Neo Totalitarianism (1): Introduction

Developments are such that we need to come back at length to the discussion on Neo-communism: Fjordman had his essay with the focus on multiculturalism [1] critiqued by the University of Helsinki and encloses a chilling article on the (non)future of the nation-state; the Sanity Squad have come out with a brilliant historical post on education and indoctrination; and a very interesting article on WSJ's Opinion Journal has appeared that sheds some very insightful light on the numbers aspect (demographics, socio-economics, fiscal).

For some time I have been pondering whether to expand the following series, or start a new one:

- Neo-Communism Exposed: Part I, Part II, Part III, or
- Conned by the Left, Again: Part I, Part II, or
- Treason: Part I (The Natives are getting Restive), Part II (Crimes Against Europe's Indigenous Peoples), Part III (Cultural versus National Borders), Part IV (A Vast Left Wing Conspiracy?)

As we reached a new phase in the investigations I decided to re-title this series Neo Totalitarianism, because that is basically what it is. On a global scale of course, as this is yet another trait these systems have in common: the wish of expanding the vision of Utopia world wide.

Of all the wide definitions and dichotomies describing the two arch enemies of Left and Right - one other interesting theory can be found in the 'unconstrained view' versus the 'constrained view'. Another one, if I let my imagination run riot, would be The Constructors versus the protectors of The Natural Flow. Having the builders in, inevitably involves a certain amount of demolishing before the new folly can be build; the honorable task of the proponents of the natural flow, is keeping the builders at bay by applying the brakes and other defence strategies, performing the necessary damage limitation and reparation work whenever a visit of the (de)construction team has regretfully occurred.

The point of this argument is not, is the Communist International handing out newly laminated membership cards, or mystical red hankies soaked in the blood of the revolutionaries. Neither is it as much concentrated on centrally planned economics (irreparably discredited by the Soviets), but rather centres on governmental, cultural and sociological, and other soft aspects.

And although I must admit, if you look at the progression of events and developments in time, one could be excused for having the impression that the whole thing is somehow being orchestrated, perhaps by an organization like the Bilderbergers or the Trilaterial Commission. Of course these 'secretive' organizations are rather Leftist bogeys, and I suspect we owe it to them that things aren't any worse than they are. But if we picture an actual conspiracy at work, this is the type of club you might be looking for. If you hear the word 'interconnected', sound red alert and apply crash helmet!

But I do believe in Zeitgeist, causality, developments in time occurring in waves and cycles, persistent common error, and members of a nasty Leftist intelligentsia and a meritocratic elite who cannot stand, letting the natural flow of history take its course; and whose second nature it is, to turn against the culture to which they owe their existence.

This is the enemy within, who does not hesitate to use corporate, governmental institutions and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to turn against the status quo, which they see as a remnant of a useless history that needs deconstructing, to make place for Utopia. It creates an atmosphere by subtlely raising eyebrows at traditional symbols and tut-tutting other expressions of national unity. It disseminates myths, like "look at all the wars and misery that religion has caused" without blinking an eye at the millions and millions of victims of the last two world wars and counting, which have their roots firmly planted in the Enlightenment of Atheist Humanism.

The ceaseless Marxist dichotomy of oppressor versus the oppressed is alive and well. And there isn't a Socialist, Social-Democratic, Christian-Democratic or Left Liberal Party in the world that would include this very long term vista in their party political programs, or advertise it to the voters, but reflexes and specifically NGO activities betray them.

With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and Francis Fukuyama's thesis of the "end of history" [2] it was thought the fight against totalitarianism was over: the Right was beaten in 1945 and in the civil wars shortly after, never to appear again in any significant form. It was taken for granted that the fatal fallacy of communism and socialism was adequately proven with the demise of the Soviet Union.

The West happily set itself to the business of improving liberal democracy. Little did we know that in the deepest and darkest corners of higher eduction, NGOism and (semi) governmental institutions, the beast was still lurking. Since the turn of the century it has been moving again, somewhat tacitly at first, but by the year with more confidence, increasingly throwing its weight about but as yet hardly visible behind a curtain of undemocratic political practice, as we shall shortly see.

~ To be continued with Part I Multiculturalism and Transnational Progressivism: Let us first turn to Fjordman and his article "Communism for the 21st Century" ... ~

In Search of the Origins of Postmodern Self-Loathing (II)

Part (I)

Part (II)

Auguste Comte completed his vast work in re of Positivism in 1842. Comte believed in no other source of human knowledge than the empirical method exclusively, and built a fuzzy agnostic pseudo-religion around it. Positivism is the opposite of relativism, it is materialistic and science as an idea gone haywire.

It is not a very great surprise that every French intellectual appears to be practically raised on it. De Lubac: "Every undergraduate in France knows "the law of the three states ... every branch of knowledge has necessarily to pass through three successive theoretical states: 1. the theological or fictitious state, 2. the metaphysical or abstract state, 3. and the scientific or positive state".

So in the earliest stages of man's development he began by conceiving phenomena as a result of continuous influence of supernatural agents, which Comte terms fetishism: found in animism - to which we seem to be reverting today, as Comte would have it, as we shall see - and for example in the Greek and Roman pantheons.

In a later stage, the metaphysical, man came "to regard such phenomena as produced by various abstract forces inherent in bodies but distinct and heterogeneous". This stage is found in the monotheistic religions 'of the Book', Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

And finally man considers phenomena as subject to a "certain number of invariable natural laws that are nothing but the general expression of the relations observed in their developments", in other words science: the third, or positive state. For this stage Comte later used the term 'sociology'; Auguste Comte is considered by some to be the father of sociology.

Comte seems to have had a total contempt for the contemporary dominant, secondary stage and would prefer to skip the phase altogether, which he deemed possible under certain circumstances. It reminds me of the remarks of Stuart Sim in his contribution to the polemics on Signandsight re The Multicultural Issue: "Personally, I'd like to see religion wither away as a force in human affairs ...". Sim means, secondary stage religion. Compare Comte: "Catholicism is rotten to the core, all theology is 'outmoded', and everything that comes from it is now in a state of hopeless decrepitude, etc. ...".

De Lubac: "When the generation of transmission had come to an end, a ceremony would 'finally inaugurate the new religious regime ...". In anticipation Comte had started his own calender (as we have seen in Mussolini a sign of megalomania): on 23rd Archimedes in the year 63 (22nd April 1851) Comte wrote: "I shall be preaching positivism at Notre Dame as the only real and complete religion".

Comte described the third state "as positive as any other science based on observation". Comte even came to perceive a fourth state, in which the mind frees itself even from science: the truly positive state. Perhaps predictably enough Comte's ideal fourth state results paradoxically in ... relativism! Comte saw those that reached this ideal state as "resolutely freeing themselves from the prejudice that leads us 'to place ourselves on a different footing from things' and 'to claim a special place in the universe". Sounds familiar?

Compare that with today's multicultural complaint based on relativism's tenets about Western ethnocentricity and the Christian view of our central place in the Cosmos. Auguste Comte saw it thus: Monotheism or the metaphysical state is opposed to both the first and the third stage, "so much so that the positive state can be considered as the reestablishment of the "normal state, interrupted during the Western transition ...". If that isn't true self-loathing, I don't know what is: Down With Us! It was with us, 160 years ago.

A measure of how just like relativism today, 'positive thought' pervaded Comte's contemporary intellectuals, De Lubac writes: "Right at the end of his life, he noted with satisfaction that his 'thirty years of work' had already secured the admission of this law by all thinkers really abreast of the times", much like today's relativist prophets are congratulating themselves with the pervasiveness of their own particular postmodern fallacy.

While much can be said about Comte's mistakes and the willful suppression of later discovered facts, De Lubac sums the main problems with positivism up as follows: "... his (Comte's) offence lies in ... wishing to reduce man to no more than the subject matter of sociology". The extraordinary things happening as a result of the fallacy when the mind is reduced to its object can be found here in two articles by my philosopher-hero Greg Koukl, "All Mind, no Brain" and "All Words in your Brain".

To wrap this up in the words of Henri De Lubac: "Having reached its final state of rational positivity ... the human mind abandons its quest of the absolute ... Comtean thought immured itself in the relative as a last resource after having found itself powerless to decide the question of the absolute. Separating 'positive knowledge' from 'belief', it took the terrestrial horizon as its boundary, without prejudice to what might lie beyond it ... Comte is said to have declared the problem of God unsolvable".

In Search of the Origins of Postmodern Self-Loathing (I)

I'm sure Dr Pat of the Sanity Squad would have one or two astonishing things to say about the origins of self-loathing, so common today in the West. But I approach matters from another angle. I beg to disagree with those who attribute it to a lack of confidence - because if so - then, what triggered the lack of confidence: this isn't an answer, but posing the question in another way.

Those who have gone a little deeper into the illogics of the ideology of multiculturalism and the underlying 'philosophy' of relativism, will be familiar with its bizarre tenet that Western civilization in general and Christianity in particular, are uniquely and inherently bad. I adorn philosophy with inverted commas, because I fail to see that it is even deserving of the term sophistry (for relativists: this was not meant as a compliment)! I have written extensively about relativism in The Lighthouse Blog. It only makes sense if the laws of science are temporarily suspended, so that logic is no longer a measure of true or false.

For some imperial reason best known to our European leaders, this piece of ideological junk has been elevated to the status of official sociological policy within the E.U. member countries, that being a bit of mystery in itself unless Eurabia makes any sense to you.

Americans must slowly prepare themselves for being subjected to possibly the worst excesses of the phenomenon, once the Democrats get their hands on the U.S. administration. This is at present the only thing standing between myself and the acceptance of the Eurabia Theory. Yes, I have single handedly promoted its status from conspiracy theory, to real theory. I'll come back to all that in later posts.

Okay, when the ideology of multiculturalism forces its way into you life, you're having to deal with the extraordinary notion that white occidentals are inherently more bad than other humans: something vaguely reminiscent of original sin, but exclusively for the Western hemisphere and its satellites.

Once you realise that an important basis of the multiculti hogwash lives on the molecular level - genes being so remarkably similar of all people, that they do not even want to make race distinctions anymore (hence the term multicúltural, as opposed to multi-racial or multi-ethnic), the unique exclusion of the Caucasion race can't be but another one of the ideology's breathtaking amount of paradoxymora [2]. This phenomenon is common as muck in relativism. To date it has given the adherents no rise to re-examine its tenets or its truth-value (but then, they don't believe in truth, so this attitude only stands to reason ....pfffff!).

Well, having wrestled with the question why occidentals should be inherently worse than say, Huns or Turks, I may have located a possible source for this idea. Henri de Lubac in his book The Drama of Atheist Humanism has written extensively about an Enlightenment precursor thought up some time, half way through the nineteenth century in ... you've guessed it ... France, that wonderful source of heaps of pernicious intellectualism. I shall be short about it, as details can easily be found in (online) reference works (for some major ones, visit The Lighthouse Store Room.

To be continued in Part II: Auguste Comte completed his vast work in re of Positivism in 1842. Comte believed in empirical knowledge only, and built a vast atheist pseudo-religion around it.

The Totalitarian Pseudo-Religions (II)

Continued from Part I

Enlightenment inspired, first communism and after it Nazism, sought to release man from the grip of Christianity that had kept the human spirit captive in the endeavour to save man from himself, to bind and tame human nature's creative, ferocious, chaotic, predatory side, to save his very soul. The Nietzschean ideal wanted it released, to lift man up and usurp the position of the Christian God that had kept it within bounds, denying man his own greatness, or so he thought.

The essence of this ideal is captured by Henri de Lubac in his great work "The Drama of Atheist Humanism", quoting the reflections of Rainer Maria Rilke, recorded after enthusiastically reading the work of the new prophet, Friedrich Nietzsche:

""He whom men worship as the Messiah turns the whole world into an infirmary. He calls the weak, the unfortunate, the disabled his children and his loved ones. What about the strong? How are we ourselves to climb if we lend our strength to the unfortunate and the oppressed, to idle rogues with no wits and no energy? Let them fall, let them die, alone and wretched. Be hard, be terrible, be pitiless! You must thrust yourselves forward, forward! A few men, but great ones, will build a world with their strong, muscular, masterful arms on the corpses of the weak, the sick and the infirm!"
Others have repeated the cry: "The gods are dead, long live the Overman (Ubermensch)!", celebrate the new Nietzschean ideal in terms that none can afford to ignore as a clue to some of the dominant facts of contemporary history: Nietzsche predicts an early return to the ideal, but to an entirely different and new ideal. To understand this ideal there will be a category of free minds, fortified by war, solitude and danger. They will know the wind, the glaciers, the Alpine snows; they will be able to plumb the deepest gulfs without wavering. Endowed with a kind of sublime perversity, they will deliver us from loving our neighbours and from the desire of nothingness, that the earth may recover its purpose and men their hopes".

And so, instead of the ever transcending greatness in humility, as man measures himself against the demanding directions issued by God through Revelation, man became the measure of himself, of which we oversee the result today.

Over the years a few books have been written that sought to posit something quite different, but that in passing provide us with some wonderful insights into the origins and workings of the two totalitarian pseudo-religions: communism and Nazism. One of the works, we have already introduced elsewhere: Tom Reiss' The Orientalist, gives us pages of minute details of the times and the people involved, and who - in some cases - lived through both versions of the man induced hell.

Another work - perhaps remarkably so - is The Messianic Legacy, the second 1982 tome of the Holy Blood and Holy Grail trilogy, written by former BBC journalists, Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln. They set out to make the case of the original story that was later plagiarised, vulgarised, simplified and commercialised by Dan Brown in The Da Vinci Code. Of course much later, the whole hoax of the Priory of Sion and the goings-on in Rennes-Le-Château were exposed as an elaborate fabrication by Pierre Plantard c.s. But that was after a whole industry of gullible esoterics had set up shop.

But that aside, the BBC authors must be recommended for making an excellent job of their homework. This fortunately leaves us, in the second tome of the trilogy, with an erudite description how religion and myth subconsciously influence heart and mind, and how the other New Prophets of the Enlightenment, Bakunin and Adolf Hitler for communism and Nazism respectively, willfully used religious trappings and paraphernalia to get the masses on their side. The authors term these constructs surrogate secular religions.

Bakunin for over twenty years, belonged to the rank and file of Free Masonry and - as we have seen - Joseph Stalin (alias the pockmarked one: see foto) for some obscure reason best known to himself, finished his education in a Tiblisi seminary. Not only did he rub shoulders with The Orientalist protagonist's revolutionary mother, he was also a regular house guest of the well known esoterist G.I. Gurdjieff. From both these sources he got to know humanity's religious impulse up close, and learned how to harness and manipulate it.

The Messianic Legacy describes the pseudo-religious oath sworn on the occasion of Lenin's death and how the body was preserved, displayed and adored in later years, reminiscent of Christian saints.

The value attached to the membership of the Communist Party - particularly during the thirties of the last century, was specifically religious in nature.

Membership of the Pioneers from the age of nine had all the hallmarks of a rite of passage and was on par with the Catholic's first communion. The red handkerchief - symbolizing the blood of the revolutionary martyrs - was perceived as a relic, crucifix or charm. Nobody was allowed to touch it.

The book posits however, that ultimately the Marxist-Leninist ideology was never very much more than just that. It flopped because a religion must appeal to the heart as well as the soul at the same time, give succor in times of distress and provide answers to life's cosmic questions. Communism as a pseudo-religion always remained materialist, abstract and ultimately emotionally sterile.

To be continued, Part III: A much better job was made of it on the right side of the totalitarian divide. It is customary to describe all varieties, Germanic Nazism and its Italian and Spanish counterparts, as ...