go.”
June 18, 2020
The origins of Antifa
Kyle Shideler outlines the history of Antifa from the Weimar Republic to the streets of cities all over the western world:
“antifa 8973ag” by cantfightthetendies is licensed under CC BY 2.0
With riots and civil unrest metastasizing across the United States, the president declared he intends to designate Antifa as a terrorist group. Predictably, the talking heads rushed out to declare that Antifa doesn’t really exist, and even if it did the president couldn’t possibly target it using that legal designation. They argue Antifa is an amorphous blob of discontents, not a functioning organization, and certainly not one which could be designated and targeted for concentrated counterterrorism enforcement.
As usual, the Twitterati don’t know what they are talking about. Reality is both simpler and more complex.
To begin at the beginning: Antifa — real name: Antifaschisitsche Aktion — was born during the street-fights of the 1932 Weimar Republic. It was founded by the Stalinist Communist Party of Germany (KPD), although various Communist “anti-fascist defense” units were associated with the KPD much earlier.
Anti-fascist Action’s sole purpose was to help the KPD combat other political parties for control of the streets in the revolutionary politics of the rapidly failing Weimar Republic.
And yes, they fought the Nazis.
But they also fought liberal parties, conservative parties, and anyone and everyone who got in their way. While these early antecedents were short-lived, it is useful to view Antifa in this context. More than anything, Antifa exists to serve as a tool of revolutionary politics in a failed (or failing) state.
Antifa would reestablish itself in the early 1980s, also in Germany, out of Autonomism. Autonomism is an anti-authoritarian anarcho-Marxist ideology associated with the Communist urban guerilla organizations of 1970s and ’80s Europe like Red Army Faction and the Red Brigade. Autonomism would find a home among the young punks of Germany’s squatters’ rights movement. Around this time, Antifa tactics like the “black block,” where large numbers of rioters dress in black and move together in formation as part of a larger protest, were developed.
H/T to Rafe Champion for the link.
June 2, 2020
“Calling a modern ‘artist’ a poseur is like calling water wet — what could possibly be the point?”
Severian on modern “art” and its practitioners:
Picasso’s “Guernica” in mural form in the town of Guernica.
Photo by Papamanila via Wikimedia Commons.
Leszek Kolakowski, in his essay collection Is God Happy?, wrote several fascinating essays on Communism vs. other forms of Socialism, such as Fascism and generic Leftism. He notes that while Communism proper attracted lots of serious intellectuals and artists, who produced some works of real merit, generic “Leftism” had few, and Fascism almost none.
He also notes the degeneration of art on the Left. I don’t want / am not qualified to get deep into the weeds of art history, but let me use an example (mine, not Kolakowski’s): Pablo Picasso vs … oh, pick an artist, they’re all Lefties … let’s say Andy Warhol. Noting that “important” can be diametrically opposed to things like “good,” “aesthetically pleasing,” etc., we can all agree that both were important artists. Whatever else their differences, the most obvious one was:
Sincerity.
Picasso was a lifelong member of the Communist Party. He was also a sincere artist (which, again, can be miles away from “good;” I personally can’t stand Picasso’s art). Guernica is wildly overrated, and its sentiment jejune — we all agree that bombing civilians is bad, mmkay? — but at least it’s sincere. Warhol, on the other hand, never took a sincere breath in his life. Making your work superficial on purpose doesn’t absolve you from the sin of superficiality. Warhol (and Roy Lichtenstein, and the rest of the “Pop Art” crowd) gave wannabes permission to substitute “being ironic” for “having something to say,” and there’s your modern art in a nutshell. Calling a modern “artist” a poseur is like calling water wet — what could possibly be the point?
Which brings us back to Kolakowski. He notes that there are apostates aplenty from Communism, and they all seem compelled to write big long books full of critical self-examination. Cheering for the murder of millions would do that, one supposes… except that, as Kolakowski says, you can’t find one single ex-Leftist doing it. Hell, is there such a thing as an ex-Leftist, as opposed to an ex-Communist? Kolakowski couldn’t find one (as of 1995, I think), and I can’t think of one either. Every former radical I’m aware of was just that — a radical, a card-carrying Communist or at least a virulent fellow-traveler, e.g. David Horowitz. We probably all have heard of someone waking up one day (say, after 9/11) realizing that the Democratic Party they’d been knee-jerk voting for all their lives was out to lunch, but do you know of any True Believers seeing the light?
April 14, 2020
Socialism and the environment
Luke Warren on the vast gulf between the “environmental consciousness” of fans of the socialist worldview and the real-world environmental impact of socialist policies:
Modern environmentalists often identify as socialists. Members of Extinction Rebellion, for example, often advocate tearing down capitalism and supplanting it with “eco-socialism”. Go to any “climate strike” or similar type of event, and you will see more hammer and sickle flags, raised fist symbols and Socialist Workers party posters than you can count.
Indeed, socialism and environmentalism are perceived by many as two sides of the same coin, and the idea that climate change is a “crisis of capitalism” has become conventional wisdom. It is now seemingly a contradiction to be both a capitalist and an environmentalist. This is not just a matter of rhetoric, but it is also reflected in the policy prescriptions of both environmentalists and socialists. Look at proposals for a “green new deal”, calls for large-scale nationalisation in the name of the environment.
Animated map of the shrinking of the Aral Sea between 1960 and 2008 (via Wikipedia)
But what is the story of socialism and environmentalism?
One only has to look back at the failed experiments of socialism to see just how environmentally catastrophic it has been. As the Soviet Union collapsed and the iron curtain was torn down, the rest of the world finally saw the environmental damage caused by socialist command economies. Economist Jeffrey Sachs stated that the socialist states had “some of the worst environmental problems on the entire globe” All of this, it is worth noting, occurred against a backdrop of a wide array of environmental laws and regulations that supposedly protected the public interest.
Air pollution provides an excellent example. Total greenhouse gas emissions in the USSR in 1988 equated to 79 per cent of the US total. However, the Soviet Union’s gross national product (GNP) was only 54 per cent of the USA’s, according to one very generous estimate (it was, in all likelihood, far less than that). This means that the USSR generated at least one and a half times as much pollution as the USA per unit of GNP (and again, in all likelihood, far more than that).
Accounts of those who travelled across the Soviet Union post-collapse recall swathes of the country where smog clung to the air. An article from Multinational Monitor in 1990 highlighted that 40 per cent of the Soviet people lived in areas where air pollutants, such as carbon dioxide, sulphur dioxide and nickel dioxide, were three to four times the maximum allowable levels.
The destruction of the Aral Sea, perhaps one of the worst environmental disasters, can be directly blamed on the process of socialist planning. In an attempt to make the USSR self-sufficient in cotton production, vast amounts of water were diverted to arid areas for irrigation. Much of the Aral Sea dried up, leaving port cities, Muynak for example, and fishing villages marooned miles from the shore. Worse, the exposure of the salty sea bed and extensive use of pesticides had catastrophic impacts on the health of the local population. Respiratory problems and lung diseases became widespread as people inhaled pollutants.
The Aral Sea in 2000 on the left and 2014 on the right. Photograph: Atlas Photo Archive/NASA
