We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.

Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]

Samizdata quote of the day

“It is no surprise that a liberalism that embraced the “1619 Project’s” rewriting of the U.S.’s founding history would not stop there and try now, despite its almost invisible congressional majority, to displace the country’s originating idea of individual opportunity with a broad birth-to-death entitlement state.”

Daniel Henniger, Wall Street Journal (paywall).

Remember, for some of the hyenas of the Left, the plot of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged isn’t a warning, but an inspiration.

12 comments to Samizdata quote of the day

  • Nicholas (Unlicensed Joker) Gray

    What? ‘Atlas Shrugged’ was meant to be a warning? Why didn’t anyone tell me?

  • Paul Marks

    The creator of the 1619 Project for the New York Times makes no secret of her Marxism – so why the BLEEP do people still insist on still calling Marxism “liberalism”?

    If people will not even use the words “Marxism” and “Marxist” (insisting on using words such as “liberal”, “Progressive”, “Woke” and “Social Justice Warrior”) then they will never defeat Marxism.

    The first step to solving a problem is to admit that it is a problem. The Western World has a MARXISM problem – use its name (you will not burst into flames just by saying “Marxism” and “Marxist”).

    If you want to be technical it is FRANKFURT SCHOOL Marxism (the interpretation of Marxism of the Frankfurt School – which dominates the education system, the “mainstream” media and much else), but the point is that is Marxism – it is designed to utterly exterminate the West.

    You can not reason with Frankfurt School Marxism, and laughing at them (“Political Correctness Gone Mad Ha Ha Ha” – the 1980s, utterly flatulate, response) will NOT make them go away.

    In the end – you destroy the Marxists, or they destroy you.

    Concessions (“we will follow Diversity and Inclusion – but in a more moderate way than the Marxists”) do not work, because these doctrines are DESIGNED to exterminate the West, that is what they are for. That is what they are intended to do.

    “Critical Race Theory”, “Racial Justice”, “Climate Justice” and all the rest of it is Frankfurt School MARXISM, designed for the express purpose of exterminating the West.

    So people, please wake up and smell the coffee.

  • Voldemort, Voldemort, Voldemort! Oh, OK, “You know who.” Mustn’t scare the horses.

  • CaptDMO

    SEE “The Life of Julia”
    An Obama Production.
    Also SEE: Obamaphones, for emergencies!

  • Rich Rostrom

    Paul Marks: Marxism – it is designed to utterly exterminate the West.

    The problem is deeper and and more complex than that.

    First, traditional Marxism was not “anti-Western”. The Old Reds regarded the West as the highest civilization, and therefore to be the first to be perfected by Communism. After which the West would export Communist enlightenment to the barbaric and superstitious masses of Asia and Africa.

    Nor were they anti-technology. Pete Seeger, as Red as they came, wrote “Roll On, Columbia”, which is nothing less than a hymn to hydroelectric power.

    The present disease is entangled with Marxism, but it really began with the self-critical facility of Western cultures morphing into an auto-immune disease. That happened well over a hundred years ago.

    It also became entangled with anti-colonialism and anti-racism – both originally movements to address real grievances, but also convenient sticks to beat the West with.

    The resulting anti-culture has now metastasized throughout the West’s cultural organs.

  • Mr Ed

    Why don’t the 1619ers refuse to speak English, or any European language? That would add a bit of authenticity to their message.

  • Paul Marks

    Rich Rostrom.

    Yes – it is FRANKFURT SCHOOL Marxism.

    I am well aware that even Joseph Stalin REJECTED the Frankfurt interpretation of Marxism – arguing that it was utterly insane and would destroy any society that followed it. And that “real” Marxists did not want to take over a wasteland – they wanted to take over a functioning society.

    In California children who are good at mathematics are being HELD BACK by the authorities – as some children (especially if they are from certain races) being better at mathematics than other children is a crime against “Equity”.

    One can well imagine what Joseph Stalin, or Mr Putin and Mr Xi, would say about that – and it would not be friendly.

    YES the West is not being destroyed by Classical Marxism – it is being destroyed by FRANKFURT SCHOOL Marxism (egalitarianism).

    “It started a century ago” – yes the Frankfurt School did start about a century ago. Although, I would argue, that it used the ideas NON Marxist thinkers – such as the British Fabians and the “Bloomsbury Set” (and the Apostles Club at Cambridge) who were not Marxists, but did have a fanatical hatred of Western society.

    The German, Italian and American thinkers of the Frankfurt School (and the French “Post Modernists” later) did NOT like the charge that they were using the ideas of the British Fabians and the degenerates of the Bloomsbury Set and the Cambridge Apostles Club (that they were more PLATO that Karl Marx) – but under all the complex language of the Frankfurt School, the similar nature of the basic ideas is plain enough.

    By the way – the “Alt Right” do not like do not like talking about the British contribution to all this either. As the leading Fabians, Bloomsbury Set and Apostles Club people in Britain were NOT from Jewish families – and they had the plans to undermine the West worked out long before the First World War.

    Both the Frankfurt School Marxists and their Nazi (“Alt Right”) foes, find the British pre First World War working out of these destructive doctrines a bit of a problem.

    “We Frankfurt School people invented all this” does not like “actually the British leftists thought it up first – you just added a lot of complex language to what the Bloomsbury Set and so on had already worked out”.

    And “the JEWS did it” does not like the fact that the leading British leftists (the Fabians, Bloomsbury Set, Apostles Club….) were not from Jewish families.

    I call it “Frankfurt School Marxism” – because they developed the language, “Critical Race Theory”, “Climate Justice” and all the rest of it, in recent years and decades. They dominate the education system, media and the Corporations (yes the Corporations to).

    The basic DEATH TO THE WEST idea was developed long before them – the idea of destroying CULTURE destroying SOCIETY was developed by British thinkers.

    Imagine Joe Stalin meeting the Bloomsbury Set or the Apostles Club – he would not have got on with them (any more than Mr Putin or Mr Xi would), indeed he would have had them all shot.

  • Alan Peakall

    Paul, Rich: For me, one of the more moving passages in Jung Chang’s Wild Swans was the author’s account of finally reading Marx (among other Western writers) contemporaneously with her experience of the Cultural Revolution. She reported that, for all Marx’s journalistic flourishes and lapses from intellectual honestly, his adherence to the forms of materialistic scienfic enquiry was still highly effective in exposing the baselessness of the prevailing claims to legitimacy by the CCP in Marx’s own terms.

  • Paul Marks

    Alan Peakall.

    I have “Wild Swans” about somewhere – but I can not remember it clearly. Karl Marx is rather vague about how the future socialist society was to work – but Mao certainly did not deliver what Karl Marx promised (there was no mass starvation of tens of millions of people amongst those promises).

    The Cultural Revolution reminds me of H.G. Wells – his short story “The Coming of the Comet”, DESTROY everything (the comet does not destroy anything – it is the people who destroy everything under the influence of the “new air” the comet brings with it).

    Everything is destroyed, buildings, art, literature, and social institutions such as the family – H. G. Wells thinks all this evil is wonderful (because he was evil – along with his maniac Fabian pal George Bernard Shaw, who wanted to execute everyone who could not “justify their existence” to the satisfaction of government board).

    Some people are shocked by the Fabians (such as Mr and Mrs Webb) backing the Soviet Union – but they were actually MORE radical than someone like Joseph “Stalin”.

    Had they come to power, people such as H.G. Wells and G.B. Shaw would have been like Mao in China – or Pol Pot in Cambodia.

    The fact that Britain makes heroes of these monsters (Wells, Shaw….. the rest of the “wolf in sheep’s clothing” types (see the “Fabian Window”) shows how horribly misguided this country, and the West in general, has become.

    Think about it – Mr Putin is a murderer and a general thug. But it would not occur to him to, for example, demand that everyone “justify their existence” on pain of execution – he would think it was barking mad (because it is barking mad).

    And do not let the nice Irish accent and little smile of George Bernard Shaw fool you – the utter swine meant every word. So did the others – they were all swine.

  • Paul Marks

    “Paul – would you consider G.B. Shaw and the others to be Vile Creatures?” – yes indeed I would consider George Bernard Shaw and the other totalitarians to be Vile Creatures (although I might not use the term so well as Noel Coward).

    Complaints against me to Central Office can be made at the following address……..

    Please remember H.G. Wells – who wanted to exterminate the “teaming millions of blacks, browns and yellows” – this Fabian is not a “racist”, which tells anyone (at least anyone with a functioning brain) what the word “racist” has really come to mean (clue – it is NOT about hating people because of their skin colour, it is about being pro “capitalist”).

    The “Woke” movement is not going to mobilise to “cancel” Karl Marx (who used the “N word” constantly and claimed that black people should be in the Paris Zoo) or George Bernard Shaw or H.G. Wells – or any of them.

    This was never really about skin colour.

    The 1619 Project is not going to be campaigning for statues to Booker T. Washington, Walter Williams, Thomas Sowell, Justice Thomas, Candice Owens and so on.

    The “wrong sort” of black people.

  • Rich Rostrom

    Paul Marks: Yes – it is FRANKFURT SCHOOL Marxism.

    Which began in the 1920s. But the underlying syndrome can be seen many years earlier.

    Consider Kipling’s poem “The City of Brass”, or his story “Little Foxes”, both dating from 1909. Both are attacks on a sort of thinking that is ancestral to Wokeism. And it wasn’t new in 1909.