“Suddenly, the once-revered Supreme Court, now with a majority of conservative justices, became an obstacle to democracy and had to be packed or restructured.
The First Amendment was redefined as a bothersome speed bump that slowed progress. It needlessly protected noisy conservatives and their backward values.
The CIA, FBI and Pentagon were suddenly OK — if staffed with the right people. Their clandestine power, their chain-of-command exemption from messy legislative give-and-take and their reliance on surveillance were now pluses in the correct hands. These institutions became allies, not enemies, and so their powers were augmented and unchecked.” VDH
“Sports were cool, given that they offered a huge platform for the social-justice warriors among the athletes to damn the very system that had enriched them.
The higher the gas and electricity prices, the better to shock the clueless bourgeoisie that their SUVs and home air conditioners were anti-green and on the way out.
The union shop was written off as a has-been enclave of old, white dinosaurs — an ossified, shrinking base of the Democratic Party.
The media glitterati were no longer to be mocked as empty suits and pompadour fools, but rather treated as useful foot soldiers in the revolution.
So what happened to turn the party of Harry Truman, JFK and even Bill Clinton into a woke neo-Maoist movement?
Globalization created a new multibillion-dollar consumer market for American media, universities, law firms, insurance groups, investment houses, sports leagues and entertainment outlets, not to mention the internet and social media.
In contrast, work with hands was passé, the supposed stuff of deplorables and clingers — and so better outsourced and offshored. ” VDH
Comment: I used to know a lot of real Maoists and other assorted Marxists. They were made of impressive stuff. “foemen worthy of our steel.” The present collection of Wannabe types would run if the first shot was distantly fired and then claim loudly that a QAnon insurrection had occurred. AOC is in therapy at public expense because of the thought, just the thought, that someone might kick her shapely ass. Say boo, America! pl
Col. Lang,
With your indulgence, I would like to put this OT (or not?) post here, as I think it contains some very interesting information concerning the tightly intertwined powers that be in California (and US) politics. Don’t be put off by the header, as the article informed me of things that I did not know:
https://www.henrymakow.com/2021/07/california-controlled-by-four-crime.html
Also, here is a related post concerning the high-flying financial affairs of Nancy Pelosi and her husband. I am not market savvy, so some of the terminology goes over my head, but I think that I extracted the gist:
https://unusualwhales.com/i_am_the_senate/pelosi
To tie this back to your post, Colonel, no, I don’t think the head honchos are neo-Maoist at all, judging from the evidence, rather the contrary.
Thanks,
JJ
“Globalization created a new multibillion-dollar consumer market for American … universities …”
These tax-emept NGOs have seperate law enforcement and oversight along with un-elected leadership that has decided that the stream of communist Chinese money and their addiction to it are far more important than the American citizens they were created to serve.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/233880/international-students-in-the-us-by-country-of-origin/
VDH?
Professor Doctor Victor Davis Hanson. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Davis_Hanson
Thanks, be well.
I vaguely recall having looked him up.
VDH IS a dedicated neocon. He cheered on Bush’s invasion of Iraq. He never serrved a day in uniform yet he is a proponent of pre-emptive war. He applauded Izzie settlements on the West Bank and calls Israel a ‘secular’ democracy. His claim to fame is as a military historian, but even his so-called academic works on ancient Greek warfare have been called BS.
Leith
I know Victor quite well, disagree with him on most things but not on this. pl
Leith
Ah, you’re that retired marine guy at Long Island, Washington. What are you doing back here? 582 comments approved over the years. I must really piss you off a lot.
VDH is definitely not a neocon, I regularly read his pieces on American Greatness and the National Review and not once has he called for democratization, spreading of human rights and sending troops in 3rd world nations to do nation-building and all of the above. He is a West-Coast nationalist conservative and a proud deep-rooted Californian who would like the U.S. military to ‘win’ wars rather than to entrench itself in COIN and bullshit beltway liberal think tank pet projects. Max Boot, Bret Stephens, Bill Kristol, and George Will (2.0) are your typical neocon warmongers not VHD or for example Tucker Carlson and Colonel Doug McGregor. I just wanted to clarify this ‘neocon’ usage that I see nowadays being used like crazy these days.
To say that VDH who cheerleaded the 2003 invasion of Iraq is not a neocon lends a new meaning to the word. He may not be in the top ten alongside John Bolton and Mike Pompeo. But he is definitely one of their fellow travelers, or perhaps a useful idiot.
VDH also tried to put Donald Rumsfeld on a pedestal alongside George Marshall. Nobody bought that one.
And if VDH was so against COIN as you claim then why would he write that General Petraeus was a Saviour General. Petraeus entrenched the U.S. military in COIN doctrine for both Iraq and Afghanistan when he promoted his Counterinsurgency Field Manual that he oversaw the publication of at the Combined Arms Center at Leavenworth.
Neo-conservatism as a foreign policy doctrine= Using U.S. power as an historically exceptional and morally justified means-with or without allies- to shape the world along Democracy, free enterprise, and then if possible universal human rights (this is where liberal interventionists also come into the picture).
Those who advocated for the ME wars were 3 groups:
*Neocons (e.g. Bill Kristol, Condi Rice, Dov Zakheim, Elliot Cohen, David Frum, Max Boot, WSJ editorial section, McCain, Lindsay Graham),
*Liberal interventionists/Democracy promoters (NYT, WaPo, L.A. Times, David Brooks, the Clintons, Kerry, Bob Kagan, Pelosi, Larry Diamond, Richard Kaplan, John Ikenberry),
*Conservative nationalists many of whom are also Christian Zionist and Izzy-lovers, e.g. Gingrich, Bolton, Rumsfeld, Cheney who had deep financial and political benefits at stake.
Please note that there are links and overlaps between these groups as for example Dov Zakheim is a neocon, but also a staunch zionist and Izzy-firster. Same thing about David Frum who writes for the liberal magazine The Atlantic and is also a Izzy-firster and a neocon.
The wars in the ME brought all three together and that WAS a recipe for disaster. For example, neocons were very much in favor of boots on the ground in Syria back in ’13, but liberals had mixed feeling and divided, as were conservative nationalists. So it didn’t happen. In Libya in ’11, conservatives were not in favor whereas the liberal interventionists and neocons were in favor, so it became an intervention and not a full-scale war.
Then there are people who supported the war who in my opinion cannot be adequately fitted in the above classification, for example Tucker Carlson also supported the war but now he regrets it, or Biden. So support for Iraq war and even hawkishness does not mean neoconservative credentials. You have to be 100% pure 24/7 hawk with an actual agenda that I described above, along with strong ideological conviction, and certain ‘particularism’ to be called part of the “Tribe”. Same thing about Mike Pompeo, he is not a neocon, but an Izzy-firster with minor conservative credentials. Also he despised democracy and human rights so much that during his tenure he befriended dictators and democracy killers, supported policies to roll back liberal democracy rather than working alongside liberals to build a nation from ground up as neocons did during the Bush times.
With regards to VDH’s praise of these generals, it again does not fit well with neo-conservatism because I have not come across VHD’s pieces promoting nation-building whereas neocons very much do along with liberal interventionists. So his praise for the aforementioned generals who commit to COIN, can be interpreted as a step toward actually having a fresh working military doctrine, rather than political ambition by winning the war through primarily re-capturing the upper hand from the insurgents, providing stability and controlling and dictating the situation on the ground and (I would assume) the mentality that once you go in you do not go out until you finish it as well as fighting the terrorists there instead of here kind of excuse that are rampant among VDH and for people like Bolton.
Trump for all his flaws actually managed to kill off neocons in ’16 and today they are no more than wandering intellectual hobos who had some kind of prominence and glory back in the Reagan and Dubya days but now are homeless and irrelevant. They are both unwanted by the liberals and the conservatives equally. Nobody wants them anymore. They’d better make Aliyah to TelAviv sooner or later because Trumpism poses serious threat to them.
P.S.:
Just to make it clear, I do not like VDH’s policies and his positions on foreign affairs, but find reasonable- to some extent- his stances on immigration and especially his opposition to any leftist “isms”.
“Now with money and institutions in its hip pocket, and cool popular culture on its side, the left would not just damn American institutions but infect them — alter their DNA and reengineer them into revolutionary agencies”.
This is a good article which accurately describes the long march through the institutions that has led us to this point. Gramsci and Rudi Dutschke were prophetic in one sense; the revolution has all but been accomplished and hardly a shot has been fired.
However, the Marxist ideology driving this revolution is predominantly of the cultural kind, not the economic kind. The soy latte drinking revolutionaries who think this will all lead to a woke earthly paradise are in for one heck of a shock. Do they not understand that wokism is merely a tool of State control? And as JerseyJeffersonian points out above, political power remains in the hands of the super and hyper wealthy and many are as corrupt as they come. In fact VDH describes something pretty close to the merger of a revolutionary party & big capital and we all know where that leads.
Colonel Lang – I’ve followed your blog for over a decade. You don’t piss me off. Just the opposite. I agree with you about much.
As for VDH, I lost any respect for him when he wrote in his book ‘Saviour Generals’ that Sherman and Petraeus were great commanders.
Do you know LtCol Bateman who taught Military History at West Point?
leith
No. The guys who taught that were in the equivalent of the ROTC Department, not history if I remember right. I didn’t know any of them, or the History department either.
From personal experience I will hazard to say that the biggest source of all this is the declined quality of the public education system in the US. Instead of teaching our children about the foundation and attitudes and actions of the men that allowed the US to become the greatest country in the history of humanity, the public school lesson plans are devoted to the obsession with the Holocaust, the Civil Rights Movement, and some minutiae related to the Union, as an avatar of the modern USA incarnate, winning the civil war against those Eternal Slavers in the late 19th century. A student is lucky to have one semester from 6th-12th grade fully devoted to the happenings of the 20th century. For EVERY semester from 5th-12th grade they will inevitably have some class instruction related to the Holocaust or the Civil Rights movement(as the system teaches it). I recall one semester in 9th grade where I had two classes fully devoted to The Holocaust in one semester, in English and in History. That’s half of my day devoted to the Holocaust, with a brief reprieve in math and science(they don’t teach Physics either in US public schools, but that’s a completely separate quibble): in English it was us reading Elie Weasel and his ilk, the latter History class it was the usual yearly ritual rehashing of the big H, with zero actual historical context besides the religious hammering of the main message of the lesson plan(Never Again, Jewish state good, etc). They teach both of these events, the white guilt but in particular the big H, as religions, in US public schools. The students graduate barely literate, but they can sure recite the quasi-religious tenets surrounding the Big H and the stain of white guilt. These subjects are taught to American children in the same way that they teach children in Pakistani border madrassahs, with similar results.
Let me say one just word: “Intersectioanlity”. The reason for most contemporary problems that we are witnessing now in society especially the intentional degradation of culture by liberal elites can be traced back to the birth of this terrible word. It fetishizes identity first and foremost and the ‘fluidity’ of one’s character that is in fact the culmination and sum of all the other ‘social’ aspect of an individual such as skin pigments(!), ethnicity, sexuality, and other ‘social constructs’. This terrible concept was popularized in the 1990s and is directly the next evolutionary step from the psychological and behavioral-centered Frankfurt School which replaced economic class division of Marxism as the result of exploitation with that of ‘identity’ and how one person or group views itself in society with respect to systematically imposed discrimination and racism and how understanding identity is the key in exposing systems of exploitation that is rooted in the western civilization and particularly the WASP culture. By the way, it’s their words not mine.
I would assume that today’s leftists are more ‘pink’ than ‘red’ and this also translates meaningfully into to the ‘sissification’ and the ‘soy-latte boys’ cultural degradation that Barbara Ann alludes, and I agree with Col. Lang here that the old-school Marxists and even Maoists at least has some courage or even purity of ideological belief that made them worthy opponents.
In fact, I would go one step further and say that the old school Marxists (e.g. Michael Hudson being one example) were very good at figuring things out and analyzing phenomena and processes. In simpler terms their analytical minds are adept but their prescriptions are terrible and they keep getting ‘mugged by reality’ time after time after some moron politicians decide to actually implements their ideas into real life policies; Think of the Great Society, UBI, affirmative action, mandatory ‘gender diversification’, Obamacare as examples of how the policies of Marxists (albeit with initial good intentions) if pursued can go wrong…terribly wrong and have adverse effects! Just because science and the scientific method has figured out the smallest details of human biology doesn’t mean that it can re-create man. But hey you can create Frankenstein…so there’s that I guess!
Today’s AOCs, Omars, Nikole Hannah-Joneses and the like-minded cultural Marxists (which IMO is a flawed word and it should be ‘cultural revolutionaries’ instead!) are not even capable of employing the ‘analytical mind’ of the past Marxists as even their methodologies are flawed, ideologically-driven, biased, and just flat-out wrong. And thus, their conclusions become even deadlier, more destructive, and just genocidal. They even do not conceal their animosity and rabidness and clearly express that they mean harm, not justice for all.
Polish Janitor
“Just because science and the scientific method has figured out the smallest details of human biology doesn’t mean that it can re-create man. But hey you can create Frankenstein…so there’s that I guess!”
Well put. To what extent Mary Shelly’s masterpiece was written as a Counter-Enlightenment parable is open to question, but for me it represents exactly this. The protagonist (Victor Frankenstein) believes that science, the new Creator, alone can (re)create Man from what physically remains once the soul has departed. His Promethean obsession instead brings into existence an unnatural monster that society shuns and rejects. What better way to describe the failure of the later Enlightenment’s efforts to become our new faith; that reason alone is sufficient to animate human meat robots and endow them with happiness.
At the risk of becoming a bore on the subject, I will reiterate the fact that the WEF is aiming to take this concept to its logical conclusion. They want to use science to ‘correct’ the crookedness in the timber of humanity once and for all, through transhumanism. We are to be merged with machines which will change how we transact with one another, think and behave. This we are told will make us “happy”. I reject the notion utterly, it will very obviously lead to a monstrous parody of human existence and bring about tragedy on an immense scale.
Barbara Ann,
The scientific consensus is a mechanistic materialistic view of humans and, indeed, all life. Living creatures are merely fleshy computers; programmed stimulus/response machines. There is no soul and spirituality is a fairy tale. Thought, feeling, sense of self, consciousness itself, are just epiphenomena and illusions arising from the chemical and electrical events within the computers’ wiring.
So of course using “science” to correct in the timber of humanity appears to be both logical and appropriate. When a computer fails to function as desired, one calls in a software programmer to update the applications or a technician to work on the physical hard wiring. Or, one simply disposes of the outdated malfunctioning machines. Merging with machines misses the point, a little. We are machines (to these people) and merging organic machines with non-organic ones is what one does to enhance performance. Identifying and developing the correct interface is the only challenge. There are no ethical considerations.
I think Mary Shelly’s masterpiece was both incredibly prescient and was written as a protest against the mechanistic materialism that was taking hold of the educated class of the day.
Eric
Yes, it is the view of what it is to be human that is key. I find Kant’s famous “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made” a very useful tool for classifying two fundamentally different attitudes to our fallen state. One can either laugh with Kant, accept and embrace our crookedness and work with the grain, or take it as a challenge; to ‘straighten’ humanity out. These are antithetical aesthetics which can only result in ideological conflict when their respective adherents meet.
Before science came along and fooled us into confusing spiritual progress with the technological kind, religious faith set out the paths for self improvement. Utopias were properly seen as something not attainable in this world. Gradually technological improvement, rather than remaining in the service of Mankind, has come to be an end in itself. AI represents the pinnacle of the Enlightenment, as well as its end. We will have come full circle. In creating something so smart it’s algorithmic workings are unknowable, reason reverts to faith – only this time our omniscient deity will be made of silicon. The Promethean myth plays out in reverse and there is a good chance we are doomed to eternal torment.
Marxists want to ‘straighten’ us out and reprogram us as hive animals, like bees or ants – selfless automatons in service of the State. Well past efforts show that this state is fundamentally at odds with our nature, self interest being one of the primary barriers to success. The solution; as you say, is that we are reprogrammed with new software, so that we think and behave in the correct way. I’m sure this can work, but please don’t tell me the end result is utopian – or that the worker insects you have created can any longer be called human beings.
Call me Panglossian but I am very happy with humans, crooked as they are.
Barbara Ann,
I’m with you. I’ve even come to be happy even with my own imperfections.
It seems to me that somehow these would be programmers of the utopia have never been put to test and paid their dues or had the courage to examine their own selves closely. They parade about with a dangerous artificial arrogance that speaks to me of an over-protected existence. Do they not even imagine that they too just might be crooked timber and, even if what they want to do is possible, they would be programming their own crookedness into the future world?
“we are reprogrammed with new software, so that we think and behave in the correct way.”
As every software developer/user know software is full of bugs.
This is indeed gonna be hell for everyone.
More proof the CDC was definitely stacked with the right people when they politicized “covid” and used it to take down Trump:
………..”The CDC announced, albeit quietly, on Wednesday that the RT-PCR tests used to tell millions of Americans they’re infected with Covid-19 has been unable to accurately differentiate between the various coronaviruses.
Of particular note is the inability of these tests to know whether someone is infected with Covid-19 or influenza………….”