There is a history in all men’s lives (1), and in the history of their lives men often meet with mysteries, meaning events inexplicable via the resources of common sense and logic. Some mysteries are terrestrial, some metaphysic. Setting metaphysics aside, I’ll deal with the terrestrial.
I refer here to the turbulent events of the just ended summer of 2020. Emblematic of last summer’s turbulence were the destructive and deadly riots, associated with (objectively) random police incidents.
This is in no way an expression of insensitivity towards the undue loss of human life. But seen in the context of violence in America, the death of a suspect with a hefty crime-record and who violently resisted arrest is not – however regrettably – an extraordinary event. Just during the last Labor Day weekend, and just in Chicago, there were 11 people killed and 70 wounded among those who survived the shootings.
Therefore the mystery is how could one event in Minnesota trigger such an extraordinary wave of violence across a country of 300 million, and in Europe, and even elsewhere. Violence justified, when not actually endorsed, by official and even by some government sources.
Some may say it is not a mystery, and that there are dark forces stirring, organizing and driving the riots. True, but this is akin to stating that a great cause of the night is lack of the sun (2). Follows, therefore, a modest attempt at finding the cause of this effect (3), or rather, looking for and at the forces, dark or otherwise, behind the events.
Before continuing, though, I would like to introduce the concept of Cultural Moment. I define it as the vectorial resultant of all independent and sometimes conflicting ideological and historical forces contributing to the Cultural Moment of the day, week, month, year and so forth.
To recall, a vector is the representation of a physical quantity that has force and direction. It has commonly the shape of a straight arrow. Its length represents the magnitude of the force (resulting from all separate contributing forces,) and its orientation in space shows the final direction of the force. For example, representing a car going up-hill could be an arrow in the direction followed by the car. Contributing to the length and the direction of the arrow are the power of the engine, the earth’s gravity that would pull the car back, the effect of a lateral wind that would tend to move the car out of the road etc.
In summary, all the forces contributing to the advance, retrogression or lateral motion of the car are expressed by one vector. In the analogy, the Cultural Moment is the sum of all contributing cultural, economic, historical, social, religious and philosophical forces, pulling in all imaginable directions and with more or less power.
In the current Cultural Moment, it is clear that to promote, support and applaud the actions of entities like Antifa & Black Lives Matter are members of a class that, ostensibly, has nothing to gain and all to lose if the entities in question were to triumph in their very questionable goals and endeavors.
Why then the support? Here, I think, two forces are at play, one historical and one contingent. The contingent is simple. However rarely, riots can mature into revolutions. And typically but not always, revolutions do not promote the interest of the privileged economic class – or even of the battalions of academics who have bought-in or actually promoted the patently anarchist and destructive philosophy of the rioters.
The academics, I presume or like to think, should understand that the potential violent destruction of the still current social equilibrium would eventually hurt or demolish the positions that enable them to live quite prosperously (at least compared to the non academic middle class). But apparently they don’t or pretend not to.
For when someone has a lot to lose in changing his opinions he will never change them. And it is very difficult to convince anyone of a thesis when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
In turn the current thesis is only and obliquely the genuine product of academia. It is the result of a historical and focused endeavor – mainly by the movers and shakers of an ethnic group that shall remain nameless – to subvert, vilify and eliminate Western European values from the current culture and therefore from the conduct of life. Values that we broadly recognize as ‘Christian’, meaning the summa of theological Christian thought and Greek ethics and philosophy. Helping to complete the project is the elimination of Western European ethnicities and nationalities, through demographic impositions and openly and obtrusively promoted miscegenation.
Even the Catholic Church has climbed onto the wagon of self-destruction. The current Pope plainly encourages the copulation of Italian women with Africans, because “the mother of Christ was a mestiza.” Condemning any effort at limiting the third-world ethnic invasion of Italy, the Pope declared recently that Italy should welcome migrants in unlimited numbers because (sic) “they are God”. And miscegenation is indeed the sweetening camouflage with which the new world and verbal order glorifies the dissolution of the cultural identities of peoples and national communities.
Pope Bergoglio is the representative of what Italian philosopher Diego Fusaro has described as “liquid atheism.” It consists of openly saying that God exists but then pretending that He doesn’t, and acting as if we were nothing else but consumers, inhabitants of a cosmos made up of marketable goods.
As an aside and still quoting Fusaro, the new world order has an original mode of operation. It de-legitimizes the healthy body by defining it as sick. Whereupon national identity becomes xenophobia, the family is but a form of regressive patriarchy and homophobia, the nation becomes obsolete nationalism and class struggle an invitation to violence.
In this context, the remaining two forms of resistance to the commodification of life, linked to the processes of mercantilist globalism, are the national sovereign states – the last possible bastions of democracy and social rights. While the religions of transcendence are the last space and trenches where spirituality can survive against the nonsense of an atheistic and consumerist civilization.
By the way, I would invite my 25 readers not to brand the clear assault on Christian values and Western Civilization as a ‘conspiracy theory.’ For the clever framers of collective thought know how to ensnare the minds of men by manipulating the lexicon.
‘Conspiracy’ derives from the Latin ‘conspirare’, describing a group of people synchronizing the inhalation and exhalation of their breath. By implication only a small group can ‘breathe together’ and figuratively aim at a subversive goal. For example, 9/11 was not a conspiracy; it was a military operation, involving an incredibly organized and sophisticated network, superbly shielded and essentially untouchable.
Defining as ‘conspiracy theorists’ the over 50% of Americans who don’t believe the official version of the event is branding them as fools or useless idiots. Which – in the context of the Cultural Moment I mentioned above – should tell us what the ruling class of the deep state thinks of the rest of us.
But I digress. Given the above – meaning the academics risking their ass if they stray from the endorsed line of thought – we can understand academia’s passionate espousing of hatred against the establishment and against the history of (white) nations. In their collective view, it is an exercise in self-preservation. Academia’s current attitude, at least in the so-called humanities, is a stink-pond of thought.
Some have compared the current riots with those of the 1960s against the Vietnam War, but I think not. The most influential cultural vector of the time was dodging the draft, accompanied by foggy yearnings for freedom, satisfied by promiscuity and smoking weed (maybe without inhaling, a feat cited by a notoriously mendacious Clinton as an example of personal integrity).
On the other hand, already in the 1960s some members of the chosen people felt no compulsion in airing their objectives regarding the goy. Said Susan Sontag in her essay ‘What’s happening in America,’ “The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone — its ideologies and inventions — which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself.”
The multi-billionaires’ and Hollywood’s endorsement of riots and lootings may seem more puzzling, but only on the surface. Whatever happens, the billionaires are protected, and besides, it is a good insurance policy. In the extremely unlikely event that the riots would turn into a French-style terror- revolution, they can produce evidence of having sponsored the revolutionaries, something they actually and physically did and do through generous financing.
Perhaps they don’t know or forgot that one of the key sponsors and contributors of the French revolution was Louis-Philippe, duke of Orleans, one of the wealthiest men in France, who even changed his name to Philippe Egalite’ and voted for the death of his cousin King Louis XVI. All of which did not save him from the guillotine in 1793, during the Reign of Terror.
Somewhat more puzzling is the position of an intermediate “intelligentsia” – a name sometimes improperly applied to those who do not limit their TV viewing to soap operas or programs like “Dancing with the Stars” and similar. The size of this class is uncertain, but based on personal observations and social media presence, is not small. They generally belong to the colony of the Clintonites and the Obama-bin-Biden-ites.
In attempting to explain them, I will refer for comparison to the historical moments preceding the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 – to which (the Revolution) I dedicated (4) videos of the series “Historical Sketches” [episodes 47,48,49,50 – link to the index https://cutt.ly/3fViDeb ].
In his “History of the Russian Revolution” Trotsky plainly places the Kadets Party among the reactionaries, the liberals and the enemies of the people. In fact, after the Bolsheviks took power, their organization was declared illegal.
But that is not what the Kadets were or appeared to be during the turbulent and blood-ridden prelude to the Revolution, between 1905 and 1917.
I summarize from studies on this subject and history conducted by Anna Geifman, a dual Israeli-American citizen. On the other hand Trotzky himself was a member of the chosen people, as well as 95% of the original Politburo.
“Anyone wearing a uniform was a candidate for a bullet. Country estates were burnt down (the events were defined as “rural illuminations”) and businesses were extorted or blown up. Bombs were tossed at random into railroad carriages, restaurants, and theaters.”
What was the Constitutional Democratic (Kadets Party’s) reaction? Kadets advocated democratic, constitutional procedures and did not engage in terrorism, but they openly aided the terrorists – collecting money for them, turning their homes into safe houses, and advocating total amnesty for arrested terrorists. Kadets Party member Shchepkin declared that the party did not regard terrorists as criminals at all, but as saints and martyrs. And the official Kadets’ paper, “Herald of the Party of People’s Freedom,” never published an article condemning political assassination. The party leader, Paul Milyukov, declared that “all means are now legitimate . . . and all means should be tried.” When asked to condemn terrorism, another of their leaders in the Duma, Ivan Petrunkevich, replied: “Condemn terror? That would be the moral death of the party!”
Raising money for the terrorists were lawyers, teachers, doctors, and engineers, and even industrialists and bank directors. Lenin is quoted as having said, “When we are ready to kill the capitalists, they will sell us the rope” In fact, when the Bolsheviks gained control, the (in)famous Cheka liquidated members of all opposing parties, beginning with the Kadets. Which raises the question, how can the liberals’ position be explained?
Revolutions need the support of the wealthy and the liberals. History books omit the subject entirely.
Yet revolutionaries openly claim that their success entails the seizure of all wealth, the suppression of dissenting opinion and the murder of class enemies. In todays ‘cultural moment’ some African American leaders have calculated that each ‘white’ should give African Americans at least one million dollars to compensate for the historical slavery that ended in 1863.Lenin was but one among the radicals. In 1907, another radical named Ivan Pavlov published “The Purification of Mankind,” which divided humanity into ethical races. In his analysis, exploiters, vaguely identified as a race, were “morally inferior to our animal predecessors.” This race was to be exterminated, children included, by the morally superior race, whose best members were the terrorists themselves. And another anarchist group sought to establish equality by killing all educated people.
And yet the Kadets and the liberals refused to use their position in the Duma to make constitutionalism work. All they did was denouncing the government and defending the terrorists.
In Solzhenitsyn’s novel “November 1916” the hero Colonel Vorotyntsev finds himself participating in a social gathering of the “progressives” of the time. Before finally venting his thoughts he stands as if he were hypnotized, and holds his tongue for fear of being considered a reactionary.
Later, he discusses the event with Professor Andozerskaya, who explains that she too must choose every word very carefully. Which, correspondingly, is the case with American and Western academics today. For there are extant examples of educators who lost their jobs and ruined their careers after a ‘politically incorrect’ uttering.
There were exceptions then and now. A group of Russian thinkers published a book called ‘Landmarks: A Collection of Essays on the Russian Intelligentsia.” It promoted reasoned dialogue, fostering intellectual tolerance, and swaying liberal opinion away from extreme radicalism. It failed completely, because – to summarize – it betrayed the basic sacred dogma of the radical intelligentsia—the mystique of revolution.
In this regard – and relevant for understanding the position of today’s American intelligentsia with respect to the Cultural Moment – it may be helpful to recognize the historical lexical difference between “intelligentsia” and “intelligent” (a member of the intelligentsia).
The word “Intelligentsia” was coined in Russia around 1860, but the meaning is different from its English equivalent. In order to be an ‘intelligent’ it was by no means sufficient (or even necessary) to be well-educated. And if – in the current lexical meaning – an “intellectual” refers to a curious person thinking for himself, then an “intelligent” was close to its opposite.
An “intelligent” – unless he was wealthy or could become a professional revolutionary living at his party’s expense, like Lenin – had to work, though he would not take his work seriously. Tolstoy, for example, could not be an ‘intelligent’ because he was a count.
More important and relevant to today’s American ‘intelligents’ was their holding a set of beliefs regarded as certain, scientifically proven, and absolutely obligatory for any moral person. A strict ‘intelligent’ had to subscribe to some ideology—whether populist, Marxist, or anarchist—that was committed to the total destruction of the existing order and to its replacement by a utopia that would, at a stroke, eliminate every human ill.
This aspiration was often described as apocalyptic (in the religious sense), and it is no accident that some of the most influential Russian ‘intelligents,’ including Stalin, came from clerical families or had studied in seminaries.
One hundred years later a contemporary ‘intelligent’, Prof. Noel Ignatiev (a member of the chosen people), can safely publish, in a Harvard magazine, an article by the self-explaining title, “Abolish the White Race.” Equally common to the other academic ‘intelligents’ of today is the unsaid but pretended belief in another human-ills-canceling utopia.
Here is a short and tentative comparison between the characteristics of the Russian ‘intelligents’ and today’s America’s anarchists. The Russians’ devotion to a special set of manners, including dress (‘hoodies’), deliberately poor hygiene (I don’t have reliable data), hair style (punk), prescribed and taboo expressions (rap lyrics), and a set of sexual practices described as puritanical dissoluteness (debauchery practiced as a rite) fueled by “nihilistic moralism” (the philosophy embodied in rap lyrics).
Another parallel today could be the glorification of transgenderism, the idea that gender is a social construct, and the tacit endorsement of pedophilia. ‘Tacit’ may actually be a euphemism. Though I don’t subscribe to the service I learned from more than one source that Netflix recently launched a program or series titled ‘Cuties’, featuring young female children engaging in openly provocative and pornographic gestures and motions.
On the other hand, history shows that a characteristic of cultural revolutions is to turn the abominable into the respectable. In fact, during the unfolding of the Russian revolution, an interesting protagonist was Alexandra Kollontai, who became synonymous with sexual liberation. In her semi-autobiographical novel, “The Love of Three Generations,” the logical extension of the abolition of private property applied to sex. In her political foresight, Kollontai predicted that the institution of the family would die out completely by 1970. And though the expression was not hers, she became associated with the “glass of water theory” – namely the idea that one could quench the sex drive much as drinking water quenches thirst.
But it soon became clear that Kollontai’s program was actually and physically destroying Russia – whereupon Lenin applied emergency brakes. From which, perhaps, there arose in the Soviet Union an almost puritanical attitude in these matters – an attitude that extended up and into the 1970s, in Russia and Eastern Europe at large. This was actually a personal observation when, as a very young man, I visited the Soviet Union.
In the context of ‘Black Lives Matter’ compare Kollontai’s program with the current fact that, according to various statistics, about 80% of African-American children grow up in a one-parent household, often with an unmarried mother, and with siblings from different fathers. Only Obama could officially bring this point to public attention, for obvious reasons.
All of the above should demonstrate that in the current Cultural Moment the prevailing force aims at the destruction at large of Western values – while the beginnings of this force can be traced much further back. Therefore, knowing who currently finances the program is interesting perhaps mathematically, but not philosophically. Still here are streamlined essentials.
Liberal funders such as George Soros, Rob McKay, and other “Democracy Alliance” donors have given to groups associated with the movement (Black Lives Matter) over $133 million.
In turn the “Democracy Alliance” is a collective of donors active in orchestrating “the activities of a permanent ‘left infrastructure’” since 2004. The organization, the brainchild of Democratic consultant Rob Stein (nomen omen) was established as “a taxable nonprofit.”
For curiosity, the ideological father of “Black Lives Matter” was a movement called “Vision 4 Black Lives,” (1996), in turn the successor of the Black Panthers movement. Anecdotally, the “Vision 4 Black Lives” movement incurred the Jewish wrath for condemning the American alliance with Israel and claiming that the US, through this alliance, “is complicit in the genocide taking place against the Palestinian people.”
Consequently, in 2015 a new organism called “Campaign Zero” replaced the “Vision 4 Black Lives” and created another platform for “Black Lives Matter” dropping the Palestinian issue entirely, calling instead for reparations towards the Blacks, a living wage, paid sick leave, a guaranteed living income regardless of employment, and a government-funded “baby bond” for all newborns.
Regarding the ‘faux pas’ of “Vision 4 Blacks,” we may add that “The Forward”, one of the official voices of the chosen people in America, has publicly endorsed the removal of 8 statues, including those of Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh and General Patton. Among others listed for destruction is the statue of St. Louis, patron of the homonymous city. King Louis IX (1214-1270) is a saint of the Catholic Church, at least for now. Why the advocated removal? Because he presided over a notorious mass burning of the Talmud, and was classed as an anti-Semite. On the Catholic de-sanctification of saints I refer readers to my article “Quo Vadis Vatican?”
In 2013, three radical Black organizers — Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi – became associated with the development of “Black Lives Matter,” as a worldwide movement.
Another umbrella organization from where BLM draws funds and support is known as a “A Thousand Currents.” In turn financing “Thousand Current” are the Surdna Foundation, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, International Planned Parenthood Federation, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, Wallace Global Fund, and Foundation for a Just Society, the NoVo Foundation, the Libra Foundation, Peter Buffett, son of “philanthropist” Warren Buffett. His wife Jennifer runs the NoVo Foundation.
Among the ever-present contributors we find the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the National Urban League, and the inevitable George Soros’ Open Society Foundations. The “Jordan Brand” foundation has pledged 100 million ($).
An equivalent and almost identical train of donors contributed and contributes to the fortunes of the “Antifa” movement. Of interest, I think, is a kind of European branch or political current of Antifa, meaningfully called ‘Anti-Germans.’ The primary unifying factors of the Anti-Germans movement are support for Israel and opposition to Anti-Zionism.
I could continue with the list of donors but it would be boring. More amusing and yet depressing would be a narrative of the squabbles among the leaders of BLM and Antifa on how to apportion the incredible financial bonanza among themselves. It’s a case, however, where imagination can easily supply the form of things unsaid (4).
The patient reader who reached this point may ask who are the “Sheep of the Apocalypse.” They come from Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” a world-heritage classic filled, among other things, with original analogies. Translating Old Italian into current English loses 80% of the effect, much like translating Shakespeare into Italian, but here are the relevant lines, in the Longfellow’s translation,
“As sheep come issuing forth from out the fold
By ones and twos and threes, and the others stand
Timidly, holding down their eyes and nostrils,
And what the foremost does the others do,
Huddling themselves against her, if she stop,
Simple and quiet and the wherefore know not…”
Indeed the sheep of the Apocalypse “what the foremost does the others do… and the wherefore know not,” while the actual knights of the Apocalypse, who shall continue here to remain nameless, lead them to their destruction.
Still, given that the season has just drifted into the fall, when yellow leaves, or none, or few, still cling onto their respective branches (5), the reader may forgive a reflection that is neither optimistic nor pessimistic.
If the morning answers to the spring, and the spring to childhood and youth, the noon corresponds to the summer, and the summer to the strength of manhood. The evening is an emblem of autumn, and autumn of declining life. The night with its silence and darkness shows the winter, in which the powers of vegetation are benumbed. And the winter points out the time when life shall cease, with its hopes and pleasures.
A consideration that, possibly, may serve as a warning or admonition to those who place excessive trust in the breadth and solemnity of human affairs.
- Henry IV p. 2
- As You Like It
- Hamlet
- Midsummer Night’s Dream
- Sonnet #73