"I don’t follow the traditional media’s coverage of the war in Ukraine very much—I leave that to those with stronger stomachs—but it’s impossible to ignore the two mixed and confused messages they broadcast about the chances of ending that war more-or-less peacefully. On the one hand, “talking to Putin” should be a capital crime, and any move suggesting that the West does so is a form of treason. On the other, newer and better wonder-weapons must be sent to Ukraine to “force Putin to the negotiating table."
Of course the messages are contradictory, just as we hear that Ukraine is on the cusp of victory so we must send troops now. Russia is both on the brink of collapse and at the same time about to overrun Dublin.
That's not the point. The arguments are incoherent because facts, evidence, logic, etc. are of interest to the sociopaths that rule over us, solely to the extent to which they can be weaponized at that particular moment. Thus, we are assured that we only have peaceful intentions regarding Russia and at the same time we need to gear up to invade. We're bringing democracy, see, and at the same time acting with the express and stated intent of destroying that country.
Similarly, you may note that the messianic impulses that the PMC so touchingly express with regard to the benighted residents of Darkest Africa happen to be entirely self-serving.
We are not governed by well-meaning idealists who are sometimes a bit muddleheaded and who confuse "credentials" with "education" and "education" with "wisdom". We are ruled over by full-blown Game Of Thrones sociopaths.
Dublin?!!! Damn! Last time I checked they had just landed in Cork!
I see things in a similar way. In order to ha a correct analysis of the situation, we have to separate two things. One is the PMC ideology itself as described by Aurelien. The other, equally important, is that this ideology is used by the “higher ups” (the Board of Directors running the PMCs) to justify, obfuscate & cover up their own goals. Those folks don’t give a shyte about Democracy and Progress in Irak or Lybia. They have different objectives, like control of critical resources, destabilization or neighbors via proxies, or punishing folks for even dreaming of conducting oil sales in other currencies than US$…
Yet another nice treatise about those evil Muslims who want to kill the Westerners for who they are, but not a peep about those righteous jews who slaughter Palestinians for being Palestinians and living in Palestine, in numbers several orders of magnitude higher. Mileikowsky, Jr. actually bragged about this during a recent speech to the UN, non? Talking about hadiths, theological strictures, etc. of Islam is OK, why not also mention the claim that some “god”, or a celestial real-estate office, gave the deed of a certain area to jews? Did our host read the speeches of Itamar Ben-Gvir, Blelazel Smotrich, et. al? What about the pronouncements of christian zionist Huckabee, US ambassador to Israel? Are these folk PMC? Who engineered the collapse of Syria, Iraq and Libya? Who tried to take over and partition Russia? The PMC? Surely our host is joking. The PMC are nothing but a bunch of lick-spittle footpads doing the bidding of their masters.
Good! Aurelien identifies the PMC ideology as the main driving force, while conveniently ignoring the objectives of the higher up peoples that employ the PMCs. After all, the PMC is just the “middle management” of the imperial enterprise.
I think you illustrate my point. I'm talking about the PMC's failure to comprehend certain things, I'm not laying about me in blind rage against the evils of the world. Muslims as a whole do not want to kill foreigners. Islamists, on the other hand, want to start by killing other Muslims. All this is exhaustively documented, and, if you don't want to find out about it, I can't help you.
Thanks for taking the time to respond. I am honored. IMO. discussing only "political islam" while neglecting the far more virulent, and murderous, "political zionism" with its Amalek fixation, and “political (evangelical) christianity" whose adherents are supporting the "political zionists” to hasten the arrival of a celestial Hoover is disingenuous. Particularly since political zionsim and its supporters in the west have provided arms, ammo, financial support and safe havens to "political islamists” in various countries for quite a while. The case of Syria is well documented. One also wonders why one would ask Hezbollah of Lebanon to disarm, in line with the two zio-clowns US keeps sending over there, while ignoring the ongoing genocide carried out by "political zionists". The PMC are bit-players in these operations. I hope they will be identified as “Amalek” one of these days.
"...political zionsim and its supporters in the west have provided arms, ammo, financial support and safe havens to "political islamists” in various countries for quite a while." - Spot on. Any one, who's agnostic about MI6, their best students French DGSE, their another (hugely overrated) students Mossad and CIA money suppliers as a creators and curators of "political islamists" like Daesh and Afghan mujahideen, would readily declare, that all they want is to kill westerners, 'cause they "hate our freedom and democracy", any time they pop up from the box they were put in since the last mission, that was either suspended to be recalled in due time or called off.
One topic at a time. Though A. seems to ramble a bit here the focus is on the “foundations” of the PMC and the clash of everyone against the PMC and their hangers-on. Indeed, why not cite the genocides going on in east Africa. There are more than enough local disasters that you can cite, but again they are results, not causes. And perhaps there are no answers.
They all want to kill us? But who are "they"? I don't think Iran wants to kill me. Do you? Neither the Russians, or the Chinese. Not even the North-Koreans or the Saudis. And I even doubt Hamas wants to kill me (only Jews from Israel, but that's a long story). There are no "Other" (vs. Us). There are many different others (some of them radicals, for sure). This article is a mess.
And by the way: if you asked me to fix some problem in your computer - well, I won't be the right person to fix it, that's for sure, also. Perhaps someone else? Do you know that poem from António Machado: Caminante, no hay camino, se hace camino el andar? That's the solution.
If you read the essay again you will find no reference to Iran, let alone to the other countries you mention. But unless your head is deeply and irrevocably stuck in the sand you will know that there is a phenomenon known as Political Islam, which seeks political power, and that there are extremist violent Islamist groups who seek power through the barrel of a gun. If you don't know about this, well, there are shelves of studies on it.
In case you didn't read my comment properly, I also mentioned radical Islam. What I was criticizing was precisely your silence on the different forms of Islam, especially in ancient states like Iran. That doesn't help in trying to understand the world. I think.
You repeatedly recommend Naked Capitalism, as if they were insightful.
I stopped reading them (and never trusted 'em much) when, as the Covid Emergency was winding down, they screamed to high heaven that We Are Doomed, since things were actually, really, really getting worse.
Complete fantasy -- arrogant misreading of statistics, without a smidgen of doubt.
So.
Forgive me when I suspect something similar of your own self.
Your last line is a cowardly backhanded insult. You are both a pussy and a prick, sans stones. Why not do readers a favor and stop coming here too? Naked Capitalism is not a singular voice and they are mostly an aggregator site. Which one of the tens of thousands of links they have shared are you opposed to the most? I smell PMC fear.
Likewise. Haven't been back since. Insufferable, arrogant, pr**ks! They sure removed the mote from my eye regarding statistics, though. I'll never look at them the same again.
It's hard for the West to stay the fuck out of Belgium, which is where the majority of the 2015-16 killers came from. I really suggest you go and educate yourself a bit, and then we'll talk again.
That’s hardly a fair-minded reply. For most of the historical interactions of Islam and the west the two sides have been more or less evenly matched in technology, barbarism and animosity. However, since the late 19th century up to the present the west has had a technological lead. It has used this advantage to lay to waste on a large scale the political and often also economic progress of most Islamic countries. (For example, Britain in Egypt, Iran and Palestine, France in Syria and Algeria, both, with Italy, in Libya). These events have led in some cases to population displacements from ‘east’ to ‘west’. The fact that some of these people come to try to enact some kind of futile revenge is merely a by-product of previous events, generally initiated by the west. So ‘eg’s comment is perfectly reasonable, while your reply is surprisingly, to me anyway, a bit intemperate.
Just what the US did to the industrial giant of Western Hemisphere Argentina. To their German fellow Europeans, if Americans still consider themselves as a derivative of European civilisation.
I had to re-read the essay because I couldn't recall any mention of Belgium, but presumably this where the men who committed the atrocity in Paris came from?
Jams has caught the drift of my comment. I accept responsibility for not being clear enough.
Incessant change isn't fetishised purely on a basis of irrational aesthetic preference; it's a direct consequence of the policy personnel aping the social behavior of whichever social groups possess those who demonstrate the most personal power. The 'titans of industry' are adulated and the liquid modernity they cultivate is embraced because those titans are observed to get much more status behavior and deference at a meeting than some minister might in a comparable situation of their own.
The rank of having the most comparative capacity for unbridled personal power has only been the preserve of technological services firms for three decades however. In the eighties it was celebrity that took the top spot and electoral politics before that and aristocracy before that. Any decent attempt to restrain this should consider new sumptuary laws.
I wouldn't say the Russians are paying no notice. They are, and it makes them even more deeply cynical about the West. They haven't failed to pick up, for instance, on what minorities deserve protection in Western eyes, and which ones can burn for all they care (including literally, the Russians haven't forgotten the Trade Union Building in Odessa). The Russians have given up, and the idea that anything will penetrate the Western narrative seems ludicrous. Targeting the Rest, yes, there is a point. This is rather a pity because Russia is a European country to a greater degree than it is any other kind of country. But Europe has shown quite clearly it doesn't want Russia as part of it, despite all the trying from the Russian side (Europe from Lisbon to Vladivostok, anyone?). Ah well, what can you do?
If the West started treating Russia as a real place rather than a repository for its fears and frustrations, that might help somewhat. And it's not like there aren't specialists with a reasonable understanding of the country. But paying attention to them is viewed as tantamount to treason. I've seen people argue that someone should not be listened to precisely because he speaks the language and spent time in Russia (so must have got infected with the Putinism virus?.. It's safest to rely on the opinion of those entirely clueless). Once again, what can you do?
I'm currently reading "Structures fondamentales des sociétés humaines" by Bernard Lahire (you didn't? stop everything you're doing and go buy it right now) and I can't help but remark that there's a naive sociology hiding behind the Liberal / Recentist / Progressist world-view, which is profoundly contradictory, being both anchored in the postmodern belief that there can't be laws of History, of Sociology, that Humans are fundamentally Free (ah ah ah), and on the other hand the unexpressed, implicit belief in some Iron Rules driving societies, i.e. a naive, irrational anthropology.
Syrian President: ‘We Can’t Judge Today Based on Past Rules’
(He seems to invert a core woke item - ‘We can’t judge the past based on the rules of today’).
Oprah, pardon, David Petraeus smiling and sliding into Al Jolani’s derriere: ‘Please help us understand how you got from Al Qaeda in Iraq 20 years ago to where you are today: Syria’s head of state on stage in New York City’. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/iQjfkf9cpmw
Americans just can't resist personal reinvention. And if things don't work out - it's Syria - Al Jolani, let's call him AJ from now on, AJ can become a life coach in New York under Zamdani's progressive blooming of NYC.
It's a decade or three since I read The Unconscious Civilisation and Voltaire's Bastards by John Ralston Saul (https://www.johnralstonsaul.com/non-fiction-books/) But perhaps anyone interested in Aurelien's main point might find them relevant. Perhaps Aurelien could comment on how useful they are?
I hate playing a Korean, but this essay reminds me of that great paradox in modern Korean history that modern Koreans themselves insist on rejecting.
"Modernization theory," even before the theory was formed, was the force that shaped the creation of the modern Korean state from late 19th century onward (or, likely earlier): the "forward looking" Korean elites decided that mimicking "advanced" nations was the way to bring their nation out of backwardness--social, economic, and political. For a brief while, Japan was the object to be emulated, but, within couple of decades, the paragon was the US, which went hand in hand with intense Southern Methodist missionary activities in Korea. Everyone who was anyone became Protestant and went to college in US. Ironically, the apotheosis of all these was Syngman Rhee, who fitted the stereotype of the modern PMC, before PMC became the thing, complete with Ivy League degrees--Harvard and, later, a Princeton PhD. Generally, a good talker, completely nebulous when it came to his "ideology," other than his belief that he was the chosen of God to lead his people to modernity, and utterly vicious and unscrupulous politics, justified because he was doing what was right--granted, his religious fundamentalism is not exactly Western PMC ideology, but Protestantism was a "modern" foreign thing at the time. Oh, and generally irresponsible, directionless, and incompetent policymaking--but it didn't matter because he was making the country "modern.". Ironically, things didn't go well under his rule: the internal contradictions of his regime blew up, he resigned in face of massive protests, and his intellectual successors conveniently disowned him--because modernity can't fail and can only be failed, and if you failed, you can't be a true modern and all that. And so his successor, Park, himself a mess of contradictions--who actually did get things done--is despised as the hated enemy.
There was a review of the acclaimed (by Western PMC) Korean movie Parasite that made what I thought was a remarkable observation: that it was making the kind of social critique that made PMC very comfortable. I didn't quite realize this until then, but that sort of "smarminess" is exactly what made me really uncomfortable with modern Korean art projects that Western PMCs like--like the author Han Kang.
"That's progress." An exclamation common in my long ago youth and even middle age. I would think or say, "Progress? Toward what. And why is change for its own sake necessarily desirable." Maybe it came from having a father who was a Taft republican. When I was quite young, I did not think well of that, but soon came to see that while Mr. Taft may not have been the one to carry the ideas forward, the ideas deserved due consideration. Unthinking attachment to that which is happening now is a mark not of being modern but of being unthinking. As the war in Ukraine gets older, it looks ever more complicated. Russia has prevailed on the battlefield. It will continue to do so. The shooting finally stops, mostly stops. What then? Zelensky et al will likely be gone? Will the rump Ukraine know peace and prosperity? in the short and middle term, it will not. Mr. Putin retires. Will Russia change in the direction the West, the PMC in the West, has desired. No, it will not. Will it collapse. No, it will not. So what was the war about? I have an answer for that but it is too detailed for this comment. Short version for the western PMC: Gain control of Russia. For Russia: see the draft treaties of December 2021. So what has been the result? Borders have changed. Many have died. Russia is stronger than ever. Ukraine is destroyed. The attitude of the West is unchanged. But there has been change and isn't that progress?
If I may be so gauche as to refer you to a prefab adjacency, please see my Substack post "Après Moi, le Deluluge," which touches on force and the irreconcilable by way of a cast of thousands, among them Hannah Arendt and Humpty Dumpty:
For class war, "victim migrants" replaced workers, "evil whites" replaced capitalists. Fake science now spews climate & vax nonsense instead of crops. Same rage for planned economy, bureaucracy, and same lefty bourgeois class that killed free-market right in Europe by screaming "fascist!"
Start here:
"I don’t follow the traditional media’s coverage of the war in Ukraine very much—I leave that to those with stronger stomachs—but it’s impossible to ignore the two mixed and confused messages they broadcast about the chances of ending that war more-or-less peacefully. On the one hand, “talking to Putin” should be a capital crime, and any move suggesting that the West does so is a form of treason. On the other, newer and better wonder-weapons must be sent to Ukraine to “force Putin to the negotiating table."
Of course the messages are contradictory, just as we hear that Ukraine is on the cusp of victory so we must send troops now. Russia is both on the brink of collapse and at the same time about to overrun Dublin.
That's not the point. The arguments are incoherent because facts, evidence, logic, etc. are of interest to the sociopaths that rule over us, solely to the extent to which they can be weaponized at that particular moment. Thus, we are assured that we only have peaceful intentions regarding Russia and at the same time we need to gear up to invade. We're bringing democracy, see, and at the same time acting with the express and stated intent of destroying that country.
Similarly, you may note that the messianic impulses that the PMC so touchingly express with regard to the benighted residents of Darkest Africa happen to be entirely self-serving.
We are not governed by well-meaning idealists who are sometimes a bit muddleheaded and who confuse "credentials" with "education" and "education" with "wisdom". We are ruled over by full-blown Game Of Thrones sociopaths.
Dublin?!!! Damn! Last time I checked they had just landed in Cork!
I see things in a similar way. In order to ha a correct analysis of the situation, we have to separate two things. One is the PMC ideology itself as described by Aurelien. The other, equally important, is that this ideology is used by the “higher ups” (the Board of Directors running the PMCs) to justify, obfuscate & cover up their own goals. Those folks don’t give a shyte about Democracy and Progress in Irak or Lybia. They have different objectives, like control of critical resources, destabilization or neighbors via proxies, or punishing folks for even dreaming of conducting oil sales in other currencies than US$…
Yet another nice treatise about those evil Muslims who want to kill the Westerners for who they are, but not a peep about those righteous jews who slaughter Palestinians for being Palestinians and living in Palestine, in numbers several orders of magnitude higher. Mileikowsky, Jr. actually bragged about this during a recent speech to the UN, non? Talking about hadiths, theological strictures, etc. of Islam is OK, why not also mention the claim that some “god”, or a celestial real-estate office, gave the deed of a certain area to jews? Did our host read the speeches of Itamar Ben-Gvir, Blelazel Smotrich, et. al? What about the pronouncements of christian zionist Huckabee, US ambassador to Israel? Are these folk PMC? Who engineered the collapse of Syria, Iraq and Libya? Who tried to take over and partition Russia? The PMC? Surely our host is joking. The PMC are nothing but a bunch of lick-spittle footpads doing the bidding of their masters.
Good! Aurelien identifies the PMC ideology as the main driving force, while conveniently ignoring the objectives of the higher up peoples that employ the PMCs. After all, the PMC is just the “middle management” of the imperial enterprise.
I think you illustrate my point. I'm talking about the PMC's failure to comprehend certain things, I'm not laying about me in blind rage against the evils of the world. Muslims as a whole do not want to kill foreigners. Islamists, on the other hand, want to start by killing other Muslims. All this is exhaustively documented, and, if you don't want to find out about it, I can't help you.
Thanks for taking the time to respond. I am honored. IMO. discussing only "political islam" while neglecting the far more virulent, and murderous, "political zionism" with its Amalek fixation, and “political (evangelical) christianity" whose adherents are supporting the "political zionists” to hasten the arrival of a celestial Hoover is disingenuous. Particularly since political zionsim and its supporters in the west have provided arms, ammo, financial support and safe havens to "political islamists” in various countries for quite a while. The case of Syria is well documented. One also wonders why one would ask Hezbollah of Lebanon to disarm, in line with the two zio-clowns US keeps sending over there, while ignoring the ongoing genocide carried out by "political zionists". The PMC are bit-players in these operations. I hope they will be identified as “Amalek” one of these days.
"...political zionsim and its supporters in the west have provided arms, ammo, financial support and safe havens to "political islamists” in various countries for quite a while." - Spot on. Any one, who's agnostic about MI6, their best students French DGSE, their another (hugely overrated) students Mossad and CIA money suppliers as a creators and curators of "political islamists" like Daesh and Afghan mujahideen, would readily declare, that all they want is to kill westerners, 'cause they "hate our freedom and democracy", any time they pop up from the box they were put in since the last mission, that was either suspended to be recalled in due time or called off.
I wonder why the Egyptian build a taller wall than trump against the "good palestinian"...
Maybe they know something that you "don't remember" ?
There is NO place in the world were any people can live pacifically when Islam is ruling the country.
One topic at a time. Though A. seems to ramble a bit here the focus is on the “foundations” of the PMC and the clash of everyone against the PMC and their hangers-on. Indeed, why not cite the genocides going on in east Africa. There are more than enough local disasters that you can cite, but again they are results, not causes. And perhaps there are no answers.
They all want to kill us? But who are "they"? I don't think Iran wants to kill me. Do you? Neither the Russians, or the Chinese. Not even the North-Koreans or the Saudis. And I even doubt Hamas wants to kill me (only Jews from Israel, but that's a long story). There are no "Other" (vs. Us). There are many different others (some of them radicals, for sure). This article is a mess.
And by the way: if you asked me to fix some problem in your computer - well, I won't be the right person to fix it, that's for sure, also. Perhaps someone else? Do you know that poem from António Machado: Caminante, no hay camino, se hace camino el andar? That's the solution.
If you read the essay again you will find no reference to Iran, let alone to the other countries you mention. But unless your head is deeply and irrevocably stuck in the sand you will know that there is a phenomenon known as Political Islam, which seeks political power, and that there are extremist violent Islamist groups who seek power through the barrel of a gun. If you don't know about this, well, there are shelves of studies on it.
In case you didn't read my comment properly, I also mentioned radical Islam. What I was criticizing was precisely your silence on the different forms of Islam, especially in ancient states like Iran. That doesn't help in trying to understand the world. I think.
You doubt that the hamas or other islamist want to kill you as a jew ? LOL !?
Check the population of jews in islamist country 1950 and check now.
You repeatedly recommend Naked Capitalism, as if they were insightful.
I stopped reading them (and never trusted 'em much) when, as the Covid Emergency was winding down, they screamed to high heaven that We Are Doomed, since things were actually, really, really getting worse.
Complete fantasy -- arrogant misreading of statistics, without a smidgen of doubt.
So.
Forgive me when I suspect something similar of your own self.
Your last line is a cowardly backhanded insult. You are both a pussy and a prick, sans stones. Why not do readers a favor and stop coming here too? Naked Capitalism is not a singular voice and they are mostly an aggregator site. Which one of the tens of thousands of links they have shared are you opposed to the most? I smell PMC fear.
Likewise. Haven't been back since. Insufferable, arrogant, pr**ks! They sure removed the mote from my eye regarding statistics, though. I'll never look at them the same again.
You are free to expose yourself to whatever pathogens you like. Just don't expect me to join you in your race to claim the Darwin Award ...
Under educated and over socialized.
Education - and especially academia - should take its share of the blame.
But how did almost all Western countries converge on having such a PMC? Why is it such a universal phenomenon in Western countries?
Because the PMC controls the means of economic production.
You can run a business without investment capital, ESOPS, worker management and whatnot are different types of workarounds. There are others.
You cannot so much as run a hot dog stand without management.
"They" want to kill "us" because they want us to stay the fuck out of their countries. Can't say as I blame them, really.
It's hard for the West to stay the fuck out of Belgium, which is where the majority of the 2015-16 killers came from. I really suggest you go and educate yourself a bit, and then we'll talk again.
That’s hardly a fair-minded reply. For most of the historical interactions of Islam and the west the two sides have been more or less evenly matched in technology, barbarism and animosity. However, since the late 19th century up to the present the west has had a technological lead. It has used this advantage to lay to waste on a large scale the political and often also economic progress of most Islamic countries. (For example, Britain in Egypt, Iran and Palestine, France in Syria and Algeria, both, with Italy, in Libya). These events have led in some cases to population displacements from ‘east’ to ‘west’. The fact that some of these people come to try to enact some kind of futile revenge is merely a by-product of previous events, generally initiated by the west. So ‘eg’s comment is perfectly reasonable, while your reply is surprisingly, to me anyway, a bit intemperate.
Just what the US did to the industrial giant of Western Hemisphere Argentina. To their German fellow Europeans, if Americans still consider themselves as a derivative of European civilisation.
I had to re-read the essay because I couldn't recall any mention of Belgium, but presumably this where the men who committed the atrocity in Paris came from?
Jams has caught the drift of my comment. I accept responsibility for not being clear enough.
Incessant change isn't fetishised purely on a basis of irrational aesthetic preference; it's a direct consequence of the policy personnel aping the social behavior of whichever social groups possess those who demonstrate the most personal power. The 'titans of industry' are adulated and the liquid modernity they cultivate is embraced because those titans are observed to get much more status behavior and deference at a meeting than some minister might in a comparable situation of their own.
The rank of having the most comparative capacity for unbridled personal power has only been the preserve of technological services firms for three decades however. In the eighties it was celebrity that took the top spot and electoral politics before that and aristocracy before that. Any decent attempt to restrain this should consider new sumptuary laws.
I wouldn't say the Russians are paying no notice. They are, and it makes them even more deeply cynical about the West. They haven't failed to pick up, for instance, on what minorities deserve protection in Western eyes, and which ones can burn for all they care (including literally, the Russians haven't forgotten the Trade Union Building in Odessa). The Russians have given up, and the idea that anything will penetrate the Western narrative seems ludicrous. Targeting the Rest, yes, there is a point. This is rather a pity because Russia is a European country to a greater degree than it is any other kind of country. But Europe has shown quite clearly it doesn't want Russia as part of it, despite all the trying from the Russian side (Europe from Lisbon to Vladivostok, anyone?). Ah well, what can you do?
If the West started treating Russia as a real place rather than a repository for its fears and frustrations, that might help somewhat. And it's not like there aren't specialists with a reasonable understanding of the country. But paying attention to them is viewed as tantamount to treason. I've seen people argue that someone should not be listened to precisely because he speaks the language and spent time in Russia (so must have got infected with the Putinism virus?.. It's safest to rely on the opinion of those entirely clueless). Once again, what can you do?
I'm currently reading "Structures fondamentales des sociétés humaines" by Bernard Lahire (you didn't? stop everything you're doing and go buy it right now) and I can't help but remark that there's a naive sociology hiding behind the Liberal / Recentist / Progressist world-view, which is profoundly contradictory, being both anchored in the postmodern belief that there can't be laws of History, of Sociology, that Humans are fundamentally Free (ah ah ah), and on the other hand the unexpressed, implicit belief in some Iron Rules driving societies, i.e. a naive, irrational anthropology.
The PMC does produce unrivaled comedy:
Syrian President: ‘We Can’t Judge Today Based on Past Rules’
(He seems to invert a core woke item - ‘We can’t judge the past based on the rules of today’).
Oprah, pardon, David Petraeus smiling and sliding into Al Jolani’s derriere: ‘Please help us understand how you got from Al Qaeda in Iraq 20 years ago to where you are today: Syria’s head of state on stage in New York City’. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/iQjfkf9cpmw
Americans just can't resist personal reinvention. And if things don't work out - it's Syria - Al Jolani, let's call him AJ from now on, AJ can become a life coach in New York under Zamdani's progressive blooming of NYC.
It's a decade or three since I read The Unconscious Civilisation and Voltaire's Bastards by John Ralston Saul (https://www.johnralstonsaul.com/non-fiction-books/) But perhaps anyone interested in Aurelien's main point might find them relevant. Perhaps Aurelien could comment on how useful they are?
I hate playing a Korean, but this essay reminds me of that great paradox in modern Korean history that modern Koreans themselves insist on rejecting.
"Modernization theory," even before the theory was formed, was the force that shaped the creation of the modern Korean state from late 19th century onward (or, likely earlier): the "forward looking" Korean elites decided that mimicking "advanced" nations was the way to bring their nation out of backwardness--social, economic, and political. For a brief while, Japan was the object to be emulated, but, within couple of decades, the paragon was the US, which went hand in hand with intense Southern Methodist missionary activities in Korea. Everyone who was anyone became Protestant and went to college in US. Ironically, the apotheosis of all these was Syngman Rhee, who fitted the stereotype of the modern PMC, before PMC became the thing, complete with Ivy League degrees--Harvard and, later, a Princeton PhD. Generally, a good talker, completely nebulous when it came to his "ideology," other than his belief that he was the chosen of God to lead his people to modernity, and utterly vicious and unscrupulous politics, justified because he was doing what was right--granted, his religious fundamentalism is not exactly Western PMC ideology, but Protestantism was a "modern" foreign thing at the time. Oh, and generally irresponsible, directionless, and incompetent policymaking--but it didn't matter because he was making the country "modern.". Ironically, things didn't go well under his rule: the internal contradictions of his regime blew up, he resigned in face of massive protests, and his intellectual successors conveniently disowned him--because modernity can't fail and can only be failed, and if you failed, you can't be a true modern and all that. And so his successor, Park, himself a mess of contradictions--who actually did get things done--is despised as the hated enemy.
There was a review of the acclaimed (by Western PMC) Korean movie Parasite that made what I thought was a remarkable observation: that it was making the kind of social critique that made PMC very comfortable. I didn't quite realize this until then, but that sort of "smarminess" is exactly what made me really uncomfortable with modern Korean art projects that Western PMCs like--like the author Han Kang.
"That's progress." An exclamation common in my long ago youth and even middle age. I would think or say, "Progress? Toward what. And why is change for its own sake necessarily desirable." Maybe it came from having a father who was a Taft republican. When I was quite young, I did not think well of that, but soon came to see that while Mr. Taft may not have been the one to carry the ideas forward, the ideas deserved due consideration. Unthinking attachment to that which is happening now is a mark not of being modern but of being unthinking. As the war in Ukraine gets older, it looks ever more complicated. Russia has prevailed on the battlefield. It will continue to do so. The shooting finally stops, mostly stops. What then? Zelensky et al will likely be gone? Will the rump Ukraine know peace and prosperity? in the short and middle term, it will not. Mr. Putin retires. Will Russia change in the direction the West, the PMC in the West, has desired. No, it will not. Will it collapse. No, it will not. So what was the war about? I have an answer for that but it is too detailed for this comment. Short version for the western PMC: Gain control of Russia. For Russia: see the draft treaties of December 2021. So what has been the result? Borders have changed. Many have died. Russia is stronger than ever. Ukraine is destroyed. The attitude of the West is unchanged. But there has been change and isn't that progress?
As far as Russia is concerned, a pro-NATO neo-Nazi Ukraine being destroyed is definitely progress.
If I may be so gauche as to refer you to a prefab adjacency, please see my Substack post "Après Moi, le Deluluge," which touches on force and the irreconcilable by way of a cast of thousands, among them Hannah Arendt and Humpty Dumpty:
https://dingusansich.substack.com/p/apres-moi-le-deluluge
Sorry, but our elites DO have an ideology called "communism".
-Bourgeois transnational rich elites (Lenin had 3 Rolls-Royces) – check
-Globalism – check
-Wipe out family & roots to make "new men" – check
-De-Christianization – check
-Loot the kulaks & wealth creators – check
-Giant regulatory bureaucracy (hello EUSSR) – check
-Dump "social" to turn people into slaves – check
-Fake Lysenko science – check
-Class war – check
-Censorship, repression – check
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For class war, "victim migrants" replaced workers, "evil whites" replaced capitalists. Fake science now spews climate & vax nonsense instead of crops. Same rage for planned economy, bureaucracy, and same lefty bourgeois class that killed free-market right in Europe by screaming "fascist!"
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Another century, same shit again !