Jonathan Davis

Came across the fascinating “Marginalia on Radical Thinking” series by The Loyal Opposition to Modernity blog.

A really loved this interview with Keith Preston, who “writes the blog Attack the System,  which attempts to tie together both left and right anarchism in a Pan-secessionism against the empire. ….his critique of the way many left anarchists are militant shock troops of liberalism to be a serious and disturbing critique as well as the Nietzschean critique of modernity to be taken seriously and not softened as it has been in French post-structuralism.”

On 4th Generation Warfare and “Totalitarian Humanism”

S.: On the Fourth generation warfare:  This seems to also seem to be used as an excuse to strengthen the state.  Do you see this is a trend that is, at root, a sign that elements of the larger culture(s) are separating and going into radically different directions?

K.P.:  Sure. I think a major part of the premise behind the US’s “war on terrorism” is awareness on the parts of the overlords of the empire that the fourth generation resistance is rising and challenging the state in many different areas. So the state is trying to strengthen its position.

At present, most serious fourth generation efforts come from the periphery and conflict between these regions and the empire which is for the most part centered in the West has existed for centuries, of course. So there’s nothing particularly new going on there. However, within the center of the empire itself there does seem to be a separation taking class due to a lack of cultural cohesion. In Europe, the conflict is fueled by mass immigration into what were until very recently mostly homogenous societies. In America, I think the conflict is largely a class conflict on two different levels. First, there is the broader widening of class divisions that has simultaneously generated a strengthened plutocracy at the top, a shrinking middle class and a growing lower prolertarian and lumpenproletarian classes. Large scale immigration has played a role in this obviously, but I don’t think it’s the principal cause. Second, there seems to be a particularly intense class struggle between the dying WASP elites and their constituents among the traditional middle class and the rising upper middle class that is informed by the values of political correctness or what I call totalitarian humanism. This is what I consider to be the source of the US culture wars.

K.P.:  I think what you call “totalitarian humanism,” I call liberalism without the gloves on.  This, however, confuses people since the term liberal is linked to the center-left, which is only one of its manifestations.  Do you see the contradictions within totalitarianhumanism leading to more or less balkanization?

S:  Oh, more balkanization. Very much so. In fact, I think the contradictions within totalitarian humanism will be what eventually brings about its demise. Totalitarian humanism will end when the PC coalition fractures and its component parts eventually turn on each other. A key fault line is going to be the incompatibility of Western liberalism with the social conservatism endemic to most non-Western cultures. For instance, I’ve seen some research that shows anti-gay attitudes are more prevalent among African-Americans than any other ethnic group in the US. Secularism is certainly far more prevalent among Western liberals than among Third world immigrants. Right now, the line that the totalitarian humanist Left takes is something along the lines of “Oppressed peoples everywhere, unite against the white bourgeoisie!” or some variation of that. But these fault lines are very real and will increasingly find their way to the surface over time.

…I consider totalitarian humanism to a very dangerous force that is on the rise in the West, and despite their professed oppositional stance, the Marxist and anarchist left have swallowed the totalitarian humanist bait hook, line, and sinker so to speak, essentially making them the useful idiots of the liberal establishment.S.:  A friend of mine says the same thing: “Lately the rhetoric between liberals and leftist, you’d think the far left would be an alternative to a lot of PC platitudes, but it isn’t anymore.”   This leads me to some serious questions: I have noticed a lot of professed anti-Fascists using fascist-style intimidation against other forms of anarchism. I suspect you see these anarchists essentially reflecting the anarcho-liberal confusion and becoming a sort of militant-wing for liberal identity politics?

K.P.:  The “anti-fascists” are the mirror image of the Nazi stormtroopers who went about physically attacking Jews and Marxists during the Weimar period. Essentially they are the brown shirts of totalitarian humanism. The tendencies that I refer to as the “anarcho-leftoids” are a kind of parody of PC. Describing them as a “militant wing for liberal identity politics” would be apt in some ways, though perhaps too charitable. They are the new fascists in every essential aspect.

On Nietzche and anarchism

S.:  What do you think is Nietzche’s relevance to anarchism?

K.P.:  Of all the great thinkers of the modern era, Nietzsche was probably the most prescient and penetrating. He recognized that the core foundations of Western civilization-philosophical, cultural, moral, religious-had essentially been overthrown by the advancements in human knowledge that came out of the scientific revolution, the industrial revolution, and the Enlightenment. Not only had Christianity been discredited, but so had traditional Western metaphysics. What distinguishes the thought of Nietzsche is that he takes things a step further and attacks the intellectual systems that grew out of the Enlightenment and had taken hold among educated people in his own era. In particular, he understood the progressive faith associated with movements like liberalism and socialism to essentially be secular derivatives of Christianity. Nietzsche regarded the intellectuals of his time as not having really abandoned faith in God, but rather as having invented new gods to believe in like progress, utopianism, equality, universalism, nationalism, racialism, anarchism, and so forth. All of these became forms of secular millenarianism in Nietzsche’s day.

Nietzsche considered all of these trends to be efforts to come to terms, or perhaps avoiding coming to terms, with the death of the foundations of traditional values. He saw these new gods as creating a cultural powder keg that would explode in grotesque warfare in the twentieth century, which is precisely what happened. He also believed it would be the twenty-first century before Western people began to really confront the crisis generated by the erosion of the foundations of their civilization and that cultural nihilism would be the greatest obstacle that the West would have to overcome. We see this today in the self-hatred and wish for cultural self-destruction that exists among Western peoples, particularly the educated elites. For instance, it is quite obviously seen in the thrill with which Western intellectuals anticipate the potential demographic overrun and cultural dispossession of the West.

What is ironic is that the leftist fundamentalism that dominates the mainstream of the anarchist milieu is perhaps the most advanced form of this nihilism. They’ve essentially absorbed the nihilism of the Western elites and amplified it several times over. In particular, they often epitomize the slave morality Nietzsche regarded as having its roots in Christianity and having been carried over into its secular derivatives on the political left.

So I think that the thought of Nietzsche, properly understood, could contribute to an awakening in the anarchist community, and provide us with the intellectual armour necessary to effectively combat our establish overlords rather than simply parroting them as so many of us do now. It does no good to simply regurgitate the values of political correctness when these are simultaneously the legitimizing values of the ruling class.

S.:  Thank you for your time. Anything you’d like to say in closing?

K.P.: Just to say that the first principal of any authentic radicalism has to be independence of mind above all other values. It’s not about how much you agree or disagree with me. Rather, it’s about your ability to apply critical analysis to every question and to every situation. It’s about being able to see every side of every question and giving due recognition where it’s merited. Any set of ideas, no matter what they are, can become menacing when they are dogmatized to the point of becoming unquestionable articles of faith, particularly when intertwined with the authority of the state. No matter how righteous a particular crusade may seem if its presumptions are not subject to regular critical scrutiny then it becomes a potential foundation for yet another tyranny.

Read the entire interview here: http://skepoet.wordpress.com/2012/03/28/marginalia-on-radical-thinking-keith-preston-on-balkanization-and-the-state-of-exception/

Last night I had a deeply irritating problem with synching nvAlt and Simplenote. It forced me to look through my hundreds of note fragments looking for the problematic note. 

I came across an old note about Raymond Williams’ book “Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society“. 

Williams is a fairy extreme leftists (sympathised with Pol Pot) but the book is wonderful. 

Here are a few excerpts: 

Aberrant decoding:  An anti-structuralist term that recognises that audiences et messages in different ways to the ones intended.  ’Encoding’ is the term used to describe the way in which media practitioners construct messages so that they can be understood by the widest possible audience, almost always the aim of media professionals. ‘Decoding’ is the term used to describe how people read these messages.  In communication theory there is an approach which claims that messages are encoded (produced) through one set of meaning structures and are therefore necessarily decoded (received) in the same linguistic framework and with the same meaning structures    

Anomie:  Normlessness (a product of sodal disintegration).    

Aporia:  A seemingly irresolvable logial difficulty or serious perplexity.    

Canon:  A list of approved texts, orginally of a religious character.      

Civil society: Everything in society that is not government    

Cultural capital  The transmission of privileges from one generation to the next.    

Dominant/Residual/Emergent : The factions wlthln cultures that are always in a state of conflict.        

Doxa:  A broader term than ideology, meaning somethihg close to comnon-sense or everyday assumptions.    

Enonce/enondation : The distinction between speaking and the effects of that act.    

Episteme:  The dominant mode of organising thought at a given tiistorical time.    

Essentialism:  The belief that people, groups or objects have fixed, ate characteristics. A combination of social and cultural characteristics that together form a distinctive socal identity.    

Feedback:  A term describing the reception and response of a message.    

Flaneur: The observer.    

Governmentality : Michel Foucault devised the term ‘governmentality to describe the increasing tendency over the past two centuries for the state to intervene in the lives of its citizens    

Habitus:   A system of shared sodal dispositions and cognitive structures.    

Hegemony:  The exerdse of cultural and social leadership by a dominant group.    

Hermeneutics:  Understanding how understanding works: a theory of interpretation.  Its basic philosophical meaning refers to translating something not understooda textinto a comprehensible form. We might say it refers to the process of interpretation, and it was generally used to describe the interpretation of biblical texts. Its current usage refers to our understanding of how understanding takes place, particularly in relation to how readers understand the meaning of works of art and literature.    

Metanarrative:  Stories about stories (Jean-Fran ois Lyotard).    

Metaphor/metonymy:  Metaphor: the substitution of one term for another.  

Metonymy: the substitution of an element of a term for the term itself.    

Moral panic : A media spiral in which sodal control and hysteria escalate social problems.    

Phenomenology:  A philosophical approach that concentrates on the meaning of experiences.    

Subaltern:  The underclass; the oppressed in colonial societies.    

The book is available at Amazon.com 

Raymond Williams on Wikipedia

Excerpts on Culture and Popular

The Sunday Time last week illustrated some of the absurdities of the abuse of the term racist.

In a story about Female Genital Mutilation (FMG), aka Female Circumcision, although that’s a euphemism,  the police are accused of being racist for NOT prosecuting offenders yet they did not prosecute offenders for fear of…well…”inflaming racial tensions”.

UP TO 100,000 women in Britain have undergone brutal sexual mutilations and medics in this country are offering to carry out the illegal operations.

…Female genital mutilation (FGM), which involves the surgical removal of external genitalia and, in some cases, the stitching of the vaginal opening, is widespread across large parts of Africa.

In Britain it is illegal and carries a prison sentence of up to 14 years.

Forward, a charity that campaigns against FGM, revealed this weekend that an estimated 100,000 women in Britain have undergone mutilation. A further 24,000 girls are thought to be at risk of suffering the agonising procedure.

Despite the scale of the problem, the police have failed to secure a single conviction. This weekend, as campaigners called for a crackdown, police were accused of failing to pursue prosecutions for fear of inflaming racial tensions.

Waris Dirie, a former model who was mutilated as a child and is now a United Nations ambassador for the abolition of the practice, said: “If a white girl is abused, the police come and break down the door. If a black girl is mutilated, nobody takes care of her. This is what I call racism.” -  Britain’s 100,000 mutilated women | The Sunday Times (Paywall)

Well Ms Dirie, you are not entirely right about that.

For 15 years there has been systematic rape of thousands of vulnerable white children by Pakistani British men in the north of England. Both police and social workers were well aware of the rape and abuse, but decided not to act for, you guessed it, fear of inflaming racial tensions.

You see no horror, not even the rape and mutilation of children,  is enough to break multicultural taboos. Mass rape and mass mutilation are preferable to inflamed “racial tensions”.

Just how bad is the racial situation in the UK if this is the level of sacrifice needed to guard against the truth? Not even the Soviets went this far – i.e.  allowed their own kids to be raped and mutilated – to protect their ideology?

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BBC Radio4 brought the news this morning that George Galloway has won the Bradford West bi-election in the UK.  He did so by shamelessly pandering to the local Muslim community, prompting some to say this is a foretaste of coming Islamization as Muslim minorities grow towards majorities ¹. Others reckon it was his celebrity Big Brother appearance, but I doubt it ².

Meanwhile his fellow left-wing radical,  Ken Livingston, is well analysed in a leader in The Times today ³:

Ken Livingstone is many things, but he is not a stupid person. Nor is he a stranger to political calculation….So adroit is he that he has sought to make an asset out of a weakness that has sunk lesser men: his inability to control his tongue. Through most of his career he has managed to retail this laxness as a charming refusal to dissemble. And his occasional gaffe or inappropriate act he has relabelled as an independent streak.

It is precisely this skill that makes his clash with London’s Jewish community so concerning. His relationship with Jews, never good even in the years before he was Mayor, has deteriorated to such an extent that a number of members of that community are withholding their support, even though they routinely vote Labour.

…There are two explanations for Mr Livingstone allowing himself to become embroiled in what seems an odd fight to pick. The first is that he genuinely has a problem with Jews and just cannot help himself.

…Yet awkward lack of familiarity with the sensitivities of others is hard to associate with Mr Livingstone. So a more troubling explanation presents itself. He is doing it on purpose. There are more than four times as many Muslims in London as there are Jews. Mr Livingstone may believe that he can divide and rule. He may have seen the impact that George Galloway has made with a similar strategy.

The beginnings of Mr Livingstone’s split with the Jewish community might lie in his long-held convictions, but his refusal to heal the division might be calculation of the sort that, to put it at its most gentle, he is certainly capable of. And his otherwise puzzling comments about homosexuality — that the Tory party is “riddled” with it — make more sense if viewed as part of a strategy to woo more religious Muslims.

This turns what would otherwise be a nasty squabble into an issue of importance to all London citizens and, indeed, beyond. A divisive politics that seeks to exploit tensions between religious groups for electoral gain would be a disaster, not just for the city but for the country. And it is to be hoped that Mr Livingstone will find it a disaster for him as well. Muslims value a united London, too.

You are rumbled Ken. The Galloway Gambit has worked very well in Bradford West, one of the most densely Muslim areas in Britain, but it will not work in London.

[Update: Must post these comments from The Times]

First up, this brilliant Leader from The Times:

It is probably only right, after his remarkable victory in the Bradford West by-election, to salute George Galloway’s indefatigability. This was an unexpected return to Parliament for the man who won Bethnal Green & Bow for his own Respect party in 2005, but who was thought to have ruined his political career by posing as a cat and lapping milk from the hands of the actress Rula Lenska in Celebrity Big Brother.

If only cat impersonations were the extent of Mr Galloway’s unfitness for office it might be possible to gloss over his victory in Bradford West. Unfortunately, the one thing that Mr Galloway is not is a pussy cat. His praise of Saddam Hussein in 2002, for the supposed dictatorial virtues of courage, strength and indefatigability, is notorious. He described the July 7 bombs in London as “not unpredictable”. President Assad of Syria was, in Mr Galloway’s estimation, “a breath of fresh air”.

So it is as someone with no understanding of irony that Mr Galloway described his by-election victory as “the Bradford Spring”. The electors of Bradford West ought to prepare themselves for representation of a fairly idle kind, if Mr Galloway’s record is anything to go by. The last time he was an MP, Mr Galloway managed to attend a full 8 per cent of votes in the House of Commons.

Worse than that, they have elected someone who has deliberately and dangerously exploited divisions between communities. Mr Galloway’s support for the tyrannous regimes in Iraq and Syria implies that he is prepared to avert his gaze from murder, torture and the systematic violation of the rights of citizens. They have also elected a man whose opposition to the conflict in Afghanistan seems to extend to an ambivalence even about armed attacks on British soldiers.

Beyond Mr Galloway himself, what are the wider implications at the end of a tumultuous week in British politics? Mr Galloway is a cat who prowls alone, a lone orator who attracts disciples, but he is not a man with the prowess to build a political movement. It is emphatically not true, as Mr Galloway claims, that “the people of Bradford have spoken this evening for people in inner cities everywhere”. There are few seats, if any at all, in which the politics of the far Left can combine with still sore grievances over the Iraq war.

Mr Galloway’s targeting of the Asian community, especially through its postal votes, was his tactic in Bradford, as it has been before in London. It appears to have inspired an unusually large turnout of 50 per cent. These are rare circumstances, so it would be wrong to leap to the conclusion that Bradford West was a thorough indictment of Ed Miliband’s Labour Party. That said, a swing against Labour of 36 per cent is hardly a vote of confidence. It is no great commendation to preside over the first loss of a by-election by the official Opposition since 2000. The greater worry for Mr Miliband, however, is that when the Conservative vote collapses, as it did by 22 per cent, the malcontents are not going straight over to Labour. This appears, on a national scale, to be the lesson of the political movements of the week gone by.

In the longer run, Mr Galloway’s victory may illustrate a trend away from the two main political tribes. In 2010 Labour and the Conservatives gained 66 per cent of the vote, the lowest proportion since 1922. The Liberal Democrat vote has halved since 2010 but its vote is more concentrated than ever before. The stranglehold of the big parties is slipping and “other parties” are growing.

Mr Galloway will now begin another of his political lives. If his victory acts as an alarm bell to the mainstream parties, perhaps something will have been salvaged from this week. However, the discussion about kitchen supper, pasties and jerry cans has been put into proper perspective by the election to Parliament in Bradford West of a thoroughly undesirable Member.

Next, a wonderful opinion piece from David Aaronovitch:

In the small hours of yesterday morning George Galloway took to the stage in West Yorkshire and declared the “Bradford Spring” — an “uprising” of the ordinary people against the political establishment.

As ever with Mr Galloway, those who knew anything about him were impressed mostly by his shamelessness. This was the man who, as the Arab Spring got under way in Syria, continued to express his admiration for the Syrian dictator Bashar Assad as a man of “reforming zeal” possessed of “a vision of Syria as a genuinely independent Arab country”.

None of that had mattered to a majority of those who voted in the Bradford West by-election. If solidarity with oppressed Muslims abroad was part of the Galloway appeal, such fellow feeling clearly did not extend to the people of Homs. As it did not to those taking such risks for democracy in Iran — a country for whose state propaganda outfit, Press TV, Mr Galloway has in his time done much service.

So what did matter? Why have Bradfordians wound up with the slate-voiced pussy of the Big Brother house as their Member of Parliament? Asked about his victory and her party’s defeat on the radio yesterday morning, Harriet Harman referred several times to the “particular problems” of the constituency but declined to specify what these were. It seems to me, however, that such circumspection is unnecessary.

Mr Galloway would not have stood in Bradford West had it not contained a very substantial Muslim population. In the general election of 2005 he fought and won the seat of Bethnal Green & Bow. The Muslim population there was about 40 per cent and he won with 36 per cent of the vote. In 2010 he stood in Poplar, East London, where the Muslim community represents something above 33 per cent. There was no collapse in the Tory vote and Mr Galloway came third with 17 per cent.

He passed on all the previous by-elections in this parliament, standing only for the Scottish Parliament last May, where his party achieved a vote share of 3 per cent (the Muslim population of Glasgow is about 3 per cent, but most will have voted for other parties). Then along comes Bradford West, where the census of 2001 showed a Muslim community of about 38 per cent.

So Mr Galloway is a specialist targeter of British Muslim votes. The idea spread around by his Respect colleagues that his principal attraction was his anti-austerity stance doesn’t bear even cursory examination. And indeed in Bradford some of his appeal to the voters was couched in sectional and religious language unprecedented in the past 60 years of British politics. One of his leaflets began thus: “God KNOWS who is a Muslim. And he KNOWS who is not. Instinctively, so do you. Let me point out to all the Muslim brothers and sisters what I stand for.”

Further down Mr Galloway laid claim to leading the decent, pious life: “I, George Galloway, do not drink alcohol and never have. Ask yourself if you believe the other candidate in this election can say that truthfully.”

While readers pick themselves up off the floor, I should add that those who have followed Mr Galloway for years will smile at the omission of adultery from the list of vices he abjures. I should just add that almost no Galloway event or pronouncement is now complete without several invocations of “Allah” in one form or another.

To get an idea of the strangeness of this, try to imagine a campaign in Hendon South where the winning candidate addresses voters with the sentiment “G-d knows who is a Jew and who is not”, boasts to the electorate that he keeps kosher and then implies that his opponent has been spotted mixing milk and meat. Such religiosity is rarely seen in British politics, thank the Eternal One, the Lord of Hosts.

But why would Mr Galloway think such an approach would work? John Mann, the Labour MP for Bassetlaw, wrote yesterday about campaigning in Toller ward in Bradford. “The 5 per cent of our target Labour promises who are white were rock solid,” he found, “but the 95 per cent of promises that were Asian names were rather different … probably not a Labour vote.”

Mr Mann analysed part of the failure. “What was particularly disconcerting was having no Muslim doorknockers, no Urdu speaker, no hijab-wearing woman talking to Muslim women voters. Indeed that abiding memory was of a terribly deprived area where Galloway supporters, often in traditional dress codes, rallied their voters.”

But the Labour candidate was also a Muslim — from Toller. What he couldn’t do, however, was what Mr Galloway is so good at — rousing popular anger at the Establishment (of which Labour is inevitably part) and playing on a sense of grievance and victimhood that is particular to some Muslim communities. The reason why Iraq, for instance, evokes a response but Mr Galloway’s backing for the killers of Muslims in Syria does not, is because it fits a narrative of Muslims being oppressed by outsiders. In a sense it creates an internal community solidarity that would otherwise be eroded by the modern condition of Britain.

Some of this may explain why Ken Livingstone has managed to have a run-in with some of London’s Jews. Not only has he been oddly insensitive to the Jewish community but at the same time he has courted Muslim opinion with a creepy assiduity. This culminated in his speech to the Finsbury Park mosque two weeks ago in which Ken promised to “educate the mass of Londoners” in the teachings of Islam. Speaking about Muhammad’s last sermon, he told the audience: “I want to spend the next four years making sure that every non-Muslim in London knows and understands [its] words and message.”

It may be that Ken has, unnoticed, made similar promises to Jews, Buddhists, Sikhs, Methodists, Mormons, Scientologists and everyone else about their prophets and gurus. But we doubts it, my Precious, don’t we, because we knows that there are no voteses in it.

Mr Galloway’s victory shows something else too that has nothing to do with communalism. As Ed Miliband pointed out, only 4 in 10 Bradford voters opted for the three main parties. When something else plausible and exciting comes along (even if it is only a dictator-loving retread demagogue), many, many voters would like to flirt with it.

And that’s why we have back in Parliament a man whose first tweet after the election read: “Long live Iraq. Long live Palestine, free, Arab, dignified.” Uninterested in domestic concerns, George Galloway is probably the first Arab Nationalist to be elected to the British Parliament. He is far too flawed and too unusual to be a harbinger of mass gallowayism. He is the florid symptom of a problem — the pustule, but not the disease.

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