tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3591186784456519139.post4422859747872876866..comments2024-01-02T17:38:32.872+00:00Comments on Economics of Imperialism: Winston Churchill & British ImperialismTony Norfieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03896437404164741498noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3591186784456519139.post-40411571553908363372021-11-02T14:02:31.251+00:002021-11-02T14:02:31.251+00:00Great blog, thanks! About Mussolini and Fascism (a...Great blog, thanks! About Mussolini and Fascism (and even Hitler and Nazism), this topic is always muddied because we remember them through the lens of WWII and the Holocaust. Fascism was based on a philosophy of corporatism, basically organizing society the way a corporation is organized, through representatives at the top. In the unorganized industrial world of the early 20th century, we can understand its appeal as something that worked. Even with Nazism, one can understand the appeal in a society that had just disintegrated in WWI. People were searching for political philosophies that actually worked, and we can imagine the sense of admiration of two leaders in Europe who had found something that worked. Nazism drew on Hegel's idea of "Geist" and Heidegger's philosophy of being as submergence in the Geist of the nation. We all know how all this ended, but we need to keep the times in context. We like to philosophize about the world we live in, but that's not how the world actually works. Leaders don't sit around theorizing, they're looking for models that work. That's what any system of political economy is, a model that can be important and exported, whether it's socialism, liberalism, fascism, etc. The crisis we're in right now is the failure of all models. Right now "illiberal democracy" is in vogue, in the 90s it was liberal democracy. The masses of people don't have any clue what to do, they're expecting their leaders to figure out what works. But no politician today is going to invest in big ideas, except people like Trump and Orban who have revisionist ambitions. The name of the game now is managing the global financial system and controlling technology innovation. I was reading a long piece in the New York Times magazine about the American' right's newfound solidarity with Hungary as a vanguard model of white nationalism. Hacks like Rod Dreher are making pilgrimages there. It has nothing to do with political philosophy, they're just looking for models that work in a world where nationalism is no longer a viable ideology. What is nationalism? The essence of nationalism is not language or ideas or even people, nationalism is a regime dedicated to using national assets for the benefit of all citizens. Nationalism was a sort of bourgeois socialism, but is that sort of nationalism even possible anymore when "national assets" are global assets owned by foreign investors? Trump et al. have appropriated all the superficial aspects of nationalism but they are not nationalists anymore than Bernie Sanders is a socialist. These are just political brands now. Bernie wasn't actually building a socialist party, he just used the socialist brand to rally the Left in America, as Trump used the nationalist brand to rally the Right. This is how we have to remember people like Mussolini and Churchill. They weren't theorists they were politicians, but if we try to read them through a lens of theoretical political philosophy, then of course we'll find things they said and did that don't square with our ideas of how the world should be. Another way of saying this is we're all naive, and people like Churchill are less so.Jasonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03011630125025524992noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3591186784456519139.post-28377200518963993582021-10-19T14:38:45.006+01:002021-10-19T14:38:45.006+01:00Slavoj Zizek thinks the left should embrace decenc...Slavoj Zizek thinks the left should embrace decency, because he believes decency no longer exists in politics. He used Trump as an example, and he also used the argument that we now live in a society where Torture is not covered up, whereas, he says, in the past torture was hidden, because it was seen to be indecent.<br /><br />I take the totally opposite view to Zizek, I think we have gone into decency overdrive in the last quarter of a century, where politicians dress up their criminality in good deeds, in decency.<br /><br />These comments show that in the past things were much more transparent!<br /><br />In my view, one job of the left is to strip away the decency and expose the indecency that lies behind it.SteveHnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3591186784456519139.post-41580791761477831362021-10-18T21:33:56.943+01:002021-10-18T21:33:56.943+01:00Another one for your collection, excerpted from &#...Another one for your collection, excerpted from 'Zionism versus Bolshevism’, Illustrated Sunday Herald (London), February 8, 1920 (https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Zionism_versus_Bolshevism) <br /><br />“International Jews… [are a] sinister confederacy… [who] have forsaken the faith of their forefathers, and divorced from their minds all spiritual hopes of the next world. This… world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing… now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads and have become practically the undisputed masters of that enormous empire.<br />There is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation of Bolshevism by these international and for the most part atheistical Jews… It becomes, therefore, specially important to foster and develop any strongly-marked Jewish movement which leads directly away from these fatal associations. And it is here that Zionism has such a deep significance for the whole world at the present time… <br />In violent contrast to international communism, it presents to the Jew a national idea of a commanding character. It has fallen to the British Government, as the result of the conquest of Palestine, to have the opportunity and the responsibility of securing for the Jewish race all over the world a home and a centre of national life… <br />If, as may well happen, there should be created in our own lifetime by the banks of the Jordan a Jewish State under the protection of the British Crown, which might comprise three or four millions of Jews, an event would have occurred in the history of the world which would, from every point of view, be beneficial, and would be especially in harmony with the truest interests of the British Empire.<br />John Smithhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16017412607423567331noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3591186784456519139.post-88178798215481054492021-10-18T17:25:43.895+01:002021-10-18T17:25:43.895+01:00Here's another gem: 'One may dislike Hitle...Here's another gem: 'One may dislike Hitler's system and yet admire his patriotic achievement. If our country were defeated I hope we should find a champion as indomitable to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations.' -- Winston Churchill, <i>Step By Step, 1936-1939</i> (London, 1939), p 170, and reprinted unaltered on page 158 of the London, 1947 edition.Dr Paulhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07163651179353887227noreply@blogger.com