The 68ers in a Nutshell

From the diary of Kenneth Tynan, High Modernist Hero (more on this later):

Someone at the party says: 'Whatever happened to Danny Cohn-Bendit?' At once I am back in Clive Goodwin's flat, packed with every literary Leftist in London for the party he gave in the spring of '68 to celebrate Cohn-Bendit's flying visit to London. The barricades were up in Paris; everybody was talking about 'instant revolution'; and when Cohn-Bendit held a question-and-answer session with the guests, I made myself immediately unpopular by asking: 'What's your strategy? What is the next step the student will take?' C.B. said impatiently: 'The whole point of our revolution is that we don't follow plans. It is a spontaneous permanent revolution. We improvise. It is like jazz.' Everyone applauded and reproved my carping. I went on to ask: 'Nobody ever had a successful revolution without the support of the army- are you trying to form any links with the military?' C.B. again brushed the question aside as an irrelevance: 'The army is no problem. Many young officers agree with us.' At the very moment, as we discovered later, de Gaulle was quietly testing the army's loyalty; assured that he had it, he knew that he was sitting pretty and that the revolution, for all its tumult and euphoria, was a paper tiger.

So what did happen to ol' Danny? He became a EU bureaucrat and supported neoliberalism and imperialist wars on Bosnia and Afghanistan. Of course the students were hardly the most radical part of Mai68. The Situationists with their cynicism and spot on critiques of modern capitalism and the workers who occupied their factories and established councils were the ones setting the stage for a new society. A few brats who didn't want to go class and idolized Stalinist murderers like Che and Mao were in no position to take power, except as future stockbrokers, paper pushers, managers and other assorted scum.

Former Trots Make Good

Recently I was reading about a group of former British Trotskyists from the now defunct Revolutionary Communist Party who evolved through the pages of their journal Living Marxism from stagnant Leninists to a group of smart left-libertarians with solid critiques of the liberal establishment, the therapeutic state and the cult of the victim. As a former Trotskyist myself, this story held some personal interest. Also, it is nice to see ex-Trots actually move on to something worthwhile rather than become tired social democrats or cretinous neoconservatives (or some unholy synthesis of the two).

The most interesting part of the whole story, however, was the behavior of certain leftists (especially environmentalists given LM's questioning the authenticity of global warming fears) as the group moved towards more independent positions. Guardian journalist George Monbiot has developed an especially strange obsession with the group, accusing them of sinister entryism, being stooges for corporate lobbyists and of being a cult. It seems that any amount of independent thinking will get one cast out of the Left 'community' faster than Hester Prynne and with all manners of absurd accusations in tow.

The death of their journal came about after they lost a libel action made against them by Independent Television News. This came about when an article was published in LM which correctly pointed out that ITN coverage of the Serbian conflict was incorrectly labeled with the express intent of providing bias against the Serbs. You see the group around the LM journal noticed from their years with the organized Left that when war and imperialism was being waged under the guise of 'humanitarian intervention' there were considerably fewer people to demonstrate against it. Their new site, Sp!ked Online (which was created after LM was forced to fold due to the loss of the libel suit), is also quite astute at pointing out the class prejudice and moral superiority inherent in liberal activism.

Of course, I don't share their Sinophilia or desire to keep the borders open, but it is certainly nice to a see a group of writers and activists who are solidly antiwar (that is opposed to it even when waged by a Democrat president), support Irish republicanism even after the peace process, and who are solid libertarians but not afraid to use Marx as a way to understand capitalism. Anyway, Sp!ked is in the links section, so check it out for yourself.

I Love This Kid!

I first found out about Mr. Kor because he listed himself as a follower of James O'Meara's blog. His list of sites which he follows (which inlcludes my semi-moribund Frickin' Good Culture art blog) made me privy to such interesting stuff as Momus' livejournal and Spike Magazine. As far as I can discern, Mr. Kor, who also goes by Mad Max Quorum, is a Danish artist who produces deliciously low abstract digital videos and rants of a radically PoMo, metapolitical nature. I was greatly impressed by his thoughts here and here. I hope we see more of his stuff and possibly even his comments on my little, lonely isle of cyberspace. Hear, hear to the new generation of smart ass, art schooled, metapolitcally minded yute who are breaking with mainstream liberal orthodoxy and scaring the shit out of the entrenched culture classes!

Out with the Old... Again

Stewart Home writes in The Easy Way to Falsify Your Credit Rating:

The God of modernity is not the God of the Old Testament. There is no God but God, and in the twentieth-century he was sent to the back of a dole queue, that is until "Islamoprotestant" neo-traditionalists reinvented him as a movie director. The 9/11 hijack script followed the cultural logic of slasher movies, where the invisibility of the killer is used to overcome the non-representability of evil. If all sides in the post-9/11 "conflict" feel or felt able to invoke God as justification for their actions, then they must necessarily configure each other as emissaries of Satan. It doesn't matter whether or not they've seen The Exorcist or The Omen, they've absorbed the scripts by osmosis. Religion has been Hollywoodised. A lust for dramatic crises has been mixed with a conservative desire for crisis management, that assimilates and defuses the threat of free and spontaneous human activity.

The reader can take away two conclusions from this passage:

a. The "War on Terror" and the seeming conflict between Western secular, modern, liberal democracy and Eastern traditional, theocratic Islam is another false dichotomy, stylized and determined by the power elite as a cover from the actual workings of reality. Or rather, a guise used to prevent people from making their own conclusions as to the workings of their external reality. This can also be termed a false narrative and has been called such things as "the clash of civilizations." From the Western perspective it is usually expressed in absurd statements such as, "They hate us because we are free." From the Islamic side it usually comes across as simply, "They're infidels!" The false narrative of the Terror War is the logical next step from the false narratives of the Cold War and the two World Wars previous. Because America needed an enemy to legitimize her unipolar role as police-officer-to-the-world, there is much that is even phonier about the Terror War narrative than with the previous narratives. With the Cold War there was an actual race for global hegemony and both sides were equally equipped in terms of weapons and technology. Contrast this with the disproportionateness of the current "conflict." Then there is the matter of the identity of the enemy itself. By all accounts, Al Qaeda is what the US media and political regime uses as an umbrella term for any Islamist insurgent group fighting against it. Of course, the fact that they are dealing with Fourth Generation Warfare and a multitude of groups and individuals (many of whom hate each other as much as they hate the United States) who are only aligned by a general ideological framework defined from the outside is never mentioned in mainstream discourse on the Terror War because it would undermine the ability to pigeonhole the situation into easily consumable terms. The more one looks at the Terror War, the more it seems to be collective delusion set up by a bored MIC in need of an outlet for all their weapons left over from the Cold War and, again, legitimation. At the very least, the whole "conflict" is being determined entirely by the cultural terms of late modernity, namely simulacra. This certainly includes the way the Other side is viewing it as well. Along with Home's comments on the Hollywoodization of religion, consider the very unIslamic behavior of the 9/11 hijackers prior to the attack. Clearly they were imbued with a very modern sensibility and viewed their task as hand as such. This was not the mindset of a traditionalist, rather it has all the markings of a modernist: creative destruction, material excess, letting losse, and the labor value theory applied to the spiritual realm.

b. As Home notes, "The God of modernity is not the God of the Old Testament." This is because the latter is long dead, pronounced as such by Freddy Nietzsche all the way back in the 19th century. The current protestations against secular society by Muslims and Christians alike is simply because these misbehaving ingrates are a bit slow on the pick up. The fact of the matter is that liberal secular society is the one on wane and is dying. So if modern secular liberalism is in its final throes, that means that religious society must have died a while back. That is why these idiots are frothing at the mouth for Armageddon and actively trying to bring it to fruition. They know they are old hat, more out of date than a gramophone. The very fact that they are either fermenting environmental collapse or nuclear war shows that they don't even believe their own nonsense. After all, why should mere mortals tamper with God's plan if it is inevitable? For another example, take the Christian Zionist attachment to Israel. A true Chrisitian traditionalist would never lend allegiance to a nation-state created by the godless United Nations. This is because Israel can only be created by God himself, hence Orthodox Jews are intensely anti-Zionist.

b.
1. The other fundamentalists in this equation are the modern fundamentalists. Christopher Hitchens, Martin Amis, the Euston Manifesto crowd, and those dyed-in-the-wool neoconservatives who cut their teeth on issues of Partisan Review, that handy journal of literary high modernism. These folks believe fervently, dogmatically so, in the liberatory aspects of secular liberalism, the representative democratic republic, and the welfare(-warfare) state. The thought of these things coming under intense scrutiny by a new generation with new ideas, by the dawning of a new era, scares them very much and has put them in a corner where they are lashing out. While I would happily have all the Abrahamic nutjobs kill each other off and leave the rest of us in peace, these irrational rationalists, illiberal liberals, and dogmatic skeptics worry me just as much.

Extra! Extra! Dying Industry Supports Dying Ideas!

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Missed Opportunities

The current issue of Harper's contains a very interesting review of Timothy Snyder's book on the Archduke Wilhelm of Austria, member of the Hapsburg dynasty, who attempted to forge and reign over an independent Ukraine. Wilhelm is described, along with Henryk Józewski, as believing:

passionately that the state shouldn't seek to impose a cultural identity on its citizens, and both were prepared to risk their lives for the idea of pluralism. This makes them romantic heroes for our times as well as true Europeans.

Of course Harper's, despite being the pinnacle of print media for the left-leaning intelligentsia, is trying to make the comparison between Wilhelm's politics and those of the European Union. The EU, it should be noted, is really trying to regain independence for Europe by trying to out Americanize the Americans. This is not too dissimilar from the way former British colonies would flaunt their Britishness, hence the penchant for cricket in the West Indies, as if to say, "It's okay. You can go now. Your work is done."

But Wilhelm's politics were probably much closer to an anarcho-nationalist imperium or Alain de Benoist's 'Europe of 1000 flags.' The article goes on to describe what could be interpreted as Wilhelm's attempt at a form of national communism:

Broke, an exile in republican Vienna and Bavaria, he drifted into the shadowy world of royalist conspiracies. He started a newspaper that bore as its slogan "Ukrainians of all lands, unite!" and a masthead featuring a Ukrainian worker with a hammer and sickle. Wilhelm offered himself as the only man capable of reversing the tide of Bolshevism. He enlisted the help of the most dubious partners, including syndicates of extreme right-wing German nationalists, to whom he proposed shares in the trade of the yet-to-be nation in return for the cash required to install himself. His effort, in 1924, was foiled by an anti-monarchist movement, which organized its own effort to topple Stalin. Predictably, this rival movement was a failure, resulting in a massacre of Ukrainians

There is no doubt that the Archduke was motivated by self interest and a desire to claim his title as ruler of a sovereign nation. Descriptions of his personal life show that, like many aristocrats, he was possessed of a certain libertinism:

Although Wilhelm enjoyed dressing up in women's clothes and visited male brothels in Paris, sometimes in the company of his valet (a police report stated that Wilhelm frequented "assiduously" establishments on the Left Bank with Arabic names), he appears also to have acquired a mistress.

Despite this seeming egoism, there is now doubt that Wilhelm was intensely serious about an independent, sovereign Ukraine. The article states that the Hapsburgs:

"did love" their ungrateful subjects, a love that "was cosmopolitan, indiscriminate, selfish, unreflective, and thus in some sense perfect."

In other words, Wilhelm would have been a very laissez faire Prince, leaving the task of organizing the social, economic, cultural and political structures of the country to the Ukrainians themselves, while the monarchy would provide the backbone of stability and symbolic authority. Funny how common sense, self determination and self interest work together.

The Pet Rock Presidency

With Obama officially in the White House, legions of idiots in this country are all hopped up on hope and his approval ratings are going through the roof, all before he has actually done anything, of course. As such, it seems that his Hopefulness has much in common with the pet rock, bullshit toy par excellence of the late modern era. See that's not just any rock one can pick up off the ground, it's a pet rock, get it? And this new administration it's really different from all the previous ones, especially the Bush and Clinton ones. Can't you feel the change happening already? It's even stronger than that high I got from smoking banana peels.

Hot on the heels (and discarded peels) of this massive delusion, the Church of Feel Goodism has issued another communique. Good to see that the Hollywood liberals are intent on proving me right when it comes to characterizing their psychosis. However, I am a little saddened to see Miss Richie leaving the celebutante league for their antithesis. I was hoping that the oppressive vapidity and unquenchable thrist for decadence displayed by those moneyed members of my generation might actually develop into something truly Bacchanalian. Anyway, here is Sean Jobst on what we can expect from the New Boss:

The masses have succumbed to the hysteria surrounding the inauguration of Barack Obama as the next President of the United States. The calamities of the Bush administration have conditioned them to accept with open arms anyone who raises the slogan "change". The very mention of this slogan has sent them into a whirlwind of giddiness. But what is behind all the hype? Are the masses deceiving themselves in believing Obama represents change?

There is much to the fact that Obama was the first Democratic candidate in a long time to receive even more corporate money than his Republican challenger. There is much to the fact in his voting record, which is certainly not a record of one who challenges the system. One can best understand a politician's true motives and interests by examining their corporate money-trail and their own voting record.

Despite all his rhetoric about ending the war in Iraq, when has he decisively struck a blow to the Bush administration or even attempted to do so? He has said nothing about ending the American military presence in Iraq, and will actually escalate the conflict in Afghanistan. This is because he still operates from the common interventionist framework, such that to question American intervention overseas is anathema.

Where is he in criticizing the Israeli crimes in Gaza? Or the Palestine issue in general? He has demonstrated there will certainly be no change in American support for Israel. This is shown by his rhetorical and voting record, his kowtowing before AIPAC, and nomination of the Israeli dual-citizen Rahm Emanuel for the crucial post of White House Chief of Staff. Indeed there is much to the fact that Emanuel was his first appointment, as if to assure AIPAC that it will be business as usual.

Only the rationale for these interventions will alter, as they will now be given the guise of "humanitarian" concerns. They are fundamentally designed to perpetuate the interests of the American financial elites, and assumes an utterly patronising attitude which proclaims one global standard which trumps distinct cultural traditions and historical institutions.

Once again the delusion that America has a moral obligation to spread its ideas and institutions across the world, that nations with their own traditions nevertheless yearn for the globalised mono-culture based on profane market concerns. A mere playground for the multinational corporations to rape the land and plunder resources at will, of course with the connivance of governments in the "third world".

There will be an expanded role of internationalist organisations to provide the legitimation of such interventions. NATO will be expanded to serve the interests of American elites in the crucial region Zbigniew Brzezinski termed "the Grand Chessboard". The U.S. government will continue to rely on mercenary forces drawn from their "allies", to secure the resources of Eurasia for American corporations and serve the broader crusade against Iran.

Of course all this shall occur under the conniving eye of the United Nations, an ineffectual organization if there ever was one. All the protests about "national sovereignty" will mean little with the emerging Global State. Words are utilized to connotate different things to different people - the masses or the intellectual elites. To the elites "change" merely refers to a change in rhetoric, while the fundamental paradigm shall remain the same.

The masses who believe they have voted for some revolutionary change, fail to recognize they are utterly subject to the basic assumptions of the system, such that they cannot accept any other reality other than their condition. The society has made it "chic" to support Obama, as seen in the proliferation of Obama-themed art. The masses fail to realize the implication of the same media which lied to them and manufactures their consent to serve the interests of the power elites, suddenly jumping on this Obama bandwagon. Their thinking is confined to the dialectic established by the system, with no tolerance towards those who question their basic assumptions.

There will be no efforts at monetary reform, to break the power of that cartel of private banking interests called the Federal Reserve to create money out of nothing. This system exerts global influence through institutions such as the IMF and World Bank. There will be no change to this massive concentration of wealth. The financial and political elites will continue to make decisions affecting billions of people, literally behind closed doors with such elitist organizations as the Council on Foreign Relations or Bilderberg.

Obama is not beholden to the people, despite all his populist rhetoric. Rather, it is all a game to deceive the masses and manipulate public opinion according to the desires of the Globalist-Corporate elites. There will be no investigations of 11th September, nor efforts to bring top Bush, Cheney or other leading officials of the previous administration to justice for their war crimes.

As for serving corporate interests, Obama has repeatedly voted for corporate welfare such as the "bailouts". He has stood against any efforts by common people to hold the corporations accountable, such as with the tort laws. Obama voted for the Class Action Reform Bill, which has made it much more difficult for workers or consumers to hold them accountable. The State will continue with its symbiotic relationship to Big Business and the banking interests.

The calamities of the Bush administration led increasing numbers of people to distrust the government, seeking to reassert the broad powers ensured to them by the Constitution against government. Statists reversed this trend by raising the mantra of "change", to condition the people into believing government is perpetuating their interests. But their civil liberties will be further eroded, as Obama voted to re-authorize the Patriot Act and supported the FISA warrantless wire-tapping bill.

Given the preceeding information, it is my firm contention that there will be no real change during the Obama administration. Merely the rhetoric will change, while the State continues to expand and increase its powers through interventionism. The corporations will benefit and so will the ever-influential Zionist lobby. To those who have fallen for all this hype, I can only somberly lament that they have been terribly deceived. To those who know better, it will be a sad reminder of the despicable state in which we find ourselves.

Real change can never come from within a political structure dominated by two parties with little differences, both beholden to the same interests and who have made politics a charade with their corporate wealth and selling out to the highest bidders. Rather, change can only come from those who reject this dialectic and have escaped the matrix.

I say this as an American with close connections to Europe, the son of an immigrant on one side and the great-grandson of immigrants on another. And I reiterate for those who struggle for Europe a nation, the prescient warning of another American with a European outlook, Francis Parker Yockey, that if Europe does not unite and pursue a neutralist policy within its own interests, then it risks becoming subordinated to American hegemonic power. The world certainly needs viable regional power-blocs which can provide checks on concentrations of power, which are dangerous for all - even Americans. We need a multi-polar world and not a Global Superstate.