by Francis Lee for The Saker Blog
Nomenclature Below – Men and Ideas
1. INTERACTIONISM/PHENOMENOLOGY
Wilhem Dilthey (1833-1911)
Edmund Husserl (1859-1958)
Max Weber (1864-1920)
Alfred Schutz (1899-1959)
Heinrich Rickert (1863-1936)
Karl Mannheim (1893-1947)
2. EXISTENTIALISM
F.Nietzsche (1844-1900)
Martin Heidegger (1899-1976)
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1985)
3. HUMANISTIC MARXISM
Georgy Lukacs (1885-1971)
Karl Korsch (1886-1961)
4. THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL
Herbert Marcuse
Walter Benjamin
Theodor Adorno
Max Horkheimer
Erich Fromm
Neo-Frankfurt
Jurgen Harbermas
PART 1
HUMANISM INPHILSOPHY AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES
At the outset, it needs to be made clear that I am using the terms ‘humanism’ in a generic, but also very specific manner: generic insofar as in that it will be used to subsume several overlapping and inter-related perspectives in sociology (and psychology and philosophy for that matter). The latter will include hermeneutics, phenomenology, interactionism, existentialism, ethnomethodology, and behaviourism; specific in the sense that it refers to a perspective based upon the unique attributes of man, and an appreciation that although man is part of nature he is also distinct from nature. Humanism, particularly as it was developed in Germany and the German speaking world, was perhaps synonymous with romanticism; its patterns of thought and weltanschauung that it gave rise to was in large part a reaction against both the Gradgrind empiricism which developed in Britain and the rationalist tradition in France. The Anglo-French worldview was itself very much a product of the Enlightenment and was composed of two distinct currents of thought which gave rise to the formation of positivist doctrine. On the one hand there was the philosophy of Descartes, and on the other the empiricist tradition articulated by Bacon, Hume, Locke and the two Mills (father and son, James and John).
The Anglo-French approach made little headway in Germany. For the German philosophical tradition is best characterised by the idealist celebration of the self; by respect for the transcendental, and by the conviction of the power of the imagination and will. As opposed to positivism – namely, the doctrine that the social and historical world may be apprehended and understood by using a precise empirical-quantitative methodology as used by the natural sciences – humanism regards the social and historical world as being largely inaccessible to experimental-quantitative investigation. Fundamental to difference between positivism and hermeneutics (i.e. the interpretive understanding of man and society) is the dualistic of humanism and the monistic structure of positivist thought. This structure entails an assumption on the part of positivists that there is one world – a world of nature of which man and society are a part. This view is easily discernible in both behaviourism and functionalism. Thus, there is no distinction to be made between the world of inanimate matter and the world of man and society. Both nature and society are held to be governed by an unchanging and invariant system of cause-effect connexions or laws. It therefore follows that the methodology which has had such (it is claimed) spectacular success in discovering these laws in the natural world, should also be utilised in the study of history and the social world.
Humanism, except in its more extreme phenomenological forms, regards this as being largely question begging. The outer world of causal necessity must be sharply demarcated from the inner world of will, meanings, values, intuitions, emotions, normative and religious impulses. What constitutes an appropriate methodology for the study of nature should not necessarily be regarded as serving for the template methodology for the study of man and society. Humanistic epistemology, therefore, is dualistic in the sense that it postulates two worlds – nature and man – and implicit in this recognition is the necessity to fashion methods of enquiry and investigation which are appropriate for each.
It was the great German philosopher, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) who first laid the foundations of this approach. In his magnum opus, Kritik der Reinen Vernunft (Critique of Pure Reason) he was to put forward this notion of two worlds: there was the world as it is the noumenal or intelligible world, and the world as it appears to us – the phenomenal or sensible world. He argued that we could only directly apprehend the phenomenal world, i.e. the world of appearances. Being trapped in the world of appearances we could only infer the existence of a ‘higher’, ‘transcendental’ or ‘noumenal’ world. What we did not and indeed could not know was whether world as it appeared to us corresponded to the world as it was. We could not know the thing-in-itself. Did appearance coincide with essence? Since there was no way of finding out we were left with a rather unsatisfactory epistemological agnosticism.
Moreover, this cosmological dualism is taken further and replicated in the self. Kant divides the self into:
1. The knowing subject, or noumenal self, and
2. The object which is known about, the phenomenal self.
Thus, the self becomes a unity of two worlds, the subject-object, inner and outer, noumenal and phenomenal, intelligible and sensible. On the one hand, the phenomenal is posited in the world of appearances and subject to causal laws; on the other hand, the noumenal self exists outside the realm of necessity and inside the world of choice and moral freedom. Contemplating these two dimensions of human existence Kant opined that ‘’ “Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”
It was in this way that Kant had solved (or at least thought he had solved) the timeless antimony of the freedom-versus-necessity polemic.
Subsequent German thought never escaped the giant shadow cast by the Konigsberg professor. After the substantial interruption of Hegel, the Kantian influence reasserted itself in Germany: Neo-Kantianism began in the 1870s and took on a number of different hues. Probably the most influential of these was the Marburg school, but no less important – for our purposes at least – was the Baden school, whose best-known representatives were Windelband and Rickert. This latter strain of neo-Kantianism was of crucial importance for the development of hermeneutics and interpretive social theory. (It should be noted at this point that social theory and sociology were now beginning to develop within the matrix of traditional philosophy.) As Kantians Windelband and Rickert’s epistemology was based upon a dualistic structure: they argued for two types of knowledge, and, as a consequence, they advocated two types of methodology. There were the sciences of the natural world (Naturewissenschaften) and the sciences of man and society (Kulturwissenschaften) or (Geisteswissenschaften). This was also the view of one Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) who for a time had been under the influence of the British and French positivists. Dilthey was to advocate an interpretive system of social science, Geisteswissenschaften, for the study of the social world. The methodology would be in part based upon the strictly scientific approach (since man was a material being in the world and therefore subject to invariant laws of causality), but also based upon an interpretive understanding (verstehen) of the inner dimension of human existence which remained inaccessible to empirical investigation. This latter approach Dilthey termed Hermeneutics. The combination of the two methodologies, that is, the hermeneutic-scientific paradigm was to become known as Lebensphilosphie.
‘’We do not show ourselves genuine disciples of the great scientific thinkers simply by transferring their methods to our sphere: we must adjust our knowledge to the nature of our subject matter and thus treat it as the scientists treated theirs. We conquer nature by submitting to it. The human studies (Geisteswissenschaften) differ from the natural sciences because the latter deal with facts which present themselves to consciousness as external and separate phenomena, whilst the former deal with the living connections of reality experienced in the mind … We explain nature but we understand mental life … This means that the methods of studying mental life, history and society differ greatly from those used to achieve knowledge of nature … and … Any empiricism which forgoes an explanation of what happens in the mind in terms of the understood connections of mental life is necessarily sterile.’’ (Ideas about a Descriptive and Analytical Psychology).
Thus, it would be incorrect to cast Dilthey as being an opponent of science; it would be more correct to say that he was aware of the limitation of scientific methods, and aware of its misapplications to the human studies. Not only would natural science methodology be inappropriate for the study of man and society, it would positively distort the very reality it sought to apprehend. He argued that:
‘’The starting point is the scientific approach. As long as it remains conscious of its limitations its results are incontestable’’ (An Introduction to the Human Studies)
Commitment to science yes, but the caveat is clear in that the wholesale importation of natural science methodology into the human studies (positivism) as advocated by inter alia, Auguste Comte, and John Stuart Mill, would ‘’mutilate the very historical reality they sought to understand to assimilate it to the concepts and methods of natural science.’’ (op.cit)
As a thinker Dilthey was very much under-rated and was to strongly influence Max Weber (1864-1920). It might also be noted that little in the way of an admission of intellectual indebtedness came from the latter source. This notwithstanding, and taking his cue from Dilthey, Weber was also committed to the construction of a new unified scientific-hermeneutic paradigm for the social sciences. This commitment is summed up in his famous axiom, ‘’sociology must be causally adequate and adequate at the level of meaning.’’ Weber believed that history and society consisted of an interlocking concatenation of cause-effect variables which might be apprehended by dispassionate empirical investigation, such as was instanced in his famous work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (PESC) where he sought to explain the rise of capitalism in the west by reference to several antecedent causal variables (one of which was ascetic Protestantism). Per Contra, however, he was also of the view that the understanding (Verstehen) of ‘meanings’ is essential to the understanding of human action. Moreover, this understanding involved an interpretive penetration into the inner world of meaning structures (hermeneutics) and was bound, therefore, to be largely intuitive, involving as it did the synchronisation of two minds. This dualism in Weber’s thinking is again apparent in his work, The Methodology of the Social Sciences, where he argues for the necessity of a value-free social science, and then goes on – like Kant – why such value-freedom is not possible. My own view was that Weber was in fact arguing for a rigorous rather than a scientific sociology.
In the world of philosophy, the post-Kantian movement in Germany was moving away from epistemology (theory of knowledge) and towards ontology (theory of being). Thus, latter branch of philosophy being subsumed under the catch-all phrase ‘’existentialism’’. In the first instance the main proponents of this doctrine were Freidrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) and a little later by Martin Heidegger (1889-1976). There were also a number of other inputs into this doctrine but for some reason they all came from France. These included Sartre, Buber and Merleau-Ponty.
Like nearly all German thought, existentialism is generally opposed to rationalist and empiricist doctrine – which is to say the whole Anglo-French intellectual/philosophical tradition which assumes that the universe is a determined and ordered system, governed by objective laws intelligible to the contemplative observer who may discover these natural laws. Existentialists also question the assumption that reason is the guiding force in the regulation of human affairs. For existentialists, the universe is an unknowable chaos; no individual has a predetermined place or function within a rational system and no-one can discover his supposed duty through reasoning: everybody is compelled to assume the responsibility of making choices. Because of this the human condition is one of anxiety (angst) which arises from man’s realisation of this necessary freedom of choice, of the awareness of manifold possibilities, and of the finiteness of any existence that was preceded by and must terminate in nothingness.
Free-choice is at the heart of existentialism – in a threefold sense: epistemological, ontological, and normative. This last sense being probably the most important. ‘Become what you are’ enjoined Nietzsche, ‘live authentically’ declares Heidegger. Excessive conformity – that is extrinsically induced role-structured behaviour – was an example of what Sartre called ‘bad faith’ or ‘mala fides’. When we cease to choose and merely slump into a preconceived ‘role’ we are in a state of inauthenticity or ‘bad faith’ (mala fides) because we are surrendering our humanity by this denial. Refusal to choose transforms us into ‘objects-in-the-world’ rather than a conscious acting subject. To repeat: The man who unthinkingly accepts his condition, including moral code by which he lives, as if it were inevitable, is in bad faith.
These moral imperatives, and the relativism which they imply, is also replicated in existential theories of knowledge. The world is to be interpreted as Nietzsche once remarked. From Nietzsche’s view point, not only was the selection of ethical codes and a way of living purely arbitrary and subjective, so also was the experience and perception of the natural world. We had a choice about what view of the world to adopt. Thus, the relativism which is at the heart of existentialism extends from the normative into the epistemological sphere:
‘’It is perhaps just dawning on five or six minds that physics too is only an interpretation and arrangement of the world (according to our own requirements, if I may say so, and not an explanation of the world).’’ (Beyond Good and Evil – aphorism 26)
This type of epistemological relativism clearly presages and permeates the work of later theorists of the sociology of knowledge and the philosophy of science such as Karl Mannheim and Thomas Kuhn. Kuhn endorsed the view that there is no objective world of ‘facts’ and ‘laws’ which may be apprehended using natural science methodology. Or at least if there were it would be impossible to recognise it even if we saw it. According to Kuhn scientific theories are constructed around paradigms, but these paradigms have a given shelf-life. It follows from this that if the world is paradigm-structured (which it is), the science is nothing more than – in Kantian terms – ‘making objects conform to our concepts.’ (We may note in passing that the Copernican revolution is still alive and kicking.) What was true at one time and place was not necessarily the case in any other. It would seem to follow logically that the history of science will more than confirm this, and that all ‘truths’ (excluding the a priori variety) must be regarded as being provisional. ‘Truth’ the ‘Facts’ are seen to be very elusive quarries; will-o’-the-wisps forever eluding our grasp. Science does not necessarily furnish us with an explanation of the world, instead it provides us with a paradigm which seems plausible for a given time. As George Santayana once opined in this connexion:
‘’Science … which had seemed like a family of absolute monarchs – sovereign axioms, immutable laws – was very shortly transformed into a democracy of theories elected for a short term of office.’’
It was initially through the work of Edmund Husserl (1859-1958) that phenomenology first entered the mainstream of the German humanistic tradition. In an attempt to ground reason in a secure context Hursserl advocated a system of rigorous introspection: an examination of individual intellectual processes. As far as Husserl was concerned there was and could be no distinction made between what is perceived and the perception of it. Unlike the empiricists, however, phenomenologists believed that experience is not limited to apprehension through the senses, but also includes whatever can be an object of thought, e.g., mathematical entities, moods, dreams and so forth.
Alfred Schutz (1899-1959) is usually credited with the development of phenomenological sociology whose main contours are to be found in his rather obscure work, The Phenomenology of the Social World. The theory is based upon a number of key premises.
The influence of social structure on individual behaviour is disregarded. Or in Husserllian terms ‘bracketed off’. Individual action stemmed from volition and meaning.
Phenomenological sociology is concerned with an analysis and description of everyday life, the ‘life-world’ of the individual and associated states of consciousness. Social reality is nothing more than the creation of the social actors resulting from their multiple interactions. Precisely in this sense, and in contrast with Kantian dualism, phenomenology is monistic – this insofar as there is deemed to be no second reality, no second noumenal or transcendental world beyond or behind the world of our creation, there is simply our own subjectively created world.
This ‘life-world’ is the ‘paramount reality’ of social life. As was the case with the other variants of the humanistic school, phenomenology requires interpretive skills of the highest order from its practitioners; these interpretive skills involving an intuitive and empathetic understanding of the inner states of the social actors. As Max Scheler, the famous advocate of this approach once remarked, ‘phenomenology was the name for an attitude of intuitive contemplation in which one receives something to intuit or to experience which would otherwise remain hidden.’
Demarcation of interactionism from phenomenology is largely a matter of emphasis: it could be argued the interactionism represents a methodological riposte to naturalist and positivist methodology, whereas phenomenology represents a strongly anti-structuralist theoretical perspective. Although of course in the final analysis this distinction is rather scholastic since it is impossible to disentangle method from theory – the one being predicated upon the other.
PART 2
HUMANISTIC MARXISM
It should be clear from what has already been said that the development of social theory does not take place in a vacuum. The development and formation will be given a quite distinctive stamp and be largely shaped by the national, political, and cultural milieu of which it is a part. Thus, the formation of German social theory both reflected, and in turn was largely influenced by that cultural and academic tradition. This is not to exclude the existence of a romantic movement in England or a positivist movement in the German speaking world; but these movements were weak and marginal, being out of step and against the mainstream of the dominant traditions.
What was true of German social theory in general was also true of Marxism in that part of the world – particularly during the 20th century. The general history of Marxism will provide ample evidence of a gradual ossification of a system of critical thought and political practice (praxis) into a pseudo-science of the most sterile positivist type. Marxism, particularly in the hands of those such as H.M.Hyndman, G.Plekhanov, F.Engels, and N.Bukharin, was to be transformed form a theory of revolutionary praxis into a materialistic dogma which postulated ‘iron laws’ of social development. Per the theory of historical materialism, for example, all societies moved through similar stages of development from ‘primitive communism’ to the definitive stage of ‘higher communism’. Within this grand conceptual schema socialism became the inevitable stage of human development. The views and actions of individual social actors were deemed irrelevant as this great historical drama unfolded.
This view of history and social development shares very strong affinities with that of the French positivists: indeed, there is a striking similarity between this doctrine and Auguste Comte’s ‘law of three stages’. It is worth repeating at this juncture that both positivism (and positivist Marxism) are both predicated upon the belief that the historical process moves forward under its own impetus and according to the laws of historical development which are regarded as having an objective existence. This inexorable historical process will take place regardless of the wishes, views, and activities of individual social actors. The object of the social scientist should be to lay bare these ‘laws’ of social development. This positivist outlook is common to thinkers as diverse as Durkheim and Engels.
It is precisely this positivist Marxism that became one of the principal objects of attack for the humanistic Marxism of Georgy Lukacs (1885-1971) Karl Korsch, and later the Frankfurt School (see more below). In his very influential and at the time controversial book History and Class Consciousness Lukacs critiqued what he regarded as the pseudo-scientific, orthodox Marxist ‘science of society arguing that it leads to a contemplative position on the part of the observer. This necessarily followed if socialism was regarded as being in any sense inevitable. For if it were inevitable the implication would be that political praxis would be irrelevant. Lukacs always insisted that Marxism was first and foremost a theory of political praxis. Political activity was indispensable for any struggle to change the world. Additionally, he was concerned to restate the dialectical relationship which existed between thought and being. In the rather sterile world of orthodox Marxism man was a social product, being determined consciousness. Changes in human consciousness were considered by the orthodox school to be mere epiphenomena occasioned by changes in the economic base of society. This in fact was not the view of Marx.
The young Marx – whom Lukacs and his co-thinkers were at pains to rehabilitate – always insisted upon the dialectical reciprocity which existed between being and consciousness, infrastructure and superstructure, historical subject and historical object, social and social structure. KM always insisted that man was both product and producer of history and culture. Following Marx, Lukacs was concerned to restate this relationship of the active and volitional side as well as the institutional and cultural side of being and consciousness; a relationship which had been obscured by the one-sided, structuralist, determinism of orthodox Marxism. The question of whether capitalism was to be replaced by socialism was, for Lukacs, a yet unresolved question. Such transitions are largely a matter of political will and organization. There was no inevitable transition from one to the other.
Concurrent with Lukacs’ work the social theory developed by the ‘Frankfurt School’ shared many affinities of the Hungarian thinker. The FS was comprised of a group of social scientists who worked at the Institute of Social Research (1923-1950) which was connected to the University of Frankfurt/Main. It was closed by the Nazis in 1933 but reopened after the war. During the period 1933-1945 the work of the school was transferred to the United States where members of the group worked at various universities including Columbia and Berkeley. These thinkers and the work included the following: Herbert Marcuse One-Dimensional Man, Reason and Revolution, Eros and Civilization, Theodore Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, Minima Moralis, Erich Fromm, The Fear of Freedom, The Sane Society and other lesser luminaries such as Walter Benjamin and Max Horkheimer, who wrote mainly on aesthetics. The German playwright, Bertolt Brecht, was also part of this ideological milieu, although he was not directly involved.
The defining characteristics of the Frankfurt School – who were to become the intellectual icons for the far left in the 1960s – were as follows
- A rejection of the type of economic determinism that was so much part of orthodox Marxism;
- Extreme eclecticism incorporating into its own version of (humanistic) Marxism both Weberian social theory and Freudian psychoanalysis.
This rather catholic paradigm prompted the French social theorist, Raymond Aron to remark that ‘inside every neo-Marxist there is a neo-Weberian trying to get out.’
It should be no surprise, therefore, that discussions which took place between the wars involved both Marxists and non-Marxists, and that a certain cross-fertilization of views and ideas were to ensue.
A series of discussions took place in the Weber household on Sunday afternoons involving inter alia Max Weber, Lukacs, Georg Simmel and the writer Thomas Mann. Marianne Weber was to recall that only Lukacs could hold his own with her husband acting as an opposite pole of attraction during these informal debates.
Post 1945 Frankfurt neo or humanistic Marxism revised traditional Marxist theory arguing that the working class had become to a degree integrated into the system and had become a conservative force. This was particularly a cogent view put forward by Marcuse in One Dimensional Man. If there was to be a social revolution – and Marcuse and his co-thinkers were not particularly sanguine about this possibility – then it would have to come, or at least must be spearheaded by the ‘out’ groups, that is by those new radical forces and movements not yet integrated into the system, to wit, feminists, students, the poor and unemployed, ethnic minorities and ecological groups. The FS also placed considerable emphasis on the importance of culture and its role in reproducing and legitimating the role and dominance of capital.
A later figure in this lineage of humanistic Marxism has been Jürgen Harbermas. Many of the familiar themes of the FS are reiterated and updated in Harbermas’ writings. His various themes and postulates are grouped under the heading of Critical Theory and include politics and problems of epistemology, the fact/value distinction (very Kantian) methods and problems of legitimation, as well as that principal leitmotif in German social theory – the critique of positivism.
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I think that it would be legitimate to claim that social and political theory including British empiricism, American instrumentalism, French rationalism, German metaphysics, seem to have come to a shuddering halt at the present time. The era of Grand Theory seems to have run its course. We apparently have eschewed the great ‘ism’s and imbibed a routine ultra-conservatism which reduces the world to a type of permanent Gradgrind ‘common-sense.’ More broadly, it seems beyond question that the West is in unstoppable decline. All the great literature, philosophy, history and science are no more. Additionally, looking at the West’s leadership we may observe a collective and destructive mediocrity which is incapable of reversing this trend; and on the contrary are accelerating it; and in the vanguard of this are what I will call the crackpots of Davos: Karl Schwab, Bill Gates, and the totally compromised political, business, and media elites. How long and in what form will these future developments take place is a matter of conjecture; but that they will take place is pretty much certain.
“All the great literature, philosophy, history and science are no more. Additionally, looking at the West’s leadership we may observe a collective and destructive mediocrity”.
Alas! I can only agree. After the War, when we had crushed the horror of Hitler and things began to get better in Europe, I expected that our widespread prosperity and universal education would lead to a great increase in artistic creation. Instead we saw the passing of giants like Picasso and Epstein in art, of Bartok and Schoenberg in music, of Einstein and Planck in science, with no replacement. There was one exception, Solzhenitsyn the writer, who survived into the 21st century and lived to see that he had prophesied the resurrection of the soul of Russia. Also among political leaders there was Mao and Putin who did great constructive, regenerative things for their respective countries. I would call Putin a Western leader because I have always regarded Russia as part of Europe: even though that immense country stretches to the the furthest East of Eurasia, I have always thought of “the West” as being the whole of Christian Europe from Dublin to Vladivostok. If Solzhenitsyn and Putin have shown that Russia can still produce a great regenerative writer and a transformative leader, then so I imagine can the rest of Europe.
As for the philosophers named in this history of modern Western thought, I have read only Kant the philosopher of human freedom and Hegel the philosopher of cosmic evolution both of whom seem to have the seeds of moral regeneration and social development in our society. Two writers seem to me to have been omitted: Goethe the great evolutionary scientist and philosopher of the Life Force; and Karl Jaspers the existentialist who, unlike Heidegger, was not a Nazi sympathiser and, unlike Kierkegard, had common sense.
As for “the young Marx” I class him with the great Romantic exiles of the 1848 Revolution together with Wagner and Heine. As for the older Marx, he turned out to be a prophet; his name seems to appear most often (out of all that long list of bygone modern thinkers) when I read discussions of our current political and economic woes. Vote Communist in the next election.
Dr. N G. With you again. Yes the general picture does look much darker when the ruling consensus is to survey only the cultural greats that the ruling class find culturally tolerable. And to disallow any context for contradiction.
The key for me is understanding when and why European civilization went “underground.” Any civilization’s creativity is progressive by nature and since the crushing of the French revolution the new bourgeois ruling class have feared the progressive development of culture. They rightly discerned that culture itself has carried with it the threat of socialism since the 1848 affair. Consequently there has always being a hidden bias driving the bourgeois class from that date onward. Their lizard brain survival instinct defines itself by what it excludes; i.e., the common masses. So destroy the proletariat with wars and control the culture. Well it worked didn’t it? Or so they thought.
Then ignore most deliberately cultural greats like Carl Jung, who has taught me far better than any Hegelian scholar, how to understand Hegel and his cosmology of history. The destruction of European civilization and culture is a direct and intended result of well focused bourgeois class war. And the CIA institutionalized it.
As doctor Maroudas suggests, recognition of the creative greatness of a culture requires allowing that creativity to be embraced within the context of the larger creativity, recognizable in history’s ongoing cosmic movement. Cultural greats need, for their recognition and evaluation, to be “situated” within their larger social context. Ever since the European class war became the driving socio-economic dominant – that necessarily larger cultural framework has been socialism. The culture itself reveals this. This being the terrible threat.
So if they punch out socialism they punch out the heart of culture. Mission accomplished. But all it has done has pushed the evolution of the culture underground. And this is where contemporary generations know how to find it, of necessity. Without even realizing it they are following Carl Jung’s admonition that when a culture becomes overburdened in the realm of consciousness (meaning mind disconnected from the unconscious) then the cure is to learn to live “unconsciously.” But that disconnect of the mind from the unconscious has been a central defining function of the bourgeois class itself. They are its specialists. In the bourgeois universe mind disconnects from soul. Which means the culture tolerated by the bourgeois mind must be contradicted from the unconscious.
Being an educated European I must give culturally oppressed Americans great credit for their skill at so living “unconsciously.” Seriously, they often make it work. But they get no credit. Because it is culturally invisible.
So our real culture has become invisible, to the established institutional mind that is. But if they paid attention these “culturati” would admit that what they claim to seek is always bubbling up from below. From within the “underground.” As one of our musical greats sang, It is “hiding in the back streets.”
”/…/ looking at the West’s leadership we may observe a collective and destructive mediocrity”
Mediocrity, giggle… That would have been an apt description if it took, say, three from the West’s ”leadership” to attain Putin’s working capacity — qualitatively and quantitatively. Putin wipes the floor with the whole lot. I would rather brand it as collective and destructive naffness.
> … Putin’s working capacity – qualitatively and quantitatively.
> Putin wipes the floor with the whole lot.
True. That’s why western political impostors need quantitative easing. Quantitatively, however, there’s nothing to be done. It’s hopeless.
P.S.:
@Francis Lee, Sartre died in 1980 not in 1985, though I wish he’d had a few more years.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn has shown, in few words, the causes of Western decay:
“Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.” Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”
Western ‘philosophy’ (and the German one especially) not only forgot God, but banned Him altogether, replacing Him with the ‘European Man’, dehumanizing Man by the same token.
It is worth quoting one of the few theologians of our time, Saint Justin Popovich:
”All the European humanisms, from the most primitive to the most sophisticated, from the fetishistic to the papal, are based on a belief in man as he finds himself in the midst of his given spiritual and physical empirical situation and his historical context. In this view the entire essence of every humanism is man (homo), and encapsulated in the ontology of every humanism is nothing other than humanism (homo hominis). Man is the highest value, the supreme value. Man is the principal criterion, the ultimate criterion. “Man is the measure of everything.” That, at its core (in nuce), is every humanism, every homanism. Therefore, all humanisms, all hominisms are, in the final analysis, idolatrous and polytheistic in origin. Pre-Renaissance, Renaissance, and post-Renaissance-Protestant, philosophical, religious, social, scientific, cultural, or political -all the European humanisms strive consciously or subconsciously, but they strive unceasingly, for one result: to replace faith in the God-man with a belief in man, to replace the Gospel of the God-man with a gospel according to man, to replace the philosophy of the God-man with a philosophy according to man, to replace the culture of the God-man with a culture according to man. In brief, they seek to replace life according to the God-man with life according to man.”
There cannot be any ‘regeneration of the West’ without returning God as the center of our life. Russia is on the right track.
But does not Christian humanism mean – In the first instance God became man in the life of Jesus Christ. So that man could evolve to become God in the light of Christ. Which means the entire Christian tradition is aiming for a unitary humanism wherein the living Creator is discovered at the center of the human. The contemporary term being self realization. Which calls in a humanism with a transcendent spiritual center. Problem solved – through uniting spirituality with humanism. Neither works well without the other. Together we enjoy spirit centered human wholeness. Why not call that spiritually self aware humanism?
Anyway this whole argument is historically derivative. In the past religion was used for anti-humanism. Class rule. So humanism being an attempt to free the spirit from religious distortion sought an alternative frame of reference from which to approach religion. Hence the appearance of divorce. But if I remember rightly Renaissance humanism had an openness to the sacred. The “sin” being the attempt to hold humanism and transcendent spirit apart.
Now, the expression “God became man so that man might become god” is not to be taken symbolically, but ontologically. Man acquires personally, through the grace of the Holy Spirit the divine nature, the life eternal. It is the core of the religion that you seem to consider ‘anti-humanism’ that ‘Renaissance humanism’ sought to liberate Man from.
Not the core of the religion at all. Merely its distortion during the patriarchal era for the purposes of elitist class power. Roman Empire style. Which continued in Catholicism. The fundamental drive of Christianity is humanistically sound. Which is why our inadequately honored teacher, Karl Marx, saw himself as a Christian humanist. It is a sin against both humanism and religion to see them as separate. When one separates humanism from religion the wholeness of both humanity, and the wholeness of spirit, are both lost. This wisdom was really the core of Marx’s critique of religion; it did not allow for the wholeness of human experience. But it was the distortion of religion that Marx was fighting, not its essence. But that understanding did not survive the 20th century. For Marx, communism is the humanized fulfillment of Christianity. That is what he meant by communism being the transcendence of human self estrangement.
Marxism is the anti-thesis of Christianity. Christianity without Jesus Christ the God-Man is pure Satanism.
As Saint Justin Popovich put it:
”Without the God-man, man is in fact without a head, indeed without a self, without an eternal self, without an immortal God-like self. Without the God-man, man does not exist; there is only less-than-man, half-man, or no man at all. And at this point we must add the following truth: without the God-man, man is always a slave to death, a slave to sin, a slave to the devil. Only through the God-man does man realize his God-ordained potential. He becomes “God by grace” and in this way achieves the full potential of his existence and his personhood… without the God-man and independently of Him, man always risks the danger of becoming like the devil, since sin is simultaneously the strength and the icon of the devil. Functioning independently of the God-man, man voluntarily reduces himself to a devil-like state of sin. He becomes a relative of the devil. “He that commits sin is of the devil” (1 John 3: 8). We must not forget that the principal objective of the devil is to deprive man of his God-like potential, to de-theanthropize him, to delete his Divinity, and to thus transform him into a being similar to himself. Humanistic anthropocentricity is in essence devilcenteredness. They both wish one thing: to belong only to themselves, to be only in themselves and for themselves. However, in this way, they actually bring themselves to the kingdom of the “second death” where there is neither God nor anything of God’s (Rev. 21: 8,20: 14). That which has been discussed to this point is nothing other than the evangelical, apostolic, patristic, Orthodox humanism of God (Theohumanism, Theohominism)”.
Beware what you wish for. Hell is not a pleasant place to live forever.
Anon: You wrote;
”Without the God-man, man is in fact without a head, indeed without a self, without an eternal self, without an immortal God-like self. Without the God-man, man does not exist; there is only less-than-man, half-man, or no man at all.”
You are totally correct. This is the essence of Christianity as I see it. However what escapes so many is that this is really what Karl Marx was talking about when he wrote that communism is collective self realization. Self realization is a modern language for saying the very thing you are saying. Marx criticized religion for not doing that properly. The argument between Marxism and Christianity is a straw argument. And it only makes sense on the level of superficial intellectual appearances. I salute and support your Christianity, (as I share it) but the people need to experience their god-self in a socialist context. This was Marx’s service, and why people can’t leave Marx alone. Marx spoke of that “shrewd spirit” that marks all the contradictions of history.
He knew full well what you call God was the real master of it all. It is just that the language and style of religious discourse is mutating in our times, so it is hard to keep track of all the pieces flying around.
The ‘socialist context’ you are talking about was set from the very beginning of ‘Christianity’. It is the Church founded by the God-Man. “He said to them, “Go into the whole world and proclaim the Good News [of the Resurrection from the dead] to every creature. Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved; whoever does not believe will be condemned.”
”There shall be a resurrection of the dead, both of the just and unjust” and ” those who have done good to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil to the resurrection of judgment”.
”We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come”.
Marx would have none of it.
“Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”
This may well be a useful framing of the situation.
However, it is less productive if the mind is drawn to project onto some ‘thing’ this god-conditioned thinking as an undecidable ontological reality.
The more pragmatic value is to consider the other end of the stick as an empty anti-hubrisitc antidote within the human condition or ecology of mind — a Dzanga Bai clearing in the midst of an epistemological jungle if you will.
One only needs to consider the genealogy of the mathematical zero, braided from the pragmatic Sumerian displacement zero and Indian mystical zero, closely associated with the philosophical notion of “nothingness” called Shunya (a form of salvation), to see what is necessary to make a system work. An inner space free of dogma, hubris and angst. A wheel-hub’s void for the wagon’s axil.
Remembering to provide ‘space’ for effective linkage with the (supposed) metaphysical realms is the point, imo. How that is done is cultural methodology. Such a common micro-void (within) allows self and social assemblage like keys on a key ring. Opaque virginal absence of such an opened condition within a mind’s ecology necessitates alternative external social structures and organisational mechanics for political praxis.
Werner Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle demonstrates mathematically how nothing can be predicted when under the limit of one’s resolution. Applying this Principle to the ‘Social Sciences’, when considering the actions of humans, the limits of the human mind/psyche are the limits of resolution. Therefore, splitting human behavior into parts is bound to be worth very little. It is impossible to separate one’s biases from the creation of experiments and the analysis of their data. For my money, if you want to understand human behavior, ask a dog.
Sigh…. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle says no such thing “as nothing can be predicted”, merely that the uncertainty in the product of position and momentum, or lifetime and energy, has to be of the order of Planck’s Constant (strictly, divided by 2pi) because of the wave/particle duality. The Uncertainty Principle derives from experiment (the diffraction of electrons) and the De Broglie equation: wavelength = Planck’s constant divided by momentum (lambda = h/p).
An everyday experience of the Uncertainty Principle is the high-pressure sodium street lamp. The low-pressure sodium lamp gave out the hideous yellow colour of the 589nm sodium line, but under high pressure the lifetime of excited sodium atoms between collisions with other sodium atoms is so short that the Uncertainty Principle kicks in, and light is emitted over a wide range, giving a white light.
Much of the American and Western “left” is a phony left or a Synthetic Left.
One of interesting facets of the Cold War, which many people don’t even realize, is how the United States and its spook agencies like the CIA (or related outfits like Congress for Cultural Freedom) actively cultivated a Controlled Left that was anti-Soviet Union and anti-Communist in both the Western intellectual and artistic class.
The Frankfort School (like Adorno et al.) and subsequent Post-Modernists philosophers like Michel Foucault and Jacque Derrida are the political spawn of the CIA-controlled Synthetic Left.
The CIA thus was massively involved in bankrolling and promoting everything from esoteric artistic trends like Abstract Impressionism to “leftist” literary journals like the Partisan Review to numerous “progressive” intellectuals like Irving Kristol (daddy of Bill Kristol), Hannah Arendt, and George Orwell.
The hated “Neoconservatives” of today are in many ways the result of this Synthetic Left, as their political forefathers like Irving Kristol originally began as Trotskyites or Socialists, whom the CIA promoted against the Soviet Union.
In addition to its anti-Soviet and anti-Communist politics, the USA created this Synthetic Left in order to downplay issues of class, capitalism, and imperialism in favor of identity politics like race, gender, and later sexuality. Indeed, this Synthetic Left would increasingly argue that all forms of truth, reality, and identity were socially constructed, malleable, and fluid. Hence, the LGBTQwerty world that we live in today.
Sound familiar?
What Right Wingers today derisively call “Cultural Marxism” is really just the US Government/CIA-created Synthetic Left!
Frances Stonor Saunders’ _Who Paid the Piper?: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War_ and _The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters_ are among the best books on this history of the Synthetic Left.
The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters
http://moscowamerican.com/images/c/ca/The_Cultural_Cold_War_The_CIA_and_the_World_of_Arts_and_Letters_Frances_Stonor_Saunders.pdf
The CIA and the Cultural Cold War Revisited
https://monthlyreview.org/1999/11/01/the-cia-and-the-cultural-cold-war-revisited/
THE CIA READS FRENCH THEORY: ON THE INTELLECTUAL LABOR OF DISMANTLING THE CULTURAL LEFT
https://www.greanvillepost.com/2021/07/23/the-cia-reads-french-theory-on-the-intellectual-labor-of-dismantling-the-cultural-left/
How the CIA cultivates a fake left: From the cultural cold war to intersectional imperialism
https://www.greanvillepost.com/2021/05/13/how-the-cia-cultivates-a-fake-left-from-the-cultural-cold-war-to-intersectional-imperialism/
How to tell the false left from the real left—an intro to The Synthetic Left
https://www.greanvillepost.com/2020/06/22/how-to-tell-the-false-left-from-the-real-left-an-intro-to-the-synthetic-left/
Yes, all these facts are correct. Still, there is an elephant in the room: The Euro-centric, backward, chauvinst tradition of classical Marxism. When the Western Trots curse anything they don’t approve of as Stalinism and how this Stalinism is an affront to their pure, top-notch Marxism, they have a point. Marxism stipulates that Europe and North America are the most advanced societies on Earth, boasting a particularly advanced working class that will come to the rescue of mankind. This alleged superiority of course implies that Western Marxists should run other peoples’ revolutions which is the crucial link between Marxism and neoconservatism.
Russia in particular has proven all this to be a heap of worthless, stinking rubbish. Really, as far as Russia is concerned, Marxism — along with Liberalism — stands out as a Western foreign import, aimed at destroying the Russian state and people alike. Stalin is a hero in Russia — Trotsky is not (the opposite verdict applies in the West).
Stalin and Putin are total anathema to most Westerners including those who uphold Marx, and rightfully so. These two men alone have stirred up more trouble to Western imperialism than Europe’s and North America’s entire ”Left” will ever do even if they had an entire millennium at their disposal.
Stalin trained to be a priest. He remained, albeit unconsciously to a point, attuned to the ‘soul of the Russian people’ who is profoundly religious. Why did he do what all rulers of Russia did in moments of greatest danger for Russia: take the icons of the Mother of God to the frontline, thus invoking the Protection of the Protectrice of Russia? Why did he re-open the churches? Why did he fight a ‘Patriotic’ War (like Tsar Alexander I) and not an ‘anti-fascist war’, as he was expected?
@Anonymous (the one who wrote): “Stalin trained to be a priest.”
Reminds me of a well known anecdote about Stalin’s favourite pianist, Maria Yudina, to whom Stalin awarded a prize:
https://www.classicfm.com/discover-music/latest/maria-yudina-stalin/
‘I thank you for your aid, Yosef Vissarionovich” she wrote [addressing Stalin by his patronymic]. “I will pray for you day and night and ask the Lord to forgive your great sins before the people and the country. The Lord is merciful and He’ll forgive you. I gave the money to the church that I attend.”
That prize was probably the best investment Yosef Vissarionovich ever made.
Yes, the Western Left are Western supremacists–no different from Western Liberal Democrats or Conservatives.
They all believe that they are the moral judge, jury, and dictators of the world and thus will instinctively attempt to discredit any alternative system or “rival nation” to their own fake democracies.
Malignant and demonic as they are, Western regimes and ruling classes are only a reflection of Western people themselves, who are just as criminal.
”Malignant and demonic as they are, Western regimes and ruling classes are only a reflection of Western people themselves, who are just as criminal.”
Yes — more specifically spoiled rotten. Whenever they resort to their psychological projections where Russia and China are perceived as ’enemies of the world’s peoples’, one only has to decipher their verbiage a little. To wit: ’The world’s peoples’ = The West’s 99%. And that makes profound sense.
Again, looking at the specimen of Karl Marx, there was an erstwhile commenter here Peter J Antonsen who passed the following dead right verdict upon the man and his Western adherents. 6 years ago, Antonsen wrote:
And, as I wrote myself in early March this year:
“Yes — more specifically spoiled rotten. Whenever they resort to their psychological projections where Russia and China are perceived as ’enemies of the world’s peoples’, one only has to decipher their verbiage a little. To wit: ’The world’s peoples’ = The West’s 99%. And that makes profound sense.”
I would agree. Western citizens (aka the 99%) who whine about the 1%, the elite, or the globalists are cut from the same political cloth as the 1% in that they ALL support the West’s godly right to exploit the rest of the world and thus feed their own way of life and standard of living.
In other words, the 99% want the 1% to give them a greater cut of the economic spoils of Western pillage and looting.
Neither group, however, opposes this Western pillage and looting, which they justify with Goebbelsian propaganda about “Defending Our Way of Life”; “Promoting Freedom and Democracy”; or upholding a Rules-Based World Order.
Also, here is a good article about “anti-Stalinists” who act as “left wing” propagandists for the American Empire.
The best examples of this American Imperial Left (or AIL) are the Trotskyites, Democratic Socialists, and “anarchists” like Noam Chumpsky.
“Anti-Stalinists” kill class consciousness
https://rainershea.com/f/%E2%80%9Canti-stalinists%E2%80%9D-kill-class-consciousness
So who are the righteous peoples?—And the righteous system?—Do we look to the so-called Islamic civilization offered by the assorted truly pious Salafists, Wahhabists, Taliban or Iranian Shia Islamic revolutionaries? A close analysis of the way they live and organize shows that they offer a “God’s brave new world order” where every adult would live and act in a very micromanaged, microregulated, simple, humble, restricted style resembling monks and nuns. There would of course be no more consumer capitalism, and planetary resources would be used drastically less. There would be something like zero population growth since presumably all sexual contact between men and women would be also microregulated and limited only to approved clinical procedure like a handshake specifically and only to conceive a child as “approved”. Wouldn’t that just fit in with true globalist agenda for the 99% of the world, be that in the “West” or the “South” or wherever. Maybe that is why deeper state global actors from the West may actually favor these truly pious Salafists, Wahhabists, Taliban and Shia Iranian revolutionaries and their civilizational model as against the chaotic and much too free-wheeling secular world.
As for Russia, to use that as a model society,—whole mysterious “Russian soul” is riddled with very bloody warlike history no better than anything from the “West” and also riddled with weird Ukrainophobia,—freaking out that any organized group of people calling themselves “Ukrainians” even exist, and insanely freaking out that some dreaded language called “Ukrainian” even exists [is that language really so impossible for a Russian to learn, where Polish, Serbian, Belarussian, any other Slavonic language is okay], so that there are only these so-called “little” Russians, namely, “despicable fake Russians” to be gotten rid of and the land they now occupy to be re-settled by the “true and great” Russians, from the population around Moscow and from the regions to the northeast and north of Moscow, who have the “correct true Russian soul”.—No, that does not look like a model righteous society either.—Putin has voiced “Ideas” about “unity” of the “Russians” and “Ukrainians” but many Russians definitely do not talk and behave like they consider themselves and Ukrainians to be one people, not at all.—That is very obvious in many of the blog posts here.
This time around, I’ll be focusing entirely upon Russia/Ukraine. Sincerely, I don’t find the above, mostly void, conjecture about the Islamic world and its impact on our global future particularly inspiring or even relevant.
So here goes:
”As for Russia, to use that as a model society,— whose mysterious ’Russian soul’ is riddled with very bloody warlike history no better than anything from the ’West’ and also riddled with weird Ukrainophobia — freaking out that any organized group of people calling themselves ’Ukrainians’ even exist”
Dead wrong. Sure, Russia’s history is rife with grisly violence, but a considerable part of it was due to Western campaigns of conquest. And, very tellingly, a crucial difference to Russia’s advantage is that, unlike the West, there is no messianic urge to genocide in the Russian ethos and, by extension, the Russian culture. Modern Western, especially Pindo, ”mass culture” speaks for itself.
Ukrainophobia — well, yes and no. Putin has stated that Russians and Ukrainians are one people. Judging by the exodus of Ukrainians to Russia, there seems to be substance to this claim. Still, the true mental sickness which is Ukrainian Russophobia suggests that there are some non-negligible differences between the populations. Russia and Ukraine went through the same Liberal hell 30 years ago in the wake of the break-up of the USSR, but it only spawned fascist degeneracy and extreme chauvinism — in the form of Bandernazism — in Ukraine. This should really call into question the mental sanity of Ukrainians as a people (just like the mental status of the similarly minded Pindos should be). Ukraine under its current, fabulous Bandernazi ”leadership” is depopulating, so the non-existence of Ukrainians (except as a diaspora) is hence no baseless contention.
“UkroNazis” and “Bandera-Nazis” would not have existed then nor exist now had it not been for the murderous pogrom of the Ukrainian communists by the Russian Pavel Postyshev and his gang in the early 1930s at the
same time as the murderous famine of common rank and file Ukrainians was also implemented. Stalin himself
was neither Russian nor Ukrainian and at that time would have had no personal “dog in the fight” but someone persuaded him that Ukrainians needed to be killed, as many as possible under the circumstances.
Marx is disqualified by association with Hyndman, Plekhanov, Engels, and Bukharin? How?
Hegel was an interruption? Really?
Marx rises again in the comments here to become the most numerously mentioned name. No surprise.
It seems to me that the struggle, evident on this page as a whole, is very much like the struggle waged by some of us who respect Marx’s work, to get our comrades to read and appreciate the entire field of philosophy, of which Marx’s work is an outstanding part.
A selective canon that excludes Marx is as defective as one that contains Marx and his followers alone.
As it was in the early 1840s, so it will have to be again. There will have to be a through reckoning of all philosophy before the world can make a good resolution and a good break.
A sign of this happening will be the inclusion, without embarrassment, of Marx’s works in introductions to general discussion such as the article above; and a corresponding growth of awareness among his fans that Marx’s works stand within a context that is as old and continuous as literature itself.
One thing that has notably changed is that it is now possible to read a great deal of the necessary, original material for free on the Internet, at, for example, marxists.org.
A most enjoyably well-written article. My only comment is to raise a caution about classifying Heidegger as an ‘existentialist’ (a label he rejected) — or as a ‘postmodernist’ (especially those among them who attempt to reduce everything to subjectivity). Since Heidegger asserts that there is only one world (Dasein as Being-in-the-world, NOT Being-in-a-world), then it follows that there is a continuity between the existential modes of zuhanden (ready-to-hand) and vorhanden (present-at-hand), and a continuity of truth as aletheia (ontological disclosure). In other words, mere subjectivity is as impossible as mere objectivity; they are a continuum.
Remarkably, what all of these mentioned philosophies fail to address about the concept of “free will” or “freedom of choice” is what is observable in experience.—The freedom of choice is basically due to the limitations of our foreknowledge of all the ultimate consequences of each of our decisions. If we had such perfect foreknowledge then this foreknowledge would control our choices and those choices would no longer be very free. So then the only ultimate choice would be: do we choose the journey of ever increasing victories, successes, accomplishments, harmony, happiness and love,—or do we choose the journey of ever increasing pain and suffering, self-abasement and affliction, discord, resistance, opposition and hatred. Once the fundamental choice of journeys is made, then the perfect foreknowledge of the consequences of each given decision will guide the decision made, and there would be no more “free will” or “free choice” in those given matters.
On other issues,—what would be “socialism” and what would be “communism”? If we define “socialism” as
overall absence of profit motive and overall absence of private property, the observable examples of social organizations like that are fire departments, police departments, hospitals and emergency facilities, and the military. There, all main items of property are not private, and the profit motive—as motivating behavior within the given institution itself—is not significant. There is of course less individual freedoms, and more overall regimentation, but there would be no unemployment, and everyone would have some nourishment and shelter.—And what about a society where economy be automatic, driven by computers and algorithms responsive to orders punched in. You could just order and custom-build and procure for yourself any item you wanted. You would not need to work for it, or work for the money to purchase it. There would really be no money and no debt. And no work as drudgery. Would that be the true “high communism” or “advanced communism”?
Yet would all the drawbacks and troubles in human nature be thereby resolved? I still think not.
On the issue of Stalin’s socialism “only in one country” versus Trotsky’s socialism as “world revolution” one might realize, if assuming as truth that the “communist revolution” was actually supported and constructed
as a social-control experiment by global business elites, then of course they would prefer Stalin’s approach
to limit the implementation of the so-called revolution only to one global region, the former Russian Empire, and therefore Stalin would indeed be more popular.
And then there is Solzhenitzyn’s mention about humans forgetting “God”—yet absolutely critical is how does
one define “God” and what does it really mean to be attuned to God and God’s will, in this world. The eminent tactic of the Devil is to trick humans into believing they do the work of “God” when they actually do devilish work.—That has happened countless times in recorded human history.
Lenin and his pals were shipped to Russia by the Germans as a bacillus — a deadly toxin designed to destroy Russia as a fighting force. Withdrawal from the Great War was a good in itself. Sure. But the Russian Revolution derailed Russia’s development as a modern industrial society. And it wasn’t just the Germans promoting the Bolshevik bacillus. The Anglo-Americans had their own agents in play as well.
Likewise, Hitler was injected into the German body politic by Central Bankers (Schacht and Norman) as well as huge corporate money from the likes of the Bush- Harriman gang, along with Rockefeller and Morgan resources.
“empirical-quantitative methodology”
Yes.
This method is no longer fashionable or “trendy”.
Back in 1944 our Viennese cousins kept excellent records.
The only issue was the nomenclature regarding “nationality” on the records.
They were busy in those latter days of 1944.
The gravity drop blade in the beheading machine could easily process 20 political prisoners per day.
The problem: the advancing Russian Army could use those prisoners for the Nuremberg trials.
So the heads had to come off and the records were sent to Berlin, only to be found in a cellar 20 years later.
To this day the graves of the beheaded are hidden away, well away, with more than one soul to a grave.
No one talks about these souls.
There was an attempt around 2009 to address those dark days.
A few Viennese officials cleansed their guilt for a day, and then quickly moved on.
The assault on the DPR and LPR was about to begin in a short 4 years.
There was a business plan to present, the asset stripping UA harvest was to begin, and the Danube was busy with freight.
Some how they had to pump Euro 15 billion into KIEV and get that EU public money off shore as fast as possible.
They made one mistake.
They under estimated the strength and sheer will power of the DPR and LPR people.
Such a bitter disappointment, but no matter, the money was easy, the Nazi flags flew and everybody was happy.
The Kiev thugs failed to murder the people in The Crimea, but they had a wonderful time in the Trades Hall massacre.
The CIA report was written with perfect prose and was hidden away.
Life was so good for the KIEV crowd, the USA was over the moon.
The Rand Corporation Plan of slow and steady genocide of the DPR and LPR continued.
The western guys were thrilled with the UA women and “couch casting” was big business.
You see, that is all that was left of the west UA, the harvesting of the women folk.
The Canadian Bandera crowd realised they were in perfect focus and BINGO they had a big fire to destroy the records.
A few stones were turned over and a few creatures of the Neo Nazi cult were disturbed here and there.
And all the while some of us documented, and followed carefully.
This time we had the records and we sent them all around the world for everyone to see.
Such a bitter blow to the prestige of Brussels, Berlin and Vienna.
As for the “international community” well, they were really annoyed.
They settled down a little when they realised the “game was up” so to say.
Even the Rand Corporation was “taken by surprise” when they realised that the Black Sea was no longer available.
The bluff was called, and nothing at all happened.