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The Twilight Struggle

Thread ID: 17321 | Posts: 17 | Started: 2005-03-15

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Walter Yannis [OP]

2005-03-15 10:52 | User Profile

[URL=http://www.catholicexchange.com/vm/index.asp?art_id=27758]Catholic Exchange[/URL] The Twilight Struggle 03/15/05

I recently came across examples of a phenomenon that has intrigued me my entire adult life: the apparent soft spot that American “progressives” have in their hearts for Communism. One instance popped up in the February 18th issue of the New Republic.

The magazine’s editor, Martin Peretz, has written an essay about the plight of liberalism in the United States. Peretz is convinced that American liberals are in disarray, lacking leadership and an animating vision for the future, and is searching for way to revive liberalism’s influence on society.

Let us leave aside for the moment whether he is correct about liberalism’s prospects and focus on his acknowledgment of the soft spot for Communism. Peretz: “Post this question at an Upper West Side dinner party: What was worse, Nazism or Communism? Surely, the answer will be Nazism.” Why is Peretz convinced that liberals will respond that way? Because, he says, liberals will argue that “Communism had an ideal of the good. This, despite the fact that communist revolutions and communist regimes murdered ever so many more millions of innocents and transformed the yearning of many idealists for equality into brutal assertion of evil, a boot stamping on the human face forever.”

You are entitled to your opinion; you are not entitled to your facts. You can’t argue with Peretz’s facts: Mao and Stalin butchered far more people than Hitler. Why, then, the difference in the liberals’ reaction?

Taki Theodoracopulos noted the same phenomenon in the February 14th issue of the American Conservative. He writes of a dinner he attended at Sardi’s in New York, after the opening night of the play Dame Edna on Broadway. Among his companions was “Joan Juliet Buck, an old friend and former editor of French Vogue. She wore a hammer-and-sickle pin on her hat.” Taki seized the moment. “How would you like it,” he asked her, “if I wore a tiny swastika on my lapel?” Ms. Buck was not pleased with the comparison. “It’s not the same,” she responded.

“But,” notes Taki, “I’m afraid it is. We are free to wear a pin that commemorates Communism, ignoring the enormity of communist crimes.” Again: Why?

I would wager that most readers of this column could come up with their own examples of the phenomenon. I can remember colleagues from my days as a teacher in a public high school in the suburbs of New York City, earnest women who would hang posters of Che Guevara in their classrooms and distribute to their classes magazines from the Red Chinese consulate extolling the idealism of Mao’s Red Guards. These teachers were hardly communist agents; they were suburban clubwomen who enjoyed Broadway plays and fine restaurants and Caribbean cruises. But they saw something noble, something good about these totalitarian tyrants. Why?

I can also remember a film prepared by ABC news for classroom use that was widely shown in New York’s schools in the 1970s: The People of the People’s Republic of China. It featured a young Ted Koppel, roaming China interviewing government officials, teachers and peasants, each of whom assured Koppel that Mao and the Red Guards were widely supported by the masses. Koppel was aware of the brutality of Mao’s regime, a reality now admitted to by the modern government of China. But, like Peretz’s and Taki’s dinner companions, he was willing to overlook it. Why?

Why did the same Americans who would castigate anyone who expressed the faintest sympathy for Hitler or Mussolini, make excuses for Mao and chant “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is gonna win” at their anti-war rallies, and journey to Cuba to chop sugar cane for Castro? Why the double-standard? Why would a teacher who displayed a poster of Castro in her classroom be defended by the teachers’ union, but not one who hung a Nazi or Ku Klux Klan banner? Why?

I submit that L. Brent Bozell, father of Brent Bozell III, the head of the Media Research Center, provided the answer back in the 1970s:

Liberals are coming to understand, even if darkly, that the logic of their analysis and ambition points them down a road they cannot follow: that the Gnostic dream of an earthly paradise can be realized (as the Communists know) not by changing society, but by changing man, by transmutative surgery on the soul. It follows that if Gnosticism is ever to triumph it will triumph in Communist form. Yet liberals instinctively recoil from that prospect; their sense of humanity, their residual attachment to the values and norms of the West, forbid the Communist solution. What a pickle — to be possessed by a world view that demands the victory of your enemy! Men affected by such a neurosis go mad, and civilizations do also. And in the meantime they fight — stubbornly — but aimlessly, without hope and without purpose: a "twilight struggle.”

Bozell recognized the schizophrenia of the progressives. They do not share the communists' belief in violent revolution or totalitarian dictatorship. They reject the means that communists employ to realize their ends. But liberals and communists desire the same ends.

An overstatement? I say no. Liberals and Marxists share many of the same Enlightenment roots. Consider the promises of Marxism: a utopian vision of the perfectibility of the human race, a managed economy for the purpose of ending the disparity between the haves and the have-nots, the end of the nation-state system and the establishment of a one-world government to promote the brotherhood of man, a secular society that will end the influence of the Church and religious authorities, control of the media and the schools for the purpose of transforming society in a “progressive” manner, the creation of a new communal consciousness to take the place of capitalism’s stress on the individual, a society where the limits of traditional morality and outdated views on the differences between the sexes will be replaced by the guidelines of “reason.”

Which of the above aspirations would not be championed in the faculty room at your local college or around the water cooler at the major news weeklies? You are right: not one. It is this overlapping of goals that accounts for the American liberal’s reluctance to treat Marxist revolutionaries, even brutal tyrants such as Mao, Stalin and Castro, as enemies. It accounts for the double-standard of the woman with Taki at Sardi’s with the hammer-and-sickle pin on her expensive hat. It is at the heart of the “blame America first” mentality among American intellectuals.

James Fitzpatrick's new novel, The Dead Sea Conspiracy: Teilhard de Chardin and the New American Church, is available from our online store. You can email Mr. Fitzpatrick at [email]fitzpatrijames@sbcglobal.net[/email].

(This article originally appeared in The Wanderer and is reprinted with permission. To subscribe call 651-224-5733.)

Walter Yannis

2005-03-15 11:24 | User Profile

It's obvious that the reason Jewish Communism is acceptable among Western elites while German Nazism is anathema is that Communism was a Jewish thing and that the Western elites are largely Jewish.

And even those members of the elite who aren't Jewish know better than to say anything against the Jews, and indeed know that saying nice things about Lev Broshtein (Trotsky) (see frontpagemag.com, for example) is a sure way to curry favor among the Jewish financial and media establishment.

I respectfully submit that that is completely obvious.

So, what's with the author?

Does he really fail to see the obvious, or does he dissemble?

In my opinion, the author is engaged in what Orwell called doublethink. He is intentionally hiding from his conscious mind the simple and obvious fact of Jewish power and influence determining this and a myriad other of the "paradoxes" that seem to baffle writers like the author of this article.

I would like to hear what others think about this.

How is it that intelligent people like this author can identify the problem, describe it well, and then fail to draw the most elementary conclusions about it cause?

Franco

2005-03-15 12:12 | User Profile

-

Yes.

Jewish-invented, Jewish-spread communism "feels good." Never mind that communism is a fraud that doesn't create a paradise as promised. States don't "whither away" to usher in a utopia, like Marx said. But that doesn't seem to matter.

And, yes, most of the top elites in the West are Jewish. Since Nazism was a reaction to communism, the elites hate it.

Texas Dissident

2005-03-15 17:04 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Franco]Jewish-invented, Jewish-spread communism "feels good." Never mind that communism is a fraud that doesn't create a paradise as promised. States don't "whither away" to usher in a utopia, like Marx said. But that doesn't seem to matter.[/QUOTE]

One could say the same thing about white racialism.

Franco

2005-03-15 18:09 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Texas Dissident]One could say the same thing about white racialism.[/QUOTE]

Surely you are not comparing the two? The West WAS a paradise until Jews bageled and yarmulked it, wouldn't ya say?

xmetalhead

2005-03-15 19:19 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Franco]The West WAS a paradise until Jews bageled and yarmulked it, wouldn't ya say?[/QUOTE]

Don't forget lox'd and cream cheesed us too. :yucky:

Amaara

2005-03-16 03:27 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Walter Yannis]So, what's with the author?

Does he really fail to see the obvious, or does he dissemble?

In my opinion, the author is engaged in what Orwell called doublethink. He is intentionally hiding from his conscious mind the simple and obvious fact of Jewish power and influence determining this and a myriad other of the "paradoxes" that seem to baffle writers like the author of this article.[/QUOTE]At the end of the day, we have to confront to the fact that communism appeals to an awful lot of White people as well. Were every Jew on the planet to disappear tomorrow, there would still be a lot of comsyps left. After we aknowledge Jewish propoganda, we have to further aknowledge gentile suseptibility to that propoganda. If Jewish propoganda is the lethal enzyme eating away at White society, how do the White receptor cells work? Studying those receptor cells is at least as important as studying the enzyme itself.

Jewish propoganda wouldn't work if we didn't have a weakness for it. Let's study that weakness so we can find a cure for it.

Franco

2005-03-16 05:19 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Amaara]At the end of the day, we have to confront to the fact that communism appeals to an awful lot of White people as well. Were every Jew on the planet to disappear tomorrow, there would still be a lot of comsyps left. After we aknowledge Jewish propoganda, we have to further aknowledge gentile suseptibility to that propoganda. If Jewish propoganda is the lethal enzyme eating away at White society, how do the White receptor cells work? Studying those receptor cells is at least as important as studying the enzyme itself.

Jewish propoganda wouldn't work if we didn't have a weakness for it. Let's study that weakness so we can find a cure for it.[/QUOTE]

It's not just some Whites who have a weakness for communism. Some non-Whites do, too.

But it was the Jews who dreamed up, and then spread, the idea of communism in the first place. Whites, by their very nature, are nice people who want to make other people's lives better. The Jews have exploited that fact.

mwdallas

2005-03-16 22:37 | User Profile

[QUOTE]In my opinion, the author is engaged in what Orwell called doublethink. He is intentionally hiding from his conscious mind the simple and obvious fact of Jewish power and influence determining this and a myriad other of the "paradoxes" that seem to baffle writers like the author of this article.[/QUOTE] We have psychological mechanisms that protect us from unpleasant truths. It's not clear exactly how they work, and they work differently for different individuals. I would venture to say that much, if not most, of the discussion of this phenomenon is in the context of the discussion of the effects of LSD-.25. Almost paradoxically, the potent hallucinogen also inhibits neurological/psychological inihibitors that filter out realities that pose a threat to the censored view of reality that helps us function effectively. I am inclined to a credulous reception of articles like Fitzpatrick's. To those of us in the "reality-based community", it seems so obvious once we've caught on, but were we not each in the dark at one point? I certainly was, despite considerable exposure to Jews and immersion in Jewish milieus.

Like MacDonald, I lived in a Jewish Marxist milieu for some time; the curious thing was that there was no suggestion that these people cared a whit about blacks or women or any of the oppressed classes they purported to champion. I was left with the impression that the whole production was just a means to gaining power, but none of these people seemed personally power-hungry. What I saw was enough to convince me that liberalism was a sham, it was not in my interest, and it was not designed to serve the interests of those it purported to serve. Still, it was left to MacDonald to connect the dots for me.

Walter Yannis

2005-03-17 06:05 | User Profile

[QUOTE=mwdallas]We have psychological mechanisms that protect us from unpleasant truths. . . . . What I saw was enough to convince me that liberalism was a sham, it was not in my interest, and it was not designed to serve the interests of those it purported to serve. Still, it was left to MacDonald to connect the dots for me.[/QUOTE] Oh, I freely admit that I engaged in doublethink on the Jewish issue in particular and the racial issue in general. But when confronted with the truth I came over to the other side. Not so Fitzpatrick. McDonald has been available for years now, there's really no excuse now for an intellectual like Fitzpatrick to say he didn't know. Freepers and Dittoheads - well, I don't expect much from the proles. But a smart guy like Fitzpatrick?

We all conceal the truth from ourselves to one degree or another like you say, but at some point there's a level of willfulness in our self-deception that makes it morally noxious.

Maybe I'm being too hard on people, but then again I don't consider myself to be terribly out of the ordinary, either morally or by way of intelligence. If I got it, why can't they?

Petr

2005-03-17 08:23 | User Profile

[I][B] - "But it was the Jews who dreamed up, and then spread, the idea of communism in the first place." [/B] [/I]

The idea of socialism, even of total communism, has existed ever since the dawn of history. Marx gave birth only to its modernist Marxist variant.

If you really want to delve into this issue, here's an intriguing online book for you:

[SIZE=3][B]"The Socialist Phenomenon"[/B][/SIZE]

by Igor Shafarevich

[url]http://robertlstephens.com/essays/essay_frame.php?essayroot=shafarevich/&essayfile=001SocialistPhenomenon.html[/url]

Petr

mwdallas

2005-03-17 15:52 | User Profile

[QUOTE]McDonald has been available for years now, there's really no excuse now for an intellectual like Fitzpatrick to say he didn't know.[/QUOTE] Well, yes, there are more direct paths to realizing the truth now than there were. Perhaps he does know more than he lets on.

Okiereddust

2005-03-18 04:51 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Petr][I][B] - "But it was the Jews who dreamed up, and then spread, the idea of communism in the first place." [/B] [/I]

The idea of socialism, even of total communism, has existed ever since the dawn of history. Marx gave birth only to its modernist Marxist variant.

If you really want to delve into this issue, here's an intriguing online book for you:

[SIZE=3][B]"The Socialist Phenomenon"[/B][/SIZE]

by Igor Shafarevich

[url]http://robertlstephens.com/essays/essay_frame.php?essayroot=shafarevich/&essayfile=001SocialistPhenomenon.html[/url]

Petr[/QUOTE]Interesting that you brought up that book. I've admired Shafarevich for a long time, ever since "From Under the Rubble".

At the risk of oversimplifying, I thought his approach was basically in the tradition of Dostoevsky and Russian mysticism referencing as he does Dostoevsky's work [I]Demons[/I]. His chapters on Marcuse are interesting though.

Jack Cassidy

2005-03-18 06:25 | User Profile

I think there is difference in kind between Communism and Nazism. The former is strictly a politico-economic system, the latter incorporates anthropological elements and therefore goes beyond Communism. Communism and secular totalitarian regimes may have killed more people, but it was done with a logic and within a political sphere. Nazism had racial and religious elements and therefore went into the more abstract realms of anthropology and metaphysics, making its evil acts and killings alot more unacceptable. For example, think of a case where a hardcore Bible-thumper decides that race-mixing runs counter to the Bible and kills a mixed-race kid. Then think of a case where 5 men are killed in a mafia hit because they cheated the boss out of profits by keeping money from the sale of out-of-state cigarettes. All jokes aside, which case makes you more uncomfortable? You have five times as many dead in the latter case. In a totalitarian or Communist regime you knew the score at all times. You went along and didn't work against it and you wouldn't end up as one of the cracked eggs. In Nazism you were never quite sure where you stood because the rationale for its actions weren't apparent-- not in a capricious sense but in an abstract (non-tangible) way. I think this revulsion with Nazism described in the article and the acceptance of Communism has to do with an intuitive understanding of what I attempted to explicate.

p.s.- I believe the crisis of Western Civilization is anthropological and religious. While Nazism apparently recognized this, its plan of action was clearly antithetical to Western Civilization (from eschewing traditional Christianity to its nutty racial theories-- esp. w/ regard to the Slavs). One of the obvious differences between paleo-cons and neo-cons is the former's recognition that it is useless to try and fix anthropological problems with political solutions. Political actions applied to anthropological problems can only exacerbate the problem or stem the flow of blood for a short time. A good illustration of this political/anthropological distinction can be seen in Europe. With decades of mud flood and high mud birth rates Europe is becoming third world, it is degrading in all respects. Exactly what guys like Prof. Richard Lynn have predicted. There is no political solution to this problem for European countries, they will go down the drain in tighter and tighter spirals, ending up in a hellish mud society. The U.S. appears to be on the same path, but its problems are different from, and less severe than, Europe's.

Phantasm

2005-03-18 07:08 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Walter Yannis] It's obvious that the reason Jewish Communism is acceptable among Western elites while German Nazism is anathema is that Communism was a Jewish thing and that the Western elites are largely Jewish. ... In my opinion, the author is engaged in what Orwell called doublethink. He is intentionally hiding from his conscious mind the simple and obvious fact of Jewish power and influence determining this and a myriad other of the "paradoxes" that seem to baffle writers like the author of this article. ...[/QUOTE] After an analysis of the given facts... the conclusion here is obvious to an “objective critical thinker.” I would hypothesize that most people who happen to be “Jew aware” are objective critical thinkers... but not all critical thinkers are objective... and thus not “Jew aware.” The reason for this is that the thought process of people like Mr. Fitzpatrick is prone to “pre-filtering.” Any information that is not socially acceptable, politically correct or causes discomfort is discarded or discredited before analysis. If critical information is discarded or discredited before being analyzed... there is no possibility of a proper conclusion.

The International Jew has managed to socially re engineer our Republic of rugged individualists into a nation-state of tragically imp collectivists. Our society is now predominated by couch potatoes, lemmings, freeloaders and opportunists who's only focus in life is easy money and the satisfaction of petty indulgences. These individuals are extremely sensitive to discomfiture on both the physical and emotional level. Therefore, it should be no surprise that these people “pre-filter...” either on a conscious or subconscious level.

The doublethink theory is certainly feasible... especially in a society were the “thought police” are everywhere.

:ninja:

Walter Yannis

2005-03-18 08:10 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Phantasm]The reason for this is that the thought process of people like Mr. Fitzpatrick is prone to “pre-filtering.” Any information that is not socially acceptable, politically correct or causes discomfort is discarded or discredited before analysis. If critical information is discarded or discredited before being analyzed... there is no possibility of a proper conclusion. :[/QUOTE]

The very definition of doublethink.

Okiereddust

2005-03-18 08:14 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Walter Yannis]It's obvious that the reason Jewish Communism is acceptable among Western elites while German Nazism is anathema is that Communism was a Jewish thing and that the Western elites are largely Jewish.

And even those members of the elite who aren't Jewish know better than to say anything against the Jews, and indeed know that saying nice things about Lev Broshtein (Trotsky) (see frontpagemag.com, for example) is a sure way to curry favor among the Jewish financial and media establishment.

I respectfully submit that that is completely obvious.

So, what's with the author?

Does he really fail to see the obvious, or does he dissemble? [/QUOTE]No, it really isn't obvious, at least not blatantly so. Its arguable now if the western elites, even in America, today, are largely jewish. But remember fundamentally the reason Communism is fashionable and Nazism is not is that Communism comes from the realm of (fashionable) liberalism, while Nazism comes from the realm of (unfashionable)anti-liberalism.

Jews now dominate the liberal and neo-liberal (i.e. establishment conservative/neoconservative) realms of course because they have mastered the art of turning liberalism to their own ends. And in the process hiding their own ethnicity and ethnic interests to some extent. That is precisely why it isn't openly obvious.

And finally of course they have mastered the art of delegitimizing, as "paranoid" those that become aware of the obvious and talk about it. You must pretend they're powerless and oppressed, (or at least today benign and unorganized individuals) and if you don't prretend that, everyone knows they'll collectively and ruthlessly destroy you.

Remember that's the rule Sobran always said applies to the Jews and Jewish power. To survive (in public life at least), everyone must be aware of it, but no one must talk about it.

Sort of like the Mafia when you work uncomfortably near them. No Mafiosi, nosiree, just "ordinary businessmen".

It may be doublespeak in a sense. But I don't consider it a mark of represensible moral noxiousness. Just pedestrian moral accommodationism. Just like paying bribes to the Mafia is in NYC - people do it to survive.