Greetings and salutations! Last time I managed to say that I wonder how people of at least average intelligence can end up believing things so far apart from each other. If there is a dispute and two people have widely divergent opinions and one of them is right and the other one is clearly wrong and is refuted by obvious realities, how is it that the wrong person in this scenario will still cling to their beliefs? To illustrate this I took an unhinged right-wing rant that I'd recently read and decided to go through it line-by-line.
The rant began by saying that US society was deteriorating because of demoralization caused by ideological subversion. I discussed the topic of flawed societies and their flawed institutions and their flawed values and how criticism ("subversion") is often times necessary. The ranter ("Bob Bishop") then stated that his analysis is based on the writings of Yuri Bezmenov, a former diplomat/spy from the Soviet Union who defected to the West (Canada in fact) in the 1970's. I then talked a little about the justifications for Bezmenov's disillusionment with the Soviet system, the similarities between his career in the Soviet Union and those of similarly-placed individuals in the USA's system, and why I think Bezmenov's change of allegiance was futile in the end.
I didn't get a chance to deal with the snippet below before I'd decided that the post was getting too long for anyone who might still be coming to my blog for a quick read and therefore brought things to a speedy intermission. So let's continue. Here's the quote:
Even though the USSR collapsed, the ‘war for the minds’ methodology was adopted by America’s far-left intellectuals decades ago. Their Jacobin spawn, hell-bent on ruinous culture war, now controls the media, universities, Department of Justice, and intelligence communities. They are close to fulfilling their psychopathic goal of implementing a Marxist nirvana through mass disorder and degrading American institutions.
I guess the methods of ideological subversion that Bezmenov described were already long-practised by the USSR which is why "America's far-left intellectuals" ... Actually, it's unclear whether Bishop is saying Bezmenov's list of subversive methods was employed by left-wing intellectuals decades before the USSR's collapse, or just decades before the present time (even in the context of the failure of Russian communism). Regardless, leftist intellectuals have been doing their dastardly work for a long time. [Go to the comments section of the first post on this topic for Purple Library Guy's eloquent trashing of the idea that left-wing smarty-pants have the power to "take over" US society.]
Anyways, now we have the villain of the piece. Those behind the USA's deterioration through subversion are far-left US-American intellectuals. What does this mean? Obviously Bishop is talking about the "political spectrum." But this makes it crucial to find out where Bishop imagines the "Center" is on the "left-right" spectrum. Is Joe Biden a centrist who was forever "reaching across the aisle" to gut Social Security, increase the incarceration rate, and serve the financial industry with his Republican colleagues, or is he a far-left eco-terrorist? Was Barack Hussein Obama similar to a moderate Eisenhower Republican or was he a Marxist, Black Nationalist, Muslim-sympathizer? Was Hillary Clinton an anti-choice, right-wing Democrat who supported right-wing Republican Senator Barry Goldwater when she was a teenager, or is she a pagan fertility cultist who loves taking mind-altering substances?
These are widely separate descriptions of these politicians. Either these three recent leaders of the Democratic Party are leftist radicals or they are right-wing servants of oligarchy. I have presented some links to establish my position that they are right-wingers who serve the capitalist oligarchy. They should at least be taken into consideration by those who would say otherwise.
And, whatever the case, the fact of the matter is that we're lost before we've even gotten started. We can't even agree on terms. I do NOT think that "far-left" means Biden, Clinton, Obama. If Bishop does, then we're at something of an impasse.
Therefore, I think it best if I dispense with wondering what Bishop might mean when he uses a term and simply explain what those terms actually mean and then smack Bishop's palm with a ruler when he fucks it up.
So: "Far-left intellectuals" began a process of ideological subversion in the USA decades ago and now their "Jacobin spawn hell-bent on a ruinous cultural war controls the media, universities, [DOJ], and intelligence communities."
The Jacobins were a political club in Revolutionary France whose members advocated republicanism, equality and a strong central state. They are associated with the "Reign of Terror" by conservative, as well as most Anglo-American commentators of the French Revolution. In Paris, hundreds of political opponents were executed and 17,000 were killed in the monarchist revolts in the rest of the country. These are serious numbers and they do not speak well for the Jacobins. On the other hand, most status-quo and counter-revolutionary groups have, throughout history, been just as violent and lawless as the Jacobins were. We don't hear so much about this because history is always written by the victors. Bishop is using Jacobin as a pejorative because he's an old fuddy-duddy who wants to show that he's read some history books.
What is a "culture war"? This is where people who espouse "traditional values" of the "white, male, Christian power structure" feel threatened by non-whites, immigrants, feminists, other religions and atheism, and non-heterosexual orientations. Generally, what they believe in is 100% good and anything that deviates from it is 100% bad and so they fight back against it. They declare war on it and blame the other side for starting it. If the other side fights back conservatives become even more unhinged and enraged.
Apparently the far-left controls the media (according to Bishop). The far-left doesn't control the media. The USA's Public Broadcasting System gets a lot of its money from Big Pharma, the Military-Industrial-Complex, Wall Street and fossil fuels interests such as the Koch Brothers Foundation. The traditional three big networks, ABC, CBS, MSNBC, as well as CNN, and legacy print journalism outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post can be said to represent corporate liberals. These sorts of places tend to favour the neoliberal, corporatist Democratic Party but it would be false to say that they don't give a respectful hearing to mainstream Republicans. They also have far-right columnists and commentators on their payroll.
The USA's corporate media has supported every single war that the USA has ever started. This used to not be a problem for right-wingers but the "Forever Wars" and their obvious futility has started to make some on the right espouse isolationism. As well, Donald Trump's dealings with the Russian mafia made him sympathetic to Russia's opposition to the traditional, bipartisan, and incoherent Russophobia of the US ruling class.
I would say that the corporate media are more liberal than the bulk of the US population on social issues (though I'm prepared to be shown wrong on that) but more right-wing on economic issues than the general public. (Bernie Sanders' appeal to the FOX News audience proves that in spades.)
The right-wing has its own media where its audience finds their social-conservative veiws and their confused, contradictory views on the economy and the environment and other issues gets fed to them. FOX News, various online sites like Glen Beck's "The Blaze" and Ben Shapiro's "The Daily Wire" (the latter especially funded by many billionaire "charities") and many newspaper chains, ... FUCK IT! Bishop is just whining here. Complete bullshit. An idiot.
Bishop claims that the "far-left" controls the universities. Given that people like him believe that Global Warming is a left-wing hoax, that Darwin's evolution by natural selection is a fraud, that feminism is a satanic communist plot, that homosexuality is a deliberately chosen "lifestyle" adopted simply to give the middle finger to our Lord n' Saviour Jesus Christ, that COVID-19 is an ordinary seasonal flu being pumped-up by more Jewish globalists into a "plandemic," and many other idiotic things, I shall, in this instance, conflate the actual "far-left" with the neoliberals the way he does and thereby STILL argue that the "far-left" doesn't control the universities.
Long-time commenter "Purple Library Guy" once offered an eloquent statement on this subject at this post:
I mean, I myself work at a university, and have been basically hanging at a university watching its transformation since 1983. And it's in Canada, which makes it probably more thoroughly progressive than the American ones.
And there's a big important fact about the designated right wing culprits: They have little funding and few students. There are no armies of gender studies students taking over the world. Period, full stop, the end. Same goes for the previous version, the "cultural Marxists". Sure, there are a few people in a few disciplines that are interested in race and gender and cultural equality and things, some with a sort of marxist lens and stuff. But they are absolutely swamped by the rise of the elephant in the room: The Business department.
As far as I can tell, if you look at the balance of faculties at universities in North America since I started being a university person, STEM has actually stayed fairly constant. There's always panics about STEM going down the tubes, and there are problems in STEM because of the relentless instrumentalizing and corporatizing, so that less solid research not dedicated to getting someone a patent takes place. But still, complaints about not enough STEM are constant, come from all sides of the political spectrum, and generally lead to action, so whenever STEM starts to erode it gets beefed up again. STEM is not subject to any kind of ongoing neglect. Could there be more with good results? Sure, maybe. Could the amount we have be better run? Oh hell yes. But there is no crisis of STEM neglect.
Then, the liberal arts and social sciences. Since the 80s, these have systematically shrunk. A lot. When I started out, the English department was still riding high, semi-prestigious. Now it hobbles along. OK, and the women's studies, comparative literature (there is actually almost zero of this at my university), in the Canadian case First Nations studies, anything related to race . . . all that stuff is a small part of this shrinking basket. There is certainly less study of literature + of "comparative" literature + world literature + whatever literature, all added together, now than there was just of basic canon English literature back in the day. If the study of literature wasn't a threat to our competitiveness in the 60s and 70s, it sure as hell isn't now. Same goes for the social sciences, most of which have never been oriented towards practical anything.
But there are areas that have grown, hugely, from basically nothing. There's computing, obviously, and that's fine. But mostly, the 80s saw the massive rise from nothing of the business department (actually, in my university it gets to call itself a whole faculty, like there's faculty of Arts, faculty of Science, faculty of Business! Alongside, there was growth in the Economics department and some other related stuff.
So what I notice is that this right wing critique seems to treat gender studies courses and business department stuff as the same thing. They're obviously not the same thing. Their impulses for existing, institutionally, ideologically, monetarily are vastly different. Gender and racial studies stuff starts from two sources: Grassroots struggles for justice, and interested academics looking for some ideas to hang their hat on. Their funding comes from lots of little academic turf battles, and it is small. The business stuff comes from the ideological hegemony and wads of direct funding from big business, and from the movement into university administration of business types. And it is much, much, much bigger. And indeed, even some of the remaining arts have been put into the business service--people used to study art, now many instead study graphic design so they can make ads.
So, yeah, there are genuinely left-wing people at universities. Not a whole hell of a lot. They DO tend to make more noise about politics than apolitical people tend to do. They DO tend to outnumber right-wing douchebags who celebrate wars (that they often have no intention of fighting in), denying the existence of racism while being poster-children for racism, trashing feminism while being closet-case misogynists and other crimes. And, if you're a science-denying shit-head/conspiracy theorist, then you probably see various science departments as THE ENEMY as well.
I don't even know where to begin on Bishop's ranting about a far-left takeover of the Justice Department. I'll use that as a google search term and see what I get. That's a soberly written piece from The National Review which, on first reading, still sounds like hypocritical partisan wailing. I remember reading articles with a similar tone from Democratic-supporting writers about the partisan depredations of the bush II Justice Department. Here's something that I want to check out:
Garland’s DOJ has, to date, sued both Georgia and Texas over their election laws; sued Texas over its abortion law; and sued Texas over its redistricting. More suits of the same nature are likely to follow. It has conspicuously avoided suing Maryland, New York, or Illinois over gerrymandering, even with the governor of Maryland publicly begging him to do so. But that’s a Democratic gerrymander.
Specifically, I want to investigate this Maryland claim. [...] I found a bunch of partisan Democrat/Republican sites about the story. It seems a lower-court justice threw out a Democratic gerrymandered map, the Republican governor had gerrymandered the map earlier in his political career back in 2011. Two Maryland Democrats didn't go along with the partisan efforts. The Democrats and the Governor eventually got a revised map approved.
The "far-left" takeover of the Justice Department is actually just the same partisan nonsense that Republicans and Democrats engage in all the time. The professional-wrestling type of kabuki theatre that I have long advocated is a complete waste of everybody's time. I mean, consider just what the National Review article is saying: Democrat US Attorney General Merrick Garland is going after REPUBLICAN assaults on the electoral process while leaving DEMOCRATIC assaults alone! Again, hypocritical partisan hyperventilating.
Finally, what about the "far-left" takeover of the intelligence communities? Remember, Bishop is talking about "far-left intellectuals" employing techniques of ideological subversion used by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to destroy the United States of America. The Soviet Union doesn't exist anymore, but that doesn't mean the mission has been abandoned. Perhaps communism can take over the USA? Russia wasn't as important as communism is! Communists want to destroy capitalism. They want the power to rule over all aspects of people's lives. They want to control personal expression, restrict or eliminate religious freedom, control education, ... and eliminate economic freedom.
But actual leftists have no access to power in the US-American federal government. The leadership of the Democratic Party is in thrall to Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Big Pharma, Health Insurance, Credit Card companies, the MIA, ... all big-time capitalists. This is where the right-wing talk about "globalists" comes in.
The "globalists" are supposedly an international economic elite. They are "the Davos crowd." They reject economic nationalism in return for "globalization." ("Globalization" was the "inevitable" way that the world economy was "naturally" going according to all the neoliberal politicians and business groups who wrote detailed treaties to make sure that "nature" took it's proper course.)
Which is to say: These are international capitalists. Neoliberal politicians. International institutions like the World Bank and the IMF and the WHO. This is where there can be some unity between actual left-wingers and average income earning right-wingers. Except that some grassroots right-wingers believe that "globalists" are something similar to the circa-1900 "cosmopolitans" which was a code-word for "Jews." To this day there is a great fear of the terrifying power of the House of Rothschilds or of George Soros. Jews (right-wingers believe) are international bankers with no loyalty to any country who manipulate currencies and crush economies at will.
Genuine leftists will tell you that the problem isn't so much free trade vs economic nationalism as it is capitalism. Economic and political democracy will allow ordinary people to protect national economies or to negotiate truly beneficial trade treaties. Right-wing anti-globalists seem to believe that national capitalists paying good US-American wages (out of the goodness of their hearts I suppose) are what is needed.
What does any of this have to do with the intelligence communities? I'll talk about that next time because this post is too damned long already.
No comments:
Post a Comment