Here's Why You Should "Care"

(On the heels of last night's post about "direct action" at the Republican convention, Michael Schneider queries.)

> I'd like to know if I can bring myself to care about
> the poor RNC getting exactly what it deserves.

Have you ever seen my distinction between the Democrats and Republicans, Michael? Do you know who Lunacharsky was?

The Republicans are stupid cowards. For at least forty years, but arguably more like about twice that long, they've known nothing but trailing behind the Democrats in all their (the Democrats) commie initiatives, tacitly conceding the premises of collectivism. Now, I know damned well that tons of Republicans are philosophically devoted to collectivism, too, and that they can split hairs in the world class. And maybe you could say that that's what I'm doing, too, but I don't think so. I am still convinced that the Republicans are generally not nearly so committed to the evil of their premises. For a lot of reasons, I believe they simply don't know, in general, what they're doing. Let me put it this way: you've seen me allude to a "conscience" in this country, toward which an appeal advanced on civil disobedience might gain traction. Well, if anything about that is true, then it's going to find an audience in the Republicans.

It is never going to happen with the Democrats, because -- in America -- they are the evil monsters who are completely, consciously, committed to collectivism. And you are never going to see them disavow the sort of thing that I pointed out in that blog-bit, which finds its roots in the Bolshevik Revolution.

"Propaganda" is an invention of the Catholic Church, going back to the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide ("Committee for the Propagation of the Faith") instituted by papal bull in 1622. Secularized forms of the idea were common through the 18th and 19th centuries. The communist innovation was logical extension of the basic idea toward completely supplanting reality by manufacture. Understanding communist epistemology clarifies this: we're talking about creatures for whom consciousness is prior to reality. They naturally hold that reality can be dictated with ideology.

That's the fundamental principle, but the manifestions in practice were (and still are) floridly variant.

"Proletkult" was a movement founded in the early years of the 20th century by Anatoli Lunacharsky, who became Lenin's Commissar of Enlightenment. Alexander Bogdanov, Lunacharsky's brother-in-law, became the chief theorist of Proletkult, which was an indulgence of Lenin's, who had actually rejected all the premises of Proletkult and had kicked Lunacharsky and Bogdanov out of the Party in 1911, only to re-admit them in 1917. In the Commisariat of Enlightenment, Lunacharsky and Bogdanov found free rein to completely re-shape every aspect of daily life under the regime. For instance: Bogdanov, an adherent of Frederick Taylor's time-motion studies of industrial production in the west, had it in mind to "mechanize speech", and when you use an acronym today, you might bear in mind that you're working with a Bolshevik invention.

Beyond all that, however, all the sort of militant "direct actions" described at the site I pointed out, find their origins in the goals of cultural subversion originating in Proletkult. When you see "street theater", for instance, you're looking back eighty years in a straight line to the original techniques of attack aimed at destroying all vestiges of individualism in a profound -- truly radical -- way. And we're talking about people who are not interested to consider and argue issues rationally, which capacity was supplanted by propaganda in the 20th century. This is the very essence of subversion: to alter -- and even destroy -- individuals' thinking without rational argument.

What I'm pointing out is that the left is hard at work at this in ways that the right are not interested to take up -- certainly not to the extremes of principle -- because they are so fundamentally dishonest. That is the basis of my challenge, Michael, the resolution of which is aimed at pointing out that there really are important differences between the two, even if they're not entirely fundamental to someone who knows -- and holds -- the difference between collectivism and individualism.

Again: the right, in general, is just stupid and cowardly. The left is positively evil, and always has been. And if you don't think so, then meet the challenge that I presented at my blog. You're going to have to go back to someone like Donald Segretti for a straw to grasp, and he was a piker by comparison, barely worth note. These people have been at this sort of thing for whole generations.

> Somebody has to do the work of resisting the
> Homeland Security Protectorate, and if
> Libertarians can't be bothered to stop
> fantasy-dreaming of trillion-dollar
> Sargasso Sea Galts Gulches, then
> the job will fall to the boorish, Moorish set.

That's not what they (the Moorish set) are about, Michael. They don't give a shit about that, and if you don't believe me, then try to imagine the "Homeland Security" necessary to implementing the politics that the Moores have in mind.