[William A. Baurle]

Originally Posted by Andrew Mandelbaum

The left you bring up, I assume, is the Bolsheviks and later Stalin. Personally I don't recognize most of that business with the anything but another Statist ideology gone bad.

Andrew,

I wrote: 'Russia, 1918'. There is nothing to assume.

Anyone who hasn't lived under a rock will know exactly what I referred to, to be blunt. That revolution had repercussions that affected the world, and, more heinously, flattened and demoralized the Russian populace.

Statist ideology doesn't have to go bad, it's bad to begin with. When you believe that the state is more important than the individual, and that any number of individuals can and often must be sacrificed to maintain the well-being of something that is not a flesh and blood entity but a nebulous abstraction— and essentially an unattainable dream in the heads of a few privileged intellectuals—then something is terribly wrong.

The October Revolution was not just an ideology gone wrong. It was a bloody massacre of innocents.

And let's not forget the French Revolution. Yet another festival of blood and carnage.

When the Mob rules, all bets are off. The Mob can be right or left, it doesn't matter. A mob will behave the way a mob behaves. And it's never pretty, and it's never good.

[Andrew Mandelbaum]

William,
I don't think you are understanding my point.
During 1918 in Russia there wasn't just one desire, one vision, or one Left. 1918 was when the Cheka turned on the anarchist who had for the most part already saw that "All Power to the Soviets" was just a short lived joke of the new State. Bakunin called their s*&t decades earlier.
July 1918 was the time of the crushed Third Russian Revolt, thus my Fanya Baron comment, so sorry bud but to me it is way more complicated than that. It appears you can crawl out from one rock and still be under another. As is true of my own post I am sure.

Real threats to the State are always turned on from all sides. Kronstadt always has to be eliminated. Like in Spain. Look at Rojava now. Not without mistakes or violent crimes on every particular but the experiment there is what I think of when I think of comrades. Or Chiapas. Or actually some of ideas in the Permaculture/Resilience hub here to lesser degree of break. I "root" for Sanders/Warren types not because I settle for the silly binary that makes this thread so tedious. I think they are more likely to create an environment less hostile to something genuine. I think the monopolization of the means of violence by the State makes the idea of some violent seizure of power a nonsensical idea so guillotine jokes aside, I don't know what 1789 has to do with anything in my posts or ideas.

I am assuming you are including the State you live beneath in your explanation. The fact that the utopic dream it offers came on a spoon just after birth and that the individuals it sacrifices are often out of sight and sound hardly changes anything.

In Neither Victims Nor Executioners, Camus writing against both these States said something he could have wrote today in defense of all those who say f*&k your binary, a another world is possible and it isn't Capitalist. Marxist or anything that plays nice with the species-ist grind we call civilization. Unfortunately the Plague that trying to get its Juggernaut on in the changing room on the Hill needs seeing to in the immediate.

"To reply once more and finally to the accusation of Utopia: for us, the choice is simple - Utopia or the war now being prepared by antiquated modes of thought.... Skeptical though we are (and as I am), realism forces us to this Utopian alternative. When our Utopia has become part of history, as with many others of like kind, humanity will find themselves unable to conceive reality without it. For History is simply humanity's desperate effort to give body to its most clairvoyant dreams." Camus

[Andrew Frisardi]

Tying in with something Andrew M. said earlier in this thread: "These Conservative Christians Are Opposed to Trump—and Suffering the Consequences.

[Andrew Mandelbaum]

Thanks Andrew. That is why the fight over Christianities like the fight over Islams is so pivotal. Fundamentalist Christianity has its own dissent and eventual discrediting in its own founding ideas and trajectory.

And it is one particular Christianity that put Trump in. Not the working class as such. IMO.

[Nigel Mace]

I have just come across this. An excellent interview/article and a particularly careful and nuanced 'use' of historical experience - an all too rare achievement. It is, I'm afraid, also all too prescient. Find it at...
http://international.sueddeutsche.de...efend-american

[Charlie Southerland]

Thank God we're only working off opinion here.

You wouldn't know what mainstream Christianity was if you were drowning in it.


La La land is up for an Oscar.

Andrew F. I am shocked you are falling for that crap.

Andrew M. Fundamentalist Christians are a minute part of the body of Christ, but you are free to speculate as much and as often as you want. You gotta blame someone, it might as well be them.


I know all about your utopia. Utopias are always for some but not for all, the reason being that man is a fallen creature and unable to make nice all the time.

Now I get where you're coming from. It is the fringiest of the fringe. I wondered if and when you'd get to it.

I mean this with all due respect; I hope it makes you happy.

[Andrew Mandelbaum]

Just read the words of Camus's famous essay and shut up, Charlie. There available online in several places. Try to familiarize yourself with some small segment of what you condemn. You keep derailing any conversation on here that return to the stated opening of the thread. It is a Trump watch thread. Start a thread of the virtues of collaboration and the song of the Right. But the sociology lab is overwhelmed with your data at this point.

You don't have a clue about the people you are talking to and how many of us are intimately familiar with the workings of your sect. I was, in my own wrestling way, through kin and fellow travelers, inside the Evangelical church for three decades. Completely immersed in dialogue, children, music, struggles, theologies, all of the salt and blood and shame of it. You have no authority on this with me. The idea that the fool who continues in a broken equation is closer to it than someone trying to question its flaws is interesting nonsense. Yours is just one voice among many Christianities and the sure sign that it may not be a trustworthy one is the claim to dismiss all the others as the voice of orthodoxy.

Life is getting to busy just now for anymore of your barking. I am gonna stay with the parts of this thread that stay on point. Feel free to carry on in my stead. I think I am clear enough to let you fill in the rest of the blanks without me.

[Andrew Mandelbaum]

Originally Posted by Nigel Mace

I have just come across this. An excellent interview/article and a particularly careful and nuanced 'use' of historical experience - an all too rare achievement. It is, I'm afraid, also all too prescient. Find it at...
http://international.sueddeutsche.de...efend-american

Thanks, Nigel!

[Gregory Palmerino]

Originally Posted by Nigel Mace

I have just come across this. An excellent interview/article and a particularly careful and nuanced 'use' of historical experience - an all too rare achievement. It is, I'm afraid, also all too prescient. Find it at...
http://international.sueddeutsche.de...efend-american

Nigel,

Thanks for another excellent link. That was a well-articulated interview. I thought this extract was particularly interesting:

"The American Revolution actually preserved ideas from Britain: the rule of law being the most important. The whole justification of the American Revolution was that the British were not living up to their own principles, were not including Americans in their own system. In a broad way that that was also the argument of the civil rights movement: the system fails itself when it does not extend equal rghts to all citizens. So there can be resistance and even revoution which is about meeting standards rather than about simple destruction. What Bannon says correctly about the Bolsheviks was that they aimed to completely destroy an old regime. We can slip from one to the other very easily, from rebelliousness to a complete negation of the system. Most Americans had a rule of law state for most of their lives, African Americans are an exception, and so most Americans think this will be there forever. They don’t get that a “disruption” can actually destroy much of what they take for granted. They have no notion what it means to destroy the state and how their lives would look like if the rule of law would no longer exist. I find it frightening that people who talk about the destruction of the American state are now in charge of the American state."

This is the point I was trying to make in my post #187 about the necrophilous age we live in. In The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, the psychoanalyst and social philosopher Erich Fromm describes the necrophilous character as one who has “the passionate attraction to all that is dead, decayed, putrid, sickly; it is the passion to transform that which is alive into something unalive; to destroy for the sake of destruction…. It is the passion ‘to tear apart living structures’” (332). I fear many Trump voters voted for the destruction of something without realizing what destruction begets, that is, death. One of the things that will certainly die is any resemblence of classical conservatism or the Republican Party. I still believe they are selling their souls for something that will eventually condemn them. Unfortunately, it's going to take us all down, I fear.

I remember sitting in a history class as an undergraduate many moons ago where the professor told us about a paper he wrote, which postulated that the Revolutionary War could have been averted if we had just employed the courts on which our common laws were founded. He surmised that the English Empire would have been so powerful, the world could have averted the Civil War, WWI and WWII. He received so many death threats that his wife made him stop talking about his theory in public. I'm not suggesting that I agree with his theory, just that it never surprises me what people are ready to kill for.

I honestly would like to hear the counterargument to that of the Yale professor in Nigel's link. (Other than the counterargument that points out he's a Yale professor, ha!).

Greg

[Andrew Frisardi]

Yes, good article, Nigel. Where he says

We need people who can help translate ideological utterances into political warnings,

a journalist I've been following on Twitter came to mind, Sarah Kendzior, who has studied authoritarian regimes in depth. See Welcome to the Authoritarian Kleptocracy at her website for many interesting links, including video interviews.