Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez does Trofim Lysensko

Lone Ranger: Hmm.... We’re surrounded by hostile Sioux Indians. Looks like we are done for, Tonto.

 Tonto:  Wadya mean, “we,” Kimosabe?

From: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, U.S. House of Representatives

To Microsoft, Google, Facebook Execs.

Dear Mr. Nadella, Mr. Zuckerberg and Mr. Pichai:

We are writing to you today in light of the important role that your companies play as we prepare to take comprehensive action on climate change…we were deeply disappointed to see that your companies were high-level sponsors of a conference this month in Washington D.C., known as LibertyCon, that included a session denying established science on climate change.

So, you think that a grammatical subject-matter like the rhetorical function of personal pronouns is the high end of boring and inconsequential. Well, think again, as we follow the trail of the “we” in Ms Ocasio-Cortez’s dispatch to three of the biggest Mr. Bigs in the information-tech industry.

“We are writing to you ….  as we prepare to take comprehensive action …. [and] we were deeply disappointed to see that your companies…” etc.  Note the ominous direction: from “we’re just communicating with you, to we’re about to do something very important, to we’re real disappointed because it looks like you are standing in our way by supporting a bunch of reactionaries we don’t like.” Sounds pretty threatening to me, and from someone sitting in the U.S. Congress. Just who is this “we” rapping the knuckles of a Big Enchilada like Zuckerberg? Well, it’s the latest social media sensation, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who in good Commissar fashion is wielding the “moral-we,” now one of the virtue-signaling Boss-ladies in the Capital city who knows what is best for us all. It is also an up-and-coming “we” of momentum and power, a bold “we” that takes “comprehensive action” and lets the bigshots who throw their money around know that they’ve been a big disappointment.

Obama some time back set the bar very high for the effective use of the “moral-we.” From the Obama’s 2008 campaign: “Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.” Ignoring the disturbing pathological elements in this concoction, if you were hoping for some semblance of genuine humility in this young generation of “leaders,” and if arrogance, unbounded self-regard and immaturity put you off, these know-it-all “we’s” who seem to be running the show are just getting started. There will be many more suspects to fuel their deep disappointment, and they will make life miserable for anyone who fails to recognize their superior virtue and doesn’t snap to.  As Bob Dylan once sang: “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”

So, we stagger bewilderedly into increasingly muddled times where, for example, the ruling Triumvirate of the tech-media world will likely go wobbly to learn that they had “deeply disappointed” a twenty-nine year old Puerto Rican ex-waitress with a few weeks of seniority in the U.S. House of Representatives and a round of talk show appearances where she recently said she said she gives “zero fucks” about criticism she’s received from members of her own party. This is now how one is supposed to speak “truth to power.”

It’s beyond distressing to see someone like this taken seriously, and the works of Karl Marx, of all people, might be taped to provide some insight into this mess. Surveying his own tumultuous times, he wrote, history repeats itself, “the first as tragedy, then as farce.” This apothegm was from his essay, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon. Tragedy reappears throughout the course of history as farce. The farce that Marx was contemplating was the French coup of 1851 by Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, a repeat of the seizure of power by his uncle, Napoléon Bonaparte in 1799 and the tragic consequences of his despotism.

Fast forward to the present, if you will, and attempt to comprehend the unfolding of the latest tragedy-as-farce in the person of Ms. Ocasio-Cortez.  An instant celebrity and the darling and future of the Democrat party, it seems, she has stepped into a starring role on the political stage as the Queen of Farce. From News Week: “Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democrat from New York, called climate change “our World War II” and warned that the world will end in 12 years if we don’t address global warming on Monday [January 21, 2119]. During an interview Monday at the MLK Now event at Riverside Church in New York with writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ocasio-Cortez argued that global warming needs to be addressed immediately to avoid the end of human existence.” 

Note, of course, the predictable scolding “if we don’t address climate change...” But this is a different “we” at work than the moral-we in her memo citied above. This is a fake one overloaded with apocalyptic hyperbole, adolescent bombast and wild hallucinations. You see, she sees herself in charge now, rescuing the world, only twelve years away from oblivion, calling the shots – the Commander in “our World War II.” And the “we” in this outpouring of mental incontinence is actually “us,” those of us who she wants to salute her, take orders, bear the cost, conform to the mountains of rules, regulations and dictates that she wants to cascade down upon us, and suffer the horrific unintended consequences that follow from the whims, fantasies and dictates of an ignoramus who has suddenly found herself with lots of power and showered with attention.

Ocasio-Cortez has with much encouragement risen quickly to become our very own Trofim Lysenko, an ambitious charlatan who led the wreckage of biological science in the Soviet Union along with the ruined lives of many distinguished scientists. Lysenko was a quack agronomist whose theory of environmentally acquired inheritance was, by the man who ran the USSR, eagerly turned into the “established science” that would be career-ending, not to mention physically hazardous, for those in the biological sciences to “deny.” “He [Lyskenko] had no postgraduate  training or higher degree, no formal claim to the title of scientist, yet he aspired to the theoretical heights from which, as he told a Pravda correspondent in 1927, practical problems could be solved by a few calculations ‘on a little old scrap of paper.’” (David Jorasky, The Lysenko Affair, University of Chicago Press, 1970, 189)  

Lysenko’s astounding success was due to his skill in bending his “scientific research” into findings that greatly pleased Stalin, whose authority in all matters of importance – art, history, music, philosophy, sociology, economics and, yes, science, was supreme and unquestionable. The science of genetics that the ignorant Lysenko overturned pointed its researchers toward conclusions that were, unfortunately for the geneticists, incompatible with Stalin’s insights into how any part of the world (social or physical) actually worked. Marx had laid the theoretical groundwork for it all: Stalin fleshed out the details and perfected its applications. Pointing out flaws in any of it, shall we say, was not a prudent decision. The real scientists who noted Lysenko’s deficiencies were also casting shadows over Stalin’s jealously guarded shield of infallibility and were dispatched to the work camps. Lysenko, with Stalin’s imprimatur, shutdown scientific debate and research in much of the life sciences, including genetics, wrecked Soviet agriculture, and put biology in the Soviet Union into a thirty-year deep freeze.

Like Lysenko, Ocasio-Cortez is a science-ignoramus (more on that below) who uses her political leverage, as we see with her memo cited above, to control what scientists get to talk about and to demonize critics. Hence the label “climate change deniers” which is intended to carry the same de-legitimizing stigmatism as “Holocaust-deniers.” “Deniers” are moral-lepers who in Stalin’s reign got shot or sent to the Gulag. In the soft-totalitarianism that now envelops us, “deniers” are shut-out of the conversations and the institutions, their careers destroyed and characters assassinated. Thus, we see Ocasio-Cortez putting the “deniers” in her cross-hairs.  “[W]e were deeply disappointed to see that your companies were high-level sponsors of a conference … that included a session denying established science on climate change.” Representative Ocasio-Cortez, like Lysenko and the CPSU bosses in earlier times, thinks she should decide who the real scientists are.

It seems to me that the obvious question Messrs Nadella, Zuckerberg and Pichai, the subjects of Ocasio-Cortez’s disappointment, should be asking themselves is: does this woman have the remotest understanding of what the “established science of climate change” is? And, does “established science” ever change? And, finally, is there some good reason she should be dictating the sponsorships of science conventions in any case? The answer to the first question is not a secret. Her formal education consists of a BA degree in economics and international relations from Boston University.  From Wikipedia here is her post-college professional experience:

After college, Ocasio-Cortez worked as a bartender in Manhattan and as a waitress in a taqueria. Her mother, meanwhile, cleaned houses and drove school buses. She launched Brook Avenue Press, a publishing firm for books that portray the Bronx in a positive light. She worked as lead educational strategist at GAGEis, Inc; for the nonprofit National Hispanic Institute (NHI), and served as NHI's Educational Director of the 2017 Northeast Collegiate World Series, a five-day long program targeted at college-bound high school students from across the United States and other countries, where she participated in a panel on Latino leadership.

It is safe to say that her knowledge and theoretical expertise in the area of “climate science” would likely rival her mastery of cardiology, cartography or civil engineering.  Would anyone trust her to design a bridge, construct a map, or read an EKG?  Given what we have seen from her so far, self-promotion seems to be her singular talent, and she shouldn’t be trusted to do much of anything. Here, sadly then is Lysenkoism, twenty-first century style, featuring a blustering, know-nothing egomaniac, threatening the end of the world, like some street-corner crackpot, demanding control over the agendas of scientific gatherings and threatening business executives. This is as about a nightmarish display of arrogance married to ignorance as one can imagine. Like all ideologues, Ocasio-Cortez’s beliefs are absolute and impregnable, only confirmation is permitted. Doubt is heresy and heretics get punished. The Stalinist in Russia shot them; the Stalinists in the U.S. smear them. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez in quest of heretics is proselytizing for her religion under the guise of science. As a waitress, nobody needed to pay attention to her; as a United States Representative, with a large following, she is a very frightening woman. That she is taken seriously by so many, particularly, young people, is a signal that the bad times are getting worse. When does the farce turn into a tragedy?

Is America a Democracy? Its Enemies Think Not

                                                                                     
 

“Stalin’s dictatorship, too would be expected to foster ‘a permanent condition of stress by creating enemies at home and abroad and/or by imposing upon the population gigantic tasks that would be unlikely to be carried out in the absence of the dictatorship’ as well as, ‘a charismatic image of the dictator,’ ‘a utopian goal, carefully kept in a remote future’ and ‘proscription of any deviating values, supported by threats and acts of repression.’”

(From Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941, p. 306)

Observations and reflections of seemingly no relevance to your daily comings and goings jump out at you sometimes and make a strong, unexpected connection to your unrelenting, consuming nightmares. Jumping out at me was the above reflection on Stalin’s dictatorship from a new biography by the prolific historian of the Soviet era, Stephen Kotkin. So, how does a long dead, mass-murdering Bolshevik connect to twenty-first century American politics now in a constant, wild frenzy over one of its most bizarre of improbabilities, a TV-reality show star and former real estate mogul with gorgeous wife numero tres sitting in the White House? 

The closest we have gotten to a “charismatic image of the dictator” in recent times might have been the cult of personality that enveloped candidate Barack Obama, The One, in 2008 replete with fainting maidens at his rallies, God-comparisons by serious journalists, and fake Greek columns for the backdrops of his speeches. Obama’s “healing the planet” magic was sustained for a season by the massive collective sycophancy composed of the media establishment, the entertainment industry and academia. The cult of Obama, however, was a celebrity cult and Americans in their embrace of celebrities are, if nothing else, a fickle lot. Obama is now (at least for the time being), past tense, the mystic, Oprah, the current fashionable buzz.  For better or worse, we have, as they say, moved on, and whatever one might care to say about Donald Trump, “charismatic” is not what first jumps to mind.

What strikes so close to home about Kotkin’s comments on Stalin’s rule is his noting of “a permanent condition of stress by creating enemies at home or abroad….”  It is safe to say, I believe, that “a permanent condition of stress” captures what so many of us now feel as we endure the daily irruptions of ideological warfare increasingly infused with the language of apocalypse and the denunciation of yet another enemy of “our democracy.” Nancy Pelosi, of the recent Republican tax bill, intoned, “It is the end of the world… The debate on health care is life/death… This is Armageddon.” In the head of this cognitively impaired septuagenarian, predicting how the levers move to arrange her thoughts might be an entertaining exercise, but she cannot possibly believe this. No one believes it, but American politics has descended into untrammeled tribal warfare, and warfare is all about friends and enemies. Obama let it slip out in a 2010 Univision interview, dropping his ‘g’s  in order to sound less like a President and more like a mob boss, “We’re gonna punish our enemies, and we’re gonna reward our friends.” Obama, however, had stumbled on to something: enemies exist to be punished; that’s the whole point, and when you practice politics as warfare, that’s the only rule. 

The existence of these enemies Obama had put in his sights for punishment, I would suggest, is what makes our “permanent condition of stress” permanent. Moreover, it should be obvious that, whatever the particular threats political enemies might exude, persistence and endurance are of the highest importance, in a word, permanence. A completely vanquished enemy is no longer an enemy, and without him, the status-quo with all of its limitations and imperfections conveniently ascribed to his wiles, belongs entirely to the victor, an undisputed but tainted possession, however, that does not work completely to his advantage. On our enemies, we depend for our longevity more, perhaps, than on our friends.

Stalin was extremely fortunate in the early stages of his dictatorship to have had Hitler and Mussolini as his enemies. The racial and national superiority claimed by the Nazis and Fascists and their affinity for violence and military aggression made them the perfect foil for the Soviet’s phony “peace” propaganda and the promise of humanity’s revolutionary march of progress toward a world of equality, harmony and plenty and a socialist workers paradise. The Soviets were the “progressives” of the 1930s; they had divined the arc of the moral universe bending toward justice and were, in stark contrast to the Nazis, bending right along with it. Though Nazi Germany was militarily vanquished by Stalin (with massive assistance from the capitalist powers he had vowed to destroy) the imagery of fascism was embraced by the Soviets up to its collapse in 1991 to define its enemies, including its primary cold war enemy, the United States.

Who then are the enemies that now foster this “permanent state of stress” that seems to plague American politics? These are “enemies within,” those who oppose or are indifferent to the coercive moralism of the self-proclaimed “progressives” who now own the Democrat party. These enemies, in continuity with practice of the Soviet-era progressives, employing the ominous swastika-blackshirt imagery of the 1930s, continue to be smeared as fascists; “fascism” meaning opposition or resistance to progress. Only moral defectives and mental pigmies can be against progress which is why “fascist” rolls so effortlessly off the tongue of a progressive whenever he encounters someone not of his ilk. 

Progress, however, is conveniently and hopelessly abstract and remains always an elusive goal, one, as noted in Kotkin’s observation above, “that is carefully kept in the remote future.” The future is never where we are at, and thus it serves to defer accountability for current failure and as the ideological fulcrum to justify the application of whatever force is necessary to prepare everyone for arrival, someday, at that morally pristine destination of perfect equality, progressivism’s ruling motif. All progressives, whether of the 1930s Bolshevik-genre or 21^st century American social justice warriors, are enthusiasts for coercion, since not everyone comprehends their current fallen state and only those who are willing to submit to the purification rituals get to continue moving toward the promise land. Those who do not are, as Hillary Clinton put it so bluntly during her 2016 Presidential campaign, “irredeemable.” With the shift of a few electoral votes, the future for anyone belonging to this class, would have looked even less promising. When you have the power, what exactly will you do to a large, intractable class of irredeemables that will not involve massive coercion? Hillary’s irredeemables would have felt her revenge; a bit like Stalin’s kulaks of the 1930s.

For today’s progressives, so enthralled with the promises of Obama and now in desperate “resistance” to President Trump, their “friends” and “enemies” no longer break out into Bolshevik-theorized hostile classes (oppressed-proletariat versus oppressor-capitalist) but into racial tribes (oppressed-people of color versus white-oppressors). The vehicle of this relationship is racism, and it is barely an exaggeration to say that twenty minutes cannot pass without Americans being reminded by some angry or condescending “authority” from the chattering classes what a racist society they live in. They watch the mobs assault historical monuments, benignly regarded for hundreds of years, now proclaimed “racist.” Speech that does not conform to the standards set by self-proclaimed victims of racial discrimination and oppression is proscribed as “hate speech,” and harassment and banishment meted out to the transgressors. Whiteness and white-privilege are officially the marks of moral turpitude and require the bearers to undergo confessional “struggle sessions” reminiscent of the Mao’s Red Guard in action during the Cultural Revolution.          

Racism, Obama revealed to us late in his Presidency, is “still part of our DNA that's passed on. We're not cured of it.” This was not good news, at least for some of us “folks.” Translated into practical-political terms this means that racists are here for the duration, enemies, you might say, of a permanent nature. What punishment might be in store for them is a matter of grim speculation. Obama’s metaphor of the “cure,” clearly, is a euphemism that barely conceals the growing hostility and resentment for the heritage and traditions of white European America and the determination to erase them.

There was no push back on Obama’s “diagnosis” from any notable within our culture shaping institutions. Indeed, this seems to be the received, state-enforced wisdom, the foundation of the ruling orthodoxy, and so once again Kotkin’s text on Stalin’s last-century terror-state bears out a certain resemblance to the descent of 21^st century American politics into a soft dictatorship. We now, as did the Russians in the 1930s, face the “proscription of any deviating values, supported by threats and acts of repression.” The dictatorship we live under today has no mustachiod, grey tunic-wearing party General Secretary who personally sets the standards for “correct” thinking enforced by an elaborate apparatus of state-terror. The proscription and repression for us is of a different more insidious, sophisticated order. Instead, we have a hoard of mini-Stalins (race-careerists, political opportunists, left-wing globalists, and cultural Marxists) throughout the land sniffing into every corner of American society for any scent of racism. The American-Stalinist orthodoxy is the judgment that racism, the defining core of American history, dominates every aspect of its social order. Redemption comes only by remaking America into a multicultural rainbow that reflects the diversity of the planet. This is not a debatable proposition: to raise questions or doubts is a high-risk enterprise. Your career can be destroyed, Nobel prize winning geneticist, James Watson, for example, for publishing research on race and IQ. You cannot speak and may be assaulted on a university campus if your views on race related matters do not meet official approval, Charles Murray and his faculty escort, for example, at Middlebury College last year. Professional advancement, academic respectability, social approval and mobility, all rest heavily on conformity to the affirmations of the fixed faith.

In government, the mini-Stalins busy themselves opening the borders to millions of third world people and denouncing as “racist” Americans who resent not only the financial and social burdens they impose, but also fear the loss of their culture and heritage. The journalists and media advocacy-functionaries, perform Pravda-like, rewarded for their fawning with access to corridors of power. From the corrupt, dissolute entertainment industry, we are subjected to productions of obscenity-laced nihilism and a steady barrage of barely disguised works of leftwing agitprop. Little-Stalins infest the workplace as sensitivity enforcers policing such things as the use of gender pronouns, searching for micro-aggressions, expanding the world of victims whose feelings require constant protection from the bigots who fail to grasp the imperatives of diversity and inclusion.   

In this dictatorship that the overlords continue, laughingly, to call “our democracy,” we – white, European, Christian Americans – are the enemy, the permanent enemy. Apologies for slavery and racism and copious confessions of white privilege will not change that. Reparations will not change that. Diversity indoctrination, sensitivity training and absorbing more lectures on tolerance will not make us less toxic. Reverence and worship of Martin Luther King and attendance at MLK prayer breakfasts will make no difference, will impress no one and will not diminish the hostility and rancor held against us. Nothing we say or do will make “whiteness” other than a permanent moral stain. The first practical order is to stop pretending otherwise and collaborating with the engineers of our destruction. What comes next should be obvious.     

                                                                     

Has the Spanish Civil War Ended?

“Spain on a knife's edge as Madrid seizes control of rebel Catalonia” (Madrid, AFP)   

Deja vu isn’t what it used to be. I am confused. Hasn’t the Spanish Civil War ended? Here is a clue from the first paragraph of the AFP news release under the headline above. “Spain was plunged into crisis Friday as Madrid seized power from independence-seeking Catalonia, the first curtailment of regional autonomy since the brutal dictatorship of Francisco Franco.” Yes, let’s keep “the brutal dictatorship of Francisco Franco” front and center when we talk about contemporary Spain. Here we have the mass media slipping some virtue signaling into the mix to guide the reader, historiographically speaking, through dark, turbulent waters toward the safe harbor of cultural Marxist hermeneutics as he contemplates the current disorder.

AFP, by the way, stands for Agence France-Presse, an international news agency headquartered in Paris and the third largest news agency in the world, after AP and Reuters. Those who gaze at the world under the journalistic tutelage of the cognoscenti from AP, AFP and Reuters, should be aware that “brutal dictatorship” is one of their well-worn meta-political prescriptions, a de rigueur qualifier for right-wing dictators, living or dead. Rarely or ever do they apply it to the “liberators” of the left who grant free health care to their wards. In vein, you will scour AP or AFP coverage over the decades to discover “the brutal dictatorship of Fidel Castro.” Rather, here is another recent piece of left-wing journalism (the NYT) rhapsodic over a different Latin caudillo.  “The Socialist-inspired movement of the late President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela led to gains in education and health care, but the country has sunk into hunger, unrest and dictatorship.”  This “hunger, unrest and dictatorship” seems to be quite the mystery.  Take note of how respectful this is – “the late President” … his “Socialist-inspired movement” and so many “gains.”

The Spanish Civil War remains the 20^th century prototype of the trending victim ideology. A lot of Franco’s victims were from Catalonia. Catalonia’s secessionist ambitions were a big part of the civil war, and it was, both materially and ideologically, the most vigorous region in opposition to the Nationalists. It was also an anarchist stronghold and the place where George Orwell observed for posterity in Homage to Catalonia the crushing of the non-Stalinist left (POUM) by Stalin’s NKVD. Today it offers an exotic fusion of hyper leftwing politics, academics and social justice activism. Visited now it would be sort of like a Berkeley, Madison, Ann Arbor and San Francisco all rolled together in a beautiful Mediterranean setting.  Standing in front of Gaudi's Sagrada Familia you might think you had just dropped some acid. To see today’s left rapidly decomposing, debauched pathologies proudly on an in-your-face display, go to Barcelona – a depressing contrast to conservative, still-somewhat-Catholic, Madrid.

However, to answer the question posed above: Did the Spanish Civil War really end in 1939 when the Republicans surrendered and the shooting stopped?  No. Two separate thoughts apply here. First, it was a civil war and, unlike conventional wars where the losers sue for peace and the winners, content with the terms, go home, the victors and the vanquished (for the most part) have to live together – intimately in some cases. The victors take their revenge, daily, in ways big and small. For the vanquished, the experience of resentment that never ceases to fester and is passed through the generations. Moreover, resentment, if properly nourished and managed, can become a powerful political weapon. In Spain, it has. Flip Clausewitz and you have the current Spanish Civil War as conducted by the Marxists: “Politics is the continuation of war by other means.”

Second, is that the Spanish Civil War is, perhaps, unique in the 20^th century as a political rebellion where the forces of reaction prevailed against a well-organized, highly energized far-left terrorism supported by and aligned with the liberal and left-wing elites in politics, the universities and haute culture. Also unique is that the narrative of the Spanish Civil War that eventually triumphed was produced and widely promulgated not by the winners (Francoists) but by the losers (the left). Its success was due in large part to its simplicity as a tragic, but inspirational morality play. The freedom-loving, democratically elected Republicans, supported and defended by the International Brigades, succumbed to the tides of Spanish fascism under the leadership of General Francisco Franco, goose stepping in a junior partnership with Hitler and Mussolini.

This is the widely promulgated Manichean version of the Spanish Civil War – the forces of Good, advancing democracy, equality and freedom, confronting Evil in the form of fascism with its instinctive brutality, militarist atavism and racial bigotry. It is wonderfully free of any moral ambiguity – the losers as heroes and martyrs in opposition to tyranny and oppression, abandoned by the Western democracies; the winner, a cretin mediocrity who took his revenge, built his dictatorship and finally drifted into senescence.

In 2012, the British Marxist, Paul Preston, published a massive tomb, The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain. Just the title and sub-title alone are a vicious smear; of course, the Catholic Church meets Auschwitz. Preston, a prolific and erudite Spanish Civil War historian, is widely read and admired in Spain. His Spanish Holocaust, however, is in keeping with the left’s reductio ad hitlerum approach to modern history. In the Prologue he writes: “I thought long and hard about using the word ‘holocaust’ in the sub-title of this book. I feel intense sorrow and outrage about the Nazis’ deliberate attempt to annihilate European Jewry. I also feel intense sorrow and outrage about the lesser but none the less, massive suffering undergone by the Spanish people during the Civil War of 1936—9 and for several years thereafter, I could find no other word that more that more accurately encapsulates the Spanish experience than ‘holocaust’.” I also feel intense sorrow and outrage reading this book, but many words could be found to show how tendentious, dishonest and outrageous Preston’s choice for his title really is, but suffice it to say that he is entirely consistent in playing the left’s tiresome game of the brown smear and preserving the fiction of the Spanish Civil War as fascism crushing democracy.  

Relieved of its romantic For Whom the Bell Tolls mythology, however, the historiography of the Spanish Civil War, thanks to the herculean labors of researchers like Burnett Bolloten and Stanley Payne, gives way in large part to the contemplation of communist (Stalinist) duplicity and treachery heavily cloaked in the rhetoric of democracy, equality and freedom.  While contributing human and material assets to the Spanish Republicans ostensibly to resist the fascist rebels, Stalin’s NKVD agents were moving through Spain rounding up, torturing and murdering dissident communists, like Andreu Nin, taking control of the Army and insinuating themselves deeply into positions of governmental power. Stalin’s Trojan horse modus operandi in Spain was a dress rehearsal for how the communists would operate to support the unfolding of “democracy” in devastated counties like Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and Poland at the end of World War II, countries that we all know became models of social equality and so bursting with confidence, prosperity and opportunity that no one was allowed to leave.

During this civil war, Stalin’s assassins were also chasing his former revolutionary colleague, Leon Trotsky, around the globe and killing his family members until the Soviet-trained Spaniard, Ramon Mercader, murdered him in Mexico City in 1940. Mercader’s mother, incidentally, was Caridad del Río Hernández, an ardent communist who fought in the Spanish Civil War and doubled as a Soviet agent.The Leon Trotsky of Stalin’s invention and dissemination was supposedly in league with Franco and the fascists. In historical retrospect, it is difficult to conceive how such a preposterous fiction could have taken hold with anyone, but Stalin’s dramaturgical skill in service to his jealousy and megalomania was second only to the eager gullibility of his acolytes and fellow travelers.

 

“Fascist” in Stalin’s lexicon was his preferred term of abuse for whomever at the moment he saw as a competitor for power, his enemy du jour. Stalinists reserve their resentment for those who compete with them for power. Inside the Soviet Union from 1936 through 1938, Stalin purged the bulk of the old Bolsheviks like Bukharin and the senior officer corps, men who, like Trotsky, were supposedly in league with the fascists. These were individuals, most of whom were deeply committed communists, revolutionaries from the early days of the Bolshevik revolution. But Stalin feared and loathed them because he viewed them as competitors for his own power base within the party. Into Spain with the support of Santiago Carrillo and his Spanish communist followers, he exported his signature calumnies, purges, show trials with the accompanying tortures and executions. His agents moved against Francisco Largo Caballero and the socialists with a ferocity and ruthlessness that was directed against the forces of Franco in lesser proportions.  All of the non-Stalinist left in Spain at one time or another during the civil war were linked to or tarnished with the label of fascist.

    

With “fascism” being so protean and flexible, how absurd to try to render the Spanish Civil war as a battle of democracy against fascism when in many ways it more resembles a replay of French Jacobins against the ancien régime. However, the resemblance is imperfect. Franco did manage militarily to crush the Republicans and punish and purge all the Spanish leftists he could get his hands on. He also tried mightily to make 20^th century Spain into an earlier Catholic Spain, not exactly a strictly fascist sort of obsession, evidenced also by his marginalizing of the Falange. But his 36 year-long “brutal dictatorship” was largely a bust. The Spanish Jacobins came roaring back, literally. After Franco’s death in 1975, the legendary Spanish Communist and devout Stalinist, La Pasionaria, Deloris Ibárruri of “No pasarán” fame returned to Spain from exile in the Soviet Union and eventually took an elected seat in the Spanish Parliament.  General Secretary of the Spanish Communist Party (PCE) Santiago Carrillo also returned to Spain from the Soviet Union. Carrillo, a Stalinist errand boy and butcher, had supervised the Paracuellos massacres by a Republican faction in 1936. He also arranged for the murder of those Spanish communists who had incurred Stalin’s disapproval. Back in post-Franco Spain, Carrillo joined Ibárruri in Parliament. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Autonomous University of Madrid in 2005. La Pasionaria and Carrillo, both very old, with bloody hands and unrepentant, died, so to speak, in the “odour of sanctity” in the crumbling remnants of Franco’s Spain.

Post-Franco, it seemed like only minutes before Spain joined the rest of secularist, consumerist, western Europe with all the once-forbidden goodies – liberated women, no-fault divorce, gay rights, abortion (eventually).  With the fading of a Catholic Spain and the Iberian embrace of secular hedonism, you might think that the Spanish Marxists would be happy. But, no. Leftists everywhere are unhappy and resentful.  Resentment brings victims (as subjects of political patronage) and targets victimizers (as objects of proscription and revenge). In the U.S. the victims are “people of color” and the victimizers are white racists, committed to the retention of their “privilege” and the pursuit of their “supremacy.” In Spain, the left has Franco as the great victimizer, having achieved, per Paul Preston, Hitler status.  When you have yet another Hitler in place, there are ample victims for consideration and no place to hide for those who cannot quite grasp the new reality. Franco, unlike Hitler, won his war, and the Spanish, unlike the post WWII Germans subjected to de-Nazification, have eluded a de-Francoization. But the left persists. In 2007 the Socialist Party passed the eerie sounding “Law of Historical Memory” which, formally condemned the Franco regime and began the process of the dismantling of all things Franco in Spain – statues, street names, etc.  – and someday, Franco’s memorial and tomb, Valle de los Caidos. The Spanish Civil War is not over, at least not for the left in Spain.

Where is the Refuge in Post-Obama America?

In 1989 Zbigniew Kazimierz Brezezinski, a premier theorist of totalitarian political systems, published The Grand Failure: The Birth and Death of Communism in the Twentieth Century. He lived a long and eventful life and unfortunately sold the services of his formidable Polish intellect to the likes of Lyndon Johnson and the feckless, attempted rabbit slayer, James Earl Carter Jr. (For those taken with odd coincidences, Brezezinksi was awarded his Harvard Ph.D. with a dissertation on Lenin’s terror-command state in 1953, the same year Stalin turned room temperature, leaving his second-string in charge of the one Lenin had created.)

One also cannot help but wonder whether Brezezinski ever came to regret that portion of the sub-title he gave to his book – the “Death of Communism” – having died in 2017, a couple of months after Barack “Mugabe” Obama was done with the “transformation” he had earlier promised of the United States of America back in 2008. In his mistitled book, Brezezinski made an observation that really jumps out at a discerning reader: “Communism thus appealed to the simpletons and the sophisticates alike…” Yes, except for the past-tense of the verb. Moreover, these days it can be a challenge to separate the sophisticates from the simpletons.

This insight does help to dispel the mystery of Obama’s rapid ascendency – from a no-account, back-bench, corrupt state senator to “heal the planet” President of the United States. Obama is a simpleton who passed himself off as a sophisticate with a great deal of assistance from high placed, fake-sophisticates like New York Times columnist, David Brooks. Recall, that it was Brooks, who after interviewing candidate Obama, was so smitten with the combination of his blackness and well-pressed slacks, gushed that that he was destined be a great President. Then, of course, there was Senior Newsweek Editor, Evan Thomas’s comment on Obama’s 2009 Cairo speech: “I mean in a way Obama’s standing above the country, above – above the world, he’s sort of God.”

Here is a clue as to how it unfolded, how Obama rose to divinity, happily documented for us by, again, the New York Times long before the thin, street agitator from South Chicago, Hawaii, Indonesia, or wherever he was from, proclaimed himself as The One. 

BOSTON, Feb. 5, 1990 — The Harvard Law Review, generally considered the most prestigious in the country, elected the first black president in its 104-year history today. The job is considered the highest student position at Harvard Law School.
The new president of the Review is Barack Obama, a 28-year-old graduate of Columbia University who spent four years heading a community development program for poor blacks on Chicago's South Side before enrolling in law school. His late father, Barack Obama, was a finance minister in Kenya and his mother, Ann Dunham, is an American anthropologist now doing fieldwork in Indonesia. Mr. Obama was born in Hawaii.
''The fact that I've been elected shows a lot of progress,'' Mr. Obama said today in an interview. ''It's encouraging.” 

What the NYT scribblers omit in this article, one of their typical “first black fill-in-the-blank” panegyrics, is more interesting and relevant than what we get to read. But skipping through the boiler plate, reverential tripe, here, luckily, we have Obama captured, unaware, on record as the self-promoting simpleton he is and has always been. “The fact that I've been elected shows a lot of progress…. It’s encouraging.” Perhaps, but the little we know about Harvard and the lot we know about Obama suggest that this election had nothing to do with what most people think of as “progress.”

His remarks in fact do tell us all we need to know about the career path Obama had in mind and the fake sophistication that would be layered around him as he hustled his way up to the highest ring on the boss-ladder. “Progress” is a gem of Obama-Speak, one that captures the solipsistic equation of his personal advancement with “that arc of the moral universe that bends toward justice.” Recall, this was a Martin Luther King apothegm, a favorite of OHB, used during his reign to keep reminding those “folks” out there that the course of his presidency and the “moral arc of the universe” were pretty much on the same track. This sort of theatrical moralizing yourself into the woven fabric of the universe is a common adolescent trait, usually forgivable because most adolescents grow up and wise up. Obama did neither and ended up convinced that the banalities that always seemed to be popping into his head and out of his busy mouth were profound moral revelations. “If you're walking down the right path and you’re willing to keep walking, eventually you'll make progress.” Ok, well maybe this inspiration came to Obama after channeling that old Nancy Sinatra tune: “These boots are made for walking and that's just what they'll do. One of these days these boots are gonna walk all over you,” which, when you think about it, is what happened to the American people when Obama started walking down his path.

But, on to “It’s encouraging.” Always the master of misdirection and condescension, even at 28 years old Obama was already posing as the sage elder who has divined the “right way” everyone needs to go and, if politely asked, is willing to point in that direction.

It was certainly encouraging for Obama, enabling him to tout himself later in quest of another presidency as a constitutional law scholar even though during his tenure as editor of this “most prestigious” journal he skipped on one of the standard expectations for appointment to the post, never publishing a single paragraph on the law or anything remotely related. In fact, he never published anything other than two books about his favorite subject, himself, and there is ample reason to suspect that, even with those, he had a lot of help. All of this was fairly common knowledge, but for the sophisticates in journalism and the commentariat (Brezezinski’s sophisticates, including his airhead daughter, Mika, it seems) it was time for white America to atone for its racist past. Obama was the right black, platitude-polishing slickster to make it happen, endorsed by the illustrious Senator Harry Reid for his “light-skinned” appearance and speaking patterns “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.”

We are in the post-Obama era, the bad news being that the eight- year-long lobotomy he performed on the country was successful. How else to explain that in the 2016 Presidential election campaign, the Obama-endorsed candidate, who was under a federal criminal investigation with a decades long history of graft, influence peddling and subornation, got almost 66 million Americans, the plurality in the country, to vote for her. 
  
Obama’s Presidency with its culmination in Cult-Marx, identity politics vastly expanded the population of Brezesinski’s simpletons who swoon when the “free stuff for everyone guy” comes along and says things like “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” Identity politics, crudely reductionist in its approach and primitive in its emotional appeal, makes the natives even more restless. The mad scramble is on. All the incentives are to join, if you can, one of the communities of the marginalized and oppressed, articulate your grievances, agitate for revenge and demand the assistance of the state in taking it. If none is immediately available for membership more are under development, and barring that, you can resort to being a self-flagellating advocate for one of them. There are many self-serving options.

The moralists who call the shots now are all about structuring this new social order so as to protect and reward the oppressed, and then punish the oppressors after they are outed. Most importantly, in such an order it is obviously neither healthy nor prudent for anyone to risk being branded as an oppressor of any sort, or even suspected as such. Which is why in the post-Obama era not-being-a-racist certification has become the most coveted social prize. “Please, really, I am not a racist. How can I convince you? I’ll do anything.” Consider for a moment the power dynamics in play here, and then you quickly understand why political resistance has almost completely collapsed to the moral-extortion racketeering that Obama and his minions institutionalized and now operates openly in both parties.
   

In her great work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt wrote: “Society is always prone to accept a person offhand for what he pretends to be, so that a crackpot posing as a genius always has a certain chance to be believed.” Written long before the arrival of The One, it is comforting to believe that if she had been alive to contemplate the crackpot of Hope and Change, she would have been a one of the few sophisticates who did not fall for the scam.

Post-Charlottesville: We Are on Our Own

We on the right owe something to the leftist mob that, with the assistance and connivance of the state and local authorities, assaulted the lawfully and peacefully assembled protestors in Charlottesville, Virginia last August 13th. Thanks to the Antifas, whatever fleeting illusions or fantasies we may have nurtured about living in a society where there are institutions to protect people who dissent from the prevailing orthodoxy have evaporated. Charlottesville was a watershed 21^st century moment revealing that the Sovietization of the U.S. (21^st century style) is nearly complete.

Since the official interpretation of this Virginia riot seems to one of a resurgent fascism raising its ugly head, it may help to remember how the Soviets in their heyday used “fascism” to keep their fact-free storyline intact and tighten the party’s suffocating grip on the throat of even the puniest of opposition. During those days when the CPSU was calling all the shots on behalf of the Russian proletariat, they relied on an impregnable ideology that happened to explain just about everything that needed explaining. Facts, figures, the reality of empirical discovery and confirmation were secondary to the “reality” in the form of a creation myth fashioned by the CPSU philosophers. It was continuously embellished and promulgated to keep the vodka-besotted peons from beginning to realize that things in the promise land were not quite right and that the people in charge were an assortment of liars, psychopaths and criminals.

The myth in a nutshell was that Lenin, Stalin and their ensemble of good guys at just the right moment of history had taken power on behalf of oppressed toiling masses and were building the socialist workers paradise that Karl Marx had predicted eventually would be installed everywhere. On the way, these good guys encountered some very bad guys – Hitler, Mussolini, the faces of fascism and enemies of humanity – who temporarily disrupted the grand march of progress to abundance and equality. For a while the future did not look so good for Stalin’s utopian pretentions, but with the help of a naïve and enfeebled FDR and a cynical Churchill, the General Secretary got to watch Hitler, Mussolini and the fascist world they threatened to impose come crashing down and see himself emerge victoriously as the world’s greatest anti-fascist, pieces of Hitler’s chard skeleton retrieved by the Red Army from the Fuhrer bunker in Berlin as his most prized trophy. Historically, symbolically and politically, fascism was dead, but fascists of a certain sort could now be permanently featured as key performers in the governing ideology, enemies of progress ready to be summoned for duty when they were most needed. Fascism, as it turns out, had never been completely vanquished and whenever and wherever things went wrong, the reincarnated Hitlers and Mussolinis appeared on cue triggering, of course, the resurgence of anti-fascist brigades to stomp them down once again and modestly proclaim their own courage and heroism.

        

If the recent history of the Charlottesville debacle and its frenzied media aftermath were somehow to be dubbed into Russian and tweaked a bit, the entire sorry episode could easily be imagined to have been staged somewhere in Brezhnev’s U.S.S.R. Charlottesville, home to the University of Virginia was founded by Thomas Jefferson who was, now brace yourself and grab a teddy bear for comfort, a slave owner. His famous home, Monticello, is just outside the city. Soon expect him to be thrust into the cultural Marxists’ rouges gallery of once great Americans because his life did not meet the moral standards set by the likes of Al Sharpton and Maxine Waters. Only in a society completely slipped off its moorings and ruled by a mafia-style clique of pretend champions of the oppressed could cretins like Sharpton and the mobs he leads into the streets be seriously attended to by the mainstream media and courted by the power brokers.

Jefferson’s UVA is now a festering academic cesspool of cultural Marxism, about as a hospitable a venue for right-wing protestors as Berkeley, Madison or Ann Arbor. Just thinking the wrong thoughts in places like this can get you assaulted. The “Unite the Right” (UtR) protestors were the perfect patsies in this pathetic “morality” drama. They were set up to be the chief (the only) villains by the power players ranging from Virginia Governor Terry “Mr. Clintonista” McAuliffe, Charlottesville Mayor, Michael Signer, an understudy of Hillary Clinton-handler, John Podesta, and their police stooges who perp-walked the hapless UtR protestors into the teeth of the masked, club-wielding Antifas, who, incidentally, unlike the patsies, had no permit to assemble. The rioting ensued, people were beaten up and a woman was killed by a man, James Fields, in his car attempting to escape the rampaging antifas. Fields, has now experienced an American-style show trial (prosecutor, defender and judge all working in concert) and will likely spend the rest of his life in prison.

How then did those who run the opinion-shaping, attitude-adjusting organs of mass media, the major instruments of mediation and interpretation of events like this, explain to the American people what had happened? Predictably, they seemed to have had no inclination to look carefully at the facts and circumstances and raise questions that might have led to more than the usual predicable fascist, racist smear of people who don’t necessarily believe that white racism pulsates from every crevice of American life and justifies the recreational burning down of the cities. This rampant racism, apparently, not only infects people and institutions but stone and marble as well, and the professional grievance mongers and the rabble they arouse are now assaulting the statues and monuments they reckon to be contaminated.

President Trump provoked hysteria from the “virtue professionals” posing as journalists when he refused to parrot the lines from the Pravda-like scripts of the New York Times, Washington Post and the cable news networks rejecting their standard “fascists-evil/anti-fascists-good” trope dating back to the early days of Stalin’s masterful political dramaturgy. His Soviet Union was always locked in mortal combat with fascists of some sort, but who they were depended on whom he had it in for at the particular moment. In the run up to Hitler’s chancellorship they were “Social Fascists” the German Social Democrats who, by playing by the rules of constitutional politics, were obstructing the path to world revolution. When Hitler finished strangling the Weimar Republic, Stalin switched to the Popular Front and the Social Fascists became needed democrat allies in opposition in the face of German rearmament. The British were fascists until the summer of 1941 when Hitler, then Stalin’s partner in the rape of Poland and the Baltic states, double crossed him and launched Barbarossa, after which they became his allies.  How one becomes a fascist, you might say, is situationally dependent on the left’s current priorities.

The fury over Trump’s rejection of the Pravda script and his refusal to sanctify the criminality of masked, armed thugs simply because they were self-proclaimed “anti-fascists” became part of a greater on-going setup, a stepping up of the relentless efforts of the left to de-legitimate his election. Don’t forget: during the 2016 Presidential campaign Trump himself was routinely denounced by columnists in the major outlets, as well as Democrats and Republicans, as a fascist. Post-election, the “resistance” was born; the “fascist” motif never for a moment abates. Trump’s supporters, recall, were consigned by Hillary Clinton late in the campaign to the moral trash heap as “irredeemables” because they were “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic – you name it.” Well, yes, you can probably go on with the naming game for a long time – there is always a new victim group to be identified and cultivated with its own unique “-ism” or “-phobia”, one more target of “hate” – but “fascist” probably captures the generic essence of bigotry that can be manifested in so many recondite forms.  

Charlottesville became the perfect storm and fueled the left’s continuing paranoid fantasy of an impending fascist America. Ignored is the fact that Klansmen, neo-Nazis and neo-Fascists supposedly on the verge of taking over are such a fringe element in American society so far removed from any sources of power and influence that without the left to constantly raise them to the status of a threatening political force they would probably disappear altogether. But the Southern Poverty Leadership Conference needs them to sustain their fund raising and luxury Birmingham, Alabama digs, and the broader left needs them with all of their crude imagery to smear the right and as a fulcrum for their hysterical moral posturing.

The Democrats always burst orgasmic anytime a real live Klansman or neo-Nazi sallies out from the shadows and gets some attention which means they can pretend that hooded lynch mobs are lurking on every corner and that every conservative is Bull Connor or George Lincoln Rockwell. Not to be outdone, the Republican traveling carnival of gelded hacks – Marco Rubio, John McCain, Lindsay Graham and, of course, Mitt Romney – did not hesitate to join the chorus of Democrat trained seals sounding like they had just emerged from a “white privilege” indoctrination session led by Barack Obama. Marco Rubio, the classic empty suit, with no intention of the irony tweeted: “When an entire movement built on anger & hatred towards people different than you, it justifies & ultimately leads to violence against them.” Little Marco, apparently, is unable to grasp meaning of psychological projection.

It is tempting to say that it could be worse, that with a shift in a few tens of thousands of votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin last November Hillary Clinton would be staggering around the White House plotting her revenge on the “basket of deplorables,” another “wise Latina” or a Black Lives Matter savant would be on the Supreme Court, and “hate speech” legislation would be wending its way through Congress. This is not much comfort, however. Trump, whatever his intentions may have been, will never “drain the swamp” and his Presidency is no serious threat to the cultural Marxist hegemon. It is a temporary bump in the road that will probably end very badly before the next scheduled election.  

There is no part of the establishment – the political parties and the Federal behemoth, the courts, the MSM and the entertainment industry, public schools and the universities – that has not embraced the mindless orthodoxy that equates any and all resistance to the cultural Marxists’ program of white guilt indoctrination, with its de rigueur confessional and self-flagellating rituals, as a form of fascism that must be extirpated. There seems to remain no serious institutional, political or legal obstacles to the escalating predations of the left’s shock troops, Black Lives Matter and the Antifas who, like Mao’s Red Guard of the 1960s and 70s are mounting a cultural revolution and marauding with a destructive fury that promises a complete ruination of what is left of traditional America. An avalanche of slander, lies and abuse is raining down from all corners, and a mailed fist in full force is falling on the resistance to it; we are on our own.

Words, Weapons and Rituals of the Left, and a Nod to J. L. Austin

 

 Anyone today who attempts to understand what is happening in the West (America, Europe) – the collapse into a cloaca that is the solipsistic Face Book pop culture, the avalanche of nihilism, the ciphers and the soft-totalitarian apparats, now seemingly unimpeded, closing their long, velvet-covered fingers around our necks – might wonder how a resurrected George Orwell would reflect on the rampant corruption that has greased the slide into this sewer.  

In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.’ All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.

Well, yes. This is, indeed, “our age,” politicized right down to the dictated pronoun assignation of transgendered whatever they fantasize they are and their restroom privileges, and you find yourself chocking on the daily output of the “mass of lies” from the sneering, self-infatuated pygmies resting on their glorified perches in the government, journalism, the entertainment industry, the NGOs and tenured professorships. Not to forget the social justice warrior CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg or the vapid, preening Hollywood celebrities who never tire of massaging their bloated egos and publicly wallowing in their invincible ignorance.  

The aftermath of the recent leftist-inspired mob violence in Charlottesville with the Pravda-like organs of the mass media in high dudgeon has given us a clear and terrifying vision of the cultural Marxist monopolized control and manipulation of language that is used to shape the public perception of social conflict.

To get a better sense of what the left is all about with the relentless labeling of any and all opposition as fascist, racist, proponents of hatred, etc., and in the spirit of Orwell to try to understand how language in the service of ideology has become so corrupted, it might be helpful to consider the notion of “performative utterances” (hereafter, performatives) as developed by J. L. Austin, a British language philosopher from the last century.

From: How to Do Things with Words, ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisá. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962.

[Defining the Performative]

Utterances can be found… such that:

·      They do not ‘describe’ or ‘report’ or constate anything at all, are  not ‘true or false,’ and

·      The uttering of the sentence is, or is a part of, the doing of an action, which again would not normally be described as, or as ‘just,’ saying something.

Performatives, as Austin explains, are not, logically speaking, propositions, that is, assertions that can be shown to be true or false. They do not attempt to describe the world or to affirm or deny some aspect of reality. They are “utterances,” actions that change the social world. Austin gives a number of examples, but let me offer a couple to demonstrate the point.

A minister or priest performs a marriage ceremony and at the conclusion utters, “I pronounce you man and wife.” A judge at the conclusion of a trial says to the defendant, “I sentence you to ten years at hard labor.” Neither the minister nor the judge with these sentences describe the world; their utterances are socially sanctioned actions that change it. Now married, the couple has a different social status. The man and woman are viewed and treated differently, view themselves differently and have different roles, expectations and obligations than they had before the performative was made. Likewise, the accused now becomes a convicted criminal who is viewed and treated differently after the judge’s performative.

How then does this notion of performatives apply to the current efforts of the cultural Marxists to control and manipulate public perceptions of politics and morals? The left engages in a profound dissimulation that disguises what are actually performatives as demonstrable true propositions or assertions about reality. While they pretend to be describing someone or something, what they are really about is acting in a way that demoralizes and ultimately de-legitimates the status of those who may compete with them for power or resist their incursions into their lives. As employed by the left, these performatives do not inform; they deform people who refuse to conform. They are weapons the left uses to destroy those whom they always perceive as morally inferior beings, their enemies. Think of Hillary Clinton’s horrific “basket of deplorables” slur during the last Presidential campaign.

How, specifically, do these weaponized performatives work for the left? Let’s begin with oldest, the most reliable and the most predictable: “You are a fascist.” The speaker in making what appears grammatically to be an assertion depicting some feature of reality is really acting out in a well-established social ritual that seeks to alter social reality in two mutually reinforcing ways. First, it elevates the speaker’s social status as a morally superior and courageous person who recognizes evil and stands far above and against it. The speaker becomes immaculate. Second, the moral polarity comes into play and the “authority” of the accuser is established. Very good people must be opposed by very bad people, and what catch-all word seems to work best to capture all those malignancies associated with the villains who occupy the imaginations of the folks who write the opinion columns in the New York Times and who blabber on CNN and MSNBC– bigotry, intolerance, sexism, racism, etc.? “Fascist” works very nicely. There is, of course, no room for Fascists anywhere in “our democracy,” as they like to say (“our democracy” being their euphemism for “our invitation-only clubhouse”). Such an individual is morally contaminated, “irredeemable,” “not part of America” in Hillary Clinton’s parlance, someone beyond the pale, whose ideas and beliefs must be extinguished.

“Fascist” is one of the most important words in the lexicon of the left, wrenched from its historical, political moorings, so vague and protean that it is descriptively useless. Bearing only vague, emotional associations, it has been stripped of its referents, and thus serves as an all-purpose, expandable-contractible label for prospective targets who may pose as obstacles or irritants.

  

Once upon a time there were real flesh and blood fascists, people who were recognized as such because they actually called themselves “fascists,” dressed up in black shirts, took power for a time and talked about how great fascism was as compared to the decadent bourgeoisie. As we know, things turned out badly for them, and Benito Mussolini, the man who brought fascism to the world ended up as a battered corpse hanging upside down from a steel girder above a gas station in Milan next to his mistress, Claretta Petacci in 1945.

That marked the grisly end of fascism as embraced and practiced by people whom everyone, including themselves, recognized as fascists; as an ideology and a movement that attracted a mass following it was kaput, an attraction that has lingered on for a few out on the fringe.

It was Joseph Stalin who recognized the mobilizing power of the word, “fascist” and fashioned an abstract, malleable “fascist,” introducing a being, unlike Mussolini, immortal and ubiquitous (Leon Trotsky was “baptized” by Stalin as one). Fascists who populate the Stalinist universe can only be contained by their antipodes, thus, “anti-fascist,” a word which endows one thus designated with a heroic, moral invincibility. The anarchists during the Spanish civil war who raped and murdered nuns and burned down churches were anti-fascists and thus remain vanquished heroes who fought a losing battle for “democracy.” The antifas who attacked and beat up people recently at Charlottesville and other rallies are lauded predictably by Nicholas Scylla Kristof and Mitt Charybdis Romney as opponents of bigotry and hatred. Stalin’s “fascist” was the gift to the left that keeps on giving and every generation of leftists since his demise has happily and eagerly attached it to whomever displeases them, most recently Donald Trump and his supporters.     

The “You are a fascist” performative is the paradigm for the cultural Marxists’ engagement with all dissent and opposition. It moralizes the speaker, enveloping him with goodness and virtue. As well it immunizes him from (moral) criticism and (legal) accountability and at the same time demoralizes the accused making him into an enemy who represents an existential threat to their fictional “our democracy.” “Politics” for the left is shorthand for conniving at the destruction of the opposition, politically, always, physically, if possible.  

“Racism” works in tandem with “fascism.” “You are a racist” is a weaponized performative camouflaged as a descriptive, yet another one of the expulsion rituals that render the accused “untouchable” while confirming the impeccable moral credentials of the speaker. Like “fascist,” “racist” has migrated from being a word that once perhaps referred to real and distinguishable features of someone to a slippery, nebulous abstraction that means whatever the speaker wants it to mean. This is why racism which has risen to the heights of a raging moral plague has of necessity been metastasizing into various strains such as, “covert racism,” “legacy racism,” “economic racism,” “environmental racism,” “systemic racism,” “institutional racism.” There is no relief, no escape from it; with this the left is refereeing a game of whack-a-mole that never ends.  

No one today accused of racism can prove the accusation to be false. This means that the accuser cannot be held accountable, and because of this, as long as the threat of being accused of racism is widely and commonly resisted and feared, the left will use it with increasing recklessness and indifference to whatever damage it does. It has worked to perfection for them; whenever the threat goes down, the white flag always goes up. So, it is a near certain prediction that the racism that plagues the West will continue to mount toward epidemic proportions.  

What Austin’s performative utterances may help us to understand is that for the left politics in all of its manifestations is war with no Geneva Convention-style restrains, with unconditional surrender as its end game. For them there is no compromise, no loyal opposition, no notion of fair play or rules of a civil society that limit what the players should do. We are the enemy. We forget it at our peril.