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.
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.