Seeing as you reference him, in addition to my previous comment I would direct you to read Toby Rogers' latest Substack piece 'The unholy alliance between capital, postmodernism, and left authoritarianism' which underlines all the sloppy conceptions of postmodernism held by the right that I referred to. This misconception about what postmodernism actually is provides a major and divisive stumbling block between those counter revolutionaries who have given postmodernism a sympathetic and open reading and those who merely parrot Peterson's et al corruptions of it.
Great article. One of the best I have read to date on these issues in intellectual and philosophical terms. I take it from your text that by 'postmodernists' you are primarily referencing Baudrillard and his cultural analysis of simulacra, simulation and hyperreality? Unfortunately there are too many, especially on the right who get their definitions and 'understanding' of an apolitical postmodernism which is based upon a critical cultural analysis of transformed societies to the politicized version of postmodernism produced by people like Jordan Peterson and Stephen Hicks who mangle it into sloppy politicized definitions such as Neo or Cultural Marxism.
Funnily enough I have been going through my own contextual struggles around many of the issues you bring up in this piece although I think I am going to try and round them up under closely related working titles such as 'The Hubris of Power' or 'The Unwritten Machiavellian Constitution of the West' as part of an institutional and corporate Machiavellian/sociopathic/narcissistic transformation whose recent more widespread dissemination I trace to the popularization of the twin evil philosophies of Neoliberalism and Neoconservatism produced by Leo Strauss and others at the bastion of evil which is the University of Chicago.
Alastair Crooke has very recently produced some very interesting articles which touch on the issues you raise as they relate to the war in Ukraine and the Counter-Revolution quietly developing in the West which are giving rise to phenomenon such as RFK Jr. There are very many related pieces in this puzzle still left to be put together.
Thanks for your thoughtful and encouraging comment Simon. You are also my first subscriber who is not a friend, so thank you for that too! Did you come via my UK Column article or some other way?
OK, to your questions. I am using postmodernists to refer to the French post-structuralists and their heirs who sought to deconstruct and relativise truth, de-centre 'the subject' (author etc.)
Agreed. JP’s rendition, where he conflates po-mo with ‘Cultural Marxism,’ is odd and incorrect. I get his point regarding the shift from economy to culture as an object of analysis but he seems to conflate the Frankfurt school folks with the post-structuralists, and they were saying very different things.
Re: Baudrillard, I was not using his work directly. Having said that his series of essays published as ‘The Gulf War Did Not Happen’ are brilliant. His point that it was not a war but an atrocity propagandised as ‘war’ is pretty much exactly how I read the plandemic, with the caveat that the key protagonists believe their own bullshit. There is science, philosophy, and no shortage of experts and pundits to support *both* positions; therefore, I think we’re dealing with something new: the fragmentation of a shared reality.
Yes I came via your UK Column article on RFK Jr which was also excellent and very well referenced. If you don't mind I will get back to you in the future on some issues and topics you cover as they coincide with my own but from different perspectives. One of the concepts I have been developing is that a broadly Machiavellian Fascism is no longer recognizable in terms of any empirical observations of 'objective reality'. Corporate domination and control of government, regulatory agencies, intelligence agencies, the judicial system etc. is so complete now that Fascism has no need to deploy signs and symbolism as forms of marketing and branding in order to appeal to the popular masses as they simply buy up and corrupt all political parties and consequently do not need to win any popular electoral support. Theorists and critics have been conceptually institutionalized into only being able to recognize fascism in terms of a handy observable checklist of semiotic insignia, uniforms, flags etc and a demand that in order to qualify as such it must exhibit the two very specific ideological traits of racism and nationalism.
None of these things are essential to the underlying, fundamental ideology of fascism. Fascism now abhors nationalism and racism as it is fundamentally 'globalist' in its outlook and the colonial ambitions of its reach and cannot be identifiably racist as it hates and despises all of its deplorable populations equally. The immoral political system is now so thoroughly corrupted that it is only moral outsider's such as RFK Jr. that can recognize the functioning of a fascism that has divested itself of all historically contextual signifiers.
Thanks Simon. Good to know you came via UK Column. I’m interested in your term ‘Machiavellian fascism’. Agree with your last point regarding the pivotal role of the ‘moral outsider’ and the blindness of most within. Happy to continue the conversation!
You also need to pay attention to this article by George Orwell in the 40s. Burnham published a book at that time on 'Management' and Orwell based 1984 upon it. The very first quotation that Orwell cites outlines The Great Reset.
"Capitalism is disappearing, but Socialism is not replacing it. What is now arising is a new kind of planned, centralised society which will be neither capitalist nor, in any accepted sense of the word, democratic. The rulers of this new society will be the people who effectively control the means of production: that is, business executives, technicians, bureaucrats and soldiers, lumped together by Burnham, under the name of ‘managers’. These people will eliminate the old capitalist class, crush the working class, and so organise society that all power and economic privilege remain in their own hands. Private property rights will be abolished, but common ownership will not be established. The new ‘managerial’ societies will not consist of a patchwork of small, independent states, but of great super-states grouped round the main industrial centres in Europe, Asia, and America. These super-states will fight among themselves for possession of the remaining uncaptured portions of the earth, but will probably be unable to conquer one another completely. Internally, each society will be hierarchical, with an aristocracy of talent at the top and a mass of semi-slaves at the bottom."
Note how Machiavelli is a consistent link between Burnham, Strauss and the Neocons.
With regard to Machiavellian fascism, I'm still working on it but you should read these articles by Cynthia Chung who is very smart for a young lady. The roots of Machiavellian fascism grow through the roots of the neo-Machiavellians, through James Burnham, to Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago and then onto the Neoconservatives such as Paul Wolfowitz et al who have influenced US evil foreign and economic policy ever since.
The notion that our Machiavellian corrupt elite are trying to spread their poisonous personally morality onto the outraged public is a disturbing but very real phenomenon.
"There is an ongoing systematic effort to normalise the abhorrent and to promote it as a regular and accepted feature of everyday life. Without backing from within the apparatus of power, which in reality is the network of psychopaths who hold Western societies in their iron grip, aggressively reshaping it in their own corrupt likeness and image, this normalisation of evil could not take place."
Alastair Crooke has done another piece which could be considered as a companion as it deals with this normalization, memory hole and move on process that the MSM reserve now for the corrupted Bidens etc.
Seeing as you reference him, in addition to my previous comment I would direct you to read Toby Rogers' latest Substack piece 'The unholy alliance between capital, postmodernism, and left authoritarianism' which underlines all the sloppy conceptions of postmodernism held by the right that I referred to. This misconception about what postmodernism actually is provides a major and divisive stumbling block between those counter revolutionaries who have given postmodernism a sympathetic and open reading and those who merely parrot Peterson's et al corruptions of it.
https://tobyrogers.substack.com/p/the-unholy-alliance-between-capital
Great article. One of the best I have read to date on these issues in intellectual and philosophical terms. I take it from your text that by 'postmodernists' you are primarily referencing Baudrillard and his cultural analysis of simulacra, simulation and hyperreality? Unfortunately there are too many, especially on the right who get their definitions and 'understanding' of an apolitical postmodernism which is based upon a critical cultural analysis of transformed societies to the politicized version of postmodernism produced by people like Jordan Peterson and Stephen Hicks who mangle it into sloppy politicized definitions such as Neo or Cultural Marxism.
Funnily enough I have been going through my own contextual struggles around many of the issues you bring up in this piece although I think I am going to try and round them up under closely related working titles such as 'The Hubris of Power' or 'The Unwritten Machiavellian Constitution of the West' as part of an institutional and corporate Machiavellian/sociopathic/narcissistic transformation whose recent more widespread dissemination I trace to the popularization of the twin evil philosophies of Neoliberalism and Neoconservatism produced by Leo Strauss and others at the bastion of evil which is the University of Chicago.
Alastair Crooke has very recently produced some very interesting articles which touch on the issues you raise as they relate to the war in Ukraine and the Counter-Revolution quietly developing in the West which are giving rise to phenomenon such as RFK Jr. There are very many related pieces in this puzzle still left to be put together.
https://strategic-culture.org/news/2023/07/17/a-bonfire-of-the-vanities/
https://strategic-culture.org/news/2023/07/24/counter-revolution-do-you-know-what-time-it-is/
Regards
Simon
Thanks for your thoughtful and encouraging comment Simon. You are also my first subscriber who is not a friend, so thank you for that too! Did you come via my UK Column article or some other way?
OK, to your questions. I am using postmodernists to refer to the French post-structuralists and their heirs who sought to deconstruct and relativise truth, de-centre 'the subject' (author etc.)
Agreed. JP’s rendition, where he conflates po-mo with ‘Cultural Marxism,’ is odd and incorrect. I get his point regarding the shift from economy to culture as an object of analysis but he seems to conflate the Frankfurt school folks with the post-structuralists, and they were saying very different things.
Re: Baudrillard, I was not using his work directly. Having said that his series of essays published as ‘The Gulf War Did Not Happen’ are brilliant. His point that it was not a war but an atrocity propagandised as ‘war’ is pretty much exactly how I read the plandemic, with the caveat that the key protagonists believe their own bullshit. There is science, philosophy, and no shortage of experts and pundits to support *both* positions; therefore, I think we’re dealing with something new: the fragmentation of a shared reality.
Yes I came via your UK Column article on RFK Jr which was also excellent and very well referenced. If you don't mind I will get back to you in the future on some issues and topics you cover as they coincide with my own but from different perspectives. One of the concepts I have been developing is that a broadly Machiavellian Fascism is no longer recognizable in terms of any empirical observations of 'objective reality'. Corporate domination and control of government, regulatory agencies, intelligence agencies, the judicial system etc. is so complete now that Fascism has no need to deploy signs and symbolism as forms of marketing and branding in order to appeal to the popular masses as they simply buy up and corrupt all political parties and consequently do not need to win any popular electoral support. Theorists and critics have been conceptually institutionalized into only being able to recognize fascism in terms of a handy observable checklist of semiotic insignia, uniforms, flags etc and a demand that in order to qualify as such it must exhibit the two very specific ideological traits of racism and nationalism.
None of these things are essential to the underlying, fundamental ideology of fascism. Fascism now abhors nationalism and racism as it is fundamentally 'globalist' in its outlook and the colonial ambitions of its reach and cannot be identifiably racist as it hates and despises all of its deplorable populations equally. The immoral political system is now so thoroughly corrupted that it is only moral outsider's such as RFK Jr. that can recognize the functioning of a fascism that has divested itself of all historically contextual signifiers.
Thanks Simon. Good to know you came via UK Column. I’m interested in your term ‘Machiavellian fascism’. Agree with your last point regarding the pivotal role of the ‘moral outsider’ and the blindness of most within. Happy to continue the conversation!
You also need to pay attention to this article by George Orwell in the 40s. Burnham published a book at that time on 'Management' and Orwell based 1984 upon it. The very first quotation that Orwell cites outlines The Great Reset.
"Capitalism is disappearing, but Socialism is not replacing it. What is now arising is a new kind of planned, centralised society which will be neither capitalist nor, in any accepted sense of the word, democratic. The rulers of this new society will be the people who effectively control the means of production: that is, business executives, technicians, bureaucrats and soldiers, lumped together by Burnham, under the name of ‘managers’. These people will eliminate the old capitalist class, crush the working class, and so organise society that all power and economic privilege remain in their own hands. Private property rights will be abolished, but common ownership will not be established. The new ‘managerial’ societies will not consist of a patchwork of small, independent states, but of great super-states grouped round the main industrial centres in Europe, Asia, and America. These super-states will fight among themselves for possession of the remaining uncaptured portions of the earth, but will probably be unable to conquer one another completely. Internally, each society will be hierarchical, with an aristocracy of talent at the top and a mass of semi-slaves at the bottom."
Note how Machiavelli is a consistent link between Burnham, Strauss and the Neocons.
https://orwell.ru/library/reviews/burnham/english/e_burnh.html
With regard to Machiavellian fascism, I'm still working on it but you should read these articles by Cynthia Chung who is very smart for a young lady. The roots of Machiavellian fascism grow through the roots of the neo-Machiavellians, through James Burnham, to Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago and then onto the Neoconservatives such as Paul Wolfowitz et al who have influenced US evil foreign and economic policy ever since.
https://strategic-culture.org/news/2023/01/15/life-james-burnham-from-trotskyism-to-italian-fascism-to-father-of-neo-conservatism/
https://strategic-culture.org/news/2023/01/25/machiavellians-james-burnham-fascist-italian-defenders-freedom/
Hi Petra
Interesting article here with reference to Sound of Freedom.
https://strategic-culture.org/news/2023/08/01/a-sick-society-now-takes-up-arms-against-motherhood-and-cherry-pie/
The notion that our Machiavellian corrupt elite are trying to spread their poisonous personally morality onto the outraged public is a disturbing but very real phenomenon.
"There is an ongoing systematic effort to normalise the abhorrent and to promote it as a regular and accepted feature of everyday life. Without backing from within the apparatus of power, which in reality is the network of psychopaths who hold Western societies in their iron grip, aggressively reshaping it in their own corrupt likeness and image, this normalisation of evil could not take place."
Alastair Crooke has done another piece which could be considered as a companion as it deals with this normalization, memory hole and move on process that the MSM reserve now for the corrupted Bidens etc.
https://strategic-culture.org/news/2023/07/31/the-scandal-implosion-stratagem-will-it-work-for-ukraine/
P.S. Thanks for the links.