Buxtehude

 Dietrich Buxtehude, 1637-1707

Forwards

“If you were going forwards, wherever you were going, or thought you were going, and the road, the pathway, whatever led straight into this big pit, what would you do?”

“And the pathway didn’t go round it?”

“No, no. Straight into it.”

“Well what kind of pit is it?”

“Impossible to know. It’s deep anyway, and it’s very dark. You can’t make it out.”

“I suppose I’d take my chances and have myself drop away into it. Progress is everything after all.”

“You wouldn’t turn back?”

“I couldn’t do that. That would be a refutation of everything I believe in.”

“Going forwards?”

“Exactly!”

Eternal Recurrence

“You know that idea of Eternal Recurrence? What do you think could be seen as a good example of it in history?”

“The Temptation in the Garden. It’s a phenomenon that endlessly recurs, though with a lot of fluidity to the form of the temptation!”

“And this happens to famous figures in history?”

“Well yeah, but to everyone all the time. But it’s a dynamic phenomenon or recurrence though rather than a static one.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because there’s freedom involved.”

swaNs, eVenIng

 

yesTerdaY

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised Precursor

“The Revolution will not be televised” is a famous line from the song of the same name by Gill Scott-Heron from 1971. This line has a precursor though which many of us may be less aware of.

When the writer Maxim Gorky, a supporter of the Bolsheviks, went to plead with Lenin that, amidst the  mass executions of ‘class enemies’ being carried out by the regime, the life of a Romanov Grand Duke be spared since he was a fine historian, Lenin responded with the catchy line: “The Revolution needs no historian.” 

He was a very inclusive man. He would execute anyone.

Solzhenitsyn, Loving One’s Country, Lenin

                                        My people perish for lack of knowledge.

                                         Hosea 4:6

From D.M. Thomas’s biography on Alexander Solzhenitsyn where Solzhenitsyn, having survived life in the gulags and a recent failed assassination attempt on his life by the KGB and now expelled from the Soviet Union, in defending himself from various attacks, wrote to the New York Times explaining that:

. . . “what he opposes with every bone in his body is the belief that nationhood does not matter. Socialism’s aim, said Lenin, was to abolish the distinction between nations, to bring them into fusion. And Vadim Borisov observed in his essay ‘From Under the Rubble’, severe moral censure was addressed to Russian writers who could not overcome the ‘base instinct’ of loving their country.

Shortly before deciding on his expulsion, the Politburo (the highest centre of executive power in the Soviet Union) met specifically regarding how to deal with this impermissible intellectual dissident, and in the recorded minutes of the session “Brezhnev warns against nationalism as a breeding ground for anti-Communism. Victor Grisham, First Secretary in Moscow describes Solzhenitsyn as “a true degenerate”; this from a bureaucrat who liked to have a fully equipped brothel connecting with his office. Mikhail Solomentsev supported the call for more ideological warfare against nationalism, while long term Secretary of Ideology and Second Secretary of the Communist Party, Mikhail Suslov added his warning against bourgeois nationalism.

Which all explains why a few decades on, good, obediently indoctrinated citizens of various western shores should be ashamed of their own nations and their nations’ flags as hateful far-right emblems! Down with nationalism! Onwards the ideology! I previously posted on this here: Bourgeois Missionary on a Bike. 

Another extract from the biography while we’re here, on Lenin from that book. Solzhenitsyn, born in 1918 into that communist era was himself, prior to ending up in the gulag, an ardent believer in both the ideology and in Lenin. He believed Stalin was polluting these pure waters, but he later came to completely revise that opinion of both, as he called it ‘the cult’ and of Lenin :

Against enormous odds, Lenin achieved his vision: Persuading a nation a seventh of the earth’s surface that any moral law could be broken in the interest of one class (back when the Left was seemingly all about the class struggle and the triumph/dictatorship of the proletariat and the defeat of bourgeoisie). Within a few years Lenin had prefigured all the evils that Stalinism would consolidate: unlimited power of the Party and the bureaucracy; total regimentation of public life and taught as a substitute for religion; the liquidation of alien elements; and all embracing organ of state terror with a vast system of slave labour camps throughout Siberia and the North.

If the people threatened this happiness he planned for them, they would have to be punished. Scores of peasant revolts were extinguished. The vast unpopularity of the Bolsheviks shook Lenin and forced him to reintroduce private enterprise on a small scale under the NEP (New Economic Plan). But he had no intention, had he lived, of letting this compromise continue indefinitely. As he wrote to Kamenev: “It is the biggest mistake to think that NEP will put an end to the terror. We shall return to the terror and economic terror.” 

This use of terror as a tactic of control was a staple of revolutionary ideology ever since the Reign of Terror  of the early 1790s in the aftermath of the French Revolution, seen as a shortcut to crushing all opposition - by definition evil - to the revolution and its leaders - by definition good. Responding to criticism from Boris Souverine, who had known Lenin, following Solzhenitsyn’s book Lenin in Zurich, he wrote:

How can anyone blacken Lenin’s name more than he himself did by ordering the execution of peasants for failing to clear away snow? . . . What can anyone say about Lenin and Trotsky . . . that would be worse than simply recalling how they created the first and greatest totalitarianism the world has seen, and how they devised the methods of mass terror, including the technique of drowning people imprisoned in barges (thus anticipating the gas chambers)?

Anyway, just to repeat the link to Bourgeois Missionary on a Bike

Return to Babylon - Transhumanism

 

A very interesting talk on the technological cult of transhumanism at Orthodoxy Ethos. The video in effect starts at about the 6 minute mark.

On its way

Whether this is on its way to a successful incarnation of itself or not I don’t know, but this is it as of now.

along the path