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Since When Is Joe Biden a ModerateLBJ Library Photo by Jay Godwin (297/1170)

Since When Is Joe Biden a ‘Moderate’?

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by Paul Gottfried

In an exultant commentary on Joe Biden’s victory on Super Tuesday, New York Post-syndicated columnist Salena Zito tells us: “The Dems’ silent majority, which doesn’t tweet, is finally crying out for moderation from the party.” Zito also quotes Dave Saunders, “a legendary Democratic strategist in Virginia,” who “finds it ‘ironic’ that southern voters are often criticized by the national party for being too moderate, but they’re the ones who saved the party from a left-wing candidate like Sanders.” Presumably Biden is the personification of “moderation,” as I’m reminded whenever I hear the Fox News All-stars praise him, while attacking the evil Bernie as a commie-loving radical. It’s been Joe’s accomplishment to rescue his party and nation from the “leftist demagogue” who is running against him. He is helping to return the country to “moderate” government, which presumably is not something that Trump has been doing because of his divisive personality.

Unfortunately, there is no indication that Biden will be practicing any kind of “moderation” if elected. For one thing, depictions of him as a moderate overlook the inconvenient fact that he is running well to the left of former president Obama, who was our most leftist chief executive up until his election in 2008. Candidate Obama publicly opposed gay marriage, favored strict border controls, and would never have announced, in contrast to Biden, that he wished to provide (…)

Read the rest in The American Thinker, March 20, 2020: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/03/since_when_is_joe_biden_a_moderate.html

Dr. Paul Gottfried is Distinguished Senior Fellow in Western Civilization and the History of Ideas.

Swallowed by the Swamp

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Watching the Trump Administration is more and more like watching a funeral procession. The Republic is dead and there follows a parade of fifty hearses for fifty states. So many obituaries, so many political death notices. “Dearly beloved, we are gathered here together to honor the memory of President Donald Trump, who was…. Well, what was he?” We are not sure. But now, of course, he is a political corpse (like the country itself).

There is so much chaos. Those who cling to hope, who believe in the billionaire hero, who believe he is politically yet alive, refuse to see what is before their eyes. They believe the Great Border Wall is going to be built. They believe illegal immigration is going to be stopped. They think the influx of Muslims will slow to a trickle.

But none of that will happen. Even if the stock market continues to climb, even if we rebuild our military, socialism will yet devour us from within; for Trump is not consistently anti-socialist. He has already compromised with elements of the socialist agenda. And such compromise must be fatal to his agenda, in the end. Because of the Republicans in Congress, it seems, Obamacare will remain the law of the land. Crony capitalism will continue to strangle us economically. Our China trade will gradually reduce us to Third World status. Political correctness will continue its march toward full blown Stalinism. The family will continue to disintegrate. The birthrate will continue to plummet. In the end, the Muslims will own it all — because even the Mexicans and Chinese will stop having babies.

So the Republic, which is dead, will not even be remembered; for the Muslims will not remember us. They will not honor our ancestors. That was our duty, which we refused to accept. Even our Constitution will be forgotten. And, of course, it already is. We have a Constitution in name only. We have Republicans in name only. Our Democrats are Bolsheviks and our Bolsheviks are doing for us what they did for Russia. They are killing us. They have eliminated all our instincts. The critical instinct, of course, is the survival instinct; and that is long gone, long erased. The younger the citizen, the less instinct remains. Finally, there is no citizen at all. There is nothing.

It is the “suicide of the West” writ large. No turning back. Because it’s all about convenience. The next generation of Americans? They are left with three ideas: (1) procreation is unnecessary; (2) having fun is all that matters; (3) don’t think about your country.

Trump was going to change that. At least he made some people think so. But we cannot return to 1955. And even if we could return, we’d just end up here again. Because 1955 logically brings us to 2017, because we never uprooted Marxism. We never stopped the subversion of our country. It has infected us. It has taken over our schools. It has defeated motherhood. It has castrated the father. We are tranvestited. We are transexualized. In other words, we are neutered.

Imagine reconstituting instinctual existence from scratch, with nothing but misguided political correctness to go by. There will be only one voice, one viable way out; and it will sound, at the eleventh hour, like the voice of Ann Barnhardt; full of contempt for what we have done to ourselves, for our weakness, for our degradation, for our fall from Grace.

Trump is not going to save us. He is too outnumbered, too outflanked, too late. He is the victim of the Big Lie. “Russia hacked the election.” He doesn’t know how to fight it. He doesn’t know what to do. Even Hannity is going to be dragged down and trampled by this unstoppable, monstrous lie. It is helpful, in this context, to read Diana West’s piece on The Seth Rich Chronology.

Seth Rich was a DNC staffer who was shot in the back twice, and died once. Evidence is mounting that he was the guy who leaked the DNC emails. The Wikileak emails. Yes, the emails that probably cost Hillary Clinton the election. These are the same emails that everyone has forgotten because “Russia hacked the election.” Clinton’s wickedness and criminality was on display in those emails. In fact, a special prosecutor should have been named to investigate Mrs. Clinton. Instead, a special prosecutor has been named to investigate Mr. Trump!

So, if you haven’t understood the game as yet: repeat this sentence, again and again: “Russia hacked the election.” Then put two bullets in the back of Seth Rich and call the Special Prosecutor in the morning. Trump is going down next! I say again, even if Trump was in bed with the Russian mafia, Russia did not hack the election. Russia did not want Trump to be president. They wanted Clinton. Those who have followed the Clinton career, with its communist ties and its trips to the Communist Bloc, knows that Russia has only pretended to dislike Mrs. Clinton. Russia only pretended to like Mr. Trump.

Russia didn’t have to hack the election. They are never so obvious, so crass. The Russians have strategic style! They have elegance! They have no economy, and their leaders are psychopaths; but hey, they’re not going to hack the DNC and get caught. It isn’t what they do. Their agents, after all, are the real rulers of America. These Marxists, these “former” Soviet sympathizers, took the United States by the throat when Obama was elected; and they continue to choke the life out of the country, holding a firm grip on the Washington bureaucracy. There is no getting them out (short of civil war).

Let’s not pretend this mess is fixable by legislative amendment. There’s going to be a hard reset, one way or another. That is because, in truth, the Constitution was mortally wounded long ago. Then Obama came and finished it off. The Supreme Court helped him. The Republicans helped him — with gay marriage and socialized medicine. The Constitution gives no power to the Federal Government to manage everyone’s Healthcare. Under the Consitution, the Federal Government does not have the power to change the meaning of common English words, like marriage, which always meant the union of man and woman. But now it means the union of man and man, or woman and woman, or man and chicken. Goodness knows what it will mean next; except, in truth, it means nothing as of this writing.

So there is no Constitution. It was dead letter long ago. All the rest is an illusion, a misunderstanding. And now the Left will be coming for us all. They are writing down our names for the Great Book of Death. And beside each name is written the “N” word. It is the word that dehumanizes as it annihilates. Here, “N” stands for Nazi, and every Nazi must be exterminated. Once you are set down as a Nazi, your freedom ends. Your rights are at an end. There is only a rope, or a firing squad, or a prison cell.

For the DNC whistle blower, Seth Rich, there were two bullets in the back. Shot down while talking to his girl friend. Dead before he reached the hospital. Code blue. Couldn’t be revived; so if you are a Democrat of conscience, and you see that Clinton cheated Bernie Saunders out of the Party nomination, and you have the emails to prove what happened, you’d better think twice. Because, regardless of Clinton’s cheating, there remains that definitive sentence: “Russia hacked the election.” Repeat after me. Say it. Come now. Say it. This is how you bend laws and break Constitutions. This is how you warp the consciousness of a generation as you build Soviet power. And then, two bullets in Seth Rich’s back.

But this is nothing new. Remember White House Council Vince Foster? Remember Commerce Secretary Ron Brown? I met one of the witnesses to the Ron Brown murder — U.S. Navy medical photographer Kathleen Janoski. “Wow, look at the hole in Ron Brown’s head!” Yes, a bullet hole. And here, as I turn the pages of Terry Reed’s memoir about the Clintons, with the title Compromised: Bush, Clinton and the CIA, we find that many other assassinations are alluded to. And that was back in the 1980s, in Arkansas, when Bill Clinton was governor there.

The Clintons are not lambs. They are not well-meaning people. They are monsters. They are killers. And the people aligned with them are crooked. And the senators who voted for Bill Clinton’s innocence during his impeachment trial, were merely thinking of their own mistresses, and of their other dalliances, and recalling that Newt Gingrich resigned because the Clintons exposed his hypocrisy. And the same was true with Gingrich’s successor. Yes, the House voted for impeachment and Newt Gingrich was the guy who resigned. The Speaker of the House.

Ah, the power of a blackmail threat. The House was courageous, so the House leaders paid for their courage. But the Senate thought twice. Clinton was guilty, but they found him innocent. They did so because they were also guilty. And so the Republic ends.

This is where we have arrived. And now we have proof. Read the twelve most damaging of the Wikileaks emails at http://www.mostdamagingwikileaks.com/. Here we find that Hillary wants to erase the U.S. border. We find that she took money from countries she knew had funded ISIS, that her lieutenants were paying people to incite violence at Trump rallies. And there’s so much more — of money laundering and lies, and fake policy positions and lawbreaking. And the Democrats never denied any of it. There was merely that sentence, the Big Lie, the Great Diversion: “Russia hacked the election.”

And two bullets in Seth Rich.

Are you angry yet? Does it make you afraid? Where is the outrage? Where is the passion? Certainly, it is no longer visible in Mr. Trump. And Jeff Session’s picture should be on a milk carton along with the faces of other missing persons (says a journalist friend). Where did they all go? Where are the treason trials? Where are the criminal investigations?

The swamp has swallowed them all. And now there is nothing left but an eruption of swamp gas, a burping of what was — only months ago — a political movement in favor of draining the swamp.

So watching the Trump Administration is like a funeral procession. And I am sickened by this procession. A procession of the damned. Not one hearse, but fifty hearses for fifty states of the Union.

 

Jeffrey Nyquist is the President of the Strategic Crisis Center and Distinguished Senior Fellow in Political Science at the Inter-American Institute for Philosophy, Government, and Social Thought.

This article was originally published at jrnyquist.com . The opinions published here are those of the writer and are not necessarily endorsed by the Institute.

A Brief History of Male Chauvinism

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Women have always been exploited by men. That is a truth that nobody doubts. From the solemn lecture halls in Oxford to popular TV shows, from Collège de France to pop music groups, the world reaffirms that certainty, maybe the most unquestionable truth that has ever crossed the human mind—that is, if it ever actually crossed it, for it might have come straight out of wombs into academic books.

Not desiring to go against such an august unanimity, I here intend to list a few facts that may reinforce, in the hearts of believers of all existing and yet-to-be-invented sexes, their hatred against heterosexual adult males, those execrable creatures that no one who was unlucky enough to be born as a male wants to be when he grows up.

Our narrative begins at the dawn of time, at some imprecise moment between the Neanderthals and the Cro-Magnons. It was in those dark ages that the exploitation of women started. Living in caves, the human communities were constantly ravaged by the attacks of wild beasts. Males, taking advantage of their prerogatives as members of the ruling class, hurried to secure for themselves the safest and most comfortable of places of the social order: they remained inside the caves—what rascals!—preparing food for their babies, while the poor females, armed only with clubs, went outside to fight lions and bears.

When the hunting and gathering economy was replaced by agriculture and cattle-raising, men took advantage of women again, always assigning them the hardest jobs, such as moving rocks and blocks of stone, taming wild horses, and cutting furrows on the ground with a plough, while they, those lazy pants, stayed home painting pottery and weaving. That is revolting.

When the great empires of antiquity dissolved, yielding their places to a bedlam of warring fiefdoms, feudal lords quickly formed their private armies, exclusively made up of women, while men took refuge in castles and remained there enjoying the good life, delighting in the reading of the poems that warrior women wrote, in between battles, to praise their manly charms.

When someone had the extravagant idea of spreading Christianity throughout the world, which required sending missionaries to all corners of the Earth, where they ran the risk of being impaled by heathens, stabbed by highway robbers, or butchered by an audience bored with their preaching, the heavy burden of that mission was laid upon women, while men Machiavellianly stayed home and made novenas before their family altars.

The poor women were victims of the same kind of exploitation on the occasion of the Crusades, where, clad in heavy armors, they crossed deserts to be run through by the swords of the moors (female moors, of course, since the partisans of Mohammed were no less sexists than we). And what about the great voyages of discovery!? Seeking gold and diamonds to adorn idle males, brave female seafarers crossed the seven seas and fought against ferocious indigenous male warriors whose only advances towards them were, alas, of a military nature.

Finally, when the modern state instituted military conscription for the first time in history, government armies were made up of women, and beheading at the guillotine was the punishment for those who insisted on resisting or dodging the draft. All of that, of course, so that men could stay home reading The Princesse de Clèves.

In short, for millennia women have been dying in the battle field, moving blocks of stone, erecting buildings, fighting wild beasts, crossing deserts, seas, and jungle, making all sorts of sacrifice for us, idle males, to whom no challenge remains other than that of getting their hands dirty in soiled diapers.

In exchange for the sacrifice of their lives, women, our heroic defenders, have not demanded from us anything except the right to raise their voices at home, make a few cigarette burn marks on tablecloths, and, occasionally, leave a pair of socks in the TV room for us to pick up.

 

Translated from the Portuguese by Alessandro Cota.

 

Olavo de Carvalho is the President of The Inter-American Institute and Distinguished Senior Fellow in Philosophy, Political Science, and the Humanities.

The opinions published here are those of the writer and are not necessarily endorsed by the Institute.  Translation from the Portuguese by Alessandro Cota.

Golitsyn’s Methodology and the Trump Administration

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The new methodology provides explanations for many contradictions and anomalies in the communist world on which the old methodology throws no light. It explains the confidence of the communist world and the loyalty and dedication of the vast majority of its officials. It explains the reasons for disclosures of information by the communist world about itself and relates them to the requirements of long-range policy. It explains the seeming tolerance of a totalitarian system toward dissension openly expressed by its citizens in their contacts with foreigners. It provides criteria for assessing the reliability of sources, for distinguishing genuine secret agents and defectors from provocateurs, for distinguishing genuine information from disinformation and propaganda. It provides pointers to the identification of agents of influence in the West. It suggests that disinformation, recognized as such, can provide clues to the intentions of its authors. It offers guidance on the relative importance of the official and unofficial communist sources. It diverts attention from spectacular communist polemics between parties and focuses it instead on the solid advances in the groundwork of communist cooperation and coordination. It points the way to recovery from the crisis in Western studies and assessments of communism. It could help to revive the effectiveness of Western security and intelligence services. It explains the communist victory in the Vietnam War despite the Sino-Soviet split. Above all, it explains the willingness and ability of the communist world, despite the appearance of disunity, to seize the initiative and to develop and execute its strategies in relation to the United States, the other advanced industrial countries, and the Third World in the quest for the complete and final victory of international communism.

-Anatoliy Golitsyn, New Lies for Old, p. 102

 

What would Anatoliy Golitsyn, the KGB defector who correctly anticipated the fake collapse of communism, say about the Trump administration? I believe he would say that the communist strategists have launched a new provocation based upon a supposed split between the communist-dominated U.S. Democratic Party and (Soviet) Russia.

This supposed split offers some tantalizing tactical advantages to the communist side. It diverts attention from the extensive and treasonous collaboration of the American Left with Russia and the communist bloc. It also helps to camouflage future collaboration on the part of Trump’s critics. (People who warn of Russian interference with the elections will not be scrutinized too carefully themselves in this regard, especially by a media that is packed with communist operatives). To say that Trump is a Russian puppet diverts attention from the fact that those leveling the accusation have served Russia and the communist cause for many years. It weakens the authority of a president who has promised to reverse the many policies of national self-negation which have been the mainstay of the Democratic Party, and the watchword of the Republican establishment.

Meanwhile, Barack Obama continues to relay commands to his leftist cadres within the U.S. Federal Government. This is why he stayed in Washington. For all intents and purposes, he is still president; that is, he is the commander-in-chief for the communists in Washington. Their conspiracy continues, as ever, toward the “inevitable” convergence of capitalism with communism (on communist terms).

It is important (from the communist point of view) that nobody guess the actual situation, that nobody see how far the subversion has gone, or how powerful the communist side has become within the state. While Obama was U.S. President an identical circumstance played out in Washington as in Moscow. In both capitals the communists were depicted as an inconsiderable and irrelevant minority. In reality, the presidents of both countries were committed communists. The levers of power were in their hands, and the world suspected nothing. While Obama worked to disarm the United States, Putin worked to rearm Russia. While Obama undercut our allies abroad, Putin invaded Crimea and intervened in the Middle East. As the danger grew, as Hillary Clinton was sure to be the next and final president, the collaboration between Washington and Moscow was guaranteed to result in America’s defeat.

But then a miracle happened. Donald Trump was elected president; a man of impeccable nationalist instinct, of remarkable courage in the face of the enemy. The communists were aghast at his victory. And so, strange as it seems, they decided on a preposterous fraud. While they posed as Russia’s enemies, Donald Trump would be depicted as Russia’s friend.

For the leading communists to deny their communist affiliation was a preliminary strategic step in both Washington and Moscow. Freed from the label of what they had actually been, the communists were able to advance without opposition from those annoying anti-communists. And now they are compelled by the logic of their false position to paint the “patriotic American dinosaur” (Donald Trump) as Russia’s puppet. Here the real puppet points to the man and declares that he is the puppet. It is a history-making deception. It is grand and it is bold. It cynically estimates the ignorance of the populace, the corruption of the political class, and the willing treachery of the media. It relies on the fact that the smartest strategists and analysts on the American side have been sidelined or murdered. So there is nobody to call out the truth.

Who now dares say the truth about what has happened in this country? Anyone writing in this vein is committing career suicide. Therefore, only someone without a career would dare to write along these lines at all! Even then it means being assigned to a death list, like Anna Politkovskaya and Alexander Litvinenko. (You want a successful career? You want to live? Sing the tune that is assigned. Play a role out of the communist script. You can be a conservative if you wish, but you will be Moscow’s conservative.)

Of course, you probably think I am crazy. You think communism went away in 1991. You think that communism no longer exists. But then you will have to explain how we got here – with communist thugs using open intimidation on the streets of our cities! If communism lost the Cold War, why does it presently hold such power in government agencies, universities and newspapers? Why do you think U.S. counterintelligence is spying on the President of the United States and his staff? Who wants to bring him down? You need to explain all the variable phenomena of today: from the communist-inspired economic sabotage of global warming “science” to the insistence that our border remain a sieve. It is only our enemies who stand to gain from these policies.

But communism is dead. Nobody believes in it anymore. We are told that the last true believer in communism was Stalin’s protégé and USSR Communist Party Ideology Chief Mikhail Suslov. Gorbachev and Yeltsin, and other top Soviet officials, made a show of abandoning communism. But I tell you it was only a show. Former KGB officer Anatoliy Golitsyn insisted that all communist sources of information are larded with falsehood; that communist officials publicly and privately make misleading statements about themselves, their thoughts and their intentions.

What do we actually know about the thinking of Mikhail Suslov or Mikhail Gorbachev (for that matter)? We only know what Communist Party officials say is true – about themselves and their party. And communists lie! There is also a more subtle point, which may seem contradictory, but is fundamental at the non-ideological level: It is irrelevant what Suslov or Gorbachev believed. Their personal beliefs would be decisive only if Marxism had been a mere belief system, if it represented a stable set of principles; but Marx himself did not believe in Marxism. He laughed at people who believed in it. Why would it matter if Suslov also did not believe?

What is decisive to understand about Marxism is its ever-shifting role as a rationale for a new kind of power. What is important here is not the particulars of the rationale itself, but the spirit which calls forth the rationale in the first place. If we want to understand how the great totalitarian machine is able to morph and shift and change with the times, we must go to its soul. At bottom Marxism is a strategy behind which stands a pathological desire for absolute power and global destruction. The outward phenomenon of Marxism is merely the intellectual camouflage of the politically self-actualized psychopath. Here is the outward expression of his rationalization for murder, for seizing power. This outward expression has changed time and time again, but its spiritual essence is always the same. And we always seem to miss the point of it. We always seem to address the inner thoughts and intentions of people who are assumed to believe or not believe in a set of “principles.” But this is an error. We do not understand these people at all! The communist does not take ideas seriously. He is serious only about power and strategy.

A mask is not an idea. A strategy is not a principle. These are tools, weapons, methods. Marx did not believe in his tools. He used them, and his followers used them, until the tools of the hour no longer served their purpose. Then the old tools, the old weapons, were discarded for a new set of weapons – “new lies for old.” Those who talk about belief or disbelief are only talking about the superficial shell of the thing, which can be replaced with a new shell – a new outward appearance. If Marx did not believe in Marxism, then the true Marxist should not believe in it either. It is a sorry swindler who believes in his own swindle. Behind the shell of the communist’s outward pretenses we find the same core phenomenon: the malevolent soul of the destroyer, the envious lusting for power and revenge, the hatred of the good for being the good. And in this soul’s self-affirmation we find, curiously, a reformulation of the same old totalitarian themes; the same old bag of tricks for debasing and leveling humanity. All that being said, the outward shell of the supposedly debunked Marxism is by no means out of the game. Out-and-out communism could return to power at any time. The various outer shells – the rationales and swindles – may change and shift as circumstances require; yet the driving force from within remains ever constant, ever alert to new opportunities. Marxism is strategy, not belief. That is why Mao Zedong said, “Marxism is better than a machine gun.” One does not believe in a machine gun. One uses it, merely, to neutralize an enemy. One must keep in mind the usefulness, in this regard, of ideological mortars and howitzers and atomic bombs – the whole arsenal of political correctness.

But you cannot get over this idea; namely, that communism is dead. You saw it die on TV. How can we talk once again about Marxism-Leninism? Or as an Estonian presidential candidate once asked in response to my discourse: “What’s Marxism-Leninism?” His pained expression relayed the idea that Marxism-Leninism was something that didn’t really exist. Nobody believed in it, so why did it matter? Even the communists don’t believe in communism anymore. It’s as simple as that! Any idiot who tells you that there are true-believing communists should wear a dunce cap. Russia a democracy. China is capitalist. Cuba is an open society with superb health care. And that nice little North Korean man is a champion of world peace!

It is merely one more ridiculous proposition out of many. In fact, it is the final ridiculous proposition. It is the proposition that crushes man’s soul. To say that communism doesn’t exist is to surrender. It means giving up your country to the communists who don’t exist. Remember the Ministry of Truth from George Orwell’s 1984? It was a ministry that dispensed nothing but lies. Now imagine if the Ministry of Truth disbanded itself and admitted to lying. “We are turning over a new leaf,” says the Ministry of Truth. “We are now the Ministry of the Real Truth.” Oh, it’s such a relief! Finally, we can believe in them! Marxism-Leninism is gone and the Marxist-Leninists are now honest! If they say we won the Cold war, we won the Cold War. In a world where nonsense is often believed, why would this nonsense not be accepted as the New Gospel (according to Saint Gorbachev)? The hammer and sickle comes down, the tricolor goes up. How could you question that? It’s like being against chocolate!

So where did all the communists go? Did they simply revert to Christianity? Did they become Scientologists? Stop and think for a moment. You control half the planet and you’ve been fooling people in every country for decades. And what do you do for an encore? You fall off the edge of the flat earth! Well, I guess they topped themselves after all. And then, twenty-five years later, suddenly, you discover they have taken over your child’s mind and sent him into the street to beat up an old displaced factory worker wearing a hat which says, “Make America Great Again.” You have the CIA and FBI spying on the President of the United States to the advantage of change agents. And Congress is dragging its feet on Trump’s cabinet nominees because they’ve been honey-trapped by the Satanic Pedophile communist zombie apocalypse. It is real Satanism, real pedophilia, real undead communists, and a real apocalypse.

Have you ever seen the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers? It’s an allegorical fiction about a communist takeover. Well, we’re living it. In fact, the pod people are attempting to convince the world that they are the ones fighting the alien invasion! This lie is repeated on every news channel. And you might easily believe them: First, because you did not understand who the enemy was. Second, because you don’t believe in pod people. Third, because you voted pod people into the White House in 1992, 1996, 2008 and 2012. And when the pod people finally colonized your government and rotted out your nuclear arsenal, the old pod president didn’t go back to Illinois. He remained in Washington to command the pod-people army inside the federal government, while Mr. Trump erroneously believes himself to be in charge.

So they don’t believe in Marxism-Leninism anymore? So why do we have socialized medicine? And why does Vladimir Lenin, who died in 1924, lie calmly with his eyes closed in his mausoleum on Red Square – not buried in a grave with a stone marker? No doubt, he is kept on display in Moscow because “nobody there believes in him anymore”! It’s a funny kind of not-believing in someone, don’t you think?

Nobody in Moscow believes in communism! They refuse to bury Lenin because he makes a nice tourist attraction. And besides, Vladimir Putin wears a cross and says he believes in God. (Well, he doesn’t really like to talk about it. But we think he believes in God.) And so, at the end of the day, we are all Kremlin puppets. We are all bouncing helplessly at the end of Moscow’s string. Even now the puppet-master appears to be at odds with his most secret creatures – the moles at CIA and FBI! Appearances notwithstanding, the puppeteer must always hide the puppet’s strings. This he accomplishes by a diversion in which he calls the man (Trump) a puppet and the puppet (Obama) he calls a man. And so, as well, he calls his friend enemy and his enemy he calls friend.

If President Trump could read one paragraph of these scribblings, I would wish that he read this last paragraph. Then he might understand, in an instant, who his enemies are – both foreign and domestic. And I say, that enemy is not an opponent, not a competitor, not a business rival. No, no. I mean – an enemy! And once our president can tell friend from foe, his strategic compass will align to true north and half the battle will be won.

Jeffrey Nyquist is the President of the Strategic Crisis Center and Distinguished Senior Fellow in Political Science at the Inter-American Institute for Philosophy, Government, and Social Thought.

This article was originally published at jrnyquist.com . The opinions published here are those of the writer and are not necessarily endorsed by the Institute.

Introduction to the Philosophy Seminar – Part 2

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How Do Cultural Shifts Happen? A lecture originally delivered online in Portuguese as an introduction for Mr. Olavo de Carvalho’s Brazilian Philosophy Seminar. 

Student: In an interview you gave to Atlântico magazine, you said that, instead of dividing the political spectrum into right-wing and left-wing, we should try to classify political movements as revolutionary and counter-revolutionary, because this latter pair of concepts enables us to see, for example, that some political positions and movements usually regarded as right-wing are actually revolutionary and thus belong together with left-wing movements—something which escapes our view when we use the usual definitions of left and right. Regarding this problem you have been addressing so far, have you developed another key to understanding the problem of progress, something like your concepts of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary?

Olavo: No, I have not. What I am doing is merely splitting apart a pair of concepts and saying that they do not form a pair of opposites in reality. More accurately, only at the level of vocabulary—only semantically speaking―, backwardness is the opposite of progress. In historical reality, there is no such thing as a phenomenon of backwardness which is the contrary of progress. Even if in our minds we conceive progress as a forward movement and backwardness as backward movement, the fact is we know that in reality time never moves backwards and that it is impossible for it to do so. Now, let us examine the expressions “advanced societies” and “backward societies” in light of this. It is obvious that the current conditions of any society can get worse, but they cannot literally go back to a prior state because the  present conditions of a society include all their prior states. Some people say: “Oh no, we’re going back to the Stone Age!” But being born in the Stone Age is one thing, and having to live with Stone Age instruments after having known all the technology we have today is quite another. This is not going back to the Stone Age. This is something totally different; this is deterioration, not backwardness.

So, from this you can see that, being among the most used, the most imaginatively powerful, and the most entrenched in our culture, this simple pair of concepts (progress and backwardness) can make people not to understand a number of historical processes.  That is to say, if people judge historical processes in terms of progress or backwardness, they will never be able to grasp the reality of what they are considering.

Wanting to become intellectuals, historians, philosophers, and so on, the poor and naive students will naturally apply to and eventually enter universities. The problem is that as they gain entry into the world of high culture, they will receive a severe impact of a huge network of intellectual blinders/impediments. Of course, they will also get a lot of positive knowledge, but when we compare the whole of material knowledge they learned, the whole of the content they acquired at university, with the system of concepts that organize this knowledge, we see that the latter is always more powerful. Why? Because the contents and their organizing concepts relate to each other as form relates to matter, in the Aristotelian sense of these words, and because it is the form of a body of knowledge determines what this knowledge means.

Now, the study of philosophy has precisely the purpose of enabling you to create your own network of concepts according to the actual needs of the quest for knowledge and not according to pre-established social ends, which are rather focused on  the creation, expansion, and conservation of cultural fashions. Philosophy is an instrument for the creation of conceptual structures capable of comprehending and transcending the structures of the cultural fashions that prevail at the moment. In this sense, philosophy is a powerful instrument of deculturation. So, since your task is to try to see beyond the horizon of the culture in which you are, the first thing you need to be able do this is to learn how to retrieve the lost cognitive and intellective possibilities from times past.

How do you restore these possibilities? In the first place, you must have  the necessary materials at your disposal, that is, the texts and documents that tell you exactly what happened in the periods of the past you are studying. Next, you must use your imagination to try to understand—note well—not the authors of the past as they understood themselves but rather your own situation as those authors would understand it if they were alive.

You cannot study Plato, for example, from the viewpoint of the contemporary culture because you will never understand him. Why? Because, in addition to that series of important cultural mutations that took place in the twentieth century, we are now going through a gigantic transformation in our society, a transformation determined by a factor called “technology.”

The impact of technology on modern society and culture has been only gradually perceived and integrated into human consciousness, and, strictly speaking, we are not yet living in a technological civilization, because technology does not decide and determine all social processes, although it determines a great and important number of them. But there are still a lot of things that are based on processes which have nothing to do with technology. For example, consider the facts that in our society there is a large number of religious people and that these people live, partially at least, within a cultural environment upon which technology has little or no influence at all because it simply has nothing to do with religion.

However, it is one thing to live in an environment where people believe in the existence of a God who has created the world and who is going to drive the process of history until it reaches a certain goal—the end of the world and the passage of all things into  eternity. Now, it is quite another to live in a culture where everything is a matter of technology. And the fact is that as the impact of technology on society gets stronger, our culture tends to consider all matters  in the light of technology.

The first and most immediate consequence of this is that everything that lies beyond the reach of technological action ends up falling beyond the reach of people’s imagination as well. (When I say “immediate,” however, I do not mean that this effect occurs without any delay, since several decades, at least, may be necessary for it to take place.) Because if technology becomes the main lens through which we view reality, then, sooner or later we will end up only thinking about those things which fall within the grasp of technology or which will supposedly fall within the grasp of technology in the future. This means that, in a sense, the realm of human action (in its material sense) becomes the ultimate horizon of reality and that nothing exists beyond it.

It is evident that the territory which falls within the grasp of man’s technological agency is vast. For instance, we may expect that someday all currently existing diseases will be cured by technological means. This has not happened yet, but we may fairly expect it will, and it is a fact that people have hopes that it will indeed happen. When people contract a disease for which there is no cure yet, what do they usually do?  They sit tight and hope that, within two, three, four, five, ten, or twenty years, a cure for their disease will be found. For example, I think that all the HIV positive people in the world entertain this kind of hope. So, as I was saying,  there is indeed a realm of existence which can be affected by man’s technological action and this realm is very large. However, when technology is understood as the key to existence, then, quite naturally, all that lies beyond the theoretical possibility of technological action ceases to attract people’s interest. The world, seen from this viewpoint, becomes a sort of laboratory for us to conduct our experiments (which, of course, may go right or wrong), and everything that cannot be tested through experimentation ceases to be of any interest for us.

As a consequence, all those dimensions of existence upon which technology cannot act in any way are viewed as non-existing or irrelevant—an example of this is the phenomenon of death. Nowadays people cannot seriously think about death, only about how to postpone it, which is actually thinking about how to extend human life, or how to prolong human existence. Prolonging human existence is indeed a technological possibility, and more than that, it is a possibility that technology has been able to realize so far. But what about death itself? The fact is that sooner or later, we are all going to die, that death is part of the structure of reality, and that no life-prolonging technology can possibly change this structure. And because the phenomenon of death cannot be affected by technology, because the reality of death lies beyond the reach of technological action, the concept of death is not integrated into our society and we live in a culture where death has no place. For centuries death was one of the most predominant themes in culture, but now, suddenly, the topic of death is gone. People do not talk about it anymore; they only talk about health, about extending life, about eliminating pain, and so on.

When you set out on a quest for high culture in a cultural situation like that, you start your intellectual journey with a huge blind spot in your field of vision, because an entire dimension of reality is invisible for you, as if it has never existed.

Now, the study of high culture and philosophy can help you recover the vision of those lost dimensions of reality, that is, it can help you become capable of imagining that which is not usually imaginable in your own culture. The problem is that acquiring high culture is often identified with acquiring the credentials necessary to obtain government authorization to enter the teaching or the researching profession. This poses a problem for all those who seek to acquire high culture. For it is one thing to want to acquire high culture in order to be able to understand reality, and specially the reality of history, of civilization, of human existence throughout the ages. It is quite another thing to want to acquire  high culture in order to be able to practice this or that profession. In fact, these two uses of high culture are not just different, but opposed to each other, because if   have to adapt yourself to the present culture to the most, so that you may be able to represent it professionally.

This is why I consider the academic institution to be the worst enemy of higher studies nowadays and why I have remained on the fringes of academia all my life. I have always feared it because I knew it did not strengthen people’s consciousness to enable them to understand reality, but rather molded their minds to enable them to perform certain social roles. Besides, I have also noticed that the social role of the academic and the scientific profession can be so hostile to a true understanding of reality that even the best minds, to the extent they strive to adapt and be successful in those professions, have to maim themselves intellectually so as not to say things that would be incomprehensible or shocking in their professional environments. Of course, there are exceptions to this. There are people who are able to have an academic career and still remain in touch with reality, but they are very scarce.

 

End of the second part.

 

Olavo de Carvalho is the President of The Inter-American Institute and Distinguished Senior Fellow in Philosophy, Political Science, and the Humanities.

The opinions published here are those of the writer and are not necessarily endorsed by the Institute. This lecture was delivered online in December 2008. Translation from the Portuguese by Alessandro Cota and proofreading by Benjamin Mann.

Strategical Possibilities and Dialectical Games

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NATO membership for Ukraine means death for Russia.
– Alexander Prokhanov

In the first stages of Zyuganov’s creation of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (not without some participation on my part, as well as Prokhanov…), efforts were made to interpret and conceptually appraise the presence of the national component in the Soviet worldview (National Bolshevism), but this initiative was abandoned by the leadership of the [Communist Party], which had occupied itself with some other matters…. However, on the level of rhetoric and first reactions, Russian Communists in all senses present themselves as confirmed national conservatives – sometimes even as ‘Orthodox Monarchists.’”
– Alexander Dugin, The Fourth Political Theory

 

Alexander Dugin, quoted above, is not an ideologist. He is a strategist. Before delving into what strategy is, or can be, let us first consider the situation in Ukraine. Either Russian troops will drive into Ukrainian territory after 9 May, or Russia will rely on secret agents within the Ukrainian government to re-establish (or maintain) indirect control of the country. This latter strategy, if successful, could give Moscow a fresh avenue for making mischief within the EU. The fact that Russian clandestine structures are already embedded throughout Europe is hardly acknowledged or fully appreciated by expert opinion. Europe’s energy dependence on Russia is acknowledged, of course, but this is trivial in comparison.

Moscow’s grand strategy has always been multi-dimensional. To achieve a goal, the Russians do not merely follow one line of approach. They follow several parallel and opposite lines of approach simultaneously. This makes it difficult for Western strategists and politicians to anticipate Russian moves. Again and Again, Russia baffles us. We remain mystified, failing to realize that Russia possesses clandestine instruments developed under the Soviet Union that are unmatched in sophistication. We have nothing that can compete with these. To give a brief overview, there is the economic and financial penetration of Europe by Russian businesses and front companies. There is the role played by Russian organized crime in terms of blackmail and money-laundering. There also exists, as during the Cold War, classic networks of secret agents engaged in infiltrating governments and influencing policy. With regard to all these elements, until the countries of Europe grasp the possibilities open to Russia’s clandestine forces there will never be a full appreciation of the way Moscow is likely to use its military forces in combination with diplomatic leverage.

It was Clausewitz who said that war is politics carried on by other (i.e., violent) means. It was Lenin who inverted this dictum, saying that politics is war carried on by other means. The Bolshevik Revolution was not merely a social and political revolution. It signified a revolution in strategic thinking that has never been fully appreciated. Victory may be achieved with a combination of military and non-military means. It may be achieved through economic sabotage, through information warfare, or even through the corruption of government, language and culture.

The famous words of the ancient Chinese strategist, Sun Tzu, may serve as the inspiration for a new and all-pervading strategic science. Here strategy becomes the ruling god of all, the first principle of government and the East’s answer to the constitutional politics of the West. Oh yes, even in its decadence, the United States is (at least partly) guided by its Constitution. The Russian Federation is guided by its long-range policy (based on Sun Tzu’s principles). “All warfare is based on deception,” wrote Sun Tzu. “Hence, when able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must seem inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe that we are away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near. Hold out baits to entice the enemy. Feign disorder, and crush him.”

The brilliance of Sun Tzu lies in the fact that his dialectical approach to deception can be applied to any set of opposites. Thus we may rewrite Sun Tzu’s words: “All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when you are a Communist, you must appear to practice capitalism (e.g. in Beijing); when you are a cynical atheist, you must appear as a Christian (e.g., Putin); when you are attacking an opponent through Islamic surrogates, you must appear to be attacked by these same surrogates (e.g., in Chechnya); when you possess strategic nuclear supremacy (as Russia does), you must appear as a mere regional power (because Obama says so). Hold out baits to entice the enemy. Feign disorder, and crush him.”

The transposing of opposites from the dimension of time-space, to the ideological dimension of left-right, is only one of many permutations. If it was possible for Putin to have a Chechen alibi prior to the destruction of the Twin Towers on 9/11, it was also possible for him to have a Christian alibi (by jailing Pussy Riot) in the midst of the cultural breakdown of the United States. As Global Warming is used as a pretext to sabotage the economies of the West, it is pro-forma for Putin to declare that he believes in “global cooling.” Again, one might use the analogy of an alibi. Given these examples, we cannot take Moscow’s stated intentions at face value. Does Moscow really want to annex Ukraine, or push Ukraine into Europe’s open arms? Is Ukraine itself a poison vat, ready to spill into Europe? Again, Putin is making for himself an alibi: so that when Western culture turns gay, Putin will not be blamed; when global warming is found to be a hoax, Putin will not be blamed; when Ukraine is bailed out by the EU and proves the final straw that bankrupts Europe, Putin will not be blamed. (In fact, he will present himself as Europe’s savior.)

Sun Tzu suggested that excellence in warfare consists in winning without fighting. To accomplish this you infiltrate the enemy camp and disrupt his plans through provocation, sabotage, and by sowing confusion; you prevent enemy factions from joining together; you demoralize the culture, spread irrational ideas among the intelligentsia, promote lawlessness and drunkenness among the working and professional classes. As Sun Tzu said, “In all fighting, direct methods may be used for joining battle, but indirect methods will be needed in order to secure victory.”

You must know your enemy’s direction of march, but he must never learn yours. The best strategy is one that is unknown to others, and the most effective warrior is one who enters the enemy camp unrecognized. To accomplish any objective, depict yourself as one for whom the objective is inconceivable. Many might be capable of stopping you. But who would think they had to?

 

Jeffrey Nyquist is the President of the Strategic Crisis Center and Distinguished Senior Fellow in Political Science at the Inter-American Institute for Philosophy, Government, and Social Thought.

This article was originally published at jrnyquist.com . The opinions published here are those of the writer and are not necessarily endorsed by the Institute.

Cardbox Coffins: That’s What Venezuelans Can Afford to Bury Their Dead

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According to report by several news sources, in Venezuela, the poor can no longer afford wooden coffins and are burying their dead in card box coffins.

Nicolas Maduro’s nephews have admitted to drug-trafficking in partnership with the FARC

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Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s nephews have admitted to drug-trafficking in partnership with the FARC, according to news report by El Nuevo Herald: http://www.elnuevoherald.com/noticias/mundo/america-latina/venezuela-es/article91491757.html