In 1917, a very small group of underground socialists were able to leverage the absolute chaos left in the wake of Russian military defeat and collapse of vital supply to major cities, by using slogan repetition to blame the entire old regime for everything that had gone wrong, promising things they could not possibly deliver, but delivering what hungry and desperate audiences wanted to hear.
While historians have traditionally called these events part of the Russian 'Revolution', the realities on the ground were that they were an opportunistic political coup d'état, whose success provided the tools and resources to then successfully fight a civil war that would then entrench a new Czar in Moscow.
The events we are now facing in the West are different in detail, not as sudden, or a result of war, but they are still a coup, albeit a slow motion one.
The societies in which this is happening have been seriously weakened by at least three generations of chronically over productive and consumptive Indulgence Capitalism, which has made a catastrophic mess of the social/existential and ecological commons that would be comparable with the effects of protracted war.
Indulgence Capitalism itself is a legacy product of total global war, whereby economies and cultures that have been protractedly mobilized by war machines to bombard enemies with military ordinance, were converted to production war mobilized by marketing machines, to bomb consumer ordinance onto concentrations of shop troops, while turning ecological landscapes into collateral blast zones, where all the recognizable boundaries, ordinary existential grounding and reference points have disappeared, like a picture of a first world war artillery battle ground.
Over a 50–70-year period, these societies have been culturally and ecologically skeletonized into an adolscentized totalitarian zombyizm that was bound to be chronically vulnerable to colonization by jewel wasp (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emerald_cockroach_wasp) model predators. The victims have long been trained to be hunted down by any fantasy they have been persuaded to want.
The once liberal Woke Ascendancy is no different in its modus operandi from its mining, heavy industry and services regime opposite numbers. The Woke use exactly the same machinery of consciousness domination as the tobacco industry.
Any unrepresentative swill of well-organized and funded activists can take over the shop with very little surface disturbance to business-as-usual, in ways that look spontaneously 'natural', 'rightful' and 'inevitable', as they seamlessly 'work' with already well drilled populations that are inured to the politics of 'liberation' conformity.
We no longer need catastrophe and crisis to unsettle us sufficiently to try desperate measures led by violent gangsters. Three generations of invisible conditioning have done their work all too well. These days, any snake oil opportunist just has to feed the right prompts through The Matrix, and it will spontaneously shape shift into the desired format, regardless of whether the agenda and outcomes are even sane....which is difficult to ascertain, because the rational, evidence based and critical consciousness that might determine such category boundaries that Western societies once boasted of in abundance, are now only spasmodically operational, and increasingly contracted out to Asian neighbors and migrants.
We are in far more trouble than we can even begin to know.
Calling all people left of centre “marxists” is pure rhetoric. Let’s keep to the details. A “Marxian” framework for understanding history has merits and deficits, which can be discussed. Similarly there is a wide-ranging discussion at the heart of this about private property, empire, occupation and justice that is particularly interesting and relevant. But dropping the caricatures is required or it degrades into name-calling.
While I’d agree with much of this article, two comments. One is the reference to Stephen Lewis as a “Marxist” and later a reference to certain “socialists”. To avoid confusion and what many would see otherwise as howlers, best stick to referring to these folks as “social democrats”. The distinction is obvious, accepted and avoids a charge of exaggeration (ie state ownership vs generous welfare state.) I believe the term “visible minority” (criticized by some Leftists at the time) originated in Walter Pitman’s 1977 report “Now is Not Too Late”, several years before your claim (ie Rosalie Abella in 1984). Pitman among other things was an NDP MPP and later President of Ryerson Polytech.
Robin Collins: Socialism has been foisted upon the free world by many strategies in the past two centuries, obviously revolution has been one strategy and less obviously evolution has been another – the idea of the social democrats, since armed revolution is not always advocated, is that they can simply vote socialism into being in countries stubbornly clinging to free West principles, that they can slowly evolve their host body into the longed-for socialist utopian future without the liberated citizenry realizing the severe state of moral compromise they are being subjected to. I would gladly and repeated blaspheme against your sensibilities and call Stephen Lewis a bloody Marxist all day long if it would serve to draw attention to that fact.
I'll tell you what was a "howler" however: that time when on Oct 30th, 2022 you described yourself as having been in the "M-L" (=Marxist-Leninist) camp in the 1980s and then balked at my calling you a Marxist (you went on to say "I'm not a Marxist, maybe never was.") https://wokewatchcanada.substack.com/p/from-police-brutality-to-race-relations/comments .
Sometimes the distinctions between Marxist and socialist vs social-democratic are important and to combine them together isn’t useful or is misleading. The complaint surely is over totalitarianism not provision of social services. That’s my point. Same can be said about liberal vs conservative or democratic vs republican. I suggest that the four quadrant approach be used (left-right and authoritarian-libertarian axes) as it is more fruitful. (See: www.political compass.org and see what you really are.) Otherwise we end up red-baiting or calling everyone fascists. Thanks for clarifying that Pitman got the term “visible minority” from Livingstone, a point not made in the article.
You got me again Robin Collins - Stephan Lewis is totally not a Marxist, he just wants to vote in the socialist utopia again and again. How did I red-bait like that 0_0 As for your repeated complaint about how the article describes the origin of the term "visible minority" we were considerably more precise than you have so far represented. Quote: "In the 1984 report, we see the first ever use of the term "visible minority" - a term which only exists in Canada, and which had been created by black feminist radicals like Kay Livingstone, but wasn't instantiated into policy and legal practice until judge Abella's report in 1984, and the related act in 1986."
In 1917, a very small group of underground socialists were able to leverage the absolute chaos left in the wake of Russian military defeat and collapse of vital supply to major cities, by using slogan repetition to blame the entire old regime for everything that had gone wrong, promising things they could not possibly deliver, but delivering what hungry and desperate audiences wanted to hear.
While historians have traditionally called these events part of the Russian 'Revolution', the realities on the ground were that they were an opportunistic political coup d'état, whose success provided the tools and resources to then successfully fight a civil war that would then entrench a new Czar in Moscow.
The events we are now facing in the West are different in detail, not as sudden, or a result of war, but they are still a coup, albeit a slow motion one.
The societies in which this is happening have been seriously weakened by at least three generations of chronically over productive and consumptive Indulgence Capitalism, which has made a catastrophic mess of the social/existential and ecological commons that would be comparable with the effects of protracted war.
Indulgence Capitalism itself is a legacy product of total global war, whereby economies and cultures that have been protractedly mobilized by war machines to bombard enemies with military ordinance, were converted to production war mobilized by marketing machines, to bomb consumer ordinance onto concentrations of shop troops, while turning ecological landscapes into collateral blast zones, where all the recognizable boundaries, ordinary existential grounding and reference points have disappeared, like a picture of a first world war artillery battle ground.
Over a 50–70-year period, these societies have been culturally and ecologically skeletonized into an adolscentized totalitarian zombyizm that was bound to be chronically vulnerable to colonization by jewel wasp (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emerald_cockroach_wasp) model predators. The victims have long been trained to be hunted down by any fantasy they have been persuaded to want.
The once liberal Woke Ascendancy is no different in its modus operandi from its mining, heavy industry and services regime opposite numbers. The Woke use exactly the same machinery of consciousness domination as the tobacco industry.
Any unrepresentative swill of well-organized and funded activists can take over the shop with very little surface disturbance to business-as-usual, in ways that look spontaneously 'natural', 'rightful' and 'inevitable', as they seamlessly 'work' with already well drilled populations that are inured to the politics of 'liberation' conformity.
We no longer need catastrophe and crisis to unsettle us sufficiently to try desperate measures led by violent gangsters. Three generations of invisible conditioning have done their work all too well. These days, any snake oil opportunist just has to feed the right prompts through The Matrix, and it will spontaneously shape shift into the desired format, regardless of whether the agenda and outcomes are even sane....which is difficult to ascertain, because the rational, evidence based and critical consciousness that might determine such category boundaries that Western societies once boasted of in abundance, are now only spasmodically operational, and increasingly contracted out to Asian neighbors and migrants.
We are in far more trouble than we can even begin to know.
Chomsky would agree, as would I (with less gravitas) that the October revolution was essentially a coup.
https://youtu.be/jxhT9EVj9Kk
Calling all people left of centre “marxists” is pure rhetoric. Let’s keep to the details. A “Marxian” framework for understanding history has merits and deficits, which can be discussed. Similarly there is a wide-ranging discussion at the heart of this about private property, empire, occupation and justice that is particularly interesting and relevant. But dropping the caricatures is required or it degrades into name-calling.
While I’d agree with much of this article, two comments. One is the reference to Stephen Lewis as a “Marxist” and later a reference to certain “socialists”. To avoid confusion and what many would see otherwise as howlers, best stick to referring to these folks as “social democrats”. The distinction is obvious, accepted and avoids a charge of exaggeration (ie state ownership vs generous welfare state.) I believe the term “visible minority” (criticized by some Leftists at the time) originated in Walter Pitman’s 1977 report “Now is Not Too Late”, several years before your claim (ie Rosalie Abella in 1984). Pitman among other things was an NDP MPP and later President of Ryerson Polytech.
Robin Collins: Socialism has been foisted upon the free world by many strategies in the past two centuries, obviously revolution has been one strategy and less obviously evolution has been another – the idea of the social democrats, since armed revolution is not always advocated, is that they can simply vote socialism into being in countries stubbornly clinging to free West principles, that they can slowly evolve their host body into the longed-for socialist utopian future without the liberated citizenry realizing the severe state of moral compromise they are being subjected to. I would gladly and repeated blaspheme against your sensibilities and call Stephen Lewis a bloody Marxist all day long if it would serve to draw attention to that fact.
I'll tell you what was a "howler" however: that time when on Oct 30th, 2022 you described yourself as having been in the "M-L" (=Marxist-Leninist) camp in the 1980s and then balked at my calling you a Marxist (you went on to say "I'm not a Marxist, maybe never was.") https://wokewatchcanada.substack.com/p/from-police-brutality-to-race-relations/comments .
As for your correction about Walter Pitman having coined the term "visible minority" in 1977, it was actually invented by black feminist Kaye Livingstone in 1975 as we state in the article above. See: https://c2cjournal.ca/2022/02/its-time-to-abolish-the-absurd-and-slightly-racist-concept-of-visible-minorities/
Sometimes the distinctions between Marxist and socialist vs social-democratic are important and to combine them together isn’t useful or is misleading. The complaint surely is over totalitarianism not provision of social services. That’s my point. Same can be said about liberal vs conservative or democratic vs republican. I suggest that the four quadrant approach be used (left-right and authoritarian-libertarian axes) as it is more fruitful. (See: www.political compass.org and see what you really are.) Otherwise we end up red-baiting or calling everyone fascists. Thanks for clarifying that Pitman got the term “visible minority” from Livingstone, a point not made in the article.
You got me again Robin Collins - Stephan Lewis is totally not a Marxist, he just wants to vote in the socialist utopia again and again. How did I red-bait like that 0_0 As for your repeated complaint about how the article describes the origin of the term "visible minority" we were considerably more precise than you have so far represented. Quote: "In the 1984 report, we see the first ever use of the term "visible minority" - a term which only exists in Canada, and which had been created by black feminist radicals like Kay Livingstone, but wasn't instantiated into policy and legal practice until judge Abella's report in 1984, and the related act in 1986."
“First ever use” in Canada in 1984? No, it’s in the Pitman Report much earlier.