The Academic Respectability of the Totalitarian Left

 Years back I studied history at university in Cork, and I remember being surprised in first year of that three year degree course of a couple of modules on the course, these being, however they were precisely titled, History through the Lens of Marxism, or Marxist History. The USSR was no more and the obvious connection of totalitarian communism  with Marxism was something I don’t think anyone was in doubt about, and the toxic nature of that regime and ideology was a given in the world I had grown up in. But now no one seemed to be batting an eyelid with Marxism playing quite a significant part in the collegiate studying and understanding of history. All of a sudden I was within an environment where Marxism was all very respectable. There were no enforced modules, for example, teaching history through an intellectual lens of Christianity! And just to add, Marxist ideology has a supposed perfect rational understanding of both the logic of past history, but also of future history, where it is progressing. And this includes of course a value judgement on this progress. It is the academics’ role to facilitate its progress. And it is all in short, an intellectual cult in which the intellectuals, through the means of takeover of the State take complete control of society. So it’s not hard to see the ideology’s appeal for thus inclined intellectuals!

Just one other snippet from that time: I remember someone I was friendly with, who was certainly bright and very pleasant to ever deal with, and who was studying Philosophy along with, I think, English. I remember being surprised not long after college when he had seemingly become an ardent convert to socialist ideology - he himself very much middle-class in his background. But he - and was espousing standard doctrine - was hoping the working-classes lives would become much worse, because until then there was no hope of the Revolution coming which would open up the glorious future, i.e. the triumph of the intellectual Marxist cult of which he was now one of the guardians. (Then of course, of course, the plight of the working-classes, though it had seemed to be the entire point of the Left, was simply abandoned as an unproductive cause, and focus shifted entirely to issues like gender and racism as more useful to the cause.)

So that was always the essence of any cause in the hands of the Left, once we are in the Marxist realms. The superficial cause, such as the proletariat, is the weight used by the cult and its elites to gain power. I remember being amazed that this pleasant, well-meaning guy was hoping less well-off people’s lives would get worse! The stupid naivety from an intelligent person in this already exposed toxic belief system was almost incomprehensible to me. And one other thing I remember being aware of here: maybe that same night when he talked of his leanings, he and another friend had been watching some inane Hollywood comedy such as I at this stage in my life wouldn’t even think of sitting down to. But here, simultaneous to his utopian Marxist hopes, he’s intentionally dwelling within this inane level of consciousness, and one which of course was coming from the corporate entertainment world that is surely inimical to any grand hopes for humanity!

“A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways” (James 1:8).

Expensive Bottle

A man was given as a birthday gift a beautiful and very expensive bottle of wine, of which he was very pleased, grateful and proud. And he had every right to be. Anyway, it was later produced and poured out, and drunk appreciatively. But then, naturally, after the bottle was emptied and the wine drunk only the bottle remained. But he was still proud of his bottle, it wasn’t the kind of wine he’d be getting every day, or to be honest any day, most likely, and so - and who will blame him - he took to buying his regular and lesser wines and pouring their contents into its bottle, it made him feel good I suppose, the illusion, this I suppose it was implied was his level. And if guests were ever present, at least the right kind of guests, the bottle would be produced, and all would be pleased to partake in its glory, so to speak. And if there were any doubts as to the quality of the wine matching its exalted label, well, understandably, those doubts remained silent. Who would gain by mentioning them? They would all lose.

So I suppose things will go on like this as long as no one is so clumsy as to knock over and smash the lovely bottle. And maybe also as long as no one is uncouth enough to come along and express doubts as to quality and exaltation of the wine. Though I’m sure, however much discomfort they might momentarily produce, they could always be ignored, forgotten about and maybe not invited again. 

FemininE

 Something I’m trying to sort out - though easier said than done.

horse 2

 

This was posted recently, and has been changed a little bit since.

changed

 Something I previously posted after being worked on and changed a bit, though not significantly. This is one that I mostly do like.

PM 3

 Further updates from UK prime minister Keir Starmer’s obstacle strewn attempts to launch a music career, where the matter was felt to be of such importance for not just Starmer but the Labour Party as a whole, that an extraordinary general meeting of the party was held today somewhere in the bowels of London to debate the matter. To explain, the issue at hand was not seemingly whether it is correct for a prime minister to attempt to become a pop star, but the appropriateness of the song itself, or rather specifically the song title: Can’t Stop Dreaming of Gulags and Rape Gangs (Not Necessarily in that Order).

After several hours of heated and intense debate, it was decided by a reasonably significant Party majority that the song would be more appropriately titled simply Gulags and Rape Gangs. 

“That the prime minister should not be able to stop dreaming of any matter, no matter how exalted, speaks perhaps a little too much of a primacy of personal concerns, rather than a rational devotion to the subjects of the day and their service to the Cause,” explained a Labour Party spokesperson. “We have no need for dreaming. What is needed is cold clear action and remorseless discipline. And so we think it is more desirable in its service as propaganda for the Cause - which is the only justification for any public action -  that the song - a thing of rare beauty, I might add - be released with the more down-to-earth title: Gulags and Rape Gangs. And this is now the prime minister’s conviction also.”

The Conservative Party has since applauded the decision.

USSR

 

I spotted this in my town a couple of days ago. Thought it was brilliant! Even has the hammer and sickle symbol in there.

Ave Generosa

 

By Hildegard von Bingen, a 12th century German Benedictine abbess, polymath and visionary. And below, O Ignis Spiritus, also by her.

PM Two

Unexpected developments from the music world where it seems the release of UK prime minister Keir Starmer’s upcoming and debut single Can’t Get Enough of Those Funky Groovy Rape Gangs may not be going as smoothly as expected. It seems significant figures within the industry have suggested the song may struggle to receive significant airplay in its current form. 

“Sadly, in this corrupted world it seems even the prime minister is forced at times to bow to the demands of the far-right mob,” declared a Downing Street spokesperson.

Mr Starmer was immediately rushed this afternoon to the Abbey Road studios, where a now altered version of the song was recorded. Thankfully, the infectious beat and soaring melodies remain as was, with only the lyrics and song title altered. 

The modified song is now called: Can’t Stop Dreaming of Gulags and Rape Gangs (Not Necessarily in that Order).

Tony Blair is again on rhythm guitar.

Understandably everyone involved is now a little bit nervous of how this altered version will be received.

PM

Perhaps with one eye already on a post-political career, Keir Starmer has just recorded a song which is set for release over the coming weekend. The public, curious no doubt, as to what the prime minister’s song will offer them, are apparently in store for an unpretentious tune, driven by an infectious beat and soaring melodies. 

The song is called Can’t Get Enough of Those Funky Groovy Rape Gangs. Tony Blair is on rhythm guitar.

Dostoevsky on MAGA

Re-reading Dostoevsky’s novel 1872 novel Demons at the moment, this brought to mind the Make America Great Again movement, where the socially awkward but deeply sincere character Shatov who has renounced revolutionary, leftist ideology, talks of the attitude of this milieu towards its own nation and people. In an earlier chapter he retorts to the self-indulgent but relatively benign liberal figure Stepan Verkhovensky:

“These men of yours never loved the people, never suffered for them or sacrificed anything for them, no matter what they themselves imagined for their own good pleasure !”  he growled gloomily, looking down and turning impatiently on his chair. “One cannot love what one does no know, and they understood nothing about the Russian people! Not only have you overlooked the people - you have treated them with loathsome contempt.”

The bit though about the attitude to nation and its successes or failures belo:

“They’re paper people; it all comes from lackeyishness of thinking. And there’s hatred there too,” he said after a moment’s silence. “They’d be the first to be terribly unhappy if Russia somehow suddenly got reconstructed, even if it was in their own way, and somehow became boundlessly rich and happy. They’d have no one to hate then, no one to spit on, nothing to jeer at! All that’s there is an endless animal hatred of Russia that has eaten into their organism . . . And there are no tears invisible to the world under the visible laughter.”

Newer version

 A newer version of something shown previously, though I think it’s been changed a bit again since this photo was taken.

Makes Me Proud

 I don’t exactly keep abreast of these things but anyway . . . 

“You know what makes me proud as a British citizen?”

“What?”

“The way our prime minister -“

“Starmer?”

“Yeah of course. But the way he is willing to step in to keep the Ukrainian War going.”

“He’s the guy who was at the heart of that regime that was allowing those rape gangs to keep going raping women and children in England?”

“I suppose so, yeah; though I don’t know why you should want to bring that up.”

“So a rape gangs enabler wants to keep a war going - I’m not quite sure I see where the pride comes in. You’ll have to explain it to me. Are the two issues connected - the rape gangs and the war?”

“It would be more polite and proper to call them grooming gangs.”

“I’m not really interested in being more polite and proper.”

The Blue House in the Potholder District

 

By Ernst Kirchner, circa 1908.

Apples, bucket

 There was a bucket in the garden which was filled with rain water, but then a load of apples were taken from a tree and put into the bucket, displacing some of the water. But then the apples, rather than taken inside and later eaten or used for baking, were forgotten about and left in the bucket, and over the following days they slowly worsened and rotted, until finally they were fit for nothing but to be thrown to the jackdaws and crows or else tossed into the compost.

faint b

 

An earlier picture changed a little bit.

Give

 Deep State Cabal have a new song out with the express aim of “giving the beleaguered peoples of the world hope.” The song is called Give War a Chance. The b side is called Power to the Elites.

The New Ideas, Dostoevsky

Below from Dostoevsky’s novel Demons where the refined, liberal character Stefan Trofimovich Verkhovensky encounters the next generation in the development of the ideas first which he imagined he embodied. He is pleasant but self-indulgent and aimless, and the father of the revolutionary figure Pyotor Verkhovensky, loosely based on the demonically ruthless real-life revolutionary Sergei Nechaev, who in turn was a major influence on the likes of Lenin. 

Varvara Petrovna threw herself wholly into the “new ideas” and began holding evenings. She invited writers and they were immediately brought to her in great numbers. Never before had she seen such writers. They were impossibly vain, but quite openly so, as if fulfilling a duty. It was as if they perceived some special, just-yesterday discovered beauty in it. They were all proud of something to the point of strangeness. It was written on all their faces that they had just discovered some extremely important secret. They were abusive and considered it to their credit.

. . .  It was clear that among this rabble of new people there were many swindlers, but it was also unquestionable that there were many honest and even quite attractive persons, despite certain nonetheless surprising nuances. The honest ones were far more incomprehensible than the rude and dishonest ones; but it was not clear who was making use of whom.

… “We left as if in a daze,” Stefan Trofimovich later used to say. “Oh my friends, you cannot imagine what sorrow and anger seize one’s whole sick when a great idea, which one has long and piously revered, is picked up by some bunglers and dragged into the street, to more fools like themselves, and one suddenly meets it in the flea market, unrecognisable, dirty, askew, absurdly presented, without proportion , without harmony, a toy for stupid children! No! It was not so in our day, this is not what we strove for. No, no, not that at all. I recognise nothing . . .”

poles

 

Out the Window

 They got everything out of books, and even at the first rumor from our progressive corners in the capital were prepared to throw anything whatsoever out the window, provided they were advised to throw it out.

Dostoevsky, Demons.

Civic Grief, Social Injustice, Dostoevsky

He used to fall regularly, three or four times a year, into a state known  among us as ‘civic grief’ * - that is simply a fit of spleen, but our esteemed Varvara Petrovna liked the expression. Later on, besides civic grief, he also began falling into champagne; but the alert Varvara Petrovna guarded him all his life against all trivial inclinations.

[* The phrase ‘civic grief’, meaning an acute suffering over social ills and inequities, was widely used in the Russia of the 1860s; the disease itself became fashionable in Petersburg, where the deaths of some high-school students and cadets were even ascribed to it.]

This and its additional note from the early pages of the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation of Dostoevsky’s 1872 novel Demons, inspired by the liberal ideology and its progressively radical developments in Russia of the time.

Panagia

 

out and about

 

Caravaggio ‘s Populist Radicalism

 Below from Andrew Graham-Dixon’s biography of Caravaggio, Caravaggio - A Life Sacred and Profane, regarding the artist’s uncouth ‘populist’ discord from the prevailing intellectual and artistic aesthetic:

The very idea of looking back was a profoundly original move. It ran directly contrary to the prevailing aesthetic orthodoxy of late Renaissance thought, as expressed by Giorgio Vasari in his Lives of the Artists that art should continually evolve and progress, that it was the duty of every artist to increase that forward momentum.

Vasari would have regarded a preference for the old and popular over the new and sophisticated as shockingly absurd and perverse.

Pride Does Not

 Pride does not understand that it walks in darkness and does not know the meaning of wisdom. How can it know when it is in its darkness?

St Isaac the Syrian

ink 1703

 

Not maybe two of my best but anyway.

piece 1503

Noun or Verb

“Is the sun a noun or a verb?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, a noun is an object and a verb is activity. So, for example, you could say a wall at least in terms of ordinary life and what is available to perception, is simply an object and there is no activity going on. So therefore it is a noun rather than a verb. But with the sun, it’s all activity, united of course within a, let’s say, dynamic form, but at no moment is there ever form without all the activity. So its prime nature is much more in all the incredible activity rather than in any way being an object that could be said to exist apart from the activity. So, not that it probably matters, but it seems to me the sun is more a verb than a noun. And maybe we could even think about ourselves in relation to this lens also.” 

colours, lines

 

Proud

 We are proud and honored to announce the release of a new Countercultural Icons of Humanity song, titled Don’t You Dare Threaten the Establishment and Their Bureaucratic Systems of Benevolence or Else You’ll Have Us to Deal With. The song contains the beautifully poetic lines, “We got anti-establishment countercultural rock n roll outrage on tap”, “Money laundering doesn’t exist”, and also “Don’t follow the money.”

The song is accompanied by a b side: Don’t You Even Think of Calling Us Pompous Vanity Filled Servile Shitbags, and it contains the line: “Feeding from the trough.”

Quick Messing About

 Something very quick from just now.

horSe

 

Something I’ve started, and probably nearly finished.

figures 1203

 

Whether it remains like this, something from last night.

WAll

 

Sumi-0503

 

It’s no thing of beauty but anyway . . .