0 comment Monday, November 17, 2014 | admin
At Steve Sailer's blog, following a post called The Ennui of the Left, there was one brief comment that caught my attention among a number of interesting comments.
That very prolific commenter, 'Anonymous', said this:
Steve, you're so wrong about post-WWII USSR. It was culturally conservative in a million ways. Its death was a giant victory for leftism - for gay rights, loose sexual morals, drugs, feminism, violent crime, ugly modernist art, etc. across a huge part of the globe.
Pre-WWII USSR was indeed leftist. It's ignorant to confuse them.'
It's pretty obvious to most thinking people on the right that we (the West) did not really 'win the Cold War', as the triumphalist rhetoric on the mainstream right still boasts. The mythology is that when Reagan said 'Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!' that Communism sort of crumbled, or melted like the Wicked Witch doused with water, and before we knew it, the Berlin wall was down and the Eastern bloc countries were 'free.'
I've alluded before on this blog to the curious fact that the old Soviet communists were very prudish and very traditional in many respects on social/sexual matters. They may have been lenient in regard to making abortion widely available, and they may have been very 'feminist' in that they put more women into leadership positions, but in regard to culture they were much more conservative than we in the Western ''free'' countries were, even in the 1950s. The 1950s, remember, was the decade most American leftists describe as hyper-conservative and repressed.
I've told the story before of a news event that was reported when I was a child, when Soviet leader Khrushchev visited America. He was given a tour of a movie set, where the movie 'Can-Can' was being filmed. He disapproved of what he saw, commenting that ''the face of humanity is more beautiful than its backside.'' That was his broken-clock moment; he was right on that point. Nowadays, our entertainment media and pop culture are more than ever fixated on people's 'backsides' and on titillating entertainment and 'art'. We've gone from relatively tame scenes, like the one Khrushchev witnessed, to Lady Gaga and beyond.
The old Soviet Union disapproved of rock'n roll and jazz, and promoted classical and folk music. At the time, it seemed that our country perversely decided that if the Russians disliked these things and censored them, then they must be good, and that in defiance of our enemies, we would wallow in the things they tut-tutted about. I see the same sort of thing in regard to Islam's prudishness. Many 'conservatives' see our Western cultural and social decadence as an act of defiance against Islam, and a statement of 'freedom.' I think we have gotten a little confused here.
The anonymous commenter at Sailer's blog refers to 'ugly modernist art' which the Soviet Union banned. This piece describes in detail how the arts were censored and how the Soviet State made sure that all art had the correct political message, delivered in the correct style.
Works of art were censored for the following reasons:
"...* political reasons (criticism of the Soviet Union, CPSU, Soviet regime, particular political bodies and figures);
* political unreliability (temporary or permanent) of an artist, whose work was the subject of the publication;
* political unreliability (temporary or permanent) of an author of a publication;
* mentioning an unreliable person, unworthy fact or event in the text unless it was criticized (possible cuttings of the text or plates);
* generally prohibited subject (for instance: unofficial Soviet art);
* propaganda of fascism, violence or terror (horror films belonged to that category);
* pornography (a magic word - none of the censors could ever give a distinct definition of this term in their special vocabulary; the most frequent reason for art publications to become banned as most of the artists, since the ancient times, had made the studies of the nude models);
* themes, subjects, facts, events which caused or might have caused undesirable thoughts, associations or illusions not in favour of the Soviet state.
[...] The criteria for division of art of the past into two categories was quite simple: the work of art should bare or not some peculiar signs of progressiveness, such as themes of labour, struggle for justice, protest against the bourgeois society, pity for suffering, depiction of poor people, social and class struggle. For obvious reasons the mediaeval art, being the art which served the religion, was not worth studying.''
What seems to have happened by the late 1970s when the 'dam burst', as the writer says, was that the censorship seemed to have only whetted the Soviet people's appetite for what was termed 'decadent Western bourgeois' art and ideas. The Russians seem, since the fall of the old regime, to have plunged headlong into that Western decadence.
I remember when the so-called Iron Curtain came down being somewhat mortified by how fast the people seemed to embrace the libertine lifestyle, drugs, promiscuity, and the worst excesses of greed. Obviously they had not really believed in the stringent standards of their regime -- or were they just easily seduced away by rock music, blue jeans, porn, and the lure of easy money?
Just because our enemies hate the decadence they see in our popular culture, that is not justification for our taking pride in it or considering it a good example of 'freedom' as many people do.
But the question has often occurred to me: why was the old left socially and culturally conservative, honoring the best of classic Western art and culture, while the new left, the post-60s left, trashes our artistic and cultural heritage in favor of ugliness and corruption, worshipping the new and hideous rather than the old and aesthetically pleasing?
And now that the old Soviet Union seems to have been degraded culturally and socially, have 'we' won, or have they won? Or have we all lost? It seems that we have embraced some of the worst features of their leftism, and they have absorbed the worst of our ways.
Leftism seems to be able to morph itself into whatever form works best in the target society, like an opportunistic infection.
That very prolific commenter, 'Anonymous', said this:
Steve, you're so wrong about post-WWII USSR. It was culturally conservative in a million ways. Its death was a giant victory for leftism - for gay rights, loose sexual morals, drugs, feminism, violent crime, ugly modernist art, etc. across a huge part of the globe.
Pre-WWII USSR was indeed leftist. It's ignorant to confuse them.'
It's pretty obvious to most thinking people on the right that we (the West) did not really 'win the Cold War', as the triumphalist rhetoric on the mainstream right still boasts. The mythology is that when Reagan said 'Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!' that Communism sort of crumbled, or melted like the Wicked Witch doused with water, and before we knew it, the Berlin wall was down and the Eastern bloc countries were 'free.'
I've alluded before on this blog to the curious fact that the old Soviet communists were very prudish and very traditional in many respects on social/sexual matters. They may have been lenient in regard to making abortion widely available, and they may have been very 'feminist' in that they put more women into leadership positions, but in regard to culture they were much more conservative than we in the Western ''free'' countries were, even in the 1950s. The 1950s, remember, was the decade most American leftists describe as hyper-conservative and repressed.
I've told the story before of a news event that was reported when I was a child, when Soviet leader Khrushchev visited America. He was given a tour of a movie set, where the movie 'Can-Can' was being filmed. He disapproved of what he saw, commenting that ''the face of humanity is more beautiful than its backside.'' That was his broken-clock moment; he was right on that point. Nowadays, our entertainment media and pop culture are more than ever fixated on people's 'backsides' and on titillating entertainment and 'art'. We've gone from relatively tame scenes, like the one Khrushchev witnessed, to Lady Gaga and beyond.
The old Soviet Union disapproved of rock'n roll and jazz, and promoted classical and folk music. At the time, it seemed that our country perversely decided that if the Russians disliked these things and censored them, then they must be good, and that in defiance of our enemies, we would wallow in the things they tut-tutted about. I see the same sort of thing in regard to Islam's prudishness. Many 'conservatives' see our Western cultural and social decadence as an act of defiance against Islam, and a statement of 'freedom.' I think we have gotten a little confused here.
The anonymous commenter at Sailer's blog refers to 'ugly modernist art' which the Soviet Union banned. This piece describes in detail how the arts were censored and how the Soviet State made sure that all art had the correct political message, delivered in the correct style.
Works of art were censored for the following reasons:
"...* political reasons (criticism of the Soviet Union, CPSU, Soviet regime, particular political bodies and figures);
* political unreliability (temporary or permanent) of an artist, whose work was the subject of the publication;
* political unreliability (temporary or permanent) of an author of a publication;
* mentioning an unreliable person, unworthy fact or event in the text unless it was criticized (possible cuttings of the text or plates);
* generally prohibited subject (for instance: unofficial Soviet art);
* propaganda of fascism, violence or terror (horror films belonged to that category);
* pornography (a magic word - none of the censors could ever give a distinct definition of this term in their special vocabulary; the most frequent reason for art publications to become banned as most of the artists, since the ancient times, had made the studies of the nude models);
* themes, subjects, facts, events which caused or might have caused undesirable thoughts, associations or illusions not in favour of the Soviet state.
[...] The criteria for division of art of the past into two categories was quite simple: the work of art should bare or not some peculiar signs of progressiveness, such as themes of labour, struggle for justice, protest against the bourgeois society, pity for suffering, depiction of poor people, social and class struggle. For obvious reasons the mediaeval art, being the art which served the religion, was not worth studying.''
What seems to have happened by the late 1970s when the 'dam burst', as the writer says, was that the censorship seemed to have only whetted the Soviet people's appetite for what was termed 'decadent Western bourgeois' art and ideas. The Russians seem, since the fall of the old regime, to have plunged headlong into that Western decadence.
I remember when the so-called Iron Curtain came down being somewhat mortified by how fast the people seemed to embrace the libertine lifestyle, drugs, promiscuity, and the worst excesses of greed. Obviously they had not really believed in the stringent standards of their regime -- or were they just easily seduced away by rock music, blue jeans, porn, and the lure of easy money?
Just because our enemies hate the decadence they see in our popular culture, that is not justification for our taking pride in it or considering it a good example of 'freedom' as many people do.
But the question has often occurred to me: why was the old left socially and culturally conservative, honoring the best of classic Western art and culture, while the new left, the post-60s left, trashes our artistic and cultural heritage in favor of ugliness and corruption, worshipping the new and hideous rather than the old and aesthetically pleasing?
And now that the old Soviet Union seems to have been degraded culturally and socially, have 'we' won, or have they won? Or have we all lost? It seems that we have embraced some of the worst features of their leftism, and they have absorbed the worst of our ways.
Leftism seems to be able to morph itself into whatever form works best in the target society, like an opportunistic infection.
Labels: Art, Censorship, Communism, Conservatism Anti-Communism, Cultural Conservatism, Cultural Marxism
0 comment Tuesday, November 4, 2014 | admin
..on 'tradition', respectability, and change.
I've been trying to compose this post from a series of jumbled thoughts, so forgive me if it is not quite as coherent as it might be.
Over at a blog which I suppose is considered conservative/traditional and Christian, I've been reading a thread which, among other things, discusses whether or not our ancestors (White people's ancestors) were 'racist', considering that they held views which would not be tolerated in polite society today. Some expressed the certainty that yes, they were probably 'racist' but that the older generations just saw things in a different light and were not fully culpable for that. They didn't know any better, in other words.
In my opinion, that seems to imply that we, in this generation and era, have been given greater 'light' and wisdom than our forefathers, or that as Christians, we have some new revelation which gives us more 'humane' ideas about race, ethnicity, or perhaps other religions, than our forefathers had. I don't see how that position is tenable for a fundamental Christian. Now, there are many people today who shy away from that term, 'fundamental' but I simply mean it in its original sense, that of accepting the fundamentals of the Christian faith, including the truth of the Bible.
I've said before that to believe such a notion bespeaks a certain level of arrogance and self-righteousness unbecoming of a Christian. I don't see much evidence that we are the moral superiors of our forefathers; isn't that a concomitant of the belief in Darwinism, that human beings are 'evolving' upward?
The Christian who imagines he is more enlightened or advanced than all previous generations is no better, it would seem, than the Pharisee who thanked God that he was not a sinner like the other poor benighted soul alongside him. It's that kind of moral superiority projected backward in time, pitying our forefathers in their ignorance.
It also puts me in mind of Mormons, who used to have restrictions on blacks' participation in their Church hierarchy, based on their beliefs about how the races came to differ.
Many Christians cynically ask how the Mormon church fathers came to find a handy new revelation which just happened to conform to the new politically correct rules about race. It seems mainstream Christianity has found a handy new word from God too, so that we see things so much better than those dead old White men who were our forefathers.
Does truth change, or do we just try to conform our ideas of truth to the popular consensus of our day?
This all leads me to ponder the Kinists, who it seems are under fire from other Christians frequently because of their politically incorrect views. Yet it seems that the Kinists have more of a claim to conforming to historic Christian practice than do the modern-day 'Babelists' who would 'join together what God hath put asunder'.
Strangely, this never seems to give the PC Christians of today a moment's pause. The fact that their interpretation of Christianity, with its exhortation to mingle all peoples together, socially, genetically, and religiously, is something new under the sun, and is not something their ancestors would recognize.
But it seems our generation is busily inventing a new 'tradition' in which the past is glossed over, a tradition that is an ad hoc invention based on politically correct necessity.
The Kinists are also being criticized for being 'anti-Semitic', which apparently is enough to pronounce them anathema -- though the earlier generations of Christians expressed beliefs that would today be called anti-Semitic. The philo-Semitism that is so common among Christians today is again, not something that our grandparents (or even parents, in some cases) would recognize as the Christianity of their childhood.
The issue of attitudes toward Jews seems to be the one defining issue for many 'conservatives', who seem to want to make it the dividing line between the respectable, civilized, enlightened people vs. the 'haters' and 'bigots.' Recall, if you can, the counterjihad blog wars of a few years ago, where certain counterjihad blogs were anathematizing and attacking anybody who was too politically incorrect and 'extremist'. I suppose this is a marking of territory; those who don't conform or meet the rules for acceptability are banished to the outer darkness, and the heresy-hunters solidify their own bona fides as being on the side of respectability.
But what if the truth itself is not 'respectable'? What then? Is it ''so much the worse for the truth, then" as Hegel supposedly said? What if the truth offends or implicates certain people, or groups of people? And how, if we place whole groups of people above criticism and beyond scrutiny, can we ever arrive at the whole truth?
This is where the 'right' is going wrong; placing political correctness or the good opinion of certain important people above truth. And in doing so, the 'right' becomes just the pale shadow of the left.
How did one group of people become so all-important that to criticize or even scrutinize and question them puts one off limits? How are people willing to sacrifice their own society and ultimately their own folk rather than examine others, whose interests and agendas conflict with our own?
I've been attacked here in the past for not writing about 'the Jewish Question'. I've been told I was a hypocrite and a fraud for not doing so explicitly, and insinuations were made that I had Jewish in-laws or even Jewish ancestry -- neither of which are true. The truth is, my own views have been in flux and not fully formed, though I know what I believe now. However even back then, I chose not to exclude any mention of the Jewish issue, nor ban people who mentioned it in comments, though some of my readers pressured me to delete and ban. I decided that in the name of free speech, I would not shut down any discussion of it, though I myself did not initiate it usually. My allegiance is to my people, and it would not occur to me to side with others over my own folk. Though I have been accused of being pro-Jewish I would never favor them, or others, over my own people. I know where my loyalties are.
So when someone says that they would prefer 'suicidal multiculturalism' over a homogeneous ethnostate, I find that hard to understand.
It provokes one to wonder how we got from where we were in my parents' day to where we are today; how did what was considered natural and right back then become unspeakably abhorrent today?
It's a question that has been discussed in various forms on this blog over the past few years, probably to a wearying degree for some of my readers. But I had hoped, in all this discussion of the issues, to lead a few out there to question their own presuppositions, and to think about whether the tradition they uphold is really 'tradition' in the sense of being time-tested, or whether it's just warmed-over liberalism dating back to circa 1960.
I've been trying to compose this post from a series of jumbled thoughts, so forgive me if it is not quite as coherent as it might be.
Over at a blog which I suppose is considered conservative/traditional and Christian, I've been reading a thread which, among other things, discusses whether or not our ancestors (White people's ancestors) were 'racist', considering that they held views which would not be tolerated in polite society today. Some expressed the certainty that yes, they were probably 'racist' but that the older generations just saw things in a different light and were not fully culpable for that. They didn't know any better, in other words.
In my opinion, that seems to imply that we, in this generation and era, have been given greater 'light' and wisdom than our forefathers, or that as Christians, we have some new revelation which gives us more 'humane' ideas about race, ethnicity, or perhaps other religions, than our forefathers had. I don't see how that position is tenable for a fundamental Christian. Now, there are many people today who shy away from that term, 'fundamental' but I simply mean it in its original sense, that of accepting the fundamentals of the Christian faith, including the truth of the Bible.
I've said before that to believe such a notion bespeaks a certain level of arrogance and self-righteousness unbecoming of a Christian. I don't see much evidence that we are the moral superiors of our forefathers; isn't that a concomitant of the belief in Darwinism, that human beings are 'evolving' upward?
The Christian who imagines he is more enlightened or advanced than all previous generations is no better, it would seem, than the Pharisee who thanked God that he was not a sinner like the other poor benighted soul alongside him. It's that kind of moral superiority projected backward in time, pitying our forefathers in their ignorance.
It also puts me in mind of Mormons, who used to have restrictions on blacks' participation in their Church hierarchy, based on their beliefs about how the races came to differ.
Many Christians cynically ask how the Mormon church fathers came to find a handy new revelation which just happened to conform to the new politically correct rules about race. It seems mainstream Christianity has found a handy new word from God too, so that we see things so much better than those dead old White men who were our forefathers.
Does truth change, or do we just try to conform our ideas of truth to the popular consensus of our day?
This all leads me to ponder the Kinists, who it seems are under fire from other Christians frequently because of their politically incorrect views. Yet it seems that the Kinists have more of a claim to conforming to historic Christian practice than do the modern-day 'Babelists' who would 'join together what God hath put asunder'.
Strangely, this never seems to give the PC Christians of today a moment's pause. The fact that their interpretation of Christianity, with its exhortation to mingle all peoples together, socially, genetically, and religiously, is something new under the sun, and is not something their ancestors would recognize.
But it seems our generation is busily inventing a new 'tradition' in which the past is glossed over, a tradition that is an ad hoc invention based on politically correct necessity.
The Kinists are also being criticized for being 'anti-Semitic', which apparently is enough to pronounce them anathema -- though the earlier generations of Christians expressed beliefs that would today be called anti-Semitic. The philo-Semitism that is so common among Christians today is again, not something that our grandparents (or even parents, in some cases) would recognize as the Christianity of their childhood.
The issue of attitudes toward Jews seems to be the one defining issue for many 'conservatives', who seem to want to make it the dividing line between the respectable, civilized, enlightened people vs. the 'haters' and 'bigots.' Recall, if you can, the counterjihad blog wars of a few years ago, where certain counterjihad blogs were anathematizing and attacking anybody who was too politically incorrect and 'extremist'. I suppose this is a marking of territory; those who don't conform or meet the rules for acceptability are banished to the outer darkness, and the heresy-hunters solidify their own bona fides as being on the side of respectability.
But what if the truth itself is not 'respectable'? What then? Is it ''so much the worse for the truth, then" as Hegel supposedly said? What if the truth offends or implicates certain people, or groups of people? And how, if we place whole groups of people above criticism and beyond scrutiny, can we ever arrive at the whole truth?
This is where the 'right' is going wrong; placing political correctness or the good opinion of certain important people above truth. And in doing so, the 'right' becomes just the pale shadow of the left.
How did one group of people become so all-important that to criticize or even scrutinize and question them puts one off limits? How are people willing to sacrifice their own society and ultimately their own folk rather than examine others, whose interests and agendas conflict with our own?
I've been attacked here in the past for not writing about 'the Jewish Question'. I've been told I was a hypocrite and a fraud for not doing so explicitly, and insinuations were made that I had Jewish in-laws or even Jewish ancestry -- neither of which are true. The truth is, my own views have been in flux and not fully formed, though I know what I believe now. However even back then, I chose not to exclude any mention of the Jewish issue, nor ban people who mentioned it in comments, though some of my readers pressured me to delete and ban. I decided that in the name of free speech, I would not shut down any discussion of it, though I myself did not initiate it usually. My allegiance is to my people, and it would not occur to me to side with others over my own folk. Though I have been accused of being pro-Jewish I would never favor them, or others, over my own people. I know where my loyalties are.
So when someone says that they would prefer 'suicidal multiculturalism' over a homogeneous ethnostate, I find that hard to understand.
It provokes one to wonder how we got from where we were in my parents' day to where we are today; how did what was considered natural and right back then become unspeakably abhorrent today?
It's a question that has been discussed in various forms on this blog over the past few years, probably to a wearying degree for some of my readers. But I had hoped, in all this discussion of the issues, to lead a few out there to question their own presuppositions, and to think about whether the tradition they uphold is really 'tradition' in the sense of being time-tested, or whether it's just warmed-over liberalism dating back to circa 1960.
Labels: Bigotry, Cultural Conservatism, Kinism, Political Correctness