Postlavians Beating a Dead Fuhrerprinzep

[Richard Stanley]

Wow, if nothing else you've done a service in making me understand that Orwell was such a binary thinker. There are only two human social possibilities, Hedonist or Fascist.

Orwell's notions of Hitler (at least as you've provided) appear rather facile to me, like we all are to take Hitler's facade at face value. Joe likes to frequently make use of the term Lifetime Actor, and here, Hitler is a perfect candidate for inclusion.

As such, Hitler's facade of rhetoric was certainly a messianic Man of Struggle, but his debauched quantum reality was that of a (bisexual) Hedonist. He started his Nazi career as an military counter-intelligence agent. As you mentioned about the Docherty video about how the British prepared their society for WWI long in advance, the same thing was going on in Germany. And even further, we can see that the Kaiser, via Max von Oppenheim, seeded with the Ottomans what we know of today as global Islamic Jihad. To wit, it all flowed from the Shepherds, via various Sheepdogs.

Even Hitler's stay in prison, where 'somebody' wrote Mein Kampf, was rather a sweet suite. Like he was pampered after the war in South America and elsewhere, for a job "well done". His big accomplishment was the establishment of Israel, without which the Scofield rabble could not froth over the second Second Coming. The Bible, Scofield's or otherwise, is Monarchist and cyclically so. Again, a dynamic process and thus typically static lens of analysis is of dubious use. As such, Fascism as has been deployed (ignorantly from your unique static construction) is a transitional process ploy back to a monarchical / imperial state, a temporary facade. Hence, the Return of the (supposedly Good but more often not) King.

Again, just as you ridiculously cannot point to a successful instance of Fascism, there is no significant instance of Democracy that hasn't had the thumbs of somebodies' hidden hands on its scales. And you continually dodge this issue of a contiguous thread of shepherding duality. To what purpose?

Since the beginning of Joe's introduction to us of this topic I have only been tangentially involved, at best. But let's say that I fully buy into these interpretations of the Frankfurt School, then they are still well subordinated under our models of SSSM and CCCS.

In any case, its interesting that the Frankfurt School decided to debase the cultures of American and other Democracies so as to prevent the rise of Fascism. Yet, Fascism has Manly Militance, like proper Christianity, while Democracy just wants masturbatory Hedonistic Peace, its effeminate militaries increasingly resorting to automated, UnManly killing with drones and such. War is Peace and Peace is War. Hmmm

If there is any significant differential genetic component to our Shepherds, Sheepdog, and Sheep Model it would be that of the psychopathic spectrum or similar.

Your appeal to the Nazi's nature movement, just as to the related Volkish movement, is another non sequitur. The Nazi's expediently incorporated such under their political umbrella so as to broaden the Party's appeal in the essential need to achieve critical mass. Such expedience is also what facilitated 'critics' to claim that the 'paganistic' Nazis had little nexus with Christianity, when the opposite was the case.

Also, if we are to take the Hitler phenomenon at face value, Hitler didn't unite with welcoming Ukrainians ... because, as you alluded to -- the Nazis thought less of the Slavs than they did of the Jews. And, lebensraum is essentially an imperial ambition or minimally just rhetoric. Just imagine this Bannon Utopia of Manly Fascist Nations, at (h)edonistic peace with all their (White?) neighbors, their Manly weapons aimed at each other evoking Mutually Assured Destruction. Oh, I forgot, at some point their swords will be beat into ploughshares, the lion will lay down with the lamb. Bah humbug.

In any case, I'm yet rather interested in how Badleytidian Fascism will determine its leaders, the succession process and all, necessary to maintain long term continuity. Will its now admitted caste system work like DeVere's and/or will it allow upwards and downwards mobility?

OK, I see why your thesis is not really a thesis, merely a yet incoherent hypothesis.

 

[Jerry Russell]

But let's say that I fully buy into these interpretations of the Frankfurt School,

Excuse me? Badley is conflating eros, hedonism, and debauchery, which are three different things. And, he's conflating Adorno, Horkheimer & Marcuse, who followed very distinctive paths.

After his engagement at the Institute for Social Research (aka Frankfurt School), Marcuse went on to work for the OSS and the US State Department from 1943 to 1951. So if somebody wanted to suspect that Marcuse's later philosophical development was somehow influenced by his work with the US intelligence & foreign policy establishment, there's some possible basis for that.

Claude attempts to incriminate Adorno & Horkheimer by noting that they never explicitly spoke out in opposition to Marcuse. Well, there must be 10,000 fascist wannabes and neo-Nazis posting You Tube videos right now, and I've only denounced about three of them by name. But that doesn't mean I support the rest.

I haven't read Marcuse, nor have I done an exhaustive search to find out what Adorno and/or Horkheimer might have said about him, either directly or indirectly. I seriously doubt that Marcuse was as much of a debauched sex maniac as Badley is claiming.

I'm yet rather interested in how Badleytidian Fascism will determine its leaders,

At one point I was a little curious, but now I'm losing patience.

To my mind it seems clear enough: Fascism is a form of tyranny, in which the authoritarian dictator is maintained in power through his allegiance and loyalty to a capitalist oligarchy. The dictator and his oligarchs are firmly in control of all means of production and mass propaganda.

Who in his right mind would recommend such a system, as the best that humanity can do? Even in its friendly American "democratic" form, it's brought us, as a species, to the edge of extinction.

This is the 42nd post in this thread, with no inkling as to what Faithfully Yours Claude Badley is even talking about. When is he ever going to get to the point?

 

[Richard Stanley]

I am not presupposing that Fascism is a good thing per se, but that it contains good things... ...despite its being associated with LOSERS like Hitler and the Daffy Ducktator.

One, like Churchill, can make the same claims for Democracy, or even Rigged Democracy, right?

Contemporary Rigged Democracy has the advantage of providing for a pretty stable and safe means of power succession (via the Hidden Elect), but maybe in your model we yet need to have the interregnal bloody power struggles as between historical dynasties? Interesting too, that the monarchies sometimes resorted to a relative democracy of the Elect to transition between dynasties, as a less manly means to transition dynasties. Sans a suitable royal 'issue', the 'peers of the realm', the Electors, would gather to select from one of their own to be the new dynast. This 'Elect' is one and the same as that in the Biblical 'Predestination of the Elect'.

Hitler lost due to his racism - since if he had backed both the Ukrainians and the rebel anti-Communist Russian general Vlasov, the Nazis would have subverted and beaten the Soviet Union, meeting up with unopposed Japanese troops coming westward along the Trans-Siberian railway. The USA leadership, Freemasons and all, would have broken out in panic as Turkey and Spain rallied to the Axis cause, full knowing that the US's subsequent attack on Spain via Portugal would bring Mexico to Spain's side! (So will you help Trump build that wall????)

Hitler lost for a lot of reasons, his being a blithering idiot in a slightly different manner than the Orange Daffy Ducktator (ODD). Hitler's public persona was more well-spoken and serious, but these acting affects are for addressing specific exigencies. I have discussed on my Trump thread about Trump's alter ego, and George Dubya Bush did similar to affect a Western hillbilly affect at the beginning of his presidential career.

In case you haven't seen it, based upon Suchender's post, here, we examined the collective actions of Stalin and Hitler regarding Operation Barbarossa based upon the amazing revelations of Suvorov's Icebreaker.

As such, I don't think the Freemasons anywhere would have been in a panic. Franco's Spain was always in Hitler's pocket, more useful as seemingly neutral non-combatants, for servicing U-boats, and helping facilitate in-gress and egress to the wartime Reich. The latter for such as allowing the Bank of International Settlements to quietly facilitate capitalist funding for all the Fascists, especially Hitler, both before and during the war.

Excuse me? Badley is conflating eros, hedonism, and debauchery, which are three different things. And, he's conflating Adorno, Horkheimer & Marcuse, who followed very distinctive paths.

Would you be happier if I had said: "But let's say, for the sake of argument, ..."?

At one point I was a little curious, but now I'm just bored. This thread has been endlessly winding on for 41 posts now, without the slightest inkling as to what Badley's definition of Fascism is.

To my mind it seems clear enough: Fascism is a form of tyranny, in which the authoritarian dictator is maintained in power through his allegiance and loyalty to a capitalist oligarchy. The dictator and his oligarchs are firmly in control of all means of production and mass propaganda.

So impatient.

But we are slowly getting to see what Badleytidian Fascism is. He is indeed claiming that 'Good', or optimal Fascism is akin to the Hindu caste system, and maybe even like Plato's caste system. Maybe even like Nicholas DeVere's caste system, where the latter went to lengths to say that even the top Norman, the apex of humanity, must occasionally get his feet muddy and muck about with the basest laborers, as needed (Hopefully not very damn often). Everybody is accorded their human dignity while also merrily fulfilling their duties. All these were per an immobile caste system, while we discussed the notions of mobile caste systems, based upon demonstrated meritocracy.

And, as we have discussed, our Rigged Democracy is a deviously disguised form of Fascism as well.

Which leaves the question about what the proper cultural treatment of sex and the marriage relationship is. Is the Traditionalist Augustan-Roman / Catholic cultural notion of the Madonna / Whore Complex preferred or optimal, or what? Is there a Double Standard for the Sexes, and yet another one for the Elect? So many exciting questions, so little existential Time!!!!

What will the robot invader bastards do to our Culture and sex lives, or lack therof? We're still trying to cope with those damn troubadours (and their LOVE consequences), ... and now I've got racoons to deal with, thanks to the Romantic Bowel Movement and Scofield.

 

[Richard Stanley]

Maybe it might help to revisit what this clever chimpig wrote:

...​

As shown by Georges Dumezil, the idea of a tripartite social caste system is basic to Indo-European culture. A paradigmatic example is the Vedic Indian caste system, consisting of the Brahman (priest / king), kshatriya (warrior), and vaishya (agriculture / trade) classes. This caste system, generally, was known in the Mediterranean region via Plato’s Republic, if not earlier. If partly forgotten, it was re-encountered in Alexander the Great’s time, when the Greeks ran headlong into it on the way to India. Hellenistic art from that period and region shows a cultural fusion of people in Greek attire portraying Buddhist themes. Aspects of this Indian cultural fusion later found their way into the elite Roman and Helleno-Jewish formulation of Christianity. From there, in turn, flowed the horrors of feudalism, the inquisitions, holy and not so holy wars, institutionalized Jewish ghettos, and so on. ​

​

However, Stephen Knapp argues here that in the original Vedic concept of the caste system, one’s place was not determined by one’s birth (though as it does today it certainly helped). Rather, it was more of a meritocracy. Moreover, everyone had an inherent dignity and satisfaction in their respective societal contributions and rewards. He provides a folk story that attempts to explain why and how this system devolved. Inasmuch as this all happened in prehistoric times, perhaps this is the case.​

​

Nicholas De Vere, in his The Dragon Legacy, makes the same underlying argument — that there was once a widespread ancient and benevolent caste system. De Vere believes that it was his ancestors, the red headed and green eyed clan of Aryans, who emerged as the rulers by universal acclaim of their self-evident merit. Since the collapse of that system, De Vere’s ultra-exclusive Aryans have been quietly and gallantly fighting off the greedy “tinker nobility”. These latter would be either the descendants of conquering warlords of other clans, or the latter day merchant class nobility. The pseudo-fascist Julius Evola argued somewhat similarly for what he claimed was the oldest sect of Buddhism, that of the Pali. He says that subsequent schools of Buddhism debased the ‘divine’ caste system in their successive attempts to popularize Buddhism.​

​

Similarly it is claimed that in the days of ancient Sumeria, the practice of actual, overt slavery was relatively benign. One might become a ‘bonded’ slave to another to address an exigent downturn in personal circumstances. However, one could not only emerge from this condition, but while still in it one could even buy and sell property as a slave. Perhaps the book of Leviticus contains a memory of this context, where such ‘bondage’ could not last for more than 7 years, and one must treat one’s enslaved brother better than the others.​

​

Based on all this speculation, it seems entirely possible that at the dawn of written history, there was a divide, the same as there is today, between two general traditions, or ideals, for societal organization. While some societal elites preferred a static caste system, other elites (along with many commoners) held to an ideal of social mobility based upon merit and such, using some form of modified caste or no seeming caste at all. But even if De Vere is being grossly self-serving, and/or deceptive, and Knapp may be misguided, all this gets to the heart of the matter of the true dialectic.​

​

For here, if the reader pays attention, the book of Genesis ironically, precisely and explicitly describes Abraham as a typical wealthy caravan merchant. When he arrived at Hebron, a typical trading colony inside of a foreign state, the Hittites there immediately recognized him as a princely man of importance. Abraham’s traveling retinue of 318 shepherds served double duty as his armed host. That is, the claimed patriarchal father of the Hebrews was both a princely merchant and acted in a militaristic fashion, as did his conquering descendants. And yet, the pious view of Abraham is that he (and his famous progeny) were not so very different from common and lowly shepherds of literal sheep.​

​

With the ‘invention of the Jewish people’ (to borrow from Shlomo Sand) and the synthetic Judaic construct, the conflict between rigid caste and social mobility hardened into a social false dialectic. We find Egypt (and, later, Greece and Rome) taking the more rigid approach, while the Hebrews saw themselves as beneficiaries of a slave revolt. Thus they saw themselves as more likely to honor individualistic values. The new-found state of ‘freedom’ and ‘equality’, however, resulted in the continuation of hierarchical practices under a new set of labels and laws. Their new and unique god was yet still an avatar for their veiled human masters.​

​

The Temple Cult is emblematic of this dialectic, partly because it seems that the First Temple may have never really existed as it was depicted, possibly aside from the conveniently undateable megalithic platform. Instead, it may have been creatively retrojected into the past, with the iconic confabulations of Solomon and his father, David. The alleged precursor to the temple, the tabernacle, and its main accoutrement, the so-called Ark of the Covenant, are nothing but Egyptian in origin and commonplace pharaonic reality (i.e. military campaign portable shrines in the case of the tabernacle). This may be taken as a strong hint of what is to come in our narrative analysis. ...​

https://postflaviana.org/old-testament-intro-rev2/​

Notes to the above:

1. Abraham's royal house retinue of 318 armed shepherds were termed tsabians. This name is remarkably similar to the star watching Sabeans of Harran, the place where Genesis claims the career of Abraham started. One of the names of the Jewish and Christian god is Lord Sabaoth, the Lord of Hosts ('host' meaning an armed force). When the later Assyrians and such conquer Israel, it is stated that 'tsabians' fled, and it is murkily (because the recorded history is murky) around this time that the Sabines end up colonizing the Italian peninsula, albeit their later foundational legend, the Aeneid, claims that they were refugees from the Trojan War. The elite Sabines (the future Caesars and popes) would end up cuckolding the Etruscan Tarquin kings via the ruse of the Rape of the Sabine Women. How about this for Weaponizing Sex?
2. Consistent with De Vere's thesis, the Sab... people ended up, historically, all over the place, e.g. Egypt, today's Yemen, and in my opinion, at least one contingent clan of the Spartans. I claim that they were also known as Biblical Ephraim, the ongoing hidden managers of the social construct of Judaism, and as the peers of the other Sabines, forming the inbred Euro-nobility till today.

 

[Claude Badley]

I need to remind you about this site rule also:

https://postflaviana.org/community/index.php?threads/forum-rules-site-policies-and-disclaimer.1224/

2 - No personal attacks or abusive behavior​

​

Each and every member on this forum has a right to be treated with dignity and respect. The following behavior is not acceptable:​

​

- Personal attacks: Any insulting or abusive behavior that is directed at a specific person.​

- Bullying (flaming): Repeated abuse towards another member, this could be undertaken by one member or a number of members.​

- Instigating (trolling): Repeatedly provoking a member with the goal of getting an irrational response from them. Or, content consisting of unsupported assertions, speculations, or opinions, which are deemed to be gratuitously inciting acrimony, rather than promoting sincere dialogue and mutual understanding.​

- Comment bombardment: replying by posting an excessive volume of marginally relevant content.​

​

Repeated comparisons of your hosts to the Three Stooges, is insulting and abusive. This is our site, and we don't have to put up with it.

Yes, you are completely right and I apologize unreservedly to you, but especially to apologize to other readers and participants as I do not want to influence them negatively, Miss Kitty in particular.

Yours faithfully
Claude

 

[Claude Badley]

Excuse me? Badley is conflating eros, hedonism, and debauchery, which are three different things. And, he's conflating Adorno, Horkheimer & Marcuse, who followed very distinctive paths.

The three, eros, hedonism and debauchery can become a sequence in some, indeed many people - happily not in too many people, and you, Jerry are presumably free of it as you could rightly distinguish them so clearly. For me it has always been a struggle, but my personal experience is that I was aware of it from age 11, not merely because my mother warned me, but because I had experienced such feelings already and seen the result in other people. I knew what joyless thinking (Orwell on Hitler) was by the age of 12! Becoming a doctor also helped as one learnt all about STDs and particularly cryptic STDs and their nasty implications (e.g. Epstein-Barr virus).

After his engagement at the Institute for Social Research (aka Frankfurt School), Marcuse went on to work for the OSS and the US State Department from 1943 to 1951. So if somebody wanted to suspect that Marcuse's later philosophical development was somehow influenced by his work with the US intelligence & foreign policy establishment, there's some possible basis for that.

Claude attempts to incriminate Adorno & Horkheimer by noting that they never explicitly spoke out in opposition to Marcuse. Well, there must be 10,000 fascist wannabes and neo-Nazis posting You Tube videos right now, and I've only denounced about three of them by name. But that doesn't mean I support the rest.

Most of the 10,000 wannabees are hopeful dictators and murderers of course but this does not mean that they can ALL be labelled outright as necessarily racists, demagogues etc., even though this would be true of most. They have to learn too - and note that many Fascists came to regret parts of their past since a political system like a religious system, always ends up a "package deal" that has good and bad bits in it. The question is finding a philosophical stance that can rid us of the mish-mash of 'system-creation'.

I haven't read Marcuse, nor have I done an exhaustive search to find out what Adorno and/or Horkheimer might have said about him, either directly or indirectly. I seriously doubt that Marcuse was as much of a debauched sex maniac as Badley is claiming.

Aha! Now I see what you mean. I am not claiming that he himself was a sex maniac; rather, he was (hypocritically) promoting behavior and ideas that would lead to hedonism and particularly to debauchery and thus mental and physical damage. I see even the case of my sister here, not just from her alcoholism - from which, remarkably she has abstained from over a year now.

Marcuse in interviews was a chain-smoker and seems to have been a heavy smoker most of his life. One of the discoveries of Kinsey was that smokers (and thus implicitly nicotine users) find reduced enjoyment from the sex act compared to non-smokers - which I suppose reflects the archetypal picture of a couple smoking in bed, meaning that they have just had sex but just don't get no satisfaction (as I was never a smoker I cannot comment personally here). And so too I seriously doubt that Marcuse himself was sexually debauched - since if he were we would, I think, have heard about it by now from the sensationalist media. After all, I can remember Woodstock being obsessed over by the mass media in 1969 and I was nearly 14 then wondering "what is the point of all this stuff" especially as it was quickly copied in Australia as the Ourimbah Pop Festival!

At one point I was a little curious, but now I'm losing patience.

To my mind it seems clear enough: Fascism is a form of tyranny, in which the authoritarian dictator is maintained in power through his allegiance and loyalty to a capitalist oligarchy. The dictator and his oligarchs are firmly in control of all means of production and mass propaganda.

The system you are describing here is merely a tyranny, comprising ONE MAN where everyone must bow down to a single dictator. Fascism was a short-lived phenomenon (1921-1945) arising directly from the Leninist threat, where the question of establishing a stable system and a mechanism of succession never came up in practice - Spain becoming a constitutional monarchy in the 1970s with Franco's death. Admiral Doenitz, Hitler's formal successor had only the task of signing the surrender!

Who in his right mind would recommend such a system, as the best that humanity can do? Even in its friendly American "democratic" form, it's brought us, as a species, to the edge of extinction.

This is by using the extended definition of Fascism, including the USA and thus so many Latin American dictatorships too.

This now brings up the big point about racism vis-a-vis Fascism. If we use the extended definition then Fascism is not necessarily a racist movement. I had travelled in Argentina in the 1990s, learning something about people's attitudes there. With the death of Juan Peron in office in the 1970s there commenced the Dirty War against Leftists. Victims were dropped into the ocean from helicopters with their feet set in concrete. They were not treated as racially inferior however, since pregnant female victims were only killed for their leftist activism after they delivered, the babies being handed over to childless couples among the Argentinian (by definition 'fascist') elite - mainly but not exclusively the military. The lack of information about the victims led to their mothers demonstrating every week in the street (the grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo), soldiers distressed at having to deal with elderly female victims. The 'fascist' regime was then, despite the censorship, unable to pacify the people's anger - so they started the Malvinas (Falklands) War, hoping to revive nationalism to ensure their legitimation. Attacking a nuclear-armed country anyway was not a good idea and in 1982 the regime quickly collapsed after military defeat.

The grandmothers have continued their demonstrations until today and some of the adoptees have now realized who their real parents are. The Catholic Church was heavily involved in the military coverups, and I remember one cleric who was indicted here with his picture in the newspaper. I only remembered his face, not being particularly interested in the Catholic involvement there. I see his face more today though - he is Pope Francis I. So I think I will have everyone's agreement that Francis I was not and is not a racist - but this hardly excuses either Catholicism or the Dirty War.

This is the 42nd post in this thread, with no inkling as to what Faithfully Yours Claude Badley is even talking about. When is he ever going to get to the point?

The point is that the 'extended fascist' definition fetishizes democracy to draw away from the fact that a financial elite (Secret Society, Freemasons, Judaeo-Christians etc.) are actually in charge. In the case of more strictly defined Fascism, the financial elites were restricted in their power, notably in Nazi Germany. See Otto Strasser's discussion of the issue in Hitler and I pp. 106-114 at https://www.resist.com/Onlinebooks/HitlerAndI-Strasser.pdf ; it shows how Fascism comprised different competing strata, rather than being some simplistic nationalist ideology, despite the fact that it began that way with Mussolini.

The crucial philosophical point that you rightly ask for, Jerry, is not the historical phenomena and opinions outlined above. Rather it is a general Fascist recognition, reflected in their continuous calls for 'order' in society, that not merely society, but Nature itself, is fundamentally disordered. Causality exists for sure, but the causality of Nature, even apart from the effects of human societies and politics, does not comprise or underpin a harmonious whole that can protect humans from danger and disaster, whether natural or from other human collectives (not mere humans acting alone).

This Fascist teaching as to the 'inherent disorder of Nature' is radically opposed to both common Western philosophical positions (not all) and to implicit Marxist teachings. Hence the Fascist looks for a human order to defend at least certain humans from the distress of the disorder and disaster deriving from 'external forces' whether natural or man-made. The West and the Marxists, preferring to preach that the universe is a harmonious whole (e.g. Spinozan pantheism, a doctrine that ultimately had him ejected from his own Jewish community - a fact that Zionist and modern Jews usually overlook) mistake this Fascist position towards nature's disorder and irrationality. Instead they label Fascism itself an 'irrational' or 'irrationalist' doctrine, readily supporting their claims by pointing to a common Fascist "anti-intellectualism", for example: Hitler's racism, Mussolini's about-faces and Francoist Spain's clinging to and preaching the worst absurdities of Catholic dogma.

So we find that Fascism is actually based upon a thorough disillusionment towards naive childish misconceptions of universal and human harmony - misconceived teachings like the Socialist Man utopia of Marxism and the 'Golden Age' goal of Western capitalism so longed for in the 1950s and 1960s, especially as they seemed to be coming true in that era! Hence Fascism is still in search of an appropriate philosophy - one that can curb its nastier implications and set up a viable system - since the question of explaining human personality differences has NOT been dealt with thoroughly (witness Kevin McDonald's 'The Culture of Critique' which only worsens and confuses the underlying issue).

As you can see, Jerry, it has taken me time to reply as I had to put this post together to give a coherent yet comprehensive-enough reply to the core issue - so I hope in this case I have given an inkling as to how modernity has corrupted philosophy, and thus how I hope to link in to my other thread.

Yours faithfully
Claude

 

[Jerry Russell]

I apologize unreservedly to you, but especially to apologize to other readers and participants as I do not want to influence them negatively, Miss Kitty in particular.

Apology accepted!

The three, eros, hedonism and debauchery can become a sequence in some, indeed many people

Yes, and I'm not denying that this slippery slope isn't a very real problem in the world today.

The system you are describing here is merely a tyranny, comprising ONE MAN where everyone must bow down to a single dictator.

Then we are still awaiting your vision of an improved version of fascism, which would solve some of the problems with the early 20th century manifestations? Richard is right, I need to be more patient...

It looks like perhaps your post was cut off in mid-thought. An editor problem, or perhaps you were interrupted?

 

[Claude Badley]

Very interesting material - but I always beware De Vere given his Aleistercrowleyphilia.

Maybe it might help to revisit what this clever chimpig wrote:

...​

As shown by Georges Dumezil, the idea of a tripartite social caste system is basic to Indo-European culture. A paradigmatic example is the Vedic Indian caste system, consisting of the Brahman (priest / king), kshatriya (warrior), and vaishya (agriculture / trade) classes. This caste system, generally, was known in the Mediterranean region via Plato’s Republic, if not earlier. If partly forgotten, it was re-encountered in Alexander the Great’s time, when the Greeks ran headlong into it on the way to India. Hellenistic art from that period and region shows a cultural fusion of people in Greek attire portraying Buddhist themes. Aspects of this Indian cultural fusion later found their way into the elite Roman and Helleno-Jewish formulation of Christianity. From there, in turn, flowed the horrors of feudalism, the inquisitions, holy and not so holy wars, institutionalized Jewish ghettos, and so on. ​

​

However, Stephen Knapp argues here that in the original Vedic concept of the caste system, one’s place was not determined by one’s birth (though as it does today it certainly helped). Rather, it was more of a meritocracy. Moreover, everyone had an inherent dignity and satisfaction in their respective societal contributions and rewards. He provides a folk story that attempts to explain why and how this system devolved. Inasmuch as this all happened in prehistoric times, perhaps this is the case.​

​

I have been able to work this out, but realized only more recently, by examining the Rg Veda, that there were originally three castes: Sudras, Vaisyas and Kshatriyas. The Brahmins came later by discarding the god Indra "who hates dark skin", trying to remove the continuing prejudices. This seems to have occurred before the dark-skinned god, Krishna, arose, though I suspect that the coming of Krishna and Brahma are intimately linked, despite the fact that I cannot prove it.

****​

Based on all this speculation, it seems entirely possible that at the dawn of written history, there was a divide, the same as there is today, between two general traditions, or ideals, for societal organization. While some societal elites preferred a static caste system, other elites (along with many commoners) held to an ideal of social mobility based upon merit and such, using some form of modified caste or no seeming caste at all. But even if De Vere is being grossly self-serving, and/or deceptive, and Knapp may be misguided, all this gets to the heart of the matter of the true dialectic.​

​

For here, if the reader pays attention, the book of Genesis ironically, precisely and explicitly describes Abraham as a typical wealthy caravan merchant. When he arrived at Hebron, a typical trading colony inside of a foreign state, the Hittites there immediately recognized him as a princely man of importance. Abraham’s traveling retinue of 318 shepherds served double duty as his armed host. That is, the claimed patriarchal father of the Hebrews was both a princely merchant and acted in a militaristic fashion, as did his conquering descendants. And yet, the pious view of Abraham is that he (and his famous progeny) were not so very different from common and lowly shepherds of literal sheep.​

Good stuff, but I have found in Michael Hudson's book ...And Forgive them their Debts that he has at long last uncovered the origin of Judaism: from debt-refugees from the Palestine coast (Plain of Sharon), who, unlike other Egyptian dominated peoples, could flee to the Judaean highlands to meet up with the natives there. Judaism arises from this combination. While Hudson* does not develop the story, it is readily apparent from linking it with other literature. Hence as Dumezil says:

With the ‘invention of the Jewish people’ (to borrow from Shlomo Sand) and the synthetic Judaic construct, the conflict between rigid caste and social mobility hardened into a social false dialectic. We find Egypt (and, later, Greece and Rome) taking the more rigid approach, while the Hebrews saw themselves as beneficiaries of a slave revolt. Thus they saw themselves as more likely to honor individualistic values. The new-found state of ‘freedom’ and ‘equality’, however, resulted in the continuation of hierarchical practices under a new set of labels and laws. Their new and unique god was yet still an avatar for their veiled human masters.​

***​

This may be taken as a strong hint of what is to come in our narrative analysis. ...​

https://postflaviana.org/old-testament-intro-rev2/​

Now I have a problem which I have not yet revealed to you all.

Notes to the above:

1. Abraham's royal house retinue of 318 armed shepherds were termed tsabians. This name is remarkably similar to the star watching Sabeans of Harran, the place where Genesis claims the career of Abraham started. One of the names of the Jewish and Christian god is Lord Sabaoth, the Lord of Hosts ('host' meaning an armed force). When the later Assyrians and such conquer Israel, it is stated that 'tsabians' fled, and it is murkily (because the recorded history is murky) around this time that the Sabines end up colonizing the Italian peninsula, albeit their later foundational legend, the Aeneid, claims that they were refugees from the Trojan War. The elite Sabines (the future Caesars and popes) would end up cuckolding the Etruscan Tarquin kings via the ruse of the Rape of the Sabine Women. How about this for Weaponizing Sex?
2. Consistent with De Vere's thesis, the Sab... people ended up, historically, all over the place, e.g. Egypt, today's Yemen, and in my opinion, at least one contingent clan of the Spartans. I claim that they were also known as Biblical Ephraim, the ongoing hidden managers of the social construct of Judaism, and as the peers of the other Sabines, forming the inbred Euro-nobility till today.

While I cannot connect the Sabines of Rome with the Sabaeans of Harran, I have to tell you that I am nowadays a researcher on the other Sabaeans, the Mandaeans or "Sabaeans of Iraq". While there may be an original connection to the Harran-Sabaeans, the Mandaeans, who are Gnostics, heartily reject the planet-gods as good, regarding them instead as malignant and evil. The Mandaeans are the only surviving Gnostic sect, having held out in the Tigris-Euphrates marshes among the Marsh Arabs; they are NOT mentioned by the Christian heresy writers (i.e. Irenaeus, Hippolytus nor Epiphanius). They reveal the Gnostic basis of Christianity but WITHOUT refuting anything substantial that Carotta, Vaillant & Fahy and Joe Atwill have established.

I have been invited to Oxford University in July to speak about the newest research on the Mandaeism, aided by my good friend Carlos who lives in Sydney, is an actual Mandaean, and really appreciated CM when I bought it for his assessment "on spec" because the Amazon review of it didn't make it appear stupid enough to ignore!

Yours faithfully
Claude

*I feel enormous pride at being associated indirectly with Hudson's book since I know two people in the Acknowledgements section, though they have not met one another. And yes, I have just been made a trustee in an Australian Henry George association.

 

[Claude Badley]

Both!

It looks like perhaps your post was cut off in mid-thought. An editor problem, or perhaps you were interrupted?

Yes indeed I was unable to go further but the interruption to my "twin towers of thought" was due to having to think about Kevin-11, i.e. the Culture of Critique book, which I only found out about from listening to a Joe "Powers & Principalities" episode where he mentioned that it was unavailable as a book - leading one to think that this "rare" text had some crucial fundamental importance for social issues. That I could get it readily online meant that I now had to wade through its inconsistencies, especially its attack on "Not in Our Genes" - by which I am not implying that the latter text is satisfactory.

I just hope that readers here have read 'Not in Our Genes' so that you will get some idea of what I need to deal with - on a separate thread.

Yours faithfully
Claude

 

[Claude Badley]

I hope you won't think the world reducible to ONE binary opposition

Wow, if nothing else you've done a service in making me understand that Orwell was such a binary thinker. There are only two human social possibilities, Hedonist or Fascist.

...as in the first words here, but this is just me extrapolating unreasonably.

Orwell's notions of Hitler (at least as you've provided) appear rather facile to me, like we all are to take Hitler's facade at face value. Joe likes to frequently make use of the term Lifetime Actor, and here, Hitler is a perfect candidate for inclusion.

That is true, since human personality is multilayered and multifaceted - and cannot be explained by the simple 'electrochemical model' of human brain function.

As such, Hitler's facade of rhetoric was certainly a messianic Man of Struggle, but his debauched quantum reality was that of a (bisexual) Hedonist. He started his Nazi career as an military counter-intelligence agent. As you mentioned about the Docherty video about how the British prepared their society for WWI long in advance, the same thing was going on in Germany. And even further, we can see that the Kaiser, via Max von Oppenheim, seeded with the Ottomans what we know of today as global Islamic Jihad. To wit, it all flowed from the Shepherds, via various Sheepdogs.

True, but some Shepherds and Sheepdogs (e.g. Germans but not only Germans) were to be sacrificed for "the greater good." So no wonder Hitler was such a joyless thinker - and yet turned on Slavs and Communism as the 'real' enemy, to Otto Strasser's vexation.

****
Again, just as you ridiculously cannot point to a successful instance of Fascism, there is no significant instance of Democracy that hasn't had the thumbs of somebodies' hidden hands on its scales. And you continually dodge this issue of a contiguous thread of shepherding duality. To what purpose?

By that I presume you mean some essential (contiguous) link between say the shepherds of old (Rome, Greece, Israel) and present-day Western financial elites. A link in methods for sure, but the genealogy in terms of emotional bonding is harder to assert - despite that fact that genetic (i.e. human DNA) links will no doubt be found.

Since the beginning of Joe's introduction to us of this topic I have only been tangentially involved, at best. But let's say that I fully buy into these interpretations of the Frankfurt School, then they are still well subordinated under our models of SSSM and CCCS.

In any case, its interesting that the Frankfurt School decided to debase the cultures of American and other Democracies so as to prevent the rise of Fascism.

The "rise of Fascism" here meaning a greater general understanding of the malignant potential of Anglo-America-&-Zionism. While there is some meagre understanding of this in the public domain, it is very slight and usually perverted to traditional racial & religious prejudices - this website being exceptional.

If there is any significant differential genetic component to our Shepherds, Sheepdog, and Sheep Model it would be that of the psychopathic spectrum or similar.

You are presuming here the common belief that psychopathy is a genetic affliction.

Your appeal to the Nazi's nature movement, just as to the related Volkish movement, is another non sequitur. The Nazi's expediently incorporated such under their political umbrella so as to broaden the Party's appeal in the essential need to achieve critical mass. Such expedience is also what facilitated 'critics' to claim that the 'paganistic' Nazis had little nexus with Christianity, when the opposite was the case.

Environmental concerns were expedient for many Nazis but there is no doubt that Walter Darre and other leading Nazis like Hermann Goering took major steps in environmental protection e.g. the game laws and Goering's breeding of the rare European bison.

Also, if we are to take the Hitler phenomenon at face value, Hitler didn't unite with welcoming Ukrainians ... because, as you alluded to -- the Nazis thought less of the Slavs than they did of the Jews. And, lebensraum is essentially an imperial ambition or minimally just rhetoric. Just imagine this Bannon Utopia of Manly Fascist Nations, at (h)edonistic peace with all their (White?) neighbors, their Manly weapons aimed at each other evoking Mutually Assured Destruction. Oh, I forgot, at some point their swords will be beat into ploughshares, the lion will lay down with the lamb. Bah humbug.

In any case, I'm yet rather interested in how Badleytidian Fascism will determine its leaders, the succession process and all, necessary to maintain long term continuity. Will its now admitted caste system work like DeVere's and/or will it allow upwards and downwards mobility?

OK, I see why your thesis is not really a thesis, merely a yet incoherent hypothesis.

DeVere's caste system is a poorly hidden racial one. Rather, caste will be determined by one's personality, personality not being fully determined by one's genetic makeup nor the environment. Rather, individual idiosyncrasy is the key - and this has to be accommodated by the future authorities.

Nietzsche was coming towards this view on personality and caste when he became insane from syphilis in 1890 - a true tragedy for mankind, as it allowed his sane writings to be dismissed as those of a madman. Georges Sorel's ideas are very close to Nietzsche and the two authors, though separated by language, represent an understanding largely absent in the English-speaking world in the late 19th and early 20th century!

The initial task, as the new caste system is being set up, is to separate money from power, to control the banksters and thus the amount of money in circulation and thus control inflation. With this, there must be compensating remuneration for unskilled labor - less desirable work being paid a higher renumeration. Unskilled laborers will thus vote with their feet, moving to higher paid dirty jobs or low paid easier-to-do jobs to fit whatever suits them best. This is the opposite to Western systems (where the market decides leading to mass impoverishment in the face of a non-expanding economy) and to Marxism (where work is done through hortatory methods and blackmail in the belief that money will no longer be required as people will work for the sake of it) where, ideally, the remuneration is the same whatever the hours or the amount of work one does.

Capitalists will still exist - but capitalism will not since the capitalists no longer rule the economy. Children will be educated on a universal education system with universal health care. You have to have the latter otherwise people will be wiped out by new diseases - particular those from superbugs now antibiotic resistant which tend to survive and breed in the poor and destitute people now found everywhere in capitalist countries (including Australia).

Only lawyers will be electively free of the caste system - since the nature of their occupation means that as judges and advocates they have to represent others. Clearly much work and practical experience will be required here to prevent them rorting the system.

Land will be taxed as a privilege by the Georgist system - which you have probably ascertained from my postings above. This will need to be heavily policed lest the Freemason-financier types try to take over once more!

So is it still an "incoherent hypothesis"?

Yours faithfully
Claude

 

[Richard Stanley]

Becoming a doctor also helped as one learnt all about STDs and particularly cryptic STDs and their nasty implications (e.g. Epstein-Barr virus).

I had 4 years of moderately severe CFS is the late eighties, it started classically with a month long case of menengitis. I tested negative for Epstein-Barr, and nothing made a dent in it until the MSM 60 Minutes had a show discussing the theory that mercury in amalgam fillings was involved. Long story short, it definitively was.

Aha! Now I see what you mean. I am not claiming that he himself was a sex maniac; rather, he was (hypocritically) promoting behavior and ideas that would lead to hedonism and particularly to debauchery and thus mental and physical damage. I see even the case of my sister here, not just from her alcoholism - from which, remarkably she has abstained from over a year now.

And so too I seriously doubt that Marcuse himself was sexually debauched - since if he were we would, I think, have heard about it by now from the sensationalist media. After all, I can remember Woodstock being obsessed over by the mass media in 1969 and I was nearly 14 then wondering "what is the point of all this stuff" especially as it was quickly copied in Australia as the Ourimbah Pop Festival!

While Atwill et al. attribute such to a Jewish revenge plot, I attribute such to the typical cyclical machinations of the larger dialectic system. The Sexual Revolution and related occurred in tight relationship to Spelly's War, aka Vietnam, and the Kennedy assassinations. The most consequential result was the capitulation of internal American WASP hegemony, in favor of the majority Catholics, whose foreign leader is the 'Joseph' of Judaism. Because that's the System.

Hence, why I have bugged you about troubadours.

In possible support of your position, its interesting to learn recently that those naughty wife-swapping Etruscans were making themselves rich by selling their wine to the pale 'natives' of the north, their wine being much stronger than the natives' domestic beer. This cultural debasing practice went on in North America as well.

Fascism was a short-lived phenomenon (1921-1945) arising directly from the Leninist threat, where the question of establishing a stable system and a mechanism of succession never came up in practice - Spain becoming a constitutional monarchy in the 1970s with Franco's death. Admiral Doenitz, Hitler's formal successor had only the task of signing the surrender!

After 40 years or so in exile, the Savoys were restored to the monarchy of Italy. They were exiled because of their close links to .... the Fascists. As I have already mentioned, the Fascists paid homage to their Savoy's Sabine roots with the building of the model city of Sabaudia, the name itself referring to the post imperial lands of the Sabines: the Piedmonte, the Haute Savoy, and Burgundy.

This is by using the extended definition of Fascism, including the USA and thus so many Latin American dictatorships too.

The grandmothers have continued their demonstrations until today and some of the adoptees have now realized who their real parents are. The Catholic Church was heavily involved in the military coverups, and I remember one cleric who was indicted here with his picture in the newspaper. I only remembered his face, not being particularly interested in the Catholic involvement there. I see his face more today though - he is Pope Francis I. So I think I will have everyone's agreement that Francis I was not and is not a racist - but this hardly excuses either Catholicism or the Dirty War.

I don't know the ethnic demography of Argentina, as it relates to indigenous peoples and mixtures. In my adventure in Spain, the man who replaced me was a Mexican-American. The Spaniards were very interested in the spelling of his surname, because it was the Mexican spelling and not the Spanish. I was quite taken back by my replacement's reaction to these queries, as he insisted that he was of pure Spanish blood.

Mexico, at least, is well known as to its strata of Europeans at the top, Mexican mixtures in the middle, and the indigenous at the bottom.

So we find that Fascism is actually based upon a thorough disillusionment towards naive childish misconceptions of universal and human harmony - misconceived teachings like the Socialist Man utopia of Marxism and the 'Golden Age' goal of Western capitalism so longed for in the 1950s and 1960s, especially as they seemed to be coming true in that era!

This doesn't mean that this understanding provides for an optimal society. Rerum Novarum attempted find a middle way between workers and capitalist employers, but it could not bring itself to allow for any compromise with collective approaches whatsoever (unless the Church was doing it). The Nazi's "middle way" seems to me to be a big bait and switch scam, sold with blaming the Jews for the problems that Kaiser Wilhelm and his royal relatives fomented.

Hence Fascism is still in search of an appropriate philosophy - one that can curb its nastier implications and set up a viable system - since the question of explaining human personality differences has NOT been dealt with thoroughly (witness Kevin McDonald's 'The Culture of Critique' which only worsens and confuses the underlying issue).

I think it would behoove you to find a better name, as Fascism is so freighted. And, I'm pretty sure that it really means that it is veiling a different agenda, as 'fascia' typically does.

Very interesting material - but I always beware De Vere given his Aleistercrowleyphilia.
Yes, I suspect he wasn't telling us the whole Truth.

I have been able to work this out, but realized only more recently, by examining the Rg Veda, that there were originally three castes: Sudras, Vaisyas and Kshatriyas. The Brahmins came later by discarding the god Indra "who hates dark skin", trying to remove the continuing prejudices.

I find Shendge's work, The Language of the Harappans very interesting in this regard, as relates to her discussion of the cataclysmic collapse of the IVC, the rerouting of the major rivers. And as Gene Matlock noted in his Jesus and Moses - Are Buried in India, Birthplace of Abraham and the Hebrews, he brings up the name of the three rivers as applying to Abraham, Sarah, and Haggar. Namely, the Brahmaputra, the Sarasvati, and the Ghaggar-Hakra.

Good stuff, but I have found in Michael Hudson's book ...And Forgive them their Debts that he has at long last uncovered the origin of Judaism: from debt-refugees from the Palestine coast (Plain of Sharon), who, unlike other Egyptian dominated peoples, could flee to the Judaean highlands to meet up with the natives there. Judaism arises from this combination. While Hudson* does not develop the story, it is readily apparent from linking it with other literature. Hence as Dumezil says:

Yes, we have discussed these archaeological findings via Finklestein and Silberman's The Bible Unearthed. This all makes for a very nice foundational story for the Freedom loving Jews, but it doesn't account for many other vectors into the "social construct", the actual depicted nature of Abraham for one, and Joseph's relationship to 'Pharaoh' writ large.

While I cannot connect the Sabines of Rome with the Sabaeans of Harran, I have to tell you that I am nowadays a researcher on the other Sabaeans, the Mandaeans or "Sabaeans of Iraq". While there may be an original connection to the Harran-Sabaeans, the Mandaeans, who are Gnostics, heartily reject the planet-gods as good, regarding them instead as malignant and evil. The Mandaeans are the only surviving Gnostic sect, having held out in the Tigris-Euphrates marshes among the Marsh Arabs; they are NOT mentioned by the Christian heresy writers (i.e. Irenaeus, Hippolytus nor Epiphanius). They reveal the Gnostic basis of Christianity but WITHOUT refuting anything substantial that Carotta, Vaillant & Fahy and Joe Atwill have established.

One doesn't need to make the argument that your Sabaeans are exactly the same as the other Sabeans. That there could be nexus in place and/or time might only suggest that there was some Identity Theft and cuckolding taking place. That said, my Sabeans also engage in a lot of cosmic didgeridoo. Maybe this means there were two different schools, as Josephus stated for the Pharisees. One had to be exterminated, while the other exist today.

DeVere's caste system is a poorly hidden racial one.

It's even more exclusive than that.

So is it still an "incoherent hypothesis"?

It's getting less so.

 

[Jerry Russell]

Children will be educated on a universal education system with universal health care.... Land will be taxed as a privilege by the Georgist system...

With policies like that, I think you might be a commie!

We're huge fans of Henry George here; mentioned in:

https://postflaviana.org/cultural-degradation/

https://postflaviana.org/community/index.php?threads/fixing-democracy.2493/post-11400

 

[Richard Stanley]

Also with here, regarding the OG intent of Monopoly, the board game: https://postflaviana.org/community/index.php?threads/the-georgist-irony-of-monopoly-the-board-game.1704/#post-9868

What happened there is also illustrative of how co-optation (of social reforms) and moral inversion works.

In any case, I'm not sure how a property tax works in a Georgist system, especially if it is much like our current property tax system which ensures unequal public education and other services.

 

[Richard Stanley]

While the following does not speak to any specifics of the Frankfurt School, it is an interview by Abby Martin with Richard Wolff on Cultural Marxism -- and Jordan Peterson's backing down on his claim that no one would debate him on Cultural Marxism, refusing to debate Wolff after Wolff took the challenge.

Wolff traces the term to the Nazis, which used it for propagandic efficiency to allow anything that opposed their ideology to be thrown into a disparaging trash bin. This is the exact same technique employed by defenders of Capitalism today. Anything that they don't like is commie. If too many of their voters like Social Security or Medicare, then this precludes this treatment.

Ironicly, the Nazis claimed to hate Capitalism (as the opposite side of the Jewish coin) as much as they hated Bolshevism. This, despite that they took massive capitalist funds from outside Germany both before and during the war (via the Bank of International Settlements in Basel). The agenda for the war was not as advertised.

 

[Richard Stanley]

Hence as Dumezil says:

I forgot to say that clever chimpig outfoxed himself. That was me (quoting Dumezil and others) actually.

I have been invited to Oxford University in July to speak about the newest research on the Mandaeism, aided by my good friend Carlos who lives in Sydney, is an actual Mandaean, and really appreciated CM when I bought it for his assessment "on spec" because the Amazon review of it didn't make it appear stupid enough to ignore!

We demand a full report.

 

[Claude Badley]

Also with here, regarding the OG intent of Monopoly, the board game: https://postflaviana.org/community/index.php?threads/the-georgist-irony-of-monopoly-the-board-game.1704/#post-9868

I learnt that at a Georgist meeting - to my great surprise about 5 years ago, just before I'd heard of CM and Docherty & McGregor's work on WW`.

What happened there is also illustrative of how co-optation (of social reforms) and moral inversion works.

In any case, I'm not sure how a property tax works in a Georgist system, especially if it is much like our current property tax system which ensures unequal public education and other services.

The property charges are meant to be governed by auction sales, regions with high auctions - indicating higher-priced land would then be charged higher Georgist land rates. In Australia at the moment farmland is of low price and housing land of high price, hence the need to charge Georgist land rent on cities in order to lower house prices and rents to make them affordable.

But try telling that to the morons who for 30 years have chanted that holy mantra: "The value of your home goes up every day" despite the termites, the broken tiles, the peeling crumbling plaster, the leaky guttering and the widening crack under the floor.

There is much to be done, obviously, to make it work - but number one is to provide good-paying jobs so that unemployment - and the relative poverty it imposes - is a choice rather than something forced. Money is as money does, and this is the second rule to prevent inflation, the first being to halt fiat money! But we need tough and effective leadership with integrity for that - not a bunch of Secret Society Freemason types chanting F.U. while reading their J. D. Salinger!

Yours faithfully
Claude

 

[Claude Badley]

You make a tough argument there in order to deny the existence of anything called 'cultural Marxism' - and by using two competent characters long familiar to me from RT (Russian Television)

While the following does not speak to any specifics of the Frankfurt School, it is an interview by Abby Martin with Richard Wolff on Cultural Marxism -- and Jordan Peterson's backing down on his claim that no one would debate him on Cultural Marxism, refusing to debate Wolff after Wolff took the challenge.

Wolff traces the term to the Nazis, which used it for propagandic efficiency to allow anything that opposed their ideology to be thrown into a disparaging trash bin. This is the exact same technique employed by defenders of Capitalism today. Anything that they don't like is commie. If too many of their voters like Social Security or Medicare, then this precludes this treatment.

Note however that the Nazis called it "cultural Bolshevism", a narrower term specifically referring to Leninism, whereas cultural Marxism today refers to a broader current of thought based upon Marx & Engels.

The Nazis certainly preached anti-profiteering - notably the Strasser brothers - until Hitler got crucial industry funding.

Ironicly, the Nazis claimed to hate Capitalism (as the opposite side of the Jewish coin) as much as they hated Bolshevism. This, despite that they took massive capitalist funds from outside Germany both before and during the war (via the Bank of International Settlements in Basel). The agenda for the war was not as advertised.

The reason that I accept the term 'cultural Marxism' is NOT because Joe Atwill uses it* but because Marx claimed that his system - and by implication his philosophy - was complete in that it explained the world correctly. This philosophy was later termed 'dialectical materialism' but even Engels, who understood the Marxist philosophy best, did not solve all the pressing issues, even though he gave a better account than anyone else of it.

The philosophical fatality, i.e. blindness of Marxism arises from Marx himself, being seen most clearly in his 'Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844' written after his PhD Thesis on Epicurean versus Democritean Atomist Philosophy. In the section titled 'Estranged Labor' (Marx, Early Writings, Penguin, pp. 328-329) he writes:

The universality of man manifests itself in practice in that universality which makes the whole of nature his inorganic body... Nature is man's inorganic body, that is to say nature insofar as it is not the human body. … But productive life is species life. It is life-producing life. The whole character of a species, its conscious activity constitutes the species-character of man. Life itself appears only as a means for life. …

Estranged labor therefore turns the human species-being (das Gattungswesen des Menschen) - both nature and his intellectual species-powers - into a being alien to him and a means of his individual existence. It estranges man from his own body, from nature as it exists outside him, from his spiritual nature (Wesen), his human essence (Wesen).

The estrangement of labor from a human being as in the second part of the quote is found in the capitalist mode of production where a labourer does not produce for himself but for another. However the first part of the quote treats a human being only as an abstraction. By writing of "human species-being" as the essence of a human, Marx completely rules out differential personality among human beings - in fact, atomizing human beings along the lines of both Democritus and Epicurus even though his philosophy would harmonize with Karl Jung's "collective unconscious".

Hence Marxists have treated human personality as malleable, as entirely controlled by the environment, hence the belief in creating 'Socialist Man', despite the fact that WW2 in Russia would afterwards be called 'The Great Patriotic War' not 'The War for Socialist Man against Nazi Racist Insanity'.

It is a matter of common observation that individuals have radically different personalities - even though the origin of personality differences cannot be pinned down substantially to hereditary factors, as Jordan Peterson or Hitler might imagine, nor even environmental ones. Yet the mere fact of radically different personalities among people effectively refutes the whole Marxist agenda as "the Proletariat" cannot be created because of "the failure of the subjective factor" (to use Marxist terminology). Marx simply did not appreciate the vexatious issue of differential human personalities, hence Marxists of later times did not either. The worst offender here is Lenin in The State and Revolution where he writes of the "withering away of the state" and the "withering away of democracy" too!

Hence cultural Marxism is that agenda, normally Leftist, that espouses Leftist-type ideas (at least in a Western cultural system) while remaining blind to the fundamental question of human personality differences. For example, it tries to avoid the issue by espousing bureaucratic policies, arrangements and hierarchies that can avoid the personality difference question while seeking the assistance of identity politics etc. to support the particular Cultural Marxist agenda.

To put it even more starkly, Cultural Marxism accepts significant personality differences in practice (e.g. identity politics of ethnic groups, gays and transsexuals etc.) while rejecting such differences in theory as merely superficial and insignificant! Hence its hopeless approach to issues and the confusion it engenders.

At a deeper level it is actually the failure of ancient Greek atomistic philosophy (that of Democritus and Epicurus) which underpins modern Western science - i.e. the inherent blindness of Western thought today that reduces pretty well everybody to stooges of the system at some prolonged stage in their lives!

Yours faithfully
Claude

*Last time I looked Wikipedia had no entry under 'Cultural Marxism' because the contributors could not agree on the meaning.

 

[Richard Stanley]

At a deeper level it is actually the failure of ancient Greek atomistic philosophy (that of Democritus and Epicurus) which underpins modern Western science - i.e. the inherent blindness of Western thought today that reduces pretty well everybody to stooges of the system at some prolonged stage in their lives!

Amazing!!! When I was a lad in public elementary school we had to take aptitude tests -- that determined what respective kind of atom we were. On the surface it seemed like nothing was done with this data, but a few years later we began to be segregated into different classes, where the math and such was different. This went on progressively.

Do you think that anything can be applied, or learned, from comparing chimpanzee culture to bonobo culture? Would the latter be an 'natural' exemplar of Cultural Marxism in the wild and its results? Whatever the case, I'm guessing the latter has less homosexuality by frustration driven choice. Supposedly the latter are infinitely more peaceful. No wonder we're called chimpigs and not bonopigs. Maybe Bono is the exception, that peacemonger!!!

In any case, how would your enlightened caste system work in this regard? Would it de-atomize us into 3 castes, or 300?

 

[Jerry Russell]

*Last time I looked Wikipedia had no entry under 'Cultural Marxism' because the contributors could not agree on the meaning.

I've been following this debate. Actually, there's a pretty broad agreement among most of the editors, that 'Cultural Marxism' is a conspiracy theory based loosely on the work of the Frankfurt School. That's why the term 'Cultural Marxism' currently re-directs to a section of the article on Frankfurt School.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_School#Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_theory

Up until December 2014, there was an article named 'Cultural Marxism', but it was deemed useless and beyond redemption by the editorial team and a panel of three administrators, and was deleted under the WP:TNT guideline, "Blow it up and start over". An archive copy of the old article is at this link: https://archive.fo/YzkIS and the deletion discussion is summarized here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Articles_for_deletion/Cultural_Marxism_(2nd_nomination)

The lack of a full article entitled 'Cultural Marxism' has been a bone of contention ever since, and many both inside & outside the encyclopedia have felt it's an embarrassing omission. Several attempts to remedy the situation have failed. But, I checked this morning and discovered to my surprise, that after years of discussion, a new consensus seems to be developing. Editors mostly agree that the article section "Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory" has matured sufficiently to merit splitting off to its own article by that name. At this moment, the vote is 8 in favor, 3 opposed. Cast your vote here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Frankfurt_School#RfC:_Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_theory_section_-_possible_split

The editors of the article on "Cultural Bolshevism" discuss the relationship between Cultural Marxism and Cultural Bolshevism, here on the talk page for that article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Cultural_Bolshevism

The conclusion seems to be that the modern theory of Cultural Marxism developed independently from Cultural Bolshevism, although advocates of the modern version of the conspiracy theory have recognized the similarity to Nazi views on the subject.

 

[Claude Badley]

I'm stunned!

To me this is proof, Jerry...

The editors of the article on "Cultural Bolshevism" discuss the relationship between Cultural Marxism and Cultural Bolshevism, here on the talk page for that article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Cultural_Bolshevism

The conclusion seems to be that the modern theory of Cultural Marxism developed independently from Cultural Bolshevism, although advocates of the modern version of the conspiracy theory have recognized the similarity to Nazi views on the subject.

...that important and influential people (e.g. hopeful and actual Wikipedia editors) are reading Postflaviana!

Yours faithfully
Claude

PS: Perhaps too I should indicate why Gramsci is often mistakenly lumped with the Frankfurt School as a "Cultural Marxist". I find the answer in the editorial footnotes to Gramsci's three volume Prison Notebooks which recently came out in English, myself being a proud owner of these.

Gramsci refers only to Lukacs, not to the happy HAM (Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse) hockers, Gramsci having limited access to the outside world by 1930. In Volume 2 pp. 192-3 §43, he refers to Lukacs' "Objectivity of the Real", disparaging it as an attempt to restrict dialectical understanding to human society but not nature. His only possible appreciation of Lukacs concerns the latter's displeasure with Nikolai Bukharin's rubbishy treatise on materialist philosophy - called "the Popular Manual of Sociology" in Gramsci's works (Historical Materialism otherwise, see volume 1 p. 36) - which reveals the unforgivably crude level of Soviet philosophical understanding (even Lenin criticized Bukharin for not properly understanding the philosophy of dialectical materialism).

However in the editorial notes for this section (pp. 565-7), the editors of Gramsci try to link him intimately with Lukacs' thinking, since both criticized Bukharin's Popular Manual along somewhat similar lines. However, any similarity here reflects only Bukharin's crudeness rather than Lukacs and Gramsci thinking along the same lines. Let's hope this footnote cures others, e.g. Joe, of lumping a genuine thinker like Gramsci with the happy HAM hookers of "Cultural Marxism". Thus the only conspiracy I see here is the crudity of Gramsci's editors (or the English translator Buttigieg) trying to buttress the link between Gramsci and Lukacs - implying to me that either they must themselves really believe the crude materialist BS in the Popular Manual, or wish to deceive their readers with such BS.