Ideological Archeology: Rousseau (II)

Swiss-French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau's (1712-1778) personal life is marked by traits sounding awkwardly contemporary. Self-pity and paranoia play see-saw with wrong choices and deflecting blame. Man is by nature good, it is society that is the cause of corruption and vice. Iconic for Rousseauian thought is the image of the noble savage, man in his natural state before his fall from Paradise.

There is nothing ambiguous about his ethics however: he believed his 'doctrine of two substances' to be the key to the absolute quality of good and evil [Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 2001, p., 2001, p. 719]. In an example in a classical setting he saw in Athenian decadence the degrading influence of reason. He preferred the cruder, militaristic Spartans, an unspoiled and nobler tribe. Their callous practice of exposing babies to nature - now in dispute - may well have inspired Rousseau to expose his own five illegitimate children to the hardships of the Paris orphanage.

Although Rousseau died in 1778, before the French Revolution, his justification of violence to power was the source of inspiration of the Reign of Terror that the Jacobins unleashed during the latter part of the rebellion. In 1792 the French 'citizen army' faced the Prussian forces at Valmy. In a psychological victory they prevented them from marching on to Paris to restore the monarchy. Earlier in the capital a mob had stormed the Tuilleries Palace. In the massacres over a thousand political prisoners were brutally hacked to death. Fabre d'Eglantine declared: "In the towns, let the blood of traitors be the first Holocaust to Liberty, so that in advancing to meet the common enemy, we leave nothing behind to disquiet us!" [Wildmonk]

After "the first Holocaust to Liberty" many more would follow. It is a specific feature, typical of Rousseau's constellation of ideas. The chief ingredients as expressed in "Profession de Foi" are a sweeping rejection of tradition, Revelation, and all institutionalized authority. [Radical Enlightenment, p. 718]

In Roussea's ideas we find the source of every anti-Liberal, violent revolution ever since the French Revolution went off the Lockean track. Rousseau is ultimately the father of many noxious and lethal traditions besides: Romanticism, redistributive Socialism, philosophical agrarianism, conservative Communitarianism, Nazism, and more to the point, the Counter-Enlightenment and postmodernism. Cultures, adopting Rousseauian ideas found in them a mirror of some aspect of their own identity. [Wildmonk]

Many have descended into the abyss of collectivist hell. In France his radical egalitarianism led to The Reign of Terror, in Germany to Left and Right Socialism with known result, in Russia and the Far East to communism, starvation and slaughter on grandiose scales. In China Mao Tse Tung's Great Leap Forward resulted in the greatest mass murder in human history and in Cambodia the Khmer Rouge's extermination campaign to establish Rousseauian agrarianism resulted in the deaths of well over twenty percent of the population. [Wildmonk] If this is not evil, frankly I don't know what is.

Why Rousseau is different
Rousseau stands apart in many respects. He marks the fault-line in Western tradition between Anglo-American and Continental lines of thought, and forms the point of departure from the Enlightenment because he is essentially anti-modern [Wildmonk]. While loosely following the traditional path of Enlightenment thought, his radical stance differs notably on the crucial issues of anti-individualism [Isaiah Berlin, "Against the Current", 2001], anti-capitalism and against private property ("Radical Enlightenment", p. 273), anti science and technology, his radical egalitarianism, and the inherent mindset in which the means are justified by the perceived noble end.

Rousseau is often quoted as the iconic philosopher of the Enlightenment, but it is quite clear he fiercely rejected all its tenets and values. No doubt, here we have the ground zero of the Counter-Enlightenment.

He was certainly no believer in mutually beneficial interaction, or the beneficial effects on society of self-interest (Bernard Mandeville (1670-1733), "The Fable of the Bees"), asserting that "society hardly needs to feed man's love for himself and his desire to be first among men." ["Radical Enlightenment", p. 273].

His radical egalitianism is echoed in the notion that rational and industrious man with dehumanizing machines would replace royalty as an enslaver of the common man, being better and more ruthless on the aggregation of material goods. He argued that the separation of the progress and dissemination of science and art from political and religious control are hazardous for society and for the virtue of the people [Bloom, 1990]. But it gets worse."

Common will" instead of freedom
In Rousseau we see the first social contract at the price of freedom and the birth of a notion called the "common will". The latter is a concept that in Rousseau's approach requires state intervention. This should not be confused with the 'common good'. It is a far more developed conception which, and unlike the former, can only be realized in the context of civil society under the state ["Radical Enlightenment", p. 720).

For the creation of a society of common will, "freedom of all the people", they need only accept the dictates of the state. This was Rousseau's essence of "true civilization." The struggle between rich and poor would then rise to a moral experience of self-restraint. [Wildmonk] With the faculty of moral choice thus abdicated and forfeited to the state, people would be free from lowly - earthly desires and reach full - ideal potential. Man is thus divorced from the social and economic context in which he lives and interacts with others. The ideal state of heaven, separated from earthly considerations.

This totalitarian approach to freedom, an abomination in every sense, was later further developed by Marx, who wrote that "capitalist, individual liberty is the most complete suppression of all individual liberty and total subjugation of individuality to social conditions" [Wildmonk: Marx, "Grundnisse", pp. 131]. "Freedom can only consist in socialized man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of their human nature." [Wildmonk: Marx, "Selected Writings", pp. 496].

In this way man's separation from his nature and morality began. Never in human history were their worse judges of human character than Rousseau and his followers: all seek some degree of formal control over individual freedom for the purpose of creating material conditions deemed necessary for "true freedom", moralectomy in precise equal measure. Rousseau's concept of "common will" became the most savage, bloody instrument of social engineering in the history of mankind.

The Atlantic Ridge
In the United States Thomas Jefferson was the most prominent supporter of the French revolutionary achievements. Nevertheless, property rights and Enlightenment liberties were set in stone in the spirit of Locke, Montesquieu and Adam Smith. The present Democratic Party is being diverted further and further from that tradition as the sway of the postmoderns intensifies. Rhetorical style and attitude betray their influence.

While National Socialist and Communist ideas have swept America to some extent in their haydays - notwithstanding the counter culture, a product of the latter - these Rousseauian inspired ideologies remained by and large a marginal affair. Rousseau entering Locke's territory by the back- door may come as a surprise to some Americans - the wrong brand of revolution is encroaching on its most basic principles.

In Europe the situation was markedly different, as we shall see. Locke's influence remained on the whole limited to the British Isles. France and Germany have both Rousseau traditions, not Lockean. Today of great long-term concern is a possible return to some form of Rousseau inspired extreme ideology. It is chilling to see the rise of an unelected governing body on the European continent. The post-democratic elitism, combined with postmodern ideological chaos understood in the philosophical context, is an even more disquieting prospect.

Counter-Enlightenment projection* is on the order of the day and may even be consciously used as a tactic. Rousseau's brand of radical and revolutionary ideas, combined with the notion that civilization is so corrupt that it must be considered beyond salvation, makes him the father of all violent struggle in the last two and a half centuries.

Americans, tending to confuse Locke's revolution with Rousseau's, occasionally fall into the trap of supporting the wrong causes: initially the Russian Red Terror, and more recently, the covertly Islam inspired call for independence in the middle of Europe's powder keg, the Serbian province of Kosovo in the heart of the Balkans, thus providing a foothold in Europe for similarly based and equally pernicious radicalism.

The zero-sum game approach to economics also originates with Rousseau, which is giving rise to the annual media talking point that "a new report is suggesting that today's rich are getting richer, and the poor are getting poorer". This is incorrect propaganda, some reason requiring regular public re-affirmation, perhaps for that reason alone.

Rousseau and Religion
The great minds of the Enlightenment proper - Spinozists excluded - never saw Christianity as their mortal enemy. To them Church and the Enlightenment were natural allies. Rousseau was no exception, but he had only a passing acquaintance with the Christian political tradition. Therefore he dismissed the role of Christianity as a moderating force in society. He saw the faith as entirely a spiritual undertaking, occupying itself only with "heavenly things."

Rousseau's Christians are so detached from reality that they can hardly be recognized: a people so spiritualized that they display a profound disinterest if their earthly pursuits are successful or not. Rousseau's call for transcendent values to harness the energies of men towards the 'common will', coupled with the rejection of Christianity as a engine of these values, made it a central tenet of all the Rousseauian ideologies [Wildmonk].

To Rousseau religion was an imperative. "... the state cannot ... pursue a policy of toleration for disbelievers, or view religion as a matter of individual conscience. It absolutely must, therefore, reject dangerous notions of toleration and the separation of church and state." and "so fundamentally important is religion that the ultimate penalty is appropriate for disbelievers ..." [Stephen R.C. Hicks, "Explaining Postmodernism", Scholargy Press, 2004, p. 98].

Despite being so enamored with force-feeding religion, after the publication of his work "Emile" he was driven into temporary exile in Bern after a warrant for his arrest was issued. "Emile" was widely denounced as irreligious and seditious.

The Legacy
The loather of civilization Rousseau was nevertheless greatly admired by the early Counter-Enlighteners, as he is by today's postmoderns. His followers mostly selected from his work what they could use to prop up their ideologies. Marx accepted Rousseau's critique of Locke's economic man but stood solidly by the Enlightenment in his appreciation for science and technology. Marx even went so far as to describe his ideology as Scientific Marxism, basically a pseudo scientific rationalization of his aggregate of ideas.

Hegel as well as Rousseau inspired Marx' theory of dialectic materialism, in which the theme is the dichotomy of the Oppressor versus the Oppressed. Now clearly a tactic of this dialectic, Rousseau's vista of a noble, primordial world destroyed by man's egoism, might well also have sired the epidemic of Western self-loathing.

Irony
Ironically, while Rousseau was convinced that civilization was the cause of moral degradation, little did he know that his followers, by rejecting objective reality, would drop morality along with it. Despite two and a half centuries of genocidal legacy in pursuit of Rousseauian ideal society it enjoys considerable support among the Western intelligentsia, specifically in the humanities departments of academia, the media, all levels of education, contemporary arts, the political elite, advisory boards, government ministries and departments and what is loosely described as 'the corridors of power.'

The postmodern heirs remain committed to undermining free-market democracy, casting misty eyes upon the Rousseauean atrocities. 110 million dead are not vile enough to discredit 'the Party of Humanity' in the views of some of the most stubborn apologists. Considering that totalitarian societies are today's version of the tribal community he so admired, the Rousseau ideal society could well be described as an agrarian totalitarian state.

Another point of irony is that Rousseau's conviction, that reason engenders egocentrism has been falsified by every non-government sponsored humanitarian organization on the face of the planet, while Rousseau's faithful follower Hegel is responsible for the subjectivism that saw the birth of egocentrism gone mad, the 'Master of the Universe' syndrome (each individual creates his own personal version of reality: If I die overnight, will the sun still rise tomorrow?).

In France, Rousseau's ideal of small, intimate villages and a peaceful, agricultural society built on the consent of the common will has resulted in France becoming a by-word for centralized statism. Rousseau's tenet that reason caused man's fall from paradise may well be the basis of the later Counter-Enlightenment's political ideals, modelled on the re-creation of 'paradise on earth', Utopias which usually turn out to be dystopias instead.

Postmodernism or Rousseauism?
Rousseau can certainly be traced back as the source of all members of the postmodern coalition: environmentalists, third-worldists (Baran-Wallerstein), feminists, anarchists, 'gender, identity and sexual orientation' theorists, traditional socialists of various plumage, and 'classical' postmoderns. It is a true gathering of Rousseauians that has largely remained uninvestigated, underreported and certainly undeclared.

In the chaos of the total postmodern bankruptcy in the wake of mayhem, moralectomy and grandiose failure, there is but one purpose left. A resolve that brings these ideologies together with a tradition with which it has so much in common. We are witnessing a spontaneous feast of recognition with radical Islam.

It is truly remarkable that every prior held conviction and allegiance has by now been jilted in favour of furthering the causes of the intolerant: it's back to the Rousseau basics. The grant plan: a strategy to deconstruct Western, democratic, liberal capitalism by critical theory, and 'irrational means of the will.'

* If you think of yourself as a peaceful, loving person, while actually you are full of wrath and hatred, the psychological coping device of projection - as if by magic - transforms the object of that wratch into someone who is hateful, devisive, full of vitriol and bile, bigoted, intolerant and hatemongering.

The Safety of Collectivism

The German cultural English language site Signandsite recently dealt with an interview, published in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung am Sonntag with sociologist Wolfgang Sofsky, "who, in his coming book defends the private sphere in Germany against ever greater infringements in the name of terrorism control and tries to explain Germans' resignation to these constraints on their freedom."

"There's something missing in Germany: anti-totalitarian consciousness. We've had anti-communism, we've had anti-fascism on command, but we've had no clear-sighted anti-totalitarianism. While totalitarian regimes have existed on both German soils, there is no fully-developed sensitivity for the threat to freedom."

I posit that Sofsky's "sensitivity for the threat to freedom" comes with the Enlightenment's philosophy of Libertarianism, that was - at heart - an Anglo-Saxon project. It brought with it the blessings and accomplishments of human autonomy, the individual as operative unit, limited government, free market and a laissez faire attitude towards economy, and all what comes with reason and the right of free enquiry: technology, mechanization, and the scientific method.

Germany, upon shedding feudalism - instead of embracing Libertarianism, became home to the collectivist Counter-Enlightenment movement as started by Rousseau; thereafter - to its later chagrin - it adopted from that collectivist movement, both its political branches: Right Collectivism, National Socialism, and after its defeat, Left Collectivism, Communism. Germany's Libertarian Party, is until this moment, a marginal affair.

From the above may be concluded that Germany just doesn't seem to like individualism very much, preferring instead big government, the state as the embodiment of the collective spirit of the people. As a consequence Germans simply cannot be bothered with "ever greater infringements in the name of terrorism control" and "these constraints on their freedom."

I suspect, that the sociologist's sudden concerns over the people's privacy have more to do with the psychological projection known as Bush Derangement Syndrome and the American war on terrorism, in Leftist eyes seen as an excuse for a power grab, rather than the freedoms of the German people.

And it's not just the Germans who prefer to swap freedom for state control. It is true for most parts of Europe, as we shall see. Perhaps feudalism has made its way into the European psyche, predisposing it for the safety of Collectivism and the immaturity of never really having to grow up. Father State Will Provide is - according to psychiatrist Lyle H. Rossiter Jr in "The Liberal Mind, The Psychological Causes of Political Madness" - to blame for much of today's Narcissistic pathology (I'll come back about it in some detail). The chaos and responsibility that come with freedom can indeed be frightening, as adolescents know.

In social-economics there's the light weight Anglo-Saxon model, and the so-called 'Rhineland' variety. The continent - having adopted the latter, and Scandinavian countries an even weightier version of it, sees the Anglo-Saxon model as predator capitalism and - like the Germans - fail to see that they themselves have traded their freedom for a collectivist government that redistributes people's wealth as it sees fit: not free citizens, but all dependents of the state, from cradle to grave. They have even managed to turn Liberalism into Socialism Redux by the colpo of usurp, pervert, destroy.

While the French may be irritating the rest of the known world to bits by their obnoxious chauvinism, and the Germans - in view of recent history - temporarily don't talk so loud about The Goodies At Home, the Swedes somehow have persuaded themselves of the idea that they are the envy of the cosmos. Europeans misinterpret American patriotism in a similar vein.

But Americans don't pride themselves of their (heavily mixed) blood, or the beauty of their soil! They are proud of the Idea that is America, the human spirit that has shed the mentality of serfdom: the symbols of the government of the people, by the people and for the people. Europeans completely fail to understand the Americans' right to bear arms. They miss the connection, that those arms stand symbol for the guarantee of the principle, that the government exists at the people's pleasure, and not the other way around.

Fjordman has again produced what he knows best, another article on the inherent totalitarianism of the European Union: "... The European Union is basically an attempt – a rather successful one so far – by the elites in European nation states to cooperate on usurping power, bypassing and eventually abolishing the democratic system, a slow-motion coup d'état. Ideas such as 'promoting peace' are used as a pretext for this, a bone to fool the gullible masses and veil what is essentially a naked power grab. It works because the national parliaments still appear to be functioning as before."

"This is perhaps the most dangerous aspect of the EU: it is increasingly dictatorial, but it is a stealth dictatorship ... [it] has a lot more in common with totalitarian regimes such as Nazi Germany - and the Soviet Union - than the supposedly evil nation states it seeks to replace, especially its tendency to suppress freedom of speech, indoctrinate school children with blatantly false information and impose decisions upon its subjects without their consent."

Fjordman goes on a bit about the E.U. 'glossocracy', the Orwellian new speak, and government spokespersons' media guidelines regarding idiom and self-censorship: political correctness with a view to control mind and free flow of speech. Certainly also in evidence in the U.S. as promoted by the Democrats, it defies comprehension, but it now transpires that this phenomenon is an attempt by Pomo (Postmodernism: see Chart I: The Straight Red Line) to redistribute the right of free speech: a totalitarian effort to compensate unequal groups in proportion to their inequality. Pomo logic: the more elements of The White Patriarch a particular group has, the less unequal it is, the less entitled it is to free speech.

It is the same source that keeps on hyping the message, that we should loath ourselves on account of our imperialistic past: that waive after waive of ethnic cleansing, the enslavement of peoples other than powerful, rich, white, Christian males. I'll come back very shortly on the curious and fatal relationship of Pomo and language in general.

The Straight Red Line (7): Plotting against The West

~ Continued from the Part 6: the Collective ~

We have now established and asserted the Straight Red Line of the Counter-Enlightenment movement, as described by Stephen Hicks in "Explaining Postmodernism", running from the anti-Reason Collectivism of Rousseau, the Relativist Subjectivism [1] of the German philosophers of Romanticism (Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche), the Totalitarian Socialism of the Nazis on the Right side (Heidegger, Spengler), and Communists on the Left (Marx, Engels), through to Islam inspired terrorism, and the irrational European terror groups as the Bader Meinhoff c.s., on to the contemporary animal rights anti-globals and their organized rioting, topped up by the Postmodern Relativist thinkers in the Marx tradition: Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida, Marcuse and Rorty. The Postmodern movement includes branches of Feminism, Multiculturalism and Environmentalism.

The implication of the1984 revelation of former KGB agent and Soviet defector Yuri Alexandrovich Bezmenov that the KGB had been subverting three generations of Western students from 1968 onwards (if not before) (see other posts in this series), combined with the above pedigree of Subjective and violence prone philosophy, lays bare the origins of radical political Islam and explains the - at first glance - inexplicable attraction of that movement and Postmodern Leftism. (See Chart I to follow the Straight Red Line.)

I suggest wrapping up the series with more revelations about the group's mutual attraction and admiration, detailing the joint plans for the destruction of the Liberal, modern West, and then move on to further detailed analysis of the Unholy Alliance's strategy of misinformation, demoralization and subversion.

Melanie Phillips, author of "Londonistan" in an article posted on 18th May, "Liberalism v. Islamism" (aggregated to American Diplomacy) confirms Theodore Dalrymple's analysis of Islam being hopelessly and fatally insecure. Faced with an intractable dilemma - to abandon the faith which was supposed to bring glory and salvation, but instead has condemned Muslims to the backwater of humanity - or embrace modernity, acquiring with it the power that results from free enquiry: progress, knowledge and science. He holds that like all people when faced with an intractable dilemma, they lash out. Hence their accusation that is barely understood in the West, that they are 'under siege' by the ever expanding Liberal culture.

Melanie Phillips: "The driving force behind the Islamic Jihad is the fight against Liberalism and modernity. All the iconic conflicts ... are secondary to the fundamental aim of the Jihad to prevent Liberalism and modernity from destroying Islam." But Liberalism just wants to be left in peace without Sharia Law being foist upon it, a plea that regretfully falls on deaf Jihadi ears.

Underscoring the thesis of the Straight Red Line, Phillips describes how - more or less coinciding with the KGB's activities of the perversion of Liberalism by subjecting it to unrelated, Narcissistic, pathological ideas and behavior - the Muslim Brotherhood proposed to destroy Liberalism before it would infect the Islamic world, and to replace it with Islam through the pincer movement of both terrorism and cultural takeover.


This plan allegedly was laid out in a program of subversion in 1978 when the Organisation of the Islamic Conference sponsored a seminar in London which said, Muslim communities in western countries must establish autonomous institutions with help from Muslim states, and lobby the host country to grant Muslims recognition as a separate religious community, a step towards eventual political domination.

The plot is confirmed by a book published in 1980 by Khuram Murad, titled "The Islamic Movement in the West", and affirmed by a Muslim Brotherhood document seized in Switzerland in 2001, known as ‘The Project’, outlining a twelve-point strategy to 'establish an Islamic government on earth'.

At the time I have derided Hoover Institution Fellow and Townhall columnist, Dinesh d'Souza for siding with Islam against our fellow Western ideology, Liberalism. I haven't read his book "The Enemy at Home", but a gist article "It's the Culture, Stupid" can be found on Townhall, making the point that Islam has a problem with the amoral side of permissive Liberalism specifically, not with the West as a whole.

Today's Liberalism of course is not what it originally set out to be when the philosophy first developed during the Enlightenment. In fact, it has become its very opposite. Indeed, it bears all the characteristics of the Counter-Enlightenment: anti Reason, Collectivism, Relativist Subjectivism, victimhood. I posit that this well known process of 'usurp, pervert and destroy' was carried out by the KGB subversives in an effort to rob the West of its morals, the process of de-moral-ization. Now that the move towards depravity and decadence is more or less complete, the Unholy Alliance by Phillips' pincer movement is ready for the cultural takeover.

I disagree however with Phillips' conclusion - which is in keeping with mainstream opinion - that rampant individualism is a logical consequence of the philosophy of Liberalism, the Classical version, that is. In the post "The Mill Paradigm" I explained that John Stuart Mill's tenet of personal autonomy has been gravely violated by Leftist Liberalism. What is usually criticised as amoral individualism, is most of the time caused by a pathological condition called Narcissism, and has absolutely nothing to do with Classical Liberalism.

It is however at home in Leftist Liberalism, born of the KGB ideological demoralization program, literally to rid the West of notions of right and wrong, good and bad, by injecting Counter-Enlightenment thought into the system that holds that Reality does not exist, rendering these moral principles null and void. The result is all around us.

I dare now safely say, that all conspired to atomise Western culture from within: demoralized and confused to the core by pathological ideologies, it is upto Jihadism to deliver the coup de grâce. In case anyone would object that this scenario will destroy Left Liberalism as well, I can tell you they are but usefuls in the hands of the Postmoderns, who would like nothing better than to obliterate the naked, irrational, grasping ape of a man from the face of the earth entirely.

Hicks: "Postmodern thinkers inherit an intellectual tradition that has seen the defeat of all of its major hopes ... For those opposed to the Enlightenment, the modern world has offered no comfort ... Science .... generated nuclear bombs and super-bacilli. And the confidence in the power of reason [has] been revealed to be a fraud ... [from the] postmodern perspective the universe has been ... shattered ... But there was always Socialism ... the order that would transcend everything and create the beautiful, collectivist society. The failure of Left politics to achieve that vision was merely the last straw".

If Hicks is right, Postmoderns are beyond caring.

I have prepared the beginnings of a inventory (Chart II), detailing the advance of the 'program' as pertaining to the various spheres of activity. I do invite and would greatly appreciate active commenting, critique or whatever the reader may think to contribute. Thanks!

The Straight Red Line (5): Love of Islam, Loathing of Self

~ Continued from Part 4: the Founders ~

The touching words quoted yesterday (here in entirety) were uttered by the Subjectivist [1] champion of the Collectivist Counter-Enlightenment movement: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). I regret to say we have no winner of Hicks' groundbreaking tome "Explaining Postmodernism".

Rousseau set the tone of the premise of mankind basically being good but corrupted by his environment, that we have come to know so well in Leftist thinking. In Rousseau's vision the world's trouble is caused by civilization, Reason and its fruits, knowledge and science. He's often quoted as a philosopher of the Enlightenment, but it is quite clear he rebelled against all the tenets of individual Liberalism, Reason, secularism and limited government.

In Rousseau we find the very source of our trouble with Postmodernism, but also the answer to many a vexed question:

- "why does the Left ally itself with Radical Islam against the permissive Liberal society that is of their own making and of which they are the prime beneficiary?", and

- "why should Western civilization be considered so uniquely bad?" and related:

- "what's with the self-hatred", in these pages often termed "Down With Us", or Operation Western Auto-Destruct, so often confessed to by our Postmodern Multiculturalists and directed against white, rich, hetero-sexual, Christian men in particular and Western society in general.

Earlier I suggested to have discovered the source of self-loathing in the Positivism of Auguste Comte. But in Rousseau we have yet an earlier Ground Zero.

Disappointed Marxists often return to the grandfather of Collectivist Anti-Reason, but when the Leftist press recently sabled the film '300', about the three hundred Spartans that defeated the Persian Army in 480 Before Christ - driven by Pacifism and love of anything that doesn't answer to the white, male litany, in casu the Greeks - they forgot to check back on their Classics, the pure, emotional Rousseau.

As opposed to the degradation of Athenian decadent Civilization generated by Reason, Rousseau glorified the militaristic Spartans as pure, unspoiled, noble tribesmen - their callous practice of exposing babies to nature may have even inspired him to expose his own five children to the hardships of the Paris orphanage.

Because to Rousseau, the more advanced a civilization, the more corrupted and corrupting it is. As a paradigm of Rousseauian thought we can envisage the Noble Savage, or man's fall from Paradise: the snake of old was often used as a symbol of wisdom; read 'reason' for 'wisdom' (not to be confused!) and you have Rousseau in a nut-shell.

More of his ideas inspired by the image of noble savagery is the divorce of Eros and Agapi, so highly prized by contemporary man and woman; and a distaste for compassion with others which would only generate more decadent civilization: this is reminiscent of the view that drove the Russian Revolution: one cannot create a workers' Paradise with sentimentality, at which point usually the village headmaster was made an example of.

Rousseau also inspired in Marx the use of the Leftist dichotomy of the Oppressor versus the Oppressed; and seems to have been the source of Postmodern Fallacy Number One: the world as a pie, the view of the zero-sum game, where it is inappropriate and fatal.

Rousseau as the source of Western self-loathing can be found in the vision of the noble, primordial world that is destroyed by man's civilizing force: Reason, knowledge, science, technology, art, aesthetics, property, and economy; man not only destroyed this pristine environment (!), he also became soft, fat and lazy, and created a social conflict: a few winners on top and a whole lot of losers at the base of the pyramid of power.

It's this inequality that is so damning in Rousseau's erroneous total-sum game! Far from considering contemporary Western society an engine of equality and a creator of wealth, it is seen by the Rousseau followers as doomed, the epitome of social pathologies! Down With It ... à la Lanterne! Presently the problem is our destruction of the environment by technology: it doesn't save it, it despoils it.

The West prides itself for what it considers progress. But for anyone who has invested completely in a world view seen as evil, amoral and utterly failed, this gloating is unbearable. So the fight isn't over for the KGB's ideologically demoralised remnants. The capitalist world's moral values are attacked as utterly sexist, racist, dogmatic, authoritarian, cruel, uniquely civilized - uniquely bad!

If Reason makes no sense to what you're saying as Reality clearly shows otherwise, attack Reason as pernicious and superfluous, and persuade the world that Reality doesn't exist!

Rousseau as the source of the revulsion for civilization unmasks Fjordman's correspondent at the University of Helsinki for the Postmodern vile hypocrites that Multiculturalists at heart are: sending the message that retaining culture should be a human right, when in fact they mean to destroy anything that can remotely be considered a 'civilization', favouring instead the long-lost ideal: Marx' pseudo religious red paradise, or by default, Rousseau's wild tabula rasa of the tribal society, so pure and self-sacrificial, possibly Islamic (apparently not considered civil enough to be damned).

But then again, Postmoderns have a relation to language, that Muslims also have when lying to infidels: language, not as a means to transfer information, but as a means to a usually bloody end: it is about effectiveness. This is part of the confusion: to Postmoderns language is not about objective Truth, which to them doesn't exist any way. Therefore language isn't used as an instrument of precision, but as a propaganda tool. A word of advice: never, ever, take a Postmodern's words literally: what is being said habitually requires a good deal of deconstructing before its meaning can be discerned - which they will then go on to reject as non-existent.

To Rousseau religion was a imperative, as we have seen in yesterday's puzzle contest. He had the intention of cutting a few individual heads in the interest of society's stability as a whole. In Hicks' words: "... the state cannot ... pursue a policy of toleration for disbelievers, or view religion as a matter of individual conscience. It absolutely must, therefore, reject dangerous notions of toleration and the separation of church and state. Further: so fundamentally important is religion that the ultimate penalty is appropriate for disbelievers ..."

At which point we see the source of our Unholy Alliance of the Left and assertive Islam emerging on the horizon. As the cursed Western civilization was practically built by Christianity, this obviously rules it out. Now Islam on the other hand - due to the precise parallel characteristics of Collectivism, Anti-reason and Oppressor versus Oppressed - is the ideal candidate. The use of irrational terrorism is just an added attraction, as we shall see!

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Ayatolla Extraordinair, far from being the Left's Mister Nice Guy, also has the honour of being the source of political justification to irrational violence, committed by Jacobin thugs during the French Revolution, the Reign of Terror; of the horrors that Marxist dictators inflicted upon their own peoples; and of various Leftist terrorist groups who - from the 1960's onwards, when it began to dawn on them that with the passing of the 100 million victim mark - the Totalitarian game was up.

Most people, myself included, with the fall of the wall in 1989, made the mistake in taking for granted that Communism had conceded defeat. But the KGB's ideologically de-moral-ized, brainwashed crowd never gave up: they weren't programmed to pack it in. On the contrary! After their contributions to the permissive society to corrupt it even further, the West is currently witness to their collusion with the forces of Radical Islam.

I think we need to carefully consider the ominous words of one of the Four Horsemen of the Communist Apocalypse, Herbert Marcuse of the Frankfort School in 1974, after the 'failed revolutions' of 1967 and 1968: "It will be resurrected in the universities".

~ To be continued in Part 6, the Collective: ... we have seen that Syria/Lebanon and Iraq found themselves - as French colonies during World War II - on the side of Vichy and Nazi Germany ... ~

Science as Liberal Ideology and a Puzzle Contest

Today a bit of a break from the Straight Red Line series: the line that runs from the Counter-Enlightenment movement of the eighteenth century on to Marx and (National) Socialism, to contemporary Postmodern thought patterns: all branches of Relativism as Multiculturalism, and presently in full development: post-democracy Transnational Progressivism, best described as a neo feudal form of Empire.

First another matter that requires our attention, and then I'll wrap it up with a puzzle contest pertaining to the above. On a first received basis the winner gets a copy of Stephen Hicks' ground breaking book, "Explaining Postmodernism".

America has been dealing with this problem for a some time, now it's Europe's turn: Liberal morality being thrust upon the nations, whether its people share the world view, or not. A clarification is required at this stage, the usual caveats with an added dimension: we are not talking Classical Liberalism or Libertarianism here, the Enlightenment version of laissez-faire, of the scientific variety that operates by empiric investigation and submission to falsification.

Instead the subject matter pertains to the atheist variety of the Counter-Enlightenment lot that has usurped the Liberal title and inserted into it a set of its own characteristics to further the ideological ends: collectivism, anti-reason and socialism, that runs counter to the rational, individual liberty of the original thing.

The usurpation doesn't end there: enlightened science is being used as a means to provide the subjectivist, liberal ideology with a rational coat of paint: it is actually a bit of a dirty trick ... like Kim Jong-il saying he's proclaiming North Korea hence a capitalist nation, while secretly maintaining a plan economy and defending the construct as the only respectable and lawful way to conduct a free market.

At stake: the all important existence of God ... God Must Be Averted and Stamped Out, at All Cost ...!

Subject matter is the Council of Europe's Parliamentary Assembly's draft resolution on the dangers of creationism in education. This institution is one of Europe's impermeable political entities, not to be confused with any of the European Union's agencies, but it bears all the hallmarks of the same pseudo democracy, claiming "pluralistic composition of democratically elected members of parliament" while there are very few citizens that have heard of it beyond the evening news, let alone having voted for any of its members.

Its proud President is Mr Van der Linden, in an earlier incarnation a nondescript backbencher of the Christian Democrat persuasion in the Dutch parliament, got respectability by moonlighting in Brussels corridors of power.

This body of crypto dictators have seen fit to draw up a rag of a Subjectivist Manifesto that is typical of the breed. It lives and breaths liberal morality activism: "The theory of evolution is being attacked ...!" it rants. Yes, this is what you do in science with theories: you attack them in order to see if they can stand up to scrutiny.

But it stands to reason: after 150 years the theory is still unproven and the chances of basic enzymes of life arising by random processes are 1 to 1 followed by forty thousand zeroes! So instead of attacking it, it had better be kept in a velvet coated vault for fear of it desintegrating into sub-atomic particles.

The Discovery Institute just the last few days published an article by David Berlinski that sums up the story of "The Origins of Life" rather nicely: some 17 pages of modern science history and not an end in sight. The author concluding that "We must wait end see".

This is the actual state of the scientific investigation, but the Council of Europe have elevated it to gospel truth and wants to root out all forms of alternative investigation and research: "The Parliamentary Assembly is worried about the possible ill-effects of the spread of creationist theories within our education systems and about the consequences for our democracies. If we are not careful, creationism could become a threat to human rights, which are a key concern of the Council of Europe."

There you have it in a nut-shell: consider the consequences for human rights and democracy if God cannot be averted. I don't propose to repeat the entire rag, but this is not the language of lawyers and it certainly isn't scientists talking: this is sheer activism in defense of the politically correct ideology! We are way, way out of line, at present!

I promised a riddle, a little contest ... okay ... but brace yourselves for this one: the full kit of protective totalitarian raid paraphernalia is required. I'll give you the answer who's quoted here tomorrow. Good luck, here goes:

"while the state can compel no one to believe it can banish not for impiety, but as an antisocial being, incapable of truly loving the laws and justice, and sacrificing, if needed, his life to his duty. If, after having publicly recognized these dogmas, a person acts as if he does not believe them, he should be put to death ... the individual particularly ... is surrendered to a new moral and collective body which has its own self, life, body and will. [In moral society, one] coalesces with all, [and] in this each of us puts in common his person and his whole power under the supreme direction of society's leaders."

Science: Waking Up to the Forces of Darkness

After the series on transnational progressivism - a futuristic, dystopian, totalitarian, world view that will eliminate wars, pestilence, revolutions, borders, plurality voting, democracy as we know it (we are entering the Post Democratic era!), autonomy and nationalities, a vista that has attracted proponents left, right and centre, among whom, if I am not gravely mistaken, quite a few royals - it is perhaps useful to add a few words on the other enemies of the nation-state, the postmoderns, be it that they hate the status quo for entirely different reasons. But the objectives coincide, perhaps fatally so.

Objectivist philosopher Stephen Hicks has written the book on postmodernism. He uses an insightful classification: not Left, and certainly not Right, but Counter-Enlightenment. In view of the Liberal moral bankruptcy and rampant degeneracy that - at particularly vulnerable times - makes radical Islam seem almost preferable, one can easily see that Liberalism has had its day and is over the hill. But putting 'paid' to all blessings of Reason altogether, is like throwing the baby away with the bath water.

I am working my way at present through the small tome written by Hicks. It is a thin booklet for the good reason there isn't that much to say on the subject, postmodernism being largely hot air produced by immature mad men with a bent for the surreal; still, on account of its deliberately confusing influence on the brain, reading it is also quite a tedious pastime.

Let me start by saying that - although the work I have been doing here for the last half year or so - has been done quite independently and without much reference work by others (there isn't much anyway), my findings are to a large extent borne out by the professional work carried out by Hicks, with the exception of the rather smart classification. Consequently, I will take nothing back of what I've written in these pages on the subject. If anything, the concept of postmodernism is even more politically driven, more intellectually and philosophically vacuous, and anything as pernicious as maintained.

This piece of drivel has been around since Hegel and the German Counter-Enlightenment movement of Schopenhauer, Fichte, Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and after them Marx, Derrida, Rorty, Foucault and Lyotard; currently it has taken over the arts, the mainstream media, a number of segments of Leftist political parties, entire university faculties and other places and institutions of (higher) learning: but the first public evidence that science has woken up to the danger it finds itself in, is dated 28th May 2007 - that's right: a week ago!

In evidence is one A4 size article written by one of The Guardian's science commentators, James Randerson titled "Dawkins' Christmas card list". It is all the more a strain on credulity, as this particular newspaper is almost entirely dedicated to all things avant garde in ultra Left and postmodern thinking: a colleague Guardian pet columnist of said Messrs Dawkins and Randerson is multicultural prophet Timothy Garton Ash, one of the Three-fold Kings of the Borg ("... resistance is futile, prepare to be assimilated ..."). Are we to understand the gentlemen never rub shoulders on Christmas parties, having a good tête-a-tête about the finer points of the latest rage in Leftist thought?

"Science, and the rationalist movement in general, face a 'sinister challenge' from leftwing thinkers who promote cultural relativism", evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins is quoted to have said during an event organised by the newspaper. Dawkins has quite a few opinions and not always in reference to the subject of evolutionary biology exclusively. He is the author of "The God Delusion" and other virulently Christophobic literature.

Fellow panelist at the same event was geneticist Steve Jones of University College London and "The Guardian Science Experiment". Speaking to the event's tag line "Have we abandoned the enlightenment?", he reserved special venom for the animal rights movement, which he attacked as 'stridently anti-rational'. So much hurt are these radical atheists by the forces of darkness that they'd almost - almost - embrace traditional Christianity as somewhat 'enlightened'! Spare me the amateur operetics!

In the light of what we know about postmodernism, about said learned gentlemen and their relationship to ultra Left leaning Al-Guardian, the above is simply astonishing! I will of course return to Hicks' book on the subject in detail, but let me say that postmodernism is a reaction to and rejects all, the Enlightenment stands for: reason, science, technology, free market capitalism, you name it: if it has been beneficial to mankind, postmodernism rejects it. Ergo, science and the Left are opposing, mutually exclusive entities!

Postmodernism, according to Hicks "the end result of the Counter-Enlightenment attack on reason" offers no alternative philosophy to Liberalism, in which all the postmodern bogies have condensed. Instead it simply embraces all that is Liberalism's opposite: anti-rationalism, anti-knowledge, anti-technology, anti-capitalism, anti-free market economy, anti the empiric method (postmodernism is unfalsifiable and of course, as it doesn't recognize science anyway, it doesn't feel obliged to make any sense as long as the other objectives are met).

If you've ever wondered as I have, where today's leading role for emotions stems from, this might be your answer. Jung's findings that "sentimentality is a superstructure that covers brutality", in this respect sounds particularly apt. Let's say, postmodernism is a form of adolescent anti-intellectualism bordering psychosis.

Alternatively, if you are familiar with Marx' works, with a few minor updates, you get an idea what the boys and girls of postmodernity are up to: just read Power for Capitalism, Minority Group for Class, and Emotion for Reason. Or a short meditation on the works of Salvador Dali or M.C. Escher might also be sufficient for some insight.

Let me put it yet in another way: it is like somebody has concluded that The Enemy is a white, rich, male individual whose strength is the power of reason. The answer therefore is the mobilization against him of all other collective minorities - non-whites, women, the under-privileged - and attack the power base of reason. As the Enlightenment shaped the world, postmoderns strive to re-shape it through the Counter-Enlightenment movement.

While proponents cannot even claim having an answer to any of the big questions, or they'd commit their first oxymoron - the first of many, I might add - of all the adherents around it is apparently only Richard Rorty who has enough professional honour to care about the fact! The rest finds the whole thing of reason, fallacies and oxymora one huge joke in the light of their meaning of life, taking over where Marxism left off: the demolition of the blessings of The Enlightenment and Liberalism.

It explains Fjordman's and my own suspicion that postmoderns aren't remotely interested if their rants make any sense or not, or if their pseudo philosophy contains a hundred or three hundred oxymora. Apart from an apparent obsession with phallic symbols (of which a good many weapons, like missiles and arrows) and other objects with the power of penetration, the symbol i representing the square root of negative one seems a problem as well, as is the making of the speed of light the fastest phenomenon, thereby unfairly privileging it over other speeds! As they don't recognize science, they constantly confuse scientific fact with opinion.

Let me wrap this item up for the time being with a few quotes from postmodern intellectuals. As they themselves hardly believe a word they're saying, please note that the gems of Post-structuralism are using language merely 'ironically'. Enjoy the next quotes and note the chief characteristics: gross generalization coupled with dramatic exaggeration, put together in naive baby talk (mommy, why are people making war?):

"Postmodernism seeks not to find the foundation and the conditions of truth but to exercise power for the purpose of social change. The task of postmodern professors is to help students spot, confront and work against the political horrors of one's time".
Frank Lentricchia, 1983

"All my analysis are against the idea of universal necessities in human existence. It is meaningless to speak in the name of - or against - Reason, Truth, Knowledge."
Michel Foucault, 1988

"Reason is the ultimate language of madness - there is nothing to guide or constrain our thoughts and feelings. So we can do or say what we feel like".
Michel Foucault, 1965

"Deconstruction relieves me of the obligation to be right ... and demands only that I be interesting."
Stanley Fish, 1982

"Reason and Power are one and the same. Both lead to and are synonymous with prisons, prohibitions, selection process, the public good."
Jean-François Lyotard, 1999

And let's not forget the comic feminist, Miss Dworkin who is unquotable in decent company, but who typifies the effect of male sexuality on women in military terms, with an invasion.

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" ... ~

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 ...