Category Archives: Communism

NEW COLUMN: A New Party Boss In South Africa Is No Reason To Party

Africa, Communism, Democracy, Morality, Political Philosophy, Race, South-Africa

THE NEW COLUMN comes abridged and unabridged. “A New Party Boss In South Africa Is No Reason To Party” is the short and not-so-sweet version, now on Townhall.com.

In Africa, You Oust A Tyrant, But Not Tyranny” is longer with lots of “inside baseball” for the nerds. It’s on the Unz Review, America’s smartest webzine.

An excerpt:

READERS were angry. I had rained on their parade by venturing that the appointment of a new party boss to head South-Africa’s dominant party was an insignificant game of musical chairs.

But perhaps it is I who should have been annoyed. Nobody with a modicum of cerebral agility should see in the new South-African Strong Man, union boss-cum-tycoon Cyril Ramaphosa, a significant change of the guard.

Surely by now it should be common knowledge that in Africa, you replace a despot, but not despotism; you oust a tyrant, but not tyranny?

There’s a reason Ramaphosa riles crowds at a South African Communist Party rally just as easily as he excites the head of Goldman Sachs’s South Africa office. (For a clue, ask yourselves how a union boss becomes a tycoon.)

In the tradition of dimming debate, the chattering class has reduced systemic corruption in South Africa and near collapse in Zimbabwe, respectively, to the shenanigans of two men: Jacob Zuma and Robert Mugabe.

Emblematic of this is a thematically confused  article in The Economist, offering a description of the dynamics set in motion by the Zuma dynasty’s capture of the state.

At first, the magazine explains the concept of “state capture” as “private actors [having] subverted the state to steal public money.”

Later, the concept is more candidly refined: “The nub of the state capture argument is that Mr. Zuma and his friends are putting state-owned enterprises and other governmental institutions in the hands of people who are allowing them to loot public funds.”

Indeed. Corruption invariably flows from state to society.

And, “state capture” is quite common across Africa, even if “unfamiliar elsewhere in the world,” which is all the “context” The Economist is willing to provide.

“To avoid a dire, two-decade dynasty of dysfunction, South Africa’s ruling African National Congress should ditch the Zumas,” the magazine concludes.

That’s it? If only.

The Corruption of South Africa,” courtesy of The Economist, hurtles between being an excellent exposé, yet providing nothing more than reportorial reductionism.

Continental context, if you will, is essential if one is to shed light on the “Dark Continent.”

To wit, the seductive narrative about the ANC’s new boss, Cyril Ramaphosa, gets this much right: There is nothing new about the meaningless game of musical chairs enacted throughout Africa like clockwork. The Big Man is overthrown or demoted; another Alpha Male jockeys his way into his predecessor’s position and asserts his primacy over the people and their property.

Elections across Africa have traditionally followed a familiar pattern: Radical black nationalist movements like the ANC take power everywhere, then elections cease. “One man, one vote, one time,” to quote the book, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa.” Or, if they take place, as they do in South Africa, they’re rigged, in a manner.

For a prerequisite for a half-decent liberal democracy is that majority and minority status be interchangeable and fluid, and that a ruling majority party (the ANC) be as likely to become a minority party as the opposition Democratic Alliance (DA). In South Africa, however, the majority and the minorities are politically permanent, not temporary, and voting along racial lines is the rule.

So, as the dictator Mugabe hung on to power for dear life, reasonable people were being persuaded by the pulp and pixel press that if not for this one megalomaniac, freedom would have flourished in Zimbabwe, as it has, presumably, in Angola, Congo, Congo-Brazzaville, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan, and the rest of strife-torn Africa south of the Sahara. …

… READ THE RESTA New Party Boss In South Africa Is No Reason To Party” is now on Townhall.com.

In Africa, You Oust A Tyrant, But Not Tyranny” is on the Unz Review.

Russia Has Abandoned Cultural Marxism; America Is Embracing It

America, Communism, Cultural Marxism, History, Neoconservatism, Russia

Historian Srdja Trifkovic explains why the Nikki-Haley American elites hate Russia:

” … The most significant trait of the Bolshevik terror during the civil war and in the ensuing decades was the promotion of a quasi religious forma mentis based on anti-Christian zeal, and the parallel insistence on the creation of a New Man divorced from his ancestors, his naturally evolving communities, and his culture. As Trotsky wrote in 1924,”

Man will make it his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to the heights of consciousness, to make them transparent, to extend the wires of his will into hidden recesses, and thereby to raise himself to a new plane, to create a higher social biologic type, or, if you please, a superman.

“Today, Russia is in recovery, while America’s dominant elites are gripped by a rather similar kind of madness. Abroad, ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Russia has been pursuing conventional, national-interest-based policies, while the United States has pursued global hegemony. ‘History has called America and our allies to action,’ George W. Bush announced in his Leninist 2002 State of the Union Address. ‘We’ve come to know truths that we will never question.’ The same principle has been reiterated enthusiastically in Obama’s Reagan-plus ‘vindication of the idea of America,’ and reluctantly by Trump in the aftermath of his defeat by the Swamp.

At home, Russia is emerging as the last major European country that remains true to its roots. America is enthusiastically destroying monuments—Confederates today, the Founders tomorrow. Russia is unencumbered by obsessive self-examination. America’s elites have used allegedly enlightened and progressive ideas and ideals to create a plethora of isms, and to promote a complex Cultural Marxist paradigm of unlimited grievances and victimhood. Just like the Bolsheviks, they judge all things not on the grounds of their legality, legitimacy, or natural morality, but—as per Charlottesville—strictly on the basis of their ideological contents.

The Bolsheviks were evil; but they were also blinded by their own notions of imminent world revolution, and thus unable to resist the state-rebuilding force of Stalin’s ‘socialism in one country.’ Their heirs in today’s America are demonstrably more dexterous in Gramscian terms, but just as criminally insane: Quos deus vult perdere, dementat prius. Their citadels—the media and academia—are literally beyond redemption. It would be in the American interest for the flyover-country deplorables to develop a strategy of permanently excluding them from the nation’s political and cultural scene. …”

… Read the rest in “A Tale of Two Revolutions” by Srdja Trifkovic.

UPDATED (11/7): America’s Embracing Cultural Marxism; Putin’s Reviving Russian Traditionalism

BAB's A List, Boyd Cathey, Christianity, Communism, Conservatism, Cultural Marxism, John McCain, Nationhood, Neoconservatism, Russia

By Dr. Boyd Cathey

The unrestrained Russophobia of a John McCain or a Bill Kristol or Max Boot is grounded in their essential belief in such concepts as international “human rights” and America’s role as the global “enforcer” of those rights, which impels them to condemn Russia’s “persecution” of homosexuals, its institution of mandatory Christian religious instruction in its public schools (which neoconservatives condemn as “religious intolerance”), and its refusal to accept the economic and political straightjacket of the EU or other “international organizations.”

Additionally, as many of the leading Neocon pundits and writers are of Russian Jewish descent and Russian nationalism and Orthodoxy imply for them various forms of historical anti-semitism and the pre-revolutionary era anti-Jewish pogroms, Putin’s Russia is seen as symbolizing a possible recrudescence of those evils (despite the strong support he has received from Russia’s native Jewish population).

So, thus, the conjunction and harmony of Max Boot’s and Romney’s view, with George Soros’s view that Russia is now globally, “enemy number one.” And thus, also, some of the reasons for that unseemly ideological “marriage”….

Back at the beginning of 2015 (December 29, 2014), I wrote a long, heavily documented article about Putin and Putin’s Russia, attempting to shed some light on his past and the various largely spurious accusations leveled against him. It was reprinted by over thirteen web sites, both in the United States and overseas, and translated into Italian, Russian and a couple of other languages. I won’t reproduce it today, although it may be accessed at: http://www.unz.com/article/examining-the-hatred-of-vladimir-putin-and-russia/ (I have revised and updated it since then and can send that newer version to anyone requesting it.) Rather, today I will offer some details of what the media, in its near entirety, does not report, or, if it does, it does with a pronounced and virulent anti-Putin bias.

Over the past few months Russia has been commemorating the 100th anniversary of the bloody Bolshevik Revolution (1917), the results of which included the violent and horrible deaths of approximately 100 million human  beings (according to the authoritative Black Book of Communism). Vladimir Putin has repeatedly traveled to various sites of infamous Communist murder and criminality from that era, and has dedicated memorials—“walls of grief”—and newly-erected and rebuilt Christian churches to memorialize and honor those victims. Russian cinema has, likewise, joined this effort of memory and correcting the Marxist view of history, with numerous (and popular) films that portray a frankly, very open anti-Communist viewpoint.

You would think that the Western media and our Western political leaders would welcome this—that after the life-and-death struggle with Communism for over seven decades our leaders would celebrate this turn of events.

But, no, rather Putin’s praxis is seen as nothing more than “calculating,” the “insincere use” of those anniversaries to consolidate his “dictatorial” or “neo-Stalinist” rule, and, more grievously, his refusal to fully accept all those wonderful fruits of Western-style globalism and, yes, his unreasonable rejection of the triumph of that other variant of Marxism, the dominant Cultural Marxism which pervades the West.

Is this not, then, Leon Trotsky’s revenge? Stalin’s legions were incapable of bringing down the Christian West, and Soviet Communism of the doddering Kremlin commissars ended up on that “ash heap of history.” But Trotsky, whom Stalin had murdered in his Mexican exile in 1940, now, with his millions of ideological descendants and godchildren, appears well on his way to actual and ultimate triumph.

Today, then, I ask your indulgence at the length: I pass on four items that offer a somewhat impressionistic view of what has happened in and to Russia since August 1991, when Vladimir Putin—that ex-KGB bureaucrat—was largely responsible for thwarting and defeating the KGB coup against the incipient anti-Communist Russian republic. (Yes, that is just one fact most of our Neocon pundits like to omit.) First, London-based Professor Paul Robinson’s examination of how the establishment Western media continues to ignore Putin’s open and vigorous rejection of Soviet Communism and his exhibited desire to memorialize its victims.

Second, I pass on a short article that appeared in The Washington Post back in 2008, shortly after the death of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in which he praised Putin’s efforts to revive Russia’s traditional Christian and moral heritage, and, equally, Putin’s praise of Solzhenitsyn’s valiant opposition to Godless Communism.

Third, from that epitome of Establishment Deep State “high” journalism, I reproduce a 2013 article from The Atlantic monthly, worryingly suggesting that Putin was becoming the head of a “worldwide traditionalist conservative crusade” against the progressivist and modern West. It literally sent shivers down their secularist spines. Yet, the article is fascinating for offering a view in not only the minds of the cultural Marxist Left, but, with a certain irony, found also in much of basic Neocon thinking.

Fourth, from the large collection of Putin’s speeches that I have archived, I pass on excerpts of his “State of the State” address to the Russian people, December 16, 2013—this is representative of the rhetoric and imagery, and the historical references that he employs in most of his addresses, and also exemplifies the type of conservative legislation his political party, United Russia, has enacted in the Russian Duma. (The UR party hold 340 of the 450 seats.)

==========================================

~ DR. BOYD D. CATHEY is an Unz Review columnist, as well as a Barely a Blog contributor, whose work is easily located on this site under the “BAB’s A List” search category. Dr. Cathey earned an MA in history at the University of Virginia (as a Thomas Jefferson Fellow), and as a Richard M Weaver Fellow earned his doctorate in history and political philosophy at the University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain. After additional studies in theology and philosophy in Switzerland, he taught in Argentina and Connecticut before returning to North Carolina. He was State Registrar of the North Carolina State Archives before retiring in 2011. He writes for The Unz Review, The Abbeville Institute, Confederate Veteran magazine, The Remnant, and other publications in the United States and Europe on a variety of topics, including politics, social and religious questions, film, and music.

Related:

“Examining the Hatred of Vladimir Putin and Russia” By Boyd Cathey.

Wall of Grief” BY PROFESSOR PAUL ROBINSON.

Toward end, Solzhenitsyn embraced Putin’s Russia,” Boston.com.

Vladimir Putin, Conservative Icon,” By Brian Whitmore.

TRANSCRIPT: [Putin] Presidential Address to the Federal Assembly.

UPDATE (11/7):

Comments Off on UPDATED (11/7): America’s Embracing Cultural Marxism; Putin’s Reviving Russian Traditionalism

George Orwell’s “1984” And The “Must Topple” List

America, Communism, Free Speech, History, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Literature, States' Rights

FROM George Orwell’s “1984”: “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day-by-day and minute-by-minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

Must topple” is courtesy of the Observer-Reporter.